The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  When Spatz tore at her lip with his teeth he almost rushed forward and choked the man, but then he fought back the red miasma clouding his sight and thought, Science, Ricki. The voice of reason. You need it now.

  There was something of Irène’s dispassionate habit in the way he ignored Nell’s anguished face, the door to the butler pantry swinging closed behind the tall blond German as he returned to entertain his jackals, and continued down the stairs into the wine cellar. He ran steadily in the dark, and turned sharply left where the passage from the cuverie fed into the one from the house. He could hear low voices in the distance: Allier and the Dutch bankers, negotiating barrels.

  He climbed up into the first-year room and out into the June darkness.

  What was it that had driven the children from the house?

  He thought of his own daughter and son, Hélène thirteen years old now, Pierre a few years younger, both overwhelmed by the violence of the adult world. The little de Kuypers knew too much about flight and death; too much impermanence; so they finally made a home for themselves. How much safer it must have seemed than anything the grown-ups could provide.

  They were shivering and slightly damp with the sea air when he found them, huddled together under the barrel staves and stones. Six years old and maybe four, staring from their den with the eyes of foxes.

  “Les allemands,” the little girl whispered, holding her brother close. “They’ve come for Papa.”

  “You must be utterly quiet,” Julian de Kuyper said softly to his daughter as he settled her in the huge oak cask, “and even when the barrel rolls, you must not cry out. Promise?”

  The girl nodded; and her aunt Mathilde stepped into the cask beside her, enfolding both children in her arms. The maître du vin, Henri, wrapped a blanket he’d brought from his cottage around her, and Joliot caught one last glimpse of Mathilde’s bowed head as the old man nailed the cask lid closed.

  Henri had appeared without warning minutes after Joliot arrived at the water gate with the children. Mad Jack nearly shot off the cellar master’s white head, looming noiselessly out of the darkened tunnel. Henri explained that the countess had ordered him to be at the water gate for low tide, as a shipment must be moved downstream to Bordeaux. He’d brought none of the Mouton workers with him, and he asked no questions, even when the expensive new oak barrels were broached and filled with the countess’s houseguests.

  “Sad news,” the old man murmured as he hammered down the lids on first Elie and then Moïses Loewens. “They say Mouton and Lafite are in German hands tonight. Baron Philippe has been thrown into one of Pétain’s prisons. But they won’t get these, eh?”

  Nobody answered him. They could all hear the sudden tramp of feet pacing toward them: It sounded like the entire German army was on the move. Headed straight for the water gate.

  “Quickly,” Mad Jack said. “The casks!”

  And Mathilde’s barrel rolled slowly toward the river.

  Nell raced through the cuverie and down the steps to the aging room, her heart pounding. It was Spatz who’d invited the Nazis into Loudenne’s wine cellar, and as the Germans were still waiting for dinner it seemed like a good way to kill time. The conquerors were in the mood for celebration. They wanted to gloat over this prize they’d won.

  Spatz led them down the kitchen steps to the cellar while Nell melted into the hall, waiting only for the last uniform to disappear before she pelted out the front door and across the lawn. There were many entrances to Loudenne’s cellars.

  She had farther to go than the Nazis did but she was running now, and they were pausing at every arch of the cave below the house to study the bottles and their labels, talking of vintages and classed growths and whether German beer was not after all superior to French wine.

  She could hear their voices echoing in the cellar as she flitted like a shadow past the passageway leading up to the house. A few yards more and she would reach the water gate.

  A shot rang out and she reeled backward, right shoulder exploding in pain. Oscar, she thought despairingly. Genevieve. She reached for the wound and felt the warm blood welling under her fingers.

  “You idiot!” she called furiously in English as she stumbled toward Mad Jack. “You’ll bring them down on you like a pack of wolves!”

  And already the sound of voices behind her had stopped, the hammer of feet had begun.

  “Get on the boat,” she ordered the four of them—Allier, Joliot, Henri, and the earl—as they stared at her in horror.

  “Nell—you’re bleeding!”

  “Spatz is with them,” she persisted. “He’ll recognize you, Jack, and if he does you’re all dead men. Get on the boat.”

  Allier grabbed Joliot, who seemed unable to move, and pulled him over to the last barrel. They shoved it furiously toward the laden barge moored beyond the water gate, which was already rising; the tide had turned.

  “Von Dincklage? Good Lord—I haven’t seen the bastard since my polo days in Deauville,” the earl said blankly. “The blighter always cheated.” He raised one of his pistols as though measuring the distance between the river and the enemy.

  “I’ll take that,” Nell said, and pulled it from his hands with her good left arm. “Now go. I’ll hold them off.”

  In the end it was not Spatz who killed her as she stood with the earl’s gun leveled before the hatch leading out onto the Gironde; Spatz still wore civilian clothes and his pistol, secure in his suit jacket, was mostly for show. But neither did he stop the Nazi officer who raised his arm and shot the Countess of Loudenne at point-blank range.

  There were times for choosing sides, and this was one of them.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “You’re staying behind?”

  Allier turned and studied the man standing on the pier with his hands in his pockets. Rangy and fine-boned, with deep-set eyes. He’d spoken in flawless French, but from the carelessness of his clothes Allier thought he must be foreign. A woman with a broken arm stood beside him.

  “Yes,” he answered. “As are you, Monsieur…?”

  The man extended his hand. “Joe Hearst. American embassy. And this is Miss Sally King. Our people left Bordeaux yesterday.”

  “I see,” Allier said. He bowed to the woman.

  “We were camping at Château Loudenne,” Hearst persisted. “I saw you there Sunday night. The green Simca. Is the countess all right?”

  Allier glanced at Joliot-Curie, who stood wretchedly on the quai a good twenty yards distant, and said softly, “I think she is beyond all worry at present.”

  “Please give her my regards when you see her again, Monsieur…”

  “Jacques Allier.” He offered his hand. “Ministry of Armaments.”

  Something in the American’s face changed. He looked swiftly from the quai to the Broompark, which was just slipping its moorings and backing into the Garonne with the entire French physics establishment on board. But it was Sally King who spoke.

  “Allier!” she said. “Then you must have known Philip!”

  “Pardon, mademoiselle?”

  “Philip Stilwell. My fiancé. He sent you some papers before he died—” She stopped short, and glanced up at the man named Hearst.

  Allier fingered his spectacles. “Le pauvre Philippe. You have all my sympathy, Miss King. He was murdered, I think?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “And the papers he meant you to have are gone. They sank in the Channel when my boat was torpedoed.”

  He glanced at Joliot-Curie, who seemed almost a separate country; there was nothing more Allier could do for the man, now that he’d refused Mad Jack’s final offer of asylum. And so he began to walk slowly away from the river, his work there finished.

  “What exactly were these documents, s’il vous plaît?”

  “A list of shipments of carbon monoxide.” Hearst fell into step beside him, his arm protectively around Stilwell’s girl. “One of German sanitoria and hospitals. Something about bus routes. The obituary of a chemical en
gineer named Juergen Gebl, who worked for a company named I.G. Farben…”

  Allier pulled the collar of his coat closer about his neck. The Broompark was dwindling behind them and Mad Jack’s voice carried over the whine of the German bombers. The earl was singing a sea chanty. He’d lashed the wine casks holding the heavy water to the Broompark’s side; if the ship was hit, explosives would scuttle the heavy water before the barrels fell into enemy hands. But Allier no longer worried about the heavy water or the people who sailed with it.

  “Would you tell us why Philip died?” Sally King’s voice rose above the persistent bombers, the engines’ whine. “The carbon monoxide? I realize it means nothing to you in the face of all this…” She gestured to the splintered fragments of boats in the harbor, the shattered quais. “One death in the midst of so much…but to me…”

  “…to you, it is as though all light was extinguished,” Allier said. “And you hope for justice. For meaning. Bon. Your fiancé was murdered because there are people who did not wish the world to know what he had found. That these Germans—” he glanced over his shoulder at the chaos of the Garonne—“are killing their infirm and unfit citizens like so many diseased cattle. Polio victims. The mentally ill. Epileptics and tuberculars. Pensioners or children—it doesn’t matter. They’re all wrenched from their loving families for ‘special treatment,’ and the next thing you know, a death certificate’s in the mail.”

  “My God,” Hearst muttered. “But you can’t just…”

  “Euthanize people? That’s what they call it in Berlin. The word means beautiful death. The Master Race needs to look absolutely flawless while it devours the world, mon ami. So the authorities bus their medical failures to certain centers—hospitals, mostly—where they’re locked in a room fitted with pipes full of carbon monoxide. A slow and messy death, Mr. Hearst. Courtesy of I.G. Farben. They’re turning a healthy profit on auto exhaust.”

  “That’s hideous,” Sally King said faintly. “It’s…inhuman. If it’s true…”

  “Oh, it’s true, I assure you. That engineer, Juergen Gebl, witnessed it. He wanted to know where all the carbon monoxide was going. He saw children of ten and fourteen taken off those buses. That’s why he had to be killed, you see. A gang of ‘Communist thugs,’ I think they called them, beat him to death one night as he walked home. It’s all detailed in my file.”

  “It should be stopped. If you published it—”

  “Your Philip thought so, too.” Allier turned. “Particularly as I.G. Farben was once a Sullivan and Cromwell client. It enraged him that American lawyers would treat the murder of innocents as just so much commerce. But some in his firm did not want the truth disclosed. And so Stilwell, too, had to die. In a manner so shameful that no one would investigate.”

  “Emery Morris,” the woman said. “He was paid by I.G. Farben.”

  Allier nodded. “His old partner, Rogers Lamont, refused to represent Farben any longer. Juergen Gebl was a friend of Lamont’s.”

  “But if Morris had to kill Stilwell,” Hearst mused “—if silence is so vital—the Nazis must still be doing it. Gassing people.”

  “In the midst of the invasion of France?” Allier laughed harshly. “Why kill civilians when there are so many Allied soldiers to shoot? They’ve traded gas for Messerschmitts.”

  Somewhere out in the harbor, a shell exploded with a flare of black and orange. They could no longer see the Broompark.

  “Mr. Allier,” Sally King said, “we’re staying here, Joe and I. We’d like to help you with this war.”

  “In that case, mademoiselle,” he answered gravely, “I will certainly find something for you to do.”

  And they walked on into the heart of conquered France.

  AFTERWORD

  Any number of outcomes might be imagined for the fictional characters that fill these pages: Sally King, Joe Hearst, the Loewens brothers, and the de Kuyper family to name a few. For others, however—characters drawn from actual people who lived through the events—the future played out in ways that can be told.

  Mad Jack, the twentieth Earl of Suffolk, succeeded in getting the heavy water lashed to the Broompark safely into Southampton harbor a few days after its departure from Bordeaux. With a logic comprehensible only to the British, the water was eventually placed under the care of Windsor Castle’s librarian. Mad Jack was killed a year after the events described in this novel, while attempting to defuse a bomb.

  Frédéric Joliot-Curie supported the underground Résistance movement by offering the use of his laboratory at night for the clandestine construction of bombs, despite the fact that four German scientists were sent to work with him at the Collège de France. He joined the French Communist Party after the war. His role as a pioneer of atomic physics and even his name have been forgotten by many. This may be due to his constant efforts to bridge the gap between Soviet scientists and the West during the height of the Cold War; his political affiliation made him suspect in the United States and among some colleagues in Europe. He died in August 1958.

  Irène Joliot-Curie worked in her laboratory throughout World War II, supported and shared her husband’s political views, and died of leukemia in the spring of 1956. There is no evidence to suggest that she betrayed her husband’s research to the Germans. The mystery of the leaks in the Ministry of Armaments remains unsolved to this day.

  Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski contributed to British atomic research while at Cambridge and returned to France at the war’s close. They enjoyed distinguished careers in physics.

  Jacques Allier survived the war and returned to banking.

  Rogers Lamont was killed by a German sniper in the British retreat to Dunkirk. He was the only Sullivan & Cromwell partner to die in World War II, although many served. A plaque to his memory as an oarsman and a scholar is mounted in the boathouse at Princeton University.

  I.G. Farbenindustrie continued its work in chemical warfare, moving from the supply of carbon monoxide to the production of Zyklon-B, the prussic acid extermination gas used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The company reorganized after World War II, and is now known internationally as BASF. Documents pertaining to the use of carbon monoxide in domestic euthanasia programs, as well as I.G. Farben’s role in Hitler’s Final Solution, are retained in the company’s archives.

  Hans Gunter von Dincklage—Spatz to his friends—sat out the war as the vaguest of spies. He lived in the Ritz Hotel, where one day he met Coco Chanel in the lobby. Chanel is said to have admired Spatz’s flawless French and excellent tailoring; despite the fact she was twelve years older, the two became lovers. Chanel moved into Spatz’s suite at the Ritz (she’d been evicted from her own by the Germans) and became an ardent supporter of the Occupation. Before Paris was liberated in August 1944, Spatz fled east. Chanel was denounced as a collaborator, arrested, and interrogated by the Free French. She and Spatz eventually reunited in Switzerland, where they lived in exile for many years before drifting apart. Chanel returned to Paris in 1953 and, at age seventy, reopened her fashion house after a hiatus of fifteen years, with a collection that took the world by storm in the spring of 1954.

  The end of Spatz’s life remains obscure.

  Château Loudenne still sits on the banks of the Gironde in the Médoc, but it has not boasted a count or countess for many years. The Gilbey family, of British gin fortune and fame, bought the estate in the late nineteenth century, and it is still owned by their successors. A cooking school operates in the rose-colored château, and although the wine remains cru bourgeois, it is of good quality.

  Mouton-Rothschild was occupied by the German army throughout the war. Baron Philippe de Rothschild was thrown into a Vichy prison, from which he managed to escape to England and join de Gaulle. His wife, Vicomtesse Elizabeth de Chambure, spent the war in Paris—where she was arrested by the Gestapo in the final weeks of France’s Occupation and dragged away from her young daughter, Philippine. Elizabeth de Chambure was exterminated at Ravensbrück concentratio
n camp a few weeks later.

  On his return to Mouton after the liberation of France, Baron Philippe requested a labor party of German POW’s to repair the extensive damage to his château and construct a new drive through the park. Forever after, Baron Philippe referred to it as the “Road of Revenge.”

  Memphis Jones is based on the jazz performer and cabaret legend Josephine Baker, who fled Paris for North Africa at the German invasion and joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces as a spy. Baker was later decorated for meritorious service by de Gaulle, and remained in Paris until her death in 1975. Throughout her life she collected lovers and adopted children of diverse ethnic backgrounds, whom she called her “Rainbow Family.”

  Ambassador William Bullitt served as Provisional Mayor of Paris once the French government abandoned the city to the Germans. He witnessed the capitulation of French forces and is said to have served champagne to the Government of Occupation when it entered Paris, despite his well-known hatred of Nazism. He left Europe in July 1940, and was never given another post under Roosevelt. Despite his close friendship with the President, Bullitt’s blunt style and penchant for gossip irritated and distanced FDR, as did his expectation of being appointed Secretary of the Navy in a war cabinet. A devastating car accident damaged his health; his Freudian study of Woodrow Wilson was roundly panned by critics; and he died of cancer in 1967.

  Max Shoop closed the Paris office of Sullivan & Cromwell and sent his American colleagues home to New York on what is described as the last ship out of Bordeaux. He and Odette eventually left Paris for Switzerland, where he ran intelligence operations for the Office of Strategic Services under his former Sullivan & Cromwell partner, Allen Dulles. After the war he returned to Paris and joined the international firm of Coudert Brothers. He died in 1956.

  John Foster Dulles served as Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower, thereby ensuring that an international airport would one day be named for him. His brother, however, gave up his S&C partnership in 1940 to join the OSS. Allen Dulles was sent to Berne, Switzerland, in December 1942, and spent the next three years running intelligence operations throughout Europe, using in many cases old contacts he’d made through the Sullivan & Cromwell network. Allen’s flair for intrigue and deception—formerly practiced against his wife—found a natural outlet in espionage, and following the war he was made Director of Central Intelligence. Dulles ran the CIA for a decade, during the high watermark of the Cold War. Perhaps more than any other single man he left his mark indelibly on the organization.