The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  “Did you arrest a Russian that day?”

  “A cartload of them. Don’t know if any of them was the one giving it to the Sieland woman.” He snorted. “Good German men dying on the front, and here the women at home bent over for the lowest scum.”

  “There’s scum everywhere, Herr Konstantin.” She poured herself another drink. She’d lost track of the number and didn’t care. Who could have possibly hated Elisa enough to shop her to the police with such a lie? In the war, sleeping with an eastern worker was a blood crime. To the Nazis, it was treason. “I want to be clear about this. Your people interrogated her, not the Gestapo?”

  “Things were a little chaotic by the end, sweetheart. You wouldn’t believe the workload. We ignored the usual process and handed her over to them directly.”

  “Without talking to her?”

  “She wasn’t in a talking mood and neither were we. We drove her across the city and it was worse than a goddamn battlefield.”

  “What about her son, Willy? Where was he?”

  “Wouldn’t know. Never saw him.”

  “Nobody’s seen him. A boy can’t just vanish.” Clara looked to Jakob for sympathy, and was surprised when he turned away. In the mirrored wall, she saw him chewing an unlit cigarette. “Theoretically,” she said, trying to be factual to calm herself, “if Elisabeth Sieland was accused of a sex crime, what would have happened to her?”

  “Depends,” Konstantin said. “She’d have been in jail awhile till she was tried. Lucky for her the war ended a couple weeks later. She wouldn’t have had to sit long.”

  “What if she was convicted?”

  “Prison. KZ maybe.”

  She didn’t believe it, refused to imagine Elisa in a concentration camp. “The war was ending. There wasn’t time to transport her anywhere, was there?”

  “If they were in a hurry, they could’ve put a bullet in the back of her neck.”

  A block of ice dropped into her stomach. Jakob touched her arm, and it woke her, a comfort, a reminder that the worst might not have happened. “Do you have proof for anything you’ve told me?”

  “Sure, sweetheart, I carry around all the old Gestapo files,” Konstantin said.

  “Then how do I know you’re not lying to get your free drinks and your girl in coconuts? It’s an easy night’s work.”

  “So she does think I’m lying. That’s the thanks I get.”

  Jakob said, “Shut it, will you?” To Clara, “Liebling, if he told you what you wanted to hear, the story would sound a lot different. A lie would have explained things tidily and made you walk out of here happy. A lie would’ve been easier on all of us. But I thought you wanted the truth.”

  As if the truth was that easy to see or believe. “Is it possible Elisa was let go after questioning?”

  Konstantin examined his chapped knuckles. “Not too likely with that kind of accusation, but who knows? If she was nice to them, maybe they were nice to her. It was clear she wasn’t picky, eh?”

  “Thank you for coming, Herr Konstantin.”

  He grumbled at being dismissed, as he called it, but at least he left without her having to shake his hand. At the control panel, she turned up the volume on the speaker. In the ballroom, a man was mangling “Five Minutes More” as if he’d never heard of Sinatra, the English language, or the concept of being in love. A tiny doubt nagged at the back of Clara’s mind: Elisa years ago when they first met, pregnant and unmarried. She had thrown herself into an affair back then. Had it happened again? In her work, had she grown so deeply attached to one of the Russians that she had thrown caution to the wind to be with him without telling her best friend?

  She sat beside Jakob and wrenched the diamond off her finger. “You held up your end of the deal.”

  Instead of taking the ring, he cradled her hand in his, warm, gentle, and admired the ring pinched between her index finger and thumb. “A beautiful thing. Where’d you get it?”

  “It was my grandmother’s.” The longer he held her hand, the more it relaxed, a weight she didn’t have to carry herself. The effect spread through her, the soothing support of his body. She didn’t want him to let go.

  “We’ll think of some other payment,” he said, his look so intense, she felt herself blushing.

  “I’m afraid that I don’t use my body as currency, Herr Relling.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Come on. I’m Clara Falkenberg, the great fräulein and so on and so forth. In the war, you used to fall asleep gazing into my eyes. We’ve heard about my dear old friend and her supposed crime. What other payment did you have in mind?”

  “You don’t have to snap at me because you’re angry.”

  The singer finished, and the band started up a schmaltzy number with far too much muted trumpet. Through the speakers, she heard the dancers return to the floor, the scuff of their shoes, the rise of conversation. She was ashamed at how easily she felt attacked and offended, and she rested her hand lightly on Jakob’s sleeve.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to think about anything anymore. I guess it’s possible Elisa did this. Slept with a Russian. But why the risk? Did she think about the consequences for her son?”

  “You’re really worried about him. You know him well?”

  She picked at her skirt. “I did before the war, but after it started, there was so little time.” She’d ignored her own nephew. She hadn’t known what he was to her at the time, but the guilt stung her now. “Wherever Elisa is, so is he. Maybe she was in a Gestapo jail and then the Americans freed her. She would have tracked him down, and now they’re both . . . somewhere.” Even to her, this explanation sounded far-fetched. She was trying hard to stay hopeful, but nothing she’d found out so far was helping her.

  Jakob cupped his hand over his mouth and massaged it as if he was trying to keep something from slipping out. Then he turned the knob on the panel. Music flooded the room, so loud she had to lean close to hear what he said. “We talked about trust, remember? Can I trust you?”

  She tightened her hold on his arm. He was about to tell her something important, perhaps the reason he had been looking for Elisa too. She dreaded what it might be—another crack in the ground beneath her feet. “Of course you can. What is it?”

  The music suddenly cut off in a jangle of cymbals, shattering glass, pounding shoes. Someone shouted in English, “Over there, behind that curtain,” and someone else—she recognized the voice of her old friend, Reynolds—“She won’t be hiding under a table, you idiot.” Suddenly, quite close, as if he was leaning into the speaker, Captain Fenshaw said in German, “Line up in an orderly manner, ladies and gentlemen. Orderly.”

  “His timing is getting better,” she said. She didn’t know why that pleased her so much. In a detached way, she wondered if she was drunk.

  Jakob shoved her coat into her arms. “If that’s your English captain, he was called, and I bet I know who called him. Slapping Günther was a really, really bad idea. He’d sell out his grandma for a cigarette. But getting the Brits to raid his own club? That’s low.”

  “How could he possibly know to call Fenshaw?”

  “Wouldn’t cost him much to buy a few informants in the underworld. I wouldn’t trust a single one of the fellows around here in the dark.”

  “They can’t hear us, can they?” She adjusted the sound on the panel. The panic was gone, and there was only the hum of whispered conversation. Now and then, she could hear snatches of bad German as soldiers demanded papers.

  “Liebling, we need to go. Now.”

  “We’ve got a little time. Captain Fenshaw will tear apart the ballroom, the bars, and the ladies. I’m most likely to be in those. He thinks he knows me.” She was smiling, maybe at the foolish idea that one person could ever really know another.

  “Did you tell Günther you were looking for me? Because he sure as hell knows I’m here. And if they catch Konstantin, he’ll tell them where we are.”

  That cut through the
warm fog in her head. She pulled on her coat and stumbled against the furniture on her way out. Jakob checked the hallway, then led her to the door at the end. Beyond was a cold corridor lit by bare bulbs. It reminded her of the servants’ hall at Falkenhorst, the space behind the ovens that warmed the family’s rooms. The corridor went on and on. Jakob muttered to himself, counting the doors as they passed. On the other side of the wall, policemen and soldiers were giving orders. Don’t move. Block the doors. Papers at the ready, please. After a while, she didn’t hear them anymore, only the thump-tap of Jakob lurching on his crutch.

  Through a door into a dim hallway. “No light,” Jakob whispered, and pressed on to still another door. A bolt pulled back. Then complete darkness and stinging cold. The air smelled of grease and gasoline.

  “Got a flashlight?” he said.

  She fumbled it out of her coat. The light caught a wing, a wheel, moved across the hood of a car. Next to it, a flat wagon stood on a strip of rail track. “What is all this?”

  “Transport for the racketeers who run this place. Shine that light over here, will you?”

  It illuminated a box on the wall. He pawed through keys on little hooks, selected one, and led her to a small-wheeled contraption that looked like a shrunken armored vehicle. “Can you drive?”

  “This thing?”

  He pressed the key into her hand and hopped to the garage door. “Get her started.”

  “We could drive right into a police blockade.”

  “We’re on the other side of the warehouse. If there’s a blockade, hopefully it’s behind us.” Grunting, he bent for the door handle. “Hurry up, liebling. No headlights.”

  She started the engine, and it puttered like a small motorcycle. A car with that weak a motor couldn’t possibly move.

  Jakob hauled up the garage door. She looked out into the night with dismay. The street and buildings had vanished behind a curtain of snow.

  17

  The snow fell heavily onto the windshield and seeped into the cracks of the car—a tin can, Clara thought, that smelled of wet dog. The snow and their breaths condensed on the windows. The engine was better than she’d thought, though, and the tires had some traction. When she saw herself heading straight for a streetlamp, she jerked the wheel, and the car reacted, sketching a wide arc in the snow, one complete turn before straightening enough for her to regain control. Thankfully, there were no other cars on the road.

  “You’re doing fine, liebling.” Jakob rolled down his window. Snow pelted him as he leaned out to look behind them. “Nobody is following us.”

  “You’re sure?” She could see nothing through the frosted rear window, but imagined Fenshaw pursuing them in his vehicle.

  Jakob pulled himself back inside, closed the window, and then brushed the frozen crystals off his hair and clothes. “It’s dark behind us. I doubt even the Tommies are crazy enough to drive in this weather with their headlights off. We’re good, liebling. Keep her steady.”

  Her hands were sweating and her arms ached but at least she was thinking clearly despite all the alcohol in the club. She drove on instinct, concentrating on the tunnels of light her car cast in front of her. “I’ll get us to the Falkenberg Works,” she said. “We can wait out the storm in the camp I pitched in one of the abandoned factories.”

  “In this weather, we need four solid walls and a stove. We can go to my house.”

  “If Fenshaw finds out I met you, he might look for me there.”

  “He won’t look for you at the iron works?”

  “He already did and he didn’t find me.” She swiped her glove over the windshield. “There. That’s the main station.” She eased them over the Freiheit, the crossroads transformed into a wide field of snow. After a right turn, they passed snow-blown buildings and white mounds she took to be abandoned streetcars. She prayed that she and Jakob wouldn’t end up in a snowdrift, trapped. Their car might get them where they needed to go, but it would make a rotten shelter from the storm.

  Jakob helped her navigate, pointing out buildings he said he knew by shape alone even if they were nothing but dark lumps under the accumulating snow. He insisted it was possible to orient yourself in a storm like this by instinct. He’d done it often enough in Russia, hauling supplies air-dropped to their lines, dragging the sled through drifts up to his thighs, every bit of him bundled up except for the slits around his eyes. Even then, when he was blind from blowing snow, he made it. He made it every time.

  She sensed he was telling her this to make her feel better, and it did, against all logic. “Thank you,” she said. “For getting me out of that raid.”

  “For a minute there, I wasn’t sure you wanted out.”

  She kept her eyes on the road, what little she could see, but felt him looking at her in the dark. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean you and your English captain. I promised to help you, but I won’t be dragged into a game. You were teasing him, right? All night. You wanted him to show up.”

  It shocked her to hear it said so clearly, an idea that up until that moment had been a tiny voice in her mind. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Then why were you the woman everybody was supposed to remember? Slapping the doorman, flashing her diamond, dancing barefoot.”

  “I was just having some fun.”

  “A peculiar kind of fun if you ask me.” The angry flicks of a lighter, a brief flame on his cigarette. “I’m not playing along. I can’t afford jail right now.”

  She concentrated on the road, aware of him smoking, disgruntled, beside her in the dark. She’d thought they were friends, or at least heading in that direction. She didn’t want to lose him already. “May I call you Jakob?”

  He didn’t reply, and she chose to interpret that as consent. “Before the raid, you wanted to tell me something. What was it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It must’ve been important, Jakob. You said something about trust.”

  He blew out a stream of smoke, long and slow. “Yeah, I sure did.”

  They were chugging along a wide boulevard when the engine began to cough and gasp, unsettling noises she associated with ailing machines from her childhood, living things that her father had said could grow ill or fail if they were not cared for. Clara changed gear, and the whole car shuddered. Jakob thumped the fuel gauge and then sat back cursing.

  A few minutes later, the engine gave out with a disconcerting suddenness. They drifted, Clara working the brakes and steering them gently into a snowdrift. She recognized nothing outside the windows; all she could see was the driving snow and the white bulk of the ruins all around. “Stay here. I’ll go and see where we are.”

  “Fräulein, wait—”

  The wind nearly blew her back into the car. She stabilized, pushed against it, angry now at the storm, one more thing in her life trying to knock her off her feet. She wasn’t going to stand for it, not tonight. She trudged one slow step at a time toward the rear, her feet sinking in the snow up to her ankles, until she reached the trunk. There was no miraculous can of gas inside, but she did find a blanket and a flashlight without batteries. She wrapped the blanket around herself, tucked the flashlight down her coat, and struggled through the snow to a junction. Someone had planted a sign on a post with arrows pointing in all directions. They were in English, and directed the Allies toward the collieries and factories in the area. She recognized the names, knew them all, and cried out in triumph when she saw Falkenberg Iron Works, 1km.

  She threw herself back into the driver’s seat. “We’re a kilometer from the Works. We can walk it.”

  “No we can’t.”

  “I have supplies. We can make a fire, and—”

  “This storm is going to get worse before it gets better. I can smell it. A kilometer is too far.”

  “We have to try.” Their breaths were clouding. “We can’t stay here. We’ll freeze to death.”

  “And how fast do you think that’s going to happen out there? Listen to
me. In the war, I had to live for weeks, months, in weather like this. Worse than this. You want to know what the cold can do to you? I’m not talking about frostbite. I’m talking about your body shutting down so gently you don’t even notice. You cool till your muscles and joints don’t work, and you’re drifting in your head. Sleeping, dreaming, gone. You’re like a corpse. But you’re still alive, you know? Alive, but your heart slows down. It keeps slowing until it stops. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve felt the White Death creeping up on me more than once and I am not going through that again.”

  She hadn’t expected him to show his fear, but she understood it. For him, it wasn’t a matter of walking a kilometer. His crutch was jammed the full length of the car. He had no coat, no hat, no gloves, and, of course, no left leg. She suddenly guessed how he’d lost it. Frostbite in Russia. It had eaten away at his toes and his foot and the doctors had taken his leg to be sure. This kind of weather was an old enemy that had already won as far as he was concerned. She didn’t know how to motivate him without showing she knew this, that she’d guessed what lay behind his fear. She didn’t want to damage his pride when that was the only thing that would get him onto his good foot and out of there.

  “One kilometer,” she said. “A straight shot. No hills.”

  “It’s not about hills. It’s the cold, the wind. One false step—”

  “We’re going to make it and I’ll tell you why. This is my territory. This is my street. We are heading for my iron works, and I’m telling you right now we are going to beat this storm.”

  Her old arrogance could be persuasive, she knew that, and in the moment of silence after she was done, she sensed it had impressed Jakob. “What’s your plan if I fall on my ass and break the only leg I still have?” he asked.

  “I’ll carry you, of course.”

  He sighed back into his seat, murmuring a prayer. After the amen, he said, “Okay. I’ll try.”

  “No, you’re going to do it. I don’t have any use for a man who only tries.” She carried his crutch with her around the car and opened his door. “Ready?”