“Oh, honey. You know I don’t like to.” Gently, he removed her hand. “Listen, I’m going to say hello to Harry. Why don’t you go on and dance with your friends? I’ll be just over there.”

“If that’s what you want.” Genevieve pursed her lips in irritation. “There are men who’d kill to dance with me, you know.”

“Chérie!” Lulu was shimmying wildly with the tall man in the cream suit.

Genevieve allowed Joseph Lazarus to take her hands and draw her close. Even as she began kick-stepping with Lazarus, her gaze was fixed on Lulu and the tall man.

“Isn’t she a marvel?” Lazarus was dressed like a waiter, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether this was a costume or merely his terrible fashion sense. “Look at the way she moves. She’s an empress. She should be in that fresco.” He pointed at the ceiling overhead. Genevieve glanced up at jackal-headed men among pyramids and palm fronds. Men with enormous eyes standing sideways. Lulu’s eyes were enormous too, and surrounded by a layer of thick black kohl that was certainly reminiscent of ancient Egypt.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” The band leader lowered his trumpet. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we have in our midst that spectacular cabaret star, the most painted and photographed woman in the whole of Paris—Lulu of Montparnasse! Hey, Lulu, let’s have you up here. Come on, girl, give us a song.”

And before he’d even finished speaking, Lulu was up there on the stage. Saying something to the pianist, who nodded. Turning to face the room, and announcing, “This is a song about Paris. It’s a special time, my friends, in this most amazing of cities. And 1925 will be the most amazing year of them all. The song is called ‘C’est nous qui avons de la chance.’ In English, that’s ‘We are the lucky ones.’”

Her voice, when she began to sing, was fine silk thrown over broken glass—covering but not truly concealing it. The words blurred together. You couldn’t make them out. It was the voice that counted. Its pain, in spite of the cheery song title. It was the heartache in the big eyes that counted, belying the smile on the red lips, the frivolity of the painted-on beauty spot.

Genevieve was holding out her glass for a champagne refill and looking around for Robert when a deep, American voice just by her ear said, “What’s that supposed to be, do you think? An egg or a head?”

It was the man in the cream suit. He pointed at the Brancusi bronze atop its plinth.

“It’s an egg that looks like a head that looks like an egg that looks like a head,” said Genevieve. He really was very handsome, this man. Broad shoulders, the nicest kind.

“You say that with such authority. Perhaps it’s the English accent.”