Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (13 page)

But he had been wrong, she thought as she slipped across the room, clutching her suitcase tightly. Behind her, she heard mattresses sighing as the girls lay down, surrendering to the cocaine.

Her hand hovered over the doorknob. In her mind, she saw
Hitler’s face as he had looked the last time they had seen each other, right after he’d learned about her and Daniel. White with shock, his eyes bloodshot and disbelieving.
You’re too trusting, Gretchen
, he’d said.
Everywhere, the Jew disguises himself. . . .

Daniel, true and straightforward, so unlike the men of lies she’d known before him. Even though he’d hated his life in England, he’d stayed for her sake.

She couldn’t give up. For Daniel’s sake, she must be willing to do anything.

Turning, she surveyed the room—most of the girls lay on their beds, tumbling into drug-hazed dreams. The small brunette was still awake, huddled on a bed in the far corner. She plucked at her dressing gown’s hem, as though she couldn’t stay still.

Gretchen walked back to the girl’s bed. “What happened to Monika? Who shot her?”

The girl’s face was still soft with baby fat; she couldn’t be any older than Gretchen. “I don’t know.” The words came out hard and angry. “The police don’t seem to care. Not even Monika’s parents do—she hadn’t spoken to them in years.” She swiped at the tears on her cheeks and nodded at the other girls. “We were on the stroll when it happened.”

On the stroll . . .
Surprise stopped Gretchen in her tracks. All of these girls were prostitutes. Did this lodging house only accept boarders who worked in that profession? She remembered Frau Fleischer’s comment about sending her to a doctor, and nerves coiled in her stomach. Frau Fleischer must think she was a prostitute, too. She’d have to get out of this place soon, before they figured out that she wasn’t.

Stay for Daniel,
she reminded herself and sat on the girl’s bed, the mattress rustling under the added weight.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Birgit.” She rubbed at the white dust coating her nostrils.

“What happened that night?”

Birgit flicked a silver lighter into life and fed the end of her cigarette into the flame. She took a long drag. “A car pulled up. A fellow got out of the backseat. It was Monika’s best customer’s car. I was so curious because he’d never shown himself before.” The words tumbled out as though she was eager to talk about that night. “Monika wouldn’t ever tell me his name, although I begged. I thought at last we were going to meet this fellow, and then he called out, ‘Fräulein Junge!’ and she turned and said, ‘Who are you?’” Birgit shuddered, hugging her knees to her chest. “He pulled out a pistol and shot her in the head. She didn’t make a sound. She just fell to the ground and didn’t move.”

So Monika Junge hadn’t known her killer. He hadn’t been a jealous boyfriend or a regular customer, but someone sent with the express purpose of murdering her. She and Daniel had been right: This killing was important. Why it was, she could not yet begin to guess.

“This customer must be behind Fräulein Junge’s death,” Gretchen said. “But since she didn’t recognize her killer, the customer couldn’t have been the man who shot her.”

Clearly, it had been a carefully planned assassination. But why murder a lowly prostitute? Had she merely been a convenient victim, someone whose murder would go largely unnoticed? An easy crime to blame Daniel for? By February 28, the day of Monika’s death, the National Socialists had known that Daniel
was back in Munich. With Hindenburg as president and the Enabling Act not yet passed, Hitler’s power was very limited. He must have realized that he needed a legal-looking reason to have Daniel executed.

But the scenario didn’t unspool neatly like a ribbon. If the National Socialists had only wanted to pin a murder on Daniel, they would have killed an anonymous person in the street. The murderer, though, had known Fräulein Junge’s name. She’d been the intended target. Her death, and Daniel being blamed for it, had been the proverbial two birds killed by a single stone.

DANIEL WAS STILL WAITING ACROSS THE STREET
when Gretchen sneaked out twenty minutes later. His eyes burned into hers as she hurried across the road. Up and down the snow-dusted avenue, boys bent over games of jacks as girls skipped rope, chanting a nursery rhyme to the steady
thwack
of the rope hitting the ground. Daniel grabbed her hand and pulled her into a passageway between the soot-stained houses. Here the walls slumped toward each other so precariously that they blotted out the weak strains of winter sunlight, and the children’s shrieks faded.

As quickly as she could, she told him everything she had learned, ending with the part she knew would upset him: She had asked to tag along with the rooming house girls tonight, to see if the customer drove past. Daniel shook his head, but she plowed on before he could interrupt.

Her offer had been refused—Frau Fleischer had said she couldn’t work, or even accompany the other girls as she’d hoped, until she’d been checked over by a physician and registered with the police. Prostitution might be legal in Berlin, the Frau had advised, but the profession had rules that were well worth following. After all, she’d added, if a customer caught a venereal disease from a prostitute, he could sue her in court for causing bodily harm. The landlady had cackled, saying Gisela—Gretchen had nearly started before remembering her false name—could enjoy a rare night off.

“Which means I’ll be alone tonight in the rooming house,” Gretchen said. “We might not have such a chance again.”

Daniel nodded in instant comprehension. “You said Frau Fleischer had Monika Junge’s lockbox in her office. Maybe there’s something inside that can help us figure out why she was killed.” He paused, his brows furrowed in thought. “There’s a men’s hostel down the street. It looks poor, so perhaps they’ll be too eager for my money to ask for my papers. I’ll reserve a bed there for myself, so I can be nearby.”

He touched her face, as if he was about to kiss her, then seemed to change his mind and stepped back, his hand falling to his side. Gretchen tried to ignore the stab of disappointment.
He’s miserable in England
, she reminded herself. And she couldn’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else. Perhaps it was for the best if they distanced themselves from each other—even though the absence of his touch was a pain so bright and sharp, it took her breath away. She had to pause before she could speak.

“Tonight I’ll open the front door when the coast’s clear, so keep a watch on the house,” she said at last. “Get a tool of some
kind from a hardware store, if you can. We’ll need it to break into the office. And here’s some money—you’ll need it for the hostel.” She gave him a few bills, which he took without a word, his cheeks slightly flushed.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “Stay safe.”

They separated at the street. Back in the bedroom, the girls were asleep, and Gretchen sat on her bed, wrapping herself in the blankets Frau Fleischer had provided. Snow had started falling again. As she listened to it hissing on the windowpane, she traced in her mind the little she had seen of the rooming house’s layout: the front hall, flanked by a parlor on the right, a dining room on the left, presumably with the kitchen behind. Frau Fleischer’s office was probably off the parlor, close to the chimney, so she could stay warm while going over the account books.

Most likely the office was kept locked, but Gretchen doubted the mechanism was too complicated for her to pick. She had plenty of experience because Papa had taught her how when she was little.

Sitting on the bed, surrounded by the girls’ shallow breathing, her old memories reared up: inching down the unheated stairwell with Papa in the middle of the night, trying not to stumble in the darkness, keeping a lookout while he fitted a thin pick into the cellar door lock. Watching as he twisted the tool back and forth until the tumblers fell into place.

Steady hands, delicate wrists, he used to say, his teeth shining white as he tried to smile. They would grab handfuls of coal from the bins in the basement; it was intended for their building’s furnace, but Papa always said nobody would notice the few missing pieces they needed to heat their kitchen stove. Gretchen would giggle because that was what he wanted, but her shame made
her insides hot. Her big, strong papa, who made shoes and had fought so hard in the war, was a thief.

Had he been as wicked as Hitler? Or had he been a simple man, so enthralled with his war comrade “Adi” that he had wanted his son to become his copy? What did it say about
her
, to have a monster or a fool for a father? Hitler would proclaim that blood and birth were inescapable bonds, but Alfred would tell her that she was her own person. She prayed Alfred was right.

At six o’clock, Frau Fleischer rang the supper bell and everyone trooped down the stairs into the dining room. Gretchen sat between Birgit and the redheaded girl. Back at the boardinghouse in Munich, she’d eaten in the kitchen with Mama and Reinhard, and now she found herself as shy as if she sat at a fancy restaurant and wasn’t sure of her table manners.

She soon discovered that she needn’t have worried; suppers at the rooming house were noisy, raucous affairs, with girls reaching over one another’s plates for the bread basket and chattering loudly. Some of them talked about going to the arcade at the Haus Vaterland tomorrow afternoon. One of the girls said she wanted to try the new tearoom on the Geisbergstrasse, which brought howls of laughter and jeers that she only wanted to see the Chinese businessmen who preferred it, because they were reputed to be big tippers, and what would her beau say?

“Do you have one?” Birgit asked Gretchen.

Gretchen started. She’d been thinking of her revolver, which she’d left rolled in a blouse in her suitcase. She’d wanted to bring it with her, but none of the other girls had carried their pocketbooks downstairs. “One what?”

“A beau.” Birgit reached for her glass of beer.

“Yes,” Gretchen said automatically, then thought of what she and Daniel had said to each other by his parents’ house. She picked at her bread, miserable. “I don’t know.”

Birgit laughed. “Either you do or you don’t.” She speared a green bean and waved her fork. “I don’t have a beau, and it’s much easier that way. Nobody to worry about but myself. Nobody to fuss at me about my job.” She chewed while the others chattered and giggled around them. “You look new to all this, so let me give you some advice: It’s better being alone.”

The words echoed in Gretchen’s head throughout supper. She smiled while the girls teased her about her modest clothes and unpainted face, and nodded as they said they’d help her get herself fixed up properly before work tomorrow night. Afterward, as they congregated in the front hall, smoking and talking as they slipped on hats and coats, Gretchen watched them from the parlor.

Better being alone
. . . Was that true for her and Daniel? Since he was so unhappy in England, should she insist that he make another life for himself somewhere else, where he could find a real reporter job and friends? Maybe it was cruel to tie themselves together when he had nothing in Oxford except for her. She wished she knew what to think, how to feel. This suspension in midair was agonizing.

The door banged shut, the chatter stopping as abruptly as if a switch had been turned off. Gretchen snapped back to the present. For a moment, she stayed still, listening to the building settling. Nothing. No footfalls on the stairs, no voices calling, no toilets flushing. Frau Fleischer must be ensconced in her room for the night. It had to be now.

She turned off the gas parlor lamp, so the Frau wouldn’t come down to investigate why the lights had been left on. With measured footsteps, she crossed the front hall. The prostitutes had extinguished the gas wall sconces when they’d left—apparently Frau Fleischer was as stingy about utility bills as Mama had been at the boardinghouse—and the room was a black hole. She moved cautiously until her fingers brushed the cold brass of the front door handle. It turned easily in her hand.

Lights glowed in the windows of the decrepit stone and brick buildings opposite. Across the avenue, a few men in peacoats shuffled past, the burning tips of their cigarettes red dots in the darkness. No cars coasted across the cobblestones, and there was no sound except for the whistle of wind. It was an ordinary winter night.

A lone figure jogged toward her and passed through a square of gold thrown on the ground by a window. Daniel.

He ran up the front steps and together they crept across the hall. In the parlor, the sofas and chairs were little more than massed shadows. Gretchen could trace the rectangle of the chimney, dark and straight against the whitewashed plaster walls. Beams from a passing car’s headlamps swept through the room, sparkling on a brass doorknob in the far corner. Frau Fleischer’s office.

Daniel twisted the handle, then shook his head. “Locked.”

Crouching, Gretchen studied the door. A common handle and a keyhole. This should be easy. She almost smiled when Daniel took a slender lock pick from his coat pocket.

As she slid the tool into the keyhole, Daniel moved closer, ready to dash into the office the instant the door was open.
Carefully, she worked the pick back and forth, concentrating on the rasp of metal on metal.

Steady hands, delicate wrists
, said Papa’s voice in her head. She leaned forward, twirling the pick in a slow circle until its tip caught on the locking mechanism. Barely daring to breathe, she pressed down and heard the tumblers click.

“Good work.” Daniel eased the door open. He pulled something out of his pocket and clicked it on. The flashlight’s yellow circle skimmed the small box of a room: a plain wooden desk, a single chair, a dented filing cabinet. A few framed photographs dotted the walls: men sitting at a sidewalk café and smoking cigars, a couple standing on a car’s running board with their arms around each other’s waists, a group of dark-suited fellows playing cards.

A creaking sound froze Gretchen in place. “Daniel, did you hear that?”

But his flashlight was trained on the photographs.

“The rings,” he gasped.

Gretchen followed his gaze. The men in the final picture sat around a large table, cigarettes dangling from their lips, smoke misting the air. They held their cards close to their chests. Each of them sported a band inlaid with a shiny stone—probably a diamond—on their left pinkie fingers.

Daniel spun to face her. “Did any of the prostitutes or the landlady have diamond rings?”

“Frau Fleischer does.” She couldn’t understand why he sounded so urgent.

“How big was the stone?”

“Huge. But why—”

“We must get out of here immediately,” he interrupted, seizing her hand with his good one. He pulled her out of the office. Somewhere she heard the creaking sound again, but close enough this time that she recognized it—a floorboard whining under someone’s weight.

They raced into the parlor just as the unmistakable pop and fizzle of gas lights flaring into life sounded from the front hall. As a yellow glow flickered and grew, a black shape dashed through the entryway straight toward them.

Gretchen stumbled backward, her heart surging into her throat. Nearby, she heard Daniel cursing and wrenching the pick free from the lock.

The shape flew at them, sharpening into the bone-thin, black-dressed figure of Frau Fleischer. She carried an ancient-looking shotgun. Gretchen let out a harsh cry as the landlady swung the weapon up and jammed it against her forehead.

“Don’t move,” Frau Fleischer snapped. “The men will deal with you when they arrive. I telephoned them as soon as I heard the front door open
after
my girls had already left. Now if you so much as breathe, I’ll blast your head off.”