Conspiracy

by Andy Marino

  Max shoved his soccer cleats into his knapsack, then changed his mind. He tossed them away and added another sweater from his drawer. He was trying to think practically. Underwear, pants, shirts. He would wear two coats and a scarf. He glanced at his shelf, hesitated, then swept all of his medieval figurines into the bag and cinched it shut.

  The Hoffmanns were going to a safe house. When Max heard the term safe house, he imagined a fortress with battlements, a moat, and a drawbridge. But he knew that in reality, their new home would be a cramped, nondescript flat where they could hide out, in a neighborhood where people kept to themselves.

  He went to his window. A gorgeous morning had emerged from a cold gray dawn—clear blue sky, with a hint of wispy clouds on the horizon. He had not slept a wink. After Max and Gerta got home and told their parents about the compromised drop, Hans’s betrayal, and Albert’s vicious attack on the Gestapo agents, Papa and Mutti had not hesitated before announcing that it was time to leave the villa. They could never come back home. There was no telling how much information Hans had fed to the Nazis.

  It was time for the surviving members of the resistance to go even deeper underground. It was time to hide.

  Max looked down at the street, half expecting gleaming black cars to screech to a halt in front of their house, Gestapo agents and SS men and maybe even Hitler himself to rush up the front porch. He rubbed his eyes. He was still running on adrenaline. His heart hadn’t stopped hammering since they’d fled the opera house.

  He remembered staring out of this window at squadrons of RAF planes while distant fires splashed crimson across the low clouds.

  He remembered a time before the war when his uncle Friedrich had pointed out constellations in the night sky, Orion’s Belt and the five bright stars of Cassiopeia.

  He remembered the day his mother had put up the green curtains. He lingered for a moment, his hand on the thin, silky fabric, before he bid his bedroom goodbye.

  In the hall, he met Gerta. Her bag was slung across her shoulder.

  “You know what the worst part is?” she said. “Picturing all their grubby Nazi fingers poking through our stuff. I think it would be better if we burned it down.”

  “You want to burn our house down?”

  “It’s not our house anymore, Maxi.” She gestured at the walls. “This isn’t our life anymore. We gotta get used to that—fast.”

  Max followed his sister downstairs. Papa and Mutti were waiting in the sitting room.

  “Did you talk to Frau Becker?” Max asked.

  “No,” Papa said. “It isn’t safe.”

  “Do you think she’s okay?” Gerta said.

  “I think she will never let the Gestapo capture her,” Mutti said. “And neither will we. Now come. Get your coats.”

  “I never thought it would be Hans,” Max said, putting on his light jacket, then his heavy overcoat. It still didn’t seem real. Now the thought of Hans’s Swiss chocolates made him sick. “Why did he do it?”

  “We’ll never know,” Mutti said with a bitter edge to her voice. “Maybe he’s a true Nazi sympathizer. Maybe he just likes money. Maybe he did it for some Aryan fräulein.”

  Max glanced around the sitting room, trying to etch the sight of the furniture and the wallpaper into his mind. He had always taken his house for granted—the sofa was here, the armchair there—but now he wished he could run his hands along every banister and lampshade, to sit at the kitchen table over a bowl of hot stew one last time.

  “We knew this day might come,” Papa said. “But just because we’re leaving our house, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a home. Home is wherever we are—the four of us. Never forget that.”

  Max went to the door.

  “No, Maxi—not that way,” Papa said. “I think it’s best if we go out the back.”

  Max followed his parents and sister through the kitchen, out the back door, and into the small garden behind the house. They moved through some tall weeds that had survived the frost, opened the gate in the fence, and slipped into the narrow alley that separated their backyard from the neighbor’s.

  Max used to play here before the war, but over the past few years, he had nearly forgotten its existence. As the Hoffmanns moved quickly down the alley, Gerta gave him a nudge.

  “Look.” She pointed to a clot of dead scrub brush and brambles that seemed to grow out of the bottom of the fence. Suspended in the thorny twigs was the painted figure of a prince, his silver crown chipped, his tunic faded.

  Max snatched it up and put it in his pocket. He tried to remember the day he had dropped it back here, but he could not. He imagined that it was bright and sunny, that the world was peaceful, and that he was happy.

  “Hurry,” Papa said, and Max ran to catch up.

  Many of the characters in this book, along with the events and interactions that make up their day-to-day lives, are fictional. However, the bomb-ravaged cityscape of 1943–1944 Berlin was a very real place, the backdrop against which the real plot to kill Hitler—Operation Valkyrie—took shape.

  The plotters of the Becker Circle are fictional, but their jobs, experiences, and beliefs reflect the real-life members of the Valkyrie conspiracy, which consisted of anti-Nazi army officers, aristocrats, intellectuals, businessmen, diplomats, and—yes—a certain Russian émigrée princess. Their activities on behalf of Berlin’s Jewish population are based on the work of the real-life Solf Circle, a group of dissidents who met at a Berlin salon and were eventually betrayed by a Swiss doctor.

  Claus von Stauffenberg, the lynchpin of the conspiracy, really did sustain horrific injuries in North Africa, courtesy of an American fighter-bomber. Even with one eye and three working fingers—a disability he regarded as a minor inconvenience—Stauffenberg was by all accounts a commanding presence, a brilliant leader, and a staunch anti-Nazi. Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, he never joined the Nazi party, and wasn’t shy about telling friends and colleagues that he was in full revolt against Hitler, calling the Führer “evil incarnate.” As a secret plotter, he played a dangerous game—and yet, as one of the most promising young officers in the Wehrmacht, he seems to have blinded potential foes with his talent and charisma, and was afforded the privilege and access he needed to carry out his plans. I am indebted to the book Secret Germany by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, which explores his life and the Valkyrie conspiracy in great detail.

  Princess Marie is heavily inspired by the real-life Marie Vassiltchikov, a young Russian princess who lived in Berlin during the war, worked in the German Foreign Office, and had an insider’s view of the plot to kill Hitler as it developed. I would recommend her book Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945 to anyone who wants to learn more about life in Berlin during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Her diary was an invaluable resource, and I drew upon her memories for many details in this book, from the tiger’s whiskers assassination scheme to the chalk inscriptions on bombed-out houses.

  Wherever possible, I tried to situate the lives of the Hoffmanns in the midst of historical upheaval using real dates and places. Regarding some of the major milestones, November 1943 really did mark a drastic escalation in RAF bombing raids. The “fashion show” assassination was a real plan, and Hitler actually did cancel his appearance at the last minute without giving a reason. By this point in time—February 1944—the Führer had survived many attempts on his life through sheer luck, including one involving bombs hidden in two liquor bottles stashed aboard his aircraft. The bombs failed to detonate.

  For a wealth of details about the daily lives of Berliners during the war, credit goes to Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse. This book provided the inspiration for countless moments in the Hoffmanns’ lives. Proper air-raid procedure, the wartime rationing system, tactics of the Gestapo, the texts of radio broadcasts (though Hornet and Wasp is sadly fictional)—I learned so much from this book, and I’m grateful to its author for his exhaustive research.

  Finally, any liberties I’ve taken with the geography of Berl
in or the sequences of historical events are mine alone. If I bent certain situations (and city streets!) to the whims of this story, it’s no fault of the authors mentioned above.

  The plot is enacted! Turn the page for a sneak peek at EXECUTION.

  The cramped upper rooms of the two-story flat in Prenzlauer Berg baked in the summer sun. Max Hoffmann never thought he would miss frigid winter nights, but the June heat was making him nostalgic for snow, ice, and the bitter wind that howled through the streets of Berlin. He mopped sweat from his brow with the edge of a bedsheet. The humid air of the safe house smelled of mold, despite the Hoffmanns’ best efforts to keep their new home clean and dry.

  Max, Gerta, Mutti, Papa—all of them attacking the nooks and crannies of the dismal old flat with brooms and dust rags, scouring the washroom with what little cleaning powder they received with their meager rations, stashed weekly in the flat’s overgrown backyard by the communist underground. Their benefactors might as well be ghosts. Max had never seen them.

  The Hoffmanns cleaned and cleaned. The mold persisted.

  Max remembered Frau Becker sliding the curtain of her car window aside to take in the view of her beloved Berlin back in February, when she had discussed plans with the Hoffmanns for exposing the Nazi spy in their midst. Smells like rot, she’d said. Max wondered if it wasn’t just their safe house that was redolent of decay, but the city itself. The entire Third Reich positively reeked of it these days.

  By now, Frau Becker was decaying, too, he thought darkly. A mound of bones in some unmarked traitor’s grave—if the Nazis hadn’t just thrown her corpse on the fire. The fierce old woman deserved so much better. Max felt a dizzying rush forming in the pit of his stomach. He sat cross-legged on his narrow cot with his back against the wall and clenched the thin sheet in his fists. He bunched up the fabric as if holding on tight could anchor him against what was about to happen. The wall across from his bed was no more than three or four paces away, but as dizziness took hold, the small room seemed to stretch out in front of him and the wall hazed into some unreal distance. It was as if he were looking through a telescope in reverse. Pins and needles shot down into his legs and prickled his chest as a peculiar weightlessness took hold.

  His knuckles turned white as he clung to the sheet and gritted his teeth. This was what happened when he thought too much about the Becker Circle’s demise. He was rocketed along at a million kilometers per hour, propelled by a deep and terrible sense of the sheer unfairness of it all. It was a sensation like nothing he had ever known.

  It wasn’t fair that Hans Meier, the person he had liked best in the Becker Circle, turned out to be a Nazi spy.

  It wasn’t fair that Frau Becker never got to see the Nazi flags torn down in the city that she loved.

  It wasn’t fair that Max, Gerta, Mutti, and Papa had been forced to leave their old lives behind and trade their airy villa in Dahlem for a smelly, old row house in Prenzlauer Berg, where they weren’t even allowed to go outside.

  It wasn’t fair that Herr Trott and General Vogel had been executed, and Albert and Princess Marie had vanished without a trace.

  Finally, it wasn’t fair that Adolf Hitler was alive and Frau Becker was dead. That alone was proof that the universe was tilted in favor of evil over good.

  The room spun. Max felt like he was in free fall, a pilot ejected from a burning plane without a parachute. Fragments of winter nights danced madly in his head—death in the shadows of the ruined opera house, wet chalk on blackened brick …

  “Stop stop stop stop stop,” Max said. If he didn’t pull himself back to reality, this little episode would leave him feeling awful for the rest of the day.

  He closed his eyes and tried to blank his mind. A few weeks ago, after an episode at the dinner table, Papa had taught him breathing exercises to help keep him tethered to the real world when his body and mind started to spin out of his control. He inhaled to a count of five and exhaled to a count of seven, the whole time thinking sloooowwwwdowwwwnnnnnn, stretching the word like a piece of toffee in his mind.

  After several long, slow breaths, he risked opening his eyes. The wall had returned to its proper place. He let go of the bedsheet and sat perfectly still for a moment, thinking: calm.

  He focused on sounds from other parts of the flat: Mutti and Papa puttering around downstairs, sipping weak ersatz coffee and munching on stale bread. Gerta and Kat Vogel talking quietly in their room across the narrow hallway.

  Here was another fine example of the unfairness of it all: Now that they’d moved to a much smaller house, Max had to share it with not one older girl, but two.

  He knew it was a horribly selfish thought. Kat’s father had been executed by the Nazis, her mother sent to a camp in Poland. Kat herself had narrowly escaped the same fate. He was glad that she was alive. But couldn’t she be alive somewhere else?

  There was barely enough food for the four Hoffmanns, and most everything came with substitute ingredients—sawdust instead of flour, roasted grain instead of coffee beans. They weren’t starving, but they had all lost a little bit of weight. Max’s hunger was a small bright pebble in his stomach, always there to remind him that he was surviving on scraps.

  It was time to go downstairs and force down a slice of dry, mealy bread for breakfast.

  He decided he would wait until Gerta and Kat went down, ate, and came back up to their room. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone this morning. To pass the time, he thumbed through one of the French theatrical programs some previous occupant of the safe house had left in a pile in the corner of the bedroom. Since the Hoffmanns had arrived at the house in February, Max had actually managed to teach himself to read a little bit of French, but today he just let the words of Le Coeur Dispose wash over him.

  A bead of sweat fell from the tip of his nose and splatted against the program, splotching the print. Max tossed the booklet aside and mopped his forehead with the sheet.

  It was hard to imagine a time when he had ever been cold. He hugged his arms to his chest and tried to make himself shiver, as if he could lower the temperature by memory alone.

  Suddenly, footsteps pounded up the stairs. Max hopped out of bed in alarm—the whole family was supposed to tread lightly in the safe house. Mutti appeared in his doorway, wide-eyed and breathless.

  “It’s begun!” she said. Then she turned and poked her head into Gerta and Kat’s room. “Get up, get up, they’ve finally done it!”

  “Done what?” Max said, going out into the hall. His mother took him by the shoulders and laughed.

  “They’ve just announced it on the radio!”

  Max was stunned by this abrupt burst of energy. His family had been moping around the house for weeks, barely speaking, and now it seemed as if Mutti had gone mad.

  “The Allies have landed in France!”

  Andy Marino was born and raised in upstate New York, and currently lives in New York City with his wife and two cats. You can visit him at andy-marino.com.

  Copyright © 2020 by Andy Marino

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, April 2020

  Cover art © 2020 by Mike Heath

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-35903-9

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