While it was commonly acknowledged within and without the embassy that many of the consular officers carried on the rolls as agricultural attaches and visa officers : spent much of their time gathering intelligence information for transmission to Washington, it was generally believed that Eldon C. Baker was nothing but what he was officially announced to be. Most of his peers thought he was stuffy and more than a little boring.
When the fall of Paris became inevitable, the French government had moved to Vichy, and the neutral embassies, which of course included the United States embassy, had followed it. Few people on the embassy staff had been surprised when Eldon C. Baker was left behind, as officer-in-charge of the deserted embassy building. To them, Eldon C. Baker was the type of man who could be spared for caretaking chores while his brighter associates went about the important business of diplomacy.
Actually, Eldon C. Baker was an intelligence officer. He had been left behind because, to an extraordinary degree, he enjoyed the confidence of his superiors, both in the upper echelons of the embassy hierarchy (where only two people besides the ambassador knew of his intelligence role) and within the State Department’s intelligence system itself.
The first time Eldon C. Baker saw Eric Fulmar was in Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champstlys6es. Baker had been taking dinner there with an amiable German counterpart, Frederick Ferdinand “Freddie” Dietz, a junior Foreign Ministry officer assigned to the office of the military governor of Paris.
Fulmar was with two very pretty girls and a dark-skinned young man, an Arab of some kind. Baker’s attention had been split between the pretty girls and the Arab, between personal and professional curiosity. At a table across from the one with the two young men and the pretty girls sat three men, drinking coffee. One of them was black, a huge man whose flesh spilled over the collar of his shirt and whose belly pressed against the table. He was Senegalese, Baker decided, and he was certainly not in Fouquet’s league socially. Not if the two Frenchmen he sat with were doing what he thought they were doing. : Baker knew one of them by sight, not by name. He was a member of the Sfiret6, the French security service, and he was normally assigned to the Colonial Office. All three of them, rather obviously, were assigned to protect the Moroccan, or Algerian, or Tunisian, whatever he was, sitting at the table with the pretty girls and the handsome young man.
“Now, there’s a nice pair,” Baker said to his dinner partner.
“Which pair?” Freddie Dietz had quipped. “Or, you mean both of them.”
“Yes.
“The one on the left is the daughter of Generalmajor von Handleman-Bitburg. She’s in town with her mother for a short holiday with her father.”
“And the other?”
“Don’t know. I wish I did.”
“Who’s the Arab?”
The first word that came to Baker’s mind, looking at the Arab, was “arrogant.”
He was tall, thin, and very well tailored, in a dinner jacket with an old-fashioned high collar. He was sharp-featured, hawk-eyed, and had long-fingered, sensitive hands. When he shook his cuffs, Baker saw heavy jeweled gold cuff links, and both a bracelet and a heavy gold watchband. He had a ring with a stone Baker couldn’t identify on the pinkie of his right hand, and there was a large diamond-worth a fortune, Baker thought, presuming it to be real-in a heavy gold setting on what Westerners consider the wedding-ring finger.
As Baker watched, he snapped his fingers impatiently for someone to pour wine, and then a moment later, putting a cigarette to his lips, looked around impatiently for the lackey he obviously expected to provide an instant light.
“I haven’t the foggiest, but the fellow is Eric Fulmar.”
Eric Fulmar was blond, blue-eyed, lithe and tanned. He was wearing a dinner jacket, not nearly as well tailored as the Arab’s and with simple back studs in a modem, rolled-collar shirt. Baker felt enormous energy coming from this goodlooking young man. Not nerves. Not craziness. Power. There was purpose to his gestures and selfassurance he had only rarely met in a kid so young.