Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

During the fourth song Genevieve had a scheduled break while the chorus performed without her. The number was the risqué “La java bleue,” which they sang while dancing the java, a scandalous version of the waltz that began with the male choristes grabbing their female partners’ derrieres and pulling them close. It was quite a spectacle, invariably engaging the audience’s full attention. Even the stagehands watched agog from the wings.

This was the middle of seven songs that constituted the first act. She was on again for the next three. After that came intermission, followed by six songs. It was an exhausting program even under the best of conditions, which these were not. Already she was running on pure adrenaline. She had a headache in the form of a constant dull throb behind her eyes. The food she’d gulped had settled like a rock in her stomach. She was tired to the bone, and so tense she had to consciously remind herself to relax her diaphragm as she sang.

She was confident that no one in the audience could pick up on any of that. When she took the stage, she was totally focused on the performance she was there to give. But when she was offstage, like now, the headache and the unsettled stomach and the exhaustion came crashing down on her.

To say nothing of her burning fear for her mother.

What she should do was take this time to hydrate and rest. What she was doing was rushing to find Max.

Pierre, who with a couple of helpers was busy working on the scrim curtain needed in the next number and lately had exhibited problems rising and lowering, saw her from the wings.

“You’re on again in ten minutes, Mademoiselle Dumont,” he hissed in nervous warning as she went by.

“I know.” She would have added a soothing don’t worry, but that would have been useless: worry was part of the job, and apparently part of his nature, as well. Poor man, he was looking sweatier than ever. “I won’t be late.”

With the sultry music for a backdrop, she headed for the small office next to the prop room that Max had taken over for the duration of their run. Experience had taught her that she was likely to find him in there alone at this time, which meant that this would be her best opportunity to talk to him in private. Catching him on his own during intermission was always chancy: usually he was with people. After the show, he was often gone before she left the stage and Otto took her back to the Ritz.

Waiting until tomorrow felt impossible. Keeping her concentration and her energy up during her show was taking every bit of strength and determination she possessed. Once the show was done, she would be, too. Already she was anticipating collapsing in a throbbing mass of shredded nerves back in her hotel room.

But how could she sleep, how could she eat, how could she rehearse or go through another performance or do anything at all, knowing that her mother was possibly being tortured or killed while she did it?

The answer was she couldn’t. She needed to tell Max.

Now that she was offstage, scenes from her childhood bombarded her: herself as a very little girl, seated beside Lillian at the piano in the green parlor as her mother taught her to play. She could see her own small fingers stretching to span the keys, see her mother’s pale, elegant hands demonstrating, hear the hesitant notes of her first attempts at “Alouette”; herself a little older, maybe all of eight years, walking hand in hand with her father among the vines amid all the hustle and bustle of pruning and having him hunker down to show her the small buds that would turn into clusters of grapes; the four of them, Maman, Papa, Emmy and herself, running among the vines from smudge pot to smudge pot as darkness fell, setting the kerosene heaters alight when a hard frost threatened the crop.

In those days family had been a given, a fact of life that she took for granted, like air to breathe. The coming storms that would tear them apart, tear everything apart, were not yet even a cloud on the horizon.

Worry over Lillian’s fate increased with every beat of her heart. It lurked beneath every note she sang, every practiced move in every number, every smile and gesture she gave the audience. It felt like a sharp-clawed animal had gotten lodged deep inside her body and was slowly, systematically tearing its way out.

The intensity of her fear for her mother and her grief for her father woke her to the fact that Vivi’s death had left her emotionally numb. She saw now that she’d been drifting, not caring about anything or anyone, including herself. Nothing could reach her, not the fact that she’d committed murder, or Max’s perfidy, or even the war, because the cold, hard shell that had encapsulated her heart on that day had prevented her from fully feeling. Becoming Genevieve, singing, using the gift that was her voice to create a whole new life, was the only thing that had allowed her to survive. But surviving was all she’d been doing. Rescuing Anna had pierced the shell. Going to Rocheford—going home—had broken it wide-open by thrusting her back into Genevra’s skin and making her feel again.

She’d already lost so much, and each loss had left her feeling like she was bleeding to death inside. She didn’t think she could bear it if she lost her mother, too.

Telling Max what had befallen the missing baroness, that said baroness was in fact her mother and that she wanted, no, required him to arrange her rescue if he ever hoped to have her cooperation in any of his schemes again was not going to be easy. Filling in all the details to his satisfaction would probably take more time than this small break would give her, but any questions he had could be answered later. By presenting him now with the bare facts, she meant to at least get him started on contacting whomever he needed to contact or doing whatever he had to do to put a plan in motion to save Lillian. The most terrifying thing about this particular ticking clock was she had no idea when time would run out.

She wasn’t even going to allow herself to think that the task might be impossible, even for Max. Over the years she had developed respect for his ability to get things done.

As she meant to make clear to him, she needed him to get this done.

The door to Max’s office opened as she neared it. A man emerged, alone. She stopped, watched. As he closed the door behind him and came walking toward her through the shadowy backstage area, she recognized him: the bearded old man from La Fleur Rouge who’d brought Max word of her parents’ fate: Hippolyte Touvier.

There was nothing outwardly suspicious about his appearance, or his movements, or even his presence backstage. Max often had backstage visitors. But her heart started tripping nonetheless. She knew why he had visited Max before. Easy to guess why he was visiting again.

She wore her costume for the next number, a body-hugging dress in the red, white and blue of the French flag that ended at the tops of her thighs in a froth of ruffles. Spangled with sequins, worn with sparkly red pumps and red net stockings held up by red satin suspenders, it had been designed to catch the eye, which in this instance was not a good thing. The relative lack of lighting in this part of the backstage area helped, as did the probability that Touvier had not, before, actually gotten a good enough look at her to recognize her. Her experience with Vartan and the others had opened her eyes to how wary these men were of strangers, and how suspicious a man in fear of betrayal could be.

She quickly ducked to one side of a prop Eiffel Tower and pretended to be studying the call-board on the wall behind it as he passed. As far as she could tell, he didn’t notice her at all, and once he was gone, she breathed a small sigh of relief.

Then she hurried to Max’s office. With a quick knock on the closed door—no reply—she let herself in.

Max wasn’t there. No one was there. Her glance around the cramped, cluttered space touched on the old desk, the chair behind it, a file cabinet, a coatrack with Max’s overcoat and hat hanging from it.

Either Max had slipped away before Touvier had left, before she’d gotten near enough to see him go, or Touvier had missed him entirely.

By now her heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest.

Touvier had promised to bring back the answer to Max’s message as soon as he received it. Did he bring it?

A packet of cigarettes rested on Max’s desk, beside the telephone, as innocuous as a notebook or a pencil. Except for the fact that the cigarettes were Gitanes. Max smoked Gauloises Bleues.

She crossed to the desk, picked up the packet. It was open. A couple of cigarettes were missing. It looked like any ordinary smoker’s ordinary pack.

Touvier had taken the message Max had given him and hidden it inside a cigarette. Was the answer Touvier had promised to bring hidden inside one of these?

Her pulse raced as she stared down at the packet. She should wait for Max.

But she already knew she wasn’t going to. Perhaps he’d already received the message. Perhaps there was no message to receive. Perhaps these were simply cigarettes, anyone’s cigarettes. But she had to check. She had to know.

Casting a nervous glance at the door—she didn’t want to even imagine what Max’s reaction would be if he caught her—she picked up the packet and tapped the cigarettes out one by one. Looking at them, feeling them, smelling them, quickly and nervously, she could detect no difference—wait, was this one slightly firmer in the middle? Even tightly packed tobacco tended to have some give to it.

Remembering how Touvier had done it, she pinched and pulled at the tobacco at the top. A plug came out in her hand. It was a solid stopper with a layer of tobacco cunningly affixed. Below it, a tightly rolled scrap of paper had been inserted into the empty cylinder that ended in an identical plug.

Her hands shook as she tipped the paper out. Unrolling it, she read the black, sloping handwriting with a glance.

Baroness a threat. Your orders are to rescue her if possible, otherwise execute her. Act quickly. You know what’s at stake.

Genevieve had to read the message a second time before she could take it in. Cold sweat broke over her in a wave.

For a moment she stood frozen, staring at the scrap of paper. Her first impulse was to destroy it. That way Max would never receive it, would never know what it said.

Unless he’d already read it. Or Touvier let him know that he’d delivered the answer to his message, and Max checked with the source, who repeated it. Or there was a fail-safe, a backup way of transmitting such an order. Or—there were a thousand ors.

She couldn’t destroy it. That wouldn’t stop the message from ultimately getting through. And for it to turn up missing would arouse suspicion. Of everyone who had access to this office, probably, but also of her. Anyone could have spotted her entering Max’s office.

One thing she had learned over the course of their association: falling afoul of the Resistance did not end well.

Her other option was to tell Max the whole story, her whole story, just as she’d meant to do, and beg him to go ahead with plans to rescue her mother while taking killing her off the table.

He would not deny her. Would he?

As Otto had said, Max was a soldier. If a speedy rescue proved difficult, would he flout a direct order? Even for her?

The truth was she couldn’t be sure.

Hands shaking, she rolled the piece of paper up and put it back inside the cigarette. Careful to leave no trace, she replaced the plug, put the cigarette back into the packet and placed the packet back where she’d found it.

She was just stepping away from the desk when the door opened and Touvier walked in.

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