Hahn was watching. The soldiers were watching. Every single Nazi in an audience full of them was watching.
Swallowing in an attempt to loosen up her throat, she flexed her fingers, wet her lips.
The choking sensation didn’t abate.
The expectant silence of the audience increased in intensity until she could feel it beating at her like a battering ram.
She could feel the weight of Hahn’s gaze.
Someone slid onto the bench beside her, startling her. She threw a quick, questioning glance sideways.
Max.
A warm wash of relief did battle with the chills attacking her as she watched him settle his stick—he’d found it; what did that mean?—on the floor near his feet.
If he was in custody, desperate, afraid for his life, afraid for hers, it didn’t show.
His eyes were steady on hers. He was so close their bodies brushed. The spotlights picked up blue highlights in his black hair, threw shadows that emphasized the chiseled bone structure beneath his hard, handsome face.
“Duet?” he murmured.
As all the conversations they urgently needed to have—Are you under arrest? What did you do with Touvier’s body?—were clearly impossible under the circumstances, she whispered back, “Yes, please.”
Whatever happened after, right now she had Max, solid and capable, beside her. Already she could feel the worst of the choking sensation receding.
He started to play. She closed her eyes, folded her hands in her lap and willed the music to fill her.
The first vocal cue came, and she wasn’t ready. Her throat still felt a little stiff, her diaphragm tight.
She didn’t worry. She’d performed with Max many times. Not on a stage like this, but in bars and nightclubs and rehearsal halls and a host of other places. He could carry the song until she could take it.
“Parlez-moi d’amour...” Max sang. He possessed a nice baritone with good timbre and shading, a little husky, decent range, not quite professional quality, but certainly adequate for this song. She listened to his familiar voice and felt the fear that had wound itself around her throat and diaphragm fade, felt the tension in her muscles ease, felt the music flowing inside her again with all the life-giving force of the blood in her veins.
“Parlez-moi d’amour...” The words came trilling out of her throat, blending with his. He stayed in the lower register, the harmony, as her voice soared above his, taking the vocals to the haunting, arena-filling levels that had made her famous. They shared the microphone, their faces so close she could feel the warm prickle of his cheek brushing hers. She was searingly conscious of how close her mouth was to his, of the latent power in his body, of the quicksilver grace of his hands on the keys. As the song reached its crescendo, she could feel a magical kind of chemistry flowing between them, feel the audience’s rapt reaction, feel the electricity in the air. At last, almost reluctant, she brought it down, entwining her voice with his, ending on a softly poignant note that she held as he played beneath it. At the end, as they looked deeply into each other’s eyes and the music faded away, the intensity of their connection was such that she was startled when the audience broke into rapturous applause.
Wrapping an arm around her waist, Max slid his lips across her cheek. She felt the heat of it clear down to her toes. Entirely of its own volition, her body softened and leaned into him. She felt almost intoxicated and was not entirely sure if it was from the music—or the man.
“Carry on as usual. They don’t know about us,” he whispered into her ear.
For maybe half a heartbeat, she was transfixed by the feel of his lips brushing the delicate whorls.
Then she registered the message. Just as quickly as that, the magic of the music and the performance evaporated.
She came back to earth with a thud. Touvier, Hahn, the search. The audience, applauding wildly.
The terrible danger they were in.
Fear settled like a rock in her stomach. With thousands of eyes on her, most of which were Nazi eyes, she did the only thing she could: pretend like everything was fine.
Head clear now, she looked at Max, to find that his eyes were fixed on her face.
“All right?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.” Her voice was equally low. Her eyes held his. “Max—thank you.”
He gave her a small, wry smile. “Anytime, angel.”
She didn’t find the endearment so provoking now.
They were still seated on the piano bench. His arm was still around her. She was still snuggled into his side. To anyone watching, she realized, it must look like they were sharing a private, intimate moment. In keeping with the atmosphere they’d created with the song. Which was over.
Time to survive the rest of the night. At least she felt better. Stronger.
“Come take a bow,” she said, and pulled Max up with her. He grabbed his stick and they walked to the front of the stage and stood together, hand in hand, as the audience rose to its feet.
He took a bow, kissed her hand, then released it and left her, center stage front, to acknowledge the accolades alone.
Then the curtain rang down, and she had to hurry away to change for the next number. Hahn was still in the wings. He was talking to Max and ostentatiously applauded her as she passed him. She smiled and waved in response and tried not to let herself be overcome with anxiety by the sight of the two of them together. Max had told her that the Germans knew nothing of them and to carry on as usual. The only thing she could do was assume he was right.
The choristes whose papers and persons had already passed inspection were changing in the utility room for the next number. More trickled out of their dressing rooms one at a time as they were apparently cleared.
At the moment, the search seemed to be concentrated on the trap room storage area beneath the stage and the crossover behind it. Soldiers filled both areas. From what she could see through the open door of the trap room as she passed it, they were opening trunks and boxes, examining equipment large and small, looking in closets, looking everywhere and at everything.
Cold shivers chased each other down her spine.
What are they looking for? Who are they looking for?
She thought of Max’s office—did he have anything incriminating in there? She thought of her dressing room, of Touvier, and felt nauseated.
Berthe, pale and perspiring but free, was in her dressing room when she reached it. A desperate glance around found nothing incriminating. Touvier’s corpse was not there. At least, nowhere that she could see.
What had Max done with it? Apprehension turned the rock in her stomach into a boulder.
Her spangled skirt was gone, too. A hardly noticeable damp spot on the carpet was the only hint that remained of what had happened.
“I only have a few minutes, so we must be quick,” Genevieve warned for the benefit of the soldiers in the hall as she closed her dressing room door.
The minute it was shut, the two women flew together.
“What happened?”
“They checked my papers.”
“There was no problem?”
“They are pigs.” Berthe’s broad face relaxed into a grim smile. “Stupid German pigs. Thank God.”
As this feverish, whispered exchange took place, they were getting Genevieve ready for the next number, something they’d done so often together that they did it like clockwork.
Genevieve had to know. “Was Max here in the dressing room when you got back?”
“No one was here. A soldier was outside the door.”
How had Max managed it? Her nerves tightened to perilously near the breaking point.
A knock. “Mademoiselle Dumont, it is time for you to return to the stage.”
The same soldier. Where the stagehand who usually delivered the message was, where Pierre was, she could o
nly guess: probably still being detained for inspection.
“Sing fast,” Berthe said. “The sooner we can leave here, the better.”
Berthe’s joking—or not joking—order underlined what Genevieve already knew: as long as the soldiers remained in the theater, none of them were safe.
The show went on. Genevieve doubted that the audience noticed any difference, but backstage, the nervous dread of the performers and crew, the heavy atmosphere created by the soldiers’ presence, the awful anticipation that accompanied the search combined to create a cloud of fear that lay over everything. Her show almost never had mistakes, but tonight notes were flat, dancers tripped, musicians missed their cues.
She herself had to work hard with every song to keep the grinding tension from corroding her performance.
When, finally, blessedly, she was climbing the ladderlike stairs up to the catwalk for the finale, she was so drained that each step was an effort. The last notes of the penultimate number, the cancan, blasted riotously through the theater. Below, the dancers had just taken their final bow and were running offstage. A pair of soldiers stood in the prompt corner, which was usually where Pierre could be found during performances. She didn’t know where Pierre himself was. She caught a glimpse of Madame Arnault herding the girls toward the greenroom, where they were now changing while the utility room was turned inside out. As she reached the catwalk, she scanned as much of the backstage area as she could see for Max. If he was down there, she couldn’t find him. The soldiers had already searched his office and had evidently found nothing to interest them.
Maybe they’d get through this.
“Mademoiselle.” Yves the stagehand was there to usher her to her swing. She followed him, the long black feathers of her skirt rustling as they trailed over the narrow metal walkway, holding her head carefully so as not to snag the plumes of her tall headdress on anything. It was dark up there so high above the lights, and cool and quiet as the few workers allowed on the grid of metal beams and catwalks took care to make as little noise as possible.
She settled herself on the gilded swing, and held on as Yves signaled the stagehands working the crank that she was ready. Then she was away, arcing six stories above the audience before being slowly lowered into place. The final song, “J’attendrai,” was a beautiful one, and she closed her eyes and focused on it to the exclusion of everything else, letting the heartbreak of it fill her as the opening violins started to play.
“Halt! Stop where you are!” The roar was followed by the pounding echo of running footsteps high above her head. Her eyes flew open, and she looked up, aghast, to see a quartet of soldiers near the ceiling, pursuing a man bolting away from them. A collective gasp below her told her that the audience, too, had seen. Cloaked by the shadows at the top of the house, the fugitive fled along the very catwalk from which her swing was launched. That particular narrow pathway didn’t run all the way across the top of the theater. To escape the soldiers, he would have to dodge along a connecting catwalk and clamber down a ladder to the crossover and from there try to exit the theater.
“Halt!” Two of the soldiers, having apparently spotted the potential escape route, branched off onto an intersecting catwalk, clearly hoping to intercept their target. They were brandishing guns in one hand, holding on to the railing with the other. The clatter of their jackboots on metal rang through the theater. “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
The man, seeing that he was in danger of being cut off, daringly vaulted the railing and landed on a catwalk that didn’t connect to the ones the soldiers were on. He scrambled up, darted away. Genevieve’s mouth fell open as he burst out of the deepest of the shadows into an area of reflected light and she recognized him.
Pierre.
Impossible...
A loud bang sounded. Pierre screamed, toppled over the rail and fell, plummeting past her with his arms flailing and his coat flapping like a bird shot out of the sky.
The wet, explosive sound as he hit the stage apron was hideously familiar. Looking down in horror, Genevieve knew instantly that he was dead. She went dizzy as the sight of the still figure sprawled on the ground catapulted her back to the worst moment of her life.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Lower the damn swing! Now!” It was the one clear thing Genevieve heard, she didn’t know how many minutes later. An eternity.
Max roared it from the floor of the auditorium as she hung there, some thirty feet above the ground. She was doing her best to stay conscious so as not to let go of the flower-bedecked chains and fall to her death herself while the theater revolved around her like a carousel and a terrible, rising darkness threatened to whirl her away.
He was there to gather her up when someone responded to his shouts, when the swing was close enough to the floor so that he could grab her. She practically fell off it into his arms, thankful for his strength, glad she no longer had to fight the ringing in her ears or the dizziness that made her feel like she was spinning away or the crushing horror that descended on her in waves, because Max was there and he would take care of everything.
“Let’s get this off you.” He was talking about her headdress, the towering plumes that bobbed and swayed and had taken on all the weight of millstones pulling at her neck as she’d grown dizzy and weak. Between the two of them they got it off. What he did with it she didn’t know, because she melted against him, burying her face in his shoulder, breathing in the safe, familiar scent of him as she fought with every bit of self-preservation remaining within her to shut out everything else.
“I’m taking her out of here,” he told Hahn, as with a snapped order at someone the German joined the contingent of soldiers surrounding Pierre’s body. Max mitigated the fierceness of his statement with a stiff “With your permission, of course.” That nod to the officer’s supreme authority galled him, she knew, but it was necessary because Hahn could snap his fingers and have them both shot, for no more reason than he wanted to.
“A thousand apologies! I would not have had this happen for the world. Our objective was to make an arrest, not endanger our friends and create a spectacle.”
Hahn must have cast a baleful look at his men as he spoke, because one of the soldiers piped up with a timid-sounding, “Sir, we caught him with a radio. He is the one we were searching for—the radio operator. He was trying to escape.”
Smiling, sweating, tomato-faced Pierre a radio operator for the Resistance? It was the most dangerous work of all, with an average survival time that was measured in weeks, not months.
Her heart contracted. A hero.
“We will discuss this later.” The ice in Hahn’s tone disappeared as he said to Max, “She is not hurt?”
“Physically? I don’t think so, no. But look at her. She’s sensitive, an artist, and this is too much for her. It’s a miracle she didn’t fall! She needs to get out of the theater, be someplace quiet where she can grow calm.”
Genevieve was aware enough to realize that he had only one arm wrapped around her, because, of course, in the presence of the enemy, he could not be seen to not need his stick.
“Certainly you may take her away. When she’s feeling better, please tell her how much I enjoyed her show, and that I hope we may meet again under better circumstances.”
A soldier said something, and Hahn must have turned to answer him because Max, with a muttered, “We’re going to walk now,” started off, slowly, taking her with him.
She would have thought he was being overcareful of her, but she discovered as she moved that her legs were unsteady and her head still swam and the heavy rushing sound she could hear was actually only in her ears. Her vision was fine, except she felt at a distance from things. As if she were standing on the outside of a building watching what was taking place within through a window.
“My God, did you see that?”
“Look, it’s her! The Black Swan!”
“Genevieve, hello! Over here!”
“At first I thought it was part of the entertainment. Then—”
“Mademoiselle Dumont, loved the show!”
Snatches of conversation reached her ears through the noise and commotion swirling around them as the audience was ushered from the auditorium. She didn’t respond to the voices calling out specifically to her because she couldn’t. It took all her strength to keep moving. Without Max’s support, she would have collapsed in a heap. A few of her girls in their bright bird costumes huddled together near the stage. Someone somewhere finally thought to kill the stage lights. An unwary glance back found one of the soldiers around Pierre’s body kneeling to close the dead man’s eyes. The moment when death was truly acknowledged, when all hope was relinquished.
She got a flashing image of another, infinitely loved pair of eyes being oh-so-tenderly closed and went ice-cold and light-headed all over again.
After that she saw nothing at all, because she kept her eyes tightly shut and her face buried in Max’s shoulder. If she allowed herself to look, or think about it, or remember...
She couldn’t let herself remember. She would shatter into a thousand tiny shards if she did.
“Here, put this on.” Max slid out of his jacket and wrapped it around her. He had a brief exchange with a soldier. Then they were through the door, stepping outside, and the combination of the cold night air and light rain that blew into her face revived her enough so that she felt able to lift her head from his shoulder and look around.
Rue de Clichy in front of the theater was crowded with vehicles. After a niggle of initial surprise, Genevieve realized that the show had been cut short by only about ten minutes and the previously arranged rides were arriving as scheduled to pick up the audience. In that same vein, she saw that Otto was in place with the Citroën.
Max bundled her into the back, got in beside her.
“What happened?” Otto’s tone made it clear that all it took was one look at them to know something had. Not a surprise: if she was half as pale as she felt, she must look like a ghost, and Max had his arm around her in the car, which he never did. Huddled in Max’s jacket, pressed against his side, she still shivered from head to toe. Her heartbeat felt erratic. She had to work to keep her breathing even.
The Black Swan of Paris Page 32
