The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  “She couldn’t get away with it. Betraying my father like that. He made the ultimate sacrifice for the Reich. After he died, she didn’t even try to act like she was sad. She was glad he was gone. But she had no right to be glad.”

  His father. He was talking about Reinhard Sieland. Willy saw his mother and Theodor Falkenberg together in late January. They got word that Reinhard had fallen just a few weeks later, and Elisa had been torn with relief—and guilt?—at the funeral tea. The Allies were sweeping toward them. The war was in its last months, the last bloody crescendo. They were all going mad one way or another. And Willy, nursing his confusion and anger at what he had seen at the Works, and now racked with grief . . .

  “Willy, what did you do?”

  “I’m a soldier like my father. I had to do my duty. I had to, fräulein.”

  Clara stood abruptly. “What did you do?”

  “You saw her at the funeral. She deserved it. She shamed my father. She shamed me. She deserved to . . . to be punished. I had to tell them what she did.” He seemed barely able to summon the next words, but once he succeeded, they tumbled out. “They listened to me. The Gestapo. They didn’t laugh at me or send me away. They believed me. I had to tell them something so they’d come for her. Tell them it was a Russian instead of—”

  “You betrayed your own mother?”

  “She’s the one who betrayed—”

  “It doesn’t matter what she did. You were only thirteen, but you weren’t stupid, Willy. You were never stupid. You were old enough to know what would happen next. You brought the Gestapo down on your own mother? How could you do something so low, you miserable—”

  He swept the cups off the crate, the nails and screws scraping her hand and thudding against her coat. Then he drew his gun, and for a mad moment, Clara saw sparks in her eyes, thought she had been hit, felt the pain of it in her chest. But he hadn’t fired; he was shouting: “Get out! Get out! Out-out-out-out-out—” On and on, the gun at her back as she tripped down the tunnels in the dark, and then the strip of light, the mine’s entrance, Willy behind her crying out-out-out-out—

  —until she climbed into searing daylight. She felt arms catching her, Jakob smelling of fresh smoke, a bulging sack at his feet. “Clara, what happened?”

  She told him, the horror swirling inside her—Willy with a gun, a gun at her back—and then she pulled away from Jakob, stumbling down the snowy slope to the riverside. She kept going, stepping into the river, her feet cracking through the ice sheet. The cold bit her ankles and she gasped at the sharp pain as Jakob pulled her out of the water and into the weeds.

  “What the devil are you doing? He put a gun on you?”

  “It wasn’t his fault.” She hugged Jakob tightly so she wouldn’t fall. “He doesn’t know who he is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jakob’s coat, his heartbeat, his closeness, began to soothe her. “He’s my brother.”

  “What?” He was holding Clara, turning her face up to look at him. “I thought he was Elisa’s son.”

  “He is. And my father’s.” She told him what she knew, what she’d pieced together, and even after she had told it, she still felt that she had been spinning a tale, that none of this could be real.

  Gently, Jakob turned her toward the mine. “Come on, Clara. We need to get you warm and dry.”

  “I’m not going back in there. I just can’t. Not yet.”

  “Your legs are wet. In this cold—”

  She pulled away from him. His reaction left her in despair. He didn’t understand. The cold didn’t matter. Willy was her brother, and he had betrayed her oldest friend, his own mother. Clara could understand Willy’s shock at seeing her father and Elisa together. She understood his grief at the death of the man he’d thought was his father. He’d felt wronged, ashamed, angry. He was just a boy. But what kind of boy walks into Gestapo headquarters and reports his mother and lies because he’s angry with her?

  “I think you should take what you can from the mine and go home, Jakob. Be careful. He’s—” She couldn’t admit that Jakob had been right. Willy was more unstable and dangerous than she’d ever thought possible. The quiet, gentle boy she had known had been twisted into someone new. “I think it’s best if he calms down alone.”

  “Come home with me, Clara.”

  A flare of gratitude cut through the turmoil inside her. “Thank you, but I need to think some things through on my own. Besides, Fenshaw might come looking for me there. Meet me at the Works tomorrow.”

  She could see the indecision in his face, the anxiety. “I’m all right. I really am. I’ll keep warm on the way back and you’ll see me tomorrow. Bring me some food.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He was squeezing her hand, and though she was already pulling away, she held on to him too, their fingers linking until the last moment.

  Dark

  Willy cradled his head in his hands as if she had hit him. Pounded him over and over. She’d called him a low, miserable . . . what? What was he? A boy? A man? A soldier? A dirty rat?

  He stumbled to the crate table, to the map on the wall, that stupid map. All of his stupid little notes about stupid armies moving from one stupid battlefield to the next. What did it matter? He was in a hole in the ground alone.

  He scooped up a handful of dirt and spat on it and rubbed his hands until they were good and black and then he smeared the muck across the map, soiling it.

  He dropped onto his bed, and Gertrud fluttered to his leg, rustling her wings and peeping.

  “I’m all right,” he said. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t want to worry her. For her sake, he pushed away his anger. For her sake, he took long and dusty breaths.

  He allowed ten minutes to compose himself, counting the time in his head, every one of those six hundred seconds. By then, he wasn’t shaking anymore. He washed his hands and opened his footlocker, mumbling, and took out his ledger. Just as he suspected, nobody had recorded the food taken from the stores the past few days. He would have to correct this. There was a proper way to do these things.

  The ledger under his arm, he went into the corridor and noticed charcoal marks where there weren’t any before: arrows, numbers on the doors, and sometimes labels—bread, sugar, cigarettes. She did this. He didn’t know how he knew. It didn’t matter; he wanted no reminders of that woman. He rubbed out the marks, uneasy because he was destroying something that made sense, something he should have done himself.

  In the room with the canned bread, he sighed at the chaos, the open boxes, the dented cans, the opener on the floor. Then he began the long, soothing task of stacking them as high as he could, one can on top of the other, a shining tower.

  20

  Jakob limped to the street corner and paused to catch his breath, leaning against a lamppost that had lost its lamp. He needed the rest. He wasn’t about to stumble into his own home and collapse from the walk, several hours, maybe more, from Willy’s mine. He didn’t want to scare Dorrit and Gabi like that. They were probably scared enough. By his reckoning he’d spent three days snowed in at the Works and almost two days in the mine, and he was anxious to show them he was all right, to see that they were all right. He laced his thumbs under the straps of the pack on his back, shifting the weight from his aching shoulders. The girls were going to forgive him for being gone so long when they saw the delicious feast he was bringing them.

  The food should have put him in a good mood, but as he smoked a cigarette from the mine, he couldn’t stop thinking about Clara. He still felt the pressure of her head on his chest as the words flooded out of her—Willy, her brother, his mother, her father, the Gestapo—a rambling story he didn’t understand except for one major fact. Willy was Theodor Falkenberg’s son. Clara’s brother. If Jakob had known, he wouldn’t have kept the kid a secret for so long. But then, she clearly hadn’t known either. Her story had been hard to follow when she was clinging to him, needing his comfort, his support, and he was still stunned
by it. Amazed by the wound she had shown to a fellow like him. He should have done more, should have helped her, but he hadn’t known how at the time—and now she was gone.

  He hoped she had had the sense to find a public hall on the way back to the Works, somewhere to dry off, to thaw her feet. He knew what the winter could do, what a slip in a frozen river could do. He shivered at the thought of her curled up in her camp, a victim of the White Death. He wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. As soon as he had checked on his sisters and warmed up, he was going back for her. He shouldn’t have let her go alone.

  The snow was piled all along the curbs, dirty and trampled, formed into snowmen with bits of rubble for eyes. The neighborhood kids went scurrying around him, kids he knew by sight. He followed them onto his street as they streaked in one direction, toward the army vehicle parked near his house. A British officer sat on the hood, arm deep in a cardboard box. He was rummaging around, taking his time, teasing the kids swarming around him.

  In German, he said, “I think it’s empty.”

  The kids shouted, “No! No! Chocolate, Tommy! Biscuits, please!” They pressed in, the younger ones hopping and squealing.

  Jakob was stiff with cold, his back a roar of pain that started at his prosthesis and licked like a flame up his spine. All he wanted was to get home, to sit by the oven, to see how his sisters had done in the blizzard. But the officer stood between him and his front door and it was no coincidence. Jakob had no illusions. This was Clara’s English captain.

  The sadistic son of a bitch. What kind of a louse put a woman in a locker? And there he was, torturing the kids, playing games when they were literally starving for whatever he had in that box.

  “Biscuits,” Fenshaw called, flourishing a packet over his head. “Who likes biscuits?”

  Two dozen kids bellowed, “I do, sir! Me, sir!”

  “They go to whoever can guess my favorite color.”

  The kids screamed colors while, all around, women swept snow off the pavement or hung out of the windows dislodging icicles from the drains. Jakob’s sisters weren’t in the crowd, but he thought he saw a movement behind the dirty cellophane that formed their parlor window. He would have to risk it, and why not? Fenshaw had probably tracked him down after talking to people at the South Sea, but he had nothing on Jakob. Not really. Besides, Jakob wanted a closer look at the bastard.

  He limped past the crowd toward his door.

  “Jakob Relling?” As he handed the biscuit packet to a screaming toddler, Fenshaw flashed Jakob a cold smile that reminded him he was wearing the army-issue gray overcoat from the mine.

  “Is this about the coat, sir? I meant to dye it, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  Fenshaw answered in German dominated by a strong English accent. “It’s too cold to talk outside. Maybe you could invite me in? Looks like you’ve been walking a lot today, and in this weather. I’m sure you need to warm up. Have a wash, maybe?” Fenshaw rubbed his clean-shaven chin, and Jakob resisted the urge to scratch the stubble on his own. Fenshaw’s mustache looked as though he trimmed it under a microscope. His coat was spotless, his trousers pleated. His cuffs—you could tell everything from cuffs and hems, Jakob’s mama used to say—were good as new. His shoes were wet from snow but had the clean gleam of leather polished that morning. Compared to Fenshaw, Jakob felt like a grimy, hairy creature recently rolled in out of the jungle.

  On the doorstep, Fenshaw noticed the broken brick keeping the door ajar. In the hallway, he rattled the stairway balustrade. Splinters of wood fluttered to the steps.

  “Wouldn’t go up there if I was you, sir,” Jakob said, wishing Fenshaw would do just that, step onto the landing that no longer existed and plunge through the ceiling of what used to be his neighbor’s flat, now a rubbish heap.

  Dorrit was waiting for them in the hallway. She wore their mother’s apron and held a wooden spoon upright as though she was about to thwack someone with it. “Oh, Jakob, you’re back! Where have you been?”

  He forced himself around Fenshaw and clamped his free arm around her waist, careful about it, not wanting to squeeze too hard. “You got through the storm all right, little mouse? Where’s Gabi?” He led her into the kitchen where Gabi was cutting a turnip into transparent slices. She flew at him, so excited and relieved, she forgot about the knife in her hand. He snatched it away as she threw herself into his arms. That’s how Fenshaw found them when he looked in on the kitchen. He was decent enough to touch his cap and withdraw.

  “He’s come every day since the storm blew over,” Dorrit said, whispering. “I don’t like him. He’s too nice. He brought us chocolate and coffee. Nobody does that for nothing. What does he want from you?”

  Jakob wrestled the pack off his back, and when the girls saw the tins and packets, they gasped with delight. “Don’t eat it all at once,” he said, kissing both on the head. “Make some coffee, will you? We have to show some hospitality, whether we want to or not.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “You know me. I can talk myself out of anything.” He waited by the stove for the coffee and then took it into the sitting room. Fenshaw was browsing through the ladies on the American calendar, lingering on sweet-faced Miss December, and then he turned his attention to a group photo on the wall, the one Jakob had hung low enough to see when he lay on the sofa at night. The Rellings before the war, twelve including grandparents, all tangled elbows and grins and giggles as they huddled together to fit in one picture.

  “You have a large family,” Fenshaw said.

  “There’s just the three of us left.” In Jakob’s mind, he heard the questions Fenshaw didn’t ask and didn’t really want to know the answer to. Nobody wanted to hear about other people’s tragedies. Everybody had their own.

  The next few minutes were strange. An exchange of courtesies, Fenshaw wishing he’d brought in some biscuits to go with the coffee, Jakob getting up for milk, Fenshaw waving him back to his seat. Fenshaw supplied the cigarettes, leaving a full packet on the table between them. He talked about the weather, that dreadful storm. Jakob compared it to winter in Russia, though there was no comparison, the whole time wondering why Fenshaw was being so damned friendly. If he wanted to know about Clara, why not demand the information? In Jakob’s experience, you had to watch the Tommies when they were being too nice. You never knew when they’d turn on you, remind you of what a Nazi you’d been, regardless of the truth. The Tommies would call you a lowly foreigner in your own country. Fenshaw looked the type.

  Fenshaw steered the chitchat toward Jakob himself, his history. He seemed to know exactly who Jakob was, where he went to school, that he had finished his exams before the war. “I hear you were a scholarship boy,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  “Sure.”

  “Falkenberg, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Met the great man himself before the war. What did you think of him?”

  “I was just a kid at the time, sir. Herr Falkenberg seemed like the chancellor, the president, and the pope all rolled into one.”

  “You’d be amazed how many people thought that. Would you say you’re an ambitious man?”

  The new direction threw Jakob off. At the mention of Falkenberg, he’d been preparing himself for an assault on Clara, a battery of questions about her.

  “Suppose so, sir.”

  “What do you want to do with your life now the war is behind you?”

  “Start an import-export business. American goods to and from Europe, you know? Buy cigarettes there, sell them here for a massive profit. Use that to buy a camera here, sell it over there. Profits like you wouldn’t believe. Soldiers are cashing in. Why not me?”

  “That’s what interests you? Profit?”

  “Just trying to take care of my family, sir.” Jakob’s hands shook slightly as he raised his mug to his lips. He wanted Fenshaw to get to the point but didn’t know how to force it without exposing himself.

  Fenshaw sat back and touched th
e satchel he’d brought in with him. “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “No idea, sir.”

  “Come on.”

  Jakob lit a cigarette, automatic motions that covered up his nerves. “You don’t want to marry my sister, do you?”

  “I like to see people in their own homes. Drag someone to a police station and it’s harder to see what kind of chap you’re dealing with. At home, he shows a different side.”

  “Nobody acts normal with an Allied officer in the house, sir.”

  “We’re not enemies, Herr Relling. I’m here to help you if you’re willing to be helped.” Fenshaw took a portrait-sized photograph out of his satchel and set it on the table between the coffee things. “Recognize her?”

  In the picture, Clara must have been twenty or so, and if Jakob had known her at that age, he would have melted into a puddle at her feet. Her blond bob swung close to one eye, giving her a peekaboo look. At the same time, she was trying to look regal, her nose up. What got him, what really tore him up inside, was the freshness in her face, the innocence winning out over the sophisticated look she was aiming for. Back then, she wasn’t disillusioned. He supposed that was true of everybody since the war, but it still hurt to see how far she had come from this: portrait-sized, with dramatic lighting.

  “Never seen her before and I’m sorry about that, sir, believe me.”

  “She’s a brunette now, much thinner, a bit worn down by the war. She’s thirty-one years old. She tells people she’s twenty-five.”

  “Vain, is she?”

  “In her way, yes.”

  Jakob studied the photograph a little longer. Clara’s shoulder was bare, reminding him of his nightly dreams at the Works, in the mine; she’d been right there beside him, curled in his arms, but he dreamed of her anyway. In an evening gown and pearls striding toward him, white silk hushing across the dance floor, her saying, “I’d love to.”