Daniel’s hand tightened on Gretchen’s. His expression was calm, but the way his fingers grasped hers told her how furious and helpless he must feel. He looked at her, a muscle clenching in his jaw, and she tried to smile, hoping he realized what she was trying to tell him: She didn’t believe the lies anymore. He smiled faintly back.
When the speech ended, Hitler strode out while the music was still playing, his old trick to avoid his supporters who might want to haggle over points he’d made. Gretchen’s heart pounded when he approached her row, but again, he didn’t look at her, only straight ahead. It was his custom, Gretchen knew, his way of disconnecting slightly from his audience, so he could seem above them. But what if he happened to glance her way? He would recognize her, she knew it. The hair dye and cosmetics wouldn’t fool him.
He was coming closer, so near she could see flakes of dandruff dusting his shoulders, white flecks on brown. Her heart surged into her throat. Don’t look, don’t look, she begged. She tried to tear her gaze away, but she couldn’t keep herself from staring at him. Even now, she felt herself as drawn to him as a moth to an open flame. There was something impossibly mesmerizing about him—something glittering and powerful, a lightning strike that dazzled the eyes long after it had sizzled into nothingness.
He was only a few feet away now. Her arm, raised in the salute, shook from the effort of holding it aloft. Soon he would see her. He must.
But he passed her row, his eyes still focused in the distance. She sagged in relief, letting her arm fall, her fingers curling around the back of the chair in front of her for balance. Around her, the audience broke into little clumps, talking about those wretched Communists. Daniel placed his hand on the small of her back, jolting her. She followed him and Birgit to the exit. It took all of her self-control not to push people out of the way and race from the hall.
They caught an omnibus at the corner. It was crowded, and Daniel insisted that Gretchen and Birgit take a seat together while he sat at the only other empty spot, among a cluster of drunkards singing “Mack the Knife.”
“So he’s your ‘sort-of’ beau?” Birgit nodded at where Daniel sat at the back of the bus. “What’s sort-of about it? He’s rather gorgeous. You ought to lay claim to him before someone else does.”
Heat rushed into Gretchen’s cheeks. “It’s not that simple. There’s no way we can stay together and have everything we need to be happy.”
Birgit rolled her eyes. “Of course you can’t have everything. Why the devil did you think you could?”
Gretchen opened her mouth to reply, then shut it in surprise. Was Birgit right? Was it impossible for any one person to have each of the pieces she needed to make her existence whole? She and Daniel had already sacrificed so much for each other’s sake. How could she give up the Whitestones, the first proper family she’d ever had, or Daniel, his cherished career, and not watch their love warp into loneliness and anger? Tears pricked the backs of her eyes. It was impossible.
“I’ll give you some advice, though Lord knows you probably won’t want it.” Birgit settled back in the seat, all the merriment gone from her face. “I grew up very poor—there were seven of us in a one-room apartment. I left school as soon as I could, four years ago when I was fourteen. I wanted to help support my family, so I’ve done—well, you know what I’ve done.”
Her usual confident manner was gone, her voice soft and hesitant. “Monika was a lot like me. She came from a rich family in the Charlottenburg district, but she’d left home when she was quite young, too.” The corner of her mouth pulled up, a flicker of a smile. “She wanted to be an actress, you see, and her parents thought that was beneath her. So she supported herself however she could while she went on auditions. I don’t think she ever landed a role. She got so discouraged. That’s when she turned to cocaine. I—I need it, too. To help me forget what I have to do at night.”
She pulled a handkerchief from her purse, but her eyes remained dry. Gretchen shifted uncomfortably. “Birgit, you don’t need to tell me any of this, if you don’t want to—”
“I want to so you can understand,” Birgit interrupted fiercely. “You have something beautiful with him and you’re ready to throw it away because it isn’t easy. I saw how he looked when you said you wanted to go to the Sportpalast with him. As though he’d been punched in the stomach. As though he’d do everything in his power to protect you.”
In her lap, she twisted the handkerchief into a rope. “Monika would have done anything to have a man look at her that way. Lord knows she tried to find a man who loved her so deeply.” She let out a shuddering breath. “But he had her killed instead. And I . . . I’ll never find a decent boy who can overlook what I have to do.”
Gretchen couldn’t help thinking of Geli and Eva. Had they, too, been desperate to find a man who loved them? Was that why Eva had carved herself down into someone Gretchen barely recognized?
Slowly, she became aware of Birgit’s stare. She didn’t know what to say to her. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I had no idea how difficult your lives were. And I do love Daniel. So much that I’m willing to give him up, if that’s what it takes for him to find a place where he can be happy. If he goes back with me, he won’t be able to find work and he’ll be miserable,” she added in a low voice. “I can’t bear to have him abandon his career for me. I’d rather be without him than cause him any unhappiness.”
“Oh.” Birgit let out a heavy sigh. “That’s true love, then, what you have. And I’m the one who’s sorry.”
She rested her arm over Gretchen’s shoulders, drawing her closer. They sat in the jostling bus, their heads touching, just as Gretchen and Eva used to do when they were little and sharing secrets. Gretchen closed her eyes and let a few tears slide out from under her lids. It was too much—the possibility of losing Daniel, seeing Hitler again, reliving the old memories of Eva and her family.
Tears wouldn’t change anything. She opened her eyes. Through the window, she watched the Tiergarten rise up. The massive park seemed frozen under a layer of snow. Little lamps flickered among the trees like dozens of fireflies, the tiny gold orbs reflecting off the snow so the ground glittered. Figures walked the pathways, moving from the shadows into the light from the lanterns and back again. They reminded Gretchen of the trapped souls in Dante’s Inferno, never fully in the dawn or the dark but caught somewhere in between. Like Hitler. She shivered and looked away. He wasn’t here. But she could have sworn she heard the low cadence of his voice and smelled his scent of toothpaste and sugar.
Back at the hideout, Daniel was jubilant. “That fellow Weiss walked right into my trap!” he told Friedrich, who had stopped by in between rounds of some of the nightclubs under his protection. “He said they were looking for Fräulein Junge’s diary, but didn’t find it.”
Friedrich tapped his fingers together thoughtfully. “Which means it’s still out there somewhere. And we’d better find it first. I can’t imagine where she would have kept it, if it wasn’t in her lockbox. We’ll see what I can pry out of Göring at the ball tomorrow night.” He thumped Daniel on the shoulder. “Excellent work, Herr Cohen. You and your girl should get some rest. Tomorrow night will be a long one.”
Grinning, Daniel took Gretchen’s hand and they walked to the bedroom they shared. Behind them, Gretchen heard the front door open and close; Friedrich was gone, and the only other occupant of the darkened apartment was tonight’s Ringverein guard. The place was so quiet, she could imagine that she and Daniel were alone.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “After seeing Hitler?”
She tried to nod, but tears filled her eyes instead. “He looks the same,” she burst out. “After what he did to Papa and Reinhard—he should feel something! I used to think he felt emotions so keenly. When I was little, I remember how he’d become so angry or depressed, sometimes for days at a stretch. But now he seems to go on and on and on without feeling a thing.” She took a shuddering breath, swiping at her eyes with the back of her han
d. “He ruined my family, and he doesn’t care.”
Daniel wrapped his good arm around her. “No, he doesn’t. I’m so sorry, Gretchen.”
She pressed her face into his neck, her body shaking with sobs.
“Oh, Gretchen.” Daniel sounded desperate. “Please don’t cry. I can bear anything except your tears.”
He held her closer and kissed her cheek. Her heart started hammering. She had missed this—the feel of his mouth on hers, the sense that they were sharing a breath. Without thinking, she reached up just as he bent down and their lips met. The room seemed to fall away, and the thunder of Hitler’s voice in the stadium; the tight ache in her throat; the tinkle of glass as SA men smashed shop windows; the swastika banners snapping in the breeze; and police wagons rumbling over the cobblestones in Munich. All she felt was the heat of his mouth and his hands, rubbing up and down her arms.
She kissed him back, on the mouth, the soft skin of his temple, the curve of his neck, until the tension had melted from her body and all of her muscles felt as warm and liquid-smooth as honey. Through her blouse, his hand caressed her back with his fingertips, his touch sending shivers down to her toes.
“My Gretchen,” he murmured, his lips a breath away from hers.
His voice snapped Gretchen back to the present. She pulled away from him. Daniel’s eyes flew open. The moonlight painted his cheeks with silver, showing the surprise on his face. “What’s wrong?”
“I—I can’t kiss you. Not when things feel so uncertain between us.” She looked away from his stricken expression, biting her lip so she had a different pain to concentrate on.
He embraced her, pressing his cheek against hers. “We’ll figure things out,” he said into her hair. “I promise.”
“How?” she said. “There are no solutions for us.”
“I don’t know.” There was such sadness in his voice that tears rose to her eyes again. “I just don’t know.”
She stood in his arms, listening to his heart beat in rhythm with hers, a steady thump as regular as clockwork. Wishing she knew if she had the rest of her life to hear that reassuring sound or only days, if they proved his innocence and parted forever. Wondering if tomorrow night’s gangsters’ ball would bring them closer to the answers they sought—and push them further apart.
The next night, they took a taxi across the Spree to the Hotel Adlon, where the Ring’s annual ball was being held. They spoke little, and what they said was formal and polite, the conversation of acquaintances. Fatigue had left the inside of Gretchen’s mind as gray and sluggish as a puddle of rainwater. Several times during the night, she had woken with a hammering heart, trying to hold on to the lingering wisps of her dreams. Hitler’s voice, low and laughing, and the taste of sugar on her tongue were all that remained. As she had burrowed under the blankets again, she wondered why she felt as though she was forgetting something.
Now, as she sat beside Daniel in the taxi, he looked tense, his fingers tapping on his thigh. Five days, Gretchen thought. That was all that remained until the Enabling Act was brought to a vote before the Reichstag. They were running out of time.
As they alighted on the sidewalk, Gretchen caught their images in the cab’s back window. They were almost unrecognizable, even to her eyes. Members of the Ringverein had lent them clothes for the evening. Daniel wore a tuxedo, a white silk scarf around his neck, his slicked-back hair hidden by a top hat. Gretchen had rouged her cheeks and painted her lips red. With her short hair curling around her face, she looked like a flapper—so unlike the girl in childish braids that Hitler had known. Her gold column dress and black sequined wrap glittered in the glass before the taxi pulled away into the traffic streaming up and down Unter den Linden. It seemed like a dream that they had been driven down this street as prisoners of the Ringverein just seven nights ago. Today she’d even been given her revolver back—yet more proof that these Ringverein men were people of their word, and an uneasy trust existed among them. Gretchen carried the Webley in her black evening bag. Its weight was comforting.
“Ready?” Daniel asked.
“Yes,” Gretchen said, but nerves knotted her stomach. Together, she and Daniel crossed the pavement toward the massive hotel. They had been there once before, months ago, when they had met Herr Professor Forster, who had treated her father and Hitler at the end of the Great War and admitted that he had diagnosed Hitler as a psychopath.
The hotel looked different at night, its dozens of windows blazing with golden light. A long striped awning extended from its entrance to the street, to protect the beautifully dressed men and women slipping out of taxis and private automobiles. Elaborate lanterns on either side of the front doors illuminated the bronze plates beneath etched with the words “Hotel Adlon.”
They joined the guests filing inside. The lobby reminded her of the illustrations she’d seen of Bavarian palaces. The yellow marble pillars stretched to the ceiling high overhead. Everywhere dark and white marble gleamed, and porters in pale blue peaked caps whisked guests’ bags into the elevator.
She and Daniel followed the line of men in top hats and tails and women in evening dresses into the ballroom. At the entrance, she paused for an instant, dazzled by the spectacle. Chandelier lights threw glittering squares of gold across the room. Swing music cascaded from the orchestra’s bandstand, a quick, sinuous rhythm of brass and drums. At a glance, Gretchen guessed there were about two hundred people crammed into the ballroom. Couples spun around the dance floor, the ladies’ gowns blurring into a long smear of red and blue and silver, the men’s tuxedo tails swirling. For an instant, she wished she and Daniel could join them, dancing and laughing as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
Don’t, she told herself sharply. There was no sense in wanting things that couldn’t possibly happen. Her eyes squinted to see through the cigarette-laced air. Along the ballroom’s edges, a couple dozen Ringverein men and their girlfriends or wives stood, smoking, drinking, laughing so loudly that the sounds of their merriment cut through the music. Diamonds sparkled around the women’s necks, and the men’s hair gleamed with pomade. She recognized many of the fellows from the hideout, although they looked drastically different in their tuxedos.
Long tables, laden with silver platters of hors d’oeuvres, had been set up along the room’s perimeter. Gretchen had never seen such food—oysters in the shell, finger sandwiches, caviar, paper-thin crackers. It was hard to fathom that across the Spree there lived people who subsisted on horse meat and lung soup that cost a measly sixty pfennigs a bowl.
With Daniel’s hand on the small of her back, Gretchen wove between the guests, searching for Hermann Göring, but there was no sign of him. He’d accepted Friedrich’s invitation immediately, but perhaps he’d changed his mind about attending. She tried to ignore the ache of disappointment. He’ll be here, she promised herself. The lure of gourmet food and the social cachet of attending a gangsters’ ball would be too much for him to resist.
They sat at a table jammed against the wall. Daniel hadn’t used the hat check, as he wanted his things nearby in case they needed to leave suddenly, so he set his hat and walking stick on a chair. Gretchen laid her wrap over them.
“That’s him.” Daniel’s hand gripped her arm. “At the entrance.”
She peered between the dancing bodies. A hugely overweight man in a tuxedo stood by the doorway. Surprise stole her voice. There was no question it was Göring; even from this distance she recognized his icy eyes and fair hair glistening with brilliantine. But the face she’d remembered as long and aquiline had grown broad and florid. The once-trim figure was now buried in rolls of excess flesh. She’d heard he’d gained weight after he’d been shot in the putsch with her father, but she’d had no inkling he was so transformed.
As she watched, Friedrich ambled over to Göring. Though the music and raised voices made it impossible to hear what they said, she saw them shake hands and laugh. A National Socialist and a Ringverein man, sworn enemies, chuckling over a shared jo
ke. She shook her head in disbelief. Daniel had warned her that Berlin’s freewheeling atmosphere was another world from provincial Munich, but she hadn’t really understood until this moment.
“Let’s get closer so we can listen.” Daniel’s voice was a warm murmur in her ear. “Friedrich said he might want to duck away and ask you for advice on how to handle Göring.”
“Very well.”
They skirted the edges of the dance floor. A group of men, red-faced with drink, staggered into them. Gretchen lost her grip on Daniel’s hand. She spun to look for him, but all she saw was a line of girls about her age, blowing out rings of cigarette smoke or gulping champagne. One was chattering about the new trapeze act at the Wintergarten; another was whining that she only had three marks, not nearly enough for a packet of cocaine.
She tried to slither away from them, but they were packed so tightly together that there was no pathway to ease herself through. The girls’ elbows knocked into her back as they gestured, complaining that it was simply too ridiculous that you couldn’t buy cocaine for less than five marks these days. Gretchen turned, searching for Daniel, and found herself facing a National Socialist Party pin, a white circle rimmed with red and intersected by a black swastika, pinned to a jacket lapel. Her heart surged into her throat. Göring was the only National Socialist in attendance—the only person who would wear such a button. She let her eyes travel up to the man’s face and the blood in her veins cooled to ice. It was him.
Please, please don’t remember me, she begged silently. He smiled blandly at her. “What a pleasure to see a delicate flower among weeds. How do you do, Fräulein?”
“Very well.” She heard the words coming out of her mouth automatically. What would Alfred tell her to do? The image of Göring and Hitler sitting on her family’s threadbare sofa rushed back to her, Göring in a finely tailored suit he couldn’t possibly have been able to afford, Hitler in a worn blue suit and brown leather vest and shoes with a hole in the bottom. Appeal to his vanity, she thought, and somehow she pulled her lips into a smile she prayed looked natural. “I’m a great admirer of yours, Minister Göring.”
Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke Page 18