Shadow Over Paris

The storm clouds had long since gathered over Europe as the Nazis swept towards the glittering prize of Paris. Nothing and no-one had been able to stand in their way. Poland had been brushed aside, swiftly followed by Denmark and Norway and then the Benelux countries of Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. All that stood in their way was a huge, French army and a token British force gathered along the Maginot Line to stop Hitler’s devastating fighting machine.

Very little of this was on the mind of Charlotte de la Cour as she walked out of the London Underground at Baker Street station and into the chilly April wind. She tugged her coat around her in an attempt to retain some of the Underground warmth and stood there for a while gathering her thoughts before asking someone for directions to the Inter Service Bureau. She had an appointment at the Bureau for a job interview as a translator. The woman she asked pointed along the street and told her the Bureau was a short walk. Charlotte thanked her and, head down, walked briskly against the wind.

There was precious little to inspire Charlotte as she stared up at the old building. Its Victorian façade echoed a past that intimated a kind of heroic stoicism for which the British Empire was renowned. But now it was simply a dreary looking structure that held secrets few people knew of and would hardly be interested in anyway.

She looked at the slip of paper in her hand and stepped up to the front door. It wasn’t until she rattled the heavy knocker against the dull, brass plate that she saw a poster in an adjacent window with an arrow and a message to use the door in the passageway alongside the building.

She frowned and took herself along the pavement, stepping into the narrow alleyway still clutching her slip of paper and walked ten yards or so to a plain looking door. A small plate carried the words Inter Service Bureau. She wrapped her knuckles on the dull brown wood and waited. Presently the door opened and an elderly looking man peered at her.

“Yes?”

Charlotte immediately opened her handbag and pulled out the letter she’d received from the Bureau and showed it to him. “I have an appointment,” she said. “It’s for a job interview.”

“And what is your name?”

“Charlotte de la Cour.”

He stood back and pulled the door open wider. “This way,” he said.

The daylight, what there was of it from the dingy alleyway, disappeared as he closed the door. The grim looking corridor was only lit by a single bulb, which made the place look gloomier than ever. He pointed to a row of chairs and asked her to wait there. Then he wandered off.

Charlotte sat down. She heard muffled voices coming from a closed door facing her. Suddenly the door opened, and a young woman came out, called out her thanks and smiled briefly at her. Charlotte smiled back. She could see a small scar at the corner of the woman’s mouth. As she smiled, it distorted her lips a little but did nothing to change her vivacious looks. The woman walked off down the corridor as an unseen hand closed the door behind her. Charlotte began to wonder what kind of place it was she’d come to; all she wanted was a job as a translator, but everything seemed so quiet and gloomy she wasn’t sure she would like to work in such a dull environment.

She let her mind drift back to her younger days in France, long before the war started, thinking about her life there before her father died. She thought of the fun filled days as a youngster living in the suburbs of Paris, her friends, her life and her mother — her very English mother who always encouraged Charlotte to use the English language when the two of them were on their own. Once father was home, she always reverted to her native French tongue.

Before he died, Charlotte’s father had worked for the Fonction publique de l’État, the French Civil Service, and was based in the heart of the city. Charlotte loved travelling up from the suburbs on occasions to meet him when he had finished work for the day. In the summer it was such a joy to spend time walking with him along the banks of the River Seine, and she loved walking alongside the stalls selling stamps. She would stop at each one and gaze in sheer joy at the scenes from countries all over the world. She loved the Notre Dame cathedral with its towering columns and a roof so high that she felt you could step from there into heaven. Sometimes, especially when her mother was with them, they would spend an evening in the vibrant streets of the Latin Quarter, popular among students from the Sorbonne University, listening to the laughing voices, the street singers, and the sounds from the cafes and restaurants.

She could almost feel herself breaking into song when suddenly the door opened.

“Mademoiselle De La Cour?”

Charlotte snapped out of her daydream and looked up at the man who was standing there holding the door open. He was quite tall, a little cadaverous looking but well dressed in a suit, collar and tie. He was holding a pipe in his hand.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Mister Jefson. This way please.”

He let Charlotte through into a small office that was filled with the aroma of his pipe tobacco. Like the corridor, there was only a single light battling against the dull brown walls and sparse furnishing. He indicated the one chair facing the desk as he sat down in the chair opposite.

“Please,” he said.

Charlotte sat down and held her handbag on her lap, unable to relax enough to feel comfortable. She waited for him to speak and watched as he opened a slim folder in front of him.

“Thank you for coming, Mademoiselle De La Cour.” He said that in French, and surprisingly good French as far as Charlotte was concerned. “Good journey up?”

“It was only from Crawley,” she answered. “Not far.”

“So, let me see…” He ran the tip of his pipe down the top page in the file. “Charlotte de la Cour. French national. Lived in France until you came to England to study languages at Oxford.” He looked up. “You remained in England. Why didn’t you go back to France when you finished your degree?”

Charlotte shifted a little on the hard, wooden chair. “When my father died, my mother decided she would come to England with me while I studied at Oxford. The plan was to return to France once I’d graduated.” She shrugged. “But the outbreak of war…” She left it unsaid.

“Made it difficult for you to return?”

She shook her head briefly. “I wanted to go back, but my mother was unsure. The newspapers were telling us it would all be over by Christmas, so we decided to wait until then.”

“Why did you want to go back?” he asked.

“I wanted to see my Aunt Matilde.”

Jefson’s shaggy eyebrows lifted. “Oh. And this Aunt Matilde?”

“My father’s sister,” Charlotte explained. “She lives in Paris in the fourteenth arrondissement. That’s on the outer suburbs—”

“Yes, I know where it is,” Jefson interrupted. “Please go on.”

“I wanted to persuade Aunt Matilde to come and live with us. I thought it would be wise,” she added.

He nodded. “I can understand that. Have you thought how safe a journey to France might be?”

Charlotte looked down at her hands. “I thought while I’m here in London I could speak to someone we know in the French Embassy. He was a friend of my father; they worked together in the Civil Service in Paris.”

Jefson picked up a pen and wrote something on the top page of the folder. He put the pen down and smiled at Charlotte. “Just updating your file,” he explained.

“Does your mother know you will be seeing this friend of your late father?”

Charlotte frowned, wondering why he’d asked the question, but she answered anyway. “No; I told her I was meeting one of my university friends in London. A girl’s day out if you like.”

“Do you find it easy to…” He glanced up towards the ceiling, looking thoughtful for a brief moment. “To be economical with the truth?”

“Do you mean do I find it easy to lie?”

“That would be another way of putting it,” he admitted. “It leads me to believe that you were very keen to go back to France, even to the point of lying to your mother.”

Charlotte chuckled softly. “You make me sound quite mean, but yes, I was very keen. Still am in fact if I could find a way of doing it without my mother knowing.”

“That’s interesting,” he said, and looked back at the folder. “Now, you came to England to study languages at Oxford. English and German, I understand?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Would you tell me why you chose those particular languages?”

Charlotte shuffled her bottom again in the chair. “Well, my mother is English, which made that choice easy. And we always spoke in that language when there was just the two of us at home. And because English is allied to the Germanic tongue, Teutonic of course, it made sense to study that as a second language. And Queen Victoria was married to Prince Albert, a German, which did rather cement the languages together, and I could see the advantage of being able to speak the three most important languages in Europe. Why do you ask?”

“How fluent are you in English and German?” he asked, ignoring Charlotte’s question.

She shrugged. “Well, by studying in England rather than the Sorbonne in Paris it exposed me to the colloquial English tongue. Consequently, I speak fairly good English.”

He held his pipe up. “Then we’ll continue in English. Please go on.”

“Okay,” she answered in English. “You’ll be able to judge for yourself how well I speak it. As for my German, I’ve yet to test myself alongside a native German, but my tutor at Oxford was well pleased with me whenever we conversed in that language. So, I’m quite confident about working as a translator, which is why I’ve applied for this job.”

Jefson did not respond to that, but looked back at the folder, then closed it. He leaned back in his chair, put the pipe in his mouth and studied Charlotte for a while. There was little that made her stand out; she was quite small, not big boned at all. Her brunette hair was cut in the fashion of the day, the top was brushed to give it volume, while the bottom looked as though it had been curled with a heated roller or iron. Her hair framed her face beautifully, which he had missed on his first appraisal when she walked into the office.

One thing Jefson prided himself on was the ability to assess someone quite accurately on their first encounter. And in his position, it was vital he made the right assessment. He breathed in sharply through his nose and sat forward.

“You have listed on your application that you can lip read. Why did you put that?”

She shrugged. “You asked for any other interesting or useful skills, so I put that down.”

“How did you come to learn that. Or why?”

“My mother has been partially deaf all her life. When I was a toddler, I had a speech impediment. My mother assumed I had inherited her deafness, so she taught me to lip read.”

“And the impediment?”

She shook her head. “I grew out of it.”

“And was your lip-reading skill of any use.”

She laughed. “Only when the boys were making lurid remarks about me at school. I could use it as a weapon against them. Same at university.”

He smiled broadly. “I can imagine.” He tapped the folder. “Leaving aside your lip-reading skill and the young boys, do you have any idea how things are going in Europe? The war, I mean?”

Charlotte sighed heavily. “Not very well by all accounts. We can only believe what we read in the newspapers, but they do say that the first casualty of war is the truth. So, no, I don’t really know.”

“Then let me tell you. At the moment, the war in Europe is going very badly for the Allies. Our intelligence leads us to believe the Germans will be in Paris within the next three or four weeks considering how fast they are moving. Unfortunately, the French Army seems unable to stop them despite the help from the British Expeditionary Force. And we believe France will be seeking a surrender before they are completely overwhelmed.” He stopped there and leaned forward to pick up a box of matches. He took one out and relit his pipe. “One thing we are desperately short of is good intelligence.” He shook the burning match and dropped the dead ember into an ash tray. “And also, a way of communicating it,” he added.

Charlotte wondered if this was the reason her language skills were needed — to translate any information received from France. Or Germany for that matter. She began to feel a trifle uncomfortable about being there. Jefson had quite skilfully meandered around the details he had in front of him; mostly supplied by Charlotte in her application letter. She hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he came to the point of the interview.

Suddenly, he switched to French, and a dark, serious look came over his face. “Mademoiselle De La Cour, do you feel that France is ready for an all-out war against Germany?”

Charlotte wondered what her opinion mattered when all she wanted to do was work as a translator. But he had asked the question, so she felt it warranted an answer.

“Well, France has almost three million men at arms, so yes.”

He nodded his head thoughtfully. “If you was back in France now, would you be concerned, bearing in mind what I’ve just told you?”

She smiled. “I think I might be blissfully unaware until I knew more.”

“The information you get from the newspapers; is that what you mean?”

She shook her head. “They rarely tell the truth and only go for dramatic news to sell newspapers.”

Jefson put the pipe in his mouth and sucked in the smoke. Charlotte could see the tobacco flare in the bole of the pipe. He tipped his head back and blew the smoke up into the air.

“So, if you knew the truth, the stuff they don’t print, how concerned would you be?”

Charlotte wondered where Jefson was going with this. “I don’t know what truth we are talking about, unless it’s the kind that governments never tell the people who voted them into power.”

“Secret stuff?” he suggested.

Charlotte shrugged. “For those who are privy to that kind of information I would imagine, but I can’t see how that could affect a low-grade clerk working as a translator.”

He leaned forward, his arms on the desk.

“If you worked for the Ministry of Information,” he told her, “you would have some important, as well as highly classified information in front of you that would get you closer to the truth and a greater understanding of how strong France is. Or at least, could be. And that, Charlotte, would bring you to a deeper awareness of how well the war is going.”

“So let me understand this,” Charlotte said. “As a translator I would be privy to a lot of information the Bureau receives from France, or Germany.”

He smiled thinly. “Not working here in the Bureau,” he said. “But somewhere else.”

Charlotte frowned. “Then where?”

He waited a few seconds before answering.

“In France.”

End of sample. The story continues in the full novel.