The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  “You should find Noakes,” Nell told him tersely. “He could cable her family. Inform them she’s alive. They may have heard about the Clothilde. They will want to know.”

  The thought gave him direction and served to kill an hour of time. When he returned from the U.S. consulate, Sally still had not awakened. And so he paced, stifling the impulse to demand a doctor at the top of his American lungs.

  The fishing boat had put in to shore north of Dieppe in response to a signal from the company of marooned soldiers, a transport crew who’d abandoned their vehicles and supplies and had only their guns and a case of wine for moral support. They’d come through Fécamp on their way to the beach and heard of a woman in desperate need of a hospital. The German army was nearly in Dieppe and so the fishermen decided to evacuate Sally, too.

  “Severe concussion,” the doctor told them. “Pneumonia as well. We’ll set the arm. There’s little else we can do for her.”

  “Will she live?” Hearst asked.

  “Look you, monsieur,” the doctor said bitterly, “I stopped playing God when the Germans arrived.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Spatz was angry as he walked the Marseille waterfront in search of them, but he was masking his feelings well. No frustration in the Sparrow’s genial smile, the direct and inviting gaze.

  He considered himself a good judge of character, but in recent days his judgment had failed him badly. Nell had seduced Joliot-Curie but refused to betray him, and when Spatz reminded her that he needed information if he was to sell his soul to the British, she’d said, almost as an afterthought, that their old friend Mad Jack knew everything about the French bomb already.

  That had rocked him badly.

  Nell knew more than she was telling, but she was obsessed with her Jews and bored by physics. She was harboring love like an illness, Spatz thought. He would have to consider how to control her. It might be the gift of Joliot’s freedom; it might be Bertrand’s.

  Perhaps it would be the Jews.

  But this Friday, the thirty-first of May, he’d come to Marseille in search of Memphis. It was her car he saw first.

  The sleek touring sedan was pulled up inside the cordon that separated the Moroccan ship from the crowd of swaying and frantic people attempting to board it. Von Halban was leaning against the front fender, one foot crossed casually over the opposite ankle, his back to the press of refugees. He may have been conscious of the wave of people behind him, of the insults and pleas hurled in seven different languages; his expression was almost too dignified. There was only one trunk left in the car and Spatz recognized it as von Halban’s own—he’d help to load it the night they left Paris, heavy as lead. The uranium must be inside. Von Halban had failed, then. He hadn’t delivered it.

  His heart lifting, Spatz adjusted his hat and thrust through the crowd. He had only to mutter in German, conscious of the language’s frightening power, to part the mass as easily as the Red Sea.

  Von Halban reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a packet of tickets. The noise of the quai was preying upon him: stevedores and sailors, the passengers and their friends who’d gathered to wave good-bye, the press of fingers at his back. Refugees. Which was what he was now, he realized, cut loose from his mission and his home. He felt a kind of vertigo, as though he were standing on the parapet of a high window and had no choice but to jump. He must leap across the eight-foot span of water separating the dock from the boat and claw his way on board. It was madness to go back. He would be deported to a labor camp as soon as he reached Paris.

  “Hello, old man,” Spatz said.

  The cordon had opened for him as readily as the Alibi Club. He was smiling at Hans, but von Halban smelled the danger in the air around him, bitter as cordite.

  “How did you find us?”

  Spatz shrugged. “Followed the blood.”

  It was a shock, the words thrown so carelessly on the ground between them. He thought of the two dead Germans, nodded weakly.

  “Where is she?”

  “Inspecting her cabin. Miss Jones is very careful about her luggage.”

  “No kidding.” He drew out a cigarette, offered one to Hans. “But your luggage stays,” he observed. “You’re not going with her?”

  “How is Annick?” von Halban asked. “My girls?”

  “Fine.”

  “They reached her parents, yes?”

  Spatz did not reply. His eyes came up to von Halban’s. There was a taunt in the man’s gaze that reminded von Halban of the way a cat looked when it played with a mouse.

  “That luggage,” Spatz mused. “I thought when I helped you load it in Paris that it was heavy as lead. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  The vertigo pitched and roared in his ears; he was suddenly too tired to fight it anymore, to keep pretending. “Spatz—why do you make a woman your personal spy? Why not put yourself beside me in the car, if you want what I carried so badly?”

  “Because you would never have agreed to take me,” the German answered reasonably, “and you would never have opened your mind to me as you did to Memphis. I knew you would. I was always certain to use that.”

  In one blinding second, von Halban saw it all: the woman vulnerable, suffering despite her defiance; his own guilt and pity. The naïve way he’d assumed that shared danger meant shared truth. He’d shifted the uranium from his own trunk to hers in the belief it was the sole chance he had of getting it out of France. He’d handed a jazz chanteuse the future of French science. To turn over to her lover at the first opportunity.

  She was coming down the gangplank toward them, smiling brilliantly, as though Spatz were the only man in the world she’d ever wanted—as though the day was complete merely because he’d arrived. Von Halban watched, and it seemed to him that even the clamor of the desperate people pressing at his back ceased for an instant, as though the raw animal grace of Memphis’s form, the intoxicating wildness of her look, had the power to silence even war.

  “Hey, baby,” she said softly, and wrapped her arms around Spatz. “I got a bunk big enough for two.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “You’ve made yourself bien confortable here,” Jacques Allier observed as he stepped into the drawing room of Clair Logis.

  The villa sat on Rue Etienne-Dollet, not a bad part of Clermont-Ferrand. After disposing of Product Z, as Allier persisted in calling it, Moureu and Kowarski had mounted a hurried hunt through town for vacant properties. Clair Logis was a summer place, owned by a family who lived in Paris. The house agents had been only too glad to take cash down, with times so uncertain—and Moureu was authorized to sign a month’s lease.

  Kowarski had transformed the house in the subsequent two weeks. His Russian wolfhound, Boris, had a bed in the main salon, where half of Joliot’s lab was already up and running; the villa’s dining room table was now a bench for experiments. Even the kitchen had a gas-fed torch in one corner for improvised glass-blowing and welding.

  Kowarski hadn’t shaved in days. He seemed to be living in his lab coat, with a hunk of bread permanently stuffed in one pocket and his reading glasses in another. He was happy in the belief he’d left war behind and could work now in peace. He told Allier he was pursuing what he called a divergent chain reaction, in a mixture of uranium oxide and heavy water. Allier thought he could guess where Lew had obtained his deuterium; he decided not to inquire about the uranium oxide.

  “Have you heard from your colleague—Herr von Halban?”

  “Not a word,” Kowarski said cheerfully. “But Hans is all right. He’ll turn up one day. How are things in Paris?”

  “Très mal. You heard the Belgians surrendered?”

  “Three days ago. The twenty-eighth of May. I had the radio on.” Kowarski preferred his phonograph records, which he’d managed to bring—along with his wolfhound—south in the truck. His taste ran to experimental Russian composers, dissonant and jarring, a corollary to the random paths of nuclear particles.

  He bit off a hu
nk of bread. “Fucking Belges. Between them opening the front door and the Brits running out the back—” He shrugged. “What German wouldn’t drive down for a look at Paris?”

  “There have been grave errors on the government’s part,” Allier said slowly, as though the words were treason. “Vous n’avez aucune idée—”

  How to tell the scientist about the poor intelligence, the errors in judgment, the squabbles and fear of old men? It didn’t matter anymore. Everyone at the Armaments Ministry knew the war was lost. The government would be gone in a matter of days. There were tanks lying along every road out of the Ardennes and two million French soldiers, killed or abandoned to the enemy. Only the French people continued to believe.

  “It’s a grand country, this.” Kowarski sighed. “I’d never seen the Auvergne before. Moureu, now—he was practically raised here as a boy. Loves these hills. Even the air is different, Allier. Stronger and fresher. I can’t wait to bring my family down.”

  Allier could have told Kowarski he was a heartbeat away from internment, and all his family with him; but though he’d been willing to face death alone in a Norwegian aerodrome, he was a coward in other things. When the time came to take Kowarski in the night, Allier would be far away.

  “Don’t send for your wife,” he advised. “You may have to move on.”

  “But I’ve already told her we’ve got Clair Logis for a month!”

  “I hope,” Allier said sharply, “that you never refer to the villa by name. Particularly when you correspond with Joliot. If you must mention the place, say only Rue Etienne-Dollet. It’s safest that way.”

  Kowarski threw back his head and laughed, but at that moment there was a knock on the door and both men fell silent, staring at each other. It was after nine o’clock at night and the entire town was under blackout darkness.

  The wolfhound scrabbled to its feet, hackles rising.

  “Moureu?” Allier whispered.

  Kowarski shook his head. “He’s gone back to Paris. To help Joliot break down the lab.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I’d better answer the door.”

  Allier watched Kowarski follow his dog to the door in unreasoning panic. He carried a gun in the pocket of his coat, but he’d left that in his Simca; he’d had no time to unload the luggage. For no reason he could name he wanted his gun very badly right now.

  Boris whined like a child and Kowarski threw open the door.

  “Hans!” He spread his arms wide in a Russian bear hug. “How good to see you! You survived the trip south, eh?”

  Allier could see von Halban’s face, too white and disembodied in the blacked-out doorway. No lights on the threshold, no lights at the villa’s entrance or in Rue Etienne-Dollet, and behind von Halban was the wealth of Auvergne night.

  Von Halban looked strained and unnatural, he seemed rooted to the threshold, and when his eyes found Allier’s, there was a beseeching terror in them.

  Allier began to move. He was too late.

  Von Halban stepped woodenly through the door of Clair Logis, his hands reaching for Kowarski. There was another man behind him—a tall blond man that, to his horror, Allier knew.

  He’d last seen him running after the wrong plane, two months ago, on a night of cold and death in Norway.

  The man was smiling, indifferent to Allier’s presence. It was possible he’d forgotten the planes for Perth and Amsterdam, the Italian girl shot down over the North Sea. He had a gun at von Halban’s back.

  “I’m sorry, Lew,” von Halban muttered. “I’m so sorry. He has come for the water, yes?”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  When Allier finally reached Frédéric Joliot-Curie four days later, the physicist was standing on the paving stones behind the Labo de Physique, watching the documents burn.

  He had come to the end of six years’ accumulation of paper, everything thrown onto the blaze from the conviction that nothing was worth saving anymore. The important things were in his brain, or had already been published long ago; if the rest of his jottings were lost to posterity, so much the better. The vacuum he left behind would provide other men with something to discover, something to invent, in the happy delusion of originality.

  He reached into his lab coat pocket and withdrew a bundle of letters. They had lived for the past decade among his lab notes, too incendiary to store with socks and undergarments. He traced his own name, written in Nell’s careless and jagged pen; the foreign stamps posted from England. In the midst of so much despair and ending, he yearned for the sound of her voice.

  It occurred to him to wonder if Irène had read all these words, years ago. It hardly mattered now. Nell was no longer his private country, his sea for voyaging. He had bartered that secret self for the privilege of seeing his children.

  He tossed the letters into the flames.

  When Allier told him about the German from Norway who’d appeared at von Halban’s back, Joliot did not immediately share the truth: that the heavy water was safe at a Bordeaux vineyard. He listened to Allier in silence—to the bitter self-recrimination, the certainty of betrayal among foreigners, the hatred for von Halban, who’d been thrown into an Auvergne jail once his German friend left with the water. When Allier was done, Joliot said only, “Let him go.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Allier retorted savagely. “Will you never see the truth, enfin, even when it lives in your pocket?”

  “Let him go,” Joliot repeated. “It’s obvious the Nazi must have threatened his family. Or me. Yes, perhaps it was me. I was to be killed in some horrible way, and von Halban got noble at the wrong moment.”

  Allier stared at him impotently, his mild banker’s face bewildered. Joliot said, “It’s only water, Jacques.”

  “Which I very nearly paid for with my life!”

  “On two separate occasions. I know. And I’m grateful. But the whole country is going to the dogs before our very eyes. We tried our best. We failed.”

  “We were betrayed.”

  Joliot shook his head gently. “We were found. Nothing more than that. It wasn’t Hans’s life that was at stake—he’s the sort who’d die gladly. But he would never bargain with someone else’s life. I know the man, Jacques. I know the man.”

  “You can’t be wrong, can you?” Allier snarled. “The great Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Nobel genius, the man who married fame for the sake of his career—”

  Without turning, Joliot said, “Did you find the uranium?”

  “What?”

  “The uranium metal von Halban was supposed to deliver to the French navy. Did he tell you where it is?”

  “He refused.”

  Good man, Joliot thought. And walked away.

  He ran Mad Jack to earth in a suite at the Hôtel Meurice, entertaining three women. Joliot suspected they were filles de joie or perhaps chorus girls from the Folies Bergères, but he remembered Allier saying the earl’s tastes in women were varied and quixotic. He declined an offer of champagne but accepted a slice of pâté de foie gras. The earl escorted the women to the door with a bottle in each hand.

  “Well,” he said as he sat back down at his dining table and thrust his game foot onto a neighboring chair, “have you decided to jump? Are you coming to England?”

  “No.” Joliot eyed the warm bread lingering between them and realized it had been days since he’d eaten properly. The food shortages had begun with so many grocers and bakers closing their shops; the hemorrhage from Paris since the first of June had been painful. “Somebody has to stay in France. Otherwise we’ll start thinking it was always German.”

  Mad Jack smiled, and Joliot watched the sensual curve of his lips, the possibility of humor or cruelty they held. Generations of inbreeding were responsible for the man’s eccentricities—and his acute intelligence.

  “I might have gone to Dunkirk, you know,” the earl said. “Or dodged Messerschmitts all the way across the Channel. I won’t wait here long enough to be hanged by Jerry. But if you change your mind in the next
few days, give me a jingle. I’ll make arrangements for you and your family.”

  He offered the bread basket. Joliot took a slice.

  “What I chiefly need,” he said, “is a boat.”

  Mad Jack laughed. “You and every bloody Frenchman. There’s two hundred thousand of your countrymen looking for a ship at this very moment, and I’m sorry to say they’re dashed out of luck.”

  “I don’t want it for myself. It’s for the heavy water we took out of Norway. It ought to be sent to England before France falls.”

  The earl’s bright blue eyes rose to meet his. “I understood the stuff was shanghaied.”

  “I sent decoy canisters to the Auvergne.”

  “Did you, now.” Mad Jack whistled softly. “What a bright boy you are, Joliot-Curie.”

  June 5: Churchill withdrew all his attack planes from France, convinced that French air bases would fall at any moment. Irène was inclined to regard this as typical of the British, l’Albion perfide, who’d quit ferrying their boats to Dunkirk now that all the English soldiers were saved. Hundreds of thousands of Belgians and French were still stranded on the beaches.

  “I will never go to England,” she vowed. “I will never allow my children to be reared by the English.”

  June 9: Ambassador Bill Bullitt sent one of his remaining aides to Lisbon to procure twelve submachine guns for the defense of the embassy, convinced a Communist mob would sack the city once the Germans approached.

  Moureu arrived back at the Collège de France an hour after breakfast, disheveled and weary, having driven all night against the waves of refugees heading south. He had come to help Joliot finish the packing and to collect his wife. There were, he said, a million people on the roads. Perhaps more.