The Alibi Club

by Francine Mathews

  The flat was an enfilade of rooms: bedchambers at one end of the wide salon, servants’ quarters and kitchen at the other. Sally shut her bedroom door quietly and crept down the hallway in the clothes Odette had lent her. A ridiculous pair of borrowed dress slippers dangled from her hands.

  The bolt driven home in the front door’s lock did not even squeak as she pulled it; still holding her breath, she stepped onto the landing. The blue glow of blackout bulbs fell like sainthood around her.

  There were no taxis until she reached the Opéra, and even then, she had no money to pay a fare. The eerie silence of the world magnified her footfalls until she could almost believe the buildings trembled as she passed. The chief danger was that her solitude would attract the attention not of thieves but of a gendarme, who would certainly demand to see her papers. Sally had none. She kept off the main boulevards, hugging the side streets and narrower ways.

  Just before three-thirty in the morning she crossed the Seine at Pont Alexandre Trois, the heavy dome of Les Invalides looming in the blackout sky; the moon had set. And yet some movement as of a bird across the dim vault attracted her attention; she stopped short near the parapet of the bridge and stared upward. A plane droned ominous as thunder. It had to be German—no one else would make this sortie over sleeping Paris, the city exposed like an indolent nude beneath the stars. Sally stood rooted, her face uplifted, waiting for the whistle of the falling bomb, the flaring leap of fire.

  Dawn was breaking fresh and golden over the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter as she closed the door of her flat for the last time and set out, suitcase clenched firmly in one hand. She was smiling faintly to herself because, incredibly, Tasi had left Joe Hearst’s letter with its three hundred francs unviolated on the little dressing table in Sally’s studio and now, please God, she could buy a cup of coffee. The tone of Hearst’s note was puzzlingly brusque—If you receive this, contact me immediately at the chancellery—but it was nice of him to think of her.

  Sally’s ankles were aching from all the walking she’d done in dress slippers, and the suitcase would begin to feel heavy soon; but the pounding in her head was gone and with it, all uncertainty. She felt light of heart, as though she’d cut some rope that held her. Swimming steadily out to sea.

  Other people with suitcases in their hands were trudging along the pavements. None of them looked as cheerful as she did. And what reason did she have for this rising joy? The man she had meant to marry was dead. Her city was on the cusp of destruction. But as she approached Philip’s old apartment—Mme. Blum the concierge already up and sweeping the threshold of the massive courtyard doors—she began, softly, to sing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I don’t understand at all what you people do,” Allier was saying in an absent sort of way as von Halban prepared coffee over a gas burner he kept in his corner of the lab. “My superiors tell me what I should do about it. C’est tout.”

  Liar, von Halban mentally replied. You understand physics well enough to have explained it all to the British in London only last month. G. P. Thomson and Oliphant and Cockcroft—who said it couldn’t be done and who’ll steal our work, now. Our colleagues and competitors. Our allies in this war.

  “We each have our métier,” he countered hollowly. “I know nothing about banking, myself. I am always in want of money.”

  “But that would be your wife! Women are always spending more than they ought, n’est-ce pas?—and your wife is French, I think you said?”

  You knew that before you rang the buzzer at my door, Allier, you know everything about me, and this subtle conversational approach does not deceive me at all. I remember being sent to Porquerolles while you adventured your way through Norway. I remember the shame and fear of it, my wife refusing to come with me and taking the children to her mother. The look in her people’s eyes.

  He turned, beaker raised, and offered the steaming brew to his enemy.

  “I don’t suppose you have milk,” Allier suggested mournfully.

  Von Halban did not reply. Dawn was breaking over Paris in the watery, opalescent fashion of spring and they had been at it for three hours: collecting lab papers and the canisters of heavy water Joliot had stored at the Collège for a month. There were twenty-six of them in all, handmade by an artisan in Norway for the specific purpose of being smuggled in thirteen suitcases: Allier’s work, again. The canisters were waiting by the doorway of the lab, ready for transport, if transport could be found.

  The uranium metal was a trickier proposition, and von Halban had refused to let Allier anywhere near the lead boxes in which it was stored. The Frenchman would simply have to take his word for it that all four hundred kilograms were assembled and accounted for.

  “The cyclotron cannot be moved,” he’d told Allier firmly. “The magnet alone took two years to build in Switzerland, yes? It cost the earth and weighs a ton. You will never disassemble it.”

  “It’s the only cyclotron in Europe,” Allier retorted. “We cannot allow it to fall into German hands.”

  As von Halban drank the scalding coffee now, he was thinking not of magnets or particles but of Joliot: of this unknown woman rising in ecstasy above him. Of an impossible happiness entirely of the flesh. Thinking of how it was all to be ruined, and how he was the agent of Joliot’s ruin.

  “These names,” Allier persisted. “Year after year. These discoveries. Fermi, the Italian. Nobel Prize. Niels Bohr, the Dane. Nobel Prize. Albert Einstein, of no country and every country—Nobel Prize. That German and his Uncertainty Principle. What is his name?”

  “Heisenberg. Werner Heisenberg.”

  “—One of the few, I might point out, who is not a Jew.”

  Is he waiting for me to laugh heartily? von Halban wondered. To agree that Jewish Physics, as Hitler calls it, is a perversion and a farce? The Nazi hatred of Jewish Physics is the world’s best hope, because the Nazis will kill the very science that could win their war.

  “Fermi spent his Nobel prize money escaping from Italy with his wife,” he told Allier. “They left like thieves in the night, with a suitcase full of cash, and sought asylum in New York. This is what a laureate has come to, in the present age.”

  Allier was silent, his spectacles focused on the surface of his coffee cup.

  “My mother is Jewish,” von Halban persisted, overly loud. “Because of that my father has fled to Switzerland and I am unable to work in my native country ever again. I speak of Austria, you understand. Perhaps you did not know, Monsieur Allier, that Austria since the Anschluss has also closed its doors on Jewish minds.”

  “Oh, I knew,” Allier replied easily. “That’s the reason you gave for requesting French citizenship—that, and the expensive French wife. You’ve worked with him some time, je crois?”

  Him being Fred the Seducer of Unknowns, lover of Russians and Apostate Jews: le Professeur Joliot-Curie.

  “Five years.”

  “Ah. And he’s taken out patents for all this…business, I assume? Or he’s applied for same?”

  Business being an amorphous term for the subtleties of atomic energy. They’d discussed it last October and agreed: Scientists had certain rights to the fruits of their work. Intellectual property.

  “We all signed the requests for patents,” von Halban said tiredly. “Fred and I and Lew Kowarski. We are a team, yes?”

  Defiant words. The team might be broken tomorrow, at a word from this man. The French banker’s smile was genial; Allier was concerned, von Halban thought, for Fred’s gullibility. Did the banker know about the sealed document they’d signed and deposited with the Académie des Sciences?—The design for a sustained nuclear reaction, the first of its kind in the world?

  Which either Kowarski or I could take back to our native land, von Halban thought, and sell to the highest bidder. So fuck you, Allier. My intelligence has no ruler. No allegiance you can command. In this war, it’s every Jew for himself.

  They heard him long before the key rattled uselessly in the un
bolted laboratory door and he stuck his long nose around the heavy steel jamb; heard him because he was singing.

  Von Halban saw it all: the fear that rose sharply in Fred’s eyes, the reserve that followed like a shot bolt. The clothes he hadn’t changed since yesterday and that seemed, in the meticulous—the fastidious—Fred, to be a greater declaration of betrayal than any words might offer. In his mind’s eye von Halban saw again the form of the unknown woman, a joy entirely of the flesh—and felt a shudder pass through his body. Gott in Himmel. Poor Fred.

  Being human, Joliot seized on the most obvious reason for their presence in his lab at dawn.

  “Irène?” he said. “Something’s happened to her? The children?”

  “I spoke with Madame Joliot-Curie a few hours ago,” Allier offered smoothly. “She seemed well enough. Concerned, of course, when I mentioned I could not locate you—mais, assez bien…”

  Von Halban watched his friend shade his eyes with one thin hand; his lips were moving in a curse or fractured prayer.

  “Then what have you come for?” he muttered. “What is it today, Allier?”

  “Marching orders,” the banker said briskly. “Dautry says everything in the lab must go to the Auvergne, Joliot—including, of course, you.”

  As the morning wore on, Joliot found that his hands were shaking—either from von Halban’s coffee or perhaps the panic rising in his throat. He had lived a settled life for so long: the milk cart pulling up to the service entrance of the house in Antony, the bluish liquid poured from buckets into the scullery maid’s tin, Irène insistent that the milk must be boiled to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, and the girl slacking, always, at this incomprehensible job. The children in their school uniforms with their hair brushed and gleaming. His work clothes laid out on their double bed, hers nearly always the same: a starched white shirt smacking of the convent, a formless black skirt with an ample waistband for those rare occasions when, as she put it, she ate too much and made a pig of herself. Two pairs of sensible shoes, somewhat scuffed, beneath the marital dresser. It might have gone on this way indefinitely, both of them grayer, their vitality consumed by method and science, but for the war. War had left him single for the span of too many hours, exposed to the possibilities of chaos.

  Von Halban had gone home to tell his wife about the lab’s evacuation but when Joliot walked him to the door he’d paused on the threshold and muttered, “Fred. I’m sorry. I did not intend for this man to violate your privacy—”

  “It’s not your fault, Hans.”

  He nodded once, eyes sliding away from Joliot’s guilt. He was a reticent man; he would never ask questions; but the nebulous matter would lie between them and a kind of unease would grow, a lack of confidence.

  Impulsively Joliot said, “I was with an old friend. An old…flame.” It was the only word for Nell. “I knew her before Irène. Loved her…Oh, God, Hans, I’m such a fool.”

  “No,” he said gently. “Never a fool. And you do not have to tell me.”

  “She’s an Englishwoman. Married to a comte. I’ll probably never see her again…”

  Von Halban’s nostrils had flared slightly and he’d said, with sudden nervousness, “Not…not the Comtesse de Loudenne?”

  Merde, Joliot had thought viciously. The whole world knows already.

  “Be careful, Fred,” von Halban said. “Her cousin is a Nazi spy—and I think he was her lover once, too…”

  So he was listening now to Jacques Allier as the banker-lieutenant talked of war matériel and places of safety, but it was Nell he saw in his mind’s eye: Nell the coiled wire of passion, Nell the bitter flame.

  “…considering the town of Vichy,” Allier was saying. “Reynaud and Daladier believe that if we can put the Massif Central between ourselves and the panzers, we could survive indefinitely.”

  “I don’t know of any lab in Vichy,” Joliot managed.

  “Time enough to worry about that once you’ve got your apparatus down there.” Allier sipped tentatively at his coffee, as though radioactivity had a taste that could be identified, sour or sweet on the tongue. “The vital thing is to get the water and uranium out of Paris, n’est-ce pas? I’ve wired the manager of the Banque de France in Clermont-Ferrand—the capital of the Auvergne—and he’s willing to store whatever I ask in his vault. That should do for your water. Complete security and complete discretion, no questions asked.”

  A bank vault, Joliot thought mordantly. I’m in the hands of financiers, just another commodity for trade. How do I set up my cyclotron in a steel vault surrounded by money changers? But I’m forgetting. The cyclotron is immovable. The cyclotron stays. Which means that so, ultimately, do I.

  “We can start the canisters on the road to the Auvergne tonight and you can make your way down there with the rest of the lab equipment once your wife returns from Brittany,” Allier decreed. “I’ll rent you a villa big enough for your personnel and their families.”

  “Henri Moureu should take the water,” Joliot said. “He’s my deputy here at the Collège, and you can have no question about his loyalty—his father played a key part in the last war. He was called ‘the Marshal of French Science,’ I believe. Moureu knows the Auvergne fairly well. But he’ll need a truck.”

  “I am familiar with M. Moureu,” Allier said.

  …Down to the size of his underwear, Joliot thought. Have you measured all our balls? Do you know exactly what we boast in combined inches? Damn you and your necessary impertinence.

  “And the uranium?” he asked. “It should go with the water. I can’t do much useful work without it.”

  “The water and metal must be separately stored,” Allier said. “The world just isn’t safe for your kind of science.”

  Joliot looked at this mild-featured banker, accustomed to caution, and felt a wild impulse to laugh. Science was a leap into the void that had nothing to do with safety. Irène’s mother had died leaping, her body glowing with radium, and it was fated that Joliot would follow her into that abyss. All the Curies decayed with a half-life both gorgeous and deadly.

  “You want me to do nothing, then, for the duration of the war?” he said with sharp intensity. “My work goes nowhere without supplies. I thought that was understood.”

  “Your work is important, bien sûr. But so is the need to keep it out of the grasp of the Germans. Your work, as you call it, could destroy the world, Joliot.”

  “Nonsense! We’ve no idea yet what’s possible—what these atoms could do…Fuel an entire country’s electrical grid, perhaps. Heat all of Europe in winter—”

  “Level a city the size of Paris,” Allier concluded implacably. “With every living soul buried beneath it.”

  Joliot bowed his head. “To what bank vault does the uranium go?”

  “The minister wants it out of France—one of our colonies in North Africa, perhaps. Our job right now is simply to get it to Marseille. And await orders.”

  “Uranium is dangerous,” Joliot said. “Nobody but a trained scientist should handle it. I’ll have to send Kowarski. Or von Halban.”

  “No.”

  “You do realize,” he persisted, voice rising, “that von Halban and Kowarski are unavoidable vulnerabilities for you, for Dautry? Everything I know, they know, too.”

  “Then they will be interned.” Allier said it quietly. “Kept under lock and key. There’s no other acceptable solution.”

  “Are you going to lock up their wives and children?”

  “If necessary.”

  “Then you lock me up, too. I refuse to cooperate. I refuse to…lend myself to something so despicable as the betrayal of friends.”

  Allier said nothing for an instant, his gentle eyes dim behind his spectacles. “But perhaps the betrayal has already occurred.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a leak,” the banker said patiently. “We’ve been aware for some time that a spy is selling our secrets. Someone at the Ministry, maybe. Someone here. I’ve come under sus
picion myself, I’m certain of that, and the fact I survived my trip to Norway is no excuse. I shouldn’t have survived and the water should never have made it out of Oslo. But it did and the leaks continue. We think they’re meant to continue. Until the Germans have the information they need. We’re all being kept alive—kept on a string—watched. Like laboratory rats.”

  Joliot swallowed hard, cotton-mouthed. “What kind of leaks?”

  Allier shrugged. “The less you know the better. But I assure you it is entirely possible that someone on your staff—someone with knowledge and divided loyalties—has systematically betrayed you. I think we could name several possible turncoats, yes? That Russian, Lew Kowarski. The Austrian, Hans von Halban. Possibly—forgive me—yourself or your wife. Both of you have professed sympathy, after all, for the Communist system.”

  “Von Halban must take the uranium metal,” Joliot said flatly. “Send a watchdog if you like—go yourself, I don’t give a damn. But allow him this chance to prove himself. Unfounded suspicion will kill a man; it hangs over his life like poison gas. I won’t do that to Hans. He’s too good a physicist.”

  “I doubt that the minister will allow it.”

  Joliot’s lips quirked in a wintry fashion. “The minister has no choice. I outrank you, Lieutenant Allier. Tell Dautry I issued my orders.”

  When the banker left, Joliot faced the task of calling Irène.

  They were apart only on rare occasions, and when they communicated it was usually by letter. For this, however, he required the telephone and there was only one in the building, in a wood-paneled cubicle in the main hall. A trunk call was a tedious affair of dictating the number to the national operator, who placed the call to Arcouest and then phoned him back with Irène on the line. His wife’s voice astonished him: disembodied, breathless with tuberculosis, the voice of an elderly woman. “I’m sorry Allier disturbed you last night, my darling.” He was relieved that she could not see his face.