The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  He was a scientist and did not inflate his data.

  The French government packed up and quite suddenly was gone. The ministries tossed belongings from their upper windows all day, and small columns of smoke could be spotted, as though a general leaf-burning was under way. By nightfall, the beautiful stone buildings echoed and the bureaucrats were on their way to Tours. Parisians still sat in the sidewalk cafés under the blacked-out sky, drinking when no food was available.

  Irène withdrew all their money from the Banque de Paris, and hid it carefully in the lining of her suitcase.

  June 10: Premier Paul Reynaud, after assuring Franklin Roosevelt that the French would fight “in front of Paris; we shall fight behind Paris; we shall close ourselves in one of our provinces to fight and if we should be driven out of it we shall establish ourselves in North Africa to continue the fight,” left town, as quietly as a thief.

  Irène wrote a letter to her nanny but could not mail it to Arcouest; the post offices were abandoned. She carried it by train to a friend who lived south of the city, a friend bound for Brittany, who promised it would arrive.

  She and Joliot had heard nothing of their children in days. And the Germans were in Brittany now, too.

  June 11: Mussolini declared war against France and England.

  The last pieces of lab equipment were sent south to Clermont-Ferrand: a galvanometer, an ionization chamber, a spectroscope. Joliot had sent ten cases of equipment to the Auvergne altogether, worth something like two hundred thousand francs. He was convinced he might as well have thrown everything into the trash. It was impossible to know if it would arrive.

  Allier came to say farewell. He’d waited long after the Ministry of Armaments had left Paris, hoping he could persuade Joliot to head straight to Bordeaux and a boat for England. Joliot had told him nothing about Mad Jack’s offer or the decoy water canisters.

  “I released your colleague,” Allier said abruptly, “from the prison in Riom.”

  “Why?”

  The banker looked away, unable to meet Joliot’s eyes. “Your uranium was delivered to the French governor in Morocco by a woman—an American negress—in a suitcase full of shoes.”

  “I see. So it’s safe?”

  “Oui.” Allier swallowed with difficulty. “But we’ve had word…through certain sources…that all your research reports—copies of the ones you’ve burned, copies sent to the Ministry—were found by the Germans.”

  Joliot’s stomach somersaulted in shock. “Where?”

  “In a railroad car near Charité-sur-Loire. Mon Dieu. They were almost certainly left there by prior arrangement.”

  “You mean they were sold.”

  Allier nodded.

  “So your leak—your German spy—is in the Armaments Ministry. Not in my lab.”

  “It looks that way.”

  Joliot stared out at the twilight visible beyond the open laboratory door. Moureu was carefully packing the boot of his Peugeot, as though a perfect job might get him out of Paris.

  “We leave tomorrow,” he said.

  It was dark when he and Irène locked the doors of the lab for the final time. It had been dark all day: the petrol refineries along the Seine were burning. Heavy, black smuts fell from the skies, coating the fresh chestnut leaves in mourning. Oil was in Joliot’s hair and all over the surface of his car. The Germans were reported to be only fifty miles away.

  Moureu and his wife were waiting for the small convoy to start. Irène was clutching some gold and platinum she’d brought from the laboratory, precious stuff to anybody but essential to a physicist’s work. She had her mother’s gramme of radium stored in a lead-lined box. She could not stop coughing; the oily air had lodged in her weak lungs and clotted her throat; the tension of the past few days had exhausted her, and her placid face was torn with anxiety and pain. Joliot did not speak as he sat at the wheel of the Peugeot, hoping she might sleep once they hit the open road.

  He pulled away from the Collège de France a few minutes before three o’clock in the afternoon. The Latin Quarter and the Boulevard St-Germain were empty; so far, so good. Moureu kept steadily behind him although his Peugeot was less powerful than Joliot’s. They turned into the Boulevard Raspail, heading for the Porte d’Orléans, and came to a shuddering stop.

  A sea of southbound vehicles stretched before them, not only on the side of the road heading toward Orléans, but completely filling the northbound lanes as well. The entire boulevard had been given over to the mob fleeing Paris, and nobody was moving. A few gendarmes waved ineffectual arms, panic on their faces.

  They’re wondering, Joliot thought, why they can’t leave, too.

  He rolled down his window and called, “How far does the blockage go?”

  “Two hundred miles, monsieur,” the man replied.

  Irène collapsed into coughing.

  The car inched forward under Joliot’s feet.

  He settled in, resigned, to waiting.

  At four in the morning he realized he had managed to crawl twenty miles over the past twelve hours, a foot at a time. A stream of humanity was trudging by the stalled cars on both sides of the Route Nationale No. 20, the broad highway that ran from Paris to the south of France; he had an impulse to abandon the Peugeot, take to his feet with Madame Curie’s radium stuffed into his shirt, and walk to the Auvergne.

  “They say it’s General Weygand’s idea to block the road with refugees,” Irène observed dispassionately, “to keep the Germans bottled up in Paris. It will take days to clear this road.”

  Joliot heard her words; he might have responded to them with a murmur of agreement, an exhausted grunt, but the sound of engines came to his ears, too: cutting the sky in half.

  “Get down!” he screamed, just as the Messerschmitts flew over.

  From the surging roar came a rat-tat-tat of machine guns, strafing the immobile traffic on the Route Nationale; the horrible staccato that was like hail, and yet not hail, the hulking shape of the machine just visible through the blackout, flame spitting from its guns. His car was in the outer lane of traffic and Joliot could just jerk the wheel and send it over into the ditch, but the car next to him was hit—he saw the driver jerk back and forth as the bullets pierced his body.

  Irène screamed—a low, guttural sound that became relentless coughing. Her body doubled over. The Peugeot lurched wildly off the road and Joliot counted three planes, seven, then he could not count anymore and the noise was suddenly gone.

  The car was filled with the raw sound of breathing.

  “Moureu,” Irène gasped.

  Joliot threw open his door, staggered out unsteadily, pelted backward to the spot where he’d last glimpsed Moureu’s Peugeot. It was not there.

  “Moureu!” he called, desperation cracking his voice. “Moureu!”

  He glanced wildly around. A tide of moaning rose from the wreckage, the flicker of flames. A figure crawled toward him on its knees through the packed and riddled cars—

  And there was Moureu’s car, nose-down in the opposite ditch, Moureu sprawled against the steering column. His wife bending over him.

  “I think he’s knocked out,” she said when Joliot reached her. Her teeth were bared like an animal’s. “The impact of the crash. I don’t think he was hit.”

  “We’ve got to get off this highway,” Joliot muttered.

  There was no help for those left behind. No way to send for help. Joliot went on, a foot at a time, hoping for a crossroads where he could turn. Irène’s eyes were closed and she spoke only once, to ask if she could pee in a field somewhere. Joliot waited almost an hour before he pulled the Peugeot off, desperate to make some progress, and the sun was high in the sky when he helped her out of the car and up the highway’s bank. She squatted in the grass, indifferent to the entire population of Paris inching by her. And the sound of the planes came again.

  “Irène,” he shouted. “Lie down!”

  He curled behind the parked car and waited. But the rat-tat-tat never ca
me; only the rising whine of the engine, cutting out once, the buzz of a thousand hornets settling down somewhere near him.

  He stood up, looking for his wife.

  She was flat on the ground with her hands over her head. Beyond her was a plane, idling in the middle of the field. A man was climbing out of it—climbing with difficulty, because one of his legs was bad and the cockpit could hardly hold his large British frame.

  “Mad Jack,” Joliot whispered.

  He began to run across the field toward him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The fever broke on the third day, when Hearst had almost given up hope.

  He’d taken to driving the fifty miles between Loudenne and Bordeaux each morning, Petie sitting in the passenger seat beside him. The old Frenchman would buy provisions in town: food, charcoal for the camp’s cookfires, milk if he could find it—and drive back to the Americans scattered under the château’s pines, while Hearst sat vigil in the overcrowded hospital ward. After dinner Petie would return, and fetch Hearst back to lie on the hard ground under the June stars, certain Sally would be dead by dawn. He never asked Petie how he found the petrol to fuel the Buick, and the old Frenchman never told him.

  The doctors worried about Sally’s fractured skull, the possible swelling of her brain. She was excruciatingly thin, her jutting bones more painful than elegant, her skin rough with dehydration. She thrashed in uneasy dreams. More than once Hearst caught the shouted name of Morris.

  When he could not bear it any longer he would walk out of the hospital and down to the docks. He talked up the fishermen, hoping to learn further details of Sally’s story and whether anyone had seen a man of Emery Morris’s description. No one had. So many refugees flooded Bordeaux now that nobody looked hard at any of them. It was after one of these disconsolate strolls that he returned to find Sally’s eyes wide open.

  “Joe,” she said hoarsely. “Did you die, too?”

  From that point on, her progress was swift, although she did not immediately recover her memory. It was another two days before she could tell him about the torpedoes and the way Morris died, the lawyer’s admission of guilt in Philip’s murder—and then, with fresh horror as the image returned, of how the casket sank beneath the Channel waves with its burden of missent documents.

  She asked daily if Hearst had any news of Léonie Blum, but he never did. The old woman had vanished.

  He tried to suppress all talk of the war, believing it might increase her fretfulness at being confined to bed, but on Friday, June fourteenth, he could no longer hold the world at bay. He arrived at the hospital to hear the radio blaring the German army’s triumphal march down the Champs-Élysées.

  “They won’t stop there, will they, Joe?” Tears were streaming down her face; it was as though Philip had died all over again.

  Hearst thought of Bill Bullitt, sheltering from air raids in his embassy’s wine cellar, and said, “We’ve got to move on, Sally. As soon as you’re able. There’s a ship due any day, the S.S. Milwaukee out of New York, and we’re all going to get on it.”

  “Not another ship,” she protested faintly.

  “You can’t walk across the Atlantic.”

  “What about the Pan Am Clipper?”

  “You’d still have to get to London. Which means another ship. And after all—nothing could possibly be as bad as what you’ve already experienced.”

  She shook her head. “I’d rather go back to Paris. I’d rather live with the Germans all around me than trust myself to the sea.”

  “First things first,” he temporized. “Let’s get you back on your feet. I’m taking you home to Loudenne today.”

  Light broke on her face and a new kind of hope seemed to sustain her through all the tedium of discharge and the wrangling over her lack of documents—a detail Hearst would have to address with the American consulate at the earliest opportunity. But the long ride over the rutted and narrow roads was difficult, and when he finally pulled up before the château door, she had lost consciousness again.

  “Worn out, poor poppet,” Nell said briskly as she helped Hearst carry Sally up the wide marble steps. “Will she be ready to sail by Monday?”

  “Monday?” he repeated.

  “The shipping agent sent word. Your Milwaukee is expected the seventeenth.”

  “Good God,” he said blankly. “She’ll have to be.”

  Sunday night at dusk, the sound of tires on gravel alerted Hearst they had visitors.

  He was ambling toward the house for dinner with Sally, who was sitting up now and eating rather well for someone who’d cheated death, when the small green Simca bowled down the drive.

  Elie Loewens’s violin, filtering through the château’s open windows, fell silent.

  Hearst stopped abruptly under the pines. He knew the vineyard workers’ ancient jalopies and Henri’s truck and the vehicles owned by distant neighbors. None of them drove a Simca.

  The château’s massive front door clicked quietly closed. He looked up. Nell stood watchful in the twilight. Her small, catlike face floated palely above her work clothes.

  The Simca’s side doors opened simultaneously to disgorge two men.

  “Hallo,” Mad Jack called cheerfully to Nell. “It’s been ages. How’re you keeping, old thing?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  That same night, Frédéric Joliot-Curie kissed his wife’s cool forehead, adjusted the reading lamp so that the glare would not hurt her eyes, and said, “You’ll be all right?”

  She stared back at him coldly from the crisp white sheets. It had not been Irène’s idea to check herself into the sanitorium, hastily found in a small town in the Dordogne; it was Allier’s work, Allier who had appeared suddenly out of nowhere that Sunday afternoon when they were just getting settled into the villa called Clair Logis. The banker had roared up on Fred and Moureu as they walked the high road to the Puy de Dôme in the bright June sunshine and told them: The final collapse of French forces was only hours away. Nothing could hold the Germans back. They had to move on from Clermont-Ferrand, from the Auvergne altogether. It was time to make for Bordeaux. Time to find a ship.

  It was then Fred had produced the Englishman, the one who called himself an earl, and told the little banker all about his deception with the heavy water, how he’d put it in the hands of his lover—he had not called the woman that, of course, but Irène knew everything; she had known his heart for years, and she observed the small flicker of his eyelids as he said the countess’s name. He had deceived the government, it seemed, as well as his wife, and for an instant Irène was acutely sorry the heavy water had survived, that Fred would be rewarded in this way for his betrayals. But Allier was overjoyed; he embraced Fred and kissed him on both cheeks, as though if he could he would award the man a medal, and then he’d shaken the Englishman’s hand. It was the earl who informed them he’d found a ship capable of transporting the water, the Scottish Broompark, waiting now in Bordeaux harbor and bound for Southampton in a matter of days.

  “You could get a ship,” she’d observed shrilly, “for the world’s supply of heavy water. You English were willing to take that. But not our young men, hein?”

  “Irène,” Fred chided. “Remember how much we owe Lord Suffolk.”

  It was true the earl had set down his plane on a field near the Route Nationale and plucked them all out of the deathtrap of cars waiting for the Messerschmitts; it was true he’d flown them right to the Auvergne and landed safely at the airstrip in Riom, where Kowarski was waiting with a car; but Irène no longer cared. He’d left the Peugeot behind and God knows when they’d ever have another. It was probably in the hands of the Germans now.

  “Certainement, you must be on that ship when it leaves,” Allier told Kowarski and von Halban. “It will be your privilege to present the deuterium to the British authorities. There is nothing in France for you now. Joliot—”

  Fred refused to discuss the matter of emigrating to England. There was a discussion of wives and chil
dren, annoying appendages that must be sent parcel post from a variety of locations, some of them now behind enemy lines. Moureu was silent and pale, his eyes flicking nervously toward his wife, who said nothing; probably she liked the idea of London and the shops.

  Irène raised her voice to denounce them all for betraying France, for running like cowards, but her breath gave out and she was coughing again, painfully and convulsively, nearly choking on the violence of her own hatred for the war, for her failing body, for the husband who had never loved her enough.

  When she came to her senses again, she lay in this bed: a private room in a private sanatorium, no sound of artillery or screaming in the distance, a clean and well-lit place to die.

  “That man wants you for England,” she told Joliot. “You’ve left me here so you can run.”

  “Will you be all right?” he repeated.

  “Of course. I have everything I need.” Except love. “You’ll come tomorrow?”

  “If I can.”

  Painfully, she thrust herself upright. “You’re going to her, aren’t you? To that English whore in Bordeaux.”

  “I’m going to help move the water. Allier and the earl are already there.”

  She lay down and turned her back to him. He could die for all she cared, without a word of forgiveness; she hoped he would. The spasms began again, choking her; she reached for a glass of water.

  He touched her hair once, and left.

  It was three A.M. when Joliot reached Loudenne in Kowarski’s car. He navigated the silent, blacked-out avenue with caution, groping toward the house. He had never been to the place—it was another man’s patrimony—and even now he felt he was trespassing.

  He was aware of the odd, humped shapes of tents scattered about the wide grounds that ran between château and vineyard, but he had no idea what they might be or why they were there. It was very late and he was drained and aching with both guilt and the dangerous euphoria of seeing Nell again.