Prisoner of Night and Fog (12 page)

They sat together on the floor. Cohen fiddled with the lock for several minutes. Finally, he pulled off his shoe and smashed it onto the box with such force that Gretchen started. The broken lock dangled in two pieces. Inside the box lay a worn leather book, no bigger than her palm. Cohen flipped through it, pausing at a page before pressing it into her hand.

“Read it,” he said. “And you’ll start to understand, as I have.”

She carried the diary to one of the arches, where the purple gleam of twilight still filtered strongly enough through the opening for her to see the page.

10 November 1923
, she read.

I am dying. I must write this down before it is too late. The tall shoemaker Müller marched in the front line, a few feet ahead of me. When we reached the Residenzstrasse, the street was too narrow for him to walk with the others, so he continued on ahead of them. I think he was hit first. I saw his body jerk once. Then he stumbled in front of Herr Hitler, his body acting as shield, absorbing the bullets meant for our leader. He was dead in an instant
.

Then I was shot and on the pavement, too. I dragged myself forward on my elbows, trying to get to Hitler. He had fallen, too, maybe shot. But Müller’s corpse lay between us. There were powder burns on his back. Then Hitler was scrambling up, helped by two other comrades, and they were hustling him away, and I tried to run, too, toward the center of the city with everyone else—

She stopped, staring at the white page without seeing it. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father marching in the softly falling snow, proud and tall in his Great War uniform. She saw him knocked sideways by a bullet’s blast, then his body convulsing again and again.

Taking a shaky breath, she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, willing the image away. Powder burns on his back. A bullet hole, encircled with dried blood and gray dust, on his tunic between his shoulder blades.

Someone had pressed a pistol against her father’s body and fired. The shot’s proximity sprayed powder onto his coat, and the bullet’s blast knocked him sideways in front of Hitler.

Everything Cohen had said was true. Someone had murdered her father.

Tears burned her eyes.

The powder burns meant the shot had been fired too close to her father’s body for it to have been a mistake. She couldn’t deny or explain away the truth anymore, not now that she had seen the same doubts as hers in someone else’s journal.

She opened her eyes and stared at the blurred floor Her father had not been a hero; he had not leapt in front of Hitler to protect him from a barrage of bullets. He had stumbled sideways, protecting Hitler with his body, because he had already been shot. The bullet’s impact in his back had thrown him in front of Hitler. He hadn’t intended to sacrifice himself for the Führer at all.

Her hands tightened into fists. He had been murdered, and whoever had killed him needed to pay.

Daniel spoke, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”

She didn’t bother replying; there was no real answer. “How did you find out about the diary?” she asked.

She watched him as he answered. How steadily he kept his eyes on hers, as though he had nothing to hide. As much as she wanted not to, she believed everything he said. “Stefan Dearstyne came to the
Munich Post
offices last week, late at night. I was the only reporter still there.

“Stefan had recently found the diary, and was deeply troubled by what it revealed. He had known nothing about his brother’s suspicions, and Lars had died the day after writing that entry. Apparently, Stefan had been asking questions at NSDAP meetings and speeches, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. I agreed to help him investigate in return for an exclusive scoop.”

She braced her hand on the archway frame, the stone rough under her palms. Papa’s reputation had kept her and her family safe and cared for. But it had all been built on a lie. A National Socialist had murdered her father. And for the first time in her life, she had a problem she couldn’t present to Uncle Dolf and wait for his solution. Without knowing who was involved, how could she drag Uncle Dolf into a dangerous investigation, especially when the Party was strengthening into the most powerful political force in Germany? He needed to focus on the Party’s goals, not on an eight-year-old crime.

She felt Papa’s hands rubbing her back after she woke crying from a nightmare. She felt his warmth curling around her when she sat on his lap and smelled his scents of tobacco and shoe polish and snow-dampened wool. She heard his voice, deep and slow, like that of a dove, nothing like Uncle Dolf’s wood thrush voice that was melodious and smooth but flowed so fast that sometimes she couldn’t hang on to his words long enough to puzzle them out. She tasted Papa’s lumpy potato pancakes—the one food he could cook—too tough in places and too soft in others, and remembered how she ate every bite, even when Reinhard pushed away his plate and Mama said she should have saved the potatoes for soup instead. And she saw his bullet-ripped and bloodied uniform.

“I need to know what happened.” She sounded so harsh, she scarcely recognized herself.

“Even if it means your family loses its privileged status?”

She turned away from the window, her palms stinging. She turned away from the archway, her palms stinging. She had gripped the frame so tightly, the stone had scraped her skin. But she didn’t mind the pain. She welcomed it. The sensation was something to cling to; anything was better than this gut-churning fear. “Even then, Herr Cohen.”

“Very well.” His eyes held hers for a long moment. “You realize it’s very likely that whoever killed your father is a high-ranking National Socialist, for he would have been marching in the front lines. And whatever we uncover will create a scandal within the Party.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She tried to sound scornful, but her voice was shaking too badly.

“No.” He spoke quietly, without a trace of the anger or condescension she expected. “I want what I suspect you want, although you may not wish to admit it. The truth.” He hesitated. “No matter what it costs.”

14

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN A BOARDINGHOUSE,
Reinhard kept his door locked, though a few twists with Gretchen’s hairpin solved the problem. She stepped into the gloom, drawing the door closed. In the heavy silence, her ragged breaths sounded thunderous.
My God
, she thought,
I must be going mad, taking such a chance
.

Since meeting with Cohen yesterday, she had felt a subtle shifting of the ground beneath her feet. It moved and buckled continuously. She had to walk carefully, speak slowly, or she feared she might betray her new imbalance. Her new fears.

This morning, Gretchen had helped Mama prepare the boarders’ breakfast, she and her mother speaking like strangers as they moved about the kitchen in their well-practiced routine. At the Braunes Haus, she had answered telephones, filed papers, skimmed newspapers for stories about the NSDAP; she had listened when Uncle Dolf stopped by the office to complain to Hanfstaengl about a foreign reporter’s unflattering article; and she had smiled when he kissed her hands farewell in his old-fashioned manner.

After work, she had bicycled back to the boardinghouse, arriving at half past six, just in time to dish out supper: a shoulder roast, stewed in beer with apples and cabbage in a Dutch oven, and, for dessert, a pear cake studded with walnuts. Sugar and fruit and nuts—clearly, the household accounts weren’t as dire as Mama had said.

She scrubbed the dishes and then fixed a meal for Reinhard, ham and cheese sandwiches and apples, tucked with a red checked cloth into a tin lunch box, and she said nothing as he grinned, boasting he was going on a train journey and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night at the latest. She listened to the front door bang shut behind him, wondering where he could be going. But one never asked Reinhard questions.

And then she turned her gaze toward the stairs. She hadn’t been permitted inside her brother’s room for about three years, since she had dusted his writing table and accidentally broken a tiny glass bird, a present for his twelfth birthday from Uncle Dolf.

Her heart beat faster. After Papa’s death, Mama had given many of his possessions to Reinhard, saying a man’s only son should inherit his things. Quickly, Gretchen mounted the stairs. She didn’t know when she would have the chance again to search her brother’s room.

She wasn’t certain what she had expected: piles of dirty laundry on the floor, perhaps, or a stack of girlie magazines hidden beneath the bed, or maybe some records by the big band orchestras he enjoyed. What she hadn’t expected was nothing at all.

The room was a blank canvas, leaving no hints of its resident’s personality. Her bedroom burst with color: the rag quilt her grandmother had sewn; the postcards of Paris and London, Madrid and Zurich pinned to the wall; the stack of library books on the desk; the red curtains she had stitched together last summer.

Reinhard’s room was practically empty: the narrow bed covered with a fraying chenille spread, a spotless writing table, a hooked rug on the varnished floorboards, the furnishings the color of milk, the wood a pale maple, all color washed away.

There was nothing on the walls: no pictures, no books, no records. Neatly hung brownshirt uniforms in the armoire and a wet washcloth hanging over the chipped basin’s lip were the only indications anyone had been in here recently.

The room was a void.

Papa’s old shoemaking tools lay at the bottom of the armoire, behind Reinhard’s winter galoshes and storm trooper boots. The iron shoe repair stand, the heavy old scissors, the thick thread, the patches of leather. She had to blink back tears.

Her father had been so proud of his cobbler skills. Like the men of every trade, he had been required to complete a
Wanderschaft
—three years spent traveling throughout Bavaria, studying under different shoemakers before submitting his work to the guild and receiving the title of master, which meant he could open his own business.

He had loved to tell her about those years, walking from town to town carrying a knapsack containing his only possessions, his tools and an extra set of clothes and a tin drinking cup, sleeping in fields when he couldn’t find an apprenticeship and stealing fruit from orchards when he was hungry. Finally, after receiving the coveted master title and returning home to Dachau, he had proposed to Mama and, after their marriage, had headed for the big city, Munich, to start his own shop.

But then the war had come, and the shells had blasted away something within Papa, so the man who returned was blank-eyed and unpredictable. Sometimes, he smiled the same wide smile she had seen in old photographs, and talked with the easy charm she imagined had won her mother’s heart. Sometimes, he sobbed uncontrollably for hours, crouched in the bedroom, and Mama whispered they must all speak softly so they didn’t upset him.

Maybe the old Papa, the good-natured, smiling man in the photos, could have found his way through the twisting corridors Germany had become after her defeat. But not this new man who shifted so readily between sunlight and shadows.

This father lost his business and had to work for another cobbler, settling for a far smaller income. This father moved his family into a shabby two-room apartment in Schwabing, and often they didn’t have enough money to buy groceries, so Gretchen and her brother went to bed hungry almost every night.

Sighing, she shook her head. If only she could erase most of her memories of those days, saving only little pockets of them instead. Papa taking her to the zoo, and laughing when she squealed in fear at the lions. Papa smiling when she danced in the kitchen, and scolding Mama for snapping at Gretchen to get out of the way because she had to make supper.

She closed the armoire. There was nothing here to tell her why he had died, only reminders of how he had lived.

She was leaving in defeat when a floorboard sank an inch beneath her weight.

Had Reinhard hidden something here? Why would he go to such trouble? She dropped to her knees and pulled at the board, her pulse throbbing. All of the nails had been removed and the board lifted easily. A stack of newspaper clippings and an index card with her brother’s leftward-slanting writing lay in the opening.

She snatched them up. The clippings came from the
Munich Post
. Peculiar. Reinhard didn’t read newspapers, but when he did, he flipped through the Party’s
Völkischer Beobachter
or
Der Stürmer
. Not the local Socialist paper that Uncle Dolf despised so much he called it the Poison Kitchen. What possible reason could Reinhard have for cutting out articles from a newspaper he likely didn’t read?

She was starting to skim the first clipping, dated about two months ago, when a quiet, male voice came from the hall. “Fräulein Müller? Your mother is coming up the stairs.”

Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. There was no way she could explain away her presence in Reinhard’s room to Mama. Quickly, she laid the clippings and card down, then slid the floorboard into place. She slapped the light switch off and stepped into the hallway just as her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. The Englishman Whitestone stood across the corridor.

“Gretchen?” Mama asked. “Are you looking for me?”

“No. I—I thought you were in bed.” She was glad the hallway was dim, for she felt a blush heating her face.

“Fräulein Müller was advising me on the best gardens to visit in Munich,” the Englishman cut in. “She has been most helpful.”

“Gardens now!” Mama’s smile looked forced. “First it is all the places popular in the city with National Socialists, then it is Herr Hitler’s favorite restaurants! You will know Munich as well as any local by the end of your visit, Herr Doktor Whitestone.” She glanced at Gretchen. “Good night. I’ve already locked up, and all the chores are finished.”

“All right, Mama. Good night.”