What greeted me took that breath away. Instead of a person lying in wait, there hung a glorious array of colours. One side contained stylish yet sensible clothing for everyday – but the other made me want to weep. Tentative fingers brushed across silks and satins, the like of which I hadn’t worn since before the war. I held an emerald green Balenciaga gown to my chest and I felt my knees go weak.
I’d play his game. And I’d play it on my own terms.
Operation Black Cat. I liked the sound of that.
Chapter Eleven
Matthew had set up my new identity, supported by all the required documentation. Solange Verin was a widowed Frenchwoman of independent means and vague political allegiance. She had a housekeeper – appropriately vetted by Matthew’s people – a required accessory for someone of Madame Verin’s stature, but I drew the line at a chauffeur. From what the taxi driver said, there were enough bufos around to track a person’s whereabouts. I didn’t need to make it too easy for them.
With a growing understanding of how the city worked, I began to establish Madame Verin, finding an odd exhilaration in allowing rumour to work in my own favour as for the first time for years, I became the hunter instead of the hunted.
At the chemist in Estoril, two fashionable Italian women gossiped about an event at the Hotel Aviz. I made a mental note to have a drink there later.
My manicurist, gesturing to a frumpy blonde, whispered that the Abwehr were better known for their sexual exploits than for any intelligence, either gathered or innate. Barring one or two, she added.
That wasn’t comforting – it only took one man, one person to find out my secrets.
The milliner revealed the Portuguese obsession with French designs, even as they were frowned upon by the state. This supported Matthew’s political assessment, although Estoril, inhabited by a strange mix of exiled royalty, aristocrats and officers, refugees and spies from at least a dozen different countries, seemed to play by a different set of rules. The capital was farther up the river, but based on the bored look of the bank teller when I exchanged rather a large amount of French francs into Portuguese escudos, in this suburb lay the real power.
By mid-afternoon, I’d dropped my parcels at the villa and applied another dose of brown dye to my hair. Finally groomed to a state that even Lady Anne wouldn’t be able to find fault with, I followed the hordes down the hill towards the beach. It was enough for the first day. I would secure a safe house in another part of town and a few disguises later in the week.
Graceful hotels lined the street, and at the base, a small castle stood behind arches that reminded me of the ruins I’d seen on Rome’s Palatine. Beyond that, a large garden led up to a casino. I meandered along the beach before stopping for lunch at a yellow building with a steeple reminiscent of a dunce’s cap. The Tamariz.
Smiling, I followed the maître d’ past a group of Germans at the bar and a table of Englishmen, their suits still crisp despite the heat. I sat under a large umbrella on the terrace, acclimatising to the warmth and the seemingly comfortable way the nationalities interacted with each other here. I ordered lunch in French, allowing my voice to carry.
‘One of ours,’ a women at the next table murmured, approving.
‘But supporting who?’ another asked.
There were three of them: middle-aged Parisiennes with an impressive range of diamonds and double chins. Over the low din of clicking crystal and silverware on porcelain, the wheels of Estoril’s rumour mill began to churn.
*
The black lace mantilla swept across my shoulders, secured by a large marcasite cat at the cleavage of the Balenciaga gown. If it concealed the dress’s neckline, it also hid the puckered bullet hole the Germans had left on my shoulder last winter. Walking into the casino by myself would be bad enough, but that was the sort of gossip I wasn’t prepared to deal with yet.
The doorman held open the doors and for a moment, I was back in London. Before. The air was scented with a familiar mix of French perfume, cigarette smoke and sweat. The colours of the gowns and uniforms were as blinding as the light refracting off the heavy chandeliers. Walking through the doors, I entered a warped version of the world I’d deserted five years before.
With a small clutch bag in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, I exchanged a handful of notes for chips, trying not to smirk as a man, hair combed back from an Eastern European face, swanned past, a woman clinging to each arm. There was something horribly clichéd about him, giving me more than an inkling about the games being played here.
Perspiration beaded more than one brow, as much from the heat as from the games. A man with silvering hair and a long Gallic nose sat at one of the tables, surrounded by a group of unsmiling men. He rubbed his pencil moustache and threw in a few chips. It wasn’t difficult to gather that he was out of his depth. I turned away, taking no comfort from his situation.
The atmosphere was almost surreal, with warring factions politely moving past one another. That being said, they did appear to keep to tables with other like-minded individuals.
At the roulette table, a slim, pale man in a white dinner jacket stood with a group of uniformed Germans. While his posture wasn’t ramrod straight, nor was it the deliberate slouch of a British aristocrat. The ironic twist of his lips made it clear he
