The driver of the hearse was smoking, hips propped against the door of his vehicle; he’d exchanged a few curt pleasantries with the limousine’s chauffeur, something about the weather or the sales Boches, Sally hadn’t exactly heard. He was a man not quite old enough to have avoided the Front, but she noticed that he kept his right arm tucked close to his rib cage as though it were only partly functional, and she imagined some sort of trench wound in his twenties that had relegated him to driving the dead for the rest of his days.
Mme. Blum was late. The limousine driver had already looked twice at his watch. Sally had adopted the mannequin’s slouch—one leg cocked, hips sidelong, hands clutching her bag. A suitcase sat docilely at her feet. She was staring as though bored in the direction from which Mme. Blum ought to come, a beautiful woman whose indolence might be read as any number of moods. Not necessarily worried.
It was Joe Hearst who broke her fixed indifference: emerging quietly from the bowels of the morgue with consular paperwork in his hands. His lanky frame was unconsciously graceful, as though while unobserved, he was the kind of man who tap-danced to a tune only he could whistle. His face, however, was deathly pale and there were complicated shadows under his eyes, purple and gray. This, Sally thought, was the face he would wear for the rest of the war—eternally responsible for what he could not save. Like herself.
That woman who’d ditched him had a lot to answer for.
She felt a pang of guilt; she was too interested in the complexity of Joe Hearst for a woman who’d just lost her fiancé. The consciousness of her life and energy reasserting itself even as Philip lay quietly decomposing ten feet away brought a rush of color to her cheeks.
“Mme. Blum’s not here, Joe.”
“Probably found another ten things she absolutely needed in Bayonne,” he said briskly, “and is struggling to get them into her suitcase. Listen, Sally: The reports from the Front this morning aren’t good. We can’t tell whether the Germans are heading south toward Paris or veering west, to the sea. It’s possible they’re doing both. Either way, you’ve got to get on that ship in Cherbourg today. This may be your last chance to get out.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m leaving Paris in forty minutes’ time. Shoop and everybody at Sullivan and Cromwell are right on my heels, heading for Bordeaux. Every American expat in France will be desperate for a berth in another week, and you’ll be back here in Paris trying to figure out how to escape without a car or gas, your money dwindling. Don’t be a fool. Get on that boat with Stilwell’s body. Go home.”
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes and her whole body felt hot, now, her throat constricting like a rebellious child’s. “How long have you been in Paris, Joe?”
He was taken aback. “Eighteen months.”
“I’ve been here four years. A sixth of my lifetime. It’s the most gorgeous life I could ever lead, and it dropped right into my lap. I’ve been Cinderella in Paris, I’ve been the Evil Stepmother if I wanted, I’ve been one hell of a princess in any kingdom you could name. I was never going back. To the place where I’m just somebody’s daughter. Just Sally King.”
“You can come back when the war’s over.” Hearst slipped his arm around her shoulders; at his touch, she felt an unaccustomed shock.
“I’ll be married to some chump by that time,” she said bitterly, “and weigh a hundred more pounds.”
“Get on the boat.” He released her. “I need you to carry Philip Stilwell’s documents to New York, Sally. It’s the only way they’ll get there.”
“The things we read last night? You think they’re that important?”
“Somebody murdered Stilwell for them.”
The words lingered in the air between them. Sally glanced involuntarily at the too-quiet hearse.
“I need you to deliver them to Allen Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell’s New York office. He’ll figure out what they mean. Your ship will reach Manhattan long before any other kind of mail.”
He’d already decided what her life would be, how she’d cross back over the Atlantic with her dead dreams, deliver his convenient parcel for him. But she noticed, all the same, the twist of pain at his mouth. This cost him something.
“Getting that file out may be the only thing you can do for Stilwell,” he said gently. “The only kind of justice you’ll find.”
“Give it to me,” she said. And walked away from him toward her funereal car.
And so Léonie Blum arrived at last, puffing with the exertion of dragging her suitcase down into the Métro and up again, her forearms damp with sweat. Hearst saw her safely into the capacious limousine and listened while she clucked in sympathy over Sally, who exerted herself to make the little old woman feel welcome, a valued companion. Sally did not look at Hearst, however, as she said her good-byes, and he detected a lifelessness beneath the good manners—a kindling of despair. He did not care if she wept all the way across the ocean, provided that she went.
He stood on the paving after the two cars pulled away, both traveling too slowly for his taste, and cursed the day Sally King had walked into Bullitt’s embassy.
“Now that’s a looker,” Petie said dreamily from the front end of Hearst’s Buick, where he’d been standing guard. “Nice little thing, too, Boss.”
“She’s not little,” Hearst said abruptly, “and she’s in love with a dead man.”
He had just lifted the chrome handle of the car door when someone called out his name. He turned his head toward the morgue, scanning the drift of people crisscrossing the pavement. There it was again: Hearst.
A slight figure, almost indistinguishable from the pale limestone of the surrounding façades; a soft-brimmed gray hat like any other. Only Max Shoop’s eyes commanded attention today, arresting Hearst where he stood. They were blazing with malice and fury.
“She’s gone?”
“Sally? A few minutes ago.”
The lawyer swore, unexpectedly and viciously.
He knows she has the papers, Hearst thought. He knows.
“You couldn’t have warned her?”
“About what?”
“Emery Morris.” Shoop walked to the edge of the paving, shading his eyes as he stared west. “He’s on the run—and wanted for murder.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
On the morning of the day war really came to France, Memphis awoke in a small, white-plastered room tucked under the eaves of the inn at Alise-Ste-Reine. She thought it was a weird name for a tiny village lost in the folds of the hills—Alise, the Sainted Queen—when nobody now alive could remember exactly who Alise was. The hamlet had held maybe five hundred souls before its men were hauled off to the Front; a farming village, close to Dijon, and notable for a grand bronze statue of Vercingetorix in its neat central square. Hans had told her Vercingetorix was an old fart who’d died fighting Caesar—every statue in France, it seemed, commemorated some lost and bloody cause.
Sunshine streamed through the casement and the scent of roses swam headily on the wind, but neither sun nor scent had awakened her. It was engines—revved high and loud, repeatedly gunned as though to emphasize a point—and the voices of men rising through the open window. She got up and scuttled to the casement, peering down on the square.
Gilles Martin was standing in front of the inn with his son, only a kid in his teens for all he worked in the bar. The innkeeper had looked her up and down without speaking a word last night, as though she’d dropped out of the sky, dropped from Mars maybe, in her shining coffee skin and her Parisian clothes. His wife had demanded sharply if von Halban was with the German army, and when he denied it, she’d examined his French papers narrowly and muttered something about Fifth Columnists and reporting him to the local gendarme. Hans had quietly explained that he was a French citizen, a resident of Paris, that he was conducting Miss Jones to Marseille, where she was engaged to perform—and from the look on the innkeepers’ faces they expected a strip routine, something bare-breasted and gyrating like the post
ers of Paris from the twenties. The wife had put her arm firmly around René’s shoulders—that was the son—and pulled him out of harm’s way, back into her kitchen. At first Gilles had insisted there were no rooms, the place was full up, though even Memphis could tell the town was deserted now the war was on, Sedan only a couple hundred miles to the north. Hans had unrolled some of Spatz’s money and pushed it into the man’s palm. He’d shut up at that point. Found not one, but two rooms.
Hans was standing a little behind Gilles and René, as though he’d just walked out of the inn after breakfast: eyes squinting into the sun and that expression of caution on his face that Memphis had learned to recognize. He went through life looking wary, as though every day was one big chilly pond he was forced to stick his toe into, as though something nasty might bite him. She was beginning to feel affection for him after all these days in his car—or her car, rather, piled high with trunks and bandboxes and a satchel or two, Hans hunched over the wheel patiently negotiating traffic. They’d been on the road for nearly three days, ever since that hurried meeting at Hans’s place Wednesday night: a confused departure from her echoing house on the Rue des Trois Frères, Spatz silently smoking, all her costumes and feathered boas, spangled brassieres and towering hats shoved willy-nilly into the depths of the Vuitton trunk, too many pairs of shoes left behind, the satchels needed for her precious sheet music.
“Where did you get that money?” Spatz had asked her with deceptive unconcern, as she counted out the cash she’d taken from the man at the American Express office.
“From one of my fellas,” she’d said coolly. “You don’t know him.” Not about to tell how she’d talked to the lawyer named Shoop. The memory of that desperate conversation in the wee hours, Jacquot’s bedroom and the look of death on Shoop’s face, still made her squirm. But she’d cashed the man’s check all right.
“You use everybody, don’t you, my sweet?”
“Same as you use me,” she retorted. “You think I don’t know you’re sticking this guy Hans in my car for a reason? Which one of us you watching, Spatz? Me or the German?”
“Hans is Austrian. And of course he’s there to watch over you. I want you out of Paris safely.”
He’d come to stand behind her as she tossed her jewelry in the depths of a handbag, golden head cocked in amusement. She raised her head and met his bright, birdlike gaze in the mirror. His hand caressed her shoulder. Gooseflesh rising.
“And while you’re on the road, my darling,” he said, “I want you to keep in touch. Call me whenever you find a public telephone. Tell me exactly where you are. Just in case I need to…rescue you.”
What had surprised Memphis during the long hours of travel was how restful she found Hans von Halban. The Austrian might look at the world as though it were going to savage him, but behind the wheel of her car he was comfortable enough: rarely speaking, companionable in his silence, never expecting to be entertained. She had spent most of her life entertaining somebody—she’d done it at three for her sisters and brothers, she’d done it at thirteen the first time she got married—she’d done it in London and Manhattan and up and down the Champs-Élysées. She’d come to think of men as idiots whose mouths were always hanging open, waiting for some woman to dangle her tit. Hans was different. When he talked, he figured she had a brain in her head. It was a novel sensation.
“How come you friends with Spatz?” she’d asked that first night, as they turned in the opposite direction he’d been ordered by the Ministry to follow, and headed resolutely east, into the teeth of the advancing German army. His plan, as he’d vaguely sketched it, was to take the fastest route to Marseille so as to get home sooner to his wife and kids, and the fastest route was east and south. He was counting on the fact that not even the panzer divisions could cover many miles in two days, and anyway the rumor was the Germans were headed for the Channel. He was just brushing the edge of Champagne, turning toward Troyes and then Dijon, but what he hadn’t reckoned on was the whole French army scattering like a pile of windblown leaves, south from the Ardennes and their failed counteroffensive into Troyes and every other town in Champagne, the roads clogged to a standstill with exhausted men and jeeps and village people struggling to get through the ranks to Paris. Hans had pushed on for a few hours in the dark of Wednesday night until, at last, he pulled off to the side of the road and they both watched the columns of sagging soldiers trudge by. Moonlight glinting on the barrels of their guns. Memphis had opened a bottle of cognac she’d brought along for the ride and they’d passed it to each other, wiping the bottle’s rim with one of her gloves.
“I became Spatz’s friend the day I understood I could never be French,” he said then. “It is not enough to take the citizenship or the French wife. When your loneliness is unrelieved—when you feel invisible to most others—just the sound of your native tongue can bring tears to your eyes, yes? You have felt this also, I think, Miss Jones?”
They were speaking French because his English was poor and her German nonexistent, and when she heard his words, everything twisted inside her. She’d said she didn’t care if she never went back to Tennessee, she could stay in Paris the rest of her life, but the truth was there were times she wanted nothing more than to sit down at her mother’s table in the humid forenoon of a Memphis July, rest her elbows on a crumpled paper bag, and shell peas into a bowl. She wanted the food only her mother could make, she wanted the lilting patois of her dusty, run-down street—the speech that had rocked and curdled her infancy, that had shouted her out of town, that rang in her ears in her worst midnight dreams. She understood all too painfully what Hans von Halban meant: Sometimes even an enemy looks like salvation if he calls you by your name.
The Enemy was standing in the square right in front of Gilles Martin’s inn, now, at forty-three minutes past seven o’clock in the morning, Saturday the eighteenth of May. Three soldiers in what Spatz called feldgrau uniforms: gray wool tunics and trousers, gleaming black boots rising to mid-calf. They wore helmets and goggles and thick black gloves and they had arrived on the backs of three motorcycles—young René was openly admiring these, all the complicated mechanics of a German machine. The fact that the trio represented the advance guard of a formidable force was obvious to Memphis, as she stared from her attic room: They were too self-assured, these three who’d conquered a town just by passing through it. There were more where they came from.
One of them—the commanding officer, she guessed—spoke French, and he was speaking it very loudly, as though to compensate for his lousy accent. She gathered that he was recommending that the entire remaining population of Alise-Ste-Reine pick up and hit the road before the German army arrived. He was also demanding petrol for the motorcycles. There was a snag at this point—Hans and Memphis had already discovered there was no petrol to be had in Alise-Ste-Reine. In point of truth, theirs was the only car in the entire village. Hans had stolen some fuel in the dead of night from a storage depot on the outskirts of Troyes, but that was a day ago and Memphis was beginning to worry about the distance ahead: the ascent into mountainous country around Grenoble.
Gilles motioned to Hans, pleading for an interpreter, and with that familiar look of wariness Hans stepped forward and broke into German. And at that moment, a shot rang out from somewhere beyond the square: a single, sharp crack of a rifle. One of the German motorcyclists dropped to the ground like a stone.
The officer glanced at the fallen man—blood spurting from the neck, the second soldier bent over the prone body, shaking his head—and then without much thought or apparent effort he grabbed Hans, grabbed Gilles and the boy René, and dragged them into the center of the square: a human wall between himself and the unknown sniper. As Memphis watched, the German muttered something to Hans, who in turn spoke confidentially to Gilles Martin: The innkeeper called out in French, high and desperate.
Hold your fire! Come forward and surrender your weapon! If you do not—there will be consequences!
A silence set
tled over Alise-Ste-Reine. Memphis watched the little group, standing like statues in the early sunlight. A bird settled on the head of Vercingetorix, lazily stretched its wings.
The German officer pulled a knife from his pocket and slit the boy René’s throat from ear to ear.
Gilles they shot in the head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was difficult to know what to burn and what to save. Allier had told him to start sorting the research reports he’d compiled for the Ministry, file the essential data in folders and boxes but destroy the reports themselves, with their incriminating trail of responsibility, and Joliot meant to do so. He even constructed an ideal arsonist’s chamber far from the volatile chemicals of the lab, a steel drum that must have held something important at one time but was mere refuse now, suitable for flames and ashes. He was used to constructing infernal machines. Every physicist was one part auto mechanic, a tinkerer with toys, and Joliot was no exception. He’d made his own cloud chamber. Installed his own Hoffman electrometer. Blown and cut glass. Assembled the cyclotron. All examples of his patient ability to waste time—since everything must be abandoned now. The futility of his life kept him on his knees in front of his desk, surrounded by papers, unable to decide what should be consigned to flames. His citation from the Nobel committee, perhaps?
It was there that Mad Jack found him.
Joliot had never met Mad Jack. It was Allier who served as the Earl of Suffolk’s pilot fish—his entrée to the Collège de France. Once he’d devoured the Sullivan & Cromwell papers, the earl wasted no time in locating Jacques Allier, through contacts at the British embassy and the various French ministries. Mad Jack knew the French johnnies would have plans for a star like Frédéric Joliot-Curie, not to mention his wife, and it was vital he scotch those plans while they were yet in the making.
The Alibi Club Page 18