“Wagner is going to be waiting for me outside the stage door tonight. He expects to take me to dinner after the show.” Her tone was abrupt, as if she blamed him.
“Is that so?” Max stood up and reached for his stick, which rested against the piano. There were no dark circles beneath his eyes, no lines of dissipation around his mouth. He wore a gray suit and tie, his hair was combed smoothly back from his face and he was clean-shaven. She wished she didn’t know how deceiving those saturnine good looks of his could be. “That’s a pretty big fish you’ve caught.”
“I haven’t caught him. And I’m not going.”
“Why not?” He came around the piano and took her arm, urging her toward the lift. “Sounds like it should be a pleasant evening. The note you left made me anticipate something more alarming. To say nothing of the urgent message you sent by way of Otto.”
“I’m glad you hurried right to my side to find out what was going on. I only left the note for you—” she glanced at her watch; it was half past two “—at about half past five this morning. That was, oh, some nine hours ago. And Otto was last night. Where have you been?”
“Here and there. You badgered the life out of Otto, then got up at the crack of dawn, came over here and left me a note saying you needed to see me now to tell me you’re going to dinner with Herr Obergruppenführer?” His brows lifted at her.
She’d known it was a flimsy excuse. Wagner’s invitation was nothing she couldn’t have dealt with on her own, and he knew it as well as she did. She scowled. “I’m not going to dinner with him. And it’s your fault I’m in this fix. You can damn well get me out of it.”
“I gladly would, but I doubt he’d be willing to take me to dinner in your place.” They were across the room by then. He hit the button for the lift. “We have an appointment, by the way. In an hour. At Radio Paris.”
“So that’s why you turned up.”
“I turned up because you sent for me. The radio show just happened to coincide with that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t sound so skeptical. You know I always turn up for you.”
“Sooner or later. And I hate Radio Paris.”
“I’m not asking you to marry it. Just sing for it.” He took her hat and coat from the pegs she’d hung them on, plopped her hat onto her head, helped her on with her coat and put on his own hat.
“Do you ever listen to their broadcasts?”
“Frequently.”
“They’re nothing but propaganda. They even change the lyrics to songs. Did you hear what they did to ‘With My Girlfriend’?” Indignantly, she sang: “In the garden of England, deception has flourished...”
“We work with what we have.”
“I’m tired. I’m hungry. I want to go back to the hotel.”
“After you sing ‘Seule ce soir’ over Radio Paris, I’ll take you back to the hotel immediately.”
“Why ‘Seule ce soir’?”
“It’s one of my favorites.” His voice was bland.
“You’re going to get me arrested one of these days.” She straightened her hat, tied the belt of her coat and frowned at him.
“For what? Singing ‘Seule ce soir’ over the radio? There’s nothing in that to get you arrested. It’s a beautiful song, and hearing you sing it so beautifully will brighten the hearts of your countrymen. You’re doing a public service.”
She snorted.
He shook his head. “There’s that skepticism of yours again. Where’s your trust in your fellow man?”
“If you mean you, I left it somewhere back in Brussels.”
“You do have a fixation with that, don’t you?”
“You lied to me, you manipulated me—”
“On the other hand, I could have left you to rot in jail in Casablanca. Or worse. The way I look at it, you’re coming out way ahead.”
“Since I’m liable to get arrested and shot at any time, I’d say it’s pretty much a draw.”
“I told you, you do what I tell you, I’ll keep you alive.”
They stepped inside the lift when it arrived, and Max hit the button that started them down.
She said, “Kind of short notice, isn’t it? I’m surprised the radio station was willing to accommodate you.”
“They’re not accommodating me. They’re accommodating you, and at the same time they’re doing themselves a favor. They don’t often get the chance to put a star of your magnitude on the air, and they know we’re only in Paris for these last three days.”
Genevieve’s chest tightened as she realized that he must be confident of solving the problem that was her mother within that time frame. He would hardly leave Paris until the situation was taken care of. Would he?
Speculating was useless. She didn’t know enough about that side of him, about how he operated, about what he did when he wasn’t with her, to make anything but the wildest of guesses. For the first time she realized how thoroughly he had insulated her from the work they did. Otto had said he protected her, and she was just beginning to realize how true that was.
The lift stopped and they stepped out. Even at this time of day she could see customers in the parlor, but the hall was deserted and they encountered no one as they walked outside. The Citroën was parked by the side entrance. Max opened her door for her, then got behind the wheel.
She caught herself chewing her lower lip as the car pulled away from the curb, but she immediately stopped, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“Where were you this morning?” Max asked. His tone was casual, but she knew him. Otto must have told him about coming to pick her up at the Ritz and instead getting a message saying she’d make her own way to rehearsal, which was unprecedented. Of course he homed in on it. She was a fool not to have been expecting it. Her only excuse was she’d been so busy coming up with that other lie that she’d forgotten about the need for this one.
“Here and there.” She threw his words back at him while she did mental gymnastics trying to come up with a reasonable explanation.
“Seems to be a lot of that going around.”
“Seems to be.”
“You want to be a little more specific?”
Ordinarily she would have simply said no and left him to stew, but under the circumstances she didn’t want to ratchet up his curiosity any more than it already was. “Remember those friends I told you about? I met them for breakfast.”
“The friends with the steely grip?”
He was referring to the bruises on her arm, she knew. She didn’t want to have to come up with another lie to explain those away, so she reverted to flippancy. “That’s them.”
“Ah. A last-minute engagement, I take it?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Mine was a last-minute engagement, too.”
“At five in the morning?” She could only presume that wherever he’d been had something to do with Lillian. Time to do a little digging as to his whereabouts. “Where does somebody go at five in the morning, anyway?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “If you mean me, who says I went there at five in the morning?”
As the implication that he’d been out all night sank in, her knee-jerk reaction—that he’d been with a woman—was immediately replaced by the more obvious one, that he’d been out hunting Lillian. The thought made her stomach twist.
“There’s a curfew, in case you’ve forgotten. If you were to be caught out on the streets...”
“Worried about me, Genevieve?”
“Worried about what will happen to me if something happens to you.” Her voice was tart. “You have all the important documents. And if you’re arrested, you might talk.”
He laughed. “Ouch. That’s putting me in my place.”
They turned onto the Champs-Élysées, joining the steady stream of traffic. Cars, trucks, bicycles in var
ious iterations and a horse-drawn carriage shared the wide boulevard. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks, dodging around the queues that were barely shorter than they had been that morning. The horse chestnuts lining the street were abloom with pink-and-white flowers, and sunlight sparkled over all. The scene was almost idyllic—except for the gaunt faces and worn clothes of the people they passed, the ubiquitous swastika banners, and the soldiers and military vehicles that were everywhere.
Radio Paris was headquartered in the Poste Parisien building. It was differentiated from its next-door neighbor, the gaudy Lido, the famous cabaret that, along with the Moulin Rouge, was the Casino de Paris’s biggest competitor, by lines of triangular balconies marching across its front and the huge bronze disc with a pair of back-to-back Ps that crowned its roof.
Inside the building, Genevieve was greeted effusively by the manager and taken up to the broadcast studio, where Jean Hérold-Paquis, whose daily news reports regularly called for the total annihilation of Britain, was just signing off with his signature ringing pronouncement, “England, like Carthage, shall be destroyed!”
The irony of using this, the official Nazi radio station, to broadcast a signal to the Resistance was not lost on her, but she had only a moment to appreciate it.
“You want to dedicate this song to Elise, from Gervais,” Max murmured.
Genevieve nodded, then the sound engineer came for her and she was stepping up onto the platform in front of the tall, square-framed microphone. A moment after that, she was flashed the green light that meant you’re on.
“This song is dedicated to Elise, from Gervais,” she said into the mic, and sang “Seule ce soir.”
The bowing manager kissed her hand, and his assistant presented her with a bouquet of roses on behalf of the station on her way out.
“I felt like a Christian in the Colosseum with the lions in there,” she said when she and Max were back in the car again. The Citroën’s engine purred as Max accelerated to get in front of a pair of bicycle taxis. Nestled on the seat between them, the roses perfumed the air. “And if you recall, that ended rather badly for the Christians.”
“The key difference here is that these lions don’t know you’re a Christian. They think you’re another lion.”
“For now.” They were on their way to the hotel, and she decided to take the opportunity to probe a little while she could. “So have you learned anything new about your missing baroness?”
He glanced at her. “Remember that, do you? Why all the interest?”
“I find the idea of a baroness on the run from the Nazis mildly fascinating.”
“The twists and turns your mind takes are unfailingly intriguing. And as far as I know, she’s still on the run.”
“No word as to where she might be?”
“None.”
“Where do the Nazis take people like that? When they’re caught? If she were arrested in Paris, for example, where would she be held?” She tried to sound like the questions were prompted by nothing more than idle curiosity.
“Cherche-Midi is where they generally take women. Although it’s hard to say.”
That small tidbit was hardly news, and certainly not worth passing on to Emmy, who almost certainly would be already aware of it. Max was looking thoughtful now. A trifle nervously, she wondered what he was thinking. Impossible to imagine that he could be somehow linking her recent absences to her curiosity about the baroness, but still his expression made her uneasy.
“You know,” he said. “It might be a good idea for you to go to dinner with Herr Obergruppenführer tonight after all.”
She looked at him in surprise. “What? No.”
“It’s a chance to pump him for information we won’t get any other way.”
“What information?”
“The mindset of the top brass. There are rumors that some of them are ready to turn on Hitler. Feel him out about the SS’s attitude toward der Führer. We also hear that Wagner is a friend of Rommel’s. You could try to find out what he knows about what the Generalfeldmarschall is up to. You could pretend to be afraid, say you’ve heard rumors the Allies are getting ready to invade, ask him where he thinks the invasion will happen. If he says something generic like on the coast, ask him what the Desert Fox could possibly do to prepare for an attack by sea. Try to find out where, precisely, Rommel is concentrating his defenses. You know, bat your eyelashes, tear up if you have to, hang on his every word. I’m betting with a little effort you can get him to tell you everything he knows. Just be sure to remember what he tells you.”
“Max—”
“You might even be able to find out something about the missing baroness.” He threw that out there so casually that, if she hadn’t known he was involved in his own desperate search for said baroness, she would have thought it was nothing more than a lure designed to tantalize her into more readily agreeing to do what he wanted. “If she’s been arrested, Herr Obergruppenführer will almost certainly know of it. Tell him you’ve heard rumors that some members of the aristocracy have been working with the Resistance, and you personally are outraged by that and find it hard to believe. Get him talking, see what he says.”
Up until then, she’d been appalled at the idea of going to dinner with Wagner. It felt rather like getting into the water with a shark and encouraging it to swim after her. Max had just opened her eyes to the opportunity it presented. Besides pumping Wagner for information for Max, there was a chance she could use him to locate her mother. As one of the hated SS’s top interrogators, he might very well know where a prisoner brought to Paris for interrogation was being held. Where her mother was being held.
She would have to be careful, question him artfully. If he were to suspect her motives, she would be in terrible danger. Hitler had recently ordered that anyone caught aiding the Resistance was to be immediately executed. The only exceptions were for those slated for interrogation, and then the order was that they were to be executed as soon as the interrogation was complete. No exceptions.
Her heart slammed at the thought.
Reaching the place Vendôme, they pulled up to the Ritz. At this time of day, the hotel was bustling. Third in line, the Citroën crawled toward the entrance.
“All right, I’ll do it,” she said, picking up the roses as they reached the front of the queue and a doorman came forward to open her door for her.
“Good girl. And leave the roses. They’re for me.”
She looked at him, realized that the roses must contain a message, and remembered the low-voiced exchange he’d had with the assistant when the man had handed the roses over. She laid them back down with a grimace.
“Of course they are. Whatever was I thinking?”
The doorman opened the door and she got out.
“You’re not the only one with admirers, you know,” Max called after her.
She didn’t have to look around to know that he was smiling.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I was first a soldier, then a police officer, and then I became a soldier again.” Wagner spoke over the forkful of pressed duck that was on its way to his mouth.
He had, as promised, been waiting for Genevieve outside the stage door after her show, and she had now spent the better part of two nerve-racking hours in his company. They were almost at the end of their meal, and he was waxing expansive under her outwardly admiring gaze. Having employed the age-old feminine stratagem of encouraging him to talk about himself, she was listening with every appearance of wide-eyed attention as he did so. She’d already learned that he was, indeed, good friends with Rommel, and that the general Wagner described as “invincible” was frustrated by the failure of those closest to the Führer to heed his suggestions for further fortifying certain areas of the coast that were deemed less likely to be targets for invasion. Nonetheless, according to Wagner, Rommel remained confident in his ability to beat back t
he Allies anywhere they might attempt a landing. Beyond a massive troop buildup in the Pas-de-Calais area, considered to be the most likely spot because of certain intelligence they’d received as well as its proximity to Britain, he’d ordered a slew of nasty surprises to be prepared for the potential invaders up and down the coast that would prevent them from progressing beyond the beaches, where, when the time came, he planned to cut them down in droves. She was, Wagner told her, not to harbor the slightest worry about such an invasion succeeding, because it would not.
Genevieve made an encouraging sound when he paused, and he continued with the far less interesting subject he’d been pursuing for the last quarter hour: how he’d come to occupy the position he was in. “When the police came under the control of the SS, I saw how efficient the organization was, how meticulous they were in carrying out their duties, how forward thinking they were in their policies. I have been with the SS ever since. We are the ones who are most loyal to the Führer. We were formed to serve as his bodyguards, you know. In the SS, our motto is My Honor Is Loyalty. And we live up to that motto every day.”
He took another bite of duck.
She made big eyes at him. Mentally she was busy trying to compile everything he’d told her into a list so that she could recount it to Max without forgetting anything. “That is so impressive. Yet there’s a rumor going around that some of those closest to the Führer feel that Germany would be better served by a new leader.”
His gaze sharpened. “Where did you hear that?” There was a snap to his voice.
The lightning change in his demeanor jolted her. Careful, she cautioned herself, and covered the jump in her pulse with a smile.
“The party circuit.” She shrugged, kept her voice light. “You know what that’s like. Lots of gossip, no way to know what’s true.”
“I do indeed.” The sudden harshness in his face faded as he looked at her. “There is nothing to it. Der Führer is lionized by those of us who serve under him. What he is working to build now is a thousand-year empire, and we, all of us, are proud to be a part of it. Next time you hear any such talk, you may tell those who spread that kind of nonsense, from me, that our leader will remain in place for life, and in our hearts for eternity.”
The Black Swan of Paris Page 24