Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke (9 page)

They turned left, making for the western edge of the woods.
Gretchen’s legs shook from hunger, and her vision wavered. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Maybe on the train into Munich, but that had been luncheon, about nine hours ago. She stumbled over a tree root and Daniel’s hand was instantly on her arm, holding her upright. His touch felt so familiar, so right.

Tears trickled from her eyes, trailing an icy line down her cheeks. He wiped them away, his fingers twitching, a sure signal that his old injury was troubling him again.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” He was white to the lips.

“You don’t need to do that,” she said. “Try to pretend you’re all right when you’re not. I wish you’d let me help you sometimes.”

He gave her a tired smile. “Gretchen, you don’t know how much you already do.”

She smiled back at him. They continued walking in the darkness between the trees, but Gretchen carried the heat and the light of his words with her, keeping her warm, helping her believe, if only for a moment, that they were safe.

THE FARMHOUSE SAT IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD
. From far off, it looked as Gretchen remembered: a large, old house made of dark wood silvered with age. As she grew closer, breathing hard from a stitch in her side, she saw that some of the blue shutters with heart cutouts were missing or hung cockeyed. Several roof tiles were gone. The farmland her grandfather had plowed for his potato fields had surrendered to mud and weeds. Clay pots on the front steps lay on their sides, cracked, spilling dirt across the porch.

At the far end of the mud-choked fields, Gretchen stopped in confusion. What had happened here? Her grandparents never would have let the farmhouse fall into such disrepair. She shot a wary look at her surroundings, but she saw no one. Had the National Socialists sacked the place?

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked.

“It’s a mess.” She looked over her shoulder at the outbuildings: a barn, a couple of sheds, a henhouse, but they were quiet, the doors shut, no lights showing between the wooden slatted walls. The place was quiet as a tomb. “Let’s go in,” she added, shaking off her unease.

They knocked repeatedly and had to wait for several minutes before shuffling footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. It opened and a woman, bent with age, peered out at them. She carried a kerosene lantern, its yellowish flicker washing over her face. She wore a knitted woolen shawl over a white nightgown. A blue kerchief was wound around her head, but Gretchen didn’t need to see her hair to know who she was.
Mama
. She let out a half-gasping sob.

Mama stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. Her cheeks, once so fair and soft, stretched tightly over her cheekbones. She opened her mouth to speak and a strange whistling sound streamed out. Dark holes dotted her gums. She was missing half of her teeth.

Gretchen froze. “What happened to you?”

“Gretl, is that truly you? Your hair . . .” Mama stretched out a trembling hand, then let it fall, as though she were afraid to touch Gretchen.

“I dyed it.”

“Why would you do such a thing? Your beautiful hair—oh.” Mama’s expression hardened. The words seemed to whoosh between her missing teeth, making it difficult to understand her. “You did it to look like
him
, I suppose.” She looked past Gretchen, her eyes narrowing as they swept up and down Daniel.

Daniel removed his hat and nodded at her, his face carefully blank. “Good evening, Frau Müller.”

Mama glared at him. “Why are
you
here? Isn’t it enough that you took my daughter from me? Do you have to come back and rub my nose in it?”

“Mama, please.” Gretchen laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “It wasn’t Daniel’s fault that I had to leave Munich.” The words she longed to say felt heavy in her mouth:
It was Uncle Dolf’s fault; he’s the real monster!
But she didn’t dare say them. She and Daniel needed to remain on Mama’s good side, if they wanted to be allowed to stay.

“We just need a place to spend the night,” Gretchen said. “Please, Mama. We won’t be any trouble, I promise.”

Tears clogged her throat. She couldn’t believe that she had to beg her own mother for shelter.
This was what Hitler did to us
, she thought bitterly. His insidious lies had torn them apart. For the thousandth time, she wished her father had been assigned to any regiment besides the 16th, in which he had met Hitler during the Great War. There was no telling what their lives might have been like, if not for that one turn of fate.

Sighing, Mama held the door open for them. They slipped past her into a filthy parlor lit by the glow of Mama’s lantern. The fireplace looked cold and black, and the box where Gretchen’s grandfather used to keep the woodpile was empty. Ice crystals glittered on the wood-paneled walls. Months of rain and wood smoke had darkened the windowpanes. The watercolor painting above the mantel had been ripped; someone had stitched it together with red thread.

“What happened to the farm?” Gretchen asked. “Where are Oma and Opa?”

“Your grandparents are dead,” Mama said dully.

“What?”
Gretchen gasped. “What happened to them?”

“They fell ill last winter.” Mama curled a hand over her mouth, hiding her missing teeth. Each word was accompanied by a soft whistling sound. “Pneumonia.” She walked into the kitchen.

The backs of Gretchen’s eyes stung. Not Opa, who liked to smoke pipes in the evening and tell stories about his childhood, back when artists had flocked to Dachau to paint the ever-shifting landscape with its play of sunlight and shadow. And Oma, who smelled of cherries and could roll a piecrust perfectly on her first try and used to guide Gretchen’s young fingers on knitting needles.

Daniel wrapped his good arm around her. “I’m so sorry.”

She buried her face into his shoulder, counting her breaths. One. Her grandparents had been old. Two. She and Daniel were still alive, and they had to do whatever it took to stay that way. Three—she stopped, remembering that Hitler had taught her this calming method years ago, when she had been anxious about a school exam. She’d rather drown in grief than use any of his tricks. Even if they worked.

She pulled back from Daniel. He smiled a little, running his knuckles down the side of her cheek. “Go and talk to her,” he said quietly. “You haven’t seen each other in ages. I don’t want to get in the way. I’ll stay out here.”

How did he know what she needed, without being told? She nodded her thanks at him and followed Mama into the kitchen. This room was worse than the parlor: The cast-iron stove was cold and coated with a layer of grease, and the brown linoleum-topped table was gritty with spilled food. The tin bathtub her
grandparents used to fill with water from the well sat in the middle of the floor, its bottom wavering under a film of soap-scudded water.

How could Mama live in such filth? At the boardinghouse, she’d been a stickler for cleanliness, washing the linens, scrubbing the lavatories, scouring the windows with vinegar, and beating carpets on the back steps. What had happened in the past eighteen months to change her so completely?

“You must be hungry,” her mother mumbled, but Gretchen laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and guided her down into a chair.

“Please,” she said. “What’s happened here?”

Mama sighed and undid her kerchief. Her hair fell forward like a curtain, shielding her face. Silver threads glinted among the blond strands. “After they died, I couldn’t keep up with the farm. There’s so much work to be done, and I can’t afford to pay anyone to help me. . . .” She trailed off.

“And you?” Gretchen forced herself to ask, praying the answer wasn’t what she suspected. “What about your teeth?”

Mama cradled her head in her hands. “It was the night you and your Jew left.”

Slowly, Gretchen lowered herself into a chair. Even through the haze of the months, she remembered each detail of the final hours she and Daniel had spent in Munich. They had caught a train to Dachau, intending to beg her grandfather for his car so they could drive over the border. They’d been walking near the old powder factory when Mama had appeared. She had assumed they would avoid the town center and keep to the outskirts, to decrease the risk of running into their pursuers. When she had
warned them that SA men had already arrived at the farmhouse, Gretchen had seen their chances of escape evaporate like mist. Until Mama had given them her life’s savings and they had hiked to Ingolstadt, where they’d boarded a train bound for Switzerland.

“When I got back to the farmhouse,” Mama said, her voice hissing between her missing teeth, “the SA men were beating Opa. They wouldn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know where you’d gone.” She raised her head, tears shining in her eyes. “They tore the painting over the mantel. You know how Oma loved that picture. Then they hit me.” She touched her lips.

They must have hit her many times, to knock out so many teeth. Gretchen felt sick. This was her fault. While the SA had attacked her mother and grandfather, she’d been hiking through the countryside with Daniel, safe and unhurt and starting a new life.

She took her mother’s hand. Mama’s fingers felt cold, and the backs of her hands were knotted with blue veins. They’d never been pretty hands. Red from preparing meals for other people to eat and washing clothes for the boarders to wear. Nails broken and skin mottled from endless labor to keep Gretchen and Reinhard fed and clothed.

But Gretchen had loved those hands. They had protected her.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. Tears streamed down her cheeks. For once, she didn’t try to stop them.

“I know, Gretl,” her mother said. She didn’t squeeze Gretchen’s hand back, but she didn’t let go either. “Just as Herr Hitler would be, if he knew what had happened. The Party has grown too big. When it was small and within Herr Hitler’s control, it
was a good organization. Now it’s expanded beyond his grasp and there are rogue members doing wicked deeds in his name.”

Gretchen snapped her head up to look at her mother. Thin and pale in her old nightgown, her face painted yellow by the light of the lantern on the table. This was what Mama told herself, so she could keep going. Alone on a dying farm, abandoned by the people she’d thought were her friends. Oblivious that the man she admired so greatly had killed her husband and ordered her son’s death.

“Uncle Dolf isn’t who you think—” Gretchen stopped. Her mother’s eyes were steady on hers. And bright with tears.

Gretchen glanced at the dirty kitchen and thought of the fields that probably wouldn’t yield many potatoes in the fall. What harm was there in letting Mama believe what she needed to? She had no power, no influence, nobody to listen to whatever she might say. The truth seemed crueler than a lie.

Gretchen clutched her mother’s hand. “Yes, Mama,” she said. “I’m sure Uncle Dolf would be very sorry, if he knew.”

HER MOTHER TOASTED BREAD FOR GRETCHEN AND
Daniel. As they ate in silence, Gretchen watched Daniel sneaking glances around the kitchen, his expression pensive. She realized a city boy like him had probably never seen a home without running water or electricity before. This must seem like another world to him.

She thought of the Whitestones’ kitchen: bright with electric light, an icebox full of fine cuts of meat. And the cupboards in her family’s old kitchen, so often empty, when they had lived in an apartment and Papa had been alive. She could still hear Papa’s hoarse mutter that he wasn’t hungry. But she’d seen the way he’d looked at the pieces of turnip on her plate. He’d been starving, and had pretended he wasn’t so she and Reinhard would have something to eat. His hatred for the Jews made a horrifying kind of sense: He’d needed someone to blame, and
Hitler had suggested an easy scapegoat.

When they were done eating and had thanked Gretchen’s mother for the meal, Mama took their plates, careful not to touch Daniel’s fingers. “Gretchen, you may stay as long as you want,” she said without looking at him, her voice shaking. “You’re welcome to live here.”

Gretchen’s heart ached as she watched her mother carry the dishes across the room. “Mama, I can’t. Daniel needs me.”

“Fine,” her mother snapped. Her back was ramrod straight as she stacked the plates beside the dirty ones on the counter. “Go to bed. Your Jew can have the spare room at the end of the hall.”

Her Jew
. Mama couldn’t see him as anything other than that. Swallowing a sigh, Gretchen led Daniel upstairs to a long, dark hallway lined with three bedrooms. She pointed at his door, but couldn’t bring herself to look at him. What must he think of her, with a mother who despised him so deeply that she couldn’t call him by name?

“There are extra blankets in the armoire,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry, Daniel.”

He placed his index finger under chin, propelling it upward until their gazes met. “It’s fine. I already knew what she thinks of me.”

She clung to him for a moment, listening to the reassuring thump of his heart. “We can do this, can’t we?” she asked, needing to hear him agree. “Prove your innocence?”

“Of course.” He sounded so much like the Daniel she’d known in Munich, brash and confident, that she couldn’t help smiling. When she was with him, anything seemed possible. Somehow they would clear his name and show the world that
the National Socialists were responsible for this Fräulein Junge’s murder. With foreign eyes watching Berlin, Daniel would be permitted to leave the country, and they could go back to England and the life they’d been building together. The future rolled out before her like a length of twine, long and curving but wonderfully tough and strong.

“Good night,” she said, kissing him before slipping into another spare room. Curled up under the heavy blankets, she let herself think of the Whitestones and tears rose to her eyes. They could have no inkling how desperate things had gotten in Germany, and must be so worried about her. In the darkness, she clasped her hands together and prayed she got the chance to see them again.

The express to Berlin didn’t leave until nightfall. A day stretched out in front of Gretchen and Daniel, waiting to be filled. After a meager breakfast of scrambled eggs, they sat in the parlor, talking about this mysterious murder Daniel was supposed to have committed. Who had this woman been and why had she been killed? Without knowing more information, though, it was useless to speculate, and finally they gave up in frustration. The investigation would have to wait until they got to Berlin; in the meantime, they had to find ways to make the hours pass.

Daniel chopped wood for the cast-iron stoves that her mother used to heat the farmhouse; Gretchen filled the kitchen tub with fresh water and scrubbed all the dishes clean. As she went into the yard to toss out the water, she glimpsed her mother slipping into the henhouse. She followed Mama inside.

In the dark coolness, she saw her mother reaching into the
straw for eggs while hens pecked at the feed on the ground. Gretchen helped gather the eggs into a basket.

“You said you came here from Munich,” Mama said. “Did you visit Reinhard’s grave there?”

Embarrassment flushed Gretchen’s face. She hadn’t even thought of her brother’s resting place. She shook her head.

“I haven’t been back myself.” Mama gently placed more eggs into the basket. “Reinhard’s friends in the SA paid for the tombstone. They said it was beautifully carved.” Her voice broke on the last word. Alarmed, Gretchen tried to touch her, but her mother shied away.

“No, Gretl,” she said hesitantly, “there’s something I need to tell you—something I’ve been thinking about since Reinhard died. It wasn’t his fault that he became . . . well, what he was.”

Gretchen glanced at her mother in confusion. “What do you mean?”

For a long moment, the only sound was the hens clucking and the rustle of straw. Then Mama let out a low moan and sank to the ground, dropping the basket. “It was your father’s fault,” she said.

Something icy grabbed Gretchen’s insides. What was Mama talking about? Slowly, she lowered to a crouch beside her mother. “I don’t understand.”

“He wanted Reinhard to grow up to be like Herr Hitler.” Mama dropped her hands from her face. Tears trapped in her wrinkled cheeks shone like silver threads. “He was determined to treat Reinhard just as Herr Hitler’s father had treated him. It was all because of that story Herr Hitler confided to us once.”

The words tumbled out as though Mama been holding them
inside for a long time. “His father often whipped him. One night, when Herr Hitler was a small boy, he heard his father coming down the hall to beat him. He was determined to get away and tried wriggling through the window. But he couldn’t quite fit. So he took off his clothes and was almost through when his father opened the door. Herr Hitler snatched up a bedsheet to cover his nakedness. His father laughed and laughed at him. He even told Herr Hitler’s mother to come and look. From then on, he called Herr Hitler ‘the toga boy.’ Papa said it sounded as though Herr Hitler had been toughened up from a very early age.”

Suddenly pieces locked together: Papa striding toward Reinhard, drawing his belt free from his trousers. Whipping him over and over, saying someday Reinhard would be thankful. Kissing Gretchen’s cheeks or dancing with her around the kitchen while Reinhard sat in the corner, sulking. Why had they been treated so differently? Even as Gretchen asked herself the question, she knew the answer: Papa had coddled and loved her because she was a girl. Her gender had kept her safe. But Reinhard, the boy, the one who was expected to have a job someday and make a success of himself, had been treated in the same manner Hitler had. Whipped and humiliated and mocked.

Gretchen surged to her feet. Papa, the man everyone had told her was so kindhearted. Misguided, his mind wracked by warfare, but good deep down—that was what she had promised herself the whole time she’d been living in England. Air seemed to vanish from her lungs. Perhaps the man she’d loved and missed so much hadn’t existed at all.

“How could you do that to Reinhard?” she choked out.

Mama’s eyes gleamed with tears. “Papa thought he was
turning Reinhard into a leader. We didn’t dream he’d turn out so differently from Herr Hitler—so cold and unfeeling. And he
did
die protecting you,” she added, sounding defensive.

Gretchen remembered the lie she had told her mother, a tiny piece of comfort she had hoped would help Mama get through the years. The truth swelled inside her mouth until she was bursting to let it out, but she didn’t speak. The pleading on her mother’s face was unmistakable—perhaps a part of Mama suspected that Reinhard had died in another manner, but she needed to believe what Gretchen had told her. Gretchen turned away from her mother and braced her hands on the wall, feeling the wooden splinters digging into her palms. The pain was welcome—it was something to feel besides this widening hole within her rib cage.

“I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Papa knew that Uncle Dolf was diagnosed as a psychopath when they were recovering at the military hospital together. How could he want Reinhard to be like him? How could he remain friends with Uncle Dolf and bring him into our home?” The last words felt as though they had been wrenched from her.

“Herr Hitler a psychopath!” Mama snorted. She picked up the basket and began gathering eggs again. “As if your father ever believed in that sort of nonsense. Those mind doctors are quacks, Gretl. Papa knew they must have been mistaken about Herr Hitler.”

The last pieces fell together in a rush. Gretchen had read the letters her father had sent to her mother during the Great War. He’d written that he’d heard the doctors talking about Hitler, but he couldn’t believe that their whispered words truly applied to him. He’d known the truth, but hadn’t accepted it. That was
why he’d tried to turn his only son into a reflection of his dearest friend.

But Reinhard had grown up so emotionless, while Uncle Dolf was all fire. Papa must have feared he’d made mistakes in Reinhard’s upbringing, to make him so different from Hitler. Eventually their parents had taken Reinhard to a doctor—and received the same diagnosis that Hitler had gotten. It had been her father’s death warrant. Maybe then her father had finally believed the truth about Hitler. Or maybe he had continued to think that psychologists were charlatans. Either way, his knowledge had gotten him killed. When the National Socialists had attempted to overthrow the Munich government, he’d warned Hitler not to let his overwrought nerves get the best of him again—and Hitler had realized that Papa had known about the diagnosis from five years earlier and had to be eliminated to prevent the embarrassing secret from ruining his future political chances.

Gretchen wondered if Papa had figured out what was happening, in that brief second between Hitler’s pressing his pistol into his back and firing. Had he realized that the man he’d loved as a brother, the friend he’d tried to turn his son into, had been a monster?

The air inside the henhouse was so stifling that she couldn’t breathe.

She shoved the door open and ran across the fields. She needed a place to hide from the world. Beside the barn, she sank to her knees and let herself cry. Poor Reinhard. He hadn’t had the chance to grow into his own person. Maybe the early lack of their mother’s touch had coiled something inside him, and their
father’s beatings and jeers had only twisted it tighter.

Maybe, if things had been different, she and her brother could have been friends.

Or perhaps he still would have grown up broken and emotionless; she couldn’t pretend to understand all the mysteries of the human mind. But her beloved papa had helped to shatter what should have been whole in Reinhard. The man she’d adored and whom she’d needed to believe in so badly.

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Surely the answers weren’t this easy, though, were they? Her parents’ mistreatment of Reinhard must have affected him, but that couldn’t be the sole reason he had turned out sadistic and distant. There had to have been something else within him, something that had been in him from the start.

Maybe Hitler had been involved in shaping her brother’s personality, too; he’d certainly spent a lot of time with them while they were growing up. He’d taught them that they were special, separated from the so-called mongrel races because of their Aryan blood. Had Hitler’s teachings given Reinhard permission to hurt others—because he thought they were subhumans and didn’t matter?

And what about Hitler? Had his upbringing, which she knew almost nothing about, warped him into a hate-spewing politician? She thought of his brother and sisters and shook her head. She’d once met his older half sister, Angela, a kindly, middle-aged lady, and she’d heard stories about his other siblings. They had sounded ordinary enough. Certainly Hitler’s childhood must have helped to form him, but it wasn’t the only factor.

Gretchen rested her burning forehead in her cold hands.
How desperately she wished Alfred were with her right now. But she could imagine what he would say:
Reinhard may have been ill-treated but he was responsible for his actions. He chose to harm people, just as Hitler chooses to hate. We are each our own person, separate from our family, not wholly formed by our experiences.
We
decide who we want to be.

Resolutely, she got to her feet and brushed dirt from her stockings. Maybe the Papa she’d loved and mourned had been her own creation. Her real father had been either deluded or wicked; at this point, it hardly mattered which. He was gone, and now she’d never know him. But she was alive and whole. And she chose to see with her own eyes, however painful and ugly the view.