Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (19 page)

She kissed him back, on the mouth, the soft skin of his temple, the curve of his neck, until the tension had melted from her body and all of her muscles felt as warm and liquid-smooth as honey. Through her blouse, his hand caressed her back with his
fingertips, his touch sending shivers down to her toes.

“My Gretchen,” he murmured, his lips a breath away from hers.

His voice snapped Gretchen back to the present. She pulled away from him. Daniel’s eyes flew open. The moonlight painted his cheeks with silver, showing the surprise on his face. “What’s wrong?”

“I—I can’t kiss you. Not when things feel so uncertain between us.” She looked away from his stricken expression, biting her lip so she had a different pain to concentrate on.

He embraced her, pressing his cheek against hers. “We’ll figure things out,” he said into her hair. “I promise.”

“How?” she said. “There are no solutions for us.”

“I don’t know.” There was such sadness in his voice that tears rose to her eyes again. “I just don’t know.”

She stood in his arms, listening to his heart beat in rhythm with hers, a steady thump as regular as clockwork. Wishing she knew if she had the rest of her life to hear that reassuring sound or only days, if they proved his innocence and parted forever. Wondering if tomorrow night’s gangsters’ ball would bring them closer to the answers they sought—and push them further apart.

The next night, they took a taxi across the Spree to the Hotel Adlon, where the Ring’s annual ball was being held. They spoke little, and what they said was formal and polite, the conversation of acquaintances. Fatigue had left the inside of Gretchen’s mind as gray and sluggish as a puddle of rainwater. Several times during the night, she had woken with a hammering heart, trying to hold on to the lingering wisps of her dreams. Hitler’s voice, low
and laughing, and the taste of sugar on her tongue were all that remained. As she had burrowed under the blankets again, she wondered why she felt as though she was forgetting something.

Now, as she sat beside Daniel in the taxi, he looked tense, his fingers tapping on his thigh.
Five days
, Gretchen thought. That was all that remained until the Enabling Act was brought to a vote before the Reichstag. They were running out of time.

As they alighted on the sidewalk, Gretchen caught their images in the cab’s back window. They were almost unrecognizable, even to her eyes. Members of the
Ringverein
had lent them clothes for the evening. Daniel wore a tuxedo, a white silk scarf around his neck, his slicked-back hair hidden by a top hat. Gretchen had rouged her cheeks and painted her lips red. With her short hair curling around her face, she looked like a flapper—so unlike the girl in childish braids that Hitler had known. Her gold column dress and black sequined wrap glittered in the glass before the taxi pulled away into the traffic streaming up and down Unter den Linden. It seemed like a dream that they had been driven down this street as prisoners of the
Ringverein
just seven nights ago. Today she’d even been given her revolver back—yet more proof that these
Ringverein
men were people of their word, and an uneasy trust existed among them. Gretchen carried the Webley in her black evening bag. Its weight was comforting.

“Ready?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” Gretchen said, but nerves knotted her stomach. Together, she and Daniel crossed the pavement toward the massive hotel. They had been there once before, months ago, when they had met Herr Professor Forster, who had treated her father
and Hitler at the end of the Great War and admitted that he had diagnosed Hitler as a psychopath.

The hotel looked different at night, its dozens of windows blazing with golden light. A long striped awning extended from its entrance to the street, to protect the beautifully dressed men and women slipping out of taxis and private automobiles. Elaborate lanterns on either side of the front doors illuminated the bronze plates beneath etched with the words “Hotel Adlon.”

They joined the guests filing inside. The lobby reminded her of the illustrations she’d seen of Bavarian palaces. The yellow marble pillars stretched to the ceiling high overhead. Everywhere dark and white marble gleamed, and porters in pale blue peaked caps whisked guests’ bags into the elevator.

She and Daniel followed the line of men in top hats and tails and women in evening dresses into the ballroom. At the entrance, she paused for an instant, dazzled by the spectacle. Chandelier lights threw glittering squares of gold across the room. Swing music cascaded from the orchestra’s bandstand, a quick, sinuous rhythm of brass and drums. At a glance, Gretchen guessed there were about two hundred people crammed into the ballroom. Couples spun around the dance floor, the ladies’ gowns blurring into a long smear of red and blue and silver, the men’s tuxedo tails swirling. For an instant, she wished she and Daniel could join them, dancing and laughing as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Don’t
, she told herself sharply. There was no sense in wanting things that couldn’t possibly happen. Her eyes squinted to see through the cigarette-laced air. Along the ballroom’s edges, a couple dozen
Ringverein
men and their girlfriends or wives stood, smoking, drinking, laughing so loudly that the sounds of their
merriment cut through the music. Diamonds sparkled around the women’s necks, and the men’s hair gleamed with pomade. She recognized many of the fellows from the hideout, although they looked drastically different in their tuxedos.

Long tables, laden with silver platters of hors d’oeuvres, had been set up along the room’s perimeter. Gretchen had never seen such food—oysters in the shell, finger sandwiches, caviar, paper-thin crackers. It was hard to fathom that across the Spree there lived people who subsisted on horse meat and lung soup that cost a measly sixty pfennigs a bowl.

With Daniel’s hand on the small of her back, Gretchen wove between the guests, searching for Hermann Göring, but there was no sign of him. He’d accepted Friedrich’s invitation immediately, but perhaps he’d changed his mind about attending. She tried to ignore the ache of disappointment.
He’ll be here
, she promised herself. The lure of gourmet food and the social cachet of attending a gangsters’ ball would be too much for him to resist.

They sat at a table jammed against the wall. Daniel hadn’t used the hat check, as he wanted his things nearby in case they needed to leave suddenly, so he set his hat and walking stick on a chair. Gretchen laid her wrap over them.

“That’s him.” Daniel’s hand gripped her arm. “At the entrance.”

She peered between the dancing bodies. A hugely overweight man in a tuxedo stood by the doorway. Surprise stole her voice. There was no question it was Göring; even from this distance she recognized his icy eyes and fair hair glistening with brilliantine. But the face she’d remembered as long and aquiline had grown broad and florid. The once-trim figure was now buried in rolls of
excess flesh. She’d heard he’d gained weight after he’d been shot in the putsch with her father, but she’d had no inkling he was so transformed.

As she watched, Friedrich ambled over to Göring. Though the music and raised voices made it impossible to hear what they said, she saw them shake hands and laugh. A National Socialist and a
Ringverein
man, sworn enemies, chuckling over a shared joke. She shook her head in disbelief. Daniel had warned her that Berlin’s freewheeling atmosphere was another world from provincial Munich, but she hadn’t really understood until this moment.

“Let’s get closer so we can listen.” Daniel’s voice was a warm murmur in her ear. “Friedrich said he might want to duck away and ask you for advice on how to handle Göring.”

“Very well.”

They skirted the edges of the dance floor. A group of men, red-faced with drink, staggered into them. Gretchen lost her grip on Daniel’s hand. She spun to look for him, but all she saw was a line of girls about her age, blowing out rings of cigarette smoke or gulping champagne. One was chattering about the new trapeze act at the Wintergarten; another was whining that she only had three marks, not nearly enough for a packet of cocaine.

She tried to slither away from them, but they were packed so tightly together that there was no pathway to ease herself through. The girls’ elbows knocked into her back as they gestured, complaining that it was simply too ridiculous that you couldn’t buy cocaine for less than five marks these days. Gretchen turned, searching for Daniel, and found herself facing a National Socialist Party pin, a white circle rimmed with red and intersected by a black swastika, pinned to a jacket lapel. Her heart surged into her
throat. Göring was the only National Socialist in attendance—the only person who would wear such a button. She let her eyes travel up to the man’s face and the blood in her veins cooled to ice. It was him.

Please, please don’t remember me
, she begged silently. He smiled blandly at her. “What a pleasure to see a delicate flower among weeds. How do you do, Fräulein?”

“Very well.” She heard the words coming out of her mouth automatically. What would Alfred tell her to do? The image of Göring and Hitler sitting on her family’s threadbare sofa rushed back to her, Göring in a finely tailored suit he couldn’t possibly have been able to afford, Hitler in a worn blue suit and brown leather vest and shoes with a hole in the bottom.
Appeal to his vanity
, she thought, and somehow she pulled her lips into a smile she prayed looked natural. “I’m a great admirer of yours, Minister Göring.”

“You’re a Bavarian!” he exclaimed, and she cursed her accent. “You’ve come a long way from home.” He guided her toward the bar and held up two fingers at the bartender. Gretchen glanced at the labels on the bottles: Clicquot, Mumm, Heidsiek, Roederer, four different types of champagne alone. She’d never seen such extravagance. “What do you think of our great city?”

This question she knew the answer to; most National Socialists followed Hitler’s lead and despised Berlin, calling it a cesspool of corruption and depravity. “It’s awful.”

Chuckling, Göring took the champagne flutes from the bartender and handed her one. “It’s not as bad as that.” His voice was light and kindly. “Berlin’s music and theaters are marvelous.”

The response startled Gretchen so much that she took a sip
to give herself time to figure out what to say. How could she handle this fellow? A National Socialist who didn’t jump onto the Party bandwagon was more of a challenge than she had anticipated. Through the fog of cigarette smoke, she saw Daniel moving toward them from several feet away, and she shook her head slightly. He stepped back, his face tight, his gaze trained on her face.

“So you say you’re an admirer of mine?” Göring asked. Above his glass, his eyes met hers—they were as she remembered, a sharp bright blue, like a lake frozen solid. “I confess I’m surprised. I thought you
Ringverein
types weren’t interested in politics.”

She went hot all over at her blunder. What in heaven’s name could she say to him? Just then a loud voice boomed close behind her. “Minister Göring! You see I’ve left my sickbed to join you! If it hadn’t been for Chancellor Hitler and the wretched tin can he calls an airplane, I wouldn’t have succumbed to the flu in the first place! But no, he must make speeches in three separate cities in one day. Twelve hours in an airplane—pure misery!”

Gretchen stilled. No. It was impossible. The newcomer sounded exactly like Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Party’s foreign press chief, who had watched her grow up and who had been her boss at the National Socialist headquarters. But he still lived in Munich with his wife and son—didn’t he?
Oh, God
. Please let it not be him! There was no way he wouldn’t recognize her.

She had to get out. Now.

“Fortunately, you had excellent accommodations for your recovery.” Göring laughed. “Fräulein, may I present Herr Hanfstaengl? He has been a guest at my palace for several weeks.”

She kept her head down, letting her curls slide forward to
curtain her face. “A pleasure,” she muttered. “Please, excuse me—some fresh air—”

She started to move away, but Göring’s hand clapped down on her shoulder, anchoring her in place.

“I’m gratified to make your acquaintance.” From the corner of her eye, she saw a dark blur: Hanfstaengl bending forward in an elaborate bow. “Yes, Minister Göring has been kind enough to let me stay with him until I can find proper lodgings for my family. And I’ve been grateful for his offer or else I’d be stuck in that monstrosity where Herr Hitler lives! Why, the hideous place is symbolic of everything that’s been wrong with the government since the war ended. Did you know the riots used to be so bad that they constructed a secret passage from the attic running all the way to this hotel, so that the chancellor could escape in emergencies? What a shambles our government has been! But that will all change.” He barked out a laugh. “Herr Hitler plans to have the passage walled up. He won’t need it.”

“Fascinating,” Gretchen murmured. What could she do? If she ran, they’d wonder why and might chase her. If she looked up . . .

“Shut your mouth, can’t you, Hanfstaengl?” Göring hissed. “Need I remind you where we are? Ah, there’s our host coming toward us. Behave yourself.”

Göring’s hand slipped from her shoulder. This was her chance. She slid her eyes to the left and saw Daniel pushing through the masses of people to get to her. She held up her hand, hoping he understood that he needed to stay back. Since Göring wanted him caught for murder, surely he’d acquainted himself with Daniel’s criminal file—and photograph.

“Pardon me,” she muttered and plunged into the crowd, weaving between the tightly clustered people, her heartbeat thundering in her ears.

“Wait a minute,” she heard Hanfstaengl say behind her. “There’s something familiar about that girl.”

She started to move forward just as a hand fastened on her wrist and whipped her around. Motionless, Hanfstaengl stared down at her, a towering figure almost six and a half feet tall. He looked the same: a long face with a lantern jaw, wiry hair falling over his forehead, wide shoulders. Several feet behind him, Gretchen glimpsed Göring, who had already turned away to chat with someone else.