Part Six: Operation Overlord — Chapter 11 - The Barman of the Ritz

JULY 19, 1944

When Inga walks into the bar at closing time, Frank is happy to see her, until he catches the fear in her eyes, her trembling lips.

“Please, is there somewhere we can talk?” she hisses. The bar is almost empty and the only guests left are French citizens, but, to be safe, Frank guides her down into the cellar.

Once inside, Inga takes Frank’s hand; he can feel her elegant nails digging into his palm and pulls away.

“Madame, calm yourself. Tell me what is going on.” The panic in her face sends a wave of terror through Frank.

“Frank, please listen to me. It’s very important. You are no longer to act as the dead letter drop. Do not accept any more notes or messages.”

A slow horror creeps up Frank’s spine. Whatever game she was playing is clearly over.

“Stülpnagel’s worried that he’s been exposed, and that any future message could be a trap set by the Gestapo.”

As Inga explains what the notes, the poems, signify, Frank hears a buzzing in his head. And then, everything goes black.

Frank wakes to find himself slumped on the cellar floor, leaning against the door of the fridge, his jacket stained with blood. He is dazed. The skin behind his right ear is tender; he must have hit his head when he fell. He feels weak, everything around him is shaking, and he is struggling to breathe.

Is she still here?

She looked completely terrified. Did she see me pass out?

“How are you feeling, Frank?” Georges’s face comes into view, his expression and voice worried.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve must have fainted, my friend.”

“Is she still here?”

“Who?”

“Inga! Inga Haag!”

“No, no one’s here. Jesus, you scared the hell out of me, Frank. What did she say to you? You’re white as a sheet.”

Frank doesn’t answer him and tries to find the strength to get up, bracing his hands against the cold tiles of the cellar floor.

“Don’t try and move, Frank. I’ll go get a towel. You’ve split your head open and you’re still bleeding.”

So, it was true. The conspiracy he had suspected was revealed at last: a plot to assassinate the Führer. And Frank had been the middleman, the stooge between Stülpnagel’s men and German counterintelligence. The dead drop.

If the Gestapo know about this, I’m done for. This is the one thought Frank can formulate through the brain fog.

All that’s left now is to play dumb and pray.

“Here, hold this towel against your head. I ran it under the hot tap.”

“Thanks, Georges.”

“You’re bleeding a lot, but it’s not serious.” Georges pauses, looking at Frank curiously.

“So what the hell did she say to make you keel over like that?”

Frank knows he has to say something. Anything, it doesn’t matter what, just to get Georges off his back. “She was terrified, she said she was going back to Berlin and she’d come to say goodbye. I waved, and then everything went blurry, the room started spinning, and I went out like a light.”

“You’re completely exhausted, and you haven’t been eating enough. Sit here and I’ll get you a seltzer water with quinine.”

Is there any chance that the assassination might still happen? Breathe. Think. Look, it’s not as though I’ve got a million options: I either disappear tonight, head for Toulouse to join Jean-Jacques and Pauline, or stay here, keep my head down and destroy any evidence linking me to the whole thing.

One way or another, he will have to go back to his apartment. He still has two notes that were never picked up that he needs to destroy. But where did he put them? It all comes flooding back and, suddenly, the jigsaw pieces slot into place: Inga Haag’s first appearance when she crashed Henri Lafont’s reception, her thinly veiled flirtation, the cat, the glass of Roederer with raspberries… Frank remembers Stülpnagel’s beaming smile on the night of his birthday—and Speidel, standing at the bar, frantically whispering with officers Frank didn’t recognize. They used me. The whole bloody lot of them. And if Inga had not come by tonight, would any of them have warned me? He’s implicated by his actions—if the assassination fails, he’ll have to pay for what he’s done. He can hardly claim to have had no choice in the matter, even if that were the case.

He feels completely out of his depth; he wishes he could pass out again.