The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

Strange how bodies kept stubbornly functioning in the middle of grief or guilt or shock.

But another part of me—small but increasingly demanding, just like the Rosebud—wanted to stick this out, whatever this was. I wasn’t sure exactly what had pulled the three of us together, or why it had turned out we were all chasing some variant of the same thing: legacies left by lost women in past wars. I didn’t have a destination anymore, or a goal at the end of this road, but we were headed somewhere and I wasn’t ready to abandon the journey.

“You wouldn’t rather play chess?” she suggested. “I let you teach me how to play, because Marguerite was t-too ignorant to know chess, but I’m actually rather good. I’d love to play a real match instead of always losing on p-purpose so you can feel superior.”

“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.”

The Boches have held us for months, Eve thought, and they still don’t know what to make of the fleurs du mal. The thought gave her a flicker of savage pride for a moment, something to straighten her shoulders before the guilt flattened them again.

Eve nearly wept. Do not forgive me, she wanted to cry. Please, do not forgive me! Forgiveness hurt so much more than hatred.

The Germans didn’t need to waste bullets killing their female prisoners when neglect and disease could do it for them.

Evelyn Gardiner had betrayed her friends, had broken down and brought them to this foul place. If she could bring them out again safely, some part of that betrayal could be forgotten, if not ever forgiven. It was what she thought every day when she pushed half her bread ration into Lili’s hands, when she tried to give her blankets to Violette even though Violette still looked at her with stony eyes. Bring them out safely, and you will have atoned.

“I don’t regret it one bit.” His voice was even. “I’m just sorry it wasn’t—slower. Done after dinner and a date, not a fistfight and a bruised lip. That’s not how you start things with a lass you like, and I like you, Charlie. You’re smarter than any woman I know, a wee little adding machine in a black dress, and I like that. You’ve got a sharp tongue, and I like that too. You try to save everyone you meet, from your cousin and your brother to hopeless cock-ups like Gardiner and me, and I like that most of all. So I’m here to apologize. I’m here to take you to dinner. I’m here in a jacket.” Pause. “I hate jackets.”

We lingered inside our fragile bubble of happiness, the kind of happiness that sits on top of melancholy as easily as icing on a cake.

Eve knew she was still thin as a rack, her hair straw dry from lice treatments and hacked close to her skull. She kept her hands thrust into her pockets so he couldn’t see the misshapen knuckles, but there was nothing she could do to hide her eyes, which never sat still anymore. Eve took in the world in constant darting glances now, looking for danger on all sides. Even here on the open pier, she angled her back against the nearest piling, seeking protection.

She used to feel a lot of things before Lili died. Now what she mainly felt was grief and rage and guilt, devouring each other like tail-eating serpents. And the never-ending whisper of her blood, saying, Betrayer.

He didn’t mean any harm, but she couldn’t bear to be touched. There were a lot of things she was finding she couldn’t bear, now that she was out of prison. Open windows. Crowds. Wide spaces without corners to set her back against. Sleep . . .

Who cared about praise when the failures were so much bigger than the victories?

His eyes dropped, and Eve realized she hadn’t put her hand back in her pocket. His eyes went from her fingers to her face and back, as though he were seeing the demure quiet-voiced girl he’d sent away to France with her carpetbag and her soft hands and her innocence. War and torture and prison and René Bordelon had happened, and now she was nothing like that girl. She was a damaged wreck of a woman with a foul mouth and destroyed hands and no innocence at all. Not your fault, Eve wanted to say to the guilty sorrow in his eyes, but he wouldn’t believe her. She sighed, flexing her ruined fingers.

“Retirement kills people like us, Eve. It’s how we die if the bullets don’t get there first.” He smiled bitterly. “Bullets, boredom, or brandy—that’s how people like us go, because God knows we aren’t made for peace.”

I couldn’t resist plunging into the waves of blue, running my fingertips along the spires. It was like wading into a fragrant sapphire lake.

“Will anyone fall for that?” I’d asked back in the hyacinth field. “It’s very Hollywood.” “They’ll fall for it because it’s Hollywood. After a war like this one, everyone w-wants a happy ending, even if it’s not their own.”

“Welcome to real spy work,” Eve said outside Les Trois Cloches, transforming before my eyes as she straightened from her old-lady hobble. “Mostly tedious, occasionally exhilarating.”

We both knew what we were doing here, during these lazy nighttime conversations. We were outlining a future and tentatively, almost fearfully, starting to sketch each other into it, then backing away from the unspoken with half smiles. Sometimes the night brought bad dreams for one of us, but nightmares were easier to bear when there were warm arms in the dark to burrow into. When grief came for either of us, it wound its way through the night and became part of the sweetness.

“Charlie,” Eve said, clear and crisp. I knew what she wanted and I was already surging forward with a howl of hatred, swinging the marble bust in a brutal descending arc. He raised his other arm, protecting his head, but I wasn’t aiming for his head. The bust of Baudelaire came down with a sickening crunch on those long spider-thin fingers clenched around the Luger. I heard bones shatter under the marble, and he screamed—screamed like Eve had screamed when he crushed her knuckles one by one, screamed like Lili had screamed on a surgeon’s table in Siegburg, screamed like Rose had screamed when the first German bullets came ripping through her baby’s body into her own. I screamed too as I hammered the bust down again, hearing another crunch of bones as I flattened those long, long fingers into red ruin. He let go of the Luger.

Eve calmly buried a shot between René Bordelon’s eyes.

His face disappeared in a red mist. The pistol cracked again as Eve spaced three more shots into his chest. He toppled back, sliding to the floor with his ruined hand flung out in surprise. Surprised to the end that there was pain he couldn’t outrun, vengeance he couldn’t escape, consequences he couldn’t evade. Women who couldn’t be beaten. The air stank, acrid with gunsmoke and the sharper tang of gore. The silence fell like a lead weight. I struggled up from the floor, still clutching the bust of Baudelaire. I couldn’t look away from René’s crumpled body. He should have looked small and old in death, pitiable. All I saw was an aged viper with its head cut off, venomous to the end.

Hatred was the steel strut that had kept her upright; she felt now like a snail without a shell, soft and helpless. It was time to go, didn’t the girl see that? Of course she didn’t. Charlie was moving like quicksilver, refusing to give up. That moment when she spat in René’s face that he was too goddamn dumb to pick the right side in two wars—Eve had wanted to cheer. It was as though Charlie had turned into Lili right before her eyes, little and fierce as a wolverine, dancing on her wits just a hair’s breadth ahead of disaster, improvising her way out of death. Lili had been defeated in the end, but not Charlie.

Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.

I realized I was crying like a helpless thing. But I wasn’t helpless at all. For so long I’d listened to the nasty inner voice telling me I was, that I’d failed my brother, my parents, Rose, myself. But I hadn’t failed Eve. And maybe I hadn’t failed the others as badly as I’d always thought. I’d done what I could for Rose and James—I couldn’t save them, but it wasn’t my fault they died. And I could still fix things with my parents.

She waved one gnarled hand overhead. Her hands still got their share of stares, and they still weren’t too good at anything but pulling a trigger, but that was all right. Any fleur du mal who lived to be old was entitled to a little wear and tear.

When Louise de Bettignies’s luck finally ran out in the autumn of 1915, a young woman named Marguerite Le François was arrested with her. In the interrogation that followed over the next few hours, the Germans quickly determined that the terrified young Marguerite was no spy, merely a local girl who had foolishly allowed a friendly stranger to borrow her pass at a checkpoint. She was released, scolded, and told to go home, even as Louise was arrested and transported to prison. The historical Marguerite Le François was very probably just an innocent dupe . . . but what if she wasn’t?

Women like Eve and Louise lived with harsher realities, but would have known very well that female spies were seen either as Madonnas or whores: stainless visions of purity like the martyred Edith Cavell, or sultry untrustworthy harlots like Mata Hari.

The female spies of World War I are largely forgotten today. As much as their contributions during the war were appreciated, there was a certain unease with how to treat them afterward. Women who entered the active zone of combat were generally viewed by the public in one of two ways: as females who shed all womanliness and became hardened and mannish thanks to the dangers of war, or as gallant little women forced by duty to take up dangerous burdens, but still fragile flowers at heart. Louise de Bettignies was admired, praised, and heaped with medals, but her contemporaries focused far less on her toughness and bravery than on her tiny stature, her femininity, her patriotism. “Louise was the most womanly woman one could imagine . . . There was nothing of the Amazon about her.” Matters were no different after World War II, when Charlie St. Clair would have been seeing the calls for Rosie the Riveter to put down the burdens of war and return to hearth and home where she belonged. Clearly, women in active fighting zones unsettled their contemporaries, but they still left a legacy behind. Girls of the ’30s and ’40s joined the SOE to train as spies against the Nazis because they had been inspired by books and stories about women like Louise de Bettignies—and they weren’t inspired by her feminine graces. They were inspired by her courage, her toughness, and her unflinching drive, just as I imagined Charlie being inspired by Eve’s. Such women were fleurs du mal indeed—with steel...