by Anika Scott
“Yeah, I know,” he said, “I look like the morning after a pub brawl. It’s all right. I’m harmless. Seems like you’ve gone a few rounds in the ring yourself. If a man did that, you got my permission to knife the coward in the back. You getting married?”
She had forgotten the dress over her arm and folded it back into the box. “God, no.” She added the box to the rest of Elisa’s things on the lawn. “Who are you?”
“Jakob Relling. Pleased to meet you.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Can I rest here a minute? Haven’t come a long way, but well, yeah, you saw the leg. My back is killing me, let me tell you.” Before she could protest, he eased himself down on the toilet in the yard. “Better. This is practical. I like it. You happen to know where Elisabeth Sieland’s house is?”
He spoke with the extra consonants and easy familiarity of a working-class man, probably a coal miner. She wasn’t quite sure why she came to that conclusion. The war and his missing leg would have taken him out of the pits. But then she noticed a smear of black on the hem of his coat that could have been coal dust, and more shadows that looked like smears he had done a bad job of washing out.
“You know Elisa?” she asked.
“I’d like to know her.” He lit a cigarette. “I’d like to know you too, liebling. What’s your name?”
“Fräulein Müller.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
She didn’t want to smile at such cheap flattery, but she did anyway. “You’re laying on the charm rather thickly, don’t you think? What do you want, Herr Relling?”
“I’m naturally charming, fräulein, and I want to pay a visit to Elisabeth Sieland.”
“Her house is right behind you.”
He swiveled, surveyed the destruction. “Did the cellar make it?”
“Yes, but it’s fourteen steps down.”
He flashed a grin that lit up his whole mangled face. “Could you do a fellow a favor? Go down for me and see if she’s there? Tell her I got good news for her.”
“She’s not here at the moment. Give me the news and I’ll be sure to pass it on.”
“That’s a nice idea, and I’d do it if I could, but this is something I have to talk to her about myself.”
“Ooh, a secret.”
“Jealous?” His grin again. It was contagious, though she knew he was manipulating her, or trying to, in the harmless, boyish way her brothers once did, especially Friedrich. When he strode into a restaurant—in a suit, dinner jacket, uniform, didn’t matter—women twice his age would twist in their seats to get a look at him. And he knew it, smiling when he met someone’s eye, gracious about the admiration and asking for it too.
Jakob Relling was gazing at her with bright interest. She tucked her hair behind her ear and tried to think of something to say. “Where did you fight, Herr Relling?” She hadn’t wanted to ask that, such a stupid, unpleasant question. The war was on her mind far too much.
“I was in Russia mostly.” Something flickered behind the charm. “You happen to know when Frau Sieland is coming back?”
“I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me why you’re looking for her.”
“I just need her help with something.”
“You said you had good news for her.”
“That too. Come on, liebling.” He fanned a half-dozen cigarettes at her. “I thought we’d manage to do this friendly, but I’ll pay for help if I have to.”
The idea of bribery shamed her. She was never the type of woman whose goodwill needed to be begged for or bought. After Elisa had told her that a worker had injured her hand in the stamping plant, Clara had immediately ordered her own doctor to treat her, and for the girl to be brought to her afterward to do lighter work at headquarters. That was how she had met Galina, how she had learned in Galina’s broken German about their home far away in the Ukraine, and about the friends she had in Clara’s factories.
She took the cigarettes Jakob was offering her and tucked them back into his coat pocket. He smelled of shaving soap. He’d cleaned himself up for Elisa. Why?
“She hasn’t been back here since the war.” She told him about the aftermath of the March 11 bombardment, and the glow dropped from his face.
“Gestapo, eh? You sure they let her go?”
“Yes.” Doubt pricked her nerves, one small jab after another, all the way up her spine. “No—I mean, I’m almost certain it had something to do with her work. Something routine. She had to deal with them now and then.”
“In the end, they could pull you in for forgetting to raise your arm, you know.”
“She did everything that was expected of her.” She gazed at him steadily, daring him to question her version of Elisa as a law-abiding citizen. An idea was growing slowly in her mind. She wanted to trust him, maybe because he felt familiar. She had worked with men like him at the family collieries. Local miners complained about everything, but were usually honest, upright, straight-talking men. She had never felt uncomfortable or threatened in a group of them, though Max had told her they were different once they went to the showers or the changing room, that as they plucked their street clothes from the baskets that hung from the ceiling, they traded theories about what she was like under her tailored suits. She hadn’t minded that they talked in that way about her. She minded more that Max could hear about it without punching someone.
She wondered if Jakob Relling had ever worked for her family, if she could appeal to the same sentiment and loyalties as with the Bergers. But it was too soon to ask, too risky. If she wanted him on her side, she would have to make it worth his while.
“Maybe we could help each other, Herr Relling.”
“I’d like that. I’d like that very much, liebling.”
She doubted he would once he knew what she was thinking. She backed into it gently. “You are a black marketeer, am I right?”
“I never said that. Did I say that?”
“Sometimes I can read between the lines, especially when a man knows the cash value of a lady’s dress. Tell me, what was your favorite deal?”
He blew a stream of white smoke at the sky. “It was the old egg racket. A classic. First, you need chickens. I organized mine from a farm in the Bergisches Land. Best chickens you could ever have. Averaged two eggs a day. Me and my family ate four eggs a week. That left ten to trade. Know what you get on the market for that?”
“Ten marks an egg?”
“Fifteen. At a hundred and fifty marks a week, I didn’t have to work. I was a full-time chicken farmer.”
“Was? What happened to them?”
“Somebody broke into the cellar and stole them.”
She couldn’t deny it. She loved the chicken story. True or not, it showed Jakob Relling had an inventive and enterprising mind. “I assume you know people in your line of work,” she said. “A lot of different people.”
“Sure.”
“Do you know any policemen?”
“I avoid that kind of people.”
“Ex-policemen, maybe? Ex-Gestapo?”
He snorted and puffed with amusement on his cigarette.
“I’d like you to find a policeman who was there when Elisa was detained,” she said. “I need someone willing to talk to me.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not?”
“You have to ask me that?” He lowered his voice. “You think some fellow is going to raise his hand and say: Yes, it was me, I was Gestapo and arrested your friend in the war, let’s talk?”
“You’d have to convince him.”
“Oh, yeah, I would. And I thought you were sure they released her.”
With a shiver, Clara remembered the times she’d had to enter the Gestapohaus on Kortumstrasse, an office that seemed like any other: desks, files, a map on the wall. She had known what went on there, however. Everyone knew. She had finally gone herself to complain about the treatment of factory workers who had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. She knew the line she walked when she raised her v
oice just a little—they should not think her a hysterical woman—borrowing its icy edge from her mother, who was a master at it. Clara had made it clear to those men that she was a Falkenberg. That they had no right to mishandle her people. Each time she did her best to hide how she trembled and sweated in her suit. They could smell fear. But now and then, she succeeded in getting workers released from custody. If she hadn’t fled the city, she could have done the same for Elisa.
“I want to be absolutely certain what happened to her. Maybe it’ll give me a clue as to where she is now.”
“You’re asking the impossible, fräulein. Forget it.” With a groan, Jakob hefted himself onto his crutch.
“Herr Relling, wait.” She entwined her arm in his. “I was wondering how much a one-carat diamond is worth on the markets.”
It was a shot in the dark, but she saw it connect with him, the curiosity—greed, maybe?—sparking on his face.
“A carat gets you fifteen thousand marks in Munich. Maybe fifty in Berlin.”
“And in Essen?” She took off her glove, and Jakob drew in a breath at the sight of her grandmother’s diamond, those facets sparkling under the gray sky. “It’s yours if you can get me what I asked. And if I find Elisa first, I’ll let her know you want to talk to her. What do you think?”
Jakob had lost all of the glowing charm he’d worn when he first started talking to her. It had made way for something deeper and sharper. Calculations were ticking along in his head. She could almost see him selling the diamond, or trading it for something else he could sell for more profit, and on and on until he got the one thing that he really, truly wanted. Whatever that was. She didn’t care. As long as he thought he was going to get it by helping her.
Her hand ached with cold, but she didn’t put on her glove. She had to keep the incentive out in the open.
Finally, he closed her hand in his. “Have I seen you somewhere before, liebling?”
She pulled away. They had been standing too close and it was her fault. To distract him from her face, she went back to the box with the wedding dress. “Take this as down payment. Elisa won’t mind. I’m surprised she kept it.”
“I couldn’t take that. Wouldn’t be right.” He said it as if her offer was indecent, as if he was having second thoughts about her, the diamond, their deal. But then he said, “Meet me a week from today at twenty-one hundred at the South Sea Club in Rüttenscheid. It’s in a warehouse off the rail lines near the freight depot. You can’t miss it.”
“I’ll be there.” She stuck out her hand to shake. Like a gentleman, he bent over her fingers and kissed the diamond. As she watched him hopping away, she wondered what he had seen in her face—and if the ring was enough to make him forget.
Wood
The first thing Willy did was unwind the screws and dump them into the cup he’d labeled screws with ink he’d made from coal dust and spit. Without the screws, the leather straps came right off the wooden leg. He’d found it outside in a bramble at the bottom of the cliff. He assumed whoever had robbed Jakob Relling had cut the straps, and they’d been out in the wet cold ever since. Willy wasn’t sure what was best. Repair or replace. He set the straps aside.
Next he turned his attention to the wood. He ran his hand over the foot, feeling a little wrong, a little disgusted at removing the damp and moldy sock and the brace that held it up. The brace was all right but the sock needed washing. He set that aside as well.
Naked, so to speak, the wood looked like a real leg, at least until it reached the knee. Willy spent a long time examining the mechanism of springs that made up the joint. Somebody had really thought this through, somebody with a mechanical mind. Thankfully, the joint was still intact. Just needed a little oil.
The upper part of the leg interested him even more because of its strange shape, like a long narrow bucket. In a book, he’d once read about pirates smuggling things in their peg legs. Now he saw how that could happen.
Willy took a clean cloth and began to polish the prosthesis, starting at the toes—strange how they were stuck together—and down around the foot where he was ticklish, and up the ankle and the calf and over the joint to the upper leg. This was where Jakob Relling’s flesh and bone fit into the wood. Obviously, losing his leg in battle had made Corporal Relling bitter and defeatist and more than a little delusional. It was disgusting, the lies people told, especially the ones they told him, as if he couldn’t see the truth. There were traitors everywhere, on the streets, in the shops, even in his own home.
The war is over, Corporal Relling had said.
The war is lost.
Go home.
At home, Willy would lay on his bunk in the cellar, and late in the night, Mama would tiptoe down the stairs and quietly open the door. He tried to keep his breathing deep and regular as she leaned over him to be sure he wasn’t awake. He shouldn’t know she’d been out. There were so many things she hadn’t wanted him to know.
Willy scrubbed the wood harder. He was going to get every bit of dirt out of the cracks. This wood was going to shine.
10
Fräulein.” One of Frau Berger’s girls had thrown open the cellar door and was calling down to Clara, panting. She had taken over guard duty from Herr Berger, and had been watching for police or the British in the street. “They’re coming.”
Clara had been warming herself by the oven, fretting about whether she had done the right thing in enlisting Jakob Relling’s help. She rushed for her backpack stowed under the bed. In the cellar, she was trapped. “How far away are they?”
“At the entrance to Sophienhof. They’re clearing the rubble we put in the street.”
That had been Herr Berger’s idea, and Clara was now hugely grateful for the precaution: anything to slow Captain Fenshaw. She said quick good-byes to everyone, no ceremony, no handshakes, and pounded after the girl up the stairs. “Thank you,” she called down to the family.
Herr Berger waved. “Go, fräulein. They’ll be here any minute.”
Outside, dusk was closing in under a white sky that hadn’t seen the sun since she returned to Sophienhof three days ago. The street was empty, but she thought she heard the sound of idling engines, the shouts of men. The girl darted across Elisa’s old vegetable patch, leading Clara onto a footpath through overgrown gardens flanked by the rubble of bombed houses. They crossed Sophienhof along secret routes carved out by local children and emerged on a street of abandoned shops. Clara tucked a can of ham into the girl’s hands as thanks.
Feeling shaken, Clara gasped for air, her hip aching again, and then began to walk, forcing herself to slow her pace. She should look like the people around her, moving slowly, weighed down by the packs on their backs or the bags over their arms containing valuables to exchange for food or something else they desperately needed. Knowing that she would feel safer in a crowd, she joined a group of people examining bits of paper on the wall of a shuttered house. Christmas gifts for the whole family, someone had written on a banner. The papers advertized what people wished to trade—a set of dishes, a grandmother’s kitchen cupboard—and what they wanted—a baby pram, a pair of men’s shoes, a camera. Clara pretended to read, glancing now and then over her shoulder. The wind was sharp against her cheeks, and she felt her nose starting to run in the cold. She didn’t want to sleep in the ruins again if she could avoid it.
She had six days until Jakob Relling would be ready for her. In the meantime . . . She started as a black car turned at the end of the block. It slowed as the children who played in the street moved out of its way. Clara saw the British soldiers inside, and felt sick. As they rolled past, they glanced at the crowd, and several men around her saluted. The car continued on.
She waited, taking deep breaths, then set off again, feeling the pull of her family home, Falkenhorst, where it would be warm and safe, for a while at least. She didn’t know if her mother was still there, or if she would even help her. Could she trust her mother to stand by her—finally?
Clara didn�
�t see that she had much choice but to shelter at Falkenhorst and take her chances with Anne. She needed to be off the streets, to wash, to eat. And there was the possibility that her mother might know where Elisa was.
On the way, she passed burned-out houses that seemed on the point of collapse. A reconstruction crew, all women, passed stones from one to the other down a hill of debris. At the corner, an old woman sold chestnuts she was roasting in a dented pan over a fire she’d built on the pavement. Not far away, a girl of about ten squatted on a doorstep brushing the shoes of anyone who could pay her a chip of coal or a bit of bread. On the shutter of a shop was a poster of Christmas trees and angels the shopkeeper might have painted himself. Clara was glad to see such signs, even if small, of life and resilience. She had seen it in the worst of circumstances. During the war, one of Galina’s friends had carved a little wooden box for Clara, and nailed a piece of tin to the lid in the shape of a daisy. She had kept it on her desk, another reminder, like the caricature from Punch, of what she was in the eyes of others.
As she approached Falkenhorst, the streets grew quiet and empty. She entered the estate from the back, pausing to listen for an engine, footsteps, whispers, any sign of Fenshaw or his men. A low wall was the only thing that signaled the line between the city and her family’s grounds. It was hardly a barrier to keep anyone out, more a symbol of otherness. She lifted one leg over it, and then the other, and faced the trees of the family forest. No one had cut them down for firewood. That was the magic of this border, a sign people still respected the boundaries of Falkenhorst.
It had never been a thick forest, and since smog no longer penetrated from the nearby iron works, she could see deep into the trees. She took a meandering route, preparing herself for what she was about to confront—Falkenhorst intact or destroyed, or some state in between. By the end of the war, it had become a kind of haunted place where the artwork and family valuables were in storage, the furniture draped with sheets. Once the power lines were destroyed, her mother rattled about alone in the halls by candlelight with an old servant to see to her needs. By then Clara rarely went home. She preferred to sleep at the Works headquarters or in the bunker. They were better than Falkenhorst with her mother and the ghosts.