There wasn’t really a word for what I was after the past day and night together. Grieving and hopeful, profoundly shocked and profoundly angry—angrier every time I looked at the photograph of the old man we had all agreed to track down. And if I looked at Finn my skin tingled with an all-over flash of what had passed between us not twelve hours ago. “I’m all right,” I said finally. He nodded, and I couldn’t tell how things stood between us, if he was sorry or not for what had happened. So I left him to put the car in gear, and turned to Eve in the backseat.

“One thing you haven’t told us: how do we find René Bordelon? He’s not going by that name anymore, or René du Malassis either. And we don’t know where he went when he fled Limoges. So how do we pick up his trail from here?”

Eve took a last drag off her cigarette and flicked the end into the street. “I have an idea about th-th—about that. He told me more than once that he intended to retire in Grasse, that he even had some dilapidated property there, an old villa he might restore someday. He’s seventy-three now; he won’t be starting another restaurant. Sounds like retired to me. I’ll wager he went to rebuild that villa, read his books, play his music, and enjoy the southern sunshine. I say we go to G-G-Grasse.”

“And do what?” I raised my eyebrows. “Drive around looking out the window?”

“Give me some credit, Yank. René never told me where his property in Grasse was, but I’ve got some good ideas of how to find it.”

“But what if he isn’t there at all?” Finn sounded doubtful. “All we have is a few chance remarks made more than thirty years ago.”

“Has anyone h-h-here got a better idea of where to start?”

Admittedly, I didn’t. I shrugged. Finn reached for the set of maps crumpled at my feet. “At an easy pace, we make Grasse in two days. Stop in Grenoble tonight . . .”

“Grenoble it is.” Eve tilted her head back, closing her eyes to the sky. “Step on it, Scotsman.”

The Lagonda hummed along southeast, the three of us each lost in our own thoughts. I found myself looking at the photograph of René again. I wondered what that SS officer had looked like, the one who gave the orders to massacre the village. I wondered what the German soldiers had looked like, the ones who could look at a girl fleeing a burning church with a baby in her arms, and be willing to pull a trigger. Anger flushed through me, slow and burning, and I thought of what Eve had said about those men, that I’d likely never find out which soldiers killed Rose.

Maybe I could, someday. Names had to exist, records. Maybe the German soldiers who survived could be brought to trial, not just for Rose but for Madame Rouffanche and her murdered village. Oradour-sur-Glane deserved justice for its dead as much as any of the atrocities investigated at Nuremburg.

But that was a problem for another day. Here, now, aimed for Grasse, the Nazis who had a hand in Rose’s death were out of my reach. But René Bordelon might not be.

As the car rolled through ever-rising hills and the gorgeous expanse of lakes and pastures, I pondered a new equation: Rose plus Lili, divided by Eve plus me, equaling René Bordelon. Four women with one man among us all. I stared at his face in the grainy photograph, looking for remorse, guilt, cruelty. But you couldn’t see those things in a picture. He was just an old man out to dinner.

I tried to tuck the photograph back into Eve’s satchel, but her gnarled hand lashed out like a whip and knocked mine away. “Keep it.”

The photograph went into my pocketbook, and I could feel that man’s empty eyes staring at me through the leather, so I turned around and looked back at Eve. She looked steadier, lighter than the hunched guilt-consumed figure in the windowsill last night, reciting her tale of torture and self-loathing. I reached out and touched her hand gently.

“You wouldn’t tell us about your trial last night,” I said, “or what happened to you and Lili and Violette afterward.”

“Not a tale for dark nights.”

I tilted my head up at the hot sun above. “No shadows now.”

She let out a long breath. “I suppose not.”

Finn and I listened as she told us of the trial: the Belgian lions, the hammering questions in German, the reduced sentences. Violette spitting in her face. I remembered the older Violette in Roubaix doing the same, and shivered at the echo. Violette . . . an idea pricked me there, an insistent little thought I’d had last night as well—an equation that didn’t balance out—but I pushed that aside for now as Eve said, “Then we came to Siegburg.”

CHAPTER 34

EVE

March 1916

After the war ended, Eve was surprised by how little impression Siegburg’s endless flow of days had made in her memory. Her time as a spy in Lille had stretched not even six months, yet she remembered it all in diamond-edged clarity. Two and a half years in Siegburg passed like a foul gray dream, every day the same as the one before.

“Take her to her cell.”

That was her welcome to Siegburg, in the spring of ’16—a brusque order and then a heavy hand in the middle of her back, shoving her down a dark corridor after Lili and Violette. None of them had had a look at the prison’s outside; it was far too dark by the time the rattling van pulled into the courtyard. “Never mind,” Lili whispered. “We shall have a good look at it over our shoulders, the day we’re released.”

But it was hard to think of release when being shoved along a corridor that smelled of piss and sweat and despair. Eve found herself shivering, pressing her teeth together so they would not rattle. The creak of a key being turned, hinges squealing, and then a massive door yawned. “Gardiner,” the guard barked, and that same brusque hand shoved Eve forward.

“Wait—” She turned, frantic for a glimpse of Lili and Violette, but the door had already slammed. The blackness was absolute, a pool of stifling, freezing darkness.

Everyone breaks down the first night. Eve would hear that later from her fellow prisoners. But Eve came to Siegburg already broken. The blackness was not nearly as terrible as the inside of her own mind, so she merely unlocked her chattering teeth and felt her way around the cell with misshapen fingers. Stone walls, smaller in dimension than her cell at Saint-Gilles. A foul bed, hard as wood and stinking of old sweat, old vomit, old terror. Eve wondered how many women had slept and cried and stifled their screams in that bed. Dimly through the door she heard cries, once a burst of shrill laughter, but no guard answered the calls. Once the cells were locked for the night at Siegburg, Eve learned soon enough, they weren’t opened until morning. A woman might be dying slowly of fever or blood poisoning, shrieking with pain over a broken bone, writhing in the agony of giving birth—the door still wouldn’t open until dawn. A good many died that way. That was, Eve supposed dully, the entire point.