The Black Swan of Paris Page 2

  “It’s not—” she began, standing up, only to break off with a swiftly indrawn breath as the door through which the girl had exited flew open. This time, in the rectangle of light, a soldier stood.

  “My God.” The girl’s whisper as she turned her head to look was scarcely louder than a breath, but it was so loaded with terror that it made the hair stand up on the back of Genevieve’s neck. “What do I do?”

  “Who is out there?” the soldier roared. Pistol ready in his hand, he pointed his torch toward the garden. The light played over a tattered cluster of pink peonies, over overgrown green shrubs, over red tulips thrusting their heads through weeds, as it came their way. “Don’t think to hide from me.”

  “Take the baby. Please.” Voice hoarse with dread, the girl thrust the child toward her. Genevieve felt a flutter of panic: if this girl only knew, she would be the last person she would ever trust with her child. But there was no one else, and thus no choice to be made. As a little leg and arm came through the gate, Genevieve reached out to help, taking part and then all of the baby’s weight as between them she and the girl maneuvered the little one through the bars. As their hands touched, she could feel the cold clamminess of the girl’s skin, feel her trembling. With the child no longer clutched in her arms, the dark shape of a six-pointed yellow star on her coat became visible. The true horror of what was happening struck Genevieve like a blow.

  The girl whispered, “Her name’s Anna. Anna Katz. Leave word of where I’m to come for her in the fountainhead—”

  The light flashed toward them.

  “You there, by the gate,” the soldier shouted.

  With a gasp, the girl whirled away.

  “Halt! Stay where you are!”

  Heart in her throat, blood turning to ice, Genevieve whirled away, too, in the opposite direction. Cloaked by night, she ran as lightly as she could for the car, careful to keep her heels from striking the cobblestones, holding the child close to her chest, one hand splayed against short, silky curls. The soft baby smell, the feel of the firm little body against her, triggered such an explosion of emotion that she went briefly light-headed. The panicky flutter in her stomach solidified into a knot—and then the child’s wriggling and soft sounds of discontent brought the present sharply back into focus.

  If she cried...

  Terror tasted sharp and bitter in Genevieve’s mouth.

  “Shh. Shh, Anna,” she crooned desperately. “Shh.”

  “I said halt!” The soldier’s roar came as Genevieve reached the car, grabbed the door handle, wrenched the door open—

  Bang. The bark of a pistol.

  A woman’s piercing cry. The girl’s piercing cry.

  No. Genevieve screamed it, but only in her mind. The guilt of running away, of leaving the girl behind, crashed into her like a speeding car.

  Blowing his whistle furiously, the soldier ran down the steps. More soldiers burst through the door, following the first one down the steps and out of sight.

  Had the girl been shot? Was she dead?

  My God, my God. Genevieve’s heart slammed in her chest.

  She threw herself and the child into the back seat and—softly, carefully—closed the door. Because she didn’t dare do anything else.

  Coward.

  The baby started to cry.

  Staring out the window in petrified expectation of seeing the soldiers come charging after her at any second, she found herself panting with fear even as she did her best to quiet the now wailing child.

  Could anyone hear? Did the soldiers know the girl had been carrying a baby?

  If she was caught with the child...

  What else could I have done?

  Max would say she should have stayed out of it, stayed in the car. That the common good was more important than the plight of any single individual.

  Even a terrified girl. Even a baby.

  “It’s all right, Anna. I’ve got you safe. Shh.” Settling back in the seat to position the child more comfortably in her arms, she murmured and patted and rocked. Instinctive actions, long forgotten, reemerged in this moment of crisis.

  Through the gate she could see the soldiers clustering around something on the ground. The girl, she had little doubt, although the darkness and the garden’s riotous blooms blocked her view. With Anna, quiet now, sprawled against her chest, a delayed reaction set in and she started to shake.

  Otto got back into the car.

  “They’re going to be moving the truck in front as soon as it’s loaded up.” His voice was gritty with emotion. Anger? Bitterness? “Someone tipped them off that Jews were hiding in the building, and they’re arresting everybody. Once they’re—”

  Otto broke off as the child made a sound.

  “Shh.” Genevieve patted, rocked. “Shh, shh.”

  His face a study in incredulity, Otto leaned around in the seat to look. “Holy hell, is that a baby?”

  “Her mother was trapped in the garden. She couldn’t get out.”

  Otto shot an alarmed look at the building, where soldiers now marched a line of people, young and old, including a couple of small children clutching adults’ hands, out the front door.

  “My God,” he said, sounding appalled. “We’ve got to get—”

  Appearing out of seemingly nowhere, a soldier rapped on the driver’s window. With his knuckles, hard.

  Oh, no. Please no.

  Genevieve’s heart pounded. Her stomach dropped like a rock as she stared at the shadowy figure on the other side of the glass.

  We’re going to be arrested. Or shot.

  Whipping the scarf out of her neckline, she draped the brightly printed square across her shoulder and over the child.

  Otto cranked the window down.

  “Papers,” the soldier barked.

  Fear formed a hard knot under Genevieve’s breastbone. Despite the night’s chilly temperature, she could feel sweat popping out on her forehead and upper lip. On penalty of arrest, everyone in Occupied France, from the oldest to the youngest, was required to have identity documents readily available at all times. Hers were in her handbag, beside her on the seat.

  But Anna had none.

  Otto passed his cards to the soldier, who turned his torch on them.

  As she picked up her handbag, Genevieve felt Anna stir.

  Please, God, don’t let her cry.

  “Here.” Quickly she thrust her handbag over the top of the seat to Otto. Anna was squirming now. Genevieve had to grab and secure the scarf from underneath to make sure the baby’s movements didn’t knock it askew.

  If the soldier saw her...

  Anna whimpered. Muffled by the scarf, the sound wasn’t loud, but its effect on Genevieve was electric. She caught her breath as her heart shot into her throat—and reacted instinctively, as, once upon a time, it had been second nature to do.

  She slid the tip of her little finger between Anna’s lips.

  The baby responded as babies typically did: she latched on and sucked.

  Genevieve felt the world start to slide out of focus. The familiarity of it, the bittersweet memories it evoked, made her dizzy. She had to force herself to stay in the present, to concentrate on this child and this moment to the exclusion of all else.

  Otto had handed her identity cards over. The soldier examined them with his torch, then bent closer to the window and looked into the back seat.

  She almost expired on the spot.

  “Mademoiselle Dumont. It is a pleasure. I have enjoyed your singing very much.”

  Anna’s hungry little mouth tugged vigorously at her finger.

  “Thank you,” Genevieve said, and smiled.

  The soldier smiled back. Then he straightened, handed the papers back and, with a thump on the roof, stepped away from the car. Otto cranked the window up.

  The t
ension inside the car was so thick she could almost physically feel the weight of it.

  “Let them through,” the soldier called to someone near the first truck. Now loaded with the unfortunate new prisoners, it was just starting to pull out.

  With a wave for the soldier, Otto followed, although far too slowly for Genevieve’s peace of mind. As the car crawled after the truck, she cast a last, quick glance at the garden: she could see nothing, not even soldiers.

  Was the girl—Anna’s mother—still there on the ground? Or had she already been taken away?

  Was she dead?

  Genevieve felt sick to her stomach. But once again, there was nothing to be done.

  Acutely aware of the truck’s large side and rear mirrors and what might be able to be seen through them, Genevieve managed to stay upright and keep the baby hidden until the Citroën turned a corner and went its own way.

  Then, feeling as though her bones had turned to jelly, she slumped against the door.

  Anna gave up on the finger and started to cry, shrill, distressed wails that filled the car. With what felt like the last bit of her strength, Genevieve pushed the scarf away and gathered her up and rocked and patted and crooned to her. Just like she had long ago done with—

  Do not think about it.

  “Shh, Anna. Shh.”

  “That was almost a disaster.” Otto’s voice, tight with reaction, was nonetheless soft for fear of disturbing the quieting child. “What do we do now? You can’t take a baby back to the hotel. Think questions won’t be asked? What do you bet that soldier won’t talk about having met Genevieve Dumont? All it takes is one person to make the connection between the raid and you showing up with a baby and it will ruin us all. It will ruin everything.”

  “I know.” Genevieve was limp. “Find Max. He’ll know what to do.”

  Chapter Two

  Is it my fate to die tonight? Lillian de Rocheford’s blood ran cold as the question pushed its way into the forefront of her mind. An owl hooting on the roof of a house brought death to the one who heard it—everyone said so. It was silly, pure superstition. She did not for one moment believe it. But last night an owl had landed on the Château de Rocheford’s steep slate roof almost directly above her attic bedroom, waking her with its mournful hoot. Today the summons had come: they were needed. She had wanted to refuse. The circumstances were such that she could not.

  Arrangements had been made, a rendezvous point set. And now here they were.

  And I’m jumping at everything that moves because of that damned owl.

  “They should be here by now.” She didn’t realize she was fretting aloud until Andre Bouchard, who’d moved a few paces ahead to peer out into the fog, looked back at her. His shadow, distorted by the gray diffusion of moonlight filtering through the trees, stretched back toward her like a skeletal hand.

  “If there was trouble, we would have heard something. Shouts, gunfire.” He spoke in a whisper, as she had done.

  It was true, what Andre said: war was rarely silent. In the last four years, since the Germans had done the unthinkable and broken through the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line to overrun France, the noise, like all the other horrible things the invaders had brought with them, had been unrelenting. First, the desperate evacuation from nearly every port along the Atlantic coast of the French army and the British and Czech soldiers whose combined efforts had failed to keep France safe. Next, the resulting firestorm as the Germans had launched their attack against the retreat that had left thousands upon thousands dead. Then came the surrender, the declaring of the city of Cherbourg open to the Nazis by their own city council, followed by the ominous rumble of trucks bringing in the despised Wehrmacht to live among them. After that, the growl of the British and, later, the American aeroplanes streaking over her beloved Cotentin Peninsula, the whistle and boom of the bombs they dropped, the staccato rat-a-tat of the entrenched Germans’ return fire, had begun. By now all of that had become so much a part of the fabric of an ordinary night that its absence made her skin prickle with dread.

  It was because of the fog, the thick swirling fog that glinted silver as the searchlights sliced through it, that the night sounds were muffled and the planes did not come, she knew. But knowing did not make her less afraid.

  There was a curfew in place. Merely to be found outside at this hour would result in arrest. Far worse to be caught where they were, in the supposedly impassable marsh that cut off the beaches from the rest of the Cotentin, and was so prized for its defensive value that the Vikings had once called the area Carusburg, or Fortress of the Marsh. It was also a key part of the Germans’ defensive strategy in the event of an attack launched against the Normandy beaches. For them to discover that she knew a way through the marsh would, she had no doubt, result in her instant execution.

  Ordinarily she would have simply refused to think about it, but—the owl.

  A cold finger slid down her spine. Only a fool would be unafraid.

  The damp chill of the fog caressed her cheeks, brushed salt-tinged fingers across her mouth like a passing ghost. The faint smell of decay that was part of the marsh drifted by with it. She clenched her teeth in an effort to stop shivering and tightened her hand in its knit glove over Bruno the pony’s muzzle to keep him quiet. The searchlights were closing in. Mounted in the boats of the Kriegsmarine patrolling the harbor and the adjacent coastline, their sweep was as punctual as sunrise.

  With one last anxious glance at the approaching beams, she ducked her face against the warmth of Bruno’s shaggy brown neck to prevent them from catching on her eyes, inhaled the pony’s familiar musky scent and counted down the seconds until it was safe to look up again.

  ...5...4...3...

  “Baroness. There.”

  Andre’s relieved whisper brought her head up prematurely, but it was all right, the searchlights had moved on. Useless to remind him that for tonight she was simply Lillian, that using her title even in this place, where with luck only the beavers could hear, was to endanger her. A lifelong tenant farmer on Rocheford, her husband’s once grand estate, wiry, balding Andre was unable to bring himself to address her so familiarly even now, when the world as they had known it was being ground to bits beneath the filthy boots of the boche.

  “Be quick.” Some of the tension left her shoulders as the chaland sliding noiselessly toward them through the glinting black water took on shape and form. Andre left the narrow spit of solid land on which they waited to squelch out to meet the small, flat-bottomed boat. The sucking sound of his boots in the mud made her heart knock in her chest.

  “The Germans are far away,” she murmured to Bruno, though whether to comfort the pony or herself she couldn’t be sure.

  Bruno threw up his head unexpectedly, dislodging her grip, as her husband Paul, Baron de Rocheford, slid out of the boat to help Andre pull it the rest of the way in. Lillian barely managed to clap her hand over the pony’s muzzle again in time to prevent him from whickering a greeting at the man he must be able to recognize by smell alone, because the distance made him no more than a denser shape in the fog. Once tall and elegantly slender, her handsome Paul was gaunt and stoop-shouldered now. He would turn sixty—impossible to believe—this year, but age was not the culprit. It was the brutally harsh conditions under which they were forced to live. At fifty, for the same reason, she herself had become bony and sharp featured, with haunted hollows beneath her eyes and hungry ones beneath her cheekbones. Her once luxuriant black hair was now thin and mostly gray. Her trousers, purchased before the war, had to be belted tightly around her waist to keep them from dropping straight to her ankles. Her once formfitting sweater hung on her like a sack. Like her much-patched black coat and the threadbare black scarf twined round her head, she had seen far better days.

  Unable to call out, Bruno stamped his feet in frustration. The splash of his hooves on the soggy ground, and the jingle of his stirr
ups, sent her stomach shooting into her throat. The concrete abomination that was the Atlantic Wall with its pillboxes full of machine guns and soldiers was not that far away. It would be foolish to trust their lives to the muffling effect of the fog.

  She gave a sharp tug on Bruno’s bridle and growled “Stop, you” into his ear.

  Her heart knocked so loudly now that she could hear its beat against her eardrums. Still she stood fast, holding the grizzled pony that was the sole survivor of Rocheford’s once proud stable, the pony that, long ago, in happier times, had been a gift to her daughter on her birthday.

  The sixteenth of May.

  Tomorrow.

  “For me?” She could still hear the incredulous delight in her five-year-old’s voice, still see her slight figure in the blue party dress as she let go of her hand to fly down Rocheford’s front steps toward a much younger but still placid Bruno, who’d just been brought round by a smiling Paul.

  “Papa, he’s beautiful!”

  The voice, like the memory, was forever preserved in her heart.

  Lillian’s chest tightened. Every cell in her body quivered with the sudden onslaught of fierce sorrow.

  Her fiery little daughter, lost to her these many years.

  Ça suffit. Put it out of your mind.

  “Any problems?” Paul’s lowered voice reached her through the mist. He was talking to Andre.

  “No, none,” he replied.

  The two men were close now, sloshing toward her through calf-deep water.

  Besides Paul, and Jean-Claude Faure, a bookkeeper from the town who had accompanied him to the rendezvous point, the boat carried two other men, who were helping to propel it by use of long poles. They were strangers to her, as far as she knew. As they were members of a different cell she had no need, or desire, to know their identities, just as they had no need to know hers. In this new world where no one could be trusted and collaborators were everywhere, anonymity was the key to safety.