The cheap smells of horsemeat and stopped-up drains permeated the air. Gretchen skirted dirty-faced children playing jacks and families trudging to church services. A few men clustered on the corner, rags in their hands, a bucket of water at their feet, ready to leap forward and wash car windshields for a few groschen. A couple of rangy mutts skittered across the street, slipping on the icy cobblestones. Last night’s rains had washed away the snow, leaving the roads frozen.
Gretchen saw desperation in the men’s lined faces and the children’s thin cheeks and the dogs’ matted fur. Years of hunger and unemployment had ground everyone down to shadows. She doubted any of them cared who had set the Reichstag on fire or about politics in general; they were too concerned with finding the next mouthful of food, the next lump of coal, the next pfennig. Uncle Dolf had always said that was how the Jew prospered, like a weed in the heart. Growing when others were too burdened with their own survival to notice.
He had lied, Gretchen thought, rage sweeping over her. That was how he grew.
Number 19’s front door was unlocked, its lobby unlit. Friedrich took the stairs two at a time, his leather greatcoat flapping about his ankles, Gretchen and Daniel rushing after him. Four closed doors lined the third-floor corridor.
Friedrich knelt before the second door and inspected the lock. “It’s been broken into. See the scratches around the keyhole?” He rattled the knob. “Someone’s locked it again.” Without waiting for a response, he inserted a metal pick into the lock, jerking his wrist once. The tumblers clicked and the door swung open. Clearly he’d earned his position as the top Ringverein member—Gretchen had never seen a lock picked so fast.
Inside, the curtains had been drawn and the lamps left unlit, so walking into the parlor felt like walking into unbroken blackness. As Gretchen’s eyes made out the humped shadows of furniture, a horrible smell reared up. Something foul, like fruit gone rotten, magnified a thousand times. She fell back, struggling for fresh air.
“I know that stench.” Friedrich dashed through a door in the wall opposite, presumably into the kitchen or bedroom.
Daniel held out his arm, blocking Gretchen’s way. “Stay back. You won’t want to see this.”
Gretchen didn’t have to ask why. There was nothing else it could be: a body long dead. She breathed through her mouth, trying not to imagine the corpse beyond the door, bloated and disfigured by time.
Blinking, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. Friedrich staggered back into the room, holding a handkerchief over his mouth. Sweat had pearled on his forehead.
“It’s bad,” he gasped. “A man, lying in pajamas on the bed. I couldn’t tell any more than that—the body’s too badly damaged. I’ll go down to the lobby to telephone the police.”
Then they were too late. The fireman’s secrets about the blaze had died with him. Gretchen struggled to swallow down her disappointment. There had to be another way to find the information they needed.
Then Friedrich’s other words registered. She stared at him.
“The police?” Daniel asked. “Surely they’re among the last people we should contact?”
Friedrich wiped his handkerchief over his damp forehead. “I’ll speak to Superintendent Gennat, naturally.” Gretchen remembered the heavyset detective from the hoodlums’ court as Friedrich added, “We must be quick before any of the neighbors notice we’re in here. You two search the parlor while I telephone. Maybe you can find something to explain what happened to Schultz. You’d best keep your gloves on. Gennat will be sure to dust for fingerprints.”
The urgency in his voice told Gretchen there was no time to ask questions. She held her hand over her mouth, trying to block out the horrific odor.
Pale slivers of light shone through the curtains. Daniel moved to open them, but Friedrich said, “No. We must disturb things as little as possible. You’ll have to work in the dark.”
He hurried from the apartment. Gretchen rushed to the parlor table while Daniel looked through the writing desk. She yanked open drawers, riffling through the contents. Nothing except for a couple of issues of Vorwärts, the Social Democrat paper. So the fireman hadn’t been a National Socialist—the Party couldn’t have depended on his silence or loyalty, if he had discovered something incriminating.
The flash of glass on the wall caught her attention: a framed photograph, showing two young men, dark-haired, smiling and squinting into the sun, wearing firemen’s uniforms. Heinz Schultz, presumably, and a brother or cousin—the similarities in their faces were too pronounced for them to be anything except relatives.
“I’ve found a letter.” Daniel held up an envelope and a slip of paper. “Written to Heinz and Gunter, both of this address, from their mother.”
Brothers, then, and roommates. An idea occurred to Gretchen, and she slipped the photograph from its frame. Written on the back were the words, Gunter (left), and Heinz (right), at Linienstrasse fire station, October 1929. She studied the image. Gunter was at least six inches shorter than Heinz.
The door opened, and Friedrich came inside. “Gennat’s on his way. Find anything?”
Gretchen slid the photograph back into its frame and hung it on its nail on the wall. “Maybe. How tall was the body in the bedroom?”
“Short. Perhaps five three, at the most. Why?”
“It could have been Gunter, not Heinz.” Gretchen’s pulse jumped with excitement. “The men looked so alike, the killer could have made a mistake and murdered the wrong brother. Heinz might still be alive.”
“What’s this about brothers?” Friedrich stuffed his handkerchief into his pocket.
She started to explain, but he waved her off, saying they could talk outside in the clean air. They checked over the parlor, making sure they had left everything precisely as they had found it. The stench had grown so overpowering that Gretchen’s eyes watered.
In the corridor, Friedrich closed the door behind them. “No sense locking it as Gennat will be the next man to enter,” he said. “What else can you tell me?”
“It was quick,” Daniel said, and Gretchen nodded, thinking of the tidy parlor. “There was no evidence of a struggle, at least in the front room. So either the victim knew his killer and wasn’t afraid of him or it was the work of a professional.”
Tires squealed from the street.
“That must be Gennat now,” Friedrich said. He led Gretchen and Daniel into the street, where an enormous, dark six-seater Daimler sat at the curb. A patrolman in a blue cape was opening its trunk, and Superintendent Gennat stood on the sidewalk, surveying the apartment building. He had heavy pouches of skin under his eyes, perhaps a remnant of last night’s late festivities.
Friedrich leaned against the car, pulling a cigar from his coat pocket. “Before you ask, Gennat, no, the fireman had no dealings with my crew. We suspect his brother is the dead man.”
“Indeed?” Gennat raised his eyebrows. “And what were you doing in their apartment at what is for you the ungodly hour of nine o’clock?”
“Searching for answers,” Friedrich said smoothly. “The fireman might know about our Fräulein Junge’s murder. You’d best watch yourself, Superintendent, or I’ll be after your job.”
Gennat laughed as he rummaged through the car trunk. It was enormous and packed with all sorts of materials: bottles of chemicals, searchlights, cameras, tape measures, rolled-up maps, and dozens of tools from diamond cutters to pickaxes. As Gennat opened a small black leather bag, the sort doctors used for house calls, Gretchen glimpsed the silver flash of surgical instruments inside. She’d never seen such a bizarre assortment of things.
The detective must have sensed her interest, for he smiled at her. “This is the first crime car in the world, Fräulein. I designed it myself.”
“And the most famous car in Berlin.” Friedrich puffed his cigar, gray curls of smoke wreathing his face. “It’s called Gennat’s Toboggan.”
Gennat hefted his medical bag. “You’d best get moving, unless you fancy bein
g locked up.” Through the hum of traffic, Gretchen heard the far-off wail of a police siren. Her legs tensed, ready to run. She glanced at Daniel as he flipped up his coat collar to hide the lower half of his face.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
They walked fast, heads down, saying nothing. Behind her, she heard a police car screeching to a stop, then the low murmurs of Gennat’s and the patrolmen’s voices. Footsteps rang on the iced-over cobblestones, growing louder as they got closer.
She looked back. It was only Friedrich, hurrying to join them and pitching his half-finished cigar into the gutter. When he reached them, no one spoke. They kept moving, gazes trained on the grimy pavement, but she didn’t feel as though she breathed until they boarded the S-Bahn to carry them across the city, back into Moabit.
26
“SUPERINTENDENT GENNAT WILL LET ME KNOW the identity of the dead man as soon as he has it,” Friedrich said when they returned to the hideout. “But I think it’s already clear that he must be the fireman’s brother. I’m going to send several of my men to track down this Herr Schultz. Some will go to the fire station to pick up gossip from his colleagues, and the rest will go to bars near Schultz’s apartment. You’ll both need to stay here.”
Relief washed over Gretchen. After the horrors of the fireman’s apartment, she wanted nothing more than to stay inside the hideout. She didn’t know if she could have managed to go back outside, where she might bump into another National Socialist from the old days. The next one she met probably wouldn’t be as sympathetic as Herr Hanfstaengl. She shuddered, thinking of the dead body in the bedroom. She knew too well how they dealt with their enemies.
“Let me go with them,” Daniel said quickly. Gretchen clasped his wrist in warning, wishing he would be quiet. She didn’t want him to go. But he didn’t seem to notice her touch and said, “I’m experienced at ferreting out information from sources.”
“I know you are.” Friedrich paused at the door to the parlor, looking back at Gretchen and Daniel. She dropped his wrist. “But I want you to remain here for now. Fräulein Müller would attract too much attention—no Ringverein works with ladies. As for you, Herr Cohen, I’m afraid you’d never pass as one of my men.” He smiled slightly. “You’re a bit too well-spoken, aren’t you?”
“I can put on an act,” Daniel protested.
“I’ve made my decision,” Friedrich snapped. “I’ll have word sent to you once we have news. Take a nap. You couldn’t have had much sleep last night.”
Then he was gone, the door slamming behind him. Gretchen was suddenly aware of how quiet the hideout was. No voices from the other rooms, no footsteps or snap of cards on a table or dice rattling in a cup. She was alone with Daniel. And she had no idea what to say to him—or how to combat the desperate sadness she saw in his eyes when he looked at her.
“I’m going to get some rest.” She hurried to their room before he could say anything.
For a moment, she sat on the bed, staring at the floorboards with unseeing eyes. The stench of the dead body was still in her nostrils; with every breath she took, she inhaled more of the rotten meat smell. Her stomach roiled. Heaving, she forced her head between her knees, feeling the blood rush from her head.
Dimly, she heard a door open and close, then footsteps come toward her. Daniel. She recognized his quick tread. His hand touched her back. “Gretchen? Are you ill?”
“The body.” She couldn’t stop shivering. “I can still smell him. He must have been in there for days.” Her voice thickened. “Alone, with no one noticing or checking on him. Soon Superintendent Gennat will have him identified, and the police will contact his family. And shatter their lives.”
Her eyes stinging, she looked up at Daniel. “I know how they’ll feel. As though the world should stop rotating or the sun shining or the rain from coming down. When those things do happen, they won’t be able to believe it. Because they’ll think that the world should be different, now that their loved one has been killed. But the world won’t be different. They will.” Her voice cracked. “That’s how I felt after Papa died—was murdered,” she corrected herself. “I remember waking up the next morning and being so angry that the sun had risen just like always. It didn’t seem fair that life should go on if he wasn’t there anymore.”
Daniel sat down next to her. His eyes were steady on hers as he said, “That’s how I feel about you. As though the whole world would go dark without you in it. On the ride back from Herr Schultz’s apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking how I would feel if something happened to you. And how fragile life is. All the time it probably took to kill that man in the apartment was one second. An instant to pull a trigger and extinguish a life.”
She couldn’t breathe. What was he trying to say?
He moved close. She breathed him in until the stink of the dead body was gone, and all that was left was Daniel.
“I don’t want to live without you,” he said. “Life is so short and so precious, and I don’t want to waste another second of it wondering how you feel about me or what’s going to become of us. I love you. If anything happened to you, the world would stop for me. I would want it to stop because I can’t go on without you. Please, Gretchen.”
He looked so unlike his usual confident self, his face open and vulnerable, that she stared at him. Many times in the past he’d said he loved her. But never with such an aching intensity in his voice or pleading in his eyes. She realized that he was handing another piece of himself to her—a defenseless part he hadn’t let her see before.
“We can work everything out,” he said in a rush. “I’ll live in Oxford. I don’t mind. I can convince my editor to give me my old job back. Assuming we get out of here alive,” he added with a slight smile. Then he looked at her and it slipped away. “Gretchen, I can find a way to be happy,” he said quietly. “Even if I’m working as a society reporter again. But I can never find a way to be happy if I’m not with you.”
Something golden and warm spread through her chest and then down her arms and legs until all of her was tingling with it. He loved her. Despite everything that should have pulled them apart, he still loved her. And she loved him. Maybe that was all that needed to be true. They didn’t need to have the answers now. What mattered was whether they were willing to seek them out together. If she and Daniel somehow escaped from Germany, they could find a compromise. Even if it meant living apart for a few years while she stayed with the Whitestones and finished her schooling and he got a newspaper job elsewhere. She knew he would wait for her. And she would wait for him. As long as it took, she would wait for him.
She smiled. “I want to be with you, too, no matter what. We can figure out a compromise. I’ll always love the Whitestones, but even if I don’t live with them, I can still visit them. I need to be with you. Everything else—families and jobs and schooling—we’ll find a way to have them, too. It won’t be perfect, but I don’t care. All I know is that a life without you would be a half life. I love you, Daniel. Every part of you.”
As he smiled, his face softening with relief, she put her hands on his shoulders. Through his suit coat, she touched the corded muscles of his right shoulder, the boniness of his left. She blurted out the first thing that came into her head. “I love your scar.”
Daniel had been bending down to kiss her, but he jerked away, looking startled. “What?”
“Your scar,” she repeated. She ran her hand down his arm, feeling the raised ridge of puckered skin. “I know you hate it. But every time I think about it, it reminds me how brave you are. How you don’t give up. It makes me so proud of you.”
The muscles in his neck worked as he tried to swallow. “Really?”
“Really,” she said, and he caught her face between his hands and kissed her so hard on the mouth that her head spun. They drew back, grinning at each other. He lifted an eyebrow in the familiar gesture she liked so much. It usually meant a joke was coming.
But he surprised her by saying, “You’re th
e only one for me. The only one, Gretchen.”
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him close, half laughing and half crying at the relief of his touch as he kissed her again. She kissed him back until she couldn’t breathe. Could barely think except for one clear thought piercing her consciousness: Kissing Daniel felt exactly like coming home.
When Daniel pulled back, he rested his forehead on hers. The heat of his skin pulsed into hers, and she couldn’t stop smiling, savoring the sensation of her lips throbbing from their kisses.
“We’d better stop before we can’t,” Daniel said, sounding reluctant.
“Would that be so terrible?” Gretchen asked.
His laugh rang out as her cheeks went hot. “I certainly don’t think so. But . . . you’re special. You deserve more than a dingy room in a hideout.” He kissed her gently. “You deserve the best of everything. I wish I could give that to you.”
“You already have,” she told him, her heart pounding at her boldness. “You’re the best of everything.”
His smile was softer than she’d ever seen it. He kissed her on the mouth, on both of her cheeks, on the warm skin of her throat until all of her body was alive and thrumming from his touch. Grinning, he stretched himself out on the bed. Gretchen lay down beside him, resting her head on his chest and listening to his heart beat into her ear. It was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. He was alive and here with her. As long as that was true, she knew she could handle anything. She listened to the slow inhalation of his breath; felt the arm holding her turn to lead and fall onto the blanket.
She smiled and peeked at his face. Relaxed and quiet in sleep, so unlike the way he looked awake: his mouth moving quickly as though it struggled to keep up with the pace of his thoughts; his eyes often narrowed and focused. Wonderfully complex and imperfect and impatient and sarcastic. Her Daniel. Still smiling, she closed her eyes and slept at last.
Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke Page 21