The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  She turned to the glass that held her false teeth, popped them into her mouth with dignity, and said, in Petie’s same guttural French, “I applied for that visa two months ago. To visit my niece in America. Nothing have I heard. Nothing! I suppose now you’ve come to deliver it in person?”

  “You’ve applied for a visa?” Hearst said.

  “Of course! Two months ago! You know nothing about it, hein? Nobody knows anything when it’s an old Jewish woman and the Nazis are coming. But I have a niece! And she lives in New Jersey! You can’t stop me from paying her a visit!”

  “I wouldn’t try. I’m not in the consular section,” Hearst explained. He reached for his card case and offered her his name. “I came to talk to you about your tenant. Philip Stilwell.”

  “Poor boy,” she said succinctly. “You’d best come into my place. I have coffee. Cognac.”

  He told Petie to stay with the car, then followed Léonie Blum inside the dark and cramped ground-floor quarters she called home.

  “Poor Philippe,” she repeated as she fetched the cups and glasses. “Always such a good boy. Always so respectful. To end like that—”

  She stopped short and scrutinized him, the bottle of cognac clutched close to her breast. “You know how he died?”

  “I know how he was found.”

  “Terrible.” She shook her head. “I saw. When that lawyer called me—Monsieur Shoop. Shaking like a leaf he was. Pale as a goose feather. And no wonder! Still I cannot believe it.”

  “You had no notion that Mr. Stilwell was…”

  “A pédé? No. He was in love with the girl—the beautiful one who wears the clothes. And then this—such a spectacle, in my building! I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it of poor Philippe.”

  “I don’t either, Madame Blum. That’s why I’m here.”

  She poured a thimbleful of cognac for Hearst, offered him oily black coffee. He took a sip of each for the sake of politeness. Was pleasantly surprised by the quality.

  “They’ve roped it off,” she volunteered shrewdly. “Philippe’s apartment. It’s as much as I’m worth to let you in there.”

  If this was a bid for a bribe, he decided to ignore it. “Have the police been back?”

  “No.” Under her gaze Hearst took another draught of cognac. “You’re not in the consular section, you say. But perhaps you know someone who is?”

  “I do,” he temporized.

  “And no doubt you know exactly where the Germans are right now, and which are the last trains out to Cherbourg harbor?”

  Hearst laughed. “I don’t know any more about the German advance than you do, Madame Blum. But I imagine you have the timetables memorized.”

  “My brother lives in Munich, monsieur. Seventy-eight years old. I haven’t heard from him in two years. They tell me he’s in a labor camp. Labor camp! What should he be doing, I ask you, at seventy-eight? Digging ditches?” She grasped his sleeve with sudden urgency. “I must get out of France. Nobody will help me, monsieur. But I must get out of France, you understand? My niece—”

  “Where does your niece live, madame?”

  “A place called Bayonne.” She pronounced it as though it were French; the name alone, Hearst thought, would be comforting in its familiarity.

  He drew his appointment book from his breast pocket, opened it to a clean page. “Write down her name. Her address. I’ll check on the visa for you.”

  Mme. Blum stared at him fixedly. She did not, he realized, trust him. There had probably been many careless offers of help, forgotten as soon as they were given. He wondered if Philip Stilwell had made promises he no longer could keep.

  “Write them down,” he said. “I give you my word.”

  She poured herself another drink and knocked it back, neat.

  Ten minutes later he was standing in the high-ceilinged, light-filled space that Stilwell had loved, thinking involuntarily how well Sally would look against its walls.

  The room was in disorder, the furniture pulled out of position to allow the passage of stretchers, the rug trampled by too many feet. The Sûreté had removed both bodies and taken their photographs and noted their measurements, but had left everything else where it lay. Somebody would be expected to pack up Stilwell’s effects and ship them home—a lawyer from the firm, or Sally.

  He picked his way across the main room, consciously avoiding the space beneath the chandelier where the man from Montmartre had dangled, and studied the crystal drinking glasses.

  “Are you always at your desk in the courtyard, Madame Blum?” he asked the concierge.

  “I sit there from nine in the morning until I make my dinner,” she said from her position by the doorway, “which is usually around six o’clock. I listen to my radio—it helps to pass the time.”

  “Did you see Mr. Stilwell yesterday?”

  “He left just after nine—cheerful he was, always a hello for me—and then I saw him return, a few minutes before three. That was unusual. That was early.”

  Hearst drew a linen handkerchief from his pocket and carefully lifted one of the glasses. A caramel-colored syrup the size of a coin had congealed on the bottom. The second glass was the same. He turned and looked for the wastebasket Sally had described—something overturned on the carpet, contents strewn across the floor. He could find nothing. Perhaps the police had taken it.

  “And did you see Max Shoop arrive?”

  “The lawyer? He came just as I was thinking of dinner.”

  “Around six,” Hearst suggested.

  “Give or take five minutes.”

  “Not half-past four?”

  She furrowed her brow. “No, monsieur. At dinner, as I said.”

  And yet, their meeting was supposed to be at four-thirty. Strange. “When did the other man arrive?”

  “Which one?”

  “The fellow who died with Stilwell.”

  Her eyes fell. “I don’t know. The police asked the same thing. Well—it must have been between three o’clock and six, when that M. Shoop appeared, hein? But I cannot always be at the desk. I have to relieve myself. And there was maybe a tradesman who distracted me—a delivery of flowers to Mme. LeCamier, on the third floor, who recently had the baby. All those steps! And the man would not take it himself, he was in a hurry, so I agreed to carry the flowers to Madame—and then I stopped just a minute to admire the baby…”

  Any number of people might have entered Philip Stilwell’s place, Hearst thought, and murdered him in peace. Even Shoop might have done it. And returned at six to establish his alibi.

  Annoyed, he walked into the bedroom and stared at the disordered bed. His mind veered from the picture of Sally’s head buried in a pillow, veered from the hazy idea he had of Stilwell, bound and prone with an erection the size of an elephant’s. But no terror lingered in this place; no fear. If Stilwell had a ghost, it had already moved on.

  He turned back to Mme. Blum. “I need to take those crystal glasses in the main room. Could you find me a bag?”

  She was pitifully eager to oblige. In her absence, he strolled again around the apartment. Thinking this time of the answer to the morning’s cable he’d found on his chair when he returned to the embassy after lunch.

  PHILIP STILWELL WORKED ON TRANSACTIONAL MATTERS, BANKING, SECURITIES. STOP. DO NOT KNOW R. LAMONT PERSONALLY BUT UNDERSTAND HE IS A MAN OF INTEGRITY AND WORTH. STOP. PARIS OFFICE TO BE SHUT DOWN SOONEST FOR PERSONNEL EVACUATION. STOP. AVOID SAME PERSONNEL AND DEAL DIRECTLY WITH ME. ALLEN DULLES.

  On this second stroll Hearst found the wastepaper basket, set tidily behind an armchair in the far corner of the salon. It was completely empty.

  He got down on his hands and knees and roamed over the carpet. When a fragment of glass drew blood from his palm, he could not suppress a crow of triumph. Tearing a page from his appointment book, he folded it in half and scraped the shattered bits of crystal from the Aubusson’s threads. Then he twisted the paper into a tight screw and pocketed it.

  “Monsieur,”
Léonie Blum muttered from the doorway, a cloth grocery bag clutched in her hands. “You will ask about my visa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I will tell you—” She licked her lips, the poorly fitting false teeth as protuberant as a cart horse’s—“This arrived. In the morning mail.”

  She held out a manila envelope.

  “Monsieur Stilwell posted this two days ago. It was returned today. Undeliverable.”

  The envelope was thick and heavy, as though it contained papers. Hearst stared at the address.

  “M. Jacques Allier,” he read aloud. “Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jacques Allier no longer worked at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. He had been given a uniform and transferred for the duration of the war to this uncomfortable cell of an office in the basement of the Ministry of Armaments, its ground-level windows covered with blackout paper and its foundations completely surrounded with sandbags the color and shape of sausages. The basement was wretchedly ventilated and thick with cigarette smoke and the odors of other people’s flatulence; it reminded him forcibly of the trench in which he’d endured most of 1917.

  Allier still suffered from claustrophobia as a result of the last war and so he was sweating now as he skimmed the morning paper, which had been set aside and forgotten in the chaos of the day: sweating, and allowing a cigarette to burn down to his fingertips, his mild-featured face struggling with the effort to look normal.

  Cots had been set up for those who were forced to hold vigil against the German advance, although it was only four o’clock in the afternoon and a French counteroffensive was rumored to be under way. Allier was hoping he’d be allowed to go home, even if it meant he was vulnerable to an air raid. He would begin to scream if he were forced to stay in this airless room with its typewriters clacking like small-arms fire.

  “The tanks have rolled right over our fortifications,” Dautry was saying to somebody beyond the door. “Concrete shattered like glass, and our best men with it. We’re overrun. Nothing to throw between here and Paris except the bodies of two million men.”

  So much for the counteroffensive.

  Allier kept his eyes on the newspaper, as though he were seated over coffee at his favorite café. While other men were screaming, limbs crushed under the treads of German tanks.

  The ash of his cigarette burned his skin. Startled, he folded the paper in four and tossed it on his letter tray. A headline on the back page, suddenly revealed, caught his eye.

  “Allier,” the minister snapped impatiently from the door of his cell. “Mon Dieu, so you alone can read the news when the world’s about to end?”

  “It’s the American.” He slid the headline under Dautry’s nose. “Dead in his flat. It cannot be another accident, hein? Like the leak of my cover on the way to Norway?”

  Dautry’s dark eyes roved swiftly over the lines of text, the innocuous photograph of Philip Stilwell. “They’re on to you, the Germans. We’ve got an informer somewhere in the chain—more than one, peut-être. Which means you and every last particle of Joliot’s lab will be on the road out of Paris by dawn, understand?”

  Allier nodded, relief spreading through him like cool water. Anything to get out of this basement. He found he was grinning at Dautry like an idiot, the inner scream transmuted to hysterical laughter.

  He went directly toward the laboratory at the Collège de France, the series of rooms where Frédéric Joliot-Curie played with his bizarre apparatus and his odder friends. Allier had never bothered to consider physics until the American boy who lay dead now in the Paris morgue had come to him at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas eight months ago. Tapping on his door with an apologetic smile and a load of documents under his arm. Excuse me, Monsieur Allier, but they tell me you’re the investment officer in charge of HydroNorsk. If you have a moment, I’d like to talk…

  There had followed a concise presentation of advancements in physics, which were coming as thick and fast in recent months as the German planes. The discovery by a German named Otto Hahn that an atom of uranium could be split in two. The suggestion, by the Danish scientist Niels Bohr, in a lecture at Stilwell’s old college, that when such an atom split, it triggered a chain reaction capable of unleashing immense force. The word bomb.

  “HydroNorsk manufactures heavy water,” young Stilwell had said patiently. “You’re aware that it’s extremely difficult to produce, is in extremely short supply, and that some people—your Nobel laureate, Joliot-Curie, is one of them—think it helps to slow down high-speed particles. To control them, maybe. So that the chain reaction can be contained…”

  Allier had got the HydroNorsk account as a way of cutting his teeth in banking. It was a small company perched on a remote bay in the northern fastness of the world, of trifling interest to anybody except a handful of scientists who craved its heavy water. The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas owned 65 percent of HydroNorsk’s stock.

  Let Allier have HydroNorsk, the bank’s managers had said with the easy assurance of the totally ignorant. He can hardly screw that up.

  And he would have, but for Philip Stilwell.

  The newspaper had reported the American was simply “found dead,” nothing about murder or even violence, but Allier was wondering, as he walked briskly toward the fringe of St-Germain, whether Philip was tortured before he died.

  If he’d talked—if he’d spilled even one-tenth of all he guarded in his brain—then none of them was safe. Dautry’s decision to move, parbleu, had come too late.

  Who was the informer? Who? Who? Somebody at the Ministry—one of the foreigners in Joliot’s lab—or Joliot himself…?

  Allier broke into a trot, heedless of the curious looks of those he passed or the picture he presented: a slight man but hunted; innocuous, perspiring.

  He stopped short near the entrance of the Luxembourg Gardens as though a shell had exploded at his feet.

  Frédéric Joliot-Curie was walking by, head down, an expression of acute concentration on his strongly molded face. Pursuing a course along one of the garden’s lateral paths as though nothing else existed but the equation he was solving in his brain.

  On the point of calling out the physicist’s name, Allier hesitated. He glanced at his watch. There was an hour or two of daylight left.

  He fell into step behind the man, and followed where he led.

  The Foreigners’ Hospital discharged her that afternoon, because Sally insisted she was absolutely fine now, and the doctor agreed that her double vision seemed to have waned. In any case, they needed her bed. She’d heard the stories of the strafed trains, how they’d pulled up at sidings on their way into France from Belgium, disgorging the dead and wounded, the bewildered, sobbing children. She caught snippets of French words as she walked unsteadily through the ward in her bathrobe, the eyes of the Flemish and Dutch women following her. More of them, the less serious cases, were slumped in chairs near the nurses’ station, and Sally realized they had been there all day. If she hadn’t been brought in before dawn she would never have been treated for the insignificant matter of near-strangulation.

  She scarcely looked at the form she was supposed to sign, her head throbbing. She had been sent to the hospital without her clothes or gas-mask case, which meant no identity papers or money, but she assumed the system was flexible; how many of the refugees she’d just passed were in a similar fix?

  “You’ll send me the bill?” she asked in as dignified a tone as she could muster.

  “It is already paid,” the discharge nurse replied. “By the gentleman who has called to take you home.”

  Hearst, Sally thought with an absurd little inner leap, and glanced over her shoulder. But it was the austere figure of Max Shoop she saw swinging through the corridor’s double doors.

  She composed her expression, although her heartbeat quickened. Shoop wore a dark coat with a white silk scarf knotted carefully at the neck, and for an instant she was back in the doorway of he
r flat with a pair of hands tightening on her throat.

  “Sally, my dear.” He offered his hand; it was papery and cool to the touch. “I’m so terribly sorry for all your trouble. Odette is furious with me. I should never have sent you home last night alone.”

  “But what else could you have done?” Sally replied reasonably. “There were the police to deal with.”

  “Yes.” He pursed his lips. “You didn’t go directly to your flat, I understand. You stopped…at the embassy.”

  “Yes.” Sally flushed, aware for the first time how her impulsive visit to the ambassador’s residence would look to Max Shoop—as though she didn’t trust him, as though she suspected everyone at S&C of murder. But who did he think she was—a little child, to be controlled and rebuked when she disobeyed Daddy? Her embarrassment turned to frustrated anger. These men, always trying to run my life…

  “I felt very alone last night when I saw Philip,” she said clearly. “All those French police, shoving me out of the room, refusing to answer questions…I needed to talk to somebody American. An objective ear.”

  “I see.” Shoop’s shrouded eyes drifted over the bruises at her neck as indifferently as though he surveyed a canvas at the Louvre. “It’s not wise to be alone. Odette has made me promise to bring you straight to our place for a good dinner and a comfortable bed. Have you collected your things?”

  “I’d rather just go home.” She was conscious of rudeness. “I’m very tired, Max, I’d be lousy company tonight and I’ve only got this bathrobe—”

  “Nonsense.” His cool fingers grasped her arm. “Odette won’t speak to me if I come home without you. She’ll lend you something to wear.”

  A finger of doubt thrilled along her spine. But there was no way to refuse him—he’d paid her hospital bill. That was because of Philip, of course: Shoop was determined to do right by the girl Philip had left behind, even if he’d failed to prevent murder.

  “I’m not convinced,” she said urgently as he steered her down the hospital corridor, “about Philip. There were these glasses in the salon—”