Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke

by Anne Blankman

  Her breath was coming too fast. With the police force under the National Socialists’ control, she couldn’t depend on them for help. She thought of Daniel’s old colleagues at the Munich Post. They’d cared about him. Surely they would help her find him, if they could. She had to get to their office straightaway.

  “I must go,” she said to Gerlich. She clasped his hand in gratitude. “Thank you for sending the telegram. I owe you a debt I can never repay.”

  Concern was etched in every line in his face. “I’m afraid you have little to thank me for. I’ve only brought you into danger and—” He broke off as somewhere a door groaned open and shut. “What was that?”

  He rushed across the room and leaned his head on the wall, listening. His face had become a mask of terror. “They’re coming back!” he whispered.

  Boots tramped outside in the lobby. Motionless, Gretchen listened to the sound divide into separate footsteps. Easily a half dozen. And coming closer.

  “Is there another way out of here?” she demanded, but Gerlich shook his head.

  She ran to the door and opened it a crack. A group of SA men, their expressions grim with purpose, strode across the lobby. Walking in the lead was an extremely short man missing an arm.

  Instantly, she knew who he must be—Max Amann, the head of the Eher Verlag, the National Socialist publishing business. There was no one else in the Party who looked like that. Perhaps he wouldn’t know who she was. They might have seen each other at minor Party events—parties and speeches and dinners, she couldn’t remember now—but that would have been a few years ago, when she looked much younger. Maybe he would believe she was Gisela Schröder, the girl on her false papers, and let her go. Gently, she eased the door shut.

  “It’s Amann,” she said.

  Beside her, Gerlich paled. “He’s come to arrest me. For years, he’s sworn to put me in jail himself, if he got the chance. Nothing else would bring him here.”

  There had to be a way out of this place. Gretchen scanned the small office: the rubbish-covered floor, the overturned desks, the window overlooking the busy street. She raced to the window and tried to force it open, but it had been painted shut. She and Gerlich were trapped.

  The doorknob started to turn. She watched it, mesmerized, unable to move.

  The door was flung open so hard that it banged into the wall. Amann stood in the entryway, his blue eyes fixed on Gerlich. Behind him, several SA fellows loomed like a brown wall.

  Amann glanced at her. “Who’s this?”

  She fumbled for her false papers in her purse. Please, please let him not look at her too closely. “My name is Gisela Schröder—”

  He snatched the papers from her and scanned them. “They seem to be in order. Perhaps we ought to take her along, too, though. Only our enemies would come here.”

  God, no. She knew what would happen if they forced her to accompany them. Sooner or later, one of Reinhard’s old comrades would recognize her. She wouldn’t last long after that—a bullet to the back of the head, if they were feeling lenient; hours of torture, if they weren’t. Blood drained from her face.

  She raised her gaze to meet Amann’s, praying her expression looked calm. With one hand, she smoothed the collar of her coat, reaching inside with her index finger and snagging it on her necklace. Quickly, she pulled it out, so the swastika charm lay, gold and gleaming, against the gray wool of her coat.

  “This isn’t where I meant to come.” She sounded breathless even to her own ears. “I had the wrong address.”

  Amann glanced at her necklace. “A foolish mistake to make today, Fräulein.” He waved a hand dismissively. “She’s one of us,” he said to his SA subordinates. “Let her go.”

  Gretchen snatched up her suitcase with shaking hands. “Thank you.” She looked at Gerlich. What about him? She hated the thought of leaving him behind. I’m sorry, she tried to say with her eyes, but he merely shook his head, mouthing, Go.

  The SA men separated a little, leaving a hole between their bodies for her to sneak through. As she darted between them, she smelled the sweaty linen of their uniforms, mixed with the staleness of cigarette smoke. Under her blouse, a thin line of perspiration slid down her spine. Hitler’s old birthday present had saved her life. But Amann might still remember her. She ran across the lobby—another second and he might yell at his men to go after her—

  From the office, she heard screams of pain and the sickening smack of fists meeting flesh. Gerlich. Her heart lurched, but she couldn’t go back.

  She dashed toward the front door, hitting it with the flat of her hand so it heaved open. She plowed down the steps into the crowded street, startling a flock of pigeons fighting over crumbs on the sidewalk.

  The birds’ harsh cries echoed as they flew into the snow-white sky, but Gretchen barely heard them, concentrating on the street ahead. More businessmen in suits and housewives in woolen coats; no familiar tall, lean figure in a fedora. Daniel might be somewhere in the city, though, perhaps only feet away. Maybe his former colleagues knew where to find him. Or maybe—her heart clenched—maybe their offices were being attacked, too.

  A streetcar trundled to a stop at the corner and she ran to get onboard before it continued on its route. She sank into a seat at the back, keeping her head down, praying nobody would look at her. The Post office was a quick ride away. Perhaps the SA were already on their way to the newspaper’s building; they seemed to be going after their old enemies today.

  She had to get there before they did.

  6

  THE STREETCAR LET HER OFF TWO BLOCKS AWAY from the newspaper office. The muscles in her legs screamed to run, but she managed to walk, eyes scanning the avenue, searching for a potential threat. Snow was falling softly now, the flakes hitting the back of her neck and sliding beneath her coat collar, so cold that she couldn’t stop shivering.

  She turned onto the small, crescent-shaped street called Altheimer Eck. The road was empty, and the air carried only the hiss of snow hitting the ground and the rustle of a few swastika pennants hanging from windows.

  She made for number 19, where the Munich Post kept their offices. She was halfway up the front steps when something hit her shoulder, smarting like a bee’s sting. Surprised, she looked up to see tiny, dark objects raining down on her. They landed on the stairs with metallic clicks. For an instant, she thought they were coins, until she picked one up. It was the letter A. Someone was throwing trays of type into the street.

  Her head snapped up. In one of the windows above, a man’s face peered through the glass, grinning down at her. He wore the khaki cap of the SA.

  She was too late.

  Behind the grinning face, she caught the whirl of movement—the flailing arms of men fighting—and through the open window, she heard the crash of chairs or tables hitting the office floor. Someone was laughing.

  More letters fell, striking her cheeks and shoulders. Dazed, she turned and stumbled down the steps. Behind her, wood smashed into stone. She spun around. Broken chairs littered the front steps. As she watched, another sailed out the window, landing at her feet and splitting apart. She jumped back, biting her lip so she wouldn’t scream.

  Was Daniel trapped up there? Had he stopped by the office to ask his former colleagues for help? Or perhaps he had been sleeping there, desperate for a place to stay where the landlord wouldn’t ask him to register with the papers he no longer had?

  She stared at the windows. If Daniel was in there, she wished she could see him, so at least she could estimate how badly hurt he was. But all she glimpsed were brown-clad shoulders, jerking as though struggling with someone.

  Panic sealed off her throat. Suddenly she could feel her brother’s fist plowing into her stomach, so hard she couldn’t breathe; could feel her knees smacking into the floorboards as Reinhard flung her down. Her vision faded to black. She thought she could smell the faint tinge of his cologne, and she let out a strangled whimper.

  Stop, she ordered herself, sucking in air unt
il her eyesight widened from a pinprick to a circle. She couldn’t let herself relive her brother’s beating every time she saw people fighting. Daniel deserved the best from her, and that’s what she would give him.

  She had her revolver in the suitcase, but she couldn’t use it—the SA would have sent a group to arrest the reporters, so there would be too many to shoot; she couldn’t incapacitate them all and help the reporters get away. If she went inside the office to look for Daniel, her false papers might not withstand scrutiny a second time.

  The clattering of shoes on cobblestones interrupted her thoughts. Two men were walking toward her, talking in low voices. They looked at her with open curiosity, and she realized how strange she must appear—frozen on the pavement, surrounded by broken chairs and typesetter’s letters. She had to start moving before more people entered the street or the SA and their captives left the building. As long as she gave no one a reason to look at her twice, she was safe, and as long as she was safe, she could look for Daniel.

  Her legs felt wooden as she walked back in the direction from which she had come, checking over her shoulder to make sure no one followed. She had failed. Now there was no way she could talk to Daniel’s old colleagues. And who knew what awaited those men once they were hauled to the city jail? For so many years, she’d seen Hitler throw aside issues of the Munich Post and drop his head into his hands, moaning that the reporters’ smear campaigns would ruin him. Even from his new home in Berlin, he wouldn’t forget them. He would enjoy taking his revenge.

  The streets filled again with burghers and housewives and shopgirls. The air smelled of snow and soot. Vehicles choked the roads: private automobiles, the low-slung Horchs and Opels she hadn’t seen in so long; a streetcar, blue sparks shooting off its cables as it rounded the corner ahead; horse-drawn carts carrying empty burlap sacks. Police wagons rumbled over the cobblestones, and a couple of policemen, their faces obscured by driving goggles, whizzed past on motor scooters. Arrests must be occurring all over the city.

  If only she knew someone powerful enough to help her and loyal enough to be trusted. Just one person.

  But she was alone.

  More police whistles shrilled, so nearby that she jumped. The man walking alongside her shot her a startled look. She had to get off the streets. Her good luck couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, someone would recognize Hitler’s former pet.

  A narrow alley yawned between two stone buildings. She darted into its darkness. Rubbish bins had been shoved against the wall, and the stink of decaying food and coffee grounds and cat piss assailed her nose. She didn’t care. She leaned on the wall, letting the iciness of the stones seep through her coat, the almost painful sensation steadying her.

  There was someone she could go to for help.

  Eva.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering in the cold wind that whipped down the alley. Contacting her former best friend would be mad.

  But for the first time in months, she didn’t shove thoughts of Eva out of her head. Her once dearest friend: sweet, laughing, sport-mad Eva, who loved photography and Karl May cowboy stories and skiing. Their thirteen years of friendship gone in an instant when Gretchen had found out that Eva had secretly been dating Hitler. For two years, two of the people she had loved most in the world had concealed their romance from her. The betrayal still tasted bitter in her mouth.

  How could she possibly go to Eva? How could she trust her again?

  Footsteps pounded in the street beyond the alley. Gretchen shrank against the wall. The opening between the buildings was so narrow she caught only a flash of a brown suit and the frightened whiteness of a man’s face as he ran past. Two SA fellows were close on his heels, shouting, “Halt! Social Democrat swine!”

  Surprise washed over Gretchen. So they weren’t only arresting reporters, but the liberal Social Democrats, too. Were any members of the opposing political parties safe? Or were they all being rounded up—everyone whom Hitler perceived as an enemy? If Daniel was still free somewhere, he couldn’t stay that way for long, not with the police force and SA groups flooding the city.

  She had no choice. If she wanted to find Daniel, there was only one person who might be willing to track down his location and keep Gretchen’s reappearance a secret. It was a risk she must take.

  Surely Hitler had thrown Eva over by now; a Bavarian shopgirl wasn’t marriage material for the new chancellor in Berlin. In the time she and Eva had been apart, she wouldn’t have become a dedicated National Socialist, Gretchen knew. Eva had never cared a pin about politics. By now, she probably had a new beau, and without the old string tying her to Hitler, she might listen to Gretchen. She might still care about her. Gretchen felt something swell in her throat. Just as she still cared for Eva.

  She crouched on the ground, trying to curl into herself, so if anyone happened to glance into the alley she would look like a shadow between the bins of rubbish. She was going to have to wait here awhile. At least one hour. By then the SA men should have brought the Munich Post reporters to jail and filled out their intake papers. Enough time for Daniel to be processed, if he had been among those captured.

  A newspaper, wet and wrinkled from the falling snow, lay on the cobblestones. She brushed it clean. It held today’s date—Thursday, 9 March 1933—but as she skimmed the front page, she saw no mention of Himmler’s police appointment. Apparently today’s events had been a surprise for Munich’s residents. How like Hitler to strike quickly before anyone anticipated his plan, and then strike again, before anyone could react. Clever. But she could be clever, too. And she had an advantage that few people did: She’d spent years at Hitler’s side, drinking in his advice as though it were water. She knew how his mind worked. That knowledge might be the only thing that kept her alive.

  So many people saw him shouting during his speeches and thought he was emotional. Spontaneous and authentic. But she’d sat in a corner of the parlor, playing paper dolls or sketching, while he’d agonized over the proper words to use at his next appearance. She’d watched as he practiced hand gestures in front of a mirror—a closed fist smashing into an open palm for emphasis, a hand soaring at the end of a sentence—while Papa nodded in approval. Behind that passionate facade lurked a calculating brain. He knew what reaction he wanted from his followers and how to provoke it. There was very little he did that was unrehearsed. She suspected that was why he seemed to disappear so completely into each role: One moment he was the red-faced, shouting speaker; the next, he was the gentle savior, accepting a bouquet of wildflowers from a child with a soft smile. He knew how to vanish into whichever person a particular crowd wanted him to be.

  She crumpled the sodden newspaper in her hand. Very well. She would become like him. She’d transform into whatever role she needed to. She’d put feeling aside and reason things through, like he would. Beginning with: Could she trust Eva?

  There was no way of knowing for certain. Once, though, they had shared so much. Several months after Eva’s parents had temporarily separated—Gretchen had never found out why—Eva had journeyed to Dachau for the summer with Gretchen and Reinhard to stay at their grandparents’ house.

  It had been a magical time. They had slept in a narrow bed beneath an open window, and every day they woke to the cackle of chickens and the rich scent of manure. They’d played hide-and-seek with the local children in the abandoned munitions factory, and the days had been long and shaded green. Years later, when Eva had been stuck at a convent school in far-off Simbach, they’d written each other faithfully every week, and Eva had once mentioned how much she’d treasured Gretchen’s kindness during the strangest time of her life.

  Maybe Eva still remembered.

  In the distance, church bells pealed, slow, solemn notes that hovered in the air before fading. Half past four. At least another thirty minutes before she could telephone Eva—it would probably take that long for the Munich Post reporters to be hauled to the city jail and processed. She prayed Eva still worked at H
err Hoffmann’s photography shop; so much could have changed in the year and a half she had been gone. Shivering, she crouched in the shadows and waited.

  The bells were ringing five o’clock when Gretchen emerged from the alley. The streetlamps hadn’t been switched on yet, and only the illumination from lit windows broke apart the descending gloom.

  She darted into the first beer hall she came across to find a public telephone. Inside it was smoky and warm. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that banners of different political parties were draped across each of the long trestle tables. She had forgotten the custom—each party or workers’ union had their own table at beer halls, strictly reserved for its members. When she was younger, Reinhard and his SA comrades had sometimes taken her with them to the National Socialist table at the Hofbräuhaus, where they could eat cold cuts on rye bread and pretzels for almost nothing, while a brass band played.

  Now the political tables were empty, except for a few men in SS uniforms, hunched over their beer steins. Nobody sat at the workers’ union tables, either; presumably it was too early for the men to have left work for the day. A brass band played on the stage, but even beneath the wailing tubas, Gretchen could hear how unnaturally silent the beer hall was.

  Before any of the waitresses could approach her, she hurried away from the main room, making for the long corridor where the lavatories were located. A public telephone hung on the wall by the men’s room. She snatched up the receiver and dialed the exchange for Herr Hoffmann’s photography shop. Somehow her fingers still remembered the numbers. The telephone buzzed twice in her ear before someone picked up on the other end.