The Black Swan of Paris

by Karen Robards

  More details registered: she lay on her side, her head on a pillow, her knees bent. The surface beneath her was soft, and the softness curved up behind her. Her back pressed against it. Except for a slight headache, she was physically comfortable, warm. Safe.

  “When?” The reply was a single terse word, but it was all she needed. That voice belonged to Max. She grabbed onto it like a lifeline, let it pull her the rest of the way toward the surface, away from the past, from the pain.

  “Two nights ago.”

  Max swore. “What happened?”

  “They were trying to get an injured British pilot out. There was an informer.”

  “Arrested? Dead?”

  “Five arrested. One dead. The Crimson Cell leader. Killed in the ambush, before they could arrest him.”

  “Name?” Max asked.

  “De Rocheford. Baron Paul de Rocheford.”

  The name hit Genevieve like a slap to the face, snatching her breath and rendering her fully aware in the same instant. Her eyes flew open. She was, she discovered, on the sofa in the studio with the quilt from Max’s bed spread over her. A single lamp on the dining table lit the space, leaving the majority of the room, including the sofa where she lay, in deep shadow. Max was there. From the papers spread out across it and the pen lying on top of them, she could see he’d been using the table as a desk. Minus his jacket and tie now, his hair mussed and tired lines bracketing his eyes, he was seated in front of it. He looked up at the stranger, an old man with stooped shoulders and a gray beard. A stubbed-out Gauloise still smoldered in an ashtray at his elbow.

  Had she heard the man right? Had he really said Paul de Rocheford?

  Dead?

  Goose bumps raced over her skin. Instinct told her not to move, not to make a sound, if she wanted to hear more.

  “Who was the informer?”

  “We aren’t sure. Yet. We’ll find out.” The man’s tone promised a grisly end for the guilty one.

  Max asked, “What do they know, the ones who’ve been arrested?”

  “We’re not sure. De Rocheford was briefed, because his help was needed to prepare for the operation. None of the others were.”

  From their attitude, Genevieve got the impression that theirs was a long-standing relationship, and the meeting a scheduled one. At a guess, it was the explanation for Otto’s reluctance to bring her to La Fleur Rouge tonight. Max being visited by strange men at odd hours was nothing new. In Belgium, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Africa, Spain—everywhere they went, everywhere she performed, there were always strange men dropping in at strange hours on Max. What they spoke of, what they planned, she knew only from overheard fragments of conversations: a bridge blown up in Austria, a factory burned to the ground in Norway, an assassination in Czechoslovakia.

  The less she knew, Max assured her, the better.

  She hadn’t argued. Acutely aware of the terrible fate in store for her if Max was compromised and they were exposed, she hadn’t wanted to know.

  Now she did. Quite desperately.

  “Who was arrested?” Max’s tone was all business. No emotion there. Genevieve, on the other hand, was a seething tangle of emotion. So tangled, in fact, that she couldn’t quite sort out what she felt.

  The man reeled off names. Genevieve recognized none of them. Then he added, “And possibly the baroness. We’ve had conflicting reports on whether or not she was with them.”

  “Lillian de Rocheford?” Looking thoughtful, Max drummed his fingers on the tabletop while Genevieve’s stomach turned inside out. Everyone knew what the Nazis did to prisoners. “How is it we don’t know?”

  “She wasn’t supposed to be part of the mission,” the man said. “De Rocheford didn’t like her to be involved in anything too dangerous, which this definitely was. It came up last-minute, with no time to plan. But she hasn’t been seen since. Some say she was captured. Some say she was injured but escaped. We haven’t been able to confirm anything yet. It’s also possible that, upon learning what happened to her husband and the others, she’s gone into hiding.”

  “We need to find out. Quickly.”

  “We’re doing everything we can. Of course, you will appreciate that it’s difficult right at present. We must be very careful.”

  “I understand. But this is of the utmost importance.” Max’s voice was coolly authoritative.

  He lit another cigarette. If she’d been hoping she was still asleep and this was just another nightmare, that hope was dashed. No dream cigarette could re-create the distinctive burnt-rubber smell of a Gauloise.

  The man said, “Getting anyone else arrested will do none of us any good.”

  Max drew on the cigarette. “Where are the other cell members being held?”

  “Cherbourg. They’ve rounded up dozens of locals, too. It’s bad.”

  “What happened to the pilot?”

  “He’s being kept separately from the others. He’ll be interrogated, then shipped to a POW camp. We’ve already confirmed that his briefing went no further than the run he was on.”

  “Well, that’s something. How certain are you that de Rocheford had no chance to tell the Germans anything?”

  “Absolutely certain. There is concern in some quarters about what he might have told the others in his cell, however. Particularly the baroness. It seems he had a distressing tendency to confide in her.”

  “Damn it.” There was the briefest of pauses, and then he said, “I want a message sent to Baker Street. Today. Wait for the answer.” Turning, he stubbed out the barely smoked cigarette in the ashtray and picked up his pen.

  “I’ll bring it as soon as I have it,” the other man promised as Max tore a sheet of paper in half and scribbled on it. While he waited, the man looked around. His gaze probed the shadows, sliding over Genevieve where she lay on the sofa. Her eyes were tightly shut again by the time his gaze reached her, and she’d drawn her head down into the quilt like a turtle into its shell. The light from the lamp barely touched the sofa, and she wasn’t sure he could even tell that anyone was huddled there. But every instinct she possessed shouted it would be a mistake to let him know that she had overheard.

  “Any word from Gunner?” Max asked, still writing.

  “Nothing. I fear something may have gone wrong. It’s been almost three weeks.”

  “The Krauts are running scared.” There was a note of grim satisfaction in Max’s voice. “I wouldn’t write him off just yet. He may have had to lie low for a while.”

  “If we were smart, that’s what we all would do.”

  “If we were smart.” Finished writing, Max folded his note and handed it to him.

  The man twisted the paper into a tight coil, doubled it, pulled a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket, tapped one out, pinched out the apparently false plug of tobacco in the top, and inserted the paper into what was clearly a hollowed-out middle section. He then put the plug back, restored the cigarette to the pack and put the pack into his pocket.

  “I hear Huntsman is being sought far and wide,” the man said. Huntsman was Max, his code name, and the casual warning sent a thrill of fear through Genevieve. Ordinarily she didn’t feel acute rushes of fear, or, indeed, any emotion at all. It was part of how she had survived. But the date always left her feeling especially vulnerable, and combined with Anna and the dream and what she had just overheard, this bit of bad news packed a punch.

  There were so many of them, the Nazis. So many who collaborated with them, too. Their spies were everywhere. All it took was an unwary word, a piece of bad luck, the wrong Resistance fighter captured, and it was over. The average life expectancy of an SOE agent working behind enemy lines was five months.

  “I hear that, too.” Imperturbable as always, Max got to his feet and reached for his stick. Of course, being searched for by the Germans was merely business as usual for him; n
othing to worry about at all. She told herself that, and let that particular fear go as the hideousness of the rest overwhelmed her. The two men moved away, their voices too low now for Genevieve to overhear. A moment later the rattle and ding of the lift announced the stranger’s departure.

  Max knew nothing of her life before. Why should he? She’d been Genevieve Dumont for nearly four years when they’d met, already established as a singer, her name legally changed to the stage name she’d assumed from the time when she’d put France behind her, as she’d thought, forever. No longer able to survive as the girl who had been Vivi’s mother, she’d fled her country, her old life, everything and everyone she’d loved, after her daughter’s death, because all of that was inevitably associated with Vivi, and she could no longer bear to be in any part of that world without her daughter in it. The person she was now, the person Max knew, was a totally different creature from the girl she’d been then. The only part that survived was her singing voice—and that damned haunting, hellacious dream.

  Dashing a hand across her eyes to eliminate any lingering trace of tears, Genevieve pushed the quilt aside and sat up. Her head throbbed and her stomach still wasn’t back to normal, but the rampant fear stampeding through her veins trumped everything else.

  Max’s brow was furrowed and he seemed to be lost in thought as he turned away from the lift.

  “What was that about?” She pushed a hand through her hair, lifting the curtain of black curls away from her face. She still wore her evening dress, but her shoes had been removed, she assumed by Max, to whom she also gave credit for the quilt and pillow. Her stockinged feet encountered the cold floor. Given the blackout quality of the curtains it was impossible to be sure, but her impression was that she’d slept for a few hours and it was close to dawn.

  At her question he looked up quickly, and his expression changed. A second later the overhead light came on and she blinked.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Long enough to hear that—” Her voice wanted to break; oh, God, she wouldn’t have expected to feel so devastated. The trick was to approach what she really wanted to know sideways rather than head-on. “The Nazis are searching for Huntsman.”

  His grimace dismissed that as unimportant. “Oh,” she continued, “and some baron’s been killed and his wife is missing. Or did I get that wrong?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t listen to what doesn’t concern you.”

  The clipped quality of his answer made it clear: she had not misheard. It was all she could do to fight off the wave of dizziness that assailed her.

  “You shouldn’t talk about what doesn’t concern me where I can listen.”

  “Touché.” He stood over her now, looking down at her closely. “You feeling all right?”

  She must have paled, she realized. Certainly she was sweating.

  “My head hurts.” She closed her eyes and let her forehead drop into her cradling hand, the better to hide her face from him. Her answer wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t why she was suddenly feeling sick as a dog. That tangle of emotions she was experiencing was unraveling strand by strand.

  “I believe it’s called a hangover.” His voice was dry. He was walking away from her. A moment later she looked up at the sound of running water to find that he was in the kitchen filling a glass.

  She said, “That man—have you worked with him before? Is his information usually reliable?” The tiniest sliver of hope that someone might have got it wrong burned inside her.

  “Reliable enough. Why all the interest?” He came back toward her carrying the glass; it held a cloudy white liquid that fizzed. Alka-Seltzer, if she had to guess.

  “He saw me.” If her mind hadn’t been clogged by burgeoning panic, she would have artfully gone to work to tease all the details out of him. But artfully was, she feared, beyond her for the moment.

  “No, he didn’t. At least, not so he would ever recognize you again. It was too dark. And you were bundled up to your nose in a quilt.” Max stopped in front of her, handed her the glass. “Drink this.”

  She took it, looked at the mixture, made a face. “I’m really more of a ‘hair of the dog’ kind of girl.”

  “Not anymore, you’re not. Drink it.”

  “Fine.” Maybe it would help. She raised the glass to her lips, drained the contents, shuddered.

  “Good job,” he said.

  Still grimacing at the chalkiness of it, she shot him a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. I could still puke.”

  He smiled.

  The rattle of the arriving lift claimed their attention. Otto stepped out of it, bundled to the eyeballs in overcoat, muffler and hat. In one hand he carried a leather valise.

  “So?” Max greeted him.

  Otto replied with a terse nod.

  At the sight of his familiar figure, Genevieve was both relieved and disappointed. She’d dreaded the arrival of another operative almost as much as she’d hoped for it. One with more information about the fate of the de Rochefords.

  Information she found herself craving like an addict craves morphine, even if some tiny remaining clearheaded part of her warned that maybe she really didn’t want to know.

  Through the unraveling strands of anger and betrayal and bitterness, she’d broken to the hard nugget of truth at the tangle’s core.

  The person she used to be was still there, alive inside her after all.

  Genevra de Rocheford.

  And, despite everything, she quaked with shock and fear over the fate of her estranged parents.

  Chapter Ten

  Genevieve—because she was Genevieve, she reminded herself fiercely—couldn’t believe how terrible she felt. She was cold all over, and shivery with it. Her head pounded and her heart raced and her stomach felt like it was full of writhing snakes. And she was not suffering from a hangover—or at least, only a very small one. This was all because of them.

  Since Vivi’s death, she’d excised them from her life, just as she’d excised everything that was Genevra, everything from before. She’d stood there, listening to the dolorous church bells tolling for Vivi, and wept. Alone in every way that mattered despite the people gathered around her, she watched the tiny casket that held her daughter being lowered into her grave. Her heart hadn’t simply broken; it had crumbled into dust and disintegrated. As it did, every connection she’d ever had to her past had shattered. She’d thought never to see, or speak to, or even think of, her family again.

  They hadn’t wanted Vivi. From that moment on, she hadn’t wanted them.

  Over the ensuing years, nothing about that had changed. How, then, was this affecting her so? Her emotions must still be raw from the dream, she decided. Otherwise, surely, the news would not have thrown her into such a tailspin.

  “Any loose ends?” Max asked Otto.

  “Taken care of.” Otto set the valise on the floor.

  Genevieve forced herself to concentrate on the pair of them. On the present, the here and now, this studio, these men. Falling apart did no one any good, and might well incite an unwelcome curiosity in Max.

  Otto said, “Was that Hippolyte Touvier I saw leaving?”

  “Careful.” Max jerked his head toward her. His tone was semi-jocular. “Our little songbird just warned me that we shouldn’t talk about what doesn’t concern her where she can hear.”

  Otto turned a questioning look her way.

  “My God. If you can’t trust me by now, then maybe we’d better call this whole arrangement off.” Her tone was far sharper than Max’s teasing called for. She couldn’t help it. She was rattled, on edge, off balance. “You think I care about all your secrets?”

  “You don’t know all my secrets.” Max gave her an appraising look, then glanced at Otto. “You have something for me?”

  From the pocket of his overcoat Otto pr
oduced a broadsheet promoting what looked like, from the illustration of a bottle on it, some kind of tonic. Max took it, plucked the empty glass from Genevieve’s hand and headed for the kitchen.

  “He’s trying to protect you. The less you know, the safer you are.” Otto lowered his voice to reach her ears alone as Max turned on the stove’s burner and held the paper over it. That’s when Genevieve realized: the broadsheet must contain a message written in invisible ink. Quelle surprise.

  “He’s worried about my safety now? That’s rich.”

  Otto took off his hat, hung it on a peg built into the wall for that purpose and unwound his muffler. “He’s been worried about your safety from the beginning. But he’s got a job to do. We all do, you included.”

  “I never wanted this job.”

  He put his muffler on another peg and unbuttoned his coat. A quick look around told Genevieve that her own coat had disappeared. For nefarious purposes, she had no doubt.

  “Some of us volunteer, some of us are drafted,” Otto said.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re one of the volunteers.” She cast a dark glance at Max, who was carefully moving the paper this way and that centimeters above the flames. “Like him.”

  “He’s a soldier. We all fight in our own ways. And sometimes we do things we might not want to do.” Otto hung his coat, then turned to look at her. “What you have to ask yourself is where you would be right now if he hadn’t been there when you needed help. Remember Morocco?”

  That brought Genevieve up short. She did, indeed, remember. She’d been back in Paris on a tour slated to take in several of Europe’s capitals when the Germans had broken through the much-touted series of defensive fortresses that formed the Maginot Line. In the wake of France’s stunningly unexpected defeat, she, like so many others clogging the roads and trains, had fled south with not much more than the clothes on her back, escaping Paris steps ahead of the Nazis. Taking a harrowing route overland, she’d ended up trapped in Africa’s largest Atlantic port city, Casablanca, while she tried to obtain the immigration, exit and transit visas that would allow her to leave.