The Alice Network

  If I left him now, he’d sit here all night with his guilt and his anger and a dead Gypsy girl. “Like it or not,” I said, echoing Eve’s words, “she’s dead and you’re alive. We’re both alive.” And I reached up, tangled my hands into his hair, and pulled his head down to mine.

  Our mouths clashed brutally, never letting go even as he lifted me up so I straddled his lap. His cheeks were wet and so were mine. He was yanking down the shoulders of my black dress and I was tearing at his shirt buttons, pushing all the layers of clothes out of the way so it was skin against hot skin, neither of us caring if anyone walked by outside the Lagonda’s windows and saw us. On the road to Oradour-sur-Glane he had kissed me with exquisite tenderness, but now his mouth was rough as he devoured the soft skin between my breasts, lashes brushing my collarbone. I pressed my cheek against his hair, hands sliding down his lean chest to his belt, and for a moment he stopped, breathing in gulps, his big hands spanning my naked back. “Christ, Charlie,” he said not too distinctly. “This wasn’t how I was hoping to do this.”

  Maybe it wasn’t roses and candlelight and romance. But this, here, now, was what we both needed. Last night had been numbness and pain and longing for oblivion—I couldn’t stay there or I’d drown. I wasn’t letting Finn drown either. I wasn’t letting him go, not like the others I’d failed and lost. “Stay with me,” I murmured against his lips, my breath coming as ragged as his. “Stay with me—” And we were tangled up along the leather seat, the important parts of my black dress all yanked out of the way, Finn’s shirt and belt on the floor.

  This was normally when my mind slid away from what was happening. This was when I stopped trying to feel something and instead grew distant and disappointed that I felt nothing—that the easiest equation in the world, man plus woman, always added up to zero. Not this time. The heaving scramble of limbs across the seat and the sounds of squeaking leather and heavy breathing were the same as all the other times, but now I wasn’t drifting away. I was melting and burning and shaking with need. Finn was trembling too, braced above me, a shadow against more shadows, his hands tangled so tight through my hair that my scalp sparkled with pain, and his mouth drank the skin at my throat and my ears and my breasts as though he could devour me. I locked my arms and my thighs around him and clung as though I were trying to climb inside him, nails sinking deep into his back. We grappled, skin against sweating skin, and it still wasn’t close enough. I clawed at him, pulling him deeper, dimly hearing the sounds I was making as we clashed in desperate, furious rhythm. It was fast and rough and good, messy and sweaty and alive. His face was hard against mine at the final shudder that speared us both, and I felt a tear slide between our pressed cheeks.

  I didn’t know which of us it had come from. But I didn’t care. It hadn’t come from grief, and that was enough.

  CHAPTER 28

  EVE

  October 1915

  If there was a day of the week to be arrested, it was Sunday. The one night out of seven that Eve didn’t work, because even decadent Le Lethe closed on the lord’s day. Eve was back in Lille by late Sunday night without needing to miss a shift. “Small favors,” she said aloud. The room was bitterly cold, and though nothing had changed—not the narrow bed, not the false-bottomed carpetbag in the corner where her Luger was hidden—it had a deserted air. Violette would not come stomping through in her heavy boots, grumping about English pilots too rash to hide properly. Lili would not come waltzing in with a story of how she bribed her way past a checkpoint with a smuggled sausage. Eve looked around the joyless little room, remembering evenings they’d spent here smoking and laughing, and a wave of despair hit so hard it nearly knocked the breath from her lungs. She had a job to do, and she would do it—but there would be no more moments of joy in it. There would be days at Le Lethe and nights in René’s bed, and that was all. No one would use this room anymore but Eve.

  Antoine will, she thought. We can work out a new schedule. Quiet, rock-steady Antoine knew the most about Lili’s sources, since he had constructed false papers for so many of them under the counter of his bookshop—perhaps he could reconstruct Lili’s rounds for someone else to take over. Somehow it had to be done. She gave in to a wave of weariness, and lay down without even taking her coat off. She should have been hungry, but somehow she was imagining the smell of René’s expensive cologne—dreading the moment she would go back to him tomorrow, no doubt—and even the imagined whiff turned her stomach. She buried her nose in her thin pillow, imagining the smell of tea and English tweed instead. “Cameron,” she whispered, and a soft tactile memory flashed of his hair under her hand and his lips lingering in the space behind her ear. She wondered if he regretted their time this afternoon. She wondered if he hated her for seducing him and then sneaking off. She wondered . . .

  But she was exhausted from terror and arrest, from anguish and love, and sleep descended in a black wave.

  The next day was brilliant and cold, and Eve trudged toward Le Lethe bundled to the tip of her nose. Normally in late afternoon the restaurant was bustling: waiters laying silver and linen for the first diners, cooks cursing as they prepared their stations. Today Le Lethe was dark, the kitchens shut up. Eve paused, puzzled, then unbuttoned her coat. There was no sign on the door or on the bar to say the restaurant was closed for the evening, and René was too fond of his own profits to ever shut his doors if he did not have to.

  A voice floated down the stairs from René’s apartments. “Marguerite, is that you?”

  Eve hesitated, tempted to pretend she’d heard nothing and slip back out into the cold. Her nerves were taut with alarm, but she would cause more suspicion now by darting out. “Yes, it’s me,” she called.

  “Come up.”

  René’s study blazed with light, though the shades were drawn. The fireplace spilled warmth across the patterned Aubusson rug, and the multicolored Tiffany shade threw patterns of sapphire and amethyst onto the green silk wall. René sat reading in his usual chair, a glass of Bordeaux at hand.

  “Ah,” he greeted Eve. “There you are, pet.”

  Eve permitted herself to look puzzled. “Is the restaurant not to open?”

  “Not today.” He marked his book with a strip of embroidered silk and laid it aside. Eve felt a chill, though his smile was pleasant. “I intended it as a surprise for you.”

  Run, a quiet voice in Eve’s head told her. “A surprise?” She linked her hands behind her back, touching the doorknob. It turned silently. “Another w-weekend away? You did say you wished to go to G-Grasse . . .”

  “No, a different kind of surprise.” René sipped his Bordeaux, unhurried. “One you’re going to give me.”

  Eve’s fingers tightened around the doorknob. One yank and she could be gone. “Am I?”

  “Yes.” René reached under the cushion on the armrest of his chair, and brought out a pistol. He leveled it at Eve: a Luger nine-millimeter P08, just like her own. At this distance, Eve knew it would drill her between the eyes long before she could wrench the door open.

  “Sit down, pet.” René gestured at the chair opposite, and as Eve sat, she saw the tiny scratch on the barrel. She knew that scratch; she buffed it every time she field-stripped her weapon. It wasn’t just a Luger René was holding, it was her Luger. Suddenly Eve remembered that faint whiff of René’s cologne she’d smelled in her room last night, and fear hit like a shrieking freight train.

  René Bordelon had searched her room. He had her pistol. Who knew what else he knew?

  “Marguerite Le François,” René said as though he were about to start one of his pet discourses on the arts, “tell me who you really are.”

  Why is it so hard to b-believe?” Eve was playing up the stammer, letting her hands flutter and tremble, running up every flag of innocence and confusion that she could fly. “It’s my f-father’s pistol. I kept it because I was afraid, the w-w-way the German officers swagger about looking at the local g-girls—”

  René’s suspicious eyes bored into
her. “You were arrested in the company of a woman who had six different forms of identification. She was undoubtedly a spy, so what were you doing with her?”

  “I d-didn’t know her! We began talking at the station, and she’d forgotten her p-p-p—her pass. I offered to let her get by on m-mine.” Eve’s thoughts careened ahead of her tongue, wildly stitching together a defense—any defense—that he might swallow. She’d never imagined he would hear of her arrest. It was all just sheerest blind chance: some German friend of René’s had enthused over Lili’s capture, mentioning in passing the stuttering girl taken along with her. A girl named Marguerite something, released because anyone could see she was innocent.

  If only they hadn’t mentioned the name. René would never have known. But they had, and the implications must have crashed on him like a tidal wave because he’d gone at once to her room. The Luger was all he’d found; Eve kept no ciphers or coded messages. But for him it was suspicious enough, so here they sat in opposing chairs.

  “You would not be stupid enough to let a stranger use your safe-conduct pass, pet,” he said.

  “I d-didn’t see the harm!” Eve tried to let her eyes fill with tears, but she was utterly cried out. She’d wept herself into hysterics yesterday morning for Herr Rotselaer; she’d wept afterward for Lili. Her eyes now were dry as stone, just when she needed them dewy and pathetic. She lowered her eyelids instead. You can get out of this, she told herself. You can.

  But René had not once yet allowed the Luger or his attention to sag. “Where were you yesterday? Why were you getting on a train at all?”

  “My n-niece’s c-c-c-communion in T-T-Tournai.”

  “You’ve never mentioned any family in Tournai.”

  “You n-never asked!”

  “Is your stammer even real? Or do you fake it to make people think you simpleminded? That would be very clever of you.”

  “Of c-course it’s real! You think I like speaking this way?” Eve cried. “I’m n-not a spy! Did you find anything suspicious in m-my room?”

  “This.” Tapping the Luger’s barrel against the carved arm of his chair. “Why didn’t you turn this weapon in when the Germans forbade civilians to own weapons?”

  “I c-couldn’t part with it, it was my f-f-f—”

  “Stop stuttering!” he roared so suddenly her flinch was entirely real. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  There was his real fear, Eve thought. That he had been made a fool of. Was he remembering all the pillow talk, all the gossip he had dropped in her ear? Or wondering what would happen to his favored status if the Germans found out his mistress had been feeding secrets to England?

  The former, Eve thought, more than the latter. It wasn’t German trust and German favors he most feared losing, but his pride. René Bordelon had to be the cleverest man in the room, always. What an unbearable thought, the possibility that a know-nothing girl half his age could have been so much cleverer.

  Too bad Eve didn’t feel clever at the moment. All she felt was terrified.

  You can get out of this, she thought, because thinking the alternative was unbearable. But what then? Even if she convinced René she was innocent, her time at Le Lethe would be over. She was finished in Lille, regardless of any orders from Allenton, and that failure stabbed—but if she could just get away, perhaps she could be stationed somewhere else.

  And a sweeter thought yet drifted through her head: I will never have to share a bed with René Bordelon again.

  Perhaps her eyes sparked, because he sat forward sharply. “What are you thinking? Why are you—”

  He was just close enough. Eve hadn’t planned it, but she snapped her foot out like a whip, catching the Luger’s barrel. Just a glancing blow, but it spun the pistol out of René’s hand toward the fireplace. No time to grab for it; Eve lunged the other way, toward the door. If she could get through while he scrabbled for the pistol, get to the stairs, then she had a chance to escape into the streets of Lille. She wouldn’t risk the trains; she’d walk across the border to Belgium. All of that went through her mind like a splinter of ice as she lunged across the sumptuous carpet. She got one hand on the doorknob, silver polished diamond bright, and thought, I can make it.

  But René didn’t scramble for the gun. He came straight after her, and as Eve’s fingers tightened on the study’s doorknob, his arm descended in a short, brutal arc. The miniature bust of Baudelaire smashed down on Eve’s hand.

  The impact lanced up her right arm in a bolt of white-hot pain. She heard a distinct crunch as three knuckles in her first two fingers shattered, crushed between the bust and the doorknob. She found herself on her knees before the door, gasping as wave after wave of agony coursed through her. She saw René’s shining shoes approach, saw the small marble bust swinging rather casually from his hand as he came to stand, breathing hard, between her and the door.

  “Well,” she managed to say through pain-clenched teeth, clutching her trembling hand. “Goddammit.”

  She said it unthinkingly in English, not French, and she heard René’s sharp intake of breath. He squatted down beside her so their eyes could meet at the same level, and his gaze was alight with—what? Fear, doubt. Above all, fury. “You are a spy,” he breathed, and there was no more doubt in his voice.

  There it was. Eve had given herself away. After fearing such a moment for so long, it fell curiously flat. Perhaps because she knew there was nothing she could have said to convince him she was innocent. Why not admit guilt?

  He wrapped his free hand around her throat, those extraordinarily long fingers pressing almost to the back of her neck. He never released the bust in his other hand, and she knew how easily he could bring it around to crush her temple. “Who are you?”

  Her hand hurt so badly, Eve could barely breathe. She sank her teeth into the scream rising in her throat until it died unborn. She managed a crooked little smile, not pulling against his grip, just nailing her eyes to his. Giving him her own gaze for once, and not his demure little pet’s.

  She might very well die here in this warm, luxurious room. But just once, she wanted to throw it in his face how badly he had been duped. She could curse herself for such a rash, prideful impulse, but she had no power to resist it.

  “My name is Eve,” she breathed, every word smooth as silk. “Eve, not fucking Marguerite. And yes: I am a spy.”

  He stared, transfixed. Eve switched to German.

  “I speak perfect German, you profiteering coward, and I’ve been eavesdropping on your precious customers for months.”

  She watched the horror, the disbelief, the rage crowd his eyes. She managed another smile and added one more thing in French, just for good measure.

  “I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arrested with. But I will tell you this, René Bordelon. You’re a gullible fool. You’re a terrible lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”

  CHAPTER 29

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  Go back to the hotel, Charlie. Get some sleep.” Finn sat half buried in the car’s shadows, buttoning his shirt. Avoiding my eyes. My whole body still thrummed from what had just happened, and I sat for a moment trying to find the words to tell him how different this had been from anything else I’d ever had. But Finn looked at me, and I could see him back behind his walls again, impossible to reach. “Get to bed, lass.”

  “I’m not leaving you here to brood,” I answered quietly. I wasn’t ever doing it again—leaving someone I cared for to fight their demons alone.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I’m going next door, back to the café. I have some apologies to make.”

  It sounded like a start, something to make him feel more himself again, so I nodded. We slid out of the car on opposite sides, stood for a moment looking at each other over the Lagonda’s roof. I thought for a moment Finn was going to say something, and then his eyes dropped to my bruised mouth and he flinched. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

/>   And now I was alone in my empty hotel room, lying on the bed, unable to sleep. Yellow light filtered through the shutters from the streetlamps, and the muted sounds of nighttime traffic. Over and over, I ran my fingertips back and forth across my belly. The Little Problem had been quiet ever since I decided not to go to Vevey. Probably figured she could take her ease and just grow, grow, grow until it came time for her to be born. Only then would she realize that the world was a cold place, and her mother had very little idea of how to give her a good life. Before Oradour-sur-Glane I’d at least had a fantasy idea, a magical equation where Charlie plus Rose magically guaranteed a happy future for everyone. Now I didn’t even have that.

  “Sorry,” I said softly to the stomach that was still flat under my exploring fingers. “Your mama’s every bit as helpless as you, baby girl.” I don’t know why I thought it was a girl, but I did. Baby Rose, I thought, and just like that, she had a name. Of course she did. Another Rose. A Rose of my own.

  A church bell chimed midnight. My stomach rumbled, the newly named Little Problem complaining that she hadn’t had dinner. Strange how bodies kept stubbornly functioning in the middle of grief or guilt or shock. “That’s one thing I do notice about you, Rosebud,” I told my stomach. “You might not be showing yet, but I already need the lavatory twice as much.”

  I got out of bed, pulled a sweater around me, used the lavatory, then found myself padding down the corridor. No light under Finn’s door. I hoped he’d managed his apologies next door and come back to dreamless sleep. I wondered if he regretted what we’d done in the backseat. I didn’t. I hesitated outside his door, then tiptoed past to Eve’s. Light showed in a yellow strip—she was awake. I struck the door open without knocking, striding inside.

  Eve sat at her windowsill looking down at the dark street. The dim light hid the ravages of her face—she could have been any age, tall and lean with a stark profile and long bare feet curled beneath her. She could have been the girl who went to Lille in 1915 . . . except for those maimed and terrible hands lying in her lap. It all came back to those hands. It had all started with those hands. I remembered how the gorge had risen in my throat when I’d first seen them, that night in London.