“‘The hidden Enemy who chews at our hearts grows by taking strength from the blood we lose,’” René quoted. “Turns out the hidden enemy isn’t as dangerous as she thought she was.”
“Yes, she is,” I said. “Your hidden enemy isn’t Eve, you old bastard. The hidden enemy is me.”
His eyes snapped to me, and he looked surprised. As though he’d forgotten I was even in the room. Part of me wanted to shriek and cower from his eyes, from the pistol that jerked in my direction, but I set my chin at its most contemptuous I don’t care angle. Never had I cared so much.
“Shut up, Yank,” Eve growled. She was sweating, color gone from her face. How long did she have? I had no idea.
Get him closer. Eve had once said René planned brilliantly, but improvised badly. I had to goad him into something rash, and I knew I could. I might never have met the man before today, but I knew him through Eve. Knew him right down to the bone.
I gave him the most scornful look I could manage. “The enemy here is me,” I said again. “I’m the one who found your restaurant in Limoges. I’m the one who hunted Eve up. I’m the one who dragged her all the way from London. Me. You thought you were so clever, starting a new life, and all it took to find you was a college girl making a few telephone calls.”
His voice was arctic. “Shut up.”
Oh, I wanted to. But that wouldn’t save me or the Rosebud. It was either take a chance and provoke him now, or wait passively to die right after Eve. “I don’t take orders from an idiot like you,” I said, feeling sweat slide down my spine. “This Baudelaire obsession of yours, it isn’t just really, really boring, it makes you easy to find. You’re not clever, you’re predictable. If you hadn’t named your restaurant after the same damn poem twice in a row, you’d still be sipping champagne over dinner right now, not packing a bag and running. For the third time in your miserable cliché of a life.”
“I said, shut up.”
“Why, so you can talk? You do love to talk. All those things you told Eve, just because she looked at you with her big doe eyes. You’re a big talker, René.” I’d never called an old man by his first name in my life, not without a Mr. or Monsieur attached, but I thought we were on first-name terms by now. Bullets plus blood plus threats of imminent death equaled a certain intimacy. “Don’t even think about shooting me,” I added as his mouth tightened and the Luger twitched. “My husband’s back in Grasse right now, and if you kill me he’ll bury you alive. I left him a note; he’s on his way already. You might get away with letting Eve die here, but you can’t murder me in cold blood.”
Of course he could. I was just trying to muddy the water, get him flustered. His pistol twitched again, and fear froze me until I realized he was looking at my wedding ring, searching my face. Trying to see if I was telling the truth.
“It’s true,” Eve said, and bleeding out or not, she could still lie like a rug. “Her husband’s a Scotsman with a temper, a solicitor with colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic—”
“This is getting out of hand,” I pressed. “Look at you standing there like you’ve won the game. You’ve lost. You can’t control all of this. Let me go, let me bandage Eve—”
His eyes slid back to her. “I’ve waited thirty years to watch her die, you little American cow. I’m not passing that pleasure up for any price on earth. When she’s dead I’ll drink champagne over the corpse and take my time remembering how she wept on my carpet after spilling her secrets—”
“She didn’t spill any secrets, you filthy liar.”
“You know nothing,” René Bordelon said coolly. “That sniveling bitch was a tattling coward.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Eve’s chin jerk. The oldest, deepest wound: her betrayal of Lili. I felt Violette’s telegram burning in my pocket. If only it had arrived a day earlier, perhaps I could have averted all of this.
She might be bleeding out, but it wasn’t too late for her to know the truth.
“You lied to her,” I said. “Eve never gave you anything, not even under the opium. The convicting information about Louise de Bettignies came from another source, a Mademoiselle Tellier.” Violette’s search of the trial records, the portions unheard by the defendants at the time, must have uncovered that. Who knew who this Mlle. Tellier was—if we survived this night, we could find out. “You learned from your German friends that they already had what they needed for a conviction against Louise de Bettignies, so you knew there was no point in torturing Eve further. But before you turned her in, you made sure she thought she was the informer.” I took a deep breath. “Admit it, René. Eve beat you. She won. You lied to make her think she’d lost.”
His drilling gaze flickered. Under my shrieking fear, I was pierced by a flash of silver-bright triumph. Eve was struggling to sit up straighter against the wall. I couldn’t tell how much my words had sunk in. René’s Luger moved back in her direction. No, no. Me, you look at me.
“How does it feel?” I taunted. “You tried to break her, and it didn’t work. Nothing has worked for you since the day she outsmarted you. She ended up a decorated war heroine, and you ended up restarting your life twice because you were too goddamn dumb to pick the right side in two successive wars—”
He broke. Too angry to shoot me from a safe distance, he came at me: the man who killed Rose, raising the Luger as he advanced. But I was lunging up from the floor, my hand sweeping the shelf above me, and the seconds stretched agonizingly as I fumbled—fumbled—and finally seized hold of the bust of Baudelaire. I brought it around in a wild swing, knocking René’s arm away before he could fire. He stumbled back, off balance, toward the desk, and my heart lodged in my throat. Drop the pistol, drop it—but though he fell back on one elbow beside the lamp, that aged hand on the edge of the desk still stubbornly gripped the Luger.
“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.