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Austria. The conceit of those Nazis! Soon France would be rid of them. She wished for nothing more.
    Until then, she had to appease types like Heller. Government-run museums like the Louvre fell under the control of the German Ministry of Culture and were subject to their whims and desires. Seeing German soldiers load their loot into trucks caused her heart to break.
    “Liberation can’t be much longer.” Anne set down her cup of tea and inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter. “Is anything happening out there?”
    “I’ll take a look.” Colette stepped over to their third-story vantage point overlooking the busy thoroughfare and pushed open the window to gain a better view.
    “German tanks are coming this way, two or three blocks to the east.” A trio of Panzers ate up pavement in single-file fashion and would soon pass on the street below.
    Her colleague stopped typing and rose from her desk to join Colette at the window. “Where do you think they’re going?”
    Colette’s ears tingled from the exhaust notes of the powerful diesel engines. “When I got off the Métro, we saw a huge convoy of troop trucks. They had to be heading to the Hôtel Meurice.”
    “Yes, I heard them pass too.”
    “And now these tanks are moving in the same direction. Maybe an Allied attack is imminent.”
    As a rule, Colette kept her distance from where the German High Command was posted. Most Parisians did the same, although some parents still visited the lovely sculptured Tuileries Garden opposite the hotel, where their children played by the pond with wooden sailboats. She leaned out the windowsill and regarded how the tanks purposefully maintained a straight line down the middle of the boulevard, which had emptied in the last twenty minutes. The few Parisians out and about skirted underneath the alcoves or slipped into the background.
    Easy now , she thought. All it took was a Resistance member to fling a Molotov cocktail at one of those tanks, and a trigger-happy tank gunner could punch a grotesque hole in the nearest building—or her office.
    Anne stood on her tiptoes and leaned out the window. “I’m looking for Allied tanks, but I’m not seeing anything.”
    Colette mirrored her movement. “Me neither. I’m sure we’ll hear shooting once the Allies are in Paris. This certainly is nerve-racking, waiting for something to happen.”
    “What are you going to do when the shooting starts?”
    “Stay here as long as I can. I would imagine that the Louvre would be one of the first places the Allies want to secure.”
    Colette closed the window, which cut down the cacophony of sound considerably. Anne returned to her desk, while Colette turned to the wooden file cabinet and unlocked the second drawer. The file she sought was one she could find blindfolded. She bent over, let her fingers count off six files, and pulled out a binder marked La Joconde .
    She carried the thick file back to her desk and untied the string holding its contents. Henri Rambouillet, her department head and senior curator, had given her a promotion that carried responsibility for the Mona Lisa back in 1942, one which raised eyebrows among other Louvre curators since she only had two years of experience. The hallway gossip was horrible. Some said the German cultural minister pressured Rambouillet because she had slept with him, but that was a filthy lie. It was her mother-tongue fluency in German that leapfrogged Colette over other applicants.
    Colette skimmed the first few pages, which she could practically recite by heart. When Hitler was rattling sabers in the summer of 1939, at least one segment of the French elites believed him—the arts community. August vacations were canceled at the Louvre, and packing and crating started in earnest. A plan was formulated to safeguard priceless works of art like the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo by removing them from the Louvre and hiding them outside of Paris for safekeeping.
    Over the next four years,