by Ryan Graudin
3: Yael, trying to fix the world. Felix, the one too stubborn to listen.
God, he missed the auto shop—spark plug swaps, straightforward engines. Nothing nearly as complicated as this: trying to sort right from wrong and truth from lie and what the hell would keep his family safe in this bloodful world.
“If I’d known about the safe house, I wouldn’t have tried to stop you.” Was this the truth? Maybe. Maybe not. It was what Felix needed Yael to believe.
It also seemed to be what she wanted to hear. “You’re a good brother, Felix. A good son, too. Your family is fortunate to have you.”
“Can you take me to them?” Even if his parents weren’t in the safe house, Adele was definitely in the resistance headquarters—the exact place Felix needed to be. All ifs aside. Salvation or damnation.
Yael frowned. “I don’t know.”
“I know I’m a… burden now, but I’ll earn my way,” he said. “The resistance needs mechanics, don’t they?”
“It’s not that. Technically, we’re the Soviets’ prisoners. My friend Miriam is negotiating on our behalf, but I have no idea when or if they’ll decide to release us.”
“Please,” Felix pressed. “Just promise me you’ll try.”
Yael said nothing. She set all the gathered chess pieces on the floor between them. Her hand dipped into her pants’ pocket, came back with something silver and heartbreaking. Martin’s pocket watch—beaten and battered and finally broken. When she set the timepiece in Felix’s palm, he didn’t try to open it. His left hand did not feel strong enough, and he already knew what he’d find if he did: hands frozen in place behind cracked glass, trapped in a time that no longer existed.
How had it come to this?
How had he come to this?
“Felix Burkhard Wolfe.” The way the girl knew his full name (and used it) sent shivers through Felix’s spinal column. “I promise I’ll do everything in my power to get you to Germania. I will get you back to your family.”
CHAPTER 27
It was well into evening when Yael was summoned back to the front room. The place was even more cluttered than before; several newspaper stacks had been shoved aside to accommodate the Soviets’ radio unit, along with its operators. The pile of papers next to the Enigma machine had grown fivefold, all covered in Miriam’s handwriting: Henryka’s back-and-forth negotiations with Novosibirsk. Yael was too far away to see what they said.
The aimless/fidgety/lost feeling tailed Yael as she entered the room. She had no idea where to stand, and it didn’t help that all seven Soviet officers were staring her down in that nerveless way of theirs. Yael’s eyes were quick to seek Miriam’s. Her friend stood by the piano, hands folded, face firm as she nodded.
Be brave, that gold gaze seemed to say. Anything is possible.
Comrade Commander Chekov was the first to speak. “Have a seat, Comrade Volchitsa.”
Comrade. Not prisoner. Yael took note of this as she sat down on Luka’s old Das Reich dais. The newspapers sagged under her weight.
Once she was settled, Chekov continued talking. “As you can see, we’ve been in contact with Novosibirsk and Germania, trying to decide on a course of action that would be beneficial for both contingents. It took some negotiating, but we’ve agreed on a solution.
“You and Comrade Mnogolikiy are to return to Germania and assassinate Adolf Hitler.”
The room went silent. Yael realized that the television had been switched off. The electronic Führer was gone, and so was the buzz, buzz, hate of his words. Yael saw herself reflected in the screen: a girl cramped down by the shock of this announcement. The circuitousness of it.
Again. They wanted her to kill Adolf Hitler again.
“The resistance’s main obstacle to victory is the desertion of its Wehrmacht fighters,” Chekov went on. “If the Führer were eliminated, as originally planned, the Führereid would be lifted, and General Reiniger’s forces would grow. Not only this, but your resistance friends have Hermann Göring in custody. He’s second-in-command in the National Socialist Party, Hitler’s natural successor. Once the real Hitler is dead, Göring will be forced to announce his resignation and appoint Reiniger in his place, a position he could claim with the Wehrmacht’s full support. The National Socialist government would be dismantled from there. Novosibirsk’s claim on the Muscovy territories would remain unthreatened.
“All this is in the transcripts if you wish to see them,” Chekov added, gesturing toward the Enigma papers littered at the piano leg’s base.
Yael didn’t need to read the notes. This might not be the verdict she’d expected, but it made sense. Novosibirsk would only sacrifice one of its soldiers (as opposed to thousands upon thousands). Erwin Reiniger’s transition into power would be seamless, backed by the full weight of the Wehrmacht. Even the SS would be rattled.…
Hitler’s survival changes things.
So change it back.
It wasn’t helplessness that filled Yael’s veins, weighing her down as she stared darkly through the television glass. Not this time. No—what rose through her blood was the wolf-fierce, the Valkyrie-calling, the clang of her iron voice:
—ALL OVER AGAIN TAKE THE SHOT KILL THE REAL BASTARD HIS DEATH CAN END THIS—
“Yael?” It was only after Miriam spoke that Yael realized she’d been staring at the screen, wordless, for a while now.
“We need to make sure we kill the right Hitler, the real Hitler. We know now that the Führer’s been using skinshifter decoys for public appearances. He wasn’t shot in the ballroom. He probably wasn’t even shot in the Grosser Platz.” The thought of Aaron-Klaus firing those four shots (all for nothing) tore through Yael’s every word. “If we manage to infiltrate the Führerbunker, we’re probably only going to get one shot at killing the man himself. We need to be one hundred percent certain our target is the genuine artifact. Not a skinshifter.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Miriam nodded. “Which is why we need to retrieve as much information as we possibly can on Hitler’s face-changer decoys before we go forward with any assassination plans.”
“But where would we…” Yael’s mouth went dry, and there was a burning under her skin not so unlike the one those needles had placed there over a decade ago. How are you feeling? she could hear Dr. Geyer asking through his too-stretched smile. Instead of listening to the girl’s answer, he flipped through the notes of his clipboard: all of Yael’s suffering reduced to letters and dates.
She knew exactly where they’d find information on the Führer’s decoys. In the heart of the red lands, where the train tracks ended and the stacks of smoke began, behind layers and layers of barbed-wire gates, along the path lined with poplar trees, inside the building made of neatly stacked bricks, down the hall, and into the office where the Angel of Death had been laboring all these years, waiting for her to return.
There. The place she did not want to go again.
Miriam had come to this conclusion as well. “If anyone knows the details of Hitler’s face-changing substitutes, it will be Dr. Engel Geyer.” She stated this in her military voice: bulletproof, every emotion bouncing off it. “Henryka looked through her records. The doctor is still working in the camp.”
Of course he was still there, cutting children open with no remorse, and oh, how Yael’s blood boiled to think of it!
“Once you and Comrade Mnogolikiy gather all the intelligence you need on the other face-changers, you’ll return to the resistance’s headquarters and use the resources there to sort out the final details of the assassination,” Chekov told Yael. “I trust we have your full cooperation?”
—CHANGE THINGS HOPE HOPE FIGHT—
Boil, boil, up and over, hot-froth anger, spilling into Yael’s words.
“When do we leave?” she asked.
CHAPTER 28
Yael’s first mission had taken an entire year of planning: The intricacies of racing across Europe, Africa, and Asia to assassinate the Führer had been ironed out over months. Drawing up the
details of this new mission had been reduced to a mere thirty-six hours.
Forging citizenship papers was easier than ever with Molotov’s Reich office at their disposal. All it took were a few minutes of typing and a few photographs cut out of old identity papers and pasted into the new ones. Yael and Miriam created aliases for every territory they planned on passing. A collection of faces, names, birth dates, and hometowns that would be plausible for any area where a patrol might stop them.
Getting the boys through the Muscovy territories and the central Reich undetected was a different matter. Adding Felix and Luka to their roster made things infinitely harder. Miriam opposed the addition—vocally, vehemently—but Yael stood her ground. Even though Miriam insisted the boys would be safe in Molotov, Yael could not get the sight of the executed soldiers out of her head. Piled mountain high. Weeping blood in streams. If she left the boys here, she would not rest easy.
Besides, Yael had a promise to keep.
Luka wasn’t quite as immediately recognizable with his face half covered in beard, but even facial hair couldn’t disguise that he was the double victor. Poster boy. Wanted the Reich over.
Felix’s face wasn’t that far behind in notoriety, and even after eight razorless days, it looked as hairless as before.
A solution to the boys’ very recognizable, very unchangeable appearances presented itself in the form of a truck. It was the sort of vehicle you didn’t look twice at: body pocked with rust flecks from harsh taiga winters, meant for transporting crops and other goods between cities. It had also been used by Molotov’s resistance cell to transport less legal packages (and people) in a hollow compartment beneath the truck bed’s boards. The space was shallow, and smelled overwhelmingly of engine grease. It was a testament to how much Felix wanted to get back to his family that he was willing to hide in the space.
When Luka saw the truck’s cracked windshield, he made a face. When he saw the compartment he’d have to share with Felix, he groaned. “And I thought the ZIS-5 ride was rough.”
“You can stay here if you want,” Yael told him.
Luka raised his eyebrows. “You trying to get rid of me, Fräulein?”
“It’s going to be dangerous.” Crossing 3,300 kilometers through war-strung territory with only a rusted truck and a few pages of papers was insanity. Not to mention their…“pit stop”… as Yael had come to think of the first portion of their mission. Stealing the identities of female overseers, walking back inside death’s jaws, and prying out a few teeth…
More than dangerous.
Deadly.
Too many things could go wrong. Would, if statistics had any say in the matter. Luka was smart. The boy must’ve known this, but all he did was shrug. “Staying here with a bunch of soldiers who want to shoot me on sight doesn’t seem much safer. Besides, someone has to keep sticking Herr Wolfe full of morphine so he doesn’t scream again.”
Sensible reasoning aside, Yael was happy that Luka was coming. She’d grown used to the victor’s company. His deflective remarks, his sneers, all those faint, shimmering threads of emotions kept snapping and restringing between them.
“I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful nurse.” She bit back a smile.
It was a good thing Felix was acrophobic instead of claustrophobic. Miriam insisted they fit as many munitions as they could into the gaps—just in case. Both boys lying together in the hidden compartment was a tight squeeze. Shoulder to shoulder inside a nest of rifles, pistols, and boxes of bullets swaddled in a waterproof tarp. The sight was unsettling.
Even more unsettling was when Yael had to slide the wood paneling shut, drawing a dark, dark shadow over the boys’ bodies. She hesitated at the very last moment, letting her stare linger with the light. Both boys met it.
Felix nodded.
Luka winked.
They filled the truck bed with sacks of potatoes. By the time the transport was fully loaded, it bowed a few extra centimeters from the weight. Yael eyed its worn tires, hoping they’d be able to handle the muddy back roads she and Miriam would be favoring. Herr Förstner assured her they would.
“Ten years and this beauty hasn’t failed us. She’d carry you all the way to the heart of Germania and back if you wanted.” He gave the truck a solid pound with his fist.
Luka thumped back in double time.
Miriam stood by the cab door. She hadn’t changed faces yet, but she already looked like a different person. Her Soviet uniform was gone, replaced by Mary Janes and hosiery and a fine knit sweater. Clothes more suited to a Lebensraum bride. Yael, too, was wearing a skirt, fighting the scratch of the stockings against her leg. The outfit Irmgard had scrounged up for her was far from comfortable, but at least it was lumpy enough to conceal the old TT-33 pistol Miriam had given her. There was makeup, too—skin-colored powder dashed all over Yael’s ebbing bruises. She was the picture of Aryan health.
“Are you ready?” asked her third wolf in the flesh.
Ready? It was the same question Kasper had posed to Yael in the van outside Adele’s building. She’d laughed at the operative and said More than before plunging into the victor’s flat.
Yael was not laughing now. Her own sweater sleeves hung a little too far down her arm, tickling her knuckles; other wolf memories prickled beneath them. Mama, Babushka, Aaron-Klaus. She did not know if she was ready to return to these outside of Vlad’s exercises. Enduring nightmares was so different from stepping back into the past. Foot to stone. Heart to hurt.
Yet it was not just the dead and their memories who depended on her, but the living. The Wolfe who needed his family. The general who needed an army. Countless countries that needed to be reborn.
Because of these, Yael hitched up her skirt and climbed into the cab of the truck.
She was not ready, but she was going.
She was going back to the beginning to find an end.
She was going to find the Führer. The real Führer.
She was going to finish what she’d started.
INTERLUDE
THREE PORTRAITS OF APRIL 2, 1955
I
Early April saw the cemetery as a cold, unsung place. Its trees were more bare than not, clawing at an overcast dawn. The gray of the stones had bled out across the rest of the landscape. Grass, gravel, ground… even the air felt dimmed as Felix breathed in.
He was early this year. Usually when he came to visit Martin, spring had a firmer hold on the world. May 2’s warmth and flowers made the whole visit bearable. But today the weather leeched the life from Felix’s bones as he walked through rows of angels and crosses. Some stones were worn beyond reading. Others tumbled to the ground altogether.
The marker Felix was looking for was still standing, still readable. The summation of his brother’s existence etched into its granite:
MARTIN WILLMAR WOLFE
BELOVED SON. REMEMBERED BROTHER.
15 OCTOBER 1934—2 MAY 1950
When Felix reached it, he stopped, fingers curled into fists in his pockets. Martin’s absence was always there—leaning alongside Felix as he worked on Volkswagen engines, cramming into the Wolfes’ church pew, hovering around the rare family dinner. But the gravestone always hit Felix with the finality of it.
Martin. Beloved. Remembered. Gone.
He liked to think that (somewhere, somehow) his brother could hear him. So once a year Felix came to talk.
“Hello, Martin.”
His brother said nothing.
“I know you weren’t expecting me today, but this year has been different.”
Different. The least inflammatory word he could think of to describe his twin sister trimming her hair into a perfect imitation of Felix’s curtained haircut with their mother’s sewing scissors and father’s razor. It was eerie how much he felt as if he were staring at himself when Adele held out her hand for his papers.
“I’m racing in the Axis Tour,” she’d told him. “If anyone comes checking for me, Papa can tell them I’m ill. You’ll need to stay hidd
en to maintain my cover.”
He’d wanted to tell her no. He should have. But that had never been the way things were between the twins, so Felix gave Adele his documents and promised to keep out of sight.
For the majority of the Axis Tour, Felix had stayed indoors—blinds shut, shadows heavy—watching himself race across the world. Reichssender footage tended to highlight the race at its best and its worst. During the first few days, they hadn’t focused much on Felix Burkhard Wolfe, the sixteen-year-old from Frankfurt with fair times. He was neither a victor nor an underdog. Plus, he was oddly camera shy.
As the days passed, the number of Axis Tour racers dwindled, as it always did, but interest in Felix Wolfe began to climb. The racer had managed to stay at the head of the pack, keeping pace with Victor Löwe and Victor Tsuda through accidents, alliances, and attempted sabotage.
By the third week, the race was tight, and as a result, the wrecks grew nastier. Just a few days ago, outside Hanoi, one of the German racers (seventeen-year-old Georg Rust) had been edged off the road into a rice paddy, an accident that cost the rider his leg. The incident had been caught on camera. Georg—a black-and-white blur—flying along with his Zündapp before being crushed into the mud. The first time Felix saw it, he was breathless. The fifth time, he felt sick. By the tenth showing, all he could see was the past and the future:
Martin flying, crushed on the Nürburgring racetrack.
Adele flying, crushed on the road to Tokyo.
Felix’s insides flew with the fear of it all, crushed by the weight of his own helplessness.
It would all be over soon. The racers had left the Kaiten and were navigating the final leg. A few more hours and a winner would emerge to claim the victory of 1955. The Reichssender was abuzz with projections. A severe stomach flu had knocked front-runner Tsuda Katsuo out of the race. Victor Löwe was ahead, set to claim the tour’s first double victory, but Felix Wolfe was close on his tail.