The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “I don’t understand,” Sally said. “Carbon monoxide? The stuff that comes out of a car’s tailpipe?”

  “Flowing freely through every highway and city in the world. So why buy the stuff in bulk?”

  She shrugged. “What else have you got?”

  “Something that looks like an official memorandum,” he said as he surveyed the next sheet of paper, “from the German Interior Ministry. Dated August of ’39. It’s about something called…how would I translate this?—The Reich Committee for the Scientific Study of Severe Hereditary and Congenital Diseases. Apparently if you give birth to a child with any kind of deformity, you have to register it with them. Or so this memorandum says.”

  “And?”

  “—And I’ve no idea what that has to do with Lamont’s letter. Except that he’s initialed this memo and scribbled From Juergen at the bottom. Maybe this was Lamont’s ‘Juergen’ file.”

  “Next,” Sally ordered, draining her gimlet.

  “A list of hospitals, as far as I can make out. ‘Stuttgart Samaritan Foundation: Grafeneck Castle. Facility for Care and Nursing: Bernburgan-der-Saale. Linz: Hartheim Castle. Facility for Care and Nursing: Sonnenstein-bei-Pirna.’ Any of those ring a bell?”

  “Philip never mentioned them, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And finally—” Hearst handed her a fourth sheet of paper, this one a flimsy copy of what might have been an invoice. “A purchase order for a fleet of buses, on behalf of the Charitable Society for the Transportation of the Sick. Headquarters, Berlin.”

  “That’s all?”

  Hearst waggled the empty manila envelope.

  “But Philip told Allier to keep these papers safe with the rest—which means there’s more,” Sally argued. “Pieces of the puzzle we don’t have.”

  “You think more pieces would help?”

  “Philip wasn’t murdered for car exhaust.”

  “Looks like somebody else was.”

  Hearst held out a fragment of faded newsprint that had been tucked into one of the document’s folds. A square scissored by conscientious hands. It was a photograph of a sober-looking man, neither old nor young, in the uncompromising black eyeglasses of an engineer.

  Juergen Gebl, the death notice said. Manager, I.G. Farbenindustrie, Ludwigshafen. Killed 25 August 1939.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  None of them could eat that night, Joliot or young Moureu, who was pale with excitement and the burden of being tried; von Halban and the big Russian they called Lew—pronounced Lev—all of them standing under the laboratory lights around the map Jacques Allier had spread on the chemistry bench.

  Allier had brought in fresh loaves of bread and a couple of good cheeses from a shop near the Ministry. He’d also brought several bottles of white burgundy and two uniformed military police with guns, who stood silently surveying the group of physicists as he talked.

  “You, Monsieur Moureu, are familiar with the Auvergne, I understand?”

  “My grandparents kept a cottage there when I was a boy.” Moureu was much younger than the rest, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a shock of unruly hair; he looked overly eager, on the verge of hysteria.

  “The roads, I’m afraid, are not much improved,” Allier continued. “You will want to stick to the main turnpikes. Head south by the Porte d’Orléans to Orléans itself, and then by degrees to Bourges and Limoges. From the Limousin, you may proceed due east to Clermont-Ferrand. You should reach the Massif Central by daylight.”

  “It was my father’s habit to take the Dijon road,” Moureu objected, “to Lyon and then west—”

  “—But with the entire force of the German army spreading like a disease in that part of the country,” Joliot said gently, “it would be wiser to do as Allier says.”

  “We aren’t coming back, are we?” Lew Kowarski looked challengingly at all of them from under his bushy black eyebrows.

  “Is that an existential judgment, my dear Lew—or a question?” von Halban asked with ponderous humor.

  The Russian shrugged. “Take your pick. Me, I don’t expect the sales Boches to stop until they reach the Atlantic. Once the deuterium’s in the Auvergne, do we hunt out a good place for temporary quarters? Find a spot for Joliot’s cloud chamber?”

  Allier stabbed at his glasses with relief. He had been dreading some kind of scene—Kowarski demanding assurance of his family’s safety, forcing the subject of their internment for the duration; Kowarski and von Halban refusing to submit. No decision had been made yet about the fate of these foreigners—the minister was too harassed with waves of tanks and Reynaud’s insistence on keeping his precious planes in reserve against some greater German thrust yet to come; he had no time for a couple of scientists. However much Allier argued treason.

  “Minister Dautry has authorized the rental of a suitable villa that might house your staff and equipment,” he answered. “On a temporary basis, of course. Once you’ve located such a place, you may send for your families. But first, the water. The branch of the Banque de France whose vault we will be using lies here, in Rue Gregoire de Tours.” He pointed with the tip of his pen at a map of Clermont-Ferrand. “A Monsieur Boyer is the manager. You are to refer to the water as Product Z. Boyer has no idea what it is.”

  “I’m taking my dog,” Kowarski said suddenly. “A borzoi. He’ll tear the throat out of any German who comes near the truck. You like dogs, Moureu?”

  “If he’s bathed.”

  “And you, Joliot?” Kowarski turned. “What do you do while we risk our necks with the Boches on back country roads?”

  “I’ll be packing up the laboratory,” Joliot replied. “Deciding what stays and goes.”

  “The cyclotron?”

  “Impossible.”

  Kowarski swore colorfully. He loved Joliot’s cyclotron the way some men cherished cars or women.

  “You and Monsieur Moureu will do most of the trip tonight.” Allier’s mild brown eyes were fixed on the Russian. “Spell each other driving. Joffroi and Méleuse—” this with a nod at the armed guards— “will ride in the back of the truck with the water. They have orders to kill anybody who tries to steal it. If they’re overwhelmed, they’re to destroy the supply.”

  “Am I also to have a personal army?” von Halban asked the banker.

  “There is a slight disagreement about that.”

  “I’ve told Lieutenant Allier that I cannot be responsible for the ill-effects of radiation,” Joliot said smoothly. “You know, Hans, that we who work with uranium on a daily basis are all dead men—it is the price we pay for science—but can we ask innocent soldiers such as these—” with a theatrical gesture at Joffroi and Méleuse—“to share our sentence? To ride all night in an enclosed compartment with poison? To undertake the duty of destroying it—and how in God’s name would they do so without the gravest bodily harm—in the event of being intercepted by the Nazis? I refuse to have blood on my hands. I refuse that burden for you, Hans. And I have told the lieutenant as much.”

  He was not a theatrical man, despite the gestures, despite the lofty words, and he intended poor Hans to read in his artifice the desire to protect him. The desire for implicit trust. For Hans and his freedom to head south in a car, blessedly alone, to do what he chose in safety with the uranium Joliot had moved heaven and earth to obtain. He could not have trusted von Halban more if he’d handed him his own son, if he’d given him Pierre to bundle onto a ship in Marseille; he wanted von Halban to know this, tonight, as they stood there in the company of strangers. In case, as Kowarski said, nobody ever came back.

  “How much uranium must be moved?” the banker asked.

  They stared at him, surprised, having assumed he would know.

  “Four hundred kilograms. We purchased it not six months ago, from a source in America.”

  “Not natural uranium?”

  “Metal,” von Halban corrected. “It’s a relatively new process—and produces a higher-density form, which means the neutrons have a sh
orter distance to travel.”

  “Do they travel?”

  “In a chain reaction.” Joliot was not looking at the banker but at von Halban. “You’ll need another truck. Allier will get you one.”

  “Of course.” The banker reached into his briefcase and withdrew an envelope. “The minister has agreed that you may take this dangerous metal alone, Herr von Halban, because le Professeur Joliot-Curie has insisted on it. But we retain the right, voyez-vous, to direct your movements. Read the contents of that envelope and then burn it. Share your instructions with no one.”

  Von Halban clicked his heels together and bowed his head—in the manner of an Austrian nobleman—and recognized too late that he might as well have screeched Heil Hitler.

  “Hans,” Joliot said a few minutes later as von Halban prepared to leave—there was luggage to pack, his wife to kiss good-bye, the Ministry letter to read and burn—“no matter what Dautry’s people say, you have only one mission. Hide it somewhere safe, where no one can steal it and no one can be hurt by it. And don’t tell me where it is until the war’s over.”

  Joliot lingered in the darkened lab, afraid that if he left the Collège de France his feet might carry him through the darkness to the Hôtel Crillon. He did not want to ask for Nell and have her deny him; he did not want to learn that she was no longer there.

  He pulled up a stool and set it in the doorway of the room that housed his cyclotron—a massive machine, the first in Western Europe. He knew from friends in Germany that the Nazi government had considered commissioning one. They had invaded France to get his. It provided a beam of deuterons of energies up to 7 MeV—exceeded only by a machine at Berkeley, where Lawrence had first invented the cyclotron. A scientist named Paxton—a colleague of Lawrence’s—had actually come to France to help Joliot build the glove box and oscillator. The magnet had been made in Switzerland at the Oerlikon works. It was a magnificent machine, worthy of a Nobel laureate and his Nobel laureate wife. Joliot hated the thought of it broken down and shipped in crates to Dahlem or Berlin.

  “And what problem, exactly, were you solving while you walked all night?” a voice asked from the laboratory behind him.

  He turned, caught her face pale and floating in the dim light; the heavy mass of her black hair, the unblinking focus of her gaze. Irène was capable of staring at the evidence of particles without blinking for moments on end; his wife could face down any natural anomaly and provide a theory for its existence. He could not say whether she understood love.

  “I was considering how to prevent the Nazis from taking what matters most.”

  “Your cyclotron?”

  He shook his head. “You. Hélène. Pierre.”

  “But are people really critical, Fred? In the individual rather than the mass?”

  She was making a scientist’s pun—critical mass. It was the sort of thing he might once have celebrated gently, admiring her detachment. Tonight, however, he was too tired and lonely to take refuge in the cerebral.

  “We all die,” she continued reasonably. “Only our discoveries outlive us. Science will endure long after it kills us all.”

  It was possible that Irène, who was so much sicker than he, whose anemia and chronic tuberculosis were constant cause for concern, whose diet was restricted now and whose activities were limited—it was possible that Irène had found the study of death more profitable than love.

  “And your conclusion?” she asked abruptly. “On your long walks in the depths of the night?”

  “The question is whether to stay or go, Irène,” he said simply. “Stay—and face the consequences of working under German rule, in the hope that France survives—or go. And lend our talents to other worlds.”

  “I will never leave France. I do not want to be buried in strange ground.”

  She turned away, walked toward the laboratory door. Upright in solitude, monolithic and impenetrable, like the death that held her hand.

  “Where are the children?” he called after her.

  “Arcouest. With Tatin. Until things are…clearer, here.”

  Tatin was the nursemaid. He thought of the small faces—Hélène and Pierre, with buttercups under their chins shining liquid yellow—and yearned toward them.

  “That was wise,” he said.

  She turned and looked at him one last time. “The Comtesse de Loudenne is in Paris,” she said. “Did you know?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Spatz rang his doorbell, von Halban was packing—a few freshly laundered shirts, an ascot for the days when ties would be questionable, two suits, and the laboratory coat he always wore while working. He threw three scientific journals into the leather satchel he’d had since Swiss boarding school: Nature, Comptes Rendus (from the Académie des Sciences), and a recent issue of the Journal de Physique, in which he himself had a modest article—“Mise en évidence d’une réaction nucléaire en chaîne au sien d’une masse uranifère”—coauthored with Kowarski and Joliot. But he was not really thinking of these things. His wife was standing in the doorway, studying him. He felt like a thief in the night.

  “Are you taking the saxophone?” Annick asked.

  It was a symbol of everything frivolous and casual that would be destroyed by war, von Halban thought: the gleaming brass instrument he’d struggled to master and had always loved, breathing through the tube at odd hours when the children were asleep, filling the stairwell of the apartment building with sinuous threads. He was too stiff for jazz, too archaically formal, a man of method and classification, a Germanic sensibility that never relaxed or let its hair down, a despairing poet who craved strict form. Why he cared for the music at all—why it spoke to him of what he would never be—had something to do with the unruly blood in his veins. The elements that were not Austrian, were not even European, but far older: blood that remembered desert sun, frenetic bazaars, the hawking and spitting of camel vendors, women’s hips undulating in the light of oil lamps. His Jewish blood, quietly triumphant in the untracked hours when he struggled for improvisation.

  “There will be no use for saxophones where I’m going,” he answered.

  “And where is that?”

  He tossed a set of undergarments in the satchel.

  “I broke our lease this morning,” Annick said with bitter triumph. “I informed Mme. Jaunne. We are leaving before these sales Boches destroy Paris, I told her; before the bombs start to fall. Thank God my parents can take care of me, even if my half-Aryan husband refuses to do so.”

  “Annick—”

  But she had turned from him, left the hallway empty. The clanging note of the front doorbell hung in the air; somewhere his daughters’ laughter.

  He sank down on the edge of the bed. He had no answers for his wife: no destination, no length of stay, no likely date of return. No advice to give in her own predicament: Remain in Paris? Run to the in-laws in Pontoise? Had he been his own master—no Joliot, no Ministry of Armaments, no uranium in lead-lined coffers waiting to be transported across the sea—he would have gathered his family in his encircling arms and left in any small plane he could find for England, or America: somewhere the Germans had not yet reached. He could not say this to Annick—there was no plane, no freedom from Joliot’s mastery. No spare change to speak of. He made a decent salary in the lab but it was hardly enough to dress Annick in the style a Parisienne thought necessary. He was careful with the monthly accounts, he often went without some minor luxury, but they were always in debt. There was no slack to take up now, no fund to pilfer, no berths to be bought on the last ships out of French harbors.

  “Hans,” she said abruptly from the doorway again—and he looked up to find her nostrils flaring, her anger so immense it nearly stopped her breathing—“visitors have come to call.”

  “Who?”

  “That German from our wedding. Perhaps he intends to recruit you. And such a woman—”

  He thought of the cousin. Some message for Joliot, perhaps. He rose quickly, too eagerly for Annick
, who snorted her contempt. But it was not the Comtesse de Loudenne who stood with Spatz in his living room.

  “Good God,” he said blankly, staring at Memphis: the embroidered silk of her traveling suit, the ostrich gloves, the snakeskin shoes. She looked magnificent, like a goddess descended from a mountain to their spartan home—a sordid space of chrome tubes and black leather. She smiled, and all he could think of was the night he’d seen her at the Folies Bergères: dancing bare-breasted with a belt of bananas slung around her waist.

  “Good evening, von Halban,” Spatz said easily from her side. “Forgive me for persuading your beautiful wife. You’re packing for a trip, I understand. Business?”

  “Of a sort.”

  “And where are you going?”

  You will proceed directly to Marseille by the western route through Tours, veering east only once you are south of the Auvergne, and in Marseille will proceed immediately to the destroyer Foudroyant, under the command of Captain Bedoyer…You will give your supplies into the captain’s keeping and return immediately to Paris…

  He had burned the Ministry letter as instructed.

  “That I am forbidden to tell, Spatz.”

  “Ah. And you, ma belle?” The bright blond plumage, the glittering bird’s eye, were cocked at Annick. “Are you bound on this journey, too?”

  “My wife is promised to her parents,” von Halban said stiffly.

  “I see.” Spatz studied Hans a moment, keenly aware as always of undercurrents and what could not be said. “Time is short, my dear fellow, and I will not abuse your kindness by wasting it. I have a proposition for you—for you and your wife, I should say—”

  Annick drew a sharp breath. “Me? You want to recruit me? But this is too much!”

  “But I forget my manners,” the German exclaimed regretfully. “Mademoiselle Memphis Jones—Annick von Halban. Doktor von Halban.”

  Memphis slipped her leg backward in an elegant, if wholly theatrical curtsey, and von Halban said hurriedly, “Of course. Charmed. A great honor—”