The Ghosts of Paris Read online

  ALSO BY TARA MOSS

  FICTION

  Fetish

  Split

  Covet

  Hit

  Siren

  Assassin

  The Blood Countess

  The Spider Goddess

  The Skeleton Key

  The Cobra Queen

  The War Widow

  NONFICTION

  The Fictional Woman

  Speaking Out

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Tara Moss

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9780593182680 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780593182697 (ebook)

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender based on an original design by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; Cover images: woman © Aida Dapo; Paris © Drunaa / Trevillion Images; (planes) Fox Photos / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

  book design by elke sigal, adapted for ebook by estelle malmed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of historical figures, places, or events is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tara Moss

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Janni, always remembered

  Prologue

  Wola, Poland, 1944

  He pressed back against brick and stone, arms over his head, shielding himself as the buildings shook and the earth beneath him rumbled.

  When the blast subsided and he opened his eyes, the square was shrouded in white dust and ash, a sight both curiously beautiful and chilling, as tiny fragments of the town and the people in it spread like unearthly snow all round. This was not destruction from a single grenade, that comparatively tiny, violent salvo of resistance, nor was this from the Nazis’ devastating Goliath tracked mines. For days the west of the city had been raided and torched, residents shot on the spot or tortured for information, and so he knew this ash was not only the remains of building and concrete, but also the remains of those who had perished within the village square during days of tireless massacre. The Verbrennungskommando, the burning detachment, was destroying evidence of the massacre here, and so his photographs, if he could smuggle them out, would matter all the more. He tried not to breathe in the deathly smoke, tried not to let it inside him. Over the past two days he had not eaten, had barely found a sip of water, and he was almost glad somehow, as the stench in the air would surely have made him retch.

  There had been shouting and movement, a grenade explosion, and now the noises stopped, a kind of respite to match the eerie, slowly falling ash. He wiped his face, raised his camera.

  Crouching, he moved forward on one knee. It was not safe. None of this was safe. Just a few more shots and he would retreat to the makeshift shelter inside the bombed-out building behind him, the building that for now obscured his presence, and that of his ever-present camera. But he would have to find a safer place before the dogs were let loose to see out survivors to be killed. Already half his focus was on escaping with his photographs. He had been in tight situations before, smuggling film out in empty toothpaste tubes, but this, he feared, was yet more serious. How would he do it? The conflict had quickly revealed itself to be a homegrown uprising of Polish rebels against a well-planned and -resourced Nazi mission of outright extermination. The German soldiers were killing all citizens, all witnesses. If they found him, they would not let him live. That, he knew.

  Makeshift barricades constructed of torn-up and shattered flagstones had been manned by several young Polish boys with rifles and homemade grenades and bombs—one of which, no doubt, had caused the latest blast—but as the dust cleared, he noticed that the brave boys were nowhere to be seen, their modest supply against the Wehrmacht, Dirlewanger Brigade “Black Hunters,” and SS Police Battalions doubtless spent. He seemed alone in the bloody square, though he doubted that was the case. Had the resistance—such as they were after five years of occupation and days of nonstop fighting—retreated to where they had a better stronghold, the square now ceded? The dusty air that moments before had been alive with bullets, boots, and ash had now settled, it seemed, to make way for something greater, something slow and menacing. He heard the heavy crunch of tracks moving over the ground and knew instantly what it was. There was shouting in German, but he could not make out the words. From somewhere came a woman’s screams, disturbingly urgent and clear in the temporary quiet. A new rumbling grew louder.

  Something was coming.

  A German tank moved into the square, gun first. It was a mighty Tiger II, weighing nearly seventy tons, moving right into the line of sight of his Argus camera. The massive machine, with its brutal gun turret, thundered steadily into the square, toward the makeshift barricades, lumbering inelegantly over each bump like a great impenetrable beast, crushing everything in its path. No barricade would be equal to it. He pushed his back into the dusty building again and his shutter clicked, clicked again. He brought the camera down from his face.

  No, he was not mistaken. There was something hanging on the front of the tank. Something tied there.

  Not something, someone.

  A woman.

  It was her screams he had heard—a woman in civilian dress, tethered by the wrists to the huge gun, her body dwarfed by its size and stretched out, legs pulled back and secured by the ankles to either side of the front of the tank. Her dress was dirty and torn, her white face twisted in horror and framed by lank brown hair. Petite and terrified, she might have been fourteen or
forty, a mother or a child. All he saw was primal terror in her large, dark eyes. Again, her screams filled the square, far above the din of the tank’s infernal rumbling.

  The sound proved too much.

  Before he’d even begun to comprehend his actions, begun to form a plan, he foolishly rushed forward, hands outstretched, his Argus swinging awkwardly at his side, momentarily forgotten. He crossed the square in seconds and leaped onto the front of the massive, slow-moving monolith, which would not pause for him, not for anyone save its master at the helm. Caught in a kind of temporary madness, he tore at the ropes that bound the struggling woman with a singular focus. Once he had freed her left ankle, she twisted in place and gestured to her other ankle. “Tamten!” she shouted in Polish. That one! He had to get the other next or she could fall face-first before the tank and be crushed under it. He tore at the binds and heard the great hull opening, a soldier shouting.

  There was no time; the soldier was climbing out and reaching for his pistol.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement as the woman—she was indeed an adult woman, perhaps in her twenties, he realized—swung herself nimbly upward onto the mammoth gun with a grunt of effort and locked her dirt-streaked legs around it. She was hanging upside down beneath the gun, and, despite his own dangerous position, he watched as if mesmerized as she inched herself forward with surprising speed and a survivor’s will, as nimble as any acrobatic performer, until her secured wrists slipped off the end of the giant gun and she fell backward, swimming in the air, dress and hair hanging, suspended by her legs, the ropes now loose and no longer binding her. With a mechanical grinding the gun turret moved to the left, taking her with it, and she let go, throwing herself from the giant tank, then disappearing from view.

  There was a pistol shot, then another, and reality came back to him with a crash as he realized how exposed he was, the precariousness of his position on the enemy tank. He turned to jump but was not fast enough; the Nazi soldier was faster, and as he hurled himself off the tank’s side he was caught across the neck, body jerking back and upward, killing all breath, a sick, gurgling sound in his ears. He hung like a rag doll from the side of the tank by his own leather camera strap, and the mighty Tiger II continued through the square, gun roving, the great beast not halting, not even slowing.

  Desperately, he clutched the strap at his neck, frantic for air, and saw blood on his fingers, his hands. It was his own, he realized. The strap of his camera was cutting in, his neck opening up. There was shouting in German, another pistol shot, and the world went black.

  One

  Sydney, Australia, 1947

  On May Day, the client walked into the offices of B. Walker Private Inquiries, announced by a faint buzzer. Billie Walker heard this from her position at her small sixth-floor balcony, where she’d been smoking a Lucky Strike and regarding, with a well-honed emotional detachment, the safety bridge that connected Daking House to Station House. She heard the door, heard the little buzzer, heard her secretary-cum-assistant welcome the stranger, their voices muffled by the closed connecting door, and took a long drag. On the slow exhale, smoke floated from Billie’s red lips, creating a temporary haze across her view of the city streets.

  Cigarette dangling, Billie turned, closed the balcony doors behind her, and walked to the oval mirror on the wall inside her office. She checked her emerald tilt hat and red lipstick in one quick and practiced movement, regarded the steady blue-green eyes staring back at her in the reflection, and, satisfied, made for the corner of her wide wooden desk and stubbed out the last of her fag. Smoke drifted upward, settling in the air. The Bakelite clock above her door informed her that this potential client was right on time. This one had made an appointment, though Billie had not been furnished with any information regarding the nature of her query, complaint, or troubles, only a surname. Things having improved at Billie’s humble agency in recent months, Ms. Walker—the B. of B. Walker Private Inquiries and the principal agent—no longer had to wait out long days for the phone to ring or a knock at the door, and, for the moment at least, did not need to contemplate the empty walnut chairs in the small waiting room and find odd jobs for her secretary to do. Business was booming for Sydney’s most famous—or was it infamous?—female inquiry agent.

  Billie smoothed down her skirt suit, opened the connecting door, and leaned against the open doorframe to take in the stranger who had entered her waiting room. She did so hope this wasn’t another divorce job.

  “Ah, here she is now. May I present Ms. Billie Walker,” Samuel Baker, her tall secretary, announced, right on cue. “Ms. Walker, this is Mrs. Richard Montgomery.”

  She still had no first name of her own, Billie thought. Shame.

  Amusingly, the woman’s gaze was fixed on Billie’s secretary in his lightly pin-striped suit and flattering tie of burgundy and sky blue that brought out his baby blues. A flirtatious smile played on the older woman’s painted lips as she regarded him. To be true, Sam was a pleasing sight. He was a strapping Australian lad whose experience of the war had left him changed, most notably his injured left hand, which was always covered in a leather glove, lending him a touch of mystery. That hand had come up against an Italian thermos bomb and was now missing a few fingers, replaced by wooden prosthetics. Sam had already proved himself invaluable on numerous occasions, so if Billie had his injury to thank for the fact that he was happy to work for her, well, the army’s loss was her gain. He didn’t mind taking orders from a woman—far too rare a trait, in her opinion—and his trigger hand was as whole and steady as you could ask for. It was a bonus that he was something like Alan Ladd in appearance, though far taller, and built several ax handles across, as the saying went.

  As Sam provided a handsome distraction, Billie took in the woman’s appearance quickly and efficiently, observing cues drilled into her from work as an inquiry agent and before that as a war reporter, and a childhood spent listening to her father, Barry Walker, the policeman turned private investigator who had inhabited these very offices, sitting at that wide wooden desk and smoking on that same small balcony where his only child now spent her moments of contemplation. Always look at the shoes, he would say. The fit and quality of the suit. The timepiece. The hat. Look at the eyes. Each detail tells a story. Indeed it did.

  At a trained glance, this woman’s story appeared to be one of style and apparent luxury—not something one saw in great abundance since the war. The suede burgundy shoes were new and well crafted, the stockings nylon and without flaw. (Billie suspected this woman had never had to stoop to painting her legs with gravy and drawing a line up the back with eye pencil to create the illusion of stockings, as so many had.) The Akoya pearl set she wore was delicate and quite real, Billie was sure, that particularly desirable luster not being possible in the new fakes. Her navy skirt suit was notable for being of the latest style, echoing the scandalously feminine silhouette of Christian Dior’s “New Look” that had taken the fashion world by storm months before: softly rounded shoulders, nipped waist, a slightly fuller skirt falling to mid-calf—not quite full enough to cause outrage on the streets of Sydney, rationing still being in place, but enough to set this woman apart as a specimen of fashion, a local doyenne of the Parisian trend. Yes, it set her apart, as did the genuine high-quality glass-eyed fox stole she wore around her shoulders. This was no prewar throwback.

  Mrs. Montgomery somehow had her finger on the pulse of international fashion trends and had money and the tailors to pull it off for her. Billie rather wanted to get a name. One thing was for certain: This was a woman of means, and that impression was confirmed by the crowning glory of her engagement ring, which was more than a carat, Billie’s trained eye told her, and completely overshadowed the comparatively simple wedding ring worn with it.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Montgomery,” Billie said, and meant it, satisfied that she was attracting the kind of clientele whose checks were unlikely to b
ounce like rubber. She lifted her shoulder off the doorframe and smiled, locking eyes with the Joan Crawford–esque beauty. Mrs. Montgomery had large eyes in a strong, rectangular face, her gaze direct and framed by dyed red hair worn short across the forehead and swept back in a center part beneath a flat, tilted navy hat. It was the face of a strong-willed woman of high standards.

  “Won’t you come into my office?” Billie said, and turned on her stacked Oxford heel. She disappeared inside and the woman followed in the investigator’s wake, her posture erect and proud, eyes flicking back to Sam, who was trailing just behind. If he was bothered by the woman’s flirtatious gaze, he didn’t let on.

  The office Billie Walker welcomed this fashionable stranger into was not the kind of surrounds where Mrs. Montgomery would seem, under normal circumstances, to belong. Though Billie was not exactly unglamorous herself, with the striking contrast of her dark hair and pale skin, and her Tussy’s Fighting Red lipstick, the utilitarian office suited her like a battered trench coat or well-traveled uniform. It was a place of action, with Billie herself a devotee of action, as the war years and more recent events as an inquiry agent attested. Fashion was something she enjoyed and employed in her profession to gain entry to all echelons of society, but her office had very few frills about it. Her aristocratic mother, if she ever again deigned to lower herself enough to grace those four walls with her presence, would complain the place “lacked a woman’s touch,” despite the space now being occupied by Billie and her so far exclusively female clientele. Billie had left it much the same as when her late father had operated his agency. The carpets were rust red, the filing cabinets a fading hunter green, the wooden desk appropriately scarred, all of it imbued with the sense of his presence, now further layered by this new generation of Walker investigator. The only concessions to its new occupant were the placement of the handy mirror, a small bottle of Bandit perfume on a shelf, some personal photographs, and the addition of a few of the more fashionable women’s journals in the waiting room. The place suited Billie well, as if her late father had lovingly worn it in for her.