The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  “If so, you could still get it taken care of on the sly. Tell him you miscarried.”

  Eve shook her head. She knew René; he hated mess and expense. To him, a mistress was something pretty that never caused trouble. Whether she miscarried a child he wanted or he had to pay to get her taken care of, she was trouble. She might easily lose her place at Le Lethe. No, her best chance to continue her work for Lili was to have things continue as they were.

  “Hm.” Violette didn’t suggest telling Captain Cameron or the other officers who oversaw the Alice Network. “You know the procedure can be dangerous. You’re sure it’s what you want?”

  Eve gave a single violent nod. “Yes.”

  “You might bleed to death, doing it this way. It’s still early days; if you wait you might still miscarry, or—”

  “Do it.”

  Her voice came out in a desperate snarl. It was more than her determination to stay, to continue her work. It was the fact that behind her surface calm, Eve battled a panic bordering on madness. She’d given up so much since coming to Lille—home, safety, virginity, even her name—and she’d done so willingly because it was for an unseen future, a sunny clearing somewhere safely beyond war and invaders. And now the invader was inside her, claiming her as thoroughly as the Germans claimed France, and there was no more future. At a stroke she’d been rendered from a spy and a soldier, someone who battled enemies and saved lives, into just another pregnant woman to be unceremoniously bundled home and treated like a whore. Eve knew exactly what kind of future she could expect seven months from now if she did nothing: unmarried, unwanted, jobless, penniless, despised, shackled for life to an invader seeded by an enemy in the cold, starvation-racked hell of a war zone. Her body had betrayed her so completely: giving way to pleasure in a profiteer’s arms, then keeping some portion of him when she tried so hard every night to wash away every trace. She was not going to let it betray her any further.

  Eve had spent weeks huddled in her cold bed, fighting the wild surges of blind panic and icy dread, and she knew she would happily risk bleeding to death for the chance to reclaim her future from the invader.

  Violette was nodding tersely. “There’s a surgeon in the network who treats people for us,” she said as Eve stood battling her own emotions. “He wouldn’t touch something like this—he goes to mass every day—but I can borrow some instruments on a pretext tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Eve said, dry-mouthed. “Yes.”

  Sunday. Holy Day, blessed day, ironic day because it was the day Eve had decided to do something most men would call her a murdering slut for even considering. It could only be Sunday, because Le Lethe was closed Sunday. It meant she had a full day free to bleed and die, or bleed and recover.

  “What happens if I die?” Eve managed to ask when Violette arrived with her bag of borrowed instruments. “During the procedure or—or after?”

  “I leave you here and never come back.” Violette was matter-of-fact. “I’d have to. If I tried to see you buried, I’d be arrested. Your neighbor would probably find you in a day or two, and then it would be a pauper’s burial for you while Lili notified Uncle Edward.”

  The sordid reality of such plans hit Eve like a knife thrust. “Well. Let’s g-get on with it, then.” And try not to die.

  “Lie quiet.” Violette said it over and over that afternoon. Eve didn’t know why; she lay quiescent as a marble figure on a tomb. Perhaps it was meant for reassurance. The bed was spread with a clean layer of sheets; Violette wore an apron with a crossover front surely left from her Red Cross days, and her voice had a nurse’s crispness. Instruments gleamed on a folded cloth, but Eve didn’t look at them too closely. She pulled off her petticoats and underclothes and stockings, everything below the waist, and lay down. Cold. She was so cold.

  “Laudanum,” Violette said, uncapping a tiny vial, and Eve opened her lips obediently, swallowing down the drops. “There will be pain, I warn you.” Her voice was brusque, officious, and Eve thought of Lili saying, The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does. Right now, Eve found it comforting.

  Violette wiped down her instruments with something astringent. She cleaned her fingers with the same harsh-smelling stuff, and warmed the metal between her hands for a moment. “Doctors,” she said, “never warm their instruments. They don’t realize how cold the metal is on a woman’s parts.”

  The laudanum was already making Eve’s head swim. The room blurred. Her body felt blunt and heavy. “Have you done this before?” she heard herself ask from a distance.

  “Once,” Violette said brusquely. “Earlier this year—Antoine’s little sister, Aurélie. She works for us, escorting the couriers so the locals don’t get suspicious, and she got caught at night by some German soldiers looking for fun. Only nineteen, poor thing. Her family came to me when they found out the bastards left her enceinte.”

  “Did she survive—this?” Eve looked at the instruments in Violette’s hands.

  “Yes, and she went right back to work for the network afterward, good stout-hearted girl that she is.”

  If she did it, so can I, Eve thought. But she couldn’t stop herself from flinching as she felt Violette’s hands part her bare knees, and heard her say, “Brace yourself, now.”

  Despite Violette’s attempts at warming the instrument, it pierced Eve like an icicle. The pain, when it came, was sharp. “Lie quiet,” the order came, though Eve didn’t move. Violette did something, Eve didn’t know what, it all felt very distant. The pain bloomed then faded away again, bloomed and faded. Cold. Eve closed her eyes, willing it all to go far, far away from her. Lie quiet.

  The instruments were gone. It was done, but it wasn’t done. Violette was saying something. “—will be some bleeding now. You don’t panic at the sight of blood, do you?”

  “I don’t panic at anything,” Eve said through numb lips, and Violette smiled grudgingly.

  “You don’t, I’ll say that for you. I first saw you, and I thought you’d go screaming home to your mummy within a week.”

  “It hurts,” Eve heard herself saying. “It hurts.”

  “I know,” Violette said, and gave her more drops of laudanum. Bitter. Why did everything in Lille taste bitter except what came from René? He was the source of rich food and delicious wine and warm cups of chocolat, whereas everything shared with Lili and Violette was bitter and vile. In Lille everything was upside down; evil was delicious and good tasted like gall.

  Violette was taking bloody cloths away, replacing the pads under Eve’s hips and between her legs. “You’re doing well,” she said. “Lie still.”

  Church bells rang outside, sounding evening mass. Did anyone go? Who thought prayer did any good in this place? “Lille,” Eve said, and heard herself quoting Baudelaire. “‘Its black enchantments, its hellish cortege of alarms, its cups of poison and its tears, its din of chains and dead men’s bones . . .’”

  “You’re rambling,” Violette said. “Try to lie quiet.”

  “I know I’m rambling,” Eve replied. “And I am lying quiet, you bossy bitch.”

  “That’s gratitude for you,” Violette commented as she piled Eve with more blankets.

  “I’m cold.”

  “I know.”

  And Eve cried violently. Not from pain, not from sadness. From relief. René Bordelon had no more hold on her future, and the relief brought tears like a storm.

  By morning it was over.

  Violette had a list of instructions. “You might bleed more. Keep plenty of cloth on hand, clean cloth. And take this for pain.” The little vial of laudanum was pressed into Eve’s hand. “I’d stay to keep an eye on you, but I’m scheduled to travel back to Roubaix today. There are urgent reports that need carrying across the border.”

  “Yes.” They had a job to do, after all. “Be careful, Violette. You said the Fritzes monitored your last trip too closely.”

  “I’ll travel a different route if I must.” If Violette was afrai
d—and no one in the network could help but be afraid now; the Germans knew there were spies in the region and the checkpoints had been hellish—she would never show her fear. Something she and Eve had in common. “Can you find a way to keep out of that profiteer’s bed for a while? You need time to heal.”

  “I’ll tell him I’m having a bad monthly. He finds all that distasteful.” That would buy at least a week.

  Violette pursed her lips. “How will you stop this from happening again?”

  Eve shivered. “I—I don’t know. What I was doing clearly didn’t work.” She could not possibly go through this again. Never.

  “There are devices, but doctors have to fit them and mostly they won’t fit unmarried girls. Take a sponge, soak it in vinegar, and push it up inside.” Violette mimed wordlessly. “Not infallible, but better than nothing.”

  Eve nodded. “Thank you, Violette.”

  A quick brushing gesture, sliding away the thanks. “We won’t speak of it, not ever. You know what men do to women who do this. Not just you, but me for helping.”

  “Never a word.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and Eve thought that if they were friends there would be embraces now. They just exchanged nods as Violette pulled up her muffler and headed into the street—yet perhaps they were friends anyway. Perhaps they were friends as men so often became friends; all gruffness and no light conversation, only a shared and wordless understanding. “Good luck in Roubaix,” Eve called after the trudging figure, and Violette raised a hand without turning back.

  Later Eve wished she had hugged Violette. She wished that very much.

  Even getting up to wave at the door left Eve exhausted and head-spinning. She crawled into her bed and stayed there, pulling her thin blankets up, stomach still cramping in long slow rolls. A dull-edged pain that came and went in waves. There was nothing to do but endure, and sometimes weep. The tears rolled over her in waves too, coming and going like the pain.

  By the time night had fallen, she wasn’t spotting blood anymore, but she still felt weak as a kitten. She sent a message to Le Lethe complaining of a nasty flu. René wouldn’t be pleased, but there was nothing to be done about it; Eve couldn’t take an entire night on her feet carrying plates back and forth from the kitchen. So she lay quiet, sweating her way through it, passing the time by field-stripping her Luger. It soothed her, the smell of gun oil and the coolness of the barrel in her hands, and she aimed it at nothing and imagined putting a bullet between René’s eyes. By the third day the Luger was the cleanest pistol in France, and Eve was cautiously convinced she wouldn’t die. She went back to work, avoiding the glowering Christine who clearly thought Eve should be fired for missing three shifts, but knew she wouldn’t be. Eve made soft private apologies to René, knowing she looked so gaunt and ill that her story of a flu and a bad monthly were quite credible, and he did not invite her upstairs at the end of the night. Small mercies, Eve thought, wobbling home and looking forward to her room and her empty bed even though it wasn’t heaped with René’s down-stuffed pillows.

  But the room, as Eve let herself in, was already occupied.

  “Don’t mind me.” Lili waved, listless. “I’m just going to sit here and shiver.”

  “I thought you were making the crossing to Belgium.” Eve locked the door. “Escorting that downed pilot.”

  “I did.” Lili sat on the floor in the farthest corner, knees drawn up to her chest, the worn ivory beads of her rosary wound tight through her clenched fingers. “The pilot got blown up by a mine. I collected my messages in Brussels and headed straight back.”

  The room was freezing, and Lili trembled in her white shirtwaist and gray skirt. Eve pulled a blanket off the bed and dropped it around her shoulders. “You’ve got blood on your hem.”

  “That would be the pilot.” Lili’s eyes were glassy, as though she was the one on laudanum. “Or maybe the woman walking in front of him, or her husband . . . It got all three of them.”

  Eve sat down, drawing the blond head onto her shoulder. It seemed there were worse nights to have than nights full of cold instruments and sharp belly pains and laudanum-laced waking nightmares.

  “The border searchlights light everything up like day.” Lili’s thumb rubbed along the rosary beads. “Once you get past the border and the shooters, there’s the wooded area. The Germans mine it, you know. My pilot wouldn’t stay behind me—he went running up to a couple walking in front of us. I think he thought the woman was pretty . . . They all three must have hit a land mine, because they just blew into bits not a dozen feet before me.”

  Eve closed her eyes. She could see the explosion, the harsh lights.

  “And then I picked up my new passes from Antoine.” Lili’s voice was even, but her thin shoulders hitched under Eve’s arm. “He reported that—”

  “Sssh.” Eve rested her cheek against the blond hair that smelled like blood. “You don’t have to talk. Close your eyes.”

  “I can’t.” Lili stared straight ahead, tears leaking slowly down her cheeks. “I see her.”

  “The woman who stepped on the mine?”

  “No. Violette.” Lili buried her face then in her folded arms, and began to sob. “Antoine gave me the news, little daisy. Violette was arrested. The Germans have caught her.”

  CHAPTER 23

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  You’re not invited to dinner,” Eve told Finn and me. “Either of you.”

  The telephone call she’d put through to her English officer had borne fruit: he was coming from Bordeaux tonight for dinner at the hotel café. Eve had been wearing her fierce mask ever since the meeting was confirmed, but by now I could see behind that mask just a bit. I’d been looking at her rather wonderingly since she’d told me she’d gotten pregnant. Pregnant. She’d been almost my age, caught in just my predicament—only she’d been half starving in a city full of enemies who would have marched her to a firing squad if they realized who she really worked for. Suddenly my Little Problem seemed a lot smaller in comparison. I knew what I’d been taught growing up, that what she’d done was wrong, but I couldn’t manage to condemn Eve. She’d been swallowed up in a war; she did what she had to do. In truth, I admired her for carrying on after such a thing.

  I knew she’d slough off my admiration, though, so I just smiled. “Just tell me one thing. Is it Captain Cameron you’re meeting tonight?”

  Eve shrugged, cryptic as always. “Aren’t you headed for that village where your cousin went?”

  “Yes.” Three days we’d been in Limoges already. I’d have taken off for Rose’s village sooner, but Finn had to do some more patient tinkering with the Lagonda’s innards before he trusted her on the country roads. Today he’d pronounced us ready, and we were leaving Eve behind to await her mysterious dinner companion.

  “What do you think?” I asked Finn, sliding into the front seat. “Is it Captain Cameron she’s meeting?”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Think we’ll be back in time to see him?”

  “That depends, doesn’t it?” He set the Lagonda’s fuel-air mixture, advanced the timing. “On whether we find out anything about your cousin or not.”

  I shivered, part anticipation and part fear, as we started down the street. “Today might be the day.”

  Finn smiled in answer, driving us out of Limoges at a leisurely pace, one arm along the wheel. He wore his usual old shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but he’d shaved, his jaw smooth for once instead of stubbled, and I wanted to reach over and stroke my hand down his cheek. I wanted it so badly that I had to keep my hands primly folded in my lap. How was it that the Lagonda felt more crowded when we didn’t have Eve along?

  “We should be there soon,” I said, just to be saying something. According to Finn’s crumpled road map, our destination was only fifteen miles or so west of Limoges.

  “I reckon.” Finn steered the Lagonda past a fenced meadow where cows munched grass, a gray stone farmhouse in
the distance. The outskirts of Limoges had quickly given way to quiet country roads and rutted lanes. It couldn’t be more picturesque, and I sat there stiff as a board. I didn’t know why I was nervous, just that I was. Finn had kissed me back when I planted one on him a few nights ago, but he hadn’t made reference to it since. I wanted to move the game along, but I didn’t know how. I might be a whiz with numbers but I was a dismal flirt.

  “What’s this village called again?” Finn asked, breaking my awkward swirl of thoughts.

  “Oradour-sur-Glane.” On the old road map it looked like a tiny place. Hard to imagine Rose in a French hamlet too small even to deserve the word town. She’d always dreamed of Paris boulevards, Hollywood lights. New York in a pinch, I remember her saying, New York’s chic enough for me. And instead she’d come to Oradour-sur-Glane, a hamlet in the middle of nowhere.

  The Lagonda rounded a corner, following a rough stone fence seeded with wild wallflowers, and I saw a little French girl walking barefoot along the top, arms out for balance. She had dark hair, but she instantly became Rose to my eyes, blond curls dancing over a blue summer dress I remembered my cousin wearing long ago. A wave of premonition hit me so strongly it was almost certainty. You’re at Oradour-sur-Glane, Rosie, I thought. I know you are. Lead the way, and I’ll find you

  “We won’t get there faster with you pushing,” Finn commented, and looking down, I realized I was pressing my cork-sandaled feet against the floor like it was a gas pedal. “Why are you sitting like you’re in church?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The Lagonda came to a stone bridge, a bicycle passing over it in the opposite direction. Finn braked to let the bicycle pass, then leaned down, took hold of my ankles, and swung my feet up onto the seat. “You usually sit with your feet curled up.”

  I was blushing as he put the car back into motion. His fingers could circle almost all the way around my ankle. I wished my legs weren’t so skinny. I wore a narrow red skirt I’d bought in Paris, and a loose white buttoned shirt like a man’s that I’d pushed over my elbows and tied up at the waist rather than tucking it in, and I knew I looked well in it—but I still wished I didn’t have such skinny legs. Rose had nice legs, even when she was just thirteen. First thing I’d do if I found her was hug her till she couldn’t breathe and then ask if I could have her legs.