She wanted to slay him with a glance. Instead, mindful that they weren’t alone, she smiled.
“It seems I have,” she agreed, and had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes narrow. She swept ahead of him into the backstage area, careful to stay out of the way of the girls in the wings as they ran in two at a time to join the high-kicking double chorus line revolving onstage. She was in costume, in a tight, strapless black bustier-style bodysuit glittering with sequins that lent her slender figure a voluptuousness it didn’t actually possess and a full, trailing skirt composed of dyed-black ostrich feathers that made opulent swishing sounds as they brushed across the stage’s wooden floor. The skirt parted in front to showcase her long, slim legs in sheer black stockings that were attached to the bodysuit by black satin suspenders. Black peep-toe shoes, a black velvet ribbon worn as a choker, and a headdress of three tall black ostrich plumes completed her ensemble, which was designed to play off both a repeating line in her finale song about waiting for a lover who would return as surely as birds come home to their nest and the nickname Max and his team had bestowed on her.
Inspired, she assumed, by her coloring—black hair, milky skin and changeable blue-green eyes—they had dubbed her the Black Swan. At this very moment the nickname, along with her image on the aforementioned swing, adorned large posters plastered all over Paris: The Black Swan Sings! The Black Swan Swings! Come See the Black Swan in Seasons of Love at the Casino de Paris, April 29 to May 21!
“Mademoiselle. If you will.” Pierre scurried around her to gesture anxiously at the ladderlike staircase that led to the catwalk high above.
“Afterward we go to the party at the Spanish embassy,” Max reminded her in an undertone as she put a foot on the first of the rung-like steps. Ah, yes, the Spanish embassy, where she would be expected to once again put her life on the line by helping him with his spying.
“I’m feeling a little under the weather. Perhaps I’ll be too ill to attend.” She threw the riposte over her shoulder. Her words were purely an attempt to irritate him. Refusing was not an option, she knew.
“By then the effects of the champagne will have worn off.”
She was already climbing and used that as an excuse to pretend she hadn’t heard. Her head swam unexpectedly. Maybe she really had overdone it with the drinking—all right, she had—but her encounter with baby Anna combined with today’s date had just been too much to bear. Max was right—it was important that she keep a clear head, but the pain had been so searingly intense that if she hadn’t found something to dull it, she wouldn’t have been able to function at all. Max should be thankful she’d managed to get through the show, she thought, and took a firmer grip on the iron safety rails and paid extra attention to how she placed her feet. If she were to fall...
She had a lightning vision of an open window, of curtains fluttering in the breeze.
Her mind reeled. Her heart took a great leap in her chest. She froze in place, utterly unable to move.
For the briefest of moments, it felt as if time and space had dissolved.
With a major effort of will, she banished the horrifying snippet of memory.
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to keep climbing.
When she reached the top—a breath-stealing height—she stepped out onto the narrow metal catwalk. Keeping a tight grip on the rail, she glanced down to find that, while Pierre had gone, Max still stood at the foot of the stairs where she had left him. His head was tipped back as he watched her. A swirl of color and activity surrounded him as the chorus girls, in their jewel-toned bird costumes, hurried to line up for the closing number, jostling one another and the exiting cancan dancers, but he remained unmoving, a study in austere black.
“Mademoiselle Dumont, forgive me, but we must hurry. The overture is beginning.”
Startled by the whisper—she hadn’t heard anyone approach—she looked up to find one of the stagehands at her elbow. His name was Yves, she remembered, and yes, he was right, there were the opening violins. Carefully gripping the guardrail, she followed him along the catwalk to where the elaborately gilded and flower-festooned swing awaited her. He helped her get into position on the narrow velvet seat, then spread the long feathers of her skirt out behind her so that they would fall just right. She adjusted her headdress and the front of her skirt to show her legs to best advantage and listened as the rest of the orchestra joined the violins. The idea with this number was that she was supposed to be a bird on the kind of arched swing typically found in bird cages. Suspended high above the audience, she would sing the popular love song that was almost always a showstopper.
“Ready, mademoiselle?” Yves asked.
At her nod he signaled the stagehands who worked the crank that would swing her out into the darkness high above the audience and then lower her until she was in the center of the cavernous open space. He unhooked the tether that had held the swing in place and gave her a push, and she was away.
The first movement of the swing was always the worst, a wide arc that was dizzying at the best of times. Tonight the effects of the champagne magnified the vertiginous feeling until she couldn’t be quite sure whether the room was spinning or her head was. Holding on tightly, she took in the horseshoe shape of the vast auditorium, the tiers of boxes rising nearly to the domed ceiling, the orchestra seats far below. Once, as a starstruck eleven-year-old, she’d sat in one of those seats with her family, practically vibrating with excitement. Her mother sat on her right, her sister on her left and her father on her sister’s other side. They’d been happy then, the four of them, with no idea at all of what the future held. She and her sister clasped hands, rapt, as they watched Josephine Baker on that very same stage where she now performed. The trip to the theater had been a surprise treat that their parents had arranged, despite the slightly risqué nature of the show, because she and her sister had been such fans. She could still remember the glittering costumes, the live doves released onstage to fly out over the audience—and how electrified she’d been by the singer herself, with her easy charisma and bright, jazzy voice. That was the first time she’d known: I want to be a singer. But such a thing then, had seemed ridiculous, impossible. She’d been part of a family, part of a world, and as such had carried the weight of expectations and hopes and dreams that were not necessarily her own, even though, at the time, she’d never even thought to question them.
Ironically, in the end she’d gotten what she’d wished for that night, but the cost had been—everything. Everything she’d loved. Everyone she’d loved. That world she’d inhabited—precious in retrospect—ripped asunder. The realization was almost more than she could bear.
The ache in her chest was crushing in its intensity.
Her suddenly blurry gaze swept over red velvet upholstery and gilded moldings and the gorgeous arched stained-glass window that was the Casino de Paris’s trademark—where she found the slap in the face she needed to bring the present back into focus. Tonight, just as it had been every night of her run and presumably every night of the last four years, the iconic window was defaced by the giant swastika banner draped across it.