The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.

It was why she’d been hired, her pure French and her pure English. Native of both countries, at home in neither.

War makes men harder to find than white flour, even for a damned profiteer like René Bordelon. Who, I should warn you, is a beast. He’d turn his own mother in to the Germans for a profit, not that he has a mother. The devil probably shit him out after a night’s drinking with Judas.”

“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?” Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”

Where’s Lili?” “Off to get a report from one of her railway contacts. Then she’ll head to the border.” Violette shook her head. “How she manages not to get shot, I don’t know. Those border searchlights would show a flea cowering on the floor of hell, but she always slips through.”

On the outskirts of Lille, the Lagonda started issuing steam from under its gleaming hood and Finn pulled over and fetched a tool kit from the rear. “Can you get her limping again?” I asked after he announced we had grease on the valves or water in the engine or baby giraffes in the gearshift for all I knew.

This last war had so completely overshadowed the first one, I knew much less about the way things had been the first time the Germans invaded. “How terrible was it, Eve?” “Oh, you know. German boots stamping on the necks of the starving, people shot in alleys. Bad.”

“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

We were like actors who had missed the cue that their scene was over. Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.

“Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness. That is what a restaurant like mine offers in a time of war—an oasis of civilization where one may forget the horrors outside for a few hours. There is no horror that cannot be forgotten, mademoiselle, given the right drug for the senses. Food is one. Drink is another. The pull between a woman’s thighs is a third.”

“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.”

“If we were ordinary, we’d be at home reusing our tea leaves and rolling bandages to support the war effort, not carrying Lugers and smuggling coded messages around our hairpins. Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.”

“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?”

Denial boiled in me furiously. No. No, you were not to blame. You cannot think that. But she did think that, and all the words in the world from me would not shift her self-loathing. I knew that much about Evelyn Gardiner. As much as I was always yearning to fix what was broken, I could do nothing to fix Eve.

“Cars should be fast. Beds should be slow.”

“Bullets, boredom, or brandy—that’s how people like us go, because God knows we aren’t made for peace.”