The Black Swan of Paris

by Karen Robards

  Fortunately, tonight he wasn’t in the audience. She knew that because, during her last curtain call, among many other floral tributes, she’d been presented with an enormous bouquet of flowers from him along with a note.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t come tonight. May I take you to dinner tomorrow night after your show to make up for it? I’ll be waiting for you at the stage door when you come out.

  ~ Claus von Wagner

  Her strategy had been to fob him off with excuses until they left Paris. If he was going to wait for her by the stage door, that wasn’t going to be possible. Of course, she could always exit another way, but he would probably see that as the ploy to escape him it would be, and be affronted. Better to once again plead after-show exhaustion. It was quite possible that he would counter with an invitation to a daytime outing, but she had only three days left in Paris, and over the past few years she’d practically turned gracefully wriggling out of unwanted dates into an art form. She could manage this.

  In any case, there were far more urgent matters on her mind than how to deal with Wagner. She had to find Max and tell him about her mother, with no further loss of time. She’d already cranked up her courage and checked his office, only to find it empty and dark. Hopefully he would be waiting for her in her dressing room. With Touvier nowhere in the vicinity.

  A pair of chorus girls came around the bend in the hallway. Still wearing the bright bird costumes from the final number, they were clearly in high spirits and just as clearly on their way to the greenroom.

  “Genevieve!” They trilled a greeting almost in unison when they saw her.

  “Wonderful job tonight,” she told them.

  “Are you coming to the party?” one of them, Nadine, asked.

  “Not tonight.”

  “You’ll have fun,” the other, Yvonne, urged.

  “Especially if you stick with us,” Nadine said, and the two of them burst into giggles.

  “Some other time.” She waved them off with a smile and tried not to breathe as she walked through the cloying patchouli-scented cloud of perfume that wafted in their wake.

  Otto came around the corner next. He was wearing his chauffeur’s uniform again. She knew what that meant. Max had gone.

  “You blew the roof off the place,” he said on a congratulatory note as she reached him. “I was on my feet clapping right along with everybody else.”

  “Thank you,” she said. He turned to walk beside her as she continued on toward her dressing room. “Where’s Max?”

  “He asked me to take you back to the hotel.”

  “What’s he doing?” Her voice was sharper than it should have been as her pulse started to race. By now he would have read the note. Would he already be on her mother’s trail? He won’t have found her, she told herself. It’s too soon. Although the note had said act quickly.

  Otto shrugged, and Genevieve stopped so suddenly that the long black feathers of her skirt swished forward around her legs. Ignoring the resultant tickling sensation, she turned and gestured at the three stagehands following her with their arms full of the flowers from her curtain calls.

  “Take them to my dressing room, please,” she said, and waited until they were out of earshot.

  Then she looked at Otto. “I need to talk to Max. Is he at La Fleur Rouge?”

  Otto shrugged again.

  Impatience narrowed her eyes. “Wherever he is, I want you to take me to him.”

  Otto shook his head. “Can’t do it.”

  “Why not? Where is he?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s got a date.”

  Genevieve’s gaze skewered him. They both knew that wasn’t the case. In the slightly more than three years that she’d known him, the number of times Max had gone out with a woman for other than business purposes had to be in the single digits. Oh, he gathered information as necessary, making himself charming to the Nazis’ wives and daughters and sweethearts to find out what they knew, but a date?

  At least, a date she knew about, she amended, as it occurred to her that she couldn’t possibly know everything he did, and he had a lot of time when they weren’t together. The thought was unsettling.

  “When next I see him, I’ll tell him you want to talk to him, shall I?” Otto’s tone was soothing, as if he thought she was being irrationally fractious. Her mouth tightened, but before she could reply a group of chorus boys came around the corner. With a barely perceptible movement of his head, Otto suggested they get moving again.

  Knowing he had a point, Genevieve swallowed what she’d been going to say and started to walk. He fell in beside her. The boys were shier than the girls, and she returned their more respectful greetings with a smile and a nod.

  “I need to see him tonight,” she said when they were sufficiently far away. The edge in her voice was in no way blunted because she was whispering. She couldn’t convey what she needed to convey to Max in a verbal message or note entrusted to Otto, she almost certainly wouldn’t be able to reach Max by telephone and even if she did, communications by telephone were known to be unsecure, and she could hardly go searching for Max all over Paris. By herself. At night. After curfew.

  She needed Otto.

  “Take me to him,” she said.

  Otto looked at her. In her peep-toe shoes she was centimeters taller than he was, and the towering black plumes in her hair made her seem taller still. Still, despite his lack of size and his shock of white hair and the lines creasing his face, there was a sudden steeliness about him that reminded her that, like Max, he was something far different from what he appeared.

  “He told me to take you straight back to the hotel after your show, and that’s what I’ll be doing.” His voice was low, but the bulldog set of his jaw indicated that was his last word on the subject.

  Her temper heated. “You know, I don’t remember agreeing to the part where Max—or you—gets to dictate my every move.”

  “He’s trying to keep you safe.”

  “I don’t need to be kept safe. I need to talk to him. Tonight.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve caused him enough problems for one day?”

  Genevieve frowned, not understanding, and Otto went on, “He had people hunting all over Paris for you. He sent me out. He went out looking himself. He was frightened to death you’d gotten yourself in trouble somehow. He put off important business, for you.” They reached her dressing room door and stopped. Otto’s voice dropped even lower. “These are dangerous times, and the work he’s doing is unforgiving. Let him do it.”

  “I’m not interfering with it.”

  “You’re making him worry about you. That kind of distraction could get him killed.”

  At the thought of Max being killed, a shiver went through her. The reality of it was something she’d never really faced up to. Now she did, and it was like an icy hand clutching at her heart. The harsh truth was that every day Max walked a tightrope. So did she, and so did Otto. So did they all, every single person who worked in secret to overthrow the Reich. One false move could send any of them—all of them—plunging to their deaths. All those years of being emotionally numb had in at least this one way been an advantage, she discovered. She’d never been truly afraid before.

  Now that layer of insulation had been stripped away.

  “Anyway, I couldn’t take you to him if I wanted to. I don’t know where he is,” Otto said.

  Genevieve found herself at a standstill. It was hard to accept, but the only thing left to do for the moment was pray that Max wouldn’t find her mother before she could talk to him.

  “You’ll see him tonight?”

  “Most likely.”

  “As soon as you see him, you’ll tell him I need to talk to him?” she asked.

  “I will.”

  “Tell him to come to me at the hotel.”

  “I’ll do that.”
<
br />   She turned away. “I’m going to change.”

  “I’ll pull the car around. Come out when you’re ready.”

  She walked out the stage door into the brisk night air a short time later, signed autographs for the small group of fans gathered there and slid into the back of the waiting Citroën. Berthe, who was with her, sat up front beside Otto. The two of them engaged in animated conversation, but Genevieve said little. She was so exhausted her brain felt fuzzy.

  Traffic was minimal. Two military trucks, traveling together, came toward them, followed a few minutes later by a Funkpeilwagen, a direction-finding van that could ferret out the location of Resistance radio operators by tracking their wireless transmissions. Identifiable by its slow pace and visible antenna, it crept past, looking like a crawling yellow-eyed insect with its curved back and slotted headlights.

  She wondered who it had in its sights tonight.

  Worry lay heavy as a brick in her stomach, but as she listened to the Citroën’s tires swish over the pavement, she found herself on the brink of nodding off.

  She badly needed sleep. But she was afraid of it, too. Afraid of what might be waiting for her in the dark.

  They were no more than a kilometer away from the Ritz when the air-raid sirens went off.

  Chapter Twenty

  The mournful wail of air-raid sirens was the first thing Lillian became aware of as she surfaced from the darkness she’d been lost in. They sounded close, far closer than they should have. Usually they were distant bleats borne on the wind from Cherbourg. But this—this nerve-racking screech seemed to originate directly overhead. Surely Paul had not had a warning system installed on their own roof?

  Then she remembered: this was not Rocheford. And Paul was dead.

  Everything came back to her in a rush. The grief, the horror. Jean-Claude. Andre. She had tried to swallow bleach but had been knocked to the ground before she could ingest more than a mouthful. Her head had smacked into the stone floor. The last thing she remembered was seeing stars—and the crushing pain of a German boot stomping her hands until she relinquished her desperate grip on the container of bleach. Mercifully, after that the world had gone black—until now.

  She was alive.

  Oh, God, why did you let me live?

  As awareness returned, pain descended like a thunderclap. The physical was bad, but the psychic was worse. Her very soul bled.

  She forced her eyes to open. They didn’t work properly. The lids felt puffy, swollen, and she could only part them a crack. Her head swam as she tried to look around, her vision blurry. Every cell in her body cried out in protest as she moved, so she stopped. It didn’t help.

  The worst of the physical pain came from her mouth. Her lips, her tongue, the inside of her throat were all sheer burning agony. Her lips—she could just see them as she cast her gaze down—puffed out like inner tubes. Her tongue felt big as a cucumber. Misshapen and dry, its tip protruded grotesquely between her teeth. Her throat felt swollen and raw. The air she dragged in through her nostrils seared the inflamed tissue as her greedy lungs sucked it down.

  Racked with thirst, she instinctively tried to swallow. She couldn’t—she had no saliva. Simply making the attempt sent fiery needles shooting through her mouth and throat and left her drenched in sweat.

  The all clear sounded. The sirens faded. The danger was over.

  Her muscles relaxed. Her lids drooped.

  Paul, are you here? She reached out for him, through time and space and death, and got no response. If he was out there, she couldn’t find him.

  She remembered the day they were married. A small wedding, in the church in Orconte. At eighteen years old, she’d been so in love with him, and so nervous at the idea of becoming his wife, that she’d trembled like a jelly. For the daughter of a village doctor to marry the future Baron de Rocheford was a big step up, socially. Even as she’d exchanged wedding vows with Paul, she’d made her own internal vow that he would never have cause to regret it, that she would be not only the best wife he could possibly ask for but, when the time came, the best baroness he could possibly ask for. After the wedding she’d set herself to mastering all the things she’d never had a reason to know: how to take her place in aristocratic society, how to run a stately home, how to raise her children to occupy a social position far different from the one she’d been born into. As the years passed, she thought she’d made Paul proud as well as happy.

  She saw flashes of him with their daughters: his eyes bright with wonder and fear (and an excess of wine), a tender smile on his face as he’d held their silently blinking, blanket-wrapped firstborn, Emmanuelle, a scant hour after her birth; a no less welcoming greeting for their squalling second born, Genevra, feisty from her first breath; in his bathing costume on the Côte d’Azur teaching them to swim: Emmanuelle with her fair hair tucked up under a cap, a frown of concentration on her face as she dutifully strove to follow his instructions to the letter, and Genevra, forgetting her cap, her black curls flying as she leaped into the water without listening to a thing he’d said; his eyes misty as he’d beheld Emmanuelle dressed for her first grown-up dance; his face flushed with pride as, settled into his favorite chair in the green parlor, he’d listened to Genevra play and sing.

  Oh, Paul.

  A rattle and a creak brought her back to the terrifying present with a start. She tensed, forcing her lids apart again as she sought the source of the sounds.

  “You are awake, I see.” A man’s voice, speaking in French with an accent that was unmistakably German, was followed by the sound of a heavy door closing. She sensed rather than saw him, an impression of energy and movement outside the limited range of her vision. But there was no missing the vitality of his presence inside the room.

  Unwilling to turn her head more than a few centimeters because of the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her when she tried, she sought him out by carefully moving only her eyes. In the process she discovered that she was no longer in that hellhole of a cellar. She was, instead, in a tiny windowless room lit by a single small ceiling fixture. Four bare walls of what looked like smooth white plaster were interrupted by the closed door, a substantial-looking panel of dark wood. She lay on her back on a cot along one of the long walls with her left wrist chained to a ring in the wall. A light blanket covered her. What she could see of her manacled arm was hideously bruised, her hand discolored and swollen.

  The room was cold, and from the sirens she assumed it was night: the aeroplanes almost always came at night. How long had it been since Paul had died? One day, two? Or more?

  The German came toward her. He was large, a high-ranking officer according to his uniform, with short, dark blond hair. He reached the foot of her cot and stopped.

  “Baroness Lillian de Rocheford, wife of the late Baron Paul de Rocheford.” His tone was musing. It wasn’t a question. He said it as if he had no doubt as to her identity. He seemed to expect no acknowledgment from her, which was wise because he got none. She watched him and breathed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Obergruppenführer Claus von Wagner.” A pause while he studied her. “Do you know what you are facing, madame?”

  She didn’t answer, of course. She couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. Her mouth was so injured, so ulcerated and swollen, that she doubted she would ever be able to make normal use of it again. Certainly speech was beyond her. But her heart, her poor broken heart, started to thump.

  Yes, I know. Although her mind slithered away from the knowledge.

  “You were brought here to be interrogated, and eventually executed, as a traitor to the Reich. As you are no doubt aware, some of our interrogation techniques can be—unpleasant.”

  Death she welcomed. But dying, as she had already learned, was hard. Her insides shivered and shook at the prospect of more pain. She thought of the sufferings of Jean-Claude. She could not hold out against such brutality.
She was not strong enough. Sooner or later she would scream to the skies every secret bottled up inside her.

  Then she remembered her mouth—she couldn’t talk. Her fingers were bent and puffed up to the size of sausages—she couldn’t even write. He might torture her, but the silver lining that came with her injuries was that he would not be able to force her to reveal anything, because they’d already done so much harm to her that, physically, she could not.

  The German picked up something from what to her slightly unfocused gaze appeared to be a pile of rags on the seat of a small wooden chair near the cot. He held it up, then turned it inside out, examining it. It was ripped and badly stained, but she recognized the deep green color: her sweater. The brown rag that still lay crumpled on the chair must be, then, her trousers. A quick inventory told her that she was not naked beneath the blanket. She wore a loose garment with sleeves that ended near her elbows and a hem that reached her knees. A dress? No, more likely a nightgown or hospital gown. Her lower legs and feet were bare.

  While she was unconscious, someone had undressed her. The knowledge made her skin creep.

  “Because you are a woman, and because I do not like to hurt women unless I must, I will tell you how you may escape such a terrible fate.” He put her sweater down, picked up her trousers and proceeded to run the once fine wool between his hands before turning them inside out, searching them as if he suspected something might be sewn inside a hem or concealed in a seam, which, thank God, was not the case. “I have received information that you have knowledge of the Allies’ plans to invade. I am particularly interested in the where and when. If you can tell me that—and do not think to lie to me, that would make me very angry indeed—there will be no need for the disagreeable consequences that your actions have brought upon you.”

  He had received information—it struck her that any number of people might be aware of Paul’s habit of confiding in her. But they could not know she knew. She clung to that thought as he put her trousers down and picked up something else—her pendant. The small garnet heart dangled by its chain from his fingers as he held it up to look at it. Her own heart came unmoored, seeming to twirl through space right along with the dark red stone.