The Baker's Daughter (11 page)

“Clear,” said the standartenführer. “Let's go to the next. Gute nacht.”

The soldiers filed out, but the boy-soldier lingered. “Happy Christmas,” he said. His eyes twinkled with youth and sleepiness.

“A blessed Christmas to you and your family,” said Papa.

He gave an awkward grin, then ran after his unit.

Papa bolted the front door after the men.

“Can you believe it?” Mutti tapped her fingernails on the wooden baker's board. “An escaped Jew! On the eve of our Savior's birth. Unbelievable.”

Elsie's head began to pound. The room went topsy-turvy. She took a gulp of the weak tea, lukewarm and slightly bitter. Gold flickered back at her from the bottom. She set it down beside a bowl of
Christstollen
dough, fat and leavened under its cloth. Papa would bake it for breakfast. She had to get her parents upstairs and the child out.

“I left this open.” Mutti quietly slipped her hand up the closed back door to the loose chain. “For the carp.” She turned to Elsie, head cocked.

“Let's get back to bed,” called Papa from the stairs.

Elsie's fingers and toes went numb. “I was cold.”

Papa's footsteps thudded up, up, up.

They held each other's gazes for a long moment. Sweat trickled between Elsie's breasts.

“I'm sorry.” She tried to make her voice casual.

Mutti rechained the door, cracked it open, then scanned the kitchen. “You are tired,” she finally said. An icy breeze fluttered her nightgown, and she hugged her arms across her chest. “Finish your tea and go straight to bed.” At the bottom of the staircase, she stopped to look around once more before slowly ascending.

It was only then that Elsie's hands began to shake. She poured the tea out and collected the ring. Not knowing where else to put it, she slid it back on her finger. The house quieted, and she wished it could stay that way, wished there was nothing inside the oven but coals and ash. She wanted to crawl under her eiderdown and pretend this night was all a terrible nightmare.

An old woman, haggard and white, reflected in the small kitchen window. Elsie looked over her shoulder. The woman did too. And then she recognized herself, sighed, and ran a hand through her hair. What was she doing? She should put the boy out in the snow. The Gestapo would find him soon, and he'd go back to where he belonged. Elsie cringed imagining him in a work camp, so thin and frail; but if they found him in the bakery, her family could lose everything. Her head whirled, and she grasped
the oven latch to keep from falling. She regretted her earlier actions. She should have shut the door and been done with the Jew. But she hadn't. So what now?

Carefully, she opened the oven. Blackness, then a pale face emerged like the moon from behind a cumulous cloud.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Tobias,” he whispered.

“Come.” She extended her arms.

S
econd Lieutenant Josef Hub stood on the doorstep with a holstered gun and a heavy sledgehammer. The three comrades in his charge eagerly awaited his command to carry out Gestapo orders; but the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant paused, unsure of himself and the power of his hand against this door. The yellow star gave no counsel. To use the brass knocker, stained and marred by the painted “u” of Juden, seemed inappropriate for the occasion.

“Should we break the windows first?” asked Peter Abend, a nineteen-year-old graduate of the Hitler Youth. The ranks were full of soldiers like Peter, boys just out of lederhosen shorts who converged in the cities from the German countryside, determined to demonstrate absolute devotion to the Reich. Naive stories of war glories filled their heads; rifles, their hands; and their lives were suddenly imprinted with a new purpose that transcended hayseeds and pig corrals. None of them had studied at the university. All were students of one school of thinking and one course of action.

“Nein,” said Josef. He pounded the sledgehammer on the door. “Open!”

Nothing.

“Open or we must come by force.”

Silence.

It was time. His orders were clear. He wore the uniform, trained in the ranks, fell in line and step at the grand parade for Führer Hitler. It was time to act the part, despite all reservations and all personal convictions. “The individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation.” Those were Hitler's words. The unity of the nation. Pure Germany.

He reluctantly blew his whistle, and the three young
sturmabteilung
charged the familiar door. The oak held at first but then cracked and split the frame. A woman yelped inside.

“We are here by order of the Third Reich for Herr Hochschild,” said Josef.

The family huddled in the dark hallway. Frau Hochschild stood strong at her husband's side, four children behind them. The three girls cried “Papa,” and the youngest, a four-year-old boy, valiantly held his father's hand.

Herr Hochschild stepped forward. “I have committed no crime.”

“You are a Jew. Your very nature is offensive,” said Peter.

“Quiet,” said Josef.

Peter hushed, but he cocked his gun audibly. The two soldiers at his side followed suit.

Josef moved in front of their barrels. “Herr Hochschild, please come with us and there will be no harm to your family. On my word.”

He could carry out these orders without barbaric measures. He was an officer of the Third Reich and had read
Mein Kampf
. He understood that one could influence the individual and group by way of rhetoric more than any other force on the planet. These soldier-boys at his command knew nothing but target practice and military games.

“Make this easy on your children, Herr. Come,” He gestured to the doorway.

Herr Hochschild stepped closer, out of the shadows. “Josef?” he asked. “Is that you?”

Josef angled his head so that the lip of his cap darkened his brow.

“It is. Josef, you know me.”

And he did. Herr Hochschild had been his literature professor. He had taught courses at the University of Munich where Josef had studied for a semester. That was before the Jewish professors were dismissed, and the SS had recruited him.

Those years ago, he'd come to this very home for supper and been welcomed by Frau Hochschild, an almond-eyed, cheerful woman who said she
always wore emeralds to complement her dark hair. She wore none now. All Jewish jewelry had been impounded to finance the New Order. Though some, he knew, bobbed on the ears of his commanders' wives.

The girls had been young the last he saw them; babies cared for by a stern Austrian nurse who disapproved of children eating sweets. Josef had learned that quickly when he presented sacks of rainbow gummi bears to the rambunctious brood, and she promptly seized them. Huddled in the hallway, they stared at him now with hollow cheeks.

The house had been different then too, effulgently lit by electric lamps that made the wallpaper flowers seem to grow right off the boards. It had reminded him of his mother's herb garden in summer. Now, the paper blooms were torn and singed around electric wires. The hallway smelled of mold and smoke. This had been a joyful place, and he couldn't help but wince at the familiarity of Herr Hochschild's voice. The same voice that discussed Goethe and Brecht with him and read Novalis and Karl May over plummy wine by the fire. For a moment, he wished he could close his eyes and return the world to that simpler time.

“I can't leave my family,” Hochschild pleaded. He reached out to Josef.

“Don't come any closer,” Peter warned.

“You must do as I say,” said Josef.

“Please, don't do this,” begged Frau Hochschild.

“We have orders.”

The two men came to either side of Hochschild, their guns aimed at his back.

“We were your friends!” cried Frau Hochschild. “You—you traitor!” She raced forward to slap Josef.

Peter fired. So close, the bullet cracked Frau Hochschild's sternum and thrust her back into her children's arms. Her final gaze met Josef's.

“A curse on you!” Herr Hochschild yelled to them. He extended a hand to his wife's cheek but was forced to the ground before reaching it. His children's faces froze in mute screams as the soldiers dragged him from the house.

When they had gone, Josef turned to Peter, took a deep breath, exhaled, then smashed the sledgehammer down on his hand. The gun skittered across the wood floor. Peter fell to his knees clasping splintered bones that poked through the flesh of his palm. Josef grabbed him by the throat.

“They're … just … Jews,” wheezed Peter.

Josef squeezed harder, his leather gloves groaned against the strain. Before the two sturmabteilung returned to stop him, Peter was dead. The
children watched it all, covered in their mother's blood, silent to the sound of shattering glass, shouts, and gunshots in the street.

Josef let go. His fingers trembled and ached.

“Traitor.” The boy whispered his mother's last word.

Josef stepped over Peter's broken body, swallowing the impulse to vomit as he left. The frosty November night helped to ease his nausea. Inside the police wagon, Herr Hochschild wailed.

“What about the children?” asked one of the troopers.

“Leave them,” said Josef.

“Where's Peter?”

“The next house. Go,” Josef commanded and handed the young man his sledgehammer. “There can be only one people, one empire, one leader.”

“I
tried to call you on the radio,” said Agent Bert Mosley. He picked his teeth with a wooden toothpick.

Riki tossed the remnants of his Taco Cabana breakfast burrito in the trash. “Sorry, must've been off on the way in. What's up?”

“We received a call from a resident. Says she's seen a couple Mexican kids on the trail behind her house. Real young ones. A couple junkers are parked nearby. She thinks the parents have set up camp in them. Lady doesn't speak no Spanish so she wanted somebody to come check. Figured since you were already out,” Bert explained. He handed Riki the address.

“I'm not out now, though.” Riki took the paper and read. “Westside?”

Bert nodded.

“All right, but you owe me.” He picked up his car keys. “Mind sprucing up the detainment room while I'm gone. That fellow from Tolentino looked pretty sick when I handed him to the Chihuahua police.”

“Old man had some kind of Mexican plague. Did you see the sores on his arms? He's crazy to think we'd let him walk into our country—infect everybody with Ebola or something.”

“It was shingles,” said Riki.

“Sorry, I didn't realize I was talking to
Doctor
Chavez,” Bert scoffed.

“The point is, he was sick. We should air out the room.”

“Call me Martha Stewart. I'll be sure to iron the linens and arrange the tulips.”

“Don't be a lazy Anglo,” Riki joked to lighten the mood. After working together for three years, their inside jokes and quips could be reduced to a handful of ringing statements.

“Fat and ignorant's my gig. Laziness is all yours. We got to stick to our roles, otherwise—
what
will become of things.” Bert laughed. Riki grinned.

On the drive, a Shakira song came on the radio. It reminded Riki of Reba. He always said she looked like a dark-haired version of the singer, especially in the mornings when her hair lay uncombed and wavy on the pillow. He'd just left her that way, messy and beautiful. Sometimes it took all the strength he had not to climb into bed beside her and bury his face in her hair and skin and sleepy smells. But he knew the moment he did, she'd wake and push him away. He couldn't have both the Reba he saw and the Reba who saw him. They were different women, and he supposed he'd rather have one than neither.