The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Nineteen forty-seven was hell for little bony girls like me who couldn’t wear the New Look. Then again, 1947 was hell for any girl who would rather work calculus problems than read Vogue, any girl who would rather listen to Edith Piaf than Artie Shaw, and any girl with an empty ring finger but a rounding belly.

The hangover of war was still visible here in a way you didn’t see in New York.

I’d noticed the shelled look of the houses on the wharf, like gaping teeth in a pretty smile. My first look at England, and from dockside wharf to hotel court it all looked gray and exhausted from the war, still shocked to the bone. Just like me.

“Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.” If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for. There was just the mess that was Charlie St. Clair, sitting at a table with her mother, with whom she had no common denominators.

I stood, chin raised to the highest I don’t care setting on the dial, and stormed out into the sunshine. My own money. Not just money I’d inherited but money I’d earned, and I couldn’t get five cents of it for myself unless I had my father in tow. It was so utterly unfair my teeth were still grinding, but I couldn’t say I was completely surprised.

Just a fortnight, and Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was? She felt like she was being burned, sloughing away every extraneous layer, every scrap of ballast from mind or body that could possibly weigh her down. Each morning she woke with alacrity, tossing the covers aside and springing from bed, her mind one long hungry scream for what the day had to offer. She manipulated her fingers around those tiny scraps of paper, those deft manipulations that would persuade a lock to give up its secrets, and she thrilled with more sheer, fierce pleasure the first time she sensed a lock’s tumblers click than she had ever felt when a man tried to kiss her.

My mother sent me to college to find a husband, but I was looking for something else. Some other path besides the one picked out for me—traveling, working, who knew what.

“The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”

Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.

The best day Rose and I ever had. The best day of my life, really, because of the simplest equation in the world: Rose plus me equaled happiness.

Eve could see why the Germans came to dine here. It was a civilized place to relax after a long day of stamping on your conquered populace.

I create civilization here—peace in a time of war. A place to forget, for a while, that there is war. Hence the name Le Lethe.”

In Lille, the French went to bed at sundown because even if there were no curfew, there was little paraffin or coal to keep a room lit. Only the Germans came out at night, like the undead, to celebrate their undisputed rule.

He was a man who liked secrets, Eve sensed. When he was their keeper.

But those two battle-axes just stood there with the counter between them, calm as if they were discussing china spoons. Such different women, one tall and gaunt and wrecked, the other sturdy and neat and respectable. But they faced each other erect and granite hard as pillars, and hatred boiled off them in black waves like smoke. I stood dry-mouthed and poisoned in its presence. Who are you? I thought. Either of you?

Eve didn’t mind that the Germans had the right to shoot her nearly as much as she minded having them walk into her room and steal her curtains.

Her silence didn’t distinguish her. Most of Lille was similarly withdrawn, bemused into apathy by hunger and boredom, monotony and fear.

The fleeting visits from Lili were like splashes of champagne in an existence of weak tea—moments when she shook off Marguerite like a drab dress and turned back into Eve.

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.”

“Tobacco is a g-gentleman’s vice, not a lady’s.” “Tais-toi. We’re soldiers in skirts, not ladies, and we need a damned smoke.”

“Before now I have preferred a finished product to a block of raw material, but Lille does not offer much in the way of elegant women these days. Hunger and patriotism have made shrews of all the ones I know. If I wish a suitable companion, it has struck me that I will have to play Pygmalion from the Greek myth, and sculpt one for myself.”

But I’d had an absolutely enormous breakfast, and on a full stomach nervousness had changed into a sense of adventure. I was in a car with an ex-convict and an ex-spy, barreling down on an unknown future—if that wasn’t a set of mathematical variables that equaled adventure, I didn’t know what was.

She took another sip from her flask, manipulated so clumsily in those lobster-claw hands, and my sense of adventure sobered. Whatever made her hands look like that, it had happened in the course of her war work, as much a battle wound as the limp my brother had brought home from Tarawa. He’d been awarded a Purple Heart in a box that had been sitting next to him when he blew his head off. What kind of inner hurts did Eve carry?

I thought of the Provençal café where I’d spent the happiest day of my childhood at Rose’s side. Was there a haven like that for us now that we were grown?

“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.”

“Eventually, Marguerite, I’ll teach you to be indifferent to what people think. It’s very freeing, to care for no one’s opinion but your own.” He looked urbane even when naked, his flesh pale and smooth against the linens.

“Ordinary women wouldn’t feel this,” she began, but Lili waved a hand. “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.”

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

Eve? I almost asked, though the woman looked nothing like Eve. She was plump, grandmotherly, with gray hair brushed into a bun—why did she make me think of tall, gaunt Eve? Then her dark eyes found me blankly and I saw the resemblance. She had the same ravaged gaze of a woman who had been harrowed and clawed to the soul. Like Eve, she could have been any age from fifty to seventy. It was all the same to her: like the melted clock, she had stopped permanently at four in the afternoon. When this town had died . . . however it died.

“I hid among some rows of pea plants. I heard more shots, more screams, more shouting . . . That’s when the men and the boys died, most of them. Gunned down. And then there was the rush of fire, as all the roofs were kindled. Night fell, and then came the sound of champagne corks popping . . . The Germans stayed the night, and they drank champagne.”

As he bent his head to examine it, Lili’s and Eve’s eyes met. When they take me, walk away, Eve did her best to telegraph. Walk away. And Lili smiled—that impish lightning flash of a smile. “It’s her pass,” she said clearly. “I borrowed it illegally, you stupid Hun.”

It wasn’t enough that the ravenous war had reached out with greedy fingers and stolen my brother from me. The same beast had gobbled up Rose too, taken the girl I loved like a sister and riddled her with bullets.

“I’m not doing this needlessly—” “You want revenge for Violette and Lili, because you love them. You want revenge, and if you can’t get it, you just want to die trying. Believe me, I know that feeling very well.”

Real dislike flickered across his face. After having to parse René’s minuscule facial expressions, watching the major’s thoughts work their way across his features was like watching a dog lumber around a city block on the end of a leash. Eve gave the leash just the tug it needed, dropping her lashes in doe-eyed obedience.

“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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

Eve looked around the joyless little room, remembering evenings they’d spent here smoking and laughing, and a wave of despair hit so hard it nearly knocked the breath from her lungs. She had a job to do, and she would do it—but there would be no more moments of joy in it.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” There was his real fear, Eve thought. That he had been made a fool of. Was he remembering all the pillow talk, all the gossip he had dropped in her ear? Or wondering what would happen to his favored status if the Germans found out his mistress had been feeding secrets to England? The former, Eve thought, more than the latter. It wasn’t German trust and German favors he most feared losing, but his pride. René Bordelon had to be the cleverest man in the room, always. What an unbearable thought, the possibility that a know-nothing girl half his age could have been so much cleverer. Too bad Eve didn’t feel clever at the moment. All she felt was terrified.

“I speak perfect German, you profiteering coward, and I’ve been eavesdropping on your precious customers for months.” She watched the horror, the disbelief, the rage crowd his eyes. She managed another smile and added one more thing in French, just for good measure. “I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arrested with. But I will tell you this, René Bordelon. You’re a gullible fool. You’re a terrible lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”