“He’s the enemy.” Eve realized she was trembling all over. Rage or shame or disgust; she didn’t know. “There are collaborators in this city one can p-pity—women who sleep with officers so they can feed their families; men who work for the Germans so they can keep their children warm. But René Bordelon is nothing but a profiteer. He’s almost as bad as the Huns.”

“Maybe so,” Lili said. “But lovemaking is a skill like any other, you know. A bad man can be a good carpenter or a good hatmaker or a good lover. The skill has nothing to do with the soul.”

“Oh, Lili—” Eve rubbed at her temples. “You sound so F-French.”

“Yes, and a Frenchwoman is exactly the person to talk to about such things.” Lili straightened Eve’s head toward the mirror. “So, Monsieur Profiteer is good at what he does between the sheets, and you are feeling guilty for enjoying yourself?”

Eve thought of René decanting a fine wine and inhaling the bouquet, René tipping an oyster down his throat in a lingering motion. “He’s a sophisticate. Whether he’s enjoying a glass of Bordeaux or a fine cigar or—or me, he takes his t-time getting it right.”

“A physical response to skill,” Lili said rather carefully, “is not a mark of what is happening in the head or the heart, you know.”

“A physical response unrelated to the head or the heart is what m-marks a whore.” Eve said it brutally.

“Oh, pish. That sounds like someone’s provincial aunt talking. Never listen to people like that, little daisy. They’re not only joyless drones, they usually wear chintz and think housework is a virtue.”

“I still feel like a whore,” Eve whispered.

Lili stopped brushing, and rested her chin atop Eve’s head. “I imagine it was your mother who told you a woman who enjoys a man when he isn’t her husband is a slut?”

“Something like th-that.” Eve found it hard to disagree with such a statement. She looked at René with nothing but dislike—how was it that his patient, innovative, cold-skinned hands could evoke anything even remotely pleasurable? “Ordinary women wouldn’t feel this,” she began, but Lili waved a hand.

“If we were ordinary, we’d be at home reusing our tea leaves and rolling bandages to support the war effort, not carrying Lugers and smuggling coded messages around our hairpins. Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.” Lili lifted her chin from the top of Eve’s head. “Listen to me. I am older than you, and considerably wiser. Believe me when I say it is entirely possible to despise a man and still enjoy him between the sheets. Merde, sometimes it’s even better that way. Disgust adds a certain intensity—‘spasms of love, spasms of hate, it is all the same.’ Puccini certainly had that right in Tosca.”

Marguerite Le Fran?ois wouldn’t know Tosca, but Eve did. “Tosca kills the man before he can force himself on her.”

“Maybe you’ll kill Bordelon someday too. Think about that when he’s on top of you; that’ll give you a spasm of pleasure, all right.”

Eve found herself giving a watery laugh. Lili’s tone was light, but her warm, steady presence was a shield at Eve’s back.

“So.” The leader of the Alice Network stepped away, got them both cups of the horrible boiled walnut leaves and licorice that did nothing to replace tea, and then took the seat opposite Eve. “You went to Monsieur Profiteer’s bed intending to please him so you could go on spying on him.”

“Yes.”

“The information you get from him is good, much better than you get from merely waiting tables,” Lili said. “And you have now learned that part of what pleases your profiteer is letting him please you. You’ll have to allow it, if you’re to stay in his bed and keep collecting that precious information.”

“I would rather f-fake the pleasure,” Eve heard herself saying. What a strange conversation this was to be having in a bare little room over cups of terrible makeshift tea, as prosaically as English ladies discussed church matters over china saucers. “But I’m not a g-good enough liar, Lili. I am a very great liar, but I cannot stifle p-p—stifle pleasure and fake it at the same time. He is so v-v-very good at reading me now.”

“And is he pleased with what he reads from you?”

“Yes. He’s a little fond of me, I think. He’s taking me for a weekend in Limoges soon.”

“Then go, and take him for everything he’s worth.” Lili looked fierce. “Every glass of wine before bed, every petit mort in bed, every drop of news he leaks after bed. This job has few enough pleasures. The food is terrible, the liquor is almost nonexistent, the cigarettes are getting scarcer, and the clothes are appalling. We have nightmares and complexions like ashtrays and we live in constant expectation of getting arrested. So don’t feel guilty for the little bit of pleasure you get, from whatever source. Take it.”

Eve sipped another swallow of sour liquid. “You aren’t going to say a w-word about sin?” Lili was oddly devout despite her outer frivolity; she carried a rosary with her on every border crossing and spoke fondly of her confessor and the nuns at Anderlecht.

“We’re mortals; we sin.” Lili shrugged. “It’s our task in life. Le Grand Seigneur forgives us—that’s His.”

“And what’s your task? Picking us all up when we’re wallowing in the m-mire?” Even stolid Violette had her black moments—Eve had seen her despondent and shaking one evening after losing a downed pilot to a German sentry halfway across the border, and it had been Lili who brought Violette out of the darkness, just as she did tonight for Eve. “Are you ever frightened and despondent?”

Lili lifted one shoulder, almost flippant. “Danger does not frighten me, but I do not like to see it. Now, haven’t you got work to do? I certainly do.”

She was gone ten minutes later, rice-paper report rolled inside the staff of her umbrella. Eve departed in the other direction for Le Lethe. As she entered the restaurant, already being set with linens and silver, she passed Christine, who twitched her skirts out of the way.

“Whore,” she whispered, voice barely audible. Eve stopped, looking over her shoulder. She raised her eyebrows, giving them Lili’s devastating arch.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I saw you.” Christine’s hiss was spiteful, though she kept her eyes on the candles she was lighting. “Going up the stairs to Monsieur Bordelon’s rooms after shift was done. He’s a profiteer and you’re just a—”

Eve took a fast step forward, seizing Christine’s wrist. “Say a word and I’ll get you fired. One word of gossip, and you’ll be out of this job where you get leftover tartiflette and lobster bisque at closing. Hear me?” She sank her nails into Christine’s wrist, shifting so the waiters bustling past with trays of crystal wouldn’t notice. “I can have you fired,” Eve repeated, and didn’t stutter once. “Blacklisted. You’ll never get another job in this city, and then you will starve.”

Christine wrenched away. “Whore,” she hissed again.

Eve shrugged, gliding away. She’d been hitting herself with that word for quite a few days now. But she discovered in that moment that she wasn’t willing to be called whore by anyone else, least of all a woman stupider than a bowl of lobster bisque.

CHAPTER 21

CHARLIE

May 1947