And so it began. It was three months before the little detective telephoned Noelle.
She went to his office, and her first words were: “Is he alive?” and when Barbet nodded,
her body sagged with relief and Barbet thought, It must be wonderful to have someone
love you that much.
“Your boyfriend has been transferred,” Barbet told her.
“Where?”
He looked down at a pad on his desk. “He was attached to the 609th Squadron of the
RAF. He’s been transferred to the 121st Squadron at Martlesham East, in East Anglia.
He’s flying Hurri—”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You’re paying for it,” he said. “You might as well get your money’s worth.” He
looked down at his notes again. “He’s flying Hurricanes. Before that he was flying
American Buffaloes.”
He turned over a page and added, “It becomes a little personal here.”
“Go on,” Noelle said.
Barbet shrugged. “There’s a list of girls he is sleeping with. I didn’t know whether
you wanted—”
“I told you—everything.”
There was a strange note in her voice that baffled him. There was something not quite
normal here, something that did not ring true. Christian Barbet was a third-rate
investigator handling third-rate clients, but because of that he had developed a feral
instinct for truth, a nose for smelling out facts. The beautiful girl standing in his office
disturbed him. At first Barbet had thought she might be trying to involve him in some kind
of espionage. Then he decided that she was a deserted wife seeking evidence against her
husband. He had been wrong about that, he admitted, and now he was at a loss to figure
out what his client wanted or why. He handed Noelle the list of Larry Douglas’ girl friends
and watched her face as she read it. She might have been reading a laundry list.
She finished and looked up. Christian Barbet was totally unprepared for her next
words. “I’m very pleased,” Noelle said.
He looked at her and blinked rapidly.
“Please call me when you have something more to report.”
Long after Noelle Page had gone, Barbet sat in his office staring out the window,
trying to puzzle out what his client was really after.
The theaters of Paris were beginning to boom again. The Germans attended to
celebrate the glory of their victories and to show off the beautiful Frenchwomen they wore
on their arms like trophies. The French attended to forget for a few hours that they were an
unhappy, defeated people.