Prisoner of Night and Fog (7 page)

“I
knew
I should have washed the windshield,” he muttered.

Ahead, a few men weaved drunkenly along the sidewalk. Somewhere, a door opened and closed, letting out a quick blare of music.

“Kurt,” Gretchen said, “who was that old man? The one you fellows removed from the Circus Krone tonight?”

“Hmm? Oh, just a half-dead Party crank.” Kurt’s frown deepened. The drunks had spotted them, and one of them had started to unbutton his trousers, leering at Gretchen. “Fools!” Kurt stuck his head out the open car window. “Nobody wants to see your pitiful excuse for manhood!” Must he fight with everyone? Gretchen bit back a sigh.

After a quick glance for traffic, Kurt jammed the accelerator, speeding the car through an intersection. “Boss’s orders,” he added. “Röhm said the man’s to be dragged out of every meeting he attends.”

The response seemed strange. Gretchen suppressed a shiver. What interest could Röhm have in an elderly, infirm Party comrade?

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“Hmm? Oh, I don’t know.” Kurt patted his pocket, probably searching for cigarettes. “We taught the fellow a lesson and then he staggered off with some boy. Weeping like a child.” He grinned and held up a pack. “Hurrah, cigarettes!”

“Why does SA-Stabschef Röhm care about the old man?”

Kurt slammed on the brake, so hard that she had to fling out her hands so she didn’t fly into the gearbox. “Idiot drivers.” He gestured at the Opel crawling front of them. “The fellow’s been hanging around Party headquarters and attending the Führer’s speeches. Asking all sorts of questions about the putsch.”

The putsch
. Her heart beat faster. The event that had ended in the street shoot-out that had killed her father.

“Questions?” She hoped she sounded casual. “What did he want to know?”

Fumbling in his pocket for a lighter, Kurt steered one-handed along a quiet street. When the lighter flared into life, its tiny orange flame illuminated his face for an instant, revealing his fair eyebrows and jade-green eyes. “All manner of nonsense. The position of the men in the front line. Powder burns. Stupid old man’s probably going senile.”

She froze. A dull roaring filled her ears.
Your father did not die a martyr to the Nazi cause, and your family’s precarious position within Hitler’s party is predicated on a lie
. An old Party comrade, who had known her father during the early years of struggle, who might have marched alongside her father during the final minutes of his life . . . “Yes, nonsense,” she managed to say. “He must be losing his mind.”

When Gretchen finally got back to the boardinghouse, closing the door in Kurt’s face as he leaned in for a kiss, which struck her as ludicrous, she hurried up the stairs, skipping the creaking steps. As she did every night, she locked the door, slid the chair under the knob, and untied the heavy curtains. Alone, at last.

She found Striped Peterl in her armoire, curled on the toes of her winter galoshes. She carried him over to the bed and stretched across the chenille coverlet, letting the cat lie on her chest, rumbling, as she petted him and thought.

The old man had asked about the men’s positions in the front line. He must have meant the march on the Residenzstrasse. Eight years ago, after failing to take over the city in the putsch, the National Socialists had paraded through Munich, right into a waiting cadre of police officers. Her father had walked with Uncle Dolf in the front. When the shooting started, Papa had jumped in front of Hitler, his body jolting as bullets bit into his chest. Taking the shots intended for his leader.

The familiar band tightened around her chest, cutting off her breathing.
Calm, calm
. She closed her eyes and focused on the flow of oxygen in and out of her lungs. Three deep breaths, the old trick Hitler had taught her. Feeling the air flow into her nostrils, her chest filling.

The method worked, as it always did. She opened her eyes. The men in the front line—a famous Great War general, a former flying ace, an army colonel, a prominent National Socialist from Russia, the Munich SA leader, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Hitler himself, and her father, Hitler’s old friend from the war.

Papa shot
 . . . Memories swamped her—the tickle of his mustache on her cheek when he kissed her, and the warm roughness of his hands as they patted her face.

They had been sitting on the kitchen floor, which was the only room they could afford to heat during the miserably cold November of 1923. Her father wore his Great War uniform and an armband decorated with a swastika, and they huddled beside the stove as he placed a kitten in her hands.

“It’s for you,” Papa said. “I’ve already named it Striped Peterl.”

“Papa, I love it!” She stroked its soft fur. “But what if it runs away, too? Like Little Franzl?”

A strange expression twisted her father’s face; for an instant, he looked afraid. But that was ridiculous; her big, strong father was afraid of nothing, and certainly not of the family cat that had disappeared a month earlier.

“You must be very careful with it,” he finally said. “Don’t let anyone else play with it. The cat is just for you, do you understand?”

“Yes, Papa. Thank you.” When she kissed him, she felt a sudden wetness on her cheeks and knew it came from his tears, and she cried, too, because Papa had promised by tomorrow night the National Socialist flags would fly from City Hall. But what he had to do first would be very dangerous.

And now, eight years later, in another house, in another part of the city, in another stage of her life, she felt like that nine-year-old child again, alone and mourning the father who would never return.

She kept his uniform on the armoire’s top shelf. When Mama had come home from the city morgue with Papa’s things, she had wanted to burn it, and toss out the battered shoes, the bloodstained woolen long johns. But Gretchen had begged to keep the shirt, the ruined cloth she had embraced over and over, sobbing because it hadn’t protected Papa at all, needing it because it had been the last garment to touch his skin.

The shirt had been tucked into a small square, and she shook it out, running her fingers over the bullet holes. So many holes, she couldn’t count them all, although she had tried. Gunpowder and dried blood, faint gray and rusty red, everywhere. Tears burned her eyes, and she started to fold it, freezing when she saw the tear in its back.

Her breath caught. A hole, on the back of the shirt, where her father’s shoulder blades would have been. A bullet hole. Gray powder had been ground into the cloth around the hole’s edges. Confused, she ran her fingers over the ragged circle, stiff with dried blood, discolored from a gun blast. Powder burns, the old man had said.

She knew the shape bullets made when they tore into something, and the grayish powder they sprayed if you fired at a close target. Uncle Dolf had taught her long ago, when she was a small child. He was one of the best marksmen in the city and believed everyone ought to know how to handle a weapon.

On Sunday afternoons, after he stopped by for tea, he and Papa would take her and Reinhard to the Englischer Garten, to a copse of beeches far from the paths, so no one would see them practice shooting at the trees. At first, the recoil shoved her back a few steps, into Uncle Dolf’s legs. He laughed and showed her how to dig her heels into the dirt, so she could brace herself.

She stared at Papa’s shirt. If the hole had been formed by a bullet’s exit, there wouldn’t have been powder burns. Only blood. But she could
see
it, a messy circle of grayish dust and dried blood.

Someone had shot her father in the back. State police troopers had stood in front of him. Only other National Socialists had been behind him.

The Jew had been right
.

8

THE NEXT NIGHT, GRETCHEN WALKED INTO THE
Golden Phoenix dance hall and stopped short to stare. Blue-and-gold designs papered the walls, turning the enormous space into a glittering Easter egg. A glorious sound, pulsing with sinuous energy, cascaded from the orchestra stand. Small tables had been arranged along the room’s edges, where couples in evening dress lounged over drinks.

The dance floor dominated the room’s center; it was a massive wooden rectangle where men in tuxedos and women in short satin frocks danced a peculiar routine Gretchen had seen in films. The Charleston, she thought it was called, a popular dance from America. She couldn’t help feeling a burst of excitement. How beautiful and glamorous everything seemed.

“That music,” said a voice behind her, “is American swing.”

She turned. Daniel Cohen leaned against the bar. Tonight he wore a black suit. At some point, the bow tie had come undone and the shirt’s top button had popped open, exposing his finely wrought collarbones. She could see the pulse beating in his throat, a rapid tattoo beneath the skin, and the sight relieved her. He was nervous, too.

“Swing music is degenerate.” She forced the words out.

He studied her with watchful eyes. “Do you like it?”

Yes. But she wasn’t supposed to. “I’ve never heard anything like it before,” she evaded.

Cohen spoke a few words to the bartender. Gretchen leaned against the counter, trying to appear as though she knew how to act. This was madness. She glanced toward the exit. Maybe she should leave. But then she wouldn’t know what had happened to Papa.

She didn’t move.

Cohen pressed a glass into her hand. “You National Socialists clean up well.”

She flushed and resisted the urge to look down. Geli had given her the dress last summer, after she’d tired of it. The short black cocktail dress glittered with thousands of sequins. Gretchen had untied her usual braid and let her long hair ripple halfway down her back. A beaded band with a dyed-black ostrich feather encircled her head. The dress was a perfect fit for Geli’s curves, but on Gretchen’s smaller frame the bodice dipped lower than she liked, and she kept yanking the neckline up.

“Thank you.” She tried to hand the glass back, but he didn’t take it. “I can’t accept a gift from you—”

His mouth twisted. “From a Jew, you mean? You certainly do march to your Hitler’s drum, don’t you?” He grabbed the glass, setting it down so hard on the bar that liquid sloshed over the edge. “Will sitting with me offend your delicate sensibilities or must we stay standing?”

She had angered him. She wasn’t sure what surprised her more—that she was sorry for it, or that he was bothered by her. Somehow he had struck her as the sort who would never permit someone else to make him feel uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but he waved her off.

“Forget it. Let’s sit down.”

They found a tiny table against a wall. Gretchen watched the men and women at the bar, laughing too hard over their drinks, and the dancers, moving too fast, as though trying to forget their troubles for one night.

“Why do you keep looking about?” Cohen asked. “You needn’t worry about being caught with me. I doubt any of your NSDAP friends would come into a place like this.”

“No, it’s just I’ve never been to a nightclub before.”

Surprise widened his eyes. “How is it I’ve lived in this city for only a month and I suspect I’ve seen more of it than you have?”

“I’m not allowed.” She spoke defiantly, to hide her embarrassment. How babyish she must appear, a child who wasn’t permitted to go out to nightclubs or listen to popular music.

“Then how did you get here tonight, if it’s forbidden?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “I snuck out.”

He laughed. The unexpected mirth transformed his face, softening its strong angles. She caught her breath and had to look away.

“Really?” Cohen said. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet. There’s a city hidden beneath the one your National Socialists want you to see—music and culture and art and dancing, all the things they’re trying to blind you to.”

His approving tone shamed her. She couldn’t imagine Uncle Dolf’s reaction if he found out.

“I don’t need your advice,” she said. “I snuck out so I could speak with you again. I need you to explain this story you seem to think you’ve uncovered about my father.”

She spoke softly, so he couldn’t hear how badly her voice shook.
Never show your enemies how much you care
, Papa had taught,
because then they have power over you
.

All traces of merriment fled from the reporter’s features. He leaned across the table, the dim lamplight touching his cheeks. “You set those brownshirt thugs on Dearstyne, didn’t you?” His gaze clapped onto hers. “You were afraid he could damage your family’s precious favored position in the Party. No one else could have done it. I’ve kept him a secret from everyone except my editor.”

She didn’t know why the anger in his voice surprised her; Uncle Dolf had warned her that Jews were vipers in the grass, ready to turn and strike at any second. “I didn’t tell anyone. And who’s Dearstyne? The old man from the Circus Krone last night?”

“Yes, Stefan Dearstyne.” He sounded bitter. “Your brother and his mates beat him and kicked him when he was on his hands and knees, looking for his knocked-out teeth.” An image of Reinhard, bending over the defenseless elderly man, his arm raised in mid-strike, flashed before her. She felt sick. “We’re not here to talk about them, but my father—”

Cohen surged to his feet. “I can’t listen to your evasions. Not even for the best scoop of my career. Good-bye, Fräulein Müller.”

“Wait!”

She hurried after him. Her arm flashed out, her fingers closing around his wrist. He stopped and looked down at her hand, as if the sight disgusted him. “Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked. “Touch a Jew? Isn’t that against the rules?”

“I don’t care about the rules right now!” She pitched her voice low, but the people at the surrounding tables turned to look at them. “People are staring at us.”

He pulled away without replying, moving quickly across the dance floor. She mustn’t let him leave, not until she knew Herr Dearstyne’s story. She darted in front of him and seized his hands. Revulsion roiled her stomach. But she
must
know the truth about Papa.