The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  You are a failure, my nasty inner voice whispered, but I pushed it away, hard.

  London went by in a blur; gray, cobblestoned, still showing rubble, cracked roofs, and bites taken out of seemingly whole walls. All from the war, and yet it was 1947. I remember my father exhaling contentedly over the newspapers after V-E Day, saying, “Excellent, now it can all go back to the way it was.” As if roofs and buildings and shattered windows just leaped back into wholeness the day after peace was declared.

  Finn negotiated the Lagonda through a street so badly holed it looked like a piece of Swiss cheese, and a thought made me look at him curiously. “Why does Eve even need a car? With gas as short as it is, wouldn’t it be easier to get around by tram?”

  “She doesn’t do well with trams.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Trams, confined spaces, crowds—they set her off. She nearly blew up like a grenade last time she took a tram. Shouting and throwing elbows at all those housewives with their shopping.”

  I shook my head, wondering, and with a rumble the Lagonda pulled up before the imposing marble-fronted bank that was my destination. My face must have betrayed my nervousness because Finn said rather gently, “Want an escort, miss?”

  I did, but a lurking Scotsman who needed a shave wasn’t going to make me look any more respectable, so I shook my head as I swung out of the car. “Thank you.”

  I tried to summon some of my mother’s effortless sashay as I crossed the polished marble floor inside the bank. I gave my name and my business, and soon I was being shown into the office of a grandfatherly type in houndstooth check. He glanced up from a chart on which he was scribbling figures. “May I be of assistance, young lady?”

  “I hope so, sir.” I smiled, marshaled a little small talk. “What’s that you’re working on?” Indicating his chart and its column of numbers.

  “Percentages, figures. Quite dull.” He rose, indicating a chair. “Do sit down.”

  “Thank you.” I sat, took a breath under my half veil. “I would like to withdraw some money, please.”

  My American grandmother had settled a trust fund on me when she died. Not massive, but a good bit, and I’d been conscientiously adding to it since I was fourteen and got my first summer job in my father’s office. I’d never touched the account; I had an allowance for college and that was all I needed. I normally left the passbook tucked into my dresser drawer under my unmentionables, but I’d tossed it into my traveling case at the last minute when packing for the ocean liner. That same part of me that had packed Eve’s address, and the report about Rose’s last whereabouts. Not laying plans, exactly, but listening to the little voice that whispered, You might need these, if you get up the nerve to do what you really want to do . . .

  I was glad I’d listened to that voice and included the passbook, because I was flat out of cash. I had no idea why Eve had decided to help me, but I didn’t think it was from goodness of heart. I’d cross her palm with silver if that was what it took, and the palm of anyone else who might lead me to Rose, but for that I needed the silver. So I presented my passbook and identification, and smiled at the banker.

  Within ten minutes, I was holding that smile in place only by sheer force of will. “I don’t understand,” I said for at least the fourth time. “You have proof of my name and age, and there are clearly sufficient funds in the account. So why—”

  “Parting with such a large sum, young lady, is not generally done. Such accounts are held to be in trust for your future.”

  “But it’s not just in trust for my future. My own savings are in there—”

  “Perhaps if we could speak with your father?”

  “He is in New York. And it’s not such a large amount—”

  The banker interrupted me again. “A telephone number for your father’s office will suffice. If we might speak to him, to gain his consent—”

  I interrupted him this time. “You don’t need my father’s consent. It’s my name on the account. It was arranged that I would have access to it when I turned eighteen, and I’m nineteen.” Pushing my cards at him again. “You don’t need anyone’s consent but mine.”

  The banker shifted a bit in his leather chair, but the grandfatherly expression never wavered. “I assure you that something can be arranged if we can just speak with your father.”

  My teeth gritted as if they had fused. “I would like to make a withdrawal of—”

  “I’m sorry, young lady.”

  I stared at his watch chain and his plump hands, the light shining through the thin spot in his hair. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore; he’d pulled his chart back and was scribbling more figures on it and crossing them out again.

  It was petty of me, but I reached across the table, slid the chart out from under his hand, and gave the columns of numbers a looking over. Before he could bristle, I took a pencil stub from the edge of the desk, crossed out his figures, and wrote down the correct ones. “You were off by a quarter of a percent,” I said, sliding the sheet back. “That’s why your balance was coming out wrong. Run it through an adding machine just to be certain, though. Since I clearly can’t be trusted with money.”

  His smile slipped. I stood, chin raised to the highest I don’t care setting on the dial, and stormed out into the sunshine. My own money. Not just money I’d inherited but money I’d earned, and I couldn’t get five cents of it for myself unless I had my father in tow. It was so utterly unfair my teeth were still grinding, but I couldn’t say I was completely surprised.

  That was why I had a backup plan.

  Finn looked up as I hurled myself back into the front seat, shutting about half my skirt in the door. “You look somewhat disreputable, if you’ll forgive me for saying so,” I said, reopening the door and yanking the rest of my crinoline in. “Are you actually disreputable, Mr. Kilgore, or do you just hate to shave?”

  He folded the battered paperback he’d been reading. “Bit of both.”

  “Good. I need a pawnshop. Someplace that won’t ask too many questions if a girl has something to sell.”

  He stared a moment, then moved the Lagonda back into the noisy London traffic.

  My American grandmother had left me some money in a trust fund. My French grandmother had had a spectacular double strand of pearls, and before she died she’d had them divided into two single-strand necklaces: “One each, for petite Charlotte and la belle Rose! I should give them to my daughters, but mon dieu, how pinch-mouthed your mothers both turned out,” she’d said with her usual French candor, making us giggle guiltily. “So you two wear them instead when you get married, mes fleurs, and think of me.”

  I thought of her, reaching into my purse and fingering the luscious strand of pearls. My little French grandmother, dead long before she ever saw a swastika waving over her beloved Paris, thank God. Pardonnez-moi, Grandmère, I thought. I’ve got no choice. I couldn’t get at my savings, but I could get at my pearls. Because my mother had been quite serious about dragging me to Paris after my Appointment, getting new clothes and making calls on old friends and making it clear we were in Europe for social reasons, nothing scandalous. Hence, pearls. I let myself have one more look at them, the great milky beads with the single square-cut emerald that served as a clasp, and then I stalked into the pawnbroker’s shop where Finn had pulled up, laid the pearls down on the counter with a clatter, and said, “What can you offer me?”

  The pawnbroker’s eyes flickered, but he said smoothly, “You’ll have to wait, miss. I’m finishing up some important orders.”

  “Usual trick,” Finn murmured, having unexpectedly followed me in this time. “Get you impatient so you’ll settle for what he offers. You’ll be here a spell.”

  I jutted out my chin. “I’ll sit here all day.”

  “I may just go check on Gardiner; the house isn’t far from here. You won’t scarper on me, miss?”

  “You don’t have to call me miss, you know.” Even if I rather liked it, the formality seemed s
illy. “It’s not like you’re escorting me around Buckingham Palace.”

  He tilted a shoulder and loped out. “Yes, miss,” he said just as the door closed. I shook my head, then sat down in an uncomfortable chair with my grandmother’s pearls looped through my fingers, and it was a good thirty minutes before the pawnbroker turned his attention and his jeweler’s glass to me. “I’m afraid you’ve been duped, young lady,” he said with a sigh. “Glass pearls. Good glass, but just glass. I could give you a few pounds, I suppose—”

  “Try again.” I knew down to the dime what my necklace was insured for. Mentally I converted dollars to pounds, added 10 percent, and named my sum.

  “Do you have some provenance? Perhaps a bill of sale?” His glass flashed at me, and I could see his fingers twitch toward the emerald clasp. I twitched the strand back and we kept haggling. Another half hour eked grimly by, and he wasn’t budging, and my voice rose despite myself.

  “I will go somewhere else,” I snarled finally, but he just smiled, bland.

  “You won’t get a better offer, miss. Not without provenance. Now, if you had your father with you, or your husband—someone to give assurances that you had permission to dispose of them . . .”

  That again. All the way across the Atlantic, and I was still on my father’s strings. I turned my head toward the window to hide my rage, and saw the flash of Rose’s blond head in the passing throng outside. A moment later, I saw it was just a scurrying schoolgirl. Oh, Rosie, I thought miserably, staring after the girl anyway. You left your family and went to Limoges; how in God’s name did you do it? No one lets girls do anything at all. Not spend our own money, sell our own things, or plan our own lives.

  I was girding myself for a helpless argument when the shop door banged open, and a woman’s voice caroled, “Charlotte, what on earth—lord, gel, I told you to wait for me. I suppose you knew it would break my poor old heart parting with my b-baubles, and thought you’d spare me?”

  I stared. Eve Gardiner came sweeping through the shop, beaming like I was the apple of her eye. She had on the same print housedress she’d worn this morning, wrinkled and threadbare, but she had stockings and a pair of respectable pumps; her gnarled hands were hidden by darned kid gloves, and she’d tucked her straggling hair up under a vast, once-stylish hat with half an osprey pinned to the crown. She looked, to my utter astonishment, like a lady. An eccentric lady, maybe, but a lady.

  Leaning discreetly in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest, Finn gave an almost invisible smile.

  “Oh, I shall be sorry to part with these,” Eve sighed, patting my pearls like a dog and turning an aloof smile on the pawnbroker. “South Sea pearls, you know, from my d-dearly departed husband.” A handkerchief dabbed to her eye, and it was all I could do to keep my chin from hitting the floor. “And the emerald, that’s from India! Came from Cawnpore, far back in my family, my dear grandfather under Q-Q—under Queen Victoria. Blowing up sepoys, and good riddance to the little brown devils.” Her voice dripped Mayfair elegance. “Now, examine that luster under your glass again, and let’s hear your real price, my good man.”

  His eyes were flicking over her meticulously mended gloves, the wobbling osprey. The picture of threadbare gentility; an English lady on hard times, come to pawn her jewels. “Some provenance, madam? Some proof of—”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve got it here somewhere.” Eve thumped an enormous handbag onto the counter, sending the jeweler’s glass scattering. “There—no, that’s not it. My eyeglasses, Charlotte—”

  “In your bag, Grandmother,” I weighed in, finally managing to squeeze some words past my astonishment.

  “I thought you had them. Do check that bag. No, hold this. Is this it? No, that’s the bill for that Chinese shawl, let me see . . . Provenance, it must be here . . .”

  Pieces of paper cascaded over the pawnbroker’s counter. Eve plucked through each one like a magpie, chattering in that immaculate drawl like she’d just tripped out from tea with the queen, fumbling for nonexistent eyeglasses, holding each scrap of paper painstakingly against the light. “Charlotte, do check your bag again, I am positive you have my eyeglasses—”

  “Ma’am,” the pawnbroker said, clearing his throat as another set of customers came in. Eve took no notice, braying away like a dowager in an Austen novel. “Lud, sir, don’t fuss at me. This is it, yes—no, well, it’s in here somewhere—” Her osprey wobbled dangerously, shedding a little shower of feathers that smelled like mothballs. The pawnbroker tried to move to the next set of customers, but she rapped him on the knuckles with his own glass. “Don’t wander off on me, my good man, we’re not finished with our business! Charlotte, dear, read this for me, my old eyes . . .” The customers who’d walked in stood there for a while, then finally wandered back out.

  I stood there like a bit player in a movie as the pawnbroker finally gave a little moue of impatience. “Never mind, madam. Provenance is not required—I am not so little a gentleman that I cannot take the word of so obvious a lady.”

  “Good,” Eve said. “Let’s hear your price.”

  They wrangled for a while, but I knew who was going to win. A moment later the defeated pawnbroker was counting a great many crisp banknotes into my hand, and my pearls disappeared behind his counter; we turned to see Finn holding the door with a grin that only showed around his eyes. “My lady?” he said, straight-faced, and Eve swept through like an old duchess, osprey bobbing.

  “Ah,” she said as the shop doors closed behind us, and the Mayfair drawl was utterly gone from her voice. “I enjoyed that.”

  She looked entirely different from the drunk old bat of last night, with her teacup of whiskey and her Luger. For that matter, she looked entirely different from the hungover crone of this morning. She looked sober, crisp, savagely entertained, her gray eyes sparkling and her bony shoulders shedding the age and the aura of threadbare gentlewoman as though it was an inconvenient shawl.

  “How did you do that?” I demanded, still clutching my handful of notes.

  Eve Gardiner tugged off a glove, revealing that monstrosity of a hand again, and tugged her ever-present cigarettes out of her bag. “People are stupid. Stick a halfway d-decent story and a random bit of paper under their nose, and with plenty of self-possession one can always get through.”

  She sounded like she was quoting someone. “Always?” I parried.

  “No.” The sparkle disappeared from her eye. “Not always. But this wasn’t m-much of a risk. That pompous arse knew he was getting a b-bargain. I just made him want to shovel me out of the shop a little faster.”

  I wondered why her stammer came and went the way it did. She’d conducted that charade in the shop as smooth and cool as cream. And why had she gone through with that charade in the first place? I studied her as she held her cigarette out to Finn and he struck a match for her. “You don’t like me,” I said at last.

  “No,” she said, and gave me that hooded glance again, like an eagle looking down from her aerie. An amused glance, but I saw no liking there at all, no softness.

  I didn’t care. She might not like me, but she spoke to me like an equal, not a child or a slut. “So why did you help me in there?” I asked, matching her bluntness. “Why are you helping me at all?”

  “How about money?” She looked at my fistful of notes, and named a chunk of it that made me gasp. “I c-can take you to someone who might know something about that cousin of yours, but I’m not doing it for free.”

  I narrowed my eyes, wishing I didn’t feel so short, tucked as I was between the tall Scotsman and the tall Englishwoman. “You don’t get a penny till you tell me who you were calling this morning.”

  “An English officer currently stationed in Bordeaux,” she said without hesitation. “We go back thirty years, he and I, but he’s on holiday. So I tried another old acquaintance, a woman who knows a thing or two. I asked her about a restaurant called Le Lethe, and the man who ran it, and she hung up on me.” A snort. “The bitch knows s
omething. If we go talk to her in person, I’ll g-get it out of her. And if we can’t get it out of her, I can certainly get it out of my English officer once he’s back from duck hunting in Le Marche. So, is that worth a few quid to you?”

  She was asking for a lot more than just a few quid, but I let that go. “Why did your interest prick up when I mentioned Monsieur René?” I shot back instead. “How can you know him when we don’t even have a last name? Or was it the restaurant’s name that hooked you?”

  Eve smiled through a haze of smoke. “Fuck off, Yank,” she said sweetly.

  No stammering on that. It wasn’t a word I’d ever heard a woman say before Eve Gardiner. Finn looked at the sky, carefully blank faced.

  “All right,” I said. And counted banknotes one by one into her hand.

  “That’s only half what I asked.”

  “You’ll get the rest after we talk to your friends,” I said just as sweetly. “Or else you’d probably go on a bender and leave me high and dry.”

  “Probably,” Eve agreed. But I wondered, despite my own words. She wanted something more than my money. I was sure of it.

  “So, where do we find this old friend of yours, the woman?” I asked as we all squashed into the Lagonda convertible, Finn behind the wheel, Eve in the middle with her arm slung carelessly around his shoulder, me squashed up against the door stuffing the rest of the banknotes into my pocketbook. “Where are we going?”

  “Folkestone.” Eve reached to stub her cigarette out in the dashboard, but Finn snatched it from her and tossed it out the window, glaring. “After Folkestone—France.”

  CHAPTER 4

  EVE

  May 1915

  France. That was where Eve would be going to work as a spy. A spy, she thought experimentally, probing the thought the way a child probed the hole left by a missing tooth. Her stomach fluttered, part in nerves and part in excitement. I am to be a spy in France.