The Lost Spy (Slim Moran Mysteries)

by Kate Moira Ryan

  “Do they do anything besides howl? And please chew with your mouth closed. Just for once, just for me, please.”

  Daniel closed his mouth, swallowed, and then explained, “They started out small, with random killings of Allied soldiers and simple acts of sabotage, but their latest—and for me, most disturbing—activity is that they’re killing the Jews who have come back to Germany to start their lives again.”

  “So what’s your job? You can’t kill them all, can you?”

  “I can kill their leaders.”

  “Is that why you needed five thousand dollars?”

  “I’m bringing in members of the Haganah to help me.”

  “The Haganah? What the hell is the Haganah?” Slim asked, not sure she wanted to know.

  “It means defense in Hebrew. It defends Israel. The members that I am working with are mostly made up of survivors of the Lodz Ghetto, and they’re brutal.”

  “What’s Herr Wiesenthal’s role in all of this?”

  “One of the leaders is purported to be Klaus Barbie. He wants us to bring him in alive so he can be tried in a court of law. This is the last known photo of him.” Daniel took out a snapshot of a thin man with a hawkish face in a Gestapo uniform, smirking.

  “Does he think he can bring in the Butcher of Lyon alive?”

  “No, he doesn’t think he can do it.”

  “He can’t mean . . .”

  “Yes, he wants me to.”

  Neither of them spoke. Slim felt paralyzed by fear. They both knew that if Daniel failed, the werwolf would make sure he did not survive. She reached for his fingers and cleared her throat.

  “Promise me that you’ll be careful.”

  “I will.” He squeezed her fingers and then said, “Slim.”

  She looked up, hoping for some word, anything to signify what she meant to him.

  “I need more money.”

  Slim wanted to ask, “Is that the only reason you want me? Can’t you see how desperately I love you, that you brighten my day? When I am in your presence, I am happy for whatever brief time we have.” But she couldn’t say any of that, because what if it just hung in the air without a response? That would kill her. She’d learned as a child that emotions did nothing but complicate things. And she wished for that black-and-white world she’d known before Daniel had come into her life and introduced color.

  Slim spent the morning on the phone in a café just outside the US Army base, arranging for funds to be transferred into Daniel’s account. It took more than an hour. By the end of the call, Slim was hoarse because the connection had been so bad that she’d had to shout into the phone. Afterward, she sat down to order lunch from a woman who looked to be in her sixties. She was missing her front teeth and made a whistling sound when she spoke.

  “Do you speak any English?” Slim asked her as the woman cleared away her plate of spaetzle.

  “A little. I learn from the American soldiers,” the friendly woman said eagerly.

  “Was there a prison for women in Karlsruhe during the war?”

  The woman’s expression became guarded and suspicious.

  “I know nothing about a prison such as that,” she said.

  Slim tried another tactic. “I am trying to find out what happened to my sister.” She pulled out the photo of Marie Claire in her uniform. Slim figured if she said Marie Claire was her sister, she would sound less official and therefore less threatening.

  “She was woman soldier?” she asked, incredulous.

  Slim lowered her voice and said conspiratorially, “She was a spy for the British government.”

  “No! True?” The woman’s eyes widened.

  “Yes, and she was caught and sent to a jail in Karlsruhe.”

  “There was prison in schloss, but only for men,” the woman said doubtfully.

  “Was there another prison, only for women?” Slim persisted.

  “You wait here, yes?”

  Slim nodded, and the woman exited. Moments later she came out, arguing with an elderly man.

  “This is Herr Hauptmann. He worked in the schloss during the war.”

  “As a member of the SS?” Slim asked.

  The man shook his head angrily when he heard SS.

  “No, no, he was . . .” The woman searched for the words. “Things that broke, he made work.”

  “Oh, I see, sorry. He was like what we would call a janitor?” Slim smiled at the man, who seemed mollified when he heard the word sorry.

  “Yes, yes, he fixer. He said no women were ever at schloss. He would know. He was there from 1941 until the end.”

  “Was there anyplace else my sister would have been sent?”

  In German, the woman asked the man, who nodded and then replied.

  “He says there was women’s prison, but just for German women.”

  “Can you ask him where it was?”

  She translated for him, “It’s still there. He knows a woman who is director.”

  “He knows the director?” Slim asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can he take me?”

  The man stepped back and held his hands up.

  “No. He will give you address and map, but he is afraid if the werwolf sees him with you, they kill him.”

  Using a prewar map of Karlsruhe, the man showed Slim where the Frauengefängnis, or the women’s prison, was located. Even though the city had been laid out in a grid, most of the buildings had been bombed. Coupled with missing street signs, it was almost impossible to find where the prison was.

  After an hour, she felt lost, so she stopped an older couple for directions. The man nearly spit on her. “You are in Germany, Fräulein,” he said in heavily accented English.

  “I know.” Slim was puzzled.

  “You don’t belong here!” the man shouted at her. “Go back to America!”

  Others she tried to stop pushed her out of the way, not wanting to deal with a well-dressed American woman. Desperate, Slim waved an American dollar bill in the air, and a young mother with a child in a battered stroller stopped.

  “Wo ist Frauengefängnis?” she asked.

  With hand signals, the woman pointed her in the right direction.

  The prison was a massive three-story building made of sandstone that wrapped around the block. At the entrance, Slim asked where the women’s section was, and the guard pointed to the left. She made her way down a long hallway to another reception desk, where she was stymied by her inability to communicate. As a last resort, she pulled out the photo of Marie Claire and said, “Meine Schwester,” which seemed to confuse the guard even more, as he couldn’t understand why this American was looking for her sister in a German prison. However, he appeared to sense that this was a matter for someone higher up to deal with, and he motioned for Slim to follow him and led her to the director’s office.

  Frau Becker, a thin woman in her fifties, seemed annoyed at first by the intrusion, but her demeanor changed to almost compliant when Slim showed her the photo. Motioning for Slim to wait, she left, and minutes later she came back with a young woman who said, “Frau Becker is the director of the women’s section. She does not speak English. I do. For a time, I worked on the American base as a maid and learned there. How can Frau Becker help you?”

  Slim pointed to the photo and explained that she was trying to find out what happened to her sister.

  Becker spoke to the woman, who translated for her. “Frau Becker knows this woman. She was here for almost three months in Karlsruhe in 1943, March through early May .”

  The director went to a cabinet and pulled out an enormous ledger. She paged through for several minutes while speaking excitedly.

  “Frau Becker says this is a prison for Germans, not foreigners, so when your sister was brought here, she did not want to admit her because she was told that your sister had to be kept away from all the other prisoners because she was a foreign enemy. Frau Becker told the SS that she could keep her only two weeks. They agreed, but by the end of two and a h
alf months, she was still in prison. She phoned her superiors and asked that your sister be transferred. She didn’t have the room and had been told that this prisoner was dangerous.”

  “Was she?” Slim asked.

  The woman repeated the question to Frau Becker, who shook her head no, but then exclaimed when she found what she was looking for in the ledger.

  “Frau Becker says, ‘Here is your sister’s entry. She arrived on March 6, 1943, and was transferred in May.’”

  Slim looked at the entry and saw Marie Claire’s name with an exit date.

  “Does she know where she was sent?”

  “Your sister was picked up in a car by two SS men and taken to the Karlsruhe train station. That’s all she knows.”

  “I have one last question.”

  “Yes, please go ahead.”

  “If Frau Becker had not called the SS to pick my sister up, is it possible she could have waited out the war here?”

  Frau Becker shrugged and then spoke resignedly to the young woman, who translated, “She says maybe yes or maybe no. The prison was repeatedly bombed during the last days of the war. Many prisoners did not survive. Some did. It was simply a matter of luck.”

  Frau Becker handed back the photo and said something to the young woman.

  “She is sorry that she cannot tell you more,” the young woman translated. “Are there any other questions?”

  “No, but this has been enormously helpful. Thank you.” Slim left the office feeling as though she had hit another dead end, but at least as far as she knew, Marie Claire was still alive.

  Dusk was falling when she got outside, and she quickly got lost trying to retrace her steps back to the café. While she tried to make sense of where she was on the useless prewar map, a man walked up to her and whispered, “Bist du verloren?”

  He was thin, in his late twenties at most, and there was something off about him. He asked if she was lost again, this time grabbing her arm for emphasis. Scared, Slim shook her head no and tried to release herself. He jabbed something metal into her rib, which she realized might be a handgun. How could she be so foolish as to walk around Karlsruhe alone, especially with night falling? She willed herself to stay calm and remembered what Daniel had taught her to do if she was ever attacked. Straightening the fingers of her free arm, she jabbed him dead center in the throat, cutting off the air to his windpipe.

  The man fell forward, gasping and releasing his grip on her, and she ran as fast as she could, screaming for help at the top of her lungs. There was no one around to come to her aid. Hearing the smack of shoes hitting the pavement, she looked over her shoulder and saw her attacker chasing after her. Slim darted down another war-torn street and spotted an American jeep driving toward her. She jumped in front of it, the driver barely braking in time. He jumped out and grabbed her.

  “Lady, you are one crazy dame.” Slim was shaking so much, he reached out for her other arm to steady her. “Hey, I know you! You’re the girl from last night!”

  Slim looked up at her savior and realized it was the gap-toothed GI from the bar. Before she could thank him, a bullet whizzed by, missing her but hitting her protector in the back of the head. The GI’s arms loosened around her, and Slim saw the German coming toward her. Panicked, she leaned against the GI, pushing him with her weight into the backseat, and jumped into the driver’s seat. The keys were still in the ignition. Another shot hit the windshield, shattering it. Slim put her foot on the gas pedal and shifted the gear to drive, but the transmission would not turn over. From behind, Slim felt hands around her neck, lift her up, and throw her into the backseat.

  “Please, please, let me go . . .” Slim begged, but instead of releasing her, the man climbed on top of her and slapped Slim, busting open her lip. He began to unbutton his trousers. Slim tried to push him off as he pulled up her skirt He was going to rape her if she did nothing. This time, she kicked him hard in the groin.

  Just that moment, Slim felt the man being pulled off her and thrown onto the street. She turned and saw Daniel pouncing on the unconscious man with a knife drawn.

  “Daniel,” she gasped.

  “Look away!” He commanded, but Slim couldn’t, and she watched him slit the man’s throat with a single gesture. Daniel kicked and spat on the dying man, and then he turned to Slim, who was trying to pull down her skirt.

  “Oh, my God, did he . . .” He could not finish the sentence.

  “No, he almost did,” Slim replied, shaking, “I kicked him hard in the balls.”

  He looked at her and then saw the soldier from the night before dead in the backseat.

  “What are you doing with him?” Daniel nearly spat.

  “He was trying to help me. I was being chased by that animal.”

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “We can’t just leave him here,” she said, pointing to the soldier.

  Daniel touched the young man’s neck with two fingers and said, “There’s nothing we can do to help him. He is dead. We have to go. I can’t be caught with two dead bodies.”

  “You did nothing wrong,” Slim insisted. “You saved me.”

  “There is a dead German and a dead GI. The Americans will arrest me, and I don’t have the time to explain this. They wouldn’t believe me, anyway,” he said as he held out his hand to her.

  Slim looked back at the two dead men, grabbed his hand, and ran beside him down the darkened street.

  In Daniel’s room, he helped Slim undress.

  “You are very lucky,” Daniel said, helping her into the warm bath he had drawn. Taking a cloth and a bar of soap, he began to wash her. “Thousands of women were raped when the French colonial troops overran Karlsruhe in 1945. People here want revenge. Walking alone on these dark streets was stupid, Slim. He probably would have shot you after he raped you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “When you weren’t here this afternoon, I asked around. The woman downstairs in the café told me where you’d gone, and that’s when I began to panic. I reached the prison, and they said you’d been there, and then I randomly ran down the streets looking for you. When I heard the screams, I ran as fast as I could.” Daniel rang out the washcloth. “Slim, the Germans are not our friends. They are not to be trusted.”

  “Surely not every German is bad, Daniel. Marlene—” Slim began.

  “Marlene left Germany when she saw what was happening. Listen to me; tomorrow I’m getting you on a train, and you are leaving this godforsaken place. And I want you to promise me that you will not step foot in Germany again.”

  “I cannot promise that, Daniel.”

  “You can and you will,” he said quietly.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then you must promise me that you will never go anywhere in Germany without me. Can you promise me that?”

  “Yes, I can guarantee you that.”

  “Good. Step out, and let me dry you off.”

  Slim stood up. The bruises on Slim’s arms from where she had been grabbed were beginning to blacken.

  “Were you able to transfer the money to my account?”

  Slim nodded, and he kissed her shoulder as she climbed into bed. She watched him roll up her bloodied clothing and shove it into his duffel bag. When he came into bed, they didn’t touch or speak for several minutes; finally, Daniel pulled her gingerly toward him, and they fell asleep.

  The next morning as Daniel drove Slim to the train station, an uneasy silence hung between them.

  At the station, Slim bought her ticket, then turned to Daniel and asked, “Could you do me a favor and ask the agent if I might speak to the stationmaster?”

  “Slim, must I? We have only ten minutes before the train arrives. I’d like to just wait in peace,” Daniel said, sitting down on a bench.

  “Please,” Slim persisted, and Daniel finally got up and walked over to the ticket window. Seconds later, the agent called out the window to an elderly man in uniform at the edge of the platform whom Slim had seen
the night she’d arrived.

  “What do you want me to say to him?” Daniel asked, annoyed.

  “Ask him if he worked here in May 1943,” Slim said.

  Daniel did. The man nodded.

  “Ask him if he ever saw this woman.” Slim took out the photo. “Tell him that she was transported by two SS men to this station.”

  Daniel showed the man the photo and asked. The man began to grow agitated.

  “What is he saying?” Slim asked.

  “He said that the SS requested three tickets to Struthof, which made no sense to him.”

  “Why didn’t it make sense?”

  “He’s saying the only concentration camp near there is Natzweiler, and that was only for men.”

  The man began to yell.

  “What is he saying? Why is he so excited?” Slim asked.

  “He knew one of the SS men. He was a doctor here in Karlsruhe before he started working at Natzweiler, so he kept badgering him to make sure he was taking the young woman to the right place. And finally, the doctor, Brandt was his name, showed him a telegram—it said that she was to be executed there.”

  The older man grabbed Slim’s hands and lowered his voice.

  “He wants you to know there wasn’t anything he could do. He did give the woman some of his hot coffee from a thermos. When she asked him what the telegram said, he told her that she was going to a camp to do farm work. He didn’t want to tell her she was going to be executed. He doesn’t know if that was right or wrong to do. He thinks about her still. She haunts him. He remembers that she wore a yellow dress. She carried a coat as well, but she didn’t wear it because it was so hot.”

  Slim saw that the man was trembling.

  “Tell him thank you. And that he was right not to tell her.” The man had been kind to Marie Claire and clearly needed to be absolved of his guilt.

  The stationmaster nodded at Slim when Daniel told him. The train pulled into the station.

  After making sure that she was settled in her car, Daniel kissed her on each cheek and then left. As the train pulled away, the stationmaster held up his hand to Slim. She waved back and then pulled down her shade. As far she was concerned, Dennis and the other surviving agents were right. Marie Claire had to be dead.