Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (23 page)

“SUPERINTENDENT GENNAT WILL LET ME KNOW
the identity of the dead man as soon as he has it,” Friedrich said when they returned to the hideout. “But I think it’s already clear that he must be the fireman’s brother. I’m going to send several of my men to track down this Herr Schultz. Some will go to the fire station to pick up gossip from his colleagues, and the rest will go to bars near Schultz’s apartment. You’ll both need to stay here.”

Relief washed over Gretchen. After the horrors of the fireman’s apartment, she wanted nothing more than to stay inside the hideout. She didn’t know if she could have managed to go back outside, where she might bump into another National Socialist from the old days. The next one she met probably wouldn’t be as sympathetic as Herr Hanfstaengl. She shuddered, thinking of the dead body in the bedroom. She knew too well how they dealt with their enemies.

“Let me go with them,” Daniel said quickly. Gretchen clasped his wrist in warning, wishing he would be quiet. She didn’t want him to go. But he didn’t seem to notice her touch and said, “I’m experienced at ferreting out information from sources.”

“I know you are.” Friedrich paused at the door to the parlor, looking back at Gretchen and Daniel. She dropped his wrist. “But I want you to remain here for now. Fräulein Müller would attract too much attention—no
Ringverein
works with ladies. As for you, Herr Cohen, I’m afraid you’d never pass as one of my men.” He smiled slightly. “You’re a bit
too
well-spoken, aren’t you?”

“I can put on an act,” Daniel protested.

“I’ve made my decision,” Friedrich snapped. “I’ll have word sent to you once we have news. Take a nap. You couldn’t have had much sleep last night.”

Then he was gone, the door slamming behind him. Gretchen was suddenly aware of how quiet the hideout was. No voices from the other rooms, no footsteps or snap of cards on a table or dice rattling in a cup. She was alone with Daniel. And she had no idea what to say to him—or how to combat the desperate sadness she saw in his eyes when he looked at her.

“I’m going to get some rest.” She hurried to their room before he could say anything.

For a moment, she sat on the bed, staring at the floorboards with unseeing eyes. The stench of the dead body was still in her nostrils; with every breath she took, she inhaled more of the rotten meat smell. Her stomach roiled. Heaving, she forced her head between her knees, feeling the blood rush from her head.

Dimly, she heard a door open and close, then footsteps come
toward her. Daniel. She recognized his quick tread. His hand touched her back. “Gretchen? Are you ill?”

“The body.” She couldn’t stop shivering. “I can still smell him. He must have been in there for days.” Her voice thickened. “Alone, with no one noticing or checking on him. Soon Superintendent Gennat will have him identified, and the police will contact his family. And shatter their lives.”

Her eyes stinging, she looked up at Daniel. “I know how they’ll feel. As though the world should stop rotating or the sun shining or the rain from coming down. When those things do happen, they won’t be able to believe it. Because they’ll think that the world should be different, now that their loved one has been killed. But the world won’t be different.
They
will.” Her voice cracked. “That’s how I felt after Papa died—was murdered,” she corrected herself. “I remember waking up the next morning and being so angry that the sun had risen just like always. It didn’t seem fair that life should go on if he wasn’t there anymore.”

Daniel sat down next to her. His eyes were steady on hers as he said, “That’s how I feel about you. As though the whole world would go dark without you in it. On the ride back from Herr Schultz’s apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking how I would feel if something happened to you. And how fragile life is. All the time it probably took to kill that man in the apartment was one second. An instant to pull a trigger and extinguish a life.”

She couldn’t breathe. What was he trying to say?

He moved close. She breathed him in until the stink of the dead body was gone, and all that was left was Daniel.

“I don’t want to live without you,” he said. “Life is so short and so precious, and I don’t want to waste another second of it
wondering how you feel about me or what’s going to become of us. I love you. If anything happened to you, the world would stop for me. I would
want
it to stop because I can’t go on without you. Please, Gretchen.”

He looked so unlike his usual confident self, his face open and vulnerable, that she stared at him. Many times in the past he’d said he loved her. But never with such an aching intensity in his voice or pleading in his eyes. She realized that he was handing another piece of himself to her—a defenseless part he hadn’t let her see before.

“We can work everything out,” he said in a rush. “I’ll live in Oxford. I don’t mind. I can convince my editor to give me my old job back. Assuming we get out of here alive,” he added with a slight smile. Then he looked at her and it slipped away. “Gretchen, I can find a way to be happy,” he said quietly. “Even if I’m working as a society reporter again. But I can never find a way to be happy if I’m not with you.”

Something golden and warm spread through her chest and then down her arms and legs until all of her was tingling with it. He loved her. Despite everything that should have pulled them apart, he still loved her. And she loved him. Maybe that was all that needed to be true. They didn’t need to have the answers now. What mattered was whether they were willing to seek them out together. If she and Daniel somehow escaped from Germany, they could find a compromise. Even if it meant living apart for a few years while she stayed with the Whitestones and finished her schooling and he got a newspaper job elsewhere. She knew he would wait for her. And she would wait for him. As long as it took, she would wait for him.

She smiled. “I want to be with you, too, no matter what. We can figure out a compromise. I’ll always love the Whitestones, but even if I don’t live with them, I can still visit them. I
need
to be with you. Everything else—families and jobs and schooling—we’ll find a way to have them, too. It won’t be perfect, but I don’t care. All I know is that a life without you would be a half life. I love you, Daniel. Every part of you.”

As he smiled, his face softening with relief, she put her hands on his shoulders. Through his suit coat, she touched the corded muscles of his right shoulder, the boniness of his left. She blurted out the first thing that came into her head. “I love your scar.”

Daniel had been bending down to kiss her, but he jerked away, looking startled. “What?”

“Your scar,” she repeated. She ran her hand down his arm, feeling the raised ridge of puckered skin. “I know you hate it. But every time I think about it, it reminds me how brave you are. How you don’t give up. It makes me so proud of you.”

The muscles in his neck worked as he tried to swallow. “Really?”

“Really,” she said, and he caught her face between his hands and kissed her so hard on the mouth that her head spun. They drew back, grinning at each other. He lifted an eyebrow in the familiar gesture she liked so much. It usually meant a joke was coming.

But he surprised her by saying, “You’re the only one for me. The only one, Gretchen.”

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him close, half laughing and half crying at the relief of his touch as he kissed her again. She kissed him back until she couldn’t breathe.
Could barely think except for one clear thought piercing her consciousness: Kissing Daniel felt exactly like coming home.

When Daniel pulled back, he rested his forehead on hers. The heat of his skin pulsed into hers, and she couldn’t stop smiling, savoring the sensation of her lips throbbing from their kisses.

“We’d better stop before we can’t,” Daniel said, sounding reluctant.

“Would that be so terrible?” Gretchen asked.

His laugh rang out as her cheeks went hot. “I certainly don’t think so. But . . . you’re special. You deserve more than a dingy room in a hideout.” He kissed her gently. “You deserve the best of everything. I wish I could give that to you.”

“You already have,” she told him, her heart pounding at her boldness. “You’re the best of everything.”

His smile was softer than she’d ever seen it. He kissed her on the mouth, on both of her cheeks, on the warm skin of her throat until all of her body was alive and thrumming from his touch. Grinning, he stretched himself out on the bed. Gretchen lay down beside him, resting her head on his chest and listening to his heart beat into her ear. It was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. He was alive and here with her. As long as that was true, she knew she could handle anything. She listened to the slow inhalation of his breath; felt the arm holding her turn to lead and fall onto the blanket.

She smiled and peeked at his face. Relaxed and quiet in sleep, so unlike the way he looked awake: his mouth moving quickly as though it struggled to keep up with the pace of his thoughts; his eyes often narrowed and focused. Wonderfully complex and
imperfect and impatient and sarcastic. Her Daniel. Still smiling, she closed her eyes and slept at last.

The next morning, Superintendent Gennat telephoned Friedrich to confirm that the body in the apartment had been Gunter Schultz’s, the younger brother of the fireman they sought. Which meant that Heinz might still be alive.

Friedrich ordered a couple of his men to return to the bars around Herr Schultz’s apartment, once night had come and the establishments had opened. Someone needed to question Schultz’s neighbors, too, he added. Perhaps one of them had seen something.

“I can go,” Daniel had jumped in.

Friedrich shot him an annoyed look. “My men are pretending that Herr Schultz defaulted on a gambling debt and that’s why they’re looking for him. Nobody will give them a second glance. You, Herr Cohen, as I’ve already told you, can’t possibly pass as one of us. You’ll wait here until I figure out how you can be useful again. That will be all.”

He and the three
Ringverein
men left. Gretchen watched Daniel, sensing his frustration in the way he paced the parlor.
Three days
, she thought, but didn’t speak it aloud, knowing it would make Daniel feel worse. Today was the twentieth—which meant they had three days until the Reichstag voted on the Enabling Act and Hitler assumed dictatorial powers. She didn’t see how they could possibly prove that the National Socialists had had Fräulein Junge killed to cover up their responsibility for the Reichstag fire. They didn’t have enough time.

She sank onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands.
From another room, she heard the steady ticking of a clock. Ticking down minutes they didn’t have.

Unbidden, the image of Hitler in his old bed-sitting-room, surrounded by birthday cakes, rose in her mind. She hadn’t had time to puzzle over the dream, but now she wondered again why she had had it. What was her subconscious trying to tell her?

She fetched a piece of paper and a pen and sat at the table. Alfred had taught her a technique he used on his patients to coax forth their repressed memories. He had based it on Freud’s free-association method, in which patients were encouraged to say whatever came into their heads, without censoring their thoughts. Often this technique opened a back door into people’s memories. It might help her now.

Taking a deep breath, she imagined again the scene in Hitler’s room: him slumped on the bed, surrounded by cakes, and her father starting to speak to him. She wrote down the first word that occurred to her:
cake.
Then the next—
taster.
Her fingers flew over the page as more words popped up in her thoughts.
Poison. Reporter. Blood. Smoke. Lies
.

She stopped, studying the words, the black slashes of them on the white paper. Slowly, she set down the pen.

The trick had worked; bits of the afternoon had flown back to her. The ugly parts, before Hanfstaengl had arrived. At first, Uncle Dolf had been afraid that some of his birthday cakes might have been poisoned, moaning that he had so many enemies. She had offered to sample the cakes for him, like the king’s tasters she had learned about in school, and he had burst into delighted laughter.
My little glutton!
he’d said, patting her cheek.
Very well, we’ll have some. Which do you want to try first?

Once they had begun eating, he and Papa had talked in low voices about Herr Gerlich, who had wanted to meet with Hitler to discuss his plans to improve Munich’s economy. She had forgotten that Hitler and Gerlich had met a few times that year; they’d been friendly with each other until Hitler had tried to overthrow the city government in the putsch in which her father had died. Gerlich had declared Hitler couldn’t be trusted, and they’d been bitter enemies ever since. Her throat tightened. These days, Gerlich was trapped in Munich’s city jail, and she didn’t imagine that Hitler would ever approve his release.

Focus
, she ordered herself. Worrying about Gerlich wouldn’t help him. She glanced at the next words on the list.
Blood. Smoke
. She could hear Hitler’s voice in her head, murmuring that he hoped Gerlich was as credulous as the public.
They’ll swallow anything if it’s repeated often enough
, he had said, clapping her father on the shoulder.
Like blood and smoke, eh, Müller? The truth doesn’t matter. Only the
appearance
of it
.