The Chaos Loop

by Peter Lerangis

  Removing his backpack, Corey reached inside and pulled out the rusted, twisted piece of metal, the artifact from Auntie Flora’s box. He held it high, his eyes darting from it to the chandeliers. “Leila?” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Holding up your Auntie Flora’s artifact. Look at it. Then look at the chandeliers.”

  Adjusting for the warps and corrosion, the bent shard was a perfect match for any of the curved metal bars.

  Leila gasped. “Whoa . . . it’s the same.”

  “Which explains how this artifact got us here,” Corey said.

  “But why would Auntie Flora’s ancestors have saved a mangled piece of a chandelier? Why did she keep it?”

  “And the message that was attached to it—what did that mean?” Corey reached into his pack, pulled the photo from the decaying envelope, and flipped it to the message on the back.

  CLARA, MEIN LIEBCHEN:

  VERGISS NICHT.

  HÖR NICHT AUF ZU VERSUCHEN

  11/39

  —M. STROBEL

  “This stuff about never forgetting,” Corey said. “Never forget what?”

  “Leila?”

  The call from the kitchen startled them both. “Breakfast break,” Corey said.

  “Put that thing away.” Heading toward the kitchen, Leila cried out, “Es tut mir leid, Maria! I’m sorry!”

  Corey shoved the metal back into his pack and followed Leila into the kitchen. There, Maria had set out plates piled high with fluffy, steaming omelets and piping hot cups of tea.

  As Corey sat, he caught a glimpse of a calendar on the wall—a portrait of a smiling milkmaid and an unsmiling cow in a field, with a date printed across the top: NOVEMBER 1939.

  Corey glanced at Leila. She’d picked up on that, too. If they’d had any doubts, there was the date. The same day and month on the artifact.

  “Ess! Eat!” Maria urged as she removed her apron and sat across from them. “This Onkel Franz? He is free tonight?”

  “Onkel who?” Corey said.

  Leila kicked him under the table. She gave him a look that said just-say-yes-to-my-dumb-alibi-because-it-was-all-I-could-think-of. “Yes, Franz. Who we are visiting in Germany. Our favorite uncle.”

  “The best!” Corey said, playing along. “We love him. A lot. We call him . . . Franzy Pants.”

  “Please, I invite to you to come. Here. Tonight,” Maria said with a smile. “All three of you. I bring you dinner.”

  Corey shot Leila a panicked look. “Uh . . . unfortunately Uncle Franz can’t come.”

  “Oh?” Maria said.

  “He’s dead,” Corey blurted.

  At Leila’s second kick, Corey let out a gasp. “He means Franz is sick,” Leila said. “Franz ist krank. Danke, Maria, aber wir müssen gehen.” She turned to Corey. “We can’t stay for dinner because we need to go to take care of him. Right, Corey?”

  “I know very good doctors,” Maria said.

  “We need to take him away to a special hospital,” Leila blurted. “Far away.”

  “New York,” Corey improvised.

  Maria nodded. “Ahhh, it is good, you leave Europe now.” She gave them an uncertain look. “You of course know about Hitler?”

  “Hate him,” Corey shot back.

  Leila kicked him a third time. Trash-talking Nazis in 1939 Germany wasn’t a smart thing.

  “Hate?” Maria said.

  “Um, maybe hate is the wrong word?” Corey quickly replied.

  But Maria’s lips were curling into a smile. Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said, “Das ist gut. Sehr gut.”

  “So y-you agree?” Leila whispered. “You’re not a—”

  “Nazi?” Maria said with a sneer. “Nein! Aber— You do not tell anyone I say this?”

  “No way,” Leila said.

  “I’m all about keeping secrets,” Corey added.

  Maria nodded. She sat at the table and leaned toward them. “Everything in Germany bad. Very bad,” She waved her fingers nervously in the air. “The country ist ganz verrückt. Crazy. You will not want to be near the Bürgerbräukeller when we are visited by der Affe mit dem Schnurrbart.”

  “What does that mean?” Corey asked.

  “The monkey with the mustache?” Leila said, looking confused.

  “It is the name I give to der Führer,” she whispered, with a derisive snort. “That monkey Hitler. Every year he speaks here. Many people come. We will make many marks. But the Nazis—pfft! They take most of it anyway. Enough of this talk. Möchtet ihr Milch? Can I get you milk?”

  Maria stood back up and pulled a small wad of bills from her pocket. “When we are fertig—finished—please, take this and buy some echte deutsche Kleidung. Proper German clothing. I insist.”

  She glanced quickly at Corey’s and Leila’s outfits, barely concealing a giggle at the sight of Corey’s Air Jordans. Then she bustled to the refrigerator. She did not seem to enjoy staying still.

  Corey tucked his shoes under the table. His heart, which had been racing, was beginning to calm. He glanced at Leila, but she was staring at the apron on the counter. A tag hung from one of the straps, with a name. Quickly Leila reached toward it, pulling out the entire tag so they could see it.

  The sight of the full name gave Corey a chill.

  BÜRGERBRÄUKELLER

  MARIA

  STROBEL

  11

  The umbrella Corey had found in the trash was now leaking onto his head. The cheap 1939 clothes he and Leila had bought were already wet, especially the thin-soled shoes. Corey’s Air Jordans were in his backpack, and he missed them.

  Germans barreled down the sidewalk, bumping into him like he didn’t exist. Bulky old cars farted their ways down the street, sending up geysers of black water from deep potholes. The air smelled like gasoline, and just about every one of the rushing pedestrians smoked cigarettes.

  “Okay, I am totally stumped,” Leila said.

  Corey nodded. “You saw her name, Leila. Maria Strobel. She’s the one who gave your ancestor that twisted chandelier part, with the message on the back of a tag. ‘Do not forget. Do not stop trying.’ Don’t you think we should figure out what that means?”

  “It could mean anything,” Leila said. “Maybe they both waited on tables together. One of them broke a chandelier, and this was a souvenir. A little joke between them.”

  “If it was so little, why did it end up in Aunt Flora’s belongings all these years?”

  “I don’t know. We are so unprepared for this. Maybe we should go back home and do a little more research. I told you we jumped into this too fast!”

  “We can’t leave now,” Corey said. “Hitler’s going to be right here in Munich, Leila. At the Burgerkinger.”

  “No. It’s the Bürgerbräukeller.” Which sounded to Corey something like Beer-gur-broi-keller, spoken by someone with a mouth full of Skittles.

  Corey ducked, barely missing the jagged point of a passing broken German umbrella. “If we stay here,” he said, “we won’t have to search an entire country to find him. He’ll walk right into our trap.”

  “Uh-huh. And what’s our trap?”

  “That’s the part I don’t know,” Corey conceded. “But I’m thinking.”

  They stopped as they reached the next corner. Looming over them, plastered onto the outer wall of a brick office building, was an enormous poster featuring a portrait of Adolf Hitler. His face was tilted upward, his eyes piercing and angry, his right hand raised rigidly toward the heavens. Behind his head was a black-and-white swastika with a red background, like a garish, hideous halo. At the bottom was a message in all caps. The only words Corey recognized were ACHTUNG!, which meant “attention,” and BÜRGERBRÄUKELLER. It was an ad promoting the rally.

  A rowdy crowd had gathered. Most were staring up at the poster with great excitement, telling jokes, smacking each other on the back. A few of them gave Nazi salutes to the image. Someone was playing an accordion, and soon almost everyone
was shouting an anthem tunelessly at the top of their lungs.

  “What are they singing?” Corey asked.

  “‘Deutschland über Alles,’” Leila replied. “‘Germany Above Everything.’ I think that’s the title. It was kind of the Nazi theme song.”

  “So everyone’s a Nazi here?” Corey asked.

  “Look out, Corey!” Leila said.

  She reached out to him as a car honked, veering close to the curb. It sent up a spray of brownish-gray water from the gutter. Like an ocean wave, it doused Corey and just about everyone else on the corner ahead. The song morphed into screams.

  “Yechhh,” Corey said, wiping the filthy water from his mouth.

  “The driver did that on purpose!” Leila said.

  Soaking wet and very angry, people shook their fists and screamed at the driver, who shouted something out his window. From the center of the crowd, a rock sailed through the air and broke the car’s rear window with a loud smash.

  “What the—?” Leila said.

  “That was extreme,” Corey added.

  The crowd on the corner roared with approval, as the car skidded to a noisy halt. The driver, a wiry guy with a thin face and beady eyes, jumped out his door. Screaming, he ran toward the crowd, a crowbar held aloft. He held a tomato in his other hand, which he flung at the image of Hitler. It splatted square on the Führer’s mustache.

  There was a second man in the car, but he barely had a chance to get out the passenger door when a dozen men leaped on them both. Fists flew. In the distance police sirens echoed, but they were soon drowned out by a loud, rhythmic chorus from the crowd:

  “Sieg heil . . . sieg heil . . . sieg heil . . . sieg heil!”

  “Corey, let’s get out of here before we get killed,” Leila said.

  She was yanking on his shirt now, and he followed her down the sidewalk away from the melee. Traffic had stopped. The narrow street was now bumper-to-bumper, resounding with the clangor of car horns. From farther down the block, a troop of soldiers in brown uniforms and jackboots came running up the street with pistols and truncheons.

  Corey and Leila ran the opposite way. And they didn’t stop until they got to the Bürgerbräukeller.

  It was after 6:00 p.m. by the time they arrived. They were both sopping wet, their umbrellas broken and long since left behind in trash cans. People were lined up for nearly a block, waiting patiently under sturdier umbrellas. When Corey and Leila rushed toward the front door, some of them scowled and yelled at them in German. “They think we’re cutting in line,” Leila explained.

  “We are,” Corey said.

  As they slipped through the door, the angry shouts faded. They were replaced by a wall of sound coming from below. More loud voices. One thing Corey had noticed: the Germans in Munich seemed to shout instead of talk. As he and Leila descended the stairs into the restaurant, at least three tables were full of people singing at the top of their lungs. A brass band with an accordion and a loud tuba played oompah-pah music as they wandered among the guests.

  Maria was taking orders on a notepad, from a table full of boisterous gray-haired men who were clinking their beer steins and shouting to each other in German. Seeing Corey and Leila, she immediately left the table to greet them. “Hallo, komm herein! Come in, come in! You must eat! You are so wet! And, Corey, what happened to your neue Kleidung?”

  “That’s ‘new clothing,’” Leila explained to Corey, then turned back to Maria. “He got splashed. Look, we’ll talk later, Maria. You’re working.”

  Maria looked back toward her table with a sly smile. “Pah. These men, they do not notice. They never remember what they order. If I bring them plates of boiled rat, they eat it and say Danke schön, Maria. So. Tell me, children, are you okay? Ist etwas los?”

  “We saw a riot on a street corner,” Corey said. “This crowd attacked some guy who was protesting Hitler’s rally at the Burgerbeeger . . . beerkegger . . . here.”

  “Hitler . . .” Maria’s brash, trumpetlike voice became practically a whisper. “Yes, yes. Every year it is worse.”

  “Maria! Schnell!” shouted a heavyset man standing next to a nearby table. He was about four inches shorter than Corey, wearing a suit that was a size too small and a swastika band around his upper arm. The thickness of his waxed mustache clashed with the thinness of his hair, which was combed over his scalp like black harp strings. He smiled like a man who hated smiling.

  “Moment mal, Dummkopf!” Maria shot back. With a wry grin, she turned to Corey and Leila. “That means ‘Wait, you dumb-head.’ He is my boss, Herr Schmuckler.” She pulled Corey and Leila away from the table, into a more isolated area near the kitchen. Leaning in, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Hear, please. I tell you one time. Let us not talk about Hitler and this crazy Nazi Party when es gibt many people like this. That was my mistake. People are listening. Now please use my rooms upstairs to clean up. Door two oh eight. You can wait and I bring you food. But it will be long night. Are you hungry?”

  “Not really,” Leila said.

  “Yes!” Corey blurted over her.

  “Then you must not wait,” Maria said. “When you are ready, go to the bar. I will serve you dinner. Kostenlos.”

  As she scurried away, Corey asked, “What does ‘Kostenlos’ mean?”

  “Free,” Leila replied.

  “Twist. My. Arm.”

  Corey was already heading for the stairs.

  A meal of boiled sauerbraten, mushy asparagus, and canned orange juice in a crowded Munich bar felt like dining on the Times Square subway tracks in August. Men were dancing on tables, some wearing napkins tied into bonnets. The accordion player was pouring beer into the bell of the tuba. The floor was sticky wherever you walked, and everything smelled of cigarette smoke. The menu listed pig intestines, and Leila barely missed being hit in the head by a flying, half-eaten goose shank. If there were a Hades for time travelers, the Bürgerbräukeller at night was it.

  “Beeeooo . . . boooeeeeger-broi-keller . . .” Corey said, trying for the hundredth time to pronounce the place’s name. The äu sound was easy—you just said oy. But the ü sound was impossible.

  Behind the bar, a bartender named Wolfgang burst out laughing at Corey’s attempt. “Ist funny boy!”

  “Just purse your lips like you’re going to say ‘oo’ . . . and then say ‘ee’ through that,” Leila said.

  “Oozoo for yee to say,” Corey grumbled.

  He pushed his plate aside and took one last sip of juice, which was beginning to taste like tinfoil and ash. Corey was dying for the crowd to dwindle. Then he and Leila could get more information from Maria about the rally.

  He glanced around the room, at the sea of swastikas on armbands. They seemed to flitter at the tables like cockroaches. He wondered if Maria was the only one here, among thousands, who hated the Führer. So far the only anti-Nazis he’d seen were her and the guys in the car at the street corner. If there were more, they’d probably be in hiding. Was there some kind of underground resistance group in Munich? If she were part of that, she’d have great information. They could all brainstorm. There had to be a way to get to Hitler, right here in 1939.

  “Sometimes I hate the past,” Corey said. “I want to just reach into my pocket, get my phone, and find out exactly what happened here.”

  “Coming here wasn’t what we expected to do,” Leila reminded him. “How are you feeling? No bad symptoms yet, right? Why don’t we just go back to the present, collect historical research, and then return here? Just like you suggested—”

  “Ssshh.” Corey was staring at Maria, who was arguing with a drunken-looking man in a tattered raincoat. By now, many of the customers had left or were heading to the door, so her voice was sharp and loud. She tried to hold the man back but he staggered toward the bar, colliding with a table full of plates of half-finished desserts. The oompah band had played their last song and were packing up. Summoned by the commotion, Herr Schmuckler rushed to Maria’s side. He began pulling the drunken ma
n back toward the door. “What are they saying?” Corey asked.

  “They’re telling the guy it’s nine forty-five, the kitchen closed fifteen minutes ago, and they’re not seating anyone,” Leila replied.

  As Herr Schmuckler accompanied the guy out of the restaurant, Maria stopped at the front door. She greeted a new customer who stood alone, smoking a cigar and wearing a wet trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat that hid his face.

  The moment Herr Schmuckler went outside with the drunk, Maria gestured for the new customer to follow her. She led him to a small table by the kitchen. As he sat he removed his hat, revealing a fox-like face with thick hair and dark features. “Wait. Is she seating that guy?” Leila said. “I thought the kitchen was—”

  “That’s him!” Corey blurted.

  “Who?” Leila shot back.

  “The creepy guy I saw in the other room.”

  “Wait, the custodian killer? He’s a customer?”

  Corey grabbed a cloth napkin and tied it around his head like a kerchief. “I don’t want him to recognize me.”

  “You look ridiculous,” Leila said.

  Ignoring her, Corey narrowed his eyes and glanced over in that direction. People were walking to and fro, sometimes blocking his view. But he could see Maria leaning close to the guy, nodding very seriously and writing things down on her pad. “Leila, do you notice anything weird?” Corey whispered.

  “Besides the fact that the kitchen is closed, they’re kicking people out, and she’s still letting him order?”

  “No, about Maria. She’s always so loud and friendly with the customers. She jokes with them, insults them, makes them laugh.”

  “That’s kind of her brand,” Leila said.

  “Right. But she’s so quiet and serious with this guy,” Corey said.

  As Maria returned to the bar, she shook her head with a look of exasperation. “You know that guy?” Leila asked.

  “Of course I know Herr Elser,” she muttered. “He is staying with my friends, Alfons and Rosa, so I am friendly to him, but, ach, why does he always eat so late? I will see if the chef is in a good mood . . . meanwhile, bitte, Wolfgang! Geben Sie diesen Kindern Strudel! He will give you strudel before they put it away. It is my favorite.”