Lili’s voice was steady. “But the Germans have no interest in my survival, ma petite.”
Eve’s eyes welled, because she couldn’t deny it: the officials of Siegburg hated every bone in Lili’s troublemaking body, and made no secret of it. “You shouldn’t have led that strike, or—”
Or what? Caused strife from the day she walked through Siegburg’s doors? Planned elaborate escapes, kept spirits high with jokes and stories? If Lili had been the sort to keep her head low, she would not have led the most efficient spy network in France.
“You are going to be fine,” Eve repeated stubbornly, and would have said more, but two orderlies appeared.
“Up, Bettignies. The surgeon has arrived.”
Lili could barely stand. Eve slid an arm around her shoulder, lifting her to her feet. She wore a shapeless dishrag-colored smock, and she made a face at it. “Quelle horreur. What I’d give for something in pink moiré!”
“And a morally questionable hat?” Eve managed to say.
“I’d settle for some morally questionable soap. My hair is filthy.”
Eve’s throat caught. “Lili—”
“Pray for me when I go in there?” Gesturing with her sharp little chin in the direction of the surgery. “I need people praying for me. I wrote a letter to my old Mother Prioress in Anderlecht, but I’ll take your prayers any day, Evelyn Gardiner.”
It was the first time Lili used Eve’s real name. Even after the trial, they went on using the old code names. The ones that felt true. “I cannot pray for you,” Eve whispered. “I do not believe in God anymore.”
“But I do.” Lili kissed the rosary knotted through her fingers, even as the orderlies took her by the elbows.
So Eve jerked out a nod. “Then I’ll pray,” she said. “And I’ll see you in a few hours. I will.”
They hauled Lili out of the infirmary, Eve following behind. A nurse came out of the surgery at the end of the corridor, and for a moment Eve had a glimpse of the surgeon from Bonn smoking a cigarette. There was no bustle, Eve saw—no one was sterilizing instruments, no one was making preparations with ether or chloroform . . .
Lili, she thought in a wash of dread. Lili, don’t go in there—
Ahead she heard Lili’s clear voice reciting her rosary. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths . . .”
The corridor outside was thronged with women. Louise Thuliez, the Princesse de Croy, Violette—as many of the fleurs du mal who could steal away from their work shifts, all anxious glances and murmured prayers for the queen of spies. The two orderlies picked up their feet, hastening Lili along, and her voice faltered in its calm recitation. For a moment Eve thought Lili would finally break—that she would collapse and weep, have to be carried off prostrate to her operating table.
No. She straightened between the orderlies, lifting her chin in the old impish gesture, eyes darting along the line of her friends. The dull light struck her hair, coiled around her head in matted blond braids, and it had the look of a crown. “Mes amies,” she said softly, and as she passed Violette, she reached out and pressed her rosary into those trembling hands. “Je vous aime—”
And she was gone past them, tiny as a child between the two orderlies, almost floating as she went light-footed, lighthearted, down the long corridor toward the operating room. Eve felt her own heart beating sickly, somber as a drum. Lili . . .
Just before she disappeared, Lili turned her head back one final time and gave her swift mischievous glance. She blew a kiss to the fleurs du mal, and it hit Eve like a physical blow. Then Lili disappeared into the operating room, but her voice still floated out, merry and serene.
“You must be the surgeon. I wonder if I can have some chloroform? Because it’s been an absolute pisser of a day.”
That was when Eve’s knees buckled. That was when she knew.
“She’ll be fine,” Louise Thuliez was saying. “It would take more than a lung abscess to bring down our Lili—”
“Nothing at all . . .”
More murmurs of agreement, assurances spoken over eyes full of worry. Violette clutched the rosary so hard its looped beads cut into her fingers. “She’ll be out of bed within a week. Less than a week . . .”
But Violette wasn’t there in the infirmary for the next four hours, as Eve was. The guards shooed the prisoners away, but Eve was still under observation for typhus symptoms. She was just a corridor and a locked door away when the moans came, and the whimpers, and the strangled screams. The sounds of a woman being operated upon without ether, without chloroform, without morphine. Eve sat huddled on her cot as all her stubborn hope drained away, sobbing so hard she almost drowned out the noise of Lili’s agony—but not quite. Eve heard it all, start to finish. By morning she had sobbed herself mute; her voice was gone.
And so was Lili.
Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron:
She finished as she had lived, a soldier.
CHAPTER 35
CHARLIE
June 1947
My heart hurt.
I’d so hoped that the queen of spies was still alive, that we might meet her on this journey as we’d met Violette. A white-haired woman now, but still small and gallant and merry. Someone I’d ached to know—but she’d never had the chance to grow old.
Eve, I wanted to say to the figure hunched in the backseat, I’m so sorry—but words were just air, useless after a tale like that. Finn had pulled the Lagonda over to the side of the road twenty minutes before as we listened, and now we sat in the summer silence, utterly still.
I reached out for Eve’s knobbed hands as she lowered them from her face, but she was speaking again, looking pale and ravaged in the merciless sunlight. “There it is. You know it all. Lili died the ugliest death a b-brave woman ever suffered. And it was all thanks to me. I sent her inside those walls, and I failed to bring her out again.”
Denial boiled in me furiously. No. No, you were not to blame. You cannot think that. But she did think that, and all the words in the world from me would not shift her self-loathing. I knew that much about Evelyn Gardiner. As much as I was always yearning to fix what was broken, I could do nothing to fix Eve.
Or could I?
She passed a gnarled hand across her mouth; both were trembling. “Get this car moving, Scotsman,” she said hoarsely. “We aren’t getting to Grenoble by sitting on a roadside.”
Finn steered the Lagonda back onto the road, and we finished the long drive in silence, worn out from the stark, ugly end of Eve’s confession. Eve sat in back with her eyes closed. Finn drove like a chauffeur, looking front and center, only speaking up to ask for a map. As for me, I sat turning over an idea.