He smiled, a real smile instead of the little corner flick of his mouth that I was used to seeing. “Charlie lass,” he said, and I had time to think how much I liked my name in his soft Scottish burr, “you need a better reason than that.”
He lifted me off his lap like a doll, setting me back on my feet. He rose and went to the door, opening it wide, and I felt a slow crimson flush sweep down my neck. “Good night, miss. Sleep well.”
CHAPTER 10
EVE
June 1915
Eve made her debut two nights later as both a spy and as an employee of Le Lethe. Of the two, the second was more exhausting: René Bordelon required nothing short of perfection, and two days’ training wasn’t much time to achieve perfection. Eve achieved it. Failure, after all, was not an option. She took her new employer’s rules into her bones as he repeated them in his metallic voice just before his two newly hired waitresses began their first shift.
A dark dress, neat hair. “You are not to be noticed; you are a shadow.” Light feet, small steps. “I expect you to glide in all your movements. My guests are not to have their conversation disturbed.” Silence at all times; no whispering or speaking to the patrons. “You are not required to memorize wine lists or take orders. You bring plates to tables and clear them away.” Pour wine with the arm in a graceful curve. “Everything in Le Lethe is graceful, even that which passes unnoticed.”
And the last rule, the most important one: “Violate the rules, and you will be dismissed. There are many hungry girls in Lille eager to take your place.”
Le Lethe came to life in the evening, an unnatural patch of light and warmth and music in a city that went dark at sundown. Eve, standing in her dark dress in her appointed corner, was reminded of the legend of vampires. In Lille, the French went to bed at sundown because even if there were no curfew, there was little paraffin or coal to keep a room lit. Only the Germans came out at night, like the undead, to celebrate their undisputed rule. They came to Le Lethe, uniforms gleaming, medals polished, voices loud, and René Bordelon greeted them in an exquisitely tailored dinner jacket, his smile unforced. Like Renfield, Eve thought, from Bram Stoker’s tale: a human turned base and craven in the service of the nightwalkers.
You are being fanciful, she told herself. Turn your ears on and your mind off.
She moved through the supper hours like a graceful automaton, soundlessly clearing plates, brushing off crumbs, refilling empty glasses. One would never know there is a war at all: there were endless candles, every table had white rolls and real butter, every glass brimmed. Half the black-market food in Lille must flow through here, because the Germans clearly liked to eat well. “The food,” whispered the other waitress, a broad-hipped young widow with two babies at home. “It’s torture just looking at it!” Her throat moved as she carried a plate back to the kitchens—there was leftover food on it, in a city where the French scraped their plates of every crumb. A puddle of béchamel sauce, a dozen bites of veal . . . Eve’s stomach growled too, but she shot the other girl a warning look.
“Not so much as a nibble.” Glancing behind them at M. Bordelon, circling the room like a well-tailored shark. “Not a bite until end of shift, you know th-th-that.” At the end of the night, all leftovers from the kitchens were pooled and divided among the staff. Anyone here would be happy to tattle if a fellow employee sneaked food before the equitable division was made, because everyone was hungry. Eve cynically admired such a system: M. Bordelon successfully invented a reward that both kept his employees honest and encouraged them to spy on one another.
But if the staff were all tense and unfriendly, the patrons were worse. How easy it was to hate the Germans when you saw up close how much they wasted. Kommandant Hoffman and General von Heinrich came to dine three times during Eve’s first week, calling for champagne and roast quail to celebrate the latest German victories, roaring with laughter amid a cluster of aides. M. Bordelon was always invited to join them for after-supper brandy, sitting with indolently crossed legs, passing cigars out of a monogrammed silver case. Eve strained to listen, but couldn’t linger too obviously as she refilled the water tumblers, and anyway they weren’t talking of battle plans or gun emplacements, but of the girls they’d taken as mistresses, comparing their finer physical points and arguing over whether the general’s girl was a natural blonde or not.
Then on the fourth evening, Kommandant Hoffman ordered brandy and Eve ghosted out with the decanter. “—bombed,” he was saying in German to his aides, “but the new battery of artillery will be in place in four days. As to placement . . .”
Eve’s heart slowed in a shaft of diamond-bright excitement. She collected the Kommandant’s snifter and filled it as slowly as she dared, letting the liquor bloom as he went over the new placement for the artillery. Her hands, she noticed, were not trembling at all. She replaced the glass, silently begging for an excuse to linger. One of the aides answered her prayer, snapping his fingers for brandy even as he replied with a question about the new guns’ capabilities. Eve turned to take his glass, and saw M. Bordelon’s eyes on her from the next table where he was glad-handing a German captain and a pair of lieutenants. Her hand gripped the glass tighter, and she wondered in a sudden panic if she’d let her understanding of the Kommandant’s words show on her face. If he suspected that Marguerite Le Fran?ois spoke German . . .
He doesn’t, Eve told herself, ironing her features out to perfect blankness and remembering to curve her arm in a graceful arc as she poured. Her employer nodded approval, the Kommandant nodded dismissal, and Eve glided back to her alcove with a face smooth as cream and an earful of gold: the precise new locations for the new German artillery around Lille.
She spent the rest of her shift feverishly reciting the information to herself, the numbers, the names, the capabilities, praying she would forget nothing. Rushing home, she transcribed it all onto a slip of thin rice paper in the tiny letters she’d learned at Folkestone, rolled the slip around a hairpin, slid the pin through the knot of her hair, and sagged in relief. Lili arrived the following night on her usual Lille pickup, and it was with a certain ceremony—like the presentation of a victory laurel—that Eve bowed her head, plucked the pin from her hair, and offered it to the leader of the Alice Network.
Lili read the message and crowed aloud, slinging an arm about Eve’s neck and kissing her soundly on both cheeks. “Mon dieu, I knew you’d be good.”
If the grim Violette were here with her round glasses and her dour disapproval, Eve would try to hide her giddiness, but in the face of Lili’s glee she let out the laughter she’d been suppressing since last night.
Lili squinted at the tiny roll of paper. “Transcribing this for my overall report is going to kill my eyes! Next time just code it quickly for me.”