“No matter,” Irène said complacently. “I wasn’t sleeping. I knew you must have been out for a walk. I know your habits. How restless you are when the children and I are away.”
How neatly she solved the problem for him, he thought. He had composed the lie carefully in advance: the German bomber suddenly in the sky, the air-raid sirens wailing, himself in the communal shelter in Antony below the baker’s, all of them sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark with the smell of warm bread in their lungs. Irène would have enjoyed that, she’d have told the children how their father’s tummy had rumbled while the bombs fell through the sky, but in the end her more prosaic imagination had sufficed, his invention was unnecessary, he had simply gone for a midnight walk.
“I trekked for hours,” he said. “Working on something.”
She coughed in a way that would have split a lesser woman in two and in that instant he saw the blood spotting her handkerchief, the dreadful pallor of her face.
“Come home,” he said urgently. “Bring the children with you. I miss our life.”
He sat in the empty lab for perhaps another hour, perfecting his plans. Then he rang Nell at the Hôtel Crillon.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Those who’d looked for Memphis Jones at the Folies Bergères, or stood in line for hours outside the Alibi Club, were destined for disappointment. Memphis had behaved in a way utterly alien to her: She’d spent last night at home alone.
Rumors were flying round the nightclub world that Raoul had killed his wife’s partner and run to the south of France one step ahead of the police, or the Nazis, or both. The motive was unclear, because nobody thought Jacquot would toy with Memphis—everybody knew what kind he was—but the knowledgeable guessed the pédé had come on to Raoul and that the killing was tantamount to self-defense. Jacquot’s body was released Wednesday morning by the Paris morgue; nobody claimed it. The glittering garçon of the boîte de nuit seemed destined for a pauper’s grave.
Memphis learned all this from An Li, her Vietnamese chauffeur. He had brought her a tray in bed at ten o’clock Wednesday morning: frothy hot milk, café, a porcelain plate of orange segments. The morning mail, which contained nothing but a sheaf of bills. Memphis flipped through them indolently, the fine linen sheet drawn up over her breasts, as though unconscious of An Li’s wordless presence; but she detected in his immobility a new kind of silence, watchful and deadly. He reminded her of the big cat, the jaguar sleeping at the end of her bed, both of them ready to pounce.
“Tell the morgue we want Jacquot buried in style, no expense spared, and the bill sent to M. Raoul,” she said. “Then call the club and tell everybody on staff to show up at the funeral. Whenever it is.”
“Will Madame be in attendance?” An Li asked.
“Of course. Make sure it’s in the afternoon, now—I got somewhere to be this morning. And An Li—send Madeleine in. I want a bath as soon’s I’ve had breakfast.”
“Madeleine gave notice yesterday.”
She stared at him apprehensively: the black eyes she’d never been able to read. Raoul gone, and now Madeleine. How long before he, too, deserted her? But all she said was, “Stupid bitch. You’d think Memphis couldn’t take a bath by herself or dress herself neither. What I want with Madeleine? Shit.”
“Now that Master has left, Madeleine said there is no money and none of us will be paid. She has gone to be a fille de joie, at one of the closed houses in Clichy; the Sphinx, I think she said. With so many German soldiers coming—”
“—She’ll be walking like a cowboy for the rest of the war. Screw Madeleine. She thinks bein’ a prostitute’s so great, that’s her life dream? Be my guest. You go on, now, An Li, and take Roscoe for a walk.”
Roscoe was the jaguar. In his sinuous, shape-shifting way the big cat hauled himself to his feet, tail sleek as a hangman’s rope, heavy jaw working. He did not look at Memphis, did not seek her attention; she was already dead to him. I’ll send him to the zoo, she decided as she bit into an orange segment, juice spurting over her lips. Can’t take a cat south to Marseille, North Africa, a ship to the States. Roscoe thudded to the ground on mallet-shaped paws, swaggered toward An Li. Neither of them was indifferent to the plans she made. But they would die, she knew, sooner than give her power over them.
An hour later she emerged from a taxi before the Chancellery of the United States. She would not allow An Li to drive her, would not let him guess that she was desperate for assurance, for passage home, for somebody to tell her it would all be okay. She was afraid to lose him, this last voice in the empty house, the echoing rooms and corridors, her stylish heels clacking on the naked floors. She expected An Li to be gone when she returned to the Rue des Trois Frères. She’d made him take Roscoe to the zoo; the driver’s smoldering look suggested that this casual treason—one creature bartering another—smacked of slavery and death. She had no time for his nonsense. She was playing for survival.
“I want to see the ambassador,” she said loudly to the Frenchwoman who vetted guests at the chancellery entrance. “You tell Mr. Ambassador that Memphis Jones has come to call.”
The woman looked down her French nose at Memphis’s gown, a gorgeous thing of bugle beads and silk more appropriate to the night but fitting her body like a ripe banana peel. Unimpressed, she went off and presently returned with a man who was disappointing: not the ambassador.
“Robert Murphy,” he said, extending his hand. “The ambassador is at the Élysée Palace, I’m afraid, consulting with the French government.”
Memphis was adamant. She did not allow Robert Murphy to lead her to his back office, away from the curious eyes of various governmental departments. She stood in the middle of the marble foyer and demanded her passage home. Some kind of safe conduct. A ticket for a first-class cabin on the next ocean liner out of France.
“There are no ocean liners anymore,” Murphy said gently. “Only troop transports and merchant convoys.”
“You want to know what happens, mistuh, if Memphis Jones gets caught by the Nazis? You’ll have race riots in the streets of Kansas City. Flames in every building in uptown New York. You’ll have blood on your hands, mistuh, you and your fine ambassador, and the whole world’ll be askin’ what the hell you were doin’ in Paris when the greatest jazz singer in Europe was asking for help. Understand?”
Murphy inclined his head. He assured her he would speak to Bullitt himself. But Memphis could smell the burning paper on the air; she’d seen the chaos of desk chairs and boxes stacked in the hallways beyond the elegant reception hall. The chancellery was clearly shutting down. Murphy suggested that she try the Gare St-Lazare—he understood women were getting seats on trains, although it helped to be the mother of a child; she couldn’t borrow one, by any chance?
Memphis parked herself in a chair in front of Bullitt’s door and declared defiantly that she’d wait. It was then she heard the word coon and the word nigger, not from Robert Murphy but from a sneering woman who was destroying papers in an office two doors down from the chargé’s, a rail-thin upper-class bitch in a cashmere twinset and tweed skirt.
“If only they would go back to Africa,” Mims Tarnow said in an audible undertone to the French receptionist, “and stop embarrassing Americans the world over. I’d buy her a ticket to Tangier myself—if I didn’t have ten better places to put the spare change.”
Memphis longed to claw the woman’s narrow face, wanted to push her nose in a toilet, wanted to spit in Mims Tarnow’s eye and make her beg for a little kindness; but her knees were suddenly like water, unstable and gaping; her knees were ashamed and she sat fixed in her chair, remembering the woman who’d burnt her hands with scalding water when she was eight years old and working as a dishwasher, remembering the man who’d beat her for the fun of it behind the trash cans at her mama’s laundry, pulling her skirt up over her head until the white underpants showed, slapping his broad flat palm on her ass and chortling while his other hand gripped her hair, his erection stabbing her
side. She remembered all of this and a hundred sordid things the years of silk and comfort had failed to blot away, her cheeks flaming with hatred, and a voice inside her mocked, What the hell you thinkin’, a white man’s gonna help you, Memphis? They all Nazis by another name anyway.
She walked without a backward look out of the chancellery and down the broad marble steps to the paving, careful of her heels where the steps had worn shallow. The Place de la Concorde spread before her like a place of worship, the obelisk in the center where heads had rolled, and she stood there uncertain, aware that she could no longer think. Trying, trying.
“Mam’selle,” said a voice at her elbow. She turned. He was an elderly Frenchman, all mustache and soiled beret, his eyes watering.
“Pierre duPré at your service.” The old man lifted the beret, set it back on his gray hair. “You must know the Americans leave tomorrow. Everybody but Bullitt and a few others, gone at dawn. They hope to make Bordeaux. I could find you a place in the baggage cars, perhaps. A seat among the household servants. It is not much, tant pis, but…”
“No, thanks,” she said distinctly. “I’ll make my own way. I always have.”
Then she hailed a taxi for the Alibi Club.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sally was too exhausted to care much about Mims Tarnow, who glowered at her in the chancellery foyer, her arms filled with codebooks from her husband’s office. Mims was supposed to chuck them on the bonfire roaring in the chancellery’s rear courtyard, but Sally had stepped smack in front of her, ignoring the look of exasperation curdling the other woman’s face.
Sally said again, louder this time: “I need to see Mr. Hearst. Please. On a matter of urgent business.”
“Joe’s in a meeting with British Liaison,” Mims snapped. “You’ll have to come back later.”
As though the chancellery would be open later, Sally thought, as though the courtyard bonfire would not still be burning by morning. A cord of barely-suppressed panic was tightening around everyone scurrying through the building; Mims’s cashmere sweater was stained dark with sweat. The chancellery smelled like an animal house at the zoo, rank with fear and untamed ferocity.
She had forced her way past a surly and muttering crowd of desperate people, shouting Je suis americaine to the armed guards controlling access on this final afternoon of business. American military police from the Department of the Army held down the back courtyard, so that Mims Tarnow could throw her codebooks in safety and nobody would steal the last remaining gallons of petrol from the chancellery’s storage tanks. Bullitt had authorized snipers on the roof if the crowd got ugly when the front entrance was finally locked. The ambassador suspected the work of Communist agents.
Sally had no intention of leaving.
She took Mme. Blum’s hand—Léonie Blum, who had chosen a few cherished belongings: a prayer shawl for keeping Sabbath in the New World, a few pictures of children long since scattered, the gold teeth of her dead husband. She had set out with Sally an hour before, walking through the increasingly crowded streets with an old black leather satchel, toward the promise Joe Hearst had made only yesterday and completely forgotten. The promise of her visa.
“We’ll wait,” Sally informed Mims Tarnow.
There were no seats to be had in the foyer. Sally inched her way nearer to a marble column that seemed to demarcate the public from the private space. A soldier with a gun stood between her and the inner corridor. The French receptionist was gone from her desk; perhaps she had resigned. Mims frowned prodigiously—Sally would never be admitted to any of her sororities in future—and clicked her narrow-skirted way through the courtyard door. Her silhouette charcoal against the flames.
Sally walked up to the armed guard blocking the corridor. And began to scream Joe Hearst’s name.
Hearst had started the day early with a demitasse of espresso near his neighborhood pharmacy. Max Shoop could ship Stilwell’s body out of Cherbourg tomorrow if he liked, but Joe Hearst was still investigating murder. His reading of Stilwell’s files made the truth too important to bury. He didn’t know the pharmacien well, and the man wore the hunted look of every Parisian waiting for news from the Front—but he accepted the paper twist of shattered glass Hearst had scraped from Stilwell’s carpet, and agreed to analyze the fragments. Hearst told him time was short, the matter one of poison.
From the pharmacy he drove to Sûreté headquarters and found the police detective who’d handled Stilwell’s death. He gave the man—whose name was Foch—two crystal lowballs he’d pilfered from the Rue de Rivoli.
The detective was furious.
“It is most improper, that the concierge should have let you invade Monsieur Stil-ewell’s apartment, hein? It means nothing that you are from the embassy. Nothing.”
“It is our delegation’s duty to ensure that every American in France is treated in a manner consistent with justice,” Hearst replied. “Check those glasses for prints.”
The request was less outrageous than it seemed. Since the outbreak of war, identity cards were mandatory for every resident of Paris—and each applicant was fingerprinted by the police. Which meant that Max Shoop’s prints were on file. As were Stilwell’s and Jacquot’s. And Sally King’s.
“Justice is immaterial in the present case!” Foch spluttered. “It was an accident—if not suicide! There will be the prints of the two dead pédés on the glass. So we will learn they drank together before dying. Bon. I could tell you as much without recourse to fingerprints. It is your American obsession with le roman policier.”
“Maybe so,” Hearst agreed in his flawless French, “but you’ll do the fingerprint analysis all the same. If you refuse, monsieur l’ambassadeur will be on the phone to the Minister of Justice, who has formed the habit of dining weekly with l’ambassadeur at his château in Chantilly; and you, my friend, will be at the Front firing a gun at the Nazis before you can say vas te faire foûtre.”
Or go fuck yourself, in the common tongue.
Foch said grudgingly he’d get on the prints.
Now Hearst was waiting for the telephone to ring, with news from the pharmacy or the Sûreté—anything that might give him a thread to follow, a soul to damn with murder. His pulse jumping, he listened to British Liaison read him the riot act about Frédéric Joliot-Curie, while the pungent odor of smoke permeated the office.
“I’ve been jauntering all over France for the past month,” Liaison drawled bitterly, “looking for chaps like your Fred. I’ve got a list, you know. Long as your arm.” The Brit thrust his right hand at Joe Hearst, cuff riding upward to expose a tattoo of a curled viper cut into the wrist. “Cream of the French scientific establishment. Imperative we get them all to England before Hitler snaps them up like rats. I’ve had to promise some of them the earth, I’ve had to sell my old mother on the public street corner, I’ve had to pull out Oscar and Genevieve and hold a bloody bullet to their heads—and you just sit here and wait. For a…treasure trove…of documents to simply fall into your lap. There’s no God, Hearst. No God at all.”
“If that were true, Jack, I’d have sold the whole box of files right back to the Germans,” Hearst retorted mildly.
Charles Henry George Howard, twentieth Earl of Suffolk, was known as Mad Jack to his friends, partly because he’d never behaved much like a peer and partly because the name suited him: tattooed, limping from an old hunting injury, broad-shouldered, bristling of mustache. In another age he’d have gone to sea and set fire to ships. In this one, he’d married a cabaret dancer from the Alhambra and taken a First in pharmacology at Edinburgh. Drugs being his century’s answer to privateer’s booty.
The earl poured himself a third glass of champagne—he never stirred without a bottle—and settled his boots on Hearst’s desk. Oscar and Genevieve—a matched set of dueling pistols, remarkable for their beauty—were trained on the office door. A raft of papers was scattered all around him, most bearing the S&C letterhead. Ambassador Bullitt’s quandary—to call FDR or the British emba
ssy about the French atomic program—had produced Mad Jack: His Royal Majesty’s official Paris representative, British Scientific and Industrial Committee.
Hearst assumed the title was cover for spying. Not for the first time, he wished the United States had an intelligence service. But there was none, had been none for years: just Joe Hearst and Pierre duPré, with their fingers up France’s ass.
“Do you understand physics?” he asked.
“Not at all.” Jack peered nearsightedly at one of Philip Stilwell’s papers. “But I quite like bombs. I’ve taken to sapping in my off-hours, you know. There’s nothing like defusing a bloody great wad of wires and explosive that’s tumbled into the back garden. Gets the juices flowing, what?”
“Anything in these papers? —That might cause murder, I mean?”
The earl drained his glass. “Nosir—but I’ll send them off to G. P. Thomson in London. He’ll make sense of this lot in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Well—bottle’s empty! Time for me to be going.”
He thrust his boots to the floor, wincing slightly as his game leg made contact with Hearst’s carpet, and shuffled the papers together with deft hands. The earl’s mind, Hearst thought, was probably similar: Quick as a conjurer’s. The rest of the swashbuckling package—part Wodehouse, part Gilbert and Sullivan—was merely a cultivated distraction.
“I’m not sure I can let you take those. The files don’t belong to—” Hearst stopped in mid-sentence, listening to something he alone heard. A woman’s voice, screaming his name.
He rose abruptly and threw open the door.
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