by Nina Berry
And she walked out.
* * *
Devin was waiting for her outside the Colegio, leaning against a long black car in his perfect summer suit and his Italian race-car-driver sunglasses.
“Don’t you look like the cat that got the cream,” he said, pushing away from the car.
She let her grin take over her face, and did a little tap dance on the sidewalk. “I told Victor Anderson he could get bent and played the sick card,” she said. “I hope he fires me.”
“I heard,” he said, and held the door open as she got inside. “Should I arrange his mysterious disappearance?”
“Tempting.” She settled back into the leather seats of the cooled car. “But he’ll disappear not-so-mysteriously from Hollywood soon enough.”
“I have a report to make in half an hour,” he said. “I may get clearance after that to send you home, at which point you could quit the movie and never look back.”
“Send me home?” Her good mood faded around the edges. She still harbored anger and resentment at Devin for keeping her at arm’s length, but she didn’t want to see the last of him just yet. “But there’s a lot more I could do.”
“No,” he said flatly. “You’ve done what we needed. It’s time to let the professionals take over.”
That rankled her. They might not be paying her, but she’d done okay so far. Better than okay. “But Emma called me and invited me over for something secret she says will be really fun. I think I should go.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Devin said. “We have no idea what Von Albrecht’s keeping in that basement, or who else he’s collaborating with.”
“But that’s exactly why I should go back,” Pagan said. “They still trust me, so I’m the only one who can get inside without blowing the whole thing. I might even be able to get into Von Albrecht’s main office on the ground floor.”
Devin shook his head. “You’ve endangered your own life enough. Don’t you want to be done?”
“No, because it’s not done! If you’re making a report today, that means they probably won’t do anything until tomorrow at the soonest, and who knows what I could find out in the meantime?”
“It’s not safe,” he said. “Every time you go there, you risk Von Albrecht getting suspicious. I know you told him that you sought him out because of your mother, but he and Dieter are in the middle of plotting something dangerous. They might get paranoid about you.”
The more he protested, the more she realized she had to go. That poor dog was still down there, and all the other animals.
“It wasn’t safe yesterday, either,” she said. She hadn’t told Devin about the near-fight she’d witnessed between Dieter’s gang and the Jewish kids because she’d nearly ruined the whole mission by overhearing it. But Dieter’s ominous words about “tomorrow night” kept repeating in her ears. That tomorrow night was now tonight. “And the clock is ticking. January 30 and whatever Von Albrecht has planned isn’t far away. The sooner we know what he’s doing, the sooner I can be done.”
“What if I asked you, as a personal favor to me, not to go tonight?”
He was serious. He really didn’t want her to go. For some reason that was upsetting.
“You wouldn’t,” she said. “Because you know better.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said in the same flat voice that gave nothing away. But she wanted to think that his words were telling. “You’ve done more than your share already. I told Mercedes I’d do what I could to keep you safe.”
“No one is ever safe,” she said. “And you can’t make me safe by squashing me down, telling me what to do.”
Devin’s blue eyes were stark as they gazed at her, and he nodded. “I have to trust you.”
Trust her. There was the rub. How could anyone ever really trust her again after what she’d done to Daddy and Ava? She could’ve saved all of East Berlin and still it wouldn’t blot out that stain on her soul.
“I can understand why you wouldn’t.”
It came out very quiet.
He was frowning at her. “This isn’t about the past. This is about the very dangerous now. Even fully trained, professional agents wouldn’t be safe if they went undercover in that house. Both Von Albrecht and his son are dangerous.” He moved restlessly, something she’d never seen him do before, always so self-contained and in control. “But I know, I know. You’ve proven that you can more than handle yourself.”
“I won’t stay long tonight,” she said. How odd that she was reassuring him for once. “I’m going over at seven thirty. I’ll be out by ten.”
His eyes met hers, and the look of worry there disturbed her. “One minute later than ten o’clock and I’m coming in after you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Von Albrecht House and Dock Sud, Buenos Aires
January 12, 1962
CALESITA
Merry-go-round. A move where the lead dances around the follower.
Pagan knocked on the Von Albrecht front door exactly at 7:30 p.m., dressed in a casual gingham dress. Whatever secret thing Emma had planned better not be formal. It was a relief to see Emma as she opened the door, grinning, wearing capri pants and white Keds like the ones Pagan had worn the day before.
“You look so cute!” Emma walked onto the front stoop holding her purse and gave Pagan a hug.
Pagan hugged her back. “So do you. Love the ponytail.”
“Got your things?” Dieter said in his Argentine-German-accented English, standing in the doorway, with his hand on the knob. He was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a red leather jacket that made him look like a blonder James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
“All set,” Emma said.
“Good,” said Dieter. He looked energized. He turned a rare smile toward Pagan. “Good evening, Fräulein Jones. I hope you enjoy our little entertainment tonight.” He closed the front door and trotted down the steps past Pagan.
She stood there for a moment, confused.
“Come on,” Emma said, following her brother. “They’re waiting for us down the block.”
Pagan stayed rooted on the stoop of the Von Albrecht house. Getting inside it was the main reason she’d come over. The animals. The tunnels. “But I thought...”
“We’re going out!” Emma took her hand and tugged on it. She was wearing cherry-red lipstick and her blouse had little cherries printed on it. She lowered her voice. “Dieter made me promise not to tell you till we got there. It’s one of his gang’s secret outings, and it’s going to be amazing!”
An outing with Dieter’s gang sounded about as fun as a strip search in reform school. Did this mean the “something big” Dieter had chortled about was happening somewhere else, maybe something to do with the meeting with the Jewish kids? Von Albrecht had said that Dieter was integral to his plans, and he was also the ringleader of the gang. So wherever Dieter went, much as it galled Pagan, that was the place to be.
She hated leaving that poor tortured dog in the basement a moment longer, but it was better to stick to Dieter like glue to see what he was up to.
Later, if she had to break into the house or start a dang fire to get those animals free, so be it.
Pagan let Emma drag her down the steps and along the sidewalk after Dieter. “Is it far? How late do you think we’ll be out?” She sounded like a total stick in the mud, but she needed whatever info she could get.
Emma shrugged. “Not far. Come on!”
Two cars full of teenagers were idling on the street waiting for them. The wide-open windows had way too many feet and elbows already poking out of them. Dieter shoved one of the boys over so he could drive the Mercedes Benz, while Emma pulled Pagan into the same car. She ended up half on the lap of a boy briefly introduced as Wolfgang and half on top of Emma, who put her arms
around Pagan’s waist quite contentedly.
The drive only took around twenty minutes, but it felt like a century with Wolfgang’s knees jabbing into her backside. At one point he and the boy next to him got into a play fight, smacking and punching each other, laughing and yelling at each other in German as they did so. Pagan nearly got an elbow in her eye and said, “Hey, if you don’t mind,” in English.
Wolfgang slapped one more time at the other boy and angled his head toward Emma. “Doesn’t she speak German?”
He said it in that Argentine-inflected German this group tended to use.
“Do you know any German?” Emma asked Pagan in English.
“I shot a movie in Berlin this summer, so I learned how to count to five,” Pagan said. She’d learned during that time how handy it was to have people think you couldn’t speak their language. “And say thank you, but I don’t think that counts.”
“She doesn’t,” Emma said to Wolfgang in German. “But she just shot a movie in Berlin.”
Wolfgang’s eyes got big, and in the rearview mirror, Pagan saw Dieter give her a long hard look. “Were you only in West Berlin?” Dieter asked her in English. It was the most interest he’d shown in her so far. “Or did you go see our Red friends in the East?”
“I went to East Berlin once before the wall went up,” she said. “It was a mess.”
“Well, first the damned Americans bombed it,” Dieter said, and everyone else in the car nodded. “Then the damned Russians stole half of it. That’s not an equation that leads to success.”
He wasn’t wrong. Dieter was a bit smarter when he wasn’t in some frothing racist rage. She could see why the other kids followed him. But he didn’t have the whole story, and she wasn’t about to tell him that West Berlin was flourishing, thanks to the Allies that had defeated Hitler.
“The Führer would weep if he saw the Fatherland now,” Wolfgang said.
Dieter’s sly smile, intended only for himself, was visible to Pagan in the rearview mirror. “That’s why we do what we do,” he said. “That’s why we do what we’re doing tonight!”
Everyone in the car except for Pagan yelled out, “Jawohl!” Emma, too.
Lovely. She was stuck in a car with a bunch of Nazi kids. She’d rather dance twelve tangos with Tony Perry.
Twilight darkened to night as they moved through a neighborhood with narrow cobblestone streets to a deserted area filled with warehouses. Between buildings, Pagan caught sight of the river.
The car angled down, and something blotted out the sky. The car rattled and jumped over rougher terrain than cobblestones, and came to a stop. They poured out of the car, and Pagan found herself once again underground.
This tunnel was larger than the one she and Devin had been in the night before, and it looked carved out of the bedrock rather than lined with brick. Several of the boys had flashlights, and they moved around the floor like reverse shadows as everyone tramped farther down the tunnel.
“Where are we?” Pagan whispered to Emma.
“Look out for the tracks,” Emma said, pointing with one hand, and taking Pagan’s hand with the other. Twin metal lines emerged from the rock and then disappeared again a few yards on.
Pagan stepped over them carefully. “Is this an old metro tunnel?” she asked.
Emma shrugged. “Something like that, we think. But it gets cooler. Look!”
The tunnel narrowed sharply up ahead, and light shined through it from multiple sources. Pagan had to duck to get through the opening, and stepped down, blinking as the space then opened up wide around her once more.
Hundred of candles and a few oil lamps had been lit and placed in the nooks and crannies of what looked like a very fancy, very large basement with a high vaulted ceiling and Greek pillars lined up and down both sides. In the central area was a raised stone, almost like an altar. Off to the side the remains of human-size statues, clad in long marble robes, their feet in sandals, watched in silence. A dozen teenagers, mostly boys, were already there, lighting the candles and shouting up at the ceiling to hear the echoes.
“It’s the crypt of an old church,” Emma said.
They were standing on the top step of a staircase marching down to the crypt’s floor. It must have once led up to the ground floor of the church.
“What’s above us?” Pagan asked as Emma guided her down the steps. They were uneven from years of erosion. “Is the church still there?”
Emma shook her head. “It’s a warehouse for old trolley cars,” she said. “Nobody else but Dieter and his friends know this place exists down here! Isn’t it the coolest? I wish we could open up the tombs in the side chapels, but Dieter thinks I’m disgusting.”
Pagan was with Dieter on that one, but she smiled encouragingly. Curiosity was a good thing. She was someone who couldn’t leave a mystery behind; only for her, the mystery was usually a little more current. “You probably like history in school.”
“I love history,” Emma said. “I told Papa I wanted to be a history or archaeology professor when I grow up. But he said it was important for good German girls like me to get married to German boys and have lots of babies of pure German stock.”
Pure. There was that word again. “Do both,” Pagan said. “That’ll show your father.”
Emma wrinkled her nose and looked down. They’d reached the flagstones on the floor of the crypt. “I don’t want to get married. Boys are...” She looked over at the young men shoving one another and dripping wax on the pillars from the candles and shuddered. “Boys are awful.”
“Some of them,” Pagan said carefully. “You know, Gertrude Stein lived most of her life with her best friend, Alice. You don’t have to get married.”
“Do you want to get married?” Emma said, slinging a look over at Pagan before ducking her head down again.
“I don’t know,” Pagan said, and meant it, but probably for different reasons than Emma. Maybe it was the way her mother had dominated her parents’ marriage, or all the divorces she’d seen in Hollywood. Maybe she’d spent the first twelve years of her life doing every little thing her mother ordered her to do and couldn’t imagine bending that way again to anyone.
But maybe there was someone out there who was more like a partner than a husband. Someone who didn’t expect you to obey but who was looking for a companion in adventure. She’d never thought men like that existed. Not until very recently...
But she couldn’t tell Emma that. She had to keep up the illusion that Emma might stand a chance with her, if only for a little longer. Best to stick close to the truth, just not the whole truth.
“I like kids, but I never dreamed about my wedding the way other girls do. I don’t want to answer to some guy every day, you know?” She narrowed her eyes, considering. “Might be worth it, though, if I could get Dior to custom-make my dress.”
Emma laughed. “Ja, get the dress and the presents. And then get a divorce!”
“Believers!” Dieter had leaped up onto the stone platform in the center of the room. Towering over them in his red jacket, his golden hair gleaming in the lamp and candlelight, voice echoing back through the vaulted stone chamber, he looked every inch the young, charismatic leader. It made Pagan uneasy. He was speaking in German, so Emma quietly translated for Pagan. “We’re here for our monthly contest against the Yids, the Reds and the Negros. Are you ready?”
The assembled group let out a roar.
“Are the cars ready?” Dieter turned and pointed at Wolfgang.
“The cars are ready!” Wolfgang shouted.
Cars? That was the last thing she needed.
“Is the racecourse ready?” Dieter swiveled on top of the platform and pointed at another boy.
“The racecourse is reserved, marked and ready!” he shouted.
These idiots were going to race cars in the deserted
warehouse district of Buenos Aires? The thought made her queasy. She’d done enough crazy driving to last a lifetime, thanks. Pagan nearly turned on her heel and ditched them then. But she had no idea where she was, or how to get back to the hotel. The neighborhood hadn’t exactly been overflowing with taxis, either.
And she had to stick with Dieter. If these races happened every month, and if she was right that he had something big planned for tonight, then this wasn’t the whole story.
She took Emma by the hand and walked her down the church steps to stand by the altar at Dieter’s feet, a suitably reverential expression on her face, the better to overhear anything or follow him.
“I know that normally I am the first driver to win the first race against our enemies,” Dieter was saying. “But I’ve been showing the ropes to my best friend, Wolfgang, here, and I think he’s earned the right to take the wheel in tonight’s first race. What do you think?”
“Jawohl!” One of the boys shouted, and the others took up the call. “Heil Wolfgang!”
“Are we going to win?” Dieter held his arms out to the crowd of maybe three dozen teenagers.
“Jawohl!” they shouted as one.
Emma shouted with them, laughing and clapping. She grabbed Pagan’s hands and clapped them together while Pagan manufactured her best delighted giggle. “See? Drag races! Just a block from here. I read those stories of how you and Nicky Raven were caught racing down Sunset Boulevard, so I knew you’d enjoy it!”
Poor, silly Emma. She must’ve also read the stories of Pagan driving her Corvette off a cliff, but it hadn’t occurred to her that might’ve led to a change of heart when it came to drag racing. Pagan couldn’t imagine a more asinine activity, or one more likely to give her an anxiety attack.
Dieter had jumped down from the altar, and leaned in to say something to Wolfgang quietly. Pagan was close enough to hear: “...give you my jacket in the tunnel.”
Wolfgang nodded and then they were all headed back up the steps, out of the sunken church.