As she sat at the table, tapping her pen against the wood, already new thoughts and possibilities were coming to mind, and she suspected that if she managed to find out who was coming to the house—and why—she would in turn find out what happened to Leon Donat.
Maisie was thirsty and hungry. She sat back and decided to go downstairs to the restaurant for supper, and perhaps a well-deserved glass of wine. She thought of Priscilla, and wondered if after all that had happened, a gin and tonic would not be such a bad idea. A woman dining alone was already subject to enough attention, though. One enjoying a cocktail without a companion might inspire whispered speculation from other patrons. She rooted through her bag until she found a book Priscilla had given her to read during her journey. Gone with the Wind. She sighed. It would not have been her first choice, but any book was a good book for a woman alone who did not want the attention of others.
Entering the restaurant, Maisie noticed a copy of the Times on a chair set to one side. She picked up the newspaper and asked to be seated at a table in a corner of the dining room. She sat with her back against a banquette, where she could watch other patrons coming and going. With her newspaper folded to the first page—though she had to lean toward a wall light to see the print—she placed her order for a glass of white wine and a fish dish with vegetables and potato. She took one look around the room, trying to establish whether anyone had followed her, then pulled out her book, placing it next to her on the table, ready to open as soon as her meal was served. For now she continued with the newspaper.
“If you can read it, you can speak it.” The voice was familiar.
Maisie looked up to the man staring down at her. She shook her head.
“English, I mean,” said Mark Scott.
“That sounds like a very bad line in one of those pictures at the cinema. What are you doing here?” She kept her voice down, her eyes scanning the room in case their conversation had attracted interest. “You of all people should be more circumspect.”
“Probably, but strange as it may sound, I am one of those guys easily forgotten by people in my midst. For some reason they don’t remember me.” He set his hat on the banquette next to Maisie and drew back the chair opposite her. “Mind if I join you?” He continued to sit down without waiting for a reply. Once seated, he reached for her book and slipped into an accentuated drawl. “Gone with the Wind? Miss Donat, if the best you can do is a bit of southern romance, why, I do declare, you aren’t the woman I estimated you to be.”
Maisie shook her head and looked away.
“Oh, come on—even at the worst of times, we must have something to smile about.”
“It’s hard to forget what the worst of times can really be like, Mr. Scott, especially in the midst of another of those times.” She pushed the newspaper toward him, with its headline in bold letters: “Hitler Announces Union with Austria.” She looked up as a waiter approached with her glass of wine. “I’m not sure you should be seen here, Mr. Scott—or with me.”
“I’ll make it quick, then.” He shook his head when the waiter asked if he would like to order a beverage. “What happened when you went along to see your friend Berger? Was he tap-dancing, trying to explain the disappearance of Leon Donat?”
Maisie shook her head. “No.” She sipped her wine, casting her gaze around the room once more. She wasn’t sure Scott was as invisible as he considered himself to be. “Let’s just say it was all very light and cordial—or as light and cordial as one would expect in that place. I’m allowed to stay here for about three days, which I will use to find Donat. They won’t like me looking—the Germans or the British in Munich. But . . . there’s something very amiss here.”
“Be careful—you have no idea how complex this situation is.”
Maisie sat back. “Oh, I think I do, Mr. Scott. I’m just surprised no one has found either Donat or the young man he was supposedly helping. Mind you, the Germans thought they had him. I cannot believe they were fooled.”
“Maybe they weren’t.”
Maisie kept her voice low, took another sip of wine, and set down her glass. “That had crossed my mind.”
“It’s a web, Miss . . . Donat.” He smiled as the waiter approached again and set a plate in front of Maisie.
She declined additional condiments, and the waiter left. Scott waited until he was out of earshot.
“Don’t be the fly who gets caught in that web, Fräulein D. We’re all skirting the edges—your friend Leslie too. Did you see anything interesting today? I lost you just as the tram made it to that stop close to the river.”
Maisie looked at Scott, folded the newspaper, and lifted her knife and fork. “That’s annoying—I thought I’d managed to get rid of you before that.” She sighed, at once grateful for someone to talk to beyond the stiff Leslie and officers of the SS. “I saw two German girls playing. They must have been seven or eight. Both wrapped up warm and looking for the stray cat they’d befriended, to give it some food. Then they went on their way.”
“That sounds riveting, Fräulein D.”
“Give it a little while, and it might be: one was Jewish, and the other wasn’t. They were playing where they might not be seen, because one set of parents had forbidden their daughter to play with her friend—perhaps for the safety of both children, who knows? Given the climate here, one must be careful before pointing the finger of blame. But that’s the great sadness of any act of discrimination, isn’t it? When children cannot play together.” Maisie reached for her book. She wanted to be alone.
“Well, ma’am, I guess I had better take my leave.” Once again Scott sounded as if he’d come straight from America’s Deep South. He stood up and was gone, passing into the shadows of the dimly lit dining room. No one looked up. No waiter paid attention to his leaving. He might never have been in the room.
Before going to bed, Maisie worked on her case map. She had identified two points to which she would direct her attention the following morning. She wanted to return to the place where the Voice of Freedom had been published, and to revisit the house where Elaine Otterburn had lived with the other girls. And where was Elaine, if not in England?
In the morning, on her journey toward the Au, Maisie thought about Elaine and how she’d come to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to find her, her clothing in shreds, blood on her dress, with barely an ounce of dominion over her thoughts. Was it real terror? Or an act? Maisie had at once responded to Elaine’s predicament. Her decision to help the young woman now seemed to be a poor choice—but there had been few options. She could hardly alert the police—Elaine would have been under immediate suspicion, and in all likelihood incarcerated. Had John Otterburn’s daughter left Munich for another city—if not in Germany, then perhaps one of its neighbors? And if she was still here, then why had she remained? I am not what I seem. Then what was she? Was she more than Mark Scott’s sometime informant? Maisie thought about the woman’s character, the way she’d reacted when asked to recount the events that led to the disappearance of Luther Gramm. It was as if she were a doll dropped and broken in many pieces. She seemed to do well when told exactly what to do, but in this instance she’d shown no ability to retain her presence of mind, no fortitude under pressure. It occurred to Maisie that Elaine was only able to present herself as a certain type of woman—devil-may-care, lighter than air—when she had a safety net beneath her. On the ground it was her father’s money. In the air it was her training. Maisie considered the relationship between Elaine and her mother. Lorraine couldn’t cope with a daughter who had lost control of her emotions because the man she had a crush on was married to someone else. Maisie felt little shame when she whispered to herself, “She should have had Becca for a mother.”
The edge of the Au was as quiet as she’d hoped it would be on a Sunday. No children played, and the street in front of the former home of the Voice of Freedom was empty. She dispensed with looking through the glass-paned door that marked the entrance to the basement at the front of the buildi
ng. But as she walked farther along the street, turned the corner, and stepped along the narrow alley that led to the back entrance, she wondered why people who played a dangerous game of risk would choose to house their press in a cellar accessible via a door half-paned in glass? Or had it been disguised as something else—a small-time lawyer’s office, perhaps? The workshop of a woman who took in mending? Or a tailor? But a printing press was not a small thing—unless there had been a disguise she had missed. Perhaps there was something so blatant about running an illegal press in a room with a part-windowed door that it would seem inconceivable to the authorities that anyone would take a risk in a place so vulnerable.
She stopped some way back from the rear entrance to study the boarded-up door she had breached the day before. There were three upper floors, all of which appeared empty—perhaps abandoned when the lower floor was raided, although one resident had of course left a cat behind. As Maisie looked up at the windows, she felt a soft touch on her ankles—the stray cat had returned to press its body against her, weaving a figure eight around her ankles. The animal stared up into her eyes and squawked a meow, so she reached down and ran her hand from its pointed shoulders to its tail. The thick throaty purr was loud, signaling pleasure—or a call for food. She had come prepared. Unwrapping a table napkin which was inside a paper bag she’d brought, she knelt down and laid out a feast of leftover fish. She observed the cat crouching, ever watchful for a predator in his territory, eating in ravenous mouthfuls.
After leaving the restaurant the previous evening, Maisie had asked the hotel desk clerk if he had such a thing as a Taschenlampe. She had nightmares, she told him, and sometimes awoke frightened in the night, so she liked to have one by her bedside. He smiled, informing her that one would be brought to her room without delay. And it was. Now she stepped toward the door, pulled back the boards once again, and used the torch to illuminate the rooms beyond.
She flashed the light around the kitchen, seeing clearly what had only been in outline before. It seemed strange that there weren’t more utensils, more pots and pans—if the place had been abandoned in a hurry, how would there have been time to collect those things? Of course, the area was far from well-to-do; people might well have pillaged the abandoned property for anything they could use or sell. She opened two cupboards above a table set against a wall—there was nothing inside—and another tall, wide cupboard, like a pantry, to the left. She turned on the tap; a trickle of brown water choked its way out. The pipe behind the sink shuddered, and more water came out in thick filthy spurts, then cleared and flowed into the sink. She turned off the tap. She moved forward into the corridor, again casting the beam up and down the walls. Squares of lighter plasterwork revealed places where pictures or notices had been removed. She looked down, stepping over the detritus of life in the basement. On the floor she noticed a broken pair of pinking shears, and pins spread across the boards. Perhaps the place had indeed been disguised as the workshop of a tailor or someone who took in clothing alterations and repairs.
The front room was spacious, larger than she had thought at first. She stepped toward the remains of machinery, moving the beam across the abandoned ironmongery down to the floor, stained dark with dried ink and blood. Looking closer, she noticed that underneath the broken press were several sewing machines, the cumbersome sort that might be used in a small factory. The whole mass of metal sat on top of torn rags. Maisie directed the torch up to the ceiling, where a rod extending from one side to another still held a few brass rings. Ah, that was it—from the front entrance all anyone would see was a clutch of seamstresses toiling away, yet behind the curtain a small press operated. The rattle of the sewing machines would disguise the sound of the press. The curtain played its part too—any visitor could have concluded that it was there to protect the modesty of customers who came for a fitting, or to protect garments awaiting collection. There would have been little risk of the place being raided. There were so many small workshops of this type in any city, and not all could be policed.
But someone had tipped off the Gestapo.
There was nothing else of note in the room, apart from the broken sign that must have once covered much of the door, and which indicated that this was indeed the workshop of a tailor who took in all manner of work. Maisie’s thoughts turned to the young needlewoman she had become close to in Gibraltar. Miriam Babayoff. She wondered what had become of Miriam, now that she was married. She pictured the small house on a narrow street, the way the sun cast its midday light across the cobblestones, and the warmth on her skin as she made her way from one place to another during her time there. She pictured the small kitchen; the table where Miriam worked, the stove with a kettle on the boil, ready to make tea. And then she remembered the narrow door that led from the kitchen to the upper floors of the whitewashed house. It hardly seemed like a door from one place to another; it was more like a larder. If she remembered correctly, it was even disguised with a curtain.
Maisie stepped back into the corridor toward the kitchen. Once again she moved the beam of her torch up and down and across the walls. She directed the light onto the door to what she had assumed was a large cupboard, and opened the door. It was indeed a cupboard. Flour spilled from an open bag; the shelves were sticky to the touch, and when Maisie brought her hand away, her fingers were covered in a thick, black moldy syrup. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket to clean her hands and began to turn away toward the sink, but instead returned her attention to the cupboard again. It was almost a reflex action that led her to rap her knuckles on the back of the piece of furniture. And the sound echoing back to her told her that this was one thing she had missed. There was no wall behind the wood.
Maisie thought back to her first visit, and what she had observed as she stood outside before making her way down the slippery green steps to the basement. There’d been nothing to indicate that this was more than a three-story building sandwiched between other three-story buildings in a row of ten. There was nothing to indicate that the basement rooms would have a means of access to other floors. At first she had wondered why there was a corridor along the lower ground floor at all; then she realized that at one point there might have been two rooms and a kitchen, with the corridor allowing access to both without walking through one to get to the other. But a wall had been taken down at some point—perhaps for the first artisan. It was along that seam in the ceiling that the curtain had been hung. She suspected that, if she looked hard enough, she might find evidence of a small cot having once been situated in the corridor.
The house had no indoor lavatory—she’d seen outhouses in the alleyway where the young girls had played. Now she thought she knew how to gain access to another part of the building.
She washed her hands in cold water, dried them with her handkerchief, and brought her torch back to the cupboard, paying attention to the sides, and running her fingers along the line of wood where it met the wall. She looked inside the cupboard again, trying not to retch as the smell of rancid food and dead rodents wafted up. Then she found it—a small lever. She pushed down, and the cupboard moved toward her, almost knocking her off balance.
She pulled back on the wood of the cupboard to reveal bricks and a narrow platform—just enough room to provide a hiding place for two or three, perhaps at a pinch four people. She flashed the torch up and down the walls. They were cold and damp to the touch. She aimed the light up toward the roof of the hideout and gave a knowing smile. Small ledges had been cut out of the bricks to form a ladder of sorts, leading to the floor above. She could not climb the stairs today, nor would she need to—but she’d found an escape route for anyone who had been in the workshop when it was raided. Except for the one person who had been required to remain and close the door, to secure the lever, to disguise the hideout and draw attention away from it.
Maisie stepped off the platform and into the kitchen. She was about to close the cupboard and leave it as she found it when the torch caught something in its beam. It
was not easy to see at first, but Maisie removed the small triangle of fabric snagged on a corner of rough brick, ran the cream silk with the remains of an embroidered red rose through her fingers, and knew she had seen it before. Of course, she could not be completely sure—but if she was right, Elaine Otterburn had taken refuge in the hideout. And Maisie had no doubt that she had been very, very scared.
Another piece of the jigsaw dropped into place as she retraced her steps. It was speculative, of course, but it was a thought inspired by experience. When she had worked as a nurse among shell-shocked men during the war, a doctor had advised giving the men a purpose, something to do—learning a new trade, perhaps. One of those trades was tailoring, learning to wield a needle and thread, and later, if the mind could bear the noise, a sewing machine. It was a job that could be done in solitude, that demanded one work only at one’s own pace. There was much to recommend it. What if, she wondered . . . what if the man at Dachau had learned his trade following the war—or returned to it once his battles were over? What if he had allowed a press to be set up at the back of his workshop—and what if he had either volunteered to be the scapegoat or had been instructed in his role? What if he had believed that his army service on behalf of his country might save him? She closed her eyes, the what-ifs coming and going, as if stepping forward for consideration, then vanishing when they didn’t hold water in the face of scrutiny. What if the young Ulli Bader had known of the old soldier’s affliction, and taken advantage of it? Perhaps the man was lonely, after all. And perhaps the man did not reveal everything to those who imprisoned him, because he’d forgotten. Perhaps his mind had cordoned off the workshop because it was a place where men with guns and a brutal way about them only sparked images of battles that were still too close. Maisie had known the man at Dachau had suffered a trauma to the mind—had speculated that he was shell-shocked. Now she was sure he had played a role in helping the others escape. Had Leon Donat been among them? He was not a young man, but not an old man either. He was not slim, but fear could have helped lever him up the notched ladder in the wall. Now she wondered if Donat had known exactly what he was doing, and taken the risk anyway.
Journey to Munich Page 18
