by Alan Gratz
“Really?” I said, suddenly angry. “Did you?” I knew he hadn’t. “Did you, Max?”
“It’s the ultimate honor to die for the Führer,” Max said. More bleeding propaganda. It was all that ever came out of Max’s mouth.
Fritz nodded. “The old man should be proud his son died for Hitler. Not go soft. He’s a defeatist. Germany can’t win with people like him around.”
I huffed. This was stupid. “Melcher is a patriot. Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher, remember? He fought for Germany in the Great War!”
“The old Germany,” Fritz said. He wouldn’t be swayed. “Is he in there?” he asked.
“Yes, Quex,” one of the boys said. Fritz’s new nickname had caught on fast.
“Then let’s go!”
Fritz charged inside. I didn’t even have time to warn Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher. He was sitting at his desk, his head in his hands, when the SRD blitzed in like the Third Army invading Poland.
“Seize him!” Fritz ordered, and half a dozen boys jumped the old man. They pulled at his coat, his shirt, his tie, ripping his clothes and sending him crashing to the ground. Melcher cried out, but that only seemed to energize them more. They were like wild dogs ripping and tearing at a piece of raw meat. They kicked him and punched him and tried to pull him apart by the arms and legs.
“Don’t hurt him!” I cried, but no one was listening to me. I felt the same urge to defend my teacher that I’d felt for Fritz all those weeks ago during the book burning. I tried to fight my way into the wolf pack, but there were too many of them. And it wasn’t even all of them. The rest of the boys overturned desks, threw papers in the air, smashed the windows. The other students stood at the edges of the room and cheered them on. I backed away against the doorjamb, horrified by the abrupt violence. The animal cruelty.
There was nothing I could do. Not by myself. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t call for help. I ran outside to a police box and called in an emergency. It was all I could do. The city police weren’t the Gestapo. They could stop this madness. Arrest the boys for attacking Melcher and destroying the school. But only if they got here in time.
If they didn’t, the SRD boys were going to kill him.
Two police officers arrived by car just as the boys were dragging Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher out of the school. I sagged with relief. I’d saved him!
But when the police saw the attackers were SRD boys, they pulled up short.
“This man is a defeatist!” Fritz announced to the police officers. “We’re taking him to the Gestapo!”
The police backed off and let the boys drag Melcher away down the street. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The police were adults! Didn’t they see what was happening here? Wasn’t somebody going to make the children behave?
Not today. The police were scared. You could see it in the looks they gave each other. Nervous glances that said, If we do or say anything, they’ll come for us next. Idiots! Didn’t anybody realize this was how Nazi Germany had gotten to be this way in the first place?
I was about to say something, stand up to the SRD bullies, tell the police about Melcher’s son, tell them how Fritz and the other boys were wrong. Break this spell of silence. But then I caught myself. If I said something, I might save Melcher’s life. But I would ruin everything else Simon and my parents and I had worked for. All our plans to smuggle Simon out with the blueprints. Even if Fritz didn’t get me kicked out of the SRD, he would never invite me inside his house ever again. I would never get the last page of the jet plans. Germany would win the war. Crush the Allies. Conquer the world. And what would I have done besides save Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher’s life?
Again I saw myself four years ago, on the Night of Broken Glass. But now I saw it through new eyes—the eyes of my parents. Saw the awful trade: one man’s life against the fate of the entire world. My heart ached, as if it were slowly eating me up from inside.
Sometimes we have to sacrifice good people to win a war, Simon had told me. Sometimes you do what you have to do, even if doing it means doing something wrong.
Melcher’s watery, desperate eyes found mine, and in that moment, I knew. I knew that deep down he really hated the Nazis, and that he’d been faking his loyalty to them all this time.
And that he knew I had been too.
Melcher’s eyes begged me to say something. To speak up for him. To save him.
Instead, I said nothing. I locked my heart away in a wee iron coffin and swallowed the key. It burned going down and tears stung my eyes, but still I said nothing.
Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher closed his eyes and wept. But he didn’t give me away. He understood. Because to his own shame, he’d been silent too.
I followed the boys to Gestapo headquarters, where they dumped the broken, blubbering body of Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher on the floor in front of the SS officer on duty.
“This man has forsaken the Führer and is undermining our will to fight,” Fritz told him. How Fritz, the youngest and smallest of them, had become the de facto leader of the group, I didn’t know.
“A concentration camp is too good for him!” Max cried.
“Put a rifle in his hands and send him to the eastern front,” Fritz said. “Maybe then he’ll appreciate what he did to sabotage support for our soldiers while he was safe and warm back in Berlin.”
There were indignant nods of agreement all around.
The SS officer called for men to come and take Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher away. “We’ll take care of him,” the SS man said. My heart banged against the door of the little box where I’d locked it away, but I didn’t let it out. Nobody deserved what was about to happen to Melcher, but I couldn’t stop it. Not if I wanted to get the jet plans. But I died inside a little too.
“You won’t be needing a teacher any longer anyhow,” the SS officer said, and suddenly he had everyone’s attention. “You won’t have time for it. All Luftwaffe ground specialists have been redeployed to active fighting, which means more duties will fall to the Hitler Youth here at home. From now on, you boys will be manning the antiaircraft guns during air raids.”
We had our first training on the giant antiaircraft guns that day, on a training field just outside the city. School was officially out for every boy old enough to fight. Forever.
I should have been happy about that—it had to mean the Nazis were losing, desperate. Or I should have been excited, like the rest of the boys, to get to fire the enormous, house-size gun. But all I could think about was the jet fighter plans in Fritz’s house, and the clock ticking away the hours and minutes until Simon escaped from Berlin. I had to get into Fritz’s house by the end of the day.
I kept trying to catch Fritz, to casually mention getting together this afternoon at his house to read detective novels, but I never had the chance. He had a new group of friends now, and he didn’t have time for me. When they loaded us up to take us back to the city at the end of the day, I couldn’t even get on the same truck as Fritz. There wasn’t any room around him.
I lost Fritz in the Kuddelmuddel of boys climbing out of trucks. Had he gone straight to whatever the “science team” was? Or had that special team really been about Melcher? Was it over? Had Fritz gone home? I huffed, my breath spewing like a dragon as I sprinted the ten blocks to his house.
Lina answered the door, her big eyes staring at me.
“Is—is Fritz home?” I said, panting from the run.
Lina stared at me.
“Lina, is Fritz home?”
Lina shook her head. She started to shut the door, but I was done waiting around for Fritz. I didn’t have time. I stuck my foot in the door.
“Can I come in and wait for him?” I asked Lina. She was probably the only one home.
Lina stared at me for a few more seconds, then opened the door to me. Yes. I almost cried for joy. I was in. A quick glance at the blueprints one last time, and then I never had to come here again.
Lina closed the door behind me, and I waited in the hall.
Lina stood watching me.
“You can go do whatever it was you were doing,” I told her.
She kept staring at me, like she always did.
“Seriously, go. Get,” I told her, as if she was some annoying puppy. At last she turned and went upstairs.
I shook my head as I stepped inside Fritz’s father’s study.
Crazy girl, I thought, and then I suddenly pulled up short, my breath catching in my throat.
All the blueprints were gone from the walls.
No. No no no no no! I was so close to being finished! I just needed a few more minutes with the last page of the blueprints. I spun in the office, hoping Fritz’s father had just taken them down and they were still stacked up somewhere. But the place was as much of a Kuddelmuddel as Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher’s desk. I didn’t see them anywhere. My heart burst out of that wee iron coffin and thumped against my chest as I clawed through the piles of papers around the room.
Up until now, I’d been a Glückspilz, a weird German expression that meant “lucky mushroom.” (Which I guess is no weirder than saying I was a lucky duck. But it still sounded funny.) I’d met the one kid in all of Berlin who could give me access to top secret Nazi jet fighter plans, and he and I had become friends, helping each other pass our Hitler Youth tests and reading forbidden detective novels together while day by day I snuck secret looks at the blueprints for Projekt 1065. But suddenly I’d gone from being a Glückspilz to a Pechvogel—a “bad luck bird.”
I kept digging through the stacks of papers in Fritz’s father’s office, worried that any moment I was going to hear the front door open and Fritz or his father or his mother would catch me.
Stop, I told myself. Calm down. What would Simon do? I suddenly remembered Kim’s Game. Fritz’s father’s office was one giant Kim’s Game, one I’d been looking at for weeks now. The key wasn’t to dig through all the stacks of paper I’d seen there before. I needed to see what was different now. What was new. I turned around slowly, scanning every inch of the room. And that’s when I saw it. A thick accordion folder tied up with string by the door, addressed to be mailed. I snatched it up and took it to Fritz’s father’s desk. I held my breath as I untied the string. Opened it. Lifted the flap. Saw folded blue papers peeking back at me from inside.
Yes! I almost jumped and yelled for joy. From lucky mushroom to bad luck bird and back again! I was tempted to run away with the packet, take the whole thing to Simon and send him on his way with it. But that was greedy, and foolish. I had already transcribed almost all the plans. Stealing the whole packet now was pointless, and would just let Fritz’s father know that their plans had been compromised. I had to memorize the last page and put everything back exactly how I’d found it.
I flipped through the blueprints, found the one I needed, and unfolded it on the desk. I was about to start memorizing the math on it when I got that weird feeling you get when you know someone’s watching you.
I looked up and saw Lina in the doorway, staring right at me.
My heart caught in my throat. I was busted. Glückspilz to Pechvogel to Glückspilz to Pechvogel.
There was no telling how long Lina had been standing there staring at me. But long enough, I was sure, to have seen me open up one of her father’s personal packages and pull out a blueprint. Should I grab the last page and run? Try to bluff my way out of it, leave, and hope she never told her parents or brother?
But if Fritz’s father was about to mail the plans away, this was my last chance to see them—and maybe the last chance the Allies had to intercept them before they were used to build a working jet fighter that would change the world forever. I didn’t know what to do. I was as paralyzed as if I was standing on top of that ladder over the pool again.
“You and I can get married,” Lina said.
My mouth hung open. On the list of things I thought Lina might say to me in that moment, “You and I can get married” was right below “I’m an alien from outer space.” I was thirteen years old. She was ten years old. Why in the world would either of us be thinking about getting married?
“Um … okay,” I said.
“At first I thought you might not be Aryan, and then we couldn’t get married,” Lina said. It was more words than she had spoken to me in the entire month I’d known her. “But I asked at the BDM meeting. English is Aryan too. Not as good as Nordic, but okay.”
“I’m Irish,” I told her.
She nodded as though there wasn’t any difference. “After I graduate from the BDM and you graduate from the Hitler Youth, we can get married and have lots of babies for Hitler.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I told her. I wasn’t having lots of babies with anybody or for anybody, especially not Hitler. This girl had our whole future planned out, and we’d barely had a single conversation! I was about to argue with her, but I realized it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was getting out of here with the plans.
“Listen, it sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” I told her. “But like you said, we can’t do anything until we graduate from the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and then I’ll be in the army, and you’ll be in the Nazi Women’s League or working in a factory somewhere—”
“We can get married in between,” Lina said. “Then I can send cigarettes and treats to you at the front lines and you can write me letters back telling me how much you miss me.”
I gawked at her. She really had thought this all out.
“Right. Okay. Good plan,” I said. I had to get this over with. “So we’ll just … we’ll just wait until we graduate, and then we’ll get married and start having lots of babies for Hitler.”
“Okay,” she said, and she turned and left the room.
I slumped down onto the desk, my face turning red with embarrassment. Lina had been weird all this time because she had a crush on me.
This was the last thing I needed to deal with right now.
But maybe it was just what I needed. As long as Lina thought we were getting married, she wouldn’t be telling on me to her family.
I memorized the last page, put the plans back where I’d found them, and hurried out of the house. I wanted to get out of there before Lina came back to tell me where we were going on our honeymoon.
I didn’t tell Simon about my conversation with Lina. We wouldn’t have gotten any work done, he’d be laughing so hard. Instead, we spent what time he had left drawing up the last page of the jet fighter plans from my memory.
And then we were done. There was no more reason for Simon to stay.
“This is a swell piece of work, Michael,” Simon told me, apparently not feeling any of the ache I was feeling at his imminent departure. He bundled up the pages we had worked on together and tied a leather string around them. “It’s an incredible coup. I came to take pictures, and I’ll be going back with full-blown schematics. They’ll be waiting to pin a medal on you when you get back to England.”
Sad as I was, I liked the thought of that. Michael O’Shaunessey, decorated Irish spy!
My mother and father joined us.
“I’ve set the staff to cleaning the silverware,” Ma whispered, locking the door to Da’s study behind her. “That should keep them busy for a time.”
“They have to be suspicious of all our locked-door family meetings,” Da said.
“It’ll all be over tonight,” Ma said. “It’s all arranged,” she told Simon. She spread a map out on Da’s desk. “When the nightly air raid comes—and it will, as sure as eggs is eggs—you’ll wait until three forty-five in the morning and then make your way to this alleyway, here, where Michael will meet you.”
“I will?” I asked. It was the first I’d heard of it.
Ma nodded. “Your da and I can’t leave the air raid shelter, or there’d be questions. You know every inch of this city, Michael, and Simon doesn’t. Not only that, your SRD uniform will make most people look the othe
r way. Since you’ll already be out and about on your patrols, it shouldn’t be any problem for you to lead him through the city to his next contact.”
“But I won’t be on patrol tonight,” I told them. “The SRD will be manning the antiaircraft guns.”
It was as if I’d dropped a bomb all my own in my father’s study. Ma’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Da’s face went ashy white.
“Good lord, Michael,” Simon whispered. “You can’t be serious. That’s a death sentence, and you’re—you’re thirteen-year-old boys.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. None of us did.
“Do you think you can still get away?” Ma finally asked. “It wouldn’t be for all night. Just long enough to get Simon to Friedrichstrasse.”
“I—I think so. Sure. Yes,” I said. It made sense that Simon’s escape would take place during an air raid. Almost everybody else would be hiding underground, or have other things to worry about.
“I’m sorry, but are we just going to gloss over the fact that Michael is now a target for Allied bombers?” Da asked, looking upset.
“We can’t worry about that right now,” Ma said.
“Can’t worry about that right now?” Da said. “Our son might as well be on the front lines, fighting for Hitler. It’s become too dangerous here, for him and for us. Someone else without a family can take my place as ambassador.”
I started to protest that I could handle it, but Da cut me off with a stern shake of his head.
“No. It’s time for us to go back to Dublin.”
“We have to get Simon out of Berlin first,” Ma said, ending the argument for the moment. She pointed to the map. “Michael, you’ll take him here, to this corner on Friedrichstrasse. That’s where you’ll hand Simon off to one of my agents. You’re to tell the agent, ‘This air raid sounds like the finale to a Wagner opera,’ to which he will respond, ‘I prefer Beethoven’s symphonies, myself.’ That’s how you will know he’s our man. If he doesn’t give you the correct pass phrase, move on.”
