by Matt Killeen
Her face was in shadow and painted to a blank slate, but her voice betrayed anger and suffering.
“Are you one of the buraku. . . . Is that why you aren’t a geisha?”
“It’s a long story.” The woman sighed and shook off the question the way that Sarah noticed so many adults did. “But in part, yes. It’s all supposed to be different now, but it isn’t. There are registers, lists, you can’t keep your caste secret. It haunts your life.”
There was a crash, screaming, and laughter from outside the bedroom. When Sarah looked back to Lady Sakura, it was as if the clouds had parted and there had never been any rain. In its place, a smiling young Japanese woman in stage makeup.
“What is your name? Your real name, I mean?” Sarah asked, yawning.
“Atsuko. Takeda Atsuko.”
“Mine’s Sarah Goldstein . . . We’re Jewish really, but Mutti doesn’t like people to know. Could you tell?”
Atsuko nodded with a smile. They shook hands formally, but did not let go.
Sarah squeezed Lady Sakura’s hand and rested her head against the thick, rough embroidery of her obi. She drifted, ready for sleep, but fought the urge. She was waiting for her mother to come to say goodnight. But she never came.
Sarah clung on to Atsuko for a long minute, the mission, the danger, all forgotten.
“How are you here?” Sarah asked finally, blinking back the tears. As ever, angry at their ungovernable wantonness. “Of all the people, in all the world—”
“Wait a minute, that was my question.” Atsuko laughed, letting go of her. “Your mother has you working for the Nazis?”
“My mother died,” Sarah said flatly.
“I’m sorry. She was a . . . good woman,” Atsuko managed.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“No? Well, she tried, but she drank like a . . . brush maker? Is that what Germans say?”
“Yes, that’s the phrase.” Sarah felt she was being disloyal, felt she should not be saying anything negative, even to someone who knew the truth.
The truth.
Sarah looked at the face of the woman in front of her, suddenly so familiar, a tiny but very real part of the good inside Sarah. Yet she was not the babysitter of ten years before, much as Sarah wanted . . . needed to share something with her. The gymnast in Sarah stood on the edge of a balance beam, ready to tumble, but frightened to.
Commit to the move.
“I work for a . . . spy, I suppose. He’s British.” Sarah pushed on, as Atsuko opened her mouth. “He and the Abwehr have a common enemy.”
“Ah, Kurt Hasse and his nasty tricks department!” Atsuko smiled.
“They—we—wanted to know what he knew, what Ishii was doing here.”
“Now you know,” the woman said, spreading her arms.
“And what are you doing here?” Sarah insisted.
“I’m working—”
“Fujiwara-kun of a noble house?” Sarah interrupted derisively.
Atsuko laughed. Dimples and dancing eyes.
“Indeed. Did you find out what a courtesan was?” Sarah nodded, and Atsuko continued. “So the noble-born secretary Fujiwara-kun is just an excuse for a high-ranking official to have me here. Few people are fooled. Ishii certainly was not.”
“But why would you make that happen?” Sarah shook her head incredulously. “Why would you want to be here?”
“Can’t a man find me attractive?”
“I’m guessing any man would find you attractive if you wanted it . . .”
Atsuko laughed, the belly-chuckle of that bedroom long ago.
“Things have not improved for the burakumin. And now the empire is in the hands of those who see the Japanese as superior beings, led by a living God. People like Ishii. People willing to give diseases to innocent civilians, because they think those lives are worth nothing. They’ve done it in Manchuria, they’ll do it in the rest of China, Russia, Singapore, Philippines . . . they won’t stop. The Americans don’t want to get their hands dirty, and the British are dangerously overstretched. But the empire has to be stopped, or there will be no equality for anyone. No one will be free.”
“You’re a communist . . . ?” Sarah asked.
“No, I work for the Suiheisha. I’m a Leveler. But I do pass information to the Soviet Union. The Nazis aren’t the only people who have a marriage of convenience there. It’s only a matter of time before Germany invades Russia. Then we’ll all be on the same side.”
Sarah wanted that.
“We’re both spies now.” Sarah laughed. “You’d have got long odds for that.”
“We’ve both had to play a role our whole lives. We are both dog meat, pretending to be a sheep’s head,” Atsuko said quietly. Then she held something up. “Here, a gift. If you’re going to stop Hasse, take it with my blessings.”
Sarah took the pistol, a tiny derringer, little more than a collection of silvery-blue metal pieces barely wider than her palm, maybe 300 grams in weight. She looked into the woman’s eyes and saw, for the first time, fear there amid the determination. Atsuko opened her arms and gathered Sarah in to her.
“In Japanese, we say, the weak are meat.” The woman squeezed her and continued. “Be strong, Sarah Goldstein. Be strong.”
* * *
“And then she just walked you out?”
“Well, limped. Past the same guard. Singing. Arigato gozaimashita.”
The Captain finished the stitch knot and, lifting her foot, bit the thread to break it.
“There are scissors in the kit for that purpose,” Sarah said through gritted teeth.
“Force of habit, sorry,” he murmured, laying her leg back onto the bed.
“No scissors in the British Army?”
“With the Hejazi, not so much,” he murmured as he began rebandaging the foot. He sighed. “Very dangerous telling her about me. The Soviets are technically our enemy.”
“She’s a friend. She’s family,” Sarah insisted with a vehemence and certainty that surprised her. Maybe she was just tired. Maybe she just didn’t want to argue about it.
“She’s someone you knew ten years ago, when you were five? Six? And what if she’s captured? By the Germans? By the Japanese Kenpeitai?”
“It’s done. If you can work for Nazis, I can have friends who are Soviet agents,” Sarah finished and then began to giggle, so ridiculous was the sentence. “This is quite a vocation we’ve got for ourselves, isn’t it?”
The Captain knotted the bandage and smiled. He was really smiling. Work always made him feel better. Maybe that was all he needed.
“So, what will the admiral think of this?” Sarah yawned.
“I think he’s going to send me to the Congo to look for these missionaries,” the Captain replied, with an almost jolly sigh. He carefully repacked the medical kit.
Send me. Weakened. Unstable. Unable to commit. Unable to go a day without—
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she managed.
“He won’t want any of his people going. That risks open war with the SS. I’m deniable.”
“No, I mean . . .” Sarah struggled for the words. She was frightened to dampen his renewed enthusiasm. “Are you fit enough for that kind of work, alone?”
“I’m fine,” he bristled quietly, closing the tin with a snap. “I was shot ten months ago.”
Sarah struggled for the next thing to say, but the Captain shook his head suddenly. “Hang on, I missed something. What did she call your mother?”
“Alexandra Edelmann. That was her stage name.”
“Your mother was Alexandra Edelmann? The Alexandra Edelmann?”
“You’ve heard of her?” Sarah was surprised. Nothing remained of her mother’s career; she didn’t even know how many films she had made or what roles she’d played onstage.
&nbs
p; “Cinemas are good places for meeting contacts—dark, mostly empty in the daytime. I’ve watched a lot of films.”
EIGHT
August 25, 1940
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, their Mercedes pulled away from Abwehr headquarters along the Tirpitzufer and followed the canal toward the Zoologischer Garten.
Sarah waited as long as she could and then spoke.
“You’re bringing me,” she said with all the calm strength she could muster.
“Hang on, this is Africa. This isn’t a boarding school or a cocktail party—”
“And you’ve been to Africa?”
“Yes,” he said with certainty. “Egypt . . . Libya,” he added with less conviction.
“Not the Congo, then? Oh, is the Congo in Egypt? You know, I’m sure I read—”
“You’ve made your point, thank you,” the Captain said tersely. “I just think”—he held up a hand to stop her interrupting—“a blonde girl will draw too much attention on a continent of black people.”
“You’re blond,” Sarah said defiantly.
“You’re a girl.”
“Am I? That explains a lot, only the other day, I was looking and thinking, Where is my Piephahn, and—”
“It’s dangerous,” the Captain said, talking over her. “A dangerous place. And a dangerous mission.”
The meeting had been short. Sarah made her report while the admiral gazed out of the windows, hand on his chest. Then he sat forward, tapped his battered desk, and began talking.
“Very well. These . . . missionaries . . . scientists . . . are in Vichy territory about to fall to the Gaullist Free French, and therefore into British hands.
“One, as an agent of the Abwehr, you’re going there to stop the research from ending up with the British. I don’t want to give their scientists at Porton Down anything they might be tempted to use. Get the people back here and under the control of the Wehrmacht.
“Two, as Helmut Haller, High Society’s Fixer, you’re there to stop them being interned as a favor for an old friend.
“Three, and most of all, prevent the research from reaching Ishii, by whatever means necessary. As quietly as possible. I will not start a war with the SS . . . not yet. Start in Chad, travel south through French Equatorial Africa, and follow the bodies.”
Follow the bodies, the admiral had said.
“So you should go alone? So I can discover, weeks—months?—later that you’re dead? I’m a Jewish girl with fake papers, I’m in danger here as well.”
“Knowing you as I do, you’d be fine.”
Sarah was thrown momentarily by the implied compliment but rallied. “Thank you, but if that’s what I wanted, I’d have taken your money and left you in that barn near Rothenstadt to die and saved us all a lot of trouble. You need to bring someone . . . and I don’t mean taking that idiot, Norris. Take someone useful.”
The car slowed as it approached a checkpoint where a Blockwart was checking whether car headlamps were ready for the blackout.
“Is this because you want to do spy things?” he asked.
“You mean, for fun?” she sneered. “When I said those words last year, it was because I wanted purpose, not excitement. Spy things, Captain Floyd, are what I do. It’s what I am. I don’t have any other usefulness, unless surviving is its own reward. I’m not anyone’s child, anyone’s sister, anyone’s playmate or pupil. If you left me, yes, I would cease to exist, but no . . .” She was almost shouting now. “That is not why I want to go. It’s because you need someone with you and I’m all you have.”
The car seemed extra silent when she stopped. The Blockwart waved it through the checkpoint.
“And my foot hurts,” she added.
Sarah was exhausted. She couldn’t sleep after infiltrating the embassy. Once in bed, she had been practically shaking from fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell which.
“We should take Clementine as well, if only to keep an eye on her,” Sarah continued into the silence.
“Why not? Shall we bring Frau Hofmann, too?” the Captain muttered.
“Taking a black spy to Africa sounds prudent,” Sarah countered.
“If Norris hasn’t killed her already . . .”
He had said, shall we. Sarah had won but was too tired to revel in it. Maybe this will be good for him, Sarah thought. Or maybe they should be staying somewhere safe until he was healthy . . .
There had been something else to their orders.
“Oh, and find out who Hasse has been talking to in the United States. There’s a little nest of vipers there somewhere . . . I need to know who they want to bite and why.”
“You think they’re friends?”
“They’re Nazis. We’re all Nazis . . . for the present.”
“This better be important,” Sarah grumbled.
“Do you know what happens if the British discover that Germany has used a disease as a weapon?” the Captain said. “We’d have mustard gas dropped on Berlin. Then chlorine dropped on London . . . and so on, until there’s nothing left. It would be the end of everything.”
Through the window Sarah watched the people in the sun-drenched Tiergarten—the children and the mothers, the young women flirting with the soldiers, and the elderly walking the aches from their old bones. Unbidden, her imagination set everyone writhing, choking, and spitting up bloody foam.
Sarah closed her eyes and, on the paper of her mind, began to write.
Dearest Mouse,
It does seem strange still calling you Mouse, when your name isn’t really Mauser. But I think that maybe some things just fit. Ruth Heißstöck . . . no, that doesn’t work. Mouse it is. But then I’m not really writing this at all.
We hold these parties. Soldiers and politicians come and get drunk, and when my uncle isn’t selling them radios or barges or French wine, you can hear them talk.
They talk a lot when they’re drunk.
They’ve been talking a lot about Poland.
They’ve been talking about rounding people up and shooting them. Not Polish soldiers. Just people. Women and children, too. So they’re not all partisans, you see. They’re just killing people for the sake of killing people.
Sometimes it’s because they’re Jewish. They pushed two hundred Jews into a synagogue and set it on fire. Children burned to death.
The Führer sent the army in “to kill without mercy and reprieve all men, women, and children of the Polish race.” He said that, in so many words. He means the Poles aren’t real people.
I watch the people listening to this. Some are upset, angry, and sick under their silence. Some are pleased, happy, enjoying it.
You can see the line between the two. It’s like a new surgical incision—it’s small and neat and almost invisible, but you know it’s going to be pulled open and torn bloody. You know that even if it’s stitched back together, it will be ridged and jagged like a mountain range, that the dirt will still be there. It’ll grow septic and weep pus and it’ll infect everything and everyone.
Alles Liebe,
Ursula
NINE
August 30, 1940
THE JOURNEY BEGAN in some splendor. The polished walnut and chrome of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport with its gloved and deferential waiting staff felt like moving through Sarah’s lost childhood, when money and food were plentiful. However, that childhood of theater people had seemed to Sarah to be open and welcoming to all, back when Jewish people could walk the streets unmolested, and work, and marry whom they wanted. Black performers had been treated as a curiosity by some, but there had been no malice among her mother’s friends. Clementine’s presence here, even as a servant, drew reproving glances and snide comments. Sarah noticed them and it needled her.
“The way people are looking at you . . .” Sarah sighed.
“Am I embarrassing you? Well, sorry, Fräu
lein,” Clementine spat.
“No, I mean it’s not right.”
“You’re offering me sympathy?” Clementine said, looking up. “What kind of a Nazi are you?”
“I just—” Sarah began and stopped.
“Look, this isn’t Huckleberry Finn. I’m not here to teach you an important life lesson about us. I’m here because servants have no choice, so look for your self-improvement somewhere else.”
“You’ve read a lot of American books,” Sarah pointed out, her irritation getting the better of her.
“Clearly so have you. What did you expect, me to be climbing trees in my spare time? Picking fleas or pushing bones through my nose?”
Ursula Haller should be acting like the perfect little monster, but instead Sarah wanted to be nice, while maintaining her cover. Something about Clementine’s attitude made that an almost impossible line to tread. Sarah found herself saying what she thought, without any filter at all.
“This is . . . stupid,” Sarah managed, uncertain of what she meant.
“You know what’s stupid? Me helping military intelligence. I should have let that man with the weird accent kill me.”
This is why I don’t like people, Sarah thought. They’re difficult and complicated.
And Clementine was turning out to be very complex. She was no poorly educated domestic. As well as proving her to be a terrible maid in almost every way, her fierce intelligence didn’t fit her story. While the ferocious attitude made more sense, it seemed so reckless to Sarah, who had spent years keeping silent out of a sense of self-preservation.
It was on the plane, a brand-new Junkers Ju 52/3m whose ridged silver metalwork glittered in the morning sun, that the voyage began to go wrong.
Sarah was fine, even excited by the prospect of flying for the first time, right up until the moment she fastened the seat belt. The interior reminded her of a bus, and the large, rectangular, curtained windows made it feel light and airy. But the act of strapping herself down, even across the waist, made her feel trapped.
