He pulled me closer then, his face very near mine, and my skin thrummed. “Why exactly are you climbing all over me?”
Whore. The word echoed in my head, in my mother’s voice or maybe my aunt’s. I flinched, turned it into a shrug. “I’m a tramp,” I said, flippant. “Everyone knows tramps sleep around. And you’re kind of a dish. So why not?”
He smiled, a real smile instead of the little corner flick of his mouth that I was used to seeing. “Charlie lass,” he said, and I had time to think how much I liked my name in his soft Scottish burr, “you need a better reason than that.”
He lifted me off his lap like a doll, setting me back on my feet. He rose and went to the door, opening it wide, and I felt a slow crimson flush sweep down my neck. “Good night, miss. Sleep well.”
CHAPTER 10
EVE
June 1915
Eve made her debut two nights later as both a spy and as an employee of Le Lethe. Of the two, the second was more exhausting: René Bordelon required nothing short of perfection, and two days’ training wasn’t much time to achieve perfection. Eve achieved it. Failure, after all, was not an option. She took her new employer’s rules into her bones as he repeated them in his metallic voice just before his two newly hired waitresses began their first shift.
A dark dress, neat hair. “You are not to be noticed; you are a shadow.” Light feet, small steps. “I expect you to glide in all your movements. My guests are not to have their conversation disturbed.” Silence at all times; no whispering or speaking to the patrons. “You are not required to memorize wine lists or take orders. You bring plates to tables and clear them away.” Pour wine with the arm in a graceful curve. “Everything in Le Lethe is graceful, even that which passes unnoticed.”
And the last rule, the most important one: “Violate the rules, and you will be dismissed. There are many hungry girls in Lille eager to take your place.”
Le Lethe came to life in the evening, an unnatural patch of light and warmth and music in a city that went dark at sundown. Eve, standing in her dark dress in her appointed corner, was reminded of the legend of vampires. In Lille, the French went to bed at sundown because even if there were no curfew, there was little paraffin or coal to keep a room lit. Only the Germans came out at night, like the undead, to celebrate their undisputed rule. They came to Le Lethe, uniforms gleaming, medals polished, voices loud, and René Bordelon greeted them in an exquisitely tailored dinner jacket, his smile unforced. Like Renfield, Eve thought, from Bram Stoker’s tale: a human turned base and craven in the service of the nightwalkers.
You are being fanciful, she told herself. Turn your ears on and your mind off.
She moved through the supper hours like a graceful automaton, soundlessly clearing plates, brushing off crumbs, refilling empty glasses. One would never know there is a war at all: there were endless candles, every table had white rolls and real butter, every glass brimmed. Half the black-market food in Lille must flow through here, because the Germans clearly liked to eat well. “The food,” whispered the other waitress, a broad-hipped young widow with two babies at home. “It’s torture just looking at it!” Her throat moved as she carried a plate back to the kitchens—there was leftover food on it, in a city where the French scraped their plates of every crumb. A puddle of béchamel sauce, a dozen bites of veal . . . Eve’s stomach growled too, but she shot the other girl a warning look.
“Not so much as a nibble.” Glancing behind them at M. Bordelon, circling the room like a well-tailored shark. “Not a bite until end of shift, you know th-th-that.” At the end of the night, all leftovers from the kitchens were pooled and divided among the staff. Anyone here would be happy to tattle if a fellow employee sneaked food before the equitable division was made, because everyone was hungry. Eve cynically admired such a system: M. Bordelon successfully invented a reward that both kept his employees honest and encouraged them to spy on one another.
But if the staff were all tense and unfriendly, the patrons were worse. How easy it was to hate the Germans when you