to think well of me; I wanted to be more like her myself. I wanted to introduce Rose to her: “Meet the crazy cow who helped me find you when everyone else gave up.” I could imagine Eve giving Rose that down-the-nose gaze, and Rose giving it right back. I could imagine the three of us tossing back drinks and talking over each other, the strangest trio of women ever to become friends.
I wondered if Eve had ever had a friend who meant to her what Rose meant to me. In all her war stories, the only woman she ever mentioned was Violette, who in Roubaix had spat in Eve’s face.
“That’s a serious face you’ve got all of a sudden,” Finn said, looking down at me.
“Just musing.” I couldn’t manage to be sad. The sun was warm on my head, and my arm brushed Finn’s every other stride or two, which filled me with a ridiculous shiver of sensation. “Every step is another step closer to Rose.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you so certain she’s waiting to be found?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to put it into words. “The hope keeps getting stronger the closer we get.”
“Even though she didn’t write you in, what? Three, four years?”
“Maybe she did write me. Letters went astray all the time, during the war. Besides, I was only eleven when she last saw me. She might have still thought I was too young to hear something as shameful as—” I patted my stomach mutely. “I’m feeling more and more strongly that she’s here. Eve makes fun of me when I say I can feel her, but—”
Eve stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into her. “Le Lethe,” she said quietly.
It must have been a lovely restaurant a few years ago. I could see the beautiful lines of the building, old beams in the half-timbered style, a wrought-iron fence enclosing a dining terrace that took full advantage of the view. But the low-hanging sign with the carved gilt letters spelling out LE LETHE had been crudely splashed with red paint, and the broad front windows were boarded over. It had been a long time since waiters served vichyssoise and mille-feuilles here.
“What happened?” I asked, but Eve had already gone to the medieval doors, padlocked and barred. She gestured to the letters carved roughly into the wood, half obscured by slops of paint: COLLABOR—
“Collaborateur,” she said quietly. “Up to your old tricks, René? You should have learned the first time—the Germans always fucking lose.”
“Easy to say from hindsight,” Finn said mildly. “It wasn’t that clear-cut on the ground.”
But Eve was already moving to the next building, reaching the door and hammering on it. No one answered, and we moved on to the next house. It took four different tries and one failed interview with a housewife who knew nothing about the old restaurant, but at last we found an ancient Frenchwoman with a cigarette dangling from her first two fingers and bitter, bitter eyes.
“Le Lethe?” she answered Eve’s question. “Closed at the end of ’44, and good riddance.”
“Why good riddance?”
A curl of the woman’s lip. “The place was a nest for Germans. Every SS officer with a French whore on his arm went there on his nights off.”
“The owner allowed that?” Eve’s posture had changed, become softened and slump-shouldered, and her voice was conversational. She’d turned into someone else, the way I’d seen her do in a London pawnshop, and I hung back with Finn, letting her work her magic. “What was his name, the owner?”
“René du Malassis,” the old woman said, and spat. “A profiteer. Some people said he was in the pocket of the Milice, and it wouldn’t surprise me.”
Du Malassis. I filed the name away even as Eve asked, “What happened to Monsieur du Malassis?”
“Disappeared into the night, Christmas of ’44. He knew which way the wind was turning. Who knows where he went, but he hasn’t showed his face here since.” The old woman gave a slow, unpleasant smile. “If he did he’d get a short noose and a long struggle on a lamppost.”
“For collaboration?”
“There are collaborators, madame, and there are men like him. In ’43, you know what du Malassis did? He had a young sous-chef dragged out of those doors at the end of the night’s shift, announcing that the lad was a thief. Searched him right there in the street with everyone watching—the restaurant’s entire staff, passersby, neighbors like me who came running at the noise.”