by Andy Marino
When she finished speaking, Frau Becker was silent. Lost in thought, she regarded the Hoffmanns with an inscrutable gaze, then slid her curtain aside to peer out at Berlin. Max wasn’t sure what neighborhood they were in, but he caught a glimpse of a firefighting team snaking a massive hose into a pile of rubble. That meant there were survivors trapped inside the ruins, running out of oxygen. If the rescue crew could pump in fresh air, the people buried alive might stand a chance.
Frau Becker closed the curtain and leaned her head back against the seat.
“You may not know it to look at me now, but I loved to dance in Clärchens Ballhaus. This was such a joyful place, once upon a time …” She trailed off. Then she leaned forward. “If there are Nazis in our midst, they will find my sense of mercy sorely tested. We will root them out and kill them.”
Frau Becker tightened her grip on her cane until her knuckles turned white. “This stays between us,” she said. “Understood?” The Hoffmanns murmured their assent.
“Now then. When it comes to rooting out our rat, I admit that I am at a loss. If anyone has any ideas, I would be grateful.” She lifted her cane. “The floor is open, ladies and gentlemen.”
Max almost blurted out, Have Herr Trott followed, but managed to keep his mouth shut. It wouldn’t do to go accusing members of the Becker Circle in front of Frau Becker herself, especially when he had no hard evidence.
“We plant false information,” Papa said. “It’s the only way to be sure. We give separate falsehoods to each member individually. That way, when the Nazis act on the information, we will know who our rat is.”
“That might work if we had the resources of an entire spy agency at our disposal,” Frau Becker said. “But we have only the people in this car. And we don’t have eyes or ears inside the Gestapo or the SS.”
“What about the dead drops?” Max said. Papa’s suggestion had given him an idea. “That’s how they almost caught us before—I think they’d jump at the chance to do it again.”
“Absolutely not,” Mutti said. “You will not be used as bait in some spy-catching scheme.”
“Maxi,” Gerta said, “you’re a genius. Frau Becker, can you—”
“Gerta Hoffmann!” Mutti said sharply. But she had nothing to follow it up with—no reprimand, no admonishment. They had all come so far, it was absurd to forbid Max and his sister to participate in further resistance activities. It struck Max that bodies and buildings weren’t the only things warped and changed by war. Even if they all survived, their family would never be the same.
“Can you set up four new dead drops?” Gerta asked Frau Becker. “It’s like Papa said—we have to feed the false information to each person separately. So for the first drop, you only tell General Vogel where it’s supposed to happen. For the next one, the princess.”
“The third, Hans, and the fourth, Herr Trott,” Frau Becker said. “Hmm. That way, if any of those drops are compromised, we will be able to trace a direct link back to our spy.”
Mutti glared at Frau Becker. “I have permitted you to use my children as you see fit, and I have not slept more than two or three hours a night since we brought them into the group. But this—this is too much.”
“Ingrid,” Papa said softly.
“Karl,” she said.
“We’re not being used,” Max said.
“We’re doing our part,” Gerta said.
“Mutti, we want to help,” Max said.
“We’re just going to find a way to do it anyway,” Gerta said.
“There you have it,” Frau Becker said. “I promise you, Albert will be with you every step of the way. You may not see him, but rest assured he will be there. If there is trouble, I pity the Gestapo inspector who comes up against Albert on a dark street.”
At this, Max’s pulse quickened. Albert in disguise, stalking him from the shadows. Gestapo agents, ready to pounce. Herr Siewert’s dying words echoed in his head.
You and your whole family will die in the camps.
Maybe Mutti was right—maybe this was too much for them.
Then he caught the fierce gleam in Frau Becker’s eye and banished the thought. The plot to kill Hitler was at stake! He pushed his fear to the back of his mind, but could not make it vanish entirely. There it throbbed, cold and dark, waiting to strike again.
He wondered if Uncle Friedrich had experienced fear like this on the Eastern Front—like a stalking monster, stealing away his ability to think, to act.
Of course, Max would never get the chance to ask him.
“Does anyone have a better idea?” Frau Becker looked from Mutti to Papa. After a long silence, she clapped her hands. “Then it’s settled. The first drop will be tomorrow night, in Spandau. I will inform General Vogel and no one else.”
“Karl,” Mutti said wearily.
“Ingrid,” Papa said, and placed his hand upon her knee.
“You’ll need this.” Frau Becker reached deep into the creases of her blanket and produced a tightly folded packet, similar to the forged documents that Max and Gerta had delivered back in December.
Max shot Gerta a quizzical look. Why did Frau Becker have these papers ready? Had she known exactly what the plan was going to be before she got in the car? Why, then, had she asked for suggestions?
Gerta shrugged and took the packet.
At that moment, the car rolled to a stop. Max pushed the curtain aside. They were outside their villa. It was as if Albert had known exactly how long the conversation was going to take, and planned his route perfectly.
Max just shook his head. There were so many things about the old woman and her servant that he would never, ever understand.
The gables and spires of the Old Spandau neighborhood crowded the evening sky. Max moved quickly along Lindenufer, past the ruins of the synagogue that the Nazis destroyed on Kristallnacht, way back in 1938. The years between then and now hadn’t treated Spandau much better. Bombing raids had reduced entire blocks to rubble, and there was a furtive, broken-down melancholy to the few pedestrians he passed.
Across the street, Gerta popped in and out of the shadows. She kept her eyes down and walked like she belonged there. Max wished he could move with her quiet confidence. He still could not get over the feeling that everyone was watching him.
It was ridiculous, he knew. Besides, all he had to do was chalk a few words on some bricks. A man like Claus von Stauffenberg had to plan and carry out the assassination of the Führer himself, and yet the one time Max had met him, the colonel had acted like it was just another task, like planning a staff meeting or a luncheon. He had even joked about it!
It’s always nice to see the younger generation so enthusiastic about committing high treason with me.
Max wondered if war had made the man who he was, or if he had always been that way. Was it possible to be born brave?
Max turned the corner, catching a glimpse of the Havel River through the trees to the east. At the same time, the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Now he knew he was being watched, and spun abruptly on his heels to look behind him.
There was no one there.
Albert? he thought. Frau Becker’s jack-of-all-trades servant was supposed to be here somewhere, keeping an eye on them. Max supposed he could be anyone—even the slender lady in the wide-brimmed hat and fur coat coming toward him. He caught her eye as she passed, along with a whiff of her perfume, and wondered.
When he reached the bombed-out apartment block on the corner, he took the chalk from his pocket, glanced around to make sure he was alone, and scrawled the coded phrase on a prominent brick.
Jürgen, Liesl and I are unhurt
His whole body tingled as he wrote. He felt like he was hovering above the sidewalk, and his head felt three sizes too big. What if General Vogel was the spy? There might be a Gestapo agent crouching in the rubble with his pistol drawn, ready to spring forth. How far away was Albert?
He put the chalk back into his pocket, threw a quick nod at Gerta across t
he street, and kept walking west. It wasn’t until he reached the monument to Joachim II, several blocks away, that he realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out and took a moment to gather himself.
It was done. No Gestapo strike force had burst from the shadows. He cast a final glance over his shoulder. Was Albert the stooped old man hawking his meager wares on a ratty blanket? Max supposed it was something else he would never know, and put it out of his mind as he headed up the block to the train station.
The next night was blustery and wet. The temperature hovered just above freezing, and the rain mixed with the icy slush that sluiced through the gutters and turned the sidewalks into minefields of half-frozen puddles.
Max was grateful for his waterproof boots as he splashed down Hardenbergstrasse, a few blocks west of the ruins of the empty Berlin Zoo. He focused on his breathing, trying to break the habit of holding his breath when he was nervous. If he kept that up, he would pass out, and he’d be no good to the resistance sprawled out in the slush.
Hardenbergstrasse was lined with the imposing buildings of the Berlin State School of Fine Arts, its neat architecture largely unmarred by bomb damage. Rain slashed across the classical facades, blurring the buildings into the dusk like a smear of thick paint on a canvas.
Max kept his hands in his pockets, his right palm clutching his chalk. He had slept poorly last night and dreamed of a dead eye hovering above him. When he jolted awake with a start, the eye had been stuck to the ceiling, gazing pleadingly down at him—and then it had blinked, impossibly slowly, lashes like seaweed moving with languid grace. It wasn’t until he woke again into the bruise-colored light of dawn that Max realized he’d had a dream within a dream. All day he’d felt out of sorts and disconnected from himself, as if there were another dream-layer from which he was waiting to wake up.
Past the art school, low-slung apartment blocks presided over a few desultory trees, bare branches dripping and forlorn. Max ducked his head under a skeletal branch and made for a side street of row houses that had collapsed in a pressure blast.
Guess they forgot to open their front doors! he thought crazily.
He found a suitable pile of bricks jutting from the earth like a grave marker and took out his chalk. He wrote the first word of tonight’s coded message—Marta—and found that the chalk would not leave a mark on the wet brick. He scraped harder and snapped off the tip.
He looked behind him. He couldn’t see Gerta through the downpour. He could not see much of anything at all, except the thin limbs of the bare trees.
A shadow changed shape, came toward him quickly, and then receded, a creature unfurling and then curling into itself. Max’s breath caught in his throat. He wiped rain from his eyes.
“Gerta?” he said quietly. His voice was swallowed up by the storm. “Albert?”
The only answer was the dull roar of the rain. For a brief, sweet moment, Max was home in his bed, warm and dry, listening to the murmur of the rain on the roof as he drifted off to sleep. There was no war, no Becker Circle, no dead drop, no Nazi spy.
Uncle Friedrich was alive.
Out of the corner of his eye, the shadows shifted again—a feathery rustling, a great bird spreading its wings. Max’s mind raced—the zoo had been bombed months ago, but maybe some animals were still on the loose …
He slid his sleeve across his eyes, but it was no use. The rain would not be wiped away.
He wished he had some kind of weapon. He didn’t know how to shoot a gun, but even a pocketknife was better than nothing.
He peered into the night—
And then it was upon him. A shadow made whole, screaming and clawing.
He turned to run blindly into the darkness, but the thing gripped his shoulder and spun him around.
“Max!”
It knew his name. He struck out wildly, and it let him go.
“Max, it’s me, you idiot!”
He stopped. His pulse was hammering, his vision blurred.
His sister thrust her face into his and screamed at him. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry!” he said, swamped with relief. “I thought you were …” He stopped himself from saying a giant bird or a shadow monster.
“It’s too wet to write on the bricks!” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “Then find a dry spot!”
Together, they searched the ruins until they came upon a place where the wall had tilted without collapsing. Here, the wreckage had formed a natural shelter from the rain. Quickly, Max chalked the message.
“I think Albert’s a crusty old beggar tonight,” Gerta said. “Either that or a lady in a fur coat.”
“I can’t believe we have two more of these to do,” Max said as they sloshed back onto Hardenbergstrasse. They were both hopelessly soaked.
“Next time they try to kill Hitler,” Gerta said, shivering, “I hope it’s summertime.”
On the night of the third drop, the moon was a pale shimmer behind the clouds. It was dark and cold, but mercifully dry. Max walked north on Richard-Wagner-Strasse, past the ruins of the opera house, which had been a vast bombed-out shell since an RAF raid scored a direct hit back in November. The moonlight’s sallow glow painted the husk of the once-proud building with an eerie phosphorescence, as if it were being lit from within by a single spotlight that refused to go dark.
At the northern edge of the opera house, Max cut across a narrow strip of dead grass. He ducked into a canyon of rubble that was almost sculptural in its ruin—the collapse of the upper balcony had created a cascade of seats twisted and burned into new, unlikely forms. He thought of Frau Becker, and how sad she would be to see such destruction brought to a place of wonder and beauty. And yet there was something oddly beautiful about the way it had all come down, as if in its death throes the opera house had insisted on turning itself into a piece of art.
Beautiful bomb ruins, Max thought, shaking his head. I am losing my mind.
He came to a piece of twisted brass that coiled around itself like a snake. Part of a railing, scorched and remade by fire. He kept going, picking through the wreckage of the box seats that had bulged from the sides of the opera house, personal balconies for high-ranking officials and their families, reduced to splinters and tattered velvet curtains.
Beyond the collapsed balconies, there was a forest of marble columns sheared to half their height by the blast. Through the columns, Max could make out a few pedestrians moving down the street. He knew that Gerta was among them. Albert, too, though he would never see the man.
Max chose a column halfway between the street and a collapsed portico whose marble was bone white. He knelt down and placed the tip of the chalk against the column—and froze. There was movement off to his left. An animal? All manner of scavengers prowled the ruins at night, and a place like the opera house made a worthy home for rodents and stray cats.
Max thought of the night before, when he had nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of his sister. He tried to stay calm. If he let Gerta frighten him again, he would never hear the end of it. He steadied his hand and chalked the coded message: Heinrich, one day we will see Faust here again.
As soon as he finished writing, he heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps. Part of the marble floor was still intact, and the sharp clicks echoed between the columns, making it impossible to tell where the footsteps were coming from.
They were definitely not Gerta’s.
Albert? he wondered, but didn’t dare say the name out loud.
Suddenly Max was blinded by an overwhelming radiance. He put up a hand to shield his face. The forest of columns resounded with footsteps and shouts.
“Hands up!”
“Get on your knees!”
For a brief, weightless moment, Max lost all sense of his body. He saw the scene from above—his slow descent to his knees, the three hulking figures rushing toward him out of the dark with their electric torches blazing.
You and your whole family will die in the camps.<
br />
He came back to himself when a massive leather-gloved hand clamped down on his right arm, just beneath his shoulder, and hauled him roughly to his feet. A beam of light shone directly in his eyes. His other senses picked up scattered impressions: the smell of shoe polish and sweat, the sound of self-congratulatory voices.
“—thought he was clever—”
“—such a scrawny little thing—”
“—girl around here somewhere—”
Max’s fear was its own universe, blotting out almost everything else, but he managed a thought for Gerta. He hoped she was running into the night, ducking and weaving, escaping …
But these men were Gestapo! If they didn’t already know who Mutti and Papa were, and where the Hoffmanns lived, they would soon find out. Max had heard stories about how the Gestapo tortured prisoners in the basement cells of their headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. “Enhanced interrogation,” they called it. Sleep deprivation, starvation, isolation. Whipping, drowning, electrocution.
The rack.
Max’s knees gave out, and the Gestapo agent propped him up. He wiggled Max’s arms in a perverse dance.
“Look at my Jew-lover puppet!” he said. His comrades laughed.
The agent slammed Max’s back against a column. Max’s vision swam. The fear that had dulled his wits a moment ago had turned sharply acute, and his mind began to race. There was no slipping out of this huge man’s grip, but maybe when they shoved him into the green minna, he could find a way to jump out, hit the ground, roll away …
The man lowered his torch. Max blinked. The agent’s face came into focus—surprisingly angular for such a big man, with a jutting chin, a nose that had been broken and reset, and a high forehead. His eyes gleamed as bone white as the ruined portico at his back.
“I am Kriminalkommissar Heller,” he said, smiling broadly. “And you’re going to tell me where your partner is.”
“I don’t have a—”
“Uh-uh!” Heller cut him off. “Naughty, naughty. We know she’s out here with you. We know she has the documents.” He shook Max’s arm, bashing him into the column for a second time. Max gasped as the air rushed from his lungs. “We know everything already, so you might as well tell us the truth. I could make things much better for you.” He paused. “Or much worse. It’s up to you. I really don’t care.”
