Céleste Artois was always hungry. This was the reason she both loved and hated fiddle games—the con could be pulled in an afternoon. In the span of an hour, even. The venue was, by necessity, a fancy restaurant. Her job was to eat there alone, to order every elegant thing on the menu, to chew, to swallow, then to dab the corners of her mouth with a napkin and pretend she was satisfied.
This was the hardest lie to tell.
How could she be satisfied at an establishment like Foyot’s? This restaurant was made for hunger. It catered to imperialistic palates; sitting across from the Luxembourg Palace made it a convenient haunt for senators. There were even deeper pockets at other tables. Some of this wealth was older—men with titles and ties that went all the way back to a time when France had a crown. Others had made their money with railways and streamliners—nouveaux riches was what they’d been called in her father’s circles. Arnaud Artois had always said this term with a slight sniff, as if his family’s crumbling château could make up for the fact he himself was an exceedingly bad businessman.
If only it had…
Céleste wondered what term best suited her. Nouveau pauvre, perhaps? Did that accurately describe an heiress who’d lost a fortune, then spent the rest of her life trying to steal it back? Never mind that she’d nearly succeeded. Never mind that she could afford to buy every item on the menu, including the béarnaise sauce that was rich enough to be its own meal.
She was still starving.
She knew that everyone felt this way, to some extent. It was the reason the Enchantresses’ confidence schemes were so successful: Every person was born with a hole inside them. Shapes varied—love, power, fame, revenge, fortune, life itself—but the emptiness was universal. Promise to fill someone, and they would follow you anywhere.
They’d pay any price.
“More wine, mademoiselle?” A waiter approached the table, holding a bottle of Pontet-Canet that might as well have been squeezed from garnets for how much it cost.
Personally, Céleste thought it was a crime to answer no.
Professionally, she had to. “A coffee will do.”
Coffee would afford her more time to scout for a mark.
This was probably what foxes felt like when they slipped into henhouses, Céleste mused as she scanned the rest of the restaurant. Fiddle games were quick-pick affairs, limited to whoever happened to be sitting nearby. Such as the gentleman with his mistress two tables over—her without a ring and him covering his with a napkin. No target there. He was too taken with the promise of sex to bother with greed. Céleste skated her gaze over several tables with politicians and paused to study a portly fellow reading Le Petit Journal through his monocle. He might do. Though on second glance, Céleste realized he’d fallen asleep. This confidence trick required someone conscious. Someone who fancied themselves an entrepreneur. Someone callous and careless and tipsy enough to employ both traits.
Someone like the young man at the corner table, crowing to his companion about the previous evening’s exploits over a plate of foie gras and his fifth flute of champagne. “They have an elephant in the garden of Moulin Rouge! Not a real one, of course. There’s a staircase in its leg that leads to an opium den. The women up there… Have you ever encountered a belly dancer, Baptiste? I met several on my tour of the Balkans with Father last summer. They were bendier than the Montmartre variety.”
Yes, he’ll do. Céleste sipped her coffee down to the dregs. Typical cock: too busy preening to notice there are teeth nearby.
Or to notice his tablemate’s discomfort. Baptiste flushed to the already-flaming roots of his hair, slipping down his chair until he was more tablecloth than not. He’d probably request the check soon, which meant Céleste needed hers to come first.
She flagged down the waiter, listening in as her mark kept rambling.
“Have you ever been to the Balkans, Baptiste? It’s beautiful, but a bit backward—did you know they believe in vampires there? Actual vampires? With fangs and everything! One of the dancers, she started telling me stories. Says they don’t take just your blood but your soul too so that you don’t even go to heaven when you die. Not that I’ve been a paragon of virtue, but still! You’d like to think Saint Peter would open the pearly gates when you shed this mortal coil, no?”
“I don’t think you have to be worried about vampires, Henri,” Baptiste told his friend dryly.
“They did discover a body by the hotel.” The mark took yet another swig of his champagne. “That’s what sparked the entire conversation. Some poor soul was entirely exsanguinated! Well, I say ‘soul.’ Ha! The police were never able to identify him—the dancer told me it was a sign. ‘Always keep one eye on your shadow,’ she said. ‘Keeps the devil away.’”
Henri squinted down at the floor, and Céleste wondered if maybe the young man was a little too tipsy to play this fiddle game. Then again, he was clear-headed enough to allude to Shakespeare. And if he really did believe in vampires, then he’d have no trouble believing Céleste. Besides, the waiter was already returning with her bill.
She smiled graciously.
Out came her coin purse.
Let the show commence.
“Oh dear…” Céleste smoothed her gown, knees tilting toward the corner table. The mark’s eyes cut away from his own shadow to the soft edges of her skirts. Easy enough. “I’m afraid I left my money at the flat. It’s been a tumultuous morning—you see, my uncle passed away and I’ve been helping my brother clear out the estate and I needed to step outside for some air and I must have forgotten to check my purse…”
“Are you saying you have no way to pay?” asked her waiter.
The gentleman reading Le Petit Journal awoke with a snort. The lovers whispered secrets across their table. Baptiste looked slightly less mortified now that his companion was no longer Foyot’s most scandalous guest.
“The flat is only a few blocks away. I can be there and back in ten minutes. If you want, I’ll even leave my uncle’s painting as collateral.” Céleste lifted a parcel from underneath the table and unwrapped it. The cloth dropped back to reveal another Delacroix replica. “It’s worth the meal at least.”
“I’m afraid that’s against our policy, mademoiselle.”
“Please…”
She didn’t even need to use the next line: What would you have me do? Henri puffed out his chest and strutted to her table.
“I’ll settle the lady’s bill,” he said.
A fifty-franc note passed hands, simple as that.
“Thank you, monsieur!” Céleste thrust the painting into her “rescuer’s” arms before any debt could be cited. “My uncle’s flat is three streets over. I’ll be back with your money before you finish your champagne!”
“Oh, I doubt it.” This mutter from Baptiste gave her pause. If he suspected a trick, it might be better to cut and run.
“I’ll return,” she said firmly. “My brother asked me to get this painting appraised.”
Baptiste shook his head. “That wasn’t— Let’s just say Henri has never left a glass wet. We’d be happy to watch your artwork for you.”
So the man wasn’t suspicious. He was honorable.
Maybe too honorable for this game…
But they’d reached the point of no return. Henri set the unwrapped painting on their table and refilled his flute with a sixth bubbling serving, raising it to her in a toast. “Hurry back!”
It was a May day with a feathery sky: suited to strolling. Céleste bustled down the street for the benefit of any diners who might be peering through the window, slowing only when she rounded the corner. Running would spell trouble to the police who patrolled the streets around Luxembourg Palace. This was one of Paris’s more well-kempt districts—more cars than carriages meant that less horse shit ripened the curbs. There was less soot too. Most of the gas streetlamps had been swapped out for electric lights. People walked here without fear, even at night. They wandered through blooming gardens and stopped to smell the roses and took all their beautiful surroundings for granted.
Céleste wasn’t a particular fan of the flowers, herself, these days. Every time she coughed, she cursed them: Damn hay fever!
She had been cursing a lot lately.
Spring air thickened in her throat. She paused to catch her breath before turning into an alleyway. It was as posh as the rest of the sixth arrondissement—not lined with trash but ivy. A secret garden, Sylvie might have called it, if she weren’t busy swinging a small loaf of bread at Honoré’s walking cane. The two Enchantresses were standing at odds with each other. Céleste recognized the stance. She’d been made to practice it over and over again, during her first défense dans la rue lesson.
Now it was Sylvie’s turn.
“The cheese knives were too sharp, then?” Céleste nodded at the ficelle in the girl’s hands.
“For Sylvie? Yes,” Honoré grumbled.
“Anything can be a weapon!” The youngest Enchantress sounded like one of the parrots at the free menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, echoing back a phrase it didn’t quite understand. “A scarf can be used as a garrote! A hat can be thrown at your opponent to blind them!”
“And what will you do with breadcrumbs?” Céleste wondered. “Summon a flock of vengeful pigeons?”
“That would be more fun than footwork,” Sylvie said.
“Fighting isn’t supposed to be fun,” Honoré replied. “And footwork can be the difference between life and death. If you aren’t standing right, you’ll find yourself on your back, and once you’re on your back, your attacker has the advantage. He’s probably going to be a man, and he’s probably going to weigh more than you—”
“Ha!” Sylvie reached out with the loaf, poking Honoré on the center of her tightly bound chest. “I win! You’re supposed to say ‘touché,’ right?”
“Only if you’re fencing,” Céleste said.
“Fencing!” Honoré’s nose wrinkled as she brushed crumbs from her three-piece suit. “Fencing is for rich people with nothing better to do. When you’re in a street fight, there’s no time to say ‘en garde’ or any of that other honorable bullshit. If you wait around for your opponent to talk, you’ll find their blade slicing your throat—”
“That’s not always true,” Céleste broke in, before the diatribe could get too grim. “It wasn’t true when we first met.”
It had been in an alleyway much like this—perhaps it had been this alley. Her memory of that evening was fuzzy with falling snow and the cold shock of leaving Twenty-Seven rue de Fleurus. Gertrude Stein’s famed salon wasn’t far from there, so it was entirely possible that this was the side street where Céleste had found herself held up at knifepoint.
“You mean when Honoré tried to rob you and all you had was an art portfolio?” Sylvie piped up.
Honoré hadn’t been Honoré then. Céleste hadn’t known who she herself was either. The name at the bottom of the sketches had belonged to a girl who still had a father. A fortune. A future.
She’d had nothing to lose when she handed the drawings over to the thief.
“Yes, well, Céleste wields words just as well as any blade,” Honoré recounted. “She was quick to disarm me.”
“As I recall, you were the one who convinced me to take up a life of crime.”
A dimple appeared next to Honoré’s pasted moustache. “Speaking of robberies, did you find a good mark?”
“At the corner table, by the window. They should be easy enough to fool. The one who covered my bill keeps going on about vampires.”
Honoré laughed then and twirled her cane. “This will be entertaining. Keep practicing your footwork, Sylvie! I’ll be back soon.” The Enchantress strolled off to do her part, not stopping to smell the roses.
Céleste clenched her teeth and coughed again, into her bare wrist. The wine had been a poor choice. It must’ve stained her lips, close enough to the color of rouge to go uncommented.
“What did your mark say, about the vampires?”
Céleste pulled her gown’s sleeve over the smear of wine and looked back at Sylvie. It probably wasn’t prudent to explain to an eleven-year-old what exsanguinated meant. “All sorts of nonsense. He’s quite drunk…”
“Did he see one?” The girl’s grip tightened on the bread. “Here?”
“In the Balkans.” Céleste caught herself. If she fed Sylvie’s imagination any further, Céleste would be up all night for the next week, telling the girl that the shadows that streaked across their mausoleum’s glass ceiling were cats. Only cats. “He heard stories about them from a belly dancer. She was entertaining him—trying to get a good tip, I’m sure.”
Sylvie frowned. “Where are the Balkans?”
“Turkey. Serbia. Very far away,” Céleste assured her. “You’d do better to focus on Honoré’s imaginary enemies.”
Sylvie gave a hopeless sort of sigh and finally bit into her bread. Her dark curls quivered as she chewed. “I’d rather play the fiddle game.”
“You do play!”
This was loosely true. About as loose as the change in any failed mark’s pockets. If Céleste wasn’t able to secure a sale, Sylvie bumped into the man on his way out of the restaurant and relieved him of his banknotes anyway. The girl tried to grab the business card that “Monsieur Dumont” had left there too. They were painstaking to draw, and Céleste preferred to use them twice, if possible.
“I know, I know. ‘Always have a backup plan.’” Sylvie was using her parrot voice again, repeating the phrase Céleste said so often herself. “But I don’t want to be a contingency! I want to eat in the fancy restaurant with you!”
“I’ll teach you the role when you’re older.”
“I am older. I just had a birthday.”
It was hard not to laugh at this. Even harder not to cough. “You need to work on making your lies more believable,” Céleste said. “Maybe we can practice telling tragic backstories to strangers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées tonight.”
Sylvie’s wish—for her thirty-ninth birthday—was for the three Enchantresses to attend a ballet together. Céleste suspected this was the result of the Ballets Russes posters that had recently gone up all over the city: drawings of a dancing man wearing nothing but damn roses. She also suspected that the only reason Honoré had agreed to go see such a sight was because this Delacroix forgery was the last of their paintings. The Enchantresses needed a longer con to tide them over while Céleste worked on more masterpieces.
The thought wearied her.
She’d been sleeping more at night, instead of painting. It was hard to stay inspired with an endless string of battlefields and maidens floating in lily pads—poor Ophelia. So many painters had tried to capture her demise. Delacroix himself had done so, not once but twice! Céleste’s own versions sold well. No doubt the young men who bought them went home to hang them on their walls next to L’Inconnue de la Seine. The plaster death mask of the nameless girl who’d been fished from the river was—eerily enough—very much in vogue. Copies decorated a fair number of Paris’s drawing rooms.
Everyone loved a drowning woman.
A good sob story.
“The best lies are rooted in truth,” she told Sylvie. “And you might as well turn your pain into profit. Try to talk about the fact your parents died—”
“But they might not be dead,” the girl said.
Before Sylvie had found her way to the other Enchantresses, she’d been trapped in an orphanage on the outskirts of the city. It was a careless place, where sawdust was substituted for flour and children’s pasts got lost with the rest of the paperwork. Sylvie tended to write her own versions, same as she did for the English fairy tales. Most of them involved missing royalty, in some fashion. Each one ended with a happily ever after.
The only person she’d be fooling with that sort of story was herself.
“Maybe not.” Céleste tugged carefully at the sleeve of her own mourning gown. “Your mark doesn’t need to know that though. They just need to feel sorry for you. They need to feel like they have the upper hand.”
Sylvie’s own hands fluttered at her sides as they continued their liar’s lesson—as if she were a fledgling, eager to fly. But there wasn’t much time to come up with a good script for the ballet attendees. Honoré had finished reciting her own lines. There was an extra swagger in the young woman’s step as she returned to their alley.
“That was entertaining! Excellent selection, mon amie. Though you should hurry back before Henri gets too inebriated. He just ordered another bottle of champagne to celebrate his financial windfall. Sylvie! Did you eat your sword?”
“Only half,” chirped the youngest Enchantress. “Now it’s a dagger!”
Céleste fought back a smile. Of all the people she’d ever met, Sylvie had the most literal hunger. The kid’s stomach was a bottomless pit. It was no wonder she wanted to go back to the restaurant, where the scents of butter and cream ribboned the air, and the waiter was bringing a plate of cakes to Henri’s table. Along with a fresh bottle. The mark was trying to hide a grin of his own. He hid Dumont’s calling card too when he spotted Céleste, covering it with a linen napkin as she approached the table.
Good.
“Oh, thank you, messieurs! I returned with your francs as fast as I could!” The sum had been in her skirts all along, but Céleste made sure to pant as she deposited the money on their table. It was too easy to act out of breath. “My brother asked where the painting was, and I told him it was already with the appraiser. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost it…”
Henri didn’t even glance at her francs. “It was no trouble at all. In fact, Baptiste and I were discussing how nice this would look on his wall. Why don’t we save you an errand?”
“You—you wish to buy it?” A quick frown.
Tensions played out beneath her mark’s face too: excitement, agitation, don’t-let-the-chance-of-a-lifetime-slip-away. “How does four hundred francs sound?”
Delicious. Céleste savored every new bill that was placed onto the tabletop. “Monsieur, it’s too much! This painting may not even be worth half that. Let me get the appraisal first—”
“No!” Sweat jeweled Henri’s hairline. “Four hundred and fifty francs.”
She eyed the painting and then the money, pretending to look torn. “I don’t know…”
“Trust me, your brother will be overjoyed when you return with this sum,” Henri said. “So will Baptiste’s wife, when he gifts her this painting. Right, Baptiste?”
His friend grunted—then had a foot-to-shin flinch. “Er, yes.”
Men were rarely as honorable as Céleste hoped. Not that she was in any position to judge, stuffing so many francs into her coin purse. She took an éclair too, when Baptiste offered the plate of pastries—ostensibly out of guilt. He felt sorry for her. Sorry that she was being cheated out of a small fortune. The feeling wouldn’t last, of course, when he realized it was Henri who’d been hoodwinked. But the Enchantresses would be attending a ballet by then, with different clothes, names, and faces, shaking coins from some other rich young man’s pockets.
The éclair would be long gone too.
Sylvie was waiting outside the restaurant, feeding pigeons with the last crumbs of her ficelle. Her face fell when she saw the purse Céleste was carrying, heavy with money Sylvie wouldn’t be able to steal herself.
“But I wanted to be the backup plan!” She scowled. “I was going to ask him more about vampires.”
“You’ll have plenty more chances to steal tonight. For now, I’ve brought you a new blade.” Céleste grinned as she handed over the éclair. “You should eat it before Honoré tries to teach you more footwork.”