Clandestine Activity

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

Page 161

We're in the early stages of WW2 and the Germans are preparing to invade England from northern France (Operation Sea Lion).

Montmarte Paris
Hotel Bretagne is somewhere around here

The resistance has set up a radio transmitter in a room on the 6th floor of the Hotel Bretagne in Paris. With all the German army activity, there is a great deal of information that needs to encoded and then transmitted to London. The amount to be transmitted takes long enough that the Germans are able to get a fix on the transmitter. They break down the door and arrest the teenage girl operator. She crunches a cyanide capsule in her teeth and dies.

Mk. XV British WWII spy radio set

Nazi radio man Grahnweis inspects the Mark XV radio transmitter: 

Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, "Maybe something new inside."

There was. 

Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic - this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn't clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in the upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.

I had to read that passage twice before I figured out what happened to the Grahnweis and the senior officer.