The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  I laughed. Should have known better than to expect a sentimental moment from Eve. Finn came up beside me, and she nodded at him. “You’ll need a sharp suit, Scotsman, and some business cards. You, Yank, will need to play my devoted granddaughter. And we’ll all need patience, because this is going to take time.”

  She outlined the rest in a few sentences. The two of us listened, nodding. “Could work,” Finn said. “If Bordelon is in Grasse to begin with.”

  “And if we find him?” I asked.

  Eve smiled, blandly. “Why do you ask?”

  “Humor me.” I was thinking of the conversation on the bridge last night, my gnawing fear that Eve wanted blood. I was not going to be a party to a murder. “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  Eve quoted in French. “‘I shall come back to your bedroom and silently glide toward you with the shadows of the night . . . I shall give you kisses frigid as the moon and the caresses of a serpent that slithers around a grave.’”

  I groaned. “Let me guess. Baudelaire?”

  “My f-favorite poem, ‘Le Revenant,’ ‘The Ghost,’ but it sounds better in French. Revenant comes from the verb revenir.”

  To come back.

  “He never thought I’d come back. He’s going to be very wrong.” Finn and I exchanged glances, and Eve turned brisk again. “Back in the car, children. We can’t gawp at the flowers all day.”

  We motored into Grasse at twilight: a place of square towers, narrow twisting roads, apricot roofs and Mediterranean colors, and over everything the scent of the flower fields. Eve strode up to the hotel clerk and opened her mouth, but I forestalled her. “Two rooms,” I said, looking up at Finn. “One for Grandmaman and one for us, don’t you think, dear?”

  I said it without a hitch, laying a casual hand on his arm so the clerk would see my wedding ring. As Eve had said, selling a story is done by reciting the little details without any flubs.

  “Two rooms,” Finn confirmed, slightly strangled. The clerk didn’t bat an eye. Later I put in a telephone call to Violette in Roubaix, letting her know where to reach me. We were in Grasse, and the hunt was on.

  Finn’s new cards were embossed and expensive looking. “Pass them over with a patronizing air,” Eve instructed. “And for God’s sake, will you two quit giggling?”

  But Finn and I went on howling with laughter. The cards, in their impressive-looking script, read:

  Donald McGowan, Solicitor

  “My Donald!” I managed to say at last. “Well, my mother always did want me to catch a lawyer.”

  “Solicitor,” Eve corrected. “Limeys have solicitors, and very supercilious they are too. You’ll have to work up a good frown, Finn.” He had an impressive frown indeed as he handed his card across the maître d’s desk about four days later. By then he’d had some practice. “I am making inquiries on behalf of a lady,” he murmured. “A matter of some delicacy.”

  The maître d’ appraised him in a glance. Finn Kilgore in his rumpled shirt and tousled hair wouldn’t have gotten the time of day in Les Trois Cloches, one of Grasse’s finest restaurants—but Donald McGowan in his charcoal gray suit and narrow striped tie rated a subtle straightening in posture. “How may I be of assistance, monsieur?”

  It was the slow hour between lunch and dinner when diners were few; Eve always timed our arrival carefully so the staff had time to gossip. Or answer questions.

  “My client, Mrs. Knight.” Finn glanced back to where Eve stood in a black silk dress and broad-brimmed hat, her hands hidden by kid gloves, leaning on my arm, looking frail as she dabbed her eyes with a black-bordered handkerchief. “She emigrated to New York years ago, but much of her family remained in France,” Finn explained. “And with so many dead in the war . . .”

  The maître d’ crossed himself. “So many.”

  “I have found death records for her father, her aunt, two uncles. But a cousin is still missing.”

  If you can traipse all over France looking for your missing cousin, then so can I, Eve had said when she told us where she got the idea. Who in Europe doesn’t have a missing cousin or two these days?

  “We discovered he fled Limoges for Grasse in ’44, just ahead of the Gestapo . . .” Finn lowered his voice, dropping a few vague hints about Resistance activity and enemies in Vichy. Painting a vision of Eve’s childhood companion (brave patriot narrowly escaping arrest), now yearned for by Eve (lonely survivor of a massacred family).

  “Will anyone fall for that?” I’d asked back in the hyacinth field. “It’s very Hollywood.”

  “They’ll fall for it because it’s Hollywood. After a war like this one, everyone w-wants a happy ending, even if it’s not their own.”

  Sure enough, this maître d’, like the ones before him, was nodding, clearly sympathetic.

  “René du Malassis,” Finn said, winding up. “But he may have taken a different name. The Milice were looking for him”—a trade of grimaces; even two years after the war, everybody bristled at the mention of the Milice—“and this has made Mrs. Knight’s inquiries very difficult. But we do have a photograph . . .”

  The photograph of René, folded and clipped so all his swastika-wearing dinner partners would not show, was pushed discreetly across the table. The maître d’ studied it. Eve allowed her shoulders to shake, and I patted her back, looking worried. “Grandmaman, don’t upset yourself.” My role here: to ramp up the sympathy factor. I chafed Eve’s gloved hand between my own, heart thudding as the maître d’ hesitated.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, and my heart thudded again more leadenly. “No, I’m afraid I don’t recognize the gentleman.”

  I crossed Les Trois Cloches off the list as Finn slid a discreet banknote across the table with a murmured, If you see the gentleman, do contact me . . . Only a few hundred more places to go.

  “Don’t look dejected,” Eve said once we were outside. “I said this would take legwork and luck, d-didn’t I? This is the part that isn’t Hollywood. You don’t just go looking for someone and have him pop up like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat.”

  “You’re certain this is the best way to locate him?” Finn asked, donning his fedora. No more striding about hatless for him; Donald McGowan (solicitor) was a good deal more businesslike.

  “One of these places”—Eve gave a whack to the crumpled list in her bag—“will know him.”

  Her argument was simple: René Bordelon prized the finer things of life. Whatever else had changed, that wouldn’t have. He’d still patronize the best clubs, drink at the best cafés, attend the best theaters, and he was the kind of patron the staff noticed, because he tipped and dressed well, and could talk wine with the sommelier and Klimt with the museum guide. We had a relatively recent photograph—if we canvassed the best culture spots in Grasse, Eve argued, someone would recognize that face. Then we’d have a name.

  Standing on that sunny day among the flowers, I’d wondered, “How long is this going to take?”

  “If it were Paris, forever. But Grasse isn’t enormous.”

  Finn had worried about something more sinister. “What if he finds out a woman is looking for him? A woman with mangled hands, about the age his little Marguerite would be now?”

  Eve glowered. “I’m a professional, Finn. Give me some credit. You think I’m going to march all over Grasse with a horn announcing my presence?” Hence Mrs. Knight and Mr. McGowan, and the gloves concealing Eve’s hands.

  “One condition, Gardiner,” Finn replied. “You leave that Luger in the hotel room.”

  “You think if I saw René Bordelon on the streets of Grasse, I’d walk up and put a bullet into his brain?”

  “I’m no dunderhead. I won’t take the chance.”

  Four days now we’d been at it. We were barely unpacked in our hotel before Eve was gathering information, compiling lists. And as soon as Finn had his business cards and his suit, and Eve had a good pair of gloves and a dowager hat that hid her face without looking like it was trying to hide
her face, out we’d sallied.

  I was almost too nervous to speak the first time we sailed into a high-end café with our prepared story. Now, six restaurants, three museums, one theater, five clubs, and four days later, it was almost boring. Except for the moment of liquid anticipation every time a new concierge or waiter leaned over René’s photograph and I thought maybe, this time . . .

  “Welcome to real spy work,” Eve said outside Les Trois Cloches, transforming before my eyes as she straightened from her old-lady hobble. “Mostly tedious, occasionally exhilarating.”

  Her eyes sparkled, and I thought how much better she looked than the day I met her. Then she could have been sixty or seventy, harrowed and lined and pale. Now she’d shaken off the slump of grief and inactivity that made her seem old and fragile, and I was astounded at the change. Her face had healthy color again even if there were still harsh lines graven about eyes and mouth; she moved with swift efficiency rather than a defensive hunch; her graying hair had a gleam to it like her sharp eyes. She looked her age again, fifty-four, with plenty of vigor left.

  “She hasn’t had one of her screaming nightmares since we got here,” I commented to Finn after dinner that night, watching Eve head upstairs. “And she’s not slamming back as much whiskey.”

  “The chase is good for her.” Finn finished his after-dinner coffee. “She’s a hunter at heart. The past thirty years, she’s been standing still. Dying slowly with nothing to pursue. Maybe it’s not a bad thing if this hunt lasts awhile.”

  “Well,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t mind that.”

  He gave me that invisible smile that turned my knees to water. “I’m pure done in from all this tramping about. You?”

  “Exhausted. We should make it an early night.”

  But there wasn’t much sleeping being done in our little room with its blue shutters and wide soft bed. Neither Finn nor I objected when Eve’s search expanded to a week, ten days. The mornings were for the three of us: flaky croissants and cups of ink-dark espresso at a table so small our knees jammed together. Then the hunt, the repetition of our now-seamless play: stopping at a shop for handmade shoes off the Place aux Aires, then an atelier for expensive cologne. Strolling through the narrow twisting streets of the vieille ville headed for clubs and theaters that might recognize a favorite patron, and finally during the sleepy hour before dinner, visiting restaurants full of shaded lamps and heavy silver cutlery. Finally back to the hotel and supper, passing a bottle of Provençal rosé over plates of heaped frites. Those were the days, and Finn and I were content to let Eve direct them, because the nights were ours.

  “Have I mentioned,” I asked one night, my head against Finn’s arm, “that you look absolutely jaw dropping in a three-piece suit?”

  “Aye, you have.”

  “It seemed worth repeating.” I leaned over to tip out the last of the wine we’d brought up to bed. I was completely naked, no longer even slightly self-conscious in front of him as he lay with his hands clasped behind his head, admiring me. “When do we get the Lagonda back?”

  “Maybe another week.” Upon learning we’d be in Grasse awhile, Finn made arrangements to have that elusive leak repaired. He telephoned every other day to check on his precious car like an anxious mother.

  “You need a new car, Finn.”

  “You know what a new car costs these days, what with the wartime metal drive?”

  “Here’s to the Lagonda’s health, then.” I passed him the mug we were using for a wineglass. “I wouldn’t mind driving around Grasse instead of walking everywhere. My feet hurt, and I was counting on a few more months before I get enormous enough for aching feet.” As soon as we’d arrived in Grasse, my morning sickness had dropped away, and so had my perpetual draining tiredness. I didn’t know if it was the flower-scented breezes or all the lovemaking or just that the Rosebud was into her fourth month now, but suddenly I felt marvelous, full of boundless energy and ready for anything—even the endless walking all over Grasse. But I still missed the car.

  Finn drained the last of the rosé, then wriggled around so he was sitting with his back against the footboard. He started massaging my toes under the sheet, and I wriggled pleasurably. The night was warm, we had all the shutters open and the smell of jasmine and roses drifted in. The lamplight encircled the bed, turning it into a ship adrift on a dark sea. By agreement we didn’t talk about René here, or the war, or any of the terrible things that had happened because of either. The nighttime hours belonged to happier conversations.

  “Wait till you’re eight months in,” Finn predicted, massaging my arches. “That’s when the feet really start to hurt.”

  “What would you know about eight months in, Mr. Kilgore?”

  “Watching all my friends’ wives. I’m about the only one not hitched—first thing most of my mates in the 63rd did once they got home was knock up some girl and marry her. I’m a godfather at least three times over.”

  “I can just see you standing over a font with a screaming armful of lace!”

  “Screaming? Never. Babies like me. Go right to sleep the minute I pick them up.” A pause. “I like bairns. Always wanted a few.”

  We let that hang in the air a moment before tiptoeing around it. “What else do you like?” I asked, giving him my other foot. “Besides Bentleys.” Last night he’d read aloud out of his motoring magazine the entire mechanical rundown of the Bentley Mark VI, aping my American accent outrageously as I pummeled him with a pillow.

  “A man with a Bentley has everything he needs, lass. Except maybe a good garage to keep her in fighting trim. The one that’s got the Lagonda now, they’re good.”

  I tickled his chest with my toes. “You could run a place like that, you know.”

  “Got to be good with more than cars to run a garage.” He made a rueful face. “You know me. The bankbook would end up under an oil can and you’d never read the check stubs for engine grease, and soon the banks would own it all.”

  Not if I were the one keeping the books . . . I didn’t finish the thought even to myself, just released it gently and told him instead about the Provençal café I remembered so well, how that long-ago day had made striped awnings and Edith Piaf and goat cheese sandwiches my idea of heaven on earth. “Though an English breakfast should be featured. In the ideal café, that is.”

  “Well, I do a braw one-pan fry-up . . .”

  We both knew what we were doing here, during these lazy nighttime conversations. We were outlining a future and tentatively, almost fearfully, starting to sketch each other into it, then backing away from the unspoken with half smiles. Sometimes the night brought bad dreams for one of us, but nightmares were easier to bear when there were warm arms in the dark to burrow into. When grief came for either of us, it wound its way through the night and became part of the sweetness.

  I haven’t known you long enough to be this crazy about you, I thought, watching Finn’s profile in the soft light. But I am.

  One afternoon, two and a half weeks into our stay, Eve said over a post-lunch espresso, “Maybe René isn’t here.”

  Finn and I traded glances, both doubtless thinking of all the heads shaken no over the photograph since we’d arrived. Three restaurant managers and an expensive tailor had thought they recognized the face, but couldn’t remember the name that went with it. Otherwise, nothing.

  “Maybe I should g-give it up. Let Charlie here go back home to knit booties, and have you”—Eve nodded at Finn—“take me back to the land of fish and chips.”

  “Can’t say I’m ready to go home yet.” I kept my voice light, but Finn squeezed my hand and I squeezed back.

  “Let’s give it another week or two,” Finn said. Eve nodded. “But let’s take the afternoon off. I want to amble over to the garage and check on the Lagonda.”

  “He’s going to harangue those poor mechanics to death,” Eve chuckled as he walked away.

  “Or apologize to the car for not visiting more often,” I agreed.

 
; We sat for a while, finishing our espressos, and then Eve looked at me. “I’m no good at afternoons off. Let’s pick a few restaurants. I reckon the two of us can b-brace the waiters without our solicitor in tow.”

  I looked at her, gray eyes gleaming in her tanned face as she clapped her big hat over her brow at a rakish angle. “Maybe you should introduce me as your daughter this time. You’re not so plausible as my old granny anymore.”

  “Pshaw.”

  “I’m serious! It’s this flowery air in Grasse; it’s like the elixir of youth.” As we strolled through the oldest part of the city, where the buildings arched overhead, leaning on each other like friendly shoulders, I realized I loved Grasse. All the other cities we’d passed through—Lille, Roubaix, Limoges—had been blurred for me by the search for Rose. But here in Grasse we’d finally stopped to breathe, and the city was unfolding to me like the jasmine blossoms in the fields. I never want to leave this place, I thought, before pulling myself back to the search at hand.

  Two unsuccessful restaurant stops later, Eve pulled out her map to search for a third. I munched a concoction of fried courgette flowers to which the Rosebud had become almost as addicted as bacon, eyeing a nearby shop window. The display was all children’s clothes: sailor suits, ruffled skirts, and laid out across a display pram a tiny lacy baby dress embroidered in rose vines. I looked at that dress and had an attack of utter lust. I could see the Rosebud wearing it at her christening. I could feel her now—in what felt like a matter of days, I’d gone from utterly flat in front to just a little rounded. You couldn’t see it through my clothes, but it was there, that tiny bump. Finn didn’t say anything, but he kept running his fingertips over my abdomen at night, butterfly touches like kisses.

  “Buy it,” Eve said, noticing my stare. “That armload of lace you’re drooling over—just b-buy it.”

  “I doubt I can afford it.” Wistfully, I swallowed my last fried flower. “I’ll bet it costs more than all my secondhand clothes put together.”

  Eve crammed her map into her handbag, marched into the shop, and emerged minutes later with a brown paper package that she tossed me unceremoniously. “Maybe now you’ll pick up the pace.”