The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  He let go of the Luger.

  It fell to the floor, and I lunged for it, but René reached out with his undamaged hand and seized hold of my hair, still howling in agony, trying to wrench me back. So I kicked the pistol instead, sending it skittering across the floor to Eve.

  She lifted her blood-soaked hands and raised René’s Luger from the reddened floor. Brought it level with an effort that skinned her lips back from her teeth, as I wrenched my hair away from that vengeful grip and dove to the ground—

  As Eve calmly buried a shot between René Bordelon’s eyes.

  His face disappeared in a red mist. The pistol cracked again as Eve spaced three more shots into his chest.

  He toppled back, sliding to the floor with his ruined hand flung out in surprise. Surprised to the end that there was pain he couldn’t outrun, vengeance he couldn’t escape, consequences he couldn’t evade. Women who couldn’t be beaten.

  The air stank, acrid with gunsmoke and the sharper tang of gore. The silence fell like a lead weight. I struggled up from the floor, still clutching the bust of Baudelaire. I couldn’t look away from René’s crumpled body. He should have looked small and old in death, pitiable. All I saw was an aged viper with its head cut off, venomous to the end. My stomach lurched and suddenly I wanted to vomit. I turned away, folding one arm around my belly, lurching back toward Eve who still had the Luger in her ruined hand. She looked tattered and blood splashed, splendid and terrible, and she gave a slow pitiless smile like a Valkyrie riding in howling triumph over a horde of dead enemies.

  “One shot left,” she said quite clearly, still looking at René’s corpse, and before my suddenly horrified eyes she lifted the Luger to her own temple.

  CHAPTER 44

  EVE

  Eve’s finger was tightening on the trigger when pain split the world apart. Not the dull pain in her shoulder, slowly pulsing blood, but a hot agony sharp and bright as silver, lancing through her fingers. Charlie St. Clair, keening that berserker cry that had torn out of her throat as she lunged for René, had swung the bust of Baudelaire straight at Eve’s hand. The shot went off, deafening Eve’s already ringing ears, deflected into the wall as Eve’s arm jerked off target. Eve strangled a cry of her own as she cradled hand and empty pistol alike to her chest.

  “You Yank bitch,” she managed through clenched teeth, tears starting in her eyes. “My goddamn hand is broken. Again.”

  “The way you tricked me and ran out at the hotel, you deserve it.” Charlie dropped to her knees, and with quick strength wrested the Luger from Eve’s hooked fingers and tossed it aside. “I’m not letting you shoot yourself.”

  “I don’t have to shoot myself to d-die.” The Luger would have been the better way, poetic justice: when Eve sighted down the scratched barrel at René’s suddenly widening eyes, she’d seen it was her own Luger that he’d taken from her so many years ago. The one Cameron gave her. But Eve didn’t need a bullet to die. She could bleed out right here; all she had to do was—nothing.

  “Get off me,” she snapped at Charlie, who was trying to get a better look at Eve’s shoulder. The pain chewed like an animal, slow and steady. “Let it go, girl. Just let it go.”

  “I will not,” Charlie roared. She lunged around the room looking for supplies, completely ignoring the corpse on the floor. She came back with an armload of clean linen shirts from René’s half-packed traveling case, and a decanter of brandy. “Let me clean this, it’ll be disinfectant enough until we can get a doctor—”

  Eve struck her away with the broken hand. The agony was excruciating. Once again the sensation of red-hot sand crunching in her knuckles. Eve wanted to curl up and weep, curl up and die. She was weak and shaken and done. She had no more enemies to kill. Hatred was the steel strut that had kept her upright; she felt now like a snail without a shell, soft and helpless. It was time to go, didn’t the girl see that?

  Of course she didn’t. Charlie was moving like quicksilver, refusing to give up. That moment when she spat in René’s face that he was too goddamn dumb to pick the right side in two wars—Eve had wanted to cheer. It was as though Charlie had turned into Lili right before her eyes, little and fierce as a wolverine, dancing on her wits just a hair’s breadth ahead of disaster, improvising her way out of death. Lili had been defeated in the end, but not Charlie.

  “You don’t have to die.” Charlie pressed a wad of linen around Eve’s shoulder, stanching the blood. “Eve, you don’t have to.”

  Have to? Eve wanted to. She was a whiskey-soaked cripple with a stutter and no future. Most of her life had been wrecked because of guilt and grief and one bad man. And Eve knew enough about justice to know that killing René wasn’t enough to make life sweet again.

  She must have muttered some of this, because Charlie was arguing. “Didn’t you hear what I said to him? You didn’t betray Lili. The Germans got their information about her from someone else. The moment you told me how you’d been drugged into giving it up, I wondered—”

  Eve shook her head, feeling tears tremble. “No. It was me.” It had to be. Charlie’s accusation spat at René had passed over her ears in a blur. She had lived with the guilt so long, it was part of her soul. A few words had no power to shift it.

  “—opium isn’t a truth drug, Eve! It made you hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean it made you talk! I asked Violette to look into the trial, the things said when the defendants weren’t present, and I was right. It was this Tellier woman, whoever she was, another prisoner—”

  Eve went on shaking her head back and forth.

  “Isn’t it worth trying to find out more? Looking at those trial records yourself? You’re a spy, you have an O.B.E. and people like Major Allenton owe you favors! Telephone Violette, get more details—”

  “No.” Back and forth, back and forth.

  “You goddamn bitch, don’t you even want to get out from under all that guilt? Or will you just lie under it like a donkey in a harness?” Charlie thrust her sharp little face right into Eve’s and bellowed, “You didn’t do it!”

  The tears spilled over Eve’s cheeks. This afternoon she had cried crocodile tears to get away from this girl, but these tears were real. She wept and wept, and for a moment Charlie held her, Eve sobbing into her sharp little shoulder.

  But then Charlie was pushing and prodding, urging Eve up. “We can’t stay here. Lean on me, keep that pad pressed tight.”

  Eve wanted to let it fall, let the blood fall out after it. Let the police find two curled corpses in the morning: source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, locked together till the bitter end. But—

  You didn’t do it.

  Blood trickled down Eve’s side as Charlie half-supported and half-dragged her down the corridor, back to the shadowy kitchen, out to the warm French night. Eve was still shaking with sobs, and the pain in her hand was shattering. “Stay here while I bring the car up,” Charlie said. “You can’t walk that quarter mile—”

  But another set of headlights was showing down on the road, next to the Lagonda’s shadowy shape. Headlights bright enough to cut through even Eve’s pain-blurred, tear-blind vision. The police? “P—P—P—P—” Her tongue broke down completely; she couldn’t get out a single word. Clumsily, she wrenched at the linen pads over her wound. She’d bleed out before she went into another prison.

  But Charlie cried, “Finn!” and soon a familiar Scottish burr was rattling furious words. A strong arm went around Eve’s waist, taking her weight. Eve slid toward unconsciousness, hoping it was death, hoping to be done.

  But still thinking, in some reawakened part of her examining, questioning brain, You didn’t do it.

  CHAPTER 45

  CHARLIE

  Twenty-four hours later, we were in Paris.

  “Eve needs a doctor.” It was the first thing I’d said to Finn outside René’s villa, after the initial frenzy of explanations. “But if we take her to a hospital, she’ll be caught. Anyone with a gunshot wound will be looked at whe
n they find—” A glance back at the house.

  “I think I can patch her up long enough to get out of Grasse.” Finn soaked the makeshift bandages in more brandy and wrapped them tight around Eve, limp and unconscious in the Lagonda’s backseat. “The bullet doesn’t seem to have broken anything. She’s lost a lot of blood, but with enough strapping . . .”

  Caught. It kept echoing through my head. We’ll be caught. As Finn worked on Eve, I’d run back into the blood-stinking study and, wrapping my shirttail around my hand and avoiding the blood so no one would see a woman’s small footprints, tipped the peacock-tail lamp and the gramophone over and yanked the drawers open like someone had ransacked for a cash box. Maybe it would look like a robbery gone bad. Maybe . . . Still using my shirttail, I fumbled in my pocket and found the photograph of René we had been showing all over Grasse, folded and clipped to show just his face. I unclipped it to show the line of swastika-wearing Nazis at his side, and dropped the photograph on the bullet-riddled corpse on the floor.

  I’d felt a wave of sickness then, but Finn was shouting for me and there was no more time, so I stuffed both Lugers and the little bust of Baudelaire into Eve’s satchel, quickly wiped the door handles and anything else we might have touched, and ran. I drove the Lagonda back to the hotel with Eve stretched out in the backseat, and Finn followed in the car he had borrowed from the hotel manager to get here.

  That first night was the worst. Eve revived long enough to get into the hotel with Finn’s coat hiding her bloodied shoulder, right past the yawning night clerk, but she fainted on the upper stairs. Finn put her to bed, washed and dressed the wound with some sheets swiped from the hotel linen closet, and then all we could do was watch through the night as she lay frighteningly still. I stared at her through blurring eyes, and Finn wrapped me in his arms.

  “I could kill her,” he whispered. “Pulling you into danger—”

  “I’m the one who followed her,” I whispered back. “I was trying to stop her. It went all wrong. Finn, she could be arrested—”

  His arms tightened around me. “We won’t let that happen.”

  No. We would not. God knows I’d tried to keep Eve from killing René, but now that it was done, I had no intention of letting the police get their hands on her. She had suffered enough.

  I looked at her, frail and unconscious in the bed, and suddenly I was shaking with sobs. “Finn, she tried to k-kill herself.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “We won’t let that happen either.”

  We checked out at first light, my arm about Eve’s waist keeping her steady. The clerk was yawning, incurious, and we were out of Grasse in an hour, Finn pushing the Lagonda far past her usual pace. “Gardiner,” he muttered as the gears protested, “you owe me a new car. I’m never getting those bloodstains out of the seats, and this engine is never going to be the same.”

  All through that long day of driving, Eve never spoke, just huddled in the backseat like a collection of gaunt bones. Even as we drove into Paris, motoring over the dark waters of the Seine, and she watched as I tossed the bust of Baudelaire out the window into the river, she did not say a word. But I saw her shudder convulsively.

  God only knew how, but Finn found a doctor willing to give Eve’s wound a look without asking questions. “You can always find men like that,” he said after the man disinfected, stitched, and left. “Disqualified doctors, old army lads. How do you think ex-convicts get patched up if they don’t want a record that they’ve been getting into brawls?”

  Now that Eve had her fingers splinted and her shoulder dressed, had pills for pain and pills to keep infection away, we decided to lay low. “She needs time to heal,” I said, because she was still alarmingly apathetic when she wasn’t being foul tempered. “And Paris is big enough to hide in, if anyone . . .”

  If anyone comes sniffing after us when René is found, Finn and I both thought. But we didn’t mention René to Eve, or each other. We found cheap rooms in the Montmartre and let Eve sleep and take her pills and call us names for not getting her whiskey. It was a full five days before Finn saw the announcement in the paper.

  Former restauranteur dead outside Grasse.

  I snatched the paper, devouring the details. René Bordelon’s housekeeper had come for her weekly cleaning, and discovered the corpse. The deceased was a wealthy man living alone; the room had been ransacked. The passage of days made evidence difficult to collect . . .

  I rested my head on the paper, feeling suddenly dizzy. No mention that an old woman and her lawyer had been asking all over Grasse after him. Maybe the police knew about that, maybe they didn’t, but no one mentioned inquiries being made. No one was looking to connect a rich American widow and her imposing solicitor with a bed-bound Englishwoman and her disreputable driver in Paris.

  “Five days to find him,” Finn said, thoughtful. “If he’d had family or friends, it would have been sooner. Someone would have telephoned, got worried about him. But he didn’t make friends. He didn’t care about anyone, he wasn’t close to anyone.”

  “And I left the photograph on his chest. The one with him and his Nazi acquaintances.” I exhaled slowly, reading the short notice again. “I thought if the police saw he’d been a collaborator, they might not look too hard for whoever had killed him. Robbery or retribution, they’d just . . . let it be.”

  Finn kissed the back of my neck. “Cunning lassie.”

  I shoved the paper away. There was a photograph of René, courtly, smiling—it made my stomach writhe. “I know you didn’t meet him, but please believe me. He was monstrous.” I was the one who dreamed now about green silk rooms filled with screams.

  “I’m glad I didn’t meet him,” Finn answered quietly. “I’ve seen enough monstrous things. But I still wish I could have been there. Protected you both.”

  I was glad he hadn’t been. He was the one with a prison record; he’d have been in even more dire danger of ending up behind bars if we’d been caught. Eve and I had been enough, in the end, to take care of René—but I didn’t say so. Finn had his pride, after all. “Shall we go tell Eve she’s probably safe?” I said instead.

  “Might stop her hurling insults at us.”

  Eve listened without comment. Instead of calming her, the news seemed to redouble her restlessness, as she picked at the splints around her broken knuckles and complained about her shoulder bandages. I thought she’d be pestering me with questions about her trial in 1916, the evidence Violette had dug up on my urging, but she never touched the subject.

  And ten days after she’d been shot, I knocked on the door with a breakfast croissant and found nothing but a note on the pillow.

  Finn let loose with every curse in the book, but I just stared at the terse words. Gone home. Don’t worry.

  “‘Don’t worry.’” Finn tore a hand through his hair. “Where in hell would that dunderheaded battle-ax take off to? Violette, you think? Trying to find out more about the trial?”

  He sprinted downstairs to put a telephone call through to Roubaix, but I stood staring at Eve’s note with a different suspicion mounting. I ransacked the room, but both Lugers were gone.

  Finn was back quickly. “Violette’s seen or heard nothing from Eve, she swears.”

  “I don’t think she went to Lille or Roubaix,” I whispered. “I think she’s going home to die. Gone where we can’t stop her from pulling a trigger.”

  I’d had such foolish faith that if Eve knew she hadn’t betrayed Lili, it would fix the old wound she’d carried for so long. She’d learned she wasn’t a betrayer, and her enemy lay dead by her own hand—I’d hoped all that would be enough. I’d hoped she would now look to her future, not her tainted past. But maybe Eve had looked in the mirror and still seen nothing to live for, once hatred and guilt were gone. Nothing but the barrel of a gun.

  Just like my brother.

  My breath began to hitch in my throat. “We need to go, Finn. We need to get back to London now.”

  “She might not be head
ed for London, lass. If she wants to kill herself, she could have rented another room two streets down; we’d never know where. Or she could have gone to Lili’s grave, or—”

  “Her note said home. She’s had no home but London for more than thirty years. If she wants to die there . . .”

  Please, no. No.

  That second drive across France was very different from the first. The car seemed empty with no acerbic presence in the backseat, and there were no detours to Rouen or Lille. Just a straight, fast drive in a matter of hours from Paris to Calais, then the ferry carrying us back into a bank of English fog. By the following morning, the Lagonda was chugging toward London. My throat closed, and I realized in sudden shock that today was my twentieth birthday. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Twenty.

  At nineteen, not even two months ago, I’d gotten off the train in the rainy dark with my photograph of Rose and my impossible hopes. Evelyn Gardiner had just been a name on a piece of paper. I hadn’t known Eve or Finn or René Bordelon. I hadn’t even known myself.

  Not even two months. How much had changed in such a short time. I rubbed my just-rounding stomach, and wondered when the Rosebud would start to move.

  “Number 10 Hampson Street,” Finn muttered, steering the Lagonda through the pitted streets. London still had its scars of war, but the people strolling along those pocked streets had more swing in their steps and cheer on their faces on this warm summer day than they had when I’d first arrived. Finn and I had the only grim faces to be seen. “Gardiner, you’d better be home.”

  Home and safe, I prayed, because if I came through the door of Eve’s house and saw her lying there with a pistol in her stiffened hand, I was never going to forgive myself. I won’t let go, I’d told her in Grasse. I can’t lose you. If I did—