“She sent me off to be a maid when I was very young,” Lulu continued. “What was the point of me if I didn’t bring in some money? I went to work for the local priest, cleaning his filthy house, cooking his filthy meals. He was a total bastard. I got away as soon as I could, of course. At sixteen, I was binding copies of the Kama Sutra for a living. I knew about all the sexual positions you can imagine, and more, but I was still a virgin. Ironic, eh? Just goes to show that appearances can be deceptive. So, what about you, Olga? What’s your story?” She pushed her drink across the table to Olga and gave Genevieve a little wink.

Olga gulped at Lulu’s Armagnac, seemingly without realizing it wasn’t hers. When she placed the empty glass down, her eyes had an odd sparkle. “I came here from Russia. Some years before the Revolution. Before the war.”

Lulu nodded. “I thought as much.”

“My husband, Viktor—he had some troubles. I don’t want to tell you about them. He was worried he would have to go to prison. But he was more worried about what would happen to me and the children if they took him away.”

She broke off to cough—a nasty, hacking, persistent cough. Genevieve exchanged a glance with Lulu and pushed her own glass across the table.

“We fled here, to Paris. We used all the money we had just to get here. It was a long and difficult journey.”

“That must have been—,” Genevieve began. But Olga didn’t wait for her to finish.

“Viktor fell ill. He died shortly after we arrived.”

“How tragic,” said Genevieve.

A snort. “He was a bastard pig! I was left alone to look after the children, with no home, in a foreign country where I barely even spoke the language!”

Genevieve chose her next words carefully. “That’s such an awful story. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”

And now the oil seemed to clear from those eyes. “I couldn’t have done it without Paolo. He’s been like family to me.”

She was interrupted by another coughing fit, and Lulu gestured to Genevieve to return to the bar and buy yet more drinks. By the time she got back, the conversation had moved on. Olga was asking Lulu about the artists who’d painted and photographed her, and Lulu was off on one of her many stories, clearly enjoying the attention too much to stay focused on their objective of digging for information.

“…yes, he wanted to sleep with me—of course he did—but you have to understand that sleeping with artists is different from sleeping with other men. They’re looking for inspiration—the muse, you know. Sometimes they find it in bed with a woman. It’s…better, somehow. It’s art.”