Prisoner of Night and Fog

by Anne Blankman

  “What are you doing?” Cohen cried. “Hurry! Röhm might be here any minute!”

  She dropped the clipping and hurried to the bureau beneath the window. She yanked open a drawer and pulled out three graying undershirts. Their rank smell hit her in the face like a fist. Quickly, she went through the bureau’s pitiful contents: woolen long johns with holes in both knees, a sweater with an unraveling collar, two pairs of badly darned socks, broken bootlaces, handkerchiefs so old the fabric had turned transparent—

  “Nothing!” Cohen kicked a box in disgust. Do you see any other boxes, Fräulein Müller?”

  As she turned to answer, she spotted something in the street. At the dinner hour, the narrow avenue writhed with people: day laborers in stained jackets, school children in checked dresses or shirtsleeves, all hurrying home for their supper, and, in the midst of them, a brown circle, moving steadily.

  She froze. The men’s heads were down, their faces obscured by their caps, but their distinctive brown uniforms identified them instantly. And Röhm was unmistakable—the quick, deliberate walk and the squat, heavy frame.

  “It’s Röhm,” she said. “He’s on his way.”

  She couldn’t complete the thought. If Röhm found her, here, in this old Party crank’s apartment, helping a Jew—

  Cohen cursed. “We can’t leave without the diary.”

  Her heart swung like a hammer in her chest. The muscle in her legs tensed, ready to run. Get out, get out, get out. But she had to know more about Papa’s death.

  She glanced about the room. A moth-eaten sofa whose cushions had been tossed aside; a bureau whose drawers hung open drunkenly, their contents spilled across the floor; a few shirts and trousers and socks; a counter with a white porcelain teapot . . .

  She stared at it. So clean, when everything else in the apartment was dirty and dingy.

  Cohen followed her gaze. In two strides, he had reached the teapot and ripped off its top. He grinned. “Well done, Fräulein Müller.” He pulled out a hammered metal box, barely bigger than his hand.

  “Let’s clean up this mess,” he said, slipping the box into his pocket. “Or else they’ll know someone else was here first.”

  “No, they won’t.” They must get away now. “For all they know, Dearstyne was a lousy housekeeper—let’s go!”

  “Almost done.” Cohen snatched up the pile of papers and threw them into the box. Outside, Gretchen heard the low rumble of a man’s voice, still so distant she couldn’t separate the sound into words. Röhm, she thought as Cohen reached for the sofa cushions on the floor.

  “Forget the cushions!” She snatched up his hand and ran, pulling on him so hard that he bumped into her. They rocketed into the hallway. Footsteps echoed from the stairwell; another moment and the SA men would be upon them.

  The back stairs were their only chance. Still clutching the boy’s hand, she ran down the corridor, away from the main staircase. Together, they reached the closed door at the end of the hall, skidding to a stop. He twisted the knob, and then they were hurtling down the back stairs in the darkness. All of the overhead bulbs must have burned out, but it didn’t matter, for she could move by feel: the slippery linoleum steps, the metal railing beneath her hand, Cohen’s fingers clamped on hers.

  They shot off the bottom step together. There was light shining around the edges of a door, where it hadn’t been fitted properly into its frame, and she raced toward the slivers of light. Her hands fumbled for the doorknob, closing for an instant around the boy’s, and she heard his shuddering breath in the darkness as the knob slipped around in their sweaty fingers, and then he was turning it and they flung themselves outside.

  A narrow alley, lined with brick. Here the buildings leaned toward each other so precariously, they blotted out the little bit of sunlight left. Cohen ran toward the opposite building’s wall, where he had chained the bicycle to one of the barred windows. He hopped astride; then she climbed onto the handlebars and they rode off into the encroaching night.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  13

  DUSK HAD BEGUN TO STRETCH ACROSS THE CITY when they reached the Diana Temple in the Hofgarten. The manicured gardens feathered out in all directions, bushes and flowers fading into blurs in the blue-black twilight. Gretchen felt the warm exhalation of Cohen’s breath on the back of her neck. Sitting so close to him on the bicycle should seem wrong. But it didn’t. His proximity should disgust her, but it only confused her.

  Sometimes she had seen boys in the street wearing yarmulkes, or heard them speaking Yiddish when she rode a streetcar. She had always turned away, so she could avoid them. An easy task, since many of the city’s Jews lived in the southern part of the city, far from her. At school, she tried to ignore the four Jewish girls in her class. That, too, had been easy, for their surnames placed them at opposite ends of their alphabetically arranged seats, and she sat in the middle. Obeying her father’s instructions to stay away from Jews had been simple. She had barely had to try.

  Until she had seen the Hasidic man in the alley, she hadn’t looked at a Jewish male, not really looked at him, long enough to see the planes of his face, the expression in his eyes. Until that night, she had never spoken to a male Jew before.

  They were nothing like she had been taught.

  A dull buzzing sounded in her ears. If she and her people were mistaken about the Jews, then they were mistaken about everything. Without that screw, the entire machine would eventually break down. She felt a sob rise in her throat, and had to swallow it down. Uncle Dolf and Papa couldn’t be wrong. Could they?

  If they were wrong, nothing made sense anymore. The box she had carefully constructed about herself would fall apart. And she didn’t know if she could bear standing out in the open, in the harsh wind, without the comforting warmth of those walls she had built to shut out everything she didn’t like or understand.

  The bicycle coasted to a stop. Gretchen clambered off the handlebars, accepting Cohen’s outstretched hand before remembering they shouldn’t touch. And she had taken his hand, back in Dearstyne’s apartment.

  She ripped her fingers from the Jew’s grasp. For a moment, he looked startled, his face pale in the thickening gloom. Gretchen folded her trembling arms across her chest.

  “I see,” he said softly, “you have remembered yourself.”

  His shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, but he didn’t make a sound. Then he turned away, striding down the path toward the Diana Temple, leaving her with the bicycle. The downward tilt of his head looked lonely.

  She had hurt him. The thing she had always thought was impossible—wounding a Jew’s heart—had happened. The boy hadn’t been pretending; she had seen the injury in his eyes before he’d walked away.

  She walked slowly after him, the bicycle’s tires rumbling over the sidewalk. He was waiting inside the Diana Temple. He didn’t look at her as she neared the small stone building that stood in the center of a set of converging paths. Archways as large as doors spanned the curved walls, so she could see him standing inside, leaning against the wall, head down, dark hair hanging and hiding his expression. The metal box gleamed dully in his hands.

  He said nothing when she entered. He didn’t look at her until she touched his hand, hesitantly, her fingers light, barely skimming his warm skin. But she heard the breath catch in his throat. He recognized what she was doing—touching him deliberately.

  “Thank you for helping me off the bicycle,” she said.

  His head lifted. He didn’t smile. But something changed in his face—a loosening of clenched muscles in his jaw, perhaps—transforming him from formidable and intimidating to quiet and grave. “You’re welcome.”

  They sat together on the floor. Cohen fiddled with the lock for several minutes. Finally, he pulled off his shoe and smashed it onto the box with such force that Gretchen started. The broken lock dangl
ed in two pieces. Inside the box lay a worn leather book, no bigger than her palm. Cohen flipped through it, pausing at a page before pressing it into her hand.

  “Read it,” he said. “And you’ll start to understand, as I have.”

  She carried the diary to one of the arches, where the purple gleam of twilight still filtered strongly enough through the opening for her to see the page.

  10 November 1923, she read.

  I am dying. I must write this down before it is too late. The tall shoemaker Müller marched in the front line, a few feet ahead of me. When we reached the Residenzstrasse, the street was too narrow for him to walk with the others, so he continued on ahead of them. I think he was hit first. I saw his body jerk once. Then he stumbled in front of Herr Hitler, his body acting as shield, absorbing the bullets meant for our leader. He was dead in an instant.

  Then I was shot and on the pavement, too. I dragged myself forward on my elbows, trying to get to Hitler. He had fallen, too, maybe shot. But Müller’s corpse lay between us. There were powder burns on his back. Then Hitler was scrambling up, helped by two other comrades, and they were hustling him away, and I tried to run, too, toward the center of the city with everyone else—

  She stopped, staring at the white page without seeing it. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father marching in the softly falling snow, proud and tall in his Great War uniform. She saw him knocked sideways by a bullet’s blast, then his body convulsing again and again.

  Taking a shaky breath, she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, willing the image away. Powder burns on his back. A bullet hole, encircled with dried blood and gray dust, on his tunic between his shoulder blades.

  Someone had pressed a pistol against her father’s body and fired. The shot’s proximity sprayed powder onto his coat, and the bullet’s blast knocked him sideways in front of Hitler.

  Everything Cohen had said was true. Someone had murdered her father.

  Tears burned her eyes.

  The powder burns meant the shot had been fired too close to her father’s body for it to have been a mistake. She couldn’t deny or explain away the truth anymore, not now that she had seen the same doubts as hers in someone else’s journal.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the blurred floor Her father had not been a hero; he had not leapt in front of Hitler to protect him from a barrage of bullets. He had stumbled sideways, protecting Hitler with his body, because he had already been shot. The bullet’s impact in his back had thrown him in front of Hitler. He hadn’t intended to sacrifice himself for the Führer at all.

  Her hands tightened into fists. He had been murdered, and whoever had killed him needed to pay.

  Daniel spoke, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”

  She didn’t bother replying; there was no real answer. “How did you find out about the diary?” she asked.

  She watched him as he answered. How steadily he kept his eyes on hers, as though he had nothing to hide. As much as she wanted not to, she believed everything he said. “Stefan Dearstyne came to the Munich Post offices last week, late at night. I was the only reporter still there.

  “Stefan had recently found the diary, and was deeply troubled by what it revealed. He had known nothing about his brother’s suspicions, and Lars had died the day after writing that entry. Apparently, Stefan had been asking questions at NSDAP meetings and speeches, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. I agreed to help him investigate in return for an exclusive scoop.”

  She braced her hand on the archway frame, the stone rough under her palms. Papa’s reputation had kept her and her family safe and cared for. But it had all been built on a lie. A National Socialist had murdered her father. And for the first time in her life, she had a problem she couldn’t present to Uncle Dolf and wait for his solution. Without knowing who was involved, how could she drag Uncle Dolf into a dangerous investigation, especially when the Party was strengthening into the most powerful political force in Germany? He needed to focus on the Party’s goals, not on an eight-year-old crime.

  She felt Papa’s hands rubbing her back after she woke crying from a nightmare. She felt his warmth curling around her when she sat on his lap and smelled his scents of tobacco and shoe polish and snow-dampened wool. She heard his voice, deep and slow, like that of a dove, nothing like Uncle Dolf’s wood thrush voice that was melodious and smooth but flowed so fast that sometimes she couldn’t hang on to his words long enough to puzzle them out. She tasted Papa’s lumpy potato pancakes—the one food he could cook—too tough in places and too soft in others, and remembered how she ate every bite, even when Reinhard pushed away his plate and Mama said she should have saved the potatoes for soup instead. And she saw his bullet-ripped and bloodied uniform.

  “I need to know what happened.” She sounded so harsh, she scarcely recognized herself.

  “Even if it means your family loses its privileged status?”

  She turned away from the window, her palms stinging. She turned away from the archway, her palms stinging. She had gripped the frame so tightly, the stone had scraped her skin. But she didn’t mind the pain. She welcomed it. The sensation was something to cling to; anything was better than this gut-churning fear. “Even then, Herr Cohen.”

  “Very well.” His eyes held hers for a long moment. “You realize it’s very likely that whoever killed your father is a high-ranking National Socialist, for he would have been marching in the front lines. And whatever we uncover will create a scandal within the Party.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She tried to sound scornful, but her voice was shaking too badly.

  “No.” He spoke quietly, without a trace of the anger or condescension she expected. “I want what I suspect you want, although you may not wish to admit it. The truth.” He hesitated. “No matter what it costs.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  14

  LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN A BOARDINGHOUSE, Reinhard kept his door locked, though a few twists with Gretchen’s hairpin solved the problem. She stepped into the gloom, drawing the door closed. In the heavy silence, her ragged breaths sounded thunderous. My God, she thought, I must be going mad, taking such a chance.

  Since meeting with Cohen yesterday, she had felt a subtle shifting of the ground beneath her feet. It moved and buckled continuously. She had to walk carefully, speak slowly, or she feared she might betray her new imbalance. Her new fears.

  This morning, Gretchen had helped Mama prepare the boarders’ breakfast, she and her mother speaking like strangers as they moved about the kitchen in their well-practiced routine. At the Braunes Haus, she had answered telephones, filed papers, skimmed newspapers for stories about the NSDAP; she had listened when Uncle Dolf stopped by the office to complain to Hanfstaengl about a foreign reporter’s unflattering article; and she had smiled when he kissed her hands farewell in his old-fashioned manner.

  After work, she had bicycled back to the boardinghouse, arriving at half past six, just in time to dish out supper: a shoulder roast, stewed in beer with apples and cabbage in a Dutch oven, and, for dessert, a pear cake studded with walnuts. Sugar and fruit and nuts—clearly, the household accounts weren’t as dire as Mama had said.

  She scrubbed the dishes and then fixed a meal for Reinhard, ham and cheese sandwiches and apples, tucked with a red checked cloth into a tin lunch box, and she said nothing as he grinned, boasting he was going on a train journey and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night at the latest. She listened to the front door bang shut behind him, wondering where he could be going. But one never asked Reinhard questions.

  And then she turned her gaze toward the stairs. She hadn’t been permitted inside her brother’s room for about three years, since she had dusted his writing table and accidentally broken a tiny glass bird, a present for his twelfth birthday from Uncle Dolf.

  Her heart beat f
aster. After Papa’s death, Mama had given many of his possessions to Reinhard, saying a man’s only son should inherit his things. Quickly, Gretchen mounted the stairs. She didn’t know when she would have the chance again to search her brother’s room.

  She wasn’t certain what she had expected: piles of dirty laundry on the floor, perhaps, or a stack of girlie magazines hidden beneath the bed, or maybe some records by the big band orchestras he enjoyed. What she hadn’t expected was nothing at all.

  The room was a blank canvas, leaving no hints of its resident’s personality. Her bedroom burst with color: the rag quilt her grandmother had sewn; the postcards of Paris and London, Madrid and Zurich pinned to the wall; the stack of library books on the desk; the red curtains she had stitched together last summer.

  Reinhard’s room was practically empty: the narrow bed covered with a fraying chenille spread, a spotless writing table, a hooked rug on the varnished floorboards, the furnishings the color of milk, the wood a pale maple, all color washed away.

  There was nothing on the walls: no pictures, no books, no records. Neatly hung brownshirt uniforms in the armoire and a wet washcloth hanging over the chipped basin’s lip were the only indications anyone had been in here recently.

  The room was a void.

  Papa’s old shoemaking tools lay at the bottom of the armoire, behind Reinhard’s winter galoshes and storm trooper boots. The iron shoe repair stand, the heavy old scissors, the thick thread, the patches of leather. She had to blink back tears.