The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  His face convulsed—with rage? Or laughter?

  Sally filled her lungs and thrust herself under the capsized boat.

  It was utterly dark here, the curving height of the hull punctuated by the cross-planks of its seats, but a bubble of air remained between boat and water. She reached out and felt the sides, four feet across. He would wait for her to emerge or he would come after her; one of the two. She was betting he would follow, and she would be ready for him when he did.

  She was wrong.

  The boat suddenly crashed down on her head, forcing her underwater, the pain of it nearly knocking her senseless. She had a sharp vision of Morris, hurling himself onto the hull with all his weight and failing energy, forcing the boat deeper, preventing her escape. Drowning her.

  She reached out blindly for the gunwale and found his ankle.

  He kicked wildly, but Sally grasped the leg with both hands, dragging it down.

  All his weight was on the hull: he was not a large man, but a wiry one, with desperate strength, clinging like a limpet to the wood. As Sally pulled, Morris clawed the capsized boat over.

  He may have realized what he was doing as it happened, but the momentum was too great to reverse. The boat righted with a sudden spring, like a cork popping to the surface.

  Morris lost his grip; with a cry, he fell into the sea.

  The unexpected release thrust Sally deeper underwater, still clutching the man’s leg. He kicked out savagely at her head. The pain burst through her brain. She released him.

  The blackness of the sky at the surface disoriented her. With no light from above, she could not tell if she was reaching upward toward air or swimming deeper. Her lungs were bursting and she could see Death now, could feel it in an iron band around her chest: the desire to drink water as though it were air.

  Her head broke the surface. Shuddering drafts of rain swept overhead; the waves were jagged and surging. Another time, the sea might have terrified her. Not now.

  She drew breath in starving gasps. And after a few seconds, looked around for Morris.

  A dipping wave revealed him ten feet away, the lifeboat spinning out of reach. As she watched, he howled, threw his arms up to the sky, and sank like a stone.

  My God, she thought. He can’t swim.

  Her own part in this—the way she’d dragged him from the boat—knifed through her sickeningly and she began to crawl against the heavy seas that separated them. She could not watch another man go under the waves like a scuttled ship. She screamed Morris’s name through the rain and blackness. The wind or perhaps the drowning man, invisible now, screamed back. The lifeboat they’d fought over vanished into a trough of wave. Sally shouted again and again, the ocean slapping into her mouth, until her voice gave out.

  Her strength was ebbing. Morris was gone.

  She drifted with the current, alone in all the vastness of the sea, aware of the great cold that had cut off sensation in her bare feet, the animal chill that wracked her body. It would be like falling asleep, she thought—like drifting into the night for good—and it occurred to her that they would both lie here forever, now: she and Philip.

  She thought once of Joe Hearst with a warm sadness. He would blame himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Von Halban roared through Avignon as though Hell and all its demons were at his heels, through the quiet streets of St-Rémy, driving past Arles and down along the Rhône into the marshland of the Camargue. Every settlement or whitewashed cabane, every tumbled Roman ruin, was blacked out completely under the ink-colored sky of the Côte d’Azur.

  He knew that even now there might be German warships, German submarines, in the waters that curled far below this high cliff road. He drove with the painted headlights throwing a ghoulish blue glare over the roadbed, and he met no one—not a single truck or even bicycle—until twenty-three minutes past five o’clock in the morning, when a solitary woman plodding at the verge shook her fist at the car as it plunged toward Marseille.

  Memphis was swaddled in one of her evening coats, the first thing she’d been able to lay hands on, a black velvet cape of enormous proportions. For a while Hans thought she was sleeping but a faint tremor in the surrounding air told him she was trembling uncontrollably, her jaw clenched, her face rigid. Krauss had caught up with her twelve feet from the campfire, and by the time von Halban had stolen his dead corporal’s gun there was no pulling the German off Memphis’s body; he’d pinned her facedown and was sodomizing her. Memphis screamed like a tortured dog, and von Halban shouted orders that Krauss ignored. In the end Hans raised the revolver and shot Krauss point-blank in the base of the skull.

  He fell heavily on Memphis, his penis still thrust into her body, and von Halban had been forced to drag the perfect athlete’s frame off her, his own hands almost incapable of working, his fingers sliding on muscle and bone. She crawled away like a crushed bird; she forced herself to her feet and stumbled on into the woods as though even von Halban might kill her. When he reached her he said nothing. He did not even try to touch her.

  She had curled into a fetal ball, as though if she hugged her nakedness she might be fine, she might be a baby somebody loved, not a hunk of skewered meat. He took off his jacket and laid it gently over her. They sat like that, two stones in the night, for almost an hour, the smell of semen and blood rising around them.

  “Marseille,” he said, as the prison of Château d’If rose from its island in the sea. “They will not find us here.”

  The German soldiers who’d taken their car might be dead, but the whole German army was somewhere behind them, and neither Memphis nor von Halban would ever again feel safe.

  “Let me out of this car,” she whispered. “I got to get out of this car.”

  He had been thinking about the problem as he drove. Her husband was supposed to be at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, but so much time had passed that von Halban expected the man to have gone on to North Africa. For his part, he was ordered to find the Foudroyant and hand over the uranium to Captain Bedoyer. Neither errand seemed as important as the woman shivering beside him now.

  “You need a doctor, I think.”

  She shook her head furiously. “There’s nothin’ wrong with me that a hot bath and good coffee won’t cure.”

  “Miss Jones—” He slowed the car and brought it to rest on the narrow shoulder above the cliffs, the whole Greco-Roman settlement of Massilia spread out beneath them, coral-colored and filthy in the first light. “It would be well if I found your husband, yes?”

  “Fuck Raoul.”

  “Or we could call Spatz. You wished to call Spatz, I think.”

  “Fuck him, too.” She opened the collar of her velvet cape with swift fingers. “If this is what Germany plans to do to France, I want no part of it, understand?”

  He nodded wordlessly. Her skin where it was visible in the cleft of her cape was shining. Her profile was as timeless and ancient as the old city at their feet, the profile of a Cleopatra.

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Whatever you came south for, mistuh,” she shot back. “I’ll go my own way.”

  He said nothing as the light lit the sky. Her shuddering had stopped, but she was still huddled beneath the enveloping cloak. Eventually she would look at him, would acknowledge everything that had occurred, that he had witnessed her rape and had killed her attacker, he who’d never felt that kind of violence, who’d never panicked and shot a man dead. Eventually she would acknowledge that he was scared to death, too.

  She said, “What’ve you got in that trunk you told them was mine?”

  “Four hundred kilos of uranium metal encased in lead.”

  Her head came around. She was exhausted and in pain and she had no idea what uranium was.

  “They would have murdered us both, had they known what we carried,” he said apologetically. “It is worth the whole bloody war, Miss Jones.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and gnawed at her fingers.

  He
looked away, out to sea. “I would never have saved it without you. I would not have reached Marseille alive. But if I could have spared you this horror, Miss Jones—death or dishonor would be nothing.”

  Spatz’s money bought her coffee and a bath in a hotel that was not the d’Angleterre but a quieter place off the Rue des Oliviers. Von Halban approached Reception with the breezy confidence of a man who has shot his enemy at close range, the agent and representative of a celebrity swathed in black velvet, defying the authority behind the desk to comment on his travel-stained clothes, the smear of blood on his trousers.

  “Miss Jones intends to embark for North Africa. She wishes only to rest before her journey. Two rooms, please.”

  In the end it was the quantity of luggage and the fine motorcar pulled up before the door that convinced the hotel to find Memphis a spare suite. They gave von Halban a room on the ground floor usually reserved for servants.

  “Is the fleet in port?” he asked.

  Reception’s small black eyes flicked over him, registered the traitor’s accent, shrugged. “The French fleet, monsieur, hauled anchor three days ago. But your U-boats are in the Channel.”

  Not my U-boats, he wanted to say; but could no longer make the effort to explain himself. He was not German, but he felt complicit. He had stood by and watched a woman raped.

  Memphis slept for nine hours. She ordered dinner brought to her upstairs. Von Halban spent the intervening period walking the docks in a vain search for the Foudroyant, wondering what in heaven he ought to do. He could not sit and wait for the Germans to come; he could not turn around and go back to Paris with his dangerous cargo. He was terrified to board a boat for Marseille and lose his family forever.

  At bedtime, he received a note summoning him to Memphis.

  “What you gonna do with that trunk?” she demanded. She was dressed in silk and propped up on a sofa. “You can’t take it back to Paris.”

  “Maybe I will throw it into the sea.”

  “Me, I’m going to Casablanca. M. Etienne at the front desk arranged it—bought my passage himself—for only four times the cost of a lousy ticket. I call that a bargain in time of war. I think he’s afraid of that accent of yours.”

  “You are shrewd, Miss Jones. You will know how to survive.”

  She gave him one naked look. “I should be dead. We both know that. I never thanked you. I never—So I’m saying it now: Come with me?”

  “To Casablanca?”

  “You could bring your trunk. Get it where it needs to go.”

  “Miss Jones—”

  “I don’t need an answer tonight. But we’ll have to pay the man soon if you want a ticket, understand?”

  Hans thought of Annick and his daughters. Of Joliot-Curie, that final night in the lab: Hide it somewhere safe, where no one can steal it and no one can be hurt by it.

  “Thank you,” he told her. “I will think what we must do.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The shipping agent’s face had grown more lined and weary in the past few days, and Hearst knew before he spoke what the news would be.

  “No ships?” he suggested.

  “Non et non et non,” the man snapped. “Surely you are not an imbecile, Mr. American. How can there be ships in Bordeaux when every boat in Europe is moored off Dunkirk? Five days it has been going on, the small fishing boats and the private launches moving back and forth between England and France, and still there are hundreds of thousands on the beaches. They are all French, I understand, the ones who are left behind—because of course, the English run the boats and they take their own people first. That is always the English way, hein? They start these wars with the Boches and then they run—”

  He stopped short, his expression changing. “Bonjour, Madame la Comtesse.”

  Nell had dressed for this trip into Bordeaux in one of her narrow Parisian suits and a hat that swooped like a palm frond. She was not the same woman Hearst had watched stride around her vineyards this past week, stopping to talk to the embassy children or the strange Dutch refugees, fending off Mims Tarnow’s presumptions with a satiric lift of her brow. Mims was determined to be invited into the château for tea, or perhaps a real bath, and Nell was equally determined not to admit her.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Vingtain,” she said briskly. “I, you observe, have not run.”

  “Of course not, Comtesse. I did not mean—”

  “Perhaps you would be so good as to cable London or New York about transatlantic vessels expected to arrive in the next few weeks? We’ll check back in an hour to learn what you’ve heard, bien?”

  “Oui, c’est bien,” the clerk replied, his face flaming. “And madame—I am desolated at the news of the comte’s capture. We were all sorry to hear—”

  “Thank you, monsieur.”

  She said the words with dignity, but as they left the small room Hearst saw the lines around her mouth tighten.

  “Will you stay here?” he asked as they walked toward the quai. “Even if it’s all over, soon?”

  “Where else should I go? Loudenne is my home.”

  “I thought—family in England, perhaps.”

  She shrugged. “They’re no safer than we are here. And I would never leave without word of Bertrand and Roger.”

  “Your husband and…”

  “Henri’s grandson. Henri keeps the whole vineyard going but he’s really only living for Roger. I feel so culpable.” Her face twisted with a sudden, sharp pain. “The boy’s only nineteen. He joined Bertrand’s company as soon as war was declared. God knows what could happen to him in the hands of those people. We don’t even know if they killed them, or—”

  They’d reached the city quai, busy and commercial and lined with elegant town houses, the river narrow enough here to imagine pitching a stone to the opposite bank, a manageable waterway utterly unlike the wide, swift sweep of the Gironde estuary to the north.

  “I owe Henri everything,” she continued. “He’s kept Loudenne together for years, even when Bertrand—He’s not just someone I’ve hired. He and Roger are family.”

  It seemed to Hearst that she was more concerned for her maître de chai than for her husband. Nell had been schooled in the life of great estates, where the ties between landowner and dependent were timeless and fundamental. She saw herself at the center of a constellation of people who knew no other world than Loudenne. Nell was responsible. Nell would not run.

  “It’s different for you,” she said. “This isn’t your war. You should go home as soon as you can.”

  “That’s what I told Sally King,” he said, staring out over the river. “But she wanted to stay. Like me, she knew that home was here. I should never have—”

  He bit off the words meddled in her life. He’d told Nell about the Clothilde: torpedoes striking, the deck shattering in flame. The image of Sally slipping under the waves…

  “You blame yourself,” Nell observed.

  “Of course I blame myself!”

  “She had an extraordinary presence. I saw her pictures often, in magazines.”

  “There was far more to Sally than just a pretty face.”

  “You were in love with her?”

  He laughed harshly. “I never once allowed myself to ask that question. There was no time, and it seemed self-indulgent in the middle of the German invasion.”

  “But when the whole world is on the point of death,” she persisted, “the truth is all that matters. Answer my question, Joe. If only to yourself. Even if she is gone.”

  He caught the passion in her voice and wondered at it. Was this for Bertrand? Or someone else?

  “Listen,” she said, her hand suddenly on his arm. “That fishing boat. At the far end of the quai. They’re calling for help.”

  “Must be Dunkirk. They’ve got stretchers on the deck. But why bring evacuees here? They’re supposed to go to England.”

  “Maybe they’re French,” Nell said, then broke into a run.

  Hearst went after her. She w
as thinking, he knew, of her husband or perhaps of the boy Roger, hoping against hope that the reports had been wrong, the company hadn’t surrendered, they’d been pulled off the beach like so many others. His heart was wrung for her—for the way hope reignited even when it ought to be dead. And then he stopped short.

  A stretcher was rising in the hands of the Bordeaux fishermen: a limp figure in a sodden dress, eyes closed, face pale as death.

  “Sally,” he whispered.

  It was nearly three hours before a doctor appeared in the crowded corridor of the Bordeaux hospital, but Nell insisted on waiting with Hearst. It was Nell who’d gotten the story out of the fishing boat’s crew as they unloaded the rest of the casualties from their latest run up the Brittany coast: a platoon of lost French soldiers trapped by the German army well south of Dunkirk, and three people washed up on various beaches. One of these was Sally. The Channel tides in the grip of a twilight squall had swept her south and thrust her firmly toward shore somewhere off the Côte d’Albâtre of Normandy, where she had come to grief on the rocks.

  A boy found her in the bright Sunday morning, a boy who’d gone to look for soldiers on the beach; she was lying as though dead with the cold spring surf washing over her, facedown in the chilly sand. Hearst listened to the story in the fisherman’s heavy Médoc accent and imagined the girl in the morgue, hair cascading off her vulnerable neck, the swan’s arc of shoulder blade through the thin cotton dress.

  She was not dead. She’d been unconscious, however, from the time she was carried into the village of Fécamp four days ago. It would be the rocks, the fisherman said; the limestone cliffs of the Alabaster coast. That would explain the broken arm, as well.

  It was her left arm, swollen and bruised and bent at an alarming angle, as though she had reached out to clutch or fend off a cliff face and the rocks had slapped her hard in retribution. There were bruises and gashes on her face and legs. The long exposure in chilling sea had inflamed her lungs and she burned with fever, her breathing wracked and painful. Hearst tried to sit by the stretcher, but his gaze would shift inevitably to Sally’s eyelids, fluttering with her dreams, the wild rolling of her eyes beneath the protective skin, and he would rise impatiently and pace, shoving his long, lean frame through the waiting wounded.