He could just see her outlined at the far end of the corridor, struggling against the grasp of a chancellery guard, her face very white except for the two spots of feverish color burning high on her cheekbones. She had come to him, after all.
“Sally!”
The guard was thrusting her out of Hearst’s sight, hand raised to strike this absurdly hysterical woman. She wasn’t dead. The pictures he’d seen in his mind—the fragile shoulder blades thrusting through a light spring dress on the cement floor of the Paris morgue—were nightmares for another man’s sleep.
He strode toward her. “Miss King! It’s about time. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you we’d be worried, here at the embassy, given what happened to you two nights ago—that we’d like to know you were safe. I don’t suppose you even thought to contact us. Until you needed help again, right?”
He saw her wince at the harshness in his voice, the brutal anger on his face, and felt a poor stab of triumph. He would not be tricked into caring about this girl who went off with any man who paid her bills, who was too stupid to sit tight when people were dropping like flies around her. He would not watch another Daisy dance out the door with his heart in her hands.
“I—no, I never…” she stammered. “That is, I got your message. At my flat. You said to contact you—I brought Mme. Blum…”
He glanced from her wounded eyes to the old woman stooped behind her. Remembered, suddenly, his easy promises of yesterday. And felt sharply and miserably ashamed.
“Of course. The visa. Sally, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, in a tight, careful voice. “It’s my fault entirely. I didn’t know I was expected to report my movements to the embassy staff. I don’t need your help today, Mr. Hearst—I rarely need anyone’s help—but Mme. Blum does. Are you available?”
“Yes.”
Mad Jack was easing his elegant bulk out of Hearst’s office, his gaze roaming openly over Sally’s figure. He waggled a farewell in Hearst’s direction, Stilwell’s files tucked discreetly under his arm.
“Sally—don’t go anywhere,” Hearst said. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Naturally, I’ll wait for Mme. Blum.”
She would not look at him as she adopted a leaning pose against the chancellery wall; and he was reminded of an imperious child, clinging to dignity to keep from crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, inconsequently—and led Léonie Blum into the chaos of the consular section.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Joliot found Nell’s warehouse only with difficulty, after a few wrong turns and a series of explosive obscenities. The streets of Les Halles were narrow and strewn with every imaginable kind of refuse: pig offal and wooden crates, bales of hay and butter churns, cheese hoops and cattle hooves. Les Halles was the belly of Paris, the great open-air market in the shadow of Saint-Eustache that stretched for blocks in every direction, lined with warehouses, fringed with bakers’ ovens and wine cellars and butchers’ back rooms, the gutters running with blood at an early hour of the morning, all manner of fowl screaming their last day to the sun, the somnolent eyes of rabbits trussed and hung upside down by their feet from wooden dowels, the fresh goat cheese covered in ashes, the winey smell of apples kept too long. The people who haunted Les Halles were unlike any Joliot encountered in the rarefied air of the Collège de France: round-shouldered men with shapeless clothes and shambling gaits; heavy laborers wedded to the land and the warehouses, for whom market day was an ancient and sacred rite; women whose hands were broad and pitted as river rock, who thought nothing of wringing a goose’s neck or cutting the liver from its live body. He shoved the truck’s fender cautiously through the milling hordes, packing up now, the makeshift stands coming down, the raucous goats tethered to posts. These people looked untroubled by war, though their sons must certainly have been packed off to the Front months and months ago—like so many trussed rabbits, their world turned upside down. Every man Joliot saw in Les Halles was over the age of sixty. Anyone younger was elsewhere, with a gun in his hands.
He inched the truck forward, searching for the street Nell had told him to find, the yawning entrance to the warehouse, thinking idly of harvests and planting, of the shortage of labor in the countryside and what it would do to his children’s meals in a very little while, regardless of whether the Nazis reached Paris. Joliot, too, had endured a childhood of war, and he remembered the pinched stomach, the constant growl of hunger. Today, however, with Hélène and Pierre still in Brittany or possibly starting on their road home, he felt curiously suspended in his truck cab, above the swirl and flow of foot traffic, insulated from the noise and smells of the market stalls, alone in his deceit.
As soon as Jacques Allier had left the lab, Joliot carefully siphoned the heavy water, all twenty-six canisters, into sterile glass jugs. He refilled the canisters with ordinary tap water from the lab’s spigot and put them back in place, where Allier expected to find them. Then he loaded the heavy water into the back of the truck delivered by the Ministry of Armaments only half an hour before, an official-looking army transport with a dull green canvas cover. Only then did he set out in search of Nell.
He pulled up before a pair of vast wooden doors and leaned on the truck horn. There was a pause; some cursing from a belligerent vendor whose passage he was blocking, which Joliot ignored; then the doors swung open. Two elderly men stood inside, staring at him, their hands dangling uselessly at their sides. He leaned through the cab window.
“Mme. la Comtesse,” he said. “She’s expecting me.”
The nearest nodded, stepped back. Joliot drove carefully through, not wanting to look for Nell, not wanting to betray the pulse throbbing in his temples, the dryness of his mouth.
She was standing before a massive stack of wine barrels bound together with rope, her nose pressed against a stave of wood that had been torn from one of them, her eyes closed. Drinking in some elusive scent Joliot had never dreamed of, drinking in the oak. The growl of the truck engine brought her head around, however, and she walked toward him as he braked, turned off the ignition, swung down. He could see from her eyes and expression that she had herself firmly in hand; this was business now, they were in front of her people, the vineyard workers she’d sent from Bordeaux to requisition these things. He must not reach for her, fold her into his arms, smell the teasing scent of her hair.
He stood woodenly, waiting. She wore trousers, something he’d never seen on her, the effect both exotic and unexpectedly erotic. Her whipcord body and bobbed hair suddenly those of a disciplined boy.
“I’d given up on you,” she told him. “Henri is ready to load.”
“I don’t know Les Halles.”
“Naturally. You’re the kind who always shops in stores, aren’t you? Or your maid does. Despite your dedication to Communism. Very well—what do you need from me?”
She was determined to treat him cruelly. Pretend the night did not exist. Cut the cord with a jagged blade. “Send your men away. Henri. The other one.”
“Why?”
“Because I ask you to, Nell.”
She held his gaze, considering whether to fight for the sake of fighting him. Instead she swung around abruptly and called out in French, “The oak’s fine. Not the best quality and certainly not what I paid for, but it will have to do. God knows, if this year’s vintage is as dreadful as the last it won’t matter a damn what we put in the barrels. Start loading.”
He followed her up a rickety staircase and through a doorway in the warehouse loft, to a small office entirely deserted of people, where Nell scrawled her signature on a bill of lading, then flung herself into a chair. “Have you got a cigarette?”
He found one for her, lit it.
“You said you wanted me to carry something. To Bordeaux.”
“I do, yes.”
She drew on the smoke, waiting.
“My colleague—von Halban…knows your cousin. The German.—What’s his name?”
He winced at the word, imagining every carnal possibility, Nell’s leg pressed to the man’s mouth, his lips working at her sex, Nell’s head flung back, her teeth bared.
“Our mothers are sisters. We practically grew up together at Birchmere when I was a child, but I lost touch when Spatz went to university. And then I married and came here,” she said succinctly.
And then you married. After five torrid months of sprawling in my bed. Not even a footnote, Nell. No mention of Ricki and the empty train platform.
“Von Halban says this…cousin…is staying with you.”
Her eyelids fluttered impatiently. “Oh, God, Ricki—not this, again. Not your pathetic possessive jealousy, when you’ve got the Ice Queen at home and two perfect children. Not now. I’ve more important things to deal with.”
“It was you who asked me to stay last night. You, Nell. I’m not in the habit of picking up women, in case you wondered. I don’t do that sort of thing easily; it mattered to me, it wasn’t a casual lay—”
“—But now you’re suffering agonies, you’re wallowing in remorse, and you want me to tell you it’s all right. Well, I won’t, Ricki. I don’t slip in and out of bed with anybody who crosses my path and I resent your notion I’d sleep with a man I regard as a brother, as though I’m that desperate or that much of a slut. So fuck off, Ricki, and take whatever you’ve got in your truck back home, all right?”
“I’m sorry, Nell.”
She was stabbing out her cigarette. She refused to look at him.
“I’m not asking what you’ve done or would like to do with your cousin. I’m asking what you’ve told him.”
“Told him?” She glanced up, fingers suspended over the ashtray.
“He’s the enemy, Nell. What’s he doing in Paris right now, for God’s sake? The police must stop him daily and demand to see his papers.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s as bad as all that,” she said coolly. “He’s not in uniform and he’s spent most of his life in France. He’s got a better accent than I have. He’s probably not questioned above once a week. And when he is—he gives them my address. Tells them he’s family. Just visiting.”
“Visiting? Sacre bleu—He’s a Nazi agent, isn’t he?”
“Don’t let your jealousy run away with you, Ricki.” She eyed him lazily. “Spatz is nobody’s boy but his own. He frankly loathes Hitler and his set and I think he’s seriously considering working for the Allies, so don’t report him to your minister just yet, there’s a pet.”
“Nell—”
“You’d better tell me quickly why you’re here.”
She had given him no assistance, no reason he could cling to that would make it all right, his defection from Allier to a woman he hadn’t seen or heard of in years, whose loyalty he had every reason to mistrust.
“We have to get some lab supplies out of Paris. Before the Germans arrive.”
“And I have a truck heading south.”
“Heading toward Bordeaux, which is where we need our supplies to be.”
“Why?”
“The port. It’s more sheltered than Calais, and if we eventually have to get something to England—”
“Don’t ask me to carry uranium,” she inserted sharply. “I won’t do it. You’ll radiate my wines for a century to come, as though I didn’t have enough already to deal with. Prices for top Bordeaux on the world market are half what they were a decade ago, and between the chemical shells we’re still digging out of the soil from the last war, and the phylloxera blight that decimated the vines, the domaine hasn’t turned a profit in years. Bertrand would have sold the place long ago if I hadn’t insisted, if I hadn’t taken over complete responsibility for the place and forced it to meet the standards for Appellation Contrôlée. It’s been years of effort, Ricki, and now the war’s taken all our field hands and thrown them at the German guns, it’s taken the copper sulfate for dusting the vines—”
“I wouldn’t ask you to carry uranium,” he said swiftly. “It’s water, Nell. Twenty-six glass jugs of water, sealed by my own hand. If you’re stopped and searched, smash the bottles and let it run into the ground, understand?”
“In the final seconds before I’m arrested?” She tried to laugh but her voice broke and she placed a shaking hand over her mouth.
“You won’t be stopped. Please, Nell.”
She nodded once, her hand still pressed against her lips.
“Once you’ve got to Bordeaux safely, you’ll write to your brother Ian at Cambridge. Ask the Cavendish people if they’ll make room for it in their lab. In the event we can’t stop the German army.”
“It’s all ending, isn’t it? No matter what brave words we throw into the wind? I can’t bear it, Ricki.”
He reached for her then, took her in his arms as he’d longed to do, held her wordlessly with his face pressed against her hair. Here at the end of all things I pledge you my reason, my sanity. I give you my soul, Nell, who’ve always had it in keeping.
“What will happen to you?” she asked. “Will they arrest you? Deport you to a camp?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come with me.” She gripped his shoulders hard. “Come with me and your water. We’ll get you both to Bordeaux. To Cambridge if necessary.”
“No.”
“Ricki—”
“I have children, Nell. A wife. Who’s on her way home right now.”
Her hands fell. She stepped backward. “And so you’ll walk willingly into the Germans’ trap? You’ll accept their plans for you?”
“Have I any choice?”
“We all do. But your choices were always different from mine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The spring color faded from street and sky by cocktail hour. In the lower reaches of Montmartre, at the base of the funicular, a discarded sheet of baker’s paper tossed fitfully in the wind, still laced with sticky white icing. Tired and disheveled people—refugees, Spatz thought—had collapsed with their backs against the street lamps, their eyes staring dully ahead of them. A pregnant woman with two children; an elderly man in a newsboy cap, whose right leg was bandaged and spotted with blood. Shrapnel wounds. A Messerschmitt. Spatz understood the reasoning of the German High Command: Send a million people from the Lowlands south in panic, flood the main highways leading in and out of France, cut off all possibility of swift maneuvers for the Allied army—but he found that he preferred to hunch his shoulders and ignore the unblinking eyes. He kept his gaze fixed on the tips of his shoes.
Until the woman said, in French, “Please, monsieur. Do you know where I might find a bed for the night?”
She was alone, but no fille de joie, this one—no prostitute opening early for business. Her simple cotton dress was smeared with blood and what looked like mud; more mud spattered on her cheekbone and the fingers that clenched convulsively as they dangled at her side. He recoiled from her, from the accusation in her look.
“Have you tried one of the train stations? I think the city has set up cots,” he said.
“How do I get there?”
He turned and pointed to the Métro, the entrance of furled iron and glass. “There is a map of the system on the wall.”
“I have no money.” She said it blankly, a raw statement of fact. “I was robbed yesterday, after the planes went over.”
“Are you alone?”
“Except for my children.”
Spatz glanced around. Other than the exhausted pregnant woman he’d noticed earlier, nobody had children in this corner of the city. “Where are they?”
“I forgot. Mon Dieu, I forgot. I buried them with my own hands beside the road. Both dead! Mon Dieu, mes enfants—”
Her eyes closed tightly and her mouth fell open as she sank down onto the paving stones, keening uncontrollably. In sudden horror Spatz backed away, tossing franc notes at her feet. His hands were shaking.
At this tw
ilit hour, Montmartre stirred and women in dressing gowns emerged to sweep doorsteps filthy with vomit and grime, the tinny sound of phonograph records drifting from tired kitchens. For the most part they ignored the refugees who’d sprung up like dandelions overnight; what to do in the face of so many? It was the perfect theatre for suicide, Spatz thought, remembering the mother half insane with grief; he had never been able to bear Montmartre in daylight.
The Alibi Club was wedged into a corner of the Place du Tertre, holding down its cobblestoned bit with flaring neon and garish red lintels. The square was deserted but for a man sipping something at a table in the central café; Spatz studied him: soft hat, modest overcoat, large mustache, eyes that ignored his newspaper and swept easily instead over Spatz: well-heeled, too large for this kind of life. Spatz cocked his blond head and entered the club.
He could hear Memphis singing.
It was a mournful sound, something of Billie Holiday’s, the kind of tune Memphis never chose. Memphis didn’t cry into a heroin cocktail: She sang the world Cole Porter invented—rich white women, dancing till dawn, and champagne in bed. But today her voice ripped along Spatz’s spine with jagged fingernails, and he stood rigidly in the empty room, noticing the forlorn little tables, chairs akimbo, one white linen cloth trailing. She was singing in her dressing room. And a man—utterly different from the café loiterer outside—sat primly on her elevated stage.
“Morris,” Spatz said.
“Von Dincklage,” the American acknowledged. “I hoped you would come.”
“I’m never in the quarter at this hour.” Spatz removed his fedora, laid it lightly on one of the tables. Reached for his cigarette case.
“But then I summoned you. Through that woman in the back room.”
Spatz lifted his eyes coldly.
“It is imperative,” Morris continued, jumping down from his perch on the stage, “that we talk. Don’t you think? For the greater good of the Reich, and our mutual survival?”
“What do you want, Morris?”
The Alibi Club Page 14
