Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke

by Anne Blankman

  Every time Daniel had gone to the Post office, he had risked a beating, for Party storm troopers sometimes loitered outside, waiting for a chance to attack him and the other reporters. Despite the danger, Daniel had loved the work: He had believed that he was doing something important.

  Now he wrote about high society folks’ clothes and balls and romances. It was a decent job, for it paid enough that he could afford a room in a lodging house in town, and he never went hungry.

  He hated it.

  “The job is an excellent starting point,” Alfred said quickly. Gretchen’s hands uncurled in her lap. Thank goodness for Alfred; he always knew what to say. “Just you wait, Daniel—it won’t be long before you prove yourself and all the best editors in England are clamoring to hire you.”

  Daniel’s laugh was forced. “Thanks, Dr. Whitestone. You’re very kind.”

  Then Jack started begging Daniel to tell him pirate stories, as he always did, and soon everyone was laughing at Daniel’s tale about Captain Jack sailing the seas, searching for buried treasure. Before Gretchen knew it, they’d eaten the roast beef, creamed potatoes, and peas and were sitting in the parlor, having cake while she opened presents.

  She smiled over the hair ribbons and hand-drawn pictures from the boys and the bottle of perfume from Mary. She got a string of pearls, her first grown-up jewelry, from Alfred and Julia, and a German edition of her favorite book, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, from Daniel. He must have scoured the cramped bookshops on High Street to find it. She ran her hands over its leather cover, marveling at its softness, while the metal grille in the fireplace glowed red-hot. Faintly, she heard the telephone ring from the front hall.

  “Do you like it?” Daniel nodded at the book. “I remembered how sad you were that you had to leave your copy behind in Munich.”

  How had he remembered something so trivial? “I love it,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s perfect.”

  He leaned closer. “Did you see what Winston Churchill said in today’s paper about the debate at Oxford University?”

  She didn’t follow British politics as keenly as Daniel did, and it took her a moment to remember who Churchill was. He’d been a prominent politician during the Great War, but these days, he was a writer and a benchwarmer in the House of Commons, a position so inconsequential that he no longer had any say in policy decisions. The only reason she knew that much was because Daniel had to write about him for the society pages whenever he visited his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, at nearby Blenheim Palace.

  “The debate?” she asked, dredging through her memories. On the other side of the room, the boys had clustered around the coffee table, begging Julia for another slice of cake, and Alfred was asking Mary about school. “Do you mean that talk at the university a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Yes, when the students debated whether or not Englishmen have a responsibility to fight if there’s ever another world war.” Daniel fished a newspaper clipping out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Look what Churchill said about it.”

  She read the smudged newsprint:

  Mr. Churchill recently spoke at a meeting of the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union, saying, “My thoughts fasten on Germany, where the rumors about Jewish persecution and possible pogroms have grown louder since Mr. Hitler slunk into office last month. I understand the Nazis better than most in England, for I was recently in Munich, where the Nazis tried to bring about a meeting between me and their leader. Hitler wants war. And we ignore him at our peril.”

  It had happened at last, what Daniel had wanted for so long and despaired of ever hearing: an English politician had spoken scathingly about Germany’s new chancellor. When she and Daniel had first arrived in England, they’d been certain someone influential would listen to their warnings about Hitler. On his days off, Daniel had taken the train to London and loitered outside the Houses of Parliament. As soon as the politicians ambled out, he dashed after them, saying he had important information that would gravely affect their foreign relation policies.

  A few of the men had stopped, listening with polite smiles, then thanked Daniel and advised him to write to his local MP instead. Most of them hadn’t broken stride. It had taken Daniel months to accept the truth: Nobody wanted to listen. They were too desperate to hold onto this fragile peace. Too worn down by the years of want and economic depression and hungry bellies. They would placate Hitler for the promise of quiet lives, full stomachs, steady jobs.

  She looked up to find Daniel watching her. “Finally,” he said, “someone in England understands how dangerous Hitler is.”

  “At last,” Gretchen said with relief, then paused, biting her lip. “But everyone says he’s a has-been. What difference can he possibly make?”

  “I don’t know. We could go to his house in Kent—that’s not so far away—and tell him what we know about Hitler.” Daniel’s face lit up at the thought.

  Gretchen’s heart sank. She had hoped that Daniel had finally accepted that English politicians weren’t interested in listening to them. Even if Mr. Churchill was willing to meet with them, he couldn’t have Hitler removed from his chancellorship post. The best thing she and Daniel could do for themselves was move on.

  “Can’t we forget about Hitler just for tonight?” Gretchen said.

  Daniel’s face fell. “Of course.” He took the clipping back, pasting on a smile. “You deserve to be happy, especially on your birthday.”

  Cook appeared at the door. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Whitestone.” The words squeezed out between each rapid breath. “Mr. Cohen’s landlady just rang.” Her gaze skittered to Daniel. “She said she would have gotten word to you sooner, sir, but you were out of the office all afternoon on an assignment.”

  Daniel had been crumpling up the discarded wrapping paper. His left hand convulsed around the ball of red gift wrap, a sure sign that the damaged nerves beneath his skin were turning to fire. “Why does she need to talk to me? What’s happened?”

  Gretchen went still.

  “You received a telegram, sir,” Cook said. Her hands fluttered around her sides. “Your landlady wouldn’t have thought anything of it except . . . Well, sir, it’s a foreign telegram.” She hesitated. “It’s from Germany.”

  A hush fell over the parlor. Daniel jumped up. His face had gone sheet-white. “What did it say?”

  His voice was so hoarse, Gretchen scarcely recognized it. She understood his concern: Telegrams were expensive, and his family would only have paid for one if they had needed to get in touch with Daniel immediately. There was no one else in Germany who knew where he lived. Something important must have happened.

  Nerves twisted in Gretchen’s stomach as she rose. Cook said, “Mr. Cohen, your landlady didn’t want to read your mail. I’m afraid I’ve told you all I know.”

  Gretchen took Daniel’s good hand in hers, but he didn’t seem to notice, turning instead to Alfred and saying shakily, “Please, can you take me back now? I need to see the telegram straightaway.” He didn’t wait for Alfred’s response, glancing around the room, his eyes unfocused. “I apologize for breaking up the party.”

  “You must go at once,” Gretchen said. “Shall I come with you?”

  “No. Stay, enjoy the party.” When he leaned forward to press his mouth to her cheek, his touch felt so light she might have imagined it. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he murmured in her ear. “Maybe it’s good news. Perhaps one of my sisters is getting married.”

  Somehow she managed to pull her lips into a smile. “Maybe,” she agreed. “Tell me as soon as you can.”

  He nodded and squeezed her hand. The flurry of leave-taking began: Cook fetching Daniel’s and Mary’s coats, everyone shaking hands and saying farewell, the little boys bouncing around like tops from too much cake and excitement. Then Daniel, Mary, and Alfred were gone, the front door creaking shut behind them. Gretchen stood in the parlor, listening to her guardian’s car rumble to life in the lane alongside the house, its tires crunching over the
gravel drive as it took Daniel away.

  That night, alone in her bedroom, she rested her head on the door. The smooth coolness of the wood was soothing. From down the hall, she heard the boys going to bed: the splash of water in a basin, the rustle of sheets being turned back, the low murmur of Julia’s voice as she read them a story.

  Downstairs, Cook hummed as she scrubbed the supper dishes, and a sudden burst of static, followed by classical music, sounded from the parlor. Alfred must be listening to the wireless. When he’d returned from dropping off Daniel and Mary half an hour ago, she’d been waiting for him, desperate for news. But he’d shaken his head, saying Daniel had preferred to go to his room and read the telegram by himself. Surely he’d get in touch with her tomorrow.

  Gretchen had nodded, her throat tightening. What could have happened? Was his family all right? She knew he missed them terribly. Sometimes he said that he felt as though he had no family anywhere, with his parents and sisters hundreds of miles away in Berlin. She understood how he felt: She had no real family left, either, except for her mother, since her father and brother, Reinhard, had been killed. With seventeen months of silence between her and Mama, she supposed they might as well be dead to each other, too.

  She looked around her bedroom. It seemed the same, untouched by her nerves. Safe. She loved the feather bed covered by a flowered duvet, the simple maple wardrobe, the walls papered with pink roses, the cheap reproduction prints of all the artists Hitler despised: Klee, Kandinsky, and Picasso, the colors bright, the shapes surreal. They reminded her of a drawing she’d made in her primary school’s art class. When she’d shown it to Hitler, he’d sighed, saying, Whoever paints the sky green and the grass blue is feebleminded. She’d burst into tears and thrown it into the kitchen stove.

  Well, he didn’t make her decisions anymore. She slipped her revolver out of her schoolbag and put it in the cardboard box on top of the wardrobe, where it was too high for the maid to dust.

  It was a pity she couldn’t practice shooting, but she couldn’t risk her guardians finding out that she’d secretly bought the gun last summer with the pin money she’d made watching a neighbor’s children. They would never understand why she needed it. To her, owning a revolver was as necessary as air. When she’d been growing up in Hitler’s inner circle, she’d never met a Party man who didn’t carry a knife or a pistol. Uncle Dolf himself was one of the best marksmen in Munich and he had taught her how to shoot when she was small.

  Her heart started to pound. But instead of sliding to the floor and covering her face with her hands, as she used to do, she stared at herself in the mirror and said the words that she forced herself to say every night. “Adolf Hitler killed Papa.”

  Saying them didn’t change anything; Hitler had still gotten away with murdering her father nine years ago. All because Papa had known that Uncle Dolf had been diagnosed as a psychopath—a diagnosis that Gretchen doubted her father had believed—when they’d recovered at the same military hospital during the Great War. Hitler had been terrified that the information would destroy his burgeoning political career.

  And so he’d shot Papa during a street fight between the National Socialists and the state police, gambling that no one would notice in the confusion. As usual, he’d been lucky. It wasn’t until two summers ago, when Gretchen had met Daniel and they had investigated her father’s death, that she’d realized the man she’d adored for years was a criminal.

  Now she bit her lip to keep the tears at bay. Saying the truth didn’t change what had happened. But every time she said the words to herself, she felt stronger.

  Since the last time she had seen Hitler, he had lost the presidential election, but the National Socialists had continued to surge in the polls, and last month President Hindenburg had appointed Hitler to the chancellorship, the second highest position in the country and his due as head of the largest political party in Germany. He was powerful now, more powerful than in the years she’d known him, except in one crucial way: He didn’t own her anymore.

  She changed into her nightdress and snapped off the lamp, plunging the room into a blackness broken only by the slivers of moonlight showing through the curtain. Whatever news had been in Daniel’s telegram, she prayed it had nothing to do with the nightmares of their past.

  3

  DANIEL STILL HADN’T TELEPHONED BY THE TIME Gretchen left for school the next morning, and some of the tension melted from her shoulders. If the news had been dire, he would have told her. Everything must be all right.

  When the dismissal bell rang, she slowly put her books in her schoolbag, wishing she didn’t have to leave. Here she always felt normal, surrounded by the simple majesty of science, the smooth logic of mathematics, the precision of Latin. Every question had an answer. Unlike the questions that tormented her about her old life.

  As she wove between the girls in the corridor, she caught snatches of their conversations—tonight’s assignment on The Merchant of Venice, the French teacher’s too-tight blouse, the sixth-form girl who’d been caught in a pub with a university undergraduate—but the words brushed against her like butterflies’ wings, soft and barely felt. If only she could giggle and chatter as easily as the other girls. Sometimes forcing a laugh or a lighthearted comment required more energy than she could manage. She wasn’t like her classmates, and she never would be.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself as reached the front hall. In a few months, she would graduate and enroll at a university, so she could become a psychoanalyst. More than anything else, she wanted to heal diseased minds. She hadn’t been able to help or change her brother—the whole family had been trapped in the twisting tunnels of Reinhard’s brain, afraid to risk angering him—but she could save others. After seeing the patients at Alfred’s clinic, she now understood that many mentally ill people weren’t violent, unlike her brother. But surely there were more like him, cold and sadistic, who liked torturing family members for sport. She wanted to help them all.

  Outside the weak strains of February sunlight touched the bicycle she’d left leaning on the brick building. As she hopped astride, Mary appeared beside her, out of breath, her coat unbuttoned over her blue school uniform.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked.

  “I’m going to see if Daniel’s home,” Gretchen said. “If he has an evening assignment, he takes an hour or two off in the afternoon to spend with me.”

  A grin creased Mary’s round face. “Then I shan’t keep you. But I’ll want all the details tomorrow. Especially how you managed to keep such a gorgeous fellow under wraps for so long. We all knew you had a beau, but I’d no idea he was so splendid! Does he have any friends?”

  Gretchen smiled, thinking of the graduate students who lived in Daniel’s lodging house: hard-bitten, coffee- and gin-swilling young men who were far more interested in garnering top marks and landing high-paying jobs someday in the City than in the proper students at a girls’ school.

  “Yes, but they’re not what you’d call your cup of tea.”

  “Lucky you, then, for catching such a delicious drink.” Mary paused. “Is he ill? Because of his arm, I mean.” She flushed as Gretchen looked at her. “It’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help noticing.”

  “He’s fine,” Gretchen said quickly. There was no way she could tell Mary the truth—that some National Socialists had beaten Daniel right before they’d fled from Munich. Going to a hospital would have been only a temporary reprieve before Hitler’s men found them. By the time they’d reached Switzerland, Daniel had insisted he was much better and they should reserve their dwindling money for false identification papers, not doctors’ fees. The whole time his bruised muscles had swelled, pressing against the skin until the cells died, leaving his arm hanging uselessly by his side. Then the muscles had slowly atrophied, contracting until his arm was little more than blood and bone.

  “Oh, so he’ll be getting better, then.” Mary brightened. “That’s a relief!”

  “The nerve
damage is permanent, I’m afraid,” Gretchen said. Now that she was finally talking about the matter with someone else, the story rushed out. “Alfred took him to a specialist in London last summer. The doctor said Daniel’s lucky to have any use of his arm at all. Some days, his arm feels numb. Other times, it feels as though it’s been set on fire. The pain will come and go for the rest of his life.”

  “How dreadful!” Mary put a hand to her mouth. “He must be very brave, to cope with such an awful injury.”

  “He’s the bravest person I know.” Gretchen leaned across the bicycle handlebars to squeeze Mary’s hand. She wished they could whisper and giggle about Daniel like ordinary school chums, lying on the rug in Mary’s room, flipping through magazines, half listening to the wireless, talking about boys and whatever came into their heads. Just as she and her old best friend, Eva, used to do.

  A lump rose in her throat. She and Eva were lost to each other now, as they must be, and no amount of crying or praying would change that. Swallowing hard, she released Mary’s hand.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Mary smiled uncertainly. “Are you all right? You look sad.”

  Forcing a smile, Gretchen nodded. She was as all right as she ever could be. After bidding Mary good-bye, she pedaled down the narrow street lined with a jumble of stone and stucco buildings, past a couple of housewives pushing prams and some university undergraduates wearing their required long black robes. Overhead, clouds choked the sky, gilding the shop windows and the black automobiles crawling down the avenue with silver.

  Daniel lived in a narrow, three-story house on Iffley Road. Gretchen left her bicycle leaning against the front steps and rang the bell. After a moment, the door opened and Daniel’s landlady, a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and green sweater set, peered out at her. She didn’t smile, as she usually did.