“It was a political assassination. She was trying to shoot the Chief of the RSHA, and Gruppenführer Müller closed the case.”
“No, he didn’t. He just said he did, so you wouldn’t be able to get a fake passport that you probably have hidden someplace safe, and take off before we would finish the investigation.”
I involuntarily swallowed hard, but tried to regain my composure right away.
“And why would she want to shoot me?”
“Yes. That’s the question that Herr Müller and I discussed many times, before it all finally fell into place after we searched her house. Guess what we found? A small note saying ‘Time’s up. R.’ right there, on her table. Something happened that made her change her plans, and she didn’t get a chance to send it. But the handwriting, ink and paper coincide precisely with the ones you handed us yourself.”
“It only proves that she wanted to kill me, but definitely doesn’t make me a spy.”
“Give me a minute, I’m getting there. So now we have this girl, Rebekah, the member of the Underground movement, who decides to shoot you, and not the Chief of the RSHA, and screams ‘Die, you murderer!’ prior to shooting. What could have you possibly done so evil that she chooses you as her victim instead of such a significant political figure, who was right there with you? So I started digging deeper, and guess what I found out? I found out that Rebekah was the girlfriend of the former Underground leader Josef, who suddenly went missing the same night when you were released from jail. That’s a very interesting coincidence, isn’t it now? And the whole following week you don’t come to work because you hit your head falling off the steps in your house. But didn’t you get that injury some other way? Let’s say… struggling with somebody?”
He was looking me straight in the eye, and I tried to seem as unfazed as I could, even though my heart was pounding in my chest.
“Your allegations are completely ungrounded.”
“You’re not losing hope, are you?” Reinhard smirked. “I’ll continue with your permission. Josef went missing, and his body was never found. Alright. But who would benefit from his death? Us, the Gestapo, of course. But we didn’t kill him. Who did then? Someone who needed Josef to disappear, and fast. And if I remember correctly, your former dancing partner during the interrogation pointed out that it was Josef who was giving him orders. And then there is Josef no more. Why is that? So no one would be able to interrogate him. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
I didn’t know what to say this time.
“Good! Seems like I’m right. And if you wanted Josef to shut his mouth once and for all so he wouldn’t tell anybody that he had nothing to do with you or your Jew friend, it means only one thing: it was your radio, and it was you who was with the Jew that day transmitting those messages, it was you driving the black Mercedes, and if you two aren’t connected to the Underground, it brings us to only one logical conclusion. You’re working for the enemy. Oh yes, by the way, you have quite a beautiful American accent according to one of our agents who followed you on your trip to Zurich. The pictures of you speaking with an American agent came out really pretty too.”
The man with the newspaper lifting his head. Of course. How could I be so stupid? I stood silently on the same spot with not a single thought in my head. Except for the one – I’m dead. This time for sure.
“You don’t know what to say? It’s fine, I’m not here to interrogate you or anything. Just letting you know that your boss is probably thinking of the possible ways to kill you while reading your file with all this information. You have nowhere to run from here, and I wanted to give him the pleasure to officially arrest you. I bet I’ll get promoted after that. I’ll come watch your execution, if you don’t mind.”
He gave me another disgusting smile and headed to the exit.
“Oh yes, almost forgot.” He stopped suddenly, walked up to me, rolled up my sleeve and took the beads and cross off my wrist. My last hope. “You’re a Jew and you’re wearing the Catholic cross on you all the time? I don’t think so.”
He quickly figured out how to open the hidden section and took a small white capsule from the inside.
“Cyanide?” He shook his head. “Goodbye, Jew-girl.”
Reinhard was long gone when Georg walked inside with a stack of files in his arms.
“Annalise? Is everything alright?”
Run. The adrenaline covered me with a hot sweaty wave; I nodded, quickly grabbed my purse from under the table, said something about being right back and walked out of the anteroom. Heading to the main stairs, I kept throwing looks at the guards, trying to guess if they’d been warned about not letting me out of the building. They didn’t move and I almost ran down to the third floor, the second… and then I heard his voice behind my back.
“Annalise!!!”
I stopped just for a second to look up and see Ernst’s angry face, and ran, this time really ran, almost knocking other staff members off their feet. I knew that he was right behind me, I heard his loud steps, but for some reason he didn’t scream at the guards by the garage entrance to grab me. I got that, he wanted to catch me himself, and I didn’t even want to think of what he would do to me then.
Trying to make it to my car as fast as I could, I was digging inside my purse desperately looking for the car keys with my shaking hand, finally fished them out, yanked the door open and locked it from the inside, just when Ernst caught up with me and slammed his fist on the window almost breaking it.
“Open this fuckin door right now!!!”
“No!”
I put the keys in the ignition and started the car; I saw him taking his gun out. Let him shoot me, it’s still better than getting caught alive. I pressed the accelerator and took off with a loud screeching of the tires. He didn’t shoot, but didn’t let me go either. On a street, in my rearview mirror I saw his black Mercedes quickly approaching my car. I pressed the accelerator harder, hoping to beat him to my house, where I had my gun. At least I’ll be able to protect myself.
I already had my house keys ready when I jumped out of my car, as I heard him slamming his car door behind me. I didn’t even bother to lock the front door, I knew by now that in his infuriated state no locks would stop him. I ran all the way up to my bedroom, yanked the top drawer of the nightstand open, took the gun out, took the safety off and aimed at the entrance right at the moment when the very menacing looking Chief of the RSHA stopped at the door. He was also aiming his gun at me.
We started screaming at each other at the same time, me warning him to stay where he was or I’d shoot him, and him yelling at me to put my gun down because I was the enemy of the state and under arrest. We kept yelling louder and louder, trying to out scream each other, but neither of us wanted to give up first.
“You lied to me!!! All this time you lied to me!!!”
“I had my reasons!!! Your government left me no choice!”
“You went against your own country!”
“You’ve killed half of the population of your country!!!”
“You damn Jew!!!”
“You damn Nazi!!!”
“That’s exactly why all of you deserve to die!!! All of you are a worthless bunch of backstabbing rats! All of you to the gas!!!”
“The Jewish nation is the only nation that never started a single war in its history!!! It’s you, you started all this! Goddamn Nazis!!! You kill innocent people!!! Children!!!”
“Because all of you are traitors!!! Look at yourself! You, Jews, made us lose the Great War, and now you’ll make us lose this one?!”
“Jews fought in the Great War along with Aryans!!! And you’re sending war heroes to the camps!!! Who’s the traitor now?!”
“I’ll take you personally to Auschwitz, I’ll drag you personally right to the gas chamber and lock the door!!!”
“Not before I put the bullet in your head so nobody else suffers from you!!! You’re just like Heydrich!!! All of you are with your national superiority!”
Surprisingl
y this time he didn’t yell back at me, just clicked the safety on his gun and lowered it.
“Go ahead.”
“What?” I kept looking at him and back at his gun not sure what to do next.
“Go ahead. Shoot,” Ernst answered simply.
I shifted from one leg to another trying to figure out what kind of a game he was playing with me now.
“Well? I don’t have all day. Shoot.”
I pursed my lips and frowned at him.
“You shoot first.”
“I’m not going to shoot you. If you don’t shoot, I’ll take you to the camp.”
I turned a little sideways to him, still holding my gun high. My hand wasn’t even shaking, but I couldn’t for the life of me bring myself to pull the trigger. Even though it meant the camp.
“Annalise, shoot. You’ve killed a man before, you know how to do it. Go on, kill the Nazi. I deserved it. I’m an idiot, I believed you. If the Jewish girl tricked me so easily, I definitely deserve to get shot. You must really hate me, so do it already. After everything I’ve done to you.”
I couldn’t hear anything except for my own heartbeat. I slightly brushed the trigger with my finger for the last time, and put the gun back on the nightstand. This time Ernst looked at me, frowning and confused.
“I can’t.” I shrugged. “I can’t shoot you. Take me to the camp.”
I was waiting for him to come up to me and bring me downstairs, to his car, back to the Gestapo, but he just stood on the same spot without moving. We were looking at each other for what seemed like several hours, until I saw a faint smile touch the corners of his lips.
“You love me.”
Those three words he said, or even half asked, pierced my brain like a hot needle. I shook my head, but he smiled wider now, sure of his guess.
“Yes, you do. You love me, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You can’t shoot me because you love me. You always have.”
“No…” I whispered almost pleadingly.
Ernst walked up to me and put his gun on the bed.
“Look at me.” I kept staring at the floor, so he took my face in his hands and made me look him in the eyes. “You love me, Annalise. You really do.”
“So what? You love me too. You couldn’t shoot me either.”
“I’ll take you to the camp instead,” he said softly, slightly brushing my cheek with his finger.
“Alright. Let’s go.”
“Just like that?” He moved closer to me.
“Do whatever you want to me,” I whispered.
Ernst looked at me a little longer, and then slowly leaned to me and very gently touched my lips with his. I closed my eyes and kissed him back, still hardly breathing, still afraid, so small and helpless without my gun, my cover, my story. Just a young girl indecisively offering her naked soul to the enemy she fell in love with. Do whatever you want to me.
I was standing motionless while he was undressing me, button by button, very slowly, until I was standing absolutely naked in front of him, still fully dressed in his uniform. Nothing to hide anymore, no more lies; I let him look at me in the broad daylight as long as he wanted, until he stretched his hands to me again and took me into his arms, kissing me so deeply that I couldn’t breathe, holding so tight that it was hurting every bone.
“Are you going to make love to the Jew?” I smiled at him when he lowered me onto the bed and laid on top of me.
“No. I’m going to make love to the girl I love.”
I wrapped my arms and legs around him and swore to myself that I’d never let go. He was right. I did love him, with every tiny cell of my body.
_______________
Ernst was holding me in his arms while I was telling him my story from the very beginning. Sometimes he’d interrupt me with questions, but mostly he just listened quietly, gently stroking my hair. He was still mad at me for dealing with the Allies, he kept repeating that I should have told him everything from the very beginning and shook his head understanding the absurdity of his own words. He smoked too many cigarettes, still not able to comprehend how the hell he happened to fall for the girl who belonged to the race he swore to exterminate. But more than anything he was thinking of what to do with me now, now that Müller and Reinhard both had such a file on me that the only way for me would be to the gallows or the gas chamber.
“Over my dead body!” he said in a grave tone when I only mentioned that they would come and arrest me.
I was patiently waiting sitting next to him on a side of the bed with my legs crossed, while he was moving his index finger on top of his gun with a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Will you shoot me yourself? So I wouldn’t suffer?” I interpreted it the only way I saw possible.
“What?” Ernst looked at me in disbelief. “Of course not! Why would you even think that?”
“They know about me. You can’t get me out of the country. You can’t hide me. What are you going to do with me?”
“We’ll try something very risky. But you have to trust me on this one.”
I nodded. “I trust you.”
“Alright. Get dressed then, and… I’ll have to bring you back to the RSHA.”
We both got dressed in complete silence; I didn’t ask him anything because I knew by now that he would never hurt me. I let him tie my hands with his tie because I had to look as if he was interrogating me all this time.
“You’ll have to hit me,” I told him already in the hallway.
“What?”
“Well, if you were supposedly interrogating me all this time, it has to look natural. Hit me on the face, so they could see blood.”
“I’m not hitting you.”
“Do it. It will look too suspicious if I come back with no marks on my face.”
“Annalise…”
“Just do it and get it over with. Stop dragging time. I’ll survive a little smack, don’t worry.”
He took a deep breath and then shifted from one leg to another indecisively.
“Alright. I’ll hit you on the mouth with an open hand, not hard, but there’ll be blood.”
“Good. Do it.”
“I can’t, while you’re looking at me!”
I sighed and closed my eyes. All of a sudden he took my face in his hands and kissed me.
“I’m very sorry!”
Before I could understand anything I got such a slap that I hardly stood on my feet. I’d never been hit in my life before, and it was quite a petrifying experience. I instinctively pressed my hands to my broken lips, tasting the blood quickly filling the inside of my mouth.
“I’m so sorry! Sweetheart, angel, does it hurt?”
I should feel bad for my poor lover, gently touching my cheek and covering my already teary eyes with kisses, but it hurt too damn much. If that was how he hit people ‘not hard,’ I couldn’t even imagine how it would feel if he’d punch me with his fist and with all his force. I’d probably die of massive head trauma right there.
“I’m fine.” I wiped the tears and my mouth with a sleeve and noticed several bright red dots on my white shirt. If that doesn’t look like a good interrogation, I don’t know what does. “Let’s go.”
Ernst kissed me on my forehead again, told me that he loved me and then led me out of my house by the scruff of my neck, in case Reinhard had sent the Gestapo agents to help out the Chief of the RSHA in case something goes wrong… or to spy on him. He roughly pushed me in the back seat of his car and started it.
“Now listen to me very carefully. This is what we’re going to do…”
The End of Book Two
To be continued…
Thank you for reading Book Two from the series “The Girl from Berlin.” I hope you enjoyed it! If you liked the story, the author and all the people who worked on the book will really appreciate it if you leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016FTEU14
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2710
9583-the-girl-from-berlin
Annalise, Heinrich and Gruppenführer Kaltenbrunner will come back in the third and final book in the series – “War Criminal’s Widow.”
The Girl from Berlin: Gruppenführer's Mistress Page 28