Bernadette’s round face took on the same “the child isn’t terribly bright” expression Lucie’s schoolteachers had givenwhen they’d found her daydreaming instead of doing her times tables. “My dear Miss Girard, if I were to do the books, how would I mind the store?”
“Oh. Yes. Another day then.” Lucie continued on her way.
The university student slipped a piece of paper inside a book and placed it on the shelf. He strode away, spotted Lucie, and stopped.
One of her regular customers. A black curl dangled between intense dark eyes in an angular face.
“Bonjour,” Lucie said.
None of his features moved. Then he blinked, returned her greeting, and left the store.
Perhaps “regular customer” wasn’t the proper term, since he’d never made a purchase. Why had he acted as if she’d caught him stealing? In fact, he’d left something behind.
What was it? A school assignment? A love note?
Lucie couldn’t resist. She leaned the bike against the counter and opened the book. A slip of paper read “Thuillier” and then a strange symbol—a letterLwith an arrow coming out from the corner, down and at an angle.
Cryptic and unromantic.
She put the note and the book back where she’d found them.
Out on rue Casimir-Delavigne, she greeted Jerzy and Charles. “You’re over an hour late,” she said in a teasing voice.
Charles sat on his bicycle seat, his long legs braced wide. His oversized checkered suit shouted that he was a nonconformist “zazou”—and concealed the clubfoot that had kept him out of the French army. “Shame on you for noticing we were late.”
“There’s no shame in noticing, only in caring.” Lucie straddled her bike. “I’ll only care if the eggs are gone. Acrémerieon rue Mouffetard has them.”
“Eggs?” Jerzy scrambled onto his bike so quickly he almost tipped over. He scrunched his hat down over his black curls.“If you’d mentioned eggs, I would have dragged myself out of bed an hour earlier.”
Unlikely, given the hours the painter kept, but Lucie smiled and motioned him onward.
They pedaled past the Odéon Thèâtre and Le Jardin du Luxembourg. Lucie’s muscles protested from the previous evening’s ballet practice in her storeroom, with only her mural ballerinas for company.
With Marie-Claude and Véronique deep in rehearsals forGiselle, they had no time to practice with Lucie and little time for shopping. If Lucie hadn’t been able to leave the store, they would have all gone hungry tonight.
“Pedal faster, Lucie,” Charles called from behind. “Maybe the wind will catch your skirt. I miss seeing those legs on stage.”
Lucie glanced over her shoulder, lifting one eyebrow and one corner of her mouth.
Charles was harmless if she kept a distance from his hands, as quick and dexterous with a woman as they were on the piano keyboard.
“How’s life at the club, Charles?” she called.
“I find theharicots vertsendlessly amusing.”
“Green beans” referred to the German soldiers in their greenish-gray uniforms. “Amusing?”
Charles’s long zazou-style haircut fluttered in the breeze. “In Germany jazz is banned as degenerate, but in Paris all the haricots on leave come to my Montmartre club and try to snap their fingers to the beat.”
In front of Lucie, Jerzy leaned back his head and sighed. “I wish they tolerated my art as well as they do your music. Eggs will be some small consolation in the pitiful desolation of life.”
Poor Jerzy. Encouraging the artist had always been a full-time job, but now even more so. Although Lucie had never understood his surrealist paintings, she’d never dream of banningthem. And the antisemitic laws limited the jobs available to him. “At least you can still paint.”
“Only with a fake name.” Jerzy led them through a roundabout and down rue Gay-Lussac. “Only pretty little paintings of the Tour Eiffel and Notre-Dame and Pont Neuf. Pretty little paintings for our finger-snapping visitors to take home to their hausfraus after cheating on them in Paris’s brothels. But—I take my revenge in each painting.”
Lucie held her breath. “You do? How?”
“I work the letterVinto every design.” Jerzy jerked his chin toward a German propaganda poster, marked up with a giant chalkV.
