Morris looked up from his box; his nostrils twitched above the toothbrush mustache. “Convey that suggestion to the managing head, Mr. Max Shoop. I do not anticipate returning to the Sullivan and Cromwell offices myself.”
“No?” Hearst eyed him curiously.
“And as for young Stilwell’s remains—I do not give a damn, sir.”
“I see.” He did not invite the man to sit down again. “What can I do for you?”
Morris smiled. “No, no, Mr. Hearst. The question is what I can do to help you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This box.” The lawyer nudged it lightly with his shoe. “It contains several months’ worth of files from Philip Stilwell’s office. I removed them last night, on the strong assumption that if I did not, Max Shoop certainly would—and Shoop, Mr. Hearst, would never have delivered them to you. He would burn them first. These files, you see, could destroy Max Shoop.”
“In what way?” Hearst sank cautiously into his chair.
“They record, in excruciating detail, how Shoop has systematically violated the American Neutrality Act, by aiding and abetting the French government in the present war.”
Hearst quelled an impulse to laugh. They were all aiding and abetting the French government, however little they admitted it in public. “And you brought the files to me?”
“The American Embassy ought to know,” Morris said acutely. “Stilwell was Shoop’s tool. Hand-in-glove with the French. That kind of collaboration with a belligerent is hardly Sullivan and Cromwell policy. Mr. Foster Dulles closed the Paris office last September precisely to avoid this kind of thing. Shoop has been lying to Dulles. Pursuing his own sympathies and interests in direct violation of American law. He was using Stilwell to do it.”
“Why didn’t you go to Foster Dulles with this?”
“Oh, I will,” Morris assured him. “Shoop’s career at S and C is over. But with life in Paris so uncertain—with the Germans across the Meuse and everyone scattering to the four winds—I thought the chancellery the best place to keep the evidence. In case Shoop runs. Before he can be prosecuted.”
“For what? Violating the Neutrality Act?”
“No, no, Mr. Hearst.” Morris smiled sickly. “For murdering Philip Stilwell.”
There were eight files in all, one for each month of the war, filled with the oddest assortment of documents Joe Hearst had ever seen: notes penned in Stilwell’s scrawl that made sense only to their author; articles snipped from what appeared to be scientific journals; short messages signed MS that he interpreted to be from Max Shoop; and oblique letters addressed to the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas.
It all boiled down to a list of dates Hearst found in the final file, written in what he assumed was Philip Stilwell’s longhand.
March 1939:
• Bohemia and Moravia annexed by Germany. Note: this region sole source of uranium in Europe, now under German control.
• Joliot and colleagues show that splitting of uranium atom by a single neutron results in the emission of more than one neutron. Suggests chain reaction possible, for use as energy source—or explosive.
April 1, 1939: Joliot receives telegram from U.S. colleague begging him to stop publishing results of experimentation, due to threat of war from Germany.
May 1, 1939: Joliot takes out 5 patents on construction and use of nuclear reactors. Von Halban and Kowarski co-applicants.
June 1939: More than fifty articles to date published worldwide on atomic fission. Experimentation at breakneck pace.
Sept. 1939: I arrive in Paris. France and Britain declare war on Germany.
Nov. 1939:
• Joliot called up for military service. Captain, Group 1 Scientific Research.
• Requests French government minister Dautry purchase 400 kg uranium from Metal Hydrides, Inc., of Clifton, Massachusetts (Sullivan & Cromwell client). Also requests purchase of entire stockpile of heavy water currently stored at HydroNorsk facility in Norway. (HydroNorsk owned 65% by Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. Sullivan & Cromwell client.)
• Clients ask advice of S&C. Shoop refers matter to me.
• Discover heavy water already in play for purchase by HydroNorsk’s secondary shareholder, I.G. Farbenindustrie (25% of stock. Sullivan & Cromwell client. See files of Rogers Lamont.)
March 1940: Bank officer successfully negotiates loan of HydroNorsk stockpile to France.
April 1940:
• Germans invade Norway, seize HydroNorsk facility.
May 1940:
• Hostilities begin on Maginot Line.
• Warn Joliot about vulnerability of his cyclotron.
Here the list abruptly broke off.
Hearst sat quite still at his desk, Stilwell’s notes in his hands. He knew next to nothing about physics but he remembered something Bullitt had said once, not too long ago—about Albert Einstein. The man was in exile at Princeton and he was a weird fish by all accounts. Nonetheless, he’d written a letter directly to Roosevelt, warning him that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb. Something that could destroy the entire city of New York with a pound or two of explosive.
Roosevelt, Bullitt said, had no idea whether to take Einstein seriously. Most of the scientists the President had consulted agreed there was no feasible way to make such a bomb.
Until Philip Stilwell and the French had found it.
“Max Shoop looks capable of murder,” Bullitt said placidly when Hearst hunted him down in his office. “Think there’s any truth in Morris’s claim?”
“Nothing I can prove—yet. But the files are confusing; they’re full of atomic research. French atomic research.”
“That’d be Joliot-Curie.” Bullitt reached for a glass of water. He’d been burning documents in his tole wastebasket all afternoon and his eyes were streaming.
“You know him?”
“Slightly. —Bit of a snake-charmer, in my opinion, for all he won the Nobel. Chummy with the damned Communists. Got a Russian working in his lab.”
“And plans for a bomb,” Hearst said, “that could level Berlin. Or London. Or New York.”
“That’s not possible.” Bullitt set down his water glass. “We’ve checked.”
“Joliot-Curie would disagree. And with the Germans on their way to Paris—”
The ambassador’s office was cloudy with smoke and Hearst could barely discern Bullitt through the thickening gloom: domed head, impeccable suiting, neat fingers with their polished nails. Bullitt was no fool, but the demands on him were endless. He hadn’t slept in days and he could not be blamed, Hearst thought, for ignoring a branch of science so theoretical only ten people in the world truly understood it.
“The Germans have already taken Czechoslovakia—Europe’s main source of uranium,” he persisted. “They just took Norway—the one place in the world with heavy water. Now they’re taking Paris. Joliot has the only cyclotron on the Continent and the brains to design this bomb. I think we should be concerned, sir. I think we should inform the President.”
Bullitt refilled his water glass. “Tell it to the Brits, Joe. We’re not even in this war.”
“Will Roosevelt see it that way?”
“Roosevelt’s far more worried about the Allied retreat from the Meuse,” the ambassador retorted, “and the fact that I’ve got Winston Bloody Churchill flying into Paris on Thursday for a quick conference. The PM seems to think he can buck up the French and send them back into battle. He doesn’t know yet there’s a hole a hundred kilometers wide on the border and the Germans are pouring through like turds in a sewer. Nobody’s stopping them.”
“The French counteroffensive…”
“Is pure shit.” Bullitt reached for a pile of letters and dropped them into the flaming wastebasket. “I saw Premier Reynaud an hour ago. He’s on the point of resigning. I’m ordering all non-essential staff and family to Bordeaux tomorrow. You can book passage to England from there, maybe even New York.”
Hearst digested this. “I
can book passage, sir?”
“I want you in Bordeaux, Joe,” Bullitt snapped. “I need Carmel Offie and Murphy here and a couple of guards and telegraph operators—but you and Steve Tarnow and the others must go. No sense in all of us dying.”
“Do we even know whether Paris is the German objective?” Hearst burst out. “There’s no accurate reporting from the Front! The panzers could be heading west toward the Channel.”
“I can’t wait for news that may never come.” Bullitt coughed gutturally, the phlegm of a smoker. “Reynaud’s considering fallback positions for his government—somewhere in the Auvergne—and if he’s getting his people out, so should I.”
“The Auvergne?”
“Vichy, to be precise. The premier has some vague notion that German panzers won’t be able to penetrate the mountains of the Massif Central.”
“What about defending the city, street by street, as he claimed he’d do?”
“That’s an army’s job, not a bureaucrat’s.” The ambassador’s eyes flicked up at Hearst, flat and hard as glass. “Find Petie. Take the chancellery’s fleet of cars and plan a convoy for the Bordeaux road. Leave no later than tomorrow night, Thursday morning at the latest. Protect the women and kids if you can. It’ll be slow going.”
Hearst did a mental calculation. He’d be babysitting nearly fifty women and children, with assorted male hangers-on, the occasional servant, all of them squabbling about belongings and privileges and exactly what kind of boat would be available in Bordeaux. They’d need food. Bathroom breaks. Petrol. When there was no petrol to be found anywhere in Paris.
“What about Philip Stilwell?” he asked. “He’s still lying in the Paris morgue.”
Bullitt waved dismissively. “Shoop’s got the corpse booked on a tramp steamer out of Cherbourg Thursday. Told me so this afternoon.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hearst muttered. “And Sally?”
“Why don’t you invite her on a romantic getaway?” the ambassador suggested blisteringly. “I hear the wine country is lovely this time of year.”
He took the Buick and went straight to the Rue St-Jacques, hoping to find her home. But the concierge had gone to bed and when he tossed a rock at a random window, it was the neighbor, Tasi, who appeared at the front door.
“Sally never came back from the hospital,” she said, her slanted eyes narrowing.
“She was discharged this afternoon.”
“Then perhaps she’s left town?”
“Without her things?”
Tasi shrugged, bored and weary of the pettiness of men. “She was attacked, monsieur. She is frightened, no? And then, pauvre Philippe, it was in all the papers…”
“She’s sent no word?”
Tasi laid a delicate hand on his arm and shivered. “It’s so cold outside, monsieur, even if it is spring. Would you like to come up? I will make you some real Russian tea…”
“Do you know any of Sally’s friends? A woman or…a man, for instance, with whom she might be staying?”
“Always it was Philippe, you understand? She has gone to a hotel, peut-être.”
“She had no money to pay for one,” he said brusquely, his anxiety soaring.
What was it these fool women were searching for, running off into the blue, alone and unprotected? Daisy had done the same thing—skipping out the front door with her laugh still bubbling on her lips. No farewell kiss, no forwarding address. His fault, of course—his enduring sin that his wife had run into the maw of violence, beyond all hope of saving. He’d failed her. As he was failing Sally. Grieving, frightened, wounded Sally—
The tears streaming down her cheeks in the Foreigners’ Hospital. The man who’d put his hands around her neck…
Hearst left a note with Tasi and three hundred francs. He felt no confidence that Sally would ever receive either.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When Joliot caught a glimpse of her in the Luxembourg Gardens a few minutes before five o’clock, she was turning briskly into the path that led toward the Boulevard St-Michel. He thought he’d raised a ghost—or an incubus, rather: the embodiment of all his brutal yearnings.
It could not be Nell. Not Nell in the flesh, in Paris—
He stopped short, his eyes narrowing to follow her as she passed under the shade of the young elm leaves. Her waist, narrow and coy, might belong to any woman; so, too, the insubordinate legs; but two things screamed her name across the years of separation and distrust: the bones of her neck, fragile beneath that too-clever hat, and the decided way she stalked the paving. Her heels clicked in syncopation: sunlight, shadow, sunlight, shadow, the water trickling somewhere in a fountain and his errand gone in the second of recognizing her.
He called out. Nell.
The footsteps did not falter; her head was down, her mind lost in thought. She was bent on reaching Boul-Mich. Maybe she had an appointment there. But suddenly it occurred to him she’d seen him, too; had seen him even before he scented her presence, and had deliberately walked in her fierce English way as swiftly as she could toward the promise of escape.
He began to run, his papers flapping, the pencil he kept behind one ear plummeting unnoticed to the ground. Called her name urgently this time, so that a clutch of pigeons took clattering flight.
Her head turned—one gloved hand clenched spasmodically on the strap of her handbag. Then she halted, waiting for him.
“Ricki.”
It was her name; nobody else had ever called him that. To the world, he was Joliot, to his colleagues, Frédéric. Fred to his mother and wife. Le Professeur Joliot-Curie to the students who listened to his lectures at the Collège de France, four blocks away. Ricki was the name she’d given him fifteen years ago in Berlin as he stood, light-headed from gin and lack of sleep, with his back against the wall of the club she’d insisted they visit long after everyone else was longing for bed. Ricki, she’d said, I want your lighter. I need some heat at the tip of my cigar.
She’d been dressed like a man that night in 1925, in good English suiting borrowed from her brother: the Honourable Nell Bracecourt, daughter of an earl, slumming it in the backstreets of Berlin with a polyglot bunch of freaks. This was not her usual scene—talk of radium and Bohr’s model and quantum jumps—and Joliot could feel her boredom curling like a cat between them. Twenty-one years old and already tired of life. She’d made certain he knew just how irrelevant—how impossibly old—he really was.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his breath coming in tearing gasps.
“Is it yours, then, the Luxembourg? Nobody else allowed to set foot in it?”
“Nell—”
A smile pursed her lips, something acid on the tongue. “You never change, Ricki. Always that sense of outrage. As though I offend the world simply by walking through it.”
“You know that’s not true.” He’d spoken English to her out of long-dead habit, but his command of the language was sporadic, and he groped for words, tongue-tied and overwhelmed. “It’s wonderful to see you, Nell. You look…very well.”
She was older, he could not deny it: the luminous quality of youth had drained from her skin, leaving it taut across the bones, mapping the infinite beauty of her cheek and brow, the swallows’ lift above her blue eyes. She must be somewhat more than thirty-five, he thought. Her form was unchanged: light and contained and perfectly controlled, the body of a disciplined athlete. How she came by it he never understood; Nell was rarely disciplined or controlled.
“Thank you,” she said crisply. “I don’t make a point of advertising my perfect misery to the crowd. You’re keeping well, I take it? Still swotting away at your atoms and such?”
“Yes.” The question recalled him with a thud to reality: the lab; the errand he’d intended to run; the war. For a second he wanted to tell her everything: let the words come tumbling out, the urgency of his life in these last days, how the certainty of the German threat had thrown every choice he’d ever made under the glare of an interrogator’s bulb, like si
lhouettes projected against a blank screen. All the regrets and compromises were redeemed by only two things: the purity of his work. His children.
He nodded distractedly, staring over her shoulder. He did not realize she was frowning, eyes searching his face, until she spoke.
“Let me buy you a fine, Ricki. In the Boul-Mich. We can talk there.”
If he had ordered the cognac himself it would certainly have been lousy and he would hardly have noticed, the burn at the back of the throat being something he expected now, of a piece with the general shoddiness of things. Even the café owners were sending their stores out of the city for safekeeping, or bricking up their cellars. But Nell demanded quality: her domaine in Bordeaux supplied some of these people with their wines and she knew everyone within a twenty-mile radius of the Seine, from old Edouard at the Dôme to Héloise at Café Flore to the legendary André Terrail of Tour d’Argent. She knew exactly what was hoarded in the cave beneath their feet and she ordered it straight up, her French accent somewhat better than his English.
“You’re in Paris for pleasure?” he asked as they were abandoned at their table, sitting directly opposite the main entrance of the Sorbonne and in full sight of a host of colleagues who might wonder why the celebrated Nobel laureate was drinking in the early evening with a woman manifestly not his wife. “You’ve come to shop, perhaps? To see friends?”
“In the middle of the German offensive?” she returned coolly as she lit a cigarette. Nell’s hands. Slender and artistic and pampered. His wife’s were covered with radium burns.
She glanced at him through the smoke. “There’s a consignment of wine casks I have to get back to Bordeaux before the Nazis confiscate them. Very expensive, very new Nevers oak. Twenty of them in a hired van. You’d like to think I’m useless—one of those decorative parasites you’ve made a practice of hating, Ricki—but nobody can run a vineyard merely on privilege and good looks.”
The Alibi Club Page 10
