Page 36

Buck up, I told myself fiercely as a bellboy brushed past. Just buck up. Don’t be sorry for yourself, Charlie St. Clair, because that is just so goddamn boring.

Eve had rubbed off on me. I was swearing all the time now, just like her. Even if just in my head.

You’re a bad influence on me, the Little Problem said.

Be quiet, I told my own stomach. You’re not real. I’m not hearing you.

Says who?

Wonderful. The Little Problem was now talking. First hallucinations, and now voices.

Then I heard an enchantingly modulated shriek behind me. “Charlotte! Oh, ma p’tite, how could you—” And I turned, sweat cold on my forehead, to see that my mother had found me.

CHAPTER 12

July 1915

It was a very organized, very tidy robbery. They arrived at noon: the German officer, a folder under his arm, two soldiers flanking him. The knock sounded, both brutal and officious, and so was the officer’s tone as he snapped, “Copper inspection!” It was all plainly just an excuse. The room clearly contained no copper sheeting or piping to be seized for the German metal drive.

Eve knew what to do, well briefed by Lili and Violette. She handed over her papers and stood against the wall as they ransacked everything, not that there was much to find or take. Except, of course, Eve’s Luger in the false bottom of her decrepit carpetbag. Also her latest report for Lili, statistics of the next shipment of aeroplanes to be brought to guard Lille’s airspace and the arrival date of the pilots to fly them. Details eavesdropped as Eve brought crème br?lée and kirschtorte to a pair of German captains doing business over dessert. Details on the usual rice-paper slip, pinned into her hair.

How the officer and his men would love to find those.

So Eve looked down at her toes in an apparent agony of embarrassment as her clothes were ransacked and her mattress prodded. Her heart iced briefly as her carpetbag was lifted and rattled, but the pistol was well padded, and the bag passed muster.

One of the soldiers yanked down Eve’s curtain rod, inspecting it. “Useless,” he said, tossing it aside, but not before yanking Eve’s curtains off and stuffing them into a sack with a sidelong glance as if to ask if she’d protest. She didn’t, just inhaled her rage and let it out again. The petty small things she saw every day drove her far closer to the brink than the large. Eve didn’t mind that the Germans had the right to shoot her nearly as much as she minded having them walk into her room and steal her curtains.

“You hiding anything, Fraulein?” the soldier asked, dropping a hand along the back of Eve’s neck. “Fresh food? Meat, maybe?”

His fingers stroked mere inches away from the coded message in Eve’s hair. She met his gaze with wide, innocent eyes, not caring if he groped her as long as he didn’t find the little roll of paper. “No, monsieur.”

They swaggered out with their sack of pilfered items, Eve remembering to curtsy and murmur her thanks when the officer noted everything in his folder and issued her a bon—a voucher—for her curtains. Bons were worth nothing, but the forms must be observed. That was the lesson the invaders had taught the French.

For nearly a month now, Eve had plied her two trades in Lille. She slipped into Marguerite Le Fran?ois every morning the moment she slipped out from between her sheets, putting on the new identity so easily that at times she forgot she wasn’t Marguerite. Marguerite kept to her room unless she was out buying food, drawing as little attention to herself as possible. Marguerite murmured greetings to the family who lived across the street, a haggard mother and several skinny children, and she offered a shy smile to the baker whenever he apologized for the rocklike bread. Her silence didn’t distinguish her. Most of Lille was similarly withdrawn, bemused into apathy by hunger and boredom, monotony and fear.

Such were the days, but Eve’s nights made the grayness all worthwhile. Six nights a week she labored in Le Lethe—and at least once each week, she heard something worth reporting to Lili.

“I wish I knew how much g-good any of it does,” she confessed to the head of the Alice Network one long July night. The fleeting visits from Lili were like splashes of champagne in an existence of weak tea—moments when she shook off Marguerite like a drab dress and turned back into Eve. “How do we know what any of it is w-w—any of it is worth?”

“We don’t.” Lili eased Eve’s latest report into a split seam of her bag. “We report what we think helps, and then hope to God it does.”

“Have you ever reported something you kn-kn-knew made a difference?” Eve persisted.

“A few times. What a feeling!” A kiss of the fingertips. “But don’t fret, Uncle Edward says to tell you that you are doing top-class work. What is this British thing, putting everything into classes? It’s like you never get over having gone to public school.” Lili gave Eve her swift impish smile. “There, I’ve made you blush!”

Top-class work. Eve hugged those words at night in bed. The mattress was hard and thin; the nights hot and broken by the distant rumbling of shell fire—but in Lille, despite the danger around her, Eve slept like a baby. She never ate enough despite the nightly allotment of scraps from the restaurant; she was worked off her feet and lived cheek by jowl with fear; she’d lost weight and the glow from her cheeks, and sometimes thought she’d commit murder for a good cup of coffee—but she slept with a smile and woke each morning with the one individual thought she allowed herself before becoming Marguerite for the day.

This is where I belong.

Eve wasn’t the only one to feel that way. “Putain de merde,” Lili sighed one evening as she shuffled her handful of identity cards, trying to decide whether to become Marie the sewing girl or Rosalie the laundress when she left tomorrow. “However shall I manage when the war is over and I have to go back to being just me? How boring that will be.”

“You’re not b-boring.” Eve smiled up at the ceiling, lying flat on her back on the bony mattress. “I’m boring. I f-f-filed letters and l-lived in a boardinghouse sharing my supper scraps with a cat.” She couldn’t believe she ever managed to live that way.

“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

“Will we be bored to death when this w-war is over and so are our jobs?” Eve wondered idly. The war loomed so all-encompassing, she couldn’t imagine it ever being over. Last August everyone swore it would be done by Christmas, but being here just a few miles from the trenches, with the boom of guns in the background and the clocks permanently turned to German time, told a very different story.