He sipped his tea, standing there in the sunlight. Eve stared at him, the marks of a comb in his hair, the fresh shave of his jaw.
“You told me,” he said. “If you’re wondering.”
“I told you n-n—” she tried to say through numbed lips. “N-N—I told you n—” Nothing. Rien. Such a small word, and it would not come out. Her tongue had frozen fast.
“Louise de Bettignies, alias Alice Dubois, alias a dozen other names. You listed them all. The German Kommandant will be very happy to realize just who it is Herr Rotselaer has in custody. The head, in fact, of the local network. Astounding to think it was a woman.”
Eve just repeated, “I told you n-n—” Her faulty tongue was failing on the most important word she ever had to speak, stuttering in a panic so far past ordinary terror that she barely felt it at all. It wasn’t a reaction her body was big enough to contain; it just hovered over her like a floating mountain, ready to flatten her utterly. I told him nothing.
But she thought of the inexplicable fever dreams, the bust of Baudelaire coming to life—
René nodded, doubtless seeing the expressions chasing across her face. For so long she’d kept her face locked against him like a vault. Now it had broken open, and he was flipping through her every thought and emotion like pages of a book. “You were right in one thing you told me yesterday: I had no way to parse truth from lie in anything you told me. But opium”—swirling the tea in his cup—“induces strange visions when administered in quantity. It also reduces resistance. You certainly seemed to see some strange things last night . . . It made you very pliable in the end.”
Eve could only repeat like a broken record. “I told you n-n-n—”
“N-n-n-no, my pet. You babbled like a brook. You gave me your friend Louise, for which I am duly thankful.” He toasted her with the teacup. “And so are the Germans.”
Betrayed. The word howled through Eve’s head. Betrayed. No, she would never have betrayed Lili.
He knows her name. Where did he learn it but you?
No.
Betrayer.
No . . .
“Really,” René went on idly, ignoring Eve’s silence, “if I’d known opium was the way to make you so agreeable, you might still have your hands in one piece, and I’d have a study that didn’t smell like piss. How I’m going to get the stains out of my Aubusson, I don’t know.” His smile deepened; there was something edged and restless about it. “But perhaps a ruined rug is worth it. I enjoyed smashing you up, Marguerite. Eve. You know, I don’t think either of those names suits you.”
Lili in front of a wall, blindfolded, as rifles were leveled—
Betrayer. Betrayer. Evelyn Gardiner, you weak foul coward.
“I have a better name for you.” René put down his cup, drifted closer. He leaned down to press his cheek against Eve’s, and she inhaled the scent of his cologne. “My dear little Judas.”
Eve’s head darted like a snake. She was roped to the chair and her hands swathed in mitts, but she caught René’s lower lip with her teeth and bit deep. She tasted the coppery tang of his blood, bitter as her own failure. Sawed her teeth harder and harder, even as he shouted and began wrenching at her hair. It was the last, savage kiss between source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, their mouths locked together by teeth and blood. René had to tear himself loose. Eve’s chair crashed over, and her head hit the floor with a force that blurred the world in sickly pulses. “You vicious bitch,” René hissed, his collar blood spattered, his eyes black with fury, his metallic voice finally rising out of its smug inflectionless calm. “You spying English cunt, you half-breed shopgirl, you shrewish thieving whore—” He went on, his elegant vocabulary broken down to the most obscene gutter slang that could be dredged out of the French language, his mouth scarlet with his own blood as though he’d been eating souls, and so he had. He had been eating souls and hearts and lives these past months, anything for profit, and René Bordelon now looked like the ravening beast he was, but Eve felt no flicker of triumph for breaking him. She too had broken, with a snap far more audible and final than the wet crunch of her destroyed knuckles. She lay there roped to her fallen chair, weeping and weeping, but there were not enough tears in the world for her shame and her horror. She was a Judas; she had betrayed her best friend in all the world to her worst enemy in all the world.
I want to die, Eve thought as René pulled himself together, retreated to the window angrily stuffing a wad of cloth against his mouth. I want to die.
She was still thinking it, still weeping, when the Germans came. When they untied the ropes and hauled her away.
CHAPTER 31
CHARLIE
May 1947
Jesus,” Finn said softly. I’d been too frozen by Eve’s recitation to realize he’d come in.
“No,” Eve said in her low, graveled voice. “Jesus wasn’t anywhere near that green-walled study. Only Judas.” She reached for her packet of cigarettes but it was long empty. “It’s the s-s-study I dream about. Not René’s face, not the sound of my fingers breaking. The study. Those breathing walls, and the Tiffany peacock, and that bust of B-Baudelaire . . .”
She trailed off, her averted profile harsh. Somewhere in the distance I heard a church bell chime, and we all listened to the doleful sound: Finn with his shoulder jammed against the wall, arms folded across his chest; me curled up on the window seat; Eve across from me motionless as a statue, hands folded in her lap.
Those hands. From the beginning I’d wanted to know what had happened to her hands, and now I knew. They were the price she’d paid for serving her country, the war wounds that reminded her every day of how she’d broken. An uncompromising heart like hers wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t to blame for succumbing. She just saw cowardice, and it shamed her enough to make her refuse the medals she’d earned. I looked at my own unmarked hands, imagining a marble bust smashing down over and over until my fingers looked like Eve’s, and a bone-deep shudder went through me. “Eve,” I heard myself say low-voiced. “You are the bravest soul I have ever met.”
She brushed that aside. “I broke. A little opium in a brandy glass, and I spilled my guts.”
Something about that bothered me. It didn’t entirely add up, and I opened my mouth to say why, but Finn was already speaking, his voice soft and angry.
“Don’t be a dobber, Gardiner. Everybody breaks. Hit people in the right place, find the thing they care for, hurt them long enough—we all crack. There’s no shame in that.”
“Yes, there is, you soft-headed Scot. Lili was condemned at trial because of it, and so were Violette and I.”
“So blame René Bordelon for torturing it out of you. Blame the Germans for handing down the sentence—”