The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  Jakob was watching her, and she remembered he’d asked her a question. “Who am I? Damned if I know.”

  “Come on. You walk like there’s a vase on your head. You dance like a dream. I bet you can talk circles around everybody in this place. Except me.”

  She humored him, spinning the tale of Margarete Müller as she had with Dr. Blum and Frau Hermann. She was the simple secretary who’d lost everything in the war. Jakob looked mildly skeptical so she embroidered, adding parents who had ambitions for her, raising her for poise and all that, but what good did it do to walk like a queen when the ground was crumbling under your feet, courtesy of Allied bombers? She played the universal sport of blaming the war for everything; it was the safest excuse there was for anything he might feel was odd about her.

  “Do me a favor, will you, liebling? Could you bring me the magazine in that drawer over there?”

  She was handing it to him when she noticed the title. The NS-Frauen-Warte, the rag her mother had ordered to be displayed in the foyer at Falkenhorst when she expected visitors from the Party. On the cover, a woman climbed out of an armored Mercedes, her chin turned up, as if the taking of the picture was an unwelcome interruption of more important things. The Iron Fräulein. Clara felt a gap of distance and time opening up in her mind as she looked at that face as if it wasn’t her own. It was like seeing an old friend who had once betrayed her.

  Carefully, she said, “If you want to read a ladies’ magazine, Herr Relling, try Die Frau.”

  “You’re on the cover of that too, are you?”

  For a moment, she couldn’t find the right words. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s you.”

  She forced a little laugh—not convincing, she knew—scooped up the last bit of butter sauce from her plate, and sucked it from her fingers. “This has happened to me before, you know. It’s a mistake, Herr Relling. A resemblance.”

  “In the war, a fellow had a portrait of you up on the wall. In Russia. Back then I spent a few weeks falling asleep looking at that girl. It was the kind of thing that kept me going. I know it’s you. I know those eyes of yours. Eyes don’t change.”

  Her resistance crumbled, just as it had with the Bergers in Elisa’s cellar. Jakob knew who she was. He knew, and it was as if he had stepped closer to her in the knowing. She wasn’t alone anymore.

  In the mirrors on the walls, she saw her pale cheeks and slumped shoulders, and with a flush of embarrassment—he knew her, and she looked like this?—she sat up straighter, chin up. “Who have you told? The policeman—”

  “He doesn’t know. I haven’t told anyone.”

  “The British would pay a lot for this information. How do I know I can trust you?”

  “I guess you can’t.”

  The disappointment drove her to stand up, look for her coat.

  “Come on, liebling. I meant you can’t know you can trust me, you just have to do it. Take a leap of faith.”

  “You’re a black marketeer, not a priest.”

  “I’m on your side. I want to help you.”

  “Why? Because my father sent you to school?”

  “He saw I had a head on my shoulders and he saw I could be more than what I was born to be. That’s worth something. You could say I owe him.”

  It wasn’t enough. She was hugging her coat, wanting more from him.

  “Do you respect oaths, Herr Relling?”

  “God, no, I was in the army.”

  “I’m not asking you to swear to the führer and the fatherland. I need to know I can trust you. There must be something you’d take an oath on.”

  “What’s the point? We’re all out for ourselves. Alliances are temporary. They last only as long as we got a mutual advantage. No sense in taking oaths we’re not going to keep in the long run.”

  “You just said you owe my father.”

  “Same as saying I owe him a thousand marks. It’s not honor. It’s business.”

  She understood now. “You’re hoping to call in a favor someday if you help me. You want my family in your debt.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” By the look on his face, he honestly didn’t understand why she was upset.

  “You talked about mutual advantage.” She sat on the opposite end of the sofa, a gaping space between them. “What’s in all this for me?”

  “Glad you’re back to talking sense, fräulein. I got you the information you need tonight. That’s a start. I can help you find your friend. More important, I can help keep you on your feet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re thinner than you were last week. That dress and the makeup can’t hide that. You haven’t been sleeping either. You need more than powder to hide those circles under your eyes. You been living rough. In the ruins.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your shoes. No offense, but they’re filthy. I grew up poor, and we clean our shoes. It’s a matter of pride. If you don’t even have the means to do that, things are really bad. I’m not sure about my house, but I can find you somewhere safe to live. I can even feed you.” He paused, and she sensed him holding back some excitement. “Not so much now, but things are going to get a lot better soon. It’s winter. You aren’t going to survive on your own.” He took her hand. “Let me help you.”

  For a man like him, it was a lot to offer. The skin of his hands was hot, and his breaths were shallow. She wanted to keep being a part of whatever was moving him so deeply. But there was still the question of trust.

  “Did anyone in your family survive?” she asked.

  “Two kid sisters. Gabi is thirteen, Dorrit is seventeen. She’s got a baby on the way. Hope it’s a boy. Need to balance things out at home.”

  Right then and there, he had her. Jakob Relling was a man who took responsibility for his family. That trumped everything else he was, or might be.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m going to trust you. Please don’t disappoint me.”

  “I won’t, liebling. I promise. Promises are better than oaths. A promise is just between you and me. No flags or führers needed.” He held up the magazine. “Should I get rid of this?”

  She’d never read the article. It was something her mother had cooked up, Clara as the face of the last-ditch effort. She skimmed the pictures, landing on one of her and her father, their heads together in his office. It was from earlier in the war, before her brothers fell. Her father still had a full head of hair. A couple of years later, he had called her into his office, and his hair was so thin, the scalp glowed under the strands. As he talked, he had looked out of the open space that used to be his office window, shattered in the last bombardment. “I’ve been called to Berlin permanently. You will direct the Works here. All of it. The mines, the plants, logistics, contracts, labor. Can you do it?”

  There was something in her father’s voice she’d never heard from him before, not with her. Doubt. It was unbearable he should doubt her.

  “Of course, Papa.” And then she said the words that had burdened her ever since. “I’ll never let you down.”

  She closed the magazine. “Let’s burn it.”

  Water

  Nighttime, and Willy was squatting by the river filling the ten-liter jug. He’d rolled up the arms of his coat and thrust his hands under the water and held them there as the jug bubbled and blubbered, filling up. He wanted it done fast. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, it was the air. It felt as though something was coming, a hard, sharp wind that stung his ears and made his nose drip.

  He dragged the jug out of the flow and then dried his hands on his coat. They felt stiff, and the wind made them worse. It hurt when he bent his fingers. It was like the drills in winter. Boys lined up outdoors, at attention. He was just a Pimpf, a measly little kid, back then, and the group leader had it in for him.

  All together, they had to chant in the cold: Boys of the Jungvolk are hard, silent, and true. Boys of the Jungvolk are comrades. The highest virtue of Jungvolk boy
s is honor.

  Over and over again, shouting it into the freezing mist around them while his toes went numb and then the tip of his nose and then everything else. He’d had a sore throat and a cough and he couldn’t shout like the others. The group leader didn’t like that at all. He stopped in front of Willy and screamed at him.

  “A soldier doesn’t cough!”

  Willy had tried to swallow the tickling in his throat, but he was shaking, his nose blocked. The longer he tried to shout, the more he lost his voice until the group leader motioned for everybody else to be quiet.

  “Listen to him,” he said with a smirk.

  Willy chanted as best he could, but he sounded like a croaking frog. The group leader laughed, and that was the signal for the other boys to laugh too.

  They were always laughing at him. Pointing at him. Willy is small. Willy is weak. Willy is a mama’s boy—because he liked to go to the shops with her and carry her packages and stand in the lines alongside her. Sometimes she had things on her mind and seemed to barely know he was there. But sometimes she chatted with him and asked his opinion about what she should cook. Sometimes she smiled at him in a warm, easy way. It was worth hours at the hair salon or the grocer’s for the chance that she would smile at him like that.

  When he got home from the drill, she had wrapped him in blankets and sat him by the stove and fixed him tea and soup. He didn’t tell her what had happened but she seemed to sense it. She kept running her fingers through his hair, the warm tips along his skull. She was there beside him, asking him what he needed, but she kept looking at her watch, and again, worriedly, at the clock on the wall. Because she had to go out. Just for a while. “Will you be all right, little one?”

  She shouldn’t have called him that. What did she think he was? A boy? A snot-nosed child?

  He wanted her to stay. He wanted her to go, to leave him alone, because she didn’t understand a thing about him. When she did go, he hated her for leaving. What was she doing that was so much more important than him?

  Willy slapped himself now, a dull pressure on his jaw.

  He was outside, at night, down by the river. He turned up his face, and the lightest, coldest flake landed on his cheek. The wind whistled around the cliffs and battered his coat, and the snowflakes were racing around him. He hauled the strap of the water jug over his shoulder and scrambled up the slope, back to the mine.

  16

  Clara ripped the magazine a page at a time, enjoying the tearing sound, taking it slowly. Jakob lit the scraps. He juggled them between his hands, lit one torn page, touched it to another, and there it went, her old life up in smoke. The fire consumed her blond hairdo and the fake smile. It crawled over her old desk and the files and reports and the papers she’d signed. All that work. The vows, the duty, the sacrifice, the anguish, the feeble attempts to help. It all came to nothing.

  She carefully swept the ashes with the edge of her palm into a decorative bowl, dipped her handkerchief into her wine, and then scrubbed the last of the gray smudges off her hands. Jakob had lit another cigarette in the last flames and now he relaxed with it, an arm stretched along the sofa back. His hand was so close to her shoulder, if he wriggled his fingers, she’d feel the tickle.

  “Now,” he said, “you can tell me what the hell I’ve got myself into. Why were you all beaten up when I first saw you? Why are you living in the ruins?”

  She told him about Captain Fenshaw, his mission to hunt down war criminals, his disturbing sense of poetic justice. Jakob surprised her by flicking away the butt of his cigarette in the arrogant way the Allied soldiers did. “I like this, liebling. I get to piss on a Brit? Love it.”

  “What about the risk?”

  “Remember I said my sister’s pregnant? I never did get my hands on the Tommy that did that and then ran off, the cowardly son of a bitch. Your captain is going to have to stand in for him.” He was rubbing the thigh of his amputated leg. She didn’t think he knew.

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re looking for Elisa? Jakob?”

  He was still somewhere else in his head, and she touched his leg to bring him back. His attention snapped to her, and she snatched her hand away, kicking herself inside. She shouldn’t have touched him there. She’d gone too far. Offended him, maybe. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “It just means I get to touch your leg too. Fair is fair.”

  He held up his hand for her inspection, and then placed it snugly on her knee. “Very nice.”

  She put her hand on his so he wouldn’t get the idea he could work his way up her thigh. “I barely know you. I only met you last week.”

  “That’s what’s so amazing about life. Think what great things are going to happen tomorrow.”

  “You’re the last living optimist.”

  “I have to be. The alternative is no fun at all.”

  The girl in the grass skirt looked in and said his visitor was here. Jakob removed his hand from Clara’s leg, and she was sorry about that. She felt a surge of anxiety and needed his support. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “His name is Peter Konstantin. He was criminal police at the end of the war. He knows what happened to your friend.”

  “Did he already tell you?”

  “Fräulein.”

  The way he said it, the gentle preparation for bad news, rattled her. All she wanted, all she was hoping for, was a hint as to where Elisa had gone in the last weeks of the war. That information might lead her to where she and Willy lived now, if they’d survived at all. “What did he say?”

  “It’s a little . . . complicated. Let him tell it, all right?”

  Needing to move, she circled the sofa and faced the door as it opened. The policeman ducked inside and then paused to admire himself in the mirrored walls, turning his bulk this way and that with a look of deep satisfaction. His fur hat had shed crystals of snow as it brushed the lintel. He didn’t remove the hat during the introductions and handshakes, and when he threw himself into the armchair, the fur flaps batted his shoulders like bear’s paws. His nose had been broken at least once and healed off-center. She kept wanting to follow the tip to his left eye.

  “You’re a policeman?” she asked.

  “Used to be. I got fired for doing my job in the war.”

  Jakob passed Konstantin a cigarette in an easy fashion, as though they’d done it before. Of course they had to have met, but their familiarity unnerved her.

  “What did Herr Relling offer you to come talk to me?” she asked.

  “Free drinks and a girl wearing coconuts.” Konstantin said it to Jakob, and Jakob glanced up at Clara, and she knew there was something he hadn’t told her. She would learn it soon enough.

  “You were Gestapo?” she asked.

  Konstantin held up a thick finger. “Kripo. Criminal police. We had to do the legwork for those Gestapo shits often enough.”

  “Weren’t you the same in the end? Police is police.”

  “Says you. Not all of us saw it that way. You think we liked being drafted for Gestapo duties? As if we didn’t have enough to do.”

  “Weren’t you on the front in ’45?”

  “Had my fill of that earlier in the war.” He took a savage puff from his cigarette. “What’s all this? You think I’m some fellow off the street come to lie to you?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “Best thing for a woman is to not think. Hurts the old brain.” He tapped his hat. She cringed, hoping he was bald under there or had lice or some horrific skin disease.

  She sat on the sofa and took a breath. “Elisabeth Sieland.”

  “Yeah. Brown curls, freckles, big blue eyes. Arrested eleventh of March 1945 after the bombardments.”

  “Herr Relling told you that.”

  “Jogged my memory, yeah, but I remember her. We always made arrests after the bombs dropped. Had a lot of plundering, mostly the eastern workers, POWs, some Germans too.”

  “She wasn’t plundering. Her house was burning down
.”

  “That’s why I remember her. Back then I thought: Why the devil are we called out to Sophienhof in a firestorm to arrest some bird in her own house when we got people thieving all over the city? But orders are orders.”

  “Who ordered it?”

  “No idea. We just made the arrest, all right? Went in, got her, took her for questioning.”

  “About what?”

  Jakob shifted in his seat, watching her with a hint of anxiety. Konstantin was taking his time, torturing her as he pinched out his cigarette and tucked it into his pocket. He brushed the ash from his fingers. “Rassenschande.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I wasn’t the investigator on the case, but I heard they got her for fucking a Russian.”

  She grasped the arm of the sofa, ready to get up, face him, tell him exactly what she thought of his lies. But her legs wouldn’t do it. The shock made her breathless. She didn’t believe a word he said. Did not. In the war, Elisa inspected the barracks and camps of the Russian civilians for her. Sometimes she would go at night to slip food, soap, and other small but precious goods to the workers. Not once did Clara see a hint of inappropriate behavior. Max, her eyes and ears at the Works, hadn’t seen a thing, hadn’t heard a whisper. He would have told her, without a doubt.

  “Who accused her of such a thing? Somebody must have.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t on the case. The usual way it went, we get a tip, or they’re seen with their pants down, whatever. We pull in the happy couple. We do the interrogation, get a confession, and we pass the case over to the Gestapo. They dealt with the Russians.” Konstantin crooked his neck and yanked at the invisible rope over his head.