The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “You don’t even know if he’s alive, do you?” she said. “Just that his company gave up.”

  “I’ll find out—what his status is, where he’s sent. I know you care about Bertrand, no matter how much you two…despite your past differences…”

  “Yes.” She looked up. “Oh, God. Henri. His grandson Roger serves under Bertrand. I’ll have to tell him—”

  Spatz nodded. “I’ll wait for you in the salon. I drove most of the night and I’m tired. Is your housekeeper still here? Do you have any eggs?”

  The salon.

  Some memory of the violin—the two children playing in the formal box garden behind the house—brought Nell to her feet. Her heart was racing and for the life of her she could not say what Spatz would do with the information she was about to give him. She only knew that she was honor-bound to protect her refugees—out of simple decency, out of fellow feeling, all the bargains with Elizabeth de Chambure forgotten.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said slowly. “I have visitors, Spatz.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Joe Hearst rolled into Bordeaux at the rear of a convoy of fifteen cars and two vans, all packed with people and luggage, more than a week after he’d left Paris. It was Saturday afternoon, the twenty-fifth of May. A trip that should have required two days of travel had been prolonged by an unexpected outbreak of measles just shy of Orléans. With seven children and two adults quarantined in the village of Châteaudun, and no possibility of finding rooms for the rest of his forty-odd Americans, Hearst had twiddled his thumbs at a local campsite and fretted about the loss of time. He’d called Paris repeatedly from Châteaudun’s single public telephone: Bullitt’s office, Shoop’s office, Sûreté headquarters—anybody who might be able to give him news of the hunt for Philip Stilwell’s killer. But there was no news—Morris had not been found. Which meant that if Sally King hadn’t boarded her boat, she was still in danger.

  Now, on this Saturday afternoon, Bordeaux under a lowering threat of rain, with the end of his responsibilities in sight, Hearst was irritable as hell. He was fed up with whining and feverish children. He hated being far from the nerve center of war. He was lonely and yet surfeited with people; he wanted quiet and a bottle of good red wine—a ’29 Margaux, if possible. He left the convoy sprawling in the Esplanade des Quinconces, the reviving children chasing one another among the fountains, and stalked off under the plane trees to the American consulate.

  It was housed in an imposing eighteenth-century building, not far from the Bordeaux Préfecture—the town hall and city offices. The consul-general was a fussy little man named Noakes—“spelled with an a,” he assured Hearst primly—whose previous life had revolved around drinking wine, negotiating the sale and export duties of wines, and recommending the best vintages and domaines to American tourists traveling through his province. He lived in the consulate itself, and his bachelor existence had been a thoroughly happy one; he was unprepared for war and the demands it brought. Indeed, he was overwhelmed.

  “I may say I received a letter from the ambassador—Mr. Bullitt—some five days ago, advising me of your probable arrival,” he fretted when Hearst presented his card, “but I am afraid I can offer little in the way of help. The whole town is overrun with those looking for accommodation and passage home. Channel shipping is all at sixes and sevens, you know, whether one hails from New York or Southampton, what with the Germans harrying any vessel that so much as dares to thrust its prow out of the harbor.”

  Hearst listened, and hoped devoutly that Sally had gotten on the Clothilde in Cherbourg. She ought to be safe in New York by this time.

  “No, no, my dear Mr. Hearst—the only possible thing to do is to turn around and head back to Paris,” Noakes assured him. “You’ll be much more comfortable there, and once this silly dispute with Herr Hitler is settled—”

  “Nothing would induce me to get back on the road to Paris with that group,” Hearst replied.

  It was only by the exercise of immense patience that he prolonged the interview. Over a glass of Margaux—the ’34, if not the ’29—he eventually learned that Hoddard Noakes had done one thing in preparation for the embassy evacuation: He had consulted with the British consul in Bordeaux, who advised that he lodge his people at one of the vineyards outside the city, preferably northward along the Gironde estuary. Hearst leaped at this sensible suggestion.

  “We have tents,” he said. “We’ll be no trouble.”

  “I hope you have money as well,” Noakes observed with surprising shrewdness. “There isn’t a vineyard proprietor in the Médoc that isn’t hurting. The ’39 harvest was dreadful—the peasants insist a bad crop presages war—and now with labor so damnably shorthanded—”

  “We’ll buy provisions here in Bordeaux,” Hearst suggested, “and shift for ourselves if necessary. What we need is a place to wait for a likely ship—and your help in securing our passage.”

  Noakes scribbled a few words on a piece of paper. “Your best bet is to work with the wine-shipping companies. They all have offices here, and they move tons of cargo over the Atlantic every year. Mention my name. If you pay them enough, they’ll even telegraph New York and find out when the next big boat is due at Le Verdon. You’ll want to be standing on the quai waiting for it when it arrives. Otherwise, you’ll never get aboard. Reservations or no.”

  Hearst scanned the slip of paper: two addresses of shipping companies scrawled across the top. “And this third one?” he asked, straining at Noakes’s handwriting. “Château…”

  “Loudenne,” Noakes replied. “It’s a smallish place, quite out of the way—but it backs right down to the river. Good for your purposes. Not one of your great wine houses, mind—produces nothing but cru bourgeois—but it’s virtually empty. An Englishwoman runs it. She’s sure to find room for fifty Americans on her grounds—especially if you’ve got some hard cash. The Countess de Loudenne is not exactly flush.”

  “Will she know we’re coming?” Hearst asked.

  Noakes smiled thinly. “The domaine is not on the telephone. Much better to simply present the countess with a fait accompli, don’t you think?”

  Hearst was wrong: Sally King was not in New York.

  At the very moment he thought of her, she was gripping the Clothilde’s rail and saying to Léonie Blum: “Look at them. Thousands and thousands—we can’t possibly take them all—”

  The merchant steamer was wallowing in the swells just off the coast of Calais. The beach was black with moving ants—company after company of French soldiers who’d fled west before the German armored divisions until they’d abruptly run out of land. The boom of enemy guns reverberated from the inland hills; the air was thick with the whine of circling Messerschmitts. There were other planes in the air now, too—British fighters, always too few for the black cloud of German planes, but fretting at the flanks of the massive force, bringing an occasional enemy plane down in a spiral of smoke and fire into the sea, and plummeting themselves to the shocked moans of the people watching on board the Clothilde. At times the ants returned fire from their positions on the beach—occasionally a French tricoleur waved—but as the day wore on, it was clear the beachhead would be overwhelmed.

  “Poor boys,” Léonie Blum said heavily. “Poor abandoned souls. We must do for them what we can.”

  She and Sally had emerged from the stinking hold to witness this war. If Death came, each of them preferred to meet it in the open air, like the pilots of the RAF planes. The Clothilde had turned north, not west, when it slipped its moorings in Cherbourg, and for the past several days had hugged the coast. The French naval ships based at Cherbourg had been ordered south, to Gibraltar and the relative safety of the Mediterranean. German fighter-bombers strafed the ports and German submarines trolled the Channel. Their object, as Emery Morris explained, was only partly to terrify the retreating French troops into surrender.

  “They’re determined to keep Churchill from landing his reinforcements,” the
lawyer said. “They’ll sink everything that moves in these waters first.”

  And so the Clothilde went on: moving north at a snail’s pace, mooring at night in secluded Norman inlets, her crew flinging themselves at every spark or blast the ship sustained, as though the ship were Noah’s ark and the world’s sole chance for survival.

  “Stand by to launch lifeboats!” Captain Anders cried in hoarse French over the ship’s loudspeaker. “All passengers below!”

  “He can’t be planning to take those soldiers off the beach,” Sally said in disbelief. “My God—they’re desperate enough to sink every one of his boats.”

  Léonie Blum did not answer. She was staring at Emery Morris, who stood about ten feet away from them, also against the rail, also studying the shore. He was smoking a cigarette; an acid little smile flitted over his face.

  “I don’t like that man,” she whispered to Sally.

  “Morris? But he worked with Philip. He’s a lawyer.”

  “I don’t like him,” the older woman repeated. “He follows you with his eyes. There is something not right about that one, look you.”

  A qualm of fear ripped through Sally. She refused to encourage Mme. Blum’s fantasies, but she knew what the woman meant: Morris was watching her. Four hundred people were crammed inside the Clothilde, and yet he was always hovering at her elbow. She’d caught him once with her handbag in his hand, and he’d chided her with false amusement for leaving her belongings behind, on such a ship, where any number of thieves might be lurking among the motley passengers. There was a falseness to his tone, a too-keen interest in her things, that she understood was dangerous.

  Philip’s file, she thought. He wants Philip’s file.

  There was no reason she should suspect Morris. He’d explained he was simply trying to get to New York—that his wife had gone on before him, and he was expected to join her. But her uneasiness persisted. The one night she and Mme. Blum were allowed to sleep without interruption in their tiny cabin, she’d awakened a few hours before dawn convinced she’d heard the door click closed—convinced someone had been standing over her bed, probing with sweating palms beneath her mattress. The revulsion of fear, the sense of doom descending—Sally hadn’t slept again. She’d told Léonie nothing about it at breakfast.

  Ten lifeboats were strung out now, across the waters of Calais, the crewmen pulling with the shorebound current. Sally watched as the first of them nosed into the shallows, the soldiers on the beach not even waiting for the boat to make landfall before surging into the waves to meet it, a horde of them flinging themselves over the gunwales. The cries of the crew and the desperate men were like the screech of gulls carried on the wind. Another boat, and another, all nearly swamped, and the Clothilde’s sailors reduced to flailing at the crowds with their oars, one of them knocked overboard and his place at the stern seized by a soldier, the boat turning and pulling back for the ship with men still wading deeper into the surf.

  “They’d rather drown than be taken by the Germans,” she muttered.

  “Then most of them will drown,” Morris said indifferently at her side. “The captain told me the British are signaling over the radio for any available boat, fishing or otherwise, to take off their troops from Dunkirk. That’s a little north of us, it seems. The entire coast must be filthy with cowards. There aren’t enough boats in the world to save them.”

  “You want the Germans to win, don’t you? You like all this…desperation. You like witnessing the pain. You enjoy…death…”

  He stared back at her implacably, the familiar smile curling at the corners of his tight mustache, and in that instant of calm she understood how he had watched Philip die, how Philip’s terror and pain had excited his sexual frenzy, so that he had desecrated the bodies of the two men before leaving them in the sordid misery of their own blood and gone home to his unsuspecting wife in the suburbs. She understood it all without Morris having to say a word. The certainty of it clenched in her stomach with the conviction that his presence on the ship was no accident, and that she was in the most mortal of dangers.

  But why? What was it about Philip’s papers that had driven Morris to murder?

  “My dear,” he said gently, “I know I will enjoy your death very much.”

  Sally heard and lost his words in the terrible whistling rush that filled the air, as though a demon had split the sea and was rising in a wave to engulf the Clothilde. The torpedos—there were two of them, fired from a German submarine cruising just offshore—tore through the hull and the passengers huddled against its steel walls, penetrating the boiler room and cutting the propeller shaft in two, before exploding with a rush of fire and steam that shot up through the bridge, killing the captain as he watched the first of his lifeboats return.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The German officer was named Krauss, and his corporal was Bagge. Krauss drove with Memphis next to him in the front seat, while Bagge and von Halban held down the rear. They talked little and made frequent stops, so that Krauss could announce the coming of the Third Reich in any village square that would listen, while Bagge stole petrol at gunpoint when it could be found. Krauss was under orders to reach Marseille in advance of his company; it had become a kind of game with him, a test of how many miles he could put between himself and the German army. He often left a corpse in his wake as a calling card: Krauss was here. Von Halban had decided the man was insane.

  The two soldiers had abandoned their motorcycles in Alise-Ste-Reine and left the dead infantryman lying in state in the town hall. Hans guessed they’d intended to take Memphis’s car, luggage and all, but when they learned who she was—Krauss had liked jazz in his university days—they adopted her as a kind of mascot, an exotic prize awarded to the conquerors. She’d insisted Hans come along for the ride, and because he was Austrian by birth the Germans assumed his French papers were false; he was some kind of Reich spy, a Fifth Columnist poised for insurgency. He and Memphis were more afraid of losing the car and its contents than of riding with Krauss, and so they’d driven off, leaving the dead boy with his severed throat and the look of blank horror on his murdered father’s face, the woman screaming behind them.

  They had been traveling now for days.

  Krauss avoided large cities where the French population might actually kill him and kept to the back roads of the Rhône valley. Their days had fallen into a kind of pattern: arrive at the next stop by lunchtime, terrify the populace with the German army’s approach, steal food and fuel, shoot anyone who complained. They’d drive on until late afternoon, when Bagge would set up camp in a deserted spot and Krauss would chart his progress through France on an army map, plotting at a guess where his division might be. He thought perhaps after Marseille he would single-handedly take North Africa, but his military map ended at the Mediterranean. He would talk as he studied his geography, about the superiority of the German race and the inevitability of the Thousand Year Reich; after they’d eaten something Bagge had stolen, Krauss would order Memphis to sing. She never refused.

  Von Halban had learned a good deal about Memphis Jones in the past few days. How she’d survived, for instance. How she’d clawed her way to the top of a world populated by scoundrels. Watching her smile at Krauss, watching her charm the unhinged killer in the well-made uniform, von Halban had understood that to Memphis, all men were the same. They were brutal, they exploited everything they touched, they would kill her as casually as ripping petals off a rose—or they could be used. This was how Memphis had always lived. It was von Halban who found the situation confusing, who suffered in his soul. Von Halban who might not survive.

  He’d had only a few chances to talk about their situation because they were never alone. At night either Krauss or Bagge stayed alert on sentry duty, and by day they were all trapped in the car. It was at their most public moments that communication was easiest. When Krauss was shouting his heavily accented French in a village square—Villars-les-Dombes or Pérouges or eventually, several days later
, in Grignan—with Bagge standing at attention, Hans could whisper in Memphis’s ear.

  “We will never reach Marseille, Miss Jones. We will be shot long before.”

  “I wish I could call Spatz,” she muttered. “He told me to call. He’ll be worried sick.”

  While they drove through the Rhône valley or ventured higher into the fringes of the Alps, von Halban made his plans. It wasn’t enough to simply escape on foot. He couldn’t carry the trunk full of uranium—the trunk Memphis had claimed as her own when Krauss inspected the boot. She’d shown the German her feather boas and satchels full of albums, and when he’d tired of looking at women’s things she’d remarked carelessly that the last trunk had a lot of shoes in it. Memphis was partial to shoes. Von Halban knew it was vital to steal the car itself: Leave the two Germans stranded and never look back. But Krauss slept with the ignition key in his pocket.

  Hans hadn’t considered Memphis. Naturally, she was making plans of her own.

  “Am I right in thinkin’ it’s Sunday?” she purred as the car swept along the road toward the Vaucluse. “The twenty-sixth of May? Where has the time gone?”

  Krauss assured her that she was correct: It was the sixteenth day of the assault on France. The twenty-sixth of May.

  “Then it’s my birthday! I’m twenty-six on the twenty-sixth! We gotta have a party, Captain!” She turned and flashed a blazing smile at Bagge. “You look for some bottles of wine when we get to the next town, you hear? Red wine. That’s the only kind that’ll do for Memphis. This girl’s gonna celebrate.”

  Hans had noticed that Krauss was scrupulous in avoiding drink. Perhaps he preferred beer, or did not fully trust himself or his passengers under the influence of alcohol. He congratulated Memphis on the anniversary of her birth but said nothing about finding wine in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which despite the fame of its name was a small enough village to serve Krauss’s purpose. When they pulled up in the Place du Portail and Krauss got out of the car, Bagge at his back with his gun poised, Hans leaned forward and whispered, “Miss Jones. It is in truth your birthday?”