Code Name Hélène

by Ariel Lawhon

Frank’s name is rising in my chest, hurtling toward my lips, when he finally lowers the camera. He scrambles to his feet, lips moving frantically as though running through his options. Fight. Flight. Faint.

  Wolff drops his hand to his side and unfurls the whip. He lets it drag behind him on the ground like the tail of a rat as he walks toward Frank. I might not be romantically interested in him, but I’ve never respected Frank more than I do in this moment because he does not flinch. Does not run or make a fist or lose his nerve. He grips the camera in two hands and holds it tight against his chest like a shield. Back straight, jaw clenched, lip curled in defiance.

  Frank waits.

  I can almost see him counting off Wolff’s footsteps in the seconds it takes for them to come face-to-face. No words are exchanged. No threats. No violence. Wolff simply looks Frank up and down. Notes the pale shade of his skin and the freckles strewn about his face like ink on parchment. And Wolff makes a decision about the worth of this one man’s life. The scales weigh in Frank’s favor, apparently, because Wolff reaches out with his free hand and grabs the camera.

  Frank grips it tighter, his knuckles turning white as he strains to hold on. No. His entire body screams the word, resisting.

  Wolff raises the whip.

  And I see it there in Frank’s eyes, the calculation. He cannot retain his grip on the camera and block the whip at the same time. He must choose. Wolff yanks again, and the camera is ripped out of Frank’s hands. It’s like an appendage being rent from his body. A violent separation.

  A serpentine invasion of the soul. Hatred. Pure and holy hatred. That’s what I feel as I watch Wolff turn from Frank without ever speaking a word and strut toward the bonfire, those tall brown boots clipping against the uneven stones of the Stephansplatz. He lifts the camera and turns before the crowd, as though displaying a piece of evidence before a jury. He shows it, slowly, to every pair of watching eyes. And then he hurls it to the ground with all his strength.

  Frank’s camera shatters on contact and fills the square with the sound of cracking metal and breaking glass. Wolff bends down and pulls the long ribbon of film from its compartment, exposing it to the light. He tosses the film onto the fire, where it curls in on itself like burnt hair, then kicks each remaining piece into the coals.

  “Nein Kameras,” Wolff shouts, one long spindly finger pointing at the bonfire.

  I’m so busy watching the camera burn, breathless, that I don’t even notice one of the Brownshirts approach me. I don’t pay any attention as he reaches out and yanks the notepad from my hands. One moment it’s there and the next I’m left with three long paper cuts against the index finger of my left hand. I feel the sting first and the rage second.

  Frank, however, has seen this, and he has forgotten his camera, his outrage, and is rushing toward me. He knows me well. And it’s a good thing too, because I’m filling my lungs. I’m stepping forward. I’m reaching for the notebook. And then I am engulfed entirely in the wiry arms of Frank Gilmore. He looks to be all tendon and bone, but Frank is built like a steel cable. Once wrapped around me, he is immovable.

  “Don’t,” he hisses in my ear. “It’s not worth the whip.”

  I struggle against the surprising strength of his grasp. I want my notebook. I want revenge. But Frank is right. Wolff will not spare me simply because I’m a woman. Today’s demonstration is proof of that.

  Frank’s voice drops to a whisper, barely audible, in my left ear. “You never forget a damn thing, Nancy,” he says. “Write your article anyway.”

  We stand there as our belongings and the contents of the old woman’s millinery shop are consumed by fire, the air thick with the smell of burning wool and silk. One beautiful hat after another is tossed into the flames, first turning black around the edges, then collapsing inward only to combust with defeated little puffs, as though silenced by outrage.

  We watch as Wolff and his Brownshirts saunter from the square. We watch as the crowd waits, antsy, for them to climb onto their motorcycles. Every ear is tuned to the rumble of engines and the squeal of tires as they speed away, victorious. Then three men rush forward and lower the waterwheel to the ground. They murmur soothing things to the old woman. They gently cover her exposed body. We watch them cut the ropes that bind her wrists and ankles from the wheel and carry her off, limp and whimpering.

  “Your camera…” It’s all I can think to say, the only words I can summon.

  “Can be replaced.” I feel Frank shrug around me.

  “But the photos…”

  He clears his throat but doesn’t answer. So Frank Gilmore isn’t as stoic as he’d like to appear, then.

  My voice is that of a stranger. Distant. Tremulous. Weak. “What just happened? I wouldn’t treat an animal that way, much less a human.”

  “That’s because you are human, Nancy. They are not. Or at least not anymore.”

  The crowd begins to disperse, whispering and wringing their hands, but still Frank holds on to me, so I drop into a squat and slip out of his arms. Enough of that. I stand there, hands on my hips, glaring after the motorcycles.

  I can hear the alarm in his voice when he asks, “What are you thinking?”

  “If this is happening in Vienna, what’s it like in Berlin?”

  BERLIN

  The Brandenburg Gate

  We follow the sound of chanting. To his credit, Frank didn’t abandon me at the Westbahnhof train station in Vienna. He could have. His camera is destroyed, and without photos there’s no chance of him getting paid. He has no reason to wade further into this mess. But God bless him, Frank is British, and therefore a gentleman. He refused to send me into the lion’s den alone.

  It is eight hours by train from Vienna to Berlin but only one mile from the station to the Brandenburg Gate, so we make the trip on foot. I’m glad for the exercise, for the chance to stretch my legs. I’ve spent twenty of the last thirty-six hours on a train, with Frank, no less—he snores—and I’d give my kingdom for a warm bath and a soft bed. I miss my pillow. I miss Picon. Poor baby is staying with Stephanie and must think I’ve abandoned him. But there is work to be done and all those things can wait.

  “Dare I ask what we’re looking for this time?” Frank is far less enthusiastic now. He hasn’t mentioned romance since Vienna. “And will there be a whip?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, answering both questions at once.

  Wolff is a Brownshirt. He came from here. His entire worldview originated here. And I cannot report on what’s happening without seeing it firsthand. Frank might not have a camera anymore, but he can stand as witness. And as we melt into the crowd I am grateful for his presence.

  It is an odd thing to be amidst a sea of people and not understand a word they speak. I have been on my own since I was sixteen—for eight years now—traveling and living abroad, first in New York, then London, and now Paris. But the only language I’ve ever tried to learn is French. It feels right to me. I like the way each word rolls off my tongue. It is light and artful. Like toile. Like champagne. German is something else entirely. It originates in the throat. It’s a rumble and threat. Guttural and deep, and it sounds ominous as we are swept along in this mass of bodies headed toward the beating heart of Berlin.

  Frank keeps trying to hold my hand—protectively, I think—and I swat it away. “I’m not afraid,” I say, as a way to soften the sting.

  “You should be. I am.” He moves his grip to my elbow and I feel the drag as he begins to slow down. I can feel his hesitation with every step. He wants to turn back.

  But I lean forward, jaw stiff. “Then that’s how we differ. Because I am angry.”

  He shakes his head. “You are a terrifying woman, Nancy Wake.”

  I laugh because I don’t think of myself as terrifying at all. But I’m glad he does.

  Frank, however, doesn’t find
any of this funny. “That doesn’t mean you have to be reckless,” he says. “We don’t even know what’s going on here.”

  “And running away won’t tell us.”

  He gnaws at the inside of his bottom lip. “What you call running away I call escaping,” he mutters. He lets me lead him forward through the crowd but he never releases my elbow.

  There are at least three dozen risers set up around the Brandenburg Gate. They circle the great swath of open area in front of the monument, and the crowd spills into the space, most people rushing forward to be at ground level before a large wooden podium that squats before the gate.

  “Over there,” I say, urging Frank toward the nearest riser on the left. Once seated, we are about twenty-five yards from the podium. Close enough to see clearly but not be noticed in return.

  “What now?” he asks as we settle onto the hard wooden seats.

  “We wait. We see what happens.”

  As it turns out, we wait for a very, very long time. Through lunch. Through the afternoon. Hungry. Tired. Thirsty. We watch the area fill with more living bodies than one would think possible. We watch the flags unfurl, the uniforms arrive, and the orchestra assemble. We watch, and in our exhausted state we try to remember, to file everything away as best we can. I know I won’t recall the details on my own, so I make a game out of it.

  “Test me,” I say, closing my eyes and turning my face to the sky. The sun is warm on my cheeks and my hair. I can feel a tingling at my scalp as my dark strands soak up the heat.

  “On what?” Frank whispers.

  “Everything. I need to remember this. And I don’t dare bring attention to us by writing it down.”

  It’s a diversion from the boredom, so he decides to play along. “Okay. Um. All right, the gate. How many columns?”

  “Twelve. Six on each side. Together they form five passageways through the gate.”

  “And what sits on top of the columns?”

  “A massive stone cap.”

  It’s not the answer he’s looking for, because he adds, “And on top of that?”

  I think for a moment, hunting for that detail. I’ve spent hours staring at the gate already. It should be easy to recall, but instead I have to reach into the white spaces of my mind. This is why the game is so important. Memory is tricky, easily bleached by hunger and exhaustion. After several moments of groping around, I see it once more.

  “A bronze sculpture,” I say.

  “Of?”

  “A chariot drawn by four horses.”

  Perhaps Frank finds the game calming as well, because his voice sounds less tense when he asks, “The open area in front of the gate is surrounded by what?”

  “A colonnade. It’s very Romanesque. A place where Caesar would have pontificated.”

  He snorts. “Be careful what you ask for. The world doesn’t need another Caesar.”

  “Tell that to the Germans.”

  Frank doesn’t like this line of thought, apparently. “Keep going.”

  “On the other side of the gate is a boulevard that leads straight to the City Palace. It’s lined on both sides by linden trees. They’re all full and puffy and the leaves haven’t started to turn yet.”

  We go on like this for some time and I sit there all the while, eyes closed, answering his questions about crowd size (well over five thousand at this point), orchestra size (full, though there is one trumpeter who must have been recently drafted, because he cannot play a note—they should have given the poor man a set of bells), weather (bright and sunny but not enough wind), smells (sweat, shoe polish, grilled sausage and sauerkraut from the food carts, and something else, something tinny and metallic and very human—excitement perhaps, or maybe fear), and sounds (chanting, cheering, and chatter; the revving of engines in the distance, honks and squeaks from the orchestra warming up, singing, whispers, tired children crying somewhere behind us, and now, finally the swell of anticipation—a kind of static electricity in the air).

  Our presence here is accidental—we had no way of knowing there would be a rally—but it is illuminating. Hitler’s entrance is specifically designed, and timed perfectly. Frank and I literally have a front-row seat to this madness. Hitler waits until we are half-delirious from heat and hunger and exhaustion. Until we have sat through hours of political theater and endless martial songs. Ranks of goose-stepping soldiers. He waits until our ears are throbbing from the triumphant notes of the orchestra playing Wagnerian overtures. Drums. Marching. Chanting. Our bodies slipping into a trance of sensory overload. Hitler waits until the blue hour—that moment when the sun is down but the sky has not yet turned dark. No moon, no stars. The twelve enormous marble columns of the gate are illuminated with floodlights while the sky behind it turns a royal, majestic blue. Some might even call it divine. It’s all part of the theatrics, of course, designed to make him look bigger and more powerful than he really is. It is designed to make him look invincible. Godlike. And I’m sure he does look like that to this waiting, eager, throbbing mass of humanity. Because they lose their collective mind when he steps onto the podium, arms raised, anticipating their worship.

  “What the flaming hell is that?” Frank whispers in my ear as a tattered, stained flag is raised above the podium.

  “Oh,” I say. “That explains why he’s holding the rally here.”

  He just looks at me, waiting for an explanation.

  “Three years ago, Hitler led a torchlit procession through this gate when he seized power.”

  “Okay, but what is that?” He points again at the tattered, stained flag.

  The first words Hitler speaks are shouted into the microphone with psychotic zeal. “The Blutfahne!”

  The blood banner. It takes me a moment to realize I’ve not said the words aloud. So I speak them in disbelief. I thought it was a myth. Some sort of exaggeration promulgated by Hitler to advance his own grandiosity. To witness it with my own eyes feels like witnessing a prophesied abomination. Something warned of in the Bible.

  “It looks like a piss-poor flag,” he says.

  “It is. But it’s the first one he commissioned.” We are witnessing one of Hitler’s most venerated rituals, the solemn consecration of the colors.

  Frank leans close to my ear, afraid of being overheard. “Why are they touching the other flags to it?”

  One by one, uniformed soldiers step forward and extend flags attached to long wooden poles and brush them against the blood banner that waves ominously above Hitler’s head.

  “Those are swastikas. Each new flag is touched to the blood banner in blessing. That first flag is said to be steeped in the blood of those who died during Hitler’s first, failed coup over a decade ago. They say that fifteen of his supporters were killed that night and he soaked the flag in their blood as tribute to their loyalty.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “No. It’s evil. But look at them. They don’t care.”

  The crowd is cheering, reverential. All eyes on him. Everyone on the balls of their feet, palms raised in salute.

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I interviewed Hitler once.”

  Frank looks at me, stupefied, as though I’ve just admitted to a candlelit dinner with Lucifer himself. “You did what?”

  “It was one of my first assignments for Hearst. Three and a half years ago. They sent me to Vienna to interview the new German chancellor. I’d only heard the name Adolf Hitler once or twice at that point. I had no idea what he would become.”

  “I want to hear that story, if we make it out of here.”

  I shrug, ashamed to admit that I underestimated the impact he would have on the world. At the time he was just an assignment, a crazy man pontificating in Germany. Because I was female and unknown, Hitler allotted only thirty minutes for the intervie
w. The entire thing took place in a barbershop while he was being shaved with a straight razor. I still remember the scrape of that blade against his neck—the way it slid over the tender skin of his throat—and the snip of the scissors as his mustache was trimmed. The barber lifted the razor every time the chancellor answered one of my questions, so as not to nick him. Once, I thought I saw his hand tremble. I made eye contact with Hitler only twice: when I introduced myself and when he dismissed me. He did not thank me or say good-bye.

  It all seems like a lifetime ago. I’ve been living wild and free ever since, traveling Europe, having my fun. I’ve been blind and deaf to most of what’s been happening around me. Then I met Janos Lieberman. He was Vienna, surrounded by this growing cancer the entire time, and I wouldn’t know half of what Adolf Hitler has done since that interview if not for him.

  “Sieg Heil!” the crowd begins to chant in unison.

  “Jawohl!” he screams in reply, that rasping, staccato voice echoing through the air. “Berlin!”

  This is how people are brainwashed, I think. This is how they follow a monster. Everyone around me is mesmerized, their eyes glazed over, their breathing slow and rhythmic. And the longer he speaks, the more the crowd is hypnotized. They lean into his words, consuming them. Hitler shouts, they nod. His Lilliputian mustache quivers, his fists punch the air, he jabs and gesticulates, and they devour every word. They love him. They worship him. He is flanked by Brownshirts, each of them as putridly self-satisfied as Wolff, and I scan their faces for that whip-wielding monster but am relieved to find him absent.

  “Sieg Heil!” they scream, frantic. Obsessed. Saluting and clapping. Believing every word, receiving every command they’ve just been given. Men. Women. Children. All of them swallowing it whole so they can be corroded from the inside out.

  Frank reaches for my hand again and his voice is trembling when he says, “Can we go now? What more do you want to see?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and we slip off the risers, invisible to everyone around us, for their eyes are on Hitler alone. “I want to see nothing else.”