“Oh, you know. German boots stamping on the necks of the starving, people shot in alleys. Bad.”
So this was what fueled her nightmares. I looked at her wrecked hands, and shuddered. “Were there two Le Lethes, then?”
“Looks like it. Since your cousin worked at one in Limoges.”
The echoes here were sending cold ripples through my blood. “And a second man named René? Or could René Bordelon have owned the restaurant in Limoges as well?”
Her hand slapped the table again. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Eve, I don’t believe in this many coincidences, and neither do you. That shopkeeper said he survived the first war by fleeing Lille. He might easily have lived until 1944, when Rose got to Limoges. He could be alive now.” Excitement ran through me now alongside the dread. Rose’s employer, someone who had known her—even if he was a beast, he had a name. A name meant he was someone I could track down.
Eve shook her head stubbornly. “He would be past seventy. He—” Still her head went back and forth, a mechanical motion. “Maybe he survived the first war. But he can’t be alive now, not a man like that, not after thirty years. Someone would have put a bullet through his black rotting brain.”
I looked down at my own cold coffee, unwilling to cede hope. “Either way, his restaurant in Limoges is probably there. That’s where I’m going next.”
“Have fun, Yank.” Her voice was hard. “This is where we part ways.”
I blinked in surprise. “A moment ago you said you wanted to see his head on a spike. How are you not on fire now to find this old enemy of yours?”
“What does that m-m-matter to you? Aren’t you keen to be shut of me?”
I had been. But that was before I’d realized she had as much a stake in this search as I did. She had someone to find, just like me. I couldn’t cut anyone out from something that mattered as much as that. I’d already scrapped the plan to continue on without Eve, had assumed she’d be champing to finish the search—and here she was, quitting?
“You do what you like. I’m not chasing wild geese anymore.” Her voice was curt, her gaze stubbornly blank. “René has to be dead. So’s your cousin.”
My hand was the one to hit the table this time. “Don’t,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare. You can put your head in the sand about your own demons if you like, but I’m going after mine.”
“Head in the sand? Two years after the war’s done and you’re putting your faith in some fairy story that your cousin might still be alive.”
“I know what the odds are,” I shot back. “Even if it’s only a sliver of hope, I’ll take that over despair.”
“You don’t even have a sliver.” Eve leaned across the table, gray eyes glittering. “The good ones never survive. They die in ditches and before firing squads and on squalid prison cots for sins they never committed. They always die. It’s the wicked who go merrily on.”
I set my chin. “So why are you so convinced your René Bordelon is dead, then? Why is he dead, if the wicked always prosper?”
“Because I’d feel it if he were alive,” she said quietly. “Just like you’d feel it if your cousin were dead. Which maybe makes us both crazy, but either way it means we’re done.”
I looked at her, and I enunciated it carefully: “Coward.”
I thought she’d explode. But she just sat, braced as if for a blow, and I saw blind panic at the back of her eyes. She didn’t want her old enemy to be alive. So he wasn’t. It was that simple.
“Fine, then. See if I care.” I reached for my pocketbook and counted out the money I owed her, subtracting what I’d just paid for her hotel room. “Payment in full. Try not to drink it all in one place.”
She rose, gathering up the banknotes. Without a word of farewell she took her room key and stalked off toward the stairs.
I don’t know what I’d expected. Maybe for her to tell me more about Lille and the Great War. Why her hands were . . . I don’t know. I sat at the little table like a helpless fool, feeling abandoned, wishing I hadn’t thrown my arm around her waist in the china shop and let her lean on me. Because even after she deduced the Little Problem’s presence and was tactless enough to say so, some part of me still wanted her respect. She wasn’t like any woman I’d ever met; she talked to me as though I were a grown woman rather than a child—yet just now, she’d flicked me aside like a cigarette stub. See if I care, I’d said. Well, I did.
You don’t need her, I scolded myself. You don’t need anyone.
Finn came up, toting my traveling case over one shoulder. “Where’s Gardiner?”
I rose. “She says we’re done.”
His smile disappeared. “You’re off, then?”
“I’ve already paid for the rooms, so you and Eve may as well stay tonight. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she wants to bolt back to London tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?”
“Limoges. My cousin might be there. Or someone who knew her.” I aimed a bright, nonspecific smile at Finn, ducking his gaze.
“Now?”
“Tomorrow.” I felt too drained to go anywhere this afternoon, and I’d paid for my room as well as theirs.
“Well, then.” He brushed the hair out of his eyes, handing over my traveling case. I wondered if he was sorry or relieved to see me go. Probably relieved. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. Sorry I made you think I was a tramp. Sorry I didn’t sleep with you. So I really am a tramp. Sorry about that. But instead I blurted out the only other thing I could think of that wasn’t about me climbing into his lap and gluing my lips to his.
“How did you end up in prison?”
“Took the Mona Lisa right off the wall of the British Museum,” he replied, straight-faced.
“The Mona Lisa isn’t even hanging in the British Museum,” I objected.
“Not anymore it’s not.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Even managed to meet his eyes for a split second. “Good luck, Mr. Kilgore.”
“Good luck, miss.” And my heart expanded a little, hearing the miss.
But after Finn left, I couldn’t bring myself to go up to my room yet. Another wave of utter exhaustion hit me, and besides, sitting alone in a hotel room seemed sadder than sitting in a busy hotel court. I ordered another coffee and sat staring at it.
It’ll be easier on your own, I told myself. No more crazy old bat pointing a pistol at you. No more insults, no more getting slowed down by Eve’s hangovers and the fact that she can’t travel except in a beat-up tin can of a car. No more Scottish convicts making me act like the kind of girl who gets herself into the kind of pickle I’m already in. No more being called Yank. You can go look for Rose all by yourself, free and clear.
All by myself. It shouldn’t have felt so strange—I was used to being alone. I’d been alone since I’d parted from Rose before the war, really. Alone in the middle of a bustling family who hardly knew I was there; alone in the middle of a giggling dorm with sorority sisters who didn’t know I was there either.