by Kate Quinn
They dulled it with a little dirt. Eve rose, putting on her darned gloves. “I am a country g-girl newly come from Roubaix,” she recited. “Desperate for work, badly educated. Neat, deft, a little s-s-stupid.”
“You look stupid,” Violette said matter-of-factly, and Eve glared. She didn’t much like Violette, but there was no doubt she excelled at her job. Evelyn Gardiner was gone; the room’s single badly polished mirror reflected dull-skinned, hungry-looking Marguerite Le François.
Eve looked at Marguerite, and performer’s anxiety stabbed her like any actress preparing to step onstage. “What if I f-f—what if I fail? What if Le Lethe’s owner doesn’t hire me?”
“Then we send you home.” Lili wasn’t unkind, merely blunt. “Because we can’t use you anywhere else, little daisy. So go lie your head off, try to get hired, and try not to get shot.”
If René Bordelon was a beast, he had a very elegant den. That was Eve’s first thought as she waited in Le Lethe.
Six girls, Eve included, had assembled among the linen-draped tables and dark paneling, waiting to be interviewed. There had been two more, but they admitted when asked by the maître d’ that they spoke German, and were dismissed at once. “No one working here is to have any fluency in the language of our patrons, who require the utmost privacy in the places where they converse freely.” Eve wondered how the people of Lille could avoid learning German if enemy occupation continued for long, but did not advance the question, merely stating her own firm lie that no, she did not understand a word of German beyond nein or ja, and was waved to a seat to wait.
Le Lethe was an oasis of elegance in drab, downtrodden Lille: the crystal chandeliers gave off a muted glitter, the deep wine red carpet swallowed all footfalls, and the cloths on the tables—spaced perfectly for privacy—were spotless as snow. The front window was distinctively bow shaped and gold scrolled, and overlooked the river Deûle. Eve could see why the Germans came to dine here. It was a civilized place to relax after a long day of stamping on your conquered populace.
The air wasn’t civilized at the moment, however. It was tense and savage as the six girls eyed one another, wondering which two would be chosen and which four would go home. Working here meant the difference between eating and not eating—Eve had been in Lille for only a few days, but she already knew what a razor’s edge that was to live on. A month here, and she would be ashy skinned like Violette. Two months here, and her cheekbones would jut out like Lili’s.
Good, she thought. Hunger will keep you sharp.
One by one, the girls were led upstairs. Eve waited, clutching her pocketbook, allowing herself to look nervous, not allowing herself to worry about being hired. She would be hired, and that was all there was to it. She was not going to be sent home a failure before even getting a chance to prove herself a success.
“Mademoiselle Le François, Monsieur Bordelon will see you.”
She was led up quiet carpeted stairs to a door of sturdy polished oak. Apparently, René Bordelon lived in a spacious apartment above his restaurant. The door opened to reveal a private study, and it was obscene.
That was the word Eve found as she took it in. Obscene but also beautiful, with a gilt clock upon an ebony mantelpiece, an Aubusson rug, and armchairs of deep mahogany leather. Satinwood bookcases were filled with leather-bound volumes, decorative Tiffany glass, and a small marble bust of a man’s bowed head. The room with its walls hung in jade green silk whispered of money and taste, luxury and self-indulgence. And with the terrible conquered world that was Lille visible through the spotless muslin drapes, such opulence was obscene.
Eve despised that study and its owner before a word was spoken.
“Mademoiselle Le François,” René Bordelon said. “Please sit.”
He indicated the second of the deep armchairs. He reclined in his own with boneless elegance, trousers creased to a razor’s edge, snowy shirt and immaculate waistcoat fitted with Parisian precision. He was perhaps forty, lean limbed and tall, hair graying at the temples and swept back from a thin inscrutable face. If Captain Cameron reminded Eve of the consummate Englishman, then René Bordelon was surely the consummate Frenchman.
And yet downstairs every night, he apparently played gracious host to the Germans.
“You seem very young.” M. Bordelon surveyed her as she settled on the edge of her chair. “You are from Roubaix?”
“Yes, monsieur.” Violette, who grew up in that tiny town, had armed Eve with pertinent details if necessary.
“Why did you not stay there? Lille is a large place for an orphan of”—glancing at her papers—“seventeen.”
“There is no work. I thought I might find a job in L-L-Lille.” Eve drew her knees close together, gripping her pocketbook, letting herself look swamped and lost in all this luxury. Marguerite Le François would never have seen a gilt clock or a ten-book leather-bound set of Rousseau and Diderot, so she gaped, wide-eyed.
“You may think that to work in a restaurant is simple. The laying of silver, the removal of plates. It is not.” His voice did not flex up and down like normal voices. It was a voice made of metal, slightly chilling. “I require perfection, mademoiselle. In the food that comes from my kitchens, in the servers who convey it to table, in the atmosphere in which it is eaten. I create civilization here—peace in a time of war. A place to forget, for a while, that there is war. Hence the name Le Lethe.”
Eve opened her eyes to their widest and most doelike. “Monsieur, I don’t know what that m-m-means.”
She expected a smile, a patronizing glance, even irritation, but he just studied her.
“I have w-worked in a café before, monsieur.” Eve rushed on as if nervous. “I am d-deft and q-q-quick. I l-learn fast. I work hard. I only want t-t-t-t-t-t—”
She hung up badly on the word. For the past few weeks she hadn’t noticed her own stammer much—perhaps because she did most of her talking with Captain Cameron and Lili, who had the gift of not noticing it either—but now a random syllable stuck behind her teeth and wouldn’t come out, and René Bordelon sat and watched her struggle. Like Captain Cameron, he didn’t rush to finish her sentence for her. Unlike Captain Cameron, Eve didn’t think that was out of courtesy.
Eve Gardiner would have balled her fist and pounded her own thigh in sheer, stubborn fury until the word came loose. Marguerite Le François just stuttered into red-faced silence, looking so mortified she could sink through the sumptuously carpeted floor.
“You stammer,” M. Bordelon said. “But I doubt you are stupid, mademoiselle. A halting tongue does not necessarily mean a halting brain.”
Eve’s life would be considerably easier if all people thought this way, but not now, for the love of God. It would be far better if he assumed I was an idiot, she thought, and for the first time her nerves prickled. He should think her stupid. It wasn’t just the stammer—she’d been layering Marguerite for him in precise strokes ever since she walked through the door. If he wasn’t buying the easy camouflage her stutter gave her, she was going to need a different shield. She veiled her eyes with her lashes, pulling confusion around her like a blanket. “Monsieur?”
“Look at me.”
She swallowed, looking up to meet his gaze. He had eyes of no particular color, and he seemed to have no need to blink.
“Do you think me a collaborator? A profiteer?”
Yes. “It’s war, monsieur,” Eve replied. “We all do what we must.”
“Yes, we do. Will you do what you must, and serve the Germans? Our invaders? Our conquerors?”
He was baiting her, and Eve froze. She had no doubt at all that if he saw fire in her eye—as Lili put it—then her chance was gone. He wouldn’t hire a girl he thought might spit in the Germans’ boeuf bourguignon. But what was the right answer?
“Do not lie to me,” he said. “I am very good at scenting lies, mademoiselle. Will you find it hard to serve my German patrons, and serve them with a smile?”
No was a lie too absurd to even atte
mpt. Yes was an honesty she couldn’t afford.
“I find it h-h-hard not to eat,” she said at last, playing up the stammer just a little. “I don’t have t-t-time for other hardships, monsieur. Just that one. Because if you do not hire me, I will not find w-work elsewhere. No one will hire a girl with a s-s-s-stammer.” This was the truth. Eve thought back to her days in London and how hard it was to find that silly filing room job, because jobs that didn’t require easy speech were rare. She remembered the frustration of that job search, and let M. Bordelon see her bitterness. “I cannot answer a telephone or give directions in a shop, not w-w-with a stumbling tongue. But I can move plates and lay silver in s-s-silence, monsieur, and I can do it to perfection.”
She gave him the doe eyes again, all desperate, hungry, humiliated youth. He steepled his fingertips—extraordinarily long fingers, no wedding ring—and looked at her. “How remiss I’ve been,” he said at last. “If you’re hungry, I shall feed you.”
He spoke as carelessly as if speaking of putting milk down for a stray cat. Surely he hadn’t offered refreshment to all the girls? It is not good if he singles me out, Eve thought, but he’d already rung the bell and was now speaking with a waiter who came from the restaurant below. A few murmured words; the waiter departed and then returned with a plate. Piping-hot toast; and Eve could see that it was good white bread of the kind almost impossible to locate in Lille now, with butter—real butter—spread thick and profligate. Eve wasn’t so hungry yet that she could be transfixed by the sight of toast, but Marguerite was, and Eve let her hand tremble as she lifted a triangle of bread to her lips. He sat waiting to see if she’d wolf it down, and she bit off a ladylike corner. Marguerite couldn’t be such a country stick as Eve had planned; René Bordelon clearly wanted something more polished in his waitresses. Eve chewed her toast, swallowed, took another bite. Strawberry jam clearly made with real sugar, and she thought of the boiled beetroot Lili used as a sweetener.
“There are advantages to working for me,” M. Bordelon said at last. “Scraps from the kitchen are divided nightly among the staff. Exemptions from the curfew are issued to all my workers. I have never had a woman serving in my establishment, but as it is inevitable, I assure you that you will not be expected to . . . entertain the clientele. That kind of thing lowers the tone of a restaurant.” The distaste in his voice was clear. “I am a civilized man, Mademoiselle Le François, and the officers who eat under my roof are expected to behave like civilized men.”
“Yes,” Eve murmured.
“However,” he added disinterestedly, “if you steal from me—food supplies, silver, or so much as a swallow of wine—then I will hand you over to the Germans. And you will see that they are not always civilized.”
“I understand, monsieur.”
“Good. You start tomorrow. You will be trained by my second, beginning at eight in the morning.”
He did not raise the matter of pay. He knew she would take whatever wage he offered; all of them would. Eve swallowed the last bite of toast, ladylike but hurrying because no one in this city would leave buttered toast unfinished on the plate, and bobbed a curtsy before scurrying out of the study.
“Well?” Violette looked up from the tiny rice-paper message she sat inscribing as Eve tumbled back into the musty room.
Eve nearly whooped in triumph, but she didn’t want to look like a giddy little girl, so she nodded matter-of-factly. “I was hired. Where’s Lili?”
“Off to get a report from one of her railway contacts. Then she’ll head to the border.” Violette shook her head. “How she manages not to get shot, I don’t know. Those border searchlights would show a flea cowering on the floor of hell, but she always slips through.”
Until the day she doesn’t, Eve couldn’t help but think as she unhooked her boots. But it wasn’t profitable to dwell on the ways they could all be caught. Do as Lili said: be afraid, but only afterward. Before that, it’s an indulgence.
And now that she was out of sight from René Bordelon and his elegantly manicured hands and his eyes that didn’t blink, Eve did feel fear, humming along her skin like a poisoned breeze. She let out a long breath.
“Getting the shakes already?” Violette raised her eyebrows, light reflecting off her round glasses. Glasses like that must be useful, Eve thought—all she had to do was tilt her head against the light, and her eyes were cloaked. “Wait till you pass a bad checkpoint or have to talk your way past a sentry.”
“René Bordelon.” Eve lay back on the hard pallet, folding her arms under her head. “What do you know about him?”
“He’s a filthy collaborator.” Violette bent back over her work. “What else is there to know?”
Do not lie to me, his metallic voice whispered. I am very good at scenting lies, mademoiselle.
“I think,” Eve said slowly, and the thrum of fear increased just a tick, “that it will be very difficult to spy under his nose.”
CHAPTER 9
CHARLIE
May 1947
No,” Eve said. “I hate Lille and we are not staying one bloody night inside those walls.”
“Not much choice,” Finn said mildly, straightening from the Lagonda’s innards. “By the time I get her purring again, it’ll be time to stop.”
“Not in fucking Lille. We can push on through to Roubaix in the dark.”
I’d had just about enough of Eve in the last twenty-four hours. “We stop in Lille.”
She glared. “What, because the bun in your oven is acting up again?”
I glared right back. “No, because I’m the one paying for the hotel.”
Eve called me something even more unprintable than her usual obscenities, and began stalking up and down the side of the road. What a day, I thought as Finn went on fiddling patiently inside the Lagonda. A wretched near-sleepless night in a cheap hotel in Rouen, filled with vague unhappy dreams of Rose disappearing down endless corridors to the accompaniment of her mother’s hissed “Whore . . .” A long awkward drive this morning, Eve commenting caustically every time I had to throw up, and Finn not commenting at all, which was somehow worse.
Whore, my aunt whispered from my nightmares, and I couldn’t stop from flinching. I had so enjoyed the fresh start I’d made on this journey, savoring the fact that no one in this car knew what I was or what kind of cloud I traveled under. Well, that clean slate was an illusion; Charlie St. Clair was a whore, and now everyone here knew it, thanks to that tactless old bat Eve and her flapping mouth.
On the outskirts of Lille, the Lagonda started issuing steam from under its gleaming hood and Finn pulled over and fetched a tool kit from the rear. “Can you get her limping again?” I asked after he announced we had grease on the valves or water in the engine or baby giraffes in the gearshift for all I knew. “At least enough to get us into Lille?”
He was wiping his hands off on a blackened rag as Eve kept stalking about cursing. “If we go slow.”
I nodded without meeting his gaze. I’d barely been able to look him in the eye since my Little Problem had been unveiled. I could brazen things out more with Eve—if she was rude, I could pull my cynical shell back around myself and just be ruder. But Finn didn’t say a word, and I couldn’t out-silent him at the game of let’s see who says less. All I could do was pretend not to care.
We piled back into the Lagonda and headed out at a snail’s pace. Lille seemed like a pretty enough city with its row houses, the touches of Flemish brick on French stone whispering of the city’s closeness to Belgium, and the gracious expanse of the Grand Place. It had been sieged in the war, but clearly not bombed into rubble. There was more cheer here than I’d seen in Le Havre, more spring in the step of the people I saw bustling past with their shopping or their little terriers. Yet Eve grew more and more gray faced the deeper we got into the city.
“‘Any civilian,’” she said, clearly quoting something, “‘including the civilian staff of the French government, who helps troops who are enemies of Germany, or who acts in a w
ay injurious to Germany and her allies, will be punished by death.’”
I shook my head. “Nazis . . .”
“That wasn’t the Nazis.” Eve looked out the window again, face a stony mask. The Lagonda passed a café with a striped awning and street-side tables set out to overlook the Deûle, and I looked at it wistfully, remembering the Provençal café where Rose and I had spent our enchanted afternoon. I wondered if any place on earth had ever made me happier. There was a waitress about my age working in this café, carrying baguettes and a carafe of wine, and I envied her. No Little Problem for her, just freckles on her nose and a red-checked apron and the smell of good baked bread.
Eve’s voice, fierce and cold, broke my thoughts. “They should have burned the entire building to the ground after he was gone, and sowed the earth with salt. They should have run the waters of the real Lethe through it and made everyone forget.” She was staring at the same pretty little café, with its distinctive bowfront window scrolled in gold.
“Gardiner?” Finn looked over his shoulder. Eve’s voice might be fierce but she looked shrunken and frail, her warped fingers twined through each other as if to keep them from shaking. I exchanged puzzled glances with Finn, too baffled to remember I was avoiding his eyes.
“We need to get to a hotel,” he said quietly. “Now.”
He pulled up at the first auberge we found, and rented three rooms. The clerk totaled our room rates wrong and then when I pointed out his error, suddenly couldn’t understand my Americanized French. Finally Eve leaned over the counter and fired off a fluent northern-accented burst that surprised me and had the clerk adjusting his rates in a hurry. “I didn’t know you spoke French so well,” I said, and she just shrugged and slapped a room key into each of our hands.
“Better than you, Yank. Good night.”
I glanced at the sky outside. Just twilight, and none of us had eaten. “Don’t you want supper?”
“I’m taking a liquid supper.” Eve gave a pat to her satchel. I heard the clink of her flask inside. “I’m going to get sloshed to the gills, but if you wait for me to sleep it off tomorrow morning I will bloody well end you. We’d better be up and into that car by dawn, because I want out of this evil pit of a city and I will walk if I have to.”