Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (21 page)

THE IMPACT JOLTED HER SO HARD THAT THE BONES
in her knees crunched. Daniel landed beside her. Together, they raced up the sloping yard, nearly slipping in the snow. A darkened outline loomed up ahead: another big house, unlit at this late hour.

Gretchen looked back over her shoulder. Nothing except apple trees. No bobbing flashlights, no angry shouts.

“They’re not following us,” she managed to gasp out.

Daniel kept running. “They’re probably hoping to cut us off at this street. Hurry!”

They raced down the driveway and into an empty road. The rain was falling harder now, and the fine houses opposite wavered behind sheets of water. Around a corner, a car’s headlamps, two misted yellow circles, appeared in the gloom.

“They’re coming!” Gretchen whispered.

“We can’t hope to outrun them.” Daniel glanced around the
street. “Come on.” He grabbed her hand, pulling her toward the nearest house. They skidded to a stop next to the front steps. Gretchen risked a look over her shoulder. Through the wall of rain, the car’s headlamps glowed as it slowly rolled down the avenue.

Daniel braced his good hand on the railing and kicked at the wood planking that formed the bottom sides of the porch. The wood broke with a vicious crack. Daniel kicked again and more pieces of wood splintered, leaving behind a small hole. The darkness beneath the porch yawned like an open mouth.

“Get in,” Daniel panted, and Gretchen didn’t hesitate. She wriggled through the hole. On her hands and knees, she crawled forward to give Daniel room to get inside. The ground felt soft and damp. She tried to sit up but knocked her head on the porch floor, white-hot pain bursting at the top of her skull. Gritting her teeth, she didn’t make a sound.

Daniel lay beside her in the shadows. He let out a sudden piercing cry and curled into a ball. Gretchen crawled toward him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My arm,” he gasped out. “It feels like it’s about to explode.”

She had seen this happen a few times before, when his damaged nerves turned to flame and he writhed in agony, moaning. Pain attacks, he called them. They usually lasted a few minutes. And he was always loud during them—crying out in torment.

Her heart clutched. “Daniel, you
have
to be quiet.”

“I—I don’t know if I can,” he choked out. He had gone white to his lips; the only spots of color in his face came from his eyes, which were dark and feverish. He was making noises low in his
throat, like a wounded animal.

From the street sounded the rumble of an automobile. Göring’s men were coming.

Gretchen touched Daniel’s arm. Under her fingers, the muscles rippled, as though something alive were moving beneath his skin. Then they contracted, stiffening until they felt like metal. Daniel groaned. The breath came quick and hard through his nose.

Tires thudded over the cobblestones, the sound muted by the rain. The low purr of the car’s engine died. There was the metallic wrenching sound of car doors opening, then the click of boots on the pavement.

“They can’t have gone far,” a man shouted.

Gretchen’s and Daniel’s eyes met.
I’m sorry
, his seemed to say. He clapped his good hand over his mouth, trying to stifle his moans.

Frantically, Gretchen looked around, but she could barely see anything in the darkness. Her wrap, which she could have used to muffle Daniel, was still at the ballroom. There had to be
something
she could use. She ran her hands over the dirt, even though she knew it was hopeless.

Footsteps sounded on the pavement a few feet away. They were so near. If Daniel couldn’t hold back his cries anymore, they would definitely hear him. Gretchen scrabbled in the dirt. Nothing. She glanced at Daniel.

A wave of pain hit him—she could tell by the way his entire body stiffened—and he bit down on his lip so hard that he drew blood. It trickled down his chin in a long line. He didn’t make a sound.

“Nobody here!” a man called from the street. “Let’s get going.”

Car doors slammed and its engine growled to life. Gretchen listened to the automobile slide away, its tires shushing in the rain. When she couldn’t hear them anymore, she crawled back to Daniel’s side. His face was dead-white, and sweat had stuck strands of his hair to his forehead. Gretchen fumbled for a handkerchief in her purse, using it to mop Daniel’s face. His eyes focused on hers, dark and steady, but neither of them said a word. The car might return. The seconds lengthened, endless and quiet. There was only the icy patter of rain on brick. No whoosh of tires on pavement, no tramp of jackboots, no shouts.

At last she spoke. “Are you well enough to go?”

“I’ll manage.” He rolled to his hands and knees, wincing when he put weight on his left hand. In that instant, Gretchen wanted nothing more than to take his poor hand in hers, press her lips to his palm. But she didn’t know how to cross this strange distance between them. Besides, she had to protect herself. If they managed to escape from Germany, there was no telling where Daniel would end up and how far from each other they would have to live. She had to start disentangling herself from him, or she was afraid she’d never be able to. Loving him and losing him was better than staying with him and hating him for taking her from the Whitestones and her planned career. But the prospect still felt like a vise around her chest, squeezing until she couldn’t draw a deep enough breath.

Daniel crawled toward the hole in the porch wall. “We’d better get to the hideout and open the box.”

Gretchen pulled it from her dress. She didn’t say what she was certain they were both thinking: The diary, if that was what was inside, might have cost Fräulein Junge her life.

They took another taxi back to the hideout. An exorbitant expense, but it couldn’t be helped; they could hardly board the late-running S-Bahn trains in their ripped evening wear. Gretchen held the cardboard box tightly on her lap as the car wended the long streets. The box was so small it fit in one of her hands and was dotted with raindrops. If only she could open it, but she didn’t dare under the driver’s curious gaze.

They left the taxi on a side street near the Spree River and took another, and then a third, hoping to cover their tracks this way. At the hideout, they changed out of their soaked clothes and into the men’s flannel pajamas that the
Ringverein
guard provided; apparently, they kept a supply of nightclothes for the members who took turns sleeping there. Gretchen still felt cold to the bone.

The
Ringverein
man had gone to the kitchen to telephone Friedrich, leaving Gretchen and Daniel alone in the parlor. Daniel opened the box, the wet cardboard coming apart in his hands. Inside lay a small book covered in red-and-white-checked cloth. The diary. Gretchen’s pulse throbbed unevenly with excitement.

They flipped through the pages. The short entries had been written in a sloping hand. After skimming through the first few, Gretchen remembered that Friedrich had said that Fräulein Junge had been an aspiring actress. She’d been a real person with career plans and dreams.

Nineteen thirty-two rushed past: auditions Monika had gone on and roles she’d lost to other actresses, cold nights on the stroll, afternoons lost in cocaine-fueled dreams, yearning to break free from the drugs but coming back to their oblivion again and again.

Over the winter, the entries changed.

I bungled the audition, of course, for my head ached so badly I could scarcely remember my lines, let alone say them with the proper feeling. But it hardly matters! A most wonderful man stopped by the theater. I recognized him at once—I doubt there’s a soul in Berlin who doesn’t know his face, and I was thrilled, for he’s known to be a great lover of the theater and could nudge my career forward. Afterward, he invited me to go on a drive. Naturally I refused, for I can’t waste an evening when I should be making money. But he was most persistent, and in the end I agreed to go with him the following afternoon.

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “The romance begins.”

From then on the pages were full of Hermann—Gretchen nearly started at seeing Göring’s first name, for she remembered his love for titles and grandeur, and when she was a little girl she’d had to address him as Captain, not Herr. Fräulein Junge and Göring had taken long drives to Potsdam, talking about art in the backseat, far from curious eyes. They’d sneaked into the Wintergarten after the lights had gone down, and watched trapeze artists swing below a star-flecked blue ceiling.

By last month, the tone had changed:

Hermann says he wants companionship, not romance! For so long, I’ve thought his love for his late wife stopped him from touching me. He would ask instead
that I fill his head with my silly chatter. As though I were no more than a child. I understand now. He’s lonely, and so I would do for company. But he doesn’t want me. He has a woman in Weimar. An actress, so perhaps she isn’t quite a lady, but she must be better than I am. A Cabinet man mustn’t be seen with the likes of me, I know.

The page was dotted with sepia-toned circles. Tears, most likely. Gretchen touched the wrinkled spots on the paper. Poor, troubled Monika. It had taken her so long to realize that she was nothing more than a sweet voice to break the silence
. Like Eva
, Gretchen thought. Would her friend ever figure out that she was nothing more than a toy to Hitler?

Daniel turned the page, shaking his head. “Fräulein Junge has started complaining,” he said. “Now she’s become a liability to Göring.”

The final entry was dated 28 February 1933—the day after the fire, Gretchen recalled, probably written a few hours before Monika was killed. Almost three weeks ago—and two weeks before Gretchen herself had arrived in Germany.

I’ve just spoken with Hermann
, Monika had scribbled.

He telephoned the rooming house to cancel our luncheon date. Isn’t that like a man! Wanting you only on his timetable. He was in a foul mood, muttering something about a nosy fireman, Heinz somebody-or-other, and saying he was exhausted since he’d spent the whole night shuttling between his ministry office and the Reichstag, to keep track of the fire’s progress. Poor Hermann. As angry as I get
sometimes, I really must make more allowances for him. He has many responsibilities and they weigh on him heavily.

I need to hide this book, so none of the other girls can read it. They’re all curious about Hermann. I caught one of them trying to get into my lockbox last week. She said she only wanted to borrow my silver bracelet, but I know she wanted to see this diary. I’ll put it in the stables. Mama and Papa don’t care a pin about the horses, and they’ll never know I went by the house. When I’m done there, I get to see Hermann this afternoon! He rang me again a few minutes ago, saying he wanted to talk to me about our phone conversation this morning, and he can spare me fifteen minutes. He’ll pick me up in his car.

The entry ended there. Daniel flipped through the diary’s remaining pages, but they were blank.

Gretchen’s mind swam. A secret girlfriend. An indiscreet comment about a nosy fireman. A fifteen-minute-long meeting to discuss an earlier phone conversation. An assassination in the street hours later. Each a link in the chain winding back to the night when fire had blazed through the Reichstag.

She found her voice. “Fräulein Junge wasn’t killed because she was an embarrassing companion for Göring.”

Daniel’s eyes flashed onto hers. “She was murdered because she knew Göring was angry with a fireman. The question is—why did Göring say this fireman was nosy? What did the fireman know about the arson attack that Göring didn’t want him to?”

For a moment, they were silent. Outside in the street Gretchen heard the rattle of paper trash pushed by the wind, and from the
stairwell the creak of footsteps. Friedrich, probably, eager to talk to them.

The enormity of this discovery made her heart race. What did this fireman know? Had he stumbled across evidence that the National Socialists were behind the blaze and had set up their despised political opponents to take the blame? Had he suspected that the Dutch Communist arrested on the scene was a patsy?

“Do you realize what this means?” Daniel said. “The National Socialists aren’t only guilty of murder—they must have been involved with the fire! If we can prove it, the Party won’t be able to recover from the scandal. Hitler’s career will be over.” He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her, then seemed to catch himself and sat back. Quickly, he looked away. There was a sudden ache in Gretchen’s throat that she couldn’t swallow down.

The hideout door whined open. Footsteps raced across the hall, stopping at the parlor entryway. Friedrich braced his hand on the doorframe, his eyes bright with reflected lamplight. He still wore his top hat and tails from the ball.

“What have you found out?” he asked. “My man said you thought it was important.”

“It’s a secret far greater than any we could have guessed.” Daniel held out the diary to Friedrich. “It looks like Fräulein Junge was told something she shouldn’t have been about the Reichstag fire. You must have heard the rumors that the fire couldn’t have been set by the Dutchman they found on the scene, since he’s half blind. Maybe they’re right, and the National Socialists really are the ones behind everything. There’s only one person in Berlin who might know the truth and be willing to tell us—a fireman whose first name is Heinz.” He paused. “We must do everything in our power to find him.”