The Alice Network

Eve experiences her encounter with René as happening both in 1915 and 1947 simultaneously. As the wait staff makes a fuss and brings champagne to celebrate this happy family reunion, the two old adversaries hurl insults at one another.

Charlie forces René to admit that he arranged Rose’s death because he feared she might be a spy like Eve, but he expresses no remorse for his actions. Before the situation turns violent, the two women rise to leave. Eve, however, warns René that she intends to kill him: “In that foul rag and bone shop you call a heart, René, take the time to admit you are afraid. Because your fleur du mal has come back” (449).

Outside on the sidewalk, Charlie is reeling from her face-to-face encounter with René: “That hadn’t been a man sitting across the table from me. It had been a human viper” (450). She trails Eve back to the hotel, where Eve retrieves her Luger, intending to hunt René down. Charlie tries to reason with her, but Eve says René will always escape consequences. Charlie thinks, “Part of me agreed. But his life wasn’t worth trading for Eve’s future—he’d already eaten too much of her past” (452).

Charlie blocks the door as Eve collapses into tears, seemingly beaten. Feeling that it’s safe to leave her for a while, Charlie goes to the front desk to retrieve a telegram from Violette about the trial transcript. The message says that someone else exposed Lili’s true identity. Eve wasn’t to blame. Charlie runs upstairs to give Eve the good news, but the old woman has bolted. Finn is away having drinks with a mechanic, so Charlie scribbles him a hasty note to tell him where she’s gone and takes off in the Lagonda to pursue Eve.

As Eve rides in a cab to René’s villa, she thinks about her plan. Six bullets for René and one for herself. Her mind drifts back to Cameron, who committed suicide several years after their last encounter in 1919. Eve concludes that the only reason she didn’t kill herself sooner was because justice needed to be satisfied first: “Well, tonight the enemy would die. For Lili, for Rose, for Charlie, for Eve. Tonight, Evelyn Gardiner’s fight would be finished. More than thirty goddamned years past due, but better late than never” (459).

Charlie pushes the Lagonda to the limit to reach Eve in time. She finally finds the right villa and sees Eve’s bag by the door. Charlie is determined to save her friend from herself: “No one will be hurt tonight. I would make sure of that. Somehow” (461).

Eve sneaks silently through the darkened villa looking for René: “A strip of rich carpet made her steps noiseless, René’s lavish taste helping her on the way to kill him” (463). She hears music playing on a phonograph somewhere down the hall and follows the sound.

Charlie rushes into the villa’s study to find Eve and René at gunpoint. Eve clips René’s ear with a bullet, but René shoots Eve in the shoulder. Pointing his gun at Charlie, René intends to let Eve bleed to death and then shoot Charlie. Charlie can’t reach a weapon, but she sees the infamous bust of Baudelaire on a shelf behind her. She baits René into lunging at her:

You’re not clever, you’re predictable. If you hadn’t named your restaurant after the same damn poem twice in a row, you’d still be sipping champagne over dinner right now, not packing a bag and running. For the third time in your miserable cliché of a life. (471)

Charlie then reveals that Eve beat him. She never confessed any secrets under torture, so René was forced to lie about her betrayal of Lili. Eve, who is slowly bleeding out, grows alert when she hears this revelation. René can’t stand to be confronted by his failure, and he rushes at Charlie. She swings the bust down, crushing his fingers and forcing the gun out of his hand. As they struggle, Eve shoots René between the eyes. Then she points the gun at her own temple.

Before Eve can pull the trigger, Charlie swings the statue again: “Charlie St. Clair, keening that berserker cry that had torn out of her throat as she lunged for René, had swung the bust of Baudelaire straight at Eve’s hand” (475). Charlie breaks the bones in Eve’s hand, so she can’t fire the gun.

Even though Eve protests that she’s ready to die, Charlie won’t allow it. She races to find bandages and disinfectant for Eve’s shoulder wound. Despite her anger, Eve admires the girl: “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” (476). A few moments later, Finn arrives to take them both to safety. 

Twenty-four hours later, the trio is in Paris. Finn has found a shady doctor to dress Eve’s wounds. Before they left the villa, Charlie removed their fingerprints and left behind the photo of René, surrounded by his Nazi friends. The police assume René was killed as revenge for his collaboration with the Germans during the war, and they don’t pursue the investigation any further.

Ten days into her recuperation in Paris, Eve disappears. She leaves a note telling the other two not to worry—she’s gone home. When Finn and Charlie rush to her place in London, they find nothing but an empty house with a For Sale sign.

Six weeks later, Charlie has arranged for her parents to meet her and Finn at the Dorchester Hotel. As the young couple goes out to their car, they find a brand-new Bentley for Finn with a note from Eve. She says that she needed to investigate the facts about Lili’s betrayal by looking into the transcripts herself. She learns that another spy revealed Lili’s identity in exchange for a reduced sentence: “René lied. It wasn’t me. You were right” (488). Eve is on her way to France to reconcile with Violette.

Along with the note, Charlie finds her grandmother’s pearls, which Eve redeemed from the pawnbroker. Eve says they are a wedding gift. Charlie’s parents are stunned to see their daughter drive up to the hotel in a Bentley with a respectable-looking man on her arm. They quickly agree to the couple’s marriage.

In Grasse, during the summer of 1949, Eve is waiting for her friends in a café. She’s just returned from her latest African safari: “Shooting René had taught Eve just how much she liked to stalk, hunt, and kill dangerous things” (492).

Eve sees the Lagonda pull up. Finn, Charlie, and Eve’s 18-month-old godchild Evie Rose climb out. Eve waves at the trio, and Charlie rushes up to greet her: “‘You’re g-going to hug me, aren’t you,’ Eve said to no one in particular. She sighed, and rose, and went grinning to be hugged. ‘Goddamn Yanks’” (494).