If it weren’t for the students at the lycées and universities in the area, the store would have failed long ago. Only a few thousand Americans remained in Paris, and the Germans had placed the British civilians in internment camps.
The store assistant, Bernadette Martel, sat reading in her favorite armchair near the counter across from the nonfiction bay. The widow wore her gray-streaked dark hair in a loose bun barely clinging to the nape of her neck.
“Any new customers?” Lucie asked her.
Bernadette pointed to the front bay without raising her head from her book.
Alice Young, wife of a physician at the American Hospital in Paris, perused the fiction.
Lucie kissed her friend on the cheek. “Alice, darling.”
“Sweet Lucie.” In her forties, Alice wore a perfectly cut gray suit and a stylish hat angled over silver-and-gold hair. “How are you today?”
“Lovely now that you’re here. I have the book you wanted.” She held out the book cloaked in a dictionary’s dust jacket.
Alice frowned. “That isn’t—”
Lucie opened the book to the title page.
A smile bent Alice’s red lips. “Clever. How much?”
“You’re a paid subscriber. You can borrow it.”
“I’ll buy it. It’s for Bentley’s birthday.”
After Alice paid at the cash register, Lucie saw her friend to the front door. “See you Sunday.”
“Yes, Sunday.” Although Dr. and Mrs. Young lived on Paris’s bourgeois Right Bank of the Seine River, they had Left Bank sensibilities and attended the American Church in Paris rather than the more prestigious American Cathedral.
Alice raised her umbrella, stepped out into the light rain on rue Casimir-Delavigne, and passed a man in a field-gray German army overcoat.
Lucie sucked in her breath and ducked inside the store.
Too late. Lt. Emil Wattenberg grinned at her through the window. The man worked at the German Embassy in Paris, the institution responsible for promoting German culture in France, censoring French culture—and publishing the Otto List.
She turned to the bookshelf to ... straighten books? Although jumbled shelves were part of the store’s charm.
The door swung open. Bother. She hated having German soldiers in her store.
“Good morning, Miss Girard,” he said in heavily accented English.
She took great pains not to learn German, and Wattenberg’sEnglish was worse than his French, so she always spoke English with him. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said with the elegant indifference Parisians affected with the city’s occupiers.
Wattenberg removed his peaked cap and tucked it under his narrow arm. Dimples creased his not unhandsome face. “I would like a book. What do you recommend?”
“Pick what you’d like.” She rounded the bookcase to the bay where her friends sat.
“I would like a book to ... to build my English.” The lieutenant followed.
Jerzy Epstein shot him a quick, dark look.
Lucie turned and gave the blond officer a sympathetic gaze. “What a shame that your trip to England has been delayed.”
A snort of a laugh from Charles Charbonnier, but Lucie maintained her innocent expression.
Wattenberg smiled as if amused, but what German would be? After months of bombing London, they’d failed to break Britain’s will.
“I’d rather be in Paris. This is the city of art and culture.” Wattenberg’s gray eyes shone.
