The Secret of Lions

by Scott Blade

  Returning was a living nightmare. He never thought he would regret killing a Jew and her husband. After all, Heinrik was not the closest friend he had ever had. His fondest friend was August Kubizek from his childhood. There was only one person he loved so much it made him feel regret for killing a Jew. The only person who could make the guilt of killing Gracy and Heinrik unbearable was me.

  “I remember,” Hitler whispered.

  A table near the opening to the living room was set up with family photos. A picture of Gracy, pregnant with me, was placed in front of the others. After Gracy’s death, which he told his staff was a suicide, Hitler had all of her possessions placed throughout the house as if she were still living there happily. The dream house of Heinrik and Gracy was no more; the lake house was now a memorial to them.

  A diagram of the Kessler family tree was also laid out. At the bottom were grandparents, the parents of both Gracy and Heinrik. Almost the entire Kessler family was completely obliterated. Only one person remained alive: me.

  Hitler swallowed hard thinking about what he had done to the only son he had ever known. He ignored the velvety cobwebs that connected each picture frame to the other. It was like staring at the Kessler’s dead family tree—branch after withered branch.

  Nightingale floors creaked under the weight of each step Hitler made. He walked near the spot in the front hall where he’d first noticed the creaking and he instantly remembered it. Bypassing the living room, Hitler went straight through the kitchen and into the dining room. In his mind, he placed the Kessler family throughout the house, moving, living a normal life. He saw their ghosts.

  Gracy sat with her back to the fireplace and Heinrik sat at the head of the table next to an empty chair. Hitler wandered to the chair. He pulled it out of its resting place. The legs of the chair scraped the floorboards. The sound echoed and then vanished among the dusty, high ceiling beams.

  Hitler sat. He leaned back and stared into the darkness of the kitchen doorway. His back was now to the fireplace, just as Gracy had been sitting in his vision. Lights streamed in through the blinds of the kitchen window. He could hear the creaking of one of the guards patrolling on the front porch. A flashlight beam filtered in through the drawn blinds. It faintly lit the dining room.

  “Heinrik?” Hitler said to the apparition. “I have raised Peter well. You would be proud of him. You would be very proud.”

  Hitler closed his eyes for a moment. As he opened them, the phantom of Gracy stood across from him. She was nothing but bone: no skin, no blood, no hair, just bone.

  And yet he knew that it was her. Her bones saturated his thoughts. She said nothing. She simply stared at him with lifeless eyes.

  “Gracy,” Hitler said. “Peter is turning into such a fine man. He is engaged now. You would approve. She is good breeding material.”

  The phantom cocked its head. Heinrik looked over at Hitler. Both specters were silent.

  “Damn it! Heinrik, say something! Say something!” Hitler screamed into the empty room. For the first time in ten years, he felt complete shame and spoke the name he’d tried so desperately to forget.

  “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he repeated over and over again.

  Chapter Nine

  Fires Burn,

  Fires Burn Out

  Warsaw, 1939

  72

  Anna faced the entrance to the alley while I pissed. I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t watching. We’d drunk half the bottle of wine already. And we felt the effects.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk. I probably should have told you this, but I’ve never had alcohol before,” I said.

  “I thought you said that you’ve tried wine before,” Anna said.

  “I lied. I was trying to impress you,” I admitted.

  “I already figured that you were not being honest about that. Luckily for you, I’ve had a little more experience,” she said.

  I smiled and zipped up my trousers. I turned around to find that she was no longer in the entrance to the alley, but she was somewhere down the street.

  “Anna?” I said. I called her name again before sticking my head out from behind the alley wall.

  She was standing in an open doorway to a once luxurious apartment building across the street. Her eyes were filled with lust. She beckoned me to join her.

  I ran my hands through my cropped blond hair. Then I followed her into the apartment. Inside she waited for me near a nice sofa.

  The apartment floors were hardwood. Some of the edges of the room were scorched from the fires, but for the most part it was still a nice room.

  I drew near her. She pulled me into her. A strong, enticing scent came from her body. Her lips glistened from the light of the fires that burned in the buildings across the street. We kissed. My tongue slid inside the wet caverns of her mouth. My hands shook a little as I reached out to grab her upper leg. She cocked her head back slightly and put her mouth to my ear and nibbled on it.

  I heard the jawbones in my head make a slight cracking sound in sync with the movement of my mouth. Then I heard her breathing in my ear. It was heavy at first.

  “I want you inside me,” she whispered.

  73

  Hours later, I awoke face down on the sofa. Anna’s warm, supple body lay next to me. Her hand rested on the small of my back. I yawned. Darkness surrounded us. The fires had burned out long ago.

  The buildings across from us exhaled only smoke and ash. The empty wine bottle rolled gently down the hall on the hardwood floor. Wind blew through the shattered walls of the building with a faint whistle through the bottle's neck.

  I was still drunk. I stretched out. I felt Anna as she shifted behind me. She faced the other direction. My chest was covered with fresh claw marks. I peered down and slid the tips of my fingers along the marks she’d left on my chest. Anna had all of our clothes bundled over her.

  I stood up and rubbed my eyes. A chill blew along my spine like a cold breath from God. I shivered.

  I looked out through an opening in the ceiling at the night sky and guessed it was well into night.

  Anna looked over at me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Checking the time; we should head back now,” I said.

  “Why? Wait, you can tell time by looking at the night sky?” she asked.

  “From the stars actually. That was a part of my schooling. We need to head back because it’s late and my father will be looking for me if he discovers that we left. And if he finds us, we won’t be able to see each other again.”

  “Okay, but isn’t he away or something?” she asked.

  “Just to be safe, let’s return. I don’t think there’s anything else to see out here anyway. We’ve been here all night and seen a lot,” I said.

  “Let me get my clothes on,” she said.

  I was naked too. I didn’t even think about that. What if my father came looking for me and found me stark naked?

  “Peter, there is something that I want to say,” Anna announced.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I think that I love you,” Anna said. “I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.”

  “You love me?” I asked.

  She moved closer to me. She slipped on the last article of clothing. I felt her breath on the side of my face. The moment was sweet. It was perhaps the sweetest moment I can remember.

  “Aren’t you going to say it back to me?” she asked.

  “You know I do,” I replied. But this was not the answer she wanted. I knew it. I felt it. Yet, she remained silent afterward, and we just sat together and watched the darkness through the bomb-made skylight.

  I stood tall, looking out over the buildings. The sky was brighter toward the east. I realized it might have been closer to morning than I’d originally thought.

  “Anna, let’s get moving. The morning isn’t far away.”

  She rose and we started the journey back to the federal
building in Warsaw, back to my imposter life.

  74

  As Anna and I approached the edges of the German-made wall, we noticed the sky became brighter and brighter. It was almost blood red. The ridged skyline was silhouetted with the ashes of burned buildings in the reddest part of the sky. I became suspicious of the faint orange color. Its aura signaled within me a warning, an internal alarm.

  “Wait, Anna,” I said. “I’m not sure that we should go this way. Something’s wrong.”

  She followed me as we went through an open doorway. It led to the hallway of a building where half of the upper floors were blown out from the shelling that had occurred only days before.

  “Where are we going?” Anna asked.

  “To look for a different route,” I said.

  I took her to the back window of the first floor. We peered out and saw two Jewish girls. They were twins of about fifteen or sixteen. Long dark hair fell down their backs. They wore tattered clothing. They were covered from head to toe with milky, black soot.

  A result of the bombing, I thought.

  Anna turned and ran out of the building to the girls.

  “Wait!” I shouted and remained inside.

  “Come on; they are Jews, Peter. Let’s just talk with them,” she called back.

  She proceeded out the back of the building and around the corner to the girls. I stayed inside and watched through the back window. The girls were beautiful. For some reason they were familiar. Some of their facial structures reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t perceive who it was. And for the first time, I wondered what it was that people found so wretched about them.

  I heard Anna’s voice coming from outside the window. “Get up, Jews. You poison our minds. You destroyed our lands. You are diseased. Now get up.”

  I watched her. She started kicking one of the girls repeatedly. The other sister protested Anna’s kicking, but she was very weak and could barely move. A trail of blood ran out from under the motionless sister’s dress. It created a grotesque and crimson pathway to her thighs.

  Anna stopped kicking her when she saw the blood. She backed away slowly from the girl, horrified. I was also horrified. Within moments the girl’s dress and legs were soaked in blood.

  “Peter! What is this? What did I do?” Anna shouted. Remorse and regret burned through her like a fiery explosion through a house. She had misunderstood. She had been raised to believe in hate. I think that it that single moment, she reversed all of her hate towards a group of people that she knew nothing about.

  I turned and ran out of the building and around to the back toward them. Turning the corner, I came face to face with the girls. Anna had thrown her hands up to cover her eyes. She stood directly in my line of sight. Beyond her body’s outline, I could only see the girl’s legs and the pool of blood underneath them.

  The walk toward the twins took on a kind of slow motion. My heart pounded. It muffled my hearing. It was the same as a wartime experience: Sounds are so intense that soldiers temporarily lose their hearing. I had learned about it under the tutorship of some of Germany’s finest military instructors; suddenly my mind flashed back to a memory from long ago, a memory of school life.

  I remembered torturing my lion, Mocha. I remembered how horrible it felt to destroy the creature I was forever linked to.

  75

  The wind carried the smell of burning cinders. Anna covered her mouth. She wanted to scream. I realized I was lost in the memory of the lion. I shook off the memory of the lion and returned to her side.

  “Oh, God!” she exclaimed. She was horror-struck. Never in her life had she experienced terror.

  One twin was dead, or close to it. I was not completely sure. Blood covered her legs. As I approached from behind Anna, I realized what had happened to the twin. At first, I thought someone had raped her, and perhaps they had, but that was not what killed her. She was dead because of a series of large, open gashes on her inner thighs.

  Immediately, I recognized it was the work of a chainsaw. A sudden fright came over me.

  “We have to get away from here, Anna,” I said. I glanced around the ruined buildings, some of which still burned. There was no sign of the Todesgruppen. Still, I knew they were near.

  “Why? What is it?” Anna looked at me.

  “We’re in danger here. They probably heard us coming. They wouldn’t just leave the one girl alive,” I said and then looked around in the windows, doorways, and rooftops. I couldn’t see any of them. However, I was certain they were there.

  “Why? Why are we in…” Anna stopped dead in her sentence. She saw something on one of the rooftops; a reflective surface glimmered from the shards of fire lighting the horizon.

  A loud sound rang out through the air and echoed in between the buildings. I looked up toward the sound’s origin. It was a gunshot. It came from a sniper on the roof of the building behind me.

  I returned my gaze to Anna. I grabbed her. Using the force of my body weight, I shoved the two of us behind the remains of a burning car. The tires had long since disintergrated. Another shot rang out. A bullet nicked the roof of the car, just missing my head.

  “Are you hit?” I asked Anna. She felt around her body with both hands. She found no sign of injury.

  “I don’t think so. Peter, what about the twins?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “One of those girls was still alive. We have to get her. They’ll kill her.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said.

  “No, we can still save her.” Anna moved to get a good look around the corner of the car. She saw the other sister.

  Anna raised her head a little higher so she could get a better look. The girl twitched. The only sign of blood came from around her head. The first shot fired by the sniper had hit the girl in the head.

  The sniper was not aiming at them. The living twin was bait, used to draw us out of the building. And once she was of no further use, he shot her.

  “Stop firing! I am Peter Hitler, son of the Führer. Don’t shoot!” I begged.

  I pulled the Colt 1911 out of my coat to be safe. I hid it down by my side.

  Slowly, I began to pick my head up in order to see if the sniper had lowered his rifle. Before I could look, the sniper fired another round. This one entered the flames that burned the interior of the car. The bullet was lodged somewhere deep in the burning rumble.

  My reflexes were honed. In an instant I ducked back down by the side of the car. I neglected to consider how hot the car’s steel was. It must have been burning for a while because the heat from the steel quickly baked through the sleeve of my jacket. I cursed.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I screamed. I squeezed the Colt’s handle tight.

  “Peter, what are we going to do?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know. He has us pinned down.”

  “Why?”

  I thought for a moment. The expression on my face registered a side of me Anna had never seen before. It was new. I searched my years of training for a solution. Then I answered her, “So his teammates can sneak up on us. He shoots at us so we can’t run, and then they come to kill us. We have to get away,” I said.

  I looked around for a way for us to escape, but there was nothing close. We were trapped. The closest thing to our location was an alleyway, but it was more than twenty meters away. We would not make it, at least not both of us.

  “Listen, we have to try for that alleyway,” I said. “When I tell you to, run.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  A shot rang out. The bullet hit the ground near Anna’s feet. She began to tear up. “I can’t go, Peter.”

  She was right. That sniper was better than I’d anticipated. Neither of us would make it.

  We heard a door open from the building on the other side of the car. Another sound followed. It was a motorized sound, rough and violent. It sent terrifying images into my mind. It was the sound I had feared hearing, a chainsaw.

  “What�
�s that sound?” Anna asked.

  “Shit!” I replied. “Get ready; we are going for it.”

  I grabbed her wrist. Not even giving her time to prepare, I slung her toward the alley. I ran alongside her, blocking the view of the sniper. With reflexes I never knew I had, I fired a couple of rounds at the sniper.

  One bullet hit the ledge of the building directly beneath the sniper’s position. The second bullet whizzed by his head. The sniper ducked down, giving Anna and me just enough time to escape into the alley.

  Looking back, I could see them, the Todesgruppen. It was a group of five soldiers. One of them wielded a chainsaw. He was an enormous man. His military fatigues were stained with blood and fragments of bone.

  One of the others carried a shotgun. Two others held MP40 machine guns. The last member of the Todesgruppen brandished a flamethrower. Bits of flame and gas seeped out of the barrel. The smell of fuel filled my nostrils.

  As the Todesgruppen approached me, they did not raise their weapons. At the same time, they did not flinch or retreat from the threat of my Colt 1911. I pushed Anna deeper into the alley. She stopped by the wall for a moment.

  “We can’t stay here. We have to keep going,” I said. I squeezed her arm tightly and pulled her into the depths of the alleyway. Darkness surrounded us. A hint of light escaped the far corner of the alley.

  “Where are we going, Peter?”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll just think that we are part of the Resistance. They’re not going to listen to us. Even if they did, they would never believe us about who we are. We have to run.”

  She pulled away from me for a moment. With an indescribable tightness in her throat, she said, “Peter, I don’t want to be on their side.”

  “Come on,” I said and pulled at her.

  “No, I don’t want this,” she repeated. “Those twin girls. I don’t want this.”

  “Anna, they’re going to kill us. We have to go,” I said.

  We continued into the darkness toward the light at the end of the alley. Behind us, we heard footsteps. Flames shot into the alley. A thick puff of smoke instantly rose into the air.

  “Run, Anna,” I yelled. We picked up speed. Finally we reached the end of the alley. Beyond the corner, I realized why our pursuers walked casually and did not run after us: We ran into a brick wall.