by Andie Newton
I swung the whisky bottle in the air by its neck, cocked my hip and palmed both glasses in my hand. ‘If you want this, you’ll turn it on.’
A sly smile curled on his lips. He spun the dial until he found ‘Die Fahne Hoch’ on the 24-hour channel, lowering the volume as if our nation’s anthem was a melody for love. Next, he unscrewed one of the light bulbs in the ceiling so that the room hazed with dull light.
With his back to me, I flipped the almond locket open and dumped Toyoka’s powdered herb into his glass. It settled at the bottom and then disappeared when I sloshed whisky on top.
He grabbed the glass from my hand, sniffed it then tilted it in the air for a toast. ‘Thousand Year Reich.’
I nodded once. ‘Thousand Year Reich.’ Our glasses clinked together, and then he gulped his drink in one shot, while I took a sip of mine.
I poured him another. ‘Easy, Director Koch.’ I giggled. ‘Or there won’t be any left.’
‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ he said, before gulping another.
‘I’m not hiding,’ I said, drawing the shade on the window. ‘Just busy doing Louise’s job. You of all people should know that.’
‘I should?’
He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me into his chest. ‘Then why aren’t you on the third floor, where I can see you more often?’
‘Say the word and it will be done. There should only be one head secretary, and that’s me.’ A whisky-licked smile lingered on my lips.
‘You know,’ I said, walking my fingers up his arm, ‘if you got rid of Louise, I could sit across from you. And you could drop as many things as you like. All. Day. Long.’
He downed the rest of his drink, threw the glass to the wall and it cracked into three jagged pieces. Then he drank mine and threw it against the wall too.
I gasped in protest. ‘Director Koch—’
He kissed me hard, so hard his teeth scraped against mine. Strong fingers gripped the back of my dress and I felt the fabric scrunch in his knuckles as it tightened around my chest.
He pulled away and took a breath as if he had held it the entire time we kissed. ‘I like the way you think, Ella.’ Whisky glittered in his teeth. Gas crept from the corner of his mouth and he burped into this collar. ‘But Louise…’
I wiggled out from his hands and pretended to walk away. ‘Then I will just stay on the second floor!’
He caught me by both wrists, pulling me back as he twisted them. His neck bowed like an ape’s and his lips probed mine. I felt the difference in our size as he groped me. Then his tongue slipped into my mouth and something inside of me clicked. I’m finished fooling around. I kissed him hard, forcefully pulling his lips with my teeth. When I stopped and looked at him, his eyes were like moons.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said.
I raised one eyebrow.
He nudged me toward the bed, unbuttoning his trousers and his shirt, getting out of his clothes faster than if they had caught fire. His chest bulged with sculpted muscle and it was hard not to notice how attractive he was with his clothes off. Hungry hands clawed their way down my back and he gnawed on my shoulder as if it were food. I felt the weight of his body—he could crush me—and I didn’t like feeling helpless. I slapped him across the face, his body swayed, and the medicine glimmered in his eye.
‘I’m not your meat,’ I said.
He flopped backward onto the bed, a snarled smile dipping low on his lip. ‘Nein?’
I slid the belt from the loops on my dress, held it in the air, and then let it slip through my fingers. ‘You’re mine.’
He put his hand to his head. Perspiration beaded in his hairline and a woozy groan hummed in his cheeks. I unbuttoned my dress. One jerk of my shoulders and it dropped to my ankles. His blue eyes lowered to a melt, and he teetered forward. Then a slobbered smile skidded off my thigh, and he thumped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
I cried dryly, dropping to my knees and feeling very numb.
*
By the time I woke the next morning Erik had already left. A note on the pillow next to me said to arrive at his office after lunch to start my new job. Toyoka said if I implied sex he’d think we had it, and she was right.
I was relieved. Then I thought about the look on Max’s face in the corridor.
And I felt very hollow and sad.
24
December
Erik had sent Louise to Berlin later that morning with a small contingency from the Braunes Haus that already had plans to go there. I heard she protested with an ugly cry that bled makeup down her cheeks, which I was glad to have missed. Now, Hoffmann worried almost every day that I wouldn’t have the strength to cover up his drinking and stay on top of the files, but I was doing just fine.
Erik never forgot my name, yet surprisingly, he largely kept to himself, like he had always done before. Though sometimes after the administration meetings, when he’d take his jacket off and loosen his tie, I’d notice a slight change in his demeanour. First, he’d get very talkative, then after a drink to calm his nerves, I’d catch him following me around the office with his eyes.
Then there was Max. I left him notes for several days after he saw me with Erik, apologizing for what I had done, and every day he slipped them back under my door unopened, while I was at work. I was sure he had heard about my new job as Erik’s secretary—it was big news around the Königsplatz.
When I moved into Louise’s office it was crowded with knickknacks; porcelain kissing birds on top of the filing cabinet, a leafy green plant near the window and a year’s worth of Fraeun Warte magazines piled under her typewriter desk. Every week Louise sent a letter requesting more of her things, and I accommodated her, but only partially. I drew the line when she asked me to ship her desk; she said she was allergic to anything other than German oak and that she had broken out in hives.
By mid-December I was bored with the game we had been playing and put the rest of her things, things she hadn’t even asked for yet, into two medium-sized boxes with fat labels pasted on the front: Berlin. I stood in the middle of the room; just a coat rack, a set of filing cabinets and an L-shaped desk remained, but her smell still lingered like a ghost: a combination of fingernail polish and slept-in sheets.
I pushed the boxes into the corridor and wiped both hands together as if I had just thrown out the last of the rubbish. I had been so absorbed in the cleanup I didn’t even hear the panicked pace of a courier’s footsteps come up behind me.
‘Fräulein Strauss,’ he said, almost out of breath. ‘A cable from Berlin.’
Erik had been in his office and stood up when he noticed I had a cable in my hands. He read it silently to himself while I rearranged my office. After I had got rid of Louise’s things, it felt bigger and I thought I’d play with the position of my desk; maybe move it toward the window like I had it when I worked with Hoffmann.
Erik crumpled the cable into a ball and tossed it in my rubbish bin. ‘Louise is dead.’
‘What?’ I said, sliding my desk toward the window. His voice was oddly normal, and at first I didn’t think I heard him right.
‘RAF bombing. The entire detachment from Munich is dead.’
The RAF loved to bomb Berlin, especially since there was nothing left to bomb of Hamburg. ‘A raid? Wouldn’t they have found a shelter?’
‘They died two days ago. Twenty-three hundred pounds of bombs dropped in thirty minutes. Ten thousand people killed in one day.’
I had never heard of such a blitz on a German city. The RAF are getting stronger. ‘Is there much of the city left?’ I wondered if he expected me to lament over Louise. After all, she did go to Berlin because of me. ‘Poor Louise,’ I added, just to sound concerned.
‘That’s all the cable says.’ He turned to walk back into his office then paused, put a finger to his chin and studied my office, shifting his eyes from wall to wall. ‘This is all wrong.’ He curled his muscly hands around the corners of my desk and pulled it fr
om the wall, realigning it with the open door that connected my office to his. He flashed a flirty smile, and he slapped my rear-end, hard, which I pretended to like. Then he walked into his office and sat down at his desk as if the news from Berlin was nothing at all.
I walked back into the corridor, crossed out the word Berlin on Louise’s box and labelled it for disposal.
*
I waited for Christophe in the dark alley next to my building’s fire escape with the only thing the florist had left: a droopy purple flower and a bouquet of wilted greenery wrapped in torn brown paper. Stuffed in the middle was a list detailing the newest administration changes in the Reich.
Minutes turned into an hour, and it was already late. I played with the frayed end of my scarf, then a rusted service door from the building across the alley opened with a bang. Christophe tumbled out of it and crashed into some metal rubbish bins, spilling rotten refuse all over the pavement.
He scrambled to his feet and then bolted toward me, snatching the bouquet from my hands and tucking it under his arm.
‘Get out of here,’ he said, eyes black as marbles, and his face bearded in grey.
‘But—’ I thought he’d want to know about Louise.
He looked over his shoulder before he turned the corner. ‘Now!’
A cat hissed somewhere nearby, and I trotted as fast as I could down the alley in the opposite direction, along my building’s backside, tracing the bricks with my hand in the dark.
I felt some relief when I turned the corner onto Petersplatz and into the light. I searched my pocket for something to smoke. A man walking down the street with his hands stuffed in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth stopped cold when he saw my face.
‘Ella?’
‘Max?’ I felt a flutter of delight; it pulled me away from the wall and I smiled. Maybe now he’ll talk to me.
He peered into the dark alley behind me and sneered. ‘What are you doing out here?’ He took a drag from his cigarette. A live wire strung over our heads sparked blue light, and its glow spread a dead, ashy look across his face. ‘You know what? I don’t want to know.’ He flicked his cigarette to the ground and headed back the way he had come, toward the Marienplatz.
I reached for his arm. Words dripped down my neck and lumped in my throat. ‘Max, I need to tell you something.’ My fingers touched his coat sleeve, but he pulled away. I stood in a shadowed gap between a parked car and a cobwebbed brick door and watched him disappear into the foggy steam that rose from the gutter. A girl on a small balcony across the street shouted for me to chase him, but I couldn’t move.
The look in Max’s eyes—the disappointment, the longing—it was too much to think about. The rational part of me knew it was safer for him to hate me. Then I thought, no, he needed to know it was my life I was saving and that I didn’t sleep with Erik. I ripped the yellow scarf from my wrist, tucked it deep into my coat pocket, and then hurried after him in a cloppy, clunky run.
I burst into the square looking for him, my breath billowing into frosty white clouds that evaporated into still dark air. A man dragging his girlfriend by the hand shuffled past me and toward a small crowd just a short distance away. I stumbled closer and saw what appeared to be a deer contorted on the ground, but what would a deer be doing in Munich? I found Max buried in the commotion; my arm nudged up against his, my body in a stupor: the deer was Christophe.
Instead of the flowers I gave him, Christophe’s hands clutched his stomach, which bled a pool of warmed, dark red blood onto the chilled cobbled stones. Blood spat from his mouth, then he said something in English about his mother. People gasped when they heard his quivering, all too British voice.
I leaned forward, and his head wobbled in my direction before his lazy eyes fixed their gaze on me.
‘He’s dead,’ someone shouted, and a bitter chill blew his hair to the side—his scar uncovered for all to see.
I looked at Max in horror, hand over my mouth, and his face turned pale.
‘Ella?’ By my reaction, I was sure Max knew I had known the person that just died at our feet. More so, he was British, which meant he was a spy. His fingers searched blindly for mine. When he found them, he gave my palm a squeeze. ‘Ella?’ he said again, gulping, as if realizing through the face of a dead man that staying mad at me wasn’t something he wanted to do.
I broke out in a cold sweat—Max had my hand and people would link us together if they saw. I needed to get out of there, and I needed to get out of there quick.
I pulled my hand away, taking a shakey step backward from the crowd. Brimmed hats and thick-coated elbows dug their way through, people shrieking and whispering at the sight of a dead man. Patrons from the Ratskeller filtered into the street, beers in hand, with the band’s tune, ‘A Little Hunting Song’, bursting intermittingly every time the doors swung open.
I looked at Max, and then to Christophe, with my hand pressed to my mouth, my eyes sliding over the top. I ran away into the dark, my shoes clicking and clacking against the pavement, before being sick not far away in an unlit section of the Marienplatz.
The glass door of a closed shop flew open while I was bent over, and an old woman with wispy silver hair and black eyes loomed over me, holding a stick in her hand.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded, shaking the stick in the night air, and it was then I realized who she was.
‘Frau Haas?’
‘How do you know my name?’ She stepped forward, gritting her teeth, and I fell backward on the pavement. A new death card had been added to the front of her door: her husband, Herr Haas.
She saw me look at it. ‘Who are you?’
I scooted away, feet scraping the cobblestones, scrambling to get up, just as the glockenspiel’s forty-three clanging bells erupted wildly throughout the square.
‘Go away! Leave me alone!’
And I ran into an alley.
25
For once, I actually thought I could get caught, and not by the Gestapo but by an informant, someone who could stab me in the stomach and leave me to die in the street.
I messengered a note to Erik that I was sick and then hid in my flat, spending Christmas rocking back-and-forth in my chair, knees in my neck and arms wrapped around my legs. By the time I went back to work, fear had turned into restlessness. The bite of winter had settled into the city, nobody seemed to move unless they were running from an air raid, or going to work for the Reich. Everything dripped in grey and had a strange emptiness carved out from the inside: the buildings, the sky, the people—shells of what they used to be. I had just been thinking to myself that I needed to get out of the city, go somewhere where I could forget about the war, forget about the Reich for a while, when Erik strolled into my office. With no administration meetings to attend and his calendar cleared for the day, he’d changed into casual trousers and a collared shirt. I almost didn’t recognize him.
‘Need to get out of the city?’ he said.
‘Did I say it out loud?’
He had a winter rose in his hand and a smile that glinted glory. The rose wasn’t from a florist, but from the frozen flower boxes outside the V-building, the ones with black petals and gnarled twigs for stems. ‘Here.’ He shoved the rose into my hand and then waited for me to say thank you. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘It’s the weekend,’ I said. ‘New Year’s Eve.’
‘Yes. I know,’ he said, sitting on the corner of my desk. ‘I’m going to Schliersee with a few friends from the NSDAP to do a little skiing. Do you want to come?’ He tapped his shoe against the side of my desk. Tap, tap, tap.
‘Schliersee?’ I said as if I didn’t hear him.
Schliersee was a town Hoffmann talked about on occasion. It was a place where people skied fast during the day, drank beer even faster in the evening and watched the starry winter nights laze into crisp alpine mornings. A place untouched by the Nazi propaganda machine, only a cluster of mom-and-pop pensions along with a few small beer halls populated the town
, no real inhabitants except for the tourists—who only cared about skiing.
‘Just a little holiday. Two other girls are coming along also—a group of us.’
My pulse revved like an engine when he said ‘holiday.’ I wanted to get out of Munich, now I had my chance. And a holiday? It meant no work, just play, a day to be myself. No Max, no files, no lies, just Ella. Tomorrow is my birthday. ‘Sounds perfect.’
He hopped off my desk. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning. That is… as long as your boyfriend doesn’t mind.’
‘Boyfriend?’ The word took me by surprise. Then I remembered what I had told him in the car the night I drugged him. I wasn’t playing hard to get anymore. In fact, I wasn’t playing at all. Christophe’s death had changed everything. Louise’s too. I wanted a fresh start—I wanted to feel something other than loss, anger and duty. ‘We broke up.’
He nodded, and I smiled.
*
Erik arrived at my door early the next morning. He had a swoosh of blond hair just above his right eye, and the cuffs of his collared shirt flipped up with his cold-weather coat. His cheekbones rounded near his eyes, and he didn’t look as tall as he did in the office.
He reached behind me and grabbed my suitcase, the scent of apple Gummibär candy thick in his clothes. I gave him an odd look—something in between a smirk and a grimace. Erik Koch wasn’t the type of man I pictured helping a woman with her bags, much less smelling sugary-sweet like a handful of candies. He seemed charming; like any other boy I had met before the war had changed or taken them.
He stood straight with my case gripped tight to his side. ‘What?’ he said, noticing my look.
‘Nothing… it’s just… you look different without your work clothes on,’ I said. ‘It’s as if you’re somebody else.’
He dropped my case and stood in the corridor. One hand behind his back, the other held out for me to shake. A slight bow lowered his thick, sandy lashed eyes to mine. ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m Erik Koch. I have one older brother and a younger sister.’
