Conspiracy

by Andy Marino

  “Why would anybody go outside in that?” Max asked.

  Gerta rolled her eyes. “Because it’s the perfect cover! Even the Gestapo inspectors are hiding in basement shelters on a night like tonight.”

  “Right,” Max said, as if he’d already thought of that. “So whatever’s in those papers must be really important.”

  Gerta’s eyes flashed. “Which is why we need to see what it is.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “They’re probably still in Papa’s bag.”

  “They’re tied up with string. He’ll know if we untie it.”

  “We’ll figure out how to tie it back up! This is important, Max. You heard what the man said. The Führer must die. If Papa’s involved in …” She lowered her voice, a reflex for any Berliner, even in the relative safety of their homes, as they were constantly surrounded by eavesdropping busybodies eager to denounce their neighbors as enemies of the Nazi regime. “… assassination, then I think we deserve to know.”

  Max looked down at his scattered miniatures with a sudden pang of longing for the Hoffmanns’ Sunday dinners. Before the war, Uncle Friedrich would bring a new wooden figure every week. Papa would fetch a bottle of wine from the cellar, Mutti would cook pork schnitzel … and now, Uncle Friedrich was off fighting the Soviets, the cellar was a makeshift air-raid shelter, and there was very little pork to be had.

  Max scooped up an armored horse and a court jester and arranged them on the shelf. Pick up the pieces, get some sleep, go to school in the morning. Someday soon, Uncle Friedrich would return from the Eastern Front, the empty shelves in the grocery stores would fill up again, and life in Berlin would go back to normal. Better to keep hope in his thoughts than worry himself sick over the man in the kitchen and shadowy assassination plots. That was how a person went crazy.

  “What if I don’t want to know?” Max said.

  Gerta put her hands on her hips and regarded him severely. “What does Mutti say about Berliners?”

  Max sighed. “That they stick their heads in the sand like ostriches so they don’t have to see what’s going on around them.”

  “Which is?”

  “People being taken from their homes and relocated.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “Jewish people. And anybody who speaks out against the Nazis.”

  “And what does ‘relocated’ really mean?”

  Max sat down on the bed. His vision swam. “Relocated” meant taken by third-class train to new settlements in Poland and Hungary—everybody said so. He wished Gerta would leave him alone so he could put his room back together and get some sleep. There was going to be an arithmetic test in the morning. Long division. He needed to study. He needed to—

  “It means killed, Max,” Gerta said, answering her own question. “Relocated really means murdered by the Nazis.”

  Max closed his eyes. His thoughts churned. The reason everybody “hid like ostriches” was because they didn’t want to get a late-night visit from the Gestapo and suffer the same fate as their “relocated” neighbors.

  “If Papa really is involved in some kind of plot,” Max said, his voice near a whisper, “then isn’t it better for us not to know the details, in case we’re questioned?”

  Gerta folded her arms and cocked her head. “Clever trick, Maxi.” A smile threatened to break out on her face. “Okay, fine! Make up your own mind about what you want to know and what you don’t.”

  More muffled voices drifted up from downstairs. Max heard the door to the backyard open and close.

  “But I need to know,” Gerta said, crunching porcelain on her way out of his room.

  Max sat alone on his bed for a moment, thinking. Then he got up and followed his sister down the hall. “Gerta!” he whispered. “Wait up!”

  Max crept downstairs at his sister’s heels. There was seldom silence in the wake of a raid—especially one that had hit so close—but even the shrill sirens of the fire brigades and the shouted orders of the rescue crews seemed like blissful peace after hours of earth-shaking thunder.

  Max and Gerta peeked into the kitchen. Mutti was scrubbing the table and did not spare them a glance. They moved down the hall, stepping carefully over a silver sconce that had been jolted from its perch on the wall, its candle nowhere to be seen. It was very dark in the hallway, and Max wondered if the day would come when their electricity would be completely lost. Then even their dim, blue-filtered lamps would be useless. They would have to paint their floors and walls with white phosphorescent paint, like the curbs and sidewalks of the city. His classmate Joseph had told Max that in the public shelter near Friedrichstrasse Station there was a wall of this glowing paint bright enough to read a newspaper by.

  Gerta opened the door to their father’s study. Max breathed in the faint odor of citrus. Gerta shut the door behind them and clicked on a small battery-powered torchlight. She swept the beam through the darkness, and Max thought of the searchlights on the flak towers. The powerful lamps would send cones of light up into the sky for the rest of the night until they faded into a gray, smoky dawn.

  He felt his way to the cubbyhole beneath his father’s desk. Empty.

  “Gerta,” he whispered. “The bag’s not here.” He wasn’t sure if what he felt was relief, exactly, but he was fine with their little adventure ending before it could begin. You would think you would emerge from the cellar after an air raid with boundless energy, after being cooped up for hours. But it didn’t work that way. Max always felt drained.

  “Maybe it’s back in the kitchen,” Gerta said.

  “No, Papa always puts it back here when he’s done. That means he still has it with him.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Gerta said. “Those papers are too important for him to be walking around the streets with.”

  “How do you know?” Max said. “Maybe it’s just a … a … schnitzel recipe.”

  Gerta snorted. Max followed the skinny beam of her torch as it illuminated a corner of the rug. “What’s that?” she asked, wiggling the light for emphasis.

  Max shrugged. “The carpet?”

  “No, dummy.” She walked over to the corner of the room and knelt down. There was a small triangular piece of carpet sticking up into the air, as if it had been pulled from the floor like the tab on a tin of sardines. “That.”

  Gerta began to pull on the stray bit of carpet.

  “Gerta … ,” Max said. But then she lifted a precise square of the carpet along with the “tab,” and Max’s curiosity got the better of him. He crouched down next to his sister. Her torch revealed a shiny steel panel. Set into the metal was a numbered dial.

  “It’s a safe,” Max said after a moment.

  “My brother, the boy genius,” Gerta said. She bent her ear close to the floor safe and slowly turned the dial.

  Max knew that his sister was thinking of Hornet and Wasp, the radio serial broadcast by the BBC in England. It was against the law for Berliners to listen to foreign broadcasts, but everybody Max knew did it anyway, sometimes huddled with their radios under the sheets so they could listen at the lowest possible volume.

  In the last episode of Hornet and Wasp, Hornet cracked a safe by using a doctor’s stethoscope to listen to the nearly inaudible clicks as he turned the dial.

  There was a stethoscope in Max’s father’s bag. That would do them no good. But maybe there was a spare instrument somewhere else in the study. The cabinets were full of medical equipment.

  “Give me your torch,” Max said.

  “Shhhh!” Gerta hissed.

  “Hornet had a stethoscope,” Max pointed out.

  “He also had a quiet partner,” Gerta said. Then she raised her head from the safe. “Oh, forget it.” She let the square of carpet fall back into place.

  “Oh well,” Max said, smoothing the patch until it looked completely undisturbed.

  “At least now we know about Papa’s hiding place,” Gerta said.

  “Uh-huh,” Max said wearily. He knew th
at Gerta was just getting started. She would blow the safe open with dynamite if she had to.

  Suddenly, a floorboard creaked just outside the door to the study. Max froze. Gerta clicked off her torch.

  The door opened, and Mutti walked into the study and lit the lamp. She turned and gave a startled yelp at the sight of Max and Gerta standing in the dark corner of the room. She put her hand against her heart and caught her breath.

  “My God, I thought you were in bed! What are you doing creeping around like cat burglars? You have school in the morning, and it’s almost two!”

  Max felt himself relax. He liked it when his mother fussed about getting to bed. It reminded him of the years before the war, when the only things on his mind were soccer games at recess and whether he would have fresh potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce for lunch.

  “I guess nobody told the Royal Air Force it was a school night,” Gerta said.

  Mutti gave Gerta a pointed look. “We are all still alive. Our house is still standing. We are more fortunate than many others. This family does not use hardship as an excuse when so many others have it much worse.”

  “Like the man who came to deliver papers to Papa.” Gerta was intractable tonight.

  “Gerta … ,” Max said. Another wave of nausea hit him. He had been so close to getting through the rest of the night without thinking about the dead man in the kitchen.

  Mutti stepped toward them. Her voice softened. “I’m sorry you had to see that. But you know Papa—he is bound by duty and his oath as a surgeon to help anyone in need. We couldn’t have turned him away. You understand. And I want you to know that you were both very brave.”

  Max noted that his mother did not mention the papers, despite the purposeful way that Gerta brought them up.

  A noise like distant thunder rattled Max’s guts. An unexploded incendiary, probably triggered by the fire brigade. The sound wrenched him back to the moment Papa opened the door. Max relived the moments that followed as a series of images.

  The gash in the man’s face.

  The light in his eyes going out as the morphine swept him away.

  The Führer must die.

  “Max?” His mother’s voice sounded far away, like it was drifting up to him from the bottom of a deep well. He felt her palm on his shoulder, and then the back of her hand brushed his cheek.

  His memory paused on his father reaching into the leather bag. Again, he saw Papa calmly inject the morphine into the man’s thigh. Papa had not used any of the instruments from his bag, or even attempted to give the man care. He had simply helped him float away …

  The walls of the study came rushing back. Max found himself looking into his mother’s eyes.

  “Oh, Maxi,” she said. “Let it out. It’s okay.”

  He felt his eyes well up with tears. He did not want to cry in front of Gerta, but he did not know if he could hold back.

  “Papa didn’t save him,” he said. “He didn’t even try.”

  “Sometimes, your father knows right away that nothing can be done,” Mutti said. “All he could do was ease the man’s pain.”

  Max nodded. Next to him, he could sense that his sister was coiled like a spring—she wanted desperately to bring up the papers, but was biting her tongue.

  Mutti embraced them both. “Now get some sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow the sun will shine.”

  The next day, the sun did shine—in patches, at least, through gaps in the greasy smoke that lingered over the city.

  After school, Max and Gerta joined their parents to help clear rubble from Königin-Luise-Strasse, a few blocks from their villa. A nearby explosion had reduced the facade of an apartment building to a pile of brick that cascaded down over the sidewalk and into the street.

  Somewhere, buried in the rubble, a telephone rang.

  Max and Gerta hefted larger bricks as a team, plunking them into waiting wheelbarrows to be carted away by sunken-cheeked ostarbeiter. Max watched his mother slip a ration coupon from her pocket and approach one of the foreign work details. Just before she reached them, Papa grabbed her arm and pulled her back. Puzzled, Max glanced around. And then he cursed under his breath.

  “Here comes the pig,” he muttered to Gerta.

  The blockwart strutted along the edge of the rubble, an unlit cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth. As usual, he wore his Nazi-issued brown uniform, and his boots were perfectly shined.

  He stopped when he reached the Hoffmanns and took a moment to survey the scene. He pulled the cigar from his mouth.

  “Heil Hitler,” he said sharply.

  “Good afternoon, Herr Siewert,” Mutti replied. Max winced. By not returning the standard German greeting of Heil Hitler, Mutti risked provoking the blockwart. All it would take was a single phone call from Franz Siewert, and the Gestapo would be paying the Hoffmanns a visit. Max thought of the dead man’s papers, and Papa’s floor safe …

  “Heil Hitler,” Papa said without enthusiasm.

  Suddenly, Siewert reached out with a meaty hand and patted Max on the head. It took all of Max’s willpower not to shrink away in disgust.

  “Your dedication is impressive,” Siewert said to Papa. “But surely there is no need to involve one so young in this operation.”

  “I’m twelve,” Max said.

  “And wouldn’t a boy of twelve rather be playing with the proper friends? You know …” Siewert knelt down to speak to Max, eye to eye. Max could smell the stale tobacco of the unlit cigar on his breath. “Our magnificent organization, the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth, fields many teams of great quality. A boy strong enough to lift these stones might find himself very useful on the soccer pitch.”

  “The bombs make no distinction between the old and the young, or the rich and the poor,” Mutti said. “Neither should the rescue efforts. We are all Berliners.”

  Siewert looked at Mutti with distaste. “I am sure today’s rescue effort will not miss one boy of twelve,” he said. Then he glanced at Gerta. “Or one girl of thirteen.”

  Chills ran down Max’s spine. If Siewert knew his and Gerta’s exact ages, what else did he know about the Hoffmann family?

  “I’ll think about it,” Max said.

  Siewert nodded crisply. “Good boy. And don’t worry about all this.” He waved his hand vaguely over the rubble, as if casting a spell on it. “We have plenty of foreign laborers, and more are arriving every day, faster than we can process them. There is no need to waste the energies of German boys and girls on work that can be done by Gypsies and Poles.” With that, Siewert stood up and popped the cigar back into his mouth.

  “Herr Siewert,” Papa said before the blockwart strode away. “One question for you, if I may.”

  “Of course, herr doktor.”

  Papa nodded politely. “I was wondering if Herr Göring had changed his name yet.”

  Gerta snickered under her breath. Siewert stared blankly for a moment, and Max was worried that his father had taken it too far. Hermann Göring was the Nazi minister of aviation. Göring had been so confident in Germany’s air defense system, he claimed that, “If one enemy bomber reaches Berlin, my name is not Göring, it’s Meyer.”

  Papa always kept his mouth shut around Nazi officials—it was Mutti who liked to poke and prod at their serious, puffed-up demeanors. This was highly unusual. His father must be in a strange mood, and Max wondered if the events of last night had anything to do with it.

  Slowly, Siewert pulled the cigar from his mouth. He took one step toward Papa, scowling, then stopped. He glanced at the ruined apartment building. Then he shook his head, and a rueful smile broke out on his face.

  He pointed at Papa with the tip of the cigar. “I appreciate that, herr doktor. We Berliners must keep our sense of humor during times like these.”

  Papa smiled. “Heil Hitler,” he said.

  Herr Siewert looked pleased. He gave a crisp Nazi salute—right arm straight and angled upward, palm down—then marched off to berate a stooped old ostarb
eiter as the man struggled with a wheelbarrow piled high with bricks.

  Somewhere, the telephone was still ringing.

  Something’s going on with them,” Gerta said. She picked up the armored knight from Max’s shelf, paced over to the bed, then back to the shelf, where she plunked the knight down next to the queen.

  “Mutti and Papa?” Max asked. He slid his curtain aside and looked out at dusk settling over their little corner of Dahlem. Soon, the Hoffmanns would douse the lights completely in favor of the dim blue filters. He was so used to the weird hue by now that it tinted his dreams at night, and he often jolted awake, sweating and breathless, from blue-filtered nightmares.

  “No,” Gerta said, “Hitler and Mussolini. Yes, little brother, Mutti and Papa.”

  “I’ve never seen Papa act like that around Sie—around you-know-who. Pushing his buttons, I mean.”

  “Exactly,” Gerta said.

  Max let his eyes go slack. The villas across the street blurred into the salmon-colored November dusk, giving the neighboring houses the dreamy look of a watercolor wash.

  Mutti had once told him that Adolf Hitler was a failed painter, and often—especially in the aftermath of yet another bombing raid—Max wondered what would have happened if Hitler had stuck with art instead of turning to Fascist political rabble-rousing. Would this entire war have been avoided? Would the Nazis, with their jackboots and their heils and their terrifying nighttime rallies, never have existed at all?

  In that case, Berlin would be whole, undamaged by bombs, and thousands of its citizens would be home, enjoying their peaceful lives, instead of being “relocated.” He imagined the ruins of the Cinema Français rising from the rubble, the bricks putting themselves back together, letters jumping up onto the marquee …

  “Yoo-hoo,” Gerta said, waving a hand in front of Max’s face. He snapped out of his reverie. “I was saying, we need a plan.”

  “For what?”