Grandmère shrugged. “It can’t be helped. We all have a burden to bear, lieutenant colonel, and we women have borne ours throughout history, without the men taking much notice of it.”
“But she’s not well.”
“I am quite well,” said Daisy. “It’s passed already.”
“You’re pale.”
“I’m not—”
All three of them heard the noise at the same time, the clap of wood, the shudder of the walls as the front door burst open. No one needed to tell them to be still. They froze like actors in a tableau, staring at one another, willing the sound to go away. The world to go back to what it was.
Now footsteps, moving quickly across the bookshop floor.
Something had come over Max, in those few seconds, some invisible air of command. He was no longer the concerned civilian, the avuncular friend; he was a career officer in the German army, accustomed to swift decision and maneuver. He slid one hand into his pocket and drew out his pistol; with his other hand, he motioned the children up the hatchway stairs, all the while staring at the doorway. Daisy hustled them up, urging silence, and when they had disappeared into the attic she grasped the handle and swung the stairs back into place.
Max glanced at her and Grandmère and motioned to them furiously, mouthed the words Up, up, but it was already too late. A soft knock sounded on the door.
“La Fleur!” said a voice, a woman’s voice, not a Frenchwoman. English? “Open, open! It’s urgent!”
Daisy looked at Grandmère. Grandmère looked at Max, who shook his head.
Again, the knock. “La Fleur! The Rat sent me! You must open! Please!”
A terrible fear took hold of Daisy’s chest. She stepped forward. “Black cat?” she whispered loudly, to the crack in the door.
“Black cat? Black—oh! Black cat, white mouse. Open, please!”
“That’s the password,” Daisy said to Max, and she unlocked the door and pulled it open. A woman stood before her, tall, young, startlingly beautiful, and clearly anxious. Daisy had never seen her before. Her accent was most certainly not German.
“Thank God,” the woman said.
“Who are you?”
“Code name Opossum. You’ve got to come with me. It’s the drop, it’s been compromised. There are Gestapo agents in all the streets nearby, waiting to pounce. It’s a trap.”
“Kit!” gasped Daisy.
“You can’t go, it’s too late.”
“I have to go! I have to warn him!”
“They’ll get you, too! I’ve got orders to take these jewels of yours and . . .” Opossum stopped and looked around the room. “Who’s he?”
“He’s a contact. He’s . . .” Then Daisy whirled to face Max. “My God!” she cried.
It took him a second or two to understand her meaning. He looked stricken. “Don’t be ridiculous! You know I would never—”
“You! Was it you all along? Did you get Pierre arrested? Did you—”
Max took her by the arms. “Listen to me! There’s no time. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in danger, you and the children. Take the car, get out of Paris. Give me the damned talisman, I’ll go myself.”
“The devil you will!”
“Listen, I’m a German officer! I’ll outrank any Gestapo agent there. I’ll take Legrand into custody myself and then spirit him out. I’ll deliver the talisman into safe hands. Daisy, you must trust me. You must.”
She pulled his hands away. “Why? Why should I trust you? Because you had some stupid fascination for my mother, and now you’ve transferred it to me?”
“No! Not that. My God.”
He stepped back and stared at her, and in the instant before he spoke, Daisy knew what he was going to say. Hadn’t he already told her, just that afternoon? We were very much in love. And I have never forgiven myself for losing her. Hadn’t he been showing her this, all along?
She thought, Don’t say it.
Then Max’s lips moved, and he said the words.
“Because you’re my daughter.”
There was an instant of silence, in which the room, the whole world, lurched around Daisy. She tried to speak, but her throat would not move. She looked at the scar on Max’s face, the pink, shining, ruthless scar that disfigured his left cheek, from his temple to his jaw and right over his ear. She heard his voice that continued in agonized words.
“I never knew—I didn’t realize. I thought you belonged to d’Aubigny. I thought Aurélie—your mother—I thought she had forgotten me. That she had used me and betrayed me. She died before the war ended; there was no chance to learn the truth, no hint at all that her daughter belonged to me. I never suspected you might be mine. Perhaps I should have, but I simply assumed that . . . I thought surely she would have sent word somehow . . . if she loved me as she said—”
“Mon Dieu,” Daisy whispered.
“And then I saw you in the Ritz that day and it was as if—as if the earth fell away beneath me. Your face, it struck me senseless.” He pulled his watch from his pocket and opened the face. “It’s uncanny. You look like my sister. You see? There’s her portrait. Your eyebrows are your mother’s, and the rest is her.”
Daisy looked helplessly at him. The room kept spinning. She was going to vomit. “It’s impossible,” she whispered. She put out her arm, and somebody took it. Grandmère, holding her upright.
“It’s true, my dear,” Grandmère said. “I realized it right away. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell.”
“I thought you would hate me,” said Max. “You should hate me.”
The woman called Opossum stood dumbstruck in the doorway, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Bloody hell,” she said in English. “He’s telling the truth.”
Daisy looked back up at Max, at his warm blue eyes that stared at her beseechingly. His terrible scar. He still held the watch with its open case. She couldn’t look at that; she didn’t need to, didn’t want to. Some woman she would never know. A family she would never know. A father who had never known her, never raised her, never been there when she needed him; when she had wanted a father’s love so terribly, she had married Pierre. Her life, her history, transformed in a flash. She pulled her arm away from Grandmère and covered her mouth. It was the hand that bore Kit’s ring. The two swans dug into her lips.
“Give me the talisman,” he said again, more gently. “Go, get out of Paris. Take care of the children. It’s my turn. I failed your mother. I’ve failed you, my darling girl, but I swear before God, I won’t fail you again.”
Opossum broke in. “For God’s sake. Just go, one of you, before it’s too late! Or I’ll take the damned thing myself!”
Daisy reached inside her pocket, pulled out the talisman, and handed it to Max.
“If you do fail me,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Babs
Paris, France
April 1964