The Alice Network

  I tried to tuck the photograph back into Eve’s satchel, but her gnarled hand lashed out like a whip and knocked mine away. “Keep it.”

  The photograph went into my pocketbook, and I could feel that man’s empty eyes staring at me through the leather, so I turned around and looked back at Eve. She looked steadier, lighter than the hunched guilt-consumed figure in the windowsill last night, reciting her tale of torture and self-loathing. I reached out and touched her hand gently.

  “You wouldn’t tell us about your trial last night,” I said, “or what happened to you and Lili and Violette afterward.”

  “Not a tale for dark nights.”

  I tilted my head up at the hot sun above. “No shadows now.”

  She let out a long breath. “I suppose not.”

  Finn and I listened as she told us of the trial: the Belgian lions, the hammering questions in German, the reduced sentences. Violette spitting in her face. I remembered the older Violette in Roubaix doing the same, and shivered at the echo. Violette . . . an idea pricked me there, an insistent little thought I’d had last night as well—an equation that didn’t balance out—but I pushed that aside for now as Eve said, “Then we came to Siegburg.”

  CHAPTER 34

  EVE

  March 1916

  After the war ended, Eve was surprised by how little impression Siegburg’s endless flow of days had made in her memory. Her time as a spy in Lille had stretched not even six months, yet she remembered it all in diamond-edged clarity. Two and a half years in Siegburg passed like a foul gray dream, every day the same as the one before.

  “Take her to her cell.”

  That was her welcome to Siegburg, in the spring of ’16—a brusque order and then a heavy hand in the middle of her back, shoving her down a dark corridor after Lili and Violette. None of them had had a look at the prison’s outside; it was far too dark by the time the rattling van pulled into the courtyard. “Never mind,” Lili whispered. “We shall have a good look at it over our shoulders, the day we’re released.”

  But it was hard to think of release when being shoved along a corridor that smelled of piss and sweat and despair. Eve found herself shivering, pressing her teeth together so they would not rattle. The creak of a key being turned, hinges squealing, and then a massive door yawned. “Gardiner,” the guard barked, and that same brusque hand shoved Eve forward.

  “Wait—” She turned, frantic for a glimpse of Lili and Violette, but the door had already slammed. The blackness was absolute, a pool of stifling, freezing darkness.

  Everyone breaks down the first night. Eve would hear that later from her fellow prisoners. But Eve came to Siegburg already broken. The blackness was not nearly as terrible as the inside of her own mind, so she merely unlocked her chattering teeth and felt her way around the cell with misshapen fingers. Stone walls, smaller in dimension than her cell at Saint-Gilles. A foul bed, hard as wood and stinking of old sweat, old vomit, old terror. Eve wondered how many women had slept and cried and stifled their screams in that bed. Dimly through the door she heard cries, once a burst of shrill laughter, but no guard answered the calls. Once the cells were locked for the night at Siegburg, Eve learned soon enough, they weren’t opened until morning. A woman might be dying slowly of fever or blood poisoning, shrieking with pain over a broken bone, writhing in the agony of giving birth—the door still wouldn’t open until dawn. A good many died that way. That was, Eve supposed dully, the entire point.

  She couldn’t lie down on that foul bed. She curled in the corner on the stones, shaking with cold, waiting for morning. Dawn arrived in the company of a hard-faced guard marching in with a stack of clothes—rough blue stockings, dirty white frock with a great prisoners’ cross on the chest—and the endless string of captive days began.

  Hunger. Cold. Lice. Slaps from the guards. The daily labor: rough sewing with pricked fingers, polishing latches with abrasive cleansers, pushing together little caps of metal. Whispered conversations with the other women: Was it true there had been a battle at Mont Sorrel? The Somme? Was it true the British had captured La Boisselle? Contalmaison? Even more than food, the prisoners craved news. All they heard from the guards was that the Germans were winning.

  “Liars,” Lili snorted. “Such liars! They’re losing and they know it. All we need do is endure.”

  Endure, Eve thought. A year slipped by—more foul gray days, more slaps, more lice, more screams in the night. Lili’s serene confidence, burning brighter even as her body whittled down to stark bone. Black dreamless nights on that foul-smelling cot. Seeing women sweat to death from yellowing fevers, waste away under the twin grinding stones of cold and hunger. Seeing them stagger to the infirmary, that huge room with its ugly green shades that stank of shit and blood—some called it the Lazaretto, some just called it hell. You didn’t go to the infirmary to be treated; you went there to die. The Germans didn’t need to waste bullets killing their female prisoners when neglect and disease could do it for them. A sound strategy, Eve thought remotely. Women dying in hospital beds resulted in far less international outcry than women dying before firing squads.

  And what women these were. Identical skeletons wearing the same prisoners’ cross, dirty-haired, hollow-eyed fleurs du mal every one: fiery Louise Thuliez who had smuggled soldiers across borders for Edith Cavell; Belgian-born Madame Ramet whose son had been shot and whose two daughters had accompanied her to prison; the stoic Princesse de Croy who had organized a spy network in Belgium . . . Before Siegburg, Eve had never known just how many women there were who had risked all for the war. Even now, in their way, they continued to fight.

  “Madame Blankaert says those little steel caps we have been given to assemble are grenade heads,” Lili whispered. “Shall we do something about it?”

  “Lili,” Violette said wearily, “don’t provoke them.”

  “Ta gueule. It’s inconceivable that we be put to work on ammunition to be used against our countrymen.” And the following day the words were shouted out: In the name of England, of France, of Belgium, and of all Allied countries, I implore my companions to adamantly refuse to work on munitions. Germany does not have the right to demand from us this work of death against our homelands, to force us to ourselves make the engines which, in battle, will strike our fathers, our brothers, our husbands, our sons. We all here continue to fight and suffer courageously for king, for our flags, for our homelands—

  And all over Siegburg, the gray-faced female skeletons were suddenly alight, screaming like Valkyries, even as guards ran back and forth shoving, slapping, shouting. Eve screamed until her throat stung, even when she got a clenched fist across the cheekbone that snapped her head back like a whip. The world for a moment was bright, screaming color rather than soul-leaching gray. Eve screamed until she was bundled back into her cell, and Lili laughed even as the guards hauled her and Mme. Blankaert away to solitary confinement for inciting the strike. “Well worth it,” she said when they finally let her out a month later.

  Eve wasn’t sure—Lili was just a handful of bones, insubstantial as a shadow. Eve dropped her own blanket around the other woman’s shoulders. Endure. All we need do is endure.

  Another endless gray year. A freezing spring coming late in 1918, and with it a cautious hope feathering its way through the prisoners. “The Boches are losing,” the whisper went around as the year advanced. “They’re beaten, falling back everywhere along the front—” It wasn’t just the whispered rumors that made their way inside prison walls, rumors of English victories and French encroachments on German territory. Everyone could see the slump in the shoulders of the guards, hear the increasing shrillness in the assertions of German victory. It hovered in the air: the bloody slog of war might finally be coming to an end.

  If it had ended sooner, Eve later thought on the long nights when she was staring down the barrel of a Luger. If it had ended just a few short months sooner.

  September 1918

  Thank you for coming, little daisy.”
>
  Lili lay in the cold infirmary, her body hardly making an impression below the grubby blankets. Eve perched on the cot’s edge, shivering in her prison smock. She should have been with the other women working, but there had been a typhus epidemic not long ago and when Eve reported feeling feverish and headachy, they were quick to send her to the infirmary. Easy then to sneak from her own cot to Lili’s. “How are you feeling?” she managed to ask.

  “Not so terrible.” Lili patted her side: for a while now she’d suffered from a pleural abscess between two of her ribs, but had made light of it. “The surgeon will lance the thing, and it will be done.” The surgery was scheduled for four in the afternoon. Not long now.

  “They’re bringing a surgeon from Bonn?” Eve tried to quell her apprehension. Lancing an abscess was surely minor surgery. But in this understaffed hellhole, on a half-starved woman . . .

  Lili is not afraid, Eve reminded herself. Don’t you be either.

  But perhaps Lili was afraid, because she fixed Eve with an unusually sober gaze. Her lively eyes were sunk into a face that was little more than a skull. “Take care of Violette for me, if . . .” An expressive shrug.

  “You’re going to be fine.” Eve cut her off before she could go further. “You have to be.”

  It was what she’d clung to for more than two years. Evelyn Gardiner had betrayed her friends, had broken down and brought them to this foul place. If she could bring them out again safely, some part of that betrayal could be forgotten, if not ever forgiven. It was what she thought every day when she pushed half her bread ration into Lili’s hands, when she tried to give her blankets to Violette even though Violette still looked at her with stony eyes. Bring them out safely, and you will have atoned.

  And she’d almost done it—surely the war could not go on much longer. We are almost there. Almost home.

  Perhaps Lili saw some of that desperation in Eve’s eyes, because she reached out and laid her emaciated fingers over Eve’s misshapen ones. “Take care of yourself, little daisy. If I’m not here to haul you out of trouble—”

  “Don’t say that.” Eve gripped Lili’s hand, panic choking her. She was not going to lose Lili, not over an abscess. Not now. Not after more than two years of imprisonment, not so close to the end. “It’s just a lance-and-drain operation. Of course you’ll survive!”

  Lili’s voice was steady. “But the Germans have no interest in my survival, ma petite.”

  Eve’s eyes welled, because she couldn’t deny it: the officials of Siegburg hated every bone in Lili’s troublemaking body, and made no secret of it. “You shouldn’t have led that strike, or—”

  Or what? Caused strife from the day she walked through Siegburg’s doors? Planned elaborate escapes, kept spirits high with jokes and stories? If Lili had been the sort to keep her head low, she would not have led the most efficient spy network in France.

  “You are going to be fine,” Eve repeated stubbornly, and would have said more, but two orderlies appeared.

  “Up, Bettignies. The surgeon has arrived.”

  Lili could barely stand. Eve slid an arm around her shoulder, lifting her to her feet. She wore a shapeless dishrag-colored smock, and she made a face at it. “Quelle horreur. What I’d give for something in pink moiré!”

  “And a morally questionable hat?” Eve managed to say.

  “I’d settle for some morally questionable soap. My hair is filthy.”

  Eve’s throat caught. “Lili—”

  “Pray for me when I go in there?” Gesturing with her sharp little chin in the direction of the surgery. “I need people praying for me. I wrote a letter to my old Mother Prioress in Anderlecht, but I’ll take your prayers any day, Evelyn Gardiner.”

  It was the first time Lili used Eve’s real name. Even after the trial, they went on using the old code names. The ones that felt true. “I cannot pray for you,” Eve whispered. “I do not believe in God anymore.”

  “But I do.” Lili kissed the rosary knotted through her fingers, even as the orderlies took her by the elbows.

  So Eve jerked out a nod. “Then I’ll pray,” she said. “And I’ll see you in a few hours. I will.”

  They hauled Lili out of the infirmary, Eve following behind. A nurse came out of the surgery at the end of the corridor, and for a moment Eve had a glimpse of the surgeon from Bonn smoking a cigarette. There was no bustle, Eve saw—no one was sterilizing instruments, no one was making preparations with ether or chloroform . . .

  Lili, she thought in a wash of dread. Lili, don’t go in there—

  Ahead she heard Lili’s clear voice reciting her rosary. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths . . .”

  The corridor outside was thronged with women. Louise Thuliez, the Princesse de Croy, Violette—as many of the fleurs du mal who could steal away from their work shifts, all anxious glances and murmured prayers for the queen of spies. The two orderlies picked up their feet, hastening Lili along, and her voice faltered in its calm recitation. For a moment Eve thought Lili would finally break—that she would collapse and weep, have to be carried off prostrate to her operating table.

  No. She straightened between the orderlies, lifting her chin in the old impish gesture, eyes darting along the line of her friends. The dull light struck her hair, coiled around her head in matted blond braids, and it had the look of a crown. “Mes amies,” she said softly, and as she passed Violette, she reached out and pressed her rosary into those trembling hands. “Je vous aime—”

  And she was gone past them, tiny as a child between the two orderlies, almost floating as she went light-footed, lighthearted, down the long corridor toward the operating room. Eve felt her own heart beating sickly, somber as a drum. Lili . . .

  Just before she disappeared, Lili turned her head back one final time and gave her swift mischievous glance. She blew a kiss to the fleurs du mal, and it hit Eve like a physical blow. Then Lili disappeared into the operating room, but her voice still floated out, merry and serene.

  “You must be the surgeon. I wonder if I can have some chloroform? Because it’s been an absolute pisser of a day.”

  That was when Eve’s knees buckled. That was when she knew.

  “She’ll be fine,” Louise Thuliez was saying. “It would take more than a lung abscess to bring down our Lili—”

  “Nothing at all . . .”

  More murmurs of agreement, assurances spoken over eyes full of worry. Violette clutched the rosary so hard its looped beads cut into her fingers. “She’ll be out of bed within a week. Less than a week . . .”

  But Violette wasn’t there in the infirmary for the next four hours, as Eve was. The guards shooed the prisoners away, but Eve was still under observation for typhus symptoms. She was just a corridor and a locked door away when the moans came, and the whimpers, and the strangled screams. The sounds of a woman being operated upon without ether, without chloroform, without morphine. Eve sat huddled on her cot as all her stubborn hope drained away, sobbing so hard she almost drowned out the noise of Lili’s agony—but not quite. Eve heard it all, start to finish. By morning she had sobbed herself mute; her voice was gone.

  And so was Lili.

  Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron:

  She finished as she had lived, a soldier.

  CHAPTER 35

  CHARLIE

  June 1947

  My heart hurt.

  I’d so hoped that the queen of spies was still alive, that we might meet her on this journey as we’d met Violette. A white-haired woman now, but still small and gallant and merry. Someone I’d ached to know—but she’d never had the chance to grow old.

  Eve, I wanted to say to the figure hunched in the backseat, I’m so sorry—but words were just air, useless after a tale like that. Finn had pulled the Lagonda over to the side of the road twenty minutes before as we listened, and now we sat in the summer sil
ence, utterly still.

  I reached out for Eve’s knobbed hands as she lowered them from her face, but she was speaking again, looking pale and ravaged in the merciless sunlight. “There it is. You know it all. Lili died the ugliest death a b-brave woman ever suffered. And it was all thanks to me. I sent her inside those walls, and I failed to bring her out again.”

  Denial boiled in me furiously. No. No, you were not to blame. You cannot think that. But she did think that, and all the words in the world from me would not shift her self-loathing. I knew that much about Evelyn Gardiner. As much as I was always yearning to fix what was broken, I could do nothing to fix Eve.

  Or could I?

  She passed a gnarled hand across her mouth; both were trembling. “Get this car moving, Scotsman,” she said hoarsely. “We aren’t getting to Grenoble by sitting on a roadside.”

  Finn steered the Lagonda back onto the road, and we finished the long drive in silence, worn out from the stark, ugly end of Eve’s confession. Eve sat in back with her eyes closed. Finn drove like a chauffeur, looking front and center, only speaking up to ask for a map. As for me, I sat turning over an idea.

  A lovely city, Grenoble: compact houses and pretty little churches, the lazy blue meandering of the rivers Drac and Isère, framed all around by the distant cloud-wrapped Alps. Another auberge, and Finn helped Eve up the stairs with the baggage, casting a glance back at me.

  “I have to make a telephone call,” I said, and he probably thought I meant to my family. But the call I put through at the hotel desk, after a long wrangle with the French operator, wasn’t to the United States. It was to a china shop in Roubaix, whose name I fortunately remembered.

  “Allo?” I’d only met her once, but I knew her voice immediately. I imagined her turning her head, spectacles reflecting the light.