Read Chapter 27: The Girl's Revenge

The bells of Saint-Germain-des-Prés had just finished the six o’clock hour when Lucien Marchand heard the knock. Three taps, a pause, a single tap. Not the pattern the convent used. Not Marcel’s signal, not Brandt’s SS politesse. He slid the knife from inside his coat and approached the door of the sacristy where Camille lay sleeping, her breath shallow but steady.

The knock came again, female, impatient.

He opened the door a crack. A girl stood in the shadow of the archway, wrapped in a dark wool shawl that did nothing to hide the trembling in her shoulders. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Dirt smudged her cheek, and her hair was pinned badly, escaping in dark strands. She looked like a sparrow that had flown through a fire.

“You’re Lucien Marchand.” Not a question.

He did not confirm. “Who’s asking?”

“My name is Colette Vasseur.” She pulled down the shawl just enough to show a bruise blooming along her jaw, dark purple and fresh. “You’ve been looking for me. Major Brandt’s people have been looking for me. The difference is, Major Brandt doesn’t know what I am.”

Lucien studied her. He had a memory from a week ago, the photograph in the colonel’s file—the dead German colonel whose apartment had been the starting point of this whole bleeding mess. In the photograph, a woman on a divan, posed, smiling. He had assumed mistress. Everyone had.

“Come in,” he said, stepping aside.

She moved past him into the dim room, and he shut the door, locking it. Her eyes fell on Camille, pale on the cot, a bandage wrapped around her ribs. Colette’s expression flickered with something like recognition, but she said nothing. She turned to face Lucien.

“They told me you were the one who asked about my father.”

“Your father.”

“Colonel Ernst Vasseur.” The name landed like a stone. She watched his face for the shock. He gave her none.

“The file said Vasseur,” Lucien said slowly. “But you have a French name. And the colonel was German.”

“My mother was French. He met her in 1919, in Alsace. He married her in secret and kept me here after she died, to raise me as a proper German girl, he said, but he knew Paris was the only home I could ever have.” Her voice hardened. “They believed I was his whore. He let them believe it. It kept them from asking questions about where his loyalty really lay.”

Lucien’s mind moved fast, snapping pieces together. The colonel had been murdered in his own hôtel particulier, a knife in the back, his gold hoard hidden beneath the floorboards. The Resistance had gotten word of the hoard. Lucien had stolen it. And the girl had vanished the same night. He’d thought Brandt had hidden her away. He’d thought Marcel had sold her out.

“The night your father died,” Lucien said, “where were you?”

She raised her chin. “Under the bed. In his bedroom.”

The image was stark. Hiding, listening to her father die.

“Who did it?”

“Two men,” she said. “French. They spoke fast, in slang, but I heard them say Brandt had paid them to make it look like the Resistance had done it. A false flag, to turn his own garrison against the local cells. They left the body smelling of cordite and whispers, then they took the keys to his safe and emptied the ledger pages inside it, but they missed the floorboards.” A bitter smile touched her lips. “They didn’t know my father, not really. He never kept what mattered in a safe.”

The gold bar in Lucien’s own safe—he’d taken it from that very floor. The hoard that Brandt now demanded half of was the colonel’s hidden fortune, and Brandt had ordered the colonel’s death to find it. But he hadn’t found it. Lucien had.

“You’ve avoided Brandt for a week,” Lucien said. “Why surface now?”

“Because he’s getting ready to leave Paris.” She took a folded paper from inside her sleeve and held it out. He didn’t take it yet. “I found these in my father’s effects—the ones the killers missed. Brandt has been shipping valuables out of the country through the Banque de Suisse, under his own name, using military couriers. He’s preparing his exit. The codes are in there.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Because I want to watch him die.” She said it simply, a child’s blunt certainty. “And because I heard him on the telephone this morning, and he mentioned a convent. He said you were coming to heel. He said he’d have the gold in three days and then he’d clean up the loose ends. I heard him use my father’s name.” She looked at Camille unconscious on the cot. “And I heard him call your friends. He knows they’re here.”

Lucien took the paper. It was a page torn from a ledger, filled with coded strings and numbers, German headquarters stamps. He couldn’t read it—not the codes, anyway, but he could see what it was. A map of Brandt’s movements. Car manifests. Dates.

“Where is Brandt’s safe?” Lucien asked.

“In his house in Neuilly. Behind his bedroom wardrobe. My father told me—they were friends once, before he was murdered. They did business for three years. Brandt trusted him with his patterns.” She looked up at him, eyes dry but tired. “The safe holds his private accounts book. And it’s where he keeps the negatives from his photographer.”

Lucien felt his pulse skip. The photographer’s negative—the photograph of Lucien fleeing the atelier, the one piece of leverage that could break him.

“You have the photographer,” Lucien said carefully. “The man who photographed the atelier raid.”

“I have his sister. She works as laundress in the Hôtel Meurice. He does what she tells him, and she does what I tell her.” Colette folded her arms. “You want your negative. I want Brandt’s coded book. You want gold. He’s shipping gold out of the country. And you want to live long enough to watch Marcel Beauvais hang.” She said the name flatly. “I’ve heard that name too. From the two men who killed my father. Brandt paid them through Marcel.”

Lucien felt the world tilt. Marcel—the mole, the one who’d sold out the atelier, the one he’d already confirmed through Aurélien. The same Marcel had been Brandt’s connection from the beginning, running the betrayal that killed Colonel Vasseur, the man whose gold Lucien now carried, the man whose daughter now stood in front of him offering a pact born of equal hunger for revenge.

He looked at her for a long moment. She did not flinch. Sixteen years old, clean as a bell, and she had outmaneuvered them all—Brandt’s men, the Resistance, Lucien himself. She had nothing but a dead father’s papers and a laundress’s sister, and she’d walked into a convent guarded by armed fighters to make an offer.

“You have my attention,” Lucien said.

“Brandt’s house in Neuilly. Tomorrow night he holds a dinner for the garrison command. He’ll be downstairs until after midnight. The safe is upstairs, behind the wardrobe, in his bedroom.” She looked at Camille again. “Your friends can’t help you. They’re wounded or suspected. You’ll need a man who can climb and shoot, and a woman who can keep a sentry busy.” She turned her gaze back. “I can do both.”

Lucien exhaled, a long slow breath.

“What do you want out of the safe?”

“His account ledgers. The proof of who paid my father’s killers. And the negatives—all of them. If the photograph of you exists, there are a dozen others in there. Brandt photographs everyone he touches. Yours is just one.” She smiled thinly. “On that shelf is every secret that has walked through that man’s door. You could own Paris with it. I just want to see him burn.”

Lucien stared at her, then at the paper in his hands. He sensed, rather than heard, a rustle behind him. Camille’s voice came, weak but steady.

“Do it.”

He turned. Camille had propped herself on an elbow, her face pale, her eyes bright.

“Brandt already knows where we are. We move someone out of here tonight, or we lose the fight before we’ve started.” She looked at Colette. “Your father had a reputation. Not a clean one, but an honest one—for an occupier. He refused to ship stolen French art to Berlin. He delayed orders. I knew him before he died, once or twice through intermediaries.” She swallowed. “We heard they’d killed him. We mourned him quietly. We didn’t know why.”

“My father was no angel,” Colette said, quiet. “But they murdered him for gold and then blamed the Resistance to turn you into enemies of the very people who would have sheltered you.”

Camille nodded slowly. “Then we’ll take Brandt’s gold before he ships it, and we’ll use his own ledger to make sure every German in Paris learns he’s been robbing them blind for three years. Let them do the work for us.”

Colette looked at Lucien, all but asking permission.

He had made a deal with Brandt hours ago. Fifty percent. He had agreed on the surface. He meant to kill him anyway. Now the daughter of the dead colonel had handed him a door into the man’s house and the knowledge that his gold was leaving the country.

“Tomorrow night,” Lucien said. “But we do it my way. No explosives. No alarms. We go in quiet, we take the safe, and we leave Brandt alive long enough to wake up to an empty room and a letter from a dead colonel’s daughter.”

Colette’s eyes glittered but held no tears. She nodded once.

The bells of the convent church had gone quiet. A single candle burned on the table between them, and in its small light, grief and resolve were hard to tell apart.

Lucien folded her paper and tucked it into his coat. “You’ll stay here tonight. I’m going to one more meeting before dawn—one that should have died a week ago.”

She did not ask.

He left the room, and behind him, he heard the soft sound of the girl finally beginning to cry.