The Black Swan of Paris

by Karen Robards

  She could learn things. Even, perhaps, find out where her mother was being held. In case Emmy failed.

  On the other hand, Wagner would take her continuing availability as encouragement, and the thought of encouraging him made her light-headed with fear. His intentions went far beyond kissing her hand. From the beginning, what he wanted from her had been there in his eyes.

  She didn’t know if she could go through with meeting him for dinner again.

  You don’t have to decide right now, she told herself. Tomorrow is plenty of time.

  Meanwhile, she needed to talk to Emmy. She was desperate to talk to Emmy.

  Although perhaps Emmy already knew where Lillian was. Perhaps a rescue was already underway, or being planned.

  Please, God.

  Her stomach tied itself in knots at the thought of what might be happening even now, and how helpless she was to do anything about it.

  Once in her suite, she found Berthe waiting. Assuring her devoted henchwoman that she was fine and didn’t need her, Genevieve sent her off to bed. She went into the bedroom, scrubbed her hands until the one Wagner had kissed was red, undressed, took a quick bath, pulled on her slip-like nightgown and wrapped herself in her robe. She meant to go directly to bed but found she was too agitated to sleep and instead ended up back out in the sitting room pacing restlessly while her thoughts raced. She stopped, abruptly, only when a soft knock sounded on the door to the suite.

  It was well after midnight. She took a step toward the white-painted panel, then paused to frown at it.

  Who could it be? Hotel staff? Not at this hour. Surely—surely—not Wagner. Or—a raid?

  She went cold with fear.

  The door opened.

  The resultant leap of her heart subsided almost instantly when she saw that it was Max.

  Tension left her body in a rush. Her shoulders sagged. She was so glad to see him she instinctively reached out with both hands and took a quick couple of steps toward him. Her instant impulse—to grab onto him and tell him about the garnet heart and Wagner and her mother and thus put the whole nightmare situation into his capable hands—she just as swiftly quashed. It only took remembering Touvier and the order Max had been given.

  She stopped short, let her hands drop. “Max.” Her voice was flat.

  He had his back to her as he softly closed the door and hadn’t seen. Looking around now, he spotted her standing there in the middle of the sitting room. Lit only by a pair of small lamps, with the curtains well drawn against the night, the room was full of shadows.

  “You’re up,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to go drag you out of bed.”

  She didn’t know what she looked like—or, she did: nothing like her usual glamorous self with her face scrubbed clean and her hair pushed back behind her ears and all wrapped up in her blue chenille bathrobe, with fuzzy mules on her feet—but, having slid over her once, his eyes fastened on her face.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  She couldn’t tell him. Not the truth.

  “You just broke into my room.” She folded her arms over her chest.

  “It’s not breaking in if you have a key.” Handsome in his tux, a little louche looking with a five-o’clock shadow darkening his jaw and his bow tie loose so that the ends hung down past his open shirt collar, he walked toward her, holding the key up, letting it dangle between his thumb and forefinger, to illustrate.

  “Who gave you a key?” She frowned in an effort to hide whatever he had obviously seen in her face.

  “I always have a key.” He pocketed it. “I just don’t often use it.”

  “By often, I hope you mean never.”

  “Aside from now? Absolutely.”

  “You’re lying. I can tell.”

  The lazy smile he gave her made her wonder how many times he’d been in her rooms without her knowing it. For what purpose? To check up on her? To search it? The thought was aggravating rather than alarming.

  “Since you’re up, can I assume you were expecting me? Or were you waiting for someone else?”

  “Oh, someone else, of course. I always look like this when I’m expecting company in my hotel room after midnight. Only, silly me, I’m never expecting company in my hotel room after midnight. So maybe I just couldn’t sleep.”

  “You look beautiful, as you know you always do.” A teasing glint came into his eyes. “A little jeune fille for some tastes, but me, I like the look, so don’t worry.”

  “I wasn’t worried, believe me.”

  “So why couldn’t you sleep?”

  “Because I just had dinner with a Nazi who tortures people for a living?”

  “Ah.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you want, anyway?”

  “What do you think? Information. I saw you getting cozy with Wagner in the lobby, by the way. I take it from that the evening went well. So what did he have to say?”

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea that he’d been watching without her knowing it. “Where were you?”

  “In the bar. I wanted to make sure you got back to the hotel safely.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t?”

  “We’ll never know, will we?” Setting his stick aside, he made himself comfortable on the sofa and looked up at her. “Well?”

  She told him everything she thought he might be interested in. The only bits she held back were the parts pertaining to her mother. By the time she’d finished, they were both sitting, he on the sofa and she in a chair flanking it, so close their knees brushed. Leaning toward him, talking softly but animatedly, she racked her brain for every last detail.

  “That was good work,” Max said when she finished at last. Despite how late it now was, he seemed wide-awake and full of energy. While she...she felt drained. Limp even, as if she had just survived an ordeal, which she supposed reliving her dinner with Wagner was. “A shame he knew nothing about the baroness you’re so interested in.”

  There was no change in his expression—Max was a master at never revealing what he was thinking—but she knew perfectly well that the topic was more important to him than his casual tone implied. He never missed a thing—had he somehow picked up on the real magnitude of her interest in the topic?

  The thought was unsettling. The only thing to do was to brazen it out.

  She shrugged. “If he did, my questioning was too subtle to elicit any details.”

  “Better too subtle than the opposite.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “So the whereabouts of the missing baroness remains a mystery?” The sudden gleam in his eyes was, she thought, searching, and she vowed not to bring up the subject of the baroness around him again.

  “It seems so, yes.”

  “Probably for the best.” His tone dismissed the subject, and she was able to relax again. “You have any trouble with him?”

  Despite the offhand way he dropped the question, she knew what he was asking: if Wagner had gotten out of line with her.

  She shook her head. “No. He asked me to call him Claus, and kissed my hand before I came upstairs.”

  “I saw that.”

  “He asked me to have dinner with him again tomorrow night.” The words were abrupt. Until she said it, she hadn’t even been sure she was going to tell him. She wanted to find an excuse to refuse. At the same time, she was afraid to break the connection, because of her mother. So far Wagner was the only link she was aware of. With an unhappy flicker of self-knowledge, she realized that she’d told Max because she knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to continue using her to get to Wagner. She wouldn’t be able to get out of it now: Max would make her go.

  Max’s mouth tightened. Just fractionally, but she saw it. His hand, in the act of reaching into his pocket for wh
at she assumed were his cigarettes, hesitated. “Did he?”

  She said nothing.

  “You should go.”

  She’d known it. Max was ever one to seize opportunities, no matter the cost. Even if the cost was to her.

  “Should I?”

  “Everything you find out helps us. Wagner is a valuable resource. One you have the unique ability to access.” Pulling the cigarettes from his pocket, he tightened his fingers around the pack to the point where she wondered if he was going to crush it.

  “Then I’ll go.”

  “You want to be careful. Herr Obergruppenführer doesn’t strike me as the kind of man to be satisfied with kissing a woman’s hand for long.”

  “I’m aware of that. I can handle it.”

  He nodded. What else was he going to do? Obtaining information from terrifying men was part of her job.

  “What time are you meeting him, and where?” His voice was strictly business now.

  “At the theater after the show, like tonight.”

  “We’ll go over some of the things you want to try to get him to talk about before you go.” He returned the pack of cigarettes to his pocket without ever having so much as tapped out a smoke.

  “All right.”

  With the air of one who’d finished talking, he reached for his stick and rose to leave. She stood up, too, and their bodies brushed. As their eyes met in instinctive reaction, she was conscious of an almost overwhelming urge to lean against him, to let him take her weight, just for a minute or two. Not only the weight of her body, but the weight of her abhorrence for Wagner and her aversion to going out with him again, and the weight of all the troubles that crowded in on her, and the weight of the war and her mother and Emmy and all the losses that had been and might still be to come.

  She was just so tired of it all and so frightened, and if she could only get some relief from all the weight, just for a little bit, she would recover sufficiently to start feeling brave again. Then she realized that it wasn’t so much that she had been brave before as that she had been numb, and that frightened her, too, because she no longer knew what the world felt like without the numb.

  The one thing she was pretty sure of was that leaning on Max was not the answer. He was a spymaster and she was his tool. He would protect her, but she could not be sure that it would be for any longer than it suited his purposes to do so.

  She took a step back. The heel of her slipper caught in the carpet. She stumbled and almost went down hard.

  “Careful.” He caught her with an arm around her waist and pulled her upright so that she fell against him.

  Her cheek came to rest on his chest and her hands splayed out on either side of his waist to get her balance, and there she was, exactly where she both did and did not want to be. The faint, familiar scent of his cigarettes smelled like home to her now, she realized, and she realized, too, that he had dropped his stick to catch her and seemed to have no trouble standing straight and tall without it. Leaning against him, absorbing his solid strength and warmth and the comfort of his arms around her, she wanted to stay. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Her hands were between his jacket and his shirt, and she could feel the firm muscles of his waist. She liked how tall he was, and how much bigger and stronger he was than she.

  She could have closed her eyes. She could have clung.

  She didn’t. She pushed away, took a couple of steps back. To survive, she told herself, she needed to be able to stand on her own two feet.

  She needed to not depend on Max.

  “All right?” he asked as his hands dropped to his sides. She nodded. There was something in his eyes as he looked down at her. She frowned as she tried to identify what it was. A kind of wry acceptance? Resignation, even? As if he was coming to terms with a fact he didn’t much like but could no longer avoid.

  It made no sense. Or if it did, she was just too tired to make sense of it.

  He turned away, bent to pick up his stick. Then he started toward the door.

  “Max—” She said his name without having anything to follow it with. The truth was, and she hated facing it, she wasn’t ready for him to go.

  He looked back at her, his expression a question.

  “Good night,” she finished lamely, because she couldn’t think of anything else.

  He nodded, opened the door and walked out without another word.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Slipping out a side door of the hotel shortly after 5:00 a.m., Genevieve kept her head down as she hurried away from the place Vendôme. No soldiers were on duty at this entrance, and she was able to get away without being noticed. It was still dark out, the kind of purple-tinged darkness that presages the rising of the sun. She stayed close to the buildings as she walked quickly toward 2 rue Duphot. The rumble of traffic from the nearby rue de Rivoli, a foghorn tooting on the slightly more distant Seine, even the slam of a window closing somewhere above her, served as mere background noise to the thudding of her heart. The note, folded, was no larger than her thumbnail, and it was concealed inside the hem of her sleeve—she’d snipped a stitch to make room—but if she was caught with it, it was enough to get her killed.

  A surprising number of people were up and about. Like her, they all seemed to be slinking through the gloom as if they didn’t want to be seen.

  The flowerpot on the stoop came into view as she turned the corner onto the street. The house was dark, but one or two buildings nearby showed light through their windows. It would not be long, she knew, before the sidewalk cafés were open and people started queuing up at the shops.

  To be safe, she approached on the opposite side of the street. A boy was out sweeping the cobblestones in front of a shop with long, slow strokes of a handmade broom. The rhythmic swishing sound was the opposite of soothing, which would be, she realized, because her nerves were so on edge. She passed him, keeping her face averted, and dodged another boy who careened past on a bicycle. This one had a cloth bag full of newspapers to sell strapped across his body.

  Her heart clearly intended to pound its way out of her chest. Her fingers tightened around the key in her pocket.

  The house loomed like a crouched, sleeping beast.

  Go on. Get it over with.

  Casting a wary look up and down the street—as far as she could tell the only person near enough to see her was the street sweeper, and he had his back turned—she crossed to number 2, climbed the steps and used the key to let herself in.

  Once she closed the door behind her, the inside of the house was black as pitch. It was cold as well, far colder than outside, and she guessed that there’d been no heat on in it for a long time, since its owners were arrested, probably. She stayed where she was for a minute as her eyes struggled to adjust. Her senses were on high alert, extending way beyond their usual radius in an attempt to probe the depths of the house. Emmy had said they used it as a safe house—was someone there? Was Emmy there? She’d gotten the impression that Emmy was staying elsewhere, but that might have been wrong.

  Barely breathing, standing still as a post, she listened for sounds beyond the usual creaks and whispers endemic to an old building, absorbed faint smells of dust and damp and something vaguely floral that might have been a lingering trace of cologne, and tried to sense whether she might not be alone.

  She heard a distinct thud, and the tiny hairs on the back of her neck catapulted upright.

  What was that? A small dull sound, as if something heavy but padded had dropped. It had come—she thought it had come—from the stairs, where they turned and rose again just beyond the landing.

  Blindly she stared in the direction of the sound.

  It could have been anything, but... She was getting a terrible kind of electric feeling that someone was there, lurking unseen in the dark.

  Her pulse skittered. Her mouth went dry.r />
  “Is anyone here?” She couldn’t help it. She had to know.

  No answer. She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. She did know that she couldn’t simply stand there forever, holding her breath while she listened for something more.

  Do what you came to do and get out.

  Her eyes had adjusted as much as they were going to. There was just enough gray light filtering in through the window at the stair landing to enable her to see the doorway to the lounge. Whether or not someone was holed up in the nether regions of the house, she had to move. As quietly as she could, afraid with every breath she drew of bringing someone who wasn’t Emmy down upon herself, she stole into the sitting room, which was even darker than the hall. Groping her way along, she found the corner of the carpet mainly by touch. Lifting it, she tucked the scrap of paper, with its tiny, precise handwriting that detailed what she had seen, beneath it and lowered it back into place.

  Then she left with the swiftness of precipitous flight.

  It was only as she emerged out into what now seemed like the brightness of the predawn gloom that she realized how loudly her pulse thundered in her ears and how fast and hard she was breathing. Carefully, quietly closing the door, she turned the key in the lock with a feeling of intense relief and turned to go.

  Paying not the smallest amount of attention to her, the boy still swept the street. Now she found the slow swish of his broom steadying.

  During the approximately five minutes she’d been inside the house, nothing out here had changed. That was reassuring.

  She was halfway down the steps before she remembered the pinwheel. Difficult to see in the shadow enfolding the stoop, she heard its faint hum as it spun in the wind. Letting out her breath in a frustrated hiss, she went back up, pulled the pinwheel out of the dirt and laid it down among the flowers. The faintest whiff of lily of the valley followed her as she turned and fled.

  At the end of the street, as a result of a random glance in a darkened shop window, she became aware of two men in tan trench coats crossing the street maybe half a block behind her.