The Last Time I Saw Paris - Lynn Sheene [37]
Odette didn’t know how little she asked. Claire smothered a laugh. “The cost?”
“We wouldn’t have offered if we didn’t believe you would benefit. We ask little.”
“Well?”
“The hotels. Crillon, Lutetia, George V, Emeraude, Meurice, the Ritz. The Germans hold them all, use them all. General von Schaumburg commands all of Paris from Hôtel Meurice. Goering directs the air bombing of England from the Ritz. Important things occur inside hotel walls. Things we need to know.”
“I’m no spy.”
“No. You’re not. But you do get inside. That’s not easy to do. All we ask is you note what and who you see.”
“Dangerous.”
“You’d give us a little report, anonymous, not traceable to you, dropped in a mailbox. What is more dangerous? The papers you have in your pocket right now would get you taken in, no?”
Claire took a deep breath. A bird chirped in the tree above them. They both watched as a man rode a bicycle down the path behind the ruin.
“I need to get back,” Claire said.
Wordlessly, the women traced their way out of the park and down rue Rembrandt toward the flower shop.
Odette paused in front of the shop door. “Grey said you left your husband to be with Laurent. That is why you are in Paris.”
Through the window’s frost, Claire could make out the few tins of flowers, the plants, the soft grey walls. Above was her balcony, grey ice outlined the iron scrollwork. “No. Laurent wasn’t the reason I came.” She remembered their afternoons together in New York. “But he would have made a good way to pass the nights.”
“D’accord. Women like him for that.” A knowing grin lit Odette’s face. She glanced at Madame through the glass and her smile faded. She slipped a piece of paper in Claire’s hand. “A phone number. Think about it and let me know.”
“I will.” Claire stepped inside. She meant no.
Madame looked up from spritzing a potted ivy with an old perfume bottle filled with water. The air in the shop smelled faintly of roses.
Claire locked the door behind her. Hell, no.
December 13, 1940.
A rare day of clear sky, the sun glared off shop windows. Up to her elbows in dried hellebores, Claire watched through the glass as a woman strolled by in a long fur coat, short blond hair curled tight against her neck. Her hat was ruby red, a frothy little thing perched on the front of her head, a silk ribbon tied around the back to hold it on. She was on the arm of a German soldier in the grey uniform of Wehrmacht. An officer on leave from the real fighting or just lucky enough to be doing his bit for the war while sampling the goods of Paris.
Behind them, a handsome man with coal black hair, a thick blue scarf tossed around his neck. He walked with an arm slung around the small waist of a woman wrapped in a tailored coat to her knees, a small-brimmed hat pinned on her head. Behind them, two older women in heavy-soled shoes and heavier furs.
Claire watched out her window all morning as the ice crystals melted from the glass panes and the icy street turned to grey slush. At first a trickle, then a stream of shoppers on their way to and from the shops on the les Champs, as they called the avenue des Champs-Elysées. Reluctantly, perhaps, like a drunkard pulled by his feet from the morning bed, Christmas season had officially begun.
Madame had excused herself from the shop that morning. To meet with the manager at the Ritz, she said, but Claire knew a full afternoon away was more likely to escape Claire’s mood.
A broken vase, crumpled gold leaf, a dropped potted ivy, and cursing to go with each. Well, damn. She used to be one of those women in Manhattan in a mink coat, an outrageous hat and an obviously handsome, discreetly rich man on her arm. She had paid dearly for the right, and now she was back on her knees in a shop?
This should have been the Christmas of dreams. Her first Christmas in Paris.
Her face ached from scowling. She glared at the cracks in her fingers, her calloused hands. They hadn’t looked this worn since she was a girl. She smoothed the deep blue skirt against her legs.