“I spent four hours doing th-that,” Eve said, crestfallen.
“The new ones always put about six times the effort they should into the first message.” Lili laughed, patting her cheek. “Don’t look so downcast, it’s good work! I’ll pass it to Uncle Edward, and that new battery will be bombed by next Thursday.”
“Thursday? You can get a position b-b-b—a position bombed so quickly?”
“Bien s?r. I have the fastest network in France.” Lili wrapped the message back around the hairpin and slid it into her own blond pompadour. “And you are going to be a great asset, little daisy. I can feel it.”
Her mobile face shone with such unabashed glee that she lit up the drab little room like a border-crossing spotlight, and Eve found herself grinning. She did it; she put her training to use; she accomplished her duty. She was a spy.
Lili seemed to sense Eve’s inner rush of triumph, because she laughed again as she flopped into the room’s only chair. “It’s too, too enjoyable, isn’t it?” she said as though confessing a naughty secret. “It shouldn’t be, perhaps. It’s very serious business, serving la belle France against her enemies, but it is also such fun. There is no job that gives satisfaction like spying. Mothers will tell you children are the most satisfying of all vocations, but merde,” Lili said frankly, “they’re too dulled by never-ending routine to know better. I will take the risk of bullets over the certainty of soiled nappies any day.”
“Do you know what I loved?” Eve confessed. “Walking away from that table of uniformed beasts, leaving them to their brandy and their cigars, not one of them knowing . . .” She was so happy she didn’t stutter at all, and when she stopped to think about that later, it surprised her.
“Pffft to the Germans,” Lili said, and began unrolling a scrap of old petticoat on the table. “Come, let me teach you my method for transcribing map positions. It’s a simple grid pattern, much more efficient for communicating placement . . .”
That drab little room turned more golden than Le Lethe lit by a hundred candles. They stayed up far too late after finishing the map transcription, Lili sharing a little pilfered brandy and telling stories—“I once got a set of stolen dispatches past a nosy guard by putting them at the bottom of a cake box. You should have seen Uncle Edward’s face as I handed him a dispatch case covered in frosting!”
“Brag about me when you give him my report,” Eve begged. “I want to make him proud.”
Lili tilted her head, looking mischievous. “Little daisy, are you in love?”
“A bit,” Eve admitted. “He has a beautiful voice . . .” And he saw that she had the potential to be here, to do this. Yes, she would find it very hard not to fall a little bit in love with Captain Cameron.
“Merde,” Lili laughed. “I could easily develop a tendresse for him myself. Never fear, I shall brag you up to him shamelessly. You might see him at some point, you know—he passes through German-held territory occasionally, doing something fearfully secret. If he does, promise me you’ll do your best to tear all that tweed off him.”
“Lili!” Eve rocked, helpless with laughter. She couldn’t remember when she’d last laughed so much. “He’s married!”
“Why should that stop you? His wife is a bitch who never visited him in prison.”
So Lili knew about the prison term. “I thought we were supposed to keep backgrounds secret unless necessary—”
“Everyone already knows Uncle Edward’s background; it was in all the newspapers so it can hardly be kept secret. He took his wife’s punishment, and to my knowledge she never visited.” Eve couldn’t repress a little huff of indignation, and Lili smiled. “I say set your cap for him. If your conscience troubles you over a little thing like adultery, give it ten minutes in the confessional and a few Paternosters.”
“You kn-know, we Protestants believe in feeling our guilt and not just paying it off with a few routine prayers.”
“This is why the English are too guilty to make good lovers,” Lili declared. “Except in times of war, since war gives even the English an excuse to enjoy themselves. When life could end at any moment on the point of a German bayonet, never allow middle-class morality to get in the way of a good romp with a married ex-convict in tweed.”
“I am not hearing this,” Eve giggled, clapping her hands to her ears, and the rest of the night slid away on laughter and victory. Eve was still smiling the next day when she woke up to find Lili already gone and the little rice-paper message with her, leaving behind the scrap of petticoat with a scrawled Go back to work and remember—don’t get cocky! Will call in five days.
Five days, Eve thought, putting on her dark dress and taking herself out toward Le Lethe. I will have more information for her. She was serenely confident of that. She’d done it once, and she’d do it again.
Perhaps she was a bit cocky, thinking of Lili’s approval and a smile in a tweedy Englishman’s eyes, when she let herself through the side door into Le Lethe. To be met by the lounging figure of René Bordelon, and the sound of his inflectionless voice saying, “Tell me, Mademoiselle Le Fran?ois, where are you really from?”
Eve froze. Not outwardly—outside, she was quick to sweep off her hat, fold her gloved hands, let a puzzled expression cross her face. The natural reactions of innocence, quickly deployed. But inside she sank from effervescent lightness to a block of ice in the space of a heartbeat.
“Monsieur?” she said.
René Bordelon turned back toward the stairs that led to his private apartments. “Come.”
Back into that obscenity of a study, the windows curtained to shut out the wartime grimness of Lille and the lamps lit with such a lavish waste of paraffin during the daytime that it was a slap in the face. Eve came to stand before the soft leather chair where she won this job not quite a week ago, and stilled herself like an animal in the brush waiting for a hunter to pass. What does he know? What can he know?
He knows nothing, she told herself. Because Marguerite Le Fran?ois knows nothing.
He sat, steepling those very long fingers and regarding her, unblinking. Eve held on to her expression of puzzled innocence. “Is t-there some trouble with my work, m-m-monsieur?” she asked at last when it became clear he was waiting for her to break the silence.
“On the contrary,” he responded. “Your work is excellent. You do not have to be told twice how a thing is done, and you have a certain natural grace. The other girl clods. I have decided to replace her.”
So why am I the one being scrutinized? Eve wondered even as chagrin panged her for broad-hipped Amélie with her two children at home.
“You have pleased me very much, except in one thing.” He still hadn’t blinked. “I believe you may have lied to me about where you are from.”
No, Eve thought. He couldn’t possibly suspect she was half English. Her French was perfect.
“Where did you say you were from?”
He knows.