saw up close how much they wasted. Kommandant Hoffman and General von Heinrich came to dine three times during Eve’s first week, calling for champagne and roast quail to celebrate the latest German victories, roaring with laughter amid a cluster of aides. M. Bordelon was always invited to join them for after-supper brandy, sitting with indolently crossed legs, passing cigars out of a monogrammed silver case. Eve strained to listen, but couldn’t linger too obviously as she refilled the water tumblers, and anyway they weren’t talking of battle plans or gun emplacements, but of the girls they’d taken as mistresses, comparing their finer physical points and arguing over whether the general’s girl was a natural blonde or not.
Then on the fourth evening, Kommandant Hoffman ordered brandy and Eve ghosted out with the decanter. “—bombed,” he was saying in German to his aides, “but the new battery of artillery will be in place in four days. As to placement . . .”
Eve’s heart slowed in a shaft of diamond-bright excitement. She collected the Kommandant’s snifter and filled it as slowly as she dared, letting the liquor bloom as he went over the new placement for the artillery. Her hands, she noticed, were not trembling at all. She replaced the glass, silently begging for an excuse to linger. One of the aides answered her prayer, snapping his fingers for brandy even as he replied with a question about the new guns’ capabilities. Eve turned to take his glass, and saw M. Bordelon’s eyes on her from the next table where he was glad-handing a German captain and a pair of lieutenants. Her hand gripped the glass tighter, and she wondered in a sudden panic if she’d let her understanding of the Kommandant’s words show on her face. If he suspected that Marguerite Le François spoke German . . .
He doesn’t, Eve told herself, ironing her features out to perfect blankness and remembering to curve her arm in a graceful arc as she poured. Her employer nodded approval, the Kommandant nodded dismissal, and Eve glided back to her alcove with a face smooth as cream and an earful of gold: the precise new locations for the new German artillery around Lille.
She spent the rest of her shift feverishly reciting the information to herself, the numbers, the names, the capabilities, praying she would forget nothing. Rushing home, she transcribed it all onto a slip of thin rice paper in the tiny letters she’d learned at Folkestone, rolled the slip around a hairpin, slid the pin through the knot of her hair, and sagged in relief. Lili arrived the following night on her usual Lille pickup, and it was with a certain ceremony—like the presentation of a victory laurel—that Eve bowed her head, plucked the pin from her hair, and offered it to the leader of the Alice Network.
Lili read the message and crowed aloud, slinging an arm about Eve’s neck and kissing her soundly on both cheeks. “Mon dieu, I knew you’d be good.”
If the grim Violette were here with her round glasses and her dour disapproval, Eve would try to hide her giddiness, but in the face of Lili’s glee she let out the laughter she’d been suppressing since last night.
Lili squinted at the tiny roll of paper. “Transcribing this for my overall report is going to kill my eyes! Next time just code it quickly for me.”
“I spent four hours doing th-that,” Eve said, crestfallen.
“The new ones always put about six times the effort they should into the first message.” Lili laughed, patting her cheek. “Don’t look so downcast, it’s good work! I’ll pass it to Uncle Edward, and that new battery will be bombed by next Thursday.”
“Thursday? You can get a position b-b-b—a position bombed so quickly?”
“Bien sûr. I have the fastest network in France.” Lili wrapped the message back around the hairpin and slid it into her own blond pompadour. “And you are going to be a great asset, little daisy. I can feel it.”
Her mobile face shone with such unabashed glee that she lit up the drab little room like a border-crossing spotlight, and Eve found herself grinning. She did it; she put her training to use; she accomplished her duty. She was a spy.
Lili seemed to sense Eve’s inner rush of triumph, because she laughed again as she flopped into the room’s only chair. “It’s too, too enjoyable, isn’t it?” she said as though confessing a naughty secret. “It shouldn’t be, perhaps. It’s very serious business, serving la