“Keep out of the way,” Eve managed to mutter back. This dueling ground was no place for Charlie St. Clair; René would swat her as casually as he had swatted and maimed so many others in passing. Eve would claw him to pieces before she allowed him to hurt anyone else she cared for.
Claw him to pieces? her mind sneered. You can barely look him in the eye. But she shoved that aside along with her terror and sat down opposite him, an expanse of snowy linen stretching between them. Charlie perched on a chair at Eve’s side, uncharacteristically mute. The waiters were well trained, hovering out of earshot to give this happy reunion its privacy.
René leaned back and steepled his fingertips. Eve had a sick flash, seeing those fingers curled around a blood-stained bust of Baudelaire—seeing them trace her naked breasts in bed.
“Well,” he said softly in French. “Marguerite.”
Her pulse nearly stopped, hearing that name from his lips. But her old coolness came back with her old identity, sweeping over her in a wave. Her blood beat slow and cold, and for the first time since she turned to find him standing in the restaurant entryway she looked at the poisonous old man with some semblance of calm.
“René Gautier,” she replied. “After Théophile Gautier, I p-presume? The poet to whom Baudelaire dedicated The Flowers of Evil? In Limoges you were du Malassis after Baudelaire’s publisher, so I see you still haven’t found another poet.”
René shrugged as casually as though this were any ordinary dinner conversation. “Why not stay with the best once one has found it?”
“A fancy way of saying you have a stagnant mind.”
A waiter gushed up and presented a bottle of champagne. “Since it is a reunion worthy of celebration, monsieur?”
“It is at that,” René murmured. “Why not?”
“I could use a drink,” Eve agreed. A whiskey the size of a bucket would have been better, but she’d take champagne. She knotted her hands into fists in her lap, realizing—as the champagne cork popped and René twitched—that he was not as cool inside as he pretended. Good.
In unison they reached for their glasses as the waiter retreated. No one suggested a toast. “So many lines on that face,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself all these years?”
“Living hard. I don’t need to ask what you’ve been doing. Pretty much what you were doing the last time we met: living well, aiding Germans, getting your countrymen shot. Though now you’re not opposed to doing the shooting yourself. Lost your squeamishness in your old age?”
“It’s thanks to you I lost my squeamishness, pet.”
The word ran over her skin like a rat. “I was never your pet.”
“Does Judas suit you better?”
That hit hard, but Eve managed—barely—not to flinch. “About as well as dupe suits you.”
He gave a tight smile. As Eve watched him lounging in his expensive suit, his long nose appreciating the fizz of his perfectly chilled champagne, fury began to build. So many had died—Lili in her squalid prison, Charlie’s cousin and her baby in a hail of bullets, a young sous-chef with a pocket full of stolen silver—and this man had spent those years doing what? Drinking champagne and sleeping without nightmares.
Eve’s nightmares had not begun until after Siegburg. In her prison cell, shivering in an agony of cold on an unwashed pallet, there were no dreams, but afterward there were horror images of the green-walled study, the evil-eyed lilies, the descending bust. The room, never the man. Dreaming of that room where he’d broken her had graven the lines around her eyes that he studied so contemptuously. He looked like he’d spent the last thirty years sleeping very well.
Eve caught a glimpse of Charlie’s face, pale and immobile when she was usually so animated, and wondered if the Yank was thinking the same thing. She remembered Charlie saying that she’d never faced evil as Eve had.
You are facing it now.
René took another sip, made a small sound of appreciation, and patted his lips with a napkin. “I confess I’m surprised to see you, Marguerite. May I call you Marguerite? I never really managed to think of you any other way.”
“I’m surprised you thought of me at all. You never were one to look back at the wreckage in your wake.”
“Well, you were unique. I thought you might turn up in Limoges looking for me, after the first war.”
If not for Cameron’s lie . . . “You covered your tracks rather well when you left Lille for Limoges.”
“New identification papers aren’t difficult to manage when one already has black market connections.” A wave of his hand. “You might still have found me once they let you out of Siegburg. I did keep an eye out for news of your release. Why such a delay tracking me down?”
“Does it matter?” Eve slugged half her champagne in a single swallow. She was finding her words faster, the old back-and-forth rhythm she used to play so well against René in their conversations. “I’m here now.”
“To shoot me between the eyes? I believe you’d have done that in the doorway if you had a weapon.”
May God damn Finn Kilgore to hell, Eve thought. If not for him, she’d have been carrying her Luger.
“If that broken mess you call a hand can still fire a pistol, that is.” René summoned a waiter with a lifted finger. “The rillettes de canard. I find myself hungry.”
“Certainly, monsieur. And for madame?”
“No, thank you.”
“Your stammer’s improved,” René said once the waiter retreated. “Does it go away when you’re afraid?”
“When I’m angry.” Eve smiled. “When you get angry, you get a tiny tic at the corner of your eye. I can see it now.”
“I think you’re the only woman who has ever made me lose my temper, Marguerite.”
“Small victories. Do you still have that bust of Baudelaire?”
“I treasure it. At night sometimes I hear the sound of your fingers breaking, and I go to sleep with a smile.”
A flash of the green-walled study, the smell of blood and fear, but Eve shoved it aside. “When I need to sleep, I think of your face the moment you realized you were being fucked by a spy.”
He never blinked, but something behind his eyes tightened. Eve’s scalp shrank, but she smiled again, bolting the rest of her champagne and pouring more. I still know how to get to you, you old bastard.
“I suppose you want revenge,” René said abruptly. “Revenge is the consolation prize of the losing side.”
“My side won.”
“But you lost. So how do you intend to get your revenge, Marguerite? I don’t believe you have the nerve for murder. That broken piss-stained little thing I last saw sobbing her heart out on my Aubusson couldn’t so much as lift her head, much less a pistol.”
Eve flinched deep in her bones. She had been that broken piss-stained little thing for more than thirty years, in many ways. Until a knock on her door one damp London night barely a month ago. Until the audible click in the front of the restaurant today, where past and present united. Until now.
She would not be that broken piss-stained little thing again. Ever.