the arrest. I could almost see Eve’s friend before me, the words drew her so vividly. To me she looked like Rose, if Rose had ever lived to be thirty-five.
“Your friend was something special,” Finn said when Eve’s voice trailed off. He’d rejoined us a little way into the recitation, sitting with his beer untouched before him—and from the surprise on his face, I could tell these stories were as new to him as to me. “She sounds like quite a soldier.”
Eve finished her drink in one long swallow. “Oh, yes. Later, people called her the queen of spies. There were other intelligence networks in the first war—I learned later about the women who worked in them—but none were as fast or as precise as Lili’s. She ran nearly a hundred sources covering dozens of kilometers of front, just one woman . . . The top brass all mourned when she was arrested. They knew they wouldn’t be getting the same quality of information once she was in German hands.” A mirthless smile. “And they didn’t.”
Rose and me, Finn and his Gypsy girl, Eve and Lili. Were we all three hunting ghosts from the past, women lost in a maelstrom of war? I’d lost Rose at Oradour-sur-Glane and Finn lost his girl at Belsen, but maybe Lili was still alive and well. Would seeing her again cure what ailed Eve, the guilt and the grief? I opened my mouth to ask about Lili’s fate, but Eve was already speaking again, eyes fixed on me.
“I have spent more than th-th-thirty years picking things up after what happened in Lille. Which is why you shouldn’t take too long to mourn your cousin, Yank. Because you’d be surprised how weeks turn into years. Do your grieving—smash a room, drink a pint, screw a sailor, whatever you need to do, but get past it. Like it or not, she’s dead and you’re alive.” Eve rose. “Let me know if you decide you’re a fleur du mal after all, and I’ll tell you why you should come with me to find René Bordelon.”
“Must you always be so goddamn cryptic?” I hissed, but Eve had already risen and stalked off, leaving her empty glass. I stared after her, frustration and grief boiling in me like colliding rivers. What now, Charlie St. Clair?
“Louise de Bettignies,” Finn said, frowning. “‘Queen of spies’—I’ve heard of her, now I think on it. Probably an old headline about war heroines . . .”
He fell silent, rotating his beer between his fingers. I could see him pulling back into the tense edginess he’d had before Eve’s stories distracted him, his usual loose-limbed ease shifting to tight rigidity. “What’s wrong, Finn?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t look at me, just stared inside to where the tables had been pulled back for dancing and couples swayed to the music. “For me, this is normal.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Coming back from the 63rd, I was like this all the time.”
My brother used to get tense and foul tempered whenever people asked him what it was really like at Tarawa. He’d get that same closed-off expression, and if they pushed too hard he’d explode into obscenities and storm out. I’d always been too afraid to follow him, afraid he’d lash out at me too, but now I wished that just once I’d followed him and taken him by the hand. Just—taken his hand so he knew that I was there, that I loved him, that I understood he was hurting. But I didn’t really understand any of that until he was gone, and it was too late.
I looked at Finn’s closed face and wanted to say, It’s not too late for you. But I knew words wouldn’t reach him in a mood like this, any more than words reached James, so I just reached out and touched his hand.
He shook me off. “I’ll get over it.”
Does anyone get over it? I looked at the chair where Eve had sat. Three of us chasing painful memories across the wreckage of two wars; no one appeared to be over much of anything. I thought of what Eve had said. Maybe you didn’t have to get over it so much as try. Or else weeks turned into months and then you looked up, as Eve had done, and saw you’d wasted thirty years.
More Edith Piaf drifted over the radio. I stood up. “Do you want to dance, Finn?”
“No.”
I didn’t either. My feet felt heavy as lead. But Rose had loved to dance. My brother