The Alice Network

In May 1947, Eve has retired to her hotel room for the evening while Finn and Charlie go out to work on the car. Charlie talks about her future and says she might like to own a store someday. Finn wants to buy an auto shop, but he has no head for numbers and would have difficulty keeping the books.

Finn finally tells Charlie the reason why he went to jail. He was convicted of assault because he has a temper. Charlie says it wasn’t temper but the aftermath of war that made him act out of character. They kiss. While walking back into the hotel, Charlie wants to invite Finn to come to her room, but the night porter glares disapprovingly.

In July 1915, Eve, Lili, and Violette go out to the countryside to watch the Kaiser’s train approach. They wait eagerly for the promised bomber squadron to arrive. Much to their dismay, the planes fly overhead but don’t attack, and the train passes unscathed.

Later, Eve confides in Lili that she’s worried about the growing intimacy between herself and René. She fears he may be able to read her more easily because he knows every part of her body now. Even more troubling is that Eve receives sexual pleasure from a man she loathes. Lili says, “Lovemaking is a skill like any other, you know. A bad man can be a good carpenter or a good hatmaker or a good lover. The skill has nothing to do with the soul” (246). She advises Eve to continue the affair despite her misgivings because Eve is gaining useful information from René. 

In May 1947, the trio arrives in Limoges, where they find an abandoned restaurant named Le Lethe. A local tells Eve that the owner was named René du Malassis. He was a collaborator who disappeared in 1944 before the locals could lynch him. Charlie learns that Rose left the restaurant sometime before it closed.

Eve is restless that night and orders Charlie to help her field strip her Luger because this process helps her think. Eve is now convinced that René owned the restaurant in Limoges and engineered his own escape. She reveals that she came to Limoges with him in 1915 when he was first scouting locations for a restaurant there. Eve remembers the event because that was the weekend when she realized she was pregnant.

In September 1915, Eve is certain that she’s carrying René’s child. The thought sickens her: “At a stroke she’d been rendered from a spy and a soldier, someone who battled enemies and saved lives, into just another pregnant woman to be unceremoniously bundled home and treated like a whore” (267).

Since Violette was once a nurse, she helps Eve get rid of the fetus. Violette doses Eve with laudanum because the process is so painful. Afterward, it takes Eve days to recover. Violette leaves on another mission, but Lili returns to look after Eve. Lili also brings the upsetting news that Violette has been captured. 

In May 1947, Eve has been able to reach an official at Folkestone to get information about René. They’re going to have dinner that night, and the other two aren’t invited. Finn and Charlie set out to investigate a nearby village where Rose may have had her baby. When they arrive, they find the village in ruins. No one is around except one old woman who tells them about a tragedy that happened in June 1944.

The Nazis had heard that the village was sheltering resistance fighters, so they slaughtered all the inhabitants. The old woman was shot five times but survived. When Charlie shows her Rose’s picture, she says that Rose and her baby girl, Charlotte, were among the villagers shot by the Germans. Charlie is dismayed: “Rose stood behind me, breathing. Only she wasn’t breathing. She’d been dead three years. She was gone, and all my hopes were lies” (290).