She gave a small nod. “Good to see you again, René. Were you auditioning?”
“Spectacularly.” Marcel vaulted up on the stage. Vivi reached Zelie’s side and paused to press a kiss to her cheek. Allard and Simon were both making their way to the stage too, but via the stairs.
Simon waved his clipboard. “I’ll leave this here for you, Marcel.”
“Thank you,monsieur.”
René drifted toward Zelie—perhaps because she was a familiar face. Or perhaps because people always seemed to drift toward her. Emile and Gustave both were, and Marcel couldn’t blame them for it.Hewas too.
“I got in!” the boy exclaimed to Zelie, grin so wide it threatened to split his face. “Can you believe it?”
She laughed and reached out to pat his arm. “Having heard you before, I absolutely do. Congratulations. Your family will be so proud.”
Allard had paused at the curtains but now, as Marcel approached, held out his clipboard as well. “I’m fighting a migraine,” the man said quietly. “Is it all right if I leave you and Vivi to make the decisions? If you need a tiebreaking vote, I’ll be happy to help tomorrow, but...”
Marcel frowned. Allard did indeed look pale, with shadows under his eyes and lines around his mouth. “Of course. Go, rest. Feel better. We’ll review your notes along with Simon’s as we decide.”
“I need to get back to the hotel and tell my mother.” René, still grinning, spun to shake Marcel’s hand and then darted out as well.
Once the door had closed behind him, leaving only Zelie, Vivi, Marcel, and his cousins on the stage, Emile arched his brows. “His brother’s one of ours?”
Zelie nodded. “His parents are sympathetic too, though not active. I imagine René leans our direction as well.”
“Most boys that age will.” Vivi reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, though a glare from Marcel had her putting them back again with a sheepish grin. They’d already discussed keeping the building smoke-free—it didn’t play nicely with the lungs of wind players—but habit often overwhelmed her agreement. She pointed toward his cousins. “Don’t you go recruiting our musicians for your Maquis.”
His cousins both laughed and raised their hands, all innocence. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Emile said.
“We’ll clean up a few of the rejects, that’s all.” Gustave snatched Marcel’s clipboard from his hand. “You didn’t want thatbig fellow, did you? The one that played the what’s-it—the oversized clarinet?”
“Bassoon.” Marcel snatched it back. “And we haven’t decided yet. Wait your turn.”
Zelie shook her head, amusement in her eyes. “I thought I’d invite you all to our new headquarters. We’ve finally got everything set up—just in time, too.”
Marcel motioned them all into the wings and toward the door, flipping the stage lights off with their oversized heavy-duty toggle switches. Darkness fell with aclank, clank, clank. “In time for what?”
Zelie had stepped into the still-lit hallway, letting the others go ahead of her. Which meant her look of uncertainty was directed at him alone. “The promised man from MI6 should be arriving tonight, along with some supplies. Most especially, a new radio. He’ll train our operators on it and on anything else we need to know.”
Emile and Gustave stopped and whirled around. “Airdrop tonight? Need us?”
“Assuming the weather stays clear, yes. Both the agent and the supplies will be parachuting in. We’ll need men on the ground to meet him and help transport whatever he brings.” She sounded firm as she gave his cousins that new assignment, but the moment they faced forward again and rounded the corner, her inhale spoke of something far less certain.
Marcel pulled the stage doors closed. “This is good, right? New equipment?”
“Yes, but...” She pressed a hand to her forehead. “Navarre isn’t here to welcome him, as he’ll be expecting. And I’m not ready to tell him that I’m the second in command, POZ 55.”
“Then don’t tell him.” He wanted to say she should, could, that if this English bloke was to be trusted, he needed to learn the same lesson as the rest of them and commit to answering toher. But thetension around her mouth told him she wasn’t ready to hear that, not when it meant all of MI6 learning the truth. “Let him think you’re the chief of this particular station—it isn’t as though you don’t have plenty of other female chiefs throughout France.” He touched a hand to her back to urge her forward. Not just down the short hallway, but into this next step.
She puffed her cheeks out with air and then let them deflate. “Maybe I’m feeling territorial. Or defensive. I understand we’ll need instruction on the new equipment, but they said he’d train our recruits on general methodology too. Have we really done such a lousy job, that they need to send someone to train us?”
He had no idea, of course. But she didn’t ask the question because she wanted an expert answer. She asked because she needed reassurance. “I imagine it’s more like an orchestra. MI6 is like the violin section—concert pitch. France like the clarinets—a B-flat pitch. A bit of transposition is required for the notes you read to match what you play, otherwise you’ll allthinkyou’re playing a C, but some of you will be playing a B-flat. And we all know how that would sound. Like utter chaos.”
“Disastrous on a stage and even more so in intelligence.” She nodded, a bit of the anxiety in her eyes fading. “It’s a good analogy.”
“Really? I thought it was pretty horrible, but it was the best I could come up with off the cuff.”
She sent him a smile. “You’ve already proven yourself adept at improvisation. And really, it’s a good point. They have a set way of doing things. So do we. This training isn’t to teach us the basics, but rather to make certain our methodology is a close-enough match to theirs that we can communicate well.” She paused, stretched up on her toes, and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. That was exactly what I needed to realize.”
It was impossible to go a day in France without someone kissing his cheeks—her doing so shouldn’t have inspired him to come up with a few more bad analogies to earn another. “Did you wantus there when he arrives?” Even if they weren’t, she wouldn’t be alone. There were always agents in residence, couriers coming and going, people snagging an empty bed or a couch for a few hours of sleep before they moved on to their next mission. And Zelie always in the center of it all, the axis around which they turned. Gathering the intel on what everyone had observed the Germans doing in their own slice of France, sifting through it, sending dispatches, doling out questionnaires with the questions that England most wanted answered about German movements. How she kept it all straight was beyond him.
