Orphan Monster Spy

by Matt Killeen

  The girls saluted and chanted and saluted some more while Sarah knelt in the mud. A teacher began a speech about the war, but the girls’ raw enthusiasm drowned him out. The Ice Queen reached down and lifted Sarah to her feet. She came close so she couldn’t be overheard.

  “Now, Haller. If you are indeed to run with this esteemed company”—she gestured to her lieutenants—“you will be your year’s Schlafsaalführerin now. You must make that happen, no matter how it is done. You will lead. You will follow no one.”

  “Very well,” replied Sarah. It’s all coming together. I can do this, she thought.

  Elsa Schäfer was standing behind the Ice Queen with the others, watching intently with the same expression of amused fascination. Be fascinated. Be amused. Be my friend. Victory was so close that Sarah could taste it.

  “And you must stop fraternizing with the weak and pointless, like your friend Mauser.”

  Little Mouse. Unloved and unwanted. Weak and pointless. The only girl who gave a damn about Ursula Haller. Haller’s friend . . . Sarah’s friend. Sarah had a friend. She wanted to scream and swing a punch at the Ice Queen.

  “No.”

  “No?” The Ice Queen’s eyes betrayed real surprise.

  It happened before Sarah could stop it. She was so full of anger and power that she spoke without thinking.

  “You’re right,” Sarah snarled. “I will lead, and I will not follow anyone. So take your crowd of lickspittles and verpiss dich.”

  The Ice Queen was incredulous. “You don’t get to walk away, Haller.”

  Commit to the move.

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing. And I’m bringing my weak and pointless friend with me.” Sarah pointed at the Ice Queen. “You’ll want to be a woman of your word. We’re done, and you’re done with my class. You stay away,” Sarah finished through clenched teeth.

  Sarah could feel the opportunity, her way out, the job, sliding away like the sea from the shore . . . but her passion had been bigger, stronger, and in total control. The move was complete.

  The older girl’s mouth opened, and she seemed on the verge of slapping Sarah. Then her expression changed to a curious mix of animosity and irritation that didn’t sit well on her normally blank slate. Around them, the teachers began reorganizing the classes for the walk back to school.

  “And where is Rahn?” the Ice Queen asked as Sarah turned.

  “I have no idea,” Sarah lied with the straightest of faces. “Where did you put her?”

  The Ice Queen strode away, calling to her retinue. Elsa glanced at Sarah—a moment’s confusion—and they were gone. Sarah breathed out, like she had broken the surface of the water again. She began to shiver, doused in exhaustion. It took the Mouse and two other girls to help her back to school.

  * * *

  • • •

  The River Run proved very controversial that year. One girl, Rahn, appeared to have been attacked by a wild animal of some kind. Her injuries were serious enough that she’d been sent home to recover. It seemed that the forest was no longer safe, and the teachers were bickering, trying to apportion blame. Some felt that the whole race was dangerous and the Final Year girls had too much power over it. In the end, boredom and indifference reigned. It was too much trouble to do anything about it.

  Sarah’s victory was endlessly argued about. The impossibility of swimming the river seemed the only certainty, and some would rather believe she had flown across. There was disappointment that the win didn’t bring about a sudden end to the Ice Queen’s tyranny. Others saw the apparent truce as a betrayal, and many girls began to look over their shoulder, wondering who was the next on the Schulsprecherin’s hit list.

  Sarah ran a fever for the rest of the week. Confined to the sanatorium and between vivid nightmares, she lay and considered her mission’s complete failure. Her failure. She had been welcomed into the inner circle, to rule the school alongside Elsa Schäfer. She hadn’t just refused, she had doused that bridge in gasoline and lit the match.

  As she berated herself silently, the visiting Mouse gave her a running commentary on life in Rothenstadt, an endless narrative of gossip, politics, and supposition.

  “How did you get ahead, Haller?” the Mouse jabbered happily.

  “I flew, didn’t you hear?”

  “No. Really?”

  “Really,” Sarah said.

  She had tried to piece together the events over the river, but even she wasn’t quite sure. The whole fragmented experience was laced with pursuing horrors, cabaret songs, and dream dogs. It seemed scarcely believable, even to herself.

  Sarah had immediately regretted her willful sabotage of the mission but simultaneously clung to what it had represented. She was no monster, no monster, no monster . . . but her fractured memories of the run told another story. One moment stood out, in crystal-clear fidelity that Sarah relived over and over again: The rock hitting Rahn in the face. The cracking sound. The movement. The intention suddenly exploding out of circumstance. She could have killed her. She would have killed her, if the rock had been heavier. She had been willing to do anything to fight her off. Not even to survive, just to avoid pain—to avoid losing. It was a deep pitcher of shame and self-loathing that part of her wanted to drink from, just to prove she was still a human being. But the jug was huge. There was enough to drown in.

  * * *

  • • •

  Once she was well, any sense of triumph deserted her, along with her ethical qualms. She wanted an erneuter Versuch, a second go. The mission still stood and now seemed more impossible than ever. She couldn’t bring herself to beg the Ice Queen for forgiveness, so without anything better to do, Sarah found herself trailing silently after the Ice Queen’s entourage. There was no plan, no idea. She hung about in the shadows, watching them, their habits, and their routines. Hoping for a piece of information she could use, waiting for an opportunity that she knew wouldn’t come.

  Elsa was loud. It was the boisterousness of someone with something to prove. As the youngest, she must have felt that she had to be rougher, nastier, and noisier than everyone else. When the Ice Queen was absent, their conversation was prosaic. Horses. Boys. Marika Rökk’s new song. It was as if the war, the Reich, and die Judenfrage—the Jewish Question—didn’t exist.

  Just once Sarah heard something valuable. She was eavesdropping on the queenless court, who were smoking on a fire escape. She was crouched, back to the wall beneath them, listening to the voices she had come to know so well.

  “So who is he preying on now?”

  “That new girl Haller.”

  “Oh, the all-conquering hero—”

  “Shut your mouth, Eckel.”

  “That’s what she did on Rahn’s leg,” Eckel joked.

  “Shush. You really don’t want the Ice Queen to hear you.”

  “So what’s Foch’s story, anyway?”

  “No clue, but Schäfer knows, don’t you?”

  “Look at her face! She knows something.”

  “This is what I heard. I got it from someone whose father knows the staff—” Elsa crowed.

  “One of your pets?”

  Elsa ignored the interruption. “Foch was a loyal part of the Sturmabteilung from the very start. They put the Führer in power, but Röhm, the head of the SA, he was a Revolutionär. And there is no place for those when the revolution is over. He thought he was more important than he was. He loathed Himmler and Heydrich and thought they couldn’t touch him.”

  “Ha! Yeah, that worked out well.”

  “The SS put an end to the Röhm Putsch and wiped out the SA in just one night,” Elsa continued. “A Blood Purge, a night of the long knives. Bang. Bang. Bang.” She began to laugh.

  “That’s not news, Schäfer . . .”

  “But Foch wasn’t shot with the others, so what happened?”

  “Ah, well. When th
ey came for him, he pleaded to be let off. So they made him do something to prove his loyalty. Something disgusting.”

  “What?”

  “What’s the worst thing you can think of?”

  Gretel, thought Sarah.

  A distant bell rang. Lit cigarettes dropped one by one at the wet ground beyond Sarah’s feet.

  Sarah decided that even if she had to break her own fingers, she wasn’t going to play the piano for Foch anymore.

  EIGHTEEN

  November 9, 1939

  ROTHENSTADT’S DRIVEWAY WAS filled with expensive cars and elaborate uniforms. There were subservient drivers and mothers who wore silk and fur. The fathers had surreptitious bodyguards and supercilious expressions. Girls ran in search of parents, thoughts full of ice cream and precious attention.

  Sarah stood on tiptoe to peck the Captain on the cheek.

  “Onkel,” she said formally.

  “Ursula, I hope you are making me proud,” her Onkel replied.

  “Oh, yes, I am dedicated to my studies.” Sarah waited a moment for a boisterous Fourth Year girl to bounce past. When she had gone, Sarah went on in a singsong voice. “A solid month of marching in circles, swallowing lies, tormenting the weak—I excel at them all. I’m the perfect little monster already.”

  The Captain opened the car door. Sarah always felt that somehow she was cluttering the pristine, minimalist interior, but climbing into a safe space after the weeks of tension and miserable failure was like climbing into a pair of strong arms.

  “So where is she?” The Captain climbed in and pretended to adjust his mirror to cover his visual sweep.

  “She isn’t coming out. Professor Schäfer isn’t visiting today. It’s the Ninth of the Eleventh, remember? He’ll be in Munich for the Speeches from the Führer, flags, marching, etcetera. The usual Nazi Quatsch.”

  “Language,” he chided, starting the engine.

  The car squeezed through the throng toward the gate, along the tree-lined avenue and past long, chauffeured vehicles.

  “Why don’t you have a driver? It makes you stand out.”

  “I’m quite capable of driving a car, thank you. Besides”—he pulled out of the gate and accelerated down the road—“we are short of friends right now.”

  “We had friends?” Sarah thought she should have asked more questions before, but he had been so evasive that it had grown wearying. The car wound through country lanes as Sarah waited for a response. She pushed. “Close acquaintances?”

  The Captain snorted. “There were other agents, but fortunately we were not close.”

  “Were?”

  “The Gestapo is cleaning house.”

  For an instant, the mask slipped and Sarah saw an emotion on the Captain’s face. It wasn’t fear as such, more a sliver of discomfort. She remembered the nights she had left the Captain in an armchair and found him sitting in it again the next morning. It hadn’t occurred to her before that he had sat there all night, but now she thought about it, it had faced the front door.

  “You have me,” she began to say, but let the sentence tail away to inaudibility.

  They passed into the outskirts of Rothenstadt, a lackluster town that showed few signs of the Führer’s economic miracle. The paint was peeling, the stone crumbling, and its inhabitants looked surly and underfed.

  Did he need her? Or just an agent at the school? He sounded isolated. Did he need her the way she needed the Mouse—

  The thought was like walking into an unseen door. Did she need the Mouse?

  Did the Captain resent her the way she could not help resenting the Mouse—for being a sign of her weakness and a distraction? Was Sarah a responsibility he didn’t need? Like the Mouse, was she a vulnerability that led to impulsive action and failure?

  There were too many threads in this tapestry, and Sarah decided that she didn’t want to start pulling any of them.

  The car purred down out of the town, refusing to fill the awkward silence with enough noise.

  “So tell me about Elsa Schäfer,” the Captain asked.

  The Schulsprecherin had been as good as her word, leaving Ursula Haller and her class alone. The court of the Ice Queen was often elsewhere and always unavailable when present. Elsa Schäfer was never alone and virtually untouchable.

  She didn’t want to tell him anything. She didn’t want to admit what she had done.

  She didn’t want to take responsibility for her failure because she could barely understand it herself. She didn’t want to cry and ask to be taken home. And she was scared that if she started to speak, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.

  “I had a chance to get near her, to be her friend, but I threw it away because I felt sorry for someone. I failed the mission.”

  It leaked out of her, like she had wet herself. She felt humiliated.

  Take me home.

  She hadn’t had someone to confide in before, but, like letting the Mouse in and allowing the girl to mean something to her, it could only end badly.

  The Captain was quiet. Then he reached over and put his hand on hers.

  “All right,” he soothed. “But let me show you something. It’s a few kilometers ahead.”

  Sarah felt a pricking at the edges of her eyes. Her guilt was swiftly soaked in bitter anger, and she directed it at him.

  “We’re wasting our time anyway. Say I get invited to her house, what then? What can I possibly achieve?”

  Sarah sat in sullen and defensive muteness, arms folded. The Bavarian countryside failed to lighten her mood in the cold November light, neither crisp silver winter nor golden autumn. Then she became aware of something alien creeping into view, something that should not be there. An imposing stone wall loomed, a thick scar across the natural landscape, swallowing more and more of the sky until it filled the car windows.

  The Captain turned the car onto the road that ran in its shadow. The barrier stretched and curved away to the horizon on either side.

  “This is the wall of the Schäfer Estate.”

  Now that she was closer, Sarah could see that the older stone was repaired and smoothed off, topped by barbed wire. The Captain drove on, and the unchanging fortification rolled past. There were no overhanging trees or indeed life of any kind within touching distance of the barrier. Sarah began to understand why the Captain regarded the estate as inaccessible.

  “If I managed to scale that wall—and that’s a big ‘if’—I’m still a mile or more from the house.” The Captain pointed a gloved hand for emphasis. “The grounds are patrolled by guards. Not some local idiots, but by the Schutzstaffel. I only have the vaguest notion of what the house looks like, let alone the layout.” The wall slid by. “Want to see the way in?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Up ahead there was some kind of military convoy. Trucks lined the road, and soldiers were milling around them. As they got closer, Sarah realized that this was the gate. Any visiting car had to drive a zigzag path of short stone walls to reach the gate itself, where guards would check the driver’s identity again before opening a striped barrier. The soldiers were smart, alert, awake. They eyed the car with suspicion as it drove past. Sarah wanted to shrink from the window, to hide herself from view.

  “This place is a fortress. Unless we are invited, we are not getting in.”

  The wall resumed and filled the passenger door window.

  “She hangs out with the Final Year girls. They’re in charge.” Sarah was defensive.

  “Then join them. Make yourself interesting to them.”

  “They’re monsters,” she complained.

  “German High Command is full of monsters,” he pressed. “Do you want monsters dropping the Grapefruit Bomb on—”

  “Fine, I get it. They’ve only just stopped harassing me. Do you know what that school is? It’s a lunatic asylum run by psy
chopaths, in the name of . . . bastards,” spat Sarah.

  The car sighed across the tarmac. The Captain shook his head slowly, then straightened.

  “How did you know that Schäfer is in Munich today?”

  “Elsa has a loud voice, and I’m always around trying to make myself interesting,” Sarah sneered. “Anyway, it’s Memorial Day for the Martyrs of the Movement, so—”

  “Shush,” he interrupted. “Did she—”

  “Shush? Shush?” Sarah was really annoyed now.

  The Captain raised a hand and made a conciliatory move of his head. “Did Elsa say anything else?” he asked with the suggestion of excitement. “Anything at all?”

  “She doesn’t stop talking.” Sarah thought about the endless, meaningless discussions she’d listened to from a distance.

  “About the house? About her father?”

  “She talked about being left at school on Memorial Day. She talks about horses.” Sarah grew bored. “About Anne-something, about how the man who looks after the horses is a drunk and needs to be fired . . .”

  The Captain started to laugh.

  “Do you want to share the joke?”

  “You are an excellent, excellent spy,” he said quietly.

  Sarah didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to her.

  * * *

  • • •

  The parked car grew cold as the winter sun vanished into the trees, the red ball strangled by thorns and swallowed.

  “How do you know the stable master is going to come this way?” Sarah asked, snuggling down into her coat.

  The Captain shrugged.

  “I don’t.”

  “But you think . . . he’s going to go drinking in the town?”

  “Possibly.”

  Sarah thought all this was rather vague. “Not alone? In his bed?”

  “Possibly.”

  This reminded Sarah of the train carriage ten weeks ago and was even more irritating. “But you have a hunch,” she said.