“Oh, there’s enough blame in this withered heart for all of us.” Her voice was ruthless in its condemnation, and she still didn’t look at us. “René and the Germans played their part, but so did I. Violette never forgave me, and I don’t blame her.”
“What happened to Lili?” I asked. “Was—was it the firing squad after all?” I could see her standing up against a wall, small and gallant under her blindfold, and my gorge rose. Eve had made Lili every bit as real and precious to me as Rose.
“No,” said Eve. “It was too soon after Cavell’s execution. Too much outcry for the Germans to shoot another woman p-point blank. It was quite another fate for the three of us.” Eve shivered as if a rat had run across her nerves.
“But you survived,” I said, dry-mouthed. “Violette survived. Did Lili—”
“Enough about the trial and the rest of it. It’s not a tale for dark nights, and anyway, it’s not important at the moment.” Eve pushed it away almost visibly, whatever it was, and fixed her eyes on mine. “What’s important now is René Bordelon. You know now what he did to me, what kind of man he was. When the war ended and I came home, I had every intention of returning to Lille and blowing his foul head off. I’d been dreaming about it for years. Captain Cameron scuttled that—lied to my face the day I arrived in England, saying René was dead.” Her voice was sliding back from hoarse emotion into her usual crispness the further she got from the recitation of her own torture. “Cameron probably thought I’d have peace that way. That man was too damned noble to understand vengeance. How it keeps you up night after night shaking with hatred, dreaming that if you can only taste blood in your mouth, you’ll sleep without d-d-d-dreams.”
Finn gave a single fierce nod. He understood. So did I. I thought of the German soldiers who had shot Rose and her daughter, and my hatred was violent and instant.
“Well, I may be nearly thirty years l-l-l”—Eve’s gnarled fist struck hard against her own knee, and she jerked the halted word free—“thirty years late, but I am going to settle accounts. René owes me.” Eve’s eyes never left mine. “He owes you too.”
I blinked. “Me?”
“You say you want a reason to stay on this search, Yank, and I’ll give it to you, but you have to ask. Do you really want to hear this?”
I just blinked again. We’d all been so thoroughly entrenched in Eve’s past, I felt like an actor being dragged onstage into the wrong play. “Yes. I want to hear. But I don’t understand, I’ve never met René Bordelon.”
“He still owes you. He did a lot more than just employ that cousin of yours.” Eve sounded concise as a field officer now. “I needed to f-find out what René’s been up to since coming to Limoges as René du Malassis, so I asked Major Allenton. He’s an idiot, so of c-course he advanced right up the ranks over the years. Did quite a bit of work during the second war—I might have been involved in some of it, and that gave me a way to start the conversation that finally worked itself around to René du Malassis. With a generous application of wine and flattery, Allenton positively dripped information over dinner, some of it public knowledge, some of it very private. Thank God for loose-lipped idiots.
“Allenton coordinated with a number of French Resistance networks in the second war, arranging the drop of supplies, collecting information. It was widely known that Monsieur du Malassis was a profiteer in Limoges. For political favors, he passed information to the Nazis and to the Milice working for those scum in Vichy.” Eve reached for her satchel, and fished out something which she proffered by the tips of two misshapen fingers. “That’s René in 1944. He was a person of interest, so Allenton had a photograph.”
I took it, a photograph taken at some elegant dinner with local worthies and Nazi officials lined up for the flash. A man on the far left had been circled, and I peered close. At last Eve’s nemesis had a face—but not the elegant wolflike one I had envisioned from her stories. An old man in a dark suit stared back at me, lean faced, his silver hair swept back from a high forehead. Age had turned him stalk boned rather than stout, but he wasn’t frail; the silver-headed cane hooked over one arm swung like an accessory. I examined the faint smile on that line-bracketed face, the way he held the stem of his wineglass between two fingers, and wondered if I was simply projecting the past when I thought his photographed gaze looked cold, cold, cold.
Finn leaned over my shoulder for a look, and let out a soft curse. I knew what he was thinking. This old man had destroyed Eve in his green-walled study. She’d turned into a bitter crone crouched in the wreckage of nightmares and whiskey while he had gone on to make more money, befriend more German invaders, destroy more lives. Shoot a young sous-chef in the back for thieving. Sit at banquet tables glittering with crystal and swastikas, and smile as he got his picture taken . . .
I looked at his face, and I hated him.
“He was widely known in the second war as a profiteer,” Eve continued quietly. “But what isn’t widely known is that he was partially responsible for a m-m-m—for a massacre. It filtered up to Major Allenton, through sources in the Milice, that a civilian informer in Limoges passed information about French Resistance activity in a small town nearby. Specifically, he gave the Milice a girl’s name, and stated that she and others in the Resistance had kidnapped and killed a German officer. That officer was a close friend of SS Sturmbahnführer Diekmann of the Der Führer Regiment, the Das Reich Division. When the Milice passed this tip on and the captured officer was confirmed killed, everyone probably expected Diekmann to arrest and hang the girl. But he decided to make an example not just of her, but her entire town.” Eve’s eyes never left me. “The girl was going by the name of Hélène Joubert. The town was Oradour-sur-Glane. René was the informer who reported both.”
Dread swept over me. I remembered Madame Rouffanche’s voice, saying, Hélène Joubert, she said her name was . . . we called her Rose.
“It’s not clear if your cousin actually was Resistance,” Eve went on. “She certainly had connections if the man who fathered her child was involved. She wasn’t listed as active in any of the networks Allenton knew, though that’s not proof. Maybe she had nothing more to do with them after bearing her child, or maybe she passed on information from her workplace in Limoges. Who knows? Whether she spied on the Nazis who came to Le Lethe or not, I think René decided your Rose was suspicious. He would have been rather fearful at that point about eavesdropping waitresses.” A tight, bitter smile. “Even if she was Resistance, your cousin wouldn’t have been involved in the kidnapping and killing of any German officers, that would have been an operation for more experienced fighters. But René wanted her gone, so—”