by Ryan Graudin
The address wasn’t far from here. Yael could be there and back in five minutes. Riding straight up to the resistance’s door was out of the question. Her motorcycle and riding gear were conspicuous enough as it was, and the city was clearly under curfew. There would be patrols. Yael unclipped her helmet, unnoosed the Iron Cross from her neck. The swastika armband was next to go, crammed like bright guts into her leather pannier. Then, with a final glimpse down the alley’s empty spine, Yael changed herself.
It came like a memory, drew out like a sigh. Always painful—switch, click, shift. An Italian face: olive skin, dark hair, shaded eyes. (Non-Aryan by strict standards, though Hitler’s racial system was built just as much on politics as it was on weak pseudoscience. Like the Japanese, Italians were “honorary Aryan,” because of their pro–National Socialist war efforts.) This appearance would be enough to avoid immediate identification if she stumbled across a patrol. But the cobbled streets stayed empty as she walked through them.
The door Reiniger’s coded numbers led her to was small, painted in a splintering oxblood red. Darkness leaned inside the nearby windowpanes. Yael knocked four times—two double staccato beats—just as the protocol instructed.
The shadows stayed, licking behind the curtains. But she heard quick footsteps, the lock sliding back. Italian words whispered through the crack: “What do you want?”
“The wolves of war are gathering,” she recited the first half of the pass code.
“They sing the song of rotten bones,” the voice behind the door answered. Weathered wood pulled back to show a boy not much younger than Yael herself. Skinny, all elbows, with an acne-riddled face. Hair peaked pillow high, eyes heavy with sleep.
“Volchitsa,” he whispered her alias. “Come in.”
“I can’t stay,” Yael told the partisan as she stepped over the shallow doorframe. The room beyond smelled of candle wax and basil. “I’m still on the clock. Didn’t want to risk a tail from the checkpoint. I need your group to get a request through to Germania. I want all the information Henryka can collect on Felix Wolfe and any additional information she has on Luka Löwe’s relationship with Adele Wolfe.”
The boy nodded. “We’ll send the request straightaway.”
“Tell her I’ll retrieve the files at the drop in Cairo.” The next official checkpoint was days from now. (At the very least.) The thought of what could happen during those sandy kilometers worried Yael, but there was little choice in the matter. She’d just try her best to avoid Luka and Felix until then.
“Is there anything else you need?”
Yael shook her head.
“I must go. Finish this leg of the race.” She was already walking when she said this. Out the door, into the dark.
“I’ll be watching you on the Reichssender. Our hope goes with you, Volchitsa.”
Yael tried to swallow the partisan’s words, nod them away with her good-bye. But they clung, digging their needle claws into her shoulders. Hope. A strange word. In her past, it had been a light, wispy thing. Crushed as easily as a finger under a guard’s boot. But now… now hope weighed so much, as if the Colosseum itself had collapsed on top of her. Mortar and suffering. Brick and time. Pouring into Yael’s chest cavity. The place that was supposed to hold her heart.
The streets were still vacant when Yael walked back through piazzas with shimmering fountains and sculptures. A copper statue of the Führer, still gleaming with newness—Yael suspected it had once been a statue of Mussolini, replaced shortly after his assassination at Hitler’s megalomaniac commands—watched her pass with blank eyes. Tears of bird waste streaked down his cheeks.
Good aim. Yael nodded to the nearest pigeons, crammed shoulder tight across the window ledge of a basilica. Keep it up.
She was just about to round the bend back into the alley when she heard the voices. Yael stopped and shrank against the church’s bastion walls, listening as three separate voices spoke hurried German.
A patrol. The alley hadn’t been as tucked away as she’d thought.
Yael’s fingers dug into the stucco. She edged to the corner, dared a look. The soldiers were clustered around her bike, just as she feared. Prodding its leather and chrome like vultures over a dead thing. Rifles were slung across their shoulders; their eyes were shielded heavily by caps.
The Iron Cross! The swastika armband! The panniers were sealed, as she’d left them—clipped buckles and leather straps—but the soldiers were still poking. It was only a matter of time before they ripped open the satchels and found her National Socialist gear. Put the pieces together. Ruined everything.
Time was something Yael did not have. Chalky minutes were racking up: tick, tick, tick. Seconds she couldn’t afford to lose.
She couldn’t let them see her as Adele. Victor Wolfe would have no plausible alibi for an abandoned bike in a back alley, so close to a checkpoint. Any story she offered in Adele’s voice would be picked apart: meat, tendon, bone. They’d peck, pick, peck until they found the cobweb gaps. Shredded her open.
Her Zündapp had no distinct markings. These men shouldn’t be able to track this incident back to Adele Wolfe. Not if it was a brunette Italian woman kicking the guns from their wrists.
She could still get out of this clean.
Herr Hitler’s blank copper pupils watched as Yael ducked into the alley. “Heil Hitler!”
They jumped when she spoke, as if her salute were an actual gunshot. Yael took the moment to survey the alley in full. Three men. (Two privates. One sergeant. All stocky and built.) Three rifles. (Carcanos. 7.35 mm. Strong punch, dodgy accuracy.) Laundry fluttering overhead. One heavy, heavy Zündapp.
The closest soldier was the first to regain his composure, the only one to return her salute. “You’re out after curfew,” he said in rough Italian.
—ACT LIKE YOU BELONG NOT A HOLLOW STUFFED GIRL—
“Yes.” Yael halted under a wide bedsheet. Doorway gas lamps flickered and fleshed out the air between them. “I’m on official business. I have papers.”
The men looked at each other. Both privates had unslung their rifles, but their stances were slack. They weren’t expecting a fight. Who would from a lone alley girl?
“Official business?” The sergeant took her bait. Edged closer.
Closer.
Yael’s arm swung out, up. Her fingers snagged the cloth and pulled. The sheet fell—an avalanche of cotton on top of the sergeant. The privates yelled, all surprise, rifles pressed back into their shoulders. Yael gave them no chance to aim as she lunged at the sergeant, met his sternum with her fist. He stumbled back, into the first private. Both went tumbling, a white cloth tangle.
The third patrolman was slow, his finger frozen over the trigger. Yael kicked the Carcano from his hands and stole the air out of his lungs with a second roundhouse. He stumbled to the ground, winded.
He was just a boy. Not much older than the partisan she’d just met. Yael could see his pulse fluttering, fearful against the smooth skin of his throat.
Yael’s knife rattled against its boot sheath. Her P38 sat hard against her rib cage.
Simple solutions. Permanent silence.
Vlad had taught her the art of killing. The ways to snuff out a man’s life were endless: blow to the temple, shot to the chest, twist of the neck. Yael had perfected them all. She knew where the line was—that tenuous string between the land of the living and the twilight of ghosts—and how to cross it.
Yet for all Yael’s knowledge and skill, she never had.
The rabbits Vlad had taught her to catch and clean didn’t count. Neither did the cases and cases of empty vodka bottles she’d shattered to perfect her marksmanship. Or the straw dummies she’d punched through with knife holes.
People—living and breathing—were different.
Death. The cost of living. Following her as close as wings. Swooping down on all she passed. It had become such a careless commodity. Flung far and wide in the name of progress. But Yael knew from her many, many brushes wit
h it that death was not a power to be wielded lightly.
No. It was a power to fear. A power that swallowed your soul, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.
She would not be like the guard with the flat winter eyes, who kicked the Babushka’s frail body again and again. She would not be like the soldiers of Germania, who shot stray bitches and Jews alike. When Yael took a life, it would mean something.
A death to end this death.
So she had lines of her own. Lines before the line. Her bullets and blade were for three things: defense, coercion, and the Führer’s chest.
There were no strict lines stopping Yael now as she loomed over the boy-soldier. This scenario could be considered defense, and his blood wasn’t exactly innocent. She pulled out her gun. Saw the depths of the boy-soldier’s eyes plummet. Deep, deep, deep into a fear she knew well. A fear she still faced every day, every night, when she woke from nightmares of smoke and wolves.
He was one of them.
But she wasn’t.
Yael brought the gun down—hard—on the private’s head. Visions of death rolled back with his eyes, as limp as the rest of him.
The other two soldiers were scrambling out of the sheets. Yael leapt onto the bike, twisting it to life. The second private lunged for his gun, but the Zündapp’s wheels were already turning. Yael shot off beneath flurries of laundry, into the twisted freedom of Rome’s ancient streets.
CHAPTER 10
NOW
MARCH 11, 1956
ROME CHECKPOINT KILOMETER 1,654
1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 13 hours, 38 minutes, 30 seconds.
2nd: Luka Löwe, 13 hours, 38 minutes, 34 seconds.
3rd: Adele Wolfe, 15 hours, 48 minutes, 53 seconds.
Yael sat in the checkpoint dining area, wondering what unfortunate family had been displaced from their property. Whoever they were, they had expensive tastes. Marble floors, craftsman wrought-iron chandeliers, racks filled with vintage wines, the green bottles gathering dust. Tapestries covered every wall except one, where the scoreboard loomed. Yael sat at the table, studying it. There was a dish full of noodles bathed in rich Bolognese sauce by her elbows, but she wasn’t even certain she possessed the energy to pick up her fork.
Two hours. Ten minutes. Twenty-three seconds.
That was how much time she’d lost. Yael took in the difference with a hissing breath. She’d have to do better than that. Third place would not get her an invitation to the Victor’s Ball. It wouldn’t have her dancing in Hitler’s arms, smiling for the cameras, reaching for her weapon.…
She needed to claw back into first and stay there.
“Look who finally decided to show up for the party!”
Yael’s jaw locked—hate-tight—at the sound of Luka’s voice. The boy was still in his riding gear: boots and gloves freckled with mud, his battered brown jacket hanging from his shoulders. He looked as exhausted as Yael felt. His stubble was heavier. Goggle rings (hours old) etched red tracks around his eyes, mingling with the bruises Felix’s punch had inked there.
“What are you doing here?” Yael didn’t bother keeping the spite out of her voice as Luka took the seat across from her.
“Got the road jitters. Always takes a few hours to get them out.” Luka brought a crumbling cigarette to his lips and smiled in a way that made Yael regret saying anything at all. Her words had invited Luka to keep talking when all she really wanted was for him to swagger off. Take his “Blood and honor!” and proud pedigree with him.
Yael started eating her food in hopes that her silence would bore Luka away. But the boy seemed set on watching her eat, siphoning cigarette smoke through his bandaged nose as she slurped her noodles.
Something about him seemed softer this evening, Yael noted between bites. Perhaps it was this smoky film in the air or the tape over Luka’s face, but the edge between them was no longer a knife. More wisp and feather. Skin’s-breath and late-night whispers.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten. What you did.
After everything that happened between you two…
Adele and Luka. So many sides to their story.
Noodles caught in her throat. She had to cough them down. Luka tapped his cigarette. All of its ash crumbled away. The end glowed raw.
“I see you found a way through Katsuo’s little blockade,” he said.
Yael followed Luka’s gaze to the scoreboard. The sixteen spaces below Adele’s name were blank, waiting to be filled by racers who’d taken extra minutes for food, rest. But the list’s end was anchored by a struck-through name: Shiina Hiraku. She read those letters and heard the squeal of his wheels. His scream. Its sudden, savage end.
“Is he dead?” She wasn’t sure why she asked this. Why her throat felt thick and tangled, as if the noodles were still clogging it.
“You know they never bother telling us these things.” Luka crushed his cigarette into the table. It left a charred black mark. “Does it matter?”
Did it? After all, she’d followed her rules. Stayed behind her lines. The line through Hiraku’s name was an accident. Collateral damage.
Yael swallowed. But the tangle stayed.
Did it matter? One life. A drop in a vast, vast ocean of hundreds, thousands, millions.
Yes, pounded the hollow of her heart. Yes, cried her wolves.
It mattered. All of them mattered. All of the hundreds, thousands, millions. Vast, vast…
Would it ever end?
Five, just five. Focus on them. Make it manageable. Babushka, Mama, Miriam—
—STOP—
Now was not the time for gathering her pieces. For becoming Yael. Because she was Adele Valerie Wolfe, and she could not let the boy across the table see anything more.
But Luka was looking, trapping Adele’s reflection in his indigo irises. The corner of his lip twitched—in a slippery way that Yael (even with all her training) couldn’t read. He was reading her, though, flipping through the files of her eyes. Wordless webs of memories.
Could he see through the cracks?
Did it matter?
“I guess not,” she finally answered with Adele’s voice, Adele’s words. She kept talking, desperate for a change in subject. “You were right. Felix drugged my soup.”
“And you’re surprised?”
“I’m surprised you warned me,” she said.
Luka tugged out a pack of cigarettes, tapped two onto the table. One he jammed between his lips. The other he sent rolling over to her.
Yael eyed it, trying to imagine how something so compact and white could smell so awful. “The Führer doesn’t approve.”
“Is that how it is now?” Luka’s face thinned, eyes, lips, and all. In it Yael saw the truth: Adele would’ve taken the cigarette.
If Adele had ever smoked, it had been a very good secret. The information wasn’t in the girl’s file. Nor had Yael ever spied her with a cigarette during any of her surveillance sessions. Her flat hadn’t even smelled of it.…
“You’ve done a lot of things I never expected, but going full-on lemming?” Luka pulled a matchbook from his jacket. “Was one waltz with Herr Hitler all it took to melt you into his Aryan-morality lapdog?”
Yael’s eyes slid to the Iron Cross around Luka’s neck. It was dull with road grime, as dirty as the rest of him. “Like you’re not in this race to win the Führer’s favor?”
The boy clucked his tongue, his head shaking as he weeded a match out of the book. “I thought you knew me better than that. Then again, I thought I knew you better than that.… You’re quite the slippery one, Fräulein. Made of lies and vice and things not so nice.”
“Come up with that rhyme all by yourself?” she asked.
“Clever, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll become a poet after all this.” Luka struck his match against the table. “I warned you about your brother’s little soup stunt because I want you to stay in this race. This road is long and hard, Fräulein. You don’t survive it without allies. Like I told Herr Wolfe: I plan on keeping you arou
nd.”
“You’d trust me as your ally?”
“Trust?” Luka’s match went out from the force of his laugh. He didn’t bother striking another. The cigarette dangled unlit from the corner of his mouth. “I trust you about as far as I can throw you. But we need each other. Even if you think I’m not worth it.”
His last words were startling. They made Yael recall the look on his face when she’d said them. The flinch that mixed with his bloodied nose when she pulled a furious Felix away.
She’d hurt his feelings.
Pain like that wasn’t inflicted by an enemy. No—the victor’s expression was warped with an emotion far cloudier, far grayer.
(Heartbreak?)
Luka Löwe had cracks, too. And through them Yael glimpsed… something.… This boy was more than just letters and snapshots in a manila-bound profile. More than just jaunty words and smirks. More than just a victor, a poster boy of the Reich.
But what?
She needed that file.
The main door to the checkpoint swung open. A herd of foggy-eyed race officials tumbled into the lodge, their voices anxious.
“There are sixteen racers on the road right now. It’s impossible to account for all the Zündapps.” The Roman checkpoint operator’s accent was mozzarella soft, balancing out the red frustration on his face. “Come back tomorrow and we can give you a more solid answer.”
The men with him… they were the patrol from the alley. The sergeant and private she’d tangled in a sheet. The soldier-boy whose life she’d spared.
Maybe they had opened her panniers. Maybe they’d seen the Iron Cross and swastika armband. Maybe—against all odds—they knew.
Yael’s fingers went white around her fork.
“It was a girl.” The sergeant’s eyes swept through the room, latching on to Yael. “About her age.”
The men turned toward Yael. They were all eyes—the way the death camp’s officers had been when Dr. Geyer put her on display. Showcased his handiwork of needles and change.