Who are you? I thought. Either of you?
“One question.” Eve’s cynical amusement was gone; she looked as deadly serious now as I’d ever seen her. “One question, and I’m gone. I’d have asked it over the telephone, but you hung up on me.”
“You’ll get nothing from me.” The woman sliced her words off like shards of glass. “Because unlike you, I’m not a yellow-bellied whore with loose lips.”
I expected Eve to fly at her. She’d leveled a Luger at my head just for calling her a crazy old cow. But she stood there taking the insults like she was standing in front of a shooting target taking bullets, braced, her jaw set. “One question.”
Violette spat in her face.
I gasped, taking a half step forward, but I might as well not have been there for all the attention the two women paid me. Eve stood a moment with spittle trickling down her cheek, and then she peeled off her glove and deliberately wiped her face. Violette watched, spectacles glittering, and I took another step. This was not the way I’d seen women quarrel—vicious cat-claw digs, the vivisection of gossip that flowed through a sorority house. This was the kind of feud that led to pistols at dawn.
Why can’t anything be simple? I thought in panic.
Eve dropped the glove to the floor and slammed her bare hand on the counter with a sound like a rifle shot, and I watched Violette’s eyes fasten with sick recognition on the other woman’s ruined fingers.
“Did René Bordelon die in 1917?” Eve asked, low-voiced. “Yes or no—either way, I walk out.”
My hackles rose. René, we kept coming back to that name. In the report on Rose. In Eve’s nightmares. Now here. Who is he, who is he—
Violette was still gazing at Eve’s hand. “I forgot about those fingers of yours.”
“At the time, you told me I deserved it.”
Cool contempt crossed Violette’s face. “Your stammer’s certainly better. Does whiskey do that for you? You smell like a drunk.”
“Whiskey or rage are both fine cures for stammering, and I’m belly-full of both,” Eve snarled. “René Bordelon, you sour cunt. What happened to him?”
“How should I know?” Violette shrugged. “You and I left France at the same time, and he was still prospering in those days. Still running Le Lethe.”
Le Lethe—the restaurant where Rose had worked. But that had been in Limoges, not Lille, I thought confusedly. And I was looking for information about 1944, not the first war. I opened my mouth to say so, then closed it again. I didn’t want to step between the two women and their dueling eyes.
Eve’s eagle-gray gaze never shifted. “After the war, you returned to Lille for a while. Cameron told me that—”
Cameron now? How many new players had just been pushed onto the stage in this drama? I wanted to shriek, but I kept silent, staring at Eve as though I could yank the answers out of her with a hook. Stop asking questions and start spitting answers, dammit.
“—and Cameron also told me René Bordelon died in 1917, shot by Lille citizens for being a filthy collaborator.”
“He was a filthy collaborator,” Violette stated. “But nobody shot him—I’d have heard if they had. There would have been dancing in the streets if he’d died the way he deserved. No, I was told the bastard packed up and ran as soon as the Germans retreated, because he knew a bullet in the back was the best he could expect. No one saw him again in Lille, that’s for sure. But he was alive in 1918 at least. That man always was a survivor.” Violette gave an unpleasant smile. “So if Cameron told you differently, he sold you a lie. And you were always so proud of your ability to sniff out lies.”
None of this meant anything to me, but I saw Eve’s proud spine sag. Her ruined hands gripped the counter’s edge. Before I knew I was moving, I put an arm around her waist, fearing she’d fall. I half-expected her to slap me away with a caustic remark, but her eyes were squeezed shut. “That liar,” she whispered, and wisps of her graying hair flew as she shook her head. “That damned, tweed-hearted liar.”
“And now”—Violette plucked off her spectacles and gave them a polish—“you can get out of my shop.”
“Give her a moment,” I snapped. Eve might irk me to the point of madness sometimes, but I wasn’t letting any nearsighted shopkeeper tear her to pieces when she looked so shocked and fragile.
“I’m not giving her thirty more seconds, much less a moment,” the woman said, looking at me for the first time. She reached under the counter, and came up with a Luger just like Eve’s. “I know how to use it, little girl. Get that bitch out of here if you have to drag her by the feet.”
“What is it with you old cows and your guns?” I shouted, but Eve straightened, her face a ghastly curdled mask.
“We’re done here,” she said quietly, and made for the door. I collected her fallen glove and followed, heart hammering.
Violette’s voice came from behind me. “Do you dream, Eve?”
Eve halted, not turning. Her shoulders were straight and stiff. “Every night.”
“I hope she chokes you,” Violette said. “Every night, I hope she chokes the life out of you.”
But it sounded like Violette was the one choking as we left. The door closed behind us on the strangled sound of a sob before I could ask who she could possibly be.
I’m sorry,” Eve said from out of nowhere.
I was so startled I nearly upset my coffee. She sat, hands folded like claws around her own cup, her pallor ghastly. When we left the shop and Eve climbed into the Lagonda and sat staring into space, I’d said quietly to Finn, “Find a hotel.” He’d found an auberge across from Roubaix’s cozy city hall, and gone off to park the Lagonda while Eve and I sat at one of the little tables in the hotel’s open court. She ordered coffee in her perfect French, then ignored the disapproving glance of the waiter when she emptied her silver flask into the cup.
Now she looked up, and I almost recoiled from her sightless stare. “Shouldn’t have brought you here. Waste of your m-money. I wasn’t looking for your cousin, I was looking for someone else.”
“That woman?”
“No.” Eve knocked back a slug of her spiked coffee. “A man I’ve thought dead for thirty years . . . I suppose Cameron told me he was dead just to give me peace.” A shake of her head. “Cameron was too bloody noble to understand a vicious bitch like me. What would have given me peace was seeing René’s head on a spike.”
She bit off the words, staring out at the bustle of hotel clerks and bellboys around the potted ferns.
“René . . . Bordelon, you said in the shop.” Now we had a last name for the mysterious Monsieur René.
“He was the owner of Le Lethe. The one in Lille, anyway.”
“How did you know him?”
“I worked for him during the first war.”
I hesitated. This last war had so completely overshadowed the first one, I knew much less about the way things had been the first time the Germans invaded. “How terrible was it, Eve?”