Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Max’s fingers on her jaw hardened to iron. His body went rigid. His eyes blazed down at her.

Genevieve blazed right back at him, furious.

For the space of maybe a couple of heartbeats, the air around them sizzled with—something. Then he leaned close so that only she could hear: “Just so you know, I told Touvier that the reason you were at that safe house this morning is because I sent you there.”

Then he pushed away from her. At the same time Otto walked out of the lift, spotted the two of them and stopped dead in obvious surprise.

The atmosphere in the studio was so tense it practically crackled.

Even as Max turned toward Otto, the imprint of her hand was darkening on his cheek.

Otto wouldn’t miss that. Indeed, she watched his eyes narrow on Max’s face as Max, scooping up his stick and running a hand through his hair to restore its order, walked toward him.

“Take Genevieve back to the hotel, would you?” he said to Otto in a perfectly normal tone.

“Um, but what about...” Otto’s eyes flicked from Max to her and back.

“I have other things to do this afternoon.” He glanced back at her. His eyes glinted at her like black glass, but other than that there was nothing to be read in his expression. Still she had no doubt at all about what those “other things” entailed—trying to find out the identity of her “friend.” She only hoped Emmy’s connection to the safe house was well hidden. “As for you, once Otto gets you back to the hotel, stay there until he picks you up to go to the theater. From now until we leave Paris, unless you clear it with me first, you don’t go anywhere without Otto. Understand?”

Earlier she might have blown up at him, but learning that he’d told Touvier that he’d sent her to the house on rue Duphot, and had thus taken the onus onto himself if it turned out that she was the double agent Touvier suspected her of being, had blunted the worst of her anger at him. Other things still rankled: that he’d even for a moment harbored a suspicion that she might be a double agent, that he’d so cavalierly dismissed his early deception, that he was still using what had happened in Casablanca as a way to persuade her.

And also that, despite everything, he’d made her feel things for him that she’d never wanted nor expected to feel again.

She responded with a curt nod.

He walked past Otto, stepped into the lift and was gone.

Otto stared after him, then fixed accusing eyes on Genevieve. “God in heaven, what did you do to him?”

As instructed, Otto took her back to the hotel. Genevieve got the impression that he watched from behind the wheel of the Citroën until she was safely inside. However unsettling she found being placed on what amounted to house arrest by Max, it dimmed to nothingness in the face of the shock of learning that Touvier suspected her of being a double agent and had set people on to watch her. There was real danger in that, and she was glad that her stay in Paris was almost at an end. Under the circumstances, restricting her movements seemed wise.

The lobby was busy, but not as busy as it tended to be in the early morning or evening. Genevieve made it to the lift with no more than a quick wave for the receptionist and wasn’t surprised to find herself alone in it. Hitting the button for her floor, she stepped back and was idly watching the door close when, at the last possible second, a woman slipped through the opening to join her in the lift.

Genevieve’s first impression, from the black uniform with its starched white apron and cap, was that she was one of the hotel’s legion of maids.

“We only have a minute.” It was Emmy’s voice, Emmy’s face beneath the neat white cap. Even as Genevieve recognized her with a quiver of surprise, Emmy grabbed her hand and continued speaking rapidly. “We’ve found Maman. At least, we think we know where she is. We followed Wagner and watched him go into a house that’s been converted into a secret prison across from the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. He used a key to let himself in. We saw what pocket he keeps the key in. We’ve devised a plan to get her out, but it requires us getting our hands on Wagner’s key, which is why I’ve come to you. When do you see him again?”

Genevieve found herself infected with Emmy’s urgency. “Tonight. He’s taking me to dinner.”

“Is there someplace I can get to him, get to the two of you, some public place where we can interact without making him suspicious?”

As Genevieve did a lightning review of the possibilities in her head, the lift jolted a little as it reached the third floor, then continued its rise toward the fourth.

“He meets me at the stage door and escorts me into his car. Sometimes there are fans. If you pretended to be a fan, he wouldn’t think it suspicious that you’re there.”

“Immediately after your show ends?”

Genevieve nodded.

“I’ll be there. When you see me, make a distraction. Something to keep his attention on you and off me while I get that key. Can you do that?”

“I—yes.” She’d been going to say she would try, but the time for merely trying was long gone. This she would do. “But if you steal his key, he’ll notice. Maybe not immediately, but soon. He’s intelligent. He’ll remember any distraction I make. He’ll remember you. And he might blame me.”

“I’m not going to steal his key. I’m going to borrow it, for a moment only, to make an impression in wax. We’ll put it back into his pocket without him ever knowing it was gone and make our own key from the impression.”

“You can do that?”

“You’d be surprised what I can do.” Emmy smiled. “We’re going to get this done, bébé.”

The lift reached the fourth floor and stopped. The door began to open. With a quick squeeze, Emmy dropped her hand, stepped out into the hall, and was gone.

The next time Genevieve saw Max was that night at intermission, when he beckoned her into his office for just long enough to go over some topics he wanted her to press Wagner on. As uneasy as she had been about seeing Wagner again, Emmy’s directive had cranked her anxiety level up until she was practically jumping out of her skin while doing her best to act as if nothing was wrong. As she entered and he closed the door behind her, his eyes were remote, his mouth was hard and his attitude told her that their quarrel had not been forgotten. Well, she hadn’t forgotten it, either, and with Max, she wasn’t in the mood to pretend.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll betray you to him? I mean, if I’m a double agent and all.” She smiled a faux-sweet smile as he stepped behind his desk.

“If I thought you were a double agent, you wouldn’t be standing there.”

“Oh, does that mean you already would have had me killed? Lucky me that you believe me, then. How’s the search for my friend coming? She really is a partisan, and she really won’t betray me. I promise you.”

“Would you stop talking and listen? We don’t have much time.”

The look he gave her was grim. Hostility arced through the air between them.

He started briefing her on the topics he wanted her to touch on during dinner. His tone, his whole attitude, was completely businesslike. If she hadn’t known what had transpired between them in the studio earlier, she would have had no inkling of it.

Even her hand mark on his tanned cheek was gone.

That was Max, able to separate the personal from the professional to a remarkable degree. Except for when it was time for her to go onstage, she was not that disciplined. In fact, after the last few days, she feared she teetered on the brink of turning into an emotional wreck.

Dressed in the strapless scarlet ball gown that was her costume for the opening number of the second act, her solo rendition of “Parlez-moi d’amour,” she stood with one hand on Max’s desk and listened in stony silence as he instructed her to try to find out the German High Command’s reaction to the recent Allied air raid on Calais. Also, she was to mention that she’d heard a rumor that the First US Army Group under General Patton was amassing an army in Kent, England, and ask him if he thought it could be true.

From scraps of conversation she’d overheard between Max, Otto, and the motley collection of partisans with whom they’d interacted over the past few months, she knew that the First US Army Group was actually entirely fictitious, an assemblage of inflatable tanks, shell airplanes and phony fuel depots designed to trick Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilots into thinking it was a real army being positioned for an attack on Pas-de-Calais. She knew, too, that when she was talking to Wagner, she must not seem to know too much about those or any other troop movements, fake or real, or anything else military related. She must appear to be merely seeking reassurance that the idle chatter she’d heard didn’t mean an Allied invasion was imminent, and that Paris was a safe place for her to be. It was a fine line to walk, a tightrope where one misstep could end in disaster.

Usually she was able to carry out such assignments with cool detachment. That had been, she realized, because since Vivi’s death her emotions had been anesthetized against any deep feelings, bad or good. Now that the numb had gone, the peril inherent in the mission was enough to make her cold with dread. Add in the fact that she was going to have to stage a distraction for Emmy, and then, if she didn’t get caught doing that, once again feign interest in Wagner for some hours afterward, and she was jittery with nerves. Wagner was a predator if she’d ever seen one, a man whose touch made her sick, and knowing that on this their second date in as many days he would almost certainly feel that their relationship was progressing to the point where he might expect to do more than simply kiss her hand, her stomach tied itself in knots.

“You have no idea what it’s like to have to sit across from a man like that, pretend to admire him, let him kiss your hand or worse,” she flashed as Max finished by suggesting that she ask Wagner if he’d heard the latest rumors, which maintained that the Allied invasion wouldn’t be launched against France at all, but rather against Norway. “What if he leaps on me in the car?”

“Cough a few times during dinner. Pretend to be coming down with a cold, or, better yet, influenza.” Max’s response was actually helpful, if callously delivered. “Tell him you’re feeling chilly, and that all day long you’ve been alternating between feeling cold and hot. That should do it. Wagner is known to be paranoid about contracting an illness.”

A knock on the door, followed by an anxious “Mademoiselle Dumont, are you in there?” kept her from answering him. The voice belonged to one of the stagehands, sent by Pierre, she had no doubt, to hunt her down.

“Yes, I’m coming.”

“You’re needed onstage” was the reply.

“I’ll stop by your hotel room later.” Max followed her as she turned to head for the door, and she knew he meant so that she could report back to him on what she’d learned. She could feel him behind her—it was unsettling to realize how aware of him she’d become—but she didn’t look around. Instead she responded with a curt nod. He opened the door for her without another word. She passed through it with a swish of her full skirts to be greeted by the stagehand and then, a few steps later, swept up by a visibly relieved Pierre.

“Why do you do this to me?” Pierre scolded as he hurried her along. “One day you will miss your cue and it will be me who is forced to take your place onstage. And I, I assure you, sing like a frog. We will be ruined, all of us, ruined.”

By the time the show ended, and Genevieve, having changed out of her finale costume and dressed now for dinner, walked out the stage door into the crisp night air, she was having to grit her teeth to ward off an attack of the shivers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the weather.

She paused on the stoop. A glance found Wagner’s car, parked near the foot of the shallow flight of stairs that led down to the street. His driver, Lutz, stood beside the open rear passenger door from which Wagner was emerging.

Coming toward her from the direction of the busy rue de Clichy, a group of women, five maybe, or six, in what looked like theater-going finery, were just meters away.

Even in the darkness, Genevieve had no trouble recognizing Emmy as one of the women.

Their eyes met through the shadows. A silent message passed between them. Almost immediately Genevieve looked away, to find Wagner approaching the foot of the steps.

He was smiling up at her. She smiled back and started down toward him.

“There she is! The Black Swan!”

“Mademoiselle Dumont! Mademoiselle Dumont!”

“You’re my favorite singer!”

“Will you sign my program?”

The shrieks, from the women as they rushed toward her, were loud enough to drown out even the sound of traffic on the nearby busy street. As she looked toward them in feigned surprise, she lost her footing, tumbling with a cry down the remaining stairs. It was a short distance, but the fall itself—the sensation of falling—rocked her to the core. As a result, her stunned immobility as she lay where she had fallen was not one bit feigned.

“Genevieve!” Wagner was down on one knee beside her seconds after she hit the pavement.

“Mademoiselle Dumont!” Lutz, on his feet, hovered behind Wagner.

“Oh, no, is she hurt?”

“She’s lying so still!”

“I’m a nurse! Let me through!”

The women gathered around, too, crowding in close, exclaiming. One dropped to her knees beside Wagner and ran a hand along Genevieve’s arms. Lying on her side, Genevieve blinked up at the sea of faces above her. The fall had been deliberate, intended to provide the distraction Emmy had requested. Physically she was unhurt, apart from what might be a few bruises. Emotionally she was shaken. Focusing her vision was difficult, and the look she turned on Wagner, she surmised from his reaction, must have been dazed enough to alarm him.

“Genevieve! Mein Gott, are you hurt?” Wagner loomed over her, touched her cheek. She took a deep breath, fought to pull herself together. Behind him she saw Emmy, who’d been crouched on his other side from the woman who claimed to be a nurse, stand up. Again their eyes met.

Emmy gave her the slightest of nods.

“Nothing appears to be broken,” said the woman who claimed to be a nurse, having just finished running her hand down Genevieve’s legs. She stood up, too.

Emmy was already turning away.

“I—I think I’m all right,” Genevieve said to Wagner. “If you could just help me up.”

Taking her arm, Wagner spoke angrily over his shoulder. “You! You women! Get back! This is your fault. Lutz, get them away.”

“We never meant to hurt her!”

“We just wanted an autograph.”

“Lutz!” Wagner slid an arm around her back. Genevieve forced herself to rest limply against it.

“You’re lucky not to be placed under arrest. Go quickly. Go!” As Wagner helped her to her feet, Lutz shooed the women away.

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