The Alice Network

  Eve nodded. What else could she do? Her blood thumped cold and slow in her ears.

  “The French can be practical, do not misunderstand me,” he continued. “We do better, historically, with practicality than pride, when we can manage it. Practicality got the head off our king. Pride got us Napoleon. Which was the better plan, in the long run?” He looked at her, considering. “You, I think, are a practical girl. Risking a lie on an identity card for a greater potential gain—that is practicality underscored with boldness.”

  She didn’t want him thinking about how well she could lie. “Are you f-finished with the ledger, monsieur?” she hedged.

  He ignored that. “Your middle name is Duval, I seem to recall? Baudelaire had a Mademoiselle Duval of his own, though she was a Jeanne, not a Marguerite. A Creole girl he plucked from a gutter and turned into a beauty. He called her his Black Venus, and she inspired a good deal of obscenity and passion in these pages.” Patting the volume he’d set aside as she entered. “Honing beauty is more interesting, perhaps, than acquiring beauty already polished. ‘Many a gem lies hidden in darkness and oblivion, far, far away from picks and drills . . .’”

  Another direct, unblinking gaze. “What would picks and drills uncover in you, I wonder?”

  He knows, Eve thought in a moment of pure, frozen panic.

  He knows nothing.

  She exhaled. Lowered her lashes. “Monsieur Baudelaire sounds v-very interesting,” she said. “I shall try to r-read some. Will that be all, m-m-m-m—”

  “Yes.” He handed back the ledger. Eve closed the door and sagged the moment she was out of sight. She was sweating head to toe, and for the first time since arriving in Lille, she wanted to panic. Panic, cower, and run. Anything, just get away.

  Violette was ensconced in the apartment when Eve finally returned from work, stowing her Luger beside Eve’s in the false-bottomed bag. One look at Eve’s white face and she said with a certain resignation, “Nerves?”

  “N-no.” Eve waited until they’d completed the ritual of checking window and door for loiterers, anyone who might eavesdrop on the room as insulated though it was by derelict buildings or stone walls on all sides. “My employer suspects me,” she said, low-voiced.

  Violette looked up sharply. “Has he been asking questions?”

  “No. But he makes conversation. With me, someone who ought to be utterly b-b-beneath him. He kn-knows something’s not right.”

  “Pull yourself together. He can’t read minds.”

  I think he can. Eve knew the thought was ridiculous, but couldn’t banish it.

  “Lili gets good information out of you, so don’t turn yellow-bellied now.” Violette climbed into her makeshift pallet, plucking off her round spectacles. Eve bit her lip to stop herself from begging reassignment, anywhere in Lille where she wouldn’t be under René Bordelon’s unblinking eyes . . . But she couldn’t face Violette’s scorn, and she could not let Lili down. Lili needed her at Le Lethe, and so did Captain Cameron.

  Top-class work.

  Pull yourself together, she lashed herself. What happened to I am Evelyn Gardiner and this is where I belong? You lied to René Bordelon once, and you can go on doing it.

  “Maybe he’s not watching you out of suspicion.” Violette’s voice floated up through the dark, already filled with yawns. “Maybe it’s lust.”

  “No.” Eve laughed curtly, bending to unbutton her shoes. “I’m n-n-not elegant enough. Marguerite Le François is a c-country mouse. Too gauche for him.”

  Despite Violette’s skeptical snort, she was very, very certain of that.

  CHAPTER 13

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  There she was. My mother: lavender scented and beautiful as ever . . . only, the eyes behind the veil of her stylish blue hat were full of tears. That alone stunned me speechless as she enveloped me in a hug.

  “Ma chère, how could you! Dashing off into a strange country!” She was scolding me, but there was the hug, her gloved hand rubbing my back as though I were a baby. She pulled back, giving me a shake. “To worry me like that, and for no reason!”

  “There was a reason,” I managed to say, but she was hugging me again. Two hugs in as many minutes—my mother hadn’t hugged me in recent memory, at least not since before the Little Problem. Even longer. I didn’t quite mean for it to happen, but my arms stole around her cinched waist.

  “Oh, chérie—” She pulled back, dabbing at her eyes, and I found my voice.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Your telephone call from London, you said you were looking for Rose. What else could that mean but that you were haring off to see your Tante Jeanne in Rouen? I took the boat and telephoned her when I arrived in Calais. She said you’d been and gone already, to Roubaix.”

  “How did she know—” But I’d told her myself, hadn’t I? No, Tante, I’m not staying. I have to go to Roubaix. I’d been trying so hard not to shriek at her for how she’d thrown Rose out, I’d given myself away.

  “It’s not a big place, Roubaix.” My mother gestured at the hotel court. “This is only the fourth hotel I’ve checked.”

  What stinking bad luck, I thought, but some part of me was saying in a small voice, She hugged me.

  “Tea,” my mother decided, just as she’d decided in the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton not even a week ago. A handful of days seemed like too small a time to contain Eve and Finn and everything I’d learned about Rose.

  My mother ordered tea and then looked me over anxiously, shaking her head. “You look a mess! Have you been living rough? Mon Dieu—”

  “No, I have money. I—I pawned Grandmaman’s pearls.” The shame of that stung me suddenly; the only thing I had of my mother’s mother, and I’d traded it away for a wild goose chase. “I can get them back, I promise. I have the pawn slip. I’ll pay out of my own savings.”

  “I am just happy to know you weren’t sleeping in a ditch,” my mother said, waving the thought of her mother’s pearls away. That surprised me all over again. My mother, not caring about the pearls she’d always pointedly said should have been left to her? “Traveling alone across the Channel! Chérie, the danger!”

  Not alone, I almost said, but I really didn’t think Maman would be reassured to hear that I’d traveled with an ex-convict and a pistol-toting drunkard. I had a moment’s fervent gratitude that Eve and Finn had already gone upstairs. “I’m sorry I worried you. I never meant—”

  “Your hair,” she clucked, and smoothed a flyaway strand back behind my ear. How did I suddenly feel so small and helpless when I’d spent my last few days breaking Eve’s door down, getting a Luger pointed at my face, crossing the Channel . . . ?

  I straightened in my chair, marshaling arguments. Maman wasn’t going to hear me unless I sounded like a grown woman with a plan, not a sulky child with a temper tantrum. “This wasn’t about me being ungrateful about the Appointment. It was—”

  “I know.” My mother lifted her teacup. “We rushed you, your father and I—”

  “No, it’s not that. It was about Rose.”

  “—with this thing in Switzerland. The Appointment.” That capital letter again. “You panicked when we got off the ship in Southampton.”

  I shrugged. True enough, but—

  “We only want what’s best for you, your father and I.” Reaching out to pat my hand. “All parents do. So we pushed you onto the boat before you knew what was happening.”

  “Did I ruin everything?” I managed to ask, meeting her eyes. “Is it too late now for . . .” I didn’t know how late was too late for the procedure to be safe. I didn’t know anything.

  “We can get another appointment, ma chère. It’s not too late for that.”

  A pang went through my chest, part disappointment and part relief. I felt the Little Problem inside me as though it were vibrating, though my stomach was perfectly still.

  My mother’s hand reached out to cover mine, warm and soft. “It’s frightening, I know. But in these
cases, earlier is safer. Once it’s done, we’ll go home and give you time to rest, reflect—”

  “I don’t want to rest.” I looked up, a familiar thread of anger rising through all my confusion. “I don’t want to go home. I want to try to find Rose, if she’s still alive. Listen to me.”

  My mother sighed. “Surely you aren’t still hanging on to hope for Rose.”

  “Yes,” I stated. “Until I know she’s dead. Because after James, I can’t just write her off. Not without trying everything.”

  She rolled the edge of her napkin with the taut expression she always had at my brother’s name.

  “There’s hope, Maman,” I said, trying to reach her. “It’s too late for James, but maybe we can still save Rose. She left home, and Tante Jeanne told me why.”

  A flicker. Yes, my mother had known. A tendril of anger uncoiled at the thought that she hadn’t seen fit to tell me, but I pressed past it.

  “Rose wouldn’t have wanted to come back to her family after something like that. She might still be in Limoges. If she’s there, then we have to find her.”

  “And you?” My mother looked at me. “You can’t put your future on hold for her. Charlotte St. Clair is just as important as Rose Fournier. Rose herself would be the first to say so.”

  I looked across the hotel court, wondering if I’d see Rose’s blond head, her outline. Nothing.

  “The Appointment.” Maman’s voice was gentle. “Let me take you to the clinic, ma chère.”

  “What if I don’t want an Appointment?” The words came from nowhere. They surprised me as much as my mother.

  She looked at me a moment, then sighed. “If you had a ring on your finger, that would be another matter. We’d put the wedding forward, you’d be a beautiful bride and six months later a beautiful mother. These things happen.”

  They did. That was a bit of math all women understood: how a wedding ring plus a premature baby still magically equaled respectability.

  “But your situation is different, Charlotte. Without a fiancé . . .”

  She trailed off, and I winced. I knew what happened to unmarried girls who had babies. No one talked about them, but you knew. Nobody wanted to marry bad girls or give them jobs, their families were ashamed of them, and their friends didn’t speak to them. Their lives were ruined.

  “There isn’t any other option,” Maman pressed. “One little procedure, and you’ll have your life back.”

  I couldn’t say I didn’t yearn for normality again. I drew a finger around the rim of my teacup.

  “Please, chérie.” Maman abandoned her cooling tea, stretching both hands across the little table to clasp mine. “We’ll take up the hunt for Rose again, if that’s truly what you want. But won’t you do what’s right for your future first?”

  “I’ll go to the clinic,” I said around the lump in my throat. “After that, we look for Rose. Promise me that, Maman. Please.”

  Her hands squeezed mine. “I promise.”

  I couldn’t sleep.

  The Little Problem had flattened me with another wave of exhaustion, so I should have slept like a rock. My mother had upgraded the room I’d reserved for a nicer one beside her own, and I’d eaten a good dinner brought up on a silver tray rather than the usual packet of dry sandwiches. I was able to trade my much-rinsed-out nylon slip for a nightgown borrowed from my mother. I no longer had to worry about screams in the night from crazy Englishwomen or what would happen when my money ran out, because Maman was here to take care of everything.

  But even after she retired to her own room with a kiss to my forehead, I tossed and turned in my cool hotel sheets. Finally I got up, shrugged into a borrowed bathrobe and slippers, grabbed my cigarettes, and headed for fresh air.

  All I wanted was a balcony, but the French doors at the end of the hotel hall were locked. I ended up trailing down to the darkened main floor, too irritated to care about the startled look the night clerk gave me as I passed to the street outside.

  A quarter moon and a few streetlights did little to break the darkness. Past two in the morning, according to the clock I’d passed in the hotel court—sleepy little Roubaix was dead to the world. I pulled out a Gauloise, patting my robe for matches, and caught sight of something a dozen feet down on the curb. A gleam of dark blue metal.

  “Hello there,” I told the Lagonda, strolling to pat her sleek fender. “I must admit, I’m going to miss you.”

  “She’s flattered.” A low Scots burr came from inside the backseat, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “What are you doing out here?” I hoped Finn couldn’t see my disheveled self too well in the dark. Why, why hadn’t I asked my mother to take us to a different hotel? It was embarrassing, hanging about the same hotel as Eve and Finn like I was still hoping for something from them. We were like actors who had missed the cue that their scene was over. Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.

  Finn’s tousled dark head leaned out the window, and I saw the ember glow of his cigarette. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  I thrust my hands into my pockets, unlit cigarette and all, so I wouldn’t start patting my hair. Is there any ensemble less glamorous and appealing in the entire world than a bathrobe and slippers? “Do you always climb into your car when you can’t sleep?” I managed to say tartly.

  Finn rested his bare elbow on the Lagonda’s rolled-down window. “She’s calming. Good cure for bad dreams.”

  “I thought Eve was the one who had bad dreams.”

  “I get my share.”

  I wondered what they were about. I didn’t ask, just patted the fender again. Strange to think I wouldn’t be driving off in her in the morning. Tomorrow it would be a train to Vevey for me, and then—what did they have in Switzerland to ferry girls to their Appointments? Cabs with cuckoo clocks? Drivers in wooden clogs? I shivered in the summer night.

  Finn opened the Lagonda’s door, sliding across to the far side of the seat. “Get in if you’re cold.”

  I wasn’t, but I climbed in anyway. “Can I have a light?”

  He flicked a match. The brief flare gave me a shot of his profile and then left me night-blinded, wrapped in shadows. I drew in a mouthful of smoke, letting it out slowly. “How did you end up with a car like this?” I asked just to be saying something. If you weren’t in the backseat of a car to make out, it seemed appropriate to make polite conversation.

  “Inherited a little money from an uncle,” he said, surprising me. He rarely answered direct questions, not with the truth anyway. “He wanted me to go to school, make something of myself. But a boy with engine grease under his nails has other ideas when he gets his hands on some silver.”

  “You mean he goes out and spends every cent on the car of his dreams.” I could almost hear Finn smile.

  “Aye. Couldn’t quite stretch to a Bentley, but I found this girl here, being driven to scrap by a bawface idiot. I bought her, fixed her up, and she liked me right away.” Finn thumped the seat, affectionate. “During the war, most of the soldiers I knew had pictures of their lasses. Maybe their mother, if they were fresh out of school. I didn’t have a lass, so I had a picture of my car.”

  I pictured Finn in a uniform and a helmet, looking at a snap of the Lagonda on the deck of a transport ship. The thought made me smile.

  He tossed his cigarette butt and lit another, match flaring in the dark. “So you’re off tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “My mother found me here. We’re off for Vevey in the morning.”

  “Not Limoges? I thought you were ready to burn Limoges down to find your cousin.”

  “Limoges later. This”—I waved at the Little Problem, even though he probably couldn’t see the gesture—“won’t wait much longer, Maman says. What do I know, I’m just the girl who got in trouble.”

  “And Vevey is where you go for—trouble?”

  “You never heard of a Swiss vacation?” I stretched my lips in a smile. “It’s where girls like me go.
”

  “Thought they went down the aisle in a white dress.”

  “Only if they’ve got a boy on the hook.”

  He had that grim Scottish amusement in his voice. “Unless you’re the Holy Virgin, you’ve got a lad on the hook.”

  I gave a harsh little laugh. “Finn, I’ve got half a fraternity on the hook. And I can’t marry all of them.”

  I wondered if he’d exhale disapproval. If he’d pull away. But he just sat on the other end of the soft upholstered seat, looking at me through the dark. “What happened?”

  If it had been broad daylight, I couldn’t have said it. It was all so cheap and commonplace, so stupid. But the enveloping shadows were kind, and I turned my head so he’d only be able to see my profile and the glowing tip of my cigarette. My voice come out flat and matter-of-fact.

  “If you’re a girl, you’re divided up into three neat parts.” The fractions of dating, as I thought of it, and even the dumbest girls in my sorority knew exactly how to add those fractions up. “There are the parts boys can touch,” I went on, “the parts boys can touch if you’re engaged or at least pinned, and the parts they can’t touch till you’re married. Everybody knows the map. But boys try anyway, because that’s what boys do, because we say no. Boys try, girls deny. That’s the dance.”

  I stopped, tapping my cigarette out the window. The air smelled cooler—summer rain on the way, I thought. Finn sat silent.

  “My brother was one of those soldiers who didn’t adjust too well to being home. And by that I mean he ate a shotgun.” Brains and blood splattered everywhere, a neighbor had said incautiously, not realizing I was in earshot to hear the gory details my parents had kept from me. I’d run inside and vomited, not able to shake that terrible image from my eyes. “My parents were . . . I came home from Bennington early that semester, so I could take care of them.” Bringing my mother flowers, tying my father’s tie for him, making burned meat loaf when it was clear no one else could manage Sunday lunch. Trying anything at all that would help fix how terribly broken they’d become.