The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  “You didn’t have to—”

  “I hate being thanked. March, Yank!”

  I marched. “You’re spending a lot lately, Eve.” The money from my pawned pearls had run out, and Eve was now covering all our expenses, though I’d sworn to repay her as soon as I could crack my bank account open in London.

  “What have I got to spend it on? Whiskey, vengeance, and baby dresses.”

  I grinned, hugging the package. “Would you be her godmother?”

  “Keep saying her and it’ll come out a boy just to spite you.”

  “His godmother, then.” I paused, suddenly serious though I’d said it flippantly. “Really, Eve—would you?”

  “I don’t behave well in church.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “All right.” She gave me a rusty smile, then stalked on like a heron through deep water. “If you insist.”

  “I do insist,” I said, and the words came out thick with emotion.

  The restaurant was just off the Place du Petit Puy with its white-fronted cathedral. It was long past the lunch hour; diners would be trickling in soon for early evening drinks. I blinked at the dimness inside after the dazzling sun, mentally shifting back to my role of devoted family attendant just as Eve was already drooping against me as though too frail to walk unsupported.

  I stepped to the maître d’ and went into Finn’s spiel, which I could have recited in my sleep. Eve dabbed at her eyes, and soon I was pushing the photograph across the table. My mind was on the baby dress; I wasn’t really thinking of our quarry.

  And then I was, because the maître d’ nodded in recognition. That nod hit me like a hammer blow.

  “Bien sûr, mademoiselle. I know the gentleman well, one of our favored patrons. Monsieur René Gautier.”

  For an instant I froze. René Gautier. The name reverberated around my skull like a ricocheting bullet. René Gautier—

  Eve stepped up beside me. How she hung on to her quivery fragility, I had no idea, but she had won four medals for spying. I saw why as she quavered, without stammering or batting an eye, “Oh, monsieur, how happy you’ve made me! My René, it’s been so many years since I’ve seen him! René Gautier, that’s the name he’s taken?”

  “Yes, madame.” The maître d’ smiled, clearly savoring his chance to be the bearer of good news. Eve was right—after a war, everyone wanted a happy ending. “He has a charming little villa outside Grasse, but he comes here frequently. For the rillettes de canard, we serve the finest rillettes on the Riviera, if I do say so myself—”

  I didn’t care about the goddamn rillettes. I leaned in closer, pulse racketing. “His villa, would you have an address?”

  “Just past the mimosa fields off the Rue des Papillons, mademoiselle. We sometimes deliver a crate of wine, a Vouvray one can get nowhere else in Grasse—”

  Eve was already straightening her hat. “Thank you, monsieur, you have made us very happy,” I gabbled, reaching for Eve’s arm, but the maître d’ looked past us and beamed.

  “Ah, what luck! Here is monsieur now.”

  CHAPTER 38

  EVE

  As she turned to face her enemy, time folded in on itself. It was both 1915 and 1947; she was twenty-two, bloodied, and broken, and she was fifty-four, shaking, and still broken; René Bordelon was a suave dark-haired bon vivant, and he was this stiff-shouldered old man with silver hair and an exquisitely tailored suit. At that instant while time crashed together, both versions were true.

  Then past and present merged with a click, and it was only 1947, a beautiful summer evening in Grasse, and an old spy stood separated from her old enemy by nothing more than a few feet of tiled floor. As Eve looked at him, tall and stalk boned, the same silver-headed cane hooked over one arm, terror opened like a trapdoor in her stomach and all her patched-together courage shattered in one long silent shriek.

  He did not recognize her. He rotated his black homburg in his hands, raising an eyebrow at the maître d’s eager expression. “I am expected, I see?”

  A shudder racked Eve at the sound of the inflectionless voice of her nightmares. Her hands ached inside her gloves as she gazed, numb with disbelief, at the man who had broken them. She had never imagined she might encounter him before she was ready. She’d thought she could manage their first meeting on her own terms, surprise him when she was well prepared. Instead fate had surprised her, and she was not prepared at all.

  He had not changed. The hair gone silver, the lines at the forehead—those were just window dressing. The spiderous fingers, the even voice, the cheap soul of a torturer peeping out from behind the expensive suit of a sophisticate, that was all the same.

  Except the scar on his lip. Eve’s mark, she realized, left when she’d bitten him in their last venomous kiss.

  The maître d’ was chattering explanations, and dimly Eve felt Charlie touching her elbow, murmuring something she couldn’t hear through the buzzing in her ears. She knew she should say something, do something, but she could only stand frozen.

  René’s dark eyes returned to her face, and he stepped forward. “Mrs. Knight? I don’t recognize the name, madame . . . ?”

  Eve had no idea how she managed it, but she stepped to meet him, holding out her hand. He took it, and the old revulsion swamped her at his familiar long-fingered grip. She wanted to fling his hand away and flee like a coward, keening her old terror and agony.

  Too late. He was here; so was she. And Evelyn Gardiner was done running.

  She squeezed his hand hard, and saw his face change as he felt the deformities covered by her glove. She leaned forward so only he could hear her voice. The words came low, calm, perfectly even.

  “Perhaps you’ll recognize the name Marguerite Le François, René Bordelon. Or should I say, Evelyn Gardiner?”

  The restaurant was suddenly making a great fuss. They had a happy reunion under their roof—waiters beamed and the maître d’ offered the best table in the house. And in the middle of all the hubbub, Eve and René held each other in a gaze like an exchange of swords.

  Finally, the bastard dropped her hand and gestured toward the table the waiters were so cheerfully preparing. “Shall we?”

  Eve managed to incline her head. She turned, wondering how she was able to walk without stumbling. Charlie came to her side like a knight’s squire, her face white as she took Eve’s elbow. That fierce little hand was wonderfully steadying. “Eve,” she murmured, eyes darting at the man behind them. “What can I do?”

  “Keep out of the way,” Eve managed to mutter back. This dueling ground was no place for Charlie St. Clair; René would swat her as casually as he had swatted and maimed so many others in passing. Eve would claw him to pieces before she allowed him to hurt anyone else she cared for.

  Claw him to pieces? her mind sneered. You can barely look him in the eye. But she shoved that aside along with her terror and sat down opposite him, an expanse of snowy linen stretching between them. Charlie perched on a chair at Eve’s side, uncharacteristically mute. The waiters were well trained, hovering out of earshot to give this happy reunion its privacy.

  René leaned back and steepled his fingertips. Eve had a sick flash, seeing those fingers curled around a blood-stained bust of Baudelaire—seeing them trace her naked breasts in bed.

  “Well,” he said softly in French. “Marguerite.”

  Her pulse nearly stopped, hearing that name from his lips. But her old coolness came back with her old identity, sweeping over her in a wave. Her blood beat slow and cold, and for the first time since she turned to find him standing in the restaurant entryway she looked at the poisonous old man with some semblance of calm.

  “René Gautier,” she replied. “After Théophile Gautier, I p-presume? The poet to whom Baudelaire dedicated The Flowers of Evil? In Limoges you were du Malassis after Baudelaire’s publisher, so I see you still haven’t found another poet.”

  René shrugged as casually as though this were any ordinary dinner conversation. “Why no
t stay with the best once one has found it?”

  “A fancy way of saying you have a stagnant mind.”

  A waiter gushed up and presented a bottle of champagne. “Since it is a reunion worthy of celebration, monsieur?”

  “It is at that,” René murmured. “Why not?”

  “I could use a drink,” Eve agreed. A whiskey the size of a bucket would have been better, but she’d take champagne. She knotted her hands into fists in her lap, realizing—as the champagne cork popped and René twitched—that he was not as cool inside as he pretended. Good.

  In unison they reached for their glasses as the waiter retreated. No one suggested a toast. “So many lines on that face,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself all these years?”

  “Living hard. I don’t need to ask what you’ve been doing. Pretty much what you were doing the last time we met: living well, aiding Germans, getting your countrymen shot. Though now you’re not opposed to doing the shooting yourself. Lost your squeamishness in your old age?”

  “It’s thanks to you I lost my squeamishness, pet.”

  The word ran over her skin like a rat. “I was never your pet.”

  “Does Judas suit you better?”

  That hit hard, but Eve managed—barely—not to flinch. “About as well as dupe suits you.”

  He gave a tight smile. As Eve watched him lounging in his expensive suit, his long nose appreciating the fizz of his perfectly chilled champagne, fury began to build. So many had died—Lili in her squalid prison, Charlie’s cousin and her baby in a hail of bullets, a young sous-chef with a pocket full of stolen silver—and this man had spent those years doing what? Drinking champagne and sleeping without nightmares.

  Eve’s nightmares had not begun until after Siegburg. In her prison cell, shivering in an agony of cold on an unwashed pallet, there were no dreams, but afterward there were horror images of the green-walled study, the evil-eyed lilies, the descending bust. The room, never the man. Dreaming of that room where he’d broken her had graven the lines around her eyes that he studied so contemptuously. He looked like he’d spent the last thirty years sleeping very well.

  Eve caught a glimpse of Charlie’s face, pale and immobile when she was usually so animated, and wondered if the Yank was thinking the same thing. She remembered Charlie saying that she’d never faced evil as Eve had.

  You are facing it now.

  René took another sip, made a small sound of appreciation, and patted his lips with a napkin. “I confess I’m surprised to see you, Marguerite. May I call you Marguerite? I never really managed to think of you any other way.”

  “I’m surprised you thought of me at all. You never were one to look back at the wreckage in your wake.”

  “Well, you were unique. I thought you might turn up in Limoges looking for me, after the first war.”

  If not for Cameron’s lie . . . “You covered your tracks rather well when you left Lille for Limoges.”

  “New identification papers aren’t difficult to manage when one already has black market connections.” A wave of his hand. “You might still have found me once they let you out of Siegburg. I did keep an eye out for news of your release. Why such a delay tracking me down?”

  “Does it matter?” Eve slugged half her champagne in a single swallow. She was finding her words faster, the old back-and-forth rhythm she used to play so well against René in their conversations. “I’m here now.”

  “To shoot me between the eyes? I believe you’d have done that in the doorway if you had a weapon.”

  May God damn Finn Kilgore to hell, Eve thought. If not for him, she’d have been carrying her Luger.

  “If that broken mess you call a hand can still fire a pistol, that is.” René summoned a waiter with a lifted finger. “The rillettes de canard. I find myself hungry.”

  “Certainly, monsieur. And for madame?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Your stammer’s improved,” René said once the waiter retreated. “Does it go away when you’re afraid?”

  “When I’m angry.” Eve smiled. “When you get angry, you get a tiny tic at the corner of your eye. I can see it now.”

  “I think you’re the only woman who has ever made me lose my temper, Marguerite.”

  “Small victories. Do you still have that bust of Baudelaire?”

  “I treasure it. At night sometimes I hear the sound of your fingers breaking, and I go to sleep with a smile.”

  A flash of the green-walled study, the smell of blood and fear, but Eve shoved it aside. “When I need to sleep, I think of your face the moment you realized you were being fucked by a spy.”

  He never blinked, but something behind his eyes tightened. Eve’s scalp shrank, but she smiled again, bolting the rest of her champagne and pouring more. I still know how to get to you, you old bastard.

  “I suppose you want revenge,” René said abruptly. “Revenge is the consolation prize of the losing side.”

  “My side won.”

  “But you lost. So how do you intend to get your revenge, Marguerite? I don’t believe you have the nerve for murder. That broken piss-stained little thing I last saw sobbing her heart out on my Aubusson couldn’t so much as lift her head, much less a pistol.”

  Eve flinched deep in her bones. She had been that broken piss-stained little thing for more than thirty years, in many ways. Until a knock on her door one damp London night barely a month ago. Until the audible click in the front of the restaurant today, where past and present united. Until now.

  She would not be that broken piss-stained little thing again. Ever.

  René was still talking. “Perhaps you think you can disgrace me, turn me in as a profiteer? I’m a respected man in Grasse, with powerful friends. You’re a half-mad crone gone crazed from grief. Who do you think will be believed?”

  “You’re the man who informed against Oradour-sur-Glane.” Charlie’s voice dropped into the conversation like a chunk of ice. Eve looked at her, startled. Don’t speak, don’t draw his notice—but Charlie went on, eyes burning like coals. “You’re responsible for the massacre of six hundred souls. I don’t care how many powerful friends you have, you old bastard. France will not forgive that.”

  René’s eyes went over Charlie’s face, lingering, but he still spoke to Eve. “Who’s this little thing, then, Marguerite? Not a daughter or granddaughter, I think. That shriveled old cunt of yours surely never produced anything this pretty.”

  Eve didn’t respond. She looked at Charlie instead, feeling the squeeze of an unfamiliar emotion inside. Perhaps love. “Call her Mercury, René. The winged messenger who came knocking at my door. She’s the reason I’m sitting here. She’s the reason you won’t get away this time. She’s your downfall.” Eve raised her champagne in salute. “Meet Charlotte St. Clair.”

  His brow creased. “I don’t know the name.”

  “You know my cousin’s.” Charlie’s fingers tightened so hard around her champagne flute, Eve was surprised it didn’t shatter. “Rose Fournier, also going by the name of Hélène Joubert. She was blond and lovely and she worked for you in Limoges, and you got her killed, you son of a bitch. You gave her name to the Milice because you were afraid she might be spying on you, and she died with nearly every other soul in Oradour-sur-Glane.”

  The waiter chose that moment to arrive with the rillettes de canard. René continued to look at Charlie thoughtfully as he unfolded his napkin, smeared a toast point with duck-fat pâté, and consumed it with another small sound of appreciation. “I remember her,” he said at last when the waiter glided away. “The little bitch who liked to eavesdrop. I take a dim view of nosy waitresses.” A glance at Eve. “Never let it be said I don’t learn from the past.”

  “Why didn’t you just fire her?” The words rasped as if they were scraping out of Charlie’s throat. “Why did you turn her in?”

  “Just to be safe. And to be blunt, because it pleased me. I have a great antipathy now for spying women.” A shrug. “But
I hope you aren’t blaming me for the death of the entire village? That would be astoundingly poor logic. I am hardly at fault for some German general choosing to so thoroughly exceed protocol.”

  “I blame you for her death,” Charlie whispered. “You didn’t know if she was Resistance or not, and you still reported her. She could have been innocent, and you didn’t care. You bastard—”

  “Quiet, child. The adults are speaking.” René reached for another toast point. “More champagne, Marguerite?”

  “I believe we’re done here.” Eve drained her flute and rose. “Come along, Charlie.”

  The girl froze. Eve could see her trembling, knew the kind of rage that gripped her, how she wanted to hurl herself across the table and saw that old throat open with a butter knife. Eve understood that feeling very well.

  Not yet, Yank. Not just yet.

  “Charlie.” Eve’s voice cracked like a whip.

  The girl rose, visibly shaking. She looked at René, calmly sitting there with duck fat glistening on his lips, and she whispered, “We’re not done yet.”

  “Yes, we are.” He talked past her, to Eve. “If I see you again, you raddled bitch, or hear you are trying to find my home or blacken my reputation, I will have you arrested for harassment. I’ll consign you to oblivion and go back to a life where I never have to think of you.”

  “You think of me constantly,” Eve said. “The thought of me gnaws at you every day. Because I’m walking proof you never were as clever as you thought you were.”

  His eyes flared. “You’re a turncoat who betrayed her own thanks to a spoonful of opium.”

  “But I still fooled you blind. And that’s been eating you alive for thirty years.”

  The mask fell at last, and Eve saw raw fury. His eyes burned as though he could fell her dead on the spot, and she gave a slow, contemptuous smile. They did not move, just exchanged their dueling gazes in venomous stillness as waiters exchanged puzzled looks. This was clearly not the happy reunion they had thought to see.