By morning it was over.
Violette had a list of instructions. “You might bleed more. Keep plenty of cloth on hand, clean cloth. And take this for pain.” The little vial of laudanum was pressed into Eve’s hand. “I’d stay to keep an eye on you, but I’m scheduled to travel back to Roubaix today. There are urgent reports that need carrying across the border.”
“Yes.” They had a job to do, after all. “Be careful, Violette. You said the Fritzes monitored your last trip too closely.”
“I’ll travel a different route if I must.” If Violette was afraid—and no one in the network could help but be afraid now; the Germans knew there were spies in the region and the checkpoints had been hellish—she would never show her fear. Something she and Eve had in common. “Can you find a way to keep out of that profiteer’s bed for a while? You need time to heal.”
“I’ll tell him I’m having a bad monthly. He finds all that distasteful.” That would buy at least a week.
Violette pursed her lips. “How will you stop this from happening again?”
Eve shivered. “I—I don’t know. What I was doing clearly didn’t work.” She could not possibly go through this again. Never.
“There are devices, but doctors have to fit them and mostly they won’t fit unmarried girls. Take a sponge, soak it in vinegar, and push it up inside.” Violette mimed wordlessly. “Not infallible, but better than nothing.”
Eve nodded. “Thank you, Violette.”
A quick brushing gesture, sliding away the thanks. “We won’t speak of it, not ever. You know what men do to women who do this. Not just you, but me for helping.”
“Never a word.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and Eve thought that if they were friends there would be embraces now. They just exchanged nods as Violette pulled up her muffler and headed into the street—yet perhaps they were friends anyway. Perhaps they were friends as men so often became friends; all gruffness and no light conversation, only a shared and wordless understanding. “Good luck in Roubaix,” Eve called after the trudging figure, and Violette raised a hand without turning back.
Later Eve wished she had hugged Violette. She wished that very much.
Even getting up to wave at the door left Eve exhausted and head-spinning. She crawled into her bed and stayed there, pulling her thin blankets up, stomach still cramping in long slow rolls. A dull-edged pain that came and went in waves. There was nothing to do but endure, and sometimes weep. The tears rolled over her in waves too, coming and going like the pain.
By the time night had fallen, she wasn’t spotting blood anymore, but she still felt weak as a kitten. She sent a message to Le Lethe complaining of a nasty flu. René wouldn’t be pleased, but there was nothing to be done about it; Eve couldn’t take an entire night on her feet carrying plates back and forth from the kitchen. So she lay quiet, sweating her way through it, passing the time by field-stripping her Luger. It soothed her, the smell of gun oil and the coolness of the barrel in her hands, and she aimed it at nothing and imagined putting a bullet between René’s eyes. By the third day the Luger was the cleanest pistol in France, and Eve was cautiously convinced she wouldn’t die. She went back to work, avoiding the glowering Christine who clearly thought Eve should be fired for missing three shifts, but knew she wouldn’t be. Eve made soft private apologies to René, knowing she looked so gaunt and ill that her story of a flu and a bad monthly were quite credible, and he did not invite her upstairs at the end of the night. Small mercies, Eve thought, wobbling home and looking forward to her room and her empty bed even though it wasn’t heaped with René’s down-stuffed pillows.
But the room, as Eve let herself in, was already occupied.
“Don’t mind me.” Lili waved, listless. “I’m just going to sit here and shiver.”
“I thought you were making the crossing to Belgium.” Eve locked the door. “Escorting that downed pilot.”
“I did.” Lili sat on the floor in the farthest corner, knees drawn up to her chest, the worn ivory beads of her rosary wound tight through her clenched fingers. “The pilot got blown up by a mine. I collected my messages in Brussels and headed straight back.”
The room was freezing, and Lili trembled in her white shirtwaist and gray skirt. Eve pulled a blanket off the bed and dropped it around her shoulders. “You’ve got blood on your hem.”
“That would be the pilot.” Lili’s eyes were glassy, as though she was the one on laudanum. “Or maybe the woman walking in front of him, or her husband . . . It got all three of them.”
Eve sat down, drawing the blond head onto her shoulder. It seemed there were worse nights to have than nights full of cold instruments and sharp belly pains and laudanum-laced waking nightmares.
“The border searchlights light everything up like day.” Lili’s thumb rubbed along the rosary beads. “Once you get past the border and the shooters, there’s the wooded area. The Germans mine it, you know. My pilot wouldn’t stay behind me—he went running up to a couple walking in front of us. I think he thought the woman was pretty . . . They all three must have hit a land mine, because they just blew into bits not a dozen feet before me.”
Eve closed her eyes. She could see the explosion, the harsh lights.
“And then I picked up my new passes from Antoine.” Lili’s voice was even, but her thin shoulders hitched under Eve’s arm. “He reported that—”
“Sssh.” Eve rested her cheek against the blond hair that smelled like blood. “You don’t have to talk. Close your eyes.”
“I can’t.” Lili stared straight ahead, tears leaking slowly down her cheeks. “I see her.”
“The woman who stepped on the mine?”
“No. Violette.” Lili buried her face then in her folded arms, and began to sob. “Antoine gave me the news, little daisy. Violette was arrested. The Germans have caught her.”
CHAPTER 23
CHARLIE
May 1947
You’re not invited to dinner,” Eve told Finn and me. “Either of you.”
The telephone call she’d put through to her English officer had borne fruit: he was coming from Bordeaux tonight for dinner at the hotel café. Eve had been wearing her fierce mask ever since the meeting was confirmed, but by now I could see behind that mask just a bit. I’d been looking at her rather wonderingly since she’d told me she’d gotten pregnant. Pregnant. She’d been almost my age, caught in just my predicament—only she’d been half starving in a city full of enemies who would have marched her to a firing squad if they realized who she really worked for. Suddenly my Little Problem seemed a lot smaller in comparison. I knew what I’d been taught growing up, that what she’d done was wrong, but I couldn’t manage to condemn Eve. She’d been swallowed up in a war; she did what she had to do. In truth, I admired her for carrying on after such a thing.