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Mintz who flung herself down to the stone courtyard on the Avenue Simon Bolivar. Her husband tried to follow suit, but Nazis seized him first, calculating how much soap they'd be able to manufacture from that fat belly of his. But he retained his human dignity to the end, a proud Jew who died spitting into the faces of his executioners.

Below, through the caretaker's little window, the bedraggled head of a witch was seen as Mintz' body was dragged away, and her fiendish laughter, bouncing against the dark walls, penetrated the crevices, deep down to the cellar, where members of the Resistance heard its muffled tone, and made note of it for revenge at the proper time.

Rose Mintz, who had become an active member of the Partisan movement now lay in a hospital bed. She had been wounded during a Partisan raid on the Rue Vivien, where it had been her job to distract the attention of a Nazi officer, with her flaming red hair and the deep dimples in her cheeks.

A bullet had lodged in her back, and she had barely managed to drag herself to the nearby Bourse, where friendly hands lifted her and brought her to the safety of a hospital. Here, she had been given an assumed name. She was given the name of a patient who had died some time before- "Madeleine Prevost." This was arranged by the attending nurse, Germaine, a quiet, enigmatic person, cold and forbidding. Her eyes lacked the faintest ray of warmth; her skin was drawn tight over her bony features. The patients whispered that there had been some sort of great tragedy in her life, but exactly what it was nobody knew. She talked little, and whenever she spoke there was an element of the inconclusive and intangible about her words. Quietly and efficiently, she flitted like a white-robed shadow from bed to bed. Yet she took on responsibilities of which none but the initiated