The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

“Violette Lameron,” I greeted her.

  A long pause. “Who are you?”

  “Charlotte St. Clair, madame. You saw me not long ago; I came into the shop with Eve Gardiner—Marguerite Le François, as you knew her. Please don’t hang up.” Because she was on the verge; I could tell from the controlled rasp of breathing on the other end of the line.

  “What do you want?” Her voice came noticeably colder. “I wouldn’t help that Judas bitch out of a burning house, so if it’s a favor for her—”

  I fought down a swell of anger, the urge to snap that nothing was Eve’s fault. The urge to ask how well she would have held out against a glass of opium and ten broken fingers. But Violette was as invested in Eve’s guilt as Eve was herself, and nothing I could say would shift either of them. Only facts would do that, and for the facts, I needed Violette.

  “Someone needs to look into the trial records where you and Eve and Lili were sentenced.” I lowered my voice, turning my back on the curious hotel clerk. “I believe there’s a lie hiding in there.”

  I’d thought it from the first, hearing about the exchange of information that condemned Lili. Something there did not add up correctly. Solve for X.

  Violette sounded rather contemptuous. “You’re just a little American. What could you possibly know about records for a European trial thirty years past?”

  I could surmise a lot more than she thought. All those summers working in my father’s office specializing in international law: I’d indexed and notated French and German legal books, I’d filed trial paperwork, I’d heard my father expound over dinner as he compared European and American law . . . “The trial of three female spies in the heart of wartime would have been very well documented,” I told Violette. “You three were heroines, famous. German officers, French newspapers, Belgian clerks, English diplomats, all paying attention that day—everything about your trial would have been filed away, if only so it could be produced as proof of no wrongdoing later. If there’s a lie in there, it can be found—it’s just a matter of getting a look at the records. Will you help?”

  “What lie?” Violette asked, curiosity sharpening her voice despite herself.

  Got you, I thought. And told her.

  An even longer silence fell. “Why ask me? You don’t know me, mademoiselle.”

  “I know what you’re capable of, because Eve’s told me all about you. You won’t stop until you get the truth. I don’t know if the trial records are public or sealed after all this time, but if they’re sealed, I imagine you could get access much more easily than me. Because you were on trial that day, and you can argue your right to know the full story. And you don’t have the full story, you or Eve, because you didn’t hear all the deliberations.” I laid out a little honey, thinking it couldn’t hurt. “You’re a war heroine, Violette. Surely there are powerful people who still respect you, who owe you favors, who will pull strings for you. You’ll find a way to get the information if it’s there.”

  “And if it is?”

  “Just tell me. Tell me if I’m right. Please.”

  She was silent so long I feared the connection had dropped. I stood there dry-mouthed at the desk. Please, I begged silently.

  Violette sounded bemused when she spoke. But she sounded honed as well, as if the spy inside the respectable shopkeeper had opened her eyes for the first time in years. I didn’t think that part ever died, not in women like Eve and Violette. “Where would I contact you, Mademoiselle St. Clair, if I found anything?”

  I promised to telephone her from Grasse tomorrow with the name of our hotel, and hung up feeling shaky. I’d cast a fishing line into the water; now all I could do was wait and see if anything came up on the other end. I wondered, going upstairs, if I should tell Eve what I’d done, but answered myself with a resounding No. She’d looked so fragile in the car, frail enough to crumble at the slightest blow. I wasn’t raising her hope about anything until I had something in hand to warrant it.

  Entering the silence of my pretty little room, I flung open the shutters and looked out into the fast-falling twilight. Couples promenaded below, arm in arm, and I remembered Rose and me laughing about someday being old enough to go on double dates. I saw a tall blonde hand in hand with a laughing boy, but my memory didn’t stubbornly try to give her Rose’s face. She was just a girl, no one I knew. My hallucinatory flashes of seeing Rose everywhere I looked seemed to have stopped since Oradour-sur-Glane. Come back, I thought, looking at the throng. Come back, Rosie—but of course, she wasn’t coming back. Like my brother, she was dead.

  A knock sounded. I thought it might be Eve, come to tell me what she had planned once we arrived in Grasse, but it was Finn. He looked different, and it took me a moment to put my finger on it. He’d shaved, put on a jacket (worn at the elbows but a handsome dark blue), and his shoes had been shined to a gleam.

  “Come to dinner with me,” he said without preamble.

  “I didn’t think Eve would come down to eat tonight. She looked like she wanted a whiskey supper.” Whatever got her to oblivion fastest. Knowing now how Lili had died and how it haunted her, I could understand that better.

  “Gardiner’s done for the night.” Finn patted his pocket, jingling with Eve’s nightly haul of bullets. “It’ll just be us. Come to dinner with me, Charlie.”

  Something in his tone made me straighten. From the way he’d dressed up, I didn’t think he meant one of our usual quick refueling stops at the nearest café. “Is this—is this a date?” I asked, keeping my hand from going to my mussed hair.

  “Yes.” His eyes were steady. “It’s what a man does when he likes a lass. Puts on a jacket. Puts a shine on his shoes. Asks her to dinner.”

  “I don’t know any men who do that. Not after we already . . .” I got a flash of what we’d done in the car last night, the windows fogged up and our breath coming ragged.

  “Your trouble is, your experience is all with boys. Not men.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is that the gray-bearded voice of wisdom, coming from a man not quite thirty?”

  “What I mean is, it’s not a matter of age. There are boys aged fifty, and men aged fifteen. It’s all in what they do, not how old they are.” He paused. “A boy messes up with a lass, and he slinks off without fixing anything. A man makes a mistake, he fixes it. He apologizes.”

  “You’re sorry for what happened, then.” I remembered him last night, his hands spanning my naked back as he said not too distinctly, This wasn’t how I wanted to do this. My heart squeezed. I wasn’t sorry at all.

  “I don’t regret it one bit.” His voice was even. “I’m just sorry it wasn’t—slower. Done after dinner and a date, not a fistfight and a bruised lip. That’s not how you start things with a lass you like, and I like you, Charlie. You’re smarter than any woman I know, a wee little adding machine in a black dress, and I like that. You’ve got a sharp tongue, and I like that too. You try to save everyone you meet, from your cousin and your brother to hopeless cock-ups like Gardiner and me, and I like that most of all. So I’m here to apologize. I’m here to take you to dinner. I’m here in a jacket.” Pause. “I hate jackets.”

  I fought the smile spreading over my face, but I failed. He gave a smile back that was all in the crinkles around his eyes, and it made me positively weak in the knees. I cleared my throat, tugging at my striped jersey, and said, “Give me ten minutes to change.”

  “Done.” He pulled the door closed. An instant later his voice floated through.

  “Can you wear that black dress again?”

  I didn’t say it would be much of a dinner,” he said. We leaned on the stone balustrade of an old bridge over the river Isère, a packet of sandwiches between us. Finn had bought them from a café near the Place Saint-André, and we were eating them right out of the paper wrappings. “I’m a bit skint.”

  “We wouldn’t get a better view in a fancy restaurant.” A dark night full of stars, the flow of water scattered with broken moonlight, and the murmur and rush of th
e city around us.

  “Your favorite food,” Finn said suddenly. “What is it?”

  I laughed. “Why?”

  “It’s something I don’t know about you. There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Miss St. Clair.” He reached out and touched a crumb on my lip, dabbing it away. “That’s what a first date is for. So: favorite food?”

  “Used to be a hamburger. Onion, lettuce, dab of mustard, no cheese. But since the Rosebud here”—patting my stomach—“it’s bacon. Crispy, burned just a little. The way I’m eating, there won’t be a pig left in France by the time this baby’s born. What’s your favorite food, Mr. Kilgore?”

  “Fish and chips from a proper chippy, lots of malt vinegar. Favorite color?”

  I eyed his jacket, which made his hair look darker and his shoulders broader. “Blue.”

  “Same here. Last book you read?”

  We traded back and forth, both of us a little silly and enjoying it. Finn asked me about college and I told him about Bennington and algebra classes. I asked him how he’d gotten so good with cars and he told me about working in his uncle’s garage at age eleven. The little things, the getting-to-know-you things. Normally those conversations happened early on, before anyone got half naked in the backseat of a convertible, but we’d done it all backward.

  “First thing you’d buy if you had ten thousand pounds sterling?”

  “My grandmother’s pearls back. I love those pearls. You?”

  “A ’46 Bentley Mark VI,” Finn said promptly. “First car made by Bentley and Rolls; it’s a beauty. Though if it’s ten thousand sterling I’ve got, maybe I could go all the way to the Ferrari 125 S. It just debuted, took six of thirteen races on the Piacenza circuit . . .”

  He started telling me about the V12 engine, and it was utterly adorable. I couldn’t have told you why it was adorable—when Trevor Preston-Greene bought me a milk shake after English Lit and droned for an hour about his Chevrolet Stylemaster coup, I wanted to upend my chocolate malt over his hair. But now I stood utterly charmed as Finn told me all about the De Dion type rear suspension. “Listen to me blethering on,” he broke off finally, seeing me smile.

  “Yes,” I said. “Bored to tears, here. Tell me more about the five-speed gearbox.”

  “Makes car go zoom,” he said straight-faced. “Your turn to blether about something boring.”

  “The Pythagorean equation,” I said, picking something easy. “A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared. That means that for all right-angled triangles, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides . . .” Finn mimed clutching his hair. “Really, now. Simple Euclidean geometry is no reason for despair!”

  We both laughed, tossing our sandwich crusts down for the geese honking noisily below. Afterward we just leaned against the stones, gazing out at the water in comfortable silence. I wasn’t used to silence on dates. Girls weren’t supposed to let silence fall; you had to keep the conversation going so he wouldn’t think you were a sad sack. Be interesting! Be sparkling! Or he won’t ask you out again! But the silence now was as comfortable as the chatter.

  He was the one to break it, voice thoughtful. “You think Gardiner’s right about Bordelon being in Grasse somewhere, retired and waiting to be found? Or is she half cracked?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to disrupt this gentle peace with reality. “It seems like an awful long shot, but she’s been right more often than she’s been wrong.” A question of my own burst out. “What happens if we do find him? What is Eve going to do?”

  “If she can prove he’s René du Malassis from Limoges who collaborated with the Nazis, informed for the Milice, and shot an employee in the back merely for petty theft, she can turn him in.” Finn dusted the last sandwich crumbs off his hands. “De Gaulle isn’t kind to profiteering killers, even elderly ones. Bordelon would face prison, especially if it can be proved his collaboration resulted in the—in what happened at Oradour-sur-Glane. He’d lose his reputation, his freedom . . .”

  “Is that going to be enough for Eve?”

  Finn looked at me. I looked at him.

  “No,” we said at the same time, and his hand covered mine on the stone parapet of the bridge.

  “We need to stop her from doing anything irrevocable, Finn.” Real life wasn’t a movie—in the real world there were consequences for revenge. Consequences like prison, and Eve might have endured Siegburg as a girl, but I didn’t think she’d survive now if she went to prison for assault or whatever they called it in France. “I’m not letting her burn up the rest of her life just to take that old bastard out.”

  “But it’s her life, isn’t it?” Finn’s fingers slid inside mine, so our hands slowly interlaced. “I’ve been with Gardiner awhile now. I can understand her wanting to risk it all to make something right.”

  “Killing an old man is making things right? I can’t be a party to that, even if he is a back-shooting murderer.” I shivered, partly from the terrible thought and partly because Finn’s thumb was passing back and forth along the back of my hand, leaving tingles. “We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t go off the rails.” Wasn’t that going to be a job.

  “A job for tomorrow.” Finn tugged me away from the balustrade. “Promise me something, Charlie?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look at that photograph tomorrow. Just enjoy the drive.”

  We meandered back to the hotel hand in hand, largely silent. Finn opened the door to guide me through, fingertips resting on my bare back above the black dress’s low V slash, and my skin rippled. He walked me down the corridor to my room, formally, as if I had a father who cared about my curfew glaring at the clock.

  “I had a lovely time,” he said, very solemn. “I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

  “Boys never call.”

  “Men call.”

  We lingered inside our fragile bubble of happiness, the kind of happiness that sits on top of melancholy as easily as icing on a cake. I didn’t want to leave it. “I’m no good at this, Finn,” I said at last. A Yank in a black dress plus a Scotsman in a jacket, multiplied by a summer night and a packet of sandwiches, divided by an awkward silence and the fact that the Yank had a pregnant belly—I didn’t know how that equation came out, what it equaled. “What happens now?”

  He sounded hoarse. “What happens now is entirely up to you.”

  “Oh.” I stood a moment, looking at him, and then I went up on tiptoe. Our lips met, soft as drifting feathers, and I melted into him as his arms circled my waist. We kissed, slow and endless, Finn pressing me soft and yielding between the hard door and his hard chest, and I fumbled blindly behind me for the handle. The door burst open and we spilled through it, kissing and stumbling, my shoes landing on top of his discarded jacket. Finn got a hand loose from my hair and batted the door shut. He picked me up then, holding me in the air for another kiss, and then he made me shriek as he dropped me on the bed from what seemed like a very long height. He stood for a moment looking down at me, and I couldn’t believe I was this nervous. We’d already done this, but not in a bed, not with lights on . . .

  He dropped down with a groan, stretching himself, long and luxuriant, over me. “Beds,” he said, dropping slow kisses along my neck, the Scots burr coming thicker, “are a verra big improvement on backseats.”

  “I fit just fine in both—” as I tugged at his shirt.

  “Because you’re a midget.” He submitted to my tugging, letting me pull his shirt over his head, then flipped me back down, grinning. “Quit rushing! It’s not supposed to be a sprint—”

  “Thought you liked fast,” I managed to say. In the light he was lean and brown and beautiful. “You and your five-speed gearboxes . . .”

  “Cars should be fast. Beds should be slow.”

  I tangled my hands in his hair, feeling my back arch as he dragged the zipper of my dress down inch by inch. “How slow?”

  “Verra . . . verra . . . slow . . . ,” he murmured against my lips. “T
akes all night, where we’re going.”

  “All night?” I hooked my legs around him, looked at the dark eyes so close to mine our lashes brushed. I am falling for you, I thought bemusedly, I am falling so hard. “You’ve got to drive all the way to Grasse tomorrow,” I whispered instead. “What about sleep?”

  “Sleep?” His hands twined through my hair so tight it hurt as he growled into my ear. “Quit your blethering.”

  CHAPTER 36

  EVE

  March 1919

  It was Eve’s first step back in England since her career as a spy began. Folkestone, where Cameron had stood waving good-bye as Eve sailed to Le Havre. Where he stood now, coat rippling about his knees, waiting for her on the pier.

  “Miss Gardiner,” he said when she stepped off the ferry. It had been some months since her release—she’d lived that time in a bathtub, scrubbing obsessively as arrangements were made to bring her back from her temporary lodgings in Louvain to England.

  “Captain Cameron,” she answered. “No, it’s Major Cameron now, isn’t it?” Eyeing his new insignia. In addition to his majority was the blue and red ribbon of the DSO on the left breast of his uniform coat. “I’ve missed a few th-th—a few things, being away.”

  “I was hoping to bring you back to England sooner.”

  Eve shrugged. The women of Siegburg had been released before the Armistice was even signed, let loose from their cells by defeated-looking prison officials, stampeding in a weeping, joyous flood for the trains that would take them home. Eve would have been weeping with joy too, had Lili been arm in arm with her to take that train. After Lili died, it had not mattered in the slightest how fast she could get away from Siegburg.

  Cameron’s eyes were going over her now, registering the changes. Eve knew she was still thin as a rack, her hair straw dry from lice treatments and hacked close to her skull. She kept her hands thrust into her pockets so he couldn’t see the misshapen knuckles, but there was nothing she could do to hide her eyes, which never sat still anymore. Eve took in the world in constant darting glances now, looking for danger on all sides. Even here on the open pier, she angled her back against the nearest piling, seeking protection. Eve registered the shock in Cameron’s own steady eyes as he saw how deeply the past few years had marked her.