“Stop right there.”
Eve froze, looking around the rackety café. “Is someone listening?”
“No, no, we’re safe. If anyone understands English, which I doubt, we’re in the corner of a room too full of noise for anyone to hear a useful word. No, I meant stop calling me that horrid name.” An extravagant shudder. “Alice Dubois. What sin did I commit to earn a name like that? I shall have to ask my confessor. Alice Dubois sounds like a skinny schoolmistress with a face like a bin. Call me Lili. It’s not my real name either, but at least it has some dash. I gave Uncle Edward hell until he started using it too. I think he likes it, because he started giving flower names to the rest of his ‘nieces,’ like Violette—you’ll meet her soon; she’ll hate you, but she hates everybody—and now you: Marguerite, the little daisy. We’re his garden, and he fusses over us like an old maid with a watering can.” Alice/Lili had been speaking with her head close to Eve’s so their conversation would be inaudible, but she still broke off the instant the waiter approached with her brandy. “Merci!” she beamed, ignoring his disapproving look.
Eve had never in her life seen a well-bred woman drink spirits, except perhaps medicinally, but she kept silent, rotating her glass of lemonade. Captain Cameron warned her against thinking of this work as a game, but his prize agent seemed to consider everything a joke. Or does she? Under the breezy chatter, Lili showed an instinctive caution: her words paused the moment anyone brushed even remotely close to their table, although her voice was already so low Eve had to bend confidentially near to catch every word. They looked like two women sharing a cozy secret—which of course they were.
Lili didn’t seem to mind Eve’s scrutiny. She scrutinized right back, her deep-set eyes almost liquid in their movement. “Twenty-two years old?” she repeated. “I’d never believe it.”
“And that’s why my papers say I’m seventeen.” Eve opened her eyes to their widest, fanning her lashes in sweet confusion, and Lili gave a laugh of sheer merriment, clapping her hands.
“Maybe our mutual uncle is a genius after all. What a morsel you are, chérie—fresh from the schoolroom and dumb as a daisy, I’d swear it!”
Eve lowered her lids demurely. “M-m-most kind.”
“Yes, Uncle Edward said you had a hitching tongue,” Lili said frankly. “I imagine that’s hell in normal life, but it will stand you in good stead now. People talk around women, and they talk even more around girls, and they’ll chatter like geese around a girl who seems half witted. I advise you to play it up like mad. Let’s order baguettes! You won’t be getting good bread in Lille. All the good white flour goes to the Boches, so whenever I come south I gorge on good bread and fashionable hats. I love this city!”
And as Lili slugged back the rest of her brandy and called for baguettes and jam, Eve began to smile. “Uncle Edward said you’d have details for me.” She was hungrier for information than for bread.
“You are a straight-to-business sort, aren’t you?” Lili pecked at the first baguette, eating in darting bites like a neat little bird. “You will be going to a restaurant in Lille, very fashionable. The kind of place where they’d never serve a large brandy to a lady in a morally questionable hat.” Lili rattled her empty glass. “To have another, oui or non? Oui, of course. If one has the luxury of sleeping safe in the night to come, one should always have more brandy.” She raised a finger to the waiter three tables away, pointing to her snifter, and he looked positively pinched. “The restaurant is called Le Lethe,” she resumed, lowering her voice even further. “The German Kommandant eats there at least twice a week, and half the officers in the region flock after him, considering Le Lethe’s cooks get half the black market food in Lille. There was a waiter who worked there, clever fellow, used to pass me information. Mon Dieu, the kind of things he overheard when those officers were deep in their schnapps! I wanted someone to put in his place when he was caught, and voilà: Uncle Edward tells me he’s plucked a perfect little daisy for me.”
“Caught?” Eve asked.
“Stealing supplies.” Lili shook her head. “He had good ears, but no sense. Stealing chickens and sugar and flour from the people you spy on, merde, what an idiot. Of course he was shoved into the nearest back alley and shot.”
Eve’s stomach churned, and she put down her baguette. Shot. How very real it was all becoming—so much more real in this steaming little café than on the sunny beach in Folkestone.
Lili gave a one-sided smile. “You’re feeling sick, I know. It’s quite natural. So I’ll eat your baguette. You really should try to thin down a bit before we let you go to your interview, anyway. You look a bit too healthy to have come from Roubaix. Everyone in the north looks like a rake handle. Look at me, a bag of bones with skin like an ashtray.”
Eve had already noted the marks of exhaustion under Lili’s eyes, and now she saw the pallor of that thin face despite its smiles. Will I look like that in a few months? Eve wondered, and shoved her baguette over to Lili’s plate. “Interview?” she prompted.
“For the job at Le Lethe. The owner has let it be known he will consider hiring waitresses instead of waiters. Normally he’d faint dead away before allowing a woman to serve in his establishment, but waiters are one thing he can’t get on the black market. War makes men harder to find than white flour, even for a damned profiteer like René Bordelon. Who, I should warn you, is a beast. He’d turn his own mother in to the Germans for a profit, not that he has a mother. The devil probably shit him out after a night’s drinking with Judas.” Lili polished off the last crumbs of Eve’s baguette. “You’ll need to persuade Monsieur Bordelon to hire you. He’s clever, so don’t go thinking it will be simple.”
Eve nodded as the identity of Marguerite Le François took firmer shape. A little country girl, wide-eyed, not too bright, not too educated, but deft and quiet and graceful enough to serve boeuf en daube and oysters en brochette without drawing attention to herself.
“Once you’re hired—if you’re hired—you’ll pass anything you hear to me.” Lili fished in her handbag and pulled out a silver cigarette case. “I’ll see it gets to Uncle Edward.”
“How?” Eve asked, trying not to stare as Lili struck a match. Only common women smoke, Eve’s mother had always decreed, but Lili could not be branded common despite her violent pink hat and her brandy.
“That’s courier business,” Lili said vaguely. “My job. I can be any number of people and go any number of places, whereas that hitching tongue would get you recognized if you tried. So we will play to your strengths.”
Eve didn’t bother being offended. It was the truth, after all. She imagined Lili sashaying through armed checkpoints, chattering up a storm, and smiled. “I think your job is more d-d-dangerous than mine.”
“Oh, pffft. I manage. With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through. Especially a woman. Sometimes I take an armload of parcels and bags and drop every single one as I try to find my identity cards, chatting all the while, and they wave me through out of sheer irritation.” Lili exhaled a long stream of smoke. “To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that’s why women are good at it. Our lives are already boring. We jump at Uncle Edward’s offer because we can’t stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there’s the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It’s still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we’re going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child’s ivory skull.”
Eve wondered if Lili was a schoolmistress before the war. She wondered how Captain Cameron recruited Lili, but she knew no one would tell her. No real names, no backgrounds, not unless necessary. “Uncle Edward says you’re his best,” she remarked instead.
Lili let out another peal of laughter. “What a romantic that man is! Sai
nt George in tweed; I do adore him. Far too honorable for this business.”
Eve agreed, prison sentence or no. She kept turning that mystery over in idle moments—Cameron, imprisoned for fraud?—but it didn’t really make a difference. Whatever his background, she trusted him, and clearly so did Lili.
“Come along now.” Lili stubbed out her cigarette. “You should meet Violette Lameron. She calls herself my lieutenant, though if we had proper ranks I’d be able to scold her rather than having her constantly scolding me. I think it’s because she used to be a nurse—which you need to know, by the way, in case you ever have an injury to be patched up. She might have decided she’d rather be shot than roll another bandage for the Red Cross, but she still knows what to do if she sees broken bones or spurting wounds, and she’ll see you to right if you ever get yourself hurt. Though you won’t enjoy the process. God help me, how that woman can nag!” Affectionately. “The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”
Lili clapped the massive pink hat back over her blond hair, collected her packages, and shepherded Eve into the streets of Le Havre. It was warm despite the rain, and rosy-faced mothers herded their children back toward home as cab horses splashed through the puddles. No one here, Eve observed, had Lili’s thinness or her exhausted grainy look, and maybe Lili was thinking the same thing because she unfurled her umbrella with a vicious snap, saying, “I hate this city.”
“You said you l-loved it.”
“I love it and I hate it. Le Havre, Paris. I love their baguettes and their hats, but merde, the people have no idea what is happening in the north. None at all.” That mobile face was still for an instant. “Lille is overrun by beasts, and here they sniff if you want a brandy and a smoke to get through a pisser of a day.”
“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?”
Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”
CHAPTER 7
CHARLIE
May 1947
Summertime, almost exactly ten years ago. I’d been nine and Rose eleven when our families went on a drive through Provence . . . and ended up leaving us at a roadside café for nearly six hours.
An accident, of course. Two cars, one with the adults and one trundling behind with the children and the nanny. A stop at a café overlooking a vineyard of budding grapes, our parents looking for lavatories and postcards, Rose and me following the smell of fresh-baked bread to the kitchen, our brothers roughhousing . . . and somehow when everyone loaded back up, the nanny thought we’d climbed into the car with our parents and our parents thought we were with the nanny, and everyone drove off without us.
It was the only time I’d ever seen Rose scared, and I couldn’t understand it. We weren’t in any danger; the plump and motherly Provençal cook had made a great fuss over us once she discovered what had happened. “Don’t worry, mademoiselles! It won’t be twenty minutes before your mothers are back.” Soon we were settled at a table of our own under a striped awning overlooking the vineyard, with glasses of cold lemonade and thick sandwiches of goat cheese and prosciutto.
“They’ll be back soon,” I said, munching. As far as I was concerned, this was much better than sitting hot and cramped in the Renault’s backseat, getting admonished by the nanny and pinched by our brothers.
But Rose just stared down the road, not smiling. “Maybe they won’t come back,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like me.”
“Yes, she does.”
“Not now I’m getting, you know. Older.” Rose looked down at herself. Even at eleven she was starting to sprout a bust. “Maman doesn’t like it. She feels old.”
“Because you’re going to grow up even prettier than her. I won’t grow up pretty enough for mine.” I sighed, but the gloom didn’t last long. The day was too beautiful, and the smiling cook had just laid down a plate of piping-hot madeleines.
“Why is it always about being pretty with us?” Rose exclaimed, still glaring over the stunning view of vines and sky.
“Don’t you like being pretty? I wish I were.”
“Well, of course I like it. But when people meet our brothers, they don’t just comment on their looks, they ask, ‘How do you do in school?’ or ‘Do you play football?’ No one ever does that with us.”
“Girls don’t play football.”
“You know what I mean.” Rose looked stormy. “Our parents would never have left the boys behind. Boys always come first.”
“So?” That was just the way things were, not something to resent or even think about very much. My parents laughed indulgently whenever James pulled my hair, or dunked me in the stream until I was crying. Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty. I wasn’t very pretty, but my parents still seemed to have lofty plans for me: white gloves, a proper school, and becoming a Lovely Bride someday. Maman had already told me that if I was lucky, I’d be engaged by the time I was twenty, just like her.
Rose sat twisting the end of her blond braid. “I don’t want to just be pretty when I grow up. I want to do something different. Write a book. Swim the Channel. Go on safari and shoot a lion—”
“Or just stay here forever.” The smells of wild lavender and rosemary on the summer breeze, the warmth of the sun overhead, the sound of happy French babble from other diners, the goat cheese and crusty bread delicious on my tongue—this little café seemed just like heaven as far as I was concerned.
“We’re not staying here forever!” Rose looked worried again. “Don’t say that.”
“I was just joking. You don’t really think they’d leave us here, do you?”
“No.” I could see her trying to be rational, the big girl of eleven who knew so much more than me. But then she whispered, as if she couldn’t help it, “What if they don’t come back?”
I think I realized then why Rose was such a friend to me. She was two years older, she could have brushed me off as a little pest, yet she always welcomed my tagging along. Sitting in that heavenly café, I saw it: her brothers had their own games, her mother resented her just a little, her father was always working. Except for these summers when I came to visit and became her loyal shadow, she was lonely.
I was only nine. I couldn’t put any of this into words, or even understand it as well as I did later. But I had some muddled idea, seeing her fight the fear that her parents wouldn’t bother coming back for her, and I squeezed her hand. “Even if they don’t come back, I’m here,” I’d said. “I won’t leave you.”
Miss?”
I blinked, coming back from summer of ’37 to May of ’47. Memory had dragged me down so strongly, it was a shock to look over and see Finn’s dark eyes and tousled hair instead of eleven-year-old Rose’s blond plait and baby blues.
“We’ve arrived,” he said. “This is the address you gave me.”
I shivered. The car had stopped. I looked out at the gravel drive leading up to the rambling house where I’d spent every summer of my life up until Germany invaded France: my aunt and uncle’s house outside Rouen. Yet somehow I was still seeing that café in Provence where two little girls had spent nearly six hours before their parents realized the mistake at the next stop three hours down the road, turned around, and raced back. Those six hours were magic: Rose and I stuffed with goat cheese and madeleines, playing tag among the grapevines, bundling into aprons to help the friendly cook wash the mugs, feeling very grown-up when she allowed us a small glass of watered-down rosé apiece. Sleepily watching the sun come down over the vineyard, heads on each other’s shoulders. Feeling a little disappointed to leave, once our frantically worried parents arrived with breathless hugs and apologies. The best day Rose and I ever had. The best day of my life, really, because of the simplest equation in the world: Rose plus
me equaled happiness.
I won’t leave you, I’d promised. But I had, and now she was gone.
“You all right?” Finn asked. That dark gaze of his didn’t miss much.
“Fine,” I said, slipping out of the car. “Stay here with Eve.” She was dozing in the backseat, the sound of snores rising against the summertime buzz of the cicadas. It had been a long afternoon’s drive after a night in Le Havre at a cheap hotel. First a late start because of course Eve was hungover, and then the hours of jolting along rutted French roads, stopping every hour or so for me to get out and throw up. I made excuses about motion sickness, but really it was the Little Problem. Or maybe it was just the thought of what was coming that made me queasy. I looked at the house again, and the shuttered windows looked like dead eyes.
“Go on, then.” Finn pulled a tattered issue of The Autocar from under his seat, leaning an elbow on the window to read. “When you get back, we’ll head into Rouen and find a hotel.”
“Thank you.” I turned my back on the gleaming blue Lagonda and headed up the drive.
No one answered my knock. I knocked again. It took so long, I was ready to start peering in windows. But at last I heard shuffling footsteps inside, and the door creaked open.
“Tante Jeanne,” I began, before the sight of her froze me. My French aunt had always been slender, scented, blond like Rose. An invalid, but the Greta Garbo kind, all pretty lace bed jackets and a delicate cough. The woman before me was horribly thin, gray haired, dressed in a soiled sweater and a drab skirt. I could have passed her on the street and not recognized her—and from her blank look, she didn’t know me either.
I swallowed. “Tante, it’s Charlotte—your niece. I’ve come to ask you about Rose.”
She didn’t offer me tea or biscuits, just sank into an old divan and regarded me blankly. I perched on the edge of a frayed armchair opposite. She lost everything, I thought, looking at the prematurely aged face in front of me. Widowed . . . two sons dead . . . Rose gone. I didn’t know how Tante Jeanne was even standing. I knew she’d loved my cousin, no matter what childish doubts Rose had carried.