City of Spies (23 page)

Devin's blue eyes were stark as they gazed at her, and he nodded. “I have to trust you.”

Trust her. There was the rub. How could anyone ever really trust her again after what she'd done to Daddy and Ava? She could've saved all of East Berlin and still it wouldn't blot out that stain on her soul.

“I can understand why you wouldn't.”

It came out very quiet.

He was frowning at her. “This isn't about the past. This is about the very dangerous now. Even fully trained, professional agents wouldn't be safe if they went undercover in that house. Both Von Albrecht and his son are dangerous.” He moved restlessly, something she'd never seen him do before, always so self-contained and in control. “But I know, I know. You've proven that you can more than handle yourself.”

“I won't stay long tonight,” she said. How odd that she was reassuring him for once. “I'm going over at seven thirty. I'll be out by ten.”

His eyes met hers, and the look of worry there disturbed her. “One minute later than ten o'clock and I'm coming in after you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Von Albrecht House and Dock Sud, Buenos
Aires
January 12, 1962

CALESITA

Merry-go-round. A move where the lead dances around the follower.

Pagan knocked on the Von Albrecht front door exactly at 7:30 p.m., dressed in a casual gingham dress. Whatever secret thing Emma had planned better not be formal. It was a relief to see Emma as she opened the door, grinning, wearing capri pants and white Keds like the ones Pagan had worn the day before.

“You look so cute!” Emma walked onto the front stoop holding her purse and gave Pagan a hug.

Pagan hugged her back. “So do you. Love the ponytail.”

“Got your things?” Dieter said in his Argentine-German-accented English, standing in the doorway, with his hand on the knob. He was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a red leather jacket that made him look like a blonder James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
.

“All set,” Emma said.

“Good,” said Dieter. He looked energized. He turned a rare smile toward Pagan. “Good evening, Fräulein Jones. I hope you enjoy our little entertainment tonight.” He closed the front door and trotted down the steps past Pagan.

She stood there for a moment, confused.

“Come on,” Emma said, following her brother. “They're waiting for us down the block.”

Pagan stayed rooted on the stoop of the Von Albrecht house. Getting inside it was the main reason she'd come over. The animals. The tunnels. “But I thought...”

“We're going out!” Emma took her hand and tugged on it. She was wearing cherry-red lipstick and her blouse had little cherries printed on it. She lowered her voice. “Dieter made me promise not to tell you till we got there. It's one of his gang's secret outings, and it's going to be amazing!”

An outing with Dieter's gang sounded about as fun as a strip search in reform school. Did this mean the “something big” Dieter had chortled about was happening somewhere else, maybe something to do with the meeting with the Jewish kids? Von Albrecht had said that Dieter was integral to his plans, and he was also the ringleader of the gang. So wherever Dieter went, much as it galled Pagan, that was the place to be.

She hated leaving that poor tortured dog in the basement a moment longer, but it was better to stick to Dieter like glue to see what he was up to.

Later, if she had to break into the house or start a dang fire to get those animals free, so be it.

Pagan let Emma drag her down the steps and along the sidewalk after Dieter. “Is it far? How late do you think we'll be out?” She sounded like a total stick in the mud, but she needed whatever info she could get.

Emma shrugged. “Not far. Come on!”

Two cars full of teenagers were idling on the street waiting for them. The wide-open windows had way too many feet and elbows already poking out of them. Dieter shoved one of the boys over so he could drive the Mercedes Benz, while Emma pulled Pagan into the same car. She ended up half on the lap of a boy briefly introduced as Wolfgang and half on top of Emma, who put her arms around Pagan's waist quite contentedly.

The drive only took around twenty minutes, but it felt like a century with Wolfgang's knees jabbing into her backside. At one point he and the boy next to him got into a play fight, smacking and punching each other, laughing and yelling at each other in German as they did so. Pagan nearly got an elbow in her eye and said, “Hey, if you don't mind,” in English.

Wolfgang slapped one more time at the other boy and angled his head toward Emma. “Doesn't she speak German?”

He said it in that Argentine-inflected German this group tended to use.

“Do you know any German?” Emma asked Pagan in English.

“I shot a movie in Berlin this summer, so I learned how to count to five,” Pagan said. She'd learned during that time how handy it was to have people think you couldn't speak their language. “And say thank you, but I don't think that counts.”

“She doesn't,” Emma said to Wolfgang in German. “But she just shot a movie in Berlin.”

Wolfgang's eyes got big, and in the rearview mirror, Pagan saw Dieter give her a long hard look. “Were you only in West Berlin?” Dieter asked her in English. It was the most interest he'd shown in her so far. “Or did you go see our Red friends in the East?”

“I went to East Berlin once before the wall went up,” she said. “It was a mess.”

“Well, first the damned Americans bombed it,” Dieter said, and everyone else in the car nodded. “Then the damned Russians stole half of it. That's not an equation that leads to success.”

He wasn't wrong. Dieter was a bit smarter when he wasn't in some frothing racist rage. She could see why the other kids followed him. But he didn't have the whole story, and she wasn't about to tell him that West Berlin was flourishing, thanks to the Allies that had defeated Hitler.

“The Führer would weep if he saw the Fatherland now,” Wolfgang said.

Dieter's sly smile, intended only for himself, was visible to Pagan in the rearview mirror. “That's why we do what we do,” he said. “That's why we do what we're doing tonight!”

Everyone in the car except for Pagan yelled out,
“Jawohl!”
Emma, too.

Lovely. She was stuck in a car with a bunch of Nazi kids. She'd rather dance twelve tangos with Tony Perry.

Twilight darkened to night as they moved through a neighborhood with narrow cobblestone streets to a deserted area filled with warehouses. Between buildings, Pagan caught sight of the river.

The car angled down, and something blotted out the sky. The car rattled and jumped over rougher terrain than cobblestones, and came to a stop. They poured out of the car, and Pagan found herself once again underground.

This tunnel was larger than the one she and Devin had been in the night before, and it looked carved out of the bedrock rather than lined with brick. Several of the boys had flashlights, and they moved around the floor like reverse shadows as everyone tramped farther down the tunnel.

“Where are we?” Pagan whispered to Emma.

“Look out for the tracks,” Emma said, pointing with one hand, and taking Pagan's hand with the other. Twin metal lines emerged from the rock and then disappeared again a few yards on.

Pagan stepped over them carefully. “Is this an old metro tunnel?” she asked.

Emma shrugged. “Something like that, we think. But it gets cooler. Look!”

The tunnel narrowed sharply up ahead, and light shined through it from multiple sources. Pagan had to duck to get through the opening, and stepped down, blinking as the space then opened up wide around her once more.

Hundred of candles and a few oil lamps had been lit and placed in the nooks and crannies of what looked like a very fancy, very large basement with a high vaulted ceiling and Greek pillars lined up and down both sides. In the central area was a raised stone, almost like an altar. Off to the side the remains of human-size statues, clad in long marble robes, their feet in sandals, watched in silence. A dozen teenagers, mostly boys, were already there, lighting the candles and shouting up at the ceiling to hear the echoes.

“It's the crypt of an old church,” Emma said.

They were standing on the top step of a staircase marching down to the crypt's floor. It must have once led up to the ground floor of the church.

“What's above us?” Pagan asked as Emma guided her down the steps. They were uneven from years of erosion. “Is the church still there?”

Emma shook her head. “It's a warehouse for old trolley cars,” she said. “Nobody else but Dieter and his friends know this place exists down here! Isn't it the coolest? I wish we could open up the tombs in the side chapels, but Dieter thinks I'm disgusting.”

Pagan was with Dieter on that one, but she smiled encouragingly. Curiosity was a good thing. She was someone who couldn't leave a mystery behind; only for her, the mystery was usually a little more current. “You probably like history in school.”

“I love history,” Emma said. “I told Papa I wanted to be a history or archaeology professor when I grow up. But he said it was important for good German girls like me to get married to German boys and have lots of babies of pure German stock.”

Pure.
There was that word again. “Do both,” Pagan said. “That'll show your father.”

Emma wrinkled her nose and looked down. They'd reached the flagstones on the floor of the crypt. “I don't want to get married. Boys are...” She looked over at the young men shoving one another and dripping wax on the pillars from the candles and shuddered. “Boys are awful.”

“Some of them,” Pagan said carefully. “You know, Gertrude Stein lived most of her life with her best friend, Alice. You don't have to get married.”

“Do you want to get married?” Emma said, slinging a look over at Pagan before ducking her head down again.

“I don't know,” Pagan said, and meant it, but probably for different reasons than Emma. Maybe it was the way her mother had dominated her parents' marriage, or all the divorces she'd seen in Hollywood. Maybe she'd spent the first twelve years of her life doing every little thing her mother ordered her to do and couldn't imagine bending that way again to anyone.

But maybe there was someone out there who was more like a partner than a husband. Someone who didn't expect you to obey but who was looking for a companion in adventure. She'd never thought men like that existed. Not until very recently...

But she couldn't tell Emma that. She had to keep up the illusion that Emma might stand a chance with her, if only for a little longer. Best to stick close to the truth, just not the whole truth.

“I like kids, but I never dreamed about my wedding the way other girls do. I don't want to answer to some guy every day, you know?” She narrowed her eyes, considering. “Might be worth it, though, if I could get Dior to custom-make my dress.”

Emma laughed. “
Ja
, get the dress and the presents. And then get a divorce!”

“Believers!” Dieter had leaped up onto the stone platform in the center of the room. Towering over them in his red jacket, his golden hair gleaming in the lamp and candlelight, voice echoing back through the vaulted stone chamber, he looked every inch the young, charismatic leader. It made Pagan uneasy. He was speaking in German, so Emma quietly translated for Pagan. “We're here for our monthly contest against the Yids, the Reds and the Negros. Are you ready?”

The assembled group let out a roar.

“Are the cars ready?” Dieter turned and pointed at Wolfgang.

“The cars are ready!” Wolfgang shouted.

Cars? That was the last thing she needed.

“Is the racecourse ready?” Dieter swiveled on top of the platform and pointed at another boy.

“The racecourse is reserved, marked and ready!” he shouted.

These idiots were going to race cars in the deserted warehouse district of Buenos Aires? The thought made her queasy. She'd done enough crazy driving to last a lifetime, thanks. Pagan nearly turned on her heel and ditched them then. But she had no idea where she was, or how to get back to the hotel. The neighborhood hadn't exactly been overflowing with taxis, either.

And she had to stick with Dieter. If these races happened every month, and if she was right that he had something big planned for tonight, then this wasn't the whole story.

She took Emma by the hand and walked her down the church steps to stand by the altar at Dieter's feet, a suitably reverential expression on her face, the better to overhear anything or follow him.

“I know that normally I am the first driver to win the first race against our enemies,” Dieter was saying. “But I've been showing the ropes to my best friend, Wolfgang, here, and I think he's earned the right to take the wheel in tonight's first race. What do you think?”

“Jawohl!”
One of the boys shouted, and the others took up the call.
“Heil Wolfgang!”

“Are we going to win?” Dieter held his arms out to the crowd of maybe three dozen teenagers.

“Jawohl!”
they shouted as one.

Emma shouted with them, laughing and clapping. She grabbed Pagan's hands and clapped them together while Pagan manufactured her best delighted giggle. “See? Drag races! Just a block from here. I read those stories of how you and Nicky Raven were caught racing down Sunset Boulevard, so I knew you'd enjoy it!”

Poor, silly Emma. She must've also read the stories of Pagan driving her Corvette off a cliff, but it hadn't occurred to her that might've led to a change of heart when it came to drag racing. Pagan couldn't imagine a more asinine activity, or one more likely to give her an anxiety attack.

Dieter had jumped down from the altar, and leaned in to say something to Wolfgang quietly. Pagan was close enough to hear: “...give you my jacket in the tunnel.”

Wolfgang nodded and then they were all headed back up the steps, out of the sunken church.

Dieter was going to give Wolfgang his jacket, but why? Were they more than switching roles in the driver's seat?

“We don't have to drive the cars, do we?” she asked Emma to keep her busy. She knew Dieter would never let a girl drive in a race. Around them, the kids were streaming back up the stairs and out through the narrow opening into the metro tunnel. This then must be their gang meeting place, where Dieter gathered them first to get them all stirred up.

“No!” Emma laughed as they walked up the steps. “Dieter and Wolfgang have two special, fast cars they work on between races. Only Dieter, Wolfgang, and maybe Fritz and Heinz have been allowed to drive them so far. I'd like to see Dieter's face if I tried to drive one.”

They followed Dieter out of the crypt and walked past the parked cars inside the metro tunnel. Pagan could see now with more flashlights at work that there were actually ten cars parked in different spots. Someone in a red jacket was revving one engine of a hot rod with flames painted on the side, and someone in a black jacket was starting up the other. It wasn't light enough to tell whether Dieter was still wearing the red jacket or not. The rest of the kids kept on walking out of the tunnel.