The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  “Lili!” Eve hissed, looking at the lieutenant.

  “If you catch our good captain with his clothes off or his guard down, ask why he took that prison sentence for his dreary wife,” Lili whispered as a parting shot. “I’m dying to know!” Eve entered her questioning session with burning ears.

  “Miss Gardiner.” Captain Cameron rose, and Eve stopped short. She didn’t know if it was the sound of her own name, which she hadn’t heard for what seemed like forever, or if it was the sight of him. I forgot what you looked like. She’d thought she remembered him very well: the thin English face, the sandy hair, the tapered hands. But she’d forgotten the little things, like the way he crossed his trousered legs loosely at the knee as he reseated himself, the way he interlaced those lean hands and smiled clear to the corners of his eyes. “Do sit down,” he prompted, and Eve realized she was still standing in the doorway. She sat in the straight-backed chair across the table from him, taking time to settle her skirts.

  “It is good to see you, Miss Gardiner.” He smiled again, and Eve had a flash to their first conversation in the boardinghouse parlor. Could it really be only two months ago? What a great deal could happen in two months. Like a pair of cool French hands exploring the sides of her ribs last night, the soft hollows of her elbows and wrists, the insides of her thighs, no, she was not going to think about that. Not here.

  Cameron looked at her over his tented fingertips, and a line appeared between his brows. “Are you well? You look . . .”

  “Thinner? We d-don’t eat much in Lille.”

  “More than that.” That trace of a Scottish lilt in his voice; she’d forgotten that as well. “How are you coping, Miss Gardiner?”

  Spiderlike fingers unhurriedly tracing her earlobes. “Very well.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Narrow lips tracing the cup of her navel, the spaces between her fingers. “I do w-w-w—I do what is necessary.”

  “It is part of my job to evaluate our people, not just take their information.” That line between Captain Cameron’s eyes hadn’t gone away. “Your work has been superb. Alice Dubois—what?”

  “Nothing, Captain. I call her Lili. The day we m-met, she said ‘Alice Dubois’ sounded like a skinny schoolmistress with a face like a b-b-bin.”

  He laughed. “Yes, she would. She was unstinting in her praise for you, just now. You’ve done top-class work, but”—his eyes penetrated—“the toll of that can be high.”

  “Not for me.” Kisses with open eyes still staring, staring, staring. Eve met Cameron’s gaze, making sure her hands didn’t clench in her lap. “I was m-made for this.”

  Captain Cameron still stared, taking in every detail of Eve’s face. He wasn’t in uniform, just an old suit with the jacket thrown over the chair and shirtsleeves rolled to show lean wrists—but as much as he looked like a university professor, it would be dangerous to forget that he was an interrogator. He could slip information out of you before you even knew it was passing your lips.

  So Eve gave a cheerful smile, the good-sport girl who keeps a stiff upper lip through everything. “I thought we were here to talk about the k-k-k”—a fist against her knee, to release the word—“the kaiser’s visit, Captain?”

  “Yours were the first set of ears to hear of it. Tell me, from the beginning.”

  Eve relayed the details again, crisp and concise. He listened, taking notes. He blinked now and then. So nice to see a man who could blink.

  He sat back, surveying his notes. “Anything else?”

  “The kaiser’s arrival time has just changed—he’ll be an hour later than planned.”

  “That’s new. Where did you hear it?”

  “W-waiting tables.” From René, after he finished but before he pulled out of me. He likes to stay there awhile, until his sweat cools, so he’ll just begin . . . chatting.

  Captain Cameron caught something in her eyes. “What is it, Miss Gardiner?”

  How Eve liked hearing her own name again, especially from his lips. She liked it so much, she knew it wasn’t a good idea. “You had better keep calling me M-Marguerite Le François,” she said. “Safer.”

  “Very well.” The questions about the kaiser’s visit continued—Captain Cameron examined it from all angles, isolating every detail Eve could offer. He extracted one or two things she hadn’t thought of, and seemed pleased. “That should do it,” he said, rising. “You have been a very great help.”

  “Thank you.” Eve rose. “Tell the RFC not to miss. Tell them to b-bomb that train to shards.”

  Her intensity kindled an answering fire in his gaze. “Agreed.”

  As she turned for the door she heard his voice again with its faint Scottish lilt. “Be careful.”

  “I am careful.” She set her hand to the doorknob.

  “Are you? Lili worries. She worries for all her contacts, since she’s a bit of a mother hen. But she says you’re walking a very tight wire.”

  René’s lean weight coming down in the dark. “As you say, she’s a mother hen.”

  His voice came closer. “Eve—”

  “Don’t call me that.” She whirled around, advancing until they stood nose to nose. “It’s not my name anymore. I’m Marguerite Le François. You made me into Marguerite Le François. I’m not going to be Eve again until this war is over or until I am dead. Do you hear me?”

  “There’s no need for anyone to die. Be careful—”

  “Stop.” She wanted to lean forward and nail her mouth against his. It would stop him talking, and she knew his lips would be warm. You can’t. You’ll like it too much. Like hearing her name in his soft voice; it was bad for Marguerite and it was bad for her work.

  She began to pull away, but Captain Cameron’s hand found her waist. “It’s very hard,” he said softly. “What we do. It’s all right to find it hard. If you want to talk to me—”

  “I don’t want to talk,” she rasped.

  “It might do you good, Eve.”

  She couldn’t hear him say her name again. She could not. Of course that was why he was using it—she’d shown a weak point and he was pushing it, the handler seeing if his charge was close to cracking. Part of his job, evaluating her. Eve put her chin up, blindly turning the conversation to rock him back on his heels instead. “Either let me out of this room, Cameron, or t-take me someplace where we won’t do any talking.”

  She had no idea where those words came from. Idiot, idiot! Cameron stared at her, plainly surprised, but his hand still warmed the side of her waist. Eve knew she should step away, but a hungry part of her wanted to step closer and damn the consequences. She wanted to lie down with this man, whose every word and reaction she wouldn’t need to sift, measure, and weigh.

  But Cameron stepped away, mutely adjusting the gold band on his left hand.

  “Your wife s-sent you to prison,” Eve said bluntly. “From what I heard.” The unspoken words were, What do you owe a wife like that?

  He reared back. “Who told you—”

  “Major Allenton, back in Folkestone. Why did you conf-f-f—confess guilt when your wife was the one who c-c-committed fraud?” Eve had Cameron on the defensive for once, and she kept pushing.

  “I suppose it’s no secret.” He turned away, putting his hands on the back of a chair. “I thought I could save her from prison. My wife—she has always been unhappy. She wanted a child, desperately, and she couldn’t have one. She kept thinking every few weeks that this was the time—then the disappointment every month made her do strange things. Steal things, then make a fuss when they were missing. Fire the maids for listening at the door when they were on the other side of the house. Become obsessed with money, providing for a child’s future when we didn’t even have one yet, and claim her pearls had been stolen so she could cash in the insurance . . .” He rubbed at his forehead. “When that came out, she begged me to take the sentence for her. Someone had to go to prison, and she said she was too afraid. I wanted to spare her. She’s so fragile.”

>   She’s a liar who was content to let you take the punishment for her crime, Eve thought. Even if it destroyed your career and your life. But it sounded harsh and unforgiving, and she didn’t say it.

  “She’s to have a child in the spring.” He turned around. “She’s much calmer now that it’s finally happened. She’s . . . happier.”

  “You aren’t.”

  He shook his head, a halfhearted denial, but Eve could read him like a book. He was weary and heartsick, they both were, and they might all be dead soon in this hellish place of war and blood. She stepped closer, knowing this was a very bad idea, but unable to stop, wanting so badly to banish the thoughts of René’s spiderlike hands and toneless voice. I’m here, she thought. Take me.

  Cameron lifted her hand, bringing it to his lips. The sad gesture of a knight-errant, one who could never take advantage of a lady. It was on the tip of Eve’s tongue to tell him she was no innocent anymore, that he wouldn’t be taking anything René Bordelon hadn’t got first. But she couldn’t tell him that. He might remove her from Lille. He might do that anyway, if she lay with him as she wanted to. Fool, Marguerite’s voice hissed in Eve’s head. Stupid girl, what did Lili tell you? They all think a horizontale isn’t to be trusted and you go throwing yourself at him like a whore?

  He won’t think that of me, Eve thought. He’s not so narrow as that.

  But Marguerite was warier. Risk nothing.

  Eve stepped back. Nothing too overt had been said, quite—she could deny she meant anything intimate, even if they both knew better. “Pardon me, Uncle Edward. Are we f-finished here?”

  “Quite finished, mademoiselle. Take care of yourself in Lille.”

  “Lili takes care of me. She and Violette.”

  “Marguerite, Lili, and Violette.” He smiled, and the worry in his eyes bordered on agony. “My flowers.”

  “Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered.

  “What?”

  “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”

  CHAPTER 19

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  Four gin martinis sent Eve straight from supper to bed, but I was still restless. Too tired to go for a walk—the Little Problem drank my energy down like hot chocolate; I hoped that part of being pregnant would go away soon—but tired or not, I wasn’t ready to go up to my room. Then Finn pushed back his chair from the table, pocketing the bullets Eve had given him from the Luger. “I’ve some work to do on the car. Come hold the torch?”

  It had showered while we were eating, so the night was warm and rain scented. The pavement gleamed under the streetlamps, and cars passed by with a swish of wet tires. Finn rummaged in the car’s trunk, came out with a flashlight and a toolbox. “Keep it steady,” he said, handing me the flashlight and popping the hood.

  “What’s wrong with the old girl now?” I asked.

  Finn reached down into the Lagonda’s innards. “Got an old leak somewhere. I tighten things up every few days, make sure it doesn’t get worse.”

  I stood on tiptoe, aiming the flashlight’s beam as a cluster of giggling French girls blew past. “Wouldn’t it be easier to find the leak and fix it?”

  “You want me to take the time to break down the ruddy engine and put it back together?”

  “Not really.” As pleasant as today’s drive had been, the warm sunshine and the new camaraderie being woven among the three of us, I was on fire to get to Limoges. Rose. The closer I got to the last place she’d been, the more the hope burned in me that she really might be alive and waiting for me. And once it was Rose and me again, arm in arm against the world, I could do anything.

  “Come on,” Finn muttered to a stubborn lug nut or screw head or whatever it was. His Scots burr got thicker, as it always did when he was trying to persuade the car to cooperate. “Rusty aud bitch . . .” He worked away with a wrench, back and forth. “Hold that torch a bit higher, miss—”

  “Finn, if you call me miss now, you’ll blow my cover. As spies like Eve would say.” I tapped my fake wedding ring. “I’m Mrs. Donald McGowan, remember?”

  He got the bolt to loosen or tighten or whatever. “Grand idea, that ring.”

  “I need a picture of my Donald,” I mused. “Something I can look at mistily when I say that my heart is in the grave.”

  “Donald would want you to go on with your life,” Finn said. “You’re young. He’d tell you to marry again.”

  “I don’t want to get married. I want to find Rose and then maybe run a café.”

  “A café?” Finn looked up from the Lagonda’s innards, a lock of hair falling over his eyes. “Why?”

  “The happiest day in my life was spent with Rose at a French café. I thought maybe, if I find her . . . It’s an idea, anyway. I have to do something with my future.” Now that I had the Little Problem to think about, I needed a new plan besides my mother’s old one of Get Bs at Bennington until you can hook a nice young lawyer. Strangely, I wasn’t finding my unformed future as frightening as it could have been. I could do something I liked, now. Get a job. What did math majors do, in the practical world? I didn’t want to be a teacher and I couldn’t be an accountant, but . . . “I could run a little business like a café,” I said rather experimentally, seeing a line of orderly account books filled with my neat columns of numbers.

  “Donald wouldn’t like it.” Finn had a faint grin as he traded out the small wrench. “His widow, waiting tables and keeping a till?”

  “Donald could be a bit of a prig,” I confessed.

  “God rest his soul,” Finn said, straight-faced.

  What a difference a few days made. He used to talk like he was being charged a dollar for every word that came out of his mouth, and now here he was making jokes. “What do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean, Mrs. McGowan?”

  “Well, you’re surely not going to work for Eve forever, making one-pan breakfasts to cure her hangovers and disarming her every night before bed.” I sniffed the damp evening breeze—it smelled like more rain might be coming. A pair of old men in crumpled caps were hurrying home across the street, casting anxious looks at the skies. “What would you do, if you could do anything?”

  “Before the war, I worked in a garage. Always thought maybe I’d start my own someday. Fix up other people’s cars, do some restoration work . . .” Finn finished up inside the Lagonda, and gently lowered the hood. “Don’t think that’ll happen now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wouldn’t be much good at the business side of things. Besides, there are lots of former soldiers looking for work, and even more looking for bank loans. Who’s going to give a good garage job or a start-up loan to an ex-soldier with a Pentonville stint on his record?” He spoke matter-of-factly.

  “Is that why you’re haring off to Limoges with Eve and me?” I switched off the flashlight, handing it back. There was dim veiled light from the streetlights overhead, but it seemed very dark without the flashlight’s bright beam. “I know why I’m going, and I know why Eve’s going. But what about you?”

  “There’s not much else for me to do.” His soft voice had a smile. “Besides, I like both of you.”

  I hesitated. “Why did you go to prison? And don’t say it’s because you stole a swan from Kew Gardens or made off with the crown jewels,” I rushed on, twisting my false wedding ring. “Really—what happened?”

  He rubbed slowly at his oil-smeared hands with a rag.

  “Eve told us she was a spy in the Great War. I told you I slept with half a frat. You know our secrets.”

  He put his toolbox away in the trunk. Turned the rag over to the clean side, and began rubbing at the rain marks on the Lagonda’s dark blue fender. Through the broad front window of the hotel, the night porter watched us idly.

  “I saw some bad things,” Finn said, “during the last year of the war.”

  He stopped for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to
say anything else.

  “I have a temper,” he said finally.

  I smiled. “No, you don’t. You’re the levelest man I know—”

  He brought his open hand down against the fender in a sudden slap. I jumped, voice breaking off.

  “I have a temper,” he repeated evenly. “The months after I left my regiment, it wasn’t a braw time. I’d go out, get wrecked, start fights. Eventually I got arrested for one of them. Earned me a term in Pentonville for assault.”

  Assault. An ugly word. I looked at Finn and I just couldn’t see it. “Who’d you get in a fight with?” I asked softly.

  “I don’t know. Never met him before that night.”

  “Why did you fight him?”

  “I don’t remember. I was fair smashed, walking around angry.” Finn leaned his back against the Lagonda, arms folded tight across his chest. “He said something, who knows what. I hit him. Kept on hitting him. Six people pulled me off once I started bashing his head against a doorpost. Thank God they got me off him before I cracked his skull.”

  I stayed silent. It was misting now, very gently.

  “He got better,” Finn said. “Eventually. I went to Pentonville.”

  “Have you hit anybody since?” I asked, because I had to say something.

  He stared straight ahead, not looking at anything. “No.”

  “Maybe your temper isn’t the problem.”

  He laughed shortly. “I beat a man to a pulp—broke his nose and his jaw and his eye socket and four of his fingers—and my temper isna the problem?”

  “Did you get in fights like that before the war?”

  “No.”

  “Then maybe the temper isn’t really you. It’s the war.” Or rather, whatever he saw there. I wondered what that was, but I didn’t ask.

  “That’s a lousy excuse, Charlie. Or every soldier who came home would be in the lockup.”

  “Some go to prison. Some go back to work. Some kill themselves.” I thought of my brother, painfully. “Everyone’s different.”

  “You should go in,” Finn said abruptly. “Before you get all drookit.”