Know your Enemy
I know it's short; I'm kind of keeping it at a teaser length, though the next chapters will hopefully be longer. Please read and review.
After that fiasco in the square Eponine knew she was lucky to still be alive, and better still, without any broken bones. The last time she had failed to keep a close enough watch for the law during one of her father's despicable cons he had broken her arm, 'to sharpen her mind for the next time'. Yes, she was 'sorry' alright. Sorry he hadn't ended up in prison, where his kind belonged. 'Your kind too, Eponine,' she thought bitterly, 'you can't pretend you're any better than he is. If nobility is hereditary, then so is poverty.' She flinched as her father made his way over to the corner where she was sitting, then made her eyes empty of the hate she felt and looked up into his face.
"Eponine, I've got a new job for you. Since you can't keep a decent watch on the law in general, I want you to spy on the main man we need to watch out for. We may as well know our enemy as well as we can, and this man is the most dangerous of the lot."
She knew to whom he was referring, and the terror weld in the pit of her stomach. Inspector Javert. How on earth was she supposed to spy on a spy? He would know all the tricks. She might be street-smart and quick-witted, but she didn't have a prayer of out-witting the cleverest inspector in Paris. Her father own was sending her on a virtual suicide mission. 'So what's new?' she thought, but "Yes, father" came out of her mouth. It was not wise to antagonise a man such as her father without a good reason, not if one wanted to remain capable of independent movement afterwards, and if there was one thing Eponine prided herself on, it was her common sense. It was not like she had anything else, after all, neither beauty nor dignity.
Her father's gravelly voice continued "So follow him, keep tabs, see where he goes, who he meets. I want to know what he does every hour of the day. Montparnasse can be our go-between. Meet him every few days to pass on new information. And make sure you stick to Javert. If you're as useless at this as you are everything else, you can make yourself scarce. We won't want you round here no more."
Eponine nodded, for once words would not come from this worldly girl. She stood glumly, gathered her ragged clothes around her body and nodded to her sister and mother before reaching the door of their garret, and, with only the slightest hesitation, pulled it open and was gone into the night.
'To be honest', Eponine thought, a few minutes after leaving, the cold wind of Paris blowing through the pitiful rags she had the dignity to call clothes. 'I have absolutely no idea where to start looking. A crime scene would be best; he always seems to be the first police officer to get there, which is probably a reflection of how good an officer he is. So do the obvious thing: find a crime scene. Just one problem, crime scenes don't just appear. You have to make one.' The idea, was, if she said so herself, quite a good one. And she knew exactly where to find a willing participant. The Elephant.