Page 6

One afternoon that fall, Colette came home from school to find Mum waiting for her in the parlor.

“Where’s Liliane?” Colette asked, looking around for her little sister, who was nearly eight months old now.

“Your uncle Frederic and aunt Marie are looking after her for the night, and Papa has gone to a teachers’ meeting in Lyon for the next few days,” Mum said. “You and I have the whole evening to ourselves, and we have something important to do.”

“What is it, Mum?”

Mum’s eyes twinkled. “Your first major score, my darling. It’s time.”

A shiver of excitement ran down Colette’s spine. “Where are we going?”

“To the Opéra. I’ve bought you a new dress.”

“The Opéra?” Colette had never even been to the theater, never mind to the magnificent Palais Garnier, the grandest opera house in the world, with its soaring pillars and its gilded statues of Harmony and Poetry looking down on the avenue below.

“There’s a German production on tonight, and there will be plenty of those aligned with the Germans in the audience,” Mum said, her jaw tight.

Colette blinked at her, trying to catch up. “Are the Germans bad?”

Mum smiled. “Sometimes I forget you’re only ten.

” She seemed to be searching for words. “No, my darling, there are many wonderful German people, but the German chancellor is a man named Hitler who destroys anyone who stands in his way. He’s threatening to invade Czechoslovakia, and in Germany, he has begun doing terrible things to Jews. ”

“But… why?” Colette’s best friend, Sarah, was Jewish, and she was the nicest girl in the whole class. What could Germany’s chancellor have against people like her?

“Because Hitler is a very bad man. And those who are complicit in taking rights away from their fellow citizens are just the kind of people who deserve to have their jewels stolen. If my sources are correct, the wife of Ernst Balkenhol, the second-in-command to Hitler’s propaganda minister, will be in attendance, wearing a very expensive diamond choker. ”

“She’s our mark?” Colette asked.

“Ingrid Balkenhol is your mark, my darling,” Mum said. “Now go change, and I’ll tell you more on our way there.”

Thirty minutes later, Colette had slipped into the simple, short-sleeved black cocktail dress Mum had laid out for her.

In the mirror, fastening the pearls Mum had loaned her, she appeared at least twelve or thirteen.

She nodded to her reflection on the way out the door, whispering to herself, “You can do this.”

“The key,” Mum murmured as they walked west on the rue Réaumur through a crisp fall evening, “is to act aloof, like you couldn’t possibly care less about anyone’s opinion. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Always appear to be searching the crowd for someone. Don’t make yourself memorable in any way.”

“But this dress…” Colette looked like a film star, complete with a fur stole around her shoulders, on loan from Mum.

“You look beautiful in it, my dear,” Mum said, “but you’ll be two a penny in this crowd—which is exactly as it should be.”

Mum had explained that they would need to sit through the entire production before making their move; to arrive after it had begun would be to make a spectacle of themselves, and to depart early would put them at risk of being noticed.

“Besides,” Mum said with a smile as they crossed the rue Louis-le-Grand and emerged into the Place de l’Opéra, “the production tonight is Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde , one of the most beautiful operas in existence. ”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“A long time ago. And this version is supposed to be even more beautiful. It premiered in Paris just last Thursday with a Norwegian soprano named Kirsten Flagstad in the role of Isolde, the forbidden love of the hero, Tristan. She’s a soloist for a big opera company in America, and she’s quite famous.

The critics say that no one has ever performed the role better.

I can’t think of a better way for you to experience your first night at the opera, my darling. ”

Colette was stunned at first by the sea of elegant people, dressed in their finest, wearing a king’s fortune in jewels.

And the Palais Garnier itself! It was like nothing Colette had ever seen, with its enormous white marble staircase, colorful mosaics, and countless chandeliers lighting the way.

It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer decadence of it all.

But as she and Mum moved through the crowd, her palms were sweating.

It was one thing to steal small pieces here and there at cafés, as she’d been doing, but another thing entirely to lift a very expensive diamond choker from the wife of a powerful man in a packed theater.

“Mum, what if I can’t reach Frau Balkenhol’s neck?” she whispered in a sudden panic as she and Mum headed for their seats twenty rows back from the stage. “What if I’m not tall enough?”

Mum squeezed her hand and nodded to a blonde on the arm of a uniformed man near the front of the audience.

The woman barely came to her husband’s shoulder; her features were sharp and thin, her frame childlike.

“ That is Frau Balkenhol,” she said. The woman was hardly taller than Colette.

“You’ll be able to reach just fine, darling. ”

“And a woman that size would be accustomed to being jostled,” Colette murmured, thinking of all the times she’d been jabbed in the shoulder or elbowed in the head by people who didn’t bother looking down. The world was not built to accommodate small people.

“Exactly,” Mum said, smiling down at her, and Colette understood that, in fact, this had been part of the plan all along. Her first major score—a necklace from the diminutive wife of a bad man—had been designed especially for her.

The production was longer than Colette ever would have imagined—more than four hours, including two intermissions—but Colette found she couldn’t look away.

In fact, she found herself completely forgetting that she was here for a mission rather than to be swept away by the most beautiful story she’d ever seen.

She watched in awe as the main character, Isolde, intent on killing a knight named Tristan who was taking her to marry a king she didn’t want to marry, mistakenly gave him a love potion rather than the deadly poison she had intended.

She drank the potion, too, meaning to meet her death, but instead, the two fell deeply in love with each other, though it was a forbidden passion.

In the second act, Colette’s heart thudded as Tristan and Isolde found ways to be together, even as those who forbade it tried to tear them apart.

They declared their passion for each other, but then an ally of the king stabbed Tristan, which made Colette gasp and cover her mouth in shock as tears ran down her cheeks.

In the third act, Tristan struggled for his life as Isolde rushed to be by his side, and then, as Colette watched with wide eyes, holding her breath, he died with Isolde’s name on his lips.

At the end, Isolde joined her forbidden love in death.

As the lights went up and the performers took their bows, Colette found that she was sobbing. The opera had been a tragedy, but also the most romantic thing she’d ever seen. Despite all that stood against them, Tristan and Isolde were ready to sacrifice everything for each other.

“You must get ahold of yourself, darling,” Mum said as they stood to applaud. Her tone was amused, her eyes warm as she looked down at Colette.

“But there was so much sadness, and yet it was all so beautiful.” Colette was clapping so hard that her hands hurt. “Is love really like that?”

“Like what, my darling?” Mum asked as the curtain finally went down and the crowd began to filter out.

Colette searched for words. “Like something you’d give your life for. Like something you’d do anything for, despite the odds against you. Like something that stays with you your whole life through.”

She looked up at her mother just in time to see tears in her eyes.

“I think,” Mum said, her voice wobbling strangely, “that very few people are lucky enough to have love like that.” The crowd was moving toward the exit now, and Mum put a hand on Colette’s shoulder, nodding in the direction of Ingrid Balkenhol, who had begun to make her way toward the exit.

“It’s time, my darling. Go get in position. I’ll meet you outside, as we planned.”

Heart racing, Colette nodded and slipped away, letting the crowd swallow her.

There would be time to think about the against-all-odds love story of Tristan and Isolde later.

For now she had to focus. As she slid through the surge of people toward the top of the grand marble staircase, her doubt faded, replaced by steely resolve.

She was good at this. She had trained for this moment.

As Frau Balkenhol appeared through a theater door and moved toward Colette, deep in conversation with another woman, Colette zeroed in on the diamond choker around the German woman’s slender neck.

Necklaces were easy to steal, but still, her palms were sweaty again as she glided through the crowd.

She could feel Mum’s eyes on her from across the grand foyer. The crowd nudged and pushed along as a thousand patrons made their way to the stairs. The window was closing fast; the theft had to happen in close quarters, when everyone was jostling against one another.

Colette took a deep breath. And then, just as Frau Balkenhol passed, she reached up with her left hand and, gentle as a whisper, flicked the uncomplicated clasp at the woman’s neck, sweeping her right hand out to catch the diamond as it fell.

The moment it hit her palm, Colette closed her fist around it and deliberately stumbled forward, knocking into the man in front of her, who then knocked into Frau Balkenhol, while Colette pretended she had thrown out her hand only to catch her balance.

The man turned, but by the time he had said, “Excuse me, madame,” to Frau Balkenhol, and by the time the German woman began yelping in aggrieved protest, Colette was already melting back into the crowd.

Across the foyer, Mum nodded her approval and vanished into the sea of departing operagoers, leaving Colette to casually make her own way outside.

As she exited the Palais Garnier and the night air wrapped its icy fingers around her, she pulled her fur stole a bit tighter to shield herself against the chill.

Keeping her right hand closed in a fist around a fortune in diamonds, she ducked her head and hid a small smile of triumph as she hurried away, resisting the urge to look back.