Better to get it over with.
Eve left her underclothes and worn dress on the floor rather than pull them back over her clean body, wrapping herself instead in snowy towels. She looked at herself in the mirror, and didn’t recognize the girl she saw. Her cheekbones pressed out, a memento of the lean rations on which she now lived, but it was more than that. Soft-faced Evelyn Gardiner surely never looked so flint hard. Marguerite Le Fran?ois wasn’t hard at all, so Eve practiced in the mirror—parted lips, trembling lashes—until it was perfect.
“Ah.” René greeted her with a smile, inspecting her from bare feet to loosened nut-brown hair. “Much better.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t had such a b-bath in months.” Gratitude. She knew it was required.
He twined his hand in her damp hair, bringing a handful to his nose. “Lovely.”
He wasn’t un-handsome, lean and elegant, his suit changed for a dressing gown of figured smoke blue silk. His cool hand slipped up the length of Eve’s hair and wrapped around her throat, the fingers so long he could almost circle it. He kissed her then, leisurely, openmouthed, skillful. His eyes stayed open the whole time.
“You will stay the night,” he murmured, stroking the line of her hip through the towels. “I meet with Kommandant Hoffman tomorrow morning, rather early—he wishes to discuss a celebration at the restaurant for that flying ace of theirs, Max Immelmann, now that he is to be charged with Lille’s sole air defense. But I don’t mind going to the Kommandant a trifle ill rested.”
There it was—the reason Eve was here. René let his guard down enough to give her that snippet of information, which would surely be of interest to the RFC. Eve filed it away, her heartbeat slowing to a calm crawl of terror and resolve.
René smiled down at her. “So,” he said, taking hold of the towel wrapped around her breasts. “Show me.”
Get through it, Eve thought fiercely. Because you can use this. Oh, yes, you can.
She let the towels drop, tilting her face up for his next kiss. What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?
PART III
CHAPTER 17
CHARLIE
May 1947
We were halfway to Paris, and I was surprised we hadn’t ended up in a ditch. It was May, and the French countryside bloomed around us, but neither Finn nor I paid any attention because Eve sat in the backseat telling us all about being a spy.
A spy. Eve. A spy? I was turned all the way around in my seat, gaping at her as she talked, and even Finn kept craning over his shoulder to look.
“You’ll crash the bloody car,” she told him tartly. “And you, Yank, will end up with a fly in your mouth.”
“Keep going,” I urged. All I knew about spies was from movies, and I’d never thought any of it was true, but here was Eve, and maybe she didn’t fit Hollywood’s idea of a spy but there was something about her raspy, matter-of-fact voice as she talked of Folkestone and ciphering and Uncle Edward that made me believe every word. The Lagonda ate up the miles of winding French roads, and she kept talking. A restaurant called Le Lethe. Its elegant owner. Line after line after line of Baudelaire. A fellow spy with round spectacles and a code name of Violette—“The woman in the china shop,” I exclaimed, and got a withering glare.
“No putting one over on you, is there?”
I grinned, immune to her sarcasm. I was still giddy and unbelieving that I had walked away from my mother at that hotel, my mother and the Appointment and my whole planned-out life. But I’d had an absolutely enormous breakfast, and on a full stomach nervousness had changed into a sense of adventure. I was in a car with an ex-convict and an ex-spy, barreling down on an unknown future—if that wasn’t a set of mathematical variables that equaled adventure, I didn’t know what was.
Eve talked on and off. Wartime Lille, the shortages and requisitions. René Bordelon, that name came and went. Her employer, but from the hatred in her voice I knew he’d been more than that.
“René,” Finn said, arm resting along the back of the seat as he looked over his shoulder at Eve. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
She wouldn’t answer that, just grunted and started taking nips from her flask. Finn asked something about who she worked for, if there was anyone else in her network besides Violette, and she sat silent for a while and then said, “One or two.”
I wanted to ask more, I was burning to ask more, but I met Finn’s eyes and we both quieted. This was a tentative new triumvirate being built among the three of us—Eve wasn’t here because I was paying her; she was here out of choice, and I no longer had the right to pry. Besides, I had even more respect for her now that I knew something of her true history, so I put a lid on my pot full of questions. She took another sip from her flask, manipulated so clumsily in those lobster-claw hands, and my sense of adventure sobered. Whatever made her hands look like that, it had happened in the course of her war work, as much a battle wound as the limp my brother had brought home from Tarawa. He’d been awarded a Purple Heart in a box that had been sitting next to him when he blew his head off. What kind of inner hurts did Eve carry?
She was getting hazy in the afternoon sun, talking on and off. Midsentence she began to snore. “Let her doze,” said Finn. “I need to stop for petrol anyway.”
“How far are we from Paris?” We’d all agreed on a night’s stay in Paris on the way to Limoges.
“A few hours.”
“We’ve already been driving for hours. It’s not that far.”
Finn grinned. “I took a wrong turn listening to her describe how to decode ciphers, and we went halfway to Rheims.”
In a pearly pink twilight we stopped at a drab hotel on the outskirts of the city—no boulevard grandeur on this shrinking wallet. But shrinking wallet or no, there was something I had to buy, once Eve and Finn were checking into the hotel that smelled of day-old bouillabaisse. After a short wander down the line of shops, I found a pawnshop. It took only a few minutes to find what I needed, and I was on my way back to the hotel when I passed another shop. Secondhand clothes, and I was tired of alternating the same three sets of clothing and sleeping in my slip.
A saleswoman looked up from the counter: one of those tiny purse-lipped Frenchwomen with perfectly tailored hems, like a chic little monkey. “Mademoiselle—”