Another night falling, the second since I’d found out Rose was dead. I still feared what I’d see in my dreams, but I didn’t want to drink myself into oblivion again. My head had only just stopped throbbing.
I should already have been downstairs meeting Eve and Finn for dinner, but I was ransacking my clothes for something clean. I hadn’t washed anything out after Oradour-sur-Glane, and all I had left was the black dress I’d bargained out of that little Parisian saleswoman. It was straight, angled, severe, geometric, high at the neck and slashing very low in the back, clinging to all my straight lines instead of trying to disguise them. “Très chic,” I could hear Rose laugh, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut because she’d said the same thing at seven years old, when we got into her mother’s closet and started trying on her evening gowns. Rose with Schiaparelli sequins slithering off the shoulders of her middy blouse, trailing yards of black taffeta hem and giggling, “Très chic!” as I tottered around in a pair of satin evening pumps far too big for me.
I blinked the memory away, looking at the wavery mirror in my hotel room. Rose would have liked the black dress, I thought, and went downstairs.
Eve and Finn and I had been taking our meals at the café next door: small, cozy, very French with red awnings and tables with striped cloths. Someone was turning on the radio, and it was Edith Piaf. Of course it was. Les trois cloches, “The Three Bells,” and I wondered if the church bells had rung over Oradour-sur-Glane when the women were herded inside . . .
I saw Eve’s gnarled hand waving from the farthest table, and I wended my way through the crush of tray-bearing waiters. “Hello, Yank,” she greeted me. “Finn tells me you met Major Allenton. Isn’t he a gem?”
“Stupid mustache.”
“I came near to yanking it out by the roots once.” Eve shook her head, turning an uneaten crust of baguette between her fingers. “I wish I’d done it.”
Finn sat opposite Eve, elbow hooked around the back of his chair. He didn’t say a word, but I saw him noticing the black dress. I remembered how we’d woken up this morning all tangled up and reeking of whiskey, and tried to catch his eye, but he avoided my gaze.
“Finn told me about Oradour-sur-Glane.” Eve’s stare was direct. “And your cousin.”
Edith Piaf warbled behind me. Village in the heart of the valley, as if lost . . . I waited for Eve to say I told you so, waited for her to say she’d known all along I was on a fool’s errand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it’s worth. Which is nothing, when a friend’s g-gone. Sorry isn’t worth anything, but I still am.”
I unlocked my teeth. “Rose is dead. I—I don’t—” I stopped, started over. “What happens now?”
“Well,” Eve said, “I’m still looking for René Bordelon.”
“I wish you luck.” I pulled a hunk off the baguette. Finn rotated his water glass between long fingers, silent.
Eve’s eyebrows arched. “Thought you wanted to find him too.”
“Only because I thought he could lead me to Rose.”
Eve exhaled. The drink at her elbow was only halfway down, and her eyes had a contemplative gleam. “You might still find yourself interested in the hunt. Allenton, arse though he is, told me some fascinating things.”
“Why do you want to find René?” I lashed back. “You’ve told us he was a profiteer, that you spied on him.” That she’d slept with him for information, that he’d made her pregnant and she’d had to take care of it—but I wasn’t going to bring that up at a café table with waiters squeezing past on all sides. “What else is there that’s so bad an old man of seventy-three has to be tracked down like a dog?”
Her eyes glittered. “Does there have to be anything else?”
“Yes. Is it to do with your medals? All those Croix de Guerres and an Order of the British Empire?” I pinned her with my eyes. “It’s time you told us everything, Eve. Stop hinting and spill.”
Finn rose abruptly, moving off toward the bar. “He’s in a mood,” Eve commented, watching her driver shoulder through the throng. “Must have stirred a few things up, seeing Oradour-sur-Glane.” Then she turned back to me, assessing. “Do you have any guts, Yank?”
“What?”
“I need to know. Your c-cousin’s dead—are you going to go home now and knit baby booties? Or are you up for something more challenging?”
That hit too close to the question on which I’d been brooding. What now, Charlie St. Clair? “How do I know what I’m up for if you won’t tell me what this is about?”
“It’s about a friend,” she said simply. “A blond woman with a sunshine laugh and the courage to light the world on fire.”
Rose? I thought.
“Lili.” Eve smiled. “Louise de Bettignies, Alice Dubois, who knew how many other names she had. Always Lili to me. The b-best friend anyone ever had.”
Lili. So Eve had Lili, and I had Rose. “All these flowers.”
“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
I’d like to think I was the second kind too. But evil (how melodramatic that sounded) had never tested me as it had Eve or Rose or this unknown Lili. I’d never crossed paths with evil, just sadness and failure and bad choices. I mumbled something along those lines, and rushed ahead with a question of my own. “You’ve never mentioned a friend from your war years. Not once. So if Lili was the best friend you ever had, what else was she? Why is she so important?”
I sat listening as Eve talked, telling me of meeting Lili in Le Havre. The wry, warm-voiced “Welcome to the Alice Network.” The tight clench of hopeful hands as they watched the botched hit against the kaiser. The tears shed, the calm advice, the arrest. I could almost see Eve’s friend before me, the words drew her so vividly. To me she looked like Rose, if Rose had ever lived to be thirty-five.
“Your friend was something special,” Finn said when Eve’s voice trailed off. He’d rejoined us a little way into the recitation, sitting with his beer untouched before him—and from the surprise on his face, I could tell these stories were as new to him as to me. “She sounds like quite a soldier.”