by Andie Newton
I turned around. ‘That is a disgrace.’ Max stood behind me with some men I recognized from the NSDAP, admiring the tanks. His hands were in his pockets and he rocked back on his heels, talking, a breath of frosty air floating from his mouth.
Herr Speer tapped my shoulder. ‘Fräulein Strauss?’ he said, but I was too entranced by Max to answer him. ‘The flag.’ He tapped me again, only this time his finger felt like a needle. ‘Fraulein Strauss—’
‘Yes?’ Herr Speer adjusted his glasses, looking at me with his big green apple eyeballs.
‘The flag,’ he said, pointing. ‘Under your window.’
‘I’ll fix it. Absolutely.’
He looked relieved, probably thinking that was one less thing he had to take care of. ‘The Reich is lucky to have such a good German working for them. A true National Socialist.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘My aunt said the same thing to me on my first day in the League—’
His mouth gaped open. ‘Now!’ he barked, and I rushed off.
The foyer of my building was empty, and eerily quiet and still, even the Nazi flags on standing poles didn’t flutter when I opened the door. A chill ran up my spine, and I paused for a moment before starting up the stairs, but then stopped cold. The handrail shook. Pounding and trampling boomed from the floors above.
The NSDAP boys wouldn’t run like that. And the students were outside, admiring the tanks.
Resistance.
A boy flew down the stairs, through the foyer and out the back doors, not even batting an eye in my direction. Trailing behind him was a girl who stopped the instant she recognized me.
Sophie, Max’s sister.
Her fingers touched mine on the railing. Three more people ran down the stairs behind her and out the doors shouting for Sophie to follow them, and we stared at each other, waiting for the other to say something until finally I did.
‘Run!’ I pointed toward the doors. A brief smile lifted her face as she took off.
I burst outside through my building doors and into a snowstorm of papers which had been tossed off nearly every building in the Marienplatz and onto the crowds below. I picked one up: anti-Nazi leaflets from the White Rose, a new underground resistance group based in Munich.
I had heard of the White Rose months ago. Hoffmann found one of their leaflets stuffed in a phonebook outside our building. He thought the administration would feel disgraced, an outlawed paper so close to Nazi Headquarters, so he only showed it to me. The leaflet read like a sermon quoting from the Bible, but its message was simple: freedom from Nazism. Nobody was able to figure out who they were. Nobody knew their names. I suspected it was because the members had aliases, just like the Falcons had in Nuremberg; it would be suicide for somebody in the resistance to use their given name.
Two policemen ran toward me shouting as I held the leaflet between my hands—I swiftly crumpled it up. Their faces puffed red. ‘Did you see them?’ one said.
I mumbled a number before I shouted out that there was only one. ‘A man with grey hair who could run like lightning.’
‘Which way?’ he said, his eyes darting.
I pointed the opposite direction, and they rushed off.
There wasn’t a patch of untouched ground in the Marienplatz. Herr Speer shuffled in circles amongst the people with his hands on his head, intermittingly throwing them into the air and cursing to himself. ‘Don’t look at them,’ he kept saying, stretching his hands out. ‘We must burn them!’
Some people did pick up the leaflets, glanced at them, and then wadded them up into balls like I had. Soldiers popped out of their tank hatches to bat the leaflets with the butts of their rifles; others threw them into piles for burning where Heer Speer had swept some up with his feet.
A lone leaflet, a forgotten piece, floated down above my head, waffling like a bird with a broken wing in the breeze. I reached for it mid-air and so did Max. Our bare hands touched in the cold. Neither of us let go.
‘I watch you leave for work every morning,’ he said. ‘Every morning.’
I inhaled a gulp of air, wanting to say something, but held back. I didn’t want to move, not even to talk, for fear he’d pull his hand away. He looked older, distinguished and handsome with his muscly arms. Just a few months ago we were talking about taking down the Reich with the rest of the Falcons at the Steichele, with his ink-stained trousers and unkempt hair. Now he wore a NSDAP uniform and I couldn’t even be caught talking to him.
‘You have to let go,’ he finally said, but I shook my head. ‘They’ll think we’re reading it.’ He lay his other hand on mine, and I let go.
I stood for a second by myself, watching him take the leaflet over to the pile Herr Speer had now set to burn, before falling backward into the crowd. The long-gun swung around, clinking and clanking its gears. Max turned around, almost catching me still watching him, and I slipped behind a military lorry.
*
By Monday, stories about the White Rose had spread like fire throughout Munich. People wanted to know who they were, where they lived, and most importantly, where they were going to strike next. Sightings of the elusive ‘freedom bandits,’ as some called them, were as wide as the tales of their origins. Some thought the leaders were gruesome, monster-like creatures the Red Army had created to poison our minds. Others believed they were probably dissenters from the Hitler Youth. Auntie would have loved the Red Army stories, and she would have believed them because they were repeated on the radio.
I was finishing up some correspondence for Hoffmann when the mail clerk rang. She said she was too sick to continue her route and that if I wanted the mail for the V-building I’d have to deliver it myself. Her voice was weak and shaky, which made me believe she was telling the truth, so I told her I would do it.
The mail stop in my building was a small room off the first-floor foyer where the guard posts were. The door had been taken off months ago and the room was more of an open space than a real room in the conventional sense. The basket she left me was filled with a batch of fifty or so letter-sized envelopes addressed to every person in my building, including myself.
I sorted them, and then started dropping them into pigeonholes when Louise walked in to get her deliveries.
‘Hello, Ella.’ Her voice was whiney, and it sounded more like Erwin’s than her own.
‘Louise,’ I said, glancing up, stuffing a letter into a hole. ‘Been seeing Erwin lately?’
She looked at me oddly, as if they had been together and wondered how I could have known.
‘What I mean is,’ I said, trying not to sound too rude, ‘your voice reminded me of him.’
Louise watched me finish sorting the mail, but didn’t bother to ask why I was doing the mail clerk’s job. ‘New Year’s Eve is nearly here.’ She looked me up and down, and I paused, one hand in a pigeonhole. ‘Are you going to the NSDAP party?’ she asked.
‘You mean did someone ask me?’ I said.
‘Did someone ask you?’ she said.
I went back to stuffing envelopes into boxes. ‘I suppose somebody asked you?’ I replied. ‘Let me guess… Erwin?’ I gathered up her mail. ‘Here.’ Then I took the deliveries for me and Hoffmann and left.
Moments later Louise barged into my office, hitting the door with her fist and sending a thunderous boom down the corridor.
‘Where did you get these?’ She held up the envelope I’d delivered with her name on it, flapping it in the air. Its edge was split from being ripped open with her finger. A loud thump came from Hoffmann’s office. He had passed out on the divan an hour earlier and I had shut the frosted glass door between us. The noise, either Louise’s fist against my door, or her high-pitched voice, must have woken him.
‘Why? What is it?’
Louise wadded her envelope into a tight little ball. ‘Leaflets from the White Rose.’ She threw it at my chest, her eyes glowing.
‘White Rose?’ I felt a smile budding on my lips and I tried, with all of my might, to keep it fro
m showing. The mail clerk knew.
‘I put the envelopes in the mail slots, Louise. I didn’t post them, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’ I sifted through the deliveries on my desk, showing her the envelope addressed to me. ‘See? I got one too. I’m a victim just like you.’
Her face dropped, as if realizing she had overstepped; implying that I had sent the leaflets was more than a grievance. ‘What I meant to ask was…’ she started to say.
‘Why was I delivering the mail?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘The mail clerk got sick.’
Hoffmann’s door cracked open, and her eyes darted toward his office.
‘I didn’t mean what you think I meant, Ella.’ She turned on her heel and left just as Hoffmann poked his head out of his office.
‘What’s the commotion?’ he asked.
I tore open my envelope. ‘The White Rose sent us leaflets,’ I said. ‘The whole building. Everyone!’
‘Hmm.’ Hoffmann glanced at my leaflet, but refused to open his. ‘This will not go over lightly with the Reich.’ He fell into the door, still wobbly from getting up sooner than he would have liked.
I closed my office door, and then read aloud straight from the page while Hoffmann looked over my shoulder. ‘Our present state is the dictatorship of evil… why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks—’
‘Throw them out,’ Hoffmann said.
I finished reading the leaflet quietly to myself. Hoffmann plopped his heavy body back onto the divan, and then rubbed his head and closed his eyes.
19
New Year’s Eve had arrived. I watched Christophe mull over the munitions supply routes I had smuggled out of the Königsplatz. A thick Trommler cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, its ash growing, hanging off the end. The burst of a New Year’s firework popped behind him, and its purple flash crackled through a split in the curtains. I leaned over to catch a better glimpse, seeing a gathering of people in the square, wondering if Claudia was out there somewhere, watching me, or waiting to make contact. I pulled the curtains open wider and wider, until Christophe reached over and threw them shut.
‘Is this everything?’ he said.
‘Nein,’ I said. ‘I have one more thing.’
I pulled a drawing out from behind my bed. I had worked on it for three days, copying it from an original design. ‘It’s a rocket.’ I dangled the page in the air between two pinched fingers and he snatched it away.
‘Unbelievable.’ His eyes rolled over the page, swerving, stopping and jolting. ‘You’ve outdone yourself this time.’
‘One hundred and ninety-three kilometres. It will reach Britain,’ I said. ‘Everything you need to know is in the margin. Where they’re stored, where the test sites are, where they’re made…’
He rose slowly from the windowsill with the page still in his hands, spitting his cigarette from his mouth and then stomping it out with his shoe.
‘Watch it!’ I said. ‘This is still my flat, you know.’
‘Right.’ With his eyes still on the paper, he reached into his coat pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes and shook it at me. ‘Do you want one?’
I took the cigarette he offered and put it on my shelf for later. Then I picked his butt off the ground and smeared the ash with my foot until it blended in with the wood. I mumbled to myself about the gall he had to spit his cigarette on my floor as if he were outside.
Christophe pulled his head away from the page. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
He stared at me for a hot moment before folding up the papers I gave him into one tight square. ‘What did you do before you were a spy?’ he said. ‘Surely you did something.’
‘I was a shop girl.’
‘A shop girl?’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t expect that from you, my dear.’
‘Why? A good shop girl can make a person believe anything.’
‘You have a point,’ he said, searching the ceiling as he stuffed the papers into his pocket. ‘Working undercover inside the Reich is a feat. You know that it will be impossible for you to be a shop girl after the war, right?’
‘Why?’
‘After all you’ve seen and done, it will be hard to live a normal life. Trust me,’ he said. ‘I know these things.’
‘You don’t know anything about me.’
I peeked out from behind the curtains onto the square again, through a gap just big enough for one round eye. A handful of men with women dressed in long, glittering dresses that hung out from under thick fur coats, ogled at an impromptu dance performance by some students celebrating the end of the year.
‘I know you’re alone tonight,’ Christophe said.
He wasn’t dressed up either. ‘Aren’t we all?’
‘It’s part of being a spy,’ he said.
Christophe went to leave but a knock at the door shoved him into the crack where the door met the wall. He motioned for me not to answer the door and be quiet. But when I heard Erwin’s breathy squeals on the other side, I knew I would have to answer it. Christophe shook his head as I put my hand on the knob.
‘It’s Erwin,’ came the voice through the door. Christophe flattened himself against the wall. ‘Alex sent me.’
‘I have to,’ I mouthed.
I opened the door. Erwin held a package under one arm and loosened his bow tie with the other. Students filtered out of their flats wearing party gowns and flower corsages behind him. All were headed into the square, I supposed, for the big night.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He looked surprised to see me still dressed in my grey work suit. ‘Aren’t you celebrating? Your whole building is going to the Ratskeller. Special party there tonight.’
Instead of answering I waited for him to tell me what was so important that Alex had to send him over. It had better not be to ask me out, I thought.
He offered me the package under his arm. ‘This came for you at Alex’s address. He said you should have it right away. So here I am.’ He tapped his foot and smiled as if he expected something for the delivery. I reached for the package and he pulled it back. ‘A kiss for my trouble would be nice.’
I snatched the package from his fat hands and he huffed. ‘After all I’ve done for you, Ella.’ He walked off and I said thanks when his back was turned.
I shut my door. ‘Erwin,’ Christophe breathed. ‘Disgusting little fellow.’
‘Mmm.’
The package was small and wrapped in worn brown paper. I held it to the light and then gasped when I saw a blue rose drawn in the corner, along with the words ‘happy birthday’ written so faintly even Erwin probably didn’t notice it.
Auntie.
I tore it open. Inside, surrounded by a nest of paper confetti, was my aunt’s special egg cups and a note. The details of the design were exquisite; delicate ruby-red petals rimmed in gold that shined bright yellow. Not the tarnished, common one I remembered.
‘Egg cups? Why would someone send you those?’
I smiled. ‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s my birthday.’ I held them in my hands; never did I think I would have wanted to see these things again—now I never wanted to let them go.
Christophe lit a cigarette. ‘Egg cups for a birthday gift?’ He took a drag from his cigarette and talked as he exhaled. ‘Germans are strange.’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I said. ‘They’re special. Family heirloom.’ I imagined Auntie sitting across from me at the breakfast table, eating like a horse and looking beautiful while she did it. Something that was once so annoying was now a warm memory, and I wished I hadn’t been so insensitive to her the day she tried to give them to me.
He handed me the note from the box but looked over my shoulder as I unfolded it. I expected a birthday greeting but instead got something that looked like it had co
me from my uncle’s cipher books.
I hope you’re enjoying the book about Bavarian birds.
Remember my cologne.
ZMXAB AKTOL NAKQR EXRMZ MMLTD ANZFC
TREMM TJMDA DGNPD RDLEN EBCN WPMN
‘Is that code?’ Christophe was suddenly very interested in what my aunt had to say. He reached for the note, but I pulled away.
‘What’s this book she writes about?’
‘I don’t know.’
I thought for a moment, but I really had no idea. Then I remembered the book she put in my pack when I left for Munich. I raced to the closet and found it behind a blanket I was too lazy to fold up. I ran my fingers over the book jacket, the image of a finch, but no words. I flipped it open, and then gasped when I saw what was inside.
‘My uncle’s ciphers.’ The book slipped from my hand, and I stumbled backward onto the bed. I couldn’t believe this whole time I had one of my uncle’s cipher books in my closet.
‘Your uncle writes ciphers?’ He was excited; I could hear it in his voice as he flipped through the pages. ‘What’s your aunt’s cologne?’
‘Forty-seven eleven.’ The only scent she’d ever worn was 4711—the original.
He opened the book to page thirteen. ‘I just added the numbers.’ He motioned for the note. ‘Give me the codes.’
I handed him the note, and then listened to his pencil slide across the paper as he decoded my aunt’s message.
‘Claudia escaped prison. She is here. Come home.’
‘Claudia?’ I shot straight up. ‘Home!’
I raced to the window, my heart thumping, wondering what to do first. Claudia was probably waiting for me at my aunt’s house, maybe even in my room. She wouldn’t go to the shop—or would she?
I threw open my drawers and stuffed clothes into my rucksack while racing around the room grabbing things here and there. Then I had the most incredible thought—maybe Max would come with me? I flung open the window curtains, thinking he was in the square somewhere, headed to the Ratskeller for the New Year’s party like everyone else. I looked for him in a panic, but there was too much to do. ‘I need a train schedule.’ I dug through papers trying to find a list of trains.