A City of Broken Glass (Hannah Vogel)

by Cantrell, Rebecca

  “The one that you nicked off Paul’s table.”

  He hesitated, then drew a sheet of paper from his overcoat pocket.

  I turned on the lorry’s overhead light. Block letters in familiar handwriting goose-stepped across the page.

  TO ADELHEID ZINSLI,

  THE SUFFERING THAT JEW-FUCKERS LIKE YOU HAVE CAUSED THE GERMAN PEOPLE CAN NEVER BE UNDONE. JUST AS YOU STOLE A LIFE FROM ME, I STEAL ONE FROM YOU. THE JEWS ARE NOT DONE MURDERING THOUGH, ARE THEY? NOR AM I.

  18

  I gulped. The handwriting matched the threatening letters that had been mailed to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. My head throbbed. Red and green lights flickered in my peripheral vision.

  Lars pushed my head between my knees. “Breathe.”

  I breathed until the lights went away; then I sat up. “Paul’s death was about me,” I whispered. “It was my fault.”

  “You did not kill him.”

  “I brought him grief, then death,” I said.

  “You are missing the essential element in that note.”

  I stared at him.

  “Someone wants to hurt you. It’s why they killed Paul.”

  “It worked.” Paul’s life had ended because of something I had done. Or not done. I had never taken the letters seriously.

  Lars put his arm around my shoulders to steady me. I leaned against him and closed my eyes. He stroked my hair. I stayed there, matching my breaths with his, calming down.

  “Spatz?” He sounded sleepy.

  I sat up. “I imagine they will not stop trying to hurt me either.”

  I looked again toward the office where Anton lay asleep.

  “They know you are Adelheid Zinsli.” Lars buttoned the top button on my coat. “When we leave, they’ll know to look for you in Switzerland.”

  “Did anyone follow us here?” My heart raced as I scanned the dark warehouse, as if I could spot someone.

  “No,” he said with great finality. “I watched behind us, and we took a most circuitous route. I never saw anyone.”

  I struggled to pull myself together. He handed me the schnapps. I took a long swallow. I had to think. I had to get myself and Anton out of this. And I had to warn Lars that he might well be in danger, too. “I have received other letters.”

  “What?” He choked on the schnapps and coughed. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “They came to the paper. In Switzerland. I get all kinds of crank letters. I have for years, even when I worked crime. Peter always used to say, ‘If you’re not getting letters, you’re not writing pieces that move people.’” I shuddered. “Now I get political ones. I never take them seriously. But these were written in the same handwriting as—” I held up the letter that he had taken from Paul’s table.

  “How many letters? How long?” He rapped out questions.

  “Ten or twelve, I think,” I said. “They started coming a month ago, right after I wrote a piece criticizing the French and British governments for giving Hitler a giant swath of Czechoslovakia.”

  “You can’t ever leave well enough alone?” His brow furrowed in irritation.

  “I would not call that situation well enough.” I took another drink of schnapps. It barely burned anymore. “What would you have me do, Lars, join the French throngs throwing roses?”

  He pursed his lips. “Perhaps you could allow another journalist to draw attention to it.”

  “I will not sit by.” I met his eyes calmly.

  “My apologies, Spatz,” he said. “You are correct, of course. Please tell me more about the letters.”

  I thought back to the last letter and the ones before, when I had been safe and warm in Switzerland. “When the first one came, a secretary opened it by mistake and took it to my editor. Since then, he has been confiscating them and giving them to the police. For my safety, he sent me to Poland to write a nonpolitical feature.”

  Lars raked his fingers through his hair. “That turned out well.”

  “Quite.”

  “What do the letters say?”

  “They say—I—they.” I took a long shuddering breath. “The letters call me a traitor and a whore and a Jew-fucker.”

  He winced, unused to hearing me swear.

  I forged on. “They say that I will be called to answer for my crimes against Germany. And they urge me to come back to Germany to face my punishment, which they hint is to be a slow death.”

  “Where are they postmarked?” His unfocused eyes stared out the windshield. I knew that expression. He was thinking.

  I took another drink of schnapps. “Berlin.”

  He took the flask off me, but he did not drink. “How often?”

  “At first weekly, but lately almost daily. One arrived yesterday in Switzerland.” I watched dark shapes in the warehouse. I had not taken the letters seriously, and now Paul was dead.

  As usual, Lars read my mind. “Don’t blame yourself, Spatz.”

  “I have no one else to blame, Lars. I did not warn Paul. And I left him alone.” I looked longingly at the schnapps flask, but did not reach for it. I would not numb myself to this.

  Lars took another drink. “What happened to you a month ago, when the letters started?”

  “I have been over that again and again on my own and with Herr Knecht. Nothing significant happened to me.”

  “If the letter writer is indeed the killer, he is targeting you.” He took a deep breath. “Who would want to kill you? Whose life did you steal?”

  “I killed one of the Gestapo men who kidnapped me in Poland.”

  “Too recent to have written the letters,” he said.

  “The Röhms,” I said. “Frau Röhm blamed me for her son’s death back in 1934, and she was certainly willing to kill Anton and me to avenge him.”

  His eyes narrowed. “They are good candidates for something like this. They have no more political power, so they couldn’t just have you arrested and shot. They’d have to do it themselves.”

  “Comforting.” I shifted on the car seat. The smell of old leather wafted up.

  “Who else?” Lars tapped his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently.

  “Bauer’s family. Or Hahn’s. Or the other two,” I said. A policeman named Bauer and Lars’s former superior, Sturmbannführer Hahn, had died in a gun battle in 1936, along with two other men, moments before they would have killed us.

  He sat quiet for a moment. “I don’t know much about Bauer or the other two. Hahn was estranged from his wife for years before his death, I believe. They had a child, but I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl. I do know that Hahn often beat his wife so badly, she ended up in hospital.”

  I remembered how Hahn had broken Lars’s nose and his ribs, and the plans he had stated that he had for me. I had killed him to stop him, and while I did not regret it, I still had nightmares about what I had done.

  Lars kept talking. “I don’t imagine his wife or child would search hard for his killer, except perhaps to give him a reward.”

  “Bauer?” He and Hahn were the only two whose names I knew.

  “They are long shots,” he said. “If it’s Gestapo-related, they would have had you arrested at Paul’s house and shot you, not him. Nor would they waste time with threatening letters.”

  “So, a civilian?” I held the letter up to the light in the lorry. “I found a letter in Paul’s apartment typed on this same kind of paper.”

  Lars stared at the paper, thinking. “Do you think Paul could have written the letters? Or Miriam?”

  “Paul?” I straightened up on the seat. “Never.”

  “Miriam, then?”

  “Some of them arrived after she died,” I said. “And the letter I found in their apartment seemed to have been sent to them, not from them.”

  “Was the handwriting the same?”

  “The one in the apartment was typewritten.” I repeated it back to him.

  Lars touched the watermark. “This is government paper.”

  “Where does the paper come f
rom?” I did not question that he was correct.

  “You sign it out a hundred sheets at a time.” He rubbed the paper between his thumb and forefinger. “The paper company has a contract with the government, so this paper is not available to civilians. That is why you need to sign for it.”

  “So whoever wrote the letters to me works for the government, or at least has access to the paper.” That sounded promising. Whom did I know who worked for the government?

  “That narrows the field of suspects down to thousands.” Lars squelched my hope.

  “Not counting the Gestapo men, who else in government thinks I took the life of someone they love?”

  “It doesn’t have to be someone whose life you took,” Lars pointed out. “It could be someone who feels that you ruined his life.”

  “A much wider field,” I said. “Are you on that list?”

  He draped his arm across the seat behind me. “I am on the other end. You redeemed mine.”

  “Did I?” I picked at my glove. It felt as if every single thing I had done to try to help people had backfired. “Before you met me, you were a successful police kommissar, a Hauptsturmführer in the SS. Now you are sleeping in a garage.”

  “Spatz—”

  “You were correct to stay away, Lars. I have never loved a man who did not come to grief.”

  “The banker seems to have ended up in quite satisfactory circumstances,” he said. “Perhaps I should have read the fine print at the bottom of the contract and applied for a position in Switzerland.”

  I appreciated his effort to lighten the situation and forced a smile.

  He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

  I looked into his questioning dark eyes. Dark like Paul’s. I wanted Lars to explain his past before I made any decisions. I would regret this action later, but now was all I had. All anyone really had.

  I leaned forward and kissed him hard. My teeth clacked against his, and I tasted blood, but I did not care. I wanted to forget everything else.

  He curled his hands around my shoulders. “No, Spatz.” He pulled back from me. “I won’t. Not like that.”

  Face hot with shame, I fumbled at the door handle. I could not get out of the lorry fast enough.

  He kept hold of my shoulders. “Stay. Please.”

  I dropped my hands into my lap, head down so he could not see my face.

  He took my head between his hands and drew me close. “It’s me, Lars. And you, Hannah. No one else is here.”

  He tried to banish Paul’s ghost. I doubted that he could, but I nodded. I closed my eyes. I saw Paul’s face.

  “Look at me,” Lars said softly.

  I looked into his face and saw the expression that Fräulein Ivona had recognized from across the train station.

  “Please?” He traced my lips with his fingertip.

  I kissed him then, gently and for a long time, until I wanted to be filled, not emptied. When his lips finally peeled off mine, I had forgotten everything outside the lorry. Steam coated the windows, and he was half naked.

  “I surrender,” he whispered.

  I kissed him. “Looks more like an advance than a retreat.”

  He kissed my throat. “One touch of your skin and every single resolution disappears.”

  I arched my neck back. “What resolutions?” I asked breathlessly.

  His fingers undid the front of my dress. I had no idea what had happened to my coat, but I did not worry about it. I was far from cold.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered. “Time for resolutions then.”

  I resolved only to enjoy this moment. I had waited years to be with him again.

  I caressed his scarred back, and moved my hands lower.

  Lars moaned. “Spatz.”

  I smiled into his shoulder.

  He removed the last bit of clothing between us.

  Much later, we fell asleep in a jumble of coats on the lorry’s leather bench seat.

  19

  I woke with a start, seeing Paul’s empty shirt in my dreams. Lars’s arms were tight around me. I could scarcely believe that I lay next to him again, our bodies pressed close together on the small seat. I inhaled mingled scents of leather, cigarettes, oils, and metal tools. I moved my cheek off his chest to look at him. Golden light from the overhead lamp softened the years on his face and rendered the scar on his eyebrow invisible.

  He opened his eyes and smiled lazily. “Hello, Frau Schmidt.”

  The last time he had said that was when I woke up in his arms for the first time. Back then, I had not called him Herr Schmidt, not ready for the intimacy of a marriage in real life instead of on counterfeit papers. Things were much more complicated now, yet I surprised myself. “Hello yourself, Herr Schmidt.”

  He tightened his arms. I held him close. For a long time neither of us spoke.

  He caressed one palm down the length of my back and I shivered. “How did you sleep?”

  In answer, I only smiled.

  He rolled over onto his side and faced me. Our legs intertwined on the narrow lorry seat. “Where does that leave us now?”

  The warm feelings evaporated as I thought about our future. “Tell me about Russia.”

  “It’s not a happy story,” he said. “Shouldn’t we tell only happy stories in bed?”

  “I want us to tell only true stories,” I said. “And those are not always happy.”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “I’ve told no one. That has worked so far. Why do you want to know?”

  “Why do you not want to tell me?”

  He studied my face for a long time before speaking. “I will tell you once. But only once.”

  “I will take notes.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “I’d rather you forget it, as soon as I tell you.”

  I waited, not certain what to say.

  He reached up and switched off the lorry’s light. I felt him turn onto his back. I stayed on my side pressed tight against him. “I was arrested almost immediately. At first I thought that your SS friend had missed my name on some list, and that I was arrested for being Lars Lang and my work with the British.”

  Perhaps my SS friend, Wilhelm, had been wrong. “That was not the reason? Are you certain?”

  “Fairly, yes.” Irritation sounded in his voice. “I was quite good at my former job, you may recall. I know how interrogations work. The first interrogators were not particularly skilled and made their intentions perfectly clear.”

  I covered him with his coat. The lorry felt colder now.

  “They started with simple physical violence, the kind that can kill the suspect before you get any real information. Careless work.” He glided his hand along the coat, making sure that I was covered, too. “Of course, I was barely healed from our encounter with Hahn when I arrived.”

  I winced. That, too, had been my fault.

  “Spatz,” he said gently. “It was my own fault I was caught.”

  He put one arm around me and kept the other behind his head. I suddenly wanted him to stop talking. I did not want to send him back into the Russian prison, but if I stopped him, I might never hear what had happened, and despite what he said, he needed to tell someone, and I needed to know. “Go on.”

  “They would not have started with that kind of violence if they thought I had anything valuable to tell them, so I decided that the best way to stay alive was to wait out the first round. I stuck to my story of being a German businessman investigating the industry in Saratova.”

  “How long?”

  He settled my head against his chest. I suspected that he did not want me to see his face, even in the darkness. “It’s tough to say precisely. I’d say no more than a week.”

  In the Gestapo warehouse, the interrogators had broken his nose and two ribs in less than a minute. “A week?”

  “There’s a cycle to it,” he explained. “They didn’t expect to get information of value out of me, so they were more perfunctory.”

  Perfunctory?
I thought of the scars on his back and flattened my palm over his heart.

  “Once they finished, they dumped me in the general prison population. I figured they would either let me rot there, or things would get more interesting.”

  He did not speak for several seconds, and I kept my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. When it had slowed, I said, “Did they get more interesting?”

  “Oh yes.” He took a shuddering breath. “They did.”

  “How?”

  “First, they sent in a physician to stitch me up and set my various broken bones.”

  Which bones? I wanted to ask, but I stayed quiet. As lightly as he talked, his heart raced under my ear. I slid my leg across his and held him.

  “That showed that they suddenly thought I was of value. You never want your interrogator to believe that you have any value, unless it’s so much value that they will release you immediately. Clearly that was not the case.”

  I stayed silent. He lay still. Together we waited until he got his breathing under control. “After that, as expected, they sent in a team more skilled in extracting information.”

  I hated to ask the question. “What did they do?”

  “Let’s just say that I quickly came to miss the simple beatings.”

  All the time that I had been mourning his death, he had been being tortured. “I am so sorry, Lars.”

  “It was over a year ago,” he said. “I am quite recovered.”

  His entire body was taut next to mine, and his breaths came rapid and shallow. I stroked my hand in a circle on his chest and, slowly, his breathing eased.

  “Once they started using more … finesse, I realized that I was in the second stage of the cycle. I had hoped that would never happen, of course.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I prepared a second cover story. I decided that enough time had passed for me to have reached a breaking point, and I told them that I had been sent by Hahn to do an undercover investigation of Project Zephyr.”

  “But he did not send you. Hahn was already dead.”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “Yes, Spatz. I knew that, even though I was not sure of many things by that point. But since I had arrived in Russia little more than a week after his death, the assumption might be that he had given me the order, I had prepared myself, and left. Hahn, of course, could not gainsay it.”