That gave Eve a lonely pang of pleasure, mixed with guilt because she was about to make him worry all over again. “My p-pass, sir?” she prompted, aware that time was ticking. Cameron might be a light sleeper—if he woke up from his doze and came downstairs now, there would be another round of arguing. Far better if he woke and simply found her gone.
The major started making out a safe-conduct pass. “I’ll wager Cameron’s probably never told you what his code name is.” Eve suppressed the urge to roll her eyes at his air of cozy confidentiality. Thank God Allenton wasn’t in the field, because getting information out of him would be like plucking candy from an infant. You really are an idiot, Eve wanted to say, but she gave the answer he wanted. “No, what is Cameron’s code name?”
Allenton smirked, handing over her safe-conduct pass. “‘Evelyn.’”
CHAPTER 27
CHARLIE
May 1947
Another night falling, the second since I’d found out Rose was dead. I still feared what I’d see in my dreams, but I didn’t want to drink myself into oblivion again. My head had only just stopped throbbing.
I should already have been downstairs meeting Eve and Finn for dinner, but I was ransacking my clothes for something clean. I hadn’t washed anything out after Oradour-sur-Glane, and all I had left was the black dress I’d bargained out of that little Parisian saleswoman. It was straight, angled, severe, geometric, high at the neck and slashing very low in the back, clinging to all my straight lines instead of trying to disguise them. “Très chic,” I could hear Rose laugh, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut because she’d said the same thing at seven years old, when we got into her mother’s closet and started trying on her evening gowns. Rose with Schiaparelli sequins slithering off the shoulders of her middy blouse, trailing yards of black taffeta hem and giggling, “Très chic!” as I tottered around in a pair of satin evening pumps far too big for me.
I blinked the memory away, looking at the wavery mirror in my hotel room. Rose would have liked the black dress, I thought, and went downstairs.
Eve and Finn and I had been taking our meals at the café next door: small, cozy, very French with red awnings and tables with striped cloths. Someone was turning on the radio, and it was Edith Piaf. Of course it was. Les trois cloches, “The Three Bells,” and I wondered if the church bells had rung over Oradour-sur-Glane when the women were herded inside . . .
I saw Eve’s gnarled hand waving from the farthest table, and I wended my way through the crush of tray-bearing waiters. “Hello, Yank,” she greeted me. “Finn tells me you met Major Allenton. Isn’t he a gem?”
“Stupid mustache.”
“I came near to yanking it out by the roots once.” Eve shook her head, turning an uneaten crust of baguette between her fingers. “I wish I’d done it.”
Finn sat opposite Eve, elbow hooked around the back of his chair. He didn’t say a word, but I saw him noticing the black dress. I remembered how we’d woken up this morning all tangled up and reeking of whiskey, and tried to catch his eye, but he avoided my gaze.
“Finn told me about Oradour-sur-Glane.” Eve’s stare was direct. “And your cousin.”
Edith Piaf warbled behind me. Village in the heart of the valley, as if lost . . . I waited for Eve to say I told you so, waited for her to say she’d known all along I was on a fool’s errand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it’s worth. Which is nothing, when a friend’s g-gone. Sorry isn’t worth anything, but I still am.”
I unlocked my teeth. “Rose is dead. I—I don’t—” I stopped, started over. “What happens now?”
“Well,” Eve said, “I’m still looking for René Bordelon.”
“I wish you luck.” I pulled a hunk off the baguette. Finn rotated his water glass between long fingers, silent.
Eve’s eyebrows arched. “Thought you wanted to find him too.”
“Only because I thought he could lead me to Rose.”
Eve exhaled. The drink at her elbow was only halfway down, and her eyes had a contemplative gleam. “You might still find yourself interested in the hunt. Allenton, arse though he is, told me some fascinating things.”
“Why do you want to find René?” I lashed back. “You’ve told us he was a profiteer, that you spied on him.” That she’d slept with him for information, that he’d made her pregnant and she’d had to take care of it—but I wasn’t going to bring that up at a café table with waiters squeezing past on all sides. “What else is there that’s so bad an old man of seventy-three has to be tracked down like a dog?”
Her eyes glittered. “Does there have to be anything else?”
“Yes. Is it to do with your medals? All those Croix de Guerres and an Order of the British Empire?” I pinned her with my eyes. “It’s time you told us everything, Eve. Stop hinting and spill.”
Finn rose abruptly, moving off toward the bar. “He’s in a mood,” Eve commented, watching her driver shoulder through the throng. “Must have stirred a few things up, seeing Oradour-sur-Glane.” Then she turned back to me, assessing. “Do you have any guts, Yank?”
“What?”
“I need to know. Your c-cousin’s dead—are you going to go home now and knit baby booties? Or are you up for something more challenging?”
That hit too close to the question on which I’d been brooding. What now, Charlie St. Clair? “How do I know what I’m up for if you won’t tell me what this is about?”
“It’s about a friend,” she said simply. “A blond woman with a sunshine laugh and the courage to light the world on fire.”
Rose? I thought.
“Lili.” Eve smiled. “Louise de Bettignies, Alice Dubois, who knew how many other names she had. Always Lili to me. The b-best friend anyone ever had.”
Lili. So Eve had Lili, and I had Rose. “All these flowers.”
“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
I’d like to think I was the second kind too. But evil (how melodramatic that sounded) had never tested me as it had Eve or Rose or this unknown Lili. I’d never crossed paths with evil, just sadness and failure and bad choices. I mumbled something along those lines, and rushed ahead with a question of my own. “You’ve never mentioned a friend from your war years. Not once. So if Lili was the best friend you ever had, what else was she? Why is she so important?”
I sat listening as Eve talked, telling me of meeting Lili in Le Havre. The wry, warm-voiced “Welcome to the Alice Network.” The tight clench of hopeful hands as they watched the botched hit against the kaiser. The tears shed, the calm advice, the arrest. I could almost see Eve’s friend before me, the words drew her so vividly. To me she looked like Rose, if Rose had ever lived to be thirty-five.
“Your friend was something special,” Finn said when Eve’s voice trailed off. He’d rejoined us a little way into the recitation, sitting with his beer untouched before him—and from the surprise on his face, I could tell these stories were as new to him as to me. “She sounds like quite a soldier.”
Eve finished her drink in one long swallow. “Oh, yes. Later, people called her the queen of spies. There were other intelligence networks in the first war—I learned later about the women who worked in them—but none were as fast or as precise as Lili’s. She ran nearly a hundred sources covering dozens of kilometers of front, just one woman . . . The top brass all mourned when she was arrested. They knew they wouldn’t be getting the same quality of information once she was in German hands.” A mirthless smile. “And they didn’t.”
Rose and me, Finn and his Gypsy girl, Eve and Lili. Were we all three hunting ghosts from the past, women lost in a maelstrom of war? I’d lost Rose at Oradour-sur-Glane and Finn lost his girl at Belsen, but maybe Lili was still alive and well. Would seeing her again cure what ailed Eve, the guilt and the grief? I opened my mouth to ask about Lil
i’s fate, but Eve was already speaking again, eyes fixed on me.
“I have spent more than th-th-thirty years picking things up after what happened in Lille. Which is why you shouldn’t take too long to mourn your cousin, Yank. Because you’d be surprised how weeks turn into years. Do your grieving—smash a room, drink a pint, screw a sailor, whatever you need to do, but get past it. Like it or not, she’s dead and you’re alive.” Eve rose. “Let me know if you decide you’re a fleur du mal after all, and I’ll tell you why you should come with me to find René Bordelon.”
“Must you always be so goddamn cryptic?” I hissed, but Eve had already risen and stalked off, leaving her empty glass. I stared after her, frustration and grief boiling in me like colliding rivers. What now, Charlie St. Clair?
“Louise de Bettignies,” Finn said, frowning. “‘Queen of spies’—I’ve heard of her, now I think on it. Probably an old headline about war heroines . . .”
He fell silent, rotating his beer between his fingers. I could see him pulling back into the tense edginess he’d had before Eve’s stories distracted him, his usual loose-limbed ease shifting to tight rigidity. “What’s wrong, Finn?”
“Nothing.” He didn’t look at me, just stared inside to where the tables had been pulled back for dancing and couples swayed to the music. “For me, this is normal.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Coming back from the 63rd, I was like this all the time.”
My brother used to get tense and foul tempered whenever people asked him what it was really like at Tarawa. He’d get that same closed-off expression, and if they pushed too hard he’d explode into obscenities and storm out. I’d always been too afraid to follow him, afraid he’d lash out at me too, but now I wished that just once I’d followed him and taken him by the hand. Just—taken his hand so he knew that I was there, that I loved him, that I understood he was hurting. But I didn’t really understand any of that until he was gone, and it was too late.
I looked at Finn’s closed face and wanted to say, It’s not too late for you. But I knew words wouldn’t reach him in a mood like this, any more than words reached James, so I just reached out and touched his hand.
He shook me off. “I’ll get over it.”
Does anyone get over it? I looked at the chair where Eve had sat. Three of us chasing painful memories across the wreckage of two wars; no one appeared to be over much of anything. I thought of what Eve had said. Maybe you didn’t have to get over it so much as try. Or else weeks turned into months and then you looked up, as Eve had done, and saw you’d wasted thirty years.
More Edith Piaf drifted over the radio. I stood up. “Do you want to dance, Finn?”
“No.”
I didn’t either. My feet felt heavy as lead. But Rose had loved to dance. My brother too—I remembered doing a clumsy boogie-woogie with him the night before he left for the marines. They’d have been on the floor by now. For them, I could drag my heavy feet out there.
I moved to the crowd of dancers, and a laughing Frenchman pulled me in. I moved in time with his arm at my waist, then took his friend’s arm for the next song. I didn’t listen to any of their whispered French gallantries, just closed my eyes and moved my feet and tried to . . . Well, not forget my hovering cloud of grief, but at least dance under it. My feet might be heavy now, but maybe someday I could dance my way out from under the cloud.
So I kept moving to the music, song after song, and Finn nursed his single beer and watched me, and it probably would have been all right if not for the Gypsy woman.
I’d stepped away from the dancing to retie my sandal. Finn rose to throw away his half-drunk beer, and both of us saw the old woman behind a pushcart, dressed in faded colorful shawls. Maybe she wasn’t a Gypsy—she had the nut-brown face and bright skirts, but how did I know if that was what a Gypsy really looked like?—and she mumbled something as the café proprietor came flying out. She held out a palm, supplicating, and he waved his hands as though a rat had run through his kitchens. “No begging here!” He gave the old woman a push. “Move along!”
She trudged off, obviously used to it. The café proprietor turned away, scrubbing his hands down his apron. “Gypsy bitch,” he muttered. “Too bad they weren’t all shipped off and locked up.”
I saw the wave of dead flat anger that fell over Finn’s face.
I started toward him, but he’d already dropped his beer bottle in a sharp shatter of glass. He crossed the café in three strides, buried a hand in the surprised proprietor’s collar, yanked him up close, and flattened him with one brutal uppercut.
“Finn!”
My yell got lost in the shatter of china as the proprietor fell, taking a table with him. Finn shoved him over onto his back with one boot, flat fury still burning out of his eyes, then dropped a knee into the man’s chest. “You—lousy—little—shite—” he said with quiet precision, punctuating each word with his fist. The short efficient blows sounded like a meat mallet falling.
“Finn!”
My heart thudded. I elbowed my way past fluttering women and men rising with napkins about their necks, everyone flustered and openmouthed, but a waiter got there first, catching Finn’s arm. Finn hit him too, a quick explosion of fist into nose, and I saw the spray of blood, perfectly distinct, against a fallen tablecloth. The waiter reeled back and Finn went back to hitting the proprietor, who was shouting and trying to shield his face.
Six people pulled me off once I started bashing his head against a doorpost, Finn had said of the fight that landed him in prison. Thank God they got me off him before I cracked his skull.
I might not be six people, but no one was cracking a skull tonight. I grabbed Finn’s rock-tense shoulder, hauling with all my strength. “Finn, stop!”
He whirled, swinging at whoever was trying to stop him. His eyes flared the instant he recognized me, and he snatched away the force behind his blow, but it was too late to stop the momentum. His knuckles hit the corner of my mouth hard enough to sting. I fell back a step, hand flying to my face.
He went dead white, fist falling to his side. “Oh, Jesus—” He rose, ignoring the man lying groaning and bloody-nosed on the ground. “Jesus, Charlie—”
I touched my lips in shock. “It’s all right.” To be honest I was more relieved that he was off the proprietor and didn’t have that flat furious expression anymore. My heart racketed away in my chest like I’d just run a race. I took a step, reaching for him. “It’s all right—”
He flinched. His eyes were horrified. “Jesus,” he said again, and took off at a shambling run away from me, from the café and its crowd of murmuring customers.
The proprietor was already rising with the aid of several waiters, woozy and angry, but I didn’t spare him a glance. I ran as fast as I could in the direction Finn had gone. He’d already gone past the auberge, slipping between buildings, and I saw him vanish into the garage behind. I followed, picking past the rows of Peugeots and Citroens to the long shape of the Lagonda. Finn was in the backseat, like he’d been that night in Roubaix when we talked at three in the morning. He sat head lowered and shoulders heaving, not seeing me until I wrenched the door open and slid in beside him.
His voice was muffled. “Go away.”
I took hold of his hand. “You’re hurt—” His fingers were bruised, skin split over the knuckles. I didn’t have a handkerchief, so I just touched the abraded skin gently.
He yanked away, raking his fingers through his hair. “I wish I’d beat that miserable shite’s skull into paste.”
“Then you’d be hauled away and locked in prison again.”
“I belong in prison.” He still sat hunched, fists caught through his own hair. “I hit you, Charlie.”
I touched my own lip, felt the skin unbroken. “You didn’t know it was me, Finn. As soon as you saw me, you stopped yourself from—”
“I still hit you.” He looked at me then, his eyes holes of guilt and anger. “You were just trying to stop me killing him, and I
hit you. Why are you here, Charlie? Sitting in the dark with a bad man like me?”
“You’re not a bad man, Finn. You’re a goddamn wreck, but you’re not bad.”
“What do you know—”
“I know my brother wasn’t bad when he punched walls and screamed curses and panicked in crowds! He wasn’t bad, he was broken. So are you. So is Eve. So was I when I flailed my time away in school either crying in bed or sleeping with boys I didn’t like.” I stared at Finn, trying so hard to make him see. “What’s broken does not have to stay that way.”
I wanted so badly to help him. Take him between my hands and mend the cracks, like I’d failed to do for James. Like I’d even failed to do for my parents when they were grieving blindly for him.
“This is no place for you.” Finn’s voice was rough, clipped. I could see the angry tension coil through his shoulders again. “You should go home. Have your bairn, take up your life. Nothing good can come from hanging about with a pair of broken souls like Gardiner and me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I reached for his hand again.
He jerked away. “Don’t.”
“Why?” We’d sat shoulder to shoulder last night as we drank our whiskey; I’d laid my head in his lap and he’d stroked my hair, none of it with any discomfort. But now Finn prickled like a burr, and the space between us was alive with tension.
“Get out of the car, Charlie.”
“Why?” I challenged again. I’d be damned if I backed down now.
“Because in moods like this, it’s drink, fight, or screw.” He stared ahead into the shadows, words coming angry and even. “I did the first one last night, and the second twenty minutes ago. All I want right now is to tear that black dress off you.” He looked at me, and that glance seared me all over. “You really should get out of the car.”