Her hands tightened on the wheel as she drove past the building Navarre had first used for their work. She tried not to look at it overlong, just headed directly to the small hotel that housed Rollin’s office. Parking outside it, she gave herself a moment before climbing out of the car.
She’d left the new clothes from Madrid back in Marseille for this meeting and had chosen a simple dress that Anne Proust had apparently sent with Marcel for her. “A gesture of goodwill,” he’d said as he handed her the package the morning after she’d arrived. “To assure you she does not blame Alliance for her brother’s arrest and will still do her part.”
Zelie smoothed a hand down the skirt and tried not to see Gabriel’s flirtatious smile in her imagination, tried not to remember the expression of surprise and then delight on his face asMarcel had created a bridge in “Figaro” that shouldn’t have been there.
Had that same surprise been on his features when the Gestapo came to arrest him? But with horror chasing it rather than joy?
After pulling out the suitcase full of money from her back seat, she strode toward the building, only to check herself. Smaller steps. Less certainty. She had to walk a fine line here today—show pride enough to make it believable that she’d led a sector of Alliance, but contrite and broken enough to make them think she’d washed her hands of the foolishness. At least until she determined if Rollin was foe or friend-in-disguise.Lord God, give me your wisdom, your discernment.
A dour-faced man with a drooping mustache exited the building before her, gaze on whatever paper he held in his hand. He looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until she saw the general’s bars on his uniform that she realized why. Giraud—the one who’d risked a harrowing escape from a prison camp last spring only to be placed under house arrest. Even now, two uniformed men fell in behind him.
She edged to the side of the pavement, but even so he jostled her as he passed.
Then glowered at her. “Watch where you’re going.”
Irritation clawed through her, but she covered it with a tight smile. “My apologies, General.”
He and his escorts swept by, leaving Zelie to shake her head after them. And pause to draw in a deep breath, praying this inauspicious beginning wasn’t a harbinger of what was to come with Rollin.
The man at the front desk was no more welcoming than the general. When she gave him her name, he directed her to Rollin’s second-floor office with a grunt.
She’d met Louis Rollin before, a decade ago, when she’d been a fresh-eyed young wife still in awe of her husband. Rollin was military as well—or had been. She’d admired him then, and evenmore in later years, when he’d had the courage to oppose the anti-Semitism running rampant through France and the military. He’d even written a book on the matter so bold that it had been banned by the Nazis.
One small part of her hoped he was secretly on their side. That he’d called her to Vichy to tell her so, to offer to help.
The greater part of her thought that he, like so many others, had decided that the only way to preserve France at all was to do so in collaboration with the Germans. That was certainly what Henri and Rivière and Marcel and Gustave all thought. On New Year’s Eve, everyone had tried to talk her out of coming here today. But she had to. She had to find out what Vichy knew and convince them, somehow, that Alliance was finished. It was the only way to buy them the time and freedom they needed to rebuild. If she refused to go, they would know she was still resisting, still plotting. They would continue to watch her and all her known associates too closely.
Rollin’s office door was open, and when she knocked upon the frame, he looked up from whatever he was studying on his desk. He’d changed in the decade since she’d last seen him. Dark hair had gone gray, stress and age had chiseled grooves into his face, and he’d grown one of those horrid little bristly mustaches that didn’t span his full upper lip, only the part under his nose.
Why hadn’t men begun shaving those off when they saw Hitler wore the style too? Or perhaps he’d grown oneafterpledging his service to Nazi-run Vichy.
Zelie smiled. “Bonjour, Monsieur Rollin. I am—”
“I know who you are, Madame Bellerose. Close the door behind you.” Rollin stood as he motioned her to the chair across from his desk, but he didn’t smile. Didn’t reach for her hand. “Jacques would be horrified to realize what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
Well. That was true enough. She dipped her head and let the old shame wash over her. “I know he would.”
“Sit. And make this right. Who is ASO 43?”
She sat, clutching the suitcase in white-knuckled hands. But she lifted her chin.Just enough pride, after all. “I did not come here to give you any names,monsieur. I came to see if there were any patriots left in Vichy.”
Her one gamble, one toss of the dice.
He scoffed. “Patriots? There are more patriots here than among your ragtag band of troublemakers, I assure you.” He leaned across the desk, hands braced on the surface. Towering and menacing to try to intimidate her.
How cliché. But she cowered, as he’d expect her to do.
“Do you think wewantthe Germans here?” he asked, voice low and cool. “Of course we don’t. But working with theEnglishis no way to rid ourselves of them, and if you continue to meddle in things well above your capacity and understanding, you stand to make a ruin of all my efforts.”
Above her capacity and understanding? Zelie bit her tongue to keep from retorting and covered her bristling with a wince.
“Who is ASO 43?”
She locked her gaze onto his desk. Kept her shoulders curled inward. “It doesn’t matter. He’s declared the experiment failed. They all have.” As dejectedly as she could, she hefted the case and slid it over to him. “This was all I was able to recover from the drop of money England sent. If there’s more out there, my former colleagues have absconded with it and disappeared.”
His sneer said she was pathetic, but he opened the suitcase, surveyed the stacks of bills inside, and sighed. “I suppose it will suffice.” Rather than sit, he straightened. “Come. My wife is expecting us for dinner.”
“Your... wife?” She’d met Madame Rollin before too, yes, that same decade ago. She had a vague recollection of one of those military wives she’d soon realized she could never be. Perfectcomposure, perfect deference, perfect respect for her husband, perfect devotion to their children—and nothing more.
