THE BLACK SWAN OF PARIS
Author: Karen Robards
ISBN: 9780778309338
Publication Date: June 30, 2020
Publisher: MIRA
BOOK
SUMMARY:
For fans of The Alice Network and The Lost Girls of Paris comes a thrilling standalone by New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards about a
celebrated singer in WWII occupied France who joins the Resistance to save her
estranged family from being killed in a German prison.
Captain
Max Ryan, British SOE, is given the job of penetrating the impregnable German
prison where the Baroness and the remnants of the cell are being held and
tortured. If they can't be rescued he must kill them before they can give up
their secrets.
Max is
in Paris, currently living under a cover identity as a show business impresario
whose star attraction is Genevieve Dumont. Young, beautiful Genevieve is the
toast of Europe, an icon of the glittering entertainment world that the Nazis
celebrate so that the arts can be seen to be thriving in the occupied
territories under their rule.
What
no one knows about Genevieve is that she is Lillian and Paul de Rocheford's
younger daughter. Her feelings toward her family are bitter since they were
estranged twelve years ago. But when she finds out from Max just what his new
assignment entails, old, long-buried feelings are rekindled and she knows that
no matter what she can't allow her mother to be killed, not by the Nazis and
not by Max. She secretly establishes contact with those in the Resistance who
can help her. Through them she is able to contact her sister Emmy, and the
sisters put aside their estrangement to work together to rescue their mother.
It all
hinges on a command performance that Genevieve is to give for a Gestapo General
in the Bavarian town where her mother and the others are imprisoned. While
Genevieve sings and the show goes on, a daring rescue is underway that involves
terrible danger, heartbreaking choices, and the realization that some ties,
like the love between a mother and her daughters and between sisters, are
forever.
BUY
LINKS:
Excerpt
CHAPTER
ONE
May
15, 1944
When the worst thing that could ever happen
to you had already happened, nothing that came after really mattered. The
resultant state of apathy was almost pleasant, as long as she didn’t
allow herself to think about it—any of it—too much.
She was
Genevieve Dumont, a singer, a star. Her latest sold-out performance at
one of Paris’s great theaters had ended in a five-minute standing ovation less
than an hour before. She was acclaimed, admired, celebrated wherever she went.
The Nazis loved her.
She was not quite twenty-five years old.
Beautiful when, like now, she was dolled up in all her after-show finery. Not
in want, not unhappy.
In this time of fear and mass starvation,
of worldwide deaths on a scale never seen before in the whole course of human
history, that made her lucky. She knew it.
Whom she had been before, what had almost
destroyed her—that life belonged to someone else. Most of the time, she didn’t
even remember it herself.
She refused to remember it.
A siren screamed to life just meters behind
the car she was traveling in. Startled, she sat upright in the back seat, heart
lurching as she looked around.
Do they know? Are they after us?
A small knot of fans had been waiting
outside the stage door as she’d left. One of them had thrust a program at her,
requesting an autograph for Francoise. She’d signed—May your heart always
sing, Genevieve Dumont—as previously instructed. What it meant she didn’t
know. What she did know was that it meant something: it was a
prearranged encounter, and the coded message she’d scribbled down was intended
for the Resistance.
And now, mere minutes later, here were the
Milice, the despised French police who had long since thrown in their lot with
the Nazis, on their tail.
Even as icy jets of fear spurted through
her, a pair of police cars followed by a military truck flew by. Running
without lights, they appeared as no more than hulking black shapes whose passage
rattled the big Citroën that up until then had been alone on the road. A split
second later, her driver—his name was Otto Cordier; he worked for Max, her
manager—slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to a stop.
“Sacre bleu!” Flying forward, she barely stopped herself from smacking into the
back of the front seat by throwing her arms out in front of her. “What’s
happening?”
“A raid, I think.” Peering out through the
windshield, Otto clutched the steering wheel with both hands. He was an old
man, short and wiry with white hair. She could read tension in every line of
his body. In front of the car, washed by the pale moonlight that painted the
scene in ghostly shades of gray, the cavalcade that had passed them was now
blocking the road. A screech of brakes and the throwing of a shadow across the
nearest building had her casting a quick look over her shoulder. Another
military truck shuddered to a halt, filling the road behind them, stopping it
up like a cork in a bottle. Men—German soldiers along with officers of the
Milice—spilled out of the stopped vehicles. The ones behind swarmed past the
Citroën, and all rushed toward what Genevieve tentatively identified as an
apartment building. Six stories tall, it squatted, dark and silent, in its own
walled garden.
“Oh, no,” she said. Her fear for herself
and Otto subsided, but sympathy for the targets of the raid made her chest feel
tight. People who were taken away by the Nazis in the middle of the night
seldom came back.
The officers banged on the front door.
“Open up! Police!”
It was just after 10:00 p.m. Until the
siren had ripped it apart, the silence blanketing the city had been close to
absolute. Thanks to the strictly enforced blackout, the streets were as dark
and mysterious as the nearby Seine. It had rained earlier in the day, and before
the siren the big Citroën had been the noisiest thing around, splashing through
puddles as they headed back to the Ritz, where she was staying for the duration
of her Paris run.
“If they keep arresting people, soon there
will be no one left.” Genevieve’s gaze locked on a contingent of soldiers
spreading out around the building, apparently looking for another way in—or for
exits they could block. One rattled a gate of tall iron spikes that led into
the brick-walled garden. It didn’t open, and he moved on, disappearing around
the side of the building. She was able to follow the soldiers’ movements by the
torches they carried. Fitted with slotted covers intended to direct their light
downward so as to make them invisible to the Allied air-raid pilots whose
increasingly frequent forays over Paris aroused both joy and dread in the
city’s war-weary citizens, the torches’ bobbing looked like the erratic
flitting of fireflies in the dark.
“They’re afraid, and that makes them all
the more dangerous.” Otto rolled down his window a crack, the better to hear
what was happening as they followed the soldiers’ movements. The earthy scent
of the rain mixed with the faint smell of cigarette smoke, which, thanks to
Max’s never-ending Gauloises, was a permanent feature of the car. The yellow
card that was the pass they needed to be on the streets after curfew, prominently
displayed on the windshield, blocked her view of the far side of the building,
but she thought soldiers were running that way, too. “They know the Allies are
coming. The bombings of the Luftwaffe installations right here in France, the
Allied victories on the eastern front—they’re being backed into a corner.
They’ll do whatever they must to survive.”
“Open the door, or we will break it down!”
The policeman hammered on the door with his
nightstick. The staccato beat echoed through the night. Genevieve shivered,
imagining the terror of the people inside.
Thin lines of light appeared in the cracks
around some of the thick curtains covering the windows up and down the building
as, at a guess, tenants dared to peek out. A woman, old and stooped—there was
enough light in the hall behind her to allow Genevieve to see that much—opened
the front door.
“Out of the way!”
She was shoved roughly back inside the
building as the police and the soldiers stormed in. Her frightened cry changed
to a shrill scream that was quickly cut off.
Genevieve’s mouth went dry. She clasped her
suddenly cold hands in her lap.
There’s nothing to be done. It was the mantra of her life.
“Can we drive on?” She had learned in a
hard school that there was no point in agonizing over what couldn’t be cured.
To stay and watch what she knew was coming—the arrest of partisans, who would
face immediate execution upon arrival at wherever they would be taken, or,
perhaps and arguably worse, civilians, in some combination of women, children,
old people, clutching what few belongings they’d managed to grab, marched at
gunpoint out of the building and loaded into the trucks for deportation—would
tear at her heart for days without helping them at all.
“We’re blocked in.” Otto looked around at
her. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but whatever it was made him
grimace and reach for the door handle. “I’ll go see if I can get one of them to
move.”
When he exited the car, she let her head
drop back to rest against the rolled top of the Citroën’s leather seat, stared
at the ceiling and tried not to think about what might be happening to the
people in the building. Taking deep breaths, she did her best to block out the
muffled shouts and thuds that reached her ears and focused on the physical,
which, as a performer, she had experience doing. She was so tired she was limp
with it. Her temples throbbed. Her legs ached. Her feet hurt. Her throat—that
golden throat that had allowed her to survive—felt tight. Deliberately she
relaxed her muscles and tugged the scarf tucked into the neckline of her coat
higher to warm herself.
A flash of light in the darkness caught her
eye. Her head turned as she sought the source. Looking through the iron bars of
the garden gate, she discovered a side door in the building that was slowly,
stealthily opening.
“Is anyone else in there? Come out or I’ll
shoot.” The volume of the soldiers’ shouts increased exponentially with this
new gap in the walls. That guttural threat rang out above others less distinct,
and she gathered from what she heard that they were searching the building.
The side door opened wider. Light from
inside spilled past a figure slipping out: a girl, tall and thin with dark
curly hair, wearing what appeared to be an unbuttoned coat thrown on over
nightclothes. In her arms she carried a small child with the same dark, curly
hair.
The light went out. The door had closed.
Genevieve discovered that she was sitting with her nose all but pressed
against the window as she tried to find the girl in the darkness. It took her a
second, but then she spotted the now shadowy figure as it fled through the
garden toward the gate, trying to escape.
They’ll shoot her if they catch her. The
child, too.
The Germans had no mercy for those for whom
they came.
The girl reached the gate, paused. A pale
hand grabbed a bar. From the metallic rattle that reached her ears, Genevieve
thought she must be shoving at the gate, shaking it. She assumed it was locked.
In any event, it didn’t open. Then that same hand reached through the bars,
along with a too-thin arm, stretching and straining.
Toward what? It was too dark to tell.
With the Citroën stopped in the middle of
the narrow street and the garden set back only a meter or so from the front
facade of the building, the girl was close enough so that Genevieve could read
the desperation in her body language, see the way she kept looking back at the
now closed door. The child, who appeared to be around ten months old, seemed to
be asleep. The small curly head rested trustingly on the girl’s shoulder.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to leave the
car. Genevieve just did it, then realized the risk she was taking when her
pumps clickety-clacked on the cobblestones. The sound seemed to tear through
the night and sent a lightning bolt of panic through her.
Get back in the car. Her sense of self-preservation screamed it at her, but she didn’t.
Shivering at the latent menace of the big military trucks looming so close on
either side of the Citroën, the police car parked askew in the street, the
light spilling from the still open front door and the sounds of the raid going
on inside the building, she kept going, taking care to be quiet now as she
darted toward the trapped girl.
You’re putting yourself in danger.
You’re putting Otto, Max, everyone in danger. The whole network—
Heart thudding, she reached the gate. Even
as she and the girl locked eyes through it, the girl jerked her arm back inside
and drew herself up.
The sweet scent of flowers from the garden
felt obscene in contrast with the fear and despair she sensed in the girl.
“It’s all right. I’m here to help,”
Genevieve whispered. She grasped the gate, pulling, pushing as she spoke. The
iron bars were solid and cold and slippery with the moisture that still hung in
the air. The gate didn’t budge for her, either. The clanking sound it made as
she joggled it against its moorings made her break out in a cold sweat.
Darkness enfolded her, but it was leavened by moonlight and she didn’t trust
it to keep her safe. After all, she’d seen the girl from the car. All it would
take was one sharp-eyed soldier, one policeman to come around a corner, or step
out of the building and look her way—and she could be seen, too. Caught.
Helping a fugitive escape.
The consequences would be dire.
Imprisonment, deportation, even death.
Her pulse raced.
She thought of Max, what he would say.
On the other side of the gate, moonlight
touched on wide dark eyes set in a face so thin the bones seemed about to push
through the skin. The girl appeared to be about her own age, and she thought
she must be the child’s mother. The sleeping child—Genevieve couldn’t tell if
it was a girl or a boy—was wearing footed pajamas.
Her heart turned over.
“Oh, thank God. Thank you.” Whispering,
too, the girl reached through the bars to touch Genevieve’s arm in gratitude.
“There’s a key. In the fountainhead. In the mouth. It unlocks the gate.” She
cast another of those lightning glances over her shoulder. Shifting from foot
to foot, she could hardly stand still in her agitation. Fear rolled off her in
waves. “Hurry. Please.”
Genevieve looked in the direction the girl
had been reaching, saw the oval stone of the fountainhead set into the brick
near the gate, saw the carved lion’s head in its center with its open mouth
from which, presumably, water was meant to pour out. Reaching inside, she
probed the cavity, ran her fingers over the worn-smooth stone, then did it
again.
“There’s no key,” she said. “It’s not
here.”
“It has to be. It has to be!” The girl’s
voice rose, trembled. The child’s head moved. The girl made a soothing sound,
rocked back and forth, patted the small back, and the child settled down again
with a sigh. Watching, a pit yawned in Genevieve’s stomach. Glancing hastily
down, she crouched to check the ground beneath the fountainhead, in case the
key might have fallen out. It was too dark; she couldn’t see. She ran her hand
over the cobblestones. Nothing.
“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 tension 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.”
Excerpted from The Black Swan of Paris by Karen Robards,
Copyright © 2020 by Karen Robards. Published by MIRA Books.
BIO:
Karen
Robards is the New York Times, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestselling
author of more than fifty novels and one novella. She is the winner of six
Silver Pen awards and numerous other awards.
SOCIAL:
Author
Website: http://karenrobards.com/
TWITTER:
@TheKarenRobards
Insta:
N/A
Goodreads:
No comments:
Post a Comment