“That’s all taken care of,” Shoop interrupted. “I spoke to the police this afternoon. They’ve ruled the death accidental. They are ready to discharge the remains.”
“But—”
He glanced at her coldly. “There will be no scandal, Sally. I’ve booked your passage for New York on a merchant steamer—the Clothilde, out of Cherbourg. You will embark with Philip’s body Thursday afternoon.”
“Thursday? I can’t possibly be ready to leave France in two days. What about my work?…and all my things…”
“I’ll send someone over to your flat to pack,” Shoop said. “You will stay with us until you leave.”
“But I have to go home!”
“Why?” His gaze sharpened, so that Sally took an involuntary step backward, her hands reaching for the support of the wall.
“Did you leave something there? Something important?”
It was Joe Hearst’s voice she heard, then, as a kind of warning in her mind.
Did Philip give you anything, Miss King, to keep safe?
“My identity papers and passport,” she told Shoop. “They were in my gas-mask case. And I’ll need some clothes—”
The lawyer’s face relaxed. “I understand your gas mask was stolen. You won’t find the papers. But Odette will be delighted to take you shopping.”
She went with him quietly in the end. And began, immediately, to consider her escape.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Comtesse de Loudenne had never asked her maid to unpack her bags. She didn’t bother to go over the menu with the cook, although there’d been no harsh words at the luncheon table where she’d sat with her cousin, one hand languorously nursing a cigarette. She inclined her head to the black goddess as she departed in her velvet evening gown, but said nothing about finding Memphis in her own bed. It was von Dincklage who showed the girl the door.
“Let’s get out of Paris,” Memphis said urgently as he pecked her on the cheek. “Get a car, Spatz. Take me away from here. Nobody’ll bother you. You’re German.”
“We’ll meet at the club tonight, my darling.”
She grasped his lapel. But no more words came to her. She seemed to understand suddenly that her power was limited, and the shock of it bewildered her. A child left too long at a tiring party.
“I’ll be there around midnight.”
He shoved her firmly out, straightened his tie in the ornate pier glass that dominated one wall, and returned to the countess.
“You’ve certainly made yourself at home,” she observed impassively.
“Isn’t she marvelous?”
“That would be one word. A circus performer, I suppose?”
He cocked his head, birdlike, at her: all gleaming gold plumage. “A jazz artiste.”
“Ah.” She crushed the cigarette in the bottom of her cup, eyes fixed on the dregs. “I’d hoped you’d have the sense to get out of here, Spatz. Before I returned. The servants don’t like it, you know—a German in the house. And the master at the Front.”
He laughed and moved restlessly to perch on the windowsill. “You’ve never cared a fig for the opinion of servants.”
“No.” Her eyes came up to meet his. “Very well, then: I don’t like it. A German in the house. With the master at the Front.”
“There’ll be Germans all over Paris soon.”
“You say that to me? You have the gall to stand in my own house—”
“Not the gall,” he corrected. “The charm. We’ve always told each other the truth, anyway—”
She let him lift her chin and gaze caressingly into her eyes—Spatz, who’d never given a damn about anybody but himself.
“It’s not as though I like Germans everywhere,” he said reasonably. “I didn’t ask them to come. So what’s really wrong? You’re not offended by my…circus performer?”
“I’m frightened, that’s all.” Her mouth set bitterly; she stood, paced away from him toward the salon. “Jack is in Paris, did you know?”
“Jack” might stand for a hundred different men, of any social class or country of origin, but between the countess and Spatz it signified one person alone: Charles Henry George Howard, the twentieth Earl of Suffolk, who’d once played polo with Spatz at Deauville.
“The mad earl? He’s some sort of liaison for the British government, I think.”
“—For the British Directorate of Scientific and Industrial Research. He may be wild, he may be completely mad—but he warned me away from you, Spatz. Said you’ve been getting your hands dirty.”
“Nell, he carries a pair of revolvers he’s named Oscar and Genevieve.” His voice was deliberately light. “Drinks champagne morning, noon, and night—”
“Jack said you weren’t safe.”
His expression of amusement died. “God forbid I should be.”
“What the hell are you going to do now that the Nazis are coming? What are you going to do, Spatz? There will be nowhere left to run, soon. And you can’t work for them. You can’t.”
“Then perhaps I’ll come to terms with Jack,” he suggested.
She went very still. “What do you mean? You’d…help the British?”
He shrugged, a stretch of the sparrow’s wings. “It’d be a change. But I’d need something to sell.”
Her mouth twisted. “God, you have an ugly mind sometimes. Does nothing and nobody matter to you?”
“You matter, Nanoo.” His pet name for her, a memory of childhood.
“Oh, stop it.”
“You could help me.”
“I?” She turned to him incredulously. “How could I help? Jack is mad for science!”
“You know people.” He reached for her shoulders, drew her toward him. “You could get me something to sell.”
“That’s why you’re still here, isn’t it? So you can use me.” She was silent a long moment. “Very well. Tell me what I have to do.”
In the end she sent Jean-Luc for the car, and fled to a hotel for the night.
The man named Hans von Halban saw her standing at the curb, with the car door open and a remote expression on her face. He was a stranger to the countess, his clothes too large for his thin body, his startled brown eyes perpetually wounded, and she did not acknowledge him or even glance his way. He was struck by the dark, glossy hair that swung to her chin, and by her delicate profile. But then the German skipped down the stone steps and bent to kiss her cheek; and von Halban thought Ah, with a sense of bitter resignation. Spatz always cherished the most beautiful women in the world.
The two men had met five years before, when both of them adopted Paris as their shining refuge, a place to speak German without saying Heil Hitler. Spatz’s French was perfect and von Halban’s poor; Spatz was at home everywhere, and von Halban the perpetual alien. They shared the same given name, however, and a love of jazz. A predilection for haunting Montmartre. They’d met at the Alibi Club, long before Memphis Jones came to stay, during a lull in the acts when the sheer joy of speaking their native tongue had forged a sudden and simple bond. Spatz had attended von Halban’s wedding; his French bride was entranced with his charm. But if von Halban had tallied what he really knew of Hans Gunter von Dincklage—set it down like a calculation in the lines of his lab notebook—he’d have come up with little. A few anecdotes, a stray fact or two. A world of speculation and innuendo that followed Spatz like his personal entourage, acknowledged but never owned.
Von Halban stood now before the curbside tableau with his hat in his hand and a sickening anxiety on his face, wondering why he’d come. His French always deserted him in moments of acute embarrassment.
“Hans!” Spatz darted across the paving, hand extended. Not for him the Nazi salute.
“I…hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“You’re not. I was just going out for a drink. You’ll join me?”
“With pleasure.” He ducked his head wordlessly toward the unknown woman, who slid behind the wheel of her car, one hand fluttering farewell as she pulled ou
t into the street.
“My cousin,” Spatz explained. “The Comtesse de Loudenne. I’ve been using her place while she was in Bordeaux, but she turned up rather unexpectedly this morning.”
“And now she must leave again?”
“She’s worried about her husband. He’s at the Front.”
“Ah,” von Halban managed. He’d heard of Spatz’s cousin. Never realized there actually was a husband.
“You look ill, Hans.” Spatz cocked his alert blond head. “Joliot-Curie works you too hard in that lab!”
“If it were only that!”
He glanced distractedly at the wide boulevard, wondering why it was that this street was empty of life. The rest of the city had been flooded all day by increasing crowds of people, refugees from the north with blank expressions and exhausted steps, shuffling with children on their hips and dogs tied to their belts, clothes and pans and a few bandboxes of treasures piled into wheelbarrows. Wheelbarrows! It was unbelievable and appalling to Hans, but he was paralyzed with indecision: to stay and support Joliot to the last, or to run, run as his wife demanded. Annick would leave without him anyway—she would take the girls to her parents’ place in the country that very afternoon; she’d said he could come when he’d found a way to save them. He did not know how to begin to tell Spatz all this, Spatz who looked as though nothing could shatter his inner serenity, who was beautifully dressed and searching for alcohol in the neighborhood café as though his life were one long holiday.
The quiet of the Passy quarter was broken suddenly by a powerful engine. A car, long and sleek and black, flung itself south down the Rue de Longchamp.
“Belgians,” Spatz observed. “They’ll be in Spain by tomorrow. It’s always the wealthy ones with the fast cars that outrun disaster. Have you got a car, Hans?”
Von Halban shook his head, dread choking his throat.
The two of them walked without speaking along the beautiful and privileged streets of the sixteenth arrondissement, the Rue des Belles-Feuilles, the Avenue Victor-Hugo. The Place du Trocadéro was aswarm with vehicles, the base of the Chaillot Palace sandbagged. Spatz stopped short, his hands shoved carelessly in his trouser pockets, and stared at the massive building; it had been completed only a few years before, and favored the Fascist style of architecture.
“There’s no physics to speak of, in Spain,” von Halban said, as though concluding a conversation held long ago.
“There’ll be none here, soon.” Spatz tossed aside the stub of his Dunhill. “It comes down to this: You’ll leave because the path of honor lies elsewhere and you’re an honorable man. We both know that, Hans. Your wife can’t want you to stay and work for Himmler and his crowd.”
Heinrich Himmler, as they both knew, commanded the SS—the elite and criminal corps of the Nazi Party. The SS, and Himmler, had denounced Jewish Physics in recent months with such ferocity that even Werner Heisenberg—no Jew and Germany’s best hope for an atomic bomb—thought his career was over. There would be no future for Hans von Halban in a world of Himmler’s ordering.
Spatz seemed to know everything important already—and Hans was unsurprised. For years, rumor had linked the idle Sparrow to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr—Germany’s intelligence network. Spatz was a spy. How else could he have attached himself so vaguely to the German embassy in Paris, lingering years beyond the natural end of a foreign ministry tour? How else could he come and go like the heir to a principality, free of conventions or expectation, of the need to earn a living? A bird of passage, a bird on a wire. That was surely why they were standing together on the edge of a major intersection, staring at a monstrosity in the Fascist vein of architecture—because Spatz needed what Hans knew.
“You’re a fine physicist, Hans,” Spatz said thoughtfully. “One of the best Europe’s ever produced. You’re Austrian, of course, but the Anschluss made that distinction irrelevant. We’re all happy brothers in the Reich now, aren’t we? The real problem is that your mother is Jewish, and as a result it’s illegal for any German or Austrian institution to hire you. Verboten. As much as one’s life is worth.”
He didn’t wait for von Halban to agree.
“…So your decision to become a full French citizen and marry in kind was probably a good one. Or would have been, if the French army hadn’t decided to refight the last war instead of Hitler’s. Do you know the Allied infantry has no tanks? And they’re facing the largest tank brigade the world has ever seen? Do you know the Luftwaffe outnumbers French planes ten to one?”
“Churchill will send British planes.”
“Churchill’s keeping every last one. He needs them to fight off the invasion of Britain, once France falls.”
Von Halban licked his lips. “There are too many rumors abroad. One has no idea what to believe.”
“Unless one has read the telegrams,” Spatz said ruthlessly. “The German embassy is closed, as we both know, but believe me when I tell you there’s an underground German force in this city. I talk to them daily.”
“Your loyalty to the Fatherland must be suspect,” von Halban retorted, stung. “God knows what you find to tell your…underground.”
“Lies. Truth.” Spatz shrugged, an impatient flick of the wings. “Depends on the day. For years I’ve kept my head down and my ass out of Berlin, Hans. Only now Berlin’s on my doorstep and you think I like it? You think I want to see the boys in feldgrau uniforms goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées?”
“But—” He groped for words, his mind always filled with numbers. Particle speeds. Equations. “You just said—”
“—That I’m buying time. Yes. If I look like I’m cooperating maybe they’ll leave me alone, long enough for me to make other plans. My cousin knows people in the British legation.”
Being German was a sick joke, von Halban thought. There was Spatz: the perfect Aryan, with his taut physique and gilded head. But Spatz’s mother was British, his ex-wife was Jewish, and like Hans himself, Spatz had a nobleman’s von in his name. Any hint of aristocratic background and you were suspect by birth, grist for Hitler’s warped mill. There were at least three counts against Hans Gunter von Dincklage and every file in the Reich would list them in ink.
Von Halban began to move again, aimlessly, as though his feet could actually save him. “Gott in Himmel, what must I do, Spatz?”
“Decide your future. Because it’s got a half-life, as I think you people would say, of a couple of days. By that time you’d better be elsewhere.”
But I have no money. No car. A wife and two children.
“Will Canaris protect you?” he asked.
Spatz’s boss hated Hitler; everybody in the Abwehr did.
Spatz just looked at von Halban. “Will Minister Dautry protect you?”
Von Halban drew a quick breath. Spatz knew even this, then: that Hans’s work in Joliot’s lab came directly under the authority of Raoul Dautry and the Ministry of Armaments. Unbidden, Joliot’s face, hollowed and bony, surged into his mind: Joliot’s eyes, piercing as God’s. No word, the Great Man was saying, no word of what we do here must ever leave this room.
“Maybe,” Spatz suggested, “we could protect each other.”
“How?”
“—By pooling our resources.” He stopped short, attention focused on the tip of his cigarette. “I have money. Access to transport. I could get Annick and your girls out. And you…”
“…have information,” Hans concluded. His throat constricted so severely it was a full moment before he could speak. “Information certain people would pay to know. You have planned this for some time, Spatz. Yes?”
The Sparrow slipped his gold lighter into his jacket.
“Since the night your people stole my water out of Norway,” he answered.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Joe Hearst stared at the envelope he’d placed squarely on his desk, the heavy manila corners slightly bent with misuse and too much mailing. He was in a quandary about this envelope, sent two days befo
re by a dead man. He’d tried to make good on Stilwell’s intentions—had taken the package confidently from Léonie Blum and driven by the main office of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas—where he’d asked for Jacques Allier and been told, icily, that Monsieur was no longer employed by the bank.
End of story, no further information given.
He thought next of Sally King—perhaps this letter was as much her property now as the unknown Allier’s—and phoned the Foreigners’ Hospital.
“Gone,” the nurse said simply. “A gentleman called for her. Paid her bill, too. I suppose, with a face like that—”
Fighting a surge of jealousy, now, alone in his chancellery office, Hearst confronted the problem of the undeliverable envelope.
Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail, he thought as he stared at the scrawl of ink before him. Henry Stimson—the career diplomat who’d coined that phrase—deplored spying in any form. Stimson would have burned Stilwell’s correspondence and thought nothing more about it.
Hearst reached for his engraved letter opener, and inserted the silver tip under the resistant flap.
There was a knock at the door: soft, determined, like a kiss on the ear. A woman’s knock, he thought with a flare of hope. Sally? He slid Stilwell’s envelope hastily into a drawer.
“Come in.”
A face appeared around the jamb. “Mr. Hearst, I believe?”
He rose politely, inclined his head. “And you are?”
“Emery Morris. Of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell.” He was a compact figure, perfectly groomed, but fussily prim. “Bob Murphy said I might walk back—”
“Certainly.” Hearst motioned to a chair. “You know Bob?”
“The entire world knows Bob, I believe,” Morris observed. He bent down and eased a large cardboard box across the threshold. “I was able to serve him on a trifling legal matter at one time.”
“You’re here about Philip Stilwell, I guess—the morgue agreed to release his body. Your firm should decide whether it wants to book passage for the remains, and if so, whether you need our consular section’s help. An undertaker should be retained, of course—and a casket purchased…”
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