What would have given me peace was seeing René’s head on a spike.”
She bit off the words, staring out at the bustle of hotel clerks and bellboys around the potted ferns.
“René . . . Bordelon, you said in the shop.” Now we had a last name for the mysterious Monsieur René.
“He was the owner of Le Lethe. The one in Lille, anyway.”
“How did you know him?”
“I worked for him during the first war.”
I hesitated. This last war had so completely overshadowed the first one, I knew much less about the way things had been the first time the Germans invaded. “How terrible was it, Eve?”
“Oh, you know. German boots stamping on the necks of the starving, people shot in alleys. Bad.”
So this was what fueled her nightmares. I looked at her wrecked hands, and shuddered. “Were there two Le Lethes, then?”
“Looks like it. Since your cousin worked at one in Limoges.”
The echoes here were sending cold ripples through my blood. “And a second man named René? Or could René Bordelon have owned the restaurant in Limoges as well?”
Her hand slapped the table again. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Eve, I don’t believe in this many coincidences, and neither do you. That shopkeeper said he survived the first war by fleeing Lille. He might easily have lived until 1944, when Rose got to Limoges. He could be alive now.” Excitement ran through me now alongside the dread. Rose’s employer, someone who had known her—even if he was a beast, he had a name. A name meant he was someone I could track down.
Eve shook her head stubbornly. “He would be past seventy. He—” Still her head went back and forth, a mechanical motion. “Maybe he survived the first war. But he can’t be alive now, not a man like that, not after thirty years. Someone would have put a bullet through his black rotting brain.”
I looked down at my own cold coffee, unwilling to cede hope. “Either way, his restaurant in Limoges is probably there. That’s where I’m going next.”
“Have fun, Yank.” Her voice was hard. “This is where we part ways.”
I blinked in surprise. “A moment ago you said you wanted to see his head on a spike. How are you not on fire now to find this old enemy of yours?”
“What does that m-m-matter to you? Aren’t you keen to be shut of me?”
I had been. But that was before I’d realized she had as much a stake in this search as I did. She had someone to find, just like me. I couldn’t cut anyone out from something that mattered as much as that. I’d already scrapped the plan to continue on without Eve, had assumed she’d be champing to finish the search—and here she was, quitting?
“You do what you like. I’m not chasing wild geese anymore.” Her voice was curt, her gaze stubbornly blank. “René has to be dead. So’s your cousin.”
My hand was the one to hit the table this time. “Don’t,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare. You can put your head in the sand about your own demons if you like, but I’m going after mine.”
“Head in the sand? Two years after the war’s done and you’re putting your faith in some fairy story that your cousin might still be alive.”
“I know what the odds are,” I shot back. “Even if it’s only a sliver of hope, I’ll take that over despair.”
“You don’t even have a sliver.” Eve leaned across the table, gray eyes glittering. “The good ones never survive. They die in ditches and before firing squads and on squalid prison cots for sins they never committed. They always die. It’s the wicked who go merrily on.”
I set my chin. “So why are you so convinced your René Bordelon is dead, then? Why is he dead, if the wicked always prosper?”
“Because I’d feel it if he were alive,” she said quietly. “Just like you’d feel it if your cousin were dead. Which maybe makes us both crazy, but either way it means we’re done.”
I looked at her, and I enunciated it carefully: “Coward.”
I thought she’d explode. But she just sat, braced as if for a blow, and I saw blind panic at the back of her eyes. She didn’t want her old enemy to be alive. So he wasn’t. It was that simple.
“Fine, then. See if I care.” I reached for my pocketbook and counted out the money I owed her, subtracting what I’d just paid for her hotel room. “Payment in full. Try not to