by Kate Quinn
“Are you in a hurry, Mademoiselle Le François?” Flicking through the neat lines.
“No, monsieur.”
He took his time, rustling pages. In the heat of the summer night he’d discarded his jacket and sat in his snow-white shirtsleeves, hair as sleek as his leather shoes with brilliantine. His cuff links were unexpected spots of color, ruby red and flakes of gold.
“Art nouveau glass,” he said, observing the direction of her gaze. Did he notice everything? “In the style of Klimt. You have heard of Klimt? I had the good fortune to see some of his paintings in Vienna, before the war. Extraordinary work. There was one called Danaë, the woman of myth visited by Zeus in a shower of gold . . . Klimt shows she is aroused by the gold as it pours between her legs.”
Eve had no desire to discuss any kind of arousal in this room, artistic or otherwise. “No, I have n-not heard of it.”
“It is abandon.” He unbuttoned his cuffs, dropping the cuff links into her hand to examine. He proceeded to turn back his sleeves, displaying lean forearms, pale skinned and smooth, and Eve avoided the sight by holding the little molded glass objects to the light and watching the play of colors. “Gilt-edged abandon. People thought it obscene, but what of it? They thought Baudelaire obscene too.”
Eve placed the cuff links carefully beside the bust of the poet, studying the brutal marble profile and wondering if Baudelaire’s mistress had despised him as Eve despised René. “May I ask a favor, m-monsieur?”
“A favor? You intrigue me.”
“May I miss one night’s work, in two days’ time? I promised a friend I would accompany her to visit her uncle, and he lives at some distance.” All perfectly true. With René, Eve did her best to confine her lies to what was unspoken.
“You wish to miss work.” He measured the words. “There are many who would replace you, you know, and promise not to miss any work.”
“I know, monsieur.” Eve gave him the pleading doe-eyed look. “I hoped you were p-pleased with my service, enough to . . .”
He let her hang there for a while as he set the ledger aside. “Very well,” he said at last, and Eve nearly sagged with relief. “You may have your day.”
“Thank you—”
He cut her off. “It is quite late. Have you remembered your curfew exemption, or shall I have to walk you home again?” He unknotted his tie. “Perhaps I shall walk you home anyway. I would like to further our acquaintance, Marguerite.”
He took possession of her name, or what he thought was her name, casually discarding mademoiselle. And Eve didn’t think, as he removed his tie altogether, that he intended to walk out anywhere this evening. Any furthering of acquaintance would be happening right here.
Because I asked for a favor.
She wanted to swallow the lump in her throat, and she let herself, so he could see her throat move. Nervousness would please him.
He dropped his tie along the leather arm of his chair. “Have you considered my offer of the other evening?”
Eve didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Your offer s-s-surprised me, monsieur.”
“Did it?”
“I am not the right c-companion for a man of taste. I am a waitress. I have no beauty, no p-p-proper manners, no knowledge of the world. So yes, your offer surprised me greatly.”
He rose from his deep chair, unhurried, going to the little satinwood table laden with crystal decanters. He unstoppered one and poured two fingers of something pale and sparkling into a tumbler. It glittered like a diamond, and he handed it to Eve. “Try it.”
She sipped, not seeing a choice. It burned her throat: fiery sweet, faintly floral, very powerful.
“Elderflower liqueur.” He rested an elbow against the ebony mantelpiece. “I get it privately from a vintner in Grasse. Beautiful country, Grasse—the air smells like that liqueur, flower scented and heady. It’s unique, so I don’t serve it at my restaurant. Brandy, schnapps, champagne, those I give to the Germans. I save the unique for myself. I think you like it?”
“I do.” No point in lying to René about anything she didn’t have to. “Why share it with m-me, if you do n-n-not share the unique?”
“Because you too are unique. You are in possession of good taste, Marguerite—very good taste, I would guess, but utterly untutored. Like Eve in her garden of Eden.”
How Eve managed not to jump at the sound of her real name, she did not know. But she managed, sipping more elderflower fire.
“I have always appreciated good taste and elegance in my companions,” he continued. “Before now I have preferred a finished product to a block of raw material, but Lille does not offer much in the way of elegant women these days. Hunger and patriotism have made shrews of all the ones I know. If I wish a suitable companion, it has struck me that I will have to play Pygmalion from the Greek myth, and sculpt one for myself.” He reached up with one long finger and pushed a thread of hair off her forehead. “I had not really thought I would enjoy the process. So you see, you too have managed to surprise me.”
Eve couldn’t think of any reply. He didn’t seem to anticipate an answer, just gestured at her glass. “More?”
“Yes.”
He poured another generous measure. He is trying to make me drunk, Eve thought. Seventeen-year-old Marguerite would not have much of a head for strong drink. A few glasses of this would make her pliant and willing.
Eve looked into her glass and saw the train tracks that would carry the kaiser toward Lille. She saw the lazy figures of the Kommandant and his officers, grouped around their schnapps, idly spilling secrets. She saw Lili’s beaming face the day Eve successfully passed on her first bit of information. She even heard Lili’s voice: What a bitch this business is.
Maybe, Eve thought now, as she replied then. But someone has to do it. I’m good at it. Why not me?
She drained her glass. When she lowered the tumbler, René was standing much closer. He smelled of Paris cologne, something subtle and civilized. She wondered if now was the moment he would kiss her. She thought fleetingly of Captain Cameron, looking at her on the beach as he taught her to load a pistol. She banished the thought as René bent his head.
Don’t recoil.
He leaned close, inhaling along the line of her throat, and then he straightened with a faint moue. “Perhaps a bath. You may avail yourself of my facilities.”
Her lips tingled, untouched, and for a moment she didn’t understand. Then she looked down at her hands, her cuffs which showed tiny splashes of beurre blanc and red wine no matter how careful she was throughout her shift, and realized she had a faint film of dried sweat beneath her dress from this morning’s brisk walk in the countryside with Lili. I smell, Eve thought, and it was so humiliating she wanted to weep. I smell like sweat and cheap soap, and before I can be deflowered I must be properly cleansed.
“There is soap.” René turned away, loosening his collar in a matter-of-fact yank. “I chose it for you.”
He was waiting for gratitude. “Thank you,” Eve managed to say as he indicated the door behind him. The bathroom had the same obscene luxury as his study: black-and-white tiles, a vast marble tub, a gilt-framed mirror. There was a cake of unused soap laid out, lily of the valley, undoubtedly requisitioned from some woman’s bathroom on a raid, and Eve remembered René saying that scent would suit her. Light, sweet, fragrant, young.
Every bit of advice Lili had given her about the acts which pleased men poured through Eve’s mind, and for a moment she thought she was going to be sick, but she shoved it down. Notice what pleases him, Lili had said. Staring at the soap, Eve knew. Light, sweet, fragrant, young. How he wanted her to be, not just smell. Thoughtful of him to have provided a script.
She filled the tub, splashing hot water with vengeful wastefulness, and sank into the heat with a shiver. For more than two months, she’d had to take her baths from a washbasin with a frayed hand towel. The heat and the two glasses of elderflower liqueur were making her head swim. She could lurk in the warm scented wa
ter forever, but she had a job to do.
Better to get it over with.
Eve left her underclothes and worn dress on the floor rather than pull them back over her clean body, wrapping herself instead in snowy towels. She looked at herself in the mirror, and didn’t recognize the girl she saw. Her cheekbones pressed out, a memento of the lean rations on which she now lived, but it was more than that. Soft-faced Evelyn Gardiner surely never looked so flint hard. Marguerite Le François wasn’t hard at all, so Eve practiced in the mirror—parted lips, trembling lashes—until it was perfect.
“Ah.” René greeted her with a smile, inspecting her from bare feet to loosened nut-brown hair. “Much better.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t had such a b-bath in months.” Gratitude. She knew it was required.
He twined his hand in her damp hair, bringing a handful to his nose. “Lovely.”
He wasn’t un-handsome, lean and elegant, his suit changed for a dressing gown of figured smoke blue silk. His cool hand slipped up the length of Eve’s hair and wrapped around her throat, the fingers so long he could almost circle it. He kissed her then, leisurely, openmouthed, skillful. His eyes stayed open the whole time.
“You will stay the night,” he murmured, stroking the line of her hip through the towels. “I meet with Kommandant Hoffman tomorrow morning, rather early—he wishes to discuss a celebration at the restaurant for that flying ace of theirs, Max Immelmann, now that he is to be charged with Lille’s sole air defense. But I don’t mind going to the Kommandant a trifle ill rested.”
There it was—the reason Eve was here. René let his guard down enough to give her that snippet of information, which would surely be of interest to the RFC. Eve filed it away, her heartbeat slowing to a calm crawl of terror and resolve.
René smiled down at her. “So,” he said, taking hold of the towel wrapped around her breasts. “Show me.”
Get through it, Eve thought fiercely. Because you can use this. Oh, yes, you can.
She let the towels drop, tilting her face up for his next kiss. What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?
PART III
CHAPTER 17
CHARLIE
May 1947
We were halfway to Paris, and I was surprised we hadn’t ended up in a ditch. It was May, and the French countryside bloomed around us, but neither Finn nor I paid any attention because Eve sat in the backseat telling us all about being a spy.
A spy. Eve. A spy? I was turned all the way around in my seat, gaping at her as she talked, and even Finn kept craning over his shoulder to look.
“You’ll crash the bloody car,” she told him tartly. “And you, Yank, will end up with a fly in your mouth.”
“Keep going,” I urged. All I knew about spies was from movies, and I’d never thought any of it was true, but here was Eve, and maybe she didn’t fit Hollywood’s idea of a spy but there was something about her raspy, matter-of-fact voice as she talked of Folkestone and ciphering and Uncle Edward that made me believe every word. The Lagonda ate up the miles of winding French roads, and she kept talking. A restaurant called Le Lethe. Its elegant owner. Line after line after line of Baudelaire. A fellow spy with round spectacles and a code name of Violette—“The woman in the china shop,” I exclaimed, and got a withering glare.
“No putting one over on you, is there?”
I grinned, immune to her sarcasm. I was still giddy and unbelieving that I had walked away from my mother at that hotel, my mother and the Appointment and my whole planned-out life. But I’d had an absolutely enormous breakfast, and on a full stomach nervousness had changed into a sense of adventure. I was in a car with an ex-convict and an ex-spy, barreling down on an unknown future—if that wasn’t a set of mathematical variables that equaled adventure, I didn’t know what was.
Eve talked on and off. Wartime Lille, the shortages and requisitions. René Bordelon, that name came and went. Her employer, but from the hatred in her voice I knew he’d been more than that.
“René,” Finn said, arm resting along the back of the seat as he looked over his shoulder at Eve. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
She wouldn’t answer that, just grunted and started taking nips from her flask. Finn asked something about who she worked for, if there was anyone else in her network besides Violette, and she sat silent for a while and then said, “One or two.”
I wanted to ask more, I was burning to ask more, but I met Finn’s eyes and we both quieted. This was a tentative new triumvirate being built among the three of us—Eve wasn’t here because I was paying her; she was here out of choice, and I no longer had the right to pry. Besides, I had even more respect for her now that I knew something of her true history, so I put a lid on my pot full of questions. She took another sip from her flask, manipulated so clumsily in those lobster-claw hands, and my sense of adventure sobered. Whatever made her hands look like that, it had happened in the course of her war work, as much a battle wound as the limp my brother had brought home from Tarawa. He’d been awarded a Purple Heart in a box that had been sitting next to him when he blew his head off. What kind of inner hurts did Eve carry?
She was getting hazy in the afternoon sun, talking on and off. Midsentence she began to snore. “Let her doze,” said Finn. “I need to stop for petrol anyway.”
“How far are we from Paris?” We’d all agreed on a night’s stay in Paris on the way to Limoges.
“A few hours.”
“We’ve already been driving for hours. It’s not that far.”
Finn grinned. “I took a wrong turn listening to her describe how to decode ciphers, and we went halfway to Rheims.”
In a pearly pink twilight we stopped at a drab hotel on the outskirts of the city—no boulevard grandeur on this shrinking wallet. But shrinking wallet or no, there was something I had to buy, once Eve and Finn were checking into the hotel that smelled of day-old bouillabaisse. After a short wander down the line of shops, I found a pawnshop. It took only a few minutes to find what I needed, and I was on my way back to the hotel when I passed another shop. Secondhand clothes, and I was tired of alternating the same three sets of clothing and sleeping in my slip.
A saleswoman looked up from the counter: one of those tiny purse-lipped Frenchwomen with perfectly tailored hems, like a chic little monkey. “Mademoiselle—”
“It’s Madame.” I set down my pocketbook so she could see the wedding band on my left hand. “I need a few clothes.”
I gave her my budget as she evaluated my size in one sweep of her eyelids, and I tried not to twist the gold ring I’d bought from the pawnshop. It was a little too big, and so was the title Madame. But we were two years from the end of a war, and young widows were a common sight. I might have decided to keep the Little Problem, but I had no intention of being spit on as an unwed mother. I knew how this worked: you got a wedding ring, you made up a story about a boy who died in the war (in my case, after it) and embellished it with a few convincing details. Maybe people looked skeptical but they didn’t say anything because you had the right props: a secondhand wedding ring, and a dead husband.
Donald, I decided as I stepped into a cubicle to change. Donald . . . McGowan was my nonexistent dead husband. Half Scottish and half American, dark haired. Tank corps; served with Patton. The great love of my life, Donald was, dead in a recent car accident. He always drove too fast; I’d warned him and warned him. I’d name my child after him if he was a boy . . .
I imagined Rose wrinkling her nose at me. “You don’t want a son named Donald, Charlie. Really!”
“You’re right,” I told her. “But I think it’s a girl, anyway. So Donald will work just fine.”
“He sounds boring!”
“Don’t you insult my Donald!”
“Madame?” came the saleswoman, sounding dubious, and I tamped down my laughter, trying on one set of secondhand clothes after another. Under all these airy imaginings I was laying plans, however vague. Thinking that
if I found Rose, there might be a place for the two of us together. Perhaps here in France, who knew? I had money, savings—why couldn’t we buy ourselves a new beginning, where two false Madames with two false wedding rings could make some kind of honest life? I thought of the Provençal café where I’d spent the happiest day of my childhood at Rose’s side. Was there a haven like that for us now that we were grown?
A café, I thought, remembering how much I’d enjoyed not just that Provençal afternoon, but my brief coffee shop job at Bennington. The waiting on customers, the rush of delicious smells, the easy pleasure of juggling orders and making change in my head. A café, somewhere here in France? I imagined a place with postcards for sale and sandwiches of soft goat cheese and marbled ham, where Edith Piaf played in the evenings and the tables were pushed back for dancing. Where two young widows kept the cash till and flirted with Frenchmen, though never without mournful glances at the photographs of our husbands. I’d have to get some good fake photographs . . .
“Bien,” the saleswoman said as I came out, nodding approval at the narrow black trousers and the cropped striped jersey cut high at the collarbone but nearly showing my midriff. “The New Look is not for you,” she instructed me brusquely, sorting through the stack of clothes that had fit me and culling it down to the narrowest skirts, the tightest sweaters, the slimmest trousers. “You dress like Dior, but you were made for Chanel. I know her—she’s little and dark and plain too.”
“Well, thank you.” I looked around the dim shop, nettled. “And I doubt you know Chanel.”
“I worked at her atelier before the war! If she comes back to Paris, I will work for her again, but until then, I get by. We all get by, but not in horrible clothes.” The saleswoman glared, leveling a varnished fingernail at me. “No more ruffles! When you shop, you must think tailored, stripes, flats. Quit torturing that hair into waves, chop it off at the chin—”