The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  Max had paid the driver to take her back to her apartment, but in the darkness of the muttering streets, the hordes of people still milling desperately toward the southern reaches of the city despite the lateness of the hour, Sally felt sick with claustrophobia. The dry, wracking spasms of hysteria and disbelief she’d stifled with a shot of the concierge’s brandy were threatening to surface again. She closed her eyes and took a drag of smoke, willing the stuff to clear her brain.

  We’d suspected for some time that Philip was disturbed, Max Shoop had said in that wretched room at the base of the courtyard, stinking of burnt sausage and mold. Philip had been acting strangely. Secretive—distrustful. He saw plots everywhere. Probably because he felt guilty himself.

  She’d tried to match this picture to the Philip she’d known—tried to think back to the last time she’d seen him, two days before as he walked briskly through the Place des Vosges. The pollarded trees were beginning to leaf; somewhere a soprano was practicing her scales, and the sound had spiraled in a lovely wash over the ancient square, echoing in the vaulted arches. He’d raced the last few feet to where she stood and caught her in his arms, heedless of whoever might be watching. Springtime in Paris, he’d exulted. Who says there’s a war on?

  Philip, guilty? Philip, disturbed?

  She said nothing to Shoop about the note Philip had sent her, the alleged meeting with a member of the firm. It was obvious even to Sally that Philip’s time had been spent differently. The image of his sprawling body—the penis bright and hard—the glazed eyes staring past her—sprang unbidden to her mind. The hand holding her cigarette trembled.

  The chief thing, Max had said, is to keep the truth from his parents. Wilson Stilwell is a judge, for Chrissake. No hint of scandal—we owe his family that. Will you accompany the body home?

  The body. Philip, at twenty-eight, a corpse.

  She stared through a window fogged with cigarette smoke as though Paris itself had died. The crowd of midnight refugees was so thick in the Rue du Pont Neuf that the cabdriver cursed and abruptly threw his car into reverse. He turned west, up the Rue de Rivoli, in the opposite direction from the Latin Quarter. Sally was too numb to protest.

  I want you out of Europe, Sally, Max had said. Before all hell breaks loose, understand? I’ll talk to somebody at the embassy tomorrow—

  The embassy.

  They had reached the Place de la Concorde, and there it was: the United States’ chancellery building, where the State department and the Army people and a few guys who worked for Commerce kept their offices. Though it was spanking new, it looked forlorn and unloved in the blue glow of blackout lighting. The chancellery gave out visas and dealt with such messy affairs as repatriating the dead, but Ambassador Bullitt actually lived elsewhere, in an elegant town house gifted to the American nation. Not even the Germans could faze Bill Bullitt; the U.S. ambassador would still be pouring champagne for anyone who held out a glass. Sally had met him at the embassy Christmas party: a barrel-chested, bald-headed dynamo who’d looked her up and down with the eyes of a connoisseur. She’d been wearing the same dress she was wearing now.

  “Driver,” she said clearly, “I’ve changed my mind. Take me to Avenue d’Iléna—Ambassador Bullitt’s place.”

  It was Joe Hearst who won the right to talk to the most famous American girl in Paris, the one who’d been photographed by Horst, whose face had graced Vogue during the autumn shows of ’39, the impossibly tall young woman with the high cheekbones and the wide smile. She’d been recognized by one of the State department wives as she mounted the steps alone, uninvited to this party for Premier Paul Reynaud and the French Minister of War, Edouard Daladier, two men who perpetually swapped cabinet positions and cordially despised each other. Mims Tarnow remembered Christmas, remembered the shocking-pink gown, and although she was enough of a snob and a Radcliffe woman to feel herself superior to Sally King, she understood it was her grudging duty to report the gate-crasher to Bullitt’s chargé, Robert Murphy.

  Murphy fingered his lighter while Mims whispered in his ear, his head cocked toward the entrance foyer where more than a few of the French guests were already donning their wraps. Bullitt was known as “Champagne Bill” for his lavish parties, but with the news today out of Sedan nobody felt like celebrating; besides, Daladier’s mistress refused to speak to Reynaud’s. Sally King had paused uncertainly just inside the doorway, her expression blank and wooden. Her gas-mask case hung like the chicest of accessories from one sculpted shoulder; a smear of black trailed down her skirt as though she’d been grazed by a dirty fender somewhere.

  Murphy felt a surge of impatience. Innocents, he thought. Impossible innocents. They shouldn’t be allowed out alone.

  “Find out what she wants, Joe,” he muttered to the political secretary standing silently at his right hand. “Thirty francs says it’s passage home.”

  Joe Hearst had been in Paris for nearly eighteen months. Before that it had been Moscow. Before that, Geneva and Nairobi. Hearst was thirty-five years old, educated at Yale, a diplomat’s son. He spoke five languages. His wife had left him suddenly the previous winter and nobody at the embassy could forget the fact. They betrayed their knowledge in awkward gestures of sympathy or poorly disguised glee. Only Bullitt, who’d had numerous women—who’d lived in a palace on a cliff overlooking the Bosphorus with the notorious Louise Bryant—only Bullitt seemed to assume Joe Hearst still had a career. The rest of them were waiting to hear he’d been ordered home.

  Hearst crossed the marble floor with an air of indifference, one hand in his pocket: a tall man in evening dress, body too gaunt for the breadth of his shoulders, eyes hawkish, deep gray, intimidating in their directness. The girl in last year’s gown stepped backward as he approached. Apprehension flooded her face.

  “Miss King, isn’t it? Joe Hearst.” He bowed—one of those European habits he’d acquired from childhood—and held out his hand. “We met at the Christmas party.”

  “Did we?” Her voice was frail as rice paper. “I don’t remember. I’m looking for Ambassador Bullitt.”

  “I’m afraid the ambassador is engaged. May I be of help?”

  He was playing his stock character: the mannered diplomat, too well-bred to be offended by a gate-crasher, intent upon blocking access to the Great Man. But his mind was wandering as he recited his lines, his eyes taking in the expression of bewilderment that lurked in the girl’s face, the wisps of hair that had slipped from her chignon. Like she’s been knocked on the head, he thought. Or raped in a corner. What the hell happened to her?

  “It’s the three glasses,” she said irrelevantly. “I didn’t really see them at the time but later, in the taxi, I remembered. Two on the windowsill. One smashed in the wastebasket. They don’t make sense, any more than a word Shoop said.”

  Hearst frowned. “Are you unwell, Miss King?”

  Her eyelids flickered and she swayed slightly, fingers convulsing on the strap of her gas-mask case. He guessed she’d carried it instead of an evening bag; everybody did.

  He reached for her elbow and led her without a word into one of the wood-paneled rooms to either side of the entrance foyer: intimate rooms, with fireplaces in which nothing burned, a couch or two, shelves of leather-bound books, a single oil of the Hudson River School mounted over the mantel.

  She sank down onto a fauteuil and stared blankly at her shoes.

  “What is it?” Hearst asked gently. “What’s happened?”

  “Philip’s been murdered,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The man known simply as Jacquot had lived in a number of places during the seventeen years he’d called Paris home. As a young man fresh from the provinces he’d sought a boardinghouse where the meals were provided by an indifferent cook; hopeful of securing a place in a reputable dance company—Diaghilev’s, perhaps—he’d regarded the poor quality of the food as inducement to keeping his figure. In his thirties, the dream of classical ballet long since laid to rest, he’d held a
coveted role at the club known as Shéhérazade—and had enjoyed a brief romance with the exquisite Serge Lifar, the most famous ballet dancer in Paris, then in his first youth and fame. In this period, too, Jacquot had acquired a taste for cocaine that proved ruinous to his looks and pocket. The worldwide economic depression of recent years, combined with his own advancing age, had further blasted the promise of his boyhood: In the past few months, Jacquot had descended from trysts on the Boulevard Haussmann and champagne at dawn, to a two-room flat in a rat-infested quarter of the twentieth arrondissement, not far from Père Lachaise cemetery.

  Max Shoop had reached Jacquot’s meagre place a few minutes past two A.M., having disposed of the police at Philip Stilwell’s apartment and all their insinuating questions. It was they who’d told him the identity of the hanged man and the address of his flat. Shoop was almost finished rifling Jacquot’s pathetically few belongings.

  The main room held a stove and sink in one corner; these Jacquot had curtained off with a drapery of faded velvet. A divan of similar material, a scarred wooden table that served both cocktails and dinner; a shelf with a few books and photographs—one of them Lifar’s dark profile, signed. A portrait of Cocteau. A feather boa, worn once in a production long ago. This was a public space and Shoop found nothing here of interest to himself.

  The inner room was private, however, and here Jacquot had allowed his fancy full flight. The walls were lined in midnight blue silk, the bed draped à la polonaise. A writing desk with a modernist sculpture—possibly Braque, probably a copy—held down the view from the narrow window. It gave out onto a featureless alleyway and the collective washing of the tenement opposite.

  Shoop had allowed himself a moment to gaze around; had considered briefly the vivid impression he received of carnal appetite and sexual abandon; and then gave himself up to the plunder of the desk.

  He was a precise man, scrupulously self-controlled; a man of acute intelligence and subtlety who might have run an entire nation. He had settled instead for being a lawyer in Paris, where life was elegant and his freedom was complete. In New York he was pigeonholed: Max Shoop, Amherst 1910, Columbia Law. In Paris he could be anything: a criminal, a seducer, a builder and destroyer of worlds. In Paris, with his French wife, he might not even be American.

  For this job he wore gloves. His eyes felt no strain in the blackout darkness; he carried a small flashlight with a blue lens, its beam narrow as wire. He stacked the miscellany of papers and bills the dead man had left behind in neat piles. He was searching for something he could not name but would recognize when he saw it. Shoop was calm—Shoop was always calm—but he was conscious of the passage of time. The police ought to be arriving at any moment.

  He had just abandoned the desk and was opening the door to a clothes wardrobe when a key turned in the front door.

  A key. In the hands of a friend, or the law?

  Shoop froze. His silver head may have darted toward the window, but not even a man of his narrow frame could squeeze through the opening it offered, and the street was thirty feet below.

  He slid noiselessly into the wardrobe instead.

  And if it were the police? What then?

  He would be discovered. Questioned. But Max Shoop, American citizen, managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell’s Paris office, could talk his way out of anything.

  His feet were resting on a pair of ancient patent leather tap shoes. He quelled his breathing, ears strained to catch the sounds from beyond the wardrobe door.

  A single pair of feet entered the flat. Light, staccato, hesitant footsteps uncertain of their ground. Not the police.

  “Jacquot? Yoo-hoo, baby…”

  A woman’s voice—rich and breathless, an American voice. Shoop eased open the wardrobe door slightly and studied Memphis Jones, her back to the bedroom and her impatient body arrested in movement: no doubt wondering, Shoop guessed, where her dance partner had got to. He would simply wait for her to leave.

  But she foiled him, turning swiftly to the bedroom and crossing it without hesitation. She wasn’t looking for Jacquot any longer; there was unmistakable purpose in the beguiling face. Shoop caught the scent of roses mingled with cigar smoke as her current swept past him. Abruptly the sheets were torn from the bed and she was sliding deft hands under the mattress. With a whispered curse, she moved toward the desk. Another vulture turning over the bones.

  The careful piles he’d made of Jacquot’s papers held no interest for this woman; she scattered them like leaves. Then she turned without warning and yanked open the wardrobe door.

  They stared directly into each other’s eyes.

  “Miss Jones,” Shoop acknowledged. “A pleasure.”

  “What the hell you doin’ in there, white man? And how come you know my name? Shit.” She backed two steps toward the bed, her poise momentarily deserting her.

  “Nobody in Paris is ignorant of your name.” If he’d been wearing a hat he might have raised it to her. Irony was one of Shoop’s more conscious arts.

  “I asked who you are.”

  “Max Shoop. Attorney-at-law.”

  It was clear the name meant nothing to her. The jazz singer’s eyes narrowed. “What you want with Jacquot?”

  “I might ask the same of you.”

  “He didn’t come to work tonight. I pay the man’s salary, I want to see him in the club, you understand?”

  “I do. But Jacquot’s dead, Miss Jones—and I don’t think it was his body you were looking for under the mattress.”

  Her eyelids flickered. “Jacquot took some cash off me a few days back. I need it now.”

  She never questioned the man’s death, and she didn’t mourn him, either, Shoop thought. “There’s no money in the flat, and the police are coming. It could be awkward for you if you’re found here.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. It was a sound so childlike and joyous he was startled.

  “You think I was born yesterday, mistuh? You think Memphis is the kind of girl who does what she’s told? I don’t leave without my money—and if the police ask questions, I’ll refer them to my lawyer. Mr. Max Shoop can tell ’em why he’s hiding in Jacquot’s closet.”

  He studied her face—intent and calculating, unmarked by weariness or her sleepless night. She was a force of nature, Memphis Jones, relentless in her self-absorption.

  He decided she could be used.

  “How much?” he asked, drawing his billfold from his pocket.

  “Enough to get me to Marseille. Call it…two thousand francs even.”

  “You could buy a train ticket for a couple hundred.”

  “Not on any train what’s leaving today. Whole world wants to buy their way south today. And I ain’t waitin’ for tomorrow. Nosir.”

  “I’m surprised,” Shoop said slowly. “A girl like you ought to jump at the chance to charm half a million soldiers.”

  “I maybe would have,” she agreed, “except for the fact that my man left town last night with every last penny we’d saved. Go to the bank tomorrow, Memphis. Tell ’em we’re leaving town, Memphis. Only the banks aren’t paying a dime on Jewish accounts this week because of the Germans comin’ and them banks thinkin’ they’ll get a windfall of hard-earned cash, you know what I mean? Ain’t no accounts this little girl can touch today. You give me the money, mistuh, I walk away.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  She cocked her head, frowning at him. Shoop guessed he was the sort of man who turned up once in a while at her club: moneyed, aging, his appetites tightly buttoned beneath a starched white collar. She thought she knew what he wanted.

  “You lookin’ for a piece of sweet Memphis ass, mistuh? ’Cause if you are, I got to tell you I don’t sell mine for a piddly-shit two thousand francs. And maybe there’s no amount of money in the world would convince me to sell to you.”

  Shoop considered the offer, the episodes that might ensue. A faint singing in his brain at the thought of attitudes the woman could strike, at certain hour
s of the night.

  “I want information,” he said carefully, “about one of your men.”

  “There’s a lot of those, mistuh.” She sank down on Jacquot’s bed and crossed her legs, looking profoundly bored.

  He drew a fountain pen and checkbook from his breast pocket. Wrote a tight signature under the sum of a thousand dollars—redeemable for cash at the American Express office. At roughly thirty francs to the dollar, it was enough to get Memphis anywhere she needed to go.

  He held the check under her nose.

  Her eyes, rich and warm as fresh-cooked caramel, flicked up to his; he almost lost his resolve and begged her to take him.

  “Which guy you mean?”

  “The German,” he answered softly, closing her fingers on the check. “The one who haunts your club. He calls himself Spatz.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “So the guy was queer,” Bullitt mused as the long black car nosed its way west toward the Bois du Boulogne, “and the girl can’t accept it? Bullshit. Sally King’s one of Coco’s girls. She’s no innocent.”

  The ambassador pulled a gold cigarette case from the pocket of his dinner jacket; Joe Hearst offered his lighter. It had been as the embassy was closing—Sally sent off at last in a taxi alone, the final stragglers sauntering down the steps—that Bullitt had thrown his hand casually on Hearst’s shoulder and commanded, “Ride with me.”

  That might have meant an hour on horseback in the Bois before breakfast—one of Bullitt’s inveterate habits—but tonight it referred to the car and driver and the trip west to the château he rented in Chantilly. Bullitt hated to be alone. Particularly in the wee small hours.

  The yellow flame flared now under his chin, a jack-o’-lantern grimace, the face shrewd and hard in the flickering light. He was from one of the best Philadelphia families, a true blue blood of the old school—and yet at moments Bullitt looked like a gangster. The mix of breeding and brutality drew women like flies.