Conspiracy

by Andy Marino

  Max didn’t know what to say. This whole night, from the time he heard Gerta’s screams until the collapse of the shelter, Max hadn’t felt very courageous. There hadn’t been much time to feel anything at all, but now a sharp, animal fear settled in his guts. What were they doing, away from home during a raid, sneaking around Berlin at night with forged documents in their pockets?

  He thought of Siewert’s dying words. Oh, how he wished he could forget them.

  It was all so far beyond his ability to deal with. Thoughts of home descended on him with a furious, teeth-grinding urgency. He wanted desperately to see the knights on his shelf, and to sit with Mutti reading on the sofa while Papa smoked his pipe.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  Gerta wiped blood from her forehead with the end of her scarf. “My thoughts exactly.”

  They headed west along Messelstrasse. There were many more pedestrians out now, as the night tilted toward dawn. Nobody could sleep anyway, Max figured. They might as well survey the damage.

  “You know,” Gerta said, “I think Siewert knew something was going to happen tonight. I think he was out keeping watch.”

  “That’s sort of his job,” Max said. At the same time he thought: Was. That was his job.

  “Yeah,” Gerta said thoughtfully. “I guess. It’s just, when he grabbed me, the first thing he said was, I’ve been waiting for you. Like he knew we were going to be there.”

  Max could sense his sister’s mind hatching a theory. He hoped she would wait until tomorrow to share it with him. He was too weary for an animated discussion. Of course, she didn’t wait.

  Gerta stopped abruptly and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. “What if there’s a spy, Maxi?”

  “Shhhh,” he said, glancing around at the dark houses. They had turned onto a street that was untouched by the bombs, but Max was sure that behind darkened windows sleepless Berliners paced, listening to the street.

  Gerta lowered her voice. “Who are the people who know about our dead drops?”

  Reluctantly, Max played along. “Frau Becker. Albert. The princess.”

  “Hans,” Gerta said. “General Vogel.”

  “And Herr Trott,” Max said darkly, thinking of the glowering factory owner’s scarred face. “Let’s keep moving.” Knowing Gerta, she was capable of standing on the sidewalk for twenty minutes while her mind turned over all the possibilities.

  The searchlights vanished as they walked beneath the camouflage netting, and Max suddenly felt like somebody was squeezing his neck. He gasped for air. It was Herr Siewert’s cold dead hand, creeping out of the night to choke him.

  All at once, he was back in the shelter, breathing in dust and smoke in the chaotic darkness, bashed this way and that, unsure which way was up.

  Deep breaths, Max, he thought. While he regained his composure, Gerta kept up her feverish whispering.

  “—who would have the most to gain by betraying the group?” she was saying.

  “I don’t know, Gerta,” Max said wearily. It was too dizzying for him to think about right now—a spy for the Nazis in Frau Becker’s cozy sitting room.

  No. Gerta was just being paranoid. Frau Becker knew every little thing that happened in Berlin. Surely she could sniff out a spy in her midst.

  “I think right now we should be more worried about Mutti and Papa,” he said.

  This silenced Gerta for a moment. She sighed. “You’re right. They’ve probably got searchers with dogs out looking for us.”

  “Maybe they’ll be so happy to see us that they’ll forget to be mad.”

  Gerta scoffed. “Have you met our mother, Maxi?” She paused. “We need to get our stories straight. We need a plan.”

  “No, Gerta!” Max said, taken aback by his own vehemence. “No more schemes, no more plans. Let’s just go home and tell them what happened.” He could feel tears forming. The old woman’s dead, sightless eye was burned into his mind. His ankle felt clammy and wrong where Siewert had gripped it. He could taste the dust and smoke of the shelter, hear the cries of the injured and the terrified.

  “Okay,” Gerta said quietly. “No more schemes.”

  The house was dark and quiet. Max turned his key and opened the door. Gerta followed and shut the door behind them. Max crept across the living room. There was a strange atmosphere in the room—a feeling of total absence—and for a moment he thought they’d blundered into a neighbor’s house. He pulled the switch on the lamp. Nothing.

  “They must have turned off the electricity for the raid, and then never bothered to turn it back on,” Gerta said, heading for the main switch in the back of the coat closet. It was her job to cut the electricity at the start of every raid, and she knew the way in the dark. A moment later, the lamp came to life.

  “Papa?” Max called out. He took off his scarf and jacket and let them fall to the floor, too tired to hang them up. He wished both his parents were here to yell at him and send him to bed. Anything to get to the “bed” part of this crazy night faster would be fine with him. He felt like a poor-quality version of himself, a copy of a copy. The only way to feel like normal Max Hoffmann again would be a long, uninterrupted sleep.

  Preferably one without any dreams.

  He listened to his sister open the cellar down and call down into the shelter. No reply.

  “Nobody’s here,” she said, coming back to the living room.

  “I’m going to bed,” Max said, heading for the stairs. “I’m asleep on my feet. They can wake me up to yell at me if they want.”

  Before he took three steps, the front door opened and his parents burst inside. With a sharp cry, Mutti rushed over to Max and corralled him in an embrace. At the same time, she dragged him over to Gerta so she could squeeze them together and smother their faces with kisses. She smelled like ash and the cold night air.

  After what felt like a full minute, she let them go. Her eyes were wet, and she wiped them on her sleeve.

  “When the sirens went off and you weren’t in your rooms, I thought …” She shook her head, smiling through her tears. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “We thought we would never see you again,” Papa said bluntly. He came slowly into the living room and sat down on the sofa. His face was pale and drawn. He looked from Max to Gerta as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “It is so difficult, in these times, not to imagine the worst.”

  Before Max’s eyes, his father seemed to deflate. He had never seen Papa so tired and drained before, not even after spending two whole days at the hospital without sleep treating Berlin’s wounded.

  “We’re sorry,” Max said quietly. On top of everything else jostling for space in his mind tonight—the shelter’s collapse, the blockwart’s dying threat—he felt like he’d stolen some of his father’s vitality away with his choice to sneak out. Karl Hoffmann looked like he’d aged ten years in a single night.

  “We were just trying to help,” Gerta said. “If we didn’t get caught in the raid, we would’ve been home before you—”

  “My God, Gerta, your face!” And just like that, Max’s father leaped from the couch and into his old self. “Ingrid, get me my bag, please.”

  Mutti hurried away down the hall.

  Gerta took a step back. “I’m fine, Papa, really.” She slid her hand across her forehead, wiping away blood, then showed her palm to her father. “It’s not mine.”

  “We ran to a public shelter when we heard the sirens,” Max said, “just like you told us.”

  “It got hit,” Gerta said.

  “And part of it collapsed,” Max said as Mutti returned with the bag. Quickly, he filled his parents in on some of the details—finding their way out of the ruins, Herr Siewert’s demise, the bodies pulled from the wreckage of the shelter.

  “My God!” Mutti said. “You are lucky to be alive.” She tossed the bag on the sofa and gathered Max and Gerta up for another long embrace. “What on earth were you doing out after midnight in the first place?”

  Gerta reach
ed into her pocket and pulled out a small paper square—the identification documents from Frau Becker, neatly folded.

  “A dead drop over by Messelpark,” she said.

  Mutti’s expression hardened. She snatched the documents from Gerta’s hand and shot Papa a fierce look. “I’m going to boil that old woman’s head!”

  “It was our idea,” Max admitted. “We went to her house after school and asked for another job.”

  “Karl,” Mutti said.

  “Ingrid,” he replied thoughtfully. He lit his pipe with calm, steady hands, and regarded his children with curiosity, as if seeing them for the first time.

  “That was a very disobedient thing to do,” he said. “For that, I am disappointed in you both.”

  Max looked down at the floor.

  “It was also very brave,” Papa said.

  Max’s eyes snapped back up.

  “As much as your mother and I would like to keep you close to us every second of the day, that is not the reality of life during this infernal war. And if we are ever going to outlast these Nazi dogs, we will need brave young people to lead us into the future. People like you, Gerta. And you, Max.”

  “So,” Gerta said, “we’re not in trouble?”

  Mutti let out a quick laugh—more like a snort. “Oh, daughter, of course you’re in trouble. Even brave children of the resistance can still be grounded—war or no war. From now until Christmas, you are to leave this house for school only, and you are to go straight there and come directly home afterward. No Frau Becker, no candy shops, no cinemas. If you disobey these rules, the terms will be extended into the new year.”

  “But—” Gerta began to protest. Papa cut her off.

  “But nothing,” he said. “Your mother is absolutely correct. And instead of those American film magazines, you two will select books from the shelves in the study to occupy yourselves.”

  “Those are Gerta’s magazines,” Max said. “I don’t even read them.”

  “Both of you will stay inside and read books,” Mutti said firmly. “That is the point.”

  “Now,” Papa said, “I’m going to examine your cuts and bruises, and then you’re going to go to bed.”

  “I think we could all use some sleep,” Mutti said.

  Papa shook his head. “Not me. I must go to the hospital. Haven’t you heard?” He looked wearily at the faces of his wife and children. “A shelter collapsed near Messelpark.”

  December slid past like a reel of film unspooling, a blur of snowy afternoons and long, dull evenings indoors. Max found that he was beginning to have trouble sleeping. He would often wake with his sheets twined around his legs, sweat soaking the mattress, swatting Herr Siewert’s dead hands away from his ankles. Or else he would dream of the old woman’s eye, and the cries of the trapped and wounded would swirl around him like banshees on the wind.

  He wondered how Papa, who witnessed more horrors every day than the rest of them would see in their lifetimes, managed to sleep so soundly at night. Maybe he had simply grown accustomed to working among the dead and the dying.

  Maybe he was simply exhausted.

  Mutti and Papa refused to tell Max and Gerta anything about the fate of the documents they were supposed to drop by Messelpark. And they were equally tight-lipped about the plot to kill Hitler. Max wondered if Frau Becker had approved a plan of action yet, and where the attempt would be carried out. He saw those maps in his dreams sometimes, too—Wolf’s Lair, Eagle’s Nest, Führerbunker—and thought of the Becker Circle’s mysterious “counterparts” as rugged men and beautiful women in far-flung parts of the world, meeting furtively in cafés in Morocco and ducking into alleyways in Prague. He yearned to be a part of it all again. Maybe not so much the dead drops—he’d had enough of those for one war. He simply wanted to visit Frau Becker’s sumptuous living room, eat Hans’s chocolates, listen to the princess describe far-fetched assassination techniques.

  As for Gerta, she sustained herself through the long weeks by nurturing her theory of the Nazi spy in the Becker Circle. She held whispered conferences with Max nearly every day, examining the suspects from every angle. Max played along, just for something to do, but he still wasn’t convinced. They didn’t have much evidence besides the words that Herr Siewert had spoken when he thought he was apprehending them. But Gerta seemed to thrive on the intrigue—one day she’d come bursting into his room, convinced it had to be General Vogel, and the next day she’d be equally fervent about the princess, or Hans.

  Then, three days before Christmas, they received word from the Eastern Front.

  Uncle Friedrich was dead—killed in a Soviet rocket attack in the besieged city of Stalingrad, where much of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army was surrounded. He had been killed instantly—blown to bits along with twenty-seven fellow soldiers in an ambush along a snowy ridge.

  The last time Max had seen his uncle, Friedrich had brought him his favorite figurine, his knight on horseback.

  Cavalry is the jewel of any fighting force, his uncle had told him. Once upon a time, it was horses. Now we have tanks.

  Do the Soviets have tanks, too? Max had asked. Of course he knew that they did, but he liked to keep his uncle talking. Friedrich was a jovial man who reminded Max of a traveling storyteller from a vanished world, spinning epic yarns in the courtyard of some rambling old castle.

  Tanks as far as the eye can see, Maxi. His eyes twinkled. But ours are much quicker! Our cavalry is made up of stallions. The Soviets have old, swaybacked pack mules.

  Max had not seen Uncle Friedrich since the summer of 1941, at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was by now becoming a full-scale military disaster for Germany. The Wehrmacht was on a mad retreat across a barren, wintry tundra, pursued and harassed by a massive Soviet army thirsty for vengeance.

  In his bedroom, Max turned his favorite knight over in his hand, worrying at it like a string of prayer beads. He imagined Uncle Friedrich whittling a new piece for his collection—clumsily, awkwardly, hands frozen and cracked from the cold—and storing it in his pack, waiting until his homecoming when he could give it to his nephew. Now those skilled hands would never make another figurine. Never make anything at all.

  He imagined Uncle Friedrich waking up, huddled in a trench, on the morning of the ambush. Was there part of him that knew, deep down, that this would be his last day on earth?

  Max hoped not. He hoped that Uncle Friedrich had been thinking of home when the rockets came screaming in.

  As for Mutti, she mourned the loss of her older brother by throwing herself into Christmas preparations. She spent two days scouring the black market, and finally came home with the main ingredient for the Hoffmanns’ traditional Christmas Eve meal of carp, which she filleted and fried to crispy perfection.

  It had been Uncle Friedrich’s favorite dish.

  Afterward, the Hoffmanns joined some of their neighbors for caroling on the streets of Dahlem, Max and Gerta shielding their candles with gloved hands to keep them from going out.

  They were on the second verse of “Silent Night” when the air-raid siren drove them all back inside.

  Our counterparts want options,” Frau Becker said. “And I don’t blame them. Too much can go wrong to settle for one plan. We may have to move quickly, to strike when the opportunity presents itself. And so we must be prepared.”

  It was January of 1944, a week of dismal snow flurries and leaden skies that made it feel as if Berlin were floating in a massive cloud, untethered from the rest of Germany. That morning, Max’s parents had surprised him by telling him to take a bath—the Hoffmanns were going to a meeting of the Becker Circle.

  Max had all but given up hope of ever seeing the conspirators again. Why now? he wondered as he popped one of Hans’s chocolates into his mouth. The Swiss medical student had managed to smuggle an entire bag of foil-wrapped bonbons into Berlin, and he dumped them all out on Frau Becker’s dining table as if he were presenting gold doubloons to a
pirate king. Besides the chocolates, Albert—dressed as a shabby beggar—set out pickled herring, potato pancakes, pork schnitzel, and a hot apple strudel that Max had been eyeing since they walked in.

  “It smacks of indecision,” General Vogel said. He was sitting on the sofa clutching a glass of champagne in his bearlike paw. “And it leaves us spread too thin.”

  “I agree,” Hans said, from the arm of the plush chair in which the princess was sprawled. “If we had a singular focus, we could dedicate all our resources to it. Not pick away at the problem from so many different angles.” He glanced at Papa. “We should be more surgical.”

  “Nevertheless,” Frau Becker said, “our counterparts are assuming a greater share of the risk, as they will be the ones to actually carry out the assassination. And so we must serve their needs as best we can.”

  “In Russia before the revolution,” the princess said, “the czar’s personal bodyguard would carry out political assassinations with bullets of ice, which would melt and leave no evidence.”

  “Ice bullets,” Hans said. “Wonderful. Our work here is done.”

  The princess shrugged and sipped her tea.

  Max glanced over to the fireplace, where Herr Trott stood with his arms crossed, staring silently into the flames.

  “The issue is access,” Frau Becker said. “Access to Hitler requires a thorough knowledge of his whereabouts—knowledge that is more difficult now than it was even a month ago, and it grows more difficult every day. He is suspicious of crowds, even of Berlin itself. The man spends most of his time in the Wolf’s Lair, where no one but his innermost circle is allowed.”

  “It’s easy to be at the head of a rally in the Sportpalast while the war is going well,” General Vogel said. “But now that we’re waiting for the Allied invasion in the west and the Red Army’s routing us in the east, he doesn’t dare show his face in public. He cowers in his lair.” He shook his head and appeared visibly ill. “So many lives in the hands of a single madman …”