The Alice Network

“Just a fortnight, and Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was?” 

Eve has been searching her whole life for a meaningful place in the world. Spying allows her to exploit characteristics that others have always viewed as a weakness. She doesn’t need to conceal who she really is anymore. 

“‘Lili,’ Eve asked impulsively. ‘Are you ever afraid?” […] ‘Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.’” 

Eve is in awe of Lili’s apparent fearlessness. Lili takes risks the rest of her group would never consider. Eve repeats this comment from her mentor like a mantra on several future occasions when she finds herself in risky situations.

“Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.” 

Charlie is talking to Rose about the plight of girls. The irony of this statement doesn’t appear until later in the story. Both Charlie and Rose indulge in risky behavior rather than sitting pretty. 

“The best day Rose and I ever had. The best day of my life, really, because of the simplest equation in the world: Rose plus me equaled happiness.” 

Charlie is recalling an incident when she and her cousin were left behind at a bistro by their parents. While the day itself might have seemed perfectly happy, Charlie’s equation has a deeper meaning. Her search for Rose is an attempt to restore herself to happiness. 

“‘You two are quite a pair,’ I snorted. ‘Both barbed-wire knots made out of secrets.’”

Charlie makes this observation about Finn and Eve. She’s just beginning to comprehend the degree to which she’s surrounded herself with broken people. Each one begins to mend once they surrender their secrets to each other. 

“Alone in the middle of a bustling family who hardly knew I was there; alone in the middle of a giggling dorm with sorority sisters who didn’t know I was there either.”

Charlie is expressing her alienation from the world she left behind. It isn’t until she unites with Finn and Eve that anybody can actually see her. She also comes to see herself as worthwhile because of their influence. 

“‘Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.’” 

Lili’s breezy comment expresses the female dilemma at the beginning of the 20th century. Society isn’t quite ready to accept warrior women like her. It’s no surprise that she asserts her true nature in a world of covert operations.

“Why on earth did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway? Why were so many women such timid ninnies?” 

Eve repeats this phrase several times over the course of the story, when time she anticipates a fearful situation looming ahead. Her pragmatic acceptance of consequences severely tested during her torture René. 

“I wanted to know what had happened to Eve during the occupation of Lille, not just to her hands but to her soul.” 

As Charlie learns about Eve’s past, she begins to understand the reasons behind the older woman’s outrageous behavior. Astutely, she recognizes that physical torture isn’t the real reason for Eve’s suffering. Her soul has been broken even more completely than her hands. 

“‘Fleurs du mal,’ Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. ‘What?’ ‘Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.’” 

Eve regards les fleurs du mal as indestructible and repeats the catchphrase often over the course of the story. She associates this term with Cameron’s garden of spies and with her fellow inmates at Siegburg. She also confers the title on Charlie once she comes to respect the girl. 

“In Lille everything was upside down; evil was delicious and good tasted like gall.” 

Eve’s decision to become René’s mistress throws her into a moral twilight. She begins to appreciate the pleasures he can provide, even as she loathes his collaboration with the Nazis. She finds it easy to succumb to temptation when the straight and narrow road offers so little to recommend it. 

“‘There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,’ Eve said. ‘The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?’” 

This is an indirect reference to les fleurs du mal. Eve has come to recognize Charlie’s toughness. She now asks Charlie to redefine herself before joining Eve on her dangerous manhunt. 

“Rose and me, Finn and his Gypsy girl, Eve and Lili. Were we all three hunting ghosts from the past, women lost in a maelstrom of war?”

Charlie recognizes the parallel among her companions. What she fails to articulate is the reason they are hunting these ghosts. All three broken people are hoping to restore their faith in themselves by successfully completing their search.

“Does anyone get over it? I looked at the chair where Eve had sat. Three of us chasing painful memories across the wreckage of two wars; no one appeared to be over much of anything.” 

Unlike her companions, Charlie seems willing to move past her pain to find a cure. Both Finn and Eve have given up and simply endure their suffering. Charlie is the catalyst for change in all their lives. 

“‘He wasn’t bad, he was broken. So are you. So is Eve. So was I […] What’s broken does not have to stay that way.’” 

Again, Charlie is expressing her willingness to mend her life. She rouses her companions from their self-inflicted misery and challenges them to find a way to heal. Charlie’s own redemption comes from saving her friends from themselves. 

“It wasn’t German trust and German favors he most feared losing, but his pride. René Bordelon had to be the cleverest man in the room, always. What an unbearable thought, the possibility that a know-nothing girl half his age could have been so much cleverer.” 

Eve cracks René’s composure by demonstrating how completely she’s duped him. He retaliates by trying to destroy her body and soul. In doing this, he believes he has reasserted his own superiority over her. 

“Above all, I wasn’t ready to lose this little trio that had molded itself around Eve and Finn and me in a dark blue car.” 

Charlie is pondering going home once she learns Rose is dead. She doesn’t yet consciously realize that redemption lies within the relationships she’s formed with Eve and Finn. However, she instinctively feels the pull of their alliance and knows that it holds something of value for her. 

“It had turned out we were all chasing some variant of the same thing: legacies left by lost women in past wars.”

Charlie begins to consciously recognize the parallel nature of her quest with that of her two companions. They’re all chasing ghosts because each one hopes those ghosts can absolve them of guilt. As it turns out, Rose, Lily, and the gypsy girl aren’t the key to redemption. René is. 

“It was the last, savage kiss between source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, their mouths locked together by teeth and blood.” 

Just before the Germans arrive to take Eve away, she bites René on the lip, drawing blood. The gesture is symbolic of the violent nature of their relationship. When Eve finally catches up with him decades later, he still bears the scar from her bite.

“This old man had destroyed Eve in his green-walled study. She’d turned into a bitter crone crouched in the wreckage of nightmares and whiskey while he had gone on to make more money, befriend more German invaders, destroy more lives.” 

Charlie is contemplating a photo of the aged René. She finds it hard to reconcile the image of a benign old man with the viper who destroyed her friend. René’s sociopathic nature is implied by his ability to look so calm and happy, given the wreckage he’s left in his wake. 

“‘The thought of me gnaws at you every day. Because I’m walking proof you never were as clever as you thought you were.’”

In their final encounter, Eve once again rattles René’s vaunted composure. As much as he brags about knowing what makes her tick, Eve knows him equally well. Even René’s icy nature can’t withstand this insult to his intelligence.

“He toppled back, sliding to the floor with his ruined hand flung out in surprise. Surprised to the end that there was pain he couldn’t outrun, vengeance he couldn’t escape, consequences he couldn’t evade. Women who couldn’t be beaten.”

Charlie describes the moment as she watches René die. His supreme arrogance prevents him from understanding not only his limitations but also his mortality. 

“It was as though Charlie had turned into Lili right before her eyes, little and fierce as a wolverine, dancing on her wits just a hair’s breadth ahead of disaster, improvising her way out of death.” 

Eve watches as Charlie maneuvers René into a vulnerable position. She no longer sees her as a “little Yank” who should go home to mother. The highest compliment Eve can pay her young friend is to equate her with Lili.