The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  You’re imagining it, Eve thought blurrily. But when she blinked again, the glass peacock was still there, perched on top of the lamp, tail arrayed in a poisonous fan, all those accusing eyes staring. She was suddenly pouring sweat.

  The peacock spoke, its voice brittle as the glass it was made of. “Who is the woman you were arrested with?”

  She cried out again. Her mind had snapped; she’d gone utterly mad. Or René gave me something, she thought, something in the brandy— But that thought flew away, gone before she could grasp it or make truth of it.

  The peacock spoke again. “Who is the woman, Eve?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She didn’t know anything anymore; she’d fallen sideways into a world of nightmares and nothing was certain. The bust of Baudelaire sat on the table, his marble eyes open and filled with blood. Red drops slid down his marble cheeks. “Who is the woman?” he asked, words grinding harsh from his marble throat. “You do know.”

  There were lilies in a slender fluted vase on the mantel, long-stemmed and graceful. Evil-eyed lilies, fleurs du mal, kept forever in glass. Eve’s mouth burned, looking at the cool water around their green stems. “Thirsty,” she murmured. Her tongue had turned to dusty stone.

  “You shall have water when you tell me who the woman is.”

  Eve was still staring at the lilies, which stared back with bloody eyes. “To quench the terrible thirst that torments me, I’d have to swallow all the wine it would take to fill her grave.” Lilies’ grave. Lili’s grave. Eve cried out. The pit was opening at her feet in the middle of the Aubusson carpet, yawing black earth—

  “Le vin de l’assassin,” the marble statue said, naming the poem. “‘The murderer’s wine.’ Very good, Eve. Who is the woman?”

  The chuckle sounded like René, but Eve couldn’t see him. He was gone. She could see only the swimming green walls that breathed in rhythm with her hammering pulse, the peacock fanning its glass tail, and the bust with its bloody cheeks. The yaw of the pit at her feet. There was something down there at its bottom, some great ravenous beast. She pulled against the rope about her wrists and it wakened the pain in her hands. The beast was out of the pit and it was eating her hands, chewing its way up her wrists. If she opened her eyes, she would see its gleaming teeth slowly devouring her broken fingers. She screamed again, pulling frantically against the ropes, and the agony roared. She was going to die of this pain, eaten alive and conscious to the end. She wept, head moving mindlessly back and forth as the teeth of some rough slouching beast chewed languorously up her wrists.

  “Who is the woman, Eve?”

  Lili, she thought. Did the beast already kill you? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. Drops of sweat slid down her neck from her sodden hair.

  “Who is the woman?”

  Eve forced herself to open her eyes. She would look the beast in the face as it killed her. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see them clamped in a fanged maw, and then she shrieked. Her hands were not gone—they had changed somehow, the shattered fingers trying to regrow themselves. She had twice as many fingers, every one painted in blood and tipped not with a nail, but with an eye. All the eyes blinked at her in unison, accusing and blind.

  The beast is me, she thought in utter agony. The beast is me. Did I kill Lili? Did I kill her?

  “Who is the woman, Eve?”

  Did I kill her?

  Eve’s lips parted blindly, and the mad, pulsing world went dark. Waves and waves of blackness and pain, terror and teeth.

  Time to wake up, pet.”

  Light stabbed Eve’s eyes as she peeled them open, but nothing stabbed like the silver needle of René’s voice. She sat upright, a jolt of agony coursing through her hands. She was still roped to her chair, mouth dry as cotton and her skull splitting. René smiled, leaning against the window overlooking the street. He wore a gray morning suit, his hair was combed and oiled, and he had a teacup in hand. The light came through the window strong and bright. It was morning, though Eve couldn’t tell which morning, if a night or two nights or a month’s worth of nights had passed in that storm of pain and—

  Teeth. Pulsing walls, evil eyes, teeth. Eve’s gaze flew wildly about the study, but it looked the same as it ever had. The green silk walls were not breathing, the peacock on the Tiffany lampshade stayed confined in glass, the lilies in their fluted vase were just flowers.

  Lilies. Lili. Eve’s heart skittered, and she looked back at René. He smiled, taking a sip of steaming tea.

  “I trust you are more comfortable.”

  Eve looked down at her hands for the first time. They had been bandaged in clean cloth, bulky anonymous mitts that hid the horror underneath. She still wore her soiled clothes, but her face and hair had been sponged. René had expended some effort to make her presentable.

  “Herr Rotselaer is bringing his men to arrest you,” René explained, glancing out the window to the street below. “They should be arriving—oh, perhaps in half an hour. I thought you should look at least a trifle tidy for your captors. Some of these young officers are still squeamish when it comes to hurting women. Even English spies.”

  The relief crashed over Eve like an avalanche. The Fritzes are coming for me. She was not going to die here in this room. She was going to a German cell. Perhaps she would only come out of that cell to face a firing squad, but right now, it was enough that the cell would not have René in it. He had given up tormenting her. Given up.

  I held out, she thought in a kind of numb wonder. I endured.

  In her mind, Lili smiled. Perhaps she would see Lili in prison, and Violette. If they could stand together, they could face anything that came. Even a line of guns.

  “Your friend,” René said as though reading her mind. “Give her a hello from me if you should see her in the adjoining cell. She sounds like a rather extraordinary woman, your Louise de Bettignies. I’m sorry never to have met her.”

  He sipped his tea, standing there in the sunlight. Eve stared at him, the marks of a comb in his hair, the fresh shave of his jaw.

  “You told me,” he said. “If you’re wondering.”

  “I told you n-n—” she tried to say through numbed lips. “N-N—I told you n—” Nothing. Rien. Such a small word, and it would not come out. Her tongue had frozen fast.

  “Louise de Bettignies, alias Alice Dubois, alias a dozen other names. You listed them all. The German Kommandant will be very happy to realize just who it is Herr Rotselaer has in custody. The head, in fact, of the local network. Astounding to think it was a woman.”

  Eve just repeated, “I told you n-n—” Her faulty tongue was failing on the most important word she ever had to speak, stuttering in a panic so far past ordinary terror that she barely felt it at all. It wasn’t a reaction her body was big enough to contain; it just hovered over her like a floating mountain, ready to flatten her utterly. I told him nothing.

  But she thought of the inexplicable fever dreams, the bust of Baudelaire coming to life—

  René nodded, doubtless seeing the expressions chasing across her face. For so long she’d kept her face locked against him like a vault. Now it had broken open, and he was flipping through her every thought and emotion like pages of a book. “You were right in one thing you told me yesterday: I had no way to parse truth from lie in anything you told me. But opium”—swirling the tea in his cup—“induces strange visions when administered in quantity. It also reduces resistance. You certainly seemed to see some strange things last night . . . It made you very pliable in the end.”

  Eve could only repeat like a broken record. “I told you n-n-n—”

  “N-n-n-no, my pet. You babbled like a brook. You gave me your friend Louise, for which I am duly thankful.” He toasted her with the teacup. “And so are the Germans.”

  Betrayed. The word howled through Eve’s head. Betrayed. No, she would never have betrayed Lili.

  He knows her name. Where did he learn it but you?

  No.

  Betrayer. />
  No . . .

  “Really,” René went on idly, ignoring Eve’s silence, “if I’d known opium was the way to make you so agreeable, you might still have your hands in one piece, and I’d have a study that didn’t smell like piss. How I’m going to get the stains out of my Aubusson, I don’t know.” His smile deepened; there was something edged and restless about it. “But perhaps a ruined rug is worth it. I enjoyed smashing you up, Marguerite. Eve. You know, I don’t think either of those names suits you.”

  Lili in front of a wall, blindfolded, as rifles were leveled—

  Betrayer. Betrayer. Evelyn Gardiner, you weak foul coward.

  “I have a better name for you.” René put down his cup, drifted closer. He leaned down to press his cheek against Eve’s, and she inhaled the scent of his cologne. “My dear little Judas.”

  Eve’s head darted like a snake. She was roped to the chair and her hands swathed in mitts, but she caught René’s lower lip with her teeth and bit deep. She tasted the coppery tang of his blood, bitter as her own failure. Sawed her teeth harder and harder, even as he shouted and began wrenching at her hair. It was the last, savage kiss between source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, their mouths locked together by teeth and blood. René had to tear himself loose. Eve’s chair crashed over, and her head hit the floor with a force that blurred the world in sickly pulses. “You vicious bitch,” René hissed, his collar blood spattered, his eyes black with fury, his metallic voice finally rising out of its smug inflectionless calm. “You spying English cunt, you half-breed shopgirl, you shrewish thieving whore—” He went on, his elegant vocabulary broken down to the most obscene gutter slang that could be dredged out of the French language, his mouth scarlet with his own blood as though he’d been eating souls, and so he had. He had been eating souls and hearts and lives these past months, anything for profit, and René Bordelon now looked like the ravening beast he was, but Eve felt no flicker of triumph for breaking him. She too had broken, with a snap far more audible and final than the wet crunch of her destroyed knuckles. She lay there roped to her fallen chair, weeping and weeping, but there were not enough tears in the world for her shame and her horror. She was a Judas; she had betrayed her best friend in all the world to her worst enemy in all the world.

  I want to die, Eve thought as René pulled himself together, retreated to the window angrily stuffing a wad of cloth against his mouth. I want to die.

  She was still thinking it, still weeping, when the Germans came. When they untied the ropes and hauled her away.

  CHAPTER 31

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  Jesus,” Finn said softly. I’d been too frozen by Eve’s recitation to realize he’d come in.

  “No,” Eve said in her low, graveled voice. “Jesus wasn’t anywhere near that green-walled study. Only Judas.” She reached for her packet of cigarettes but it was long empty. “It’s the s-s-study I dream about. Not René’s face, not the sound of my fingers breaking. The study. Those breathing walls, and the Tiffany peacock, and that bust of B-Baudelaire . . .”

  She trailed off, her averted profile harsh. Somewhere in the distance I heard a church bell chime, and we all listened to the doleful sound: Finn with his shoulder jammed against the wall, arms folded across his chest; me curled up on the window seat; Eve across from me motionless as a statue, hands folded in her lap.

  Those hands. From the beginning I’d wanted to know what had happened to her hands, and now I knew. They were the price she’d paid for serving her country, the war wounds that reminded her every day of how she’d broken. An uncompromising heart like hers wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t to blame for succumbing. She just saw cowardice, and it shamed her enough to make her refuse the medals she’d earned. I looked at my own unmarked hands, imagining a marble bust smashing down over and over until my fingers looked like Eve’s, and a bone-deep shudder went through me. “Eve,” I heard myself say low-voiced. “You are the bravest soul I have ever met.”

  She brushed that aside. “I broke. A little opium in a brandy glass, and I spilled my guts.”

  Something about that bothered me. It didn’t entirely add up, and I opened my mouth to say why, but Finn was already speaking, his voice soft and angry.

  “Don’t be a dobber, Gardiner. Everybody breaks. Hit people in the right place, find the thing they care for, hurt them long enough—we all crack. There’s no shame in that.”

  “Yes, there is, you soft-headed Scot. Lili was condemned at trial because of it, and so were Violette and I.”

  “So blame René Bordelon for torturing it out of you. Blame the Germans for handing down the sentence—”

  “Oh, there’s enough blame in this withered heart for all of us.” Her voice was ruthless in its condemnation, and she still didn’t look at us. “René and the Germans played their part, but so did I. Violette never forgave me, and I don’t blame her.”

  “What happened to Lili?” I asked. “Was—was it the firing squad after all?” I could see her standing up against a wall, small and gallant under her blindfold, and my gorge rose. Eve had made Lili every bit as real and precious to me as Rose.

  “No,” said Eve. “It was too soon after Cavell’s execution. Too much outcry for the Germans to shoot another woman p-point blank. It was quite another fate for the three of us.” Eve shivered as if a rat had run across her nerves.

  “But you survived,” I said, dry-mouthed. “Violette survived. Did Lili—”

  “Enough about the trial and the rest of it. It’s not a tale for dark nights, and anyway, it’s not important at the moment.” Eve pushed it away almost visibly, whatever it was, and fixed her eyes on mine. “What’s important now is René Bordelon. You know now what he did to me, what kind of man he was. When the war ended and I came home, I had every intention of returning to Lille and blowing his foul head off. I’d been dreaming about it for years. Captain Cameron scuttled that—lied to my face the day I arrived in England, saying René was dead.” Her voice was sliding back from hoarse emotion into her usual crispness the further she got from the recitation of her own torture. “Cameron probably thought I’d have peace that way. That man was too damned noble to understand vengeance. How it keeps you up night after night shaking with hatred, dreaming that if you can only taste blood in your mouth, you’ll sleep without d-d-d-dreams.”

  Finn gave a single fierce nod. He understood. So did I. I thought of the German soldiers who had shot Rose and her daughter, and my hatred was violent and instant.

  “Well, I may be nearly thirty years l-l-l”—Eve’s gnarled fist struck hard against her own knee, and she jerked the halted word free—“thirty years late, but I am going to settle accounts. René owes me.” Eve’s eyes never left mine. “He owes you too.”

  I blinked. “Me?”

  “You say you want a reason to stay on this search, Yank, and I’ll give it to you, but you have to ask. Do you really want to hear this?”

  I just blinked again. We’d all been so thoroughly entrenched in Eve’s past, I felt like an actor being dragged onstage into the wrong play. “Yes. I want to hear. But I don’t understand, I’ve never met René Bordelon.”

  “He still owes you. He did a lot more than just employ that cousin of yours.” Eve sounded concise as a field officer now. “I needed to f-find out what René’s been up to since coming to Limoges as René du Malassis, so I asked Major Allenton. He’s an idiot, so of c-course he advanced right up the ranks over the years. Did quite a bit of work during the second war—I might have been involved in some of it, and that gave me a way to start the conversation that finally worked itself around to René du Malassis. With a generous application of wine and flattery, Allenton positively dripped information over dinner, some of it public knowledge, some of it very private. Thank God for loose-lipped idiots.

  “Allenton coordinated with a number of French Resistance networks in the second war, arranging the drop of supplies, collecting information. It was widely known that Mo
nsieur du Malassis was a profiteer in Limoges. For political favors, he passed information to the Nazis and to the Milice working for those scum in Vichy.” Eve reached for her satchel, and fished out something which she proffered by the tips of two misshapen fingers. “That’s René in 1944. He was a person of interest, so Allenton had a photograph.”

  I took it, a photograph taken at some elegant dinner with local worthies and Nazi officials lined up for the flash. A man on the far left had been circled, and I peered close. At last Eve’s nemesis had a face—but not the elegant wolflike one I had envisioned from her stories. An old man in a dark suit stared back at me, lean faced, his silver hair swept back from a high forehead. Age had turned him stalk boned rather than stout, but he wasn’t frail; the silver-headed cane hooked over one arm swung like an accessory. I examined the faint smile on that line-bracketed face, the way he held the stem of his wineglass between two fingers, and wondered if I was simply projecting the past when I thought his photographed gaze looked cold, cold, cold.

  Finn leaned over my shoulder for a look, and let out a soft curse. I knew what he was thinking. This old man had destroyed Eve in his green-walled study. She’d turned into a bitter crone crouched in the wreckage of nightmares and whiskey while he had gone on to make more money, befriend more German invaders, destroy more lives. Shoot a young sous-chef in the back for thieving. Sit at banquet tables glittering with crystal and swastikas, and smile as he got his picture taken . . .

  I looked at his face, and I hated him.

  “He was widely known in the second war as a profiteer,” Eve continued quietly. “But what isn’t widely known is that he was partially responsible for a m-m-m—for a massacre. It filtered up to Major Allenton, through sources in the Milice, that a civilian informer in Limoges passed information about French Resistance activity in a small town nearby. Specifically, he gave the Milice a girl’s name, and stated that she and others in the Resistance had kidnapped and killed a German officer. That officer was a close friend of SS Sturmbahnführer Diekmann of the Der Führer Regiment, the Das Reich Division. When the Milice passed this tip on and the captured officer was confirmed killed, everyone probably expected Diekmann to arrest and hang the girl. But he decided to make an example not just of her, but her entire town.” Eve’s eyes never left me. “The girl was going by the name of Hélène Joubert. The town was Oradour-sur-Glane. René was the informer who reported both.”