“We’ll have different jobs when the war is over.” Lili shuffled her handful of identity cards like a fan. “I should like to do something splendid, shouldn’t you? Something extraordinary.”
Lili already was extraordinary, Eve thought. Not like me. The thought held no envy—it was what made them both good at what they did now. Lili’s job was to be anyone, to shift with a few tricks of posture or grammar from one persona to another, whether seamstress or laundress or cheese seller. And if Lili’s job was to be anyone, Eve’s was to be no one, to be unobserved and unnoticed at all times.
And as the weeks passed, that became worrying. Because someone had taken notice of her.
René Bordelon lingered in the restaurant that night after the last guest departed. He sometimes did, lighting a cigar and enjoying it alone as his staff silently cleaned up around him. He played bon vivant host among the Germans, but of his own accord he seemed to swim as solitary as a shark. He lived alone, he sometimes left the restaurant to the headwaiter’s charge and attended plays or concerts, he took the afternoon air in a flawless cashmere coat and swinging a silver-headed walking stick. Eve wondered what he thought about on those nights when he let the restaurant close about him, smiling at the black windows. Perhaps he simply smiled at his profit margins. Eve steered clear. Ever since he guessed her accent and forced her to give up her birthplace, she’d given him a wide berth.
But he didn’t always allow that.
“Put away the record,” he said as Eve came out to clear the tables. The gramophone in the corner that occasionally provided discreet background music for a German patron with a fondness for the music of his homeland was hissing at the end of a recording. “One grows tired of Schubert.”
Eve crossed to the gramophone at the edge of his vision. It was past midnight; her employer sat in a pool of candlelight at the corner table with a glass of cognac. All the other tables were empty, their pristine cloths splashed with wine and tart crumbs and a few scattered glasses. The bustle of the cooks straightening the kitchens filtered in faintly, barely disturbing the silence. “Do you want another record, monsieur?” Eve murmured. All she wanted was to finish her shift, get home, and write down the train schedules for wounded troops coming in from the front, a nugget she’d heard just this evening . . .
He set aside his cognac. “Why don’t I provide the music instead?”
“Monsieur?”
There was a piano in the corner, a baby grand draped in a fantastically embroidered shawl and adorned with candles, giving the impression that Le Lethe was not a restaurant at all, merely a private home with the best of chefs. Eve’s employer strolled to it unhurriedly, taking a seat and running his extraordinarily long fingers across the keys. He began to play, a fragile melody that rose and fell like the sound of rain. “Satie,” he said. “One of the Gymnopédies. Do you know them?”
Eve did. Marguerite would not. “No, monsieur,” she said, whisking stray napkins and discarded forks onto her tray. “I know nothing about m-m-music.”
“Shall I educate you?” He continued to play, the melody soft and lulling. “Satie is an Impressionist, but less indulgent than Débussy. He has a clarity and elegance that is uniquely French, I have always thought. He evokes melancholy without unnecessary flourishes. Like a beautiful woman in a perfectly simple dress, who knows not to tart it up with too many scarves.” His eyes drifted briefly to Eve. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever had an elegant dress.”
“No, monsieur.” Eve moved a discarded pair of wineglasses onto her tray, one empty, one with a few swallows of perfect golden wine inside. She kept her eyes on that wine, because anything was better than looking at her employer. In any ordinary restaurant, the cooks would swig the glass empty as soon as Eve brought it back, but not here. They’d decant those three swallows of wine back into the bottle, because even in a restaurant awash with the fruits of the black market, liquor couldn’t be wasted. Unlike the leftover food, leftover wine was not divvied up among the staff at the end of the night. Everyone from the surliest chef to the most arrogant waiter knew René Bordelon was perfectly capable of dismissing them over three stolen swallows of white wine.
Eve’s employer was still musing aloud against the rise and fall of the piano, drawing her attention again. “If the metaphor of an elegant dress without frills does not instruct you, then perhaps one could compare Satie’s music to a perfect, dry Vouvray. Elegant, but spare.” He inclined his head toward the glass on Eve’s tray. “Try it, and see if you agree.”
He was smiling faintly, perhaps just indulging an idle whim? Eve hoped so. Hoped fervently it wasn’t something else. Whatever his motivation, she couldn’t refuse, so she raised the glass and sipped like an uncertain little girl. She considered a splutter, but that might be overdoing it, so she merely offered a nervous smile as she replaced the empty glass. “Thank you, monsieur.”
He nodded her out without another word, to Eve’s relief. Do not notice me, she wanted to beg, stealing a glance back at that solitary figure at the piano. I am no one. But she wasn’t sure her employer believed that. He’d dismissed her carefully crafted anonymity the day he decided her vowels didn’t match her identity card, and he still seemed to be looking. Wondering, perhaps, if Marguerite Le Fran?ois had any more secrets to uncover.
Two nights later, Le Lethe’s owner retired at the end of the evening. But the senior waiter sent Eve upstairs with the night’s takings, and there was that faint smile again when she entered the lavish study.
“Mademoiselle,” he remarked, lowering his book and marking the page. “The nightly take?”
Eve bobbed silently and handed the ledger over. He flipped the pages, noting a smudge here and an unusual booking there, jotting a note down, and then he remarked out of nowhere, “Baudelaire.”
“I’m sorry, monsieur?”
“The marble bust at which you are staring. It is a replica of a bust of Charles Baudelaire.”
Eve was only looking at it because she’d look at anything in this room except her employer. She registered the small bust on the shelf, blinked. “Yes, monsieur.”
“Do you know Baudelaire?”
Marguerite, Eve thought, wouldn’t be believable if she was a complete ignoramus—M. Bordelon had already discarded, unfortunately, the idea that she was stupid. “I’ve h-heard of him.”
“The Flowers of Evil are some of the greatest poems ever penned.” A checkmark went into the ledger. “Poetry is like passion—it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise. Baudelaire understood that. He combines the sweet with the obscene, but he does it with elegance.” A smile. “It’s a very French thing, making obscenity elegant. The Germans try, and they are merely vulgar.”
Eve wondered if his obsession with all things elegant could possibly be as strong as his preference for all things French. “Yes, monsieur.”
He looked amused. “You are puzzled, mademoiselle.”