The students looked surprised, but they managed to stroll back to the sidewalk casually, even a tad defiantly—not enough to get called on it, or so their instincts told them. Oskar shook his head, thinking, You can’t trust those instincts anymore.
It was a full ten minutes before the carburetor cleared and the engine would restart. The sky continued to darken, and the lights came on in shop windows and in upper-story apartments and on the marquee of a theater that was showing, of all things, “The first full-evening cartoon-film by Walt Disney, Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge.”
Von Ewigholz drove cautiously after that, circling the block and turning east, parallel to the river. After a few blocks they left behind the theaters and restaurants and wine bars, entering a more somber, dignified quarter that was recognizably the government district. Oskar had prepared himself and yet felt an inner jolt at the sight of the largest and ugliest building in that district: the Haus des Reichs, a decade-old limestone monstrosity that looked like something between a jail and a mausoleum. Six stories tall, it flashed a bit of decorative carving and other traditional features near street level, but as it rose it cast those off in favor of a stony Brutalist façade up to the roof fascia. It occupied a full, irregularly shaped city block, its four unequal limbs bent around a courtyard that (as Oskar remembered it) was empty and joyless except for a lone clock tower visible from every inward-facing window. The top floor had been claimed by the district leader of the NSDAP, and the remaining floors were shared by a miscellany of other agencies, offices, boards and services, including the Kriegsmarine, under whose protective cover the Abwehr ran its nest. Oskar counted the stories up to four and scanned to see if there were any lights on at this hour. Of course there were.
Celler Strasse was quieter and darker than the city around it, on account of lindens planted on either side late in the last century when these large, impressive town homes were built, shoulder to shoulder and set back from the road, allowing each a generous front garden. Oskar was reminded of Washington, with its similar neighborhoods full of drawn curtains, the same yellow light seeping through, the inhabitants living their bürgerlich lives in comfort and secrecy. The Horch rumbled down the middle of the street in the only permissible direction, toward the riverfront, which you could sense was close now. Few of the houses had visible street numbers, but their destination, number 49, was marked by a tasteful signpost bearing the name Dr. Kuno Ruhmann and a courteous warning: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, PLEASE.
“Is this right?” said von Ewigholz, as the car braked to a halt with a piercing squeak. “This is where your aunt lives? Who is Dr. Ruhmann?”
They were all staring at the sign and waiting for Lena to respond. Say something, damn it, thought Oskar. Trust Socialists to screw up such a simple thing.
“Yes, I—” Lena didn’t quite stammer, but very nearly. Her face was completely blank.
“So that’s the tenant she was talking about,” Oskar said, then forced a chuckle. “A doctor, no less! Well, that’s certainly stylish. I trust he’s old and bent over, or else tongues will be wagging. Such goings-on in a respectable neighborhood!” He paused, giving Lena time to catch up. “Well, then, I’ll go fetch the luggage.”
He opened the passenger door and clambered out with what he deemed a suitable degree of fumbling and awkwardness. Lena offered von Ewigholz her hand, thanking him in half a dozen ways for the kindness of giving them a ride.
“It was my honor and my pleasure,” he assured her. Then, against Oskar’s silent prayers, he opened the door on his side, stepped down to the road and brushed the wrinkles out of his tunic. “I’ll help carry your bags in.”
Oskar started to say there was no need, but von Ewigholz knew perfectly well that there wasn’t. He’d decided for some reason of his own, maybe no more sinister than ordinary human curiosity, to have a look inside this house and to meet the famous Aunt Tilde. Lena has told us all so much…There was nothing Oskar could do. Only stick to his cover, trust Lena to do likewise and hope the SOPADE, which had managed to survive the Thousand-Year Reich for this long, could hang on a few minutes longer.
“I’m coming too,” said Clair. “I must meet your aunt! The wild one in the family in a house like this? Well, you never know.” He climbed out of the car, not bothering with the door, just hoisting one long leg and then the other over the side and sliding down like a child on a playground.
This could be good, Oskar thought, and perhaps helpful, a wayward American violating social conventions he wasn’t even aware of. Distracting his minder. Drawing attention away from any lapses in performance by Lena, or Tilde, or whoever else might be involved—and Oskar dearly hoped these people had the sense to keep the dramatis personae to as few as possible.
They approached the house, Lena leading the way. The front walk ran dead straight, paved with flagstones and lined on one side by clipped boxwood, on the other by a tiny medicinal garden whose patches of herbs bore neat copper labels. The stoop was three steps high, surfaced in granite and splashed with light from electric lanterns that framed the carved-oak door. Thanks to the raucous Horch, there was no chance of surprise—the door swung back while Lena was reaching for the knocker. And there, effusing, stood their contact in the Socialist underground, a sprightly sexagenarian with cropped silver hair, shy of five feet by a good two fingers, wearing a patterned silk dress that fell from her shoulders to her knees in the style of the twenties. This woman, thought Oskar, had been a middle-aged flapper.
“Lena!” Aunt Tilde exclaimed with both hands out. “Do come in. Please, everyone, let me get a better look at you! My eyes aren’t so good anymore in the dark.”
She stood aside as they trooped past, Clair on Lena’s heels, then Oskar with their luggage, von Ewigholz trailing nonchalantly, keeping the lot of them in his field of sight. Tilde shooed them into a room off the front hall where a fire crackled needlessly in a large grate and a gentleman in old-fashioned at-home attire—a vest over a high-collared shirt—rose from a chair, holding a newspaper, to greet the new arrivals. Probably a decade older than the woman, he’d folded the paper so its name was clearly legible: the Hamburger Abendblatt, a safely nondescript regional organ. Well played if maybe too obvious, in Oskar’s professional judgment.
“I present Herr Doktor Ruhmann,” Tilde announced, lightening the formality with her buoyant delivery and a mischievous smile. “And here, Herr Doktor, you see my dear niece Lena with, if I am not mistaken, her husband, whom for the very first time I am meeting now, so naughty a girl! She tells me his name is Stefan.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt—” Lena began, but Tilde waved it aside and held out a hand for the new in-law to…clasp, he decided. A flapper wouldn’t go in for the kiss.
“You are welcome to our family,” she told him, “even if I am a trifle late in saying so.”
“It’s an honor to meet you,” he said. This wasn’t going badly at all.
“And here, Aunt, are the others I told you about. Obersturmführer von Ewigholz, who was so kind as to drive us all this way in his motorcar, and Mr. Clairborne Townsend, who comes from America.”
Tilde had a flair for this. She admired the SS man’s uniform as though it were an ordinary, if possibly extravagant, business suit. Clairborne she favored with a demonstration of her excellent, finishing-school English. “You poor young man—I am certain our Old World manners must seem quite stuffy to you. I beg you to indulge us. So many visitors, all at once—the doctor and I are quite unused to such goings and comings.”
Clair’s smile looked real enough, lacking its usual irony. He was evidently charmed, or at least entertained. Every bit the senator’s son, he began praising the house, speaking clearly and slowly in case either her hearing or her bilingualism might require special consideration.
“It’s an old place,” said Tilde, “but all the working parts are fully modernized. The doctor requires that, you know. In fact, just down the hall”—she pointed to an inner door—“we have a full water closet, in
case anyone should like to freshen up.”
It seemed to Oskar that this was directed especially at Lena and that a further suggestion was implied. If so, she missed it by making small talk with the doctor, with von Ewigholz looking on impassively, and when Oskar managed to catch her eye, she only smiled at him. He glanced back toward Tilde, who, without a break in her discourse to Clair about ornamental molding, managed to tilt an eye in the general direction of the door. That was enough for Oskar.
“If you’ll pardon me,” he said to no one in particular. Taking care not to hurry, he crossed the room and turned the handle and found himself staring down a narrow passageway, evidently meant for servants, leading back to a distant, well-lit room he guessed would be the kitchen. There was indeed a water closet en route, and a pantry, but Oskar kept going until finally stepping out into the sort of all-purpose domestic work area you find only in houses dating from an era when the presence of household staff was taken for granted. The room ran the width of the house and was outfitted for cooking, laundering, pet bathing, harvest processing, livestock slaughtering and God knew what else. Probably the architect hadn’t foreseen the need to accommodate a party of armed resistance fighters, but that is what Oskar found gathered there around a chopping table in the center of the room: two men and a woman, all about Lena’s age. One of the men aimed an antique pistol approximately at Oskar’s left eye. The gun looked heavy, and the fellow’s hand weak.
“Ah, good,” said Oskar, approaching him with only a minor break in his stride. “It’s Gunter, isn’t it? We were told to expect you.” He stuck out his arm as though to offer a handshake.
“No,” the armed man said uncertainly, “it’s Alex. Stop—”
Oskar swept his arm sideways, knocking the gun to the left, where he grabbed it and easily pried it out of the man’s grip. The maneuver took all of two seconds if you did it properly. They’d taught Oskar this trick in his first week of training, and he was amazed how well it worked.
He dangled the pistol by the trigger guard with one finger, demonstrating that he had no plans to use it. “What the devil’s going on here? There’s an SS officer out in the sitting room. Whoever you are, keep absolutely quiet and stay the hell out of sight. Do you understand?”
He looked at each of them in turn, hard in the eyes. Only the woman seemed to be considering a reply, but in the end she simply stared between the gun and Oskar’s furious expression.
“All right.” He switched on the safety catch and handed the pistol carefully back to the one who’d called himself Alex. “You won’t need this. I’ll get rid of the SS, and then we can all sit down and talk, yes?”
Alex nodded, his brow running with sweat and his hand trembling visibly as he took the gun. Oskar turned and stepped as softly as he could back up the servants’ hall to the bathroom door, which he opened and then shut with a bang louder than he’d intended.
Back in the overheated sitting room, something was amiss. Lena had sat down near the fire, where she seemed to be in conversation with Dr. Ruhmann. Only they weren’t speaking just now; both looked expectantly at Oskar, and the doctor was grasping the newspaper so tightly it had crumpled in his fist. Von Ewigholz stood in the doorway through which they’d entered the room, seeming to contemplate the banisters of the wide formal staircase. Aunt Tilde, left on her own, stood there in the middle looking befuddled, as though she’d failed in her hostess duties but couldn’t work out just how.
At last Oskar understood what was wrong. “Where’s Clair?” he said, trying to sound jovial. “Not up to his usual mischief, I hope.”
“He’s gone exploring,” Lena said. She glanced toward the SS man, though his mind seemed to be elsewhere.
“I was just telling him about the library,” said Tilde. “It rises two full stories, shelves all around, with a balcony and ladders. Perhaps I—my English—”
“Your English is lovely, madam,” von Ewigholz said. He stepped back into the room, and his courteous bow to Tilde only served to make him look taller when he straightened again. He continued in German: “I’m afraid my young friend is prone to, shall we say, a certain excess of spontaneity. He doesn’t mean to be rude.” He smiled ironically, not unlike Clair, which Oskar read as meaning: not this time, at least.
Should he go looking for Clair, then, on the pretext of seeing this remarkable library for himself? But no—there’d be plenty of time for that, their stated story being to stay for the night. Maybe Lena could go instead? Presumably familiar with the house, she might plausibly intervene as a kind of deputy hostess. Or maybe the best thing was to just wait. Why behave as though anything was wrong? Clair would get bored soon enough. Ach! Oskar thought. This sort of improvisation shouldn’t be necessary.
Then they heard the sound of voices.
“Quiet!” von Ewigholz commanded—quite unnecessarily, as they were all straining their ears.
The voices came from some indistinct place overhead but were loudest near the stairwell, which Oskar discovered by drifting toward the SS man into the front hall, where together they stared up the shadowy staircase. Oskar could make out at least two voices, maybe more, interspersed with ripples of laughter, so giddy or nervous it might’ve been a projection of his own mental state, which was roughly akin to how he’d felt before crawling out of a trench during live-fire exercises at Lichterfelde. It was all right to panic, they’d told him; that’s a normal reaction to bullets flying inches above your head. But some part of your mind must remain calm, and you must condition your limbs to obey that part. Now the calm part of Oskar’s mind was telling him that the situation could be salvaged, that he would figure out how to manage it.
Then, a shriek.
Not a shriek of terror, probably—only surprise. Probably that. Yet a shriek nonetheless. And von Ewigholz was not a man to stand dumbly in the dark while someone was shrieking at the top of the stairs; nor, for that matter, was Oskar. So the two of them advanced cautiously in quiet, deliberate steps upward.
“Stay behind me,” von Ewigholz ordered softly, and Oskar realized the man had pulled from somewhere a small sidearm of the type issued to officers of his service, a lightweight Walther, not a combat weapon but efficient at close quarters and easy to slip into a pocket. He fell a step behind with one eye on the gun.
The two them paused on the landing and listened intently for several moments. At first it seemed the voices had stopped, but in fact they’d only dropped in volume; you could just make them out, and now there were three of them, including a woman’s. Frowning, von Ewigholz crossed the landing to a spot from which he could peer down the hall, running back to front the length of the house, with three rooms on each side. The doors were shut but light was spreading from the sill beneath one of them. Abandoning stealth, von Ewigholz strode to it directly and placed his free hand on the knob. Oskar hurried to catch up but was one step too slow.
The door swung open, the effect akin to yanking a stage curtain up before the actors have reached their marks. There were four people inside, two perched on a bed, two others standing beside it. But what drew the eye wasn’t the people, it was the large pistol held by one of them: Clair, on the bed, who appeared to be inspecting it, turning it carefully like a pawnbroker estimating its value.
The person seated beside him—the young man called Alex—stared at the armed SS officer in the doorway with a look of pure terror. A third man hovering nearby made a grab for the pistol, and that’s what Oskar saw in the instant he reached the doorway.
Had he been that one step faster, he might have disarmed von Ewigholz or at least deflected the shot. In the event, the bullet went precisely where it was aimed, into the man’s forehead. The old pistol clattered to the floor, the victim collapsing beside it. Alex made a frantic grab for the weapon as von Ewigholz took aim again.
“Stop there,” the SS man said, almost conversationally. “Keep your hands—”
Clair interrupted with another shriek, this one more plangent than before. “What have you done
? We were only—”
“Be quiet. Move away, please.”
Oskar stood inches from von Ewigholz with every muscle taut, trying to game this out. The possibilities were too numerous and none of them good. He punched hard at the officer’s wrist, reaching in with the other hand to pull the gun away. This time the trick didn’t work. Von Ewigholz, his grip still tight on the Walther, rammed an elbow into Oskar’s ribs. The world turned bright and red for a moment, but it seemed to Oskar that on the edge of his vision the woman made some rapid move, and then there were two gunshots at nearly the same time. Von Ewigholz lurched backward but stayed on his feet. In the room, something thumped to the floor. Oskar threw his body into the SS man, grabbing the gun and twisting it loose. His hand, when he pulled it away, was sticky with blood. Von Ewigholz gave a low, vocalized sigh and lowered himself to the hallway floor, leaning back against the stair rail. He looked up at Oskar and nodded—meaning what?
And now Clair shoved himself through the bedroom door, all disorganized limbs and flying hair and pink, tear-stained face, making straight for von Ewigholz, whom he stared down at for a moment before folding up next to him like a puppet whose strings had been cut, holding out one trembling hand as though he wanted but feared to touch him.
“It’s all right,” the SS man said, then lifted the arm with the bloody gun hand to reveal a dark spreading stain on that side, roughly at the level of his diaphragm. “A small wound, I think. Nothing to worry about.”
Clair turned so as to look up at Oskar, bewildered and furious. “What just happened? Why are people shooting each other? Is there some kind of war going on I haven’t heard about?” His eyes grew more focused. Maybe he was starting to realize that the question was not, in fact, rhetorical.
Suddenly, or so it seemed to Oskar, other people were all around. The woman stood in the doorway behind him, gripping the old pistol in both hands and training it, dead steady, on von Ewigholz. Meanwhile, Lena had reached the top of the stairs with Tilde behind her, a few steps down, so only her head was visible through the banister. Her face registered terror, confusion, helplessness.
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