war, he was too fastidious to do his own dirty work. When he caught a thief in his restaurant—your predecessor—he called the Germans in, and they did the shooting. The second time around, from what that old woman said, he didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger himself.”
“Not a small l-line to cross,” Eve agreed. She sounded like she’d already done considerable pondering along these lines.
“So what changed him?” I asked. “By the end of the first war, what turned him from a profiteering aesthete into”—I remembered the old woman’s words—“an elegant killer?”
Eve gave a crooked smile. “I imagine it was me.”
There was a piece of this equation I didn’t have yet, but before I could ask, Eve gestured for me to reassemble the Luger, lips sealing. I changed tack.
“How will we find him now? He won’t still be du Malassis; he’ll have taken a new name again.” I slid bolt into barrel. “Where would he rabbit to from Limoges?” And what a chill it gave me to know that we weren’t just hunting an old profiteer, an old enemy . . . but a murderer.
“There’s an English officer I can contact,” Eve said, allowing my change of direction. “Someone from the old days. He ran networks of spies like me, and he kept on doing it through the next war. Stationed in Bordeaux, currently—I telephoned from London, but he was off duck hunting. He’ll be back by now. If anyone can dig up information on an old collaborator, it would be him.”
I wondered if this was the Captain Cameron she’d spoken of. He didn’t sound half bad in the stories she’d been telling. I wanted to get a look at him, see if he matched the internal picture I’d been building, but I had my own trail to follow.
“You contact your friend in Bordeaux,” I said. “I’m going to take Finn and the car, and go look for my cousin.”
Eve cocked an eyebrow, even as she was showing me how to press the Luger’s barrel down to take the pressure off the spring. “Look where for your cousin? If she’s alive, she might be anywhere.”
“My aunt said she’d originally been sent to a village outside Limoges to have her baby. The kind of total backwater where people send disgraced girls.” I was starting to get the hang of the pistol now; the parts were sliding easily in my oily fingers. “Rose stayed there to have her baby, then four months later came to work here in Limoges. But maybe she left her baby back in the village with a family to raise. Maybe she went back there when she stopped working at Le Lethe. Who knows? But it’s a small town, and everyone knows everyone in small towns. Someone will recognize the picture of Rose.” I shrugged. “It’s a place to start, anyway.”
“A good p-plan,” Eve agreed, and I flushed with pride at her approval. “Take that pistol apart one more time.” I field-stripped the Luger again, and Eve began another story: the weekend she and René Bordelon had spent here in the summer of 1915. “We came on the train, and he took me to buy a new dress. It was one thing for me to come to his rooms in a work dress, but he wasn’t going to be seen on the promenade or at the theater with me in an old shirtwaist. It was a Poiret, almond green corded silk trimmed with black velvet, forty-three velvet-covered buttons down the back. He’d count them off as he undid them . . .”
I reassembled the firing pin, wondering what Eve planned to do when she found her old enemy. Have him arrested? Everyone knew the French dealt harshly with collaborators. Or simply trust the Luger to make an end for her? I did not at all put that out of the realm of possibility.
What did he do to you, Eve? And what did you do to him?
She was telling me how the river in Limoges had looked gray when she was last here, not the bright blue it was now. How the leaves had fluttered around the heels of her new patent-leather shoes, bought to go with the almond green dress. “You remember it so clearly,” I said, presenting her with the cleaned and oiled pistol.
“I should.” Eve downed the rest of her whiskey. “That was the weekend I missed my monthly, and started fearing René had got me pregnant.”