The Last Time I Saw Paris - Lynn Sheene [55]
The door in the next room opened with a snap. Claire straightened, grabbing the phone in one motion. She faced the door as LeFevre entered. She eyed him with irritation. “So, you finally made it.” She flipped the handle back onto the receiver.
He cleared his throat, the same smirk. “So things did not work out?”
She rose from the seat, curving her body around the chair like a dancer. One hand slid across her bare skin in the vee of her dress, her fingers tugging gently at the fabric as though she might shrug the dress off.
The smirk disappeared as LeFevre stared at her fingers hooked on the dress’s neckline. Behind her body, the other hand crumpled the paper into a ball. She released the note from her hand over the trash as she walked toward LeFevre.
“Things worked out just fine. My car, please.” Claire retrieved her coat and the bottle of champagne. She smiled at him as she slid the bottle into a coat pocket.
He didn’t say another word as he led her downstairs. The waiting car was a plain sedan; the driver French, his pink Nazistamped permit displayed on the dash. Claire slid into the backseat. The interior was dark and smelled of burned oil and Gitanes.
17-08.
This leader was coming tomorrow. The scene played in her mind like a gangster movie. Odette stood in a deserted square. A car full of Resistance fighters bristling with guns turned onto the street. The leader in the backseat, swarthy, grim, chewed on a cigarette while he mulled over plans of attack. In the shadows, line after line of German soldiers, rifles ready. Odette would be lucky to die in the square. They all would be.
The brakes ground as the car pulled up to La Vie en Fleurs. Claire opened the door before the tires stopped, composing the report in her head. The driver called out Bonsoir, madame, but Claire didn’t look back as she slipped inside.
After this, she would damn well be even. She would have paid off her new life. Claire Badeau would be a free woman.
Claire’s hand trembled as she stuffed the scribbled note into the dentist’s mail slot. Addressed to Danielle, the script imprinted into the paper with the force of her pen, I have important news. We must speak. Evelyn.
It took too long to get here, slipping through the shadows after curfew, her pulse hammering, heels echoing like hammers on the bricks as she ran. The office was long closed. She only hoped Odette would get her letter in time.
The sky opened up and heavy drops of cold rain spattered the avenue. Claire looked up and down the street before she skittered across, choosing her steps over the puddles. Staying under the dark eaves, she hurried back to the shop.
Within an hour after the shop opened the next morning, a man called in an order. A large posy of white flowers. Delivered immediately to an address in Saint-Germain, the sixth arrondissement. An extra twenty francs if it is there in an hour. For Danielle.
Claire practically dashed from the shop, flowers in hand. She took the Métro to Vavin. The address, she discovered, was a café. Café des Trois Spiritueux. Odette sat at a table near the door, playing with a cup of coffee and an unlit Gitane. Claire took the empty chair across the table and dropped the posy on her folded napkin.
Odette stared down at the flowers. With a crooked smiled she held them up to her face and inhaled deeply. “It amazes me.”
“What does?”
“It is impossible to get a cup of real coffee, much less a fresh vegetable, in all of Paris, and yet you do this.” Odette cupped a snow-white blossom in her hand.
Claire shrugged and smoothed her skirt over her legs. “Madame orders from growers from the south, near Grasse. Besides—I took these from a bouquet going to a Kommandant Daecher’s mistress. Feel better?”
A smile played at the corner of Odette’s mouth. She signaled the waiter. “Something warm?”
Claire shook her head. She wanted to get this said and get out.
“You’ll sit and stir it around the same as I am. We need something to do.” Odette