He was standing by the exit with another man in a similar coat, leaning against the wall. They both wore black fedoras, pulled low over their eyes, not at an angle as was the fashion. Johanna's heart thumped in her chest and her mouth went dry. She knew she should look away and try not to appear suspicious, but she couldn't help it. She stared at them, trying to make out their features. Beneath the brims of their hats weren't the sneering, evil visages Johanna had imagined, but rather two undistinguished, almost featureless, faces of what appeared to be twins.
She recovered and forced herself to look at the door. In a manner she hoped looked casual, she pushed on the glass door and walked out of the hall, into the stream of pedestrians on the street. A light rain had begun to fall. Johanna pulled her collar up and close to her face.
OK, maybe they weren't following me. They could have been here for someone else, or just on a routine patrol, she thought, struggling to walk at a normal pace. She knew that it was the Criminal Police – the Kripo – that had street patrols, not the Gestapo. They only appeared when they had a specific purpose, or person, in mind. She tried not to think about that.
All of the confidence and ease she had built up in the last two months evaporated when she had seen those two men. Now, she had to remember what Brotherton had taught her about detecting and evading a tail.
At the time it had seemed thorough, but now Johanna's training at the hands of the British felt more like a placebo than a cure. She remembered the part about stopping in front of a store window and checking the reflection for anyone behind her. Across the street was a women's shoe store. Forcing herself to wait to cross with everyone else, she made her way over to the plate glass window and pretended to look at the shoes.
In the reflected crowded city streets she saw a man getting out of a black Mercedes, a woman pushing a baby carriage and countless other normal people doing normal things. No sign of the twin Gestapo men.
You were just on edge from the courier's no-show, she told herself. She turned away from the window and was about to head home when saw one of them standing with his back to her in a doorway down the street. The other's head appeared over his shoulder, looking back up the sidewalk. Their eyes met.
It was not a coincidence. They are after me.
Her momentary feeling of relief evaporated in an instant.
She walked away from them, careful to head in the opposite direction of her building. She thought about dropping her bags and running, but she knew that all they had to do was yell out and someone would stop her. Her mind raced as she tried to remember how to elude a tail on the street, but everything was jumbled in her mind. All she could remember was something about crossing the street and walking back the opposite way. But wouldn't that be just to expose a tail, telling them she was on to them and discouraging them from following further? What if her pursuers didn't care if she knew they were there?
Johanna felt a heat on the back of her neck, like she could sense them overtaking her. She forced herself to keep her eyes forward.
All I can do is try to lose them on the street and hope they don't decide to run after me or call reinforcements.
She headed east, crossing the street frequently, turning down narrow alleys and reversing course several times. Expecting to feel them grabbing her arms any second, she resisted the urge to look back even though it made the terror worse. Her skin prickled with heat, both from the exertion and her fear.
Turning on to the Schillerplatz, she decided to look behind her. She was getting too close to her building. She had to know if they were still there. If they knew all about her, it wouldn't matter – they would know where she lived and nothing she did would make a difference anyway. If they didn't know, leading them home would be suicide.
There were no shops on the street and no plate glass windows, so she stopped in the middle of the cobblestone street and turned around.
They were gone.
She was standing in the middle of an empty street, with puddles beginning to form between the cobbles. No one was on the sidewalks. She was alone.
Johanna dropped the pretense of calm and ran.
Crossing the street to her building, she took the front steps two at a time and almost broke the key off in the lock. She closed the door and slumped against the wall in the hallway. Then the shaking started. She took a few minutes to compose herself and went inside.
In her flat, she put her groceries away, feeling the panic ebb and flow as her mind sped from one conclusion to another. They know who I really am. They were after someone else. I lost them and now I'm safe. They already know where I live – it'll only be a matter of time before I hear a knock at the door.
The rest of the day she sat in her flat with the shades drawn. She played games with herself to keep from peeking out the window. Her emotions seesawing, she began to feel a fatalism come over her.
I can sit here until the war ends, worrying that the Gestapo is after me, but it won't change a thing. Either they are after me or they aren't. There's nothing I can do about it. I'll just go to work on Monday, then Tuesday and if I make it through the week I'll go back to the Market Hall on Saturday and hope my courier is back. I can't sit in here for the rest of my life. Whatever happens, happens.
23
Monday morning couldn't have come soon enough for Johanna. She had grown tired of waiting and worrying. This morning, she kept to her routine – eating, bathing, dressing and walking to the DAI offices as if it were any normal workday. No Gestapo men stopped her on the street, no cars came screeching.
Nor was anyone waiting for her once she got to her desk.
In fact, no one was in the office at all.
Her desk was in the middle of a large room of desks – few people had their own offices at the DAI. The "professor pool" design, as they called it, was supposed to foster inter-disciplinary cooperation. In reality, all it did was make the room an echo chamber of clattering typewriters and overlapping conversations.
Johanna checked her watch: nine o'clock exactly. Usually everyone was at their desks with classic Teutonic efficiency. Not today. She was the only one there.
After her scare on Saturday, she was not eager to dismiss the strange absences. It couldn't be some institute-wide meeting she had forgotten. She picked up the phone to call the switchboard operator. There was no dial tone. She jiggled the hook and spun the dial, but the phone was dead.
She rolled her chair over to Brochoff's desk to try his phone. It was dead too.
What the hell is going on here?
Someone in the building had to know what was happening. As she grabbed her purse and went to leave the room, she realized that she hadn't seen anyone in the building at all on her way in. Was she the only one here?
But the doors were unlocked and all the lights are on.
The door to the "professor pool" office opened and a man entered. Johanna was about to ask if there was a meeting when she noticed that he was wearing a soldier's uniform. It was gray with black collars, each with gold insignia. He wore the peaked cap of an officer. One look at him told her he didn't work for DAI.
He looked like a Wehrmacht recruiting poster come to life. She guessed he was about six foot four and was in his early- to mid-thirties. He had a heavy jaw and high cheekbones that framed his gray eyes under the black brim of his cap. His hair was close-cropped on the sides and was so blond that it appeared white against his skin.
He was looking right at Johanna and walking towards her.
She stood mute, not sure what to make of him.
He stopped next to her desk.
"Are you Johanna Falck?"
She nodded.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pistol. Johanna started at the sight of it.
He held he gun at his side. He didn't point it at her, but his meaning was clear.
"Please come with me." He stood aside and gestured to her to pass as if he were a gentleman holding the door. She picked up her coat and walked out with him
following behind.
They went out a side door that opened onto a narrow side street. A black Daimler sedan with the engine running was parked at the curb.
"Will you please tell me what's happening?" she asked with a tremble in her voice. The army uniform threw her off. Gestapo men don’t wear them, do they?
He didn't say a word. For a moment she was afraid he was going to shoot her here in the street, but then he opened the passenger door and told her to get in. Sitting in the car, she watched him walk around the front. Should she try to get out and run?
No, he looked like he could outrun her. Or shoot her.
She clasped her hands tightly in her lap as he got behind the wheel. She was sure that she was in big trouble. Scenarios began to play out in her mind – Gestapo men torturing her, the Peoples Court trying her as a spy in a show trial or someone simply shooting her in some dank prison basement.
"Will you please tell me where you're taking me?"
He ignored her, put the car in gear and pulled out onto the main street. He steered with his right hand, keeping his gun in his lap with the left. Again, he didn't point it at her, but kept it in plain sight, which Johanna took as a warning.
She tried a different tack.
"Are you with the police?"
He stared straight ahead.
She knew she wasn't going to get any answers, so she resigned herself to looking out the window as the city passed by. They passed the police station.
Well, that tells me something. He's not with the police.
The officer drove south towards the outskirts of the city. She saw a sign that said 'A-24 Karlsruhe.'
OK, so we're taking the autobahn. But to where?
They drove for three hours – west to Karlsruhe, then north to Frankfurt and Hannover. Johanna was sick with worry, compounded by hunger and a need to use the bathroom. As if reading her mind, her abductor pulled off the autobahn to a fuel station. Coming to a stop next to a gas pump, he turned to her and waggled his pistol to get her attention.
"Please do not try to run or scream," he said. "I will have to shoot you, and I do not want to do that."
The look on his face told Johanna that he was serious. Both about the threat and his desire to avoid carrying it out.
He got out of the car while an elderly station attendant fueled the car and another checked under the hood. They both smiled at her through the windshield. She stared straight ahead, trying to avoid their glances. She was tempted to ask them for help, but had seen enough army and SS men throw their weight around to know that an officer could be all-powerful in a situation like this.
I am in real trouble, she repeated to herself. I need to keep my eyes open for an opportunity to escape or at least get word back to the U.S. Not that it will do me any good.
The officer paid the attendant and got back in the car. He had a sandwich and a carton of milk which he gave to Johanna as he started the car and pulled back onto the autobahn. He apologized for not letting her use the restroom, but promised that he would when they reached their destination. She asked him what that destination was, but got no answer.
Johanna didn't know the autobahn system well, but she did know her geography. So when they passed Hannover a few hours later and continued north, she knew they weren't going east to Berlin as she'd assumed. That was where Gestapo headquarters were. If they were going to interrogate her, or simply shoot her as a spy, that would probably be where they'd do it.
Instead, they passed on to Hamburg, still traveling north. Johanna tried to remember what was north of Hamburg, thinking that there was not much between it and Denmark. As the sun began to set she saw a sign for the road to Kiel, which they followed for another half hour. She knew that Kiel was on the coast of the Baltic Sea, but not much more.
What could possibly be all the way up here?
As dusk approached, they pulled off the road and the officer repeated his warning about trying to escape. He pulled what looked like large jar lids out of the glove compartment and got out of the car. He walked to the front and bent over the headlights, which dimmed when he affixed what Johanna realized were blackout shades. After he put shades on the tail lights, he got back into the car. She saw that he now had to navigate in the dark with not much more light than that of a small flashlight. For a moment, she became more afraid of driving off the road than whatever her abductor had in store for her.
A sign appeared out of the dimness. It said that they were now entering Kiel.
She strained in the darkness to see anything of the city, but it was blacked out. Occasionally, a pool of light would spill out of a door as it opened onto the street. Other than that, all she could make out of Kiel was the edge of the low, dark skyline where it met the star-filled sky and a stream of white and red slits from a few blacked-out cars.
As her eyes began to adjust to the increasing darkness, she could see water ahead of them. The starlight illuminated what looked like a shipyard, but Johanna couldn't see any ships. As they got closer, all she could see was stacks of cargo crates piled high on piers.
The car turned off the main road and headed for the shipyard. Now Johanna was more confused than ever. They pulled up to the guardhouse, and the officer gave the young guard his identification and some papers, which the guard read with a flashlight. The guard flashed the light on the officer and Johanna, and waved them through.
They parked in a gravel lot past the entrance and the officer shut off the lights and engine.
The guard's flashlight had ruined Johanna's night vision, and now she couldn't see anything in the darkness.
"Behind your seat is a paper bag. Reach around and pick it up, please," the officer asked.
She felt around on the floor and found the bag. She pulled it into her lap.
"In the bag are a cap and an overcoat. Please put them on and get out of the car."
She still couldn't see, and had to feel around in the bag to find them. Her fingers found the hard brim of the cap, which felt like the same kind the officer was wearing. She put it on and got out of the car to put on the overcoat, which felt like heavy wool and had a belt that went around her waist. Her shoes felt unsteady in the gravel and she would have tripped had the officer not grabbed her elbow. His grip was firm but gentle.
"Just wait a moment. Your night vision will return."
She stood looking out towards the water, where she could see the starlight reflecting off the waves. She could hear the noises of the shipyard: sailors shouting, metal clanking and the chugging of truck engines.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
Johanna's eyes had adjusted and she could make out the shipyard again, silvery in the starlight.
"Yes." She could make out his face as he was looking at her. He had also put on an overcoat and had switched to a cap with gold badges on the front.
"Button your coat to the top, put the collar up and hide your hair under the cap," he ordered.
She did as she was told, and he checked the results.
"All right, in a few minutes, you will come with me. Remember, keep your head down and don't say a word. Understood?"
"Yes."
He waved his gun so it glinted in the starlight.
"Please remember the terms of our earlier agreement."
A short while later, Johanna saw him check his watch.
"It's time. Let's go."
They walked down towards the piers, passing sailors and dockworkers. The port was as busy as any other Johanna had ever seen, but she was baffled by the total absence of ships. Even in the low light, she could make out the mountains of cargo and the bustling activity around the piers, but where she expected the ships to be was only emptiness.
Turning around a line of freight trucks, the officer put out his hand to stop Johanna. He looked around the truck at the head of the line, waited for a moment and then led Johanna by the arm toward one of the piers.
Now she realized why there weren't any ships. In the long, narrow slip of the dock was a U-
boat. Its tower, bristling with antennae and guns, hadn't reached past the tops of the trucks or the piles of cargo from where it sat, low in the water. That's why the piers had looked empty.
They were at a submarine base.
She looked to either side of her and could see at least twenty other such slips, each with the buzz of activity around it. At the farthest end, looking north, she could see sparks and work lights under tarps. It must be a sub under construction in a dry dock.
Why are we here? What does a submarine base have to do with me? Are we meeting someone?
As they approached the U-boat, Johanna realized the docks surrounding it were deserted. Not deserted like it was not in use, but like everyone had disappeared in a flash. Cargo nets swung from cranes overhead as if they had been stopped in mid-motion. A cigarette butt smoldered on the ground, its tip still glowing orange.
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