by Andy Marino
“Ernst,” Albert said as Colette mopped up the blood that leaked from the wound on his bare back, “wake your mother and sisters. Tell them to get dressed and meet me down here. Oh, and pack my things. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
Colette dropped one of the blood-soaked napkins to the floor and pressed a second to Albert’s back. A wave of dizziness almost sent Max to his knees, but he managed to keep himself upright. As Colette clamped the cloth to Albert’s body, Adele wrapped his chest in gauze, holding the cloth in place.
Max turned to go. Albert began speaking French again. As Max climbed the stairs, he caught the words make them disappear.
He opened the door to the adjoining room to find Mutti, Gerta, and Kat wide awake, their bedside lamp casting a dim glow on their pale, questioning faces.
“Max!” Mutti whispered. “What’s going on? We heard noises.”
“There was a fight downstairs,” Max said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Albert says to get ready; we’re leaving in five minutes.”
“A fight with who?” Gerta said.
“The SS,” Max said. That sent them all scrambling for their bags and clothes. Max went through the door to his own room, lit the lamp, changed quickly into his Hitler Youth outfit, and then went around gathering Albert’s things and packing them up. It struck him that the SS men were just knocked out, not dead—they could come to at any moment. So how did Albert propose to make them disappear?
When Max came back downstairs, the two German soldiers were nowhere to be seen. Colette was mopping up blood near the front door. It couldn’t be Albert’s—he’d been kneeling down in the center of the room.
Colette met his eyes. Max decided he didn’t want to know. She nodded slightly, then went back to her task.
Max handed Albert a fresh shirt. Adele helped him put it on, button it up, and tuck it in. Then Max helped him with his jacket. Albert winced a little when he moved his left arm, but other than that, he looked miraculously like a well-scrubbed, well-rested Gestapo agent.
Colette rose, bundled up the bloody cloth, and hurried into the kitchen. Mutti, Gerta, and Kat joined them a moment later, their eyes scanning the front room of the auberge for signs of the struggle.
Albert faced Adele and spoke French. She listened, thanked him in French, then said goodbye. Colette peeked out from behind the kitchen door. She looked right at Max.
“Au revoir,” she said.
He returned the French farewell, and then she was gone.
Albert turned to Mutti, and she gave him a quick appraisal. “You’re hurt,” she said. Max wondered how she could tell. Maybe Albert was slightly paler than normal, but other than that he looked fine.
“It’s nothing,” Albert said. “A scratch.”
“Let me take a look,” Mutti said.
“There’s no time.”
Max turned away as a wave of nausea roiled his stomach. When he had pulled the knife out, the flesh at the edges of the wound puckered a bit, then wept like an eye …
A scratch. How painful it must be!
Albert went to the front door, opened it just a little, and peered outside. From what Max could see through the narrow opening, it was still dark. After a moment, Albert beckoned for the Hoffmanns and Kat to follow him.
Max glanced back, but the kitchen door was closed and Colette was gone.
Outside, a thin band of dawn was breaking over the gabled rooftops. The village seemed to cascade down from a higher place, where it vanished into darkly wooded hills. A light breeze floated by. The only sounds were the stream that burbled through the shallow stone canal and the low murmur of unseen crickets.
Max followed Albert to the Škoda, which was squeezed into a narrow lane alongside the auberge. They took their places inside the car—Mutti up front, Max in back between Gerta and Kat—and Albert held down the starter and then eased the car out onto the cobbled street. As they bumped along, Max kept an eye out the back window for headlights, but no one pursued them.
“What’s going to happen to Adele and Colette?” he asked.
“They will be questioned,” Albert said, “along with the rest of the village, about the disappearance of those men.”
Questioned, Max thought. He wondered if Papa was being questioned back in Berlin.
“My father told me that when the Czechs killed Heydrich in Prague,” Kat said, “Hitler ordered everybody in a single village killed and then had the village burned to the ground as punishment.”
Hitler. Max’s thoughts careened to Claus von Stauffenberg, acid fuses, briefcase bombs …
Would they ever know what had really happened at the Wolf’s Lair?
Albert pulled out of the village and onto the main road toward Paris. Despite leaving the cobblestones behind, the Škoda still bounced along—this road was much less smooth than the Reichsautobahn. It seemed to be made from packed earth rather than pavement.
“Two drunken SS goons are hardly Reinhard Heydrich,” Albert said. Max remembered hearing news of Heydrich’s assassination. He was the high-ranking Nazi known as the “Butcher of Prague,” and in 1942 the Czech resistance had managed to kill him while he drove to work one morning. “Besides,” Albert continued, “the French know how to act around Germans—they’ve been occupied for four years now, and they’ve learned a few tricks along the way. Adele and Colette will be all right.”
Something in Albert’s voice troubled Max, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“I wish you’d pull over and let me take a look at your injury,” Mutti said. That’s when Max realized what was bothering him—Albert’s voice had lost some of its snap, the bold, crisp command that was part of his Gestapo disguise. How bad was the wound, really?
Albert didn’t say anything. He kept both his gloved hands on the wheel, and the Škoda’s engine hummed along as the sky brightened to pale, unbroken blue. Gerta curled up next to Max, put her head on his shoulder, and fell asleep. Kat stared out the window. The rolling hills of the French countryside, divided into chessboards of square farm plots, lulled Max into a daze. As the sun climbed in the sky, the morning grew hot and sticky. Max loosened his hated tie. As he tried to force himself to fall asleep, the early-morning hours unspooled in his mind. There was the Nazi with the champagne bottle, the fear in Adele’s eyes, the knife in Albert’s back. Behind all of it loomed Colette, pretty even with her face twisted into a mask of hatred as she spat on that clean Nazi uniform …
Unnerved, Max turned to look out the back windshield. There was no one behind them. He used his tie to mop sweat from his brow and stared out the window. Cracked patches of mud on the side of the road resembled the scales of a snake. Distant farmhouses dotted the landscape, blots of gray stone on green.
He closed his eyes. Albert had dispatched those SS men—slit their throats, Max guessed—and dragged them out of the front room of the auberge, all in the time it took Max to get dressed and pack his bag.
He wanted to believe that all the terrible things he’d seen would fade away when they crossed the border into Spain. But now he thought that there was no place in the world where the war couldn’t reach him.
By mid-morning they were driving through ruins. Max looked out at a train yard, its platforms empty and forlorn, its tracks bending up from the ground, twisted by the devastation of a direct hit. A sign hanging from the roofless frame of a station house said NOISY-LE-SEC. Beyond the station, gutted apartments bared their interiors to the sun.
“We’re in one of Paris’s eastern suburbs,” Albert said, his voice almost a whisper. “We can’t drive straight into the city. The Nazis don’t allow cars on the streets, and we’d only draw attention to ourselves.”
“Did the Nazis do all this?” Gerta asked as they passed a half-collapsed church, its steeple jutting from the wreckage.
“This is courtesy of the Allies,” Albert said. “They won’t bomb Paris itself—too many nice things—but out here is fair game.”
He turned a corner and eased the Š
koda toward a large, forbidding two-story building. There was no glass in the windows, and one corner of the building had been sheared off by a blast, but the structure was otherwise intact. Albert steered down an alley that led to a loading dock. Three gaping archways were open to the building’s interior, each one wide enough to accommodate a truck. Albert downshifted, moving his arm with substantial effort, and guided the Škoda through one of the archways. They were plunged into darkness, and Max realized just how sun-drenched the morning had been. When his eyes adjusted, he found that they were moving across a vast expanse of abandoned machinery coated in dust. Massive rows of overturned shelves had spilled what looked like bits of leather across the floor.
“A shoe factory,” Kat guessed.
“I believe you’re right,” Mutti said. “Albert?” When he failed to answer, she raised her voice in alarm. “Albert?”
The car crept along ceaselessly. Albert’s hands had fallen into his lap, and his head lolled against the back of the seat. Mutti slid over, grabbed the wheel, and hit the brakes. The car jolted to a stop. She cut the engine. Wordlessly, everyone scrambled out of the car and went to the driver’s-side door. Mutti reached inside, slipped Albert’s arm over her shoulder, and pulled him out of the car, staggering under his weight. Together, Mutti, Max, Gerta, and Kat were able to sit him down gently on the dirty floor of the bombed-out factory.
“He’s breathing,” Mutti said. She pulled her hand away from his back and found that it was soaked in blood. “Help me get his jacket and shirt off.” After an awkward struggle with his clothing, they laid him down on his stomach. The white cloth Adele and Colette had applied to his wound was red and sodden. Mutti sucked air through her teeth and glanced around in despair. “Look at this place! There’s nothing we can do for him here.” She met Max’s eyes. “He wouldn’t stop driving, Maxi.”
“I know,” Max said.
Suddenly, a woman’s voice came from the darkness at the far end of the factory floor. “You’re early!”
The strange accent rang familiar in Max’s ears. The woman stepped out from the shadows, trailed by a pair of men, all three of them carrying rifles slung over their shoulders.
She was wearing a brown skirt that hung just past her knees and a collared white shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. It was a radically different outfit than the elegant, urbane clothes she favored in Berlin, but the woman was unmistakably Princess Marie Vasiliev.
Max was struck dumb by the sight of the woman he’d assumed was gone from his life forever, lost to the mad whims of the war …
She stopped short when she saw Albert’s prone body, then rushed to his side, knelt, and set the rifle down next to her.
“Dear God, what happened to him?”
“He got stabbed in a fight with the SS,” Max said.
She reached for her gun.
“Not here,” Max said. “In a little village a couple hours away.”
“A couple hours?” the princess said.
“He wouldn’t let me stop or take a look at him,” Mutti said. “Not that there’s much of anything I could have done. He needs to be taken to a hospital. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Of course he wouldn’t stop,” the princess muttered. “Stubborn old fool.” She glanced around at the gathered Hoffmanns. “We can’t risk bringing him to the public hospital, but we may be able to get a doctor to come out here. It’s someone we’ve used before who’s sympathetic to the cause. He’ll do what he can and keep his mouth shut.”
The cause, Max thought. So after the demise of the Becker Circle, the princess had fled to Paris and joined the French resistance. Traded aristocratic fashion for homespun clothes and a rifle. He watched in a sort of awe as she turned to one of the men behind her.
“Henri,” she said, and then continued in halting French. Henri nodded and rushed off into the shadows. A moment later, he emerged on a bicycle, zipping past them without a word and vanishing through one of the archways.
The princess watched him go, then turned to give Mutti a quick peck on each cheek. “It’s wonderful to see you again, despite the circumstances.” She smiled at Kat. “You must be General Vogel’s daughter. I was a great admirer of your father. He was a brave man. And he loved champagne almost as much as I do.”
“Kat,” Gerta said, “this is Princess Marie Vasiliev.”
Kat’s eyes widened. “Are you really a princess?”
“Forget all that,” the princess said. “Just ‘Marie’ will do, if you please.”
“She really is a princess,” Gerta whispered to Kat.
Albert’s body twitched. A low moan escaped his lips.
The princess muttered a stream of what Max assumed to be curses, in what Max assumed to be Russian. Then she put her hands on her hips and thought for a moment before turning to the second man standing behind her.
“Louis,” she said, and they commenced an animated conversation in French. Max picked up the word for doctor and not much else, but it was clear by the emphatic way Louis was responding that he was not happy about whatever the princess was proposing. Finally, he threw up his hands in defeat, pulled his peaked cap down low in a gesture of spite, and stalked off into the shadows of the factory.
“Louis will stay with Albert until Henri gets back with the doctor,” she told the Hoffmanns and Kat. “If you follow me, I’ll take you to the safe house.”
Max looked from Albert’s prone body, with its blood-soaked cloth stuck to the flesh of his back, to the princess. “We’re just going to leave him here?”
“With Louis,” the princess said firmly. “There’s nothing else we can do. And this is the perfect time to head into Paris—there are plenty of people out and about.”
Max recalled the demolished train station a few blocks from the factory. And Albert had told them that cars weren’t allowed on the streets of Paris. “How are we going to get there?”
At that moment, Louis reappeared from the shadows carrying a bucket that sloshed water and a clean white cloth. He knelt next to Albert, peeled off the napkin from his back, and set to work cleaning the wound. Gerta and Kat watched in fascination. Max wanted to turn away. Despite everything he had seen since the strange man had staggered into the Dahlem villa to die on the Hoffmanns’ kitchen table—the devastation of the ruined bomb shelter, the swift dispatching of the Gestapo agents at the opera house—the sight of blood could still make him go weak in the knees.
And yet he forced himself to watch as Louis dipped the fresh cloth in the bucket and swiped at the blood on Albert’s back. This could very well be the last he ever saw of the enigmatic man who’d saved his life over and over again. He wondered how many other families like the Hoffmanns Albert had dedicated himself to helping survive the war. The man who Max had at first taken to be Frau Becker’s butler had turned out to be the linchpin of an entire anti-Nazi crusade, from aiding Jewish refugees to taking direct action on behalf of Max and his family. Not to mention removing several Nazis from the earth—permanently.
Besides Colonel Stauffenberg, Albert was the most courageous man that Max knew.
“Max,” Mutti said, “we shouldn’t linger.”
“Coming,” Max said. He reached into his bag and retrieved the wooden knight on horseback. He set it down on the floor next to Albert and nudged Louis. The man paused in his ministrations and furrowed his brow.
“A gift,” Max said, pointing to the knight. “For when he wakes up.”
Louis nodded. Max hoped he understood. Then he turned and joined the rest of his family as they followed the princess into the shadows.
The bicycles were leaning against the wall, just beyond the reach of a long patch of sunlight that came through an upper window. Max counted eight of them. Each bike had a small license plate fixed to the back of its seat.
“This is how Parisians get around under the Nazi occupation,” the princess explained. “In the middle of the day, the streets will be full of bicycle traffic. We can blend right in.”
Mutti put her hand on Max’s shoulder. She didn’t say a word, but Max knew what she was thinking. In the last year before the war, Papa had taught Max to ride a bike—the same old bike his father had given him, Papa said. He’d trotted up and down their street in Dahlem while Max wobbled, fell, and got back up to do it all over again. Papa had patched Max’s skinned knees and elbows for an entire week until finally something clicked. Mutti had been watching from the front porch when Max returned from his maiden voyage unscathed. He kept riding the rickety old thing until Christmas, when he woke to find a brand-new bicycle gleaming in the winter sun that dazzled the villa’s sitting room.
“Now, in the name of all that is holy, change out of those horrid clothes,” the princess said. “You can leave them here, but hold on to your ID cards. Hitler sent over a whole gaggle of German citizens to help colonize Paris, and plenty of them still live here. If we get stopped, you won’t seem that out of the ordinary.” She paused. “Hopefully.”
Max found a private place behind a dusty shelf and shed his Hitler Youth uniform. He found a clean shirt, which he rolled up to the elbows, and a pair of loose-fitting trousers perfect for cycling. Then he rejoined his family and tossed his Nazi disguise in a pile with Gerta’s and Kat’s League of German Girls outfits.
“Good riddance,” Kat said. Max watched as she selected one of the bicycles, hopped onto the seat, and pedaled off across the floor of the factory. She was a little unsteady at first, but quickly righted herself, steered into a sharp turn, and sped straight at Max, squeezing the brakes at the last second and kicking up dirt as she skidded to a halt. “I’ll take this one,” she said.
A moment later they had all chosen their bicycles. Max was surprised at how quickly riding came back to him—how to balance without really thinking about it, how to lightly pinch the brakes to slow down and squeeze them to stop.
