Devil Darling Spy

by Matt Killeen

  She straddled the drainpipe and slipped, slid, and clambered down the five stories.

  Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t—

  She bounced off the ground, hurting her back in her haste, and shuffled, crab-like, into an unopened doorway.

  The windows of the shops, all of them, were shattered. The belongings of a dozen apartments lay broken or burning in the street. Groups of whooping Hitler Youth and SA stormtroopers ran back and forth, boots crunching through the debris, but there were others, young and old civilians, happily destroying, stealing, and chanting.

  The butcher’s shop was gone, an empty wreck, and on the street outside, on his hands and knees, was the shochet. He was cast in shadow but instantly recognizable. Even laid low, he almost dwarfed the stormtroopers and other troublemakers around him, but they seemed to have tied him with several ropes. As they moved, Sarah could see he had been brutally beaten. One cheek and eye had bloated, changing the shape of his face, while his nose was twisted and hanging loose. Something dark dribbled through his swollen lips.

  Even now he swung a fist at his tormentors’ legs, defying them in the only way he could. But the action unbalanced him, and the crowd, jeering, pulled at his ropes, trying to topple him. Around his neck was tied a crude, outsized Star of David, roughly hewn from a shop sign and painted yellow, a swear word scrawled across it.

  A boy from the Hitler Youth walked up to him, trailing something on the ground, like a rope. He turned when he reached him, and Sarah recognized Bernt. A teenager. A boy not much older than Sarah, but a bully, her serial tormentor . . . and someone with a grudge against the shochet and a score to settle. In his hand was a whip, a whip like nothing Sarah had ever seen, with a long tail trailing from the handle.

  “Eins!” Bernt shouted.

  The boy raised his hand, but the whip moved too fast to see.

  Crack.

  “Zwei!” yelled some of the others, laughing.

  Crack.

  “Drei!”

  This time the cracking noise was wet. And several of the others flinched as something splashed in their faces.

  “Stop,” called the butcher.

  “Stop? What do you mean stop? You don’t give orders here anymore, Israel. I’ll have to start again!” cackled Bernt.

  The whip flew and snapped across the butcher’s back, drawing a scream.

  “Eins!”

  Sarah climbed to her feet and, feeling the shriek of incandescent, howling, spitting wrath rise from her groin to her chest that bleached out all other feelings or thoughts, picked up a thick piece of timber and stepped into the light. It didn’t matter if she only got one swing at Bernt, she would make it count, after that she didn’t care.

  Then strong arms wrapped themselves around her and lifted her up and back into the shadows, her legs cartwheeling in helpless fury.

  “Be still,” hissed the body behind her.

  Sarah screamed and tried to wield the wood on her jailer, but a second pair of hands caught the lumber and twisted it free from her grasp. Those hands then clamped themselves over her mouth.

  “Zwei!”

  Crack.

  Sarah, to her horror, began to cry, a pounding, heaving sob that sucked the power from her struggles and rendered her feeble in those arms. Her captor felt her surrender, and the soft fingers covering her mouth slid away.

  “Drei!”

  Crack.

  “I have . . . to . . . help him,” she gasped.

  “You can’t,” a man’s voice behind her said.

  “Why don’t you . . . do something?” she implored.

  “We are, Liebchen. We are.”

  “Vier!”

  Crack.

  Scream.

  Sarah turned her head. He was a man of maybe fifty, beard graying, skin wrinkling, eyes awash with a blue watery sadness. Next to him, a small woman of similar age, a single tear visible on her cheek.

  “Go home. Hide,” the woman insisted. “Do what you need to do. There’ll be food to steal from our windowsill again tomorrow night. And every night.”

  “It’s not enough,” Sarah howled in anguish, looking into the flame and the twinkling glass, the blood and the vomit, the hatred and destruction. “You aren’t doing enough.”

  “Fünf!”

  Crack.

  Scream.“I don’t think we have any more to give.”

  Sarah closed her eyes.

  She opened them as the nightmare dissolved to find them filled with real tears. The pain in her belly was just the same, two years later. Sarah swore and pulled the sweat-soaked sheets off her, before turning up the lamp and digging into her pack for Clementine’s copy of Red Rubber.

  * * *

  Sarah slammed the door open, and the Captain started, shoving something under his pillow.

  “Have you read this?” she shouted, waving Clementine’s book in the air.

  He squinted with tiny pupils at the cover. Then he shrugged. “Yes, many years ago.”

  “How do you sleep? How does anyone sleep? The Belgians. The verfickten Belgians are supposed to be on our side—”

  The Captain made shushing eyebrows, and Sarah attempted to sit on her rage. She failed.

  “It’s not that long ago,” she continued. “And Clementine says nothing has changed and that much the same thing was happening here. Children, children getting their arms chopped off because their parents didn’t work hard enough. CHILDREN—”

  The Captain lost his state of calm and made an almost violent downward motion with his hands. His face contorted into something frenzied. Sarah paused and took a breath.

  “Sit and shush,” he hissed.

  Sarah felt like she might throw the book at him. Then she let her arms drop to her sides. Her eyes continued to burn. She sat on the edge of the bed, and she folded her arms over the book, her nails pressed into its surface.

  “Red Rubber—rubber bought with African blood. Floggings with dried rhino hide were routine. Routine,” she growled. “Work as tax . . . that’s slavery. In the twentieth century. Villages burned to the ground and men flogged, women . . . they . . . for objecting. They couldn’t farm, they starved, worked until they died . . . severed hands acted as currency. Is this true? Really true and it’s what happened?” She whined the last, wanting him, someone, to tell her it was a horrible myth.

  “Yes. It’s all true,” the Captain said quietly. He lay back on the bed.

  “This wasn’t a few villages; half the population of Congo Free State died . . . Clementine says ten million people. And the French? The British? Much the same?”

  “Probably, I don’t know . . . and for the love of god, shush,” he moaned.

  “Then who am I fighting for? You’ve already rounded up people and put them in camps. Already worked whole villages to death. Why are the Wehrmacht so upset? All they’re doing in Poland is what everyone has done here.”

  “It’s different,” he mumbled. “We wouldn’t do that now.”

  “Now? What are we now?” Sarah demanded.

  “Look, they’re just Africans—” The Captain stopped.

  He was actually panting.

  Sarah stared into his face.

  She wanted to grab it and push her fingernails into it.

  “And I’m just a Jew,” Sarah said quietly.

  “No, you’re more than that—”

  “More than? You mean that’s not enough? I, they, don’t qualify as human unless they’re more than that?”

  The Captain’s face hardened, and he pushed himself into a sitting position.

  “You know what,” he whispered angrily. “There have always been people, humans, who are worth less. Not because they actually are, but because someone has put themselves on top, and someone has to be at the bottom. It’s the
Jews, or the Negros, or the poor . . . always the poor, and it’s wrong, but this is how humanity functions.”

  “So what are you fighting for?” She gave an exaggerated shrug. “Why bother?”

  “You know, as well as I do, that the Nazis represent something more, something new. Like having the Congo’s Force Publique on the streets of Europe.”

  “So, that’s special, different. We can all go to war for Europeans, for Jews or white people?”

  “You think they’ll stop with the Jews? You think the Nazis ruling Africa is going to be better than Congo Free State? Do you think a government who thinks Slavs are subhuman is going to let them live happily and peaceably? No, Sarah of Elsengrund, you want to change the world, start with the most overt, obvious enemy and worry about them first.”

  “We’re hypocrites.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a politician or a statesman. I’m a soldier . . . a spy, an assassin. A murderer. I’m doing my job, my bit . . . and I’ll continue to do what I can, as long as you keep your gottverdammten voice down.”

  SIXTEEN

  September 25—October 12, 1940

  SOME PEOPLE ON the road tried to stop them. In broken French and with frightened eyes they shouted, pushed, and waved.

  Turn back. Death. Disease. Cursed.

  There wasn’t much to see. The flamethrower had done its work. Some of the villages had brick and concrete buildings that were now charred ruins, without doors, windows, or roofs. But any other sign of habitation—huts, tents, shelters, paths, the belongings of many dozens of people—was gone. There was just a wide, blackened circle that left no tree, shrub, or bush.

  Something else bothered Sarah, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  The Captain and Claude were picking their way gingerly through to the center of the clearing. Sarah and Clementine had intended to stay next to the truck but found themselves drawn onto the burned ground.

  “Well, this is cheery.” Clementine sighed and wound her camera on.

  Sarah tried to imagine a place where people lived. Where they met and smiled and danced, where children had played, where workers had returned to their families every day. Her imagination failed her. The people were abstract numbers. She looked up and tilted her head to one side.

  “No noise . . . no birds, no animals,” Sarah wondered. She hadn’t noticed that their noise had been a constant on their journey, until now.

  “White girl, jungle expert . . .” Clementine mumbled behind her, the shutter on her camera snapping open and closed.

  The ground, up close, was not black, but gray; a layer of ash had settled over it, and it snapped and cracked underfoot. Sarah pushed something with her shoe.

  “These sticks have survived . . . stone sticks?”

  “Not sticks. Not stones,” Clementine whispered.

  Something went crunch under Sarah’s tread, and with it went her confidence, detachment, and inner quiet. She slowly raised her leg out of the way to see what she had broken, increasingly sure she knew what it had been.

  In the ash, half flattened by her footprint, was the gray, flaking, incomplete but unmistakable shape of a human skull. Half a face. Watching her.

  Sarah let out a tiny, involuntary cry and stepped backward. Another crunch, another rib, another leg bone, another—

  She looked at Clementine, who was cradling an almost complete skull.

  Sarah turned and ran.

  Everywhere she looked, there were bones. Flensed, cracked, broken, blackened, scattered pieces of people.

  She backed away to the truck and pressed against it, but even here in the long grass there were charred fragments. The villagers were all around her, with stories to tell.

  Were they all dead when they were consumed by the fire? Had they welcomed it? Why was it they had to die? Did they have their own questions? Where were my children? What happened to my father? Why? How could this happen? Why? Why? Why, Sarah—

  Sarah found herself in Schäfer’s laboratory, lying on a tiled floor, too hot to touch, surrounded by flames, her skin peeling and popping, the air itself too scalding to inhale, rapidly turning opaque . . .

  “Ursula!”

  The sound came from the door, the Ausgang, where the air was cooler. But the voice was Schäfer’s . . . Every girl wants to know that she’s beautiful. Desirable . . . and in the way stood Stern who burned like a torch—

  “Hey, white girl!”

  Clementine was holding her face, a cheek in each cool hand. Her brown eyes were wide, and Sarah realized, for maybe the first time, sincere.

  “I’m just a little girl,” Sarah remembered out loud.

  “Yes, you are. It’s all right. It’s over.”

  Sarah began to scratch her arms, but the skin didn’t flake off. It wasn’t blistered and raw. She was sitting in the moist grass, leaning on the warm tire of the truck. She blinked the water from her eyes.

  “I was somewhere else. In a fire.”

  “Well, you weren’t here,” Clementine said, letting go and backing off. “I think you might have a fever.”

  Next to Clementine on the ground was the skull she had been holding moments earlier.

  “That was someone. A person,” Sarah managed, her voice breaking.

  “Just a black person,” Clementine scolded, her barriers, her defenses restored. Sarah had thought that she had control of how she felt. About the war, about the disappearing Jews in her neighborhood, about the stories of Polish atrocities. They were all just terrible facts that merited a rational, negative reaction, bar the simmering sense of injustice and spikes in her temper, quickly contained. She had thought the wheel of emotion was stationary. Sarah now grasped that it was spinning so fast she had only mistaken it for a lack of movement. She was careening, unbridled, down a hill with the untrammeled weight and dread of her experiences waiting below. No barriers. No box for her horrors.

  She felt the dread like cold shivers.

  “Fräulein has a fever,” she heard Clementine declare.

  “Have you been talking your chloroquine?” asked the Captain.

  Sarah nodded vaguely.

  “Not everything is malaria, mein Herr,” Clementine snapped.

  “Do you want me to whip this one?” Claude called.

  “You can try . . .” she growled.

  “No one is whipping anyone. Girl, shush.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and surrendered to the fire.

  * * *

  She shivered, burning, through the night, imagining the cleansing, murderous fire and the distant laboratory consumed in flames. She was dimly aware of some initial panic. The others were uncertain if she should be quarantined just in case, and an argument began, heart versus head, caution versus compassion. There were a million harmless things it could be, the Captain declared. He refused to countenance leaving her behind or sealing her up somehow and became belligerent, that much Sarah remembered. But when her fever broke the next morning, Sarah found Clementine curled up in a chair next to her bed, and the Captain was snoring in another room.

  The relieved party traveled south, Claude tight-lipped on what he had suggested but still wary of Sarah’s recovery. They found the sites of another six outbreaks and ten razed villages. They spoke to locals and survivors, who were few and far between, and the story remained the same. But behind the facts the specter of Le Diable Blanc grew more powerful and fantastical. He was a demon beast that traveled the Ubangi River, brought to life by King Leopold’s crimes. He was an emissary of a troubled spirit world sent to punish the wicked. He was even the ghost of a murdered white man, driven to reap souls of the natives who killed him.

  The itinerant missionaries arrived soon after the outbreak. Sometimes the locals were initially grateful, then concerned, and finally distrustful as the medicine and clinics failed to save or heal. Not being able to
prepare and bury their own dead caused resentment and even resistance. Sometimes the missionaries were suspected as the source of the disease and chased out of the area.

  Always, the flamethrower dealt the final blow, usually against the explicit wishes of the surrounding community. Nobody who caught the mystery disease lived to tell the tale.

  It was always a remote settlement, never close to a town or plantation where authorities could be found, never a major source of labor for surrounding farms or mines. By the time anyone knew about an outbreak, the missionaries were already in place behind a cordon sanitaire, and fear discouraged the curious.

  The other German—sometimes a French official, sometimes a British medic, but clearly the same person, with the same questions—was following the trail, but he had not been everywhere. Whatever sources Hasse was using to track the disease, it was not as effective as the chain of churches that Claude was tapping into.

  Sarah couldn’t help totting up the death toll, no matter how rough or precise their estimation.

  1,532. Give or take a few hundred.

  Give or take a few hundred.

  When she closed her eyes, she saw charred eye sockets staring back at her.

  SEVENTEEN

  October 13, 1940

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” Sarah asked again.

  “It’s a mystery tour . . .” Clementine declared, a grin lurking and a skip in her step. “All the best journeys are.”

  They were walking into town, unaccompanied by the local priest or Claude and his stick or the Captain, who was snoozing in his bed, and Sarah was beginning to feel self-conscious. Out of place.

  “There is no point having a Neger who can move unnoticed through the locals if they don’t share their discoveries with you,” Clementine added.

  “I don’t have you,” Sarah moaned. “You’re employed, by my uncle actually. And can you stop using that word about yourself?”