“Field-stripping a Luger, that really used to help me think. My hands are too buggered up to do it properly anymore, so I’ll borrow yours. Get the oil out of my satchel.”
I started spreading out the pistol’s disassembled bits. “What are you pondering?” Her eyes had a thoughtful glitter that wasn’t whiskey, though I saw the usual tumbler with its half measure of amber fluid at her knee.
“René du Malassis,” she said. “Or rather, René Bordelon. And where he went.”
“You’re assuming that he’s still alive, then.” She’d denied it so stubbornly in Roubaix.
“He’d be seventy-two now,” Eve said softly. “But yes, I’m betting he’s still alive.”
She couldn’t stop the ripple that crossed her face, a ripple of loathing and self-loathing together. How rare it was to see an emotion she couldn’t mask. She looked almost fragile, and an odd protectiveness tightened my chest. “What makes you certain du Malassis is your Bordelon?” I asked gently.
A half-smile. “Malassis is the surname of the publisher who printed Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.”
“I’m really starting to hate Baudelaire. And I’ve never even read him.” At this point I didn’t need to.
“You’re lucky.” Her voice was dry. “I had to listen to René quote his whole damned oeuvre cover to c-cover.”
I paused, holding the Luger’s barrel in one hand and the oiled cloth in the other. “So, you and he were . . .”
A raised eyebrow. “Are you shocked?”
“No. I’m no saint.” I patted the Little Problem, which seemed happier these days. It still made me tired, but the nausea was better, and I wasn’t getting any more strangely articulate thoughts from the direction of my stomach.
“René took me to this hotel.” Eve looked around the room as though not quite seeing it. “Not this room. He wouldn’t stand for anything this small. The best room in the hotel: fourth floor, big windows, blue velvet drapes. A huge bed . . .”
I didn’t ask what had happened in that bed. There was a reason she’d decided to stay up all night rather than risk dreaming. “How does this go?” I murmured, holding out various pistol bits, and she showed me how to rub down the individual parts with the oiled cloth. “So when René Bordelon needed to flee Lille, he became René du Malassis,” I said eventually. “And when he needed to flee Limoges, he disappeared again. How could that be so easy when so many collaborators were caught?” I thought of the images I’d seen in the papers of such people, male and female, humiliated or worse. The old Frenchwoman hadn’t spoken idly of hanging people from lampposts.
“René was no fool.” Eve put away the gun oil with clumsy hands. “He catered to those in power, but he always knew they might lose. And by the time he knew they would lose, he would have had a plan in place to rabbit away with his money and a new name, and start over—after Lille, and after Limoges.” She paused, considering. “I think he was planning the first of those bolts when he brought me here in ’15. I didn’t realize it then; he said he wanted to site out spots for a second restaurant. I assumed he meant expanding his business ventures, but maybe he wasn’t ever thinking about expanding. Maybe he was scoping out a spot for a new life, in case he needed one. And he did.”
“Hmm.” I laid out the last of the pistol parts, all oiled up. My hands were a greasy mess, but I’d gotten interested in the whole process. If they’d taught me to field-strip guns instead of bake biscuits in Home Ec, I might have paid more attention. “You know, there’s something different between René Bordelon and René du Malassis besides the name.”
“What’s that, Yank?”
“Willingness to pull a trigger.” I looked down at the Luger’s trigger, lying innocent among the disassembled components. “The way you described him in the first war, he was too fastidious to do his own dirty work. When he caught a thief in his restaurant—your predecessor—he called the Germans in, and they did the shooting. The second time around, from what that old woman said, he didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger himself.”
“Not a small l-line to cross,” Eve agreed. She sounded like she’d already done considerable pondering along these lines.
“So what changed him?” I asked. “By the end of the first war, what turned him from a profiteering aesthete into”—I remembered the old woman’s words—“an elegant killer?”
Eve gave a crooked smile. “I imagine it was me.”
There was a piece of this equation I didn’t have yet, but before I could ask, Eve gestured for me to reassemble the Luger, lips sealing. I changed tack.
“How will we find him now? He won’t still be du Malassis; he’ll have taken a new name again.” I slid bolt into barrel. “Where would he rabbit to from Limoges?” And what a chill it gave me to know that we weren’t just hunting an old profiteer, an old enemy . . . but a murderer.
“There’s an English officer I can contact,” Eve said, allowing my change of direction. “Someone from the old days. He ran networks of spies like me, and he kept on doing it through the next war. Stationed in Bordeaux, currently—I telephoned from London, but he was off duck hunting. He’ll be back by now. If anyone can dig up information on an old collaborator, it would be him.”
I wondered if this was the Captain Cameron she’d spoken of. He didn’t sound half bad in the stories she’d been telling. I wanted to get a look at him, see if he matched the internal picture I’d been building, but I had my own trail to follow.
“You contact your friend in Bordeaux,” I said. “I’m going to take Finn and the car, and go look for my cousin.”
Eve cocked an eyebrow, even as she was showing me how to press the Luger’s barrel down to take the pressure off the spring. “Look where for your cousin? If she’s alive, she might be anywhere.”
“My aunt said she’d originally been sent to a village outside Limoges to have her baby. The kind of total backwater where people send disgraced girls.” I was starting to get the hang of the pistol now; the parts were sliding easily in my oily fingers. “Rose stayed there to have her baby, then four months later came to work here in Limoges. But maybe she left her baby back in the village with a family to raise. Maybe she went back there when she stopped working at Le Lethe. Who knows? But it’s a small town, and everyone knows everyone in small towns. Someone will recognize the picture of Rose.” I shrugged. “It’s a place to start, anyway.”