Prisoner of Night and Fog (11 page)

She should move away. She
must
.

But when she twisted her neck, she looked into Cohen’s eyes, dark and clear and determined, focused on the street ahead. She saw the smooth curve of his cheek. And she couldn’t fear him.

So, even though she knew she should move away, she stayed still, leaving her arm where it was, lightly touching his.

PART TWO

THE GREAT MAGICIAN

Great liars are also great magicians.
—
Adolf Hitler

12

STEFAN DEARSTYNE’S APARTMENT WAS IN A
narrow brick building on a side street by the central train station. The front door wasn’t locked. The lobby, a depressing box whose walls might have been white once, years ago, was lit by a dying light fixture flickering off and on.

“Third floor,” Cohen said. It was the first time he had spoken since they had left the Braunes Haus on her bicycle. The glimmering light gilded his face for an instant, and even though she knew she shouldn’t, Gretchen couldn’t help looking at him.

In profile, she saw things about his features she hadn’t noticed before: the straightness of his nose, the full shape of his lips, the sharp point of his chin. Why couldn’t he appear the way he was supposed to? The human shape of his face, the human smell of him—all combined to make it difficult to remember he was a subhuman.

“We must be quick.” Cohen dashed across the lobby, making for the ancient linoleum-covered stairs. She raced after him.

Their jagged breathing and pounding footsteps mingled in the quiet. When they reached the third floor corridor and Cohen whipped a tool out of his pocket, forcing it into the nearest door lock, she hung back for an instant. Her heart kicked against her ribs like a recalcitrant mule.

She was about to break into a stranger’s apartment with a Jew as her accomplice. While her brother’s boss and his comrades raced through the city toward them. She stepped closer to the stairs. She couldn’t do this.

Cohen crouched on the floor, frowning at the lock. “Why won’t it open?” he muttered to himself, then glanced at Gretchen. “Going somewhere?”

“I—I c—I an’t do this,” she faltered, and he threw his tool down in frustration.

“Neither can I.” He surged to his feet. “Maybe I can break the door down.”

“Wait!” She grabbed his arm to stop him. “Röhm and his men will certainly notice a destroyed door! And do you want to bring all the neighbors running because of the racket?” She picked up the tool. It was a slender pick with a needle-sharp point. Gently, she fitted it into the lock, twisting with feather-light fingers until she heard a satisfying click. She turned the knob and the door swung open.

Cohen let out a low whistle. “Impressive. How’d you learn to do that?”

“My father taught me.” She didn’t add that Papa had instructed her how to pick locks so they could sneak into their apartment building’s cellar and steal coal for their stove. It hadn’t been his fault—the postwar inflation had been slowly killing everyone—but she didn’t want to say anything about Papa that a stranger might misinterpret.

“Your father . . .” Cohen sounded amused. “What interesting lessons you National Socialist children are taught. My upbringing must seem boring to you—my father only taught me more prosaic things, like how to read and tie my shoelaces. Never mind,” he added when she glared at him.

They stepped into the room. Walking inside felt like walking into a black night unrelieved by stars. Shutters had been fastened across the solitary window, leaving only slivers of light showing. Gretchen ran a hand over the wall, searching for a light switch, but there wasn’t one.

When Cohen flung the shutters back, she saw the window was the old-fashioned sort, without any glass, just a rectangle cut into the wall. Street sounds rushed into the room: pigeons crying, shoes tramping on cobblestones, schoolchildren shouting at one another.

Dearstyne’s home was nothing more than a small, cramped room: a sagging sofa that clearly doubled as a bed, for there was no mattress anywhere; a long countertop where an iron ring constituted a stingy stove; a scarred bureau under the window that must hold most of his possessions, because there was no armoire; and a couple of cardboard boxes filled with odds and ends. A single photograph lay on a low table.

Cohen dove for the boxes. Gretchen headed toward the bureau, but something about the photograph trapped her eye.

The paper was rough and yellowed. Not a photograph, but a snapshot that had been neatly clipped out of a newspaper. It had been snipped without a caption or accompanying text, and it showed five men shoving their way through a massive crowd. A young-faced Uncle Dolf walked in the lead, wearing his belted trench coat, with his slouch hat pulled low, which always made Mama roll her eyes and mutter that he looked like a gangster. Following him were four other men, Alfred Rosenberg, grim-faced beneath a dark hat, then Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s old bodyguard.

The next man seemed vaguely familiar. He was squat and barrel-chested, like a boxer, but so short that he resembled a dwarf. The top of his head barely reached the other men’s shoulders. She thought she had seen him before, but perhaps only at the important Party functions everyone attended, a minor cog on the wheel circling far away from the center of the NSDAP machine.

A few steps behind, her father was frozen in midstride. He must have been cold, for he wore no coat over his Great War uniform, but his expression betrayed no physical discomfort. His face looked bewildered and unhappy as he stared at Uncle Dolf’s back, and Gretchen could almost hear him saying,
Adi, what have I done wrong?

She thought back to Hanfstaengl’s story of the putsch. This photo must have been snapped as the men made their way into the Bürgerbräukeller while Hanfstaengl and members of the press milled about outside. Within thirty minutes, the SA troops would storm the beer hall and Hitler would rush to the podium, waving a pistol and shouting that the national revolution had begun. In sixteen hours, Uncle Dolf and Graf would be gravely wounded, her father dead. It must have been the last photograph taken of Papa, and he looked more miserable in that moment than she had ever known him. She had thought he would feel triumphant, certain that power was almost within the Party’s grasp.

“What are you doing?” Cohen cried. “Hurry! Röhm might be here any minute!”

She dropped the clipping and hurried to the bureau beneath the window. She yanked open a drawer and pulled out three graying undershirts. Their rank smell hit her in the face like a fist. Quickly, she went through the bureau’s pitiful contents: woolen long johns with holes in both knees, a sweater with an unraveling collar, two pairs of badly darned socks, broken bootlaces, handkerchiefs so old the fabric had turned transparent—

“Nothing!” Cohen kicked a box in disgust. Do you see any other boxes, Fräulein Müller?”

As she turned to answer, she spotted something in the street. At the dinner hour, the narrow avenue writhed with people: day laborers in stained jackets, school children in checked dresses or shirtsleeves, all hurrying home for their supper, and, in the midst of them, a brown circle, moving steadily.

She froze. The men’s heads were down, their faces obscured by their caps, but their distinctive brown uniforms identified them instantly. And Röhm was unmistakable—the quick, deliberate walk and the squat, heavy frame.

“It’s Röhm,” she said. “He’s on his way.”

She couldn’t complete the thought. If Röhm found her, here, in this old Party crank’s apartment, helping a Jew—

Cohen cursed. “We can’t leave without the diary.”

Her heart swung like a hammer in her chest. The muscle in her legs tensed, ready to run.
Get out, get out, get out
. But she had to know more about Papa’s death.

She glanced about the room. A moth-eaten sofa whose cushions had been tossed aside; a bureau whose drawers hung open drunkenly, their contents spilled across the floor; a few shirts and trousers and socks; a counter with a white porcelain teapot . . .

She stared at it. So clean, when everything else in the apartment was dirty and dingy.

Cohen followed her gaze. In two strides, he had reached the teapot and ripped off its top. He grinned. “Well done, Fräulein Müller.” He pulled out a hammered metal box, barely bigger than his hand.

“Let’s clean up this mess,” he said, slipping the box into his pocket. “Or else they’ll know someone else was here first.”

“No, they won’t.” They must get away
now
. “For all they know, Dearstyne was a lousy housekeeper—let’s go!”

“Almost done.” Cohen snatched up the pile of papers and threw them into the box. Outside, Gretchen heard the low rumble of a man’s voice, still so distant she couldn’t separate the sound into words.
Röhm
, she thought as Cohen reached for the sofa cushions on the floor.

“Forget the cushions!” She snatched up his hand and ran, pulling on him so hard that he bumped into her. They rocketed into the hallway. Footsteps echoed from the stairwell; another moment and the SA men would be upon them.

The back stairs were their only chance. Still clutching the boy’s hand, she ran down the corridor, away from the main staircase. Together, they reached the closed door at the end of the hall, skidding to a stop. He twisted the knob, and then they were hurtling down the back stairs in the darkness. All of the overhead bulbs must have burned out, but it didn’t matter, for she could move by feel: the slippery linoleum steps, the metal railing beneath her hand, Cohen’s fingers clamped on hers.

They shot off the bottom step together. There was light shining around the edges of a door, where it hadn’t been fitted properly into its frame, and she raced toward the slivers of light. Her hands fumbled for the doorknob, closing for an instant around the boy’s, and she heard his shuddering breath in the darkness as the knob slipped around in their sweaty fingers, and then he was turning it and they flung themselves outside.

A narrow alley, lined with brick. Here the buildings leaned toward each other so precariously, they blotted out the little bit of sunlight left. Cohen ran toward the opposite building’s wall, where he had chained the bicycle to one of the barred windows. He hopped astride; then she climbed onto the handlebars and they rode off into the encroaching night.

13

DUSK HAD BEGUN TO STRETCH ACROSS THE CITY
when they reached the Diana Temple in the Hofgarten. The manicured gardens feathered out in all directions, bushes and flowers fading into blurs in the blue-black twilight. Gretchen felt the warm exhalation of Cohen’s breath on the back of her neck. Sitting so close to him on the bicycle should seem wrong. But it didn’t. His proximity should disgust her, but it only confused her.

Sometimes she had seen boys in the street wearing yarmulkes, or heard them speaking Yiddish when she rode a streetcar. She had always turned away, so she could avoid them. An easy task, since many of the city’s Jews lived in the southern part of the city, far from her. At school, she tried to ignore the four Jewish girls in her class. That, too, had been easy, for their surnames placed them at opposite ends of their alphabetically arranged seats, and she sat in the middle. Obeying her father’s instructions to stay away from Jews had been simple. She had barely had to try.

Until she had seen the Hasidic man in the alley, she hadn’t looked at a Jewish male, not really looked at him, long enough to see the planes of his face, the expression in his eyes. Until that night, she had never spoken to a male Jew before.

They were nothing like she had been taught.

A dull buzzing sounded in her ears. If she and her people were mistaken about the Jews, then they were mistaken about everything. Without that screw, the entire machine would eventually break down. She felt a sob rise in her throat, and had to swallow it down. Uncle Dolf and Papa couldn’t be wrong. Could they?

If they were wrong, nothing made sense anymore. The box she had carefully constructed about herself would fall apart. And she didn’t know if she could bear standing out in the open, in the harsh wind, without the comforting warmth of those walls she had built to shut out everything she didn’t like or understand.

The bicycle coasted to a stop. Gretchen clambered off the handlebars, accepting Cohen’s outstretched hand before remembering they shouldn’t touch. And she had taken
his
hand, back in Dearstyne’s apartment.

She ripped her fingers from the Jew’s grasp. For a moment, he looked startled, his face pale in the thickening gloom. Gretchen folded her trembling arms across her chest.

“I see,” he said softly, “you have remembered yourself.”

His shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, but he didn’t make a sound. Then he turned away, striding down the path toward the Diana Temple, leaving her with the bicycle. The downward tilt of his head looked lonely.

She had hurt him. The thing she had always thought was impossible—wounding a Jew’s heart—had happened. The boy hadn’t been pretending; she had seen the injury in his eyes before he’d walked away.

She walked slowly after him, the bicycle’s tires rumbling over the sidewalk. He was waiting inside the Diana Temple. He didn’t look at her as she neared the small stone building that stood in the center of a set of converging paths. Archways as large as doors spanned the curved walls, so she could see him standing inside, leaning against the wall, head down, dark hair hanging and hiding his expression. The metal box gleamed dully in his hands.

He said nothing when she entered. He didn’t look at her until she touched his hand, hesitantly, her fingers light, barely skimming his warm skin. But she heard the breath catch in his throat. He recognized what she was doing—touching him deliberately.

“Thank you for helping me off the bicycle,” she said.

His head lifted. He didn’t smile. But something changed in his face—a loosening of clenched muscles in his jaw, perhaps—transforming him from formidable and intimidating to quiet and grave. “You’re welcome.”