“Shit, no. But we gotta get these boys real happy, you know what I’m sayin’?”
He did. He also knew Krauss was unpredictable. Alcohol might turn his simmering nuttiness into something worse. But when Bagge returned from his daily jaunt lugging cheese and bread and an entire case of wine, von Halban tried to look pleased. Bagge had even stolen wineglasses. They opened the first bottle on the way to Avignon.
She was singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and the lyric sweetness of the tune—its cagey backhanded seduction—was working on all of them. Memphis was swaying in the firelight in a costume from the Folies Bergères, spangles on her breasts and a triangle of silk over her ass. She’d never worn that kind of thing performing at the Alibi Club, and von Halban was astounded at the raw power of her body.
They’d been drinking steadily for the past hour, although he’d been careful to nurse his glass and make it last. Bagge clutched a bottle by the neck and tipped the wine straight down his throat, singing jaggedly off-tune in German. Krauss was lounging near the fire, tunic unbuttoned; his eyes were narrowed as he watched Memphis. She pulled him up to dance with her, and von Halban saw with disappointment that Krauss was still steady on his feet, still in perfect control. He was leaning toward Memphis as she moved, with the same narrow-eyed, watchful look—and then he reached out and grasped her breast, hard, in his hand.
Von Halban thought an instant of shock flashed over Memphis’s face, but her smile only widened and her body seemed to fold into Krauss’s like a liquid thing. Krauss mouthed her neck, tearing at her skin with his teeth—and Hans rose, unable to watch anymore; his stomach was cramping with fear. And with something he was sure was envy.
Bagge was standing now, too, his glazed eyes fixed on Memphis. Before Hans could speak or stop him, he hurled himself at Krauss and smashed the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape over his head.
Krauss should have dropped like a stone. Instead, he seized Bagge by the throat and strangled him.
Memphis had stepped backward while Bagge choked and gasped, a look of horror on her face. When Krauss threw down the limp body of his corporal, she turned and stumbled away on her high heels. Von Halban could hear her retching.
He waited, motionless, just beyond the fire’s circle of light, until Krauss had crashed through the underbrush after her. Then he bent down quickly over Bagge’s corpse, hunting for the man’s gun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It was Elie Loewens, the violinist, who became a go-between for Nell with the rest of the Dutch group. It was not that they lacked a common language—all of them spoke French—but the six remained aloof. It was as though they were paying guests and she their landlady. The chilliness both irked and amused her: she could not quite figure out if the Jewish banking clan regarded her as socially inferior, or thought themselves unequal to a countess.
They were unfailingly polite, taking their meals without commenting on the monotony of the food, the gaps in what might have been expected to grace a château’s table. But they did not unbend. No conversation flowed, though Nell made an effort in those first few days to inquire about their lives in Holland, their plans for the future. Not even the girl—whose name was Mathilde—responded to Nell. She was Julian de Kuyper’s young sister. His wife had died some years before. It was three days before Nell was even sure that Mathilde had a voice.
But she noticed the excellent quality of the girl’s clothes, which spoke for her: They had certainly been made in Paris. The men’s suits came from London—Nell could never mistake British tailoring—and they carried themselves like men of standing, men who had a prominence in their world.
Only Elie Loewens looked as though he understood just how completely that prominence had melted into nothing now that the Nazis gripped the Netherlands. There was a hollowness in his eyes that said there would be no going back.
The morning after Spatz had come and gone—Spatz who treated the Dutch Jews with indifferent charm, filling their silence with anecdotes of Amsterdam and his opinion of Rembrandt—Nell decided it was vital she hold a council of war. The strains of the violin had begun as soon as Spatz disappeared down the long gravel drive in Nell’s car. She followed the sound until she discovered Elie, standing in his shirtsleeves on the rear terrace. His eyes were closed and his long, sensitive fingers fluttered with the sixth sense of the blind.
She waited until he raised his chin from the instrument and looked at her.
“What is that you’re playing?”
It was not what she had intended to say, but he had been practicing the same piece over and over, ever since he’d arrived at Loudenne, and obsessions made Nell curious. They were what defined people, after all.
“Death and the Maiden. Schubert. Is there something I can do for you, Countess?”
“I’d like to talk to your brother. And Mr. de Kuyper. Would you find them, and meet me down at the chai?”
The young man studied his fingertips, the mark of the strings embedded in the pads. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the meaning of that word. Chai.”
“The outbuildings—the winery. I’m going ahead to make sure that none of my staff are there.”
She turned without waiting for his reply. As she walked toward the cuverie, part of her was listening for the strings and the bow, the resumption of frenzy. But the terrace was silent.
They appeared a quarter of an hour later: three men in dark suit jackets, correct and wary. Elie had left his violin behind. Nell was leaning against a massive oak cask, waiting for them, and the scent of grape must and the sugar of fermentation were heavy on the air.
“You know that my cousin, Herr von Dincklage, is German,” she said without preamble. “He’s no soldier and I would never describe him as a Nazi—although he certainly joined the party years ago. He wouldn’t have a career if he hadn’t.”
“Is he a spy?” Julian de Kuyper asked.
“I assume so.” Nell met the banker’s eyes. “I didn’t know Spatz was planning to visit Loudenne, and I had no time to conceal your presence from him. I asked him to keep your visit a secret. But I cannot promise that he will do so.”
“The Germans will take France just as they took Holland,” Elie said. “They won’t stop until they’ve driven us into the sea. But do you understand, Countess, that we’re running out of places to go?”
“I’ve heard stories,” Nell said slowly. “Of what the Germans did to people in Poland. People who were…”
“Jewish,” de Kuyper finished. “I’ve heard those stories, too. Thousands were rounded up. They were shot beside open graves.”
“I think we ought to have a plan,” Nell said. “A place you can hide. The obvious choice is right here.”
“Here?” Elie strolled forward, his eyes roaming among the casks, each as tall as a man. “I don’t understand.”
“This is the first-year room,” Nell explained. “Where the wine blended from last year’s harvest is sitting in oak. But beneath it is the cellar. Any Germans who come to Loudenne will naturally find it—they’ll be looking for the wine. But they’ll take the bottles. Not the casks. Even Germans aren’t that stupid.”
“I want to see your cellar.”
She took them downstairs, into the cool, grottolike depths with the arching stone vaults, where the thousands of bottles laid down by Henri over the years were stacked, waiting to be opened or sold. The cellars ran for hundreds of yards beneath the foundations of the cuverie and even the château itself, beneath the green lawns that stretched to the Gironde, beneath the gravel drive; a vast series of man-made caverns that were the true heart of Château Loudenne. They ended at the riverbank, in a water gate, where the barrels could be rolled onto boats. The Gironde had always been the primary route du vin.
“I brought these casks from Paris ten days ago,” she told Elie as she led the three men past the racks of bottles to the fresh oak barrels Henri had stored there. “There’s nothing inside them. I intended them for this year’s wine. But if I were to set
aside a few—enough to hold each of you, Mathilde and the children—”
“For the rest of the war?” Julian de Kuyper burst out.
“At least until the danger has passed. Until the Germans—if they come—have moved on…”
De Kuyper turned away, his hands clenching.
“God in Heaven,” he muttered. “Is this what we’ve come to?”
Three days later, the Americans arrived.
Joe Hearst led them in his beautiful blue Buick, straight from the Esplanade de Quinconces. He’d waited only for Noakes, the consul, to write his note of introduction to the Countess of Loudenne before rounding up the children who played by the fountains and their parents lounging in the sun. It was an hour from Bordeaux to the part of the Médoc where Nell lived, and Hearst knew that if she agreed to take all fifty of his refugees they’d be pitching tents in near-darkness. He’d told every adult in his group to put three hundred francs in the countess’s kitty; he hoped it would be enough to buy them room.
Nell was having tea alone in the salon when the cavalcade appeared—tea being the one British custom she could not abandon, however many years she lived in France—and for an instant her heart came into her mouth as she heard the rumble of wheels. She was certain Spatz had betrayed her.
“Do you hold Public Days at Loudenne,” Elie Loewens asked from the doorway, “or are there still tourists in France?”
Nell set down her teacup, and went to meet the strangers.
By nightfall, there were seventy people sheltering at the château. Nell saw no reason to explain the Dutch guests—who merited rooms inside—to the diplomats wandering the grounds. This was not, after all, an American war.
“You want a boat?” the agent repeated, “to cross the Channel? You might as well ask if we can get you to New York. Or the moon. Haven’t you heard the radio broadcasts, monsieur?”
It was Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of May, and Hearst was standing in one of Noakes’s suggested shipping offices in the heart of Bordeaux. He’d recovered something of his usual good temper in the past few days at Loudenne, but the incredulity in the agent’s voice—the disbelief bordering on mockery—raised his hackles instantly.
“No. I haven’t heard a radio. What’s happened?”
“The Germans have reached the Channel. Every available boat has been told to report to Dunkirk. There’s a massive evacuation on. They say half a million soldiers are fighting for a place in line on the beach. Half a million! Now tell me we haven’t lost the war.”
“Are you saying there are no boats coming into Bordeaux? None at all? What about merchant ships? Transatlantic steamers? We’ll skip the Channel and head straight for New York if we have to.”
The shipping agent grinned at him. “Be my guest, monsieur. You’ll be sunk before you leave Le Verdon.”
“German subs?”
“They torpedoed a Dutch steamer a few days ago—the Clothilde—off Calais.”
“What did you say?”
Hearst was gripping the man’s desk now, his body gone cold. Sally, his mind screamed. Sally. And I made you go.
“I only mention it,” the agent continued, looking curiously at Hearst, “because they brought the survivors in this morning. They’re down at the préfecture, having their papers checked—”
Hearst was out the door before the man could finish.
There were fifty-nine people huddled in the waiting room of the préfecture building in the center of town: twenty-nine men, twelve children, and eighteen women.
None of them was Sally King.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
At the moment the torpedo hit, Sally was hurled from the Clothilde’s deck into the sea.
It was a long fall; if she had been standing on a passenger liner—the Normandie, for instance—she would never have survived it. But the Clothilde was a smaller class of vessel and the distance from rail to waves was roughly equivalent to a jump from a high-diving board. Her body shuddered as it slapped the water. She was conscious of surprise as she plummeted through: struggling against her own momentum, eight feet down, twelve feet, her ears pounding with pain. Just short of twenty feet below the surface she kicked upward again.
Her head broke into the air and she screamed—more from shock at being alive, from the sheer terror of survival, than anything else. She shook the water out of her eyes.
The Clothilde was engulfed in flames. The stern was already below water, the bow keeling high, and the air was filled with the crackling of fire and the confused shouting of people still struggling on the ship. She glanced around wildly, searching for Léonie Blum.
Floating near her in the water were pieces of the hull, blasted out of its living sides. There were bodies and bales of sodden hay from the livestock hold and one horse, nose high, swimming desperately in circles. No Léonie Blum. Then she saw something familiar: the domed lid of a coffin.
It bobbed sickly a few yards from where she was treading water. One end had been torn away and she could see the soles of Philip’s shoes. As she watched, the sea poured through the opening, and with unconscious mimicry the casket upended like the ship, sliding stern-first under the waves.
Oh, God, she thought, kicking toward it frantically. I’ll never find you in all this water…your mother…I promised to take you home…
She dove, eyes straining through the murky sea, the dimness humped and horribly peopled with the dead and their belongings, hair streaming like seaweed, everything falling in slow motion, a million bubbles rising. The coffin was gone. The sheer pain of it made her gasp and she bucked skyward with a mouthful of water brimming in her lungs.
He was gone, completely gone. She could never save him now from the killers who’d snuffed his life, Morris and Shoop and all the others at S&C who cared more about money and silence than they did about Philip. The lies and the waste. Justice. She’d failed.
The back of her head slammed into something solid and hard.
The hull of a lifeboat.
She glanced over her shoulder, flung out an arm. The lifeboat must have held the crew or some of the French soldiers the Clothilde had tried to take off the Calais beach, but it was empty and capsized now. The hull curved toward the sky like the shell of a peanut. Her fingers scrabbled over the wood, which was slick with water and the fresh oil paint the ship’s crew had constantly applied to it. The sea current was dragging her under the overturned boat; if it succeeded she would die, confused by the solid weight above her, unable to surface. She dug her nails into a crack between the hull’s planks and hung on.
She’d lost her shoes when she hit the water. Her bare legs flailed beneath the waterlogged cotton of her spring dress. And then her feet touched something else.
Someone else.
Another person was hanging from the opposite side of the lifeboat, clutching the hull like Sally.
With a leap of hope, she cried out. “Hello! Is there someone there? Can you reach me? Can you help me right the boat?”
Her companion might have laughed.
A hand clutched at Sally’s wrist: a hard, strong, and cruel hand, that bent all its will in prying her fingers from the wood that might have saved her.
“Poor Miss King,” Emery Morris rasped. “Didn’t I tell you I would enjoy watching you die?”
It was a strange little drama that played out off Calais: the two of them keeping the twelve-foot hull between them, fighting each other with their feet and their hands. Circling the boat as though it were a dinner table, Sally clutching with her fingers at the gunwale when she could not grasp the keel. Once in a while Morris grunted with exertion, and she could hope he was tiring. The numbing cold of the Atlantic was taking its toll in the increasing stiffness of her limbs.
He wanted to catch up with her, to reach her side of the capsized boat before she reached his. It was a foolish waste of energy on Morris’s part; the sea was far more likely to kill her than he was. Darkness was falling now and it had begun to rain. The flaming wreck of the Clothilde was go
ne, in a sudden rushing whirlpool of water that sucked down all debris within twenty yards of the ship: bodies, crates, the struggling horse. Sally and Morris were beyond that danger, beyond any capability of saving the passengers who dove from the prow in its final seconds—the Channel current was ripping them surely south, the lights of Calais dwindling. Sally knew there were other boats near the ship, lifeboats filled with Dutch crewmen and French soldiers, with no room for survivors; salvation did not lie that way. Because she was growing tired, because panic was climbing into her mouth and her brain with the falling dark and the sound of Morris’s panting, constant and ever closer, she almost gave up.
Then she remembered Philip.
“Why did you kill him?” she gasped out. “Why did Philip have to die?”
“Because he couldn’t mind his own business,” Morris snapped. “Nosing around in my files. Questioning everything.”
“I.G. Farben. The dead German engineer.”
“I.G. Farben,” he repeated sarcastically. “The only ones with the strength of will to do their job. But if you know all about that, you’ve read my papers. Stilwell gave them to you, didn’t he?”
He was nearly upon her. Sally decided it was time to stop struggling.
She waited until he rounded the stern of the boat, until she could see his face and look him directly in the eye. The surprise of her capitulation brought him up short, his hands motionless on the hull, staring at her.
“Philip gave the papers to the American embassy,” she told him. “They’ve already sent them to Allen Dulles in New York. Soon everyone will know what you’ve done.” It was a lie, of course—the documents were at the bottom of the sea—but Morris didn’t need to know he was safe. “You’re being hunted for murder.”
The Alibi Club Page 21