She just stared into his eyes for perhaps three seconds. Three very long seconds.
Her red lips parted.
She said, with a hint of a smile that was not quite there, “Nearly?”
“Well,” he answered, and he gave her his own most disarming smile, “I haven’t seen all of you yet.”
He hadn’t known what he was going to say until it was time to speak, but as these words passed through the air she lifted her chin, almost as if to taste them. Her throat was offered to him, for a heartbeat. They stared at each other, as the two men behind Franziska Luxe seemed to Michael to diminish in size, to become cardboard cutouts, citizens of a world where passion grew pale for fear of failure. And so went the entire room and all its other inhabitants: sickly, small, and impoverished. If this Regal Room was its own jungle, the two greatest animals of the night had found each other.
And then Michael again said, “Pardon me,” to her, and to them, “Gentlemen,” and with a nod he moved away into the underbrush.
She did not follow. Nor did she track him very long with her gaze. Instead, she returned to her conversation, and a third man brought her a crystal glass of Picardon Blanc. In another moment a huge white buttercream-frosted birthday cake was wheeled out on a cart from the kitchen, and the jazz band—Die Vier glatten Klagen, printed across the bass drum in black letters—took up the universal ‘Happy Birthday Song’, and the room sang out loud as the figure of the hour, a big man wearing a white suit, a white shirt and a red tie stepped forward to try his lungs against thirty-seven candles, his face already flushed before he even began blowing.
Michael watched the festivities from the edge of the room, sipping slowly at his drink and avoiding the occasional glance from anyone else. His mind held the image of Franziska Luxe’s face: her strong jawline and classic Roman nose, her delicious-looking lips ripe for the kiss but perhaps with a twist of cruelty in them, her gray eyes almost luminous in this golden light, the arch of her black eyebrows and the mane of ebony hair that framed her face and fell about her bare shoulders and down her back. The grainy photograph of her had failed to fully prepare him. She was not the German Nordic ideal. She was not a pin-up fiction for the German troops to salivate over. She was a real woman of flesh, sinew, blood and bone. The heat that rose from her was, to him, an intoxicant far stronger than the vintage Armagnac. The aroma of her body beneath the floral Houbigant perfume—Quelque Fleur, he knew it was, from experience—was more wild and untamed forest than sculptured Paris garden.
Which suited him. After all, they’d given him the name of Horst Jaeger, the ‘hunter who lives in the woods’.
Her name was interesting as well. Franziska meant ‘free’.
But he thought that many men must have paid dearly to whisper it.
As the cake was being cut into pieces, a tub of ice cream was wheeled out. More bottles of wine and various liquors appeared. The Four Smooth Suits began to really—as the Americans would say—jump the blues, with the tenor saxophone wailing away and the drummer pounding a powerful beat. ‘Boogie-woogie’, he thought it was called. A slender young woman in a black dress, her hair red with coppery highlights and her face lovely if a little vapid, drifted out from the dancefloor and came directly toward Michael, offering him her cigarette to light. He’d picked up a packet of matches from the lobby for just such a moment—ten flimsy matches to the pack, the chemicals being in such shortage, yet the cigarette smokers were legion.
Michael struck a match and held it out, and as the red-haired woman grasped his hand to guide the flame, a breeze blew from the southeastern quadrant, the match went dark, and a hand took the cigarette from the woman’s lips.
“Go back to your husband, Bette,” said Franziska Luxe. She put the cigarette into Bette’s hand and closed the white fingers around it. “He’s about to be cornered by the most infamous homosexual in the room.”
Bette left, drifting along like someone who was already dead but didn’t know it.
“There,” Franziska said to Michael, with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “I just saved you from a boring encounter with a nymphomaniac.”
Michael lifted his eyebrows. “Thank you?”
“I am Franziska Luxe,” she announced, and offered her hand not to be kissed or merely limply held in that most gratuitous of gestures, but to be gripped and shaken. He did. She gave his hand a crush before she let him go. “I’m a photographer and writer for Signal. You may have seen my work.”
“Possibly,” he replied. “I haven’t had much time for the reading of magazines.”
“You’re a major?” Of course she’d already seen the insignia of rank. “Reconnaissance?” That was clear, by the badge. His Iron Cross was also on full display. Now came what she really desired to know: “What’s your name?”
“Horst Jaeger, fraulein. At your service.” He gave her a little bow of the head.
Her smile, cautious as it was, seemed to deepen. “Why do you presume I’m not married? I could have chosen to leave my ring at home tonight.”
“No German husband,” Michael said, “would not be cleaved to the side of a woman like yourself.”
“Really? Why is that?”
He shrugged and took a sip, the last of his Armagnac. “To protect her from men like me.”
“I need no protection,” she said, and he could tell she meant it because it wasn’t softened with a further smile. There was a pause of a few seconds, during which Michael thought he might have lost her. He was expecting her to turn away, but when a man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain touched her shoulder and murmured to her and she did not respond Michael relaxed, just a bit. The Luftwaffe man glanced at Michael, gave him a look that said good luck, and moved away.
“I’m interested in you,” Franziska told him, as the band quietened into a slower, softer number. “Major Jaeger, have you ever been professionally photographed?”
He returned a quizzical expression.
“My intent,” she explained, drawing a little closer to him, “is a photographic piece on the faces of the noble warriors. Those who haven’t surrendered. In your heart,” she said. “I can tell, in this room, who has surrendered in the heart and who has not. No, I’m not saying that anyone here is a coward, or a doom-sayer, or treasonous. But there is a difference between the noble warrior who still believes in the German future, and the rabble, whether they wear uniforms with polished gold buttons or not.” And at this point she cast a sidelong glance at the fat-bellied officer, who staggered around behind a half-empty glass of some liquor that had for a while dulled the knife’s-edge prickling at the back of his neck.
Michael was impressed by her intensity. She was standing right in front of him now, filling up his vision. Completing it, in a way. She was almost six feet tall, and he’d already seen that her heels were not very high. Again he caught the wild forest under her perfume. In her eyes lay a controlled wildness, a calm before the storm. He thought her fierce beauty was breathtaking, almost other-worldly, and he had to remind himself that he was here in enemy territory on a very dangerous and important mission, and the smallest mistake—the smallest slip of accent or attitude—could end his life before the stroke of midnight.