Elise obeyed but secretly stayed awake, waiting until she heard her mother’s breathing change. Then she rose silently, grabbed the bottle of Fanta and the bottle opener, and eased her way out of the compartment. She walked the train’s corridors hurriedly, holding on to the wall with one hand to keep her balance. It was late. Most of the other passengers were sleeping; the conductors paid her no mind.
Just as she was about to exit the last car before the luggage car, someone stepped in front of her. A man, dressed in a conductor’s uniform. A young man, a boy really. Scarcely old enough to shave. He was looking down at his feet, counting and practicing dance steps. She recognized the steps he’d been doing—the most basic move in swing dance. Rock-step, step-hold, step-hold. Rock-step, step-hold, step-hold. In his arms, he held an imaginary girl.
He looked up, his face blushing furiously at being caught. “What are you doing back here?”
“You dance well,” Elise said. “I—I’m one of the musicians. And I left something in my case.”
He turned even pinker. “You still can’t go in there. It is forbidden. Most of the musicians have their instruments with them,” he added. It was true; those with smaller instruments always carried them by hand. The Berlin Opera even bought each of their cellists an extra ticket for a seat for his instrument.
“But, you see,” Elise said, trying her best to bat her eyelashes, “I play the harp. It’s too big to travel with me. And that’s why it’s back there.”
“And why are you carrying a soda?”
Elise wasn’t prepared for this one. She blinked. “Performing tonight’s made me very thirsty.”
The boy didn’t look convinced. “Show me your papers.”
Elise smiled. “I’ll show you how to do that step properly,” she said, putting down the bottle. She grabbed one of his hands and put it around her waist, then took her arm and encircled his back. “Five six seven eight …” she counted.
They began to dance. The boy was awkward. “Now, it’s not as hard as you’re making it out to be,” Elise said. “When you do your rock step, don’t twist out as much. There—there you go—good.”
They moved together in harmony for a few moments. “All right, now don’t drop your shoulders. That’s it—yes!” They danced together, beautifully now, to imaginary music. Finally, the boy twirled her and tried for a dip. She slipped slightly in his arms and they lost the beat.
“That’s a whole other lesson,” Elise said, laughing. “I’m assuming I can go in now?”
The boy gave her a rapturous grin. “Don’t be too long,” he said, voice cracking on the last syllable.
“Keep practicing,” Elise said, picking up her soda. “You’ll be doing lifts and backflips in no time.”
She eased open the door to the baggage car. Inside was shadowy, the gloom punctured by only a single blue fluorescent light overhead. Elise picked her way through the piled luggage until she reached her father’s trunk. She rapped on it with her knuckles, then opened the brass clasps and raised the lid.
“Oh, thank goodness it’s you,” Maggie whispered, sitting up and looking around. She rolled her neck to undo the kinks. “How are John and Ernst?”
“I’m about to get them now,” Elise replied. “Are you all right?”
Maggie stretched her arms and then rose tentatively to her feet, grimacing. “I’ll live. Let’s get the boys.”
Together they searched for the harp and the timpani cases. After a battle with the clasps, both John and Ernst were released. Like Maggie, they stretched and shook out their limbs.
“How are you?” Elise asked.
“I admit I could use some water,” John said. He looked ghostly in the shadows.
“It’s not water.” Elise pulled out the bottle of Fanta and the opener. “But it’s all I could carry here without being conspicuous.”
She opened it and handed it to Maggie, who handed it to John. “You’re the one who’s injured,” she reminded him.
“But you’re the one who’s been on the run,” he said lightly, handing it back to her.
Ernst grumbled, “Oh, why don’t you just kiss each other and get it over with,” and, grabbing the bottle, put it up to his lips and took a greedy swig.
John and Maggie drank in turn. They sat on trunks and looked at each other, smiling foolishly. They were on their way home, after all.
“How much longer?” John asked.
Elise peered at her watch. “About six more hours,” she answered. “You’re going to have to go back in the cases now, I’m afraid. But the next time I see you, we’ll all be free.” She grinned. “It’s rather like a movie, isn’t it?”
“They always edit the boring bits, the embarrassing bits, out, don’t they?” Maggie said, climbing back into her trunk.
Ernst stepped into his case. “Still, I’d rather be here, in a timpani case, en route to Zürich, than on a train bound for Buchenwald.”
That brought them all up short.
“Well, when this is a movie, and Hedy Lamarr is playing Maggie and Gene Tierney is playing me, we can make sure they only show glamorous things,” Elise said lightly. “But for now, let’s just concentrate on getting to Switzerland.”
Clara, only pretending to be asleep, knew exactly when Elise left the compartment.
She trailed her daughter, staying just far enough behind to remain out of sight. She watched Elise dance with the guard, horrified at the verboten swing dance moves. And she waited, in the shadows, until Elise left the luggage compartment and made her way back down the corridor. She realized what her daughter must have done—hidden the three in instrument cases. Lord knows as a child, Elise had delighted in hiding in them herself!
Clara had no time to dance with the guard. “Here,” she said, looking past his wide blue eyes, and crumpling a wad of Reichmarks into his hand. “Stay out.” He watched her in mute bewilderment as she let herself inside.
Instrument cases, everywhere.
She started at the left, opening cases, then flipping the lids shut in frustration.
From inside her case, Maggie could hear the commotion. Someone was looking through the cases. And it wasn’t Elise. It was just a matter of time until whoever it was reached her case. She had a sudden flashback to her training at Arisaig. Keep it together, lass! she remembered a Scottish instructor yelling. No matter what they throw at you, keep it together! Don’t you dare fall apart!
Staying still and waiting seemed like too passive a move. Whoever was there would inevitably find her. Her only advantage was surprise. She waited until she heard the person get close. Then she banged the lid open with all her might. The searcher staggered backward and fell heavily against a pyramid of Rimowa luggage.
“Frau Hess?” Maggie whispered. “Clara?” Then, seeing Clara’s expression, “Mother?”
“Margaret Hope.” One corner of Clara’s mouth turned up in a smile. “You must have many questions. But, first, know this—I never meant to hurt you.”
“I do have a question,” Maggie said, desperately trying to still her racing mind. She must not be allowed to find John and Ernst. Think, Maggie, think! Keep her talking. “Why me? Why did you have a child?”
Clara shook her head. “Sektion demanded it of me. They thought it would cement my relationship with your father, in a way not even marriage could.”
“My very existence is due to Sektion?”
“It was part of my mission, yes.” Clara put one hand to her temple.”
“But you left England.”
“If I stayed, you’d always have been in danger. And I knew your father would take good care of you.”
Maggie gave a bitter laugh. “Well, that’s debatable. And the accident—how did you convince everyone you’d died?”
Clara chortled. “I bribed a morgue attendant. He falsified the paperwork, substituted another young blonde, a prostitute, with no family or friends. From there I left London, went to Grimsby, where—”
“Where a U-boat picked you up.�
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“Why, yes,” Clara said.
“You planned the same route for Princess Elizabeth,” Maggie realized.
“How did you know that?”
“Because I was there with her.”
Clara raised one eyebrow, then opened her purse. There, glinting in the blue light, was the mother-of-pearl-handled gun. “I’m through with that life now. With those people.” She picked the gun up.
“You’re going to shoot me?” Maggie asked.
Clara studied her, then shook her head.
“Take me with you,” she said, handing the gun over to Maggie. “To London. I can be extremely useful.”
Mind spinning, Maggie accepted the gun. “You want to go to London?” she asked, incredulously. “They’ll hang you there.”
“No,” Clara said firmly. “I possess too much information that they want. I’ll be invaluable.”
There was a soft sound. It was the young guard. His gun drawn, he entered the car. “Was—?” He stared at the two women.
“Mein Gott,” he whispered, clicking the safety off his Walther pistol.
“Put your gun down,” Maggie said evenly.
“Nein,” the boy said, eyes blank with fear. He began to back out of the compartment. Maggie knew exactly what he intended to do—close the door and bolt it, then call for help. They would all be captured just hours before they reached the border.
“Stop!” she cried. “Please, stop.” She took a step forward. “I don’t want to have to shoot you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He aimed the gun at Maggie’s heart and fired. A stain, like a dark red rose, bloomed through the silk of her dress. And in that instant, she focused, aimed, and squeezed the trigger three times. As she’d been trained to do, she shot the boy once through the forehead, then twice through the heart.
He staggered from the impact of the shots. Life left his eyes. Then he fell to the floor.
Maggie’s once-white dress was now stained red—with her blood, and with his, which had sprayed her. There was so much blood. Who knew humans contained so much blood?
Elise, aware her mother was no longer in their compartment, opened the door. She stood frozen in shock.
“Brava, darling. Perhaps you are your mother’s daughter, after all,” Clara said to Maggie. “Ah, Elise, how good of you to join us.”
“You killed him,” Elise accused Maggie shrilly. “You killed him.” Then, to Clara, “And what are you doing here?”
“You didn’t know? Your friend Frieda betrayed you. She let me know of your little nest of rats in the attic.”
Maggie fell to her knees, gasping from pain. Her dress was soaked with blood. It was puddling under her, sticky and red.
Maggie had killed him. She’d killed a man. A boy, really. It was what she’d been trained to do, what Thorny had told her to do. “Kill the Kraut!” he’d thundered at Beaulieu. But she hadn’t ever pictured “the Kraut” looking so young, so small, so vulnerable. “Elise,” she said to the horrified girl, her voice weak now, “I’m …”
Still in shock, Elise released Ernst and then John from their cases. Swiftly appraising the situation, Ernst scrambled to Maggie and tugged off his jacket. “You can’t die on me,” he said firmly, pressing it against her wound. “I’m a doctor. We’ve come too far.”
John knelt, taking Maggie’s hand in his.
“What are you doing here?” Elise repeated to Clara.
“Going to London with your half sister, Mausi. It’s time for Mutti’s third act.”
Maggie looked up at Elise, whose mouth had fallen open in an expression of horror, as if she’d seen a monster. Their eyes met, then Maggie crumpled to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-one
Maggie opened her eyes. She saw nothing but blinding white. For a blissful moment, she didn’t know where she was, or even who she was. Then the memories flooded through her.
She looked around and saw white sheets, a white enamel bed frame, white walls, white curtains, and, in a sky of dazzling blue outside the window, puffy white clouds. It was quiet. The air smelled of freshly laundered sheets. Through a haze of morphine, she saw an older woman, plump, with a kind face, dressed all in white, come toward her. “Mademoiselle Hope?” the nurse asked gently.
Maggie nodded. The slight movement set off a chain reaction of pain, which seemed centered in her abdomen.
The woman stood by her bed, her gray hair and eyes framed by a white, winged nurse’s cap. “Mademoiselle Hope,” she said in French, “you are in Universitätsspital Zürich—the University Hospital of Zürich. You sustained a gunshot wound to your right ribs. You will need to rest, but the doctors anticipate a full recovery.”
“What about the others?” Maggie asked weakly.
“They survived. Monsieur Sterling and Dr. Klein have returned to London. And Mademoiselle Hess has returned to Berlin.”
Elise! Maggie thought. A picture flashed of Elise’s face—her horror and disgust—when she’d seen Maggie shoot the boy. And then when she learned they were sisters—
Maggie turned her face away. “And Madame Hess?”
The nurse shook her head. “A gentleman is here from Britain—he will tell you the rest.”
“How—how long have I been here?”
“You were brought in yesterday.”
The events on the train came coursing back, horrific images she could not obliterate. What have I become? Maggie wondered. She looked down at her hands, remembering. They were clean now, but she could still feel the blood, sticky and hot. Then she grabbed the enamel basin on the bedside table and vomited. There was nothing in her stomach, so she brought up bile, black and bitter.
The nurse held her shoulders as Maggie vomited, then brought her cool water to drink, wiped her face with a cloth, and laid her back against the pillow. “The bullet is still in you,” the nurse warned. Maggie touched her wound, probed it gently with her fingers. Yes, there, embedded in flesh, she could feel the hard outline of the bullet. “The doctor will remove it later today,” the nurse continued. “It’s a minor procedure.”
“No.”
The nurse looked surprised. “No?”
Maggie’s face hardened. “I said no—leave it in.”
A shadow appeared at the door. It was Sir Frank Nelson, Director of the SOE. “Leave us, please,” he said to the nurse as he removed his knife-creased hat. “May I get you anything, Miss Hope? Water? Tea from the hospital cafeteria?”
Maggie’s lips twisted as she remembered his asking her to make him tea back in London, which now felt like an eternity ago. My, how the worm has turned, she thought. But instead of feeling joy, she felt nothing but numb.
Nelson closed the door. They were alone in the room. “Father Licht was able to get the film developed and the resulting information to Bishop von Preysing and Bishop von Galen.”
“And what did the Bishops do with it?”
“They’re going to speak out at High Mass today. By tonight, German resistance groups will have flyers of the homilies distributed all through Germany, and dropped on German troops. Hitler and his cronies will be exposed for the child murderers that they are.”
“What about Gottlieb Lehrer?” Somehow, her own safety meant so little, knowing how much peril those two valiant men were in.
“Lehrer, I’m sorry to say, was killed by the SS. Or, rather, he committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner and have secrets tortured out of him. Father Licht is still safe, as far as we know.”
Gottlieb? Dead? “But he’s a Catholic. He would never commit suicide. He’d consider it a mortal sin.”
“He saved the resistance group.”
“But according to Catholic doctrine, he’ll go to hell.”
Nelson shrugged. “Maybe his version of hell wasn’t as bad as what he was experiencing in Berlin. At any rate, surely God would take his motives for the greater good into consideration?”
Maggie said nothing. Gottlieb was dead. The German boy was dead. The little girl and her mo
ther on the train were probably dead. Elise … She felt numb inside. Nelson reached for the enamel pitcher and poured her a cup of water. She waved it away.
“Miss Hope,” Nelson said. “You were right to obtain that information and get it to Lehrer and his group. It wouldn’t have done much good to us in Britain, and in fact might have backfired if we’d tried to use it—dismissed as mere propaganda. But directing the information into the hands of the German resistance movement, and letting a German Bishop expose what the Reich was doing … that’s a coup. Against the rules, of course. But still, a coup. Brava.”
“I don’t give a flying fig about any coup.” Maggie was fighting back tears. “What about the murders? Operation Compassionate Death? Has it been shut down?”
“Not yet,” Nelson answered. “But it’s only a matter of time now. The program will be officially shut down within days. But unofficially …” He shrugged again. “Hitler and his goons are capable of anything, as you now well know.” He graced her with a sad smile.
Maggie stared up at the ceiling, eyes unseeing. The “units”—the children. Gottlieb, Elise. John, alive. The escape. Clara …
“How is”—Maggie didn’t know what to call her—“Frau Hess?”
Nelson pulled up a metal chair, its legs scraping against the spotless linoleum. “Frau Hess is fine,” he answered. “And she’s an important Nazi official with any number of ties in Berlin. She could have returned to Germany. Instead, she deliberately surrendered herself to us.”
“She did what?” Maggie wasn’t sure if something had happened to her ears or if she’d been administered too much morphine.
“We were surprised as well. After all, she was on Churchill’s most-wanted list. But after her plot with the London water supply failed—”
“Plot with the water supply?”
Nelson smiled. “Classified information, I’m afraid, Miss Hope. But I assure you that Clara Hess is in British custody. She’s been transferred to the Tower of London, where she will be interrogated.”
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