The Alice Network

  “I’m pregnant,” I told her the third time she tutted at me. “Do you want to change seats now?” She stiffened and got off at the next stop, dragging her grandchildren with her even as they whined, “Nana, we’re not supposed to get off till—” I set my chin at the I don’t care angle, meeting her final disapproving glance, and then sagged back into my seat as the door banged and left me alone. I pressed my hands to my flushed cheeks, giddy and confused and hopeful and guilty. So many emotions that I was nearly drowning, missing my numb shell. What on earth was wrong with me?

  Running off into England with an address and a name, my sharp inner voice said. What do you think you can do? You’re such a helpless mess, how are you supposed to help anyone else?

  I winced. I’m not helpless.

  Yes, you are. The last time you tried to help anyone, look what happened.

  “And now I’m trying again,” I said aloud to the empty compartment. Helpless mess or not, I was here.

  Night had fallen by the time I staggered, weary and starving, off the train in London. I trudged out into the streets, and the city rolled out in front of me in one huge dark smoky mass; in the distance I saw the outline of the great clock tower over Westminster. I stood there a moment as cars splashed past, wondering how London would have looked just a few years ago when this fog would have been scythed by Spitfires and Messerschmitts, and then I shook out of my reverie. I had no idea where 10 Hampson Street might be, and only a few coins left in my pocketbook. As I hailed a cab, I prayed it would be enough. I really didn’t relish having to yank a pearl off my grandmother’s necklace just to pay for a taxi ride. Maybe I shouldn’t have left that waitress a whole pound . . . But I wasn’t sorry.

  The driver took me to what he said was Pimlico and dumped me at a line of tall row houses. It had started to rain in earnest. I looked around for my hallucination, but there was no flash of blond hair. Just a dark street, the spitting rain, the worn steps of number 10 climbing to a dingy peeling door. I hoisted my case, clambered up, and banged the knocker before my courage deserted me.

  No answer. I banged again. The rain was falling harder, and despair rose in me like a wave. I pounded and pounded until my fist ached, until I saw the minute twitch of the curtain beside the door.

  “I know someone’s in there!” I wrenched the door handle, blinded by rain. “Let me in!”

  To my surprise the handle turned, and I flew inside, falling at last off my impractical shoes. I hit the floor of the dark hallway on my knees, tearing my stockings, and then the door banged shut and I heard the click of a pistol being cocked.

  Her voice was low, graveled, slurred, ferocious. “Who are you, and what the bloody fuck are you doing in my house?”

  The streetlamps sent a blurry light through the curtains, half-illuminating the dark hallway. I could see a tall gaunt figure, a straggle of hair, the fiery end of a lit cigarette. The gleam of light off a pistol barrel, pointing straight at me.

  I should have been terrified, recoiling from the shock and the gun and the language. But fury had swept aside the last piece of my feel-nothing fog, and I gathered my legs under me to stand, torn stocking snagging. “I’m looking for Evelyn Gardiner.”

  “I don’t care who you’re looking for. If you don’t tell me why I’ve got a damned Yank breaking into my house, I’ll shoot you. I’m old and I’m drunk, but this is a Luger nine-millimeter P08 in excellent condition. Drunk or sober I can take the back of your skull out at this range.”

  “I’m Charlie St. Clair.” Pushing the wet hair out of my eyes. “My cousin Rose Fournier went missing in France during the war, and you might know how to find her.”

  Abruptly the electric wall lamp switched on. I blinked in the rush of harsh light. Standing over me was a tall gaunt woman in a faded print dress, her graying hair straggling around a time-ravaged face. She could have been fifty, or she could have been seventy. She had the Luger in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other; she kept the pistol steadily trained on my forehead as she raised the cigarette to her lips and took a long drag. Bile rose in my throat as I saw her hands. Good God, what had happened to her hands?

  “I’m Eve Gardiner,” she said at last. “And I don’t know anything about this cousin of yours.”

  “You might,” I said desperately. “You might—if you’ll just talk to me.”

  “That’s your plan, little Yank?” Her hooded storm-gray eyes surveyed me like a contemptuous bird of prey. “Burst into my house at nightfall, no plan, and I’m betting no money, on the chance I’d know something about your m-missing friend?”

  “Yes.” Faced with her gun and her scorn I couldn’t explain why, why the chance to find Rose had turned suddenly all-consuming in my wrecked life. I couldn’t explain this strange savage desperation, or why I had let it drive me here. I could only state the truth: “I had to come.”

  “Well.” Eve Gardiner lowered her pistol. “I suppose you’ll want t-tea.”

  “Yes, tea would be—”

  “I don’t have any.” She turned and made her way back down the dark hall, walking long-strided and careless. Her bare feet looked like an eagle’s claws. She weaved a little as she walked, the Luger swinging freely at her side, and I saw she still had a finger through the trigger. Crazy, I thought. The old cow is crazy.

  And her hands—they were monstrous knobbed lumps, every knuckle misshapen and grotesque. They looked more like lobster claws than hands.

  “Keep up,” she said without turning, and I scurried after her. She struck a door open and flicked on a light, and I saw a cold sitting room—a mess of a place, grate unlit, drapes drawn so no chink of light could come in off the street, old newspapers and dirty tea mugs lying everywhere.

  “Mrs. Gardiner—”

  “Miss.” She flung herself down in a shabby armchair overlooking the whole messy room, tossing her pistol down on the table beside it. I winced, but the thing didn’t go off. “And you can call me Eve. You’ve f-forced your way into my house, so that’s a level of intimacy I’m already disliking you for. What’s a name?”

  “I didn’t mean to force my way—”

  “Yes, you did. You want something, and you want it badly. What is it?”

  I struggled out of my wet raincoat and sat down on a hassock, suddenly uncertain where to start. I’d been so focused on getting here, I hadn’t thought how exactly I should begin. Two girls times eleven summers, divided by one ocean and one war . . .

  “G-get on with it.” Eve seemed to have a faint stutter, but I couldn’t tell if it was drink or some other impediment. She reached for a crystal decanter sitting beside the pistol, unstoppering it with some clumsy maneuvering of her mangled fingers, and I smelled whiskey. “I’ve got limited hours of sobriety left, so I suggest you don’t waste them.”

  I sighed. Not just a crazy old bat, but a drunk old bat. With a name like Evelyn Gardiner, I’d been picturing someone with privet hedges and a rolled bun, not a decanter of whiskey and a loaded pistol. “Would you mind if I smoked?”

  She tilted her bony shoulder in a shrug, and as I hauled out my Gauloises, she hunted for a glass. Nothing in arm’s length, so she sloshed a measure of amber liquid into a flowered teacup. God, I thought as I lit my cigarette, half fascinated and half appalled. Who are you?

  “It’s rude to stare,” she said, staring back at me just as frankly. “Christ, all that ruffly stuff you’ve got on—is that what women are wearing these days?”

  “Don’t you ever get out?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Not much.”

  “It’s the New Look. Modeled after the latest from Paris.”

  “It looks b-bloody uncomfortable.”

  “It is.” I took a grim drag on my cigarette. “All right. I’m Charlie St. Clair, well, Charlotte, just arrived from New York—” My mother, what would she be thinking right now? She’d be furious and frantic and ready to scalp me. But I thrust that aside. “My father’s American, but my mother’s French. Before the war we sp
ent summers in France, with my French cousins. They lived in Paris, and had a summer house outside Rouen.”

  “Your childhood sounds like a Degas picnic.” Eve took a slug of her whiskey. “Make this m-more interesting, or I’m going to drink a lot faster.”

  It was like a Degas painting. I could close my eyes and those summers blurred into one long hazy season: the narrow twisting streets, the old copies of Le Figaro lying about the big rambling summer house with its stuffed attics and worn sofas, the haze of greenery with the sun filtering through and lighting up all the dust motes.

  “My cousin Rose Fournier—” I felt tears prick my eyes. “She’s my first cousin, but she’s like my older sister. She’s two years ahead of me, but she never shut me out. We shared everything, told each other everything.”

  Two little girls in grass-stained summer dresses, playing tag and climbing trees and waging furious battle against our combined brothers. Then two older girls, Rose with the beginning of a bosom and me still scrape kneed and gangly, both of us warbling along with jazz records and sharing a giggly crush on Errol Flynn. Rose the daring one with one outlandish scheme after another, me the devoted shadow she shielded like a lioness when her schemes got us into trouble. Her voice came at me, so suddenly it was like she was standing in the room: “Charlie, hide in my room and I’ll stitch your dress up before your mother sees that rip. I shouldn’t have taken you climbing over those rocks—”

  “Please don’t cry,” Eve Gardiner said. “I cannot stand crying women.”

  “I can’t either.” I hadn’t cried a drop in weeks, I’d been too numb, but now my eyes burned. I blinked fiercely. “The last time I saw Rose was the summer of ’39. Everyone was worried about Germany—well, except us. Rose was thirteen and I was eleven; we just wanted to sneak out to the movies every afternoon, and that seemed a lot more important than anything happening in Germany. Poland got invaded right after I went back to the States. My parents wanted Rose’s family to come to America, but they kept dithering—” Rose’s mother, convinced she was too delicate to travel. “Before they could make the arrangements, France fell.”

  Eve took another sip of whiskey, her hooded eyes unblinking. I took another steadying drag on my cigarette.

  “I got letters,” I said. “Rose’s father was important, an industrialist—he had connections, so the family could get word out now and then. Rose sounded cheerful. Kept talking about when we’d see each other again. But we had the news, everybody knew what was happening there: swastikas flying over Paris, people getting carted off in trucks and never seen again. I’d write her begging to know if she was really all right, and she always said she was, but . . .” In the spring of ’43, we’d traded photographs since it had been so long since we’d seen each other—Rose had been seventeen and so pretty, striking a pin-up pose and grinning at the camera. I had the photograph in my pocketbook now, worn and soft at the edges.

  “Rose’s last letter talked about a boy she’d been seeing on the sly. She said there had been much excitement.” I took a shaky breath. “That was early in ’43. I heard nothing from Rose after that, nothing from any of her family.”

  Eve watched me, her ravaged face like a mask. I couldn’t tell if she pitied me, had contempt for me, or didn’t care at all.

  My cigarette was almost down to the nub. I took a last deep drag, and stubbed it out in a tea saucer already overflowing with ash. “I knew it didn’t mean anything, Rose not writing. Wartime mail is hell. We just had to wait for the war to be over, and then the letters would start getting through. But the war ended, and—nothing.”

  More silence. It was harder than I’d thought it would be, saying all this. “We made inquiries. It took forever, but we got some answers. My French uncle had died in ’44, shot while trying to get black market medicine for my aunt. Rose’s two brothers died in late ’43, a bomb. My aunt’s still alive—my mother wanted her to come live with us, but she wouldn’t, just walled herself up in the house outside Rouen. And Rose—”

  I swallowed. Rose sauntering ahead of me through the green haze of trees. Rose cursing in French, yanking a brush through her unruly curls. Rose at that Provençal café, on the happiest day of my whole life . . .

  “Rose vanished. She left her family in ’43. I don’t even know why. My father put out inquiries, but Rose’s trail after the spring of ’44 came to a dead end. Nothing.”

  “A lot of dead ends in that war,” Eve said, and I was surprised to hear her gravelly voice after speaking myself for so long. “Lots of people disappeared. You surely don’t think she’s still alive? It’s been two years since the bloody w-war ended.”

  I gritted my teeth. My parents had long concluded Rose must be dead, lost in the chaos of war, and the odds were they were right, but— “We don’t know for sure.”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’d have f-felt it if she died.”

  “You don’t have to believe me. Just help me.”

  “Why? What the hell has all this got to do with m-me?”

  “Because my father’s last inquiry was to London, seeing if Rose might have emigrated here from France. There was a bureau helping to locate refugees.” I took a deep breath. “You worked there.”

  “In ’45 and ’46.” Eve tipped more whiskey into her flowered teacup. “I was fired last Christmas.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because I came to work sloshed. Maybe because I told my supervisor she was a spiteful old cunt.”

  I couldn’t help recoiling. I’d never in my life heard anyone swear like Eve Gardiner, much less a woman.

  “So—” She swirled her whiskey. “I’m guessing the file on your cousin crossed my desk? I d-don’t remember. As I said, I came to work sloshed a fair amount.”

  I’d never seen a woman drink like this either. My mother’s drink was sherry, two tiny glasses at most. Eve was knocking straight whiskey back like water, and her voice was starting to slur. Maybe the faint stammer was just drink.

  “I got a copy of the report on Rose,” I said desperately before I lost her for good, either to disinterest or whiskey. “It had your signature. That’s how I got your name. I telephoned pretending I was your niece from America. They gave me your address. I was going to write you, but—” Well, my Little Problem had seeded itself in my belly right about then. “Are you sure you don’t remember if there were any other findings on Rose? It could be—”

  “Look, girl. I cannot help you.”

  “—anything! She was out of Paris by ’43, the following spring she went to Limoges. We got that much from her mother—”

  “I said, I can’t help you.”

  “You have to!” I was on my feet, but I didn’t remember standing. Desperation was building in my middle, a solid ball far denser than the insubstantial shadow that was my baby. “You have to help! I am not leaving without help!” I’d never shouted at an adult in my life, but I was shouting now. “Rose Fournier, she was in Limoges, seventeen years old—”

  Eve was on her feet too, far taller than I, jabbing one of her unspeakable fingers into my breastbone, her voice deadly quiet. “Do not shriek at me in my own house.”

  “—she’d be twenty-one now, she’s blond and beautiful and funny—”

  “I don’t care if she was Saint Joan of Arc, she’s not my business and neither are you!”

  “—she was working at a restaurant called Le Lethe owned by a Monsieur René, and after that no one knows—”

  Something happened to Eve’s face then. Nothing in it moved, but something still happened. It was like something moving at the bottom of a deep lake, sending the very faintest surge to the surface. Not even a ripple—but you still knew something was moving down there. She looked at me, and her eyes glittered.

  “What?” My chest was heaving as though I’d run a mile, my cheeks hot with emotion and my ribs pressing against the iron grip of my waist cincher.

  “Le Lethe,” she said softly. “I know that name. Who did you s-say owned the restau
rant?”

  I scrambled for my traveling case, pushing aside the spare clothes, seeking the pocket in the liner. Two folded sheets of paper; I handed them over.

  Eve looked at the short-form report on top, her own name across the bottom. “There’s nothing here about the restaurant’s name.”

  “I found that out later—look at the second page, my notes. I telephoned the bureau hoping to talk to you, but you were gone by then. I talked the clerk into hunting down the original tip in their files; it gave the name Le Lethe, owned by a Monsieur René, no last name. It was hopelessly garbled, so maybe that’s why it wasn’t typed into the report. But I assumed if you signed that report, you’d have seen the original tip.”

  “I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have s-signed off.” Eve looked at the second page, and kept looking. “Le Lethe . . . that’s a name I know.”

  Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage. “How?”

  Eve turned and scrabbled for the whiskey bottle again. She sloshed more into her teacup and drank it all down. She filled the cup again, and then she stood there with her eyes staring past me at nothing.

  “Get out of my house.”

  “But—”

  “Sleep here if you haven’t anywhere else to g-g-g—to go. But you’d better be gone by morning, Yank.”

  “But—but you know something.” She picked up her pistol and moved past me. I grabbed her bony arm. “Please—”

  Eve’s maimed hand whipped up faster than I could follow it, and for the second time that night I had a gun pointed at me. I recoiled, but she advanced half a step and pressed the barrel right between my eyes. The cold circle of it made my skin tingle.

  “You crazy old cow,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she rasped. “And I will shoot you if you are not gone when I wake up.”

  She moved off unsteadily, out of the sitting room and down the uncarpeted hall.