The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  But number 10 Hampson Street was empty. Not just empty; there was a new sign posted. FOR SALE.

  Six weeks later

  Ready?” Finn asked.

  “Not really.” I turned for his inspection. “Do I look grand enough for Park Lane?”

  “You look like a bonny wee thing.”

  “Not that wee anymore.” I was very obviously pregnant now, rounding stomach hugged tight by my black dress. It wouldn’t fit me much longer, but I’d squeezed into it today for luck. It made me look very elegant and adult, and I needed that this afternoon. Because my mother and father had come to London, and they were waiting for me at the Dorchester on Park Lane.

  My mother and I had been telephoning a good deal since I’d come back to London. No matter what she’d said to me when we were last together, she was my mother and I knew she worried about me. “Chérie, you must have some kind of plan,” she’d ventured a few weeks ago. “We’ll meet, we’ll all talk—”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to come back to New York.”

  It was a sign of just how nervous my mother was that she didn’t argue. “Then we’ll come to London. Your father has business there very soon, anyway. I’ll come with him, and we’ll all sit down and make some plans.”

  I already had plans. I’d been refining them these past weeks while sharing Finn’s little bed-sit. We worried about Eve, going almost every day to her house to knock, but it wasn’t just Eve we talked about over our one-pan breakfasts. It was the Rosebud, for whom I was slowly acquiring a proper layette. It was the future and how we could manage it, Finn outlining ideas and me scribbling figures on my bank statements to see how those ideas could be made a reality (and the bankers had no trouble allowing me to withdraw my own money, once I came in with my false wedding ring on). But I wasn’t sure how interested my parents were going to be in my plans. So I prepared for them to tell me what course of action they had decided on, and prepared to say no. Whether I was still underage or not, they were going to find out I was not nearly as easy to push around as I used to be. Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.

  Still, I was afraid this meeting would go awry once I put my foot down, and I didn’t want it to go awry. In spite of everything, I missed my parents. I wanted to tell them I was sorry I’d caused so much trouble, that I understood better now how losing James had wrecked them so utterly. I wanted to say how much I wanted them back.

  “You’re sure you want me to come?” Finn wore the charcoal gray suit he’d worn in Grasse as Donald McGowan, solicitor. (My Donald!) “Your mother didn’t have a very good first impression of me in Roubaix.”

  “You’re not getting out of it that easy, Finn Kilgore. Let’s go.”

  He grinned. “I’ll hail a cab.” The Lagonda was back in the shop, where Finn, when he wasn’t repairing other peoples’ cars, was at work rebuilding her engine. The final dash from Paris really had been too much for the old girl, more’s the pity. It would have given me a great dose of confidence, gliding up to the Dorchester in the Lagonda. She might be scrap metal under the hood, but she was still all style.

  I picked up my hat, a really stunning black confection I’d splurged on because I remembered Eve shaking her head over the queen of spies’s passion for morally questionable hats. This little puff of black gauze and feathers was definitely morally questionable, and I smiled as I tilted it over one eye. “Very nice, Yank,” I imagined Eve saying, and felt the usual lurch in my stomach. The company that had put her house up for sale couldn’t tell us anything; they’d received their instructions by telegram. All we could do was leave a note with Finn’s address, begging her to contact us, and go by the house whenever possible to see if we might catch sight of her. All we’d sighted, a week ago, was a notice on the door that the house had been sold.

  Where are you? It was something Eve seemed content to let us wonder. On the days I wasn’t terrified she was dead, I wanted to kill her myself for making me so afraid.

  “Charlie lass.” Finn’s voice from the open door sounded strange. “Come look at this.”

  I took my pocketbook and joined him at the doorstep. Anything I was about to say died in my throat as I looked out. Sitting low and rakish at the curb outside was an absolute stunner of a car. It gleamed in the morning sun: a convertible in glittering, patrician silver.

  “The ’46 Bentley Mark VI,” Finn whispered, moving toward it like a sleepwalker. “Four and a half liter engine . . . independent front suspension by helical springs . . . divided propeller shaft . . .” He ran an unbelieving hand down the fender.

  But it wasn’t the car, lovely as she was, that started my heart pounding. Tucked under the windshield wiper was a big white envelope with our names in a familiar black scrawl. My mouth went dry as I ripped the envelope open. There was something bulky at the bottom, but it was the single sheet of paper I yanked out first. The note began with no apology, no salutation, no greeting. Of course it didn’t.

  You started the process with Violette, Yank, but I had to find and see the details for myself to believe it. Lili’s name and involvement in the Alice Network were given by a former cellmate, Mlle. Tellier, who, in return for a relaxed sentence, passed the Germans five letters and a confession during the time I was being questioned by René Bordelon. Confirmed with difficulty through trial records, classified documents, and other back-room sources—but confirmed. Also confirmed: Tellier poisoned herself after the Armistice.

  René lied. It wasn’t me.

  You were right.

  I realized I was crying like a helpless thing. But I wasn’t helpless at all. For so long I’d listened to the nasty inner voice telling me I was, that I’d failed my brother, my parents, Rose, myself. But I hadn’t failed Eve. And maybe I hadn’t failed the others as badly as I’d always thought. I’d done what I could for Rose and James—I couldn’t save them, but it wasn’t my fault they died. And I could still fix things with my parents.

  As for Charlotte St. Clair, I could take care of her. She had taken the hopeless mess around her, pared away the meaningless variables, the Y’s and Z’s that didn’t matter, solved for X. She had things broken down to a very simple equation—herself plus Finn plus the Rosebud, and she knew exactly how that equation came out. Eve’s note read on:

  Violette has written me. I’m on my way to France, where the two of us will visit Lili’s grave. After that, I’m going traveling. Will be back in time for the christening. In the meantime, I owe you some pearls and Finn a car.

  Finn took the envelope, upending it. A tangle slid into his big hand: the keys to the Bentley, all tangled up with a string of perfect milky pearls—my pearls. I’d gone back to the pawnshop as soon as I returned to London, but my ticket had expired and they were gone. Yet here they were. I could hardly see them, the tears were dripping so fast. One last line in the note.

  Call it a wedding gift.

  —EVE

  We brought traffic in and out of the Dorchester to a standstill. Porters, bellboys, elegantly hatted men and their white-gloved wives—everyone turned to look as the Bentley came to a halt before the hotel’s facade. She purred like a kitten and ran like a dream, and her pearl gray upholstery cradled me like a hug. Finn could hardly bear to hand the keys to the valet.

  “Take her round,” he said, coming around the fenders toward the passenger side to let me out. “The missus and I are staying for lunch.”

  Under the hotel awning, I saw my mother in a frilly blue dress, my father looking up and down the street. Saw my mother’s gaze linger rather appreciatively on Finn in his handsome suit, saw my father run his eyes over the superb lines of the car—and then saw their lips part in surprise as Finn handed me out in my dashing hat and French pearls.

  “Maman,” I said, linking my arm through Finn’s and smiling. “Dad. I would like to introduce you to Mr. Finn Kilgore. We haven’t made it official yet”—seeing my mother’s eyes dart to my left hand—“but we
’re planning on it, very soon. We’ve got a great many plans for the future, and I want you both to be part of them.”

  My mother began to flutter and my father fluttered too in his more reserved way as Finn offered a hand and I made further introductions. Then as the four of us turned toward the doors of the Dorchester opening into its incredibly elegant inner court, I looked over my shoulder and saw her one last time. Rose stood under the hotel awning in a white summer dress, blond hair ruffling in the breeze. She gave me her impish look, the one I remembered so well, and she waved.

  I waved back, swallowing the thickness in my throat. Smiled. And led the way inside.

  EPILOGUE

  Summer 1949

  The flower fields outside Grasse were in bloom, waves and waves of roses, jasmine, hyacinth. The air was heady, and the café made a beautiful place to sit. Those striped awnings invited you not to hurry on your way to Cannes or Nice, but to put your feet up, order another bottle of rosé, and while away another hour looking over the hills. The lean woman with the silver-touched plait had been there long enough to stack up several empty bottles over the afternoon. Her face was very brown, she wore boots and khaki trousers and a stack of boar-tusk ivory bracelets on one wrist, and she had the seat in the corner that put her back to the wall and her eyes on all possible lines of fire. But she wasn’t thinking about lines of fire at the moment—she watched the cars come and go on the road below.

  “You’ll be waiting awhile,” the café girls had warned when she first came stalking in asking for the owners. “Monsieur and madame drive up to the flower fields every Sunday to picnic. They’ll be hours.”

  “I’ll wait,” Eve said. She was used to waiting. She’d waited more than thirty years to shoot René Bordelon, after all, and ever since then she had spent a good deal of time waiting under a killing sun for game. Shooting René had taught Eve just how much she liked to stalk, hunt, and kill dangerous things. She didn’t care for targeting shy gazelles or graceful giraffes, but the huge wild boars of Poland or the pride of man-eating lions stalking a village in east Africa had proved fair targets for the pair of Lugers sitting oiled and immaculate in the satchel under her chair. And no one on a hunting party cared if she still swore too much, drank too much, and occasionally woke shuddering from nightmares, because it wasn’t uncommon for her fellow hunters to show similar scars. Not on the hands, maybe, but in the eyes—eyes that had seen terrible things and now looked for respite in the world’s more remote and dangerous far corners. There had been a tense, graying English colonel on the last safari who never said a word about Eve’s mangled knuckles as long as she never inquired why he’d left his regiment after El Alamein, who had sat up late over a good many bottles of Scotch and asked if Eve fancied traveling with him this winter to see the pyramids. Perhaps she would. He had long-fingered hands a little like Cameron’s.

  A car rumbled past the café-garage—a Bugatti with the top down, full of whooping Italian boys on their way to the coast. This place saw good business from the fast-living drivers racing along the Riviera roads, Eve judged from the expanded garage. Finn’s silver Bentley was there, the one she’d given him, and next to it a Peugeot with its hood raised and an Aston Martin up on blocks. She could well imagine people coming to the garage for repairs and waiting at the adjoining café, nibbling biscuits with rose jam, drinking too much wine, crooning along to the radio. Edith Piaf was playing now—“Mon Legionnaire,” an old favorite.

  It was late afternoon by the time the car chuffed up the slope: the Lagonda, rolling along at a dignified pace, her dark blue sides still buffed shiny as a dime. It pulled into the garage, and Eve waited, smiling. A moment later out came Charlie in slim black pants and a white blouse, tanned golden-brown, her hair cropped in a sleek bob. She swung a picnic basket in one hand and with the other kept firm hold on a little girl’s dusty smock. Eve wondered how old her goddaughter was, and had no idea. Eighteen months? Eve hadn’t seen her since the christening, and this sharp-chinned blond creature with the furious scowl was very different from the gurgling armful in rose-vine-embroidered frills whom Eve had held over the font. She’d donned her medals for the occasion, worn straight and proud on her shoulder where they belonged, and tiny Evelyn Rose Kilgore had nearly tugged off the Croix de Guerre in her baby fist.

  “Finn,” Charlie was calling over her shoulder. “Stop tinkering. It’s Sunday. You are not allowed to tinker on Sunday.”

  His voice floated out. “Almost done. That old oil leak . . .”

  “Good thing we don’t use the Lagonda for anything but picnics. She’s practically scrap.”

  “Have a little respect, Charlie lass.” Finn came out then, tousled and rangy, collar unbuttoned to show his brown throat. All the café girls were eying that triangle of skin at his neck like they wanted to eat it, but he had one arm around his wife and the other reaching down to pick up the baby. “Och, Evie Rose,” he said in his broadest Scots. “You’re a braw handful, you wee bairn you.”

  “She’s horrible,” Charlie said as her daughter let out a yell that could cut sheet iron. “One cranky baby minus one afternoon nap equals tantrums to the power of ten. Let’s put her down to bed early tonight . . .”

  They hadn’t seen Eve yet, tucked at the farthest table under the shade of the awning. She waved one gnarled hand overhead. Her hands still got their share of stares, and they still weren’t too good at anything but pulling a trigger, but that was all right. Any fleur du mal who lived to be old was entitled to a little wear and tear.

  Seeing the figure waving under the awning, Charlie shaded her eyes and then let out a shout, pelting toward Eve. “You’re g-going to hug me, aren’t you,” Eve said to no one in particular. She sighed, and rose, and went grinning to be hugged. “Goddamn Yanks.”

  Author’s Note

  Louise de Bettignies is a historical figure little known today—and undeservedly so, for the courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness of the woman christened the queen of spies needs no exaggeration to make for thrilling reading. Recruited by one Captain Cecil Aylmer Cameron, who had already set up intelligence operations in Folkestone and who had an eye for talent, former governess Louise de Bettignies took the code name of Alice Dubois (among several, though the nickname of Lili was my own invention) and turned her facility with languages and her organizational flair to the intelligence business. The result was one of the war’s most spectacularly successful spy rings.

  The Alice Network was supplied by Louise’s many sources based in the Lille area, and reported on the local stretch of German front with a speed and accuracy that made British intelligence and military men gush. “The services Louise de Bettignies rendered are inestimable.” “A regular modern day Joan of Arc.” “If anything happened to her, it would be nothing less than a calamity.” The Germans were equally impressed (if incensed) by the uncanny accuracy of the underground information flow, so efficient that new artillery placements were often bombed within days of being set up. Bigger intelligence prizes were unearthed by the Alice Network as well: the Kaiser’s visit where his train narrowly escaped being bombed, and the Verdun objective, which was one of Louise’s last reports (which, tragically, went unbelieved at the command level).

  The leader of the Alice Network was constantly on the move between German-occupied France, free France, Belgium, England, and the Netherlands as she passed reports, collected information, and checked on her agents, and her methods of information smuggling (coded messages wrapped around rings or hairpins, tucked below cakes in cake boxes, slipped between the pages of magazines) are all true as recorded here. Her physical courage was remarkable—she routinely sneaked across the hostile border under German searchlights and armed sentries, the ground littered with the bodies of refugees who had been spotted and shot, and she remained undeterred even after seeing a pair of escapees blown up by a mine scant yards ahead. Perhaps even more remarkable was her ability to think on her feet: Louise de Bettignies had an uncanny ability to bluff her way past checkpoi
nts, whether by juggling packages until an exasperated sentry waved her through, or by utilizing local children in a game of tag to smuggle her a pass (both true incidents). Also true is the remarkable occasion when she was recognized on the way to a rendezvous by a German general who knew her from a chess match played during her governess days, and who gallantly put his car at her disposal.

  Eve Gardiner is a fictional character, but two things about her are very real. One is her stammer—my husband has struggled with a stutter all his life, and his struggles are Eve’s: the periodic difficulty with ordinary conversation, the moments of anger or high emotion that smooth out speech, the frustration and fury at being interrupted, talked over, or automatically assumed to be less intelligent. It was my husband’s idea to give my young WWI spy a stutter and to see her turn it into an asset, to weaponize a weakness and use it against those who would underestimate her. The other real-life influence on Eve’s character is her code name. When Louise de Bettignies’s luck finally ran out in the autumn of 1915, a young woman named Marguerite Le François was arrested with her. In the interrogation that followed over the next few hours, the Germans quickly determined that the terrified young Marguerite was no spy, merely a local girl who had foolishly allowed a friendly stranger to borrow her pass at a checkpoint. She was released, scolded, and told to go home, even as Louise was arrested and transported to prison. The historical Marguerite Le François was very probably just an innocent dupe . . . but what if she wasn’t? As I read a historical account of the arrest where the two women were stripped, searched, and terrorized, where young Marguerite moved the Germans to pity by sobbing and fainting, and Louise incensed them by eating a coded message and then asking for a brandy, I couldn’t help but wonder if the two imprisoned women pulled off their last and best bluff while in German handcuffs. Thus was Eve Gardiner born, and I slid her as a mostly fictional third party into the existing historical duology of Louise and her chief lieutenant.