Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (5 page)

BY FIRST LIGHT, SHE WAS ON A SHIP BOUND FOR
Calais, standing on the deck and squinting in the sunshine that bounced off the steel-gray waters of the English Channel. France was a brown line on the horizon. From behind her, she heard the low murmurs of the other passengers braving the cold in their heaviest overcoats as she was, eager to taste the salt-scented air and hear the waves slapping against the belly of the boat.

She leaned on the ship’s railing, staring at the growing shape in the distance until her eyes ached. After so long, she was about to step back onto the same piece of land that contained Germany. Where Daniel might still be alive, and her brother and father softened to dust beneath the ground, and, as far as she knew, her mother lived among the marshlands of Dachau. She shaded her eyes from the glare with her hand, so none of the other passengers could see her tears before she blinked them away.

For the hundredth time since she’d left Oxford the previous night, she wondered what had happened to Daniel. Was he safe and in hiding somewhere? Who was this mysterious victim he was supposed to have killed, and what secrets had been concealed by the real murderer?

For she had no doubt that there had been a real crime, a real victim; the National Socialists weren’t stupid and their power was limited. They needed a body lying in the morgue—a body they had put there, so there wasn’t a possibility of the true killer being caught and destroying their case against Daniel—and evidence they had manufactured, to convince Berlin’s police force to issue a warrant for Daniel’s arrest. If the National Socialists wanted a legal-looking means of getting rid of Daniel, they’d hit upon a clever one: murder was a crime punishable by execution.

Gretchen shuddered, watching the vast docks of Calais rise above the sea. She’d have to be smarter and faster than the National Socialists and the police combined, if she wanted to get to Daniel first.

Before midafternoon, she had boarded a train, where she sat in a crowded third-class compartment with a harried-looking mother and three small children. At one of the station stops, she wired a telegram to the Whitestones, saying she had reached France. After that, there could be no more communication between them, she knew, not until she was out of Germany again and on her way back to them.

The trains were slow and some didn’t run at night, so after switching her pounds for marks at a public exchange, she slept in a grubby hotel down the street from the station. In the morning,
she left on a train headed for the border. As the hours passed, she watched sunlight glimmer on the fields flickering past, trying not to think, for thought would only bring fear.

That night, she curled in a corner of her seat, clutching her purse. When she woke in the gray dawn, the people sharing her compartment were still asleep, sprawled in their seats. Out of habit, she touched the gold hooked charm on her necklace; the
Hakenkreuz
had been her sixteenth birthday present from Hitler, and the metal felt warm against her fingers. She’d been wearing it when she’d fled from Germany. For reasons she couldn’t understand, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw it away—perhaps because it was the only thing she still possessed from her old life. Last night in the train lavatory, she’d put it on again, hoping the swastika charm would help her blend in when she reached Munich.

She drew up the window shade. Pine forests flashed past the window. Sometime during the night they had reached Bavaria. In the deepening pink of early morning, it looked the same, the land of her childhood: woodlands dark with trees, mountains cutting a jagged line along the horizon. A thin layer of snow glittered with frost. She had to look away to catch her breath. She was close to Daniel now. If he was still in Munich, they were only hours apart.

I will find him
.

By three o’clock, the train had arrived in Munich, and she walked the streets of her city again. After so many months of having to translate English into German in her head, hearing her native tongue everywhere was overwhelming. The words seemed to crash against her ears like ocean waves.

She imagined that everyone she passed turned to look at her. When she looked in shop windows, though, she saw nobody was paying her any attention. For the moment, she was anonymous, a brown-haired girl in a gray loden coat, moving quickly as though she were late for an appointment. Not as though she were afraid someone might recognize her face.

Swastika banners, flecked white from the snow spitting wearily from the sky, dripped bloodred down the fronts of narrow stone and brick buildings. Burghers in camel-hair coats and office girls in brass-buttoned jackets hurried up the cobblestone street. A clump of working men in tattered trousers and stained shirts trudged past, probably looking for work since they weren’t at the factories.

Housewives carrying string bags scurried to the Viktualienmarkt to haggle over meat and bread. Young children skipped beside their mothers—here the school day ended at one o’clock, so classes had already been let out. A couple of skeletal cats slunk down the pavement. Somewhere, streetcars clanged.

Only the children looked happy. Everyone else walked with their heads down, shoulders hunched against the cold, sneaking nervous glances at a group of men in khaki plus fours and red swastika armbands. Gretchen shrank against a building. She knew those uniforms. The men were members of the Sturmabteilung, the same unit to which her brother had belonged.

Gretchen turned away from the street, pretending to study the cigars on display in the shop window. What if the men recognized her? Both she and Reinhard had been well known among the National Socialists as the martyr’s children, and she’d met many of her brother’s SA comrades over the years.

She watched the men’s reflections in the window. They looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Too old to have been Reinhard’s friends. She might be safe.

A harsh shout cut into her thoughts. More SA men jogged down the avenue, their hands on the knife sheaths clipped to their belts. One of them called, “Faster! Before the rat gets away!”

They charged into an office building, the door banging shut behind them. None of the Müncheners seemed to notice, their faces turned away, their footsteps fast.

Gretchen’s legs shook as she forced them forward. She flipped up her coat collar and pulled her broad-brimmed hat lower, hoping it obscured her face. Why were the SA storming someone’s office? And why was no one reacting? Her legs ached to run, but a girl racing along the street would only attract attention. She walked faster, her suitcase bumping her knees as she counted building numbers. Fritz Gerlich’s newspaper office was on the left. She’d never been there before—when she’d known Gerlich, he had been working as a historian, but last year he’d taken over the anti–National Socialist newspaper
Der Gerade Weg
. Praying he was at his office today, she hurried up the snow-dusted steps.

Inside, the lobby was dim and empty. The sound of shuffling papers pulled her to an open door.

The room had been ransacked. Gretchen stopped short in shock. Desk drawers yawned open drunkenly, their contents strewn across the floor: books, pens, paper clips, loose sheets torn from spiral notebooks, the sort Daniel used when jotting notes for a story. Chairs lay on their sides. Pots of paste had been flung onto the ground, leaving a mess of cracked glass and congealed white glue.

Fritz Gerlich crouched in the middle of the room, gathering papers into a tidy stack. He looked as she had remembered: a slight figure with dark hair combed back from an oval face and thoughtful eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. In his plain navy suit he reminded her of a schoolmaster.

Sighing, he tried to fit together ripped pieces of paper, then shook his head. When she stepped forward, her shoes clicking on the wooden floor, he looked up. “May I help you, Fräulein?”

Her new hair color was a better disguise than she’d anticipated. She tipped her hat back, so he could see her face. “Herr Gerlich, it’s me—Gretchen Müller.”

“My God,” he murmured, crossing himself. Hastily, he got to his feet and hurried to close the door. “What on earth are you doing here? You shouldn’t be in Munich,” he said before she could reply. “It’s far too dangerous for you.”

“I had to come after I saw the telegram you sent to the
Oxford Mail
.” Nerves had tightened her voice into something she scarcely recognized. Through the window, she heard more shouts from the street and the tinkle of glass shattering. Perhaps someone else’s office was getting destroyed. “Do you know what’s happened to Daniel?”

Gerlich leaned against the door, his expression solemn. “No. I haven’t seen him in over a week.” He sighed. “Herr Cohen’s cousin had died before he’d arrived, and the boy’s sister had already returned to their parents’ house. Herr Cohen was most distraught.”

Aaron
. Gretchen could still see him, standing in the shabby parlor he’d shared with Daniel and Ruth. Watching her cautiously, for as a Jew he must have been afraid to say much in
front of her. But he hadn’t turned her away. He’d let her stay with them. And now he must already be underground, buried by sunset as Jewish tradition demanded, slowly turning to earth himself. She couldn’t fathom how devastated Daniel must be.

Behind his glasses, Gerlich’s eyes met hers. “I saw Herr Cohen a few days after he arrived here, when he stopped by my home. He had been beaten. Some Nazis had spotted him on the street and attacked him. They knew who he was. They’d taken his money and papers. I gave him enough money for a room for the night, but it was all I could spare. A couple of days afterward, there was an announcement in several of the Party-sponsored newspapers that he was wanted by the Berlin police for murder. They claim he killed a young woman named Monika Junge. I’ve asked around, but there’s been no word of him since.”

Gretchen clasped her hands tightly together so she wouldn’t fly apart. Her suspicions were true, then: The National Socialists had seen Daniel and were after him. In her mind, she saw him crouching on the ground, arms over his head as SA men surrounded him, kicking and lashing with truncheons. Through the tangle of jackboots, she saw his dark eyes closing in pain as they pummeled him, a line of blood trickling from his hairline to his chin. A sick feeling twisted her stomach.

“You have no idea where he might be now?”

Gerlich shook his head. “I wish there was more I could tell you, Fräulein. I sent the telegram to Herr Cohen’s editor because I wanted his friends in England to know what had happened. I never intended for you to come back . . . especially on such a day as this.” He knelt on the floor, his knees popping from the effort, and started gathering torn papers again.

“What do you mean? What’s happening?” She glanced around the wrecked room; she’d forgotten about it in her desperation to learn about Daniel. It was easy to guess who had ordered the vandalism: There was no one in Munich whom Hitler hated more than Gerlich. They had openly despised each other for years.

“The city is under attack.” Gerlich rubbed his forehead, as if in pain. “SA groups have been pillaging businesses all day. Several men came this morning. They were quite effective, as you can see.” He waved a hand at the garbage-littered floor.

“How can they hope to get away with it?” She was bewildered. After the disastrous street shoot-out in which Papa had died, Hitler had pledged that the Party must appear as a respectable organization. They beat or killed their opponents, but only if there wasn’t a chance of getting caught.

Gerlich picked up an overturned wastebasket. “The National Socialists took over the city’s police force today.” He sounded weary. “Did you know Heinrich Himmler?”

She remembered him well: pudding-faced, spectacled, soft-spoken, with a smile always twitching his lips. He was the head of the Schutzstaffel, the Party’s racially selective unit. Once she’d worked in the office adjacent to his at the Braunes Haus, the National Socialists’ Munich headquarters. She nodded, filled with dread.

Gerlich set a handful of pens on his desk. “Today he was appointed Munich’s acting police chief.”

Then what Hitler had always promised would happen: The Party and all branches of the government were becoming one. His plans, uttered casually over drinks at Café Heck or spaghetti suppers at his apartment, rushed back to her. He’d said he would
start with the police, for whoever controlled the prisons and punishments controlled the people. The
Gleichschaltung
, he called it. Coordination, the period of time when the National Socialists would bring everyone in the Fatherland into line. It was meant to be a complete revolution redefining the whole of society until it matched Hitler’s vision.

Her breath was coming too fast. With the police force under the National Socialists’ control, she couldn’t depend on them for help. She thought of Daniel’s old colleagues at the
Munich Post
. They’d cared about him. Surely they would help her find him, if they could. She had to get to their office straightaway.

“I must go,” she said to Gerlich. She clasped his hand in gratitude. “Thank you for sending the telegram. I owe you a debt I can never repay.”