The Alibi Club
Page 27
Allen Dulles later founded a quiet little watering hole where gentlemen spies could gather in the heart of Washington, D.C.—roughly on the site of the present-day International Spy Museum.
He called it the Alibi Club.
EPILOGUE
Transcript of the interrogation of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Nobel laureate and member of the Collège de France, by General Erich Schumann, professor of military physics, Berlin University, scientific advisor to General Keitel. General Schumann was accompanied by Dr. Kurt Diebner, nuclear physicist, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, and Wolfgang Gentner, physicist, who trained under Joliot-Curie from 1932 to 1935. This interrogation took place at the Collège de France on August 13, 1940. Dieter Wolfe, transcriber.
Question: Where is the heavy water?
Joliot: I put it on an English ship in the port of Bordeaux.
Question: And the name of this ship?
Joliot: I have no idea. I heard your bombers sank it a few hours after leaving port.
Question: Our records show you purchased a supply of uranium metal from the United States. Where is it now?
Joliot: The Ministry of Armaments took the uranium. You’d better ask them what they did with it. You have a spy in the Ministry, I believe?
Question: Don’t toy with us, Doktor Joliot. You of all people must know where the uranium is.
Joliot: I’m the last person the Ministry would tell. They don’t trust me at all, I’m afraid. I’m a Communist.
He was enjoying the interrogation; it pleased him to lie with such abandon now, he who’d always found it so difficult to deceive. Schumann had used the correct word—he was toying with them, throwing his knowledge of their spy and his complete indifference to the truth right in their faces. It was his testament of love and loyalty to Nell, as much as to France.
“Think twice, Fred,” Wolfgang Gentner warned him privately when at last the others had left. “They can make life impossible for you, you know. I’ve asked to be placed here in the lab so that I can protect you, but I don’t know how long they’ll leave me here. I’ve been denounced once already for my democratic tendencies.”
“Poor Gentner.” He clapped his old friend on the shoulder with sincere affection and pity. “Shall we meet later, in the Boul-Mich? I don’t promise to tell you the truth. But we might talk of our children.”
Gentner smiled at him sadly. “Those men will be back. They won’t leave you alone. They want your cyclotron and your expertise. Most of all they want your mind.”
“I don’t think even the Nazis have figured out a way to steal that.”
Gentner turned at the door. “You’re wrong, you know, about the spy at the Ministry. I understand the source of their information was someone much closer to home. Watch your back, Fred. As well as your front. You’re vulnerable on all sides, now.”
He lingered alone in the lab, his empty and echoing lab, stripped of its equipment and its vivid life. Someone much closer to home. But she had not yet returned from her rest cure in the Dordogne; they were both, he realized, delaying the reunion as long as possible.
He had a month before the children came from Brittany and Irène would be discharged. A month to heal his wounds, and go on as before: as though the war had never happened, as though his own wife had not risked the annihilation of the world by putting his research into German hands.
It was remarkable, he thought as he turned out the laboratory lights and set off to meet Gentner in the small café where he’d once drunk with Nell, what crimes a person could commit in the name of love.
About the Author
FRANCINE MATHEWS spent four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, where she trained in operations and worked briefly on the investigation into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A former journalist, she lives and writes in Colorado, where she is at work on her next thriller.
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Writing as Stephanie Barron
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THE ALIBI CLUB
A Bantam Book / September 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Francine Mathews
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mathews, Francine.
The Alibi Club / Francine Mathews.
p. cm.
1. World War, 1939–1945—France—Fiction. 2. Paris (France)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A8357A73 2006
813'.54—dc22
2005053657
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90290-7
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