The first time he had seen her mother had been on a stage like this. She was part of the corps, not yet a soloist, but to him, she had been up there alone, dancing just for him. That had been a lifetime ago, longer perhaps.
Up now, turn and turn. Jump, then back. Yes, she had her steps now. The music was in her, animating her. Ah, a misstep, a near fall. Recovery, yes. Forget it, child. The flaw only makes them see the beauty of the rest.
The applause filled the theater as she took her bow and hurried to the wings on airy steps. He watched her go, content.
“Your daughter, yes?”
He had been distracted by the dance, more so than he would usually allow, and he had not noticed the gray-haired man standing at his side until he spoke.
“Yes,” he said.
“She dances with skill,” the gray-haired man said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Perhaps we should speak outside?”
They stepped out into the granite chill of a Moscow autumn. Cars passed them by, their drivers invisible behind yellow headlights. An early rain caused their tires to hiss. Old leaves tumbled along empty sidewalks. The colonel followed the gray-haired man to the alley that ran behind the theater and lit his cigarette before lighting one of his own.
“The work is done?” the gray-haired man asked.
“We finished with the list earlier tonight,” he answered. “I expect you will find the results satisfactory.”
“We always have.” The gray-haired man coughed. “The Chairman himself would like to extend to you his thanks.”
He bowed, just slightly. “I am honored to serve the Party.”
“That is good to hear,” the gray-haired man said. Those were his words, but the colonel knew that more than this was being said: in the way he held his dirty-white cigarette, the way his small eyes glanced off into the night, the way his arthritic hands trembled.
“I remain at the behest of the Party,” he said. “And of the Chairman.”
“Yes,” the gray-haired man said, sucking on the cigarette like a man drowning. From his heavy woolen overcoat he produced an envelope and handed it across the stale alleyway air.
The colonel opened it and quickly read the terse documents it contained. “Berlin?”
The gray-haired man nodded, then crushed the half-spent cigarette under his shoe. “A filthy city full of ungrateful people,” he said with a shudder. “But an important city as well. We recently received word from a well-placed friend that our adversaries in the city have made a . . . significant discovery. It is imperative that they do not hinder our existing plans. Too much work has already been done. This must be contained.”
He tucked the envelope into his coat. Ahead, people had already begun to stream from the theater out into the streets. He took out his watch and checked the time. “You have my word,” he said. “I will see this done.”
“Yes,” the gray-haired man said. “We know that you will. That is why we are sending the Nightingale.”
FOUR
Karen touched the leather pouch around her neck. She wasn’t sure if magic would help much in the fight to come, but she felt better knowing she could call on it if necessary. She looked up and down the street. Cute houses, trimmed lawns, white fences. Everything appeared safe, but Karen wasn’t sure if appearances could be trusted. If you have to engage the enemy, it is best to do so on favorable ground. Did Helen’s house count? Hard to tell; big sisters were tricky to pin down that way.
She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. If he starts yelling, I can just threaten to turn him into a newt. If only that were a real spell; but then, he didn’t know that. Magic to him was scary and unstable, something to be avoided at all costs. Not unlike his youngest daughter. Aware she couldn’t hide in her car all afternoon, she turned off the grumbling engine and got out.
And was almost immediately assaulted by a roving band of nine-year-olds.
“Aunt Karen! You came! I told Mom you would!”
“The birthday girl’s wish is my command,” Karen said, peeling Martha’s arms off her legs before they both fell into the street. She held out her gift: a rectangle wrapped hastily in plain brown paper. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks!” Martha said, taking the gift. “Will you do some magic for us? Please?” Martha’s eyes were huge and bursting with childish glee; Karen suspected someone had been stealing frosting when her mother wasn’t looking. The others, all similarly pigtailed and looking for trouble, added their assent in a high-pitched chorus.
“We’ll see,” Karen said.
“Mom says you are the greatest magician ever,” Martha said eagerly. “Better than all the gross boy magicians.”
Karen smirked. “I’m not the greatest yet,” she said. “But I’m working on it.”
“When you are the greatest, will you blast all the other magicians with fireballs?” Martha asked.
“Or lightning?” another girl chimed in.
“That sounds like something a gross boy magician would do,” Karen said, playfully tugging Martha’s pigtail. “I’d want to do something with fewer explosions. I’ll show you some magic later, if your mom says it’s okay.”
With their demands for a performance agreed to, the gaggle let Karen pass unmolested. She wandered inside to the kitchen, where she found her sister looking oddly grown-up. Karen leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Remember when you used to try to get Mom and Dad to forbid me from coming to your birthday parties? Now you beg me to come to Martha’s.”
Helen dropped the sandwich she was hurriedly assembling and reached for a hug. “You made it,” she said, sounding more than a bit relieved.
“The drive from the city wasn’t bad.”
“It wasn’t the drive I was worried about.”
“Fair enough,” Karen replied, eyeing the white and pink cake for finger marks. “When are they supposed to get here?”
“Any minute now. You going to be alright?”
“Looks like you could use some help with those sandwiches.”
Helen smiled; she looked a lot like their mom when she did that. When had that happened?
“You got a magic spell to make sandwiches?” Helen asked.
“I wish,” Karen said, grabbing a knife and a slice of white bread. “If magicians could do that, we might have more fans.”
“I’d certainly sign up,” Helen said. After a pause, she asked, “This government job of yours, are they treating you alright? Seems like it might be a hard place to work for a woman. If you need me to go down and tell them to be nice to you . . .”
Karen stuck out her tongue. “I have a master’s degree in theoretical magic, I have my own apartment, and sometimes I even do my own laundry. When should I expect you’ll start treating me like an adult?”
“When you stop being my little sister,” Helen said. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
“They treat me fine,” Karen said. Slapping a sandwich together, she sighed. “When they aren’t expecting me to be someone’s secretary.”
“Nothing wrong with being a secretary,” Helen said.
“Nothing at all,” Karen said, “if that’s your actual job title.”
“Good point,” Helen said. “And how do you react when they behave like pigs?”
“By keeping my mouth shut,” Karen said.
Helen’s arched eyebrow was having none of it. “You would lie to me in my own kitchen?”
Karen rolled her eyes. “. . . or by shooting my mouth off until they get so angry you can see steam coming out of their ears.”
“That sounds more like my little sister,” Helen said. She wiped her hands on her apron and forced Karen to look at her. “You don’t have to sink to their level, you know. I tell Martha all the time. Just because the boys are misbehaving doesn’t give you the right to do the same.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
The doorbell chimed through the house. “You must have magic powers,” Helen said, wriggling her fingers. “You speak the words and evil spirits materialize.” Helen smiled again, but this time it was the wry grin Karen remembered from when they were kids. So there was still some of her sister wrapped in that apron after all.
“You have a back door, right? I can make a run for it?”
“You know the deal,” Helen said, wiping her hands and heading for the door. “You tell him, or I will.”
Karen could smell her mother’s perfume as soon as the door opened. Hugging her was like holding on to a soft, fragrant cloud; hugging her father, rather, was like wrapping her arms around a bristling tree stump.
“Helen didn’t tell us you were going to be here,” her dad said.
“So what a wonderful surprise,” her mom said, cutting in. “Isn’t it, Roger? A wonderful surprise.”
They were saved by the arrival of the birthday girl and her merry band and their unionized demands for cake and presents. After some tense negotiations, Helen brokered a deal for cake after lunch, but while they were waiting, couldn’t Aunt Karen do some magic for them? Never one to defy the will of the people, Helen gave her sister an apologetic glance, then her blessing.
They assembled in the living room, the kids on the floor. Her mother, true to form, followed Helen into the kitchen and her dad, suddenly without an ally, settled alone onto the lime-green couch. Karen didn’t bother to look at him; she knew what she’d see. Consistency had always been his prime virtue.
“Can you light something on fire?” one of the girls asked.
“Can you kill someone with magic?”
“Or make a boy like you?”
Karen rattled off quick answers: “Yes; I’m not going to answer that; and you’re too young for that question.” What could she show them that was just the right balance of impressive and safe? She could feel the heat of her father’s scowl. To him, there was no such thing as safe magic. Roger O’Neil was wrong about a lot of things, but he might actually be right about that one.
“Alright girls, close your eyes,” she said. She chose a simple spell, though even the easiest magic required a level of focus that could be difficult to muster while being scrutinized by a small child army. She touched the leather pouch and the familiar gesture calmed her. She breathed out, said the words of the spell, and flung her free hand into the air.
A dozen pinpricks of light, one for each partygoer, danced in the air above the woolly shag carpet. They were red and blue, purple, white, and green, all flickering and pulsing like distant stars, casting Independence Day colors across the living room.
The unanimous murmuring of astonishment proved the girls weren’t very good at following directions but at least appreciated a good show.
Now this was the interesting part. She’d done this before, but never with an audience. Ignore them. Focus. Gripping the pouch a little harder, Karen closed her eyes. She didn’t need to see the lights; she could feel them, minute extensions of her will. This part wasn’t covered by Dr. Eckstein in Intro to Illumination Magic. This part wasn’t in any of the textbooks either.
She reached out with her thoughts and touched the lights. Gently at first, until she held each one. Then, without words, without the confines of an age-old spell or timeworn incantation, she made them dance.
The lights swung wildly around the room like a confused meteor shower, spinning about each partygoer until she collapsed in dizziness or delight, then resting finally like a fairy crown on little Martha’s radiant curls.
Karen opened her eyes. It had worked. It really worked. She knew it would; she had tried it enough times. But seeing it in action, magic as an act of will rather than correct recitation, never failed to make her heart soar.
Then she made the mistake of looking at her dad. That vein was throbbing on his forehead. His right hand clutched the arm of the couch in a death grip; his left kneaded the leg that had never been the same since it took a spray of shrapnel outside of Paris. He looked like he was back there, ready to fight, ready to defend what he loved against something he hated.
“My goodness!” Mom came in from the kitchen with a platter of sandwiches and nearly dropped them when she saw the scene. Karen’s focus ruined, the lights popped into a shower of harmless sparks and the girls broke into applause.
Perhaps it was the applause that helped Karen recover. This was for Martha, after all; if Dad didn’t like it, he knew where the door was.
“Remember, girls,” Karen said to her rapt audience, “recent studies show that women have a fifteen percent higher chance of being born with magical ability and up to twenty percent higher magical aptitude, so make sure your parents let you take the tests.”
“I want to be a magician!” one of the girls said.
Not to be outdone, the rest quickly agreed.
When Karen looked up, her dad was gone.
Helen appeared at her side. “Don’t worry about him,” she said quietly, “he’ll be fine.” She pressed a napkin into Karen’s hand.
“What’s this?”
Helen gestured covertly toward Karen’s face just as she felt the blood. Karen quickly turned away and pressed the cloth to her nose. “Occupational hazard,” she said with a laugh.
Helen tried to smile, but ended up looking concerned instead, and more like Mom than ever.
* * *
• • •
When Karen turned back toward the house after depositing the bags of garbage in the bins on the street, her dad was waiting on the porch.
“Your sister said you wanted to talk to me,” he said, not looking at her.
“Did she,” Karen said. “How sweet.”
He said nothing: his default answer.
Karen sighed. Well, she’d delayed long enough. “They’re sending me to West Germany, Dad. I’m already packed. I leave tomorrow.”
“Germany,” he said, suddenly feeling verbose.
“Berlin, actually.”
“That’s in East Germany.”
“Only part of it is.”
“This for that job of yours?”
“Yes, Dad. A request came in from the State Department for a magical expert and they’re sending me.”
“To Berlin.”
“That is what I said.”
“To do magic.”
“Yes.”
He blew out a mouthful of air and looked like he had nothing more to say.
“Look, I know how you feel—”
“This isn’t about how I feel,” he said. His face was getting red; the vein was returning to the surface. “This is about what’s right.”
“And what’s that, Dad?”
“Karen, magic . . . it’s just not right.”
“Oh, yes, I remember: magic is for the krauts.”
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said, a shaking finger solidifying his argument. “Tell me half the people you work for aren’t krauts, or worse, just plain Nazis.”
“I don’t work for Nazis, Dad. I work for the government. Just because someone is from Germany doesn’t mean they’re—”
“You weren’t there, young lady. You didn’t see what I saw.”
That didn’t take long. “No, but I’ve heard about what you saw, many, many times, and I suspect I’m about to—”
“Good men died, even if you and your generation want to forget that. Good men were incinerated, blown to bits by your precious magic. You think it is all pretty lights and fun games, but I’ve seen what magic really does. I’ve seen what it’s really for.”
“You saw good men shot too, but I don’t hear you trying to outlaw guns.”
“Magic isn’t American, Karen. We didn’t use it and we won. Everybody else . . . see what good it did. The Germans used it and see what good they offered the world.
The Japs and the Russians too. You tell me how they made this world a better place with magic.”
This was why she hadn’t wanted to come. People don’t change, least of all old men who have to limp around on a daily reminder of the worst mankind has to offer. If she’d been in Europe during the war, maybe she would feel the same. But she couldn’t live her father’s life. “Dad, I wasn’t looking for your permission. My country asked for my help and I’m going. I thought maybe you’d understand that.”
At first she thought he wasn’t even going to bother to reply. It might have been better if he hadn’t. “There are ways for a woman to help her country,” he said, “but this isn’t one of them.”
Karen shifted her weight back on her heels. “Is this because I’m a magician or because I’m a woman? Pick one prejudice and focus on that—it’ll help you make your point better next time.”
“Young lady—”
“Tell Helen it was a swell party. And tell Mom I’m proud of her for sticking it out with her close-minded bastard of a husband.”
If he responded, she didn’t hear it over the sound of her car door slamming or the engine roaring to life or the tires cheering like nine-year-old girls as she made her escape.
FIVE
The plane, like everything in this city, was late. The Germans were supposed to be the model of efficiency, but after two years stationed in Berlin, Jim was skeptical. At times he wondered if the ever-present delays and disruptions were the city’s way of getting even with its conquerors: vengeance by way of bureaucracy. Or maybe bombing Germany back to the Stone Age had been more successful than anyone had realized.
“. . . the Knights Templar, if you can believe it,” Dennis was saying.
“What?”
“The Knights Templar,” he repeated. “They owned all this. That’s why they call it Tempelhof.”
Jim frowned. “The Knights Templar owned an airport?”
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