Max said, “I’ll fill you in later. Take us to the studio.”
“Why not the hotel?” Genevieve asked him as the car moved off. She might be leaning against Max, but her head was up and she was once again functional. She was doing her level best to regain her composure, to close her mind to the terrible events of the night, to fight off any link to the past.
“Because the place is going to be packed. Because you don’t want anyone to see you like this.”
“In my costume, you mean?” Because she had just realized that under his jacket she was still wearing her black swan costume from the last number. Coupled with the fact she was reasonably sure no one could tell, just from looking at her, now that her head was up and her eyes were open and she was talking and walking, that she was shaking to pieces inside, her attire seemed to her to be the most logical explanation.
Max leaned close, whispered, “I mean this,” so only she could hear, and touched a forefinger to her cheek. It wasn’t until he held it up and she saw the moisture glistening on the tip of his bronzed finger that she realized tears were rolling unchecked down her face.
She looked at him in mute dismay, then dashed her knuckles across her cheeks to wipe away the tears.
They kept falling. Now that she was aware, she could feel the hot wet slide of them against her skin.
“Here we are,” Otto said as the Citroën rolled to a stop in front of the side entrance to La Fleur Rouge, which from the outside was as dark as the rest of the city now that curfew was upon them.
Max got out and came around to open her door, then leaned in to say to Otto, “Go back and get Berthe and take her to the hotel.” He helped her out of the car, supporting her weight and doing his best to shield her from the rain by tucking her against his side, then leaned back inside the car to say, “There’s a body shoved up the chimney in Genevieve’s dressing room. Later, when everybody’s gone, go back and dispose of it.” She guessed from his lowered voice that she wasn’t supposed to hear that, and she really didn’t hear what Otto said in response. But Max’s reply was a terse “Touvier,” so she assumed Otto had asked who the corpse was.
The thought of Touvier, coupled with this new information about what Max had done with his body, made her dizzy all over again. It was too much. And Pierre...
Don’t think about it, she ordered herself fiercely. Any of it.
She concentrated on pulling herself together as Max shut the door and the Citroën pulled away.
Inside, the brothel was in full swing. Music, laughter and a cacophony of sound bombarded Genevieve from the moment she stepped through the door. Max’s arm was around her still, but she walked steadily toward the lift. Her throat was tight with grief, her stomach was knotted with it and she had to keep dashing away the tears that stubbornly continued to fall. But she walked without needing to lean on him for support, and that was something.
Until the music that was coming at her from the lounge changed to her own voice singing “J’attendrai” from the recording she’d made for Odeon Records the year before.
The images of herself on the swing, of Pierre falling, of his body lying still and broken in front of her spun in a kaleidoscope of horror through her mind. She would have collapsed in a shivering heap right there if Max hadn’t had his arm around her.
“Genevieve?” He looked at her in consternation as she sagged against him.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her throat was choked with sobs that she refused to let escape. But she could do nothing about the tears that rolled down her cheeks.
“It’s all right. I’ve got you.” He scooped her up in his arms as easily as if she were a child. Sliding her arms around his neck, she buried her face in the warm hollow between his neck and shoulder as he carried her to the lift.
Chapter Thirty-Five
When they reached the studio, Max took a moment to lock the lift door so no one else could get into the studio, something he rarely did. He didn’t put her down but instead put down his stick and juggled her around a little while he used the key, and so she noticed what he was doing. And, noticing, Genevieve immediately wondered what he was locking the lift against. Was he afraid there were more vengeance-minded partisans out there who thought she was secretly working for the Nazis? The idea that operatives from her own side might be seeking her out to kill her made her blood run cold.
Or did he fear that the Nazis, realizing their mistake in letting them go, might come storming after them?
She would’ve asked him, but she couldn’t get the words out around the lump in her throat. Her head had come up as she tried to see what he was doing with the lift. Now it dropped back to rest limply on his shoulder. The tears still rolled down her cheeks, nothing she could do about them, but she refused to bawl like a baby in his arms. And if she tried to speak, she was afraid that that was exactly what she would do.
“It’s just a precaution.” He knew her so well: he guessed what was worrying her anyway. He was walking with her now, carrying her across the studio as if she weighed nothing at all, holding her close against his chest, his voice a soothing murmur in the silence of that vast open space. The music didn’t reach up here, for which she was thankful. He hadn’t turned on the light, and she knew that was because the curtains were open. Tall rectangles of changeable grayish light from the moon, which, tonight, was playing hide-and-seek among the rain clouds, slanted across the floor. “Only a handful of people know about this place. Even fewer know that you’re working for the Resistance. Otto and me, a couple of blokes at Baker Street, one or two others. Problem is, it’s possible one of them told someone else, and word gets around. Then, of course, there’s your friend.”
The slight hint of acid in his tone reminded her of their quarrel. She didn’t care. He might still be angry at her over that, but he was there; now that she thought about it, he was always there, and that’s what mattered. Touvier flitted through her mind again; with an icy stab of fear, she wondered if he’d told anyone else of his suspicions about her, but she forced him out. Unfortunately, thoughts of him led to thoughts of Pierre, which led to...
No. She took a deep, ragged breath that sounded suspiciously like a sob as she tried to close the door on her memories.
Tonight the door wasn’t working properly: images kept spilling through. It was because, she thought, now that the numb was gone, her emotions were like a raw nerve freshly exposed.
“Cold?” he asked, and that’s when she realized how badly she was shaking. The studio was dark, but not so dark she couldn’t see. Solid leaden shapes of furniture in the gray; the glint of his eyes; the hard planes and angles of his face. They were in front of the sofa, she saw at about the same time as he said, “Here, hold on a minute,” and set her on her feet. Her legs immediately threatened to give way, and would have done so if he hadn’t kept a precautionary arm around her. She grabbed onto his shoulders as he caught up the blanket that had stayed folded on the back of the sofa since he’d covered her with it before, and wrapped it around her. “How does this bloody enormous skirt come off? Ah, yes.” Having seen her put it on many times, he found the hook-and-eye closures that fastened at her waist with no trouble and released them with the deft movements of a man to whom such things were not a mystery.
Her skirt dropped to the floor with a rustle of feathers. She was left in her bodysuit and suspenders and net stockings beneath his jacket, which covered her almost to her knees, and the blanket, which was warm and enveloping.
Didn’t matter: she still shook like a jelly.
Tucking the blanket closer around her, he tilted her chin up and peered at her face through the gloom. Since the day of Vivi’s funeral until the night she had rescued Anna, she hadn’t cried, not once. Since then, since the numb had gone, the tears had reappeared along with the feelings that prompted them. And now this: the deluge. Jerking her chin free, she scrubbed the blanket across her eyes and tried
to say something, but her throat wouldn’t cooperate. What emerged instead was exactly what she’d feared: a deep, rasping sob. Followed by another. And another.
“All right, then. Here we go.” He picked her up again and sank down on the sofa with her on his lap. As if that one sob had opened the floodgates, she wept noisily now. The shame of it burned in her, but there was nothing she could do. She curled against him, buried her face against his shoulder in a vain attempt to muffle the pathetic sounds she was making, and shivered and sobbed and clung. His body heat, the solid strength of his arms around her, the familiar cadence of his voice were the anchors to which she held fast as she did her best to stop, to turn off the tears, to no avail. “There’s no shame in crying, you know. You’ve been so strong, my brave girl, but you don’t have to be strong now. There’s nobody here but you and me, and you’ve had a hell of a night. Actually, a hell of a few years. Cry all you want.” She sniveled and whimpered—had he really called her his brave girl? She was shocked to realize how much she liked it. She fought for control as one hand emerged from the blanket to clutch his shirt front: another anchor, firmly grasped.
“You were every inch the star tonight. Not only onstage, where you dazzled as you always do, but offstage, as well. I’ve worked with seasoned commandos who, when faced with the same terrible circumstances, wouldn’t have kept their heads as well as you. You should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you.”
His words ignited a warm glow inside her. Her shivering eased. The whimpering and sniveling subsided until the sounds she was making were more on the order of occasional gasping breaths.
“Genevieve.” His tone changed, became almost conversational as he asked, “Do you remember the first time we met?”
She managed a nod. Her face was so close to the warm column of his throat that she could feel the rasp of stubble on it and the underside of his jaw when he moved his head. She could smell his shaving lotion, just faintly, along with cigarettes and a lingering hint of rain. Her tears still fell, dampening his shirt, but they were lessening. His arms held her comfortingly close. His shoulder made a broad, sturdy cushion for her head. His chest felt solid as a wall.
He makes me feel safe, she thought, and then realized that he always had.
She let go of his shirt to slide her hand around his neck as the iron bands squeezing her heart started to loosen.
“I was playing the piano,” he said. “‘We’ll Meet Again’—I even remember the song.” She remembered, too, all of it, including the song; she could hear the piano playing still, the tinkling music was what had drawn her into the bar; she could picture him, a dark, handsome stranger, bent over the keys. “And keeping an eye on the bar owner, who didn’t only work for the Nazis but two-timed them with everybody, including us, when this girl walked in. She was wearing a white dress and a black hat and she knocked my socks off. And that was before she walked right up to my piano and started to sing.”
Her lips curved. She’d needed to pay for her supper that night, and her lodging soon after, and she’d been hoping to garner some tips, or even a semipermanent gig, by horning in on his.
“Up until then, I’d thought of Casablanca as a hellhole. Hot as an oven, dry as the Sahara and everybody out to get everybody. Any night I didn’t end up with a knife in my back I counted as a good night. I’d banged up my leg pretty thoroughly a couple of years before when my plane crashed. Broke the femur in three places, broke my knee, burned the hell out of the whole thing, so bad I couldn’t fly anymore. So I was out of the RAF, and my mother—did I ever tell you about my mother? French, like yourself, concert-caliber pianist, married my father and moved to London at eighteen. She’d made sure I spoke French like a native, so I got shuffled over into the SOE. I wasn’t too happy about it, to say the least, but God and country, you know. You do what you must.”
She listened with growing attention. In the beginning, he never would talk about himself, even when she’d tried to get him to. Of course, once she’d discovered what he was, she’d understood his reluctance and even been glad of it, because whatever he might have told her would have been a lie. Then, having found out he was SOE and that whole bit, she’d been too angry at him to ask again.
He kept talking. “Then you started coming around, singing with me, and I started taking you places, and, yes, it did occur to me that you’d be a hell of an asset for us, but what I remember most from those days was thinking that Casablanca was starting to grow on me. It took me a while to figure out that the only thing that had changed about Casablanca was you.”
She drew in a breath, flicked a glance up at him. He was looking down at her, and she realized that even there, on the sofa, the dark was leavened with enough moonlight to allow him to actually see her. Probably, because of the angles, better even than she could see him: the strong line of his jaw and the straight nose and the dark glint of his eyes.
And his mouth. With a slant to it now that looked almost...tender.
Her heart started to beat a little faster. The hand that was settled behind his neck slid up over his collar, touched the thick, crisp strands of his hair.
“My orders were to set up a spy network, and that’s what I did. A bar musician was a good cover. You meet a lot of interesting people and hear a lot of interesting things that way, but it didn’t give me the ability to travel easily between countries or provide access to the kind of high-level people or information I needed. You, your voice, your growing popularity as a singer—I saw how I could use you.”
At that she narrowed her eyes at him. But she was not, she realized, as angry and hurt and bitter about how he’d manipulated her as she had once been. She’d been involved in the work for long enough now to recognize that, sometimes, hard choices had to be made.
“I wasn’t sure how to make the approach. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the approach. You were so young, and there was something—fragile—about you. You were just what I needed, but I didn’t really want to get you involved.” He brushed a few errant strands of her hair out of her face and tucked them behind her ear. The slide of his fingers over her skin left a trail of heat that lingered. “Then after that night, after what happened with Lamartine, you were involved, we were involved and I didn’t feel like I could just let you walk away. My first allegiance had to be to my country, and this was, and is, a fight for her life. For the life of civilization as we know it. You were the perfect vehicle to take the network I was building where it needed to go. So I did what I felt I had to do.” His mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I knew you were going to hold it against me. I just didn’t realize you were going to hold it against me for years.”
She took a deep breath and realized that the lump in her throat was gone.
“You’re lucky. I’ve decided to let it go.” Her voice was low and scratchy, but at least she was able to talk. The tears had stopped, somewhere in the course of listening to him, and she was no longer shaking. Instead she felt at home in his arms. The fear and pain and grief were still there, but they’d receded to the point that she was able to shove them away where they belonged, deep in the recesses of her mind.
And that, she realized, had been his intention all along: to distract her, to give her thoughts another direction. To talk her down. He knew her well enough to know just how to do it.
He said, “Have you now?”
“You shouldn’t have tried romancing me is all. That was dirty pool.”
“Angel, to be clear, I wasn’t romancing you to get you to help me. Well, not entirely.”
She let that pass in favor of giving him a searching look.
“You used to call me angel a lot. When you were romancing me. But when you stopped romancing me once I found out what you were really up to, you stopped calling me angel, too.”
“If I stopped, it was because I didn’t want to take any further advantage of a girl I’d jockeyed into working for me. And because in this
line of work any kind of close, personal relationship just makes everything more complicated. And dangerous.”
“You started calling me angel again a few days ago.” As the reason became appallingly obvious, her eyes widened on his face. “That’s because you think it’s almost over, don’t you?”
“Think what’s almost over?”
“There you go again, answering a question you don’t want to answer with another question. You know what I’m talking about—the war. The Resistance. The work we’re doing together. Everything.”
“What I know is a big push is coming. If it doesn’t go our way, God help us all.”
“What about—” she almost said us, but that sounded far too personal, like a relationship rather than the professional association they’d maintained “—our work?”
His face tightened. “I’ve known for a while now that we’d have to close up shop soon. If it comes down to the kind of all-out fighting that I think’s getting ready to happen, there won’t be any place left on this continent for girl singers or big traveling shows, nothing like that. I just wasn’t sure of the timing, when to pull the plug. Now I am. With what happened tonight with Touvier, with the Germans knowing an invasion’s coming and desperate to stamp out any trace of the Resistance before it happens, it just got too dangerous. After this show tomorrow, it’s over for you. I’m going to scrap the rest of our tour and set up a special performance in Spain for next week. From there you’re going to the States. It’s the only safe place to sit out what’s coming. Unless I very much miss my guess, Europe’s going to be a bloodbath soon.”
His tone, the set of his jaw, the perceptible hardening of the muscles cradling her told her how serious he was.
The Black Swan of Paris Page 33
