The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s an unwritten stipulation in every case that when the war is over—if it’s ever over—the Jewish partners get their assets back.”

  “And your Jewish clients are willing to go along with this?”

  Shoop shrugged. “Some are. The ones who’ve worked with us longest, the ones who are the most desperate. There are others…I’ve noticed a reluctance to believe the worst will happen. A desire to think that France will halt the Germans in their tracks and business will go on as usual. That’s not the picture of the future I’ve painted to my people, but not all of them are willing to take my advice.”

  “Does Dulles know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes.” Shoop smiled thinly. “It’s business, after all. Foster understands the concept of turning a buck better than anyone in the world.”

  Bullitt barked with laughter. “Doesn’t he just.”

  “Was Philip Stilwell working on this project to transfer Jewish ownership?” Hearst asked.

  “He was.”

  “Would someone kill him for it?”

  Shoop steepled his hands—the Pope, considering the doctrine of infallibility. “Kill Philip in order to prevent the transfer of a given company’s ownership, you mean? Surely there are less drastic methods. Like waiting a week for the Germans to arrive, and shut us completely down.”

  “You went to Stilwell’s place last night,” Hearst persisted. “Why?”

  “Philip asked me to come. He wished to discuss a private matter.”

  “Rogers Lamont’s business.”

  For the first time, Shoop’s eyes darted uncontrollably to Hearst’s face. He hadn’t expected the attack; he thought he’d satisfied them completely with his yarn about property transfers.

  “ ‘This business of Lamont’s can’t be allowed to continue,’ ” Hearst recited. “ ‘It’s immoral, it’s illegal, and it’s going to sink us all.’ ”

  “I hadn’t realized you were a spy, Mr. Hearst.” Shoop rose from his seat abruptly. “That was a private communication between Philip and me. I thought I was dealing with honorable men.”

  Hearst drew a folded square of paper from his breast pocket. “Stilwell sent this to Miss King before he died. She gave it to me last night. Was he still alive when you got to the Rue de Rivoli yesterday?”

  Shoop hesitated. He glanced at Bill Bullitt, who’d leaned back in his desk chair and was staring at the ceiling, as though patiently waiting for the drama to end. Shoop sighed.

  “If you’ve talked to Sally, you know how I found him.” He passed a thin hand over his eyes at the memory. “I couldn’t believe…I’d never thought of Philip as—At first I figured it was suicide. Something he’d chosen to fling in my face, although I couldn’t for the life of me say why. But now I don’t know—”

  Because if in fact he was murdered, you’re suspect number one, Hearst thought. “Was anyone else in the apartment when you got there?”

  “No. The door was ajar. I walked in and saw the corpse dangling from the chandelier—twisting in the most hideous way, the man’s tongue hanging out; I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the last war—and I called out for Philip. When he didn’t answer, I forced myself to walk through to the bedroom…”

  “Was he warm?”

  Shoop’s eyelids lifted slightly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Did you touch Stilwell’s skin? Was he still warm?”

  “I…Yes. I touched Philip’s neck—the left side, I think—and felt for a pulse. Nothing. But warm, yes.”

  “What did you do then? Pour yourself a stiff drink?”

  “What? No, I’m afraid I…left. I went in search of the concierge on the ground floor—Mme. Blum—and asked her to call the police. You undoubtedly know the rest.”

  There was a brief silence.

  Then Bullitt brought his chair to the floor with a crash and said crisply, “Lamont. What about Lamont?”

  “I don’t know. I never heard. Philip was dead.”

  “But surely you’ve got an idea.” Bullitt’s square head was thrust pugnaciously forward, his unblinking eyes drilling into Shoop’s face. “Tell me about the guy. New Yorker, right?”

  “Yes. Columbia Law. Before that, Princeton. Captain of the varsity crew. Never married, but much sought after by New York society mamas—one reason he moved to Europe. Rogers resigned his partnership last fall and sailed for Canada. The British gave him the rank of major, I think.”

  “How’d old Foster Dulles take that?”

  Shoop hesitated. “Foster didn’t interfere, of course. But I think he disapproved. He sent round a memo after Rogers left, stating that anyone who quit the firm to go to war might not have a job when he got back.”

  Bullitt’s harsh laughter shot through the room. “A true patriot and a gentleman, isn’t he? Jesus Christ.”

  “But this business,” Hearst persisted, “that’s immoral and illegal and will sink you all, the one Stilwell wanted to discuss—What was it?”

  The tension in Shoop’s body was visible now. He was still protecting something.

  “One of Philip’s tasks in recent months was to purge the files the firm is boxing for storage. Most of the files were Lamont’s. He’d brought his own book of business with him from Germany when the Berlin office closed—”

  “Lamont worked in Berlin?” Hearst said quickly.

  “For years.” Shoop glanced at Bullitt. “Rogers handled German reparations from the last war. Debt payments to American banks. That sort of thing.”

  “—Then he landed in Paris with his book of Nazi clients, when the Berlin office closed,” Bullitt concluded. “And he quit eight months ago, as soon as war was declared, with France, to kill those same Germans. Interesting.”

  Shoop inclined his austere gray head. “I asked Morris about it, but he had no explanation.”

  “Morris?” Hearst repeated.

  “Emery Morris. One of our attorneys. Emery worked with Rogers Lamont in Berlin, and has known him the longest.”

  “I see. What’s happened to Lamont’s files, Mr. Shoop? The ones Philip Stilwell was purging?”

  The lawyer bit his lip, as though attempting to swallow the words. “I went looking for them today,” he replied. “They’re simply…gone.”

  Later, in the few minutes left to him before touring the city’s hospitals, Hearst sat down and drafted a cable to Allen Dulles in New York.

  CHAPTER NINE

  After they had made love, Memphis fell into one of her uneasy drifts of sleep, sprawled naked and facedown with her arms flung out like a scarecrow, barely conscious of Spatz lying inches away or of the sun that was beginning to force its nose through the heavy draperies. The bed was antique, like all the furniture in the countess’s apartment, big enough for the petite forms of the seventeenth century but not the Amazon queen or the übermensch from Lower Saxony. She was dreaming of Spatz’s penis, she could feel it probing at the mouth of her sex, thick and forceful and supremely satisfying; and as she arched to meet its rhythm, her legs falling open, she was conscious of the blunt instrument sharpening—of human flesh mutating to steel—of the thrust and cut of a bayonet in her vitals. She screamed.

  And sat upright, trembling, senses still furled in sleep.

  Spatz didn’t move.

  Had she screamed? Or had the terror she’d ridden with her muscled thighs clamped her vocal cords tight? She stared at him—the perfectly formed profile, the cascade of blond hair freed of pomade, the creases of age in the corners of his eyes. She had a habit of smoothing those creases with her fingertips because age was the man’s only vulnerability; Spatz was maybe twenty years older than she was and the weathering of his skin was the single crack in his beautiful aristocratic façade. But she kept her hands to herself now and thought, Why am I afraid of you? Because you’re German?

  Or because there’s a smear of blood on your palm?

  She pulled the sheet over her breasts and lay down again, quiet as a mouse and thinking.
Blood could be anything—a cut, a splinter. Sure, he’d left the Alibi Club last night without saying good-bye, and there were hours unaccounted for between then and the moment she’d pulled up at this Fabourg address just after four A.M., but that didn’t mean he’d gone and hurt anybody. She pushed away Jacquot’s death and Raoul’s desertion and the Germans coming—the Germans coming—

  Spatz was German, yes—but a Nazi? No. He’d never been the kind who pushed his women around and called it politics when he gave them a black eye. It was the big-ass lawyer and all his questions that had ruined Memphis’s sleep.

  What does Spatz do, exactly, at the German embassy?

  “It’s closed, mistuh—has been since war broke out. Spatz is a man of independent means. Most of my men are.”

  She remembered lying back on Jacquot’s bed, the dark green velvet of her gown blending subtly with the blue silk of the coverlet, Max Shoop pacing like a judge.

  Does he meet people at the Alibi Club?

  “He meets me. Spatz is a regular. Has his own table. And they ain’t cheap to come by, I’ll tell you that.”

  Who does he spend his time with? Other Germans?

  “Sometimes. Sometimes French, sometimes English. Tonight he was with an American guy—skinny little fella with a mustache like Hitler’s. Don’t know his name.”

  I do, Shoop had said.

  Memphis pulled the sheet tighter around her body as she remembered the look on the lawyer’s stony face. The kind of look she’d expect a Klansman to wear just before the hood covered his head, the look of an executioner. The easy game of twenty questions, the check for a thousand dollars clutched in her hand, had vanished in a sudden flood of fear and she had wanted nothing more than to get out of that dead man’s room.

  And so she’d told him what the lawyer never asked to hear, the words tumbling from her lips.

  “The American rat—the one who wouldn’t drink champagne tonight with Spatz? Only other time I saw him was backstage at the Alibi Club—jerking off Jacquot in the pretty boy’s dressing room.”

  Sally King opened her eyes in the Foreigners’ Hospital to a flood of spring sunshine pouring through the casement windows. She grimaced and turned her face away; pain shot like a bolt of lightning through her skull.

  “Sally,” said a voice somewhere nearby—kind enough but with an annoying note of insistence in its tone, the voice of a schoolmaster or a parent. “Miss King.”

  Reluctantly she opened her eyes once more. The ward stretched as long as a bowling alley, three times as wide, to a vanishing point of a swing door. Beds full of women were ranked on either side. And this one man: legs crossed in an upright chair, a bunch of lilies in his hand. Her eyes traveled to his face, which she vaguely remembered having seen somewhere.

  “Joe Hearst,” he reminded her. “We met at the embassy last night.”

  “Of course—”

  She tried to sit up and it was a mistake. Her eyes clenched tight and she allowed her head to sink back as delicately as an eggshell on the stiff bolster of the hospital bed, furiously trying to remember. She was conscious of thirst, of a throbbing and relentless headache, and of embarrassment so acute she wondered if she had all her clothes on. “What happened?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  The voice was amused and apologetic now; the voice of a lover rejected out of pique.

  “It was dark,” she said aloud. “Somebody doctored the light bulb in the corridor. He grabbed my neck.”

  “Who?”

  She began to shrug and thought better of it. “Am I a flaming beauty, Mr. Hearst?”

  “Bloodstains are all the rage this season. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “I blacked out.”

  “Not by yourself. Can you remember what he looked like? The man in the corridor?”

  “Tall. Taller than me, and that’s not so usual. Six feet, maybe? And strong. His hands were like a vise. But beyond that—”

  “Young? Old?”

  “Neither. Is there any water?”

  He stood and reached for a jug, pouring a glass with his thin, long-fingered hands. They said nothing as he did it, Sally content to watch in silence, Hearst preserving his extraordinary economy of movement. He was restful, she decided; he maintained such perfect self-control.

  He waited obediently until she drank it down, then asked, “Fair? Dark? Mustache? Beard?”

  She fought an absurd desire to burst into tears. “Fair. No facial hair.”

  “Laborer? Thug?”

  “Evening dress. English tailoring, not French.” The realization was momentous, like an unexpected gift. “He had a white silk scarf draped around his neck. And his eyes were bright as a bird’s. Glittering at me.”

  Joe Hearst did not immediately reply. He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a handkerchief, offered it to Sally. So she was crying, then; it must be a reaction to the pain or the awakening or the knowledge that Philip—without warning, an image of Philip’s dead body came back to her and she cried harder, a helpless despair engulfing her.

  “Is it because of Philip?” she gasped as she dabbed at her face. “Is that why he tried to kill me?”

  “We think he was looking for something in your apartment,” Hearst said. All amusement and authority had vanished from his voice; he was the wooden diplomat again. She did not think it right to hand him the sodden square of linen he’d given her and so she kept it clutched tightly between her fingers. Looking for something. He went through my things.

  “Which means,” she said carefully, “that whatever he wanted, it wasn’t at Philip’s place. Or he wouldn’t have come to mine.”

  “Probably true. Did Philip give you anything, Miss King, to keep safe—a document? Something from the law firm perhaps?”

  She shook her head. “Not even a ring.”

  The countess arrived at her Paris apartment at ten o’clock in the morning, letting herself in at the front door with her own key. Her chauffeur Jean-Luc carried the luggage up from the boot of the open car she preferred to drive herself, and was standing deferentially with her lady’s maid three feet behind la comtesse as she struggled with the recalcitrant key. When she had thrust open the door and stood drawing off her gloves and hat in the foyer, her piquant doll’s face lined with weariness from the early hour of their departure and the general tension of the times, the depressing war news that had met them on their entry into the city—Jean-Luc drew up short in the doorway of the countess’s suite and said colorlessly, “Madame.”

  Her head turned and she was beside him in a few swift strides, features immobile as she stared at the sleeping pair in her bed. The scent of sex and sour liquor and tobacco assaulted her.

  “Very well, Jean-Luc, put the bags in M. le Comte’s room,” the countess said evenly; but he thought, as he ducked away, that he heard the explosive word “bâtard” whispered under her breath.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Like many Parisians, Pierre duPré was weary of the long econlsgomic slump and half in sympathy with Hitler. It wasn’t as though the Socialists under Blum had done France any favors—maybe it was time to give Fascism a try. And this war they’d tumbled into, all on account of somebody’s promise to Poland, a country Petie had never seen and never wanted to—! A separate peace was clearly the way to go. No more fighting England’s battles for her—he’d had enough of that when he was seventeen and nursing trench foot somewhere near Verdun. No, Petie had told Hearst: Give Alsace back to Adolf and bring the boys home.

  But with the French army in retreat this morning he was feeling prickly. Reliving old memories. Himself openmouthed in Flanders with a cloud of mustard gas on the wind.

  It was the children who were responsible, he was sure—all those blank, scared-witless faces staring back at him from the hospital wards. They ranged in age from eighteen months to twelve years, some of them orphans now in a strange city, their safe Netherlandish worlds blasted to hell by a low-flying Messerschmitt’s guns. The nurses had t
old him that quite a number of mothers were dead—Dutch, Flemish—their bodies stopping the bullets as they huddled protectively around their children. Petie knew the sound of a bullet as it burrowed through flesh, ricocheted off the steel window frames, and ploughed into the padded leather seats. Five trains were strafed as they fled south through Belgium and the morgue was filling up fast; a makeshift viewing area had been set up for identification purposes at a siding near the Gare de Lyon. Some of the families were merely separated, of course—mother in the hospital, kids left behind in the bloody carriages—but with the confusion in Paris and the pressure from the government to move the refugees immediately to resettlement billets in the provinces, who knew if they’d find each other?

  “Whaddya know, Petie?” Joe Hearst asked as he pulled the big car away from the Hôpital d’Étrangers. “Do any of us get out alive?”

  “You should be packing, Boss,” he retorted. “Now. Take the car and go south before the roads are shut for good. This isn’t your war.”

  “Bullitt won’t let me. It’s become a point of pride with him: No American ambassador has ever fled Paris. Which means none of his staff can leave, either. He’s made FDR promise not to order him out if the government goes—I think he’s hoping for a martyr’s death on the Nazi barricades. He’s already dictated a farewell note to the President to be delivered in the event of his death.”

  “It doesn’t do to joke,” Petie insisted. “You’re too young to remember the last war, you. The fucking Boches are butchers, believe me. We’ll defend the city to our last breath, sure, but with those tanks rolling…If the Line’s already broken—”