The Alice Network

  Eve imagined Cameron’s long hands loading the Luger for her. She could not imagine those hands thieving anything. “W-w-will that be all, sir?” She was aching to know more, of course, but she’d be hanged before she asked this spiteful walrus with his ridiculous mustache for another word. The major wandered off, clearly disappointed, and Eve eyed Cameron covertly the following day. But she didn’t ask him anything, because everyone in Folkestone had secrets. And on the day the training course ended, he tucked the Luger into her neatly packed carpetbag as a gift, and said, “You leave for France in the morning.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER 5

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  I don’t know how long the Channel crossing took. Time stretched on forever when you spent it vomiting.

  “Don’t shut your eyes.” Finn Kilgore’s Scottish burr sounded behind me as I clung grimly to the railing. “Makes your stomach worse if you can’t see which direction the swells are coming from.”

  I screwed my eyes shut tighter. “Please don’t say that word.”

  “What word?”

  “Swells.”

  “Just look at the horizon and—”

  “Too late,” I groaned, and leaned over the railing. I had nothing left to bring up, but my stomach turned itself inside out anyway. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a pair of Frenchmen in dapper suits wrinkling their noses and edging farther down the deck. A stiff gust of wind whipped across the deck, and my dark green hat with its horrid rolled brim went cartwheeling away. “Let it go,” I gasped between heaves as Finn made a swipe over the rail. “I hate that hat!”

  He smiled, reaching to gather my whipping hair and hold it out of my face as I retched one final time. I’d been hideously embarrassed the first time I vomited in front of him, but now I was too ill for humiliation. “That’s a delicate stomach you’ve got for a Yank,” he observed. “Judging from their hot dogs and their coffee, I thought Americans didn’t get sick at anything.”

  I straightened, probably looking as green as an old can of peas. “Please don’t say hot dogs.”

  He dropped my hair. “As you wish.”

  We were standing at the opposite end of the boat from Eve, because she’d found my misery enormously amusing, and I’d had to retreat before I killed her. Eventually Finn had joined me. He must have gotten tired of her swearing and her smoke fumes, though it was hard to imagine they were worse than my endless nausea.

  He leaned back on his elbows against the rail, tipping his head back to look at the boat’s squat upper deck. “Where do we go once we get to Le Havre, miss?”

  “Eve says the woman we need to talk to is in Roubaix, so we may as well go there before Limoges. But I was thinking . . .” I trailed off.

  “Thinking what?”

  “Rouen first?” It came out as too much of a question, and I kicked myself for that. I didn’t have to ask permission for where we went next; this was my quest, though that was far too grandiose a word. My mission? My obsession? Well, whatever you called it, my money was funding everything so I was the one in charge. Finn and Eve seemed to take that for granted, something I couldn’t help but enjoy after so many weeks of feeling like a leaf on the surface of a whirlpool. “We’ll go to Rouen,” I said firmly. “My aunt left Paris and moved to the summer house for good after the war. Rose’s mother. She wasn’t very forthcoming in her letters, but if I turn up on her doorstep surely she’ll talk to me.”

  I thought of my French aunt with her endless rattling handbag full of pill boxes for all the illnesses she was convinced she was dying of, and I wanted to seize hold of her bony arms and shake her till she coughed up the answers I wanted. Why did Rose leave home in ’43? What happened to your daughter?

  I looked across the deck and saw the eight-year-old Rose, wiry and freckled, skipping along the rail. She smiled at me, and then I saw she wasn’t Rose at all. She didn’t even have Rose’s blond hair. I watched the child run back to her mother at the bow, and still my imagination tried to tell me it was Rose’s fair plaits bouncing against that narrow back, not a stranger’s brown ones.

  “Rouen,” I repeated. “We’ll stay the night in Le Havre, then drive in the morning. We could get there tonight if we could take the train . . .” Eve had flatly refused to consider anything but car travel, and so I’d had to fork over a good sum to have Finn’s Lagonda lifted ponderously up into the boat by crane. Like we were British lords off for a Continental motoring jaunt with a champagne picnic. For what it cost to bring the car—and because of the car, we had to take the slower boat to Le Havre rather than Boulogne—I could have ferried six people to France and back. “Couldn’t that cow buck up and suffer a train ride?” I grumbled.

  “I don’t ken she could,” Finn said.

  I glanced at my unpredictable ally at the other end of the deck. On the car journey she’d been by turns insulting or silent, refusing to get out of the car when we reached Folkestone, and Finn had to escort me out to buy tickets for the Channel crossing. When we came back to the Lagonda she’d disappeared, and after going up and down in the car we found her standing outside a shabby row house marked number 8 on the Parade—just standing there, scowling. “Still wonder where that skinny English boy went,” she’d said apropos of nothing. “The one b-booted out of the course. Did he join the boys in the trenches, get himself blown up? Lucky bastard.”

  “What course?” I’d asked, exasperated, but she just gave her harsh bark of a laugh and said, “Haven’t we got a boat to catch?”

  And now she was sitting at the far corner of the deck in a shabby coat, hatless, smoking an unending chain of cigarettes and looking unexpectedly fragile. “My brother always sat like that,” I said. “With his back in a corner. When he came back from Tarawa, anyway. He got drunk one night and told me he wasn’t comfortable anymore unless he could see all the lines of fire.” A lump rose in my throat as I remembered James’s broad handsome face, not really handsome anymore under the blur of drink and the pasted-on smile, because his eyes were so empty . . .

  “A lot of soldiers do that,” Finn said, neutral.

  “I know.” Swallowing down the lump. “It wasn’t just my brother—I used to see it when the soldiers came into the coffee shop where I worked.” I caught Finn’s look of surprise. “What, you think the rich little American’s never had a job?”

  That was clearly exactly what he’d thought.

  “My father thought his children should know the value of a dollar. I started working at his office when I was fourteen.” A law firm specializing in international law, French and German heard on the telephone lines as much as English. I’d started out watering the plants and making the coffee, but soon I was filing papers, organizing my father’s notes, even balancing his account books once it became clear I could do it faster and more neatly than his secretary. “And then when I went to Bennington,” I continued, “and my mother wasn’t there to forbid me, I got a job at a coffee shop. That’s where I’d see the soldiers come in.”

  Finn looked bemused. “Why work if you didn’t have to?”

  “I like being useful. Anything to get me out of white gloves and cotillion. You can watch people in a café, make up stories about them. That one over there is a Nazi spy, that one over there is an actress on her way to a Broadway audition. Besides, I’m good with numbers, so I’m useful in a shop—making change in my head, keeping the register. I was a math major in school.”

  How my mother’s brows had furrowed when she heard I’d signed up for calculus and algebra at Bennington. “I know you like that sort of thing, ma chère—I don’t know how I’ll keep my checkbook balanced with you away in Vermont!—but don’t make too much of it on dates. Don’t do that thing you do, where you add up all the menu prices in your head to see if you can do it faster than the waiter. Boys don’t like that sort of thing.”

  Maybe that was why I’d taken the coffee shop job once I got to Bennington. My small rebellion against the litany I’d heard all my life
about what was proper, what was suitable, what boys liked. My mother sent me to college to find a husband, but I was looking for something else. Some other path besides the one picked out for me—traveling, working, who knew what. I hadn’t had it figured out yet, but then the Little Problem came along and shot my mother’s plans and mine all to pieces.

  “Making change for cups of coffee.” Finn cracked a smile. “That’s a bonny way to spend a war.”

  “Not my fault I was too young to be a nurse.” I hesitated, but asked anyway. My stomach was still rolling, and the conversation helped keep my mind off it. “What about your war?” Because everyone’s war was different. Mine was algebra homework, going on the odd date, and waiting every single day for letters from Rose and James. My parents’ war was Victory Gardens and scrap metal drives and my mother fretting about having to put makeup on her legs instead of stockings. And my poor brother’s war . . . Well, he wouldn’t say what it was, but it made him swallow a shotgun. “What was your war like?” I asked Eve’s driver again, blinking James’s face away before it made my throat tighten. “You said you were in the Anti-Tank Regiment.”

  “I didn’t get wounded. Had a braw time of it, pure dead brilliant.” Finn was mocking something, but I didn’t think it was me. I wanted to ask, but his face had closed off and I couldn’t bring myself to pry further. I hardly knew him, after all—he was Eve’s man of all work, the Scotsman who made breakfast. I didn’t know if he liked me at all, or was just being polite.

  I wanted him to like me. Not just him—Eve too, much as she both baffled and annoyed me. In their company, I had a fresh slate. To them I was Charlie St. Clair, spearhead of the world’s most unlikely search party. Not Charlie St. Clair, complete disgrace and all-around tramp.

  Eventually Finn wandered off, and my stomach began churning again. I passed the rest of the journey staring at the horizon and swallowing hard. At last the cry went up—Le Havre!—and I was the first one down to the docks, lugging my traveling case, so glad to be on firm ground that I could have kissed it. It took me a moment to register the scenery around me.

  Le Havre showed even more signs of the war than London. The harbor had been bombed flat, I remembered—the storm of iron and fire, they called it. There was still so much rubble, so many missing buildings. More than that, there was a general gray dispiritedness here, a tiredness in the crowds around me. The Londoners I’d encountered seemed to carry themselves with a certain grim humor, as if to say, You still can’t get cream with your scones, but we never did get invaded, eh?

  France, despite all the giddiness I’d read about in the papers—General de Gaulle marching down the boulevards of Paris in triumph, the delirious screaming crowds—just looked exhausted.

  By the time Eve and Finn had joined me, I had shoved my sudden melancholy away and was fingering the wad of francs I’d acquired in Folkestone. (“Dear, does your father know you’re changing this much money?”) Finn deposited Eve and her dilapidated luggage, then moved off swiftly down the dock to make certain the disembarking crane did not dent his precious Lagonda. “We’ll need a hotel,” I said absently, recounting my francs and staving off a sudden wave of weariness. “Do you know of somewhere cheap?”

  “There’s no shortage of cheap in a waterfront city.” Eve looked at me in amusement. “Want to bunk with Finn? Two rooms are cheaper than three.”

  “No, thank you,” I said coldly.

  “What prudes Americans are,” she chuckled. We stood in silence until the dark blue Lagonda at last rounded the corner purring.

  “How did he ever get a car like that?” I wondered, thinking of Finn’s threadbare shirt.

  “Probably did something illegal,” Eve said carelessly.

  I blinked. “Are you joking?”

  “No. You think he works for a bad-tempered bitch like me for fun? Nobody else was about to give him a job. I probably shouldn’t have either, but I have a weakness for good-looking men with Scottish accents and prison terms.”

  I nearly fell off my high heels. “What?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Finn’s an ex-convict.”

  CHAPTER 6

  EVE

  June 1915

  Marguerite Le François came in out of the rain and sat down at an isolated corner table in a café in Le Havre: a respectable girl, hatted and gloved, timidly asking the waiter in her northern-accented French for a lemonade. If you looked in Marguerite’s pocketbook you would find all her identity cards in immaculate order: she was born in Roubaix, she had work papers, she was seventeen. Just what else Marguerite was, Eve wasn’t sure yet—the identity was filmy, not yet fleshed out with the details that would make it real. When Captain Cameron—Uncle Edward—put Eve on the boat from Folkestone, all he’d given her was the immaculate packet of false papers; a respectable if threadbare traveling suit and a battered case full of more respectable, threadbare clothes; and a destination. “In Le Havre,” he said on the dock, “you will meet your contact. She will tell you what you need to know, going forward.”

  “Is she your shining star?” Eve couldn’t help ask. “Your best agent?”

  “Yes.” Cameron had smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. Out of his immaculate khaki uniform and back into his anonymous tweeds. “I can think of no one better to prepare you.”

  “I will be just as good.” Eve held his eyes fiercely. “I will make you p-proud.”

  “You all make me proud,” Cameron said. “The moment a recruit accepts an assignment, I am proud. Because this isn’t just a dangerous job, it’s dirty and distasteful. Not very sporting, really, to listen at doors and open a man’s mail—even an enemy’s. No one really thinks gentlemen should do such things, even in a time of war. Much less gentlewomen.”

  “Rubbish,” Eve said tartly, and Cameron laughed.

  “Consummate rubbish. Still, the kind of work we do isn’t much respected, even among those who rely on our reports. There’s no acclaim to be had, no fame, no praise. Just danger.” He tweaked her drab little hat to a better angle over her neatly rolled hair. “So, never fear that you have failed to make me proud, Miss Gardiner.”

  “Mademoiselle Le François,” Eve reminded him.

  “Quite.” His smile faded then. “Be careful.”

  “Bien sûr. What is her name, this woman in Le Havre? Your shining star, who I am going to replace?”

  “Alice,” the captain said in amusement. “Alice Dubois. Not her real name, of course. And if you can best her, you will end the war in six months.”

  He’d stood for a long time on the dock, watching Eve’s boat recede into the choppy surf. She gazed steadily back until the tweedy figure disappeared. She felt a twinge to see him gone—the first person ever to have faith in her, to believe she could be something more, not to mention her last contact with everything left behind. But excitement soon won over loneliness. Eve Gardiner had left England; Marguerite Le François had arrived in Le Havre. And she waited, sipping lemonade and concealing a curiosity that could fairly be called ravenous, for the mysterious Alice.

  The café was crowded. Sour-faced waiters squeezed past with dirty plates and bottles of wine, customers came in from the street shaking off their rainy umbrellas. Eve scrutinized every woman in sight. A stout matron with a brisk manner had the heavy anonymity and the competent air of a master organizer of spies . . . Or perhaps the raw-boned young woman who leaned her bicycle outside and then had to stop in the doorway to clean her spectacles. She might be concealing eyes like a hawk that had read German plans by the dozen . . .

  “Ma chère Marguerite!” a woman’s voice shrieked, and Eve’s head jerked around at the name she’d trained herself like a puppy to respond to. She had the impression of a hat bearing down on her—not just any hat, but a hat the size of a wagon wheel covered with pink organza and silk roses—and then the hat’s owner enveloped her in a cloud of lily-of-the-valley scent and kissed her soundly on both cheeks.

  “Chérie, look at you! How is
dear Oncle Édouard?”

  It was the phrase she was told she would hear first, but all Eve could do was stare. This is the organizer of the Lille network?

  The little Frenchwoman was perhaps thirty-five, bird boned, hardly up to Eve’s chin. She wore a dashing suit in a violent shade of lilac, topped by the mountainous pink hat. Shopping bags piled up around her as she settled chattering behind the table, switching from rapid French into equally rapid English. In this part of France, English voices were common thanks to soldiers and nurses on leave from the front. “Mon Dieu, this rain! My hat is sure to be ruined. Perhaps it should be ruined. I couldn’t decide if it was utterly ghastly or utterly magical, so of course there was nothing to do but buy it.” She extracted a few pearl hat pins and hurled the hat to the spare chair, revealing blond hair rolled into a pompadour. “I always buy a morally questionable hat whenever I come through this area. I can’t take them back north with me, of course. Wear a nice hat, and a German sentry will just confiscate it for his latest whore. So in Lille I go about in last year’s serge and a dismal little boater, and anything fashionable gets abandoned as soon as I return. I must have left morally questionable hats all over France. Brandy,” she said to the waiter appearing at her elbow, and unleashed a ravishing smile as he reared back. “It’s been an absolute pisser of a day,” she said frankly. “So make it a double brandy, monsieur, and never mind looking sour. So—” She turned back to Eve, sitting silent and rather wide-eyed through this introductory monologue, and looked her up and down, suddenly all business. “Merde. Uncle Edward sends me babies from the cradle now?”

  “I’m twenty-two,” Eve said with a touch of frost. No fluffy Parisienne who matched pink with purple was going to make her feel like an infant. “Mademoiselle Dubois—”