The Heart of the Ritz by Luke Devenish

Author:Luke Devenish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2019-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

They now had a name for themselves: The Freedom Volunteers.

The spot that they’d chosen for their ‘launch position’ was not at the Ritz, obviously, for that would only risk bringing attention to themselves. Instead it was opposite the hotel on the rue Cambon, located in an apartment building whose elderly concierge had died in the exodus. The lack of a doorkeeper allowed Tommy, Polly and Odile the perfect opportunity to execute their plans.

Across a spate of days, Tommy and Polly had performed the reconnaissance. They took turns walking alone into the building entrance as if they were familiar with it, mounting the stairs. Tommy wore his Ritz uniform, carrying a covered tray as if he was delivering a meal from l’Espadon to someone who lived within. It worked in his favour that servants were simultaneously noticed, yet not noticed by most people. If he encountered someone on the stairs or the landings, he greeted them with a nod, and continued ascending. No one blinked twice. Polly took a different approach. If she encountered someone, particularly a male, she chatted pleasantly for a moment, without revealing her business, which only implied that she had reason to be there. Fortuitously, given the proximity to the Ritz, which was crawling with Occupiers, the apartment building was of no interest to the Germans.

One of the fourth-floor apartments was empty, its door left unlocked for new tenants. It had a little balcony off the sitting room, which looked over the narrow street – and the rear entrance to the Ritz. It was ideal for their purpose.

The contraption was ingenious, conceived by Odile. Owing to her dwindling eyesight, however, she could not be the one to place it on the balcony, and so this was Tommy’s task. The day they had decided upon was the day of a mass student protest against the arrest of a prominent college professor. Rumour of its planning had reached them through Odile’s network of school friends. Initially, they had intended to join the march, until good sense kicked in. If they were ever to succeed in what they had committed themselves to, then they must never allow themselves to be the objects of adverse German attention. The student march would draw the Occupiers like a magnet. It presented them with a distraction.

They had tested Odile’s contraption often enough in Tommy’s hotel attic room to know it would work. Crouching behind the apartment balcony’s flower boxes, so that anyone looking out from the windows on the Cambon side of the Ritz wouldn’t see him, Tommy first laid a modified rat trap. Then, in setting it, he placed an empty tin can with a hole punched into its bottom. He filled the tin can with water he’d drawn from the apartment’s sink. Immediately the water began to seep from the hole, but not at any great speed, for the hole was deliberately small. Tommy then placed the little container of ‘butterflies’ that would in time be flung into the air, when the tin can had become light enough to release the trap’s mechanism.

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