Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

“Ready to go?” Max asked when he caught up with her some time later, as she emerged from the powder room. How much time later Genevieve couldn’t really say. Call it two glasses of champagne later. She was feeling much better, more relaxed, almost calm. She credited that to the fact that Wagner was still gone and she hadn’t been arrested. Oh, and the champagne.

She smiled at Max, strictly for the sake of anyone watching.

His eyes narrowed at her. They were, she noted with a critical look at them, actually more hazel than brown, with a hint of green in their depths.

He looked more closely at her. “Is something wrong?”

Realizing that she’d been staring, her brows snapped together. “Where have you been?”

“Around. Come on, let’s get our coats.”

“I have to say goodbye to our hosts first.” She started walking toward the closest of the crowded reception rooms, where she had last seen the consul general and his wife. Max caught her elbow.

“Probably better not.”

They reached the foyer, and Max asked the servant on duty for their coats.

“Mademoiselle Dumont and Monsieur—Bonet?” the man asked, and when Max replied in the affirmative, he went away.

“But I haven’t said goodbye to anyone,” Genevieve protested. She made an effort to head for the reception rooms but Max retained his hold on her arm, preventing her.

“I said goodbye for both of us. Anyway, you don’t want to be here when our good friend gets back, do you?”

Genevieve stopped trying to pull away and stood still, frowning. She knew who he was talking about: Wagner. “Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know. He could.”

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

The look she gave him said it all.

He smiled. Annoyingly.

She scowled at him. “I never want to be put in a position like that again. He was watching us like a fox would a pair of chickens the whole time.”

“He was watching you.”

“He asked me out.”

“Did he?” From Max’s expression, Genevieve saw that the revelation interested him. He was, she realized, turning it over in his mind, working out ways in which he could use it—use her—to his advantage. As always.

“You know what—sometimes you can be a real shit.”

“Only sometimes?” His tone mocked her. “We’re making progress.”

Before she could do more than blister him with a glance, the servant returned with their coats. The man helped Genevieve into hers, custom made to go with her dress in a gorgeous silver brocade shot through with gold threads, while Max, juggling his stick, shrugged into his plain black overcoat all by himself. The servant then opened the door and bowed them out. They found themselves on an imposing covered portico with a soldier stationed on either side.

As the door closed behind them, the resultant darkness made it impossible to see very much at all. A strong gust of wind blew in from the river, catching Genevieve unaware and making her stagger sideways.

“Careful.” Max caught her with an arm around her waist. She leaned against him gratefully for a moment, regaining her balance while letting him shelter her from the wind, afraid that the shock of the cold, damp air after the warmth of the rooms inside might blow away some of the pleasant wooziness she was feeling.

It was past midnight now, and the date she’d been dreading for weeks was safely behind her. All she had to do was get to the hotel, go to bed and fall asleep, and when she woke up, it would be a new day, a new year, and she could look forward instead of back.

The Citroën waited at the foot of the steps, its motor running. The pass permitting it to be on the streets after curfew was displayed prominently on the dashboard.

“Ready?” Max asked as one of the soldiers reached them, and Genevieve nodded.

They started down the short flight of steps. The soldier escorted them, holding an umbrella over their heads, lighting their way with a covered torch.

Rain spattered on the umbrella and the pavement and fell all around with a soft rushing sound. The smell of it was fishy, like the scent of the nearby river. A sliver of moon peeped out from behind the clouds, providing barely enough light to enable her to see the car and the steps. Even with her coat, she found herself shivering. Max held tightly to her arm, and for once she was glad. The steps felt slick, and that would be because they were wet with rain and her soles were leather. Leather was a valuable resource and reserved almost exclusively for the war effort, but she was allowed to have leather shoes instead of the wooden or cork soles with cloth uppers most people had to make do with.

Just as she had access to real rather than ersatz coffee, special meals in special restaurants when all around her people were starving on a diet of little more than potatoes and leeks, and all kinds of freedoms unavailable to ordinary French citizens, which with more and more frequency lately she fiercely wished she was.

Resplendent tonight in a chauffeur’s uniform, Otto was once again behind the wheel. An Austrian whose real name she had never discovered, he’d been with Max since long before that first night in Morocco, when she’d made one of the many life-altering mistakes that pockmarked her existence and walked right up to that piano in that bar and started singing along to Max’s playing.

“Below-stairs gossip had it that Wagner was here tonight,” Otto said as the car pulled away from the steps. He cast a glance in the rearview mirror at Max, who had climbed into the back seat beside her. “Did you see him?”

“We did,” Max said. “Genevieve sang to him.”

“Did she?” Otto’s next glance was aimed at Genevieve, who shot Max a sideways look but didn’t otherwise bother to respond. She was feeling rather pleasantly floaty now, and the last thing she wanted to do was engage in a verbal sparring match. “He must have enjoyed that.”

“He certainly seemed to,” Max said.

“Castellano satisfied with his present?” Otto asked.

“He was.”

Genevieve frowned. “What present?”

Max said, “A quarter million pounds deposited in a Swiss bank. Keeping Spain open for business is expensive.”

“Oh.” That the British government paid millions of pounds to Spain and various Spanish officials to sweeten the pot of continued neutrality was an open secret, and she promptly lost interest. The worry that had been niggling at her for the last twenty-four hours niggled again. She didn’t want to—she wanted to forget the whole experience because of the associations it dredged up—but she had to ask. “Did you find out anything about what happened to Anna’s mother?”

“Anna?”

“The baby. From last night.”

“Oh. The woman’s alive,” Max said. “Wounded, but alive. Her name is Rachel. Rachel Katz. She was taken to Drancy.”

Genevieve sucked in air. Located in a suburb of Paris, Drancy was an internment camp for Jews slated to be deported to Germany. Everyone knew about the abysmal conditions prevalent there. For someone who was wounded, being taken to Drancy was the next thing to a death sentence.

There’s nothing to be done. She did her best to force the memory of big, dark eyes, of terrible desperation and fear out of her head. The baby—was she being looked after properly? Little ones were so helpless, so utterly dependent on the adults in their lives...

She had to clear her throat before she could speak again. “What of Anna?”

“You don’t have to worry. She’s being cared for.”

“Did you leave word—”

Max shook his head before she could finish. He knew what she was asking: Did he leave word in the fountainhead about where Anna had been taken?

“The building is being watched. To try something like that now would be too great a risk. The best thing we can do for Anna and her mother is keep our heads down and do our jobs,” Max said.

Difficult as it was to accept, it was the truth, she knew. She closed her eyes, opened them again.

The interior of the car was dark and warm. It smelled of fine leather, cigarette smoke and rain. Fat droplets spattered the hood and slid down the windows. The motor purred, the heater hummed, the wipers swished, and the effect was surprisingly cozy.

“Looks like they’re being extra thorough.”

The tension in Max’s voice as the Citroën pulled in line behind another car waiting to be allowed out through the big iron gates instantly brought her back to full alertness. She peered anxiously ahead through the windshield to see what was happening. Soldiers who’d spent the evening in a truck parked alongside the entrance as backup for the pair of guards in the small gatehouse were out in the rain in force with their shielded torches, courteously holding umbrellas over the heads of the resplendent guests as they stepped out of their cars for inspections of their papers and persons. More soldiers examined the car, looking inside it, opening the trunk, running a mirror beneath the chassis. Citizens were subject to search at any time, and those entering or exiting areas like the Spanish embassy, which was considered the sovereign territory of another nation, were heavily scrutinized, but this seemed more extreme than usual.

“They’ve got invasion fever,” Otto said. “It’s almost as if they’re afraid enemies might be hiding in their midst.”

“God forbid,” Max said.

Knowing what was in her evening bag as they’d arrived, Genevieve had been nervous even though her pass allowed her to escape inspection. Still, as she frequently pointed out to Max, it took only one soldier to disregard the pass or not understand the scope of it and she was done for. Minus the incriminating songbook now, she watched with more interest than concern as the people in front of them were frisked, had their papers checked and their cars examined before they were allowed to leave.

“We’re up.” Otto pulled forward, rolled down his window and raised his voice to be heard above the rain as he spoke to the guard. “We are not subject to search. We have a pass. I am driving Mademoiselle Genevieve Dumont.”

“The Black Swan?” The soldier pushed his head almost all the way through the open window and shone his torch into the back. The light danced over Max and then hit Genevieve. She blinked once at its brightness, then smiled and waggled her fingers at the guard. He goggled.

“Mademoiselle Dumont,” he gasped, straightening away from the window so fast he knocked his hat askew. Righting it, he waved them on. “Proceed!”

“Of all the possessions of this life, fame is the most useful,” Max murmured once they were moving and Otto had the window rolled up again. Genevieve knew a misquote when she heard one, although she couldn’t quite place it.

“Don’t you mean noblest?” Otto asked.

Ah, there it was: Of all the possessions of this life, fame is the noblest. It was a quote by—she couldn’t remember who, but Max had said it to her before. Actually, he’d needled her with it before. More than once.

“That, too,” Max replied.

Pulling slowly through the gates as they opened, Otto turned onto the street, heading for the first arrondissement and the Ritz. Because of the blackout, the Citroën’s headlights were fitted with slotted covers that directed their beams downward to the ground. Wet, the pavement gleamed as shiny black as the nearby Seine.

“There’s another reason they’re being so careful,” Otto said as the Citroën sped up. “Word is, a few hours ago someone tossed a grenade into a truck full of German soldiers on the quai des Grands-Augustins. Six died. Just about everybody in the vicinity got rounded up and hauled off to Fort Mont-Valérien.”

“Oh, no,” Genevieve said. Fort Mont-Valérien was a notoriously brutal prison the Nazis had established in the western suburbs of Paris.

“There’s been some rioting in retaliation.” Otto sounded grim. “You can be sure there’ll be more. And it won’t end well.”

Max said, “At least now we can make an educated guess about why Wagner left the party the way he did.” He looked at Genevieve. “When he was talking to you, did he say anything about trouble in the city?”

Genevieve shook her head. That made her vision go fuzzy, so she rested her head back against the smooth leather seat behind her and blinked in an effort to clear it. “He wouldn’t tell me something like that.”

“I bet you’d be surprised by what you could get him to tell you.”

Fuzzy vision or no, her head came up. “No,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you anything.”

“I know what you’re thinking. I won’t do it.”

“Won’t do what?”

“Date him so I can milk him for information for you.”

“Such a thought never crossed my mind.”

“Just like such a thought never crossed your mind about Ernst Goth, or Ryszard Zelewski, or Hans Conti, or—” She wasn’t even halfway through the list of Nazis in various occupied territories whom Max had strong-armed her into meeting for coffee, or dinner, or dancing, or a drive, or anyplace, really, where she might be expected to be able to get them to talk.

“Not the same thing at all.” Max remained imperturbable. “They had information I needed. As far as I know at this point, Wagner doesn’t.”

“Whether he does or not, you can forget it. He scares me. It’s something in his eyes.”

“So what did you tell him when he asked you out?” Max said.

Her answer was reluctant. “I said it would be my pleasure.”

Max didn’t say anything. He didn’t even change expression. He didn’t have to. She knew him.

Her voice grew heated. “What was I supposed to—”

A loud boom rent the air.

The sound was muffled, distant, but unmistakably an explosion. Two more equally muffled detonations followed in rapid succession. Genevieve sat up in time to watch in shock as a pillar of flame shot skyward from the general direction of the Champs-Élysées. Blindingly bright in the darkness, high enough to be seen above the area’s gabled roofs and church steeples and monuments, it threw off sparks like fireworks and bathed the interior of the Citroën in a seething orange glow.

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