Conspiracy

by Andy Marino

  That night, mercifully, the air-raid sirens were silent, and Max actually managed to get some sleep.

  The next day was Saturday. The air was free of ash and smoke, the sun came out, and Papa came home.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” he announced to Max and Gerta. “Then you two will do the same. Frau Becker does not take kindly to smelly guests.”

  Perleberger Strasse was lined with three-story row houses fronted by small, neatly kept lawns, stately facades, and large picture windows. As the Hoffmanns rounded the corner, Max saw that some of these windows had been blown out, but other than that, the street had escaped the recent raids unscathed. In front of several houses, scaffolding had been erected, and workmen were busy reinstalling glass in the window frames.

  Pick up the pieces, sweep up, and move on.

  Max pulled his scarf up to cover the lower half of his face. Despite the sunshine, the air was freezing, and there was a lingering acrid odor that stung his nose and mouth. To make matters worse, Papa had insisted that Max and Gerta wear their Sunday best, as if they were going to church services on Christmas. His wool vest itched, and his necktie felt like it was choking him. But he supposed it could be worse—he could have nothing but stockings to cover his legs, like his sister, who was wearing a dress the color of a robin’s egg.

  Despite being awake all night tending to burn victims, Papa was in high spirits.

  “He’s looking forward to the food,” Mutti said. “You’ll see.”

  Papa led them up the steps of a house near the end of the street. Max took in a few small, intriguing details—the wrought-iron railing that curled around itself in odd spirals, bricks the color of honey, and an ornate brass door knocker shaped like a gargoyle with its tongue sticking out.

  Papa grabbed the gargoyle’s face and slammed it against the heavy wooden door—two quick knocks in rapid succession, followed by two more at longer intervals.

  A moment later, the door swung open. A middle-aged man in servant’s livery scanned the four faces on his doorstep. Then he gave Papa and Mutti a shallow bow—just a nod of the head, really—and ushered them inside. The servant had bushy white eyebrows like a sea captain in an adventure tale. As he stepped into the front hall, Max noticed that where the man’s left hand should be was an empty sleeve, pinned together at the end.

  “French machine gun at the Somme,” the servant said.

  Max quickly looked away. The man had caught him staring!

  “Chewed me up good,” the man continued genially. “I was lucky an arm’s all I lost.”

  “Sorry, Albert,” Mutti said, shooting Max a pointed look. “He knows better than to stare.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing, Ingrid,” the man called Albert said. “Allow me to take your coats, and then come in by the fire. I’m getting cold just looking at you.” As the Hoffmanns unwrapped scarves and unbuttoned coats for Albert to pile on his good arm, Max nudged Gerta. The front hall was lined with dark wood paneling and portraits of gentlemen from what looked like the last century, many of them wearing monocles and colorful military emblems and medals. There were ladies, too, in enormous billowing dresses. Gerta pointed at one young lady cradling a Labrador puppy as if it were a baby.

  This Frau Becker had funny taste in art.

  “The Beckers have been an aristocratic Prussian family for more than two centuries,” Papa said as Albert retreated into a small cloakroom to hang coats and scarves on metal hangers. “These portraits are Frau Becker’s ancestors.”

  Albert popped back out of the cloakroom and they followed him down the hall. Max began to hear voices—it sounded as if a lively party was already underway.

  They came to a sumptuous red-velvet curtain. Albert moved it aside and beckoned for the Hoffmanns to cross the threshold into a large sitting room.

  A fire crackled in a massive stone fireplace, immediately warming Max’s bones. Seated on plush lounges and armchairs were five people—two of them about Papa and Mutti’s age, two younger, and one much older.

  This older one was a woman, and she was positively ancient. She perched on the edge of a wicker chair, one gnarled hand curled around the grip of a cane, the other holding a leather-bound book in her lap. Her face was etched with lines, and on her head was a round furry hat like Russian soldiers wore.

  “Aha!” she said. Her astonishingly clear voice sliced through the chatter of the others in the room. “The guests of honor have arrived. Gerta and Max, I presume. Meet my new hat.” She pointed to the furry cap on her head, which reminded Max of the pelt of a large rodent. “I am told it is called an ushanka. Princess Vasiliev was kind enough to spirit it away from the country estate in Königsberg. We need all the hats we can get right here in Berlin!”

  “Frau Becker,” said a raven-haired woman reclining on a lounge with a saucer and teacup balanced in her lap, “enough with the ‘princess,’ please.” Her German was heavily accented. She turned to Max and Gerta. “Lovely to meet you. You may call me Marie.”

  Frau Becker shrugged. “I wanted them to be suitably impressed. It’s not every day one meets a real princess.”

  Marie snorted. “These days I’m about as much a princess as General Vogel.”

  She lifted a stockinged foot and pointed her toes in the direction of a large, big-bellied man in the spotless olive-green uniform of a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer, sporting a mustache that made him resemble a walrus. The Wehrmacht made up the bulk of Germany’s fighting forces—the millions of ground troops that were currently fortifying the Atlantic coastline in the west and trudging across frigid Russia in the east.

  “Karl, Ingrid, good to see you again,” General Vogel said. “And it’s nice to meet you,” he said to Max and Gerta. “I’ve heard so much about you. I’ve got a daughter about your age—my Kat is nearly thirteen. She is the most marvelous—”

  “Quiet, man, let them get some food!” Frau Becker said, waving her hand dismissively at General Vogel.

  To Max’s surprise, the general immediately stopped talking and sipped from a glass of wine.

  “The duck pâté is delightful,” said a young man seated to the left of the princess. He was thin and high-cheekboned, with a shock of blond hair combed to one side, smartly dressed in a fashionable gray suit adorned with a purple pocket square. His plate was heaped with food—bread and cheese, venison schnitzel, puff pastries. He set his plate down and approached the Hoffmanns.

  “Max, Gerta,” Mutti said, “this is Hans Meier, a medical student from Switzerland who visits us from time to time.”

  “Whenever I can, although the trains are becoming positively abominable.” Hans, too, spoke accented German. “I heard that it sometimes takes eight hours to get from the city center out to Potsdam.” He shook hands with Papa and Mutti, then sat down cross-legged on the plush carpet in front of Max and Gerta. “It occurs to me that duck pâté might not be your favorite snack. In that case …”

  He flashed his empty palms, then reached behind Max’s ear with a quick, darting movement, as if he were grabbing a fish from a stream. When he pulled back, his hand was closed into a fist, which he slowly opened. In his palm sat two gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bonbons.

  Max was speechless. He had not seen a piece of chocolate in Berlin since 1942.

  “For me?” he asked, hesitating.

  Hans gave him a look of mock reproach. “One for you, one for your sister, of course.”

  “Right,” Max said. Slowly, he took the chocolate from Hans’s palm, while Gerta did the same. He turned to Papa in disbelief. “Can we eat these right now?”

  Papa chuckled. “Yes, Max. I don’t see any reason to wait.”

  Papa and Mutti went to a small table against the far wall and began filling plates from a row of steaming serving trays. Max wondered how Frau Becker managed to host a Saturday salon as if there were no war at all. He knew there was a thriving black market that operated in Berlin—before her kitchen garden bloomed, Mutti sometimes bought fresh peas and carrots this way—and
he supposed that as an aristocrat, Frau Becker had lots of money to buy goods outside of the ration system. But an old woman and a one-armed servant hobbling around the shadows of the Anhalter Station, furtively buying duck pâté and venison, seemed absurd to him.

  As if summoned by Max’s thoughts, Albert crossed the room with a bottle of wine and placed it into a silver ice bucket next to the table. Then he exited as swiftly as he’d arrived.

  “Mmm,” Gerta said, chewing her bonbon. “Amazing.” She gave a little curtsy, which Max had never before seen her do. “Thank you, Herr Meier.”

  Max unwrapped his piece, enjoying the crinkle of the thin foil wrapper. Instead of popping the whole thing in his mouth, he began to nibble, savoring each sweet and slightly bitter bite.

  “Switzerland,” Hans said with a grin. “Come for the Alps, stay for the chocolates.”

  “I’ll take an average German milk chocolate over the finest Swiss dark any day of the week,” said the fifth stranger in the room. He was standing by the fire with his arms folded—an impeccably dressed gentleman, slightly older than Papa, with a pince-nez perched at the end of his nose.

  Hans rolled his eyes and stood up. “Herr Trott is our resident nationalist. He owns a tire factory. The war has made him very rich.”

  Herr Trott took a step forward into the lamplight, and Max saw the ugly scar that ran from above his left eye, down his nose, and across his right cheek to his jaw. “Listen to me, Meier,” Herr Trott said, “I’ve been fighting the Nazis since you were in swaddling clothes.”

  Max finished his chocolate. He hoped the rich flavor would linger in his mouth for hours, and vowed not to eat or drink anything else at Frau Becker’s that might wash it away. Chocolate brought him back to a time before the war, when Meyer’s Candy Store was a solid building and not a ruined shell, and he could get chocolates from a huge jar for a pfennig. The idea that the city might one day run out of such a wonderful thing was beyond imagination. Everybody loved chocolate.

  “Gentlemen, please,” Frau Becker said. “We’re all on the same side in here.” She pointed the tip of her cane toward the front door. “The enemy is out there.”

  Hans winked at Max, then went back to his chair. Herr Trott glowered at the fireplace.

  For a moment, no one spoke. And then the princess sat up with a jolt, spilling some of her tea into the rim of the saucer.

  “Tiger’s whiskers!” she blurted out. “An old zoologist friend of mine once told me that tiger’s whiskers—chopped up fine and mixed with food—have been used to assassinate people throughout history. It’s completely undetectable.”

  “Where are we going to get tiger’s whiskers, Marie?” Mutti said. “It’s nearly impossible to get an artichoke these days.”

  “If only the damned RAF hadn’t bombed the zoo,” the princess muttered.

  Papa cleared his throat. “Perhaps it’s time for more practical matters,” he said. “Max, may I have your jacket?”

  Max didn’t understand, but he hated wearing the wool suit jacket, and now that they were in a warm, cozy room, he was beginning to sweat. So he was happy to oblige. He took off his jacket and handed it to Papa, who laid it flat across a small end table next to the sofa.

  Then Papa took out a switchblade knife, flicked it open, and began carefully sawing into the lining of the jacket. Max’s mouth dropped open. A moment later, his father produced the packet of papers the dead man had delivered.

  No wonder his parents had insisted that he wear his Sunday best—Max’s outfit was the hiding place!

  Bring it here, Karl,” Frau Becker said. It seemed to Max that her tone had become solemn. Then it struck him that the man who had died at the Hoffmanns’ kitchen table was one of them—part of the group who met in this sitting room. Everyone here probably knew the man well.

  Hans picked up a small collapsible serving tray and set it up like a table in front of Frau Becker. The old woman produced a pair of spectacles and put them on. Papa untied the twine that bound the bloodstained papers together and flattened the pages out carefully on the tray table. Everyone in the room, including Max and Gerta, gathered around the table, jostling for space so they could see.

  Only General Vogel remained seated. “Good God, man!” He raised his voice at Papa. “You used your son as a courier! Why, if he had been stopped and searched … Well, I think we both know what would have happened!”

  Max blinked. He supposed this was true, but it had not occurred to him to be angry at his father. “Sippenhaft,” Max said, gathering his courage to talk to the red-faced general. “The blood laws. It wouldn’t matter whether the Gestapo found the papers on Papa or me. We would all be arrested.” He looked from face to curious face. “Right?” Hans winked at him. Mutti looked pained.

  “Yes, young man,” Frau Becker said fiercely, with a glance toward General Vogel. “You provided us with the safest hiding place. The Gestapo aren’t likely to search good German children for no reason. At least, not yet.”

  Max felt conflicted. He was glad that Frau Becker was pleased, but now the thought of a Gestapo agent searching him had wormed its way into his mind and would not fade away. Gestapo agents were not gentle or kind. They did not politely knock on doors; they pounded on them and screamed at whomever was inside to open up. They did not perform casual searches, but roughly patted people down in the street. He imagined the coarse hands of a towering agent ripping open his jacket, finding the hidden papers, grabbing him by the wrists, marching him toward the waiting green minna—one of the windowless trucks the Gestapo used to transport prisoners.

  “You could have told us before we left the house,” Gerta said to Papa. “You’re supposed to be telling us the truth.”

  Papa looked chastened. “I thought it would be better if you didn’t know. In the event we got stopped, I didn’t want you to act nervous.”

  “But from now on,” Mutti said, “no more secrets.” She glanced at the others. “We are a team, and we need to act like one.”

  “My Kat knows nothing of this,” General Vogel grumbled, “and that’s the way it will remain.”

  “That is your choice, General,” Papa said. “Not all of us have that luxury.” He indicated the bloodstains on the papers. “Max and Gerta have already seen too much.”

  Frau Becker smoothed one of the papers—there were three, Max noted—and leaned forward to peer at it closely.

  “Ah,” she said. “The Wolfsschanze. Very good.”

  Max shot Gerta a questioning look. She shrugged. The Wolf’s Lair? It sounded like something from a fantasy kingdom. The paper itself was no help—it was a printed map full of tiny squiggles for roads and boxes for what Max guessed were buildings.

  General Vogel joined them at the little table. “The Wolf’s Lair is Hitler’s headquarters in the east,” he explained to Max and Gerta, “in what used to be Poland.”

  Suddenly, Herr Trott jabbed a finger into one of the boxes on the map, startling Max. Out of everybody in the sitting room, Herr Trott was the most intimidating—the only one of Frau Becker’s guests who actually scared him. “This is the reinforced bunker, here,” Herr Trott said. “This is where he’ll meet with Himmler and Göring.”

  When Herr Trott named Hitler’s trusted advisors, Max’s thoughts churned. Was Frau Becker’s group planning to assassinate the entire Nazi high command?

  “Mmm,” Frau Becker said, lost in thought. “Perhaps, perhaps.”

  She shuffled to the next page and smoothed it out. “The Kehlsteinhaus,” she muttered. “I’m not so sure about this.”

  “The Eagle’s Nest,” Max said. He’d heard of this place. It was the most famous of Hitler’s headquarters outside of Berlin, an impregnable fortress perched on top of a mountain.

  “Correct,” Frau Becker said. “Give this boy a cookie.” When nobody moved, she turned to Marie. “Go on, Princess.”

  Marie shrugged. “I was getting one for myself anyway.”

  “The Eagle’s Nest is quite a remote possibili
ty,” Papa said. “I like our chances best at the Führerbunker. If you’ll kindly go to the next page.”

  Frau Becker set the Eagle’s Nest map aside and smoothed out the third and final piece of paper.

  “It’s right here in Berlin, for starters,” Papa continued. “Accessible by the largest number of personnel.”

  “Construction isn’t finished,” General Vogel pointed out. “They’re still building the new wing.” He indicated some lines on the map. “There will be living quarters here.”

  “Even so, it is where Hitler waits out the air raids,” Papa said. “We know when he will be there.”

  “He doesn’t tend to hold big military conferences in the Führerbunker,” General Vogel said.

  “Exactly right,” Herr Trott said. “If we focus on the Wolf’s Lair, we can get all the bastards in one place.”

  “Pssst!” Max and Gerta turned at the sound. Princess Marie was behind them, holding up two sugar cookies. She was also munching one herself.

  Eagerly, they took the cookies from the princess. Max forgot all about his earlier vow to let the flavor of the chocolate linger, and in two big bites the cookie was gone and he was wiping crumbs from the corner of his mouth.

  “I will have to think about this,” Frau Becker said, neatly folding the papers back into a small square. “And then I will make a recommendation. We will put it to a vote before we approach our counterparts.”

  Max glanced at Gerta. Counterparts? Who else was involved in this plot?

  “In the meantime,” Frau Becker continued, gently thwacking Max on the side of the arm with her cane, “I have a job for you.” She did the same to Gerta. “And you.”

  “What kind of a job?” Gerta said, eyes wide with excitement.

  “Frau Becker,” Mutti said, “we agreed that Max and Gerta should not be kept in the dark after what they saw, but we said nothing about them becoming active members of the resistance. They should know the truth, of course, but there’s no reason to expose them to any further danger.”