The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “The Earl of Suffolk is to be trusted,” Allier told Joliot in a lowered voice as Mad Jack lifted tubes and peered into beakers, happy as a clam at high tide. “I am ordered by my minister to give him every facility, you understand?”

  It was late Saturday afternoon. Irène hadn’t bothered to come to the lab today; she was at home in Antony, resting. Joliot was self-conscious now around her, exactingly polite. Terrified of embarking on any conversation that might tumble him, willy-nilly, into a confession of love for another woman. She had never raised the issue of Nell again after that first evening, as though everything that needed to be said was already understood between them. She was aware of his guilt much as she might visualize each facet of a scientific theory before undertaking the burden of proof. That was why she’d left the children in Brittany. She did not want them contaminated. He was suddenly and forever radioactive.

  “Got the heavy water safely out of town, I take it?” the earl inquired.

  Frowning, Joliot glanced at Allier. The banker gave a barely perceptible nod. It was true that Moureu had awakened Joliot at seven o’clock the previous morning with a telephone call, to say that he and Kowarski were in Clermont-Ferrand; Product Z was tucked away in the Bank of France’s vault; he was on his way back to Paris while Kowarski tracked down a suitable location for the temporary Auvergne lab—but that was privileged information. Not something to toss like confetti at a virtual stranger. Even if Moureu’s canisters were decoys.

  “Good of you to consider the HydroNorsk stockpile,” Mad Jack observed. “Very astute. Forward-thinking. We were no end bucked when Allier came to London to tell us all about it. Couldn’t have pulled a neater operation ourselves. And then when the Germans simply rolled over Norway—”

  “What is it you’ve come to say?” Joliot interrupted.

  The Englishman propped himself on a metal stool and fished a hard salami out of his tweed pocket. He gave it all his attention, a small knife in his hand.

  “I’m inviting you to Cambridge, old chap. The Cavendish laboratory, perfect for a man of your brilliance and reputation. I can offer you every assurance of professional support and private accommodation—help with resettling the wife and kiddies, the esteem and collaboration of the best minds in England. And you’d have the comfort of knowing you were fighting Jerry instead of walking right into his trap.”

  “It is by no means certain the Germans will prevail.” Joliot glanced at Allier, whose face was expressionless. “It could be a very long war.”

  The earl shook his head. “Honor you for the sentiment. Shows proper feeling and all that. But rather a forlorn hope, what? Your man Reynaud told our P.M. Thursday that his army was done for. Had no choice but to give up the ship. Actually read Churchill the riot act for not sending more planes! I’ve never seen the Old Man so incensed. No, I’d say it’s all over but the shouting.”

  Joliot set down the papers he’d been holding and strolled toward the laboratory windows.

  “And yet you’ve got this plan for a bomb,” the earl mused. “Taken out a patent on it. I think we’re all agreed we can’t let any particle of that research—hah! no pun intended—fall into Jerry’s hands.”

  “Reynaud will never give up Paris,” Joliot said.

  “But he has instructed our ministry, voyez-vous, to prepare to fall back to Tours,” Allier interjected. “From what I understand, every branch of the French government is making evacuation plans. We have people burning papers even now at the Armaments Ministry. There’s no telling when the word will come. You’ve got to be prepared, Joliot.”

  “I agreed to go to Clermont-Ferrand—”

  “That may not be far enough. You do realize that you, yourself—that brain in your head—are as much of a danger to France as your heavy water and your cyclotron? If you fall into German hands? We can’t guarantee your safety, mon ami. Or the safety of Irène and the children. We can’t even guarantee we can get you out. But the earl is willing to try.”

  Joliot wheeled around and stared at the banker. “Take my boys,” he said. “Take von Halban and Kowarski. They’re first-class minds and they need a place to work. The Germans will simply kill them.”

  “To be sure they will,” Mad Jack agreed. “But don’t think they won’t kill you, too, Joliot—once they’ve learned everything they need to know. Extraordinarily efficient soldiers, the Germans. Damnably efficient.”

  He had finished carving his salami and he offered Joliot a slice, his eyes thoroughly hard. The earl might sound like Bertie Wooster, but Joliot understood suddenly that the Englishman was no music hall character, no readily dismissed fool.

  “How long until I must decide?” His eyes remained on the earl and his tattooed arm, the bright blade of the knife in his hand.

  “I’ll give you a day or two.” Mad Jack grinned. “Unless Jerry gets here first.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Monday, the twentieth of May, and the German planes swooping low over Cherbourg harbor again.

  The captain had ordered them all into the hold of the ship—not the true hull, which was packed with crates of cargo because the Clothilde was a merchant steamer—but the lowest passenger area that could be reached. The uppermost deck was covered with sandbags against the possibility of fire. All around their berth were French naval ships, manning antiaircraft guns; once in a while they brought down a German plane, which plummeted like a sizzling phoenix into the sea. To the cheers of those watching.

  The bombs had been falling for four days, ever since Sally and Mme. Blum first came aboard Friday morning, and she was sick of the stench and the heat inside the Clothilde’s hold, sick of the hundreds of desperate people who’d overwhelmed the Dutch crew and forced their way onto the ship.

  Sally and Mme. Blum had arrived thirteen hours late for their scheduled departure, having fought their way through tides of retreating soldiers, most of them English, on the Cherbourg road. The exhausted men had parted for the hearse out of some vestigial respect for the dead, but both long, black cars had proceeded at a snail’s pace through the ranks, the four-hour trip lengthening and lengthening until darkness fell and Mme. Blum began to snore in the limousine’s corner and Sally was ready to scream with impatience. They gave rides to a few soldiers in the massive expanse of the limousine, boys of eighteen and twenty talking carelessly as the car crawled toward Cherbourg through the evening hours. Sally learned their names only to forget them, she heard rumors of the German advance, saw the delicate trembling of fingers as each lost boy stepped back out of the car, saluting. The whole world was staggering toward the English Channel and the Nazis were on their heels.

  At three o’clock in the morning they’d pulled off the road so that the driver could sleep. Both cars were parked on the verge of a crossroads leading nowhere through the apple orchards of Normandy, Léonie Blum murmuring in her dreams and Sally restlessly dozing. A stutter of sound, and then the hailstorm of strafing bullets: Messerschmitts. She started awake, screaming.

  When the planes had flown on, bodies and vehicles littered the road. The lucky ones had dived into ditches; a few cars had overturned. But the silent figures in the middle of the highway told their own story. She had been showered by Death and the raindrops had missed her.

  “Why would they do such a thing?” Mme. Blum raged. “How could they? With women and children on the road?”

  “They’re clearing it,” Sally said. “For their tanks and armored vehicles. It’s the most efficient way. We’ve got to get off this highway somehow.”

  Their driver—elderly, appalled, tears streaming down his face—threw the limousine into gear and turned abruptly into the side road. They followed the apple trees to nowhere for the rest of that night.

  “I’d rather he just put the damned boat to sea and took his chances,” Léonie Blum declared now in the Clothilde’s hold. “We could die here as easily as crossing to Southampton or Folkestone. What is the man waiting for?”

  “Orders.” Sally reached into her p
urse and passed the old woman a handkerchief—not too badly soiled. They had yet to spend more than an hour in their cabin; meals were sporadic affairs of water and crackers doled out by the overworked crew; and Sally had no idea where their luggage had gone. “The captain told me he’s under orders from the French navy not to leave. That’s the only reason he was still at anchor when we got here on Friday. I don’t think the poor man’s life is his own.”

  She had spoken to the captain only twice. He was a harassed and despairing individual who could not go home again to Holland, which was occupied by the Germans now, without being impressed into the German navy or having his ship confiscated. He wanted to reach the safety of England. Draw breath for a day or two. Decide the best way to fight or even whether he wanted to.

  He had refused to accept Philip’s coffin. Sally had given him all the money she had to take it on board. It was stowed now in the area of the ship reserved for meat—a refrigerated unit, although the captain, whose name was Anders, had turned off the generator to conserve his battery power. She avoided thinking of Philip’s body rocking gently in the bilge. Instead she said to Mme. Blum: “We won’t stay here forever, you know. Tell me about your niece. She’s in her forties, I think you said? With two children?”

  “Two boys,” Léonie Blum corrected. “David and Saul. Growing like weeds. She sent me pictures…Saul for my brother, the one in Munich. I haven’t heard from him in nearly two years…”

  Sally knew all about the old man in Munich who’d been sent to a labor camp. Mme. Blum had been talking about him fretfully for days, as though the decision to leave Europe, to turn her back on an entire existence and plunge, at the age of seventy-six, into the unknown, had come to be symbolized by this brother whose face she would never see again. Sally let her talk. Her own thoughts wandered to Bordeaux and Joe Hearst. He must have reached the city by now, with his collection of household effects and whining children. Maybe they were already at sea, the rest of the Americans—already bound for New York—while Sally was adrift in the Atlantic with Hearst’s precious file and her dead lover in a box.

  But she had been faithful to Joe in her way. Uncertain exactly where her luggage was, crushed by the sheer numbers of people crammed into this boat that had never been intended for passengers, she had tucked his manila envelope under the wilting spray of white flowers Sullivan & Cromwell had ordered strapped to the top of Philip’s coffin. She figured the documents were safest there, guarded by a corpse in the refrigerated hold.

  The Clothilde shuddered violently.

  “Mon Dieu,” Léonie Blum gasped, clutching at Sally’s hand. “We’ve been hit! The sales Boches are sinking us!”

  “No.” Sally was listening, her whole body straining toward the surface. “I think that’s the engines, not a bomb. We’re moving.”

  She pushed her way up on deck. It was important to stand facing France as the Clothilde moved out of Cherbourg harbor, to drink deep of the salt air and the fumes of burning, to stare until her eyes ached at this spit of land where the quaint old buildings of the town spilled into the sea, to witness the fires on the neighboring ships and stare at the Dutch seamen as they beat out the smoking embers not ten feet away from where she stood. It was important to say good-bye to this country she was abandoning. The Clothilde wallowed and heaved; a German plane soared low over Sally’s head and she stared up at its belly fearlessly, seeing the gunner’s face as he aimed through the transparent turret.

  “Get down!” a sailor shouted, but he spoke Dutch and she did not understand the words.

  The German plane passed over her head without firing.

  “I’ll never be afraid of dying,” she said aloud, watching the plane into the horizon. “It can’t be worse than leaving France.”

  “But you’re not leaving,” a voice said close by her; an intimate, insinuating voice. “Haven’t you heard? The captain’s been ordered up the coast. We’re supposed to evacuate the army. If the Germans don’t sink us first.”

  She turned and stared at the man: a neat figure despite the privations of the past four days; his eyes overly wet and bright above a toothbrush mustache.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Do I know you?”

  He smiled primly and bowed. “Emery Morris. I worked with Philip, at Sullivan and Cromwell.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Nell stood in the cool center of the cuverie—the long, dim shed where her first-year wines were stored—and watched old Henri topping up the casks. It was a methodical process, undertaken almost daily as the aging wine evaporated into thin air: the glass stopper removed from its bunghole and extra wine ladled into the barrels, to prevent an excess of oxygen in the mix. These casks were several years old, culled from the forests of Tronçais, not the brand-new ones of Nevers oak she’d just hauled from Paris. Those were reserved for the harvest to come in four months’ time, for the grapes that had not yet set on the vines that had not yet flowered. Most vineyards in Nell’s part of the Médoc preferred to use only old oak, mellowed and saturated with years of wine, but she considered new oak essential to the aging process—a concept she’d borrowed from Baron Philippe at Mouton-Rothschild. The wood imparted flavor and scent; its raw tannins shortened the aging period. She’d had difficulty convincing Henri that her instincts were right—it was he who blended Nell’s wines—and only time would truly tell if her penchant for the new was preferable to his fidelity to the old.

  Château Loudenne’s red wine was part Cabernet Sauvignon, part Merlot, a little Petit-Verdot and Malbec. Henri varied the mix from year to year, drawing on different sections of the vineyards according to the quality of that season’s grapes. He’d been doing it from the age of fifteen, having followed his father through the trellised rows since he could walk. Henri’s son had no winemaker’s palate—no sixth sense for what an untamed crush might be in twenty years—but the old man’s nineteen-year-old grandson was born with a cork in his mouth, and Henri intended for the boy to take over at Loudenne when the time came. Young Roger was somewhere in the Ardennes right now, in command of a gun emplacement. Part of Bertrand’s company, in fact.

  “I put the new folk onto spraying the Merlot vines,” Henri told Nell as she stood silently watching him. “La Baronne sent us some copper sulfate, along with her people. Good of her. All the copper in the world’s been commandeered by the Armaments Ministry. She must have had a storehouse full of it at Mouton. That’ll be the Baron, of course—only a Rothschild could get copper sulfate in time of war.”

  “Are they any good?”

  Henri glanced at her from under his bushy eyebrows. “The new folk, you mean? They know which end of the vine the grapes hang on. She didn’t send us the lame and halt, if that’s what you’re asking. They’ll do.”

  The day after Nell agreed to harbor Julian de Kuyper and the Loewens brothers, five winery workers had arrived from Mouton-Rothschild: two men in their sixties, a boy of fifteen, and two women of indeterminate age. Nell had turned them over immediately to Henri, who found them places to sleep above the chai. He’d set them tasks over the past few days and quietly assessed their talents: this one to help rack, this one to stand patiently with a bowl full of casein while Henri fined the second-year wine, this one grafting in the greenhouse. He was careful with the women and joked with the men; the boy he took instantly under his wing.

  Nell had been left with very little to do. She spent her time worrying about how she would pay these people—five more salaries to meet—and where to find food for her rapidly expanding household. Between her domestic staff, the visitors from Holland, and the winery workers, they numbered twenty.

  “I’ll just have to sell something,” she muttered, as she walked back up the gravel drive toward the château. “A painting, perhaps. A piece of silver. I’ll find a buyer in Bordeaux.”

  Thirty yards from the entrance she stopped short. The strains of a violin were wafting through an open window—painful, melancholy, fleeting. That would be Elie Loewens, the youngest
of the three Jews from Amsterdam. A trained musician who spent his idle hours practicing, practicing, as though if he could perfect this difficult passage of Berlioz he might be able to control what happened to him. Nell closed her eyes as she listened, the violin blending with the wind-stirred leaves and the call of a bird somewhere in the distance.

  “I didn’t know you ran to concerts at Loudenne,” remarked a voice behind her.

  She turned abruptly—but her ear had not deceived her.

  “What are you doing here, Spatz?”

  He had driven her little car south from Paris, taking the trip in stages over the past two days, and it was clear he’d brought news.

  “I know nothing of what’s happening,” she said. “I have a radio, but the national broadcasts are so stupid—repeating rumors and lies. What’s going on in Paris?”

  Spatz cocked his sleek blond head. “Not much. Reynaud is still hanging on, but the army’s in full retreat. I drove through enough French soldiers on the road south to overthrow Hitler myself. Pathetic.”

  “But you must know more than that! Your people—”

  “—Tell me that your husband’s company surrendered three days ago, on the outskirts of Rouen,” he said brusquely. “Bertrand’s a prisoner of war, Nell.”

  “Surrendered?” She swayed slightly on the gravel drive, and Spatz gripped her arm. “But why?”

  “No other choice. You have no idea what it’s like, Nanoo. Entire battalions are surrounded. The few poor bastards who make it to the coast grab any boat they can find and put out to sea. They don’t come back.”

  Nell looked around her blindly, groped toward a stone bench that sat under a great Médoc pine. In the house the violin had fallen silent. She could imagine the Loewens brothers peering warily through the tall windows at this blond stranger standing over the countess, the sudden terror that already they were betrayed.