The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  You dodged a bullet, she thought as her shift began, and expected to feel sick now that the danger was past. But her insides stayed stone-cold. Because the danger wasn’t past—as long as she had to work, and spy, under the gaze of her observant employer, she would be in danger. Eve had always been such a good liar; for the first time in her life she wondered if she was good enough.

  There is no time for fear, she told herself. It is an indulgence. Turn your ears on and your mind off.

  And she went to work.

  CHAPTER 11

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  Well, well.” Eve raised her eyebrows as I climbed into the backseat of the Lagonda rather than the front beside Finn. “Don’t want to share the air with the convict all of a sudden?”

  “Don’t want you sitting behind me,” I retorted. “You did try to shoot me last night.”

  Eve squinted, her eyes bloodshot in the early morning light. “Clearly, I missed. Let’s get the hell out of this city and on to bloody Roubaix.”

  Finn was right in his prediction: Eve was haggard and gray, moving stiffly as an old woman when she climbed into the car, but she said nothing about last night’s episode with the Luger. Finn did some tinkering under the hood, murmuring in a Scots burr that got thicker and croonier the more obstinate the Lagonda’s innards got—“You cannie aud heap, quit your stalling”—and finally he climbed in, adjusting the various dials and timing for start-up. “We’ll be taking it slow,” he said as we pulled away from the hotel in a rumble of gears. I turned my head and stared out the window. Take it slow, that certainly wasn’t Charlie St. Clair’s way. Forget about slow, just slug the whiskey, climb on a thirty-year-old Scotsman, and ask for a screw.

  I don’t care what he thinks of me, I told myself. I don’t care. But humiliation still choked my throat.

  Whore, came the whisper from my nasty inner voice, and I flinched. Maybe I didn’t need Finn and Eve for the rest of this journey. Eve had someone in Roubaix who might be able to tell us about the restaurant where Rose had worked in Limoges—after that, would Eve even want to stay with me? She didn’t seem to like me. I could pay her what I owed and send her staggering home with her Luger and her ex-convict driver, and I could board a train like a civilized person and take myself to Limoges to look for Rose. Subtract one Scot and one armed-and-dangerous Englishwoman from this equation, and I could conduct my insane quest by my insane self, unhampered by my even more demonstrably insane traveling companions.

  “Today,” I said aloud, and Finn looked at me over his shoulder. “We need to get to Roubaix today.” The sooner the better.

  Of course, the day that I couldn’t stand the car or the company anymore had turned into a beautiful day for a drive: all bright May sunshine and scudding clouds. It was a short distance to Roubaix, and no one objected when Finn took the Lagonda’s top down—even the Little Problem had decided it didn’t mind the car’s motion so much, so for once I didn’t spend the drive vomiting. I rested my chin on my arms, watching fields go by and wondering why the landscape seemed familiar, until something clicked. Another motoring trip, Rose’s family and mine, a couple of years after the time we got left behind at the Provençal café. We’d driven past Lille into the countryside, and after a solemn day of touring churches and old monuments, Rose had rolled back the rug in our hotel room and taught me the Lindy Hop. “Come on, Charlie, let your feet go—” Moving so fast her curls bounced; tall and bosomy at thirteen, confessing afterward that she’d already had her first kiss. “Georges, the gardener’s boy. It was horrible. Tongue, tongue, and more tongue!”

  I must have smiled at the memory, because Eve said, “Glad s-someone likes this region.”

  “You don’t?” I tilted my head back at the sun. “Who wouldn’t rather be out here than looking at the rubble in London or Le Havre?”

  “‘I’d sooner while alive invite the crows to drain the blood from my filthy carcass,’” Eve said, and added at my blink, “It’s a quote, you ignorant Yank. Baudelaire. A poem called ‘Le M-Mort Joyeux.’”

  “The Joyful Corpse?” I translated, wrinkling my nose. “Ugh.”

  “Bit creepy,” Finn agreed from behind the wheel.

  “Quite,” Eve agreed. “So of course it was one of his favorites.”

  “Whose?” I asked, but naturally she didn’t answer me. Did she have to be cryptic when she wasn’t being profane? It was like traveling with a whiskey-drinking sphinx. Finn caught me rolling my eyes and smiled, and I looked out at the rolling fields again.

  Soon enough, Roubaix appeared on the horizon. A smaller place than Lille, dustier, quieter. A fine city hall, the spires of a Gothic-looking church passing as we chugged through. Eve passed Finn a scribbled address, and eventually we pulled up on a narrow cobbled curb before what looked like an antiques shop.

  “The woman you need to speak with is here?” I asked, mystified. “Who is she?”

  Eve swung out of the car, flinging her cigarette into the gutter with an expert flick of her maimed fingers. “Just someone who loathes me.”

  “Everyone loathes you,” I couldn’t help pointing out.

  “This one more than usual. C-come or don’t, as you like.”

  She set off into the shop without a backward glance. I piled out after her as Finn cocked an elbow out the rolled-down window and began flipping through The Autocar again. Heart thumping, I followed Eve into the dim coolness of the shop.

  It was a cramped and cozy little place. Tall mahogany cabinets lined the walls, a long counter made a barrier across the back, and everywhere I saw the porcelain gleam of china. Meissen urns, Spode tea sets, Sevres shepherdesses, and who knew what else. Behind the counter a woman in black updated an account book with a pencil stub, looking up at the sound of our entrance.

  She was a sturdy woman about Eve’s age, with perfectly round spectacles and dark hair rolled into a neat bun. Like Eve, she had the graven lines of someone who’d lived hard. “May I help you, mesdames?”

  “That depends,” said Eve. “You look well, Violette Lameron.”

  That was a new name to me. I looked at the woman behind the counter, and her expression never changed. She tilted her head slowly until the lenses of her round glasses flared back the light.

  Eve gave a one-note bark of laughter. “That old trick of yours, hiding your eyes! Christ, I’d forgotten that.”

  Violette or whoever she was spoke evenly. “I haven’t heard that name in a long time. Who are you?”

  “I’m a graying wreck and time hasn’t been kind, but think back.” Eve made a circling gesture over her own face. “Doe-eyed little thing? You never liked me, but then again, you never liked anyone except her.”

  “Who?” I whispered, more mystified by the minute—but this time, I saw the other woman’s face ripple. She leaned forward over the counter despite herself, peering not into Eve’s face but through it, as though the lines of time were just a mask. I saw the blood drain out of the other woman’s face, leaving her skin starkly pale against her high black collar.

  “Get out,” she said. “Get out of my shop.”

  Jesus, I thought. What had we gotten ourselves into now?

  “Collecting teacups, Violette?” Eve looked around the shelves of porcelain. “Seems a bit tame for you. Collecting the heads of your enemies, maybe . . . but then you’d have come after me.”

  “You’re here now, so you must want me to kill you.” Violette’s lips barely moved. “You cowardly weak-kneed bitch.”

  I recoiled as if I’d been slapped. But those two battle-axes just stood there with the counter between them, calm as if they were discussing china spoons. Such different women, one tall and gaunt and wrecked, the other sturdy and neat and respectable. But they faced each other erect and granite hard as pillars, and hatred boiled off them in black waves like smoke. I stood dry-mouthed and poisoned in its presence.

  Who are you? I thought. Either of you?

  “One question.” Eve’s cynical amusement was
gone; she looked as deadly serious now as I’d ever seen her. “One question, and I’m gone. I’d have asked it over the telephone, but you hung up on me.”

  “You’ll get nothing from me.” The woman sliced her words off like shards of glass. “Because unlike you, I’m not a yellow-bellied whore with loose lips.”

  I expected Eve to fly at her. She’d leveled a Luger at my head just for calling her a crazy old cow. But she stood there taking the insults like she was standing in front of a shooting target taking bullets, braced, her jaw set. “One question.”

  Violette spat in her face.

  I gasped, taking a half step forward, but I might as well not have been there for all the attention the two women paid me. Eve stood a moment with spittle trickling down her cheek, and then she peeled off her glove and deliberately wiped her face. Violette watched, spectacles glittering, and I took another step. This was not the way I’d seen women quarrel—vicious cat-claw digs, the vivisection of gossip that flowed through a sorority house. This was the kind of feud that led to pistols at dawn.

  Why can’t anything be simple? I thought in panic.

  Eve dropped the glove to the floor and slammed her bare hand on the counter with a sound like a rifle shot, and I watched Violette’s eyes fasten with sick recognition on the other woman’s ruined fingers.

  “Did René Bordelon die in 1917?” Eve asked, low-voiced. “Yes or no—either way, I walk out.”

  My hackles rose. René, we kept coming back to that name. In the report on Rose. In Eve’s nightmares. Now here. Who is he, who is he—

  Violette was still gazing at Eve’s hand. “I forgot about those fingers of yours.”

  “At the time, you told me I deserved it.”

  Cool contempt crossed Violette’s face. “Your stammer’s certainly better. Does whiskey do that for you? You smell like a drunk.”

  “Whiskey or rage are both fine cures for stammering, and I’m belly-full of both,” Eve snarled. “René Bordelon, you sour cunt. What happened to him?”

  “How should I know?” Violette shrugged. “You and I left France at the same time, and he was still prospering in those days. Still running Le Lethe.”

  Le Lethe—the restaurant where Rose had worked. But that had been in Limoges, not Lille, I thought confusedly. And I was looking for information about 1944, not the first war. I opened my mouth to say so, then closed it again. I didn’t want to step between the two women and their dueling eyes.

  Eve’s eagle-gray gaze never shifted. “After the war, you returned to Lille for a while. Cameron told me that—”

  Cameron now? How many new players had just been pushed onto the stage in this drama? I wanted to shriek, but I kept silent, staring at Eve as though I could yank the answers out of her with a hook. Stop asking questions and start spitting answers, dammit.

  “—and Cameron also told me René Bordelon died in 1917, shot by Lille citizens for being a filthy collaborator.”

  “He was a filthy collaborator,” Violette stated. “But nobody shot him—I’d have heard if they had. There would have been dancing in the streets if he’d died the way he deserved. No, I was told the bastard packed up and ran as soon as the Germans retreated, because he knew a bullet in the back was the best he could expect. No one saw him again in Lille, that’s for sure. But he was alive in 1918 at least. That man always was a survivor.” Violette gave an unpleasant smile. “So if Cameron told you differently, he sold you a lie. And you were always so proud of your ability to sniff out lies.”

  None of this meant anything to me, but I saw Eve’s proud spine sag. Her ruined hands gripped the counter’s edge. Before I knew I was moving, I put an arm around her waist, fearing she’d fall. I half-expected her to slap me away with a caustic remark, but her eyes were squeezed shut. “That liar,” she whispered, and wisps of her graying hair flew as she shook her head. “That damned, tweed-hearted liar.”

  “And now”—Violette plucked off her spectacles and gave them a polish—“you can get out of my shop.”

  “Give her a moment,” I snapped. Eve might irk me to the point of madness sometimes, but I wasn’t letting any nearsighted shopkeeper tear her to pieces when she looked so shocked and fragile.

  “I’m not giving her thirty more seconds, much less a moment,” the woman said, looking at me for the first time. She reached under the counter, and came up with a Luger just like Eve’s. “I know how to use it, little girl. Get that bitch out of here if you have to drag her by the feet.”

  “What is it with you old cows and your guns?” I shouted, but Eve straightened, her face a ghastly curdled mask.

  “We’re done here,” she said quietly, and made for the door. I collected her fallen glove and followed, heart hammering.

  Violette’s voice came from behind me. “Do you dream, Eve?”

  Eve halted, not turning. Her shoulders were straight and stiff. “Every night.”

  “I hope she chokes you,” Violette said. “Every night, I hope she chokes the life out of you.”

  But it sounded like Violette was the one choking as we left. The door closed behind us on the strangled sound of a sob before I could ask who she could possibly be.

  I’m sorry,” Eve said from out of nowhere.

  I was so startled I nearly upset my coffee. She sat, hands folded like claws around her own cup, her pallor ghastly. When we left the shop and Eve climbed into the Lagonda and sat staring into space, I’d said quietly to Finn, “Find a hotel.” He’d found an auberge across from Roubaix’s cozy city hall, and gone off to park the Lagonda while Eve and I sat at one of the little tables in the hotel’s open court. She ordered coffee in her perfect French, then ignored the disapproving glance of the waiter when she emptied her silver flask into the cup.

  Now she looked up, and I almost recoiled from her sightless stare. “Shouldn’t have brought you here. Waste of your m-money. I wasn’t looking for your cousin, I was looking for someone else.”

  “That woman?”

  “No.” Eve knocked back a slug of her spiked coffee. “A man I’ve thought dead for thirty years . . . I suppose Cameron told me he was dead just to give me peace.” A shake of her head. “Cameron was too bloody noble to understand a vicious bitch like me. What would have given me peace was seeing René’s head on a spike.”

  She bit off the words, staring out at the bustle of hotel clerks and bellboys around the potted ferns.

  “René . . . Bordelon, you said in the shop.” Now we had a last name for the mysterious Monsieur René.

  “He was the owner of Le Lethe. The one in Lille, anyway.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I worked for him during the first war.”

  I hesitated. This last war had so completely overshadowed the first one, I knew much less about the way things had been the first time the Germans invaded. “How terrible was it, Eve?”

  “Oh, you know. German boots stamping on the necks of the starving, people shot in alleys. Bad.”

  So this was what fueled her nightmares. I looked at her wrecked hands, and shuddered. “Were there two Le Lethes, then?”

  “Looks like it. Since your cousin worked at one in Limoges.”

  The echoes here were sending cold ripples through my blood. “And a second man named René? Or could René Bordelon have owned the restaurant in Limoges as well?”

  Her hand slapped the table again. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Eve, I don’t believe in this many coincidences, and neither do you. That shopkeeper said he survived the first war by fleeing Lille. He might easily have lived until 1944, when Rose got to Limoges. He could be alive now.” Excitement ran through me now alongside the dread. Rose’s employer, someone who had known her—even if he was a beast, he had a name. A name meant he was someone I could track down.

  Eve shook her head stubbornly. “He would be past seventy. He—” Still her head went back and forth, a mechanical motion. “Maybe he survived the first war. But he can’t be alive now, not a man like that,
not after thirty years. Someone would have put a bullet through his black rotting brain.”

  I looked down at my own cold coffee, unwilling to cede hope. “Either way, his restaurant in Limoges is probably there. That’s where I’m going next.”

  “Have fun, Yank.” Her voice was hard. “This is where we part ways.”

  I blinked in surprise. “A moment ago you said you wanted to see his head on a spike. How are you not on fire now to find this old enemy of yours?”

  “What does that m-m-matter to you? Aren’t you keen to be shut of me?”

  I had been. But that was before I’d realized she had as much a stake in this search as I did. She had someone to find, just like me. I couldn’t cut anyone out from something that mattered as much as that. I’d already scrapped the plan to continue on without Eve, had assumed she’d be champing to finish the search—and here she was, quitting?

  “You do what you like. I’m not chasing wild geese anymore.” Her voice was curt, her gaze stubbornly blank. “René has to be dead. So’s your cousin.”

  My hand was the one to hit the table this time. “Don’t,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare. You can put your head in the sand about your own demons if you like, but I’m going after mine.”

  “Head in the sand? Two years after the war’s done and you’re putting your faith in some fairy story that your cousin might still be alive.”

  “I know what the odds are,” I shot back. “Even if it’s only a sliver of hope, I’ll take that over despair.”

  “You don’t even have a sliver.” Eve leaned across the table, gray eyes glittering. “The good ones never survive. They die in ditches and before firing squads and on squalid prison cots for sins they never committed. They always die. It’s the wicked who go merrily on.”

  I set my chin. “So why are you so convinced your René Bordelon is dead, then? Why is he dead, if the wicked always prosper?”

  “Because I’d feel it if he were alive,” she said quietly. “Just like you’d feel it if your cousin were dead. Which maybe makes us both crazy, but either way it means we’re done.”