“Bertrand—”
“My husband is at the Front.” Clipped words, thrown up like a shield in front of her face: I do not want your sympathy.
“I didn’t know.”
“Naturally not. You haven’t exactly kept in touch.” She stubbed out the cigarette, although it had barely burned. “Bertrand hasn’t written in weeks. I think he’s not allowed. Which means, of course, that it’s bloody awful where he is.”
“You still love him so much?”
“God, no. I simply hate to be ignored, Ricki, you know that. Why else did you cut me off so completely—if not because it hurt?”
In that instant, Nell’s hand poised over an ashtray and the slanting light of May gilding her chestnut hair, it was all alive again between them: the jealousy and the betrayal and the aching need. He wanted to circle her neck with his fingers and tell her, once and for all, that she would never belong to anyone else. No matter how much time passed. No matter who else they fucked or married.
“Have you noticed only the old men are left in these wretched places?” she said conversationally, her eyes flicking from the street to the approaching waiter. “It’s the same in Bordeaux. Not an able-bodied laborer to be had, the vines setting fruit. It’s going to get worse. Salut.”
She drank as he remembered: the amber liquid swallowed neatly as an insult. Then she set down the glass—nothing but bitter lees hunkering in the bottom—and said, “How’s Irène?”
It was a deliberate ploy. Mention the wife and cover him with shame. But fidelity had never been his problem: Nell had left him first, fifteen years ago, on a train platform with a packed suitcase and a ticket he methodically shredded over the rails until his hands bled. He’d read of her marriage in the newspapers.
“Irène’s not well. She’s gone to Brittany for a rest cure. With the children.”
“You astonish me.”
Irène frightened most people. Kept them safely at arm’s length with her reputation for genius. Her silence and self-sufficiency. Her dreadful clothes.
He guessed Nell was a little bored by her.
“It’s not the war she’s running from,” he explained. “It’s our…occupational hazard. Leukemia. Her mother died from it. Irène’s persistently anemic.”
“And you?”
He shrugged. “I’m too busy to be sick. I was called up last September. Like Bertrand.”
“Only you’re safe in Paris.”
“For the moment. My front is the laboratory.”
“Christ,” she muttered viciously. “Is this the bomb I’ve heard whispers of? Splitting the atom?”
Nell would know, of course. She was not like most people. She’d grown up around physicists, her brother chief among them—the Honourable Ian Bracecourt, who’d slaved away with Rutherford at Cambridge. Ian had sent a telegram of congratulations when the Joliot-Curies won the Nobel in 1935. But Nell’s words returned him to self-awareness: to the life he really led. The desperate secrecy. The patents he’d drawn. The Germans on the border and the things he could not tell even to his wife.
“There is no such thing as an atomic bomb,” he whispered.
Nell threw back her head and laughed.
He set his cognac aside, unfinished; raised a hand for the waiter. “Is there anything I can do for you while you are in Paris? I know Raoul Dautry—the minister. He might be able to get news of Bertrand.”
“Stay with me,” she said, unexpectedly. “I won’t run this time, I promise you.”
He dragged his eyes from his billfold to her face.
The words were uttered so quietly they might not have been said. There was denial in her careful expression: She was prepared to ignore her words if he did.
And if she had not run all those years ago—to Bertrand and his title and the fortress in Bordeaux—what then? Would he have gone slowly mad with wanting and hating her until nothing but death could save him from himself? He’d been obsessed. Obsessed. With her caprice and her charm, her refusal ever to yield, her sweet liquid sex smelling of violets. He could have eaten her alive in that bed in the Rue Martine.
Go to the lab, Joliot. Something sterile and white, not that fragile neck between your teeth.
He paid too much for the cognacs, bills slipping from his fingers.
Night fell as they left the café. They skittered like leaves through the shadowed garden.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hans von Halban was dreaming of Joliot’s cloud chamber when the doorbell rang: water vapor clinging to the glass cylinder, Joliot in his white smock with his hands balled in his pockets. The room at the back of the laboratory was dim, the mood hushed—Joliot’s shrine, Kowarski called it. Kowarski stood to the left of Joliot, enormous and hunched, his fists like mallets, his face the usual Russian blend of brutality and madness. Joliot was talking reverently of particles: how the tiniest trajectory could be traced through the condensation on the glass, the hand of God in the scattering of droplets. Von Halban tried to interrupt—tried to stop Joliot from reaching for the piston—but it was too late. The mechanical thing leaped forward, uncontrolled. The glass shattered violently as it had never done before and Joliot was screaming, his hands over his eyes, blood streaming between his fingers.
A chain reaction, von Halban thought. Gott in Himmel, it will kill us all.
He sat up in bed, panting, with the sound of the buzzer in his ears.
“What is it, cher?” his wife murmured, not really awake—not really caring, just waiting for the disturbance to go away. Her attitude toward most things.
He threw back the covers and reached for a robe—it was his habit to sleep in the nude. Annick rolled over, her blond head shining silver in the moonlight, and immediately fell back to sleep. The clock on the bedside table read 1:19 A.M.
The summons in the night, Hans thought bitterly. The knock on the door. He had been waiting for it for months. But not even the Germans could be here already.
He walked toward the front hall, his muscles tensed. The buzzer trilled again, violent as the trajectory of a particle or bullet. The sound slammed against his eardrum.
He opened the door a crack, waiting for the boot against the jamb, the overpowering force thrusting him backward, the black-clad storm troopers surging through.
Nothing.
He peered into the corridor. The block of flats was silent and dark—no sound of traffic rose from the street below. The dead hour. A mild-faced Frenchman hovered.
“Monsieur von Halban?”
“Yes?”
“Jacques Allier. Ministry of Armaments.”
Allier. He knew the name: Allier who’d worked for the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas—one of the biggest French banks, powerful, allied with government. Allier was a lieutenant now in the army. A spy.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour of the morning, but I could not find le Professeur Joliot-Curie, and—”
“You have tried the lab, yes?” von Halban interrupted stiffly.
“It’s closed and dark.”
“His home? It is south—in Antony.” Still Paris, but closer to the suburbs of Orly; Joliot liked living a distance from the lab, liked leaving his work behind when he could.
“I drove out there an hour ago. He’s not there.”
“And you found me—how?”
“The Ministry must know where its leading scientists are at any given moment, vous comprendez.” Allier shrugged, his hands spread wide. “In the current climate—”
In the current climate, keep the foreigners under surveillance. They all hate our guts.
Von Halban stepped back and ushered Allier inside. He had no other choice.
The lab at the Collège de France had been placed under the Ministry of Armaments in September, just after the declaration of war. Fred Joliot’s work—Joliot the Nobel laureate—was that crucial. Which made it awkward, Hans von Halban thought, that his principal assistants were Russian and Austrian. Enemy combatants, as it were. Suspect.
He and Kowarski had actually been sent out of Paris while this fool Allier—a banker, mein Gott, who looked as if he couldn’t harm a fly—had been off on his hush-hush mission to Norway. Kowarski dispatched to the island of Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany, and von Halban to Pôquerolle, in the Mediterranean. Just to be certain they could not conspire against the French, or betray what they did not know.
“Joliot has been called away, perhaps, to Brittany.” Von Halban heard the German edge to his own words, the unmistakable syntax of the alien. “His children are there, yes? His wife, too, one supposes. You are acquainted with Irène?”
“By reputation,” Allier returned dismissively. “I placed a trunk call to Arcouest. He’s not in Brittany.”
Von Halban studied the other man. Allier might have fidgeted; might have paced in agitation before the perfunctory hearth that graced Annick’s rigidly modernist room, the chrome tables and leather chairs—instead, he preserved a remarkable stillness, mild brown eyes fixed on von Halban’s face.
“I came to inquire whether there might be another address where Joliot-Curie could be found.”
“You will tell me what is wrong, please,” von Halban demanded bluntly. “Fred was as usual when he left the labo this afternoon. If you call there again in the morning—around nine, yes?—no doubt you may talk to him then.”
“When did you last see Joliot-Curie, Herr Doktor?”
Von Halban winced at the title. “Four. Four-thirty perhaps. He was to deliver a letter to the president of the college. He did not return.”
“He was seen at a café in the Boul-Mich at half-past five. He left with a woman—not his wife. Nobody has been able to locate him since. You understand, now, why I ask for an alternative address.”
How perfectly French, von Halban thought. How stupid of me not to have seen it coming. Joliot, whose only mistress was his cloud chamber—that and the magnetron he was building with the parts ordered from Switzerland. And if he did take some woman to bed? What business is it of mine or this petty Ministry spy’s?
“I cannot help you,” he replied firmly. “If it is as you say, he has gone to a hotel, yes? Or to the woman’s place. Come to the lab in the morning.”
There was a delicate pause.
“Or perhaps…I may be of assistance?”
Allier was still studying him with that suggestion of inner quiet, a man completely in control of himself and his emotions. His face betrayed nothing, but the silence itself spoke volumes: the Frenchman was considering how far he could trust this scientist with the German name, this man in Fred Joliot’s pocket, this too-ready ear in an hour of crisis.
“I am a French citizen,” von Halban asserted, still too stiff from pride and anger. “My wife is French. My children also. My sympathies. I have lived and worked here for years.”
“Have you got a key to the laboratory?”
“But of course.”
“Then perhaps you would be so good as to dress. We’re under orders to remove everything—everything, you understand—before dawn. If we’re lucky, Joliot will join us there.”
“Do you remember the night at Birchmere Park?” Nell asked him. “The way we huddled on the roof tiles, Ricki, waiting for the sun to rise?”
How could he have forgotten it? Her father’s house, generations of English noblemen born and dead between its stone walls, a thing of turrets and wings flung out through the centuries. Nell’s family was always pressed for money and the roof tiles were broken, but they had taken some blankets from an old linen press at three o’clock in the morning, the two of them and her brother Ian with a bottle of claret, and they had listened in companionable silence fifty feet above the ground while some small animal below was crushed in the jaws of a fox, screaming. The fen country: flat as Holland, sodden underfoot, a line of dikes keeping the whole thing from sinking. Her father had not wanted the football player with the hooked nose and the graceful body for his Nell. The earl needed money. Joliot had none.
She sat now in the deep window of her room at the Crillon, wearing nothing but his shirt. Her bare legs were drawn up under her chin and she was brooding on this other dawn as the Place de la Concorde woke beneath them, the first hush of tires circling the square. They had made love during the long hours of the night, lying in a doze and waking to this deep hunger Joliot had known only once before in his life. Bertrand’s people had always stayed at the Crillon and Nell ought to have been more discreet than to have taken Joliot there; but it was possible, he realized, that she wanted them to know that Mme. la Comtesse did as she pleased. She was English: nobody ruled her.
“Will you go back?” he asked. “To Birchmere? Now that the Germans are coming?”
“I want them to come,” she muttered. “I’m sick to death of this phony war. I want things decided. No—I won’t go back. Whether the vineyard’s called French or German is unimportant. If I stay, I can do some good there. You’ll laugh, Ricki, but I’ve come to love Domaine de Loudenne. I won’t have it taken from me. I won’t.”
Her voice broke on the word and in the sound he heard all the fear of the past winter, the news from Sedan where even now her husband might be dying, the helplessness and the tension of waiting. He stretched out his hand to stroke her head but she started up, turned her shoulder to him, walked abruptly to the bath. She did not want his sympathy; it was salt in a wound.
This was what was different about Nell, he thought: the fierce bitterness beneath her beauty. Maybe it was age or Bertrand’s indifference or the lack of children, but the mark of the survivor was cut deep into her eyes. It hurt him to see it there.
She was running water in the tub. He almost considered picking up the shirt she’d discarded on the tiles and slipping away while she bathed. It would be a relief, after the demons that had dogged him all night, her skin beneath his hands, the coiled wire of her body. A relief to be alone.
If it was commonly held that every Frenchman had a mistress, then Frédéric Joliot-Curie was the exception to the rule. He had been faithful to Irène from the first day of their meeting in 1925—she absorbed in an experiment mounted on her bench at the Laboratoire du Radium where he had been newly hired as Marie Curie’s assistant; he, Fred, bruised and sour in the aftermath of Nell’s defection. He had courted his wife in walks through the forests of Fontainebleau; during ski trips to the Alps where she removed her clothing in the most perfunctory manner and obligingly offered him her virginity; at her mother’s house in Brittany where he learned to sail; in the lab where they both pursued matters too obscure to be explained to outsiders. Irène cared nothing for the usual things: jewels or clothes or flirtation or intrigue. From childhood she had been raised by two of the most formidable minds in physics to hone the organ of her brain. When Fred thought of Irène it was in the form of Picasso before the Cubist period, her limbs massive and heavy-flanked, her face devoid of emotion. She regarded him as a good means of having children—“that remarkable experiment,” as she called it. They now possessed two.
Irène had continued to work in the lab during her pregnancies—had won the Nobel Prize with him in 1935. He was more often called by her name than his own, and though it rankled to be viewed as secondary to his wife, she’d been his passport to respect and acceptance. Frédéric Joliot, who’d failed his first qualifying exam, who’d been granted an indifferent degree from an inferior school, was of very little interest to the French scientific establishment. But Frédéric Joliot-Curie—allied with the most famous female name in France—was a man nobody could ignore.
Did I do it for that? he asked himself now, with the scent of Nell’s body still on his skin. For success? A career? It was something. A partnership. A life. And I do love her. But not to the point of madness…
The bathroom door opened. Nell stood there, warm and silent, the hawk peering out of her eyes. He walked slowly toward her. And ripped the towel from her body with his restless hands.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Shoops lived in a gilded set of r
ooms off the Rue de Monceau, overlooking one of the entrances to the park. They had been living there nearly twenty years, without children, the interiors gradually acquiring the peculiarly French patina that comes with exquisite taste and unlimited means. Odette Shoop was superbly fitted to her home, as though she’d been chosen along with the Sèvres china to ornament the place. She was petite, gamine, perpetually vivacious, and quite in the manner of Mlle. Chanel, whose salon she patronized. Sally recognized the careless jersey dress Odette was wearing; she had worn it herself during last autumn’s shows.
“My poor child,” Odette said firmly as she brushed each of Sally’s cheeks in turn with her cool crimson lips. “You have suffered an enormity. You will have a hot bath, a tray of supper brought to your room, and an early bed. Tomorrow, we will set out for the shops and equip you for the voyage home, oui?”
She had not bothered to argue, not with Odette or even with Max himself during the brief ride from the hospital to Parc Monceau. The Clothilde, he’d repeated, Cherbourg Harbor, Thursday. Your tickets are waiting at the shipping office near the docks. He had never threatened her with anything; she did not believe herself to be in physical danger; and yet, every fiber of her being resisted his plans for her. It was vital to Max Shoop that she stay away from her studio in the Rue St-Jacques, vital that she embark with Philip’s body on a merchant steamer the day after tomorrow. Sally did not like it when older men tried to order her existence. Her father had tried once and she had simply left the country. Now, she was increasingly inclined to thwart Max Shoop by staying.
The bath was heaven; dinner, a simple affair of magret de canard with a glass of excellent burgundy; the room to which Odette conveyed her, a perfection of rose and green silk brocade. But the colors reminded Sally of her Schiaparelli dress and she lay awake long after the rest of the house was doused in sleep, while the bells of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule rang the successive hours. It might be possible to slip away from Odette tomorrow in one of the crowded stores of the Boulevard Haussmann, or perhaps she could excuse herself from the tea table at Fauchon’s—but when the bells sang out three A.M., she thrust back the covers and set her feet noiselessly on the carpet.
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