“I hate being thanked. March, Yank!”
I marched. “You’re spending a lot lately, Eve.” The money from my pawned pearls had run out, and Eve was now covering all our expenses, though I’d sworn to repay her as soon as I could crack my bank account open in London.
“What have I got to spend it on? Whiskey, vengeance, and baby dresses.”
I grinned, hugging the package. “Would you be her godmother?”
“Keep saying her and it’ll come out a boy just to spite you.”
“His godmother, then.” I paused, suddenly serious though I’d said it flippantly. “Really, Eve—would you?”
“I don’t behave well in church.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“All right.” She gave me a rusty smile, then stalked on like a heron through deep water. “If you insist.”
“I do insist,” I said, and the words came out thick with emotion.
The restaurant was just off the Place du Petit Puy with its white-fronted cathedral. It was long past the lunch hour; diners would be trickling in soon for early evening drinks. I blinked at the dimness inside after the dazzling sun, mentally shifting back to my role of devoted family attendant just as Eve was already drooping against me as though too frail to walk unsupported.
I stepped to the ma?tre d’ and went into Finn’s spiel, which I could have recited in my sleep. Eve dabbed at her eyes, and soon I was pushing the photograph across the table. My mind was on the baby dress; I wasn’t really thinking of our quarry.
And then I was, because the ma?tre d’ nodded in recognition. That nod hit me like a hammer blow.
“Bien s?r, mademoiselle. I know the gentleman well, one of our favored patrons. Monsieur René Gautier.”
For an instant I froze. René Gautier. The name reverberated around my skull like a ricocheting bullet. René Gautier—
Eve stepped up beside me. How she hung on to her quivery fragility, I had no idea, but she had won four medals for spying. I saw why as she quavered, without stammering or batting an eye, “Oh, monsieur, how happy you’ve made me! My René, it’s been so many years since I’ve seen him! René Gautier, that’s the name he’s taken?”
“Yes, madame.” The ma?tre d’ smiled, clearly savoring his chance to be the bearer of good news. Eve was right—after a war, everyone wanted a happy ending. “He has a charming little villa outside Grasse, but he comes here frequently. For the rillettes de canard, we serve the finest rillettes on the Riviera, if I do say so myself—”
I didn’t care about the goddamn rillettes. I leaned in closer, pulse racketing. “His villa, would you have an address?”
“Just past the mimosa fields off the Rue des Papillons, mademoiselle. We sometimes deliver a crate of wine, a Vouvray one can get nowhere else in Grasse—”
Eve was already straightening her hat. “Thank you, monsieur, you have made us very happy,” I gabbled, reaching for Eve’s arm, but the ma?tre d’ looked past us and beamed.
“Ah, what luck! Here is monsieur now.”
CHAPTER 38
EVE
As she turned to face her enemy, time folded in on itself. It was both 1915 and 1947; she was twenty-two, bloodied, and broken, and she was fifty-four, shaking, and still broken; René Bordelon was a suave dark-haired bon vivant, and he was this stiff-shouldered old man with silver hair and an exquisitely tailored suit. At that instant while time crashed together, both versions were true.
Then past and present merged with a click, and it was only 1947, a beautiful summer evening in Grasse, and an old spy stood separated from her old enemy by nothing more than a few feet of tiled floor. As Eve looked at him, tall and stalk boned, the same silver-headed cane hooked over one arm, terror opened like a trapdoor in her stomach and all her patched-together courage shattered in one long silent shriek.
He did not recognize her. He rotated his black homburg in his hands, raising an eyebrow at the ma?tre d’s eager expression. “I am expected, I see?”
A shudder racked Eve at the sound of the inflectionless voice of her nightmares. Her hands ached inside her gloves as she gazed, numb with disbelief, at the man who had broken them. She had never imagined she might encounter him before she was ready. She’d thought she could manage their first meeting on her own terms, surprise him when she was well prepared. Instead fate had surprised her, and she was not prepared at all.
He had not changed. The hair gone silver, the lines at the forehead—those were just window dressing. The spiderous fingers, the even voice, the cheap soul of a torturer peeping out from behind the expensive suit of a sophisticate, that was all the same.
Except the scar on his lip. Eve’s mark, she realized, left when she’d bitten him in their last venomous kiss.
The ma?tre d’ was chattering explanations, and dimly Eve felt Charlie touching her elbow, murmuring something she couldn’t hear through the buzzing in her ears. She knew she should say something, do something, but she could only stand frozen.
René’s dark eyes returned to her face, and he stepped forward. “Mrs. Knight? I don’t recognize the name, madame . . . ?”
Eve had no idea how she managed it, but she stepped to meet him, holding out her hand. He took it, and the old revulsion swamped her at his familiar long-fingered grip. She wanted to fling his hand away and flee like a coward, keening her old terror and agony.
Too late. He was here; so was she. And Evelyn Gardiner was done running.
She squeezed his hand hard, and saw his face change as he felt the deformities covered by her glove. She leaned forward so only he could hear her voice. The words came low, calm, perfectly even.
“Perhaps you’ll recognize the name Marguerite Le Fran?ois, René Bordelon. Or should I say, Evelyn Gardiner?”
The restaurant was suddenly making a great fuss. They had a happy reunion under their roof—waiters beamed and the ma?tre d’ offered the best table in the house. And in the middle of all the hubbub, Eve and René held each other in a gaze like an exchange of swords.
Finally, the bastard dropped her hand and gestured toward the table the waiters were so cheerfully preparing. “Shall we?”
Eve managed to incline her head. She turned, wondering how she was able to walk without stumbling. Charlie came to her side like a knight’s squire, her face white as she took Eve’s elbow. That fierce little hand was wonderfully steadying. “Eve,” she murmured, eyes darting at the man behind them. “What can I do?”