Blood for Blood

by Ryan Graudin

  Miriam and Brigitte were the outliers, and unless Kasper talked, one of them was going to catch a bullet. She’d already taken one to the shoulder today—which was more than enough. There were smarter ways to go about this situation. If Baasch needed Kasper’s voice, that was what Miriam would give him: “I’ll do it. I’ll operate the radio.”

  The officer did not lower his gun. His signet ring shimmered. “I didn’t ask you.”

  “I’m a face-changer.” Miriam dropped her voice into a gravelly imitation of Kasper’s. It worked well enough. The operative’s voice was already hoarse from days of nonstop talking. “They won’t be able to tell the difference between my voice and his over the radio. That’s all you need, right? A convincing lie?”

  Baasch’s lips twitched. Miriam couldn’t tell if the motion signaled disappointment or pleasure. The expression might be hard to read, but the man wasn’t. She’d known many like him: ruthless creatures who enjoyed watching their prey dance before they devoured it.

  The trick to dealing with them?

  Be the prey and dance, dance until they licked their lips.

  Then strike.

  Pretending to be prey was not difficult. Miriam was a wounded Jewish woman—all properties that discounted her in the SS-Standartenführer’s mind.

  “Just how many lab rats did Dr. Geyer let loose?” The officer tutted, then nodded to the radio stool. “Very well. Take a seat.

  “Gag the others,” he ordered his men. “We don’t want them making any unnecessary fuss. And someone else tie up this inmate’s wound. We don’t need her bleeding out midmessage.”

  The loss of blood had made Miriam dizzy. She swayed her way to the communications station. Kasper called her some colorful words just before the gag silenced him, but Miriam pretended to be deaf to his insults. She also pretended that passing the traitorous Wolfe boy didn’t boil her insides down to their linings. She should’ve known he was the leak, should’ve questioned his motives further, should’ve never let the wretch out of her sight. Not that it mattered now. He was going to the same guillotine they were if Miriam couldn’t pull this off.…

  She wasn’t even fully sure what this was as she sat down to the radio, wincing. One of the soldiers began patching up her wound and not gently.

  “What should I say?” Miriam kept her eyes down, scanning the room as she did so. Thumbtacks, two stiffening bodies, a dashed typewriter, the television (which had somehow survived the firefight) still flickering behind the desk… none of these things would help. The SS-Standartenführer’s men were sacking the place, ripping books from shelves, and tossing documents they didn’t need to the floor.

  The whole process was making an awful lot of noise.

  “Tell them the headquarters were overlooked and all inhabitants are safe,” Baasch said. “Then we’ll ask for an update on Reiniger’s positions.”

  “I wouldn’t dive straight into that,” Miriam advised. “Let them volunteer the information. If you want to establish a longer repertoire, then the conversation needs to flow at a natural pace.”

  It was only when the SS-Standartenführer’s stare narrowed that Miriam realized she’d lapsed back into her commander tone. Abrasive syllables had become old habit when she was confronted with men and uniforms.

  “I am in charge of this exchange.” Baasch’s words danced on toothpoint. “I dictate the message.”

  So he did. A dutiful soldier spelled out the message on the back of one of Henryka’s discarded files and typed it through the cipher. Miriam recited the encoded letters in Kasper’s husky voice, letting her finger linger on the transmission button as many seconds as she dared, hoping that ears on the other end might catch snippets of the SS’s office sacking.

  The process felt life-drudgingly slow. Minutes passed as their message was ironed out, a response cobbled, jumbled, recited back, put through the cipher.

  THE WOLVES OF WAR ARE GATHERING.

  “The wolves of war are gathering?” Baasch read it aloud. “What does that mean?”

  It could mean a number of things. Perhaps the pause between the initial transmission and Baasch’s response had been too lengthy. Or maybe Miriam’s warning had been received, caught in the smack of a jackboot or the crash of a book.

  “It’s a pass code,” Miriam told the officer, recalling Yael’s frantic yell to resistance fighters the night before. “They want us to verify our identities.”

  The SS-Standartenführer’s lips set. (Angry or resigned? Impossible to tell.) He walked over to where Felix Wolfe knelt, pale hair dripping into a paler, sweat-sopped face. The boy flinched at every one of the SS officer’s steps. Miriam had to remind herself she didn’t feel sorry for him.

  “What’s the response?”

  “Something—” Felix gasped when Baasch jerked the wadded cloth from his mouth. “Something about r-rotting songs and bones! I don’t remember the exact wording.”

  Miriam did. They sing the song of rotten bones crooned through her memory. Rotten, rotten. This was all rotten. And if they could make it clear to the resistance that their communications had been seized without the SS knowing…

  “‘Their song of bones is rotten,’” Miriam told the SS-Standartenführer. “That’s the counterphrase.”

  Kasper’s cheek twitched against his gag. Brigitte and Johann maintained their stonewall stares. Well-trained, all of them. None of the SS had bothered securing their limbs yet. Why would they, when the operatives were stripped of weapons and so clearly outnumbered? Pistols to their skulls were enough.

  “Is that it?” Baasch asked Felix. “You swear on your sister’s life that’s it?”

  Play, play. Watch the prey dance.

  If the Wolfe boy went any paler, he’d be invisible. He nodded. “Yes, yes. That’s it!”

  It was a groveling answer, so convincing that Miriam couldn’t tell if he was lying for their sake or if he truly believed the response was accurate. So convincing that Baasch swallowed it whole.

  “Send it,” ordered the SS-Standartenführer.

  THEIR SONG OF BONES IS ROTTEN.

  CHAPTER 49

  They’d walked into the middle of a speech. No—not a speech, Luka realized as he halted in the doorway. A Chancellery Chat. The very same swastika standard that appeared on every screen in the Reich hung from the studio ceiling, providing a backdrop for the high-backed chair and the Führer sitting in it.

  The gottverdammt Führer. Or, at least, a version of him. Any blood-group tattoo that might prove otherwise was covered: The man wore his shirt buttoned all the way to the collar and a jacket over that—charcoal gray, military cut. A golden eagle party badge had been sewn over the breast pocket; the bird blazed beneath the stage lights.

  Hitler wasn’t alone. There was a camera with the scantiest of production teams camped out behind it: a cameraman and a boom operator. Four SS guards stood to the side of the room in a schoolboy row. None of them seemed alarmed by Luka’s arrival. (Then again, he was wearing their uniform. Between the slouched cap and the dim studio, no one had recognized him. Yet.)

  “We have dealt the enemy a mighty blow, but the battle is not yet won. I call upon you now, people of the Reich, to—” When Hitler spotted the pair, his speech withered in his throat. “What are they doing here?”

  A fifth man bearing the SS insignia turned to face the newcomers. Luka recognized Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler immediately. A pair of round spectacles that served to make beady eyes beadier, a thin excuse for a mustache, a dippy chin. None of these traits added up to a very impressive appearance, but there was something else, something… predacious… beneath the man’s skin. It was ill matched to his calm expression.

  “I gave explicit orders we were not to be disturbed,” the Reichsführer said.

  That explained the deserted halls.

  Fight? Flight? Take a bow? Luka was at a loss for what to do next, so he just stood on the threshold. Something was off.… Every single interview he’d ever given in this building guaranteed
two things: lights so hot they made you sweat and Joseph Goebbels in attendance, taking in every detail with a face that looked as if someone had served him a plate of dog feces. Not a word or a gesture escaped the Ordenspalais without the propaganda minister’s express permission. He wouldn’t be absent for something as significant as a Chancellery Chat.

  So where was he? Where were the extra guards? Where was the rest of the production staff? A studio like this should be swarming with people: lighting assistants, producers, set managers, multiple cameras and microphones.… It was almost as if Himmler wanted the room to be as bare bones as possible.

  Yael pushed past Luka, her steps powerful. Shadows spooled out of her as she strode to the stage. Dark hair, daring eyes, becoming herself. “I have an urgent message for the Führer, concerning the recent assault on the traitors’ headquarters.”

  “All messages to the Führer are to be conveyed through me,” Himmler began, but Yael was in front of the camera, beside the chair, pistol out, pressed to Hitler’s head.

  Breathing became a forgotten pastime. Luka stayed where he was—uncertain. The skeleton film crew didn’t move; camera lens and microphone stayed on the unlikely pair: Hitler, speechless. Jewish girl in death’s uniform. The real SS soldiers kept their formation; all four looked to Himmler for direction.

  “You’re she, yes? Inmate 121358ΔX. The girl from the gurney? I remember you sitting in the examination room, so very small.” Reichsführer Himmler moved into the haze of studio lights. Their brightness turned the rim of his glasses into mercury.

  “Don’t!” Yael swung behind the chair, gun still anchored to Hitler’s head. “Unless you want the Führer to get shot on the Reichssender a third time.”

  “This will never air on the Reichssender,” Himmler assured her. “I think it’s safe to say that after Tokyo the Führer will no longer be appearing on live television.”

  It wasn’t just the room’s emptiness that niggled at Luka, but the way the Reichsführer filled it. Why wasn’t the head of the SS on his knees, begging for Hitler’s life? Why did messages to the Führer have to be conveyed through Himmler?

  …

  …

  Holy Scheisse!

  “Which doppelgänger is this?” The earth’s very orbit fell still, throwing Luka into motion: out of the doorway, onto the stage. The rush knocked off his cap, popped a button from his too-tight uniform, but Luka didn’t care. The thing was suffocating him, so he tore it off. Back to undershirt. There was no need to hide now anyway.

  Luka drew out one of his Lugers as he moved, lining his sights on Reichsführer Himmler. Just above the facial hair abomination, just below the spectacles. “A1? B3? O5?”

  The gun’s appearance rattled the Reichsführer much less than Luka had expected. He stood nose-to-nose with the malicious metal. His lips did not twitch. His eyes did not blink.

  Hitler’s mustache trembled. Not out of fear, but anger: “I’m not a doppel—”

  Himmler held up his hand. The Führer’s mouth snapped shut.

  That clenched it.

  The man in the chair was a skinshifter. Through and through. But he wasn’t just a double or some fleshed-out version of target paper. He was a mouthpiece.

  He was the Führer.

  “Victor L—” the Reichsführer began.

  “How long?” Luka asked. The end of his pistol quivered.

  Heinrich Himmler wasn’t the sort of man who was often interrupted, especially at gunpoint. He was at a loss for how to respond. “Excuse me?”

  “How long have you been controlling the Reich, Reichsführer Himmler?” It seemed so obvious, now that Luka thought about it. “The SS-Maskiertekommando des Führers isn’t a security detail. It’s not even a placeholder for public appearances.… You have a whole list of skinshifters under your command who can wear Adolf Hitler’s face at a moment’s notice. This whole regime is a puppet show, and you’re its verdammt master.”

  Luka was right. The silence told him that.

  The cameraman shifted on his stool. The microphone shivered at the end of its boom pole. The four SS guards didn’t so much as blink. Yael’s gun vaulted from the skinshifter’s temple, seeking a new target in Himmler. False Hitler wrested the Luger from her grasp before she could squeeze the trigger, moving with far more speed than a sixty-six-year-old could muster. His face melted back into that of a much younger, fair-haired man as he turned the weapon on her. Yael stared down the barrel, lungs heaving.

  Luka’s trigger finger was starting to ache, but he wasn’t ready to shoot. There were still so many answers he needed to hear, so many things he wanted to say. “The Führer’s dead. Isn’t he?”

  “That’s the beauty of the Doppelgänger Project. The Führer cannot die.” Heinrich Himmler gestured at the four SS guards. Each blinked into a vision of Hitler—bristled mustache, bewitched blue eyes. “The Führer is immortal.”

  “But Adolf Hitler wasn’t.” Memories—new and old—were coming together in Luka’s mind. Notes from the Doppelgänger Project fit seamlessly into the scene from the Grosser Platz. Reichsführer Himmler has ordered the cessation of new SS subjects—Aaron-Klaus’s gun firing, red unfurling under, into Hitler’s shirt—due to the Führer’s recent decision to remain out of the public eye. Hitler collapsing to the ground, three holes in his chest. SS swarming his body. Luka unable to move while everything fell apart around him.

  He’d seen the truth all along.

  “Hitler didn’t cease making public appearances after the New Germania rally because he feared for his life. He died that day.”

  “Aaron-Klaus”—the noise Yael made was at joyful odds with the gun in her face—“he did it.”

  Luka’s accusations kept flowing: “You, Reichsführer Himmler, were trying to control the narrative. That’s why you wiped out all the other officials’ Maskiertekommandos and ordered the doctor to stop creating doppelgängers. It wasn’t because Hitler feared the project’s exposure.… You did! You wanted to blind Hitler’s potential successors. If Bormann, Göring, and Goebbels believed the Führer terminated the Doppelgänger Project, they wouldn’t suspect you of using it to slip behind the curtain of power.”

  “Well done, Victor Löwe.” Heinrich Himmler’s face remained clinical. There was a coolness to the droop of his lids, something chilled in his voice. “Four whole years and not even Dr. Geyer came close to guessing the truth. You were wrong about one thing, though. The Maskiertekommando was a security detail, in its earliest years. Hitler himself came up with the idea when I presented the results of Experiment Eighty-Five to him. Whenever a situation was deemed high risk, one of the doppelgängers took Hitler’s place. He’d write the speeches and run through them until the doubles perfected every single inflection.

  “May 16, 1952, was different.” Himmler’s chin tilted on its axis. His glasses glimmered. “The Führer wanted to give his own speech at the New Germania rally. The rehauled capital was the fruit of his labor, and Hitler thought he should be the one to present it to the Volk. After the shooting, he bled out on the stage, but the Maskiertekommando whisked the body away before his death was declared. I replaced him with a doppelgänger who had less severe wounds. Those few who knew about the Doppelgänger Project assumed it was a double who died. Everyone else simply assumed the surgeons of Germania were miracle workers.”

  “So you and the SS-Maskiertekommando des Führers took over the Reich. No fight from Göring. No protests from Bormann. Just a seamless transition of power.” Luka laughed. The sound was sparse, accusatory. “Cutthroat work, Reichsführer Himmler. Really top-notch.”

  The production staff was fidgeting again, but the microphone kept hanging above them, and the cameraman hadn’t taken off his headphones. The film kept rolling. Its feed wasn’t live, and the reel would probably never leave this room.

  Luka had the very distinct feeling that they wouldn’t be leaving the studio either. Himmler’s confession did not come free, and five Lugers to Luka’s drawn one spelled out a rotte
n ending. (He wasn’t that good of a shot.)

  Surviving was a lost cause.

  He might as well give his verdammt speech.

  He’d hoped for a larger audience—more in the millions than the singles. But if eight sets of ears was all Luka got, then hell if he wouldn’t make them listen. He held his pistol high and started talking.

  “My father was in the Kradschützen. Did you know that? When I was a kid, I used to pedal around Frankfurt on a rusted bicycle pretending it was a motorcycle and shooting imaginary communists because I wanted to be like him. I wanted to feel as if I was a part of something that mattered.

  “When that feeling is inside you… when you’re so hungry to matter and that missingness is all you are, you’ll believe anything, won’t you? If some lunatic stands up on a beer hall table and tells you you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to humanity because you were born to the correct set of parents, you won’t tell him he’s wrong. You might even begin to hope he’s right.”

  “Victor Löwe. We really don’t have time to entertain one of your monologues.” Himmler’s jackboots creaked as he shifted his weight. Four SS-soldiers-turned-fake-Hitlers mirrored the movement—restless.

  “Consider this my Victor’s Speech,” Luka snapped back. “It was only after I met Yael that I realized what my father, what I, what every single citizen of the Reich has been part of: wiping out entire villages—no, countries—of people. The populations who were cleared to make room for Lebensraum weren’t just sent away. They were murdered in masses. Used for sick, twisted medical experiments. I’ve read the files on the Doppelgänger Project. Experiment Eighty-Five is made up of hundreds of dead children.”

  “It was a most difficult task.” The Reichsführer did not flinch. “Most difficult, but I carried it out for the love of our people. In the pursuit of progress, sacrifices must be made. They were only Untermenschen—”

  “They were innocent children with names.” Words were not enough, not nearly enough, but Luka kept trying to say them because he needed to make himself heard. He needed to make all those children—their silence—heard. “Abel Topf. Mary Grausz. Naomi Hirsch.”