“The car rose with the force of the explosion, and the pincer grip came off the cable. When we came back down, it caught on the cable again, but it’s not locked on. As long as nothing else goes wrong, we should be all right.” Otto was sweating hard.
A pit opened in Genevieve’s stomach as she registered just how precarious their position really was. Sick with horror over Berthe, terrified that something, anything might cause the car to fall, Genevieve made sure Emmy and Lillian were secure, then crawled carefully toward Max and Otto, who clutched his thigh as blood bubbled up between his fingers.
“Berthe was dead before she fell.” Max’s voice was rough with sympathy as she reached them. He was talking to her alone, Genevieve knew, and she could only imagine what her face must look like. “I’ve seen men fall on grenades before. She was killed the moment it detonated.”
He was pulling his sweater over his head, and it took her a second before she understood that he was stripping off his undershirt.
She realized it was for Otto’s leg as he pulled his sweater back on.
Max ripped the shirt into strips, and she tied them around Otto’s leg. Otto leaned back against the wall and breathed.
No one said anything as the cable car reached another pylon and jerked upward again. The loss of Berthe was too raw, too shocking.
Her heart was heavy with sorrow, her eyes stung with tears but there was no time to grieve.
In the distance she saw the flaming torch that was Eber Schloss blazing bright against the night sky. Even as she watched, the highest, brightest flame, the east turret, broke off, plummeting hundreds of meters down the mountain while trailing fire like the tail of a kite.
Max said, “We can’t ride this thing all the way down. You notice they quit shooting at the cable? For all they know, we might be dead from the grenade, but they’ll want to make sure. They’re going to be waiting for us at the other end. We have to get off right before we reach the next pylon. There’s a hill there. After that, we’re above a drop of hundreds of meters the rest of the way in.” Max turned his head to look at Otto. “Did you park the truck where I told you?”
Otto nodded. Then he said, “Yes.” He sounded as if he was trying to gather his strength.
Max said, “When we reach the hill I was talking about, I’m going to drop you women over the side. There’s a place where it’s only about four meters, and the snow will cushion you. Otto, can you hang from your hands for a minute and drop? We need to be careful not to overbalance the car, but we have to do this fast. This particular spot’s not that big, and if we miss it—well, we can’t miss it.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
“I can do it,” Otto said.
“Did I hear you say something about a truck?” Emmy asked. It sounded as if her teeth were chattering. Genevieve didn’t think it was entirely due to the cold wind that swirled around them all. Shocked by Berthe’s death, frightened at the instability of the cable car, they were all struggling to stay strong, but the mood was grim and a pall hung over them all.
Max nodded. “I knew we’d have to get off where we’re going to be getting off, so the truck’s parked fairly close. We get to the truck, drive to the field where a plane is supposed to be waiting. If it’s there, everybody’s off to merry old England but me. I’m for France.” He gave Otto a crooked smile. “Looks like you just bought yourself a ticket out of the war.”
“I can’t go to England,” Lillian said. Her voice was breathy and weak, but there was no missing the determination in it. Like the rest of them, she was sitting on the floor of the cable car. Emmy was close by her side. “I have to go back to France. To Rocheford. I have to be there when the invasion comes. I have a mission.”
“Maman, you can’t,” Emmy said. “That’s over now.”
Lillian shook her head. “There’s no one else. I’m the only one who knows the way through the marsh. I have to do it.”
“I know the way through the marsh,” Genevieve said. “I can do whatever it is. Tell me.”
Lillian looked at her. Their eyes met, and the memory of the many hours they’d spent together exploring the marsh, observing its creatures, harvesting its plants, learning its secrets, passed between them. Always, the marsh had been their shared bond, and it was still.
“You can,” Lillian agreed, sounding as if the realization lifted a great weight from her shoulders. While the cable car slid through the night, creaking and groaning and rocking in the wind as it carried them over the seemingly bottomless crevasses that Genevieve refused to think about, Lillian told her, quickly but precisely, what she needed to do when the time came.
“She’s not an agent,” Max objected. “She’s not trained.”
“She’s trained in what she needs to know,” Lillian replied. “She’s trained in the marsh. She grew up in it.”
“Maman’s right. She can do it,” Emmy said. “Genny always was a little swamp rat.”
“I’m doing it,” Genevieve told him, while narrowing her eyes at her sister.
The fact that Max didn’t raise any more objections told her just how important this mission was.
Carefully Max stood up, grabbed the edge of the car to steady himself as the thing rocked, and looked below. “Just a few more minutes,” he warned the rest of them. Equally careful, Otto hauled himself up beside him.
The uneasy feeling Genevieve had been experiencing ever since she’d heard she was getting ready to be dropped into nothingness intensified. Telling herself those four meters were no distance at all didn’t help. Neither did the thought that she was probably safer out of the cable car than in it. Her pulse quickened, her stomach tightened and she sought a distraction. A glance at her mother, a flash of memory, and she had it.
“Maman, what did you mean when you said Wagner wasn’t the first evil bastard you’ve killed?” She kept her voice low so the conversation couldn’t be heard beyond the three of them. “You haven’t been going around murdering people, have you?”
“Only for my daughters,” Lillian replied, instantly riveting both daughters’ attention.
“Maman—” Emmy sounded both appalled and fascinated.
Lillian made an impatient gesture. “Alain—how do you think he died? It was the skullcaps. That night at dinner, in his beef bourguignonne.”
Genevieve was struck dumb. She was shocked to the core, stunned, but the second she thought about it, it made perfect sense. She knew what skullcaps could do.
“You poisoned him?” Emmy gasped.
“He was violently abusive toward you. He killed Phillippe, leaving Genevra, heartbroken, to bear a child alone. When your papa came home, when he found out either of those things, he would have killed the bastard himself, then probably would have had to stand trial and maybe even be hanged for it. Alain had already damaged our family badly. I wasn’t going to let him destroy us completely. So I did what I had to do.” Lillian’s voice was completely matter-of-fact.
Both girls gaped at her.
Then Emmy huffed a breath. “Maman. Well done.”
“All right, it’s almost time.” Max turned to them, and the topic had to be abandoned. “Everybody on their feet. Hold on to the side and be careful how you move. Genevieve, since you’re the only one who’s uninjured, I’m going to drop you first, so you can help the others.”
Genevieve’s stomach clenched, but she nodded and stood up.
“There it is,” Max said. Standing beside him now, gripping the edge against the swaying of the car, Genevieve saw the snowy hill looming in the darkness. Beyond it, Stuttgart was in sight, its church steeples and tall buildings distant dark shapes in the moonlight. A quick glance back told her that Eber Schloss still burned ferociously. Glimpses of barely visible moving lights racing up and down the mountain made her think that multiple vehicles were coming and going on that narrow access road.
“It’s time.” As
he’d told her he meant to do, Max gripped her around the waist and lifted her up so that she perched on the lip of the car. It rocked dangerously. Heart leaping, she grabbed onto his forearms for dear life. The night fell away below.
Terror leaped into full-blown life inside her, cramping her stomach, freezing her blood, paralyzing her.
“I’ve got you,” Max said. While she clung to him, he shifted his grip so that his hands circled her wrists. She didn’t dare look back, or down. Instead she kept her gaze fixed on him. He was all that kept her from falling—and soon she would fall. At the thought, she started to shake. He must have seen the panic in her face, felt the tremor in her hands, because, in full view of the others, he leaned close to press a quick, hard kiss on her lips. Too terrified to close her eyes, she looked into his instead. Vivi, Pierre, now Berthe—all the memories, her horror of falling, the knowledge that she couldn’t, could not, do this, was laid bare for him to read.
“Trust me, angel,” he said, and she realized that she did, absolutely. Then, a command: “Swing your legs over.”
It was just about the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. But she did it, and for a horrifying moment, with the cable car rocking like a cradle, suspended over nothing until the hill appeared beneath them, she waited.
She slid off the lip when he told her to and hung terrified from his hands. Then he let go and she fell.
She hurtled downward, hit and found herself tumbling unhurt through deep snow.
Chapter Forty-Eight
The escape from the cable car was successful, the truck was where it was supposed to be and the Lysanders were waiting to carry them out of Germany. Max and Genevieve, the latter over Max’s renewed objections, were dropped off in France. The others went on to England for medical treatment. Genevieve took up residence in a flat near Rocheford as she waited for the invasion to be launched. Thanks to Lillian’s courage, the Germans were all but convinced now that the Allied attack would be launched in Pas-de-Calais, and as a result, Normandy and the area around Cherbourg were under slightly less pressure and scrutiny from the Germans. That benefited Genevieve, who was in hiding, with false identity papers, her hair cut short and dyed a nondescript brown, her face scrubbed clean, under the name Giselle Martine, supposedly a widow who sold soap. Word filtered through that after the devastating attack the German press was calling the “Massacre at Eber Schloss,” there was a price on her head. Only Max, who also had a price on his head and had also changed identities, and who stopped by as often as he could, although he was busy carrying out his assigned role in preparing for the invasion, and Emmy, who’d recovered and returned to France to resume her work as Merlin, knew who she really was. Lillian, safe in England, had told her that the signal for the invasion would be broadcast out of London through the BBC, which meant Genevieve spent endless hours listening to the radio. In the meantime, she harvested Lillian’s mushrooms as her mother had directed and went for long walks that refreshed her knowledge of the marsh. When the time came, there would be no room for mistakes.
On one stormy afternoon—the invasion needed fair weather to launch, so she didn’t fear being out of place when the signal came—she took the bus to Vère. The Sisters there operated an orphanage in a rambling, half-timbered house on ten hectares of land. Coming as a Good Samaritan with a contribution toward the upkeep of the children, she was welcomed. Anna—Anna Grangier now, her true identity erased by false papers—played happily with half a dozen other children in a large room in the rear. Watching her, Genevieve thought of Rachel, her mother, and felt a wave of sadness. But Anna was safe, and well, and protected, and that, Genevieve knew, was what Rachel would wish for her.
On June fifth, at around 9:00 p.m., not long after dusk had turned to full dark, she sat at the small table where she took her meals in the dismal, one-room flat that was all the person she was pretending to be could afford, listening to the radio that was turned down very low because possessing one was forbidden. As she listened, she methodically worked a mortar and pestle to grind the last of the mushrooms she had dried into powder.
The announcer cut away from an orchestra playing a cheerful medley of what they called “Swing Time Melodies.” Another voice crackled over the tinny airwaves: “The carrots are cooked. Repeat, the carrots are cooked.”
That was it: the signal.
Galvanized, she jumped up, scooped her freshly made mushroom powder into the bag with the rest, pulled on the dark shirt, trousers and flat-heeled shoes she’d scrounged up during the preceding days in anticipation of this moment, slipped out of the building, hopped onto her bicycle, and pedaled through the windy, overcast night to Rocheford.
She was terrified: anything could go wrong. She could run into a German patrol. The plan could have been betrayed.
Yet she felt exhilarated, too. Tomorrow the free world rolled the dice, its survival on the line. Tonight, so did she.
The cellar cave at Rocheford was the rendezvous point. Already there, waiting for her, was the team she was to lead through the marsh.
“I’ve brought supplies,” she greeted the men gathered around her mother’s worktable as she let herself in. It was the agreed-upon code.
“I hope you brought dinner, too,” came the looked-for response. The voice was familiar.
A single shuttered lantern in the middle of the table left most of the cave in darkness and cast leaping shadows everywhere. She peered through the uncertain light at the speaker and recognized him as the newcomer, the dark, wiry Basque whom she’d met the day she’d rushed to Rocheford looking for her mother. He was thinner now, gaunt, in fact. So were the other men. So was she, she knew. As Genevieve Dumont, she’d been privileged to partake of the same food as the German invaders. As Giselle Martine, she starved on Jerusalem artichokes, that food for cows, and turnips and greens. The edible mushrooms her mother had left behind were gone when she got back to the cave, consumed no doubt by members of the Resistance network once she was no longer there to protect them. The skullcaps, grown in a hidden, nearly inaccessible alcove, were all that had remained.
The newcomer didn’t identify himself. No one did. Secrecy was their shield.
Instead he rose to his feet. “You,” he said.
“You,” she replied, equally rude, and looked past him at the others. She didn’t know any of them. They didn’t know her. There were five men in all. The team she was leading was supposed to consist only of four. One looked like a shopkeeper. The others were dressed all in dark clothes, with knit caps on their heads.
“If you are Rene—” it was a code name, told to her by Lillian “—this is for you.”
She held the bag of powdered mushrooms out toward the shopkeeper. He stepped forward and took it, nodded his thanks, sent a look around the assembled men, said, “God keep us all,” and was gone.
This was another, more personal contribution to the defeat of the Nazis that Lillian had planned to make, quite aside from her official assignment to act as a guide through the marsh, which she’d asked Genevieve to carry out in her stead: an arrangement with her friend the baker who prepared food each day for the German soldiers stationed at Fort du Roule.
“What’s in the bag?” one of the men asked, ever suspicious. Genevieve didn’t blame him. Suspicion, she had learned, was how they all survived.
“A special flour for the bread he bakes each morning for the German soldiers,” the newcomer replied. “They will have it tomorrow with their breakfasts.”
He didn’t specify that the “special flour” was ground mushrooms. Specifically, ground skullcap mushrooms. It was, perhaps, better that the others didn’t know.
What you don’t know, you can’t tell: she could almost hear Max saying it. And if tomorrow went wrong, they didn’t want anyone knowing what she, Lillian and the baker had done. All those who ate that bread would, depending on the concentration of powder in it, either fall violently ill or die.
One more small step toward the weakening of the German defensive line.
“Let’s go,” the newcomer said, precluding any more questions, and they did.
Theirs was a life-or-death mission to disable the equipment that worked the lock that controlled water levels along this westernmost section of the Normandy beaches. In the event of an attack, the Germans planned to flood the marshes behind the beach and the road that ran through them as soon as the invasion began, cutting off the beach so that landing Allied forces were unable to penetrate farther into the interior and would be trapped where they could easily be cut down by strategically placed German guns. Two coastal artillery batteries were in position to open fire on the beach for just that purpose.
The lock control mechanism was housed in a building that was heavily guarded to the front, toward the beach and the sea. As the marsh behind it was judged impassable, the back of the building was guarded only by a patrol that passed immediately behind it at set times. That made destroying the mechanism a stealth mission rather than a battle. Instead of blowing it up, which would attract unwanted attention and even, perhaps, send up a warning flag that the invasion was poised to begin, and in Normandy rather than Pas-de-Calais, where the bulk of the preparations were now taking place, they simply broke in and busted the thing.
The Germans wouldn’t even realize it had been done until they tried to use it, and by then it would be too late.
Mission complete, Genevieve led the party back through the tall weeds and scrub trees that covered the thousands of hectares of brackish water and oozing silt. The night was dark but calm. The storms that had settled over the region for most of the previous week had finally blown themselves out. The temperature was cool rather than cold, but the water was icy. The faint rank smell of decaying vegetation lay over everything. The wind carried on it the salt smell of the sea along with the now ever-present burnt scent from the repeated firing of the Germans’ defensive antiaircraft guns. Nevertheless, Genevieve was on edge: the sounds of the marsh—the lapping of the water, the plops of creatures going in, the cry of night birds—might be, she feared, enough to keep them from hearing any pursuit until it was upon them. And, too, there was the terrifying, exciting knowledge that the Allied invasion would soon begin.
The Black Swan of Paris Page 42