And as Lili slugged back the rest of her brandy and called for baguettes and jam, Eve began to smile. “Uncle Edward said you’d have details for me.” She was hungrier for information than for bread.
“You are a straight-to-business sort, aren’t you?” Lili pecked at the first baguette, eating in darting bites like a neat little bird. “You will be going to a restaurant in Lille, very fashionable. The kind of place where they’d never serve a large brandy to a lady in a morally questionable hat.” Lili rattled her empty glass. “To have another, oui or non? Oui, of course. If one has the luxury of sleeping safe in the night to come, one should always have more brandy.” She raised a finger to the waiter three tables away, pointing to her snifter, and he looked positively pinched. “The restaurant is called Le Lethe,” she resumed, lowering her voice even further. “The German Kommandant eats there at least twice a week, and half the officers in the region flock after him, considering Le Lethe’s cooks get half the black market food in Lille. There was a waiter who worked there, clever fellow, used to pass me information. Mon Dieu, the kind of things he overheard when those officers were deep in their schnapps! I wanted someone to put in his place when he was caught, and voilà: Uncle Edward tells me he’s plucked a perfect little daisy for me.”
“Caught?” Eve asked.
“Stealing supplies.” Lili shook her head. “He had good ears, but no sense. Stealing chickens and sugar and flour from the people you spy on, merde, what an idiot. Of course he was shoved into the nearest back alley and shot.”
Eve’s stomach churned, and she put down her baguette. Shot. How very real it was all becoming—so much more real in this steaming little café than on the sunny beach in Folkestone.
Lili gave a one-sided smile. “You’re feeling sick, I know. It’s quite natural. So I’ll eat your baguette. You really should try to thin down a bit before we let you go to your interview, anyway. You look a bit too healthy to have come from Roubaix. Everyone in the north looks like a rake handle. Look at me, a bag of bones with skin like an ashtray.”
Eve had already noted the marks of exhaustion under Lili’s eyes, and now she saw the pallor of that thin face despite its smiles. Will I look like that in a few months? Eve wondered, and shoved her baguette over to Lili’s plate. “Interview?” she prompted.
“For the job at Le Lethe. The owner has let it be known he will consider hiring waitresses instead of waiters. Normally he’d faint dead away before allowing a woman to serve in his establishment, but waiters are one thing he can’t get on the black market. War makes men harder to find than white flour, even for a damned profiteer like René Bordelon. Who, I should warn you, is a beast. He’d turn his own mother in to the Germans for a profit, not that he has a mother. The devil probably shit him out after a night’s drinking with Judas.” Lili polished off the last crumbs of Eve’s baguette. “You’ll need to persuade Monsieur Bordelon to hire you. He’s clever, so don’t go thinking it will be simple.”
Eve nodded as the identity of Marguerite Le Fran?ois took firmer shape. A little country girl, wide-eyed, not too bright, not too educated, but deft and quiet and graceful enough to serve boeuf en daube and oysters en brochette without drawing attention to herself.
“Once you’re hired—if you’re hired—you’ll pass anything you hear to me.” Lili fished in her handbag and pulled out a silver cigarette case. “I’ll see it gets to Uncle Edward.”
“How?” Eve asked, trying not to stare as Lili struck a match. Only common women smoke, Eve’s mother had always decreed, but Lili could not be branded common despite her violent pink hat and her brandy.
“That’s courier business,” Lili said vaguely. “My job. I can be any number of people and go any number of places, whereas that hitching tongue would get you recognized if you tried. So we will play to your strengths.”
Eve didn’t bother being offended. It was the truth, after all. She imagined Lili sashaying through armed checkpoints, chattering up a storm, and smiled. “I think your job is more d-d-dangerous than mine.”
“Oh, pffft. I manage. With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through. Especially a woman. Sometimes I take an armload of parcels and bags and drop every single one as I try to find my identity cards, chatting all the while, and they wave me through out of sheer irritation.” Lili exhaled a long stream of smoke. “To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that’s why women are good at it. Our lives are already boring. We jump at Uncle Edward’s offer because we can’t stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there’s the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It’s still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we’re going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child’s ivory skull.”
Eve wondered if Lili was a schoolmistress before the war. She wondered how Captain Cameron recruited Lili, but she knew no one would tell her. No real names, no backgrounds, not unless necessary. “Uncle Edward says you’re his best,” she remarked instead.
Lili let out another peal of laughter. “What a romantic that man is! Saint George in tweed; I do adore him. Far too honorable for this business.”
Eve agreed, prison sentence or no. She kept turning that mystery over in idle moments—Cameron, imprisoned for fraud?—but it didn’t really make a difference. Whatever his background, she trusted him, and clearly so did Lili.
“Come along now.” Lili stubbed out her cigarette. “You should meet Violette Lameron. She calls herself my lieutenant, though if we had proper ranks I’d be able to scold her rather than having her constantly scolding me. I think it’s because she used to be a nurse—which you need to know, by the way, in case you ever have an injury to be patched up. She might have decided she’d rather be shot than roll another bandage for the Red Cross, but she still knows what to do if she sees broken bones or spurting wounds, and she’ll see you to right if you ever get yourself hurt. Though you won’t enjoy the process. God help me, how that woman can nag!” Affectionately. “The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”
Lili clapped the massive pink hat back over her blond hair, collected her packages, and shepherded Eve into the streets of Le Havre. It was warm despite the rain, and rosy-faced mothers herded their children back toward home as cab horses splashed through the puddles. No one here, Eve observed, had Lili’s thinness or her exhausted grainy look, and maybe Lili was thinking the same thing because she unfurled her umbrella with a vicious snap, saying, “I hate this city.”