“You lied to me. How can I trust a single word you say now?”
“I didn’t want to mention him, because of our past together. I didn’t want to make our discourse uncomfortable.”
“I am an agent of the Gestapo. Do you think I put my personal feelings in the way of my investigations?”
“Of course not, but—”
“I must say I’m disappointed in you, Franka, but then I have been for the longest time, ever since you turned away from the word of the führer to embrace liberal thought.”
“I always thought so much of you, Daniel. We just weren’t right for one another.”
“Because you were better than me? Well, who’s better now? You know what I’ve done to people who lied to me? You know what I could do to you, here and now?”
“Of course, Daniel, but I’ve served my time. I’ve learned my lesson. Have you a picture of your wife and children? I’d love to see a photo of them.”
He stood up, lurching toward her. “How dare you mention them, you filthy whore! How dare you mention them with that disgusting mouth!”
Franka stood up and backed away from him, terror overtaking her. “Daniel, please . . .”
“It’s just you and me here. No one else for miles around.” He inched toward her, and she away from him, but the wall was only two feet behind, barring her escape.
“Look into your heart. You’re a good man. An excellent father, dedicated to his country, as well as his children. I’m a German woman. Don’t do this.”
“You’re a useless little slut, only good for one thing, and that’s being on your back. You were the sweetest piece I ever tasted.”
The walls of the cabin seemed to be closing in around her, and her vision dimmed. Her father’s old pistol lay in the cabinet by the front door, but that seemed like miles away. Franka screamed as he lunged at her, grabbed her by both arms, and dug his fingers into her biceps like talons into prey.
“Oh, you’ll make quite the concubine. Perhaps I’ll let you stay up here, and come and visit every few days. Otherwise, I’ll take you down to the cells and lock you up and let anyone who wants to have a go. I’ll leave that up to you.”
He came close, and she turned her face, almost vomiting as he ran his tongue up the side of her cheek. She tried to knee him and connected with his thigh as she managed to shrug him off.
“You’ll have to kill me first.”
“That can be arranged.”
She broke away across the room, but he caught her by the arms and dragged her toward her bedroom, the bedroom her parents had slept in during that warm summer of 1934. She struggled against him, kicking and scratching, drawing blood on his cheek. He forced the door open and threw her down on the bed, the door slamming shut behind them.
“Oh yes, you fight. It’s always better that way.”
Franka screamed again as he pinned her to the bed and tore her dress, exposing her underwear. She tried to scratch at him again, and he slapped her hard across the face. She lay dazed on the bed before him as he began to undo the notches on his belt. The bedroom door crashed open, and John barged in, a crutch in one hand, the glint of his pistol in the other. Berkel turned around and grabbed at the gun just as John threw a punch with his other hand and connected above his left eye. The crutch fell to the floor. The pistol roared as Berkel lunged for it again, the bullet flying through the back wall. John leaned against the doorframe as Berkel struggled against him. Berkel kicked the casts on John’s legs and wrenched John’s hand away. John fell back through the open door into the living room. The gun spilled onto the floor as Berkel reached for his own, which was holstered to his waist. Franka jumped onto his back, his body toppling to the floor under her weight. John went for the Gestapo agent’s throat and dug his thumbs into his windpipe, but Berkel rolled away. John lunged at him again, but the agent was too fast and rose to his feet, reaching for his gun once more.
“This is your boyfriend, then, is it, Franka?” He laughed as he unbuttoned his holster.
John clawed for his weapon where it lay three feet away, but Berkel already had his gun pointed at him and opened his mouth to say something as his finger tightened on the trigger.
Berkel’s chest exploded. The gun fell out of his hand as he turned, a pathetic, perplexed look on his face. Franka was standing behind him, her father’s gun smoking in her hand.
“He’s not my boyfriend, Daniel. He’s an Allied spy, and you were right. I always knew exactly what I was doing.”
“You filthy . . .” Franka pulled the trigger before he could finish the last sentence that would ever come from his lips. The bullet struck him in the chest, just below his line of medals. He fell to his knees and then backward onto the floor.
“You bastard,” Franka sobbed. “You insufferable bastard.”
Berkel’s blood was spreading across the floor in an almost-perfect circle of crimson. His eyes were still open, glaring up at the ceiling.
“Franka? Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
John raised himself to his feet, using the wall to get to her. She hadn’t moved, still had the gun pointed at where Berkel had been standing. John took the gun from her. He placed it down and took her in his arms.
“The Gestapo is going to come for us,” she said as she wrapped her arms around him. “Now they’ll know you’re here. We’ll never get out of Germany alive. You’ll never get the film back to the Allies.”
“They’ll have to catch us first.”
She rested her head on him as the tears came again. “You risked the entire mission for me. Why did you do that?”
“No mission is worth standing by and letting that happen,” he said. “I’d do it again a thousand times. I could never let anyone hurt you.”
Chapter 13
Franka looked down at the blood-spattered corpse in the middle of the living room. The Nazi armband adorning his bicep was saturated red, his uniform stained and torn, his belt still unbuckled. She wanted to shoot him again.
John reached for the crutch on the floor. He put an arm over her shoulders and brought her into the kitchen. She was shaking as he sat her down. He brought his hand up to her face. She leaned into it, putting her hand on his.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“No. You’re the one who saved me. Again. I’m just sorry it took me so long to get there.” John took a deep breath. “You are right, though. They’re going to come looking for him. We have to leave here, tonight.”
“We?”
“I’m not leaving you behind. I can’t make it without you. I need you. The mission needs you.”
“What about your legs?”
“I’m going to need you to break the casts off. They’re strong. I didn’t feel any pain when I fought with that animal.”
“They’ll be looking for me now. You’re better off going alone. They don’t know that you’re here.”
“I owe you my life. You’re coming with me. I’m not leaving without you. I’d rather die trying than leave you behind.”
Franka took his hand off her face. “You should take my car. Your papers are good. You can try to slip across the border once you make it down there.”
“Stop. Understand this. I’m not leaving here without you. I’ll take you over my shoulder kicking and screaming if I have to, but we’re leaving together.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “We’ll go together.”
“Good, I need you.”
“And I need you.”
“It’s settled, then. The first thing is to get these casts off. Then we’re going to pack everything we’re going to require for our trip. They’ll be looking for us on the roads, so we’re going to have to go through the forests. It’s our only chance.”
“In winter?”
“We have no choice. We do have a head start, however. It’s almost nine o’clock. My guess is that it wasn’t unusual for our friend on the floor to stay out all night without telling his wife, so he likely won’t be missed for another twelve hours or
so. But I’m sure he told someone he was coming up here. We have to scrub this place down and hide his body so that by the time they figure out what happened, we’ll be long gone. It’s about fifty miles to the Swiss border. How far could we get on the back roads if we drive through the night?”
“Halfway perhaps. It’s going to be difficult in the dark.”
“We’ve little choice. It’s too far to walk. We have to try and get as far as we can. That terrain is going to be rough. We might not make more than ten miles in a day walking.” John reached out and took her hands. “This is going to be incredibly hard, Franka, but we can do it together.”
“I know somewhere we can make for, where we may be able to stop off.”
“Franka, we can’t trust anyone . . .”
“My great-uncle, Hermann, lives in a village called Bürchau. It’s twenty-five miles or so south of here, between us and Switzerland.”
John shook his head.
“Hear me out,” Franka said. “He’s in his eighties and almost never leaves the house. I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he has no love for the Nazis. Both of his sons died in the last war. We’re going to need somewhere to lay our heads for a few hours. We can’t go through the night and start walking in the morning, not with your legs.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“We’ll drive every back road and trekking path big enough to take the car. We can get there by morning and then sleep.”
“What will you tell him?”
“That I got lost while hiking and I need somewhere to rest for a few hours. He won’t ask questions.”
“And if he does?”
“I’ll speak to him first. If he suspects anything, we’ll pass through.”
Franka went to the spare bedroom. The floorboards lay across the hole on the floor where John had jumped out. She brought him his other crutch, and on his way back to the room he shunted past Berkel’s dead body. Franka worked in silence, aware of how vital each passing second was. She cut the casts off his legs, using scissors to reveal the wizened, whitened flesh beneath. His legs looked thin in comparison with the rest of his body now, the muscles weakened. He stood up.
“As good as ever,” he said, but she wasn’t convinced. His legs needed another week, but time had slipped away like water through her fingers.
John felt like a child those first few seconds as he reveled in the freedom of movement that removing the casts had given him. The sight of Berkel’s bloodied body lying in the middle of the floor brought him back into the moment.
John went to the bedroom, then reached through the floorboards and grabbed his rucksack. He had blankets, a knife, matches, a compass, and more than enough ammunition. The Luftwaffe uniform lay at the end of the hole, and he folded it into the bottom of the rucksack. A concealed zipper revealed a fold of papers—his alternate German identity as a traveling laborer. John stuffed the papers into his pockets, though he hoped he would never have to use them.
“Papers?” Franka said.
“I won’t be using them. It’s safer to bring all signs that I was ever here with me.”
“What are we going to do about Berkel?”
It seemed strange to refer by name to the grotesque corpse lying in the middle of the floor. It was difficult to imagine it had once been her boyfriend, the virile Hitler Youth leader all the girls had stared at as he strode past.
“We have to hide the body as best we can.”
“Outside? Do you want to bury him? The ground is most likely still frozen.”
“We don’t have time for that. We need to leave as soon as possible. Help me with him.”
John led her back out to the living room.
“Let’s put him under the floorboards. He’ll stink up the place something awful, but we’ll be long gone by then.” John looked across at Franka and knew he shouldn’t have said that. “It’s the only place we can hide him easily. If they do a cursory search of the cabin, they might not even find him there. We only need a few days. Hiding his body could buy us some time.”
Franka tried not to look into Berkel’s open eyes, but they seemed glued to her every movement and followed her around the room.
Berkel’s body was still warm as she picked up his feet. John took his arms. She could see John trying to hide his grimace as he bore Berkel’s weight. Blood streamed onto the floor, leaving a trail into the bedroom. The hole was waiting. They threw him in. She took Berkel’s trench coat and tossed it into the hole on top of him. She felt no sorrow, not even for his wife and children. They would be better off in a world without him. She stopped just short of spitting on his body. She felt relieved that he was dead. It was a comfort to know he’d never hurt anyone again.
John motioned to her to help him, and after replacing the floorboards, they pushed the bed over them once more. Franka went to the kitchen for a bucket of soapy water, and they spent the next twenty minutes cleaning the floor until all the blood was gone, until the murder scene was sanitized. No one would care that she’d acted in self-defense. Franka Gerber was soon to be public enemy number one, and the hounds of the Gestapo would be unleashed. The Swiss border was their only salvation.
They had spoken little as they’d cleaned, but now John took her to the kitchen and sat her down at the table.
“We need to dispose of his car somehow. Is there anywhere we could hide it? Any lane or wood within a short distance we could dump it so it won’t be found until we were away?”
“There are places.”
John tossed Berkel’s keys on the table. “I’ll follow behind in his car.”
They put on coats and stepped outside. Franka pulled her scarf over her face. Even if they stopped off at her great-uncle’s house, they would have to sleep outside for at least one night. It hadn’t snowed for a week or more, and the days had warmed, but the nights were still deathly cold. Franka’s breath plumed out white in front of her as she looked up at the stars tinseled above their heads.
John searched through Berkel’s car. “Thank you, Herr Berkel,” he said.
“What’s in there?”
“A tent. It’s small, but it’ll keep the rain off our backs. A medical kit too. We can do this. We’re going to do this.”
Having stowed the tent and medical kit in the trunk of her car, Franka pulled away from the cabin. White light spiraled out from the headlamps, illuminating little more than the outline of the road and the trees that surrounded it. John had suggested keeping the lights off as they drove but relented; he must have realized that would have been suicidal. It was almost impossible to tell one place from another in the dark of night. The roads were clear but more for the use of sleighs and skiers. She didn’t dare go more than twenty miles an hour as she rummaged through her mind for hiding places she’d known as a child.
It took five minutes to reach the spot she remembered, a road that led nowhere, perhaps to a house that was never built. She stopped at the end and directed John to drive down a few hundred yards, then trudged after him to help scatter branches and leaves over the car. It was hard to tell how well they’d hidden Berkel’s Mercedes—the night hid almost everything—but they had little time. It would have to do. It was a mile from the cabin, and closer to the village, but no one came here. Not in winter anyway.
They walked back to the car in silence, only just able to make out where it was parked. Franka peered into the black beyond the tree line.
John cursed under his breath, his hand over his face. “We should have hidden him in the car. I wasn’t thinking straight in all that panic earlier.”
“Can we go back and get the body?”
“It’s too late. We’d waste too much time.”
“Surely under the floorboards in the house is a better place than stowing him in the back of his own car? The cabin is so remote.”
“We’ll have to hope so.”
It was almost eleven by the time they got back. She held the oil lamp over the floor, searching for traces of blood. John was in the
kitchen. The map was already spread across the table when she sat down beside him.
“How well do you know the territory south of here?”
“I know it a little. We used to take hikes down there when I was a teenager, but never at night, and never during winter. It’s hilly. Some of it is thick forest.”
“All the better to hide out in,” John said as he trailed his finger down toward the Swiss border. It was only inches on the paper, about forty-five miles through the forest to the nearest point. “The frontier zone extends out from the border for fifty miles in most directions. The forest is our only realistic chance. There are too many patrols on the roads and railways around the frontier zone. We’d never make it.”
“What about the border itself?”
“Making the border would be quite the achievement, but it would only be the beginning of our problems. The Nazis have set up a line of dozens of listening posts within five miles of the border. Guards with dogs patrol between them. The roads and villages down there are swarming with soldiers, and on the Swiss border itself guards are stationed every two hundred yards with orders to challenge everyone they see by day and to shoot without warning at night.”
“That’s why you were going to take Hahn through the mountains south of Munich.”
“Yes, getting there would have been no easy feat, but the mountain passes offer an opportunity that we don’t have here.”
“And we can’t get to them from here because I’ll be wanted for murder soon.”
“Precisely. We could try to make it before they found his body, but we must assume that he told someone where he was going. You’ll be wanted for questioning sometime tomorrow. We’d never make it. The forest is our only chance.”
“And once we get to the border?”
“We get lucky. We sneak across, and we’re free.”
“Luck? That’s our plan?”
“It’s not our plan, but we’re going to need a generous slice of it to get across.”
“But we do have somewhere to make for?”
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