The flower fields outside Grasse were in bloom, waves and waves of roses, jasmine, hyacinth. The air was heady, and the café made a beautiful place to sit. Those striped awnings invited you not to hurry on your way to Cannes or Nice, but to put your feet up, order another bottle of rosé, and while away another hour looking over the hills. The lean woman with the silver-touched plait had been there long enough to stack up several empty bottles over the afternoon. Her face was very brown, she wore boots and khaki trousers and a stack of boar-tusk ivory bracelets on one wrist, and she had the seat in the corner that put her back to the wall and her eyes on all possible lines of fire. But she wasn’t thinking about lines of fire at the moment—she watched the cars come and go on the road below.
“You’ll be waiting awhile,” the café girls had warned when she first came stalking in asking for the owners. “Monsieur and madame drive up to the flower fields every Sunday to picnic. They’ll be hours.”
“I’ll wait,” Eve said. She was used to waiting. She’d waited more than thirty years to shoot René Bordelon, after all, and ever since then she had spent a good deal of time waiting under a killing sun for game. Shooting René had taught Eve just how much she liked to stalk, hunt, and kill dangerous things. She didn’t care for targeting shy gazelles or graceful giraffes, but the huge wild boars of Poland or the pride of man-eating lions stalking a village in east Africa had proved fair targets for the pair of Lugers sitting oiled and immaculate in the satchel under her chair. And no one on a hunting party cared if she still swore too much, drank too much, and occasionally woke shuddering from nightmares, because it wasn’t uncommon for her fellow hunters to show similar scars. Not on the hands, maybe, but in the eyes—eyes that had seen terrible things and now looked for respite in the world’s more remote and dangerous far corners. There had been a tense, graying English colonel on the last safari who never said a word about Eve’s mangled knuckles as long as she never inquired why he’d left his regiment after El Alamein, who had sat up late over a good many bottles of Scotch and asked if Eve fancied traveling with him this winter to see the pyramids. Perhaps she would. He had long-fingered hands a little like Cameron’s.
A car rumbled past the café-garage—a Bugatti with the top down, full of whooping Italian boys on their way to the coast. This place saw good business from the fast-living drivers racing along the Riviera roads, Eve judged from the expanded garage. Finn’s silver Bentley was there, the one she’d given him, and next to it a Peugeot with its hood raised and an Aston Martin up on blocks. She could well imagine people coming to the garage for repairs and waiting at the adjoining café, nibbling biscuits with rose jam, drinking too much wine, crooning along to the radio. Edith Piaf was playing now—“Mon Legionnaire,” an old favorite.
It was late afternoon by the time the car chuffed up the slope: the Lagonda, rolling along at a dignified pace, her dark blue sides still buffed shiny as a dime. It pulled into the garage, and Eve waited, smiling. A moment later out came Charlie in slim black pants and a white blouse, tanned golden-brown, her hair cropped in a sleek bob. She swung a picnic basket in one hand and with the other kept firm hold on a little girl’s dusty smock. Eve wondered how old her goddaughter was, and had no idea. Eighteen months? Eve hadn’t seen her since the christening, and this sharp-chinned blond creature with the furious scowl was very different from the gurgling armful in rose-vine-embroidered frills whom Eve had held over the font. She’d donned her medals for the occasion, worn straight and proud on her shoulder where they belonged, and tiny Evelyn Rose Kilgore had nearly tugged off the Croix de Guerre in her baby fist.
“Finn,” Charlie was calling over her shoulder. “Stop tinkering. It’s Sunday. You are not allowed to tinker on Sunday.”
His voice floated out. “Almost done. That old oil leak . . .”
“Good thing we don’t use the Lagonda for anything but picnics. She’s practically scrap.”
“Have a little respect, Charlie lass.” Finn came out then, tousled and rangy, collar unbuttoned to show his brown throat. All the café girls were eying that triangle of skin at his neck like they wanted to eat it, but he had one arm around his wife and the other reaching down to pick up the baby. “Och, Evie Rose,” he said in his broadest Scots. “You’re a braw handful, you wee bairn you.”
“She’s horrible,” Charlie said as her daughter let out a yell that could cut sheet iron. “One cranky baby minus one afternoon nap equals tantrums to the power of ten. Let’s put her down to bed early tonight . . .”
They hadn’t seen Eve yet, tucked at the farthest table under the shade of the awning. She waved one gnarled hand overhead. Her hands still got their share of stares, and they still weren’t too good at anything but pulling a trigger, but that was all right. Any fleur du mal who lived to be old was entitled to a little wear and tear.
Seeing the figure waving under the awning, Charlie shaded her eyes and then let out a shout, pelting toward Eve. “You’re g-going to hug me, aren’t you,” Eve said to no one in particular. She sighed, and rose, and went grinning to be hugged. “Goddamn Yanks.”
Author’s Note
Louise de Bettignies is a historical figure little known today—and undeservedly so, for the courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness of the woman christened the queen of spies needs no exaggeration to make for thrilling reading. Recruited by one Captain Cecil Aylmer Cameron, who had already set up intelligence operations in Folkestone and who had an eye for talent, former governess Louise de Bettignies took the code name of Alice Dubois (among several, though the nickname of Lili was my own invention) and turned her facility with languages and her organizational flair to the intelligence business. The result was one of the war’s most spectacularly successful spy rings.