by Kate Quinn
Eve pulled the sheet up over herself. “Has he ordered any ch-ch—any changes in orders, after seeing Lille?”
“Yes, rather interesting . . .”
And René told her.
“What good information you’re getting,” Lili commented on her next visit, a few days after the kaiser’s departure. She stopped by as Eve was getting ready for her evening shift; Eve sat brushing out her hair as Lili copied the latest report. She held up the rice paper, shaking her head half in contempt and half in amusement. “Is the German Kommandant really talking about the new artillery improvements in public, over cherries jubilee and brandy?”
“No.” Eve kept her eyes on the rickety washstand mirror. “René Bordelon does in private, over a pillow.”
She could feel Lili’s eyes on her back.
Eve spoke with as much dry formality as possible, but she still tripped at the first hurdle. “Just before our interview with Uncle Edward, I b-became René’s . . .” What? Mistress? He might employ her but he didn’t keep her. Whore? He didn’t pay her beyond her wages, except in elderflower liqueur and a robe she was not allowed to wear except in his study. Lover? There was no love there.
But Lili didn’t need the sentence finished. “Pauvre petite,” she said, and crossed to take the brush from Eve’s hand. “I’m sorry. Does he hurt you?”
“No.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Worse.”
“How?”
“I—” Eve’s throat locked. “Lili, I—I’m s-so ashamed.”
The brush crackled through Eve’s hair. “I know you aren’t one to have your head turned easily, which is why I thought you could take such a step without compromising yourself. But such things can become more complicated than we anticipate. Are you developing a tendresse for him?”
“No.” A bitter shake of Eve’s head. “Never in this wide world.”
“Good. If I thought you were becoming conflicted, I’d have to report it. And I would,” Lili said evenly, continuing to stroke the brush through Eve’s hair. “I’m terribly fond of you, but the work is too important to compromise. So if it’s not a tendresse, what makes you so ashamed?”
Eve forced her burning eyes open, meeting Lili’s gaze in the mirror. “The first f-few times I went to bed with him, p-p-pleasure wasn’t—required.” Or even expected. “Now . . .”
Now, however, Eve had had time to grow accustomed to what happened in the crisp, immaculate bed. And René Bordelon had high standards in bedmates, as he did in everything else. Pleasure was expected. Giving it and getting it.
That had led to something utterly unimaginable.
“Tell me.” Lili sounded matter-of-fact. “Not much shocks me, you may be sure of that.”
“I am starting to enjoy it,” Eve said, and squeezed her eyes shut again.
The long brushstrokes never stopped.
“I despise him.” Eve managed to keep her voice steady. “So how can I possibly take pleasure in what he d-d-d—in what he does to m-m—” The word wouldn’t come. Eve let it die.
“He must be good at it,” Lili said.
“He’s the enemy.” Eve realized she was trembling all over. Rage or shame or disgust; she didn’t know. “There are collaborators in this city one can p-pity—women who sleep with officers so they can feed their families; men who work for the Germans so they can keep their children warm. But René Bordelon is nothing but a profiteer. He’s almost as bad as the Huns.”
“Maybe so,” Lili said. “But lovemaking is a skill like any other, you know. A bad man can be a good carpenter or a good hatmaker or a good lover. The skill has nothing to do with the soul.”
“Oh, Lili—” Eve rubbed at her temples. “You sound so F-French.”
“Yes, and a Frenchwoman is exactly the person to talk to about such things.” Lili straightened Eve’s head toward the mirror. “So, Monsieur Profiteer is good at what he does between the sheets, and you are feeling guilty for enjoying yourself?”
Eve thought of René decanting a fine wine and inhaling the bouquet, René tipping an oyster down his throat in a lingering motion. “He’s a sophisticate. Whether he’s enjoying a glass of Bordeaux or a fine cigar or—or me, he takes his t-time getting it right.”
“A physical response to skill,” Lili said rather carefully, “is not a mark of what is happening in the head or the heart, you know.”
“A physical response unrelated to the head or the heart is what m-marks a whore.” Eve said it brutally.
“Oh, pish. That sounds like someone’s provincial aunt talking. Never listen to people like that, little daisy. They’re not only joyless drones, they usually wear chintz and think housework is a virtue.”
“I still feel like a whore,” Eve whispered.
Lili stopped brushing, and rested her chin atop Eve’s head. “I imagine it was your mother who told you a woman who enjoys a man when he isn’t her husband is a slut?”
“Something like th-that.” Eve found it hard to disagree with such a statement. She looked at René with nothing but dislike—how was it that his patient, innovative, cold-skinned hands could evoke anything even remotely pleasurable? “Ordinary women wouldn’t feel this,” she began, but Lili waved a hand.
“If we were ordinary, we’d be at home reusing our tea leaves and rolling bandages to support the war effort, not carrying Lugers and smuggling coded messages around our hairpins. Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.” Lili lifted her chin from the top of Eve’s head. “Listen to me. I am older than you, and considerably wiser. Believe me when I say it is entirely possible to despise a man and still enjoy him between the sheets. Merde, sometimes it’s even better that way. Disgust adds a certain intensity—‘spasms of love, spasms of hate, it is all the same.’ Puccini certainly had that right in Tosca.”
Marguerite Le François wouldn’t know Tosca, but Eve did. “Tosca kills the man before he can force himself on her.”
“Maybe you’ll kill Bordelon someday too. Think about that when he’s on top of you; that’ll give you a spasm of pleasure, all right.”
Eve found herself giving a watery laugh. Lili’s tone was light, but her warm, steady presence was a shield at Eve’s back.
“So.” The leader of the Alice Network stepped away, got them both cups of the horrible boiled walnut leaves and licorice that did nothing to replace tea, and then took the seat opposite Eve. “You went to Monsieur Profiteer’s bed intending to please him so you could go on spying on him.”
“Yes.”
“The information you get from him is good, much better than you get from merely waiting tables,” Lili said. “And you have now learned that part of what pleases your profiteer is letting him please you. You’ll have to allow it, if you’re to stay in his bed and keep collecting that precious information.”
“I would rather f-fake the pleasure,” Eve heard herself saying. What a strange conversation this was to be having in a bare little room over cups of terrible makeshift tea, as prosaically as English ladies discussed church matters over china saucers. “But I’m not a g-good enough liar, Lili. I am a very great liar, but I cannot stifle p-p—stifle pleasure and fake it at the same time. He is so v-v-very good at reading me now.”
“And is he pleased with what he reads from you?”
“Yes. He’s a little fond of me, I think. He’s taking me for a weekend in Limoges soon.”
“Then go, and take him for everything he’s worth.” Lili looked fierce. “Every glass of wine before bed, every petit mort in bed, every drop of news he leaks after bed. This job has few enough pleasures. The food is terrible, the liquor is almost nonexistent, the cigarettes are getting scarcer, and the clothes are appalling. We have nightmares and complexions like ashtrays and we live in constant expectation of getting arrested. So don’t feel guilty for the little bit of pleasure you get, from whatever source. Take it.”
Eve sipped another swallow of sour liquid. “You aren’t going to say a w-word about sin?” Lili w
as oddly devout despite her outer frivolity; she carried a rosary with her on every border crossing and spoke fondly of her confessor and the nuns at Anderlecht.
“We’re mortals; we sin.” Lili shrugged. “It’s our task in life. Le Grand Seigneur forgives us—that’s His.”
“And what’s your task? Picking us all up when we’re wallowing in the m-mire?” Even stolid Violette had her black moments—Eve had seen her despondent and shaking one evening after losing a downed pilot to a German sentry halfway across the border, and it had been Lili who brought Violette out of the darkness, just as she did tonight for Eve. “Are you ever frightened and despondent?”
Lili lifted one shoulder, almost flippant. “Danger does not frighten me, but I do not like to see it. Now, haven’t you got work to do? I certainly do.”
She was gone ten minutes later, rice-paper report rolled inside the staff of her umbrella. Eve departed in the other direction for Le Lethe. As she entered the restaurant, already being set with linens and silver, she passed Christine, who twitched her skirts out of the way.
“Whore,” she whispered, voice barely audible. Eve stopped, looking over her shoulder. She raised her eyebrows, giving them Lili’s devastating arch.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw you.” Christine’s hiss was spiteful, though she kept her eyes on the candles she was lighting. “Going up the stairs to Monsieur Bordelon’s rooms after shift was done. He’s a profiteer and you’re just a—”
Eve took a fast step forward, seizing Christine’s wrist. “Say a word and I’ll get you fired. One word of gossip, and you’ll be out of this job where you get leftover tartiflette and lobster bisque at closing. Hear me?” She sank her nails into Christine’s wrist, shifting so the waiters bustling past with trays of crystal wouldn’t notice. “I can have you fired,” Eve repeated, and didn’t stutter once. “Blacklisted. You’ll never get another job in this city, and then you will starve.”
Christine wrenched away. “Whore,” she hissed again.
Eve shrugged, gliding away. She’d been hitting herself with that word for quite a few days now. But she discovered in that moment that she wasn’t willing to be called whore by anyone else, least of all a woman stupider than a bowl of lobster bisque.
CHAPTER 21
CHARLIE
May 1947
I remember this.” Eve pointed to the stone-arched bridge spanning the slow blue river that wound through Limoges. A Roman bridge, I thought, crumbling and romantic looking, the little French cars hooting and dashing across it looking incongruously modern. “It was twilight, not afternoon,” Eve went on. “René Bordelon stopped there, right by the river, and said he’d always thought outside seating an abomination for any restaurant that was not a common café, but if he could have that view, he might consider it.”
She turned away, hands thrust into the pockets of her fraying sweater, and looked along the grassy slope, the trees, the buildings stretching away along the bank. “The son of a bitch got his wish. He opened his second restaurant down the bank, with this view.”
She went striding off down the cobbled street. I looked at Finn, and we both shrugged in unison, wandering after her. Eve had awakened early, and we’d made good time from Paris to Limoges. Eve had been talkative again, so each mile brought more war stories, though some of them I had trouble believing (a failed attack on the kaiser?). She’d directed us to a hotel near Limoges’s medieval cathedral, sending Finn to park the Lagonda while she went in and interrogated the concierge in rapid French, waving the scribbled address I’d given her—the address of the second Le Lethe, where Rose had worked. As soon as Finn came back, Eve was setting out into the city on foot, leading us down twisting cobbled streets. Limoges was a pretty place: weeping willows drooping toward the river’s surface, Gothic church spires piercing the skyline, potted geraniums hanging from balconies—and it didn’t have the half-wrecked look of northern France, which had been more thoroughly overrun by Nazis.
“More peaceful here than in Paris,” Finn said, echoing my thoughts. He strode along in his shirtsleeves, drawing a few disapproving looks from Frenchmen in their crisp summer suits, but the women didn’t seem to mind his rumpled appearance if the glances were anything to go by. Finn looked back at all those passing faces—the bustling young mothers with their straw hats, the men frowning over their newspapers at café tables. “Pink cheeks,” he noted. “Not so pinched and bleak as the people we saw up north.”
“This was the Free Zone,” I said, finally able to keep up with Finn’s long stride now that I had flat sandals and cropped trousers rather than tottering heels. “The Vichy crew wasn’t anything to write home about, but the people here still had it better than they did up north.”
“Heh,” Eve snorted from ahead of us. “Don’t be so sure. They had the Milice to deal with, and the Milice were nasty buggers.”
“Milice?” Finn asked.
“French militia recruited to hunt their own for the Germans. I always hated those b-bastards.”
“But the Milice weren’t around during your war, Eve.” I tilted my head, curious. “You weren’t part of the last war.”
“Says you, Yank.”
“Wait, you did work in the second war, too? What did you—”
“Not relevant.” Eve stopped suddenly, cocking her head as the sound of bells drifted down through the lazy summer air. “Those bells. I remember those b-bells.” She resumed her straight-backed stride down the riverbank and I followed, shaking my head.
“When were you last here in Limoges, Gardiner?” Finn asked.
“August 1915,” Eve said, not looking back. “René Bordelon brought me for a weekend.”
Just a handful of words, but the suspicion I’d been nursing slid to certainty—a suspicion about the elegant owner of Le Lethe. I’d known from the sheer volume of loathing in Eve’s voice that he was something special to her; you don’t hate someone that much without a very personal involvement. Now I knew: he’d been her lover. Eve had climbed into bed with the enemy to spy on him.
I looked at her, her proud ravaged face and soldierly stride down the cobbled street. She hadn’t been much older than me at the time. Could you climb into bed with a Hun just to spy on him, Charlie? Pretend I liked him, smile at his jokes, let him unbutton my blouse, all so I could rifle his desk and his conversation for useful information? Knowing I could get shot any time I was caught?
I looked at Eve, and I admired her so much. I didn’t just want her to think well of me; I wanted to be more like her myself. I wanted to introduce Rose to her: “Meet the crazy cow who helped me find you when everyone else gave up.” I could imagine Eve giving Rose that down-the-nose gaze, and Rose giving it right back. I could imagine the three of us tossing back drinks and talking over each other, the strangest trio of women ever to become friends.
I wondered if Eve had ever had a friend who meant to her what Rose meant to me. In all her war stories, the only woman she ever mentioned was Violette, who in Roubaix had spat in Eve’s face.
“That’s a serious face you’ve got all of a sudden,” Finn said, looking down at me.
“Just musing.” I couldn’t manage to be sad. The sun was warm on my head, and my arm brushed Finn’s every other stride or two, which filled me with a ridiculous shiver of sensation. “Every step is another step closer to Rose.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you so certain she’s waiting to be found?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to put it into words. “The hope keeps getting stronger the closer we get.”
“Even though she didn’t write you in, what? Three, four years?”
“Maybe she did write me. Letters went astray all the time, during the war. Besides, I was only eleven when she last saw me. She might have still thought I was too young to hear something as shameful as—” I patted my stomach mutely. “I’m feeling more and more strongly that she’s here. Eve makes fun of me when I say I can feel her, but—”
Eve stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into her. “Le Lethe,” she said quietly.
It must have been a lovely restaurant a few years ago. I could see the beautiful lines of the building, old beams in the half-timbered style, a wrought-iron fence enclosing a dining terrace that took full advantage of the view. But the low-hanging sign with the carved gilt letters spelling out LE LETHE had been crudely splashed with red paint, and the broad front windows were boarded over. It had been a long time since waiters served vichyssoise and mille-feuilles here.
“What happened?” I asked, but Eve had already gone to the medieval doors, padlocked and barred. She gestured to the letters carved roughly into the wood, half obscured by slops of paint: COLLABOR—
“Collaborateur,” she said quietly. “Up to your old tricks, René? You should have learned the first time—the Germans always fucking lose.”
“Easy to say from hindsight,” Finn said mildly. “It wasn’t that clear-cut on the ground.”
But Eve was already moving to the next building, reaching the door and hammering on it. No one answered, and we moved on to the next house. It took four different tries and one failed interview with a housewife who knew nothing about the old restaurant, but at last we found an ancient Frenchwoman with a cigarette dangling from her first two fingers and bitter, bitter eyes.
“Le Lethe?” she answered Eve’s question. “Closed at the end of ’44, and good riddance.”
“Why good riddance?”
A curl of the woman’s lip. “The place was a nest for Germans. Every SS officer with a French whore on his arm went there on his nights off.”
“The owner allowed that?” Eve’s posture had changed, become softened and slump-shouldered, and her voice was conversational. She’d turned into someone else, the way I’d seen her do in a London pawnshop, and I hung back with Finn, letting her work her magic. “What was his name, the owner?”
“René du Malassis,” the old woman said, and spat. “A profiteer. Some people said he was in the pocket of the Milice, and it wouldn’t surprise me.”