Orphan Monster Spy

by Matt Killeen

  “I want to try an espresso now,” Sarah said, reaching for the pastry. “Two. With more sugar.”

  At that moment a woman arrived. She was dressed head to toe in black, like a widow, but with a wide white collar under her coat. Her hair was tied back sensibly, old-fashioned but oddly timeless. Her face was lined, but behind her tired eyes and the dark rings around them, Sarah could see a vivid spark. She found it impossible to tell her age.

  They stood.

  “Helmut,” the woman said, with a thick Austrian accent.

  “Professor,” he said, bowing. “This is my niece, Ursula Haller.”

  “Really? Helmut, you’ve spent so long lying you’ve forgotten how to tell the truth,” the woman complained.

  “Ursula,” said the Captain, ignoring her. “This is Lise Meitner.”

  Sarah curtseyed. The professor waved the gesture away as she sat. “I’m very pleased to meet you, whoever you are.”

  “I’m Sarah,” she said.

  The Captain rolled his eyes and replaced his hat.

  “A Jew. Splendid. You’ve grown soft. This is your new thing? Rescuing waifs and strays like me?” She laughed. It was a curious thing. “So, you had something to show me?”

  “Ursula.” The Captain sat. “Would you give Professor Meitner the notebook?”

  Sarah reached into her pocket and pulled out Schäfer’s journal. She felt a ripple of disgust and fear as she handed it to Professor Meitner, but also a desire not to let it go. She had sacrificed and suffered so much for it. She’d nearly given up . . . something greater, something she didn’t even understand properly. This book was the spoils of war, the grail, a treasure. But the contents were a mystery in a language she couldn’t read. It was an affront to her intelligence.

  The spots of Foch’s blood on its cover had faded to a dull rust, like they might just brush away. The professor opened the notebook and began to read, not with the relaxed air of someone flicking through a magazine, but with the concentrated effort of someone meeting a challenge, succeeding, and finding the solution endlessly surprising.

  “I would like a pot of tea . . . and a very large cognac. If such a thing can be found,” she said without looking up.

  “Espresso,” chimed Sarah as the Captain stood and left the table.

  A gust of wind brushed her cheeks, cool against her skin. It set the boats on the canal bobbing and creaking. She made a start on the pastry, cramming the sweet flakes into her mouth with some satisfaction.

  Professor Meitner glanced at Sarah’s face. “Where did you get sunburned at this time of year?” she asked as she read.

  “There was a fire.”

  The professor made a noncommittal noise. “Where is he dropping you?”

  “We’re going back to Berlin,” Sarah answered, chewing. “He’s not dropping me anywhere.”

  “Why would you go back?”

  Sarah swallowed. “I work for him.”

  Professor Meitner looked up sharply. “You ‘work’ for him?”

  “Yes, I work for him.” This was a distinction that she had earned. She didn’t feel like having to justify it.

  Lise held up the book. “You got this? From Hans Schäfer?” she asked. Sarah nodded. “He sent you to him?”

  She knew. The unfinished pastry sat on the plate, now unpalatable.

  “Did he know?” Sarah asked after a moment.

  “I didn’t mention it. Why would I? I had no idea he had children on his payroll.” She was ashen. Then she added, “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know.”

  Sarah tapped her feet on the cobblestones.

  Where would you go if you left him?

  “He promised me he didn’t know.”

  “You need to be very careful, Sarah, Ursula, whatever. Very careful indeed.” Professor Meitner turned the notebook over in her hands and indicated the dark stains on the cover. “Did something happen to Schäfer?”

  “He’s dead. His lab is destroyed. That’s all that remains. I’m very thorough—and careful,” Sarah added.

  “I see.” She opened the book again, this time with more care.

  The Captain reappeared with a tray and fussed around the table, laying out cups. To Sarah’s eyes, he had never looked more English. Finally, he turned a seat next to the professor and sat on it backward, leaning over the chair back.

  “So?”

  “So . . . it’s all here. The theories, experimental data, calculations. He understood it all. This even suggests he built a diffusion plant?” The Captain nodded. “A working device?” Another nod. “Jesus Christ. Thank God he was so secretive.”

  The Captain frowned and shook his head.

  “He had friends in the United States whom he worked with. There’s the wreckage of his house to pick over. He had guards who are now dying of a mystery disease . . . not to mention a catatonic daughter in an asylum who . . . might have all kinds of tales to tell.” He glanced at Sarah, who met his gaze with a fierce intensity. She had not done this to Elsa and knew there was nothing they could do for her. But knowing that didn’t give her any absolution. He propped his chin on the chair back. “Someone will put two and two together eventually.”

  “But for now, this is all there is?” Professor Meitner held the notebook in the air.

  The Captain put his hand on her sleeve. “Lise, let me take you to England. You can have a lab, staff, anything you need.” His tone was urgent, pleading. “This is your chance to stop this war before it can start.”

  “At what price?” She put the book down and placed an accusing finger on it. “Do you understand what this is? Do I save the Poles by cooking German children? Do I burn cities full of innocent people? What’s an acceptable number of civilian casualties? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? The machine gun didn’t end the last war, Helmut. It just made it more bloody. The ends”—she tapped the table in front of Sarah—“do not always justify the means.”

  “This war is going to be about more than the Poles. Britain and France have no conception about what’s coming, and they aren’t listening. Not to me anyway. They might listen to you.” Sarah had rarely seen him so animated or expressive.

  Professor Meitner laughed again. She lit a cigarette and shook her head. “Nobody listens to me. A woman? Jew or Christian? I’m ignored, despised. I could arrive in England with a working nuclear device and no one would pay any attention.” The bitterness landed like rain.

  “I listen to you.” He put a hand on her sleeve again.

  “You, Helmut, are smarter than most men.” She put a hand on his for a moment, then patted it, before pulling her arms away. “But trust me, that isn’t what the world wants. They hear what they want to hear, what they already know.”

  “And if the Nazis make the bomb before the British?” he said softly.

  “You won’t let that happen, will you? That’s your business, isn’t it? Your real business, I mean.” She took a long drag on the cigarette. “They probably think they need pure carbon or heavy water—deuterium oxide—and you need to make that impossible.”

  The professor pulled Sarah’s plate in front of her and, pushing the remains of the pastry onto the table, placed the open book on it. She poured her cognac slowly onto the pages, making the ink run.

  “I could have it reconstructed, you know,” the Captain began.

  “But you won’t,” Lise said, lighting a match. “One child, maybe.” She glanced at Sarah. “But thousands?” She shook her head.

  Sarah wasn’t certain what was happening, but she didn’t want to take part in this conversation. More bombs, but for the right people? Who were the right people? The ones who had left a trail of corpses behind them and a teenager strapped to a hospital bed? The monsters who ran the country, or the monsters who battled them?

  The professor lit a match and held it over the notebook. “I’m putting
the genie back in the bottle, for now.” The match dropped and ignited the cognac. The blue flame danced over the paper for a few moments until a gust of wind fanned it, and with a puff of smoke, the open pages blackened and vanished.

  Sarah could feel the heat of the fire in the winter air as she swallowed the syrupy golden crema, thick with sugar and with an exciting, bitter aftertaste. It was heaven in a cup.

  The book was halfway consumed.

  She reached into her pocket and removed a torn, folded piece of paper. She had taken it from the notebook the night she had found the page. It was a list of girls’ names, with Ursula Haller at the bottom. The name above that was Ruth Mauser.

  She placed it in the fire and watched it turn to smoke.

  “Professor, I would advise that you don’t stay in Copenhagen any longer than you have to. I’m not sure that Denmark will be allowed to be neutral for much longer,” the Captain said.

  “Yet you’ll take this girl back to the belly of the beast?”

  “She has work to do.”

  “Is that right, Sarah?”

  Sarah considered the question, but there wasn’t any doubt.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  WHEN I WAS growing up in the UK in the 1970s, the Second World War was everywhere. In the comics and books, on the TV, in the toy shops, and even in the shoe shops, where Clarks Commandos were the school shoes of choice. The war was seen as a source of intense pride. It was still regarded as Britain’s “finest hour,” as Churchill had called it and, well, the children of the seventies had missed out. What could we ever do that would be as important or exciting as that?

  Meanwhile, my mother’s best friend was German, and we spent many summers with her family. They were gracious and loving hosts, calm and helpful friends, and almost aggressively pacifist. I couldn’t play spies, spacemen, or pirates—or anything involving guns—without a lecture on the dangers of violence. This made it impossible for me to accept the idea of an evil or warlike Germany at face value.

  As I got older and learned more, this dichotomy grew more confusing. The details of the Holocaust and the evils of the Nazi State were revealed in all their horror. Exactly how did these gentle, sausage-obsessed people allow this to happen? The war revealed itself to be far more complicated than we’d been taught.

  Thus began a life-long, appalled fascination, trying to unpick the realities from the stories and separate the propaganda from the unpalatable truths. This book is part of that.

  Almost everything in Orphan Monster Spy, including the fabrications and story-driven exaggerations, has some basis in fact.

  While Sarah Goldstein did not exist, the idea of teenage spies, agents, and soldiers is not a fanciful one. Sarah came to life as I passed a memorial mural to the agent Violette Szabo in Stockwell, London. Part of Churchill’s “secret army,” she had been just twenty-one years old when she volunteered to be a Special Operations Executive agent. In fact, there were resistance couriers and partisan warriors across Europe who were barely in their teens, like Belgian Lucie Bruce, aged fifteen, or Freddie Oversteegen, a mere fourteen years old when she joined the Dutch resistance. Twelve-year-old Sima Fiterson used her blue eyes and sweet face to deflect suspicion and bluff her way through checkpoints while leading Jews out of the Minsk ghetto. All the while she had a pistol in a secret pocket so the Nazis couldn’t take her alive. In Germany, teenagers as young as fourteen formed a resistance, the Edelweißpiraten, risking violence, imprisonment, and for six of them, death at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944. The Leipzig Meuten consisted of groups of children and teens that were similarly crushed by the authorities. Helmuth Hübener was just seventeen when he was executed for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in Hamburg. There are not enough pages in this book to tell all their stories.

  The Werwolf did exist, but not as an all-girl outfit. It was a desperate Nazi guerilla force created to cause trouble once the Allies had occupied Germany. Opinion is divided as to how organized or effective the Werwolf was, with some scholars arguing that it was just a scary story to spook the occupying troops. As I researched, I came across a photo of a young woman involved in one of the few Werwolf-related actions, the grubby murder of a mayor appointed by the Allies in 1945. In her eyes, I imagined I saw a fraction of the cold fanaticism I was writing about. I saw the Ice Queen look back at me. She told me the rest.

  Even when I created elements in the service of the story, I later discovered they often had a real-world analogue. Sarah needed to go to an elite Nazi school—that was part of her tale from the very start—but before I had even written anything, I discovered that the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten existed and were every bit as brutal as I wanted to depict them. The Napola schools were probably better run than Rothenstadt, but the idea of Nazi efficiency and organization, still pervasive today, is a myth. The Third Reich was financial disaster, built on greed, ambition and in-fighting. Its achievements were propped up by theft and slave labor, built on a foundation of corpses. Rothenstadt is the symbol of that, a place where politics and avarice meet.

  For all its power, Nazi Germany’s weaknesses were often a result of its barbarity. Their nuclear weapons program was plagued by setbacks and was later revealed to have never been a serious threat. The cream of German scientific talent had been decimated by the loss of its Jewish and left-leaning colleagues, with many going on to work for the Allies, so National Socialist Germany was, in part, destroyed by its own bigotry.

  One of the scientists driven out of the country was the genius Lise Meitner. When faced with experimental data that confounded the greatest minds of her age, she could picture what no one else could. In doing so, she changed physics, chemistry, and the history of the world forever. She was, in modern parlance, a badass.

  However, she was also a woman and, although baptized a Christian, she was from a Jewish family. Forced to flee Germany, Meitner continued to work with her colleague Otto Hahn by mail. Her Berlin team was stumped by the data they were collecting, and it was Meitner who, in collaboration with her nephew, Otto Frisch, correctly identified nuclear fission for what it was.

  Hahn got wind of their conclusions and published their joint work under his own name. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of fission, omitting Meitner and Frisch’s fundamental contribution to his understanding of its workings. The least Meitner should have received was the Nobel Prize for Physics, but her nomination was blocked for partly political, partly patriarchal reasons.

  It’s not a huge stretch to imagine that Professor Meitner could have overcome the remaining challenges to create a nuclear weapon. Robert J. Oppenheimer, the future scientific leader of the Manhattan Project—the Allied atomic bomb program—heard about Meitner and Frisch’s discovery, and within a few days, he drew a plan for a crude but functional nuclear device on his blackboard. Meitner’s abhorrence of the concept of nuclear weapons is not fictional, however. She refused to join the Manhattan Project, and after the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner took a five-hour walk alone. She was under no illusions about her share of the responsibility.

  Hans Schäfer is fictional, but there was a rich, independent German scientist, Manfred von Ardenne, who had set up his own laboratory working with uranium outside Berlin.

  Schäfer’s bomb would have been inefficient, but it would have worked. Sarah’s “fizzle”—an explosion where the nuclear chain reaction does not become self-sustaining—would probably not have been anywhere as destructive as I’ve depicted. But anyone picking over the wreckage would have gotten very sick very quickly, and at the time no one would have known why. It was Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi who talked about people simply disappearing in a nuclear blast, but it sounded like the kind of thing Schäfer would have reveled in. I’ve stolen a lot of phrases like that. Apologies to the scientists involved.

  The Captain’s description of the bombing of Guernica is
based on first-hand accounts. However, his estimate of the dead and wounded, although considered accurate at the time, was too high. Most historians now agree the dead numbered “only” around three hundred civilians. That was still 4 percent of the population. Consider 4 percent of London, New York, or Paris, or 4 percent of your town or village. Take a moment to imagine what that might have felt like.

  The atrocity has been eclipsed by the war that followed, but it lives on in Picasso’s painting. Picasso lived in Nazi-occupied Paris during the war. The probably apocryphal story goes that a German officer pointed to a photo of Guernica and asked him, “Did you do that?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.”

  As Sarah guessed, the Poles didn’t start the war. The attack on the Gleiwitz radio station in Germany was a “false-flag operation”—it was carried out by German special forces dressed as Polish soldiers. For added reality, the SS took prisoners from Dachau concentration camp to the site and put them in Polish uniforms, before murdering and mutilating them. The SS called these prisoners the “canned goods.”

  It’s worth noting that in the present day, Gretel would have been described as having Down syndrome, but that name didn’t exist in 1934. In fact, it wasn’t until 1961 that concerns were raised in the medical community about the scientifically dubious and long since pejorative term “mongoloid.” The World Health Organization ceased use of the term four years later.

  Sarah’s mother had evidently appeared in Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at some point, with Sarah recalling Kipling and Brecht’s lyrics subconsciously. The moral of Pirate Jenny’s frankly terrifying tale of contempt, exploitation, and revenge, if there is one, is to always be nice to the cleaner.

  I may have pushed the odd quote a month or two back and forth to fit Sarah’s journey, but the specific and disturbing details are accurately retold. Old men in Vienna forced to scrub the streets—true. Jews driven out of public life—true. Marginalized Polish communities—true. The execution of the disabled—true. Kristallnacht or the Novemberpogrome—true. Stamped passports and the Swiss refusing Jewish refugees—true. The Night of the Long Knives—true. The changes in We Girls Sing!—true. Jesse Owens humiliating the Nazis in 1936—true. Langfeld’s lesson plan—true.