The Alice Network

  I looked at her, and I enunciated it carefully: “Coward.”

  I thought she’d explode. But she just sat, braced as if for a blow, and I saw blind panic at the back of her eyes. She didn’t want her old enemy to be alive. So he wasn’t. It was that simple.

  “Fine, then. See if I care.” I reached for my pocketbook and counted out the money I owed her, subtracting what I’d just paid for her hotel room. “Payment in full. Try not to drink it all in one place.”

  She rose, gathering up the banknotes. Without a word of farewell she took her room key and stalked off toward the stairs.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe for her to tell me more about Lille and the Great War. Why her hands were . . . I don’t know. I sat at the little table like a helpless fool, feeling abandoned, wishing I hadn’t thrown my arm around her waist in the china shop and let her lean on me. Because even after she deduced the Little Problem’s presence and was tactless enough to say so, some part of me still wanted her respect. She wasn’t like any woman I’d ever met; she talked to me as though I were a grown woman rather than a child—yet just now, she’d flicked me aside like a cigarette stub. See if I care, I’d said. Well, I did.

  You don’t need her, I scolded myself. You don’t need anyone.

  Finn came up, toting my traveling case over one shoulder. “Where’s Gardiner?”

  I rose. “She says we’re done.”

  His smile disappeared. “You’re off, then?”

  “I’ve already paid for the rooms, so you and Eve may as well stay tonight. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she wants to bolt back to London tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Limoges. My cousin might be there. Or someone who knew her.” I aimed a bright, nonspecific smile at Finn, ducking his gaze.

  “Now?”

  “Tomorrow.” I felt too drained to go anywhere this afternoon, and I’d paid for my room as well as theirs.

  “Well, then.” He brushed the hair out of his eyes, handing over my traveling case. I wondered if he was sorry or relieved to see me go. Probably relieved. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. Sorry I made you think I was a tramp. Sorry I didn’t sleep with you. So I really am a tramp. Sorry about that. But instead I blurted out the only other thing I could think of that wasn’t about me climbing into his lap and gluing my lips to his.

  “How did you end up in prison?”

  “Took the Mona Lisa right off the wall of the British Museum,” he replied, straight-faced.

  “The Mona Lisa isn’t even hanging in the British Museum,” I objected.

  “Not anymore it’s not.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Even managed to meet his eyes for a split second. “Good luck, Mr. Kilgore.”

  “Good luck, miss.” And my heart expanded a little, hearing the miss.

  But after Finn left, I couldn’t bring myself to go up to my room yet. Another wave of utter exhaustion hit me, and besides, sitting alone in a hotel room seemed sadder than sitting in a busy hotel court. I ordered another coffee and sat staring at it.

  It’ll be easier on your own, I told myself. No more crazy old bat pointing a pistol at you. No more insults, no more getting slowed down by Eve’s hangovers and the fact that she can’t travel except in a beat-up tin can of a car. No more Scottish convicts making me act like the kind of girl who gets herself into the kind of pickle I’m already in. No more being called Yank. You can go look for Rose all by yourself, free and clear.

  All by myself. It shouldn’t have felt so strange—I was used to being alone. I’d been alone since I’d parted from Rose before the war, really. Alone in the middle of a bustling family who hardly knew I was there; alone in the middle of a giggling dorm with sorority sisters who didn’t know I was there either.

  Buck up, I told myself fiercely as a bellboy brushed past. Just buck up. Don’t be sorry for yourself, Charlie St. Clair, because that is just so goddamn boring.

  Eve had rubbed off on me. I was swearing all the time now, just like her. Even if just in my head.

  You’re a bad influence on me, the Little Problem said.

  Be quiet, I told my own stomach. You’re not real. I’m not hearing you.

  Says who?

  Wonderful. The Little Problem was now talking. First hallucinations, and now voices.

  Then I heard an enchantingly modulated shriek behind me. “Charlotte! Oh, ma p’tite, how could you—” And I turned, sweat cold on my forehead, to see that my mother had found me.

  CHAPTER 12

  EVE

  July 1915

  It was a very organized, very tidy robbery. They arrived at noon: the German officer, a folder under his arm, two soldiers flanking him. The knock sounded, both brutal and officious, and so was the officer’s tone as he snapped, “Copper inspection!” It was all plainly just an excuse. The room clearly contained no copper sheeting or piping to be seized for the German metal drive.

  Eve knew what to do, well briefed by Lili and Violette. She handed over her papers and stood against the wall as they ransacked everything, not that there was much to find or take. Except, of course, Eve’s Luger in the false bottom of her decrepit carpetbag. Also her latest report for Lili, statistics of the next shipment of aeroplanes to be brought to guard Lille’s airspace and the arrival date of the pilots to fly them. Details eavesdropped as Eve brought crème brûlée and kirschtorte to a pair of German captains doing business over dessert. Details on the usual rice-paper slip, pinned into her hair.

  How the officer and his men would love to find those.

  So Eve looked down at her toes in an apparent agony of embarrassment as her clothes were ransacked and her mattress prodded. Her heart iced briefly as her carpetbag was lifted and rattled, but the pistol was well padded, and the bag passed muster.

  One of the soldiers yanked down Eve’s curtain rod, inspecting it. “Useless,” he said, tossing it aside, but not before yanking Eve’s curtains off and stuffing them into a sack with a sidelong glance as if to ask if she’d protest. She didn’t, just inhaled her rage and let it out again. The petty small things she saw every day drove her far closer to the brink than the large. Eve didn’t mind that the Germans had the right to shoot her nearly as much as she minded having them walk into her room and steal her curtains.

  “You hiding anything, Fraulein?” the soldier asked, dropping a hand along the back of Eve’s neck. “Fresh food? Meat, maybe?”

  His fingers stroked mere inches away from the coded message in Eve’s hair. She met his gaze with wide, innocent eyes, not caring if he groped her as long as he didn’t find the little roll of paper. “No, monsieur.”

  They swaggered out with their sack of pilfered items, Eve remembering to curtsy and murmur her thanks when the officer noted everything in his folder and issued her a bon—a voucher—for her curtains. Bons were worth nothing, but the forms must be observed. That was the lesson the invaders had taught the French.

  For nearly a month now, Eve had plied her two trades in Lille. She slipped into Marguerite Le François every morning the moment she slipped out from between her sheets, putting on the new identity so easily that at times she forgot she wasn’t Marguerite. Marguerite kept to her room unless she was out buying food, drawing as little attention to herself as possible. Marguerite murmured greetings to the family who lived across the street, a haggard mother and several skinny children, and she offered a shy smile to the baker whenever he apologized for the rocklike bread. Her silence didn’t distinguish her. Most of Lille was similarly withdrawn, bemused into apathy by hunger and boredom, monotony and fear.

  Such were the days, but Eve’s nights made the grayness all worthwhile. Six nights a week she labored in Le Lethe—and at least once each week, she heard something worth reporting to Lili.

  “I wish I knew how much g-good any of it does,” she confessed to the head of the Alice Network one long July night. The fleeting visits from Lili were like splashes of champagne in an existence of weak tea—moments when she shook
off Marguerite like a drab dress and turned back into Eve. “How do we know what any of it is w-w—any of it is worth?”

  “We don’t.” Lili eased Eve’s latest report into a split seam of her bag. “We report what we think helps, and then hope to God it does.”

  “Have you ever reported something you kn-kn-knew made a difference?” Eve persisted.

  “A few times. What a feeling!” A kiss of the fingertips. “But don’t fret, Uncle Edward says to tell you that you are doing top-class work. What is this British thing, putting everything into classes? It’s like you never get over having gone to public school.” Lili gave Eve her swift impish smile. “There, I’ve made you blush!”

  Top-class work. Eve hugged those words at night in bed. The mattress was hard and thin; the nights hot and broken by the distant rumbling of shell fire—but in Lille, despite the danger around her, Eve slept like a baby. She never ate enough despite the nightly allotment of scraps from the restaurant; she was worked off her feet and lived cheek by jowl with fear; she’d lost weight and the glow from her cheeks, and sometimes thought she’d commit murder for a good cup of coffee—but she slept with a smile and woke each morning with the one individual thought she allowed herself before becoming Marguerite for the day.

  This is where I belong.

  Eve wasn’t the only one to feel that way. “Putain de merde,” Lili sighed one evening as she shuffled her handful of identity cards, trying to decide whether to become Marie the sewing girl or Rosalie the laundress when she left tomorrow. “However shall I manage when the war is over and I have to go back to being just me? How boring that will be.”

  “You’re not b-boring.” Eve smiled up at the ceiling, lying flat on her back on the bony mattress. “I’m boring. I f-f-filed letters and l-lived in a boardinghouse sharing my supper scraps with a cat.” She couldn’t believe she ever managed to live that way.

  “That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

  “Will we be bored to death when this w-war is over and so are our jobs?” Eve wondered idly. The war loomed so all-encompassing, she couldn’t imagine it ever being over. Last August everyone swore it would be done by Christmas, but being here just a few miles from the trenches, with the boom of guns in the background and the clocks permanently turned to German time, told a very different story.

  “We’ll have different jobs when the war is over.” Lili shuffled her handful of identity cards like a fan. “I should like to do something splendid, shouldn’t you? Something extraordinary.”

  Lili already was extraordinary, Eve thought. Not like me. The thought held no envy—it was what made them both good at what they did now. Lili’s job was to be anyone, to shift with a few tricks of posture or grammar from one persona to another, whether seamstress or laundress or cheese seller. And if Lili’s job was to be anyone, Eve’s was to be no one, to be unobserved and unnoticed at all times.

  And as the weeks passed, that became worrying. Because someone had taken notice of her.

  René Bordelon lingered in the restaurant that night after the last guest departed. He sometimes did, lighting a cigar and enjoying it alone as his staff silently cleaned up around him. He played bon vivant host among the Germans, but of his own accord he seemed to swim as solitary as a shark. He lived alone, he sometimes left the restaurant to the headwaiter’s charge and attended plays or concerts, he took the afternoon air in a flawless cashmere coat and swinging a silver-headed walking stick. Eve wondered what he thought about on those nights when he let the restaurant close about him, smiling at the black windows. Perhaps he simply smiled at his profit margins. Eve steered clear. Ever since he guessed her accent and forced her to give up her birthplace, she’d given him a wide berth.

  But he didn’t always allow that.

  “Put away the record,” he said as Eve came out to clear the tables. The gramophone in the corner that occasionally provided discreet background music for a German patron with a fondness for the music of his homeland was hissing at the end of a recording. “One grows tired of Schubert.”

  Eve crossed to the gramophone at the edge of his vision. It was past midnight; her employer sat in a pool of candlelight at the corner table with a glass of cognac. All the other tables were empty, their pristine cloths splashed with wine and tart crumbs and a few scattered glasses. The bustle of the cooks straightening the kitchens filtered in faintly, barely disturbing the silence. “Do you want another record, monsieur?” Eve murmured. All she wanted was to finish her shift, get home, and write down the train schedules for wounded troops coming in from the front, a nugget she’d heard just this evening . . .

  He set aside his cognac. “Why don’t I provide the music instead?”

  “Monsieur?”

  There was a piano in the corner, a baby grand draped in a fantastically embroidered shawl and adorned with candles, giving the impression that Le Lethe was not a restaurant at all, merely a private home with the best of chefs. Eve’s employer strolled to it unhurriedly, taking a seat and running his extraordinarily long fingers across the keys. He began to play, a fragile melody that rose and fell like the sound of rain. “Satie,” he said. “One of the Gymnopédies. Do you know them?”

  Eve did. Marguerite would not. “No, monsieur,” she said, whisking stray napkins and discarded forks onto her tray. “I know nothing about m-m-music.”

  “Shall I educate you?” He continued to play, the melody soft and lulling. “Satie is an Impressionist, but less indulgent than Débussy. He has a clarity and elegance that is uniquely French, I have always thought. He evokes melancholy without unnecessary flourishes. Like a beautiful woman in a perfectly simple dress, who knows not to tart it up with too many scarves.” His eyes drifted briefly to Eve. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever had an elegant dress.”

  “No, monsieur.” Eve moved a discarded pair of wineglasses onto her tray, one empty, one with a few swallows of perfect golden wine inside. She kept her eyes on that wine, because anything was better than looking at her employer. In any ordinary restaurant, the cooks would swig the glass empty as soon as Eve brought it back, but not here. They’d decant those three swallows of wine back into the bottle, because even in a restaurant awash with the fruits of the black market, liquor couldn’t be wasted. Unlike the leftover food, leftover wine was not divvied up among the staff at the end of the night. Everyone from the surliest chef to the most arrogant waiter knew René Bordelon was perfectly capable of dismissing them over three stolen swallows of white wine.

  Eve’s employer was still musing aloud against the rise and fall of the piano, drawing her attention again. “If the metaphor of an elegant dress without frills does not instruct you, then perhaps one could compare Satie’s music to a perfect, dry Vouvray. Elegant, but spare.” He inclined his head toward the glass on Eve’s tray. “Try it, and see if you agree.”

  He was smiling faintly, perhaps just indulging an idle whim? Eve hoped so. Hoped fervently it wasn’t something else. Whatever his motivation, she couldn’t refuse, so she raised the glass and sipped like an uncertain little girl. She considered a splutter, but that might be overdoing it, so she merely offered a nervous smile as she replaced the empty glass. “Thank you, monsieur.”

  He nodded her out without another word, to Eve’s relief. Do not notice me, she wanted to beg, stealing a glance back at that solitary figure at the piano. I am no one. But she wasn’t sure her employer believed that. He’d dismissed her carefully crafted anonymity the day he decided her vowels didn’t match her identity card, and he still seemed to be looking. Wondering, perhaps, if Marguerite Le François had any more secrets to uncover.

  Two nights later, Le Lethe’s owner retired at the end of the evening. But the senior waiter sent Eve upstairs with the night’s takings, and there was that faint smile again when she entered the
lavish study.

  “Mademoiselle,” he remarked, lowering his book and marking the page. “The nightly take?”

  Eve bobbed silently and handed the ledger over. He flipped the pages, noting a smudge here and an unusual booking there, jotting a note down, and then he remarked out of nowhere, “Baudelaire.”

  “I’m sorry, monsieur?”

  “The marble bust at which you are staring. It is a replica of a bust of Charles Baudelaire.”

  Eve was only looking at it because she’d look at anything in this room except her employer. She registered the small bust on the shelf, blinked. “Yes, monsieur.”

  “Do you know Baudelaire?”

  Marguerite, Eve thought, wouldn’t be believable if she was a complete ignoramus—M. Bordelon had already discarded, unfortunately, the idea that she was stupid. “I’ve h-heard of him.”

  “The Flowers of Evil are some of the greatest poems ever penned.” A checkmark went into the ledger. “Poetry is like passion—it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise. Baudelaire understood that. He combines the sweet with the obscene, but he does it with elegance.” A smile. “It’s a very French thing, making obscenity elegant. The Germans try, and they are merely vulgar.”

  Eve wondered if his obsession with all things elegant could possibly be as strong as his preference for all things French. “Yes, monsieur.”

  He looked amused. “You are puzzled, mademoiselle.”

  “Am I?”

  “That I serve the Germans, but find them vulgar.” He shrugged. “They are vulgar. There is little to do with such vulgar people but make money off them. More people should understand that. Most of Lille chooses spite and starvation over practicality and money. They embrace the motto, to quote Baudelaire, of ‘I’d sooner while alive invite the ravens to drain the blood from my filthy corpse’ than serve a German. But pride like that will not leave you the victor in the field.” He caressed the spine of his ledger with that long finger. “It will leave you the carcass on which the ravens dine.”