Break Point

by Yolanda Wallace

  Meike felt hot tears course down her cheeks as her resolve began to waver. She had never felt so helpless or exposed.

  “Your few fans in the Reich call you the Ice Princess because you remain so cool under pressure,” Oskar said, “but, in the end, I always knew I would melt that ice or shatter it into a million pieces. You are mine now to deal with as I please. I don’t intend to stop until you beg me for mercy. Perhaps not even then.”

  Oskar’s eyes were feral and totally devoid of human compassion.

  “I wonder what Liesel sees in you.”

  Oskar turned purple with rage. He released his grip on Meike’s hair and backhanded her across the face. She staggered from the blow and nearly went down. “Liesel Becker is too good for someone like you. I never want to hear her name cross your lips again. Do you understand?” Spittle flew from Oskar’s lips like Hitler in the middle of a particularly passionate speech. “I said, ‘Do you understand?’”

  Oskar drove his fist into Meike’s belly. She bent over double, gagging from the pain. “Yes,” she gasped as the room began to spin, “I understand.”

  “Good. We shall talk more after the attendants wash the stink of aristocracy off you.”

  Meike’s legs felt leaden as she allowed herself to be herded into a windowless shower. Several long minutes crawled by after the door slammed shut. She trembled in fear as a foul-smelling liquid streamed from the series of shower heads placed above and beside her. Her skin and eyes burned from the assault. Blinded and disoriented, she heard a panel slide open. She blinked until her vision cleared enough to see part of Oskar’s face fill a tiny gap in the door.

  “The chemicals are to treat prisoners for lice, ticks, fleas, or any other unwanted creatures they might have picked up before their arrival.”

  Without warning, ice cold water shot through the jets. The high-powered spray felt like knife points as it pricked Meike’s skin. She turned this way and that but could find no escape. Her teeth continued to chatter long after the latest affront ended.

  Oskar unlocked the door and tossed her a striped uniform identical to the one she had seen the prisoners wearing when she was driven through the gates. “Get dressed and follow me. I will take you to your new home. The accommodations might not be as lavish as you are accustomed to, but I am sure you shall learn to make do in time.”

  Meike put on the baggy uniform and oversized shoes and followed Oskar to a military-style barracks. The women residing in it were alive but barely. Most of their bodies were so thin she could see the outline of their skeletons beneath their waxy, grime-covered skin.

  “That one is yours.” Oskar pointed to an empty bunk topped by a straw-filled mattress and thin wool blanket, but no pillow. Then he addressed the room. “Ladies, and I use the term loosely, please welcome our newest worker, Meike von Bismarck, a proud new addition to your detail. Please be sure to make her stay enjoyable, won’t you?”

  All eyes turned to Meike after Oskar left the room. She felt trapped when she heard the lock slide into place. She struggled to remember what each symbol meant as some of the women began to circle her.

  A woman branded as a professional criminal approached her first. “Are you the Meike von Bismarck?” Meike nodded and the woman’s eyes widened in response. “But you’re famous.”

  A woman who had been arrested for prostitution spat on the ground. “Fame? What is fame? Money and fame might mean something on the outside. In here, they don’t count for much. In here, no one is better than anyone else. And no worse, for that matter.”

  “What did they arrest you for?” the first woman asked.

  Meike shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. I wasn’t charged or subjected to a trial.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Eszter,” the second woman said. “You see the pink triangle on her uniform, don’t you? Why else would she be here?” She turned to Meike and gave her a brief once-over. “Is it true? Are you a lesbian?”

  Meike nodded again. She expected the woman to lash out at her in some way. She was looked down on in some circles for preferring the company of women. If this was one of them, she could be targeted by the prisoners as well as the guards. To her surprise, the prostitute’s eyes were hard but not judgmental as they examined her face.

  “Women aren’t as willing as men to pay for what they want, but I have been with a few in my time. Some of them were as rich as you, but none were as pretty.”

  Meike felt a moment of kinship when the woman gave her a conspiratorial wink. Friends, she guessed, were hard to come by here, where most relationships were temporary rather than long-term, but she couldn’t imagine a more valuable commodity.

  “My name is Anna. I moved to Germany from Austria six years ago looking for a better life. If I had known I would end up here, I would have stayed in Vienna.” Anna poked a grubby finger at her bony chest. “Stick with me. I will show you the ropes. I will let you know which guards are open to accepting bribes and which ones should be avoided at all costs. Sophie, the girl who had this bunk before you, didn’t listen when I tried to tell her these things. She thought she could smile pretty and flash her legs to get what she wanted, but some of the guards aren’t interested in sex. They don’t want to fuck. All they want is to inflict pain and make people suffer.”

  Meike shuddered at the thought of having to spend the rest of her life in a place where cruelty was more common than kindness.

  “Do you have someone waiting for you on the outside?” Anna asked.

  “I thought I did.” Meike thought of Helen and all the false promises she had made—all the lies she had told—while she was pretending to have feelings for her in order to spy on her. “But there’s just my family.”

  “What I wouldn’t give to be able to say the same,” Anna said wistfully. She shook her head as if trying to ward off a bad memory. “We will have plenty of time to talk in the days to come. It is late and morning comes early around here. Try to get some sleep.”

  Meike reluctantly crawled into her lice-infested bunk. The blessed darkness of sleep overtook her almost as soon as she closed her eyes. She was roused several hours later by a pair of rough hands shaking her by her shoulders.

  “Rise and shine,” Anna said. “You don’t want to be late for roll call. If you are, no one gets breakfast. Granted, the shit they call food isn’t much, but it is better than nothing. When was the last time you tried working on an empty stomach?” She laughed, flashing blackened teeth sticking haphazardly out of receding gums. “I forgot who I was talking to for a moment. You’ve probably never worked a day in your life, have you?”

  Meike didn’t try to deny the obvious.

  “Well, you’re about to make up for it now.”

  “What work is done here?” Meike followed Anna to a hard-packed patch of earth where the rest of the women from their barracks had already gathered.

  “We make weapons of war for a government that would rather see us dead,” Anna said as they joined the orderly line. “Women’s fingers, we are told, are the perfect size for making munitions. I used to try to sabotage as much ammo as I could. When the guards started testing the product before they shipped it out, they punished me for it.” When Anna held up her work-roughened hands, Meike noticed the tip of the third finger on her left hand was missing. “Good thing I’m not planning on getting married any time soon.”

  Anna let out an earthy laugh so infectious Meike couldn’t help but join her.

  “Quiet,” Oskar yelled from his perch on the steps of the administration building. “No talking in the line.”

  “Remember the guards I said you should avoid?” Anna asked in a whisper. “Put that one at the top of your list. He isn’t assigned here. He only comes to escort special prisoners like you. But each time he pays us a visit, someone ends up dead. Don’t cross him or you could be his next victim.”

  Meike rubbed the painful bruise on her belly. “I feel like I already am.”

  The female guar
d who had escorted her to the shower the day before began reading names from a clipboard in her hands. Each prisoner yelled, “Present,” when she heard her name called. Meike remembered performing the same chore each morning in school, but without the armed guards.

  After roll call was complete, each woman was handed a chunk of moldy bread and a bowl filled with a ladle of thin gruel crawling with maggots. The other women eagerly dipped the bread into the gruel and began shoveling the foul concoction into their mouths, but Meike balked.

  “Eat,” Anna urged her, “or you won’t have the energy to last a day. Each of us has a quota to fulfill. You won’t be any different.”

  “What happens if I don’t meet the quota?”

  Anna wiggled her shortened finger. “This is just the beginning.”

  Meike dipped her bread into the bowl and scooped some of the gruel into her mouth. She gagged when she felt a maggot squirming against the back of her throat, but she forced herself to swallow.

  Oskar smiled as he watched her continued degradation. His leather boots gleamed in the sun as he walked toward her and Anna. “How the mighty have fallen.” His voice dripped scorn as he walked a slow circle around them. “You have made a new friend, I see. Friends are good to have. You will need plenty of them if you hope to survive your incarceration.”

  Meike grew dizzy as she tried to track his progress without turning her head.

  “Friedrich Stern, the Jew who prefers to dress in women’s clothes. He was your friend, too, wasn’t he?” Oskar asked rhetorically. “You used the considerable resources at your command to help him escape without leaving the required ninety percent of his assets behind.”

  Meike felt herself begin to tremble. The harder she tried to stop, the worse the tremors became.

  “You have proven you are willing to do anything for your friends. And now you have made friends with this whore. What am I to do? The answer is obvious,” he said without waiting for her to respond. “I must save you from further temptation.”

  Meike’s stomach churned as she heard him pull his gun from its holster and cock the hammer. Her shaky resolve broke as he pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of her head. Her bowels released and tears ran down her cheeks. “Please, don’t shoot,” she begged. “I don’t want to die.”

  “As you wish.” Oskar moved the gun from her head to Anna’s and pulled the trigger. Meike screamed as bone, blood, and gobbets of something gray splashed the side of her face. Anna’s lifeless body slumped to the ground, her open eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. Oskar holstered the smoking gun. “Unless you want to join your newfound friend, I suggest you follow me.”

  As two prisoners carried Anna’s body to a large, open-air pit, tossed it inside, and covered it with lye, Meike trailed Oskar past a series of offices occupied by various SS officials. He entered a room marked as the office of the Gestapo trial commissioner and took a seat behind the desk. No other chairs were available so Meike remained standing.

  “It is common knowledge you assisted Friedrich Stern in defecting to Switzerland. Though I cannot prove it, I suspect you have helped smuggle money to him as well.” Oskar folded his hands on the desk and regarded her in silence for a few minutes before he resumed speaking. “Effective today, you are no longer allowed to travel to Switzerland for business or pleasure. In addition, you are barred from competing in any tennis tournament outside Europe, which means you will not be allowed to travel to New York to participate in the United States Championships. Unfortunate, considering you had put yourself in position to win the Grand Slam this year, but you brought this upon yourself.”

  Meike was too stunned to protest. Stunned by Anna’s senseless death, Oskar’s pronouncement, and the ramifications of both. Even though she wouldn’t be able to fulfill a lifelong dream, she would be allowed to leave this place. She would be allowed to live.

  “After you compete in the French Championships, you will remain in Paris to participate in the Confederation Cup. You and Liesel will each play singles and you will combine to play doubles. An alternate to be named later will be available in case of injury. The Americans have a formidable team. The Australians, too. But if you commit yourself to the task and give your best effort, you should be able to accumulate the two points required to win each tie.”

  Meike hadn’t planned to play the Confederation Cup and still had no interest in competing. She didn’t even know the complete list of teams in the field. But she didn’t need to see which countries were sending teams to Paris and which weren’t to know the Americans were the favorites.

  Even if Helen’s troublesome shoulder prevented her from taking the court, the pool of talented players the American coaches could choose from ran deep. Any team that included a combination of Alice Marble, Helen Hull Jacobs, Margaret Osborne, or Dorothy Cheney would be difficult to beat. Meike felt confident she could win her singles matches, but given Liesel’s inconsistent singles results, she didn’t know if she could count on receiving enough support from her to earn the two points it would take to advance each day.

  “If you do not abide by the terms I have laid out for you, it is my duty to inform you that you will be stripped of your amateur status and banned from future competition. The Führer is counting on a German victory in the Confederation Cup so we can demonstrate Aryan superiority for all the world to see. If you fail to deliver, you will be brought back here and your stay will not be as brief as it has proven to be during this visit.” He slid a piece of paper toward her. “Please sign here to acknowledge your acceptance of these terms. Do you have any questions?”

  “Just one.” The last document Oskar had placed in front of her would have meant signing her life away. The document he was presenting now offered what might be her last chance to save it. “May I borrow a pen?”

  *

  May 1938

  Paris, France

  Helen woke with a sour stomach and an attitude to match. It was nearly noon on the first day of the French Championships. The prestigious tournament was underway, but she was a spectator instead of a competitor. Not that she planned on attending any of the matches. Thanks to her vantage point in her friend Martine’s apartment overlooking Roland Garros Stadium, she could sit in the living room window and see the action taking place on center court without having to subject herself to the prying eyes of the public. She wasn’t ready to answer their questions—or to face her own.

  She hadn’t missed a major in years, but the tournament was going on without her this year. And according to the doctor she had seen when she arrived in Paris, it might not be the last. The doc said she might have played her last match, but she refused to think that way. She would play again. Perhaps not as well as before, but she would do whatever it took to rebuild her career. If Alice could come back from the brink of death, she could overcome this minor setback. Coming back from what she put Meike through? That would be much harder to achieve.

  As Meike put her first round opponent out of her misery, Helen poured herself a cup of coffee and tried to tame the hangover she’d had every day since Meike discovered she had been acting as a spy. And a bad one at that.

  She looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, but Martine and her lover Angelique, who spent the duration of the French Championships in Marseille each year to avoid the influx of tennis fans in Paris, hadn’t left much behind. Just a carton of eggs, a package of cured ham, and something that might have been a bell pepper before time and Mother Nature turned it into something unrecognizable.

  Helen scrambled some eggs and did her best to keep them down. She gave up after two bites. Opting for a little hair of the dog, she poured three fingers of bourbon into her coffee and waited for the pounding in her head to stop. A condition that was made exponentially worse by the sound of someone knocking on the door.

  “How long do you intend to keep this up?” Swifty asked after she opened the apartment door to find him standing in the hall with a box of groceries in his arms.

  “Unti
l I have a reason not to.”

  “Then let me be the bearer of good news.” He bulled his way inside and set the box of groceries on the kitchen counter. “I managed to convince the powers-that-be at the tennis association that you’re healthy enough to play the Confederation Cup.”

  “Did they name me to the team?”

  “Yes, but don’t get too excited. They’re not fully convinced your shoulder’s up to snuff so they named you as an alternate.”

  “Which means I get to play dress-up and march into the stadium with the team in the opening ceremony, but I won’t get to play unless someone gets hurt. The tournament’s the first of its kind for amateur female tennis players, and the one I want to win more than any other. It would kill me not to be able to participate, Swifty.”

  He held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I did what I could. The rest is up to you. You can start by drinking less of that and more of this.” He took the cup of bourbon-spiked coffee from her and replaced it with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  “Slip some vodka or champagne into this, will you? That’s the only way to make this stuff drinkable.”

  Swifty turned his back on her and began to put the groceries away. “Trust me. More booze is the last thing you need.”

  “Trust you?” Helen laughed dolefully. “Trust is in short supply these days.” She watched him putter in the kitchen. “Does Lanier know how badly I screwed things up?”

  “And how. The words ‘international incident’ came up a time or two during the course of our conversation. He’s anxious to see you, but I told him I didn’t know where you were.”

  She hadn’t spoken to anyone since she’d left Rheinsteifel, but Swifty had known where to find her because she always used Martine and Angelique’s apartment as her base of operations during the French Championships. Even though she wasn’t playing the tournament this year, their generous offer still stood.