The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  He lived just off Rue de Rivoli where it met Rue St-Honoré. An old limestone pile arranged around a courtyard, a tall double doorway flung open all day. Some dead aristocrat’s hôtel particulier, long since sliced into flats. Not a fashionable address, but Philip was too young and too foreign to know that. He wanted the heart of Paris: a view of the river from his salon, the cries of the knife-grinders beneath his window, church bells crashing into his bed at all hours of the night. Cracked boiserie and parquet that screamed underfoot. Mirrors so fogged they resembled pewter. Sally had lived in Paris longer but Philip loved the city better, loved the heartiness of her food and the guttural accents and the birdcages on the Ile St-Louis. Sunday mornings the two of them threw open the shutters and leaned on the windowsills, their shoulders suspended over the street, staring out at the world until their eyes ached.

  She had four blocks still to walk when she saw the phalanx of cars from the préfecture de police. Philip’s double-doored entry sprawled wide. Catching up her gas mask and silk dress, she began to run in the vicious sandals, straps cutting into her feet.

  He was tied to the mahogany bedposts by his wrists and ankles, blood spattered the length of his nude body. She stood in the bedroom doorway swaying slightly, the police still unaware of her presence, and studied him: slack mouth, startled gray eyes, the latticework of ribs too embarrassingly white. The armpits monkey-like, the gourd of the hips and the knot of pubic hair at the groin, glistening with wetness. The erection still flagrant, even in death. Philip’s penis, alert and red, something she’d touched once in a car. The whip forgotten on the rug beneath him. There was another man, also nude but a stranger to her, dangling from the chandelier. His toes were horribly callused, the joints blistered yellow.

  Her mouth twisted and she must have gasped something in English—Philip’s name, possibly—because one of the official French turned his head sharply and saw her, incongruous in her shocking pink gown. He scowled and crossed the room in three strides, blocking her view.

  “Out, mademoiselle.”

  “But I know him!”

  “I’m sorry, mademoiselle. You cannot be here. Antoine! Vite!”

  She was grasped by the arm not ungently and led from the apartment, past the divan on which they’d had quick suppers, past the shutters they’d thrown open, a pair of highball glasses half-filled with drink. The wastebasket had overturned, and a few shards of glass were scattered on the threadbare Aubusson. She was dragged beyond the obscene figure dangling from the chandelier and into the hallway, where she began to shudder uncontrollably and the young man, Antoine—he wore a regular gendarme’s uniform, not a detective’s khaki raincoat—stood uncertainly clutching her elbow.

  “Sally.”

  The quiet voice was one she knew. Max Shoop, who ran S&C’s Paris office, in his elegant French clothes, his eyes remote and expressionless. They would have called Max, of course. She turned to him as a small child turns its face into its mother’s apron, whimpering, her eyes scrunched closed.

  “Sally,” Max said again, and put an awkward hand on her bare shoulder. “I’m—sorry. I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

  “Philip—”

  “He’s dead, Sally. He’s dead.”

  “But how…?” She pushed Shoop away, eyes open now and staring directly at him. “What in the world…”

  “The police think it was a heart attack.” He was uncomfortable with the words and all that had not been said: the meaning of the whip, the determined tumescence. Two men dead with a simultaneity that suggested climax. But Max Shoop was not the kind to admit discomfort: He maintained a perfect gravity, his face as expressionless as though he commented upon the weather.

  “Who,” she said with difficulty, “is hanging from the ceiling?”

  Shoop’s eyes slid away under their heavy lids. “I’m told he’s from one of the clubs in Montmartre. Did you…know about Philip?”

  “That he was…that he…” She stopped, uncertain of the words.

  “My poor girl.” Lips compressed, he led her away from the flat, toward the concierge’s rooms one floor below. The good stiff shot of brandy that would be waiting there.

  “It’s not,” she insisted clearly as he paused before the old woman’s door, his hand raised to knock, “what you think, you know. It’s not what you think.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The revue at the Folies Bergères didn’t end until midnight, so Memphis never made it to the Alibi Club until one o’clock in the morning. Spatz knew exactly how the routine would go: The limousine and driver, the boy with the jaguar on its leash, Raoul hovering like a pimp in the background, his hands never far from his wife’s ass. And Memphis herself: taller than a normal Parisienne, thinner and tauter, the muscles under the dark green velvet gown as coiled and sleek as the big cat beside her. She would pause in the curtained doorway as though searching the crowd—the Alibi Club was a true boîte de nuit, a box of a room holding maybe ten tables—and the effect would be instantaneous. Every head would turn. Every man and woman would rise, and applaud her again for the simple fact of her existence, for the whiff of exotic sex she brought into the place, of jealousy unappeased.

  Spatz had seen it all before, month after month of his enslavement to Memphis—which had endured somewhat longer, he reflected, than most of his amusements. He was content to sit alone, nursing a cigar, a plate of hideously overpriced oysters untouched before him. Hundreds of people lined up outside the Alibi Club, but only forty would be ushered through the entrance ropes—and only Spatz was given a table in a corner by himself. Spatz’s careless patronage paid the bills. The fact that he was German and officially an enemy of everyone in the room was immaterial. The man’s French was perfect; he drew no attention at all.

  He was a broad-shouldered, elegantly clad animal of the highest pedigree: Hans Gunter von Dincklage, coddled son of a mixed parentage, child of Lower Saxony, blond and inhumanly charming. Spatz meant sparrow in German. The name did not immediately suit him until one understood his habit of darting from perch to perch, whim to whim. His official title during the past few years was diplomat, attached to the German embassy, but the embassy was closed now because of the state of war and Spatz was at loose ends. He had spent the winter in Switzerland but had drifted back to Paris as the guest of a cousin who lived in the sixteenth arrondissement. His wife he had divorced years ago on the grounds of incompatibility. His enemies pointed out that she had Jewish blood.

  He had done nothing of real note in all his forty-five years except play polo well at Deauville.

  A girl in fishnet tights was passing gin, but Spatz preferred Scotch. He had just palmed the heavy glass, feeling its weight as a comfort in the hand, when a man slid into the empty seat beside him.

  “This is a private table.”

  “I don’t care,” the man snapped. “I’ve been hunting for you for hours, von Dincklage. You’re ridiculously hard to find.”

  Spatz considered him. Fussy and small, with a toothbrush mustache and the sort of clothes that proclaimed the high-paid clerk; the sharp wet eyes of a blackmailer. He thought he could put a name to the man.

  “You’re Morris,” he mused. “Emery Morris, am I right? You work for old Cromwell’s outfit over near the Ritz.”

  “Sullivan and Cromwell,” Morris corrected. “The New York law firm. I am a partner there.”

  “Call me tomorrow at home. I don’t do business here.”

  Emery Morris glanced around him with a moue of distaste. “You’ll have to make an exception. There is a matter of the gravest importance—”

  But Spatz was ignoring him. He’d risen to his feet, his birdlike gaze fixed on the curtained doorway and the tall black goddess framed in the swinging curtains.

  Memphis had arrived.

  “What the hell you mean Jacquot’s not here?” she breathed through her smile—her gap-toothed smile, practiced noon and night in the huge gilt mirror that hung in her salon off the Rue des Trois Frères, her dusky face melting
into the shadows. She didn’t care who saw her miming for the mirror, naked in the full-length glass, turning while maybe Raoul or somebody else looked on: I’m just a little black gal from the hills of Tennessee, I don’t know how I’m gonna survive in this big ole white town, you think I should go in whiteface and make the Frenchies do like Memphis, everybody wearing whiteface all the time like we gonna die of hunger and cold one day.

  “I told you,” Raoul muttered, fingers nervous in his pockets, face twisted in a grin. It was the carnival barker grin of a man who pulled the strings, except only Memphis decided who held the end of her rope and it hadn’t been Raoul for a long, long time. “He never showed up. Baby, let’s make the rounds and go. My skin’s crawling just standing here. We got a train to catch.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” she murmured, her eyes on a bald man sitting in the front row, his look foolish as a bloodhound’s, one of her regulars; she thought his name was M. Duplix. “I’m goin’ to do my show.” She swayed her long body in Duplix’s general direction and smoothed his domed head with her gloved hands, crooning something her mama’d taught her years ago—sweet baby Jesus, how many years ago? Memphis was twenty-six this summer, and the years were just a string of beads around her neck. Married for the first time at thirteen. A runaway six months later and married again, this time in Chicago. A dancer in Paris by the time she was seventeen. A star by the time she was twenty, touring Scandinavia and Berlin where the riot police were brought out to protect her, degenerate that she was. Married most recently to the man who set up the Paris tour, the man who’d made her a household name: Raoul, the French Jew, thirty-nine and change, with his curling black mustache and his vague stories of titled Russian royalty, the connections he’d lost somewhere along the way. With her body and baby-cake voice and his smarts they’d made money hand over fist, most years, the Depression notwithstanding. Memphis never walked away from a show. Memphis never stopped dancing. She did ballroom teas off the Champs-Élysées at four and the Folies at ten and the Alibi Club at one A.M., and if she slept nobody but her lovers knew it, twisted in the fine linen sheets in the late hours of morning. Memphis sang for her supper and Raoul’s, too. Raoul owned the Alibi Club; it was the one thing that kept them together, despite the endless bickering over money and the strangers she couldn’t resist. He tolerated her string of men for the money they brought and the way they amused her; Memphis was too exhausting for one man to manage alone. In his own way, Raoul never stopped dancing, either.

  They were both aliens, outsiders, the Jew and the Negress from Tennessee, leading the chicest city in the world with their daring and their jazz and their exquisite clothes. Fascists of every stripe and country hated Memphis and Raoul, hated the riffs they sold like cocaine on the streets of Montmartre. Degenerate music, they called it. An alliance of half-apes and the Jews who train them, circus performers, shills. The Fascists hated the German Kurt Weill, they hated Irving Berlin and Dizzy Gillespie and Josephine Baker, and they mounted an official exhibition of Degenerate Music to prove it. The show catalog had a black jazz trumpeter on the cover, a yellow Jewish star sewn on his lapel. Memphis framed the page with her name and hung it on the Alibi Club’s wall.

  She kept singing in that breathy croon, like a baby-doll girl in a candytuft dress, a little baby girl to bounce on your lap and make love to all night long. She breathed her way up and down the scale, smoky and sighing, through all the tunes Raoul decided would fit her range; he had the latest records flown in from New York like other men imported caviar. Memphis never sang the same song twice unless the man paid for it. Memphis always made him pay, whoever he was, and each and every one of them loved her for it—loved the bold crassness, the unabashed demands, the brazen greed. Memphis snatching a thousand-franc bill from an open hand, Memphis taking her revenge for all the years of closed hotels and barred dining rooms and exclusive toilets where only white people could pee, and singing while she did it. Offstage she was like something dead or thwarted; onstage, the footlights bathed her skin in a glow so rare she seemed luminous, incandescent, the whitest black woman on the face of the planet. On the rare days she couldn’t perform—voice gone, throat scratchy from overuse—she fretted at the corners of her room like a penned dog.

  Everybody knew now that the Nazis had broken through the line at Sedan, and Raoul was certain they were coming straight for the Alibi Club. We’ve got a train to catch, he’d said. Before the knock comes on the door, baby. Before the truncheons fall and the pit opens and nothing and nobody can save us. You know what they do to Jews and blacks and people like Jacquot? Yellow stars. Pink triangles. Deportations and labor camps. No wonder fucking Jacquot never showed up for work.

  She was blowing kisses now to the regulars and making eyes at Spatz, sashaying her ass in his general direction just to tell him that she was his alone, his doll-baby with the electric fingers and the voice that purred in his dreams, even as she tried to stuff the panic back down into her shoes. Memphis would not be leaving, no sir, no way, no matter how many jackbooted Nazi shits marched into Paris in the morning, no matter how much Raoul begged and cried. Memphis was staying. A town full of soldiers meant a town full of money—a club full of pockets to burn—meant the world this girl was born to rule. Memphis was staying whether Raoul left or not. If she ran away again, she’d die.

  On the small raised platform that served for a stage at the Alibi Club, everyone could hear her. That was what she loved about the place: when she opened her mouth here, the world fell silent. She settled herself on the stool in the center of the room, and sang.

  “Strange,” Spatz murmured as he studied her through a hanging veil of cigar smoke, composed as a statue in the circle of light, “Jacquot’s missing. He normally twirls around while she sings. A number in black tie and tails. I wonder if he’s ill?”

  “He’s dead,” Emery Morris said flatly. “That’s what I came to tell you. Dead in a flat off the Rue de Rivoli. I saw him myself.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. With one of our people.”

  The admission cost Morris something and for a second Spatz had no idea what it was. The lawyer had a reputation for discretion in Paris. Emery Morris was supremely respectable and unshakably trustworthy. There was a wife who kept to herself somewhere in the suburbs, a disinclination for drink even in the name of friendship. No sexual liaisons. No suggestion of a sense of humor. It was Spatz’s business to probe for weakness in the men he encountered; he guessed Emery Morris’s was a lack of imagination.

  Jacquot the cabaret flame, the careless homosexual. Found dead with an American lawyer. Spatz’s mouth knotted in a smile.

  “I’m shocked.”

  “You know what he was,” Morris spat out bitterly. “A wretched little pervert—an unnatural…he took money for what he…”

  “Indeed. I’m simply astounded that his taste ran to Americans. For all his whips and cruelties, Jacquot was a snob. Your man killed him, I suppose?”

  Behind the neat wire-rimmed spectacles, Morris’s pupils flared slightly. “Probably the other way round. It is a sordid business and we’ve got to keep it out of the papers at all cost. With the war news, thank God, the suicide of a queer is hardly front-page stuff.”

  “But your dead lawyer?”

  Morris leaned closer, his voice low. “That’s why I’ve come to talk to you. We’ve got a problem.”

  He was gone by the time she finished singing, and Memphis never saw him go: The bright lights blinded her to the faces beyond, the tables that were filled. She sang for nearly an hour, then broke for a glass of champagne—so dry it burned in her throat, not at all the thing for singing, but the cut glass looked right in her elegant hand and it was important to work her image. She chatted with the regulars as she snaked among the tables, not wanting to look behind her for Raoul, who would be furious with impatience, his mind full of timetables. She cursed Jacquot for failing her; she would have to go home early, and then it would be the whole thing all over again: Raoul
wanting to run. Raoul threatening her. Raoul.

  There was a hand on her shoulder—not Spatz or her husband but An Li the driver, a Vietnamese Memphis kept for his exotic value, lithe and fastidious in his neat uniform. He bowed apologetically.

  “M. Raoul took the car. He asked that I give you this, madame.”

  She snatched the slip of paper; scanned it hastily. Back home in Tennessee there were people who dared to say she couldn’t even read, but Memphis had made sure her second husband taught her and she was always learning, always reading; she spoke French now and read the Paris papers. Her vision was slightly blurred tonight from the smoke or the lateness of the hour, or maybe it was the panic again, creeping up from her shoes, those precious shoes she bought in the Rue St-Honoré, the best lizard and snakeskin, the pointiest toes.

  Baby, Jacquot’s dead and there’s a cop at the door and if we get mixed up in police business we’ll never get out of Paris. Baby, you close the club and you get our money when the bank opens tomorrow and you tell everybody we’re going on a long holiday because Memphis Jones won’t sing for the Germans. Meet me in Marseille as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. R.

  She crushed the slip of paper beneath her heel.

  “Take the big cat,” she told An Li, “and go on home. Tonight Memphis is gonna party till dawn.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sally King was shivering uncontrollably. The May night was cold, so she’d allowed Max Shoop to light a cigarette for her as he tucked her into the cab. It was lurching now along the Rue St-Honoré, and ash spilled down the silk gown. Sally didn’t care. She would never wear this Schiaparelli again: she loathed its bright pink color, its swarming bugs, obscene as the last glimpse of Philip’s body; the smudge of ash could serve as mourning.