The Beekeeper's Ball

by Susan Wiggs

  Magnus took the girl by the hand and towed her down a side alley in the direction of the Royal Free Hospital.

  “Simple?” she hissed in outrage. “A condition that can’t be washed off?”

  “Or what about this?” Magnus retorted. “What about ‘Thank you for saving me from those Nazi pigs?’”

  “I didn’t need saving.”

  “Oh, no? Those guys were moments from dragging you off and raping you.”

  Her spine and shoulders stiffened, indicating that she knew what raping meant. Unfortunately, so did Magnus. The Teacher had described it in painful detail. Sometimes boys were the victims, but most often it was an especially terrible act of violence against a woman. These days, it pained Magnus to think about the Teacher, the man who had set him on this path. Because the Teacher was gone now. He had been assassinated by a German sniper, right before Magnus’s horrified eyes. The blood of the Teacher had spackled him for days afterward—under his cuticles, in his nostrils, in the whorls of his ears.

  “Like I said,” the girl snapped, “I know how to take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time.” Despite her words, she was visibly shaken, her face the color of ash, her hands and her voice unsteady.

  “Well, you’re not by yourself anymore,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “You’re with me.”

  They passed St. Stephen’s church, where he used to worship with his family, lost to him now. He looked around and saw that they were alone in the alleyway. Abruptly, he pulled her into the sanctuary, which was deserted. The carved wooden pulpit resembled a spiny dragon rearing against the tall semicircle of colorful windows surrounding the apex of the altar. Their footsteps on the stone floor echoed off the buttressed walls.

  He shoved her down onto a wooden prie-dieu, which resembled a narrow ladder-back chair. “Don’t move,” he commanded her. Then he dug into his pocket and took out his utility knife. It was outfitted with a razor-sharp blade, which often came in handy for acts of sabotage.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, squirming and pulling back to stare at the knife. “I’ll scream. I’ll—”

  “Be still.” His heart was pounding, but he knew he was doing the right thing. He’d seen the way the soldiers had looked at her.

  “But—”

  “Shut up.” With his free hand, he grabbed a handful of blond hair—silk, it felt like pure silk—and it smelled of sweet herbs and flowers. Placing the knife blade close to her head, he made a decisive cut, sawing through the locks. A half meter of honey-colored silk wafted to the floor.

  “Stop it!” she said, scrambling off the prie-dieu and falling to her knees. “You’re crazy. Leave me alone!”

  “Hold still. Get back in the chair and quit your squawking. You have to let me finish.”

  “I will not! I’ll scream bloody murder.” In a mindless panic, she tried to gather up the long strands of fallen hair.

  “And bring the soldiers in here to grab you again? Hold still, damn you.” He pressed his cupped hands on her bony shoulders and put his face very close to hers. “Listen. The brownshirts take what they want. They are extremely fond of young girls with silky blond hair.”

  She dropped the strands of hair. “I know. That’s why I wear the scarf—”

  “And it was no help today. I know of one girl who slashed her own face with a razor to keep the soldiers away.” He hoisted her back into the chair and held the blade in front of her nose.

  She batted it away. “That’s a lie.”

  He could tell from the wild look in her eyes that she knew he wasn’t lying. “And something else,” he said. “Some girls get taken away in secret, and they have to have babies with SS officers.” Magnus didn’t quite understand this, but at a recent meeting, one of the agents had read an article from Land og Folk, an underground newspaper, describing the program.

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” said the girl.

  “You’re already scared.” He covered her hand with his as she clutched the seat of the chair. Her fingers were ice-cold. “Hair will grow back. There are other things—like dignity and self-respect—that will not.”

  She glared at him in defiance, yet as she glared, a fat, tragic tear pooled in her eye and then spilled down her cheek. He was reminded then that she was just a kid. A frightened kid like all of them, with delft-blue eyes and porcelain skin, all but defenseless against the dangers of occupied Copenhagen.

  Then it hit him. He finally remembered where he had seen this girl. At the very start of the occupation, not long after his family had been taken and he’d joined the underground, he had rescued a girl with yellow hair and terrified eyes. He still remembered that shining April day, the gentrified neighborhood suddenly polluted by the presence of German transport trucks and military police.

  Magnus’s assignment had been to warn the Winther family of their impending arrest for acts of rebellion—acts that included saving people from being seized and transported. Magnus had failed to warn them in time. He’d arrived too late. Mrs. Winther had been hauled off right before her daughter’s eyes while Mr. Winther had been arrested at the hospital where he worked. But they had left behind their blond-headed daughter, who broke away from the soldiers.

  Magnus had caught up with her as she was running for her life.

  Although she was a stranger, he understood her terror and her guilt. She was terrified of the brownshirts, yet consumed by guilt because her parents had been taken, while she had survived. The same thing had happened to him on the night of the fire. That night, he had learned that the need to flee and survive was more powerful than grief. Even when a part of him wanted to crumble to the ground and surrender to despair, an inner fire burned for justice.

  Knowing this now, he had yearned to help the fleeing girl by sending her up to Helsingør to be with her grandmother.

  “Annelise,” he said. “You’re Annelise Winther.”

  Her face turned marble hard. “I am not that girl anymore. She died the day her family was taken.” With that, she slipped out of the church door, into the fading sunlight.

  As they walked along together, Magnus learned that she had not stayed in Helsingør for long, because her grandmother had passed away. Like him, she had lost everyone and everything. And like him, she had found a purpose, a reason to survive, with the Holger Danske.

  * * *

  Over the next year, he ran into her a number of times. She was young and nimble and not the sort of threat the Nazis were looking for. She tended to take part in operations that required the agent to be out in the open.

  But there were dangers at every turn. In the world of shadows Magnus inhabited, a leap of faith could quickly become a freefall. One small mistake—making eye contact with the wrong person, executing a maneuver too soon or too late—could sometimes lead to discovery and then disaster.

  The German occupation was turning more vicious. The Danes kept up their labor strikes and acts of sabotage. When the Germans tried to force the courts to punish Danish saboteurs, the entire government resigned. Now they were under martial law, and arrests were rampant—Jews, non-Jews, Danish civilians and military personnel—everyone was fair game.

  Tonight’s instructions were simple. He was to don a waxed cotton fisherman’s apron and a pair of rubber clogs, and head down to the wharves where the herring fleet was moored. This time of year, the daylight lingered to nearly midnight, spreading an eerie reddish glow across the water and sky. Wherries plied back and forth through the churning sea, longshoremen and fishermen stood around, drinking Whiskey Mac and smoking rough hand-rolled cigarettes.

  The organization switched people around. They’d learned the hard way that agents were easily vulnerable to the Gestapo. By rotating personnel, no one learned too much about an operation. If you didn’t know anything, then no amount of torture could extract in
formation from you.

  Unfortunately, that sometimes meant Magnus found himself working with new, inexperienced operatives. That was the case tonight, not because of the identifying flat seaman’s cap, the one with the white tabs out the back, which matched the hat Magnus wore. No, he recognized his inexperienced comrade by the creases in his work pants and by the fact that he was smoking a machine made cigarette—a dead giveaway that the agent was an outsider. And if that wasn’t damning enough, the guy was smoking way too fast, not in the relaxed, laconic way of a worker at the end of his shift, but as if he were a man about to face his own execution.

  Wheeling a barrow of netting over to the guy, Magnus said, “Your pants are too clean.”

  “What?” The guy looked down at the blue canvas coveralls.

  “They’ve still got the creases in the folds.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  The guy even talked funny. Magnus couldn’t quite place his accent. His Danish pronunciation was odd. He might be from some area of England.

  “My point is, you look like a phony,” Magnus said. “Get rid of that cigarette before they see you. And quit smoking it as though it’s your last one.”

  The guy dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel. In the half light, Magnus could see that he was young, probably still a teenager like Magnus himself. He had olive toned skin and dark hair—not your typical Dane.

  “Do you have the instructions?”

  The guy said nothing. He cleared his throat, shuffled his feet.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Magnus. “The moon is supposed to be full tonight.”

  The guy breathed a sigh of relief. “But how does one know when the summer light never fades?”

  That was the phrase they were supposed to exchange. And with those words, they were comrades on the mission. The foreigner explained his orders and the two of them teamed up at the loading docks, moving baskets of herring presumably destined for the fish stalls in Market Square.

  As they worked, Magnus kept sneaking glances at his partner. He wondered where the foreigner came from. He was Spanish or Italian in looks, though his accent sounded English. American? Magnus had never met an American, though he’d seen plenty at the picture show. Cowboy movies were his favorites. They were everyone’s favorites. In school, he studied English, but it was at the movies that he truly learned to speak the language.

  He decided to test his hunch. “The soldiers,” he said in English, trying to sound like Roy Rogers, his favorite cowboy, “they’re as alert as trained guard dogs, you know?”

  The guy’s head snapped up. “Sorry,” he said, obviously flustered, “I don’t understand.”

  “You have to watch for your chance,” Magnus continued in English. “The bastards are slippery. They watch every move. They watch every person. If they see a guy who is supposed to be a workman, but the work pants are creased and brand-new-looking, they get suspicious, you know? If they see a guy smoking a machine-rolled cigarette, they figure you for either a spy or a thief. And if their ears are tuned into your conversation, they might wonder why you’re speaking Danish with an English accent. They might conclude that you’re from England.”

  The guy kept working. Magnus shrugged and hefted a load. It was probably just as well they didn’t learn anything about one another. It was a hard way to live, though. Disconnected, close to no one. Sometimes he wondered if there was any purpose at all to living.

  Then he would think about the promise he had made to little Eva before she disappeared. And sometimes he would think about the girl he’d encountered that afternoon in the plaza—the beauteous Annelise Winther, shorn of her pretty hair, thanks to him. And these thoughts made him more determined than ever to get through the hard times. It was awful, though, because nothing seemed to stop the Nazis. Likely one day they would prevail and dismantle what was left of Denmark.

  Magnus already knew he would leave. He didn’t know when the day would come, though. Or where he would go.

  “America,” the guy said, in a delayed reply to Magnus’s question. “California, to be exact.”

  Hearing the words made his heart speed up. He was proud to have ferreted out the information, and intrigued to meet his first American.

  Magnus was dying to know how a Yank had come to be helping with the underground resistance. Everybody knew the United States was staying out of the war, even though there were rumblings from some quarters that they would join the Allies to stop the Germans once and for all.

  After the baskets of fish were stacked high enough, Magnus jerked his head toward the German supply ship. “Look sharp now. We need to go and pick up the marked crates.”

  They moved their barrows behind the concealing baskets and wended their way among stacked boxes. They were looking for a particular set of crates marked For Specialized Distribution.

  “It’s here,” said the American, indicating a group of boxes with the phrase stenciled in German. “Do we load them up?”

  “Yes. Don’t hurry.” The boxes were not terribly heavy; Magnus wasn’t certain what they contained. It could be ordnance, supplies or even weapons. Or perhaps the boxes were filled with more of the stupid leaflets the Germans loved to distribute, promising the Danes a better life once they submitted entirely to German protection. The leaflets were nothing but noise and propaganda.

  Magnus was overcome by curiosity. Using a utility knife, he pried up one corner of a crate.

  “Should you be doing that?”

  He shrugged and kept working. At the top of the crate was a layer of newsprint. Inside were squares of cloth. He pulled one out, angled it toward the light. Needles of ice spiked his blood. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

  “What is it?”

  He showed the guy what he had found. “Badges.”

  “What do you mean, badges? What sort of badges?”

  “I think you know.” He showed him one of the palm-sized badges with a yellow six-point star and the word Jude.

  “For the Jews, you mean,” the American said. “The Star of David.”

  “Well, they could hardly be sheriff’s badges, could they? This is not the Wild West.” Magnus felt cold despite the warmth of the summer night. “Forcing the Jews to wear the badge is just a precursor to rounding them up and deporting them,” he said. “It is only a matter of time.”

  “I have heard of these deportations. The Germans promised the Jews that they were being taken to work camps in Poland for their own safety. Now we know those are actually extermination camps where people die by the thousands.”

  “I heard the same thing,” Magnus whispered. “Where did you get your information?”

  “A group from Poland called the Bund sent an eyewitness report to England last year in the springtime. Since then, there have been many verifications, including photographs and eyewitness reports.”

  The horrifying truth about the camps was so sinister that some people still didn’t believe the stories. Magnus himself hadn’t believed the early reports. No one had. The notion of killing off an entire race of people—including women, babies, grandmothers, old men, innocent kids—was too far-fetched, too appalling. By now, however, word was out that the Germans had instituted a system of deportation of Jews in order to kill them off.

  At first, Nazis had organized mobile killing squads—Einsatzgruppen—to round up and massacre the Jews of Eastern Europe by shooting them in cold blood or asphyxiating them in gassing vans. Then they became more systematic about exterminating the entire race. Now that word was out about the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” no one even bothered to pretend the camps were anything but factories of death.

  “We’re to load these crates onto that horse lorry.” Magnus gestured at the waiting vehicle.

  “Sounds simple enough.”

  “If you say so.”

>   “Why must we keep them?” asked the American. “Why not sink the badges into the harbor?”

  “That is not for us to know. Maybe we have to make certain they can’t be recovered.”

  He and the American wheeled the cart to the flatbed cargo truck. They placed the badges in the middle and then surrounded them with the baskets of herring. The driver didn’t speak, just stayed huddled at the front. Magnus and the American hoisted themselves onto the back deck of the cart and sat with their feet dangling. Magnus put two fingers to his lips and whistled, and the cart lurched forward.

  “Remember what I told you,” Magnus warned. “We do this every day. It’s just another load of fish.”

  “Got it.”

  As they passed through the exit gate, Magnus swung his feet and offered a casual nod. The guards gave the cargo only a cursory glance, as the laden carts were a common sight. The dogs didn’t alert to any strange smell, either; the reek of herring was overpowering. They drove right past the guards. Magnus and the American sat in silence until they were clear of the harbor.

  “What can I call you?” asked the stranger.

  Some agents were keen on code names, but that was a bit silly in Magnus’s view. It only meant more to remember. “Magnus,” he said, “and that’s my given name. You?”

  “Ramon. My given name.”

  “Doesn’t sound very American.”

  “You’d be surprised. America is many things. Especially California.” He paused. “It’s always warm there. Sunny all the time.”

  A place where it was sunny all the time sounded as if it was made up, like a movie set or somebody’s dream. “Why the devil did you leave? Are you here because you want to oppose the march of the Third Reich?”

  “No. I’m here because I didn’t want to marry Evelyn Skeedy.”

  “Who is Evelyn Skeedy?”

  “A girl I know, back in California. She tried to trap me. I had to escape.”

  Magnus pondered the irony of it. For several years now, people had been trying to escape Copenhagen. “How is it that you ran away from California and ended up in occupied Denmark? Are you crazy?”