The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  She disappeared into her rented room, and I was just as quick to vanish into mine. I had no desire to be left alone in the hallway with Finn.

  Supper was a cheap packet of sandwiches eaten on my narrow bed. I washed out my underclothes and blouse in the small sink, thinking that I’d need more clothes soon, and finally steeled myself to head downstairs to use the hotel’s telephone. I had no intention of telling my mother where I was going, in case she turned up with the police in tow—I was still underage—but I didn’t want her worrying that I wasn’t safe. Yet the clerk at the Dolphin told me she’d checked out. I left a message anyway, hung up uneasily, and went back upstairs, fighting sudden exhaustion. All I’d done was sit in a car all day, but I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life. These strange waves of tiredness had been hitting me for weeks now, surely another sign of the Little Problem.

  I shoved away any thought of the L.P. as I came back to my room. Roubaix tomorrow. Part of me didn’t even want to go—Eve still insisted there was someone she had to talk to, a woman who might know something, but thanks to my aunt I already knew something. I knew Rose had been sent to a little town farther south to have her baby, and I knew she’d left afterward to find work in nearby Limoges. Limoges was where I wanted to go, not Roubaix and whatever dubious contact Eve thought she had.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, and let it rise in my chest: hope. As horrible as that hour with Tante Jeanne had been, she’d given me that hope. Because as much as I struggled to convince myself there was a chance Rose could be alive, part of me had gone on thinking my parents were right, that she must be dead. Because the girl I loved like a sister—the girl who feared loneliness—would have found her way back to us by now.

  But if her entire family had rejected her, shipped her off to have her bastard, and then wiped their hands clean . . . Well, I knew Rose. She was proud and full of fire. She wouldn’t ever walk back into the house in Rouen after the way her parents had thrown her out of it.

  I could even understand her not writing me about her dilemma. Why should she? I’d just been a little girl when we last met, someone to protect, not confide ugly things to. And shame could get to be a habit. I wasn’t sure I could have borne to write her about my Little Problem, even if I’d had an address. Face-to-face I could have cried it into her shoulder, but putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.

  If she was alive, she might be living in Limoges now. Perhaps she had her child with her. A boy or a girl? I thought, and heard myself laugh tremulously. Rose with a baby. I looked down at my own stomach, flat and innocuous, alternately making me tired or nauseated, and my eyes blurred. “Oh, Rosie,” I whispered. “How did we mess up this badly?”

  Well, I had messed up. Rose had found love, in the shape of a French bookshop clerk who had joined the Resistance. That sounded like the kind of boy Rose would like. I wondered if her Étienne had been dark or fair, if he’d given his coloring to the baby. I wondered where he’d been taken after his arrest, if he was alive at all. Probably not. So many people disappeared and died, we were only starting to understand the horrifying scope of the losses. Rose’s boy was probably gone; if she was alive then she was alone. Left behind, as she’d been at the Provençal café.

  Not for long, Rose. I’m coming for you, I swear. I hadn’t been able to save my brother, but I could still save her.

  “And then maybe I’ll know what to do about you,” I told my stomach. I didn’t want it, had no clue what to do about it. But the sickness of the last few days had brought home with painful clarity that just plain ignoring it was no longer an option.

  The French night lay full and soft and warm outside my window. I crawled into bed, lids dropping. I wasn’t even aware I’d dropped off to sleep until a scream split the night.

  That scream clawed me upright and out of bed. I was on my feet, heart galloping and mouth dry, and the terrible howl just went on and on. A woman’s scream, full of terror and agony, and I bolted out of my room.

  Finn erupted into the hallway at the same moment, barefoot and bare armed. “What is that?” I gasped as other doors farther down the hall started to creak open. Finn didn’t answer, just went straight to the door between ours, the one showing a line of yellow light underneath. The scream came from inside. “Gardiner!” He rattled the handle. The scream cut off as though a knife had sliced through a taut throat. I heard the unmistakable click of the Luger being cocked.

  “Gardiner, I’m coming in.” Finn jammed his shoulder against the door and shoved hard. The cheap bolt tore away from the wall with a sound of screeching nails, and light poured into the hall. Eve towered tall, gray-streaked hair streaming loose, her eyes two haunted sightless pits—and as she saw Finn in the doorway with me behind him, she raised the Luger and fired.

  I screamed, dropping to the floor in a ball—but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Finn tore the Luger out of Eve’s hand, and she spat an obscenity and went for his eyes. He tossed the pistol on the bed, catching her gaunt wrists in both hands. As his eyes found mine, I saw in astonishment that he was quite calm.

  “Find the night clerk and tell him everything is fine before someone summons the police,” he said, holding Eve hard. She was spitting curses in both French and German. “We don’t want to find a new hotel in the middle of the night.”

  “But—” I couldn’t look away from the pistol on the bed. She fired on us. My arms, I realized, were wrapped tight around the Little Problem.

  “Tell him she had a nightmare.” Finn looked down at Eve. She had stopped cursing, her breath coming in harsh, shallow bursts. Her eyes gazed blindly at the wall. Wherever she was, it wasn’t here.

  I heard a peevish burst of French behind me, and looked around to see the auberge’s owner, shrill and sleepy. “Pardonnez-moi,” I said, quickly closing the door between her and the strange tableau. “Ma grandmère, elle a des cauchemars . . .”

  I poured honey in my slangy American French until all indignation subsided, helped along by a handful of francs. At last the owner trailed off back to his own room, and I dared poke my head around the door again.

  Finn had settled Eve, not in her bed but in the farthest corner—the one with the clearest view of the door and window. He’d dragged a chair aside so she could huddle against the wall, and dropped a blanket over her shoulders. He was hunkered down on his heels beside her, talking softly, moving slowly as he laid the whiskey flask in her lap.

  She muttered something, a name. It sounded like René, and my skin prickled.

  “René isna here,” Finn soothed.

  “The beast is me,” she whispered.

  “I know.” Finn offered her the Luger butt first.

  “Are you crazy?” I whispered, but he made a demurring gesture at me behind his back. Eve never looked up. She was quiet now, but she still stared into nothing, her eyes jerking back and forth from the window to the doorway. Her warped fingers wrapped again around the pistol, and Finn released it.

  He rose and padded barefoot toward me. I backed into the hall and he followed, gently tugging the door closed and letting out a long breath.

  “Why did you give her that gun back?” I whispered. “If it had been loaded, one of us might be dead!”

  “Who do you think took the bullets out in the first place?” He looked down at me. “I do it every night. She curses me a fair amount, but considering she nearly shot my ear off the first evening I came to work for her, she doesn’t have much of an argument.”

  “Nearly shot your ear off?”

  Finn looked at the door. “She’ll be all right now till morning.”

  “How often does she do this?”

  “Now and then. Something sets her off—she gets caught in a big crowd and panics, or hears some scaffolding collapse and thinks it’s an explosion. You can’t predict it.”

  I realized my arms were still wrapped around my midsection. I could hardly think of the Little Problem as anything but,
well, a problem—but my arms had flown to shield it as soon as I saw Eve’s gun. I dropped my hands, vibrating all over. I hadn’t felt so alive—alive over every shaky muscle, every prickling inch of skin, every hair standing on end—in a very long time. “I need a drink.”

  “Me too.”

  I followed Finn back to his room, which was not at all proper since I was halfway to naked in the nylon slip I’d been using for a nightgown. But I shut out the nasty, knowing voice in my head and closed the door as Finn switched on a lamp and fished inside his satchel. He offered me a flask, much smaller than Eve’s. “No glasses, sorry.”

  No more miss now, of course. I shrugged, not expecting any different. I knew perfectly well what kind of equation was writing itself here. “Who needs a glass?” I bolted down a swallow of whiskey, relishing the fire. “All right, let’s hear it. René. Eve does know that name. If it’s the same one from the report, who Rose worked for—”

  “I wouldn’t know. Only that she says that name a lot in these moods.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Because I work for her.” He took a swallow from the flask. “Not you.”

  “You two are quite a pair,” I snorted. “Both barbed-wire knots made out of secrets.”

  “And for good reasons.”

  I thought back to Eve’s haunted whisper when she’d quoted that bit about how death awaited the enemies of Germany. Something about her said combatant to me. I’d seen my brother come back from war, marking the changes in him with worried, loving eyes, and James wasn’t the only ex-soldier I’d observed. I’d danced with them at mixers, talked to them at parties, made a habit of observing them because I’d hoped I could see something that would help me help James. I’d failed in that; nothing I’d ever done had helped James, and even now I hated myself for it—but still, I knew what a combatant looked like, and Eve showed all the signs. “Will she be all right tomorrow?” James wouldn’t even leave his room the morning after episodes like this.

  “Probably.” Finn leaned on the sill of the open window and looked down at the row of streetlights, taking another thoughtful swallow of whiskey. “She usually goes on the next day like nothing happened.”

  I wanted to keep probing, but the whole thorny matter of Eve and her secrets made my head ache. I let it go for now, wandering over to join Finn at the windowsill. It was what came next in the equation, after all: girl plus boy, multiply by whiskey. Now add proximity. “So we’ll be in Roubaix tomorrow, if the car doesn’t break down again.” My shoulder brushed his.

  He passed me the flask. “I can keep her ticking.”

  “You’re pretty handy with that toolbox. Where’d you learn?” Prison? Curiosity was consuming me.

  “I’ve been in and out of garages since I was a wee one. Playing with wrenches in the cradle.”

  I took another swig. “Could I take a turn driving the Lagonda tomorrow, or is she a one-man car?”

  “You drive?” He glanced at me with the same surprise he’d shown when I said I’d had a job. “I figured your family kept a chauffeur.”

  “We aren’t Vanderbilts, Finn. Of course I can drive. My brother taught me.” A sweet, painful memory: James had escaped a big family barbecue by dragging me off in his Packard and giving me a driving lesson. “I think he really did it because he wanted to get away from our noisy relatives. But he was a good teacher.” He’d ruffled my hair, saying, You drive home, you’re the expert now—and after I pulled up in a proud swish of tires, we lingered awhile before rejoining the family hubbub. I’d asked James if he would be my date to the next formal dance. I won’t get a real date, James, and we can sit on the sidelines making fun of all the sorority girls. He smiled sideways and said, I’d like that, sis. I’d gone in thinking that for once I’d helped him when he was in one of his moods.

  Not three weeks later he shot himself.

  I blinked that away, painfully.

  “Maybe I’ll let you get behind the wheel someday.” Finn looked down his lean shoulder at me, light gleaming off his dark hair. “You’ll have to be patient with her. She’s a persnickety sort of lady, after all. A bit cranky, needs special handling. But she’ll always come through.”

  “Don’t go all Scottish and metaphorical.” I took another swig from the flask and gave it back, my fingers brushing his. “It’s past two in the morning.”

  He smiled, looking back over the nighttime lights. I waited for him to move closer. But he just drained his whiskey, and moved to sit on the wall bench.

  My sharp inner voice was still saying nasty things. Before it got any louder, I went to finish the equation: boy plus girl, multiplied by whiskey and proximity, equaled . . . Taking the glass out of Finn’s hand, I climbed into his lap and kissed him. I tasted whiskey on his soft mouth, felt the roughness of his unshaven jaw. Then he broke away. “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” I wound my arms around his neck. “I’m offering to sleep with you.”

  His dark eyes went over me deliberately. I tilted a shoulder, nonchalant, and let the strap of my slip slide down my arm. His hands skimmed my bare knees on either side of him, then slid over the nylon hem rather than under it, up to my waist and holding me firm as I tried to lean forward for another kiss.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s turning out to be quite the night for surprises.”

  “Is it?” I felt his hands through the thin silky nylon, big and very warm on either side of my waist. “I’ve been thinking about this all day.” Ever since I’d seen him strip down to his shirtsleeves to work on the Lagonda. He had much better arms than most college boys, who usually ran lanky or doughy.

  Finn’s voice sounded a little hoarse, but very level. “What’s a nice girl like you doing jumping into bed with an ex-convict?”

  “You know I’m not a nice girl. Eve cleared that up. Besides, it’s not like you’re taking me to cotillion,” I added bluntly. “You’re not meeting my parents. It’s just a screw.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “Though I do wonder what you did,” I added in all honesty, trailing one finger around the back of his neck. “To get yourself tossed in prison.”

  “I stole a swan from Kew Gardens.” He still had a firm grip around my waist, holding me away from him.

  “Liar.”

  “I nicked a diamond tiara from the crown jewels in the Tower of London.”

  “Still a liar.”

  His eyes looked black and bottomless in the dim light. “Why ask me, then?”

  “I like hearing you lie.” I wound my arms around his neck again, sliding my fingers into his soft hair. “Why are we still talking?” Most boys were all hands the minute the lights went out; why wasn’t Finn? As soon as Eve made it clear what kind of girl I really was, I’d assumed he would leave off the respectful air and try to get me in the sack. That was what I was used to. I could either shove him off or go along, and I’d already decided to go along. But I wasn’t used to making the advances. I might not be pretty, but I was available—that was usually enough to get a man’s hands reaching for my clothes without any help from me.

  But Finn didn’t move, just kept looking at me. His eyes went to my waistline and he said, “Haven’t you got a lad? A fiancé?”

  “Do you see a ring?”

  “Who was it, then?”

  “Harry S. Truman,” I said.

  “Now who’s the liar.”

  The air was thick and warm. I moved my hips, and I could sense him responding. I knew what he wanted. Why wasn’t he taking it? “Why do you care who knocked me up?” I whispered, moving some more. “You can’t knock me up now, and that’s what counts. I’m a safe lay.”

  “That’s ugly,” he said quietly.

  “But it’s true.”

  He pulled me closer then, his face very near mine, and my skin thrummed. “Why exactly are you climbing all over me?”

  Whore. The word echoed in my head, in my mother’s voice or maybe my aunt’s. I flinched, tu
rned it into a shrug. “I’m a tramp,” I said, flippant. “Everyone knows tramps sleep around. And you’re kind of a dish. So why not?”

  He smiled, a real smile instead of the little corner flick of his mouth that I was used to seeing. “Charlie lass,” he said, and I had time to think how much I liked my name in his soft Scottish burr, “you need a better reason than that.”

  He lifted me off his lap like a doll, setting me back on my feet. He rose and went to the door, opening it wide, and I felt a slow crimson flush sweep down my neck. “Good night, miss. Sleep well.”

  CHAPTER 10

  EVE

  June 1915

  Eve made her debut two nights later as both a spy and as an employee of Le Lethe. Of the two, the second was more exhausting: René Bordelon required nothing short of perfection, and two days’ training wasn’t much time to achieve perfection. Eve achieved it. Failure, after all, was not an option. She took her new employer’s rules into her bones as he repeated them in his metallic voice just before his two newly hired waitresses began their first shift.

  A dark dress, neat hair. “You are not to be noticed; you are a shadow.” Light feet, small steps. “I expect you to glide in all your movements. My guests are not to have their conversation disturbed.” Silence at all times; no whispering or speaking to the patrons. “You are not required to memorize wine lists or take orders. You bring plates to tables and clear them away.” Pour wine with the arm in a graceful curve. “Everything in Le Lethe is graceful, even that which passes unnoticed.”

  And the last rule, the most important one: “Violate the rules, and you will be dismissed. There are many hungry girls in Lille eager to take your place.”

  Le Lethe came to life in the evening, an unnatural patch of light and warmth and music in a city that went dark at sundown. Eve, standing in her dark dress in her appointed corner, was reminded of the legend of vampires. In Lille, the French went to bed at sundown because even if there were no curfew, there was little paraffin or coal to keep a room lit. Only the Germans came out at night, like the undead, to celebrate their undisputed rule. They came to Le Lethe, uniforms gleaming, medals polished, voices loud, and René Bordelon greeted them in an exquisitely tailored dinner jacket, his smile unforced. Like Renfield, Eve thought, from Bram Stoker’s tale: a human turned base and craven in the service of the nightwalkers.