the porcelain gleam of china. Meissen urns, Spode tea sets, Sevres shepherdesses, and who knew what else. Behind the counter a woman in black updated an account book with a pencil stub, looking up at the sound of our entrance.
She was a sturdy woman about Eve’s age, with perfectly round spectacles and dark hair rolled into a neat bun. Like Eve, she had the graven lines of someone who’d lived hard. “May I help you, mesdames?”
“That depends,” said Eve. “You look well, Violette Lameron.”
That was a new name to me. I looked at the woman behind the counter, and her expression never changed. She tilted her head slowly until the lenses of her round glasses flared back the light.
Eve gave a one-note bark of laughter. “That old trick of yours, hiding your eyes! Christ, I’d forgotten that.”
Violette or whoever she was spoke evenly. “I haven’t heard that name in a long time. Who are you?”
“I’m a graying wreck and time hasn’t been kind, but think back.” Eve made a circling gesture over her own face. “Doe-eyed little thing? You never liked me, but then again, you never liked anyone except her.”
“Who?” I whispered, more mystified by the minute—but this time, I saw the other woman’s face ripple. She leaned forward over the counter despite herself, peering not into Eve’s face but through it, as though the lines of time were just a mask. I saw the blood drain out of the other woman’s face, leaving her skin starkly pale against her high black collar.
“Get out,” she said. “Get out of my shop.”
Jesus, I thought. What had we gotten ourselves into now?
“Collecting teacups, Violette?” Eve looked around the shelves of porcelain. “Seems a bit tame for you. Collecting the heads of your enemies, maybe . . . but then you’d have come after me.”
“You’re here now, so you must want me to kill you.” Violette’s lips barely moved. “You cowardly weak-kneed bitch.”
I recoiled as if I’d been slapped. But those two battle-axes just stood there with the counter between them, calm as if they were discussing china spoons. Such different women, one tall and gaunt and wrecked, the other sturdy and neat and respectable. But they faced each other erect and granite hard as pillars, and hatred boiled off them in black waves like smoke. I stood dry-mouthed and poisoned in its presence.
Who are you? I thought. Either of you?
“One question.” Eve’s cynical amusement was gone; she looked as deadly serious now as I’d ever seen her. “One question, and I’m gone. I’d have asked it over the telephone, but you hung up on me.”
“You’ll get nothing from me.” The woman sliced her words off like shards of glass. “Because unlike you, I’m not a yellow-bellied whore with loose lips.”
I expected Eve to fly at her. She’d leveled a Luger at my head just for calling her a crazy old cow. But she stood there taking the insults like she was standing in front of a shooting target taking bullets, braced, her jaw set. “One question.”
Violette spat in her face.
I gasped, taking a half step forward, but I might as well not have been there for all the attention the two women paid me. Eve stood a moment with spittle trickling down her cheek, and then she peeled off her glove and deliberately wiped her face. Violette watched, spectacles glittering, and I took another step. This was not the way I’d seen women quarrel—vicious cat-claw digs, the vivisection of gossip that flowed through a sorority house. This was the kind of feud that led to pistols at dawn.
Why can’t anything be simple? I thought in panic.
Eve dropped the glove to the floor and slammed her bare hand on the counter with a sound like a rifle shot, and I watched Violette’s eyes fasten with sick recognition on the other woman’s ruined fingers.
“Did René Bordelon die in 1917?” Eve asked, low-voiced. “Yes or no—either way, I walk out.”
My hackles rose. René, we kept coming back to that name. In the report on Rose. In Eve’s nightmares. Now here. Who is he, who is he—
Violette was still gazing at Eve’s hand. “I forgot about those fingers of yours.”
“At the time, you told me I deserved it.”
Cool contempt crossed Violette’s face. “Your stammer’s certainly better. Does whiskey do that for you? You smell like a drunk.”
“Whiskey or rage are both fine cures for stammering, and I’m belly-full of both,” Eve snarled. “René Bordelon, you sour cunt. What happened to him?”