Read Chapter 4: The Lapin Agile

The Lapin Agile sat high on the slope of Montmartre, a crooked little house with a lantern burning at its door, glowing amber against the blue hour. The taxi dropped Evie at the foot of the rue des Saules and she climbed the cobbled street, her heels clicking like metronome ticks against stone. The air smelled of coal smoke and wet leaves.

She had washed her hair with laundry soap that morning and pressed her only decent dress by laying it under her mattress all night. The fabric was thin, the color a faded lavender, but it was clean. She had tucked her mother's locket into the bodice of her dress, pressed against her skin, for luck.

The Lapin Agile was smaller than she'd imagined. Inside, the room was low-ceilinged and crowded, thick with cigarette smoke that pooled around the hanging lamps. Paintings crowded the walls—some good, some terrible, all of them jostling for space like patrons at a bar. A trestle table ran along one wall, where drinkers perched on wooden benches. In the far corner, a pianist was playing something slow and velvet, and a young woman with bobbed hair sang a chanson about lost love with her hand pressed flat to her chest.

Evie scanned the room. She knew Lucien by reputation only—Gaston had described him in a low voice, as if even saying his name too loudly might summon him. *A man in a suit that costs more than my café*, Gaston had said. *He collects talent like women collect perfume. And when he's done with it, he drops it.*

She spotted him before he spotted her. Lucien was separated from the crowd by an invisible moat, seated at a corner table with a bottle of something amber and a glass untouched before him. He was maybe forty, with dark hair slicked back so severely it looked painted on, and his face had the polished, careful neutrality of a man who had learned to hide every reaction before it reached his eyes. His suit was charcoal gray, immaculate, and the cufflinks at his wrists caught the light with the flash of real gold.

A man beside him whispered something. Lucien's eyes flickered toward the door—toward Evie.

She crossed the room before her courage could desert her. "Monsieur Lucien?"

He did not stand. He did not blink. His gaze traveled over her in a slow inventory—hair, dress, shoes—and whatever he concluded, he kept it to himself.

"I was told you're looking for something new," she said. "New voices. New sounds."

"I'm looking for a great many things," Lucien said. His accent was clipped, Parisian but with something harder beneath it, like a coin buried in ice. "But I don't recall hiring a recruiting agency. Who sent you?"

"Gaston. From Le Chat Bleu."

A flicker of recognition. "Gaston. The man who serves gasoline and calls it coffee." He gestured to the chair across from him with a single, elegant finger. "Sit."

She sat. The table was wet with condensation, ringed by ghost circles from glasses that had come and gone. Lucien did not offer her a drink.

"Sing for me," he said. Not a request. A test.

"Here?"

"Now. Where else would I hear you? I'm not coming to that rat hole in the Fifth to see what Gaston has dredged up."

Evie's throat tightened. She looked away from Lucien's unblinking gaze and scanned the room. The chanson singer had finished; the pianist was arranging sheet music, head bowed. The crowd had thinned slightly, those who remained talking in low tones over their drinks, smoke curling above them like ghosts.

She stood. The pianist looked up, and she nodded at him. He raised an eyebrow but began a slow, minor-key intro when she hummed the opening note to her mother's favorite song—the one Evie had been singing since she was six years old, standing on an upturned crate in her father's parlor.

She put everything into it. The loss. The longing. The raw, throaty ache that New York audiences had called "colored" and "common" and, sometimes, when she was lucky, "raw talent." She curled her fingers into her palms and let the song carry her, her voice filling the smoky space like light through a prism.

When she finished, the room had gone quiet. A few patrons were staring, their drinks forgotten.

Lucien's face was unchanged. He tapped one finger against the table, twice, a sound like a judge's gavel.

"Your voice is striking," he said. "Genuinely. It has an honesty to it—an American quality. Rough edges. Pain."

Evie's heart was hammering. She had heard that tone in New York; it was the sound of a door beginning to open.

"But—" he said.

*But.*

"Paris is not New York. We do not want the same things. The Americans who fill my club come to see Paris—the fantasy of it, the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower against the night sky. They see a Negro singer and they expect jazz, yes, but they expect it packaged. Arranged. Refined." He swirled his glass, letting the liquid catch the light. "And I do not see that in you. You sing like a woman who has been hurt. That is interesting in a private room. It is not entertainment."

"This is what jazz is," Evie said, and she heard the edge creeping into her own voice. "It's the pain underneath. What you're describing is—"

"Decoration?" Lucien's lips curled, the first crack in his careful mask. "Yes. Precisely. I am in the business of decoration, Mademoiselle—what is your name?"

"Hart. Evie Hart."

Evie Hart. You sound like a poster for a vaudeville act." He set his glass down. "If you want to sing at Le Paradis, you will need to become something. A vision. A mystery. A fantasy. Not merely a girl who has suffered. Suffering is common. We are in Paris. Everyone here has suffered; most simply do it more attractively."

He stood, adjusting his cuffs. "I will come to see you at Le Chat Bleu this week. Perhaps the rough setting will reveal something I am not seeing in this moment. But I do not make promises." He paused. "And I do not open my doors to singers who sing from wounds. I open them to singers who sing from truths."

He walked away without another word, threading through the crowd with the ease of a man accustomed to parting oceans. Evie stood beside the empty chair, her hands trembling at her sides. She wanted to call after him, to argue, to sing again—louder, harder, to force him to feel something. But the pianist had already begun another song, and the room was filling again, and the moment had closed like a door.

She shouldered her way toward the exit, past the bar, past the door—

A woman in a green headscarf bumped into her, hard, and apologized in rapid French before disappearing into the crowd. Evie steadied herself against the doorframe, the cool night air washing over her like a reprieve.

She touched her bodice.

Went cold.

The locket was gone.

Her hand flew to her neckline, patting frantically, a rising panic gripping her chest. It was not there. The chain had been severed—she found the broken ends near her collarbone, the fine links snapped. She spun, scanning the room for the woman in the green scarf, but she was gone, swallowed whole by the crowd. The Lapin Agile had no door but one, and the woman had been heading toward it when she'd collided.

Evie ran to the street, but the cobblestones were empty. A few figures moved in the distance, but none in green. The lantern light flickered above her, and she stood in the narrow circle of it—a girl who had lost her room, her job, her future, and now the only thing of her mother's she had left.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to weep. She wanted to find the woman in the green headscarf and tear her limb from limb.

Instead, she stood there, feeling the cold creep through her dress, and she made herself breathe.

The locket was gone. Her mother was gone. The life she had burned behind her in New York was gone. She had eleven francs in her pocket, a borrowed dress on her back, and a job that paid twenty francs a night in a café that smelled of stale wine and despair.

And some slick, polished handler of talent had just told her that her suffering was not pretty enough for his stage.

Evie started walking down the hill, her footsteps sharp against the stones.

She thought of the pianist across her courtyard, the unfinished melody that clawed at her heart every time she heard it. He had played for her once, and what she had heard in his music was not decoration. It was blood. It was bone. It was the sound of something true.

She would find him again. And if Lucien wanted truth, she would buy it, borrow it, steal it, make it—whatever it took.

She had come too far to go back. And she had lost too much to lose.