Conspiracy

by Andy Marino

  Max’s body tingled. He felt as if his nerves were live wires.

  “I don’t have a partner,” he said. His voice shook, but he got the words out.

  Heller shrugged. “Pity. I was hoping to wrap this up early. Ah, well.” He turned to his two fellow agents. The twin red embers of their cigarettes floated in the darkness. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a hunt.”

  Run, Gerta. Max willed her on into the night, far from the clutches of the Gestapo, far from Berlin, far from the war itself …

  “Hrrkk.” With a strangled cry, one of the red embers spun to the ground.

  “Hausmann?” Heller said. His grip on Max’s arm loosened as he turned to aim his torch at his comrades. At that moment, several things happened at once. As Heller’s light swept across the forest of columns, Max saw the prone body of a Gestapo agent lying motionless on the ground. The other agent waved his torch wildly, the beam darting in and out of the columns, illuminating nothing but empty air.

  Heller cursed. “Sieg, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Hausmann just dropped!” said the second man. “I didn’t see anything.”

  Heller dragged Max toward the fallen agent, shining his beam this way and that. “You’re staying with me,” he said. Then he nudged Hausmann with the toe of his boot. The man was completely still. His torchlight paused on the man’s face. Hausmann’s mouth was open, frozen in an expression of shock and pain. A gaping wound in the side of his neck wept blood.

  Heller’s body tensed. “He’s dead. Someone’s here.”

  Sieg cursed. In the torchlight, Max watched Sieg draw his pistol. “Show yourself, you coward!” he cried.

  Max’s heart raced. Albert!

  A dark form seemed to glide between the farthest columns, poured like liquid shadow.

  “There!” Heller shouted, aiming his torch.

  Sieg fired. The crack of the pistol split the night, and the bullet took a chunk of marble out of a column.

  “There!” Heller shouted again, his voice ragged and nearly hysterical. His beam played across what appeared to be the pinched, sallow face of a young office clerk. Sieg fired again, but the face had already vanished.

  Heller swung Max around as he spun in a circle, searching for the figure who was coming out of the dark to strike at them.

  There was a shriek of pain. Heller’s light darted to the place Sieg had been a moment ago. There was nobody there.

  Max felt Heller’s grip tighten reflexively. He could smell the man’s sour sweat.

  “Sieg!” Heller called out. Movement behind them—shuffling, maybe a footstep or two—

  Heller spun. And screamed. The figure burst out from behind a column, half running, half falling, as if to embrace the Gestapo agent. Heller let go of Max as he struggled with his attacker. He beat at the back of the figure’s head with his heavy torch. Max ducked behind a column and crouched in the shadows. He watched as Heller brutalized the attacker.

  Albert is going to die, he thought. I have to help him.

  But his legs would not carry him out from behind the column. It was only when the third figure stepped into view that Max realized what had happened.

  Albert had shoved Sieg’s lifeless body into Heller so that Max could escape.

  Heller was fighting with the corpse of his comrade.

  In a single smooth motion, the pale, well-dressed “office clerk” glided behind Heller, gripped the man’s forehead, yanked his head back, and drew a long knife across his throat.

  Heller sputtered. His arms shot out to his sides. The torch clattered to the ground. Albert held him up until Heller’s arms dangled and the man stopped twitching. Then he stepped back, and both dead Gestapo agents collapsed in a heap.

  In the weird light from the dropped torches, Albert’s body heaved and his breath came in gasps.

  Max watched him gather himself for a moment. Frau Becker’s servant had taken down three Gestapo agents with such ruthless precision, it was jarring to watch him cope with the aftermath.

  A hand found his shoulder. Max yelped.

  It was Gerta. “We have to stop meeting like this,” she said.

  “Albert—” Max’s voice was hoarse. He swallowed and tried again. “Albert just killed—”

  “I know,” Gerta said.

  Together, they watched Albert slowly relax. His body stilled and his breathing steadied. He stood motionless for a moment, then knelt next to the corpses. With the same efficiency he had just displayed, Albert searched the dead men’s pockets, removing their identification and stuffing the papers into his overcoat.

  “You’d better be on your way,” he said quietly as he opened the third Gestapo agent’s coat without looking at Max and Gerta. “Someone will have heard the shots. Police will be here soon.”

  “Will we see you again?” Max said.

  “No,” Albert said. “But I’ll see you. Now go. Tell your parents what happened. They’ll know what to do.”

  With that, Albert clicked off the torches. The forest of columns went dark.

  Max and Gerta made their way back through the canyon of fallen balconies in silence. It wasn’t until they hurried out onto Richard-Wagner-Strasse that Max was struck by what the Gestapo ambush really meant.

  It was the third night of their spy-catching scheme. There was only one person in the Becker Circle (besides Frau Becker herself and Albert) who knew the location of the drop.

  They had sniffed out the Nazi spy in their midst.

  It was Hans.

  Berlin’s majestic Anhalter Station had once been a grand symbol of connection among the people of Europe. From the platforms beneath its great glass-and-steel roof, trains carried thousands of passengers every day to places like Athens and Rome. Now that roof was a skeletal ruin, its glass blown out by incendiary bombs. Whole sections had begun to fall away, and several tracks were pocked with craters. What had once been an international transit hub was reduced to servicing a few local train lines for passengers huddled on the platforms that weren’t yet gutted by bombs.

  Dawn sent light the color of dirty bathwater down through the open roof. On the walls, shredded propaganda posters displayed a noble, youthful Hitler brandishing a Nazi flag, boldly leading his troops into battle. Nobody moving through Anhalter Station paid them any attention. Everyone was preoccupied. The station might not be of much use to railroad travelers, but the sandbagged shelters of its cavernous interior provided plenty of out-of-the-way nooks and crannies for black-market business.

  Hans Meier moved swiftly, keeping his eyes down and his satchel tightly wedged under his armpit. He felt as if he were being propelled by pure nervous energy, floating above the floor tiles.

  Perhaps the first clue that the dead drop had been a trap should have been the way Frau Becker mentioned it to him. He had been alone in her sitting room, and it was out of character for the old woman to talk resistance business without other members of the Becker Circle present. She did not like to repeat herself. But Hans didn’t think anything of it at the time, and when he got back to his room at the hotel he had called Fritz, his Gestapo handler, and dutifully reported the drop.

  That information would be worth at least five hundred Reichsmarks.

  Stupid. Hans bit his lip to keep from admonishing himself out loud. He’d gotten too comfortable, that was it. He’d let down his guard.

  For more than a year, he’d had it all figured out. He had been a member of the Becker Circle since 1942, welcomed by Frau Becker with open arms thanks to his father’s strident anti-Nazi speeches in Zurich. The group trusted him.

  After the scattered (and, Hans thought, rather pathetic) 1943 plots on Hitler’s life failed, the Gestapo was willing to pay good money for information about future attempts, and even better money for the names of the conspirators. Playing both sides had been easy. Fritz, that ambitious little worm, had practically drooled all over Hans at their first meeting at a beer hall in Unter den Linden, when he learned what kind of information Hans could su
pply. The trick was not to give the Nazis everything at once—to offer tantalizing clues, a name here and a location there, with the promise of more, always more. That was how you got paid again and again.

  What Frau Becker would never understand was that Hans really did hate the Nazis. They were nasty and brutal, and their notions of “racial purity” were pure hogwash from a scientific standpoint. And of course, there were the concentration camps, but Hans never let himself think too hard about those.

  So, yes, the Nazis were beneath his contempt. But they paid handsomely for information. He had no doubt that Germany would eventually lose the war—once the Americans landed in France, it would be all over. Before that happened, he intended to take as much of their cash as he could and get out of this whole mess with his head still attached to his neck. Then he would move to the United States—Los Angeles, to be exact. He had pored over American movie magazines. Hollywood after the war was going to be the perfect place for a charming young Swiss gentleman of refined breeding to turn a small fortune into a big one.

  In Los Angeles, Hans had read, it was always sunny and warm. You could buy a boat and sail it every day. Not like Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where your boat was stuck in the ice for six months out of the year.

  Hans allowed himself to give in to the fantasy. He could almost feel the warm sun on his face, the sand between his toes, the pretty girl on his arm …

  An announcement for the 6:23 local train interrupted his reverie, bringing him back to frigid Anhalter Station. The voice was garbled and indistinct. The intercom system had been damaged.

  There was an upsurge in activity as stragglers hurried toward the platform to catch the train. Hans kept moving toward an abandoned row of caged-in ticket booths, hugging his satchel as if it were his firstborn child.

  The satchel was full of cash. Everything he had saved and stashed away that he hadn’t dared cross the border with, until today. He no longer had a choice. The Gestapo had paid him a large sum for Frau Becker’s name. He’d only betrayed the old woman after much pretend hemming and hawing with Fritz. In truth, he was just waiting for the Gestapo to raise his fee. There was another fat payment for General Vogel. The Nazis reserved a special hatred for traitorous military officers. Hans shuddered to think what the blustery general’s fate would be. Guillotined in Plötzensee Prison if he was lucky. More likely, he would be garroted to within an inch of his life, revived, and garroted again while being filmed for Hitler’s viewing pleasure.

  Hans’s satchel also contained a series of smaller payments for reporting the dead drops carried out by Max and Gerta Hoffmann. He didn’t like to think too hard about those little bundles of Reichsmarks. He respected the professional abilities of Karl Hoffmann, and thought that Max and Gerta were good kids. But he had to give the Nazis something, and he wasn’t about to give up Claus von Stauffenberg. If anybody could pull off the assassination of Adolf Hitler, it was the one-eyed officer.

  Hans comforted himself during his rare sleepless nights with the thought that, on balance, he was helping the resistance. He wasn’t a callous man, and he wasn’t stupid. Any fool could see that the world would be a better place without the Führer in it. He would never give up Stauffenberg. He hoped he would be lying on a beach in Los Angeles, sipping a cold drink, opening a newspaper to find that the assassination plot had actually succeeded.

  He would turn to the girl sunning herself next to him, the fashion model or famous actress, and with a sly grin show her the article. He would say something mysterious to pique her interest, in his gorgeously accented English—You see, I always knew we would succeed …

  Just to the left of the empty ticket booths was an archway that led to what had once been a small restaurant. Its kitchen had been damaged in a raid, and it had never reopened. Fritz would be waiting for him there with his final payment for reporting last night’s drop to the Gestapo.

  Sure, the whole thing had been a setup. But the way Hans saw it, he’d done his job. Setup or no, the Nazis still owed him money for reporting it.

  Inside the shell of the former restaurant, a few of Berlin’s homeless were slumped over tables, sleeping on their folded arms.

  In the back, a man in a dark trench coat sat draped in shadow. Before him on the small round table was a briefcase. Hans’s heart quickened. There was his final payment. He calculated that he would be out of this horribly depressing place in five minutes, his satchel quite a bit heavier, and headed to the Silesian Station, the only station in Berlin still running long-distance trains. With his impeccable Swiss credentials, he would be out of the Reich by nightfall, even with travel as snarled as it was. And with his father’s connections, it wouldn’t be hard to secure passage from Zurich to America.

  The thought of leaving Europe behind gave him a surge of joy. He had spent far too long in this dismal, bombed-out wasteland. It was not the proper environment for a man of his qualities.

  He wrinkled his nose at the sour smell that wafted from the dozing vagrants as he moved through the restaurant. He shot a nervous glance over his shoulder—nobody following—and then sat down at Fritz’s table.

  The Gestapo man’s fedora was pulled low, nearly covering his eyes.

  “Nice hat,” Hans said. “Very stylish.”

  The Gestapo man did not reply. Hans narrowed his eyes. There was something different about Fritz today. He was a thin, almost waifish man, but today he seemed more substantial, as if he had somehow grown in bulk.

  “Anyway,” Hans said uneasily. “If you’ll kindly slide my fee across the table, I think that will conclude our business. It’s been a pleasure; good luck with the war and all that.”

  Fritz leaned forward, and the shadows receded.

  Hans’s eyes widened. Before he could react to the sight of the face, the face that was definitely not Fritz—

  (It can’t be)

  —a hand shot forward and grabbed Hans’s scarf and yanked his head down to the table.

  He tried to scream, but his mouth was pressed hard into the briefcase, and the sound that came out was ggrrrhhhhmmmmm.

  “Death to Nazi scum,” said a soft voice in his ear.

  “Albert,” he tried to say, “wait—”

  The blade entered the base of his neck, and his whole body went cold. It felt impossibly long, an icy needle slicing up through his spine. There was very little pain—just a numbness that blossomed quickly. He tried to fight but found that he could not move his arms or legs.

  He tasted rust in his mouth, and then he was on a beach, but the sun was cold on his skin (how strange) and the girl on his arm was nothing but sand. A chill wind kicked up and blew her away, and Hans found that he was alone, holding on to nothing but empty air. Then the sun set in a flash and the beach went dark.

  The door of the beautiful row house on Perleberger Strasse, with its brass gargoyle knocker, was heavy and locked. But it was still no match for the battering ram the four Gestapo agents kept in the back of their green minna.

  They announced themselves once, and when nobody answered (no surprise there), they smashed the door off its hinges. Inside the front hall, one agent stood guard to prevent escape, marveling at the odd portraits that lined the walls. This woman was supposed to be a crazy old bird, and judging by her ancestors, that was no exaggeration. Another agent searched the coatroom and, finding it empty, drew his pistol and went upstairs to the second floor. The remaining two agents moved aside the velvet curtain at the end of the hallway.

  There, inside a sumptuous sitting room, they found a stooped old woman wearing a furry Russian hat feeding papers into a roaring fire in the massive fireplace. They screamed for her to stop. She tossed a final crumpled page into the flames and turned around, leaning heavily on her cane.

  One agent drew his gun to cover his comrade while he crossed the room to apprehend the old woman.

  The fire raged at her back. She smiled and pointed her cane at the man, halting his approach. There was a chance the cane could be disguising a weapon o
f some sort—like the Jews they loved so much, the resistance thrived on unfair advantages and dirty tricks.

  “In the end,” she said, “your hatred will be your undoing. The world will know what you have done, and the human race will not stand for it.”

  The Gestapo agent said nothing. He had heard all manner of pleas, invocations, promises, and threats from the criminals, spies, and traitors he had taken prisoner over the years. At least this was just one old woman. Last night, three of his comrades on a stakeout at the opera house had been murdered by what must have been an entire gang of resistance fighters.

  When he realized that her cane wasn’t about to shoot at him, he took another step toward her and reached for the cuffs attached to his belt.

  “Death to Hitler!” she shouted in an astonishingly loud voice. The Gestapo agent rolled his eyes. He had heard that one before, too.

  The woman’s hand moved as if she were popping a piece of candy into her mouth. With a gleam in her eyes, she bit down hard on something. The Gestapo agent cursed and rushed to catch her as she crumpled to the ground. He knelt with her head in his lap and wrenched open her jaw with his fingers.

  Foam erupted from her mouth and gathered about her lips. He probed for the capsule, but it had already dissolved, releasing its deadly cyanide poison. The old woman twitched once in his arms and went still.

  The agent closed his eyes. He could feel a stress headache coming on. His boss was not going to be happy. The old woman was the ringleader of this resistance group, and he had been commanded to take her alive.

  His only hope was that when the Führer heard about this failure, his name was left out of the report.

  Take only what you can fit in a small bag!” Mutti yelled upstairs.