The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  Du Malassis. I filed the name away even as Eve asked, “What happened to Monsieur du Malassis?”

  “Disappeared into the night, Christmas of ’44. He knew which way the wind was turning. Who knows where he went, but he hasn’t showed his face here since.” The old woman gave a slow, unpleasant smile. “If he did he’d get a short noose and a long struggle on a lamppost.”

  “For collaboration?”

  “There are collaborators, madame, and there are men like him. In ’43, you know what du Malassis did? He had a young sous-chef dragged out of those doors at the end of the night’s shift, announcing that the lad was a thief. Searched him right there in the street with everyone watching—the restaurant’s entire staff, passersby, neighbors like me who came running at the noise.”

  I could see it: the nighttime mist rising off the river, the wide-eyed bystanders, a boy in a sous-chef’s apron trembling. Eve said nothing, listening so intently she’d turned to stone. The old woman went on.

  “Du Malassis dragged a handful of silver out of the boy’s pockets, and said he’d telephone the police. Promised he’d have the boy arrested and shipped east. Who knows if he could have done it, but everyone knew du Malassis stacked up favors with the Nazis. The boy tried to run. Du Malassis had a pistol in that elegant jacket of his, and he shot the boy in the back before he’d gone ten steps.”

  “Did he now,” Eve said softly. I shivered.

  “He did.” The old woman was brusque. “And du Malassis just stood there cleaning his hands off with a handkerchief, grimacing at the smell of gunsmoke. Told his maître d’ to telephone the authorities to have the mess cleaned up. Then turned his back on that boy’s body and went inside, cool as cream. That’s the kind of man he was. Not just a collaborator. An elegant killer.”

  Finn spoke. “Did the Nazis make any protest?”

  “Not that I ever heard. He must have called in favors to avoid arrest or censure, because his restaurant kept right on prospering. Oh, there’s plenty in Limoges who would have happily put a rope around that man’s neck, and he knew it. That’s why he ran, once it was clear the Germans would lose.” The old woman took a drag off her cigarette, looking at us sharply. “Why are you so curious? Is du Malassis any relation to you?”

  “To the devil, maybe,” Eve said with soft venom, and the two women exchanged tight acid smiles. “Thank you for your time,” Eve said, and turned away. But I stepped forward, addressing the old woman in my slangy American French.

  “Pardonnez-moi, madame. I am looking for a relation—someone who might have worked at Le Lethe. Not a collaborator,” I said hastily as the woman’s brows came together. “You might have noticed her. People tended to notice Rose. Young, blond, a laugh like a bell.” I brought out the worn photograph Rosie had sent me in one of her letters in ’43. The photo of her looking over her shoulder like a Betty Grable pinup, grinning. Before the old woman said a word, I knew she’d recognized Rose.

  “Yes,” she said. “Pretty girl. You’d see those SS bastards pinching her on the hip when she brought their drinks, and she didn’t go batting her lashes like some of those sluts du Malassis hired. She’d find a way to spill a drink on them and then go oozing apologies sweet as pie. You could see it all the way across the terrace.”

  That rocked me back on my heels. A new memory of Rose that wasn’t mine. Rose, spilling beer on German soldiers. My eyes prickled. It sounded like her.

  “When did you last see her?” My voice came out hoarse, and I realized for the first time that Finn had taken my hand and gripped it tight.

  “Before the restaurant closed. She must have stopped working there.” The woman spat on the ground again. “It wasn’t a place for decent girls.”

  My heart sank. I’d so hoped Rose would be alive and here, living in Limoges. But I looked at the old woman and forced a smile. “Thank you for your help, madame.”

  I wasn’t out of ideas yet.

  Eve had another of her bad spells that night. She didn’t start screaming this time, she just woke me with a series of dull thuds against the wall between our bedrooms. I poked my head out into the hotel hall. No Finn. Just me.

  I pulled a sweater over my slip and padded to Eve’s door, pressing my ear to the panels. Still that dull thwack, as though she was knocking something against the wall. Hopefully not her head, I thought, and rapped softly. “Eve?”

  The thwacks kept going.

  “Don’t aim that pistol at me. I’m coming in.”

  Eve sat on the floor in the far corner, but she was clear-eyed this time, not mumbling in the grip of waking nightmares. She stared at the ceiling, the Luger in her hand, and she methodically banged its butt against the wall. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  I put my hands on my hips, glaring. “Must you?”

  “Helps me think.” Thwack. Thwack.

  “It’s midnight. Can’t you sleep instead of think?”

  “Haven’t even tried. The nightmares’ll be waiting. I’ll wait it out till dawn.” Thwack. Thwack.

  “Well, try to bang more quietly.” I turned to go, yawning. Eve’s voice called me back.

  “Stay. I can use your hands.”

  I looked over my shoulder. “For what?”

  “Can you field-strip a Luger?”

  “They didn’t teach that at Bennington, no.”

  “And I thought all Americans were gun mad. Let me show you.”

  I found myself sitting cross-legged opposite Eve as she pointed out the various bits of the pistol and I clumsily broke it apart. “The barrel . . . The side plate . . . The firing pin . . .”

  “Why am I learning this?” I asked, and yelped as she hit me across the knuckles for pushing the receiver axle the wrong way.

  “Field-stripping a Luger, that really used to help me think. My hands are too buggered up to do it properly anymore, so I’ll borrow yours. Get the oil out of my satchel.”

  I started spreading out the pistol’s disassembled bits. “What are you pondering?” Her eyes had a thoughtful glitter that wasn’t whiskey, though I saw the usual tumbler with its half measure of amber fluid at her knee.

  “René du Malassis,” she said. “Or rather, René Bordelon. And where he went.”

  “You’re assuming that he’s still alive, then.” She’d denied it so stubbornly in Roubaix.

  “He’d be seventy-two now,” Eve said softly. “But yes, I’m betting he’s still alive.”

  She couldn’t stop the ripple that crossed her face, a ripple of loathing and self-loathing together. How rare it was to see an emotion she couldn’t mask. She looked almost fragile, and an odd protectiveness tightened my chest. “What makes you certain du Malassis is your Bordelon?” I asked gently.

  A half-smile. “Malassis is the surname of the publisher who printed Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.”

  “I’m really starting to hate Baudelaire. And I’ve never even read him.” At this point I didn’t need to.

  “You’re lucky.” Her voice was dry. “I had to listen to René quote his whole damned oeuvre cover to c-cover.”

  I paused, holding the Luger’s barrel in one hand and the oiled cloth in the other. “So, you and he were . . .”

  A raised eyebrow. “Are you shocked?”

  “No. I’m no saint.” I patted the Little Problem, which seemed happier these days. It still made me tired, but the nausea was better, and I wasn’t getting any more strangely articulate thoughts from the direction of my stomach.

  “René took me to this hotel.” Eve looked around the room as though not quite seeing it. “Not this room. He wouldn’t stand for anything this small. The best room in the hotel: fourth floor, big windows, blue velvet drapes. A huge bed . . .”

  I didn’t ask what had happened in that bed. There was a reason she’d decided to stay up all night rather than risk dreaming. “How does this go?” I murmured, holding out various pistol bits, and she showed me how to rub down the individual parts with the oiled cloth. “So when René Bordelon needed to flee Lille
, he became René du Malassis,” I said eventually. “And when he needed to flee Limoges, he disappeared again. How could that be so easy when so many collaborators were caught?” I thought of the images I’d seen in the papers of such people, male and female, humiliated or worse. The old Frenchwoman hadn’t spoken idly of hanging people from lampposts.

  “René was no fool.” Eve put away the gun oil with clumsy hands. “He catered to those in power, but he always knew they might lose. And by the time he knew they would lose, he would have had a plan in place to rabbit away with his money and a new name, and start over—after Lille, and after Limoges.” She paused, considering. “I think he was planning the first of those bolts when he brought me here in ’15. I didn’t realize it then; he said he wanted to site out spots for a second restaurant. I assumed he meant expanding his business ventures, but maybe he wasn’t ever thinking about expanding. Maybe he was scoping out a spot for a new life, in case he needed one. And he did.”

  “Hmm.” I laid out the last of the pistol parts, all oiled up. My hands were a greasy mess, but I’d gotten interested in the whole process. If they’d taught me to field-strip guns instead of bake biscuits in Home Ec, I might have paid more attention. “You know, there’s something different between René Bordelon and René du Malassis besides the name.”

  “What’s that, Yank?”

  “Willingness to pull a trigger.” I looked down at the Luger’s trigger, lying innocent among the disassembled components. “The way you described him in the first war, he was too fastidious to do his own dirty work. When he caught a thief in his restaurant—your predecessor—he called the Germans in, and they did the shooting. The second time around, from what that old woman said, he didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger himself.”

  “Not a small l-line to cross,” Eve agreed. She sounded like she’d already done considerable pondering along these lines.

  “So what changed him?” I asked. “By the end of the first war, what turned him from a profiteering aesthete into”—I remembered the old woman’s words—“an elegant killer?”

  Eve gave a crooked smile. “I imagine it was me.”

  There was a piece of this equation I didn’t have yet, but before I could ask, Eve gestured for me to reassemble the Luger, lips sealing. I changed tack.

  “How will we find him now? He won’t still be du Malassis; he’ll have taken a new name again.” I slid bolt into barrel. “Where would he rabbit to from Limoges?” And what a chill it gave me to know that we weren’t just hunting an old profiteer, an old enemy . . . but a murderer.

  “There’s an English officer I can contact,” Eve said, allowing my change of direction. “Someone from the old days. He ran networks of spies like me, and he kept on doing it through the next war. Stationed in Bordeaux, currently—I telephoned from London, but he was off duck hunting. He’ll be back by now. If anyone can dig up information on an old collaborator, it would be him.”

  I wondered if this was the Captain Cameron she’d spoken of. He didn’t sound half bad in the stories she’d been telling. I wanted to get a look at him, see if he matched the internal picture I’d been building, but I had my own trail to follow.

  “You contact your friend in Bordeaux,” I said. “I’m going to take Finn and the car, and go look for my cousin.”

  Eve cocked an eyebrow, even as she was showing me how to press the Luger’s barrel down to take the pressure off the spring. “Look where for your cousin? If she’s alive, she might be anywhere.”

  “My aunt said she’d originally been sent to a village outside Limoges to have her baby. The kind of total backwater where people send disgraced girls.” I was starting to get the hang of the pistol now; the parts were sliding easily in my oily fingers. “Rose stayed there to have her baby, then four months later came to work here in Limoges. But maybe she left her baby back in the village with a family to raise. Maybe she went back there when she stopped working at Le Lethe. Who knows? But it’s a small town, and everyone knows everyone in small towns. Someone will recognize the picture of Rose.” I shrugged. “It’s a place to start, anyway.”

  “A good p-plan,” Eve agreed, and I flushed with pride at her approval. “Take that pistol apart one more time.” I field-stripped the Luger again, and Eve began another story: the weekend she and René Bordelon had spent here in the summer of 1915. “We came on the train, and he took me to buy a new dress. It was one thing for me to come to his rooms in a work dress, but he wasn’t going to be seen on the promenade or at the theater with me in an old shirtwaist. It was a Poiret, almond green corded silk trimmed with black velvet, forty-three velvet-covered buttons down the back. He’d count them off as he undid them . . .”

  I reassembled the firing pin, wondering what Eve planned to do when she found her old enemy. Have him arrested? Everyone knew the French dealt harshly with collaborators. Or simply trust the Luger to make an end for her? I did not at all put that out of the realm of possibility.

  What did he do to you, Eve? And what did you do to him?

  She was telling me how the river in Limoges had looked gray when she was last here, not the bright blue it was now. How the leaves had fluttered around the heels of her new patent-leather shoes, bought to go with the almond green dress. “You remember it so clearly,” I said, presenting her with the cleaned and oiled pistol.

  “I should.” Eve downed the rest of her whiskey. “That was the weekend I missed my monthly, and started fearing René had got me pregnant.”

  CHAPTER 22

  EVE

  September 1915

  Autumn had barely begun, and already the cold had clamped down like a vise. Lille was a city of two worlds living side by side, the falling temperatures making a demarcation clearer than any line. On one side the Germans, who had all the coal, candles, and hot coffee they needed. On the other side the French, who had almost none of those things. The two worlds had been described as French and German, or conquered and conqueror, but now they were simply cold and not cold.

  Eve didn’t notice. She was pregnant, and the thought had driven every other from her mind.

  It hadn't been very long, but the signs weren’t difficult to read. Two monthly bloods missed—some women in Lille whispered that their courses now came irregularly due to semistarvation, but Eve didn’t think she was so lucky. She’d grown thin as a wafer, but she still had enough black-market scraps from Le Lethe not to starve. Besides, other signs had been quick to follow: her breasts had begun to feel tender, she was suddenly tired at all hours, and she had to swallow down unexpected shafts of queasiness when a juicy roast passed from the kitchens, or when she had to carry a pungent slab of Morbier in for the cheese course.

  Eve was certain. René Bordelon had made her pregnant.

  It was a realization that should have driven her to utter despair, but there was no time for that. The Alice Network was busy. French lines in Champagne had been pushing a sustained assault; the German Kommandant and his generals had spoken a good many terse words about it over their coffee. Words Eve reported. She marked hours waiting tables and then marked more hours in René’s bed, at work one way or another at least nineteen hours of every day. She passed information about artillery placements, about casualty lists, about train schedules and supply depots. She was so used to the knife edge she walked that it seemed almost normal; she kept her face and her voice so continuously locked that she sometimes wondered if she had a single spontaneous expression left. She could not panic and fall into despair simply because her body had decided to betray her. She could not.

  Eve opened her door that Saturday to Violette, come to stay on her usual round through Lille, and nearly cried with relief. All week she’d had nightmares of Violette getting arrested, now of all times. Eve never much liked Violette, but oh, she needed her.

  Violette must have seen some flash of her relief, because surprise flickered behind those round glasses. “You look glad to see me,” she commented, scraping mud off her worn boots. She frowned, adding, “Is
there news?”

  “No news,” Eve said. “But I need help, and you’re the only one I can ask.”

  Violette took off her gloves, rubbing her chilled hands as she looked at Eve curiously. “Why me?”

  Eve took a deep breath. “Lili s-s-s—she said you were a nurse.”

  “Red Cross, yes. Though not for long. The war had just begun.”

  Eve pushed down a sudden surge of doubt, but forged on anyway, because what choice was there? “I am pregnant,” she said bluntly, and made herself look Violette in the eye. “Can you help me take care of it?”

  Violette stared at her a moment, then let out an explosive breath. “Merde, are you stupid enough to mix a love affair with work like this? Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with Antoine or—”

  “I’m no idiot schoolgirl,” Eve snapped. “I had to sleep with my employer for information, Violette. Didn’t Lili t-tell you?”

  “Of course not.” Violette pushed her spectacles up her nose. “You didn’t think to take some precautions?”

  “I tried. They didn’t w-work.” Tiptoeing out of his bed at night to rinse herself out in his luxurious bathroom had felt more squalid than what took place in the bed, but Eve had never skipped doing it. If only it had worked. “And before you ask, nothing else has w-worked either. Jumping down the steps, hot baths, d-doses of brandy. Nothing.”

  Violette gave another sigh, less explosive, and perched on the edge of the bed. “How long?”

  “Two m-months, I think.” By Eve’s best guess, it must have happened very early. Maybe just the second or third time.

  “Not very far along, then. Good.”

  “Can you help me or not?” Eve’s heart lodged in her throat, and her voice rasped around it.

  “I saw more battle wounds than pregnant women.” Violette folded her arms tight across her chest. “Why don’t you tell Bordelon? A rich man like him, he might pay a real doctor.”

  Eve had already thought of that. “What if he wants it?” She wasn’t sure he would—René was hardly a family man—but Eve suspected he had something of a dynast in him. What if he decided Eve might have a boy, and found that thought . . . interesting?