The Girl Is Trouble (11 page)

“Of course not.”

She cocked her head toward Benny. “And who is he?”

“Her boyfriend,” Benny said. Just like at the hotel, he wrapped a protective arm around my waist. A blush burned its way down my face.

“How did you find me, daughter and boyfriend?”

“We went to the White Swan. There was a man there who said he was your ex-husband. He said you were working here as a waitress.”

She removed a cigarette from a wooden box and lit it. “A waitress? The swine is still charming as ever. Someday he will open his eyes and realize that all this is mine, no thanks to him.” She tweaked her mouth to the right and exhaled a stream of smoke. “So why are you here?”

“Because the papers said you were the one who found her,” I said.

She continued smoking, showing no sign of saying anything in reply.

I dug my nails into my hand, hoping the pain would give me courage. “I’ve seen the crime-scene photos. And I’ve seen the room it happened in. There was blood everywhere. That was no suicide.”

She stared at me in silence for so long that I started to think she was never going to respond. Then, “No, it wasn’t.”

My face twitched into a momentary smile before the joy at finally hearing the truth was overtaken by the enormity of what she was saying. “Then why did everyone say it was?”

“When your mother checked in, she was with a man. I never talk to them, but I see them come and go.” She flicked ash into a silver beer stein. “When I find her dead, I call the police. They come and so does the man. He takes me aside and explains to me that I need to forget everything I saw in that room. To help forget he will give me money.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. He paid for my ignorance so I did not ask.”

“So he bribed you so you would lie to the police?”

She laughed and a stream of smoke escaped her nose. “I’m not the only one who got fat pockets that day. Make no mistake about it.”

I’d never felt like hurting someone before, but right then, I wanted to hurt Anna Mueller.

“Easy, Iris,” Benny whispered in my ear. The arm around my waist grew tighter, holding me back.

“I’m sorry if that upsets you, but Ingrid Anderson was not a good person. That is why I take the money.”

“How can you say that? You didn’t know her.”

“No, but I know her kind.” She stabbed the air with her finger. “We all do. And it may be hard to hear, but no one cares how she died, they are just happy that she did. We don’t need people like her here.”

Finally, I understood what she was saying. Pearl was right: Yorkville was nothing but a hotbed of anti-Semitism. This woman, the police—everyone thought that Mama’s faith justified her murder.

No wonder Pop didn’t want to talk about it.

“Get me out of here,” I whispered to Benny.

“Why are you so angry?” asked Anna. “You know what she was, don’t you?”

I met her, cold stare to cold stare. “No. Why don’t you tell me?”

I braced myself for her to declare that Mama was a Jewish pig. But she surprised me.

“Poor little girl, don’t you know? Your mother was a Nazi.”

*   *   *

I DON’T REMEMBER
leaving the Biergarten. The time between when Anna declared Mama a Nazi and when I found myself on the street, crossing the imaginary line between Yorkville and the rest of the Upper East Side, vanished.

“She was yanking our chains,” said Benny.

“Of course she was,” I said, though I didn’t feel nearly as certain as I tried to sound. On the surface, it was a crazy accusation, but in some strange way it made sense. Of course the police didn’t care that she had been murdered. Wasn’t one less Nazi a reason for rejoicing?

But then why claim it was suicide? To protect her killer?

“It was probably just a rumor,” Benny said. We reached the subway but he seemed hesitant to go through the turnstile, as though we needed to resolve the truth about Mama before we left the Upper East Side and went home. “You know how rumors are. Once they start, they’ve got legs and there’s no stopping them, even if there isn’t a whiff of truth in it.”

He was right. We were in high school, after all, we knew how rumors began. All you needed to do was wear a tight sweater or a different shade of lipstick or skip class with a notorious Italian hoodlum and suddenly your reputation was being questioned.

But would one German say that sort of thing about another? It was, I had to imagine, the worst possible thing you could claim. To call another girl easy because of the way she dressed was one thing, but this? Was this really the sort of thing you would tell someone—total strangers at that—without evidence? What could Anna possibly gain by doing so?

And was there evidence? The worst part of Mama’s death was how incomprehensible it seemed. Everything had been so normal until Pearl Harbor. Mama had seemed so happy. She had always been independent—she had to be with Pop being gone for months at a time—and it wasn’t unusual for her to go out at night. Although she left on her own, I assumed she didn’t remain that way—it wouldn’t have been proper for a woman to walk the streets by herself. She had lots of friends, including a number of German ones who she often spent hours talking to on the phone in her native tongue. And she received mail from Germany, from family members who still lived abroad. Those were in German, too, of course, so I never knew what they said and relied on the brief translations she shared with me. I’d never had any reason to doubt the explanations behind the phone calls or the letters, but it’s not like I could’ve questioned her honesty. I didn’t speak the language, after all, and there was no Mrs. M. back then to translate it for me.

“Iris?” said Benny. I snapped to attention. He dropped his token into the turnstile and waited for me to do the same. “You going to be okay?”

I forced a smile. Why was I even allowing myself to ponder this? “Of course. I know my mother wasn’t … there’s no way she could’ve been…” I couldn’t even say the word. Maybe that was why Pop told me he didn’t want to talk about the photos: he figured thinking she had killed herself was much better than learning what some people thought she had really been up to.

We boarded the train. It was standing room only so we huddled together at a pole, sharing an easy intimacy that, on any other day, would’ve thrilled me. As we barreled toward home, I took in the crowd around us: businessmen on their way back from lunch, mothers heading to and from appointments, soldiers enjoying the city before they shipped out to places unknown, immigrants hoping they’d guessed at the right train to take them to their destination. As cautious as Pop always encouraged me to be, I never thought I was at risk when I roamed around the city. But now I wondered who else was lurking in the shadows created by the subway tunnels.

What was it Pop had said? The enemy didn’t always wear a uniform.

We arrived on the Lower East Side and I followed Benny as he took a roundabout path designed to avoid truant officers and anyone else who might be able to make things difficult for us if they saw us out and about. We entered the school property the way we’d left: through the chain-link fence.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost 12:30. We would be able to sneak into lunch and seamlessly rejoin our day. I could ask Pearl to take care of the attendance records for us. No one would have to know that we’d left school.

“Come on,” he said as he approached the window we’d exited from.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“It looks higher than it is. I’ll give you a boost.”

“No. I can’t go back in there. Not now.”

He nodded, finally understanding what I was saying. There was a scream forming somewhere deep in my abdomen and I was worried that once it started, it would never stop. Until I found some way to quell it, I couldn’t sit in a classroom and pretend everything was all right.

He looked up at the window, almost longingly, before returning his focus to me. “Can you go home?”

I could. I could tell Mrs. M. I was sick and spend the rest of the day in bed. She would call the school for me, her voice a low murmur on the phone so she wouldn’t disturb my rest. But that would require lying to her, and I didn’t have the strength to do that. Nor could I bear to tell her the truth because that would mean saying it out loud.
No one cares that my mother was murdered. You probably don’t, either. After all, the only good German is a dead German.

“No,” I told Benny. “I can’t go home. Not like this.” The tears were starting. What had held them at bay until now? I didn’t know. All I knew was that once they started, it would be many hours before they stopped.

“Come on. I know a place.” He took my hand and led me away from the school and down a series of streets until we arrived at an apartment building. We didn’t go inside. Instead, he led me around back, where stacks of sandbags leaned against the rear wall. In the center of them was a cave made of corrugated metal. Still holding my hand, he ducked inside it and led me into a space that was larger than its exterior implied. He released me just long enough to turn on a kerosene light. It revealed a barren room lined with wooden benches.

“Where are we?”

He barred the door. Daylight illuminated the edges. “Air-raid shelter.”

Of course. We had one on our block, though I’d never been inside it. There were supposed to be drills to teach us what to do if bombs started falling from the sky, but somehow our part of Orchard Street hadn’t had one yet. “Are we allowed to be in here?”

Benny shrugged. “No one’s told me otherwise. I come here sometimes. You know—to think.” A small pile of spent cigarette butts testified to how many times he’d been here before. He dipped into the shadows and emerged with a blanket and a box of animal crackers. “Here. It gets a little cold in here, but it’s not so bad.”

“Thanks.” I let him wrap the blanket around me and took a cookie when he offered it. He sat close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his body. It was the kind of space that should’ve terrified me—after all, it was designed for us to pass time in the worst of circumstances—but I found it oddly cozy. For a moment it was like we weren’t even in New York anymore, but in some prehistoric cave in another time and another place that had never heard of Nazis.

Stop it,
I told myself.
Don’t think about that. It doesn’t deserve space in your head
.

“Do you live in this building?” I asked him.

“Top floor.”

“Where are your parents?”

“My old man’s probably asleep.”

“And your mother?”

“Died four years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. Did that mean my apologies were unnecessary or that in light of the reasons behind my own mother’s death, losing his mother was nothing to dwell on?

“What does your pop do?”

“He used to deliver the mail until they found him passed out drunk on his route. So now he spends his days sleeping and his nights drinking.”

Suze had once told me that Benny’s dad wasn’t exactly Spencer Tracy. “What will happen when he finds out you skipped?”

“He won’t find out, not if I want to walk again.”

I’d seen evidence of his father’s temper. The night we’d gone dancing in Harlem, Benny had come home late enough to get beaten black and blue. Suze had taken him in that night, and in the wee morning hours, as he got ready to sleep on her bedroom floor, he’d told her how much he liked me.

But that news hadn’t had the impact on me that Suze predicted. She told me the same day I’d heard the rumors that Mama had been having an affair.

“Have you slept here?” I asked because I wanted to think of anything but Mama.

“A few times when the weather was warm. There’s a heater in here, but I didn’t want to use it, you know, just in case.”

What he meant was just in case there really was an air raid.

I thought about the Jews in Poland and how many cold and terrifying nights they’d spent in rooms like this one, of all the reasons the Jewish Student Federation had banded together and wanted only the most devoutly religious in their ranks. What would they think if they heard the rumor that my mother had supported the people who coined the rhetoric written on the locker notes?

What would Pearl think?

“Iris?”

Pearl. She had to have been worried when I didn’t show up at lunch. She could never know about any of this. I’d swear Benny to secrecy, and I’d put my heart and soul into finding out who was behind the notes. I’d start going to synagogue, too. I’d become the best damn Jew ever, so that if word ever did get out about what my mother was (maybe!) up to, no one would accuse me of sharing her twisted ideals.

“Iris?” Benny was staring at me. I returned his gaze, though he had to see in my eyes that I’d heard nothing else he’d said. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No.” I gulped hard. If it required only a drop of blood to make you a German, how many did it take to make you a Nazi? “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about what we learned today.”

“You don’t think it’s true.”

“No. Of course I don’t.” A new stream of tears started its journey. “But other people might. People who didn’t know her.”

“I promise, Iris. I can keep a secret.”

“Because if anyone found out, I’d die.” The tears came faster, and I was finding it harder and harder to breathe. No wonder Pop walked around the Orchard Street house with the weight of the world on his shoulders. How could he ever be happy when the woman he loved had been accused of something like this?

Benny put his arm around me and pulled me into his chest. “I won’t let that happen,” he said.

I buried my face in his sweater and let the wool soften my sobs. Eventually the darkness enveloped me and I slept.

*   *   *

I’M NOT SURE WHAT ROUSED ME.
I awoke to find myself still in Benny’s arms. He was awake, one hand tangled in my hair, where it was gently rubbing my scalp.

“Hey there, Nancy Drew,” he said as I looked up at him. “Feel better?”

It took me a moment to remember where I was, and what had happened. “I guess.” I was so comfortable in his arms. While it should’ve felt strange to be so close to a boy, it reminded me of being a little girl and waking up from a nap in Mama’s bed.