The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “There’s one big problem with the Maginot Line,” Hearst explained. “It’s not quite long enough. There’s a big blank space near the forest of Ardennes, and if Hitler’s thrown his panzers into it we’re all screwed. The folks back home imagine something like the Great Wall of China, when in fact the Belgian border is a bunch of martello towers with signal flags and Morse code. You French think in terms of trenches and infantry. But this’ll be an air war when it comes.”

  An air war. Which meant bombs, of course, the beautiful old buildings of Paris tumbled like the footage Petie had seen in newsreels of Poland. Tufts of hair and bits of bone embedded in the leather seats of trains, children of three torn and paralyzed from the waist down. Petie reached for his tobacco pouch and cigarette papers, rolling a smoke with one hand while the other fingered the pistol in his pocket. He’d brought it along to protect the Boss—there was talk of refugees stealing cars, refugees siphoning gas. Petie loved the Boss’s car, a dark blue ’37 Buick Special shipped over from New York on the Normandie, a convertible coupe with a rumble seat and a chrome grille as broad and high as an ocean liner’s prow. Half Petie’s anxiety for Hearst was really anxiety for the car. Leave Paris. Pack up and go. I can’t bear to see the Buick strafed with machine-gun bullets.

  “If the Boches come by air we’d better get those aeroplanes l’ambassadeur has been promising,” he suggested with a sidelong glance at Hearst. “Two, three thousand people are saying. Due any day now.”

  Hearst did not reply. He was nosing the Buick around a horse-drawn cart piled high with furniture, but there was nothing to be said in any case. In a moment of bravado Bullitt had told Premier Reynaud the United States could provide an air fleet, but Roosevelt did not possess two thousand planes he could “lend” France or even Churchill, not to mention American neutrality and Lindbergh’s America First movement and the President’s battle for reelection in the fall. There would be no help from across the Atlantic, Petie knew. But when his copains nudged him or neighbors asked outright, he suggested a secret knowledge. A contingency plan. A confidence he had no business to feel. He’d told his Emmeline to be ready to leave for the coast at a moment’s notice.

  The Morgue of the City of Paris sat where it had always done, just off the Quai de la Rapée in the twelfth arrondissement, not far from the Gare de Lyon where at least one of the strafed Belgian trains had arrived with its carloads of dead and wounded. Just across the Seine from the morgue there were five hospitals within a two-mile radius, and Hearst was expected to visit them all. He continued to drive while Petie muttered about Messerschmitts and Weygand and running through the marshes of the Marne two decades ago. Hearst was half listening and half studying the traffic, which was worse than usual. Paris was in motion, mattresses strapped to the roofs of cars. A few of them had Belgian plates; but most of those wealthy enough to drive south from Brussels had already done so, streaking through the city under cover of darkness. He thought briefly of his wife, marooned and loveless in Rome. He’d last heard from her a month ago, as Norway fell to the Germans. She’d been desperate for papers, for passage to New York, and asked if Hearst or the embassy might help. He hadn’t answered her letter and now, as he stared at the refugees, their belongings piled in wheelbarrows and perambulators, he was awash in remorse and guilt.

  He left the car right in front of the morgue, Petie slouched on its prow, pistol raised, as though the Nazis might burst from a side street at any moment. “Don’t worry, Boss,” the old Frenchman said around the cigarette lodged firmly in the corner of his mouth. “I’ll take care of the car.”

  Bullitt’s your boss, Hearst had told him repeatedly. Bob Murphy’s your boss. I’m just the low man on the totem pole. But the metaphor escaped Pierre duPré and Boss had stuck, despite Hearst’s best efforts.

  At one time the morgue had been famous for its viewing theatre, the salle d’exposition, the corpses laid out on marble slabs far below with a ribbon of the Seine flowing coldly beneath them, a natural form of refrigeration. Up to a million tourists each year had flocked to gaze at the macabre spectacle, some of them deriving an almost sexual enjoyment from the scene; but the salle had closed in 1907 and Hearst’s erotic tastes ran along different lines. There were stretchers lying everywhere he looked today, some discreetly draped, most exposed to the gaze of strangers: women of every description and age, staring sightlessly at nothing. Well-dressed women, women who’d taken the time to apply makeup before they packed their children into the Red Cross trains and turned toward Paris, women who’d probably thought they’d visit the shops in the Rue St-Honoré before taking up their refugee billets. Elderly women dressed in black, women of twenty. One girl lay face downward on the floor, jet-black hair spilling across the nape of her neck. Hearst stared at the fragile knife of her shoulder blades, exposed by the cut of her light spring frock; stared at the pale smoothness of her skin. He did not want to see her face.

  “Stil-ewell,” said the man in the lab coat who hovered in the front hall, clipboard in hand. “Dr. Mauriac performed the autopsy. The doctor will have gone to lunch, tant pis.”

  Hearst left Petie standing guard over the Buick, surrounded by a crowd of small boys whose parents, inexplicably, had not yet sent them out of Paris; and tracked the doctor to a café near the railroad station. Mauriac was a mild-featured man with a luxuriant mustache and a head as egg-pated as Bullitt’s, a shining, torpedo-shaped dome of baldness. He invited Hearst to join him in a dish of roast lamb, spring peas, the very first potatoes, and a metallic white wine from Lorraine; Hearst declined the food but accepted the empty chair opposite the doctor.

  “You will be wanting to know when the body is released, yes?” Mauriac said shrewdly as he forked the delicate pink flesh into his mouth. “There is a family in America?”

  “It is customary for the embassy to arrange such things,” Hearst agreed. “But the ambassador has taken a personal interest in the matter.”

  “Ah. He likes his pédés, then?”

  Hearst ignored the slur—something like “faggot” in English—and said, “The ambassador is acquainted with Mr. Stilwell’s father.”

  Mauriac pursed his lips, nodded once, and tackled a potato. “What do you want to know?”

  “How did he die?”

  The brown eyes came up to meet his, ferocious with amusement. “He fucked himself to death.”

  “Dr. Mauriac—”

  “You want it tidied? Your young man died of a heart attack. From the looks of his heart, it was not so strong all his life, hein? Possibly the damage to the valves from a childhood illness. Rheumatic fever. Scarlet fever. I cannot say. From the contents of the stomach, I would add that he had consumed enough powdered cantharides beetle to fell an elephant.”

  At Hearst’s expression of incomprehension, Mauriac added impatiently, “You would call this Spanish fly. It is supposed to enhance the erection, yes? But it is a topical aid, a substance d’excitation, not something one should eat. Young Stilwell must have experienced a turmoil in the bowels before he died. The inflammation of the internal organs was extreme. So, too, was the engorgement of the penis, which persisted even after death. He was a naïf or a fool, take your pick, and he paid the price.”

  “Could he have taken the stuff unwittingly? Say…in a drink he’d been given?”

  Mauriac lifted his shoulders in a gargantuan shrug, jaws working. “Possibly. There was not a great deal in the stomach. The remains of a hearty luncheon of bifteck.”

  “Any signs of violence on the body?”

  “He’d been scourged, of course, but we must assume that was of a piece with the company he kept. Also his hands bound—I saw the chafing at the wrists. They had been rubbed raw, so presumably he was not so happy with this kind of play.”

  The knot tightened in Hearst’s stomach. Bound and poisoned, possibly forced to witness the hanging of the man named Jacquot, and his weak heart pounding with terror—Stilwell’s final moments. Had he been gagged to keep him from screaming?
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  “If I were to bring you a glass from Mr. Stilwell’s apartment—could you tell me whether the drink was drugged with Spanish fly?”

  Mauriac drained his wine. “You confuse me with a chemist, monsieur le diplomate. I suggest you find one in the neighborhood. And now I must return to my work. As you observe we are inundated—these sales Boches—and I am quitting Paris this afternoon.”

  “Les vacances?” Hearst asked ironically.

  “Mais oui.” Mauriac was imperturbable. “A friend with a house near the Spanish border. I will inform the police that your Stilwell’s death was due to natural causes. You may ship him home whenever you choose.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Has Mr. Morris come in yet?” Max Shoop demanded.

  Mme. Renard, the person who really ran Sullivan & Cromwell’s Paris office, had ceased to jump whenever Shoop materialized beside her desk, but she hated his noiseless tread, the sensation of being watched. For nearly twenty years her perfectly coiffed blond head had been bowed as though in prayer at her station in the firm’s reception area, lending the sorry premises a certain amount of chic. Madame did not approve of Americans—childish in their teasing of one another, overly loud, their standards too casual and relaxed. Her standards had been learned at the feet of her mother, a forbidding woman, and in the bed of Thomas Cromwell—the elderly founding partner of S&C who’d opened the Paris office purely as a convenience to himself. M. Tommie, as Jane Renard referred to him, had spent the better part of his life in a large apartment on the Boulevard de Boulogne, had survived the deprivations of the Great War by sensibly moving into the Ritz, and had sailed for New York three years ago now, never to return—but Mme. Renard stayed on, her dress exquisite, the rest of the world mere fodder for her contempt.

  Except Max Shoop. One appraising glance from under his veiled eyes could raise the small hairs on the back of her neck.

  “M. Morris has not seen fit to appear,” she answered. “M. Canfield has been taking his calls all morning. There is a message, however, from the Morris wife. I put it on your desk.”

  Shoop’s eyes took in Frank Canfield’s open office door, the hum of conversation suggesting he was engaged. The rest of the rooms were dark. Rogers Lamont’s was empty; Philip Stilwell’s, too; Monod’s was dark since the French lawyer had enlisted in the army. We’re dwindling one by one, Jane Renard thought. I must make my plans to go, soon.

  “Any sign of those missing files?”

  She stared at Shoop coldly. “But no. They have not the legs, to walk them here and there. They will not be hiding, to appear again when we least suspect. The files were removed from this office. That much is plain. Perhaps when M. Morris arrives, he will tell us why.”

  Shoop’s eyebrows rose a fraction, as though in shock at her impertinence. Unthinkable, that she should voice the suspicion circulating ever since the files were discovered gone.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that you should come into my office, Jane. I have a cable to dictate. For New York.”

  She picked up her pad and pencil and preceded him through the doorway to the hard wooden chair she preferred, drawn up from the wall to sit menacingly, uncompromisingly, in front of Shoop’s beautiful Biedermeier desk. He had so many secrets, this Shoop; so many qualities to his silence. Well, she was done with silence and attitudes of prayer. The Germans were coming and the Americans would all run home. She could feel the panic of their leaving already, hanging in the air around Shoop.

  He closed his office door, eyes flicking mechanically to the message from Emery Morris’s wife: My husband is most unwell today, will remain at home until he recovers.

  “You circulated the notice of Mr. Stilwell’s death?” he asked, as though it were the day’s weather report, or the lunch menu at the Ritz.

  The first crack in Mme. Renard’s perfect façade appeared; her complexion crumpled and dissolved. “Pauvre enfant. It was the heart, yes? Who knew? He looked so healthy and strong. My own father, he went that way—”

  “Yes, well—” Shoop cut in. “I spoke to the embassy this morning. It’s all in hand. The return of the remains. You will order a wreath. Something for the family, with the office members’ names on it. Condolences. It can go on the coffin when it sails.”

  She made a brief note in pencil. “I will take up a collection.”

  “Is anything else missing?” Shoop asked. “Other than Lamont’s files?”

  “I did not go over the premises with your small-tooth comb. No money was taken. No drawers forced. The person responsible possessed a key.”

  “Your key?”

  “A copy, perhaps.”

  “You know more about this shop than anyone. You know which boxes were disturbed, which records of Lamont’s work are missing—”

  Her eyes narrowed like a Siamese cat’s. “Monsieur Shoop, you are not suggesting that I disturbed my slumbers to pilfer the office in the dead of night, hein? Because if that is so, I have much to do that requires my attention at home, before these sales Boches descend upon Paris and make life miserable, you understand? I can leave on the instant!” She snapped her fingers succinctly. “I need not wait for M. Morris to explain what he has done with the law firm’s property. It is nothing to me, comprendez-vous?”

  The clarity of her insight—this fifty-year-old woman with the sensuality of a bordello seething beneath her perfectly fitted suit—had the power to caution him. Shoop had no desire to focus attention on Morris. Or to link him with the missing files. Or to Stilwell’s death. It would not do for Mme. Renard to talk among the staff.

  He sat in his chair, fingers steepled and silver head bowed, the very picture of the aging jurist, and considered the fact of Memphis Jones. The rush of words she’d thrown at him during the night, and the image they conjured: Morris on his knees in his correct Savile Row suit, a cabaret dancer’s penis in his hands. That same dancer, hanged in a room with Philip Stilwell. Shoop pursed his lips as though rolling a mouthful of wine. The point, as he saw it, was not to attempt to understand but to contain the problem. And to minimize the potential damage to the firm.

  “I merely wondered, Jane, if you knew exactly which files disappeared.”

  She remained rigid in her seat, her beautifully groomed fingers clenched around her notebook. “All of M. Stilwell’s. And…the I.G. Farbenindustrie files.”

  “I.G. Farben,” he repeated. “The German firm.”

  “Yes.”

  Shoop felt a sudden surge of nausea. To cover it, he reached for a letter opener and began to turn it reflectively in his hands, as though he might read the future in its polished surface. Sullivan & Cromwell—Rogers Lamont in particular—served as counsel for an international cartel of chemical manufacturers of which I.G. Farbenindustrie was a member. The cartel also included an American firm, Allied Dye and Chemical Industries; a Belgian concern, Solvay et Cie.; and a British-owned chemical company. The four corporations held chunks of one another’s stock and were so incestuous in their governing boards as to be barely distinguishable; but all such relationships had fallen under the ax eight months ago as a result of the war. I.G. Farben was no longer S&C’s client. The stolen files were a matter of historical interest only.

  —Or were they?

  “The files were active up to the week before M. Lamont’s departure,” Mme. Renard supplied.

  Despite the firm’s embargo on German business. Shoop’s eyes flicked from the letter opener to the woman’s face. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I would be the last to know. M. Lamont never required the services of a secretary. He did all his typing himself, vous voyez.”

  He remembered that habit of Lamont’s, the jokes the urbane New Yorker was forced to endure, the comparisons with girl-typists and war correspondents posting bulletins from the front—the suggestion that it was really his memoirs or the Great American Novel he was composing behind his closed office door. He had turned the laughter with his usual wit, never relenting or giving Jane Renard his work to do.


  It was Jane, Shoop thought, who’d started the rumor that Lamont despised women.

  Shoop was a securities lawyer: He understood money, not chemicals. He’d never worked with Lamont or Morris or their clients. But as managing partner of the Paris office he ought to have known of every matter that came across his attorneys’ desks. What did I.G. Farben produce? Dye, of course. Nitrates. There was a new process for extracting nickel from ore—Lamont had worked on that patent years ago. So had Morris.

  Illegal. Immoral. Sink us all…

  That meddler in Bullitt’s office: Hearst. He was asking difficult questions. He had the annoying air of refusing to back off; Shoop knew his kind. There were always clients who could not compromise, who did not understand that life endured through what was conceded or lost, that such things as firms and wars went on regardless of individuals and their deaths…

  “The cable, Monsieur Shoop?” Mme. Renard suggested. “The one you wish to dictate for New York?”

  He stared at her as though she were a stranger. Firms and wars, he thought. These things must go on.

  “To Mr. John Foster Dulles,” he began. “German army rumored to have crossed the river Meuse yesterday. Stop. Request permission to close office and evacuate firm personnel soonest from Paris. Stop…”

  Philip Stilwell’s concierge was a hunchbacked and white-haired woman named Léonie Blum. She glared at Joe Hearst suspiciously when he knocked on her small cubicle door, which opened onto the courtyard of Stilwell’s lovely old building, and demanded to know if he was German.

  “American,” he returned in his diplomat’s French. “From the embassy.”

  “He’s a swell from Washington, you old bat,” Petie scolded at Hearst’s side. “German, for the love of God!” He regularly ran interference with know-nothings like Mme. Blum, and figured the Boss had brought him along for the purpose.