The Kingdom

of Shadows

by

K. W. Jeter

Copyright © 2011 by K. W. Jeter

This ebook edition first published June 2011.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including digital reproduction, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the express written permission of the
Author & Copyright Holder.

For information, contact kw@kwjeter.com.

For more books by K. W. Jeter, visit the
K. W. Jeter Information Site
at www.kwjeter.com.

For my wife Geri.

Du Seele bist dem Lichte gleich,

Das himmelwärts die Heimat ahnt

Und, kämpfend mit dem Schattenreich,

Sich doch zu Gott die Wege bahnt . . .

Soul, you are like the Light

That senses its home to be heavenwards

And, battling with the kingdom of shadows,

Yet makes its way to God . . .

– Frank Wysbar (1899-1967),

“The Ferryman’s Song”

from the film Fährmann Maria(1936)

BERLIN

1936

Betwixt the press of shadows and the blood . . .

– George Chapman (c. 1559 - 1634),

trans. (1616), The Odyssey, Book XI

ONE

He had never seen anything else as beautiful. A photograph in a shop window – if he was not yet old enough to be initiated into the faith of his fathers, then she would be his angel of light.

His brother Matthi knew, smiled, but did not mock. “When you are older, Pavli.” Matthi had already entered the world of adults. “Then you shall know a lot of things.”

Matthi had taken pity on him and had shown him a secret, a mystery. Undoing the tight, three-buttoned cuff of his shirt – all the Lazarene men wore shirts with cuffs like that – Matthi had pushed his sleeve up and shown Pavli his wrist. The soft inner skin had still been reddened and sore from the slow, patient needles, but the tattooed wound was starkly visible, a dark blue line a few inches long, thick in the middle, tapering at the ends.

“You see?” Matthi had shown him the tattoo on his other wrist as well. “That’s how you know it’s true. These people who call themselves Christians – they think the nails went into His palms. But that’s not how it was done. It was through the wrists.”

That made sense, the way Matthi had explained it to him. The weight of a man’s body – and God had been a man then, for a little while – would have torn the hands around the nails, rags of blood and small bones, and dropped them free. The stronger wristbones made for a proper crucifixion.

Such were the things of which the Lazarenes alone knew the truth. The dark components of their faith. Matthi knew of those things, or at least some of them. The secrets in which he’d been instructed by the elders. Already, Matthi no longer looked like a boy; he was a man, who knew the things of men. He had grown a head taller than his little brother, and his shoulders had broadened, as though to carry the burden of that invisible knowledge. The gaze in Matthi’s eyes had turned thoughtful and distant, already seeing the light of some world more real than the one held by the net of Berlin’s interwoven streets. And Matthi’s voice was both deeper and quieter now, befitting the words that spoke of the Savior’s true death and life, that those outside the Lazarene faith knew nothing of.

Sometimes, Pavli felt afraid to grow up, afraid of that day when he would be initiated into the faith of the Lazarenes as his brother had been. What if learning those dark mysteries meant that he must lose her, the beauty of the shop window?

The shop was his uncle Turro’s – the sign above the door read JOSEFSOHN, which was what his uncle had made of their family name Iosefni. That was not part of the Lazarene faith, but something they did to survive: they hid among those others who were not as they were. They became inconspicuous, walked in shadows, kept their secret ways to themselves. And were always ready to leave again.

One street off the Französische Straße, still in sight of the elegantly dressed promenaders, Arthur Josefsohn sold cameras. Rolleis and Leicas, clever machines of silvery metal and black folding bellows, deep polished lenses. It was one of the first camera shops in all Berlin.

“You see, Pavli,” his uncle had told him. “That’s why the Gaje get confused, and think we’re Jews.” He’d used the old word that meant the ones who aren’t the same as us, the word the gypsies in their rolling wagons used for people who lived in cities. “Because we have to make money any way we can. They think it’s cleverness, but it’s really just desperation.”

He knew what Jews were, and that these were not good times for them. A shop down the street from his uncle’s had its windows smashed and Juden Raus splashed across the front in red paint. People had stood around laughing when the owner had cursed and shaken his fist at a pack of brownshirts, then been kicked and pummeled to the ground. The blood had still been wet and sticky on the paving stones, glistening with splinters of glass, when Pavli had knelt down and touched it with his fingertips.

Pavli heard more of such things when he came to work in the shop. The Lazarene elders had talked about what was to be done with the two orphaned boys, Pavli and his brother, and their uncle had stepped forward to take them in.

“Why didn’t they live forever?” He had asked Matthi that as they stood with the hems of their trousers getting wet from the graveyard’s tall damp grass. “Some people do.”

“Don’t be stupid,” his brother had said. This was years ago, when their father had been buried beside their mother. “Nobody lives forever. Not even among the Lazarenes.”

Pavli didn’t know if that was true or not. Some things were mysteries. When you are older – his brother had promised him that. Then you shall know. As before, the thought of receiving such knowledge brought dread into Pavli’s gut.

Dread, and also a longing that couldn’t be quenched. To know, to know everything.

That desire had led him to do a shameful thing. To spy upon his own brother. This had not been a dream; Pavli had done it in the daytime, a few weeks after Matthi had been taken into the secrets of the Lazarene faith and become a man by their beliefs.

Pavli had slipped away from the shop and gone back to the little flat they lived in with their uncle. Where he had known his brother would be. He had been able to open the bedroom door silently, just a crack, and peer in. To where Matthi had stood in front of the dresser mirror, with his shirt stripped off. The ritual tattoos, the blue-black wounds of Christ, had shown fresh and stark on Matthi’s pale body. The wrists and the other, longer mark that went down the ribs, the symbol of the Roman soldier’s lance piercing Christ’s side – Pavli had already known about that, had seen the markings when they had both undressed for bed.

He had watched as his brother had dug his fingertips into the soft flesh of his forearm. Then Matthi had lifted his hand, peeling away his own skin.

But not the body’s skin. No blood, but instead a gossamer substance, fluttering slowly as more of it came loose. Like the sleeve of an angel’s gown, if angels were to be seen naked beneath their bright raiment. In the curtained shadows of the bedroom, the secret thing glowed with its own subtle radiance.

Matthi had loosened his hand from a glove of the silky matter. The empty shape of his arm, freed from the heavy flesh, drifted upward. His other hand had peeled away a swath from his shoulder and his neck, then had started on his jaw, when his eyes had glanced into the mirror and spotted the small face of his brother at the door’s edge.

“You should be ashamed!” Matthi had grabbed him before he could run away. “You’re not to know these things! Not yet!”

Pavli had cried, battered by his own fear. Not of his brother’s sudden rage, but of that empty thing drifting near the bedroom’s ceiling, the transparent form of his brother’s arm and the blind fragment of his face.

Matthi’s anger had ebbed. He stroked his little brother’s hair. “Don’t be afraid.” He’d tried to comfort the weeping Pavli. “It’s all right. I won’t tell anyone.” The words had been awkward, hard to find. “I . . . I wasn’t supposed to be doing that. Not by myself.”

Sniffling, Pavli had looked up at his brother. “What? What was it?” There had been nothing then, no angel or ghost floating above them.

Matthi had shaken his head. “Don’t worry. Don’t even think about it. You’ll know everything, when it’s time.” A smile, or part of one. “And this will be our own secret, that nobody else will ever know. That you saw. And we won’t even talk about it to each other. Promise?”

He had nodded, sealing the promise deep onto his heart.

In the meantime, there was the beauty in the window of his uncle’s shop. That was another mystery, that bound him in its service.

His uncle had taken the photograph. Arthur Josefsohn had set up a portrait studio in the back of the shop, with black velvet drapes and a vase of silk flowers on a little table. The front window soon filled with samples of his craft. Men gazing unabashed into the lens, and girls turning just slightly away, in poses that were both demure and coquettish. And one of these was more beautiful than all the rest, her white-blonde hair caught luminous by the camera, one strand curling at her neck. Pavli’s uncle must have known as well that she was the loveliest one, for that photograph had been placed in the center of the shop window, in a silver frame set on an easel draped with velvet.

The first time Pavli saw the picture was when his uncle Turro brought him to the shop. Before that, he had never gone much out of the narrow streets and alleys of the Bayerisches Viertel, where the Lazarenes kept to themselves, Christian heretics among the Jews who largely comprised that district. The sight of the city’s broad thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, anchored at one end by the Imperial Palace and at the other by the smaller but equally impressive bulk of the Hotel Adlon, dazzled Pavli; it was like coming out of a dark cellar into the bright sunlight. His uncle had pointed with his cane to the Adlon’s towering stone facade. “There is more money in there than in the Reichsbank.” He’d smiled and winked at Pavli. “It’s safer there, too. So we can’t get at it.”

He’d stood on the sidewalk as his uncle had turned the key in the lock. That was when he had seen the photograph in the center of the window. “Pavli – come on.” His uncle had pushed the shop’s door open. “There’s much to do.” Then he’d seen what had caught and mesmerized his nephew. “She’ll be there when we leave,” he’d said, smiling and tugging Pavli inside.

Only later did he learn that the girl in the photograph was of the same blood as him, another child of the Lazarenes. But older than him, perhaps the same age as his brother Matthi. Which meant that she had learned secrets as well, or had begun to. Secrets from before even the Lazarenes, secrets that the mother of all men had whispered to the daughters of earth, when they had been no longer children and not yet women.

But those others did not concern him. All that Pavli cared about now was the girl in the photograph, in his uncle’s shop window.

Her father had left the faith. Pavli knew that much. The man would come into the shop and argue with Pavli’s uncle.

“There’ll be blood in the streets.” The man flicked cigar ashes onto the mahogany and brass display cases that Pavli had buffed with a soft rag just a few minutes before. “Plenty of blood. Oceans of it!” The man seemed to relish the prospect.

Pavli’s uncle remained unperturbed. “There’s been blood in the streets before. And often it’s been Lazarene blood.” He shrugged. “Yet the Lazarenes are still here. Just like die Juden. Here, or there, or somewhere.”

“The National Socialists are different.” It was obvious that the man would have joined the NSDAP if he could have. “They possess the intelligence, and the will. It isn’t just random outbursts of violence. Their policies are eugenics in action.”

Pavli’s uncle rolled his eyes. “Tell that to those thugs outside. The ones that go tromping up and down the street, scaring away the trade.” The boarded-up shop a few doors down still had its Jews Out painted across the front.

“They can’t accomplish what they need to, without breaking a few heads.” The man tilted his head back to breathe out a cloud of smoke. “That’s why it’s important to be on their side. Because there won’t be anybody left on the other side, when they’re done.”

Pavli’s uncle had muttered something in reply, but the man didn’t hear – he had pushed himself away from the counter and gone over to the shop’s front window. He came back with the silver-framed photograph.

“You see what I mean?” The girl in the photograph was his daughter Marte. “This is what I’m talking about. What you must do, Turro! To survive!”

Pavli’s uncle had told him the whole story after one of the man’s previous visits. How he had left the Lazarene faith and gone to live among the Gaje, how he’d tried to bleach with skin-burning acids the ritual tattoos on his wrists and along his ribs, to no avail. And how the man had married a Gaje woman, one that he didn’t love – a terrible sin, right there – but that had met certain specifications he’d had in mind.

“Look at her!” The man talked about his daughter in cold terms that made Pavli grit his teeth when he heard them. “She is the perfect image of German womanhood! Who could deny it?”

“Your precious National Socialists could.” Turro breathed on a lens and polished it with a soft white cloth. “They have legions of busybody little Rassenprüfers, checking people’s pedigrees as if they were dogs.”

The other man’s voice bulled on. “A true Nordic beauty! Blonde and fair, the nose perfect, the brow just right.” He sounded as if he had taken the calipers of the Nazi racial investigators and measured every part of his daughter’s face. “And her eyes – eh? You saw?”

“Yes,” said Pavli’s uncle wearily. “I have seen your daughter’s eyes.”

“Blue! Both of them! None of this mongrel business, one blue, one brown! That alone should be the proof!”

Pavli’s life had been so enclosed in the little world of the Lazarene community, that only when his uncle Turro had brought him out into the city proper, had he seen that other people’s eyes were always both of the same color. The Gaje men and women and children had either blue eyes or brown, or sometimes grey or green – but not one blue and one brown. As were Pavli’s eyes, and those of his brother Matthi, and their uncle, and their parents sleeping in their graves, and all the other Lazarenes. It was the mark of their pure blood, a sign of their separateness that all were born with, that didn’t need to be tattooed on like the marks of Christ’s wounds. But until he had started working in his uncle’s shop, he had thought all people were that way. The first few days, he’d had to hold himself from peering sharply at everyone who came in, marveling at the simple fact of their eyes being matched in color.

The girl Marte’s eyes were both blue; Pavli had been able to tell this, even from just the black-and-white photograph. Her father gloated over that detail.

“Two blue eyes!” It was why he had married the Gaje woman. “Like sapphires! Cornflowers!”

“You disgust me.” Pavli saw his uncle’s lip curl. “You’ve become just like them. You think you can breed people like cattle. Your own daughter –”

The argument had become even more heated, only breaking off when a customer had come into the shop.

“You will see, Herr Josefsohn.” The girl’s father bowed stiffly toward Pavli’s uncle behind the counter. “You will see that I am right about this.” He turned and strode out, trailing cigar smoke.

Pavli’s uncle let him put the silver-framed photograph back in the front window. Even just holding that object, the image of beauty, made the thoughts whirl clattering inside his head.

He touched the glass over the girl’s face and thought again – wordlessly – of how lovely she was. If what his uncle had told him was true, then she was of the same blood as him. A Lazarene like him, but something different at the same time.

All this talk of blood and breeding chilled him. The girl’s father had given his uncle some books to read, and Pavli had looked at them in the shop’s back room. They were all about race and blood and genetics, with long charts and graphs describing the size of people’s noses and foreheads, and pictures of black Africans and sly, devilish-looking Mongolians. Pavli saw that the books were all from the same publishing company, G. Lehmann und Sohne. The publisher’s emblem, at the bottom of the title pages, was a lion with the words Ich hab’s gewagt beneath. I Have Dared. In the older books, the ones before the National Socialists’ Machtergreifung, their seizure of state power, the lion stood stiff and somewhat placid, an old lion gazing into some unseen distance. But now, in the newer books, the lion’s teeth were bared and threatening, the muscles coiled in his limbs and shoulders, as though he were about to spring on his prey and rend it to bloody pieces. What did that mean?

He touched the eyes of the girl in the photograph.

All the gypsy tribes – the Sinti here in Germany, or the Kelderari coppersmiths from the East, or the Spanish Gitanos; all the wandering gawitka and weszytka Roma, the village and forest gypsies, the bergitka Roma in the mountains, or the forytka Roma, the town gypsies who lived in houses without wheels, even the Diddakoi, the half-gypsies – they all had eyes that were both the same, dark brown, almost black. Only the Lahzeroi had the mismatched eyes, one blue, one golden-brown.

In his uncle’s shop window, Pavli set the silver-framed photograph on the easel. The girl’s eyes, both the same color, gazed out at him, and through him, piercing his heart. The Lazarene blood had been mixed with that of the Gaje – she had become something different, an angel perhaps. In heaven, the angels were supposed to sing, moving the great works of God through their courses. And she was as beautiful as the angels were said to be.

If she sang to me – Pavli closed his eyes, his breath stopped – if she sang, I would hear her. He knew that, and wished it, and dreamed it.

TWO

Her father had taught her everything she needed to know, all the lines she might have to speak. Who she would be. A part she had been born to play.

Marte waited on the platform alone, the handle of her one small case clasped in both hands. Her father hadn’t come to the Bahnhof Friedrichstraße with her, to put her on the train. “Because someone might see us together,” her father had explained. He’d taken her face in his hands and kissed her on the brow. “And then they’d wonder how such a golden beauty as you came to have such an old black dog for a father. Or maybe they’d think I was a race polluter, some kike leching after another schöne Mädel.”

Marte bit her lip, until she could almost taste the salt leak under her tongue. No one must see her crying; no one must see her at all. That wasn’t one of the things her father had told her. It was something she had decided for herself, a vow sealed in that small room of her heart that was still her own.

The tears had been fought back. It helped not to think of these things, of how frightened she was inside. If she could only become what she pretended to be, like pulling on another’s skin, looking through their eyes, being that other girl. That woman.

Marte raised her head and looked about her, at the other people waiting. Two well-dressed women in fur-collared coats, chattering to each other in bright, hard voices. Men reading newspapers, the pages of Der Angriff folded back in their hands. At the end of the platform, two soldiers smoked and talked in low voices, their heads nearly touching each other. Everyone was who they seemed to be; of all the people in this world, she was the only one with a secret.

The memories she had tried to banish, to seal away in the dark where she couldn’t see them, moved inside her again. She could hear her own voice, the bravest she had ever been, asking her father if everything – all his plans and secret dealings – would turn out all right.

“There is nothing to be afraid of.” The papers for which he had paid were laid out on the dining room table; he had been explaining to her what each one meant. “These are perfect,” he’d said, tapping the papers with his fingertip. “The man who made them for us works with Naujocks, Heydrich’s own forger. These people are masters of their craft. If I could tell you of the mischief they’ve caused to Germany’s enemies . . . but such things are not meant for the ears of an innocent girl.”

The names her father had spoken meant nothing to Marte, but they frightened her nevertheless. As did the forged papers, that she turned over one after another, wondering if the girl they described was the same as herself. The documents attested to Marte’s lineage, pure Aryan stock for three generations back. Marte had been only eight years old when she had figured out that her father’s black hair and his eyes, one blue and one golden-brown, were things of which he was embarrassed. And that her own blondness, and the matched blue of her eyes, was somehow part of all his scheming.

“These make it possible.” Her father had held the papers in his hands. “And every further step – everything that you must do, my child – will make us safer and safer. You’ll see.”

What she had seen, one time when she had come late from school, had been the master forger to whom her father had paid so much money. A little sidling man, with the bright eyes of a scurrying animal, undimmed even though he had reeked of schnapps and cigarette smoke, brushing past her in the narrow hallway with a leather portfolio clutched tight to his chest. The forger’s eyes had glitteringly inspected her, as close as if he had run his ink-stained fingers over her breasts, before he had rushed down the stairs. In the flat, her father had been admiring the newest document, a certificate from the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt attesting that Marte Helle’s Nordic pedigree had been traced back to the Thirty Years War.

Such things weren’t for women to think about, but she wondered what would ever happen if someone were to offer the little man more money, for him to tell all her father’s secrets. Wasn’t it dangerous to have anyone know so much about you, things that were like a dagger pointed at your heart? But she knew she had to trust her father, who was wiser about such matters.

A shouting whistle roused her from those worrisome memories. The train, brakes hissing, slowed around the curve of track. She let herself be jostled forward with the others, an object with no thought other than holding on to her suitcase in the press of the crowd.

She found a seat on board, surrounded by other women, the two well-dressed ones across the aisle, their laughing and talking uninterrupted from before. She could smell the women’s heady perfume, like rare flowers, but wilder and sweeter, too. They wore makeup as well, rouge on their cheeks and red, unnatural lipstick. Marte’s father had debated whether she should wear makeup, but had decided against it. He had studied a leaflet written by Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, that said makeup was un-German and only for faces ‘marked by the eroticism of Asiatic females.’ Was that what those women across the aisle were? “And what does makeup matter, anyway?” Her father had said that to her, as he had cupped her chin in one hand. “You are already so beautiful without it.”

The men – the soldiers and the newspaper readers – had taken over the rear section of the carriage, where they could ease together in their grey smoke and talk of those things that softly whispered the coming of war, like ravens flying over old battlefields. One man had already leaned forward and, with beaming courtesy, offered the contents of his cigarette case to the two soldiers.

Marte pushed her suitcase farther back on the leather webbing of the shelf above the seats. When she sat back down, she saw that the seat across from her had been taken by a girl her age, with blond hair only a little darker than her own, pulled back into a thick braid.

As the train moved away from the platform, the girl turned a level, unblinking gaze over the faces near her. The girl’s eyes caught Marte’s for a few seconds, and she felt a chill touch the base of her throat as one corner of the girl’s mouth lifted in a knowing smile.

The train’s swaying motion rocked Marte’s head against the seat back. In her skirt pocket was the ticket her father had bought her; she reached in and closed her hand around it.

Across from her, the other girl sat up straighter, her nostrils flared. “I am going to the Lebensborn hostel in Steinhöring,” she announced in a loud, clear voice. She smiled in triumph, her hands gripping the edge of the seat. From the corner of her eye, Marte could see the other passengers turning their startled attention toward the girl; at the end of the carriage, the men broke off their talking.

The girl’s voice was now a shout. “There, I will have myself impregnated by an officer of the SS, the flower of German manhood, so that I may present our Führer with the child of my flesh.” She looked across the blank faces with the piercing vision of an eagle suspended in the cold, thin air above mountain peaks.

Silence filled the carriage, broken only by the clattering of the iron wheels on the tracks.

Marte felt the narrow space twisting about her, as if she had gone mad, that there was no girl sitting opposite her. That it had been she who had cried out, so that all could hear.

The newspapers rustled again, and conversations resumed, the well-dressed women speaking in softer voices than before, leaning toward each other and glancing across the aisle. One of the soldiers laughed at something whispered to him.

The girl had turned her steel gaze to the window, as though willing distance to vanish, for the train to have already arrived at its destination.

It could have been me. Marte tried not to think; to vanish instead, to become nothing from inside out. But she couldn’t. I could have shouted that.

Her fingers touched the edges of the ticket. The destination printed on it was Steinhöring.

THREE

“Ganz verrückt.” Liesel looked over the new arrivals. “That one there is completely crazy.”

The hostel director’s car had returned from the train station. From an upstairs window, Liesel and Trudi watched the driver unloading the few bits of luggage. The shadow of the SS black flag danced over the white, pebbly gravel.

They could see Frau Hegemann giving the two new girls her welcoming speech. The words duty and honor figured in the spiel at least three times. Liesel had thought Frau Hegemann was a bit cracked, too, when she had looked into the woman’s eyes. Some of these old bats’ knees trembled every time they thought about the Führer.

That same crazed spark was in the eyes of one of the girls below. It was a look that swept away the whole world. Even the girl that carried around those burning eyes no longer really existed, except for a womb committed to the greater glory of the Reich.

“You’re right.” Trudi giggled. “When her time’s come, she’ll probably go marching into the delivery room.”

Liesel snorted in disgust. “Who could get it up for somebody like that? Even SS officers are men, just like other men.”

“Are they?” Trudi peered at her. “How do you know? They’re supposed to be different.”

“‘Different.’” She shook her head. “They all get hard and stupid when they see a pretty woman. That’s what they all want to stick their kleinen Männer into, not some silly bitch who’ll be singing the Horst Wessel Lied when she should be bouncing her tail up and down.” What men wanted, she knew, was herself; they wanted her golden hair spilling into their faces as her breasts moved against their sweating torsos. She was the best-looking girl in the Lebensborn hostel; none of the others could really compare to her. Trudi and all the other girls would have to settle for whatever men Liesel had rejected as being unworthy of the gift of her body.

The summer before, when her breasts had grown so much, so that she could cup them in her hands when she stood stripped to the waist in front of her dresser’s tiny mirror, her hands no longer her own but the grasp of a man whose face she had not yet imagined – then she was sure of her beauty and the power that came with it. The cold part inside her head, that never slept in its calculations, knew what it was worth; it could get her all she deserved.

Others saw how beautiful she had become. A Party photographer came out and took her picture, and it appeared on the cover of Das Deutsche Mädel, the official journal for all BDM girls. The words inside had described her as the perfect Germanic girl, the model for all others to aspire to. She had been annoyed that they hadn’t given her name, but even so, all the other girls in her Bund chapter had known who it was.

That was when the news about the Lebensborn came, first whispered from one girl to another, then confirmed by the older women who were the BDM leaders. Reichsführer SS Himmler’s marvelous idea, to create a way in which every German girl of good Aryan breeding could present to her Führer the greatest possible gift, a new life, a child that would be part of the future race of heroes. Without worrying about the old world’s outmoded notions of marriage and sexual morality, and with the seed of those whose German blood ran purest, who had proved themselves worthy to father the elite of the world to come.

She had been told that there would be no tie between her and whatever SS officer might choose her to bear his child; the Lebensborn program was not in the business of fostering petty emotional dependencies. Liesel was only eighteen, and she already knew that things did not work that way, or if they did, they could be made to work another way. Her way . . .

“The other one’s not so bad.” Trudi brought her nose right up against the window glass. “She’s kind of pretty.”

Liesel looked down at the other girl who had gotten out of the car. She stood waiting demurely to take her suitcase from the driver’s hand, only to have him shake his head and tell her that he would carry all the luggage inside.

She’s not used to that, thought Liesel, watching. To having people do things for her. She hadn’t been either, when she’d first arrived at the Lebensborn hostel, but it had only taken her a second to know that it was what was owed to her.

“She’s all right, I suppose.” Liesel drew back from the window. “In a cheap kind of way.”

This latest arrival might be a problem, if she had any idea of how pretty she really was, and if she put on airs about it. Then Liesel would have to smile and be nice to her, until there was the perfect chance to put her in her place.

She would have to be careful. It annoyed her to have to think about these things, but she already had plans made, and there wasn’t room for a competitor in them. No one would spoil that shining future she saw ahead.

FOUR

“Marte –” The hostel director appeared in the doorway. “I’m very disappointed in you. You must come down now and join the others.”

She lifted her face from the dampened pillow. One hand, in a child’s reflex, smeared the wetness on her cheek. “Yes . . .” She nodded slowly, pushing herself upright. “I’m sorry.”

Frau Hegemann’s expression softened, as much as the sharp, over-prominent bones of her narrow face would allow. She came into the small room and stood beside the bed. “Don’t worry so, mein Kind.” She reached out and smoothed Marte’s hair. “It won’t be so bad. There is nothing unendurable for a girl of your good stock.”

She couldn’t look at the older woman. A sudden panic had gripped her, but it had eased now, leaving a dead feeling inside her. She didn’t even know why she had been afraid. Nothing had happened that her father hadn’t told her about. Even what was to come, the lying with a man – he had described how it would be. That wasn’t what she was scared of.

“I . . . I’ll be down in just a few minutes.” Her throat felt tight when she swallowed. “I just need . . . to get ready.” Marte knew her eyes had reddened from crying.

“Very well.” Frau Hegemann drew her hand away and touched the sparse lace at her own throat, the only adornment to the high-collared, monastic grey dress that was the uniform of her Lebensborn service. “Don’t take too long.”

Marte splashed cold water from the wash basin onto her face. She looked up and gazed into the eyes of the girl held in the mirror.

Not the lying with a man . . . the presence of him, opening and consuming her . . . that meant nothing. If there had been a part of her afraid of that, the smallest child inside her, then it had disappeared long ago.

She rubbed her face with the coarse towel. Her skin felt raw and hot as she looked again into her own eyes.

His eyes . . . She knew that was what she feared. When he looks at me . . . What would he see there? A man whose face she did not even know yet, but whose hard laughter she had already heard through the room’s window, the big voices of him and the others like him, touching her ear as their boots had crunched the gravel of the building’s front drive. She had even opened her door a crack and listened, past the other girls’ excited whispers; she’d heard the SS officers’ voices right here inside the hostel as Frau Hegemann had welcomed them downstairs.

They were real, they existed. Even those ghost parts, voices with words she couldn’t make out, were more real than her. What if a man turned toward her and saw . . . nothing? She would be the ghost, the pink and white of her skin turned to glass, to air, to nothing at all . . .

Stop it. A voice spoke inside her head, but she couldn’t tell it was her own. The girl in the mirror stood very still and quiet, as though waiting.

A strand of her white-gold hair had come astray. With the tip of her finger, she tucked it back behind her ear. She felt that touch, her own hand against her skin. At least that much was real.

* * *

A radio played in the big reception room, a nice-sounding cabinet model, not a cheap tinny Volksempfänger. Someone had actually been able to tune in a broadcast of American-style jazz; though that music was frowned upon in the Reich beyond the Lebensborn’s walls, here even Frau Hegemann smiled and admitted that it made for a festive atmosphere. More than festive – everyone knew the scientific facts that Negro music helped one forget inhibitions and stirred the blood in one’s loins. And that was just what was called for.

A bar had been set up at one end of the room. Supposedly, only Apfelsanft and other fruit juices were to have been served, especially to the girls, but several bottles of schnapps had been smuggled in by the hostel’s gardener. Frau Hegemann had turned a blind eye to that. The alcohol helped some of the girls get over their nervousness at talking to men they had never met before. Some of the men had that problem, too; the hostel director always knew which ones they were, because their buddies helped out by getting them half-drunk before they arrived.

Liesel had been glad to see that Obersturmführer Dietrich Stoehr – the evening’s star, the handsome-enough face that she and the other girls had seen in the papers – was not one of those, the nervous type who needed to be well-lubricated before they could approach a girl. Funny to think that some of these hardened warriors, the new elite of the Reich, could be frightened of a soft voice and smile. They did look impressive, though, in their black dress uniforms, the mirrorlike gloss of their polished boots, the detailed insignia across their chests. Even their necks, held tall and straight by the uniforms’ collars, the double lightning strokes bright at their throats – this was what a man was supposed to be, hard and splendid, darkly so.

And a woman? What was she supposed to be? Liesel smiled. There was no doubt about that in her mind, either.

Some of the girls had managed to get dancing partners, laughing and tugging even a couple of the most awkward SS men onto the floor, near the lively blare of the radio. Stronger than the jazz music, filling the room, was the light mingled scent of the perfumes with which the girls had daubed themselves, overlaid with a shivering musk that could not even be smelled, but hung suspended in air between one warm body and another. Even the crazy one who had arrived a few days ago – she had fastened herself onto a grinning Sturmscharführer, her hands clasped around his neck to pull him even closer to her fervent gaze.

Liesel crossed the reception room, laughing when she squeezed past a group or a couple, knowing that for a moment each man’s head would turn, his gaze following her, until the girl standing before him would be able to draw him back.

Obersturmführer Stoehr stood alone, at the door closest to the hostel’s front lobby. With his gloves folded in his hands, he watched the activities of his comrades, their capture by the females appointed to them; he looked slightly bored, but patient, as if awaiting further orders from his commanding officers.

None of the other girls had tried to latch onto him. They had kept in mind Liesel’s right to this prize, and the possibility of her wrath.

She came right up and took his arm. “Is it really so dull here?” Liesel took Obersturmführer Stoehr’s arm with both hands, turning her smile up to his gaze. He seemed even younger than he had in the photographs in the Allgemeiner Zeitung. A broad face, heavy-jawed but not too much so. Handsome, or at least handsome enough. “You look as if you were about to fall asleep.”

He nodded at her. “It is very pleasant here.” His words were clipped and precise. “But it is not a world to which I am accustomed.”

“I’m sure you could get used to it.” His manner was distant and somewhat sad, but Liesel knew she could change that. She tugged him toward the music and the other couples. “If you try.”

That was part of her strategy. To not talk too much – the stern eagle look in his eyes, that she had been able to discern in the grainy pictures, had told her that he was a man who would despise prattle. But that other language, that spoke without words . . . there was no man who didn’t listen to that.

In the midst of the dancing couples, she pressed herself against him. He had apparently been trained well enough that he raised one of her hands in his, his other arm encircling her waist. She knew that the white length of her throat and the upper part of her bosom looked appealing when she tilted her head back. His cold gaze fell toward hers . . .

The music stopped, replaced by the braying voice of the radio announcer. Liesel had hardly had time enough to take a few shuffling steps with the Obersturmführer. He stepped back from her, snapping off a slight, formal bow. “That was all too brief, Fraulein.” He straightened up, his spine iron again. “Perhaps later this evening, we’ll try again.”

“Wait –” She reached toward him, but was jostled away by the laughing, talking couples heading for the makeshift bar or the folding doors that led out onto the hostel’s gardens. He was gone before she could even touch his sleeve.

“Forget about him.” A man’s voice spoke right at Liesel’s ear, startling her. She turned and saw a broad face flushed with alcohol, a big grin reeking of the same. “He’s got his thumb up his ass so far, he has to open his mouth to sieg Heil.” The cuffs of the man’s black uniform were damp, slopped over from the two full glasses he was carrying. “Here –” He forced one glass into her hands. “Drink up.”

The liquor’s sharp taste ignited her anger. She was about to hurl the glass and what was left of its contents to the floor when the drunken SS man caught her arm. “Na, na –” He laughed, clasping her against his chest; the dregs of his glass spilled on her dress. “Plenty of others. What’s one more or less, when you’re having a good time?” He bent down to nuzzle her neck, his breath hot and wet.

She leaned back, hands pushing against his shoulders but unable to break free of his grasp. The alcohol fumes were still inside her head, thick and dizzying above the column of fire in her throat.

The radio’s music had started again, louder and faster this time. More couples came out on the floor, their laughter louder as well. The drunken SS officer swayed, eyes closed.

Over the heads of the crowd, she could see the stairs. One figure stood there, her hand timidly holding onto the banister, as though the sight of the dancers had frightened her from taking the last few steps down into the room.

The drunken man hugged the breath from her, his arms locking behind her back. He swung her around, her feet grazing the floor. Through a swarm of black spots in her vision, Liesel saw Obersturmführer Stoehr, his gaze cutting past all the dancing figures. And she knew where he was looking – toward that conniving little mouse, the shy, pretty girl on the stairs.

FIVE

“I don’t know what to do.” Marte sat on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap. The dress was the one Frau Hegemann had loaned her, that being the one thing her father had forgotten, a pretty dress, a special one. This one was pink, with a squared neckline fretted with lace. She closed her eyes and remembered, though it had only been yesterday or a century ago. The mirror, and Frau Hegemann smoothing the dress in place, then stepping back to judge the effect. A pity your hips aren’t broader, the older woman had said. You’ll have trouble when the baby comes.

Marte opened her eyes. The girl in the mirror had been wearing this dress, that she wore now. So this must be her, sitting on a bed in a small room with a man in it.

“I don’t know,” she said again. How white her hands and her bare arms looked. She could imagine them floating, drifting in a river, caressed by the green tendrils of water weeds.

“That’s all right.” The man draped the jacket of his black uniform upon a chair. His shining boots stood against the wall. He stripped off his undershirt. “I do.”

Then everything would be as it should. She didn’t have to try to be anything. As long as he knew what to do next, she could watch what happened to the girl sitting on the bed, from inside, and it wouldn’t matter where she really was. If she was anywhere at all.

He stood in front of her. He pushed the dress off her shoulders. She looked up, past his bare chest, to see if there was any reflection of herself in the dark centers of his eyes.

* * *

“You bruised me.” Liesel lifted her arm and looked under the curve of her breast. There were big darkening marks on both sides of her ribs. She slapped Heinrich, not playfully. “Bastard.”

He laughed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He took another pull from the bottle he’d filched and brought up to the room. Liesel had had some of it, too, pouring fuel onto the fire that had leapt up inside her when she had seen the prize slipping out of her fingers. It had seemed then that the schnapps had no effect on her, that her anger burned it way as fast as it could be swallowed – but then the room downstairs had tilted and swayed sickeningly, and the faces of the other girls and the men with whom they had paired off had turned to laughing animal masks, laughing at her. Her hands had felt thick and swaddled as she had clutched at Heinrich, trying to keep from falling.

That was all she knew about him, his first name. Besides the fact that he was ready. He had been ready as soon as they had gotten into the room. He had slammed her against the door – everyone down the hallway must have heard – and started pawing her, his wet mouth at her throat, a hand rucking up her skirt to grip her thigh above the top of her stocking.

She had been able to push him away, stumbling backward with the bottle in his other hand. There was still enough of that coldly sober part awake in her, that she wanted to make sure this idiot didn’t tear her nice clothes. She had sat down on the bed – harder than she’d intended, her feet slipping out from under her – and had started undressing, while Heinrich goggled and drank.

“Come here.” She grabbed his belt and pulled him closer. She worked at the buckle, his trousers finally sliding down around his ankles. Men always looked so stupid and trapped like that – she had to keep herself from laughing. They hated that, she knew from experience.

“Scheiß . . .” Now he wasn’t ready. He looked as if he were about to topple over. The empty bottle dropped from his hand, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Liesel tugged him down beside her and kissed him, his jaw slackly open under her mouth. His flesh swelled in her hand. Nothing would interfere – she had been humiliated enough already, downstairs, in front of everybody. The infuriating memory came again to her, of the other girl’s face, shadowed by Obersturmführer Stoehr as he had made a small, courtly bow to her. Liesel’s fingers tightened, the man’s blood encased in their grip.

Her foot touched something cold and heavy in the tangle of his uniform on the floor. She reached down and picked it up, holding it between herself and Heinrich. It took her a moment to even see what it was: his ceremonial dagger, the emblem of his membership in the SS. She tugged on the ornate handle, and the glittering blade emerged from the scabbard.

“No . . .” Heinrich’s smile soured. “That’s not . . . something to play with.” His clumsy tongue could barely get the words out.

She dropped the empty scabbard. The blade had words engraved on it. Meine Ehre heißt Treue. “‘My honor is loyalty,’” she said aloud. And laughed – she couldn’t help it. She held the dagger up, close to her face, and looked at him. “Are you loyal, Heini?”

He watched, eyes half-lidded, as she licked the dagger blade, drawing her tongue slowly along its length. The sharp blade cut her tongue. She didn’t feel anything but the warmth trickling at the corner of her mouth.

She let him knock the dagger out of her hand; it clattered against the base of the wall. It didn’t matter. He was already on top of her, his hands pinning her wrists above her head, her blood smearing on his greedy face.

* * *

He lay against Marte’s side, head resting on her bare shoulder. He seemed to be asleep; the hand at her breast hadn’t stirred in a long time.

Warm under the blankets; she breathed slow and shallow, to not disturb the bedcovers snugged around the two bodies. Everything had happened the way her father had said it would. If the girl, the lace-trimmed dress gone now, looked in the mirror, Marte wouldn’t feel sorry for her. No one could say that the girl hadn’t done what was expected of her.

And even so . . . there had been one moment, like a spark of light falling in a sky without stars. When she had been falling beneath him. But she hadn’t been frightened, and then that moment had flared and enfolded her, and she had felt – she herself, no one else – the grasp of her thighs and bent knees against his sweating torso, and her arms had reached up and pulled him down to her.

That, and everything else, had passed. The man took his rest, his duty performed.

She was almost afraid to touch him now. He lay with the back of his head against one forearm, a dark-blue mark revealed on the skin above his ribs. A tattooed letter B was visible beneath the sheen of his sweat. Slowly, her outstretched fingertip trembling, she reached toward it. The symbol reminded her of the stigmata etched upon her father’s wrists, that he had tried to remove, and upon the wrists of all his brethren who had remained true to the secrets of their faith.

Her hand darted back when the man beside her opened his eyes. He glanced at his own torso, then smiled gently at her. “It signifies my blood type,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone in the SS is marked that way. So if we fall in battle, the medics might assist us with no time lost.”

She said nothing, but drew back against the headboard and watched as he sat up.

“I should be going.” He swung his legs out of the bed, then walked across the room to the chair on which he’d laid his uniform. He held the black trousers up, brushing a wrinkle from them with the back of his hand.

“You’re very . . .” The sound of her own voice surprised her. She didn’t know what to say; she had almost said pretty, but she knew that was the wrong word. “Nice. I mean . . . you look good.”

He glanced over his shoulder, as if he had already forgotten, and now been reminded of her presence. The corner of his mouth lifted in amusement. “There is no such thing as ‘nice’ in the SS, Fraulein. There is only Härte.” Toughness, the unbreakable nature of stone.

“I’m sorry.” Marte pulled the blankets up to her chin.

“No need to be. You are a very sweet child. I shall always remember you.”

He wouldn’t. There was nothing to remember.

“I . . . I’ve seen you before.” The words came unbidden. “Your face.”

“Oh? Where would that have been?”

“In the newspaper. It had a picture of you.”

“Ach –” He shook his head in annoyance. “That stupid business. Just grateful that it didn’t happen when I was in training camp at Bad Tölz. The others would have given me a rough time of it, with all that crap about being a hero of the Reich.”

“Are you?” Marte studied him. “A hero, I mean?”

“I killed somebody, in front of the right somebody else.” He didn’t look at her, but watched his own hands buttoning his shirt, from the bottom up. “In the Blood Purge. The Sturmabteilung leaders then were all perverts and conspirators; that’s why it was necessary for the SS to clean them out.” He finished the top button, then smoothed the front of the shirt flat with his hand. “There were others who did as much as I had, or more. But my commanding officer had Reichsführer SS Himmler’s ear and told him all about me.” He shrugged. “That is how one becomes a hero.”

She watched him continue dressing, the uniform assembling upon him like dark armor. In the little mirror over the wash basin, his reflection attended to the last details, the straightening of the bright bits of insignia on his chest, the tight closure of the jacket’s collar. He didn’t see her watching him. There was no one there to see her. The eyes the mirror showed . . . the girl she’d seen in the mirror had had eyes like that. Not blank or empty – not any more – but sealed shut, to keep inside the things that had been placed by others in that hollow darkness.

Marte had long ago stopped wondering what was in the little dark rooms behind the mirror girl’s eyes. Even lying here, under sheets that smelled faintly of a man’s sweat, a man she had never seen before and would never see again. It was nothing that she – the she that hid and listened through the door of the tiniest dark room left inside her, listened to whispers and the distant arrivals and departures of men – nothing that she had to think about.

She wondered instead about what had been put inside him, this man all dressed in black again, with his tall shining boots. What had filled those dark empty spaces inside him? Until, like her, there was nothing left but that ghostlike skin, the thin mask of one’s face.

The black-uniformed man leaned down to brush a dust speck from his shining boots. He stood up and nodded to her. “I hope you will be happy and in good health, and bear a fine child for your country.”

They told him to say that. The way she had been told, by her father and then Frau Hegemann. To say the things they wanted others to hear. He turned his eyes away, so she could not catch another glimpse of what had been hidden there.

He couldn’t look at her. But he laid his hand softly upon hers. Not to comfort her, she knew, but himself.

For only a moment. Then he was gone, the door closed behind him, and the room was empty again. In the bed, clutching the sheets to herself, she felt it all around her, the silent emptiness of the room, nothing at all inside it.

* * *

Liesel awoke, step by dragging step, her head aching and her eyelids stitched with fire.

The dead weight of Heinrich pressed against her, his arm slung possessively across her breasts. He snored gurgling into the damp pillow.

Her tongue moved through a sour taste in her mouth. She looked with deep loathing at the body half on top of her own.

“Get off me –” She managed to get one arm free and slapped him across the side of his head. Then again with her balled fist, hard enough to bring his dazed face into blinking semiconsciousness. “Get off me, goddamn it!”

SIX

One of the Lebensborn nurses stuck her head inside the hostel director’s office. “Frau Hegemann – you had best come to the maternity section.”

The nurse was overexcited; that was not the way her superior should be spoken to. But Frau Hegemann did not take the time to correct the nurse now. Without even hearing them, she had been aware of the whispers that had disturbed the hostel’s tranquil spaces. Whatever had caused such a commotion was more important than scolding an impertinent nurse. Frau Hegemann rose from her desk. “I shall be right there.”

In the newborns’ room, a senior nurse nodded to the hostel director. Surrounded by the rows of cradles, the nurse held one bundled infant in her arms. The squalling of the other small creatures, and their damp, sweetish smell, hung in the air.

“I thought you should see this, Frau Direktor.” The senior nurse pulled back the hood of the infant’s wrappings, exposing its pink, soft face. Its eyes screwed tight, one small hand fussing against its cheek.

Frau Hegemann was aware of a gaggle of the younger nurses at the room’s door, hushing each other and standing on tiptoe to try and see around her back. She knew that if she turned around and stamped her foot, they would all scatter like frightened geese.

Instead, she ignored them and reached out to touch the infant’s forehead. “There seems nothing wrong with this child.” She didn’t know which girl had been its mother; there had been several due about this time.

The nurse, with a thumb and forefinger, gently pulled open the infant’s eyelids. The pink skin reddened, the toothless mouth opening in protest.

Frau Hegemann saw then, what was the matter.

The infant’s left eye was the delicate blue of just-born creatures. And the other eye, as beautiful and perfect, a deep golden-brown.

* * *

Liesel already knew why Frau Hegemann wanted to talk to her. The talk had gone all around the Lebensborn hostel. Not just of what had happened, but what was going to be done about it. She knew, both by instinct and her sure awareness of her rightful place among all the girls, that she would be part of the answer.

She sat up in the bed, waiting for Frau Hegemann. The nurses had moved her into a private room. That was a dead giveaway, too: things were going to be spoken that were not meant to be overheard. She’d made sure that her own baby was brought in to her just before Frau Hegemann was to appear. So she could have the tiny boy she’d decided to name Siegfried – that seemed patriotic and martial enough – at her breast, the image of serene motherhood.

The door opened and the hostel director came in. She smiled at Liesel. “Everything is going well for you, I trust?”

“Quite well, Frau Direktor.” Liesel had opened the front of her bedrobe for the baby to suckle. Its small hands pawed annoyingly at her breast, but she had made her mind up to endure that. “He’s put on seven ounces.”

“Sehr ausgezeichnet.” Frau Hegemann tilted her head to look at the infant. “This is how the war of births shall be won. The Lebensborn program was instituted for just this reason, to bring such children into the life of our people. Unfortunately –” The hostel director’s face turned hard. “It has not worked out that way in every instance.”

“What do you mean?”

“You needn’t play stupid. I’m well aware of how all the girls and the nurses gossip, and that everyone here knows what has happened. One of the girls has given birth to a child that doesn’t meet the strict standards of racial hygiene that we practice here. The child shows obvious signs of a mongrelized genetic background.”

The eyes, thought Liesel smugly. A deep sense of satisfaction had arisen in her when she’d first heard the whispered news. About the bastard that mousey, conniving bitch had thrown, with its two different-colored eyes. Her Siegfried’s were both blue, like little jewels, the way a proper Aryan child’s should be.

“Investigations have been made.” Frau Hegemann sat rigid in the chair, her spine a rod of iron. “The girl should never have been allowed in here at all. The documents that supposedly substantiated her racial background were discovered to be forgeries; her mother’s Nordic blood was mixed with that of her father’s ethnic group, a degenerate strain in which this heterochromia is common.”

Liesel hadn’t heard that word before, but could guess what it meant: that other baby’s condition of one blue eye, one brown. She liked the word mongrel better, to describe such creatures. The same word someone would use for those gaunt, garbage-eating dogs in the street.

“I suppose you could drown the baby.” She tried to keep from smiling. “In a bucket of water. My uncle, on his farm, used to do that with kittens.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Frau Hegemann. “The child in question is healthy and sound, other than its regrettable . . . features.” The hostel director’s mouth curled in distaste. “There are other considerations to be kept in mind. This child is the offspring of an SS officer of note. As such, it presents us with a dilemma as to its . . . disposition. Until such time as the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt makes a further determination about what is to be done, we have been instructed to make sure that the child is to be placed in a racially fit household. That is why I wished to speak to you.”

“I’ll be happy to help,” said Liesel, “in any way I can.”

Frau Hegemann studied her for a moment. “I’m sure you will be. I’m also sure that you’ll understand the need for discretion in this matter . . .”

* * *

The other girl had been placed in a private room as well. A room with a locked door.

“I’m hoping there will be no emotional display.” The hostel director dropped her jangling key ring into the deep pocket of her dress. “The girl might have the decency to understand what her duty should be.”

The senior nurse closed the door behind them. The girl, this Marte, was sitting up in bed, the infant cradled in her arms. She bent her face down low to it, as though murmuring secrets into the small pink shell of the child’s ear.

“Marte –” Frau Hegemann kept her voice soft, as calming as possible. “You do remember, don’t you? That the whole purpose of our being here, the creating of the Lebensborn program . . . it’s all for a reason, the bringing into existence of healthy new life. Life of pure blood. The babies that are born here are to be considered as gifts to the race, and to the Führer. You understand that, don’t you?”

The girl held the infant closer to herself. That was a bad sign – the hostel director could see that the girl was going to make this more difficult than it needed to be.

“I was told,” said Marte, “that I could keep my baby. Before I came here – that’s what I was told. If that was what I wanted.”

“Yes. Ordinarily, we do give the girls that option. There should be no stigma attached to an unmarried woman whose child was fathered by a hero of the Reich. The outmoded morals of the past are to be extinguished. But . . .” Frau Hegemann drew in a deep breath. “There are unusual circumstances in your case. Surely you see that.”

A fierce light glinted in the girl’s eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with my baby.”

“Your child’s health is not the issue.” Frau Hegemann felt her jaw tensing. The impulse to slap the silly girl, to make her see sense, was almost irresistible. “Its racial background – your racial background – that is the problem. You know you are not the pure Aryan that your forged documents made you out to be. Unfortunately for you, the genetic contamination in your blood has shown up in your child. One of life’s ironies is that degenerate breeding is so powerful; it drags the good, strong blood down to its level. And that is why it is so important for our people – the true Nordic race – to safeguard their precious inheritance from those who would defile it. From such as you.”

The infant whimpered, caught in the girl’s embrace. “I’m keeping him.”

“That’s not possible. You must try to understand. This is Rassenschande – you are a racial criminal. And worse, you have engaged an officer of the SS in this crime, the mixing of bloods.” Frau Hegemann’s voice rose, her anger overwhelming her resolution to stay calm. “Do you really think you can be allowed to raise this child? That the Reich can trust one such as you? That when people see this Mischling, this little half-breed, and they ask who is its father, you won’t say your baby’s father wears the black uniform?”

The girl had shrunk beneath the lash of the hostel director’s spittle-flecked shout, bowing her head and wrapping herself around the infant in her arms. The infant had started to cry. As though no one else existed in the room, the girl opened the front of her robe and put the infant to her breast.

Frau Hegemann nodded to the senior nurse.

“Let me take him,” the nurse said softly, reaching down. “Everything will be all right. There’s nothing you have to worry about . . .”

The girl drew back, her eyes wide with fear and anger. “No –” She shook her head. “Don’t touch him.”

“There, now.” The nurse had managed to get her hands around the swaddled form. “No need to make a fuss . . .”

“No!” The girl jerked the infant out of the nurse’s grasp. She twisted her shoulder and upper back toward the women, her spine arched as she bent protectively over her child. “Go away! Leave us alone!”

Frau Hegemann had hoped that it would be easy, that the girl would see it was her duty to give up the child. It should have been easy; this girl Marte had been so quiet and timid since the day she had arrived at the hostel. So little trouble that one could have forgotten her, let her presence fade from one’s mind, if it hadn’t been for the loveliness of her face, the radiance of her white-blonde hair. Of course that was why the Obersturmführer had fallen for her, bestowed his valuable seed upon her; men were all fools in that way.

But where had this other girl come from? This one who cried out and clung to her baby? There had been nothing like this, nothing at all, behind that beautiful, still mask . . .

The infant could be torn in two, if the nurse could even get her hands on it again, before the girl would give it up.

Frau Hegemann reached down and grabbed a fistful of Marte’s golden hair, pulling the girl’s head around toward her. With her other hand, she slapped the girl’s face, hard enough to shock and stun her, mouth opening wide as a red mark in the shape of a palm and fingers swelled on her white cheek.

The blow had been enough to loosen the girl’s grasp; the nurse snatched the child away. The infant, pulled from its mother’s breast, wrinkled its face like a small clenched fist and emitted a thin, piping wail.

“No –” Marte clawed across Frau Hegemann’s shoulders and face, her outstretched hands trying to reach the nurse. The hostel director struck the girl again, a blow to her neck that sent her sprawling on the bed. She still tried to get past the hostel director, rearing up and struggling toward her child. “Give him back to me –”

A pair of younger nurses, summoned from outside the room, pinned the girl against the headboard. They could barely hold her as she struggled. Her disheveled hair tangled across her tear-streaked face. The scream that broke from her mouth echoed in the cry of the infant being carried down the hallway.

“You are a stupid creature.” Frau Hegemann, her jaw clenching in fury, stood at the side of the bed. “It’s for the best.” She slapped the weeping girl, then again, harder. “Don’t you understand? It’s for the best –”

SEVEN

The little mongrel bitch was leaving – Liesel watched with satisfaction as the car rolled toward the hostel’s gates. She let the curtain fall back into place. Frau Hegemann was sticking the other girl, the mother of the baby in Liesel’s arms, on a train back to Berlin. Where she could just slink back into the darkness where she belonged.

It had all gone to show that breeding – blood and racial purity – was indeed the most important thing. Liesel smiled to herself, thinking of how the bitch must have thought she’d won, taken the prize that so rightfully had belonged to Liesel and no one else. Only to have the invisible stain in her blood reveal that behind her pretty face was . . . what? Filth and corruption, or whatever the race of men, in their black shining uniforms and strutting boots, decided was there. That was all that mattered.

The baby, another woman’s child, started to fuss. Hungry – it was certainly a pink, healthy thing. Liesel gazed down at it, the crook of her arm already aching from the soft weight. Golden angel strands for hair, lighter than Liesel’s own – but then, weren’t most blond infants as fair as that? Nobody would be able to tell from the coloring that it wasn’t her own. A pity about the eyes – but no one would dare say anything about them, at least to her face; Liesel had already decided that.

She gave the child her breast, and it suckled greedily. A good strong baby, the offspring of a famous SS officer, a favorite of the Führer – she would make sure the child would thrive and grow. In the world around her, there were already people making arrangements on her behalf, seeing to it that her needs were taken care of. That was how it should be.

In the cradle beside her bed, her own baby began to squall. It was a pretty little thing as well, if not quite so big as this one. And hungry, too.

“Be quiet –” She would get around to the other child, her own, all in good time. It could wait. She lowered her head and kissed the one in her arms, as its tiny hands kneaded her full breast.

* * *

The handle of the door was broken, the wood around the metal splintered, as though from the impact of heavy boots.

Marte pushed the door open, the topmost hinge wobbling, its screws wrenched partway from the frame. The light from the building’s hallway spilled into her parent’s flat.

Or what had been their flat. Empty now, at least of living things. The furniture was still there, her father’s chair overturned, books tumbled from the shelves, the pages spread like the wings of broken birds.

Behind her, she heard other doors opening, faces peering out through narrow slits. The tenants of the other flats now whispered to each other, watching her.

On the street outside the building, she thought she had seen the little man, her father’s forger, the creature to whom her father had entrusted all his secret planning. From the mouth of a dark alley, the little man had peered out at her, then scuttled away on his ceaseless errands.

He’ll tell them – Marte’s breath tightened in her throat. Part of her, the hollow spaces that began just inside her skin, didn’t care. Not any more. If they came and took her away, to the place her parents had been taken . . . it didn’t matter. She could step outside, and the silent men would come up to her and take her arms, one on either side, there would be a car they could hustle her into . . . and then she would be gone. Disappeared, like so many others. At last, even the little part of her that people could still see would be extinguished.

Now she wasn’t afraid. She set her suitcase on the floor, then turned and walked out of the flat, leaving the door open.

The street was empty. No one came up, no one spoke to her. She wondered if perhaps she had already disappeared, become the ghost of that girl who had looked out of the mirror at her, long ago.

* * *

“Look at those crows sitting up there.” Ernst von Behren lifted his gaze to the Romanische Café’s gallery, where the chess-players sat hunched over their boards. He gestured with a pudgy, well-manicured hand. The gaunt men did look like crows in their black overcoats, some of them still shiny from the rain that continued to drizzle past midnight. “They’ve always been up there. They always will be, I suppose.”

Gunther glanced up with his glittering doll’s eyes, so perfect and untrue, but didn’t say anything. Von Behren watched Gunther’s high-boned face radiating boredom and contempt, feeling his own heart, not breaking, but sighing under the hammer stroke of a familiar pain.

With his fingertips, he stroked the precisely shaped point of the beard on his own face, round and plump as a sad-eyed baby’s. He knew that he probably wouldn’t ever see Gunther again after this night, that Gunther would disappear wherever all the other handsome boys went. Gunther was sulking, not just because they had come here to the great cavernous Romanische instead of some dark cellar hole smelling of roach shit and candle wax, where Gunther could have turned his elegant profile to the trembling admiration of other brokenhearted men. But also because Ernst von Behren’s contacts at the UFA studios had proved ineffectual in getting Gunther cast in a film production, even in a nonspeaking role. Gunther was probably thinking now that there was little point in going to bed with him any longer.

Well, to hell with him then, thought von Behren as he sipped at the cold dregs of coffee left in the heavy porcelain cup. He at least didn’t feel any guilt over the matter; a face as handsome as Gunther’s should be kept off the Reich’s motion picture screens, as a public service. He’d be damned if he’d be responsible for unleashing that beauty upon all the poor silly Hausfrauen of Germany, just so they could weep into their pillows that their husbands weren’t the cruel god incarnate they had seen up on the motion picture screens.

He watched Gunther take a sip of mineral water. Gunther had never lacked for admirers. Back in the rowdy starving days that now seemed, in memory, like newsreels from another planet – Gunther had done his trolling on the Weidendammbrücke and the Tauentzienstraße with the other women, the real along with the false. Not far from the Romanische in fact, just beyond the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche, that the night rain had darkened to a hulking stone beast. Von Behren could remember Gunther’s feral teenage face, with its slash of red lipstick and kohl-rimmed cat’s-eyes, chin brushing the ratty fur swathed around his neck, a spit-curled bob shining like black Japanese lacquer. The height of the glossy green-leather boots the Tauentzienstraße girls wore indicated their sexual specializations, and Gunther had tottered around in ones that signaled an absolute willingness to do anything.

That will stand him in good stead now, thought von Behren. They had entered – not just Gunther and himself, or the patrons of the Romanische, but all Germany, and probably the rest of humanity as well – a world where the willingness to do anything would be a valuable commodity indeed.

“Do you remember Conrad?” He whispered the question, knowing that if Gunther heard him against the café’s hubbub, the handsome other could pretend he hadn’t. Conrad had been another Tauentzienstraße prowler in his hungry days, the bones cutting through his narrow face giving him an emaciated, deathly glamour. But Conrad had managed to get into the films, back when they had been silent, and had stalked around as a murderous sleepwalker surrounded by crazy cardboard sets, doing so well at that and all the other parts that came his way, that now he was in Hollywood, putting on the worldly airs that impressed the Americans so much. Von Behren doubted if Conrad talked much of his Tauentzienstraße nights. But it did serve to demonstrate that it was true, in America – or at least Hollywood – you could reinvent yourself. If you were lucky.

“Perhaps I should go to America,” mused von Behren aloud. He might as well have been sitting at the table alone.

But Gunther had heard that. He turned his profile enough to give von Behren a glance of contempt, the look traitors and cowards receive.

Von Behren found that tiresome. So many others were leaving, or thinking about it – why shouldn’t he? Just yesterday he had gone by Frank Wysbar’s flat, out by the Babelsberg studios, to look at some dreadful drum-beating script Goebbels’ ministry kept shoving into the UFA production queue. He had found Wysbar sitting at the writing table, practicing a new signature. “That is what my American contacts say I would have to change my name to,” Wysbar had said, turning around in his chair and displaying a sheet of paper with the name Frank Wisbar written upon it. “What do you think?”

He had told Wysbar that it didn’t seem that much different, the letter i instead of the original y. What was a name, anyway? You did what you had to do, these days. Wysbar had sighed and said that he didn’t know, maybe he wouldn’t leave for America; at the least, he would try to hold out a while longer.

Of course, von Behren knew, Wysbar had reasons for feeling gloomy. Goebbels and the NSDAP hacks beneath him at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda – what a joke; was there a word such as endarkenment? – had given Wysbar nothing but grief about the last film he’d directed. All because he’d used a dark-haired actress – Sybille Schmitz, whom von Behren had always found good-looking enough, in a sort of strange, heavy-jawed way – as the romantic interest of a blond Nordic hero. And the actress wasn’t even the least bit Jewish; she wouldn’t have still been working if the party’s racial examiners had been able to find a spot of Hebrew blood in her pedigree. Just her luck to be a brunette, when the official fetishism dictated blue-eyed blondes, hair braided as thick as ships’ ropes.

Funny to think about Wysbar now. When von Behren had brought Gunther to the Romanische tonight, there had been a street musician outside, a blind man with a wheezing button accordion. Just a few notes of the awkward melody had reminded von Behren of something, and now he remembered in full what it had been – the ferryman’s song in Wysbar’s film. He softly hummed what he could recall of the words. The soul, something something . . . struggling against the kingdom of shadows.

Wysbar had gotten that right, at least. Das Schattenreich. That was what this world had become. All grey and black, with a few bright, spurting wounds of red. He missed the old Berlin, the Twenties that had seemed so golden to everyone, even if the gold had been as false as the money. And even if there had not been a lot to eat, there had been plenty of sex around, a sort of warm ocean of it, and not the hearty, brown bread and baby-making kind the Nazis were promoting these days.

It didn’t seem so long ago that von Behren had tagged along with one of the other scriptwriters – that was how he had started out back then, at the old Nero studio – following him to a shabby flat all the way out past the Landwehr Canal. The hallways had been dark, but they had stepped from them into a tightly pressed little world of light and blaring, syncopated music. And the black woman had been there, the one who had already taken Paris and now was conquering the hearts and loins of Berlin – that was the kind of thing that one could just stumble into back then, a laughing miracle exploding in one’s face. The Negress had worn her trademark skirt of ripe bananas, and she’d danced among the drunken partygoers, snaking her glistening ebony hips past the bellies of financiers giddy with champagne and bankruptcy. Her smile had been a kingdom of avaricious joy. Then she had gone to sleep on a horsehair sofa, a pretty child in a sailor’s suit clasped in her willowy arms.

Back then, it had been possible to believe that Africa itself would blossom in the middle of Germany. And how he had longed to be that pretty boy, or girl – impossible to tell which – resting a rouged face against the black woman’s breast.

All that was gone now. Just about the only things that had survived from that world to this, das Schattenreich, were the chess-players up in the Romanische Café’s gallery. Those hunched-over crows would likely still be there, contemplating their slow, tedious strategies, when all was rubble around them.

In this world, there were no dancing Negresses. In this world, someone such as poor Wysbar could get into trouble for having a yellow-haired man fall in love with a fair-skinned brunette.

Then again, there was no point in handing these people the stick with which they could beat you. “What I need,” said von Behren, rubbing his chin and gazing up at the blue clouds of cigar smoke drifting to the Romanische Café’s distant ceiling, “is an angel. Of light.” His fingertips pushed through his beard. “To put into a film.” He nodded slowly. “That would keep them happy.”

Gunther shot him another glance. “You mean a blonde. Why don’t you just say so?”

Von Behren shook his head. “No . . . not just a blonde. There are plenty such, God knows.” They all seemed to hang around the UFA studios like golden vultures. “I need something . . . sadder than that. And more beautiful.” He had been drinking spirits before they had come to the café, and now he was in that stage where the alcohol had started to die and fade from his blood, leaving a clarity of thought that made words difficult to match to the tumble of images in his brain.

People always needed what they themselves were not. What they had forgotten how to be, or left behind, like old clothes in a suitcase tied up with string. When people were dirty and poor, they wanted cleanliness and pretty things, up on the screen where they could lose themselves in one big collective embrace. When they felt weak, they wanted the hard clenched fist, even – or especially – if it was in their own faces.

And now, when people were so full, every corner of their souls crammed with thundering speeches, the Führer’s words like election posters slathered on the bone walls behind their eyes – what people could no longer be now, was to be merely empty. And how, in a tiny closet behind their hearts, they would long for that – von Behren could see it so plainly, the future of all dreaming written not in fiery letters, but in a blunt pencil scrawl on a torn scrap smeared with ashes.

How could he ever explain that – or anything important – to one such as Gunther? It was hopeless to try.

Gunther shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of that crap.” His hard eyes scanned across the café’s tables. “There. How about that one? She should do for you.”

Von Behren turned to look. A girl, perhaps not even twenty yet, sat at one of the tables near the café’s doors, close enough that the wet, sloppy wind brushed against the hem of her skirt every time someone went in or out. On a night like this, no matter how crowded the Romanische might get, the drafty tables by the entrance usually went empty. The girl – von Behren had never seen her here before – must have instinctively realized that the waiters would leave her alone, even if all she ordered was one small coffee that she let go cold and clouded over a span of hours.

Gunther’s lip curled. “All you want is some little wren, with its wing broken. Well, there she is. Surely you could put her in a film, and have the whole audience sniffling into their handkerchiefs.”

In the early morning hours, the Romanische’s crowd had thinned a little, and there was no one between this table and the one at which she sat. Unsmiling, her gaze seeing nothing before her, not even the barely touched cup next to her hand. The night’s chill had turned the skin of her throat into translucent ivory. Beautiful . . . and even beyond that . . .

“You see?” Contempt sharpened Gunther’s voice, the scorn of one member of the unmoneyed tribe for another. “That is all the cash she has.” Gunther had learned, on the Tauentzienstraße, the skill of reckoning strangers’ exact financial condition. The girl at the far table had a few folded bills in one hand. “She has counted it over and over, and she has no idea where or when there will come any more.”

Von Behren felt his breath stop in his throat. The girl had lifted her face, and he saw now that she was beautiful. And empty.

He could tell just from looking at her, that she had cried a great deal. But not recently – her eyes were no longer reddened from it. Whatever had happened to her – whatever had been taken from her – that was already sealed in the past. Leaving this shell behind, the parts that could no longer be hurt.

“You’re right.” Von Behren nodded. “She could be an angel.” The angel of sadness and emptiness. The girl was made lovelier by those things. And more desirable – he had enough of the instincts of other, supposedly normal men to recognize that.

“An angel,” scoffed Gunther. He showed an ugly smile as he shook his head.

But Gunther didn’t matter now. For von Behren, Gunther was already dead, vanished. All he could see was the girl at the far table. And beyond her, to that other world of light and shadow, where her face would emerge from the screen’s darkness and into the silent chambers of men’s hearts.

The girl turned her head and looked at him as he threaded his way among the café’s tables. There was nothing inside the gaze with which she watched and judged him; beyond hope, beyond despair. “Fraulein . . . a moment of your time, bitte . . .”

“Yes?” She gazed up at him as he stood beside the table. He felt his own heart stumble, then shiver into pieces . . .

LOS ANGELES

1938

EIGHT

“Hey, I got something I want you to see –”

Ray Wilson’s eyes snapped open. He’d fallen asleep in the plush chair, one of a half-dozen that faced the white rectangle of a small theater screen. There had been plenty of times he’d sat in just this spot, watching whatever dailies had come in. “I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “I should get going. I’m really bushed.”

“Naw, come on.” David Wise had carried a fresh drink over to his desk and flipped open a panel on its burnished mahogany surface; the lights dimmed and the curtains drew across the curved expanse of windows as he pushed buttons. “Stick around.”

“Dave, I really got to get some rest. I’ve got work to do.” Technically, he was head of security for the Wise Studios. Other times, when the crises were small enough for him to delegate to one of his crew of ex-LAPD detectives, he was David Wise’s drinking partner. “The work you pay me to do, remember?”

Actually, he just wanted to head home and go to bed. He’d just gotten done with a bad one, the kind he had to take care of all by himself, to avoid even the remotest chance of bad publicity.

It had necessitated driving all the way south to Tijuana and a cheap and notorious fleabag hotel down there. He had pulled out of a grimy numbered room ne of the Wise Studios’ leading actors, who’d come into unfortunate proximity with a small boy and a camera.

“That putz.” That had been David’s comment when Wilson had finally returned to the studio lot at three in the morning. David had shaken his head as he gazed at the actor sleeping it off in the back seat of the sedan. “He’s just about more trouble than he’s worth. One more time, and I’m going to toss him to the wolves.”

“Where do you want me to take him to?”

“The hell with him.” David had grabbed Wilson’s arm and pulled him toward the main studio building. “I’ve got a bottle waiting up in my office.”

That had been several drinks and – Wilson checked his watch – a couple of hours ago. He shifted in the upholstered chair. “I’m just about ready to call it a night.”

“Just a little while.” Wise walked past him, toward the projection booth tucked behind the office’s rear wall. “I just want you to take a look, that’s all.”

A little while. Before too much longer, there would be people camping out in the office’s lobby, glaring at Wise’s cool, snippy receptionist, people who would cut off one or more limbs for a piece of David Wise’s time, even a few minutes. Not even forty, and Wise was out there in the big marketplace of dreams with the Goldwyns and the Zanucks, putting dreams into the darkened theaters where the people could see them, fall into and become those dreams for a little while. Somebody like that could make dreams come true as well, the dreams of those who hungered to become real, to become those deep luminous faces, magnified in the dark. And for those who wanted to stay in the shadows, where the dreams were bolted together, out of light and word and desperate wish, the murmur of the watching dreamers, the faces on the screen whispering their desire to be real forever, world without end . . . for the dream-workers, the directors and writers and all the other bearers of these secrets, there was David Wise’s money, that made all things possible. Money that he had scrabbled together out of his dead father’s string of fleapits, jerkwater theaters with screens that were hardly more than tacked-up old bed sheets, broken-down seats that leaked scratchy horsehair and a lingering smell of urine – movie-houses that had staggered so close to the edge of bankruptcy that the only way to get something to show was for the twenty-year-old heir to make the movies himself, sticking a broken-down silents cowboy behind a rented camera and playing penny-stakes rummy all night at the developer’s lab to get reel-ends of undeveloped film to shoot with. Anything that moved, anything that people would watch, went up on the screens.

Wilson knew the rest of the story; he had known it even before he come here to work for the man. When the money started coming in, David Wise had gone on hustling and pyramiding and betting everything. More than once, he had put up ownership of all the theaters, clean ones now, palaces with chandeliers in the ladies’ rooms, all against the first weeks’ receipts on films with real actors with real names in them. Those bets had finally paid off in a studio lot scraped out of twenty acres of Southern California orange groves, with a front entrance modeled after the Arc de Triomphe, a uniformed guard at the barrier gate and the name WISE in spot-lit above.

Behind himself, Wilson heard the soft clatter of the film projector, muffled by the wall with its small inset window. Wise knew how to run the equipment himself, from his days scrabbling around, doing everything in the shabby movie-houses his father had left him. The chair next to Wilson’s creaked as Wise sat down beside him.

The screen had filled with light, shadow and form. Faces. Wilson watched, and listened to them speaking. His fatigue was deeper than he’d thought – he couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

He leaned his head toward Wise. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a German movie.” Wise continued to gaze straight ahead at the screen. “Somebody shipped it to me.”

“Who?”

“Beats me.” The studio head shrugged. “I’ve got some contacts at the UFA studios over there. One of them must have smuggled out this print and sent it to me. I was watching it when all this other bullshit happened.”

“Great.” Wilson shook his head. “Probably some goddamn Nazi propaganda. That’s all they do over there anymore.” He’d had gone along with Wise to one of the first fundraiser parties for the Hollywood League Against Nazism. Melvyn Douglas had just gotten back from Europe, with a pile of production stills showing greasy-bearded rabbis and hook-nosed war profiteers leering at blonde Teutonic virgins, all the simple-minded caricatures that Goebbels’ pet filmmakers specialized in. He didn’t have the same aesthetic standards as his boss, but the sheer crappiness of stuff like that had put a sour taste in his mouth anyway. He didn’t care for any kind of cardboard characters, let alone ones with the word kike smeared across them. How could somebody like David Wise – Weiss, actually; that had been his grandfather’s name – watch this kind of crap?

“Shh.” Wise raised his hand and pointed. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

The dialogue had stopped for a moment. On the screen was a dirty city street, tiny little shops with signs in German; probably somewhere in Berlin, Wilson figured. A girl in a shabby coat and a cloche hat walked slowly down the street, looking into the shop windows.

The camera moved in for a tight close-up, the girl’s face mirrored faintly in the window glass. Her gold hair spilled from under the edges of the cloche.

“God, she’s lovely.” Wise leaned forward, gazing avidly at the screen.

She looked young, maybe twenty at the most – and she was beautiful, Wilson admitted to himself. Her hair looked like spun white gold. But there was something more in her face and eyes, more than mere beauty. A sadness, loss made eloquent in this silence. Wilson watched as the woman laid her fingertips against the glass. That mute, untouchable element, he knew, made her even lovelier.

“Who is she?”

Wise didn’t take his gaze away from the screen. “Um, Marie – no, Marte something. I’ve got it written down somewhere. There weren’t any credits on this print, so I had to send a cable to find out.”

The name meant nothing to Wilson. There were plenty of beautiful women, in movies made here and all over Europe. This one might be special; he had no way of knowing.

He glanced over at Wise. The film producer, the owner of the studio, gazed raptly at the screen, his eyes caught in this waking dream. The shifting light played over Wise’s face, as though he had become part of that other, more real world.

Don’t – Wilson stopped himself from reaching out and touching Wise’s arm. Don’t; it’s not true, it’s just a movie. You don’t know who she really is –

But he could see that it was already too late. He watched the other man, watching the image on the screen, a face of loveliness and sadness, light and shadow.

BERLIN

1939

The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against fate,

Death lays his icy hand on kings . . .

– James Shirley (1596 - 1666), Dirge, from

The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

NINE

“Herr Reichsminister –” The functionary, a little man with sleek-polished hair, made a bow. “This is one of our honored guests tonight. Herr David Wise – from America.”

With a champagne glass cradled in her hand, Marte watched as the Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda nodded in greeting. She stood close to him, closer now than she would have if the Reichminister’s wife were still at the reception. But after giving Marte a hard, knowing gaze, Frau Goebbels had given her apologies and gone home to look after their brood of golden-haired children. Which allowed her husband the freedom to drape his arm around Marte’s shoulders – left bare by the ballgown that the studio’s costume department had given her – and shepherd her through Berlin’s political and cinematic elite.

“It is, of course, a pleasure to meet you, Herr Wise.” Joseph spoke in the low, courtly voice with which she had already become familiar. “I assure you that I know very well the films of the Wise Studios. Excellent work. You must be proud to have been the producer of such . . . how to say? . . . such visual epics.”

The American shrugged off the compliment. “We try our best.” He stood taller than Goebbels, with dark, curling hair and only a slight Hebraic bump to his nose. Different from what Joseph had told her about Hollywood film producers. They were all supposed to be squat, swarthy, hook-nosed lechers, with cunning, leering stares. This one looked decent enough to have appeared in his own movies, perhaps as the lead actor’s kindhearted friend, something like that.

“You are a craftsman.” Joseph smiled. “There can be no higher tribute.”

“I guess I’m flattered. But . . . I don’t know. Films are . . .”

Marte sipped at the champagne as Herr Wise searched through his limited German vocabulary.

“Szenen,” he said at last. “Pictures. That’s all.”

“Ah, aber am Anfang war das Wort – in the beginning was the word, Herr Wise.” Joseph’s thin-lipped smile grew wider. “Don’t you agree?”

“Maybe. I didn’t expect a National Socialist to quote Scripture, though.”

Joseph tilted his head back in amusement. “You do not know, Herr Wise – in my youth, I attended the seminary. I had wanted to become a priest. That was, of course, before I found a new faith to believe in. And entered politics.”

“Yes –” Wise nodded. “I’ve heard some things about that new faith. You’ve changed it to am Anfang war die Tat. The deed, the action.”

“Just so. And I would not have expected an American screenwriter to quote our Goethe.” The bright gaze grew sharper. “When you write a script, Herr Wise, when you first see that film inside your head – do you not start with an action? Something that happens, something that determines all that is to follow? That is why films are so important to people. They can see things happening. In that, there’s really no difference between the films made here, guided by National Socialist principles, and those you make in Hollywood. What is different here is that we are making a new world with them. Die Tat – not das Wort.”

Herr Wise seemed to be caught at a loss. To Marte, it appeared as if Joseph’s smooth words had overwhelmed the American visitor’s understanding of the language – as though again he had to take a few seconds to sort out the pieces he hadn’t caught immediately.

“Perhaps,” continued Joseph, “you would find it interesting to work here in Berlin.”

“What would I do?”

“Make films, of course. What else does a producer do? Perhaps the Wise Studios might appreciate a European partnership.”

Wise didn’t return the other man’s smile. “I’ve had partners before. Sometimes they work out.”

“Yes? Was there one in particular?”

“When I was a kid, back in Red Hook. I used to set up bare-knuckle matches for myself. Just to get something to eat. Won most of them. Another kid, this polack I was friends with, would hold the bets, and then we’d take our splits afterward.”

“Ah. But something happened, I take it? To break this . . . partnership?”

“Yeah.” Wise nodded. “I went the distance with a guy who stood a head taller, outweighed me by, I don’t know, maybe twenty pounds or so. The only reason I won the fight was that I was still standing at the end. When I got my eyes open again, I found that my partner had run off with the money, figuring I wasn’t going to make it to the other side. Took me two days to track the sonuvabitch down.”

“And did you get your money, Herr Wise? Your winnings?”

“Pretty much. But not without another fight.”

“Ah.” The Reichsminister regarded him with renewed appreciation. “You are indeed a man of more than das Wort. Tell me, was this early partner of yours also a Jew, such as yourself?”

“No.” A shake of the head. “I told you. He was Polish.”

“Ah, yes.” Joseph smiled again. “They are beasts. We have our own problems with them –”

“Your crowd seem to have problems with a lot of different kinds of people.”

Marte watched Joseph’s smile tighten. “The things that one hears in America, Herr Wise, should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. But you have my apologies; I have let our conversation stray from the more pleasing matters of art. One of which we are fortunate to have here with us. May I present to you Fraulein Marte Helle?” Joseph tilted his head toward her. “A great future lies before her. She has appeared in but one film – starred, as I believe you Americans would say – but the praise her talents have received has been most gratifying to me.”

“It’s a pleasure, Miss Helle.” The American smiled and nodded at her, then turned his gaze back toward Joseph. “And you’re right, of course. When I saw her in Die Prinzessin – that’s the movie you’re talking about? – I could see that she was a real find. A natural.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Herr Wise.” Joseph frowned. “How could you have seen Prinzessin? The studio has not even yet released it to the theatres here in Germany. Nobody has watched it other than myself and a few other officials at the Propaganda Ministry.”

“Huh. That’s strange.” Herr Wise shook his head. “When I received the print of the film back in Hollywood, I figured that it was one of your staff who had sent it to me. I watched it in the screening room at my office, figuring maybe you were shopping it around for a distribution deal. Partners, like you were talking about before.”

“As you say – strange.” The angles of Joseph’s face had turned hard and sharp. “This is something . . . I shall have to look into.”

One of the squadron of functionaries stepped from behind. “Herr Reichsminister –” He leaned close, whispering into Joseph’s ear.

“We must talk again, Herr Wise.” Joseph gave a quick tilt of his head. “I’m sure there’s much we could learn from each other.” He turned away, his retinue closing around him. Marte watched him leave the reception, walking with a careful, measured pace; she knew well by now his particular vanity, that of a man who took care to conceal his club foot, the disfigurement that marked him.

“Quite a priest he would make, eh?”

“Pardon me?” Herr Wise turned toward the bearded figure who had come up beside him.

“Shame on you,” scolded Marte. “You have been eavesdropping.”

“As does everyone in Berlin these days. If only for self-preservation.”

“Herr Wise –” Marte turned back toward the American. “May I present to you Ernst von Behrens? He directed me in Die Prinzessin.”

“And discovered you, my dear. Right here in Berlin, in that shabby coffee house.”

“You have an eye for talent, Mr. von Behrens.”

“It has served me well. The Reichminister’s estimation of my worth has risen considerably of late.” Von Behrens used the empty glass to point across the crowded banquet hall. By the great gilded doors, one of the functionaries was helping Joseph into his fur-collared overcoat. “The priesthood lost quite a candidate in him, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, I bet,” said Wise. “Probably would’ve been a real Savonarola type. I hear he likes to burn things.”

“Ah, yes, the unfortunate books. I did not see the bonfire that night, but I did pick up a scorched Heine collection in the gutter the next morning; it was still quite readable.” Von Behren nodded, watching the distant figure bid farewell to a fawning circle. “I believe the good doctor now regrets that incident. I’ve heard him talk about it – not in public, of course – and about how he hadn’t known at that time just how powerful such images are, how they’re seen by outsiders. With that lean, fanatical face of his, and the fiery – yes? – the fiery speeches he gives, incidents such as the burning of books give people the wrong impression of him. Or so he believes.”

“Must be hell, all right, being so misunderstood.”

The director shrugged. “Perhaps. Though in this case, it is useful to him to be thought of as something of an ascetic. As you say, a Savonarola. A great discipline is being demanded of the German people, great sacrifices to achieve great ends. And they might feel less than kindly toward Reichsminister Goebbels – they might feel they were being abused, or tricked – if they were to have their noses rubbed into his taste for luxuries.”

Wise snorted. “As if they didn’t know.”

“Oh, of course they know. They make jokes about such things, especially here in Berlin, where the people are so cynical to begin with, and they see so much more of his comings and goings. They know; they just want a modicum of discretion on his part. That’s all. Bad enough when Goebbels allowed pictures of his children’s horses to appear in a magazine. So now, no matter how proud he is, say, of having in his house at Schwanenwerder a bar that rises up from the floor when he pushes a button, he makes sure no mention is made of it in the press.”

“It comes up from the floor?” Wise had to laugh. “Jesus – the only other person I know of with something like that is Jack Warner, back home.” He wasn’t sure if this person knew to whom he was referring. “That’s the head of one of the big studios back in Hollywood, Warner Brothers Pictures –”

“Yes, of course.” A smile appeared in the middle of the dark beard. “I know who Herr Warner is. And so does Goebbels. That’s where he got the notion for his wondrous bar; he read about it and decided he must have one just like it. The UFA set builders came out and put it in for him. All free of charge, a donation, a token of their respect. By all reports, he is quite happy with it. Because it shows that now he is a genuine . . . what is the word? . . . mogul. Yes? Just as in Hollywood.”

“Good for him.” The American glanced at Marte before speaking again. “Does the Reichsminister have any other indulgences?”

“You must mean the women.” Von Behren raised a hand, his gesture sweeping across the hall. “Surely you saw that for yourself.”

Marte could see that the American knew what the director had spoken of. Now that Joseph had left, the reception hall was different, diminished somehow, as though its animating spirit had departed as well. But before that, it must have been obvious, in silent, unspoken ways, the bright chatter that filled the room failing to mask the other forms of communication. The glances, the touch of a woman’s hand to her own bared throat, the tinge of blood growing suddenly warmer beneath the fair skin, the laughter too bright and hard and nervous; the smells of desire and excitement, a mingled odor of perfume and sweat that slid between bodies like a dancing, invisible ghost. All those currents swirled around the slight, seemingly unheroic form of the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, his bright, hungry face above the hobbled body, like iron filings drawn into patterned rings by a magnet. Even the women who were with other men, young actresses holding onto a uniformed arm or laughing prettily at a UFA producer’s joke – without even turning to look, they knew where Joseph was in the hall. And the men – they knew as well. They could see the shadow passing between themselves and the women they escorted, the momentary shift in attention, falter of voice, quick look from the corner of the eye. If the men’s guts screwed tighter in anger or jealousy, they said nothing – not here, not in public – they said nothing because they were afraid, or they were ambitious, or in some other way, they simply acknowledged the power the little clubfooted man held. Not just inside himself, but through him, a door to all the corridors and whispered rooms of the Reich itself.

“You saw, did you not? As soon as you stepped into the hall.” Von Behren nodded slowly as he spoke. “I know that stories get told abroad; that any actress who wishes to appear in German films must first acquire permission from the head of the Propaganda Ministry, a magic piece of paper with the signature of Reichsminister Goebbels on it. And this, of course, gives him what you would perhaps call the privilege of the casting couch – that’s what they would say in Hollywood, is it not? The parade goes through the door of his office and leaves by the back way, each pretty Mädchen adjusting her clothes back in place.” Von Behren leaned forward, turning his head to look into Wise’s eyes. “But you see, don’t you, that it’s not really as simple as that. Even if he were not the Reichsminister; even if he did not have such power, and the rich man’s things that go with it – still the women would look at him that way. They did before, when he was nothing, a skinny little man in a dirty trench coat, with spittle flying from his mouth as he stood on boxes on streetcorners, shouting over the heads of a troop of paunchy, beer-soaked stormtroopers.” The director’s voice warmed to the subject, the words spilling out, as though pushed by a grudging admiration of Goebbels’ self-willed transformation. “Even then . . .” He smiled, a conspirator in the knowledge of the world. “What is that American expression I found so colorful? Ah, yes – even then, our good minister enjoyed a great many – what is the word? – conquests. That’s the saying, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure – that’s how you say it.”

Marte watched as Wise nodded in turn. The way the men spoke, so cruelly about such things – that disgusted her. Not the speaking, but the forgetting – as if she were no longer standing there with them, hearing every word. Not for the first time, she wanted to throw her empty glass to the floor, turn and stride away – but she knew she couldn’t. Not yet. Not while the things of which the men spoke, Joseph and all the rest, so mattered to her.

“Are you well?” Von Behren peered with concern at the American. “You’ve gone very pale.”

Wise took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “I’m all right.”

“Some things are not good to think upon, Herr Wise.”

Marte saw a spark of anger flash in the American’s eyes.

“How do you know what I’m thinking about?”

Von Behren smiled. “Oh, I know a great deal about you, Herr Wise. About how you came to be here. And what you came looking for. Or perhaps more properly, who.”

“Really?” It was obvious the American didn’t like people knowing such things. “And why’s that?”

“Aber natürlich – you have come to speak with a certain young woman.” The director gestured toward Marte beside him. “And so you have.”

Wise turned and studied the smaller man. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “What’s the deal?”

Von Behren smoothed the point of his beard with his hand. “Let us speak frankly, Herr Wise, as professionals in the business of making films. You hire screenwriters to put down the words for the actors to speak, and I try to get those words, and the images that accompany them, into the camera, to make a little world inside there. But we needn’t flatter ourselves. We know, don’t we, that the face, the one up on the screen, so much bigger than all the little ones watching in the darkness – that’s the only thing that’s real, is it not? And a beautiful woman’s face . . .” He shrugged. “What is more real than that? What has more power?”

“You did it.” The realization broke upon Wise. “You’re the one who sent the print of your film to me.”

“No, not directly. Some things need to be done more subtly than that. One cannot catch certain hares so easily. Let us just say . . . I arranged to have it sent.”

“Why?” Wise regarded the other man. “What do you think you’re going to get out of all this?”

“I never thought; I only hoped. That when you saw my Marte . . .” Von Behren glanced toward her, then brought his gaze back. “You are someone who makes things possible, are you not? Many things . . . for all sorts of people . . .”

That was when she knew. Why the director – the one who had discovered her, made her his protegee – had sent a print of her film so far away. To America, and to Herr David Wise. He had confided in her that such was his intent, but that she was to remain quiet about it, and not let Joseph know. He had bound her to silence, and now she knew why.

She had known as soon as the American had turned his gaze again toward her. This time, their eyes had met, and she had not looked away. For what she saw there was the same as that burning spark she saw in Joseph’s eyes. Desire, that would not rest until it had grasped all that for which it longed.

“Herr Wise . . .” Marte spoke softly. She tilted her head, so that she looked at him through her lashes. There was no need for a script, for her to know the lines to speak now. “You have traveled so much. You must be tired . . .”

TEN

She listened to him, to the words of his voice, one after another. Coming from a great distance, as though she were listening to him on the radio, as though she weren’t with him in the great high-ceilinged room at all. A dream . . . that was what it felt like, as she closed her eyes and let his voice flow past, wrapping itself around her, a familiar embrace.

But different, as well. That was how she knew it wasn’t the radio, it wasn’t the sharp whip of the Reich’s Propaganda Minister lacerating the enemies of the German Volk, or describing the present and coming glories that the Führer would bestow upon the faithful, upon all the uplifted, eager faces. Joseph’s other voice, the private one, almost a whisper. Meant for only one other person; meant for her. The voice she had heard when she had lain in his arms, his bare chest against her breasts, crushing her to him, as though one body could devour another. His mouth close to her ear, so his voice could tell of his worship, his love for the golden thing he’d won, the angel that had descended to the heavy earth and the gaze of men, his gaze.

Marte . . . The last word he would speak, before he would close his eyes, the lashes brushing her face, letting his other senses drink in the scent and presence of her. Her name, an incantation, a simple faith . . .

“There have been things said. Things about us.” Now Joseph didn’t look at her as he spoke; he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the long delicate fingers squeezed bloodless in his anguish. He gazed across the Wilhelmplatz at the dark shape of the Reich Chancellery, and the night sky beyond it. “The lies . . . the whispering . . . all of it, again and again.”

How silly of him – she could almost smile to herself as she listened. They weren’t lies, they were the truth. The things that people said, the whispers that circled about her like the dark shadows of birds. Women on the street pointing her out to each other as she passed by, the actors and crews on the film sets watching her and then turning away with shrugs and single raised eyebrows, sharing their cynical knowledge of how things worked in this world. Everybody knew the truth about them, about her and Joseph. Had he spoken so many lies himself, that he could no longer tell the difference?

“They have the ear of the Führer. They’ve poisoned his mind . . . against you.” He lowered his head, his narrow shoulders slumping forward. “Marte . . .” Her name, that invocation again, but spoken this time in a voice that could barely emerge from his throat, as though it were his last breath. “We must not see each other again. Ever . . .”

She wondered whether she should go to him, wrap her arms around him, rock him against the cradle of her breast. “But that’s what you’ve said before.”

“This time . . . this time, it must be. Forever.” Joseph looked over his shoulder at her, his face drawn taut, cheeks hollowed, the outline of his skull visible beneath. “That is the Führer’s decree.”

Forever . . . She closed her eyes, drifting away. That was funny as well, the way men said such things. As though forever meant anything at all. Joseph was as sworn to the service of Härte as any SS officer, as the father of her lost child was; they were all soldiers of this new world, cold and perfect. But that was just armor over the soft, sentimental part inside them. Forever . . . Women lost things forever, never seen again, but they went on. They learned how to.

She felt his hand against the side of her face, the fingers tangling through her hair and brushing the curve of her jaw. She opened her eyes and saw him gazing down at her.

“I made an offer.” This close, Joseph kept his voice a whisper, soft as though they were in bed together. “To him.” She knew he meant the Führer. “I offered to resign from the Ministry . . . and as Gauleiter of Berlin . . . all my posts. He could appoint me as Ambassador to Japan. I would leave Germany . . . we would leave. We could live together, in Tokyo. There would be no scandal then; we’d be far away, and people would forget about us.” Joseph’s hand moved down her neck, across the curve of her shoulder. “Magda and the children – they would be provided for. And even they would forget, eventually. Everyone would forget about us. And we would be together.”

“But he doesn’t want you to leave.” She leaned her head against his arm. “He needs you.” That was the truth, even though he had said it himself. The Führer needed his Propaganda Minister, had always needed him, even before he had become the Führer, when he had been nothing but the head of a tiny political group – brawling war veterans and professional anti-Semites – breaking heads at Bierstube meetings and squabbling in the red mud of the dying Weimar republic. Joseph had created the Führer – even that one word, his title, that had been another of his propaganda genius’s masterstrokes. “He needs you even more than I do.”

He stayed silent, but she felt the tremor in his hand, his fingers curling against her skin.

“You can never leave him . . .”

“I could.” Joseph’s voice came from far away, though he was standing next to her. “I could leave everything . . . my family . . . my home . . . to be with you. But there is no place that we could go. No place where we would be left alone. Where he would leave us alone.”

Now Joseph was lying to her again. She knew that wasn’t true; people could always disappear, become invisible, become nothing. What he really meant was that there was no place they could go, where he would still be powerful, even feared, and have so much wealth at his command. How long would he have been happy as Ambassador to Japan? Even if that had been possible, if the Führer had said yes . . . it was too far away, too remote from the machinery that he had put in place, the gears that ground out the rallies and radio broadcasts and films, the precisely cut teeth that meshed with those inside the nation’s hearts. How could he leave that, his other love, the true one, for her?

He had left her side and gone back to stand at the tall window, looking down at the street and the world beyond, folded in night.

“It would be best if you were to leave Berlin.” Joseph had gained control of himself again, his words taut and clipped. But he couldn’t look at her; she knew he wouldn’t be able to, that his voice and self-possession would break, he would rush to her and pull her to her feet, crushing her in his embrace. “It would be best for both of us. The production of your next film, and the ones after that – they can all be moved to the remote UFA facilities. You needn’t worry about what will happen to you; I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of . . .”

She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He didn’t realize, none of them ever did, how things were. Men thought they pushed the gears along, that they were in control, and really – they didn’t know. About the other gears, the other machinery that was already in motion. Joseph didn’t know.

Leave Berlin . . .

Now she was free to go to America. That would solve all their problems. And Joseph would be free of her, free of this love that interfered with the workings of his glorious destiny.

And he didn’t even know yet. Soon he would, but for now, in this moment, he was ignorant. So in command, but unaware of the other gears, the other machinery that had circled around him, his own deliverance.

She could have laughed, softly and sadly, and it would have been all right.

The laughter would have been drowned out by another sound, the rasping drone of an airplane engine. A light had appeared, a brighter star moving in the night sky, passing above the city.

The noise grew louder. The sky seemed to be full of airplanes, flooded with them, their engines massed into one great roaring. Fiery light surged up and across Joseph’s face, as though the streets below had suddenly been wrapped in flame; he turned toward her, the cords in his neck straining, his eyes wild, as he shouted something she couldn’t hear . . .

* * *

“Are you all right?”

The words, spoken right at her ear, brought her up from her sleep and the dreaming into which she had fallen. Dreaming of Joseph, and the last time she’d been with him. Now, she turned away from von Behren in the seat beside hers, his hand laid solicitously upon her forearm, and toward the airplane’s small, rounded window. Through it, she could see the flat stretches of the Templehof landing strips, the other airplanes arrayed near the low shapes of the hangars. One had already taken off and was mounting toward the clouds, sunlight flashing off its prop blades.

“Marte –”

She could barely hear him; this airplane, the one in which they sat, shivered with the vibrations from its own engines. Soon enough it would head along the grassy runway, picking up speed, and then it would be in the air itself, making for Paris. A few rows ahead of her and von Behren, the American producer sat, the one who had come all the way from Hollywood to fetch her. Herr Wise was reading an English-language newspaper; she could decipher some of the words in the headlines – von Behren had already begun teaching her the new language. She would hit the ground running, as he had smiled and put it the way the Americans themselves would say. There had been time for one quick celebratory dinner at the Adlon, she and her director and Herr Wise, the two men lifting their champagne glasses toward her. To her new career, her new life. Wise had nodded and smiled, agreeing with von Behren – by the time she got there, to the land of the nodding palm trees and the eternal sunshine, she’d be speaking English as though it were her native language. She was a quick study, and words were all the same to her, lines to be learned. Easy when one had nothing to hold on to, nothing inside that would get in the way.

That had been the celebration, with loud voices and laughter all around them. She had spent the rest of the night packing, to be ready for the morning flight. No wonder she was so tired, drifting into sleep.

The engine noise grew louder, filling the airplane’s interior. The world outside shifted as the airplane began to roll, taxiing toward its appointed runway.

Another motion caught her eye, at the edge of the field. The tassel traced across her hand as she lifted the curtain away from the small square window. A black Mercedes limousine swerved onto the field, coming to a halt parallel to the airplane’s progress. Two small swastika flags trailed from the automobile’s front fenders. She recognized it; she had ridden in it herself, many times, sinking deep into the plush leather upholstery. A pale visage showed behind the rolled-down window, a piercing gaze directed toward the airplane. The dark eyes connected straight to Marte’s own, a line stretching to an invisible thread between the man and the woman.

Von Behren grabbed her hand and squeezed it tight. He had spotted the Mercedes as well, the gleam of its black metal. There was still time, for everything to go wrong – the Reichsminister could have changed his mind, become just a man again, instead of the Führer’s loyal servant. He might have listened to the orders from his heart and thrown away everything else, the wealth, the power – all for her. A pack of motorcycles from the Berlin Polizei could come roaring from behind the limousine, swoop across the field, block the airplane from traveling any farther. The pilot might already be cutting the engines, obeying a last-minute command from the airfield’s tower . . .

It could all happen, in a moment, in the blink of an eye . . .

Nothing happened.

None of the other passengers had noticed the black Mercedes at the edge of the field. The face at the limousine’s window grew smaller with distance, until it was lost behind them. The American folded his newspaper to another page and went on reading.

When the airplane was safely aloft, banking against the clouds, von Behren let go of her hand.

“Everything will be all right now.” He patted her forearm. “You’ll see. Everything will be fine . . .”

She turned away, gazing out the small window beside her. The earth fell far below them.

It didn’t matter. If everything would be all right or not. Things would happen, the gears of the world’s machinery, seen and unseen, would turn regardless. What would happen only mattered to the other ones, the ones who existed, who were real.

Not her.

She leaned her brow against the cold window, falling from one dream to another, endlessly . . .

LOS ANGELES

1940

Perhaps really he was a dead king, from the region of terrors. And he was still cold and remote in the region of death, with perfumes coming from his transparent body as if from some strange flower.

– D. H. Lawrence,

The Man Who Died (1928)

ELEVEN

“I believe Mr. Wise expects me.”

The secretary glanced up at Marte. “I’ll see if he’s free right now.” The look from the woman continued for a moment longer, before she swivelled her chair around toward the intercom box.

She knew what the secretary’s appraisal meant. There were two secretaries here in the lobby of David Wise’s office, both young and good-looking enough; perhaps they could have gone for bit parts out on the production lot rather than sitting here all day behind their typewriters and stacks of mail. But they both had in their eyes that little smoldering spark, a seed of both contempt and envy, that the merely pretty always directed toward the beautiful. The same here in Hollywood as it had been in Berlin – the unspoken accusation that the beauty wasn’t enough, that it had to be what she had done with it, in private, that accounted for the way men, including the estimable Herr Wise, looked at her.

There was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago stopped feeling anything when it happened.

The secretary turned back to her. “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.” Efficient.

Marte sat and waited, flipping through the pages of an American magazine. The printed words were still opaque to her; she had to translate them from English into German inside her heard, to know what they meant. Speaking it was easier, it was just like reciting lines in front of a camera. That was the pay-off from all the coaching she had gotten from Mr. Wise, with dialogue from movies he had produced. Hours of practice, on the long stage-by-stage journey – Berlin to Paris, then to Liverpool and the ocean liner. And the long train ride, cities and then the empty desert spaces, that had looked to her like the place where the world ended. It had made sense that Hollywood lay on the other side of all that, a place where everything could be made from nothing, a blank piece of paper for men like Wise to write upon.

She looked up, through the window next to her. In the distance, at the edge of the Wise Studios lot, stood the Taj Mahal. Not the real thing, a replica, a false front made of wood and plaster, the paint that had imitated the jewel-like tiles flaking from the heat of the California sun. It had been built for some historical epic several years ago, heroic British soldiers in the service of their far-flung empire; taken from a book by Kipling, perhaps, transmuted into perfect romance by Wise’s staff of writers. Just that one set was bigger than anything she had ever seen at the UFA studios in Babelsberg, outside Berlin.

She returned her attention to the magazine. As she deciphered its words, she was aware of someone watching her. From the farther side of the waiting room – a tall, lanky man, with thinning red hair, wearing an unstylish checked jacket. When she looked up, she saw him keeping his gaze on the newspaper he held unfolded in front of himself, as though idly catching up on the baseball scores. Wilson; that was his name. David had even introduced his head of studio security to her, and the man had smiled and shaken her hand, and told her that if there was anything she ever needed, then she only had to call him. She knew that if he was watching her, that was just part of his job, something that David had asked him to do –

“Marte!”

The magazine was pulled from her hands and tossed onto the table on the other side of the chair. She raised her eyes and saw a smiling David Wise standing in front of her.

“God, you’re looking great.” He reached down and took both her hands in his, bringing her to her feet. “Rose took you downtown, got you all fitted out?”

She nodded. The head of the Wise Studios’ costuming department had spent all of yesterday with her on Wilshire Boulevard, taking her through the private fitting rooms of the shops, plush-lined sanctuaries where tea was invariably offered before the tape measures flew and the racks of dresses were wheeled in. The small woman with her bob of jet-black hair and gogglelike horn-rimmed glasses had torn through the offerings, yanking out the ones which she had approved. Those had been boxed, after Marte had tried them on and they had gotten past the other woman’s critical scowl, and sent on, with no exchange of money needed. The studio settled its accounts on a quarterly basis – or so the costuming head had informed her.

“Ladies, I ask you –” Wise took her elbow and turned her toward the secretaries. “Isn’t she looking swell?”

The same dim spark was in the other women’s eyes as they looked over their shoulders at her. “Lovely, Mr. Wise,” said one. They both turned back to their typewriters.

“I’m really glad you came by today.” Wise steered Marte toward the door of his office.

“But you asked me to.”

He shrugged. “People in this town, you ask ’em to breathe, they want to know what’s in it for them. Don’t you worry about that, though.” He had laid his arm around her shoulder; with his other hand, he reached for the door knob. “Trust me, people will always be nice to you.”

The office was dark except for the film screen. Standing in the middle of the room, Marte turned and saw her silhouette at the bottom of a battle scene. Shouts and explosions – a squadron of soldiers, dressed in the uniforms of 1914, charged with their rifles and bayonets through a forest, as the earth around them erupted into great bursts of fire and smoke. Some of the actors crumpled to their knees, the weapons dropping from their hands as they fell shoulder-first to the ground.

Wise pulled the door shut and walked toward Marte. The war scene covered his head and torso, other men’s faces, grimacing in pain and anger, superimposed on his. He squinted into the shifting beam of light, raising his hand to gesture at the projectionist. “Turn it down, Freddy. You’re driving us deaf in here. There, that’s good.” The shouts were murmurs now, the explosions removed to a landscape far away. He turned back to Marte. “What do you think?” He pointed over his shoulder to the screen. “Does that look like the Battle of the Somme to you?”

“I don’t know.” In their near-silence, the images of the falling men seemed like those of sleepwalkers, lost in the nightmares from which they couldn’t awake. “That all happened so long ago . . . before I was born . . .” Everything that happened up there, in that world of light and shadow, seemed like a dream to her. When she had first seen her own face transformed into radiance, she had wondered who the girl was, and if she had dreamed the Marte that watched her in the darkness. “I don’t know about those things.”

“Ah, that’s all right. I didn’t really expect you to.” Wise stood beside her for a moment, gazing at the action on the screen. “I don’t even know if we’re gonna go ahead with this one – it’s not really making a lot of sense to me any more. You know what I mean?” He glanced over at her. “There’s a war going on over there right now; why should anybody be interested in what happened in the last one? People are just glad we’re staying out of it this time.” His face grew heavier, brooding. “I should be making more comedies. Right? Get people’s minds off their little problems for an hour or two. Or romances.” He smiled at her. “That’s where you come in.”

“Yes . . . if you still think I would be . . .” She couldn’t find the word in English. “Praktisch? Suitable?”

Wise laughed, tilting his head back. “That’s really sweet. You know, I’m glad you didn’t get our complete Pygmalion number – you still got a little bit of your accent. That’s good, I want you to keep some of that exotic quality about you. It always plays well, at least with blondes. Dark-haired, you want to go the other way, tone it down.”

She hadn’t followed everything he had said. “I could dye my hair –”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “We’re not gonna touch a thing about you. Perfect the way you are.” He smiled, then leaned closer, as if he were about to kiss her. “Believe me. You’re going to be very suitable.” He drew back, gesturing toward a sofa barely visible under the bright beams from the projection booth windows. “Have a seat. Let me get you something – we really haven’t had a chance to celebrate your arrival.”

He came back from the bar with two glasses. In the darkness, she couldn’t discern what was in the one he handed to her; she took a sip and found it to be well-aged brandy. She had learned to drink things like that, expensive things, even to tell one apart from another. She let the thread of its warmth ease down her throat.

“You fixed up okay?” Wise settled down beside her, sinking back into the soft leather. The battle scene continued unreeling across from them. “How’s the little house?”

“Es ist so schön . . .” She found the English words. “It’s lovely.” That had been where the boxes from the shopping expedition had been delivered, to a Spanish-styled bungalow on a winding road in the foothills. The glazed tiles set into the walls and floor were real, not just daubs of paint like those on the lot’s fake Taj Mahal.

“You really like it?” He seemed surprised by how quickly she had answered him.

“Oh, yes. It’s so . . . so much sun. So bright.” After the driver had brought in her luggage, she had stepped out the house’s back door and been dazzled by the tumble of flowers over the garden wall, big exotic-looking ones – exotic to her; she supposed they might be as common as Gänseblumchen in this wonderland. She didn’t even know what the flowers were called, bursting like soft explosions from their creeping tendrilled vine. She had closed her eyes as she had brought her face close to the flowers, drinking in the warm, vanilla-ish scent. Like a piece of some bright heaven, that she could cup in her hands.

Bright . . .

Maybe here was that heaven, where the sweet flowers came from, their home. Before she had left Berlin, everything had come to seem so dark there. Even when she had stood beneath the glare of the studio lights, their heat drawing a rivulet of sweat through the makeup slathered upon her skin – even then, when she had barely been able to squint past them to where Ernst sat leaning forward, next to the whirring camera, even then she had known it was night outside the Babelsberg walls, or a grey daylight of scudding clouds and rain-shimmered puddles at every street corner.

“Well . . .” Herr Wise shrugged, looking away from her, as though to hide a blush of embarrassment. “We want you to be happy here.”

“Oh, but I am sure I will be.” She reached out and touched his arm. “You have been so kind to me.”

He stood regarding her from the corners of his eyes, rubbing his black-stubbled chin with the tips of his long, delicate fingers. A musician’s fingers, the hand of a violinist.

“We’ll have to get down to business soon,” he said at last. “But not right now.” She had seen a decision click into place behind his eyes, like a coin falling through the slot of a vending machine. He nodded toward the screen. “Relax, make yourself comfortable. Why don’t we just watch the movies for a while, okay?” He smiled with perfect white teeth, the smile of one of his actors. “Take a look at this.”

He signaled to the projectionist by pushing one of the buttons on the little console near the sofa. She turned and looked up at the screen, and saw her own face. In black and white; a girl stood on a street in Berlin, her empty, hungry gaze reflected in a shop window.

“That was the first time I saw you.” Wise looked at the screen, studying the girl carefully. And then back to the one beside him, the smile rising on his own face again. “I mean, the first time I saw one of your films.”

Marte closed her eyes as she leaned back into the embrace of the sofa; she could still make out the turning and fall of the shadows and faces on the screen across the room. She heard the soft clink as Wise refilled the glasses on the low table before them. She had been holding her breath, as though she were a quiet, invisible thing, not really in this room at all, or anywhere. While she had waited for that coin to fall, for that decision to be made. The one that she already knew, that she had come to expect when men looked at her. That made her real. That made the woman with her face, up on the screen, even more real, as all the men in the darkened theater gazed up at her in silence.

“Here you go . . .”

She opened her eyes and saw him holding a glass out to her. As she took it, her fingers touched his for a moment. That didn’t end. He raised his gaze to hers; in the darkness at the center of his eyes, she saw the girl’s face, the woman’s face, her face. On the tiny screen of his vision, the shadows and light from the larger one played across that image. Which one was real? She didn’t know. She didn’t know, even as he leaned forward and kissed her, their fingers still touching.

She didn’t see, but heard the glass strike the floor, the brandy spilling across the rug. But she knew where she was now, inside the annihilating embrace of a man’s arms, her head tilting back as he pressed his face into the taut angle of her throat.

All the other worlds, the bright ones and the dark, vanished as she fell.

* * *

The radiance from the screen turned her skin to silver, as though she were one of those figures of light and shadow.

Marte drew away from him and sat up at one end of the couch in the little alcove. His skin caught the reflection from the screen as well, brightened by the sheen of sweat across his shoulders, lost in the tangle of dark hair on his chest. David – as he had told her to call him; he didn’t want her to say ‘Herr Wise’ anymore – hadn’t moved when she had slipped out of his embrace. He was still asleep, or pretending to be.

She looked down at her own arms and breasts, wrists crossed against her knees. The shadows moved across her skin. The projectionist, in his small chamber above her head, had gone on running film, reel after reel, all the time she had been here with David. Perhaps the man behind the flickering beam of light was blind, or deaf, or perhaps it didn’t even matter. They had been as private here as though in a bedroom with the door closed; the soundtracks from the films had swallowed up the things he had whispered to her, his lips brushing her ear.

Perhaps there was no one up there at all. No one changing reels upon the projector – perhaps the films went on and on by themselves because they were true things, the screen a window into another world, brighter vivid than this one. The light from that world had rained gently upon her while she had slept in David’s arms, made her a part of it. For a moment, she thought that she could walk across the room, her bare feet sinking into the thick carpets, and stand against the screen, the beam of light wrapping itself around her body. In the glare of that small sun, streaming through the fingers of her outstretched hand, she might become a true, real thing herself, at home in the world that claimed her.

“Then I would . . .” She whispered aloud, the words moving inside her head as she gazed at the screen. Dann ich werde. “Then I would know . . .”

In that other world, a battle still raged. Soldiers swarmed across muddy fields, the terrible long mouths of cannons spat fire and smoke. Marte shrank back, the couch’s leather touching her rounded spine.

Other skin, living, touched her. David’s hand – she looked round at him and saw his half-lidded eyes and dreaming smile. She let him pull her close into the shelter from which she had risen. Falling, as she had let herself fall toward Joseph, and before him, the father of her baby.

She looked up into David’s face and saw that his gaze had strayed from her, even as his arms drew her closer against his bare chest. Reflected in the dark centers of his eyes were the sparks and motions of light.

The light drew her gaze as well. She looked over her shoulder, the side of her face pressed tight against his skin. Across the darkened room, in the dazzling world of the screen, a squadron of planes, cruel and beautiful things, thundered across the skies. In tight formation, wingtips almost touching, their riveted bodies as silver as the reflected light had made her own skin. They flew on, carrying metal and fire to distant parts of that other world.

She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see that anymore. But she knew that he kept his eyes open, went on watching, even as he held her tighter and more fiercely to himself.

TWELVE

Someone waited for her inside the house. Marte could see the lamp had been switched on, the big squat brass one on the table in the study. The glow filtered through the drawn curtains, spilling a dim radiance across the lawn and the path of flagstones curving to the front door. The lamp was David’s, one that he’d had sent over from the library of his own, much larger house; the room lined with books and dark wood could almost have swallowed this little cottage by itself. In the year and more since she had come to America, other bits and pieces of his had made their way here, to remind her constantly of him.

The front door was unlocked and slightly ajar. The studio car had dropped her off and driven away, leaving a silence in which she could hear again the evening crickets beneath the ranks of oleanders. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

“Hello?” She set her purse down on the entryway table. “Is there someone here?” She smelled a trace of tobacco, but not any of von Behren’s. Besides, she knew he was still holed up in David’s studio office, the two of them trying to salvage something out of a script that their leading man had called garbage and thrown down on the floor of the set in a white flurry of typed pages.

“Fraulein Helle –” A voice that she recognized, but without a name attached to it, called from the study. A man’s voice, speaking English with an accent close to her own. “I’ve been waiting for you. Come and talk.”

He sat in the study’s big armchair, right next to the table with David’s lamp on it. As Marte stood in the room’s doorway, the man even looked a little like David, legs crossed, cigarette smoke curling from the cut-glass ashtray, a book from the long rows of shelves open on his lap. That was why David had sent the lamp over, so he would have a place to read, not just scripts but real books as well, when he spent the night with her. The lamp, one of a matched pair, made the corner of the study seem like his own home library.

This man smiled and gave a little nod to her, as though he were bowing at a reception without actually being on his feet. That was when she realized who he was, where she had seen him before. He was part of the staff at the German Consulate here in Los Angeles, a functionary high up enough to attend formal events in white tie and a sleekly tailored dinner jacket, with a lower ranking in the diplomatic corps following him around, taking down whispered comments and instructions in a small notebook. She still couldn’t remember his name or official title, but she recalled being introduced to him as she had stood next to David. It had been in the lobby of one of the palace theaters, all gilt and faux marble, that had been premiering the studio’s latest film. She had glanced up at David and seen the way his eyes had narrowed, even as he had grudgingly shaken the other man’s hand and muttered some inconsequential courtesy.

“I hope you’ll excuse this intrusion.” The consulate official tilted his head back, regarding her with half-lidded eyes. “And that in your absence I availed myself of your hospitality.” His gesture took in the room around him.

She remained standing in the doorway. “Did someone let you in here?”

The man shrugged. “There are always keys, and ways of acquiring them. Even in times such as these, we have helpful friends. Please.” He indicated the smaller armchair. “You should be comfortable in your own home, shouldn’t you? And we have much to talk about.”

She sat with her hands poised nervously on her knees. She watched her fingers smoothing out the soft fabric of her skirt’s hem. The man’s presence disturbed her, a combination of apprehension and memory. He gave off a scent – not one she could actually smell, but subtler – of ink and blood, of carelessly scrawled signatures at the bottom of police forms. Rumors whispered that the Consulate was rife with Gestapo keeping an eye on the Reich’s exiles, those who had been smart or lucky or well-connected enough to escape before they could be caught in the sharp gears of interrogation and prison. It wasn’t even a rumor, she knew it was the truth, they all knew it, from those who had landed on their feet and were being paid sweet amounts of Hollywood money as she was, to those living off handouts from their envied friends. A knot of them could be laughing or grumbling among themselves, bewailing fate or sheepishly apologizing for good fortune, and the shadow of this man, or one of the others just like him, would pass between them; they would look over their shoulders, and their voices would sink to whispers or silence.

The Consulate official bent his head down to peer into Marte’s averted face. “You’re not afraid of me, are you, Fraulein Helle?” His solicitousness was an obscene joke; he could barely keep the thin-lipped smile from leaking through again. “I didn’t mean to alarm you in such a way. This unannounced visit. But I thought it best . . . for you. Some matters should be kept private. Personal matters.”

She raised her gaze to meet his. “I don’t know what you mean . . .”

“But of course. Why should you?” He took the cigarette from the ashtray, inhaled and delicately returned it. “We are among the eaters of lotuses, are we not? Whatever happened, that one does not wish to remember, can be forgotten here; whatever didn’t happen, can be . . .” He searched for a word. “Falsified? Made up. All pretend.” A nod. “It is easy to see why everyone is so happy here. Elsewhere . . . in one’s homeland . . .” He shrugged. “Not so pleasant, perhaps. When a land is at war, the Volk – your people, Fraulein Helle – they must make harsh sacrifices.”

“This is my home now.” She managed to say it defiantly, while wondering what he’d meant, and exactly what he knew, when he’d said the words your people.

“Ah.” The last trace of the smile faded. “Yes, we had been informed that inquiries had been made, regarding how American citizenship could most easily be obtained for you. Of course, you have my apologies if that is turning out to be more difficult than your patron Herr David Wise had expected. Even with friends as powerful as his, these things take time. Especially if some of the arrangements that had previously been made on your behalf were . . . shall we say? . . . somewhat unusual.”

Again fear touched her, a cold fingertip laid against her heart. What did he know? All of them, the faceless ones in the consulate in Los Angeles or the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin – what was in their files, what had they found out about her? Everything she had told von Behren, just a few years ago, after he’d first come across her at the Romanische Café, he had told her to keep all that their secret, to never tell anyone else. The things that had happened at the Lebensborn hostel – who could understand that? They wouldn’t, they would despise her or laugh at her so cruelly that her film career would be over; the Americans were addicted to gossip, they loved to tear apart a bleeding fellow creature. And then the precarious safety that she and Ernst had achieved would be over, the money and the so-helpful influence from the studio would all vanish overnight.

She hadn’t even told David any of these things, the true secrets. How could she risk it? If he were to stop loving her, stop wanting to possess her; if he were to turn away from her in disgust . . . what would she be then? If she couldn’t see herself reflected in the mirror of his eyes, or up on the screen of the films he made . . .

She didn’t know. Perhaps nothing at all. Like a shadow that vanishes when a harsh light is switched on, leaving a room empty at last.

“Fraulein Helle?”

The consulate official’s voice brought her back from her dark thoughts. She looked up and saw his simulation of kind concern.

“I think you misjudge my intentions here.” Somehow, he had peered inside her skull; he had to be Gestapo, they knew how to do that. “It would not be my wish – or anyone’s – to do that which would damage your career. Your success, the image on the world’s theater screens of such a beautiful and pure Nordic racial type as yourself –” His thin smile crept out again. “That is a great source of pride to the Reich’s guardians of culture. I have just recently returned from our native land, from Berlin. I had some interesting discussions with Reichsminister Goebbels. Whom I believe you’ve met, and spoken with, before your own departure?” The smile became even more insinuating. “I can assure you that the Reichsminister continues to take a lively interest in your performances. The first film you did for the Wise Studios – what was it? August and September, if I recall correctly. Something like that, nicht wahr?”

“Yes . . .”

“I did not see it; my apologies. A comedy, was it?”

She shook her head. “A drama. Herr Wise thought I should start with something like that.”

“Herr Wise knows his business. I understand the film was a success – or at least successful enough. Both here and then in Europe. In Berlin, even the Reichminister went to the theater and saw it. He likes to go out among the people, now and then. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that he found the film to be . . . very moving. He was quite caught up in your performance. I sat a few seats away from him, and I saw him lean forward, every time your face was on the screen, as though he wished he could somehow transport himself right into the scene with you.” The consulate official’s smile showed tolerant amusement. “I find it remarkable how powerfully these films affect even the strongest-willed man. But then that is your magic, Fraulein Helle, is it not? That is why it is your face on the screen, and not that of another woman.”

She said nothing. The mention of Joseph’s name, the way the consulate official had spoken it, had trapped her, incapable of moving. She could only wait, to hear what came next.

The official poked at the still-burning stub in the ashtray, watching the thread of smoke rise. “It is, in fact, upon the Reichsminister’s instructions that I have come here, Fraulein Helle.” He leaned back in the armchair, regarding her through the cage of his fingertips placed together. “In his capacity as overseer of the German film industry, he wishes to extend an invitation to you. I was instructed to be as discreet as possible in this matter, while at the same time conveying to you the utmost seriousness in which the offer is made. That is why I came to see you in this manner. Privately, as it were.”

Marte forced her words past the stone that had lodged in her throat. “What does he . . . what does the Reichsminister want?”

“He wants you, Fraulein Helle.” The consulate official spoke without smiling this time. “Not for himself, of course – the Reichsminister is a man of honor and duty. But for the German nation, and the Volk whose blood is in your veins. He wishes you to return to Germany – immediately – and resume your film career there. But not as another mere actress, one among the many at the UFA studios. No, you would be the queen of the German cinema. Those are exactly the words the Reichsminister used – die Königin des deutschen Filmes. This is an extraordinary thing, Fraulein Helle. To no woman before has such an invitation been made. You would be the most highly honored and glorified actress upon the screens of the German theaters – and more than that; in all the theaters of the world.”

The man’s words had pressed her back into her chair, as though he had placed his outspread fingertips against her breast and pinned her there. “I don’t . . . I don’t know if I want that . . .”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “To be seen by all men, to be admired, desired by them? What actress – what woman – doesn’t want that? Perhaps it is something else.” His narrow gaze pierced her. “Perhaps it is that you do not wish to leave your comfortable home, your coddled life here in America. Though I can assure you that the sacrifice of returning to Germany would be in your case a very small one. The Reichsminister would see to that a heroine such as yourself would suffer no . . . privations, as it were.” The word had twisted in his mouth, as though it were a sour taste on his tongue that he wanted to spit out.

“I don’t want to leave . . .” There were no secrets that she could conceal from him. “I’m . . . I’m safe here . . .”

“Yes, of course you are. To go from this land of peace and return to a homeland that is now at war . . . a war pressed upon Germany by the conspiracy of its enemies . . . you find that prospect frightening; I understand that.” The consulate official’s voice turned softer, feigning kindness. “But do you really think, Fraulein Helle, that this refuge you have found here will last forever? This is a war not just between nations, or even between ideologies, but a war between one blood – the pure Aryan blood of heroes – and that of the mongrel races who would destroy it. Do you think America can avoid being drawn into that final conflict?”

“David . . . Herr Wise told me . . . he said that America wouldn’t go to war . . .”

“Herr Wise is a clever man, isn’t he? A very clever . . . Jew.” The consulate official’s voice darkened with a withering contempt. “And of course, for Jews there never are wars; they find others to fight them, and to die in them. Herr Wise and his breed stay safe in their counting houses until all is quiet again, and then they go out onto the battlefield to pluck the bits of gold from the dead and dying. Germany and France and England have gone to war, and all the other nations of Europe, and yet it is always der ewige Jude who has won.” The official’s face grew heavy with brooding. “Your clever Herr Wise may have a surprise in store for him this time, however. This time, the war will come to the Jews, and they won’t escape.”

He wasn’t Gestapo, she knew that now. A note of fervor had entered his voice, a shrill pitch like a wire tightened to the breaking point. He was SS, disguised in a well-cut double-breasted suit of nubbly brown wool instead of a black uniform shiny with polished leather and steel death’s-heads, but Schützstaffel nonetheless. One of the true believers, not a simple follower of orders such as the soldier who’d fathered her child, but a disciple of that new dark faith, his visage honed to a knife’s edge by the rendering heat of all that he carried in his heart.

“Fraulein Helle.” The consulate official watched and judged her. “Do you not think you owe a duty to your own country, the one in which you were born? If there were even a little true German blood in your veins –” He knew, he had to know; everything, all of her secrets. “If there were even a red drop of that blood, you might find it within you to listen to its wisdom. Let the blood decide what you should do.”

She imagined this was how she would be spoken to by a priest, severe and black-clad, a raven with burning eyes. “I . . . I can’t . . .” Marte shook her head slowly. “I don’t know . . .”

“We are well aware of other factors that might influence your decision. To stay here or to return to Germany.” The consulate official’s voice turned harsher and colder. “It is common knowledge that your relationship with Herr David Wise is more than a professional one. It is a tribute to the influence he wields in the motion picture industry, that mention of your affair with him has been kept out of the gossip columns. It is a tribute to the understanding and forbearance of Reichsminister Goebbels, that he is prepared to forgive your involvement with this man. In an industry so unfortunately dominated by Jews, the pressure would be overwhelming for an attractive Nordic woman to allow herself to be pawed and fondled by such a creature, and then paraded through restaurants and night clubs as an ornament to his swaggering pride.” The venom of the consulate official’s loathing, that he had kept hidden at the premiere when he had shaken David’s hand, now tinged his voice. “It is precisely from such disgusting racial predations that the Reichsminister wishes to protect you. From the Jew’s lust for all that is fair and pure, everything that he and his degenerate race can never be. Though of course –” The consulate official’s mirthless smile returned. “I will not pretend to you that Goebbels’ interest in your affairs is purely ideological in nature. This is a matter of some personal importance between you and him, is it not? A resumption of that role you previously played in his life, before the wiles of the American Jew took you away from him.” The smile widened. “Of course, that is why you may be assured of not only your safety upon your return home, but also the exalted position you will be given – the choice of roles, the lavish production budgets, the luxuries befitting your stature. I doubt that you will miss at all the comforts and splendor of your life here.”

“But . . . I don’t understand,” said Marte. “He sent me away before. He told me I had to leave . . .”

“A man may change his mind, yes? Especially when the circumstances change. Germany is at war now; it is besieged by both international Jewry and Bolshevism. The Führer has weightier matters with which to concern himself, Fraulein Helle. The movement of armies, a military strategy that takes in half the globe – these are the things that receive his attention. And if I may say so, the Reichsminister has learned something of the art of discretion. He and his wife Magda, the mother of his children – they both have taken it upon themselves to foster the morale of the nation by preserving the appearance of their marriage. So many good, trusting Germans look up to them; it would be cruel to shatter their illusions. And those who tried to, those envious, whispering voices who carried scandal to not only the ear of the Führer, but to the professional gossip-mongers as well . . .” The consulate official shrugged. “The Reichsminister has succeeded in dealing with such as those. Silence can be purchased, with coin of one kind or another. If the Reichsminister now finds that he has a personal debt to certain forces, certain people . . . that doesn’t matter. It’s a small price to pay. And he has paid it on your behalf, Fraulein Helle. That is what you must remember.”

She felt herself growing dizzy as she listened to the man, as though the ground itself were being drawn from beneath her feet. The night filled the windows of the house, the darkness wrapping tightly around the brass lamp’s glow. The things the consulate official spoke of, the ways of the land from which she had come so far . . . just hearing of them made her feel both nauseous and frightened. She seemed once more to be walking down a hallway of apartment doors, walking slowly as she did in dreams and memory, toward the one door that stood open, with the broken, overturned furniture and papers scattered across the floor on the other side, her mother and father gone . . .

Silence could be bought. With a small red coin, shiny enough for her to look down and see her face reflected in it, in the string of red coins that trailed into the corridor, the last of them soaking dark into the fibers of the worn carpet runner.

Even speaking of Joseph made her feel strange, insubstantial. To know that was still there in that dark world, waiting, thinking of her . . . She could feel his hands grasping her arms, drawing her close to him, his thin body against her breast. And the fierceness of his hungry gaze, searching her eyes as though the reflection of his own face there could speak and tell him what he wanted to know.

Marte bit her lip, clenching her fists in her lap until they were two trembling white stones. “No –” She looked up from her hands, into the consulate official’s amused regard. “I won’t go. I won’t leave this place.”

“Your hasty decision is not completely unanticipated.” The cigarette had died in the ashtray, leaving the smell of the cold cinder hanging in the air. The consulate official tilted his head back against the armchair’s leather, his eyes hooded. “An involvement with someone so powerful as Herr David Wise is not easy to abandon. This is how the Jew maintains his control over his victims. Nevertheless –” He reached over the side of the armchair. “I have come prepared with further arguments to be made.” He straightened, laying in his lap the thin leather portfolio he had picked up. His manicured hands undid the clasp. “I’m sure that you will find these of interest. And that you will take them into consideration before giving me your final answer.”

She took the group of large glossy photo prints that he handed to her. The top one showed a woman her own age, smiling and pointing the camera out to the little boy whose hand she held. The child scowled suspiciously into the lens.

“Who are they?” Marte looked up from the photograph.

“Ah. It would have been too much to expect, that you recognize the boy. You have never seen him – at least not like this. But the woman? You don’t remember her?”

Marte bent over the photograph, examining it more closely, trying to read its silent depth. Something about the woman troubled her, a memory barely discernible, a shape gliding beneath the dark surface of a night ocean.

“Look at the next picture, Fraulein Helle.” The consulate official’s voice came from far away. “Perhaps that will help.”

She drew out the one beneath and held it up. The photo had been taken outside – beyond a stand of trees could be seen a flat expanse of water, a river with hills mounting from the far bank. The picture had been taken in the springtime, with the shadows of leaves dappling the woman’s bright hair. And it was home, her old home of Germany – she could recognize the countryside even though it was someplace she’d never been to, far from Berlin.

The woman in the photo held the little boy in her arms, leaning backward to balance him against her breast and shoulder. The shutter had snapped as she had smiled and said something to the boy, his gaze still dubious as he looked into the lens and sucked a fingertip of one chubby hand.

“Do you see, Fraulein Helle?” The consulate official spoke softly. “Look carefully. The eyes – look at the eyes.”

Not the eyes of the woman in the photograph. The little boy; Marte brought the photograph closer to her own face, searching it.

And finding . . .

“Now you see. Don’t you?” The official whispered to her.

She nodded. “Yes . . .” The photo held her, so that she could barely speak. But she saw. There in the little boy’s face, gazing silently back at her.

One eye light in shade. That was the blue one, blue as her eyes. And the other, the little boy’s left eye – that was darker, almost black in the photograph. That was the golden-brown one.

How old was the child? He looked to be about three years old, with a serious, unsmiling expression. That would be the right age. Three years – so much had happened in that time, but so little as well. Nothing had happened at all, she was still exactly the same, still the girl in the bed with her swaddled newborn in her arms, listening to the step of the hostel’s director coming down the hallway outside the door, coming toward her and the infant with eyes of mismatched color, one blue, one brown . . .

Marte turned back to the first photograph, where the woman’s face could be seen more clearly. “I remember her.” Not the girl’s name, but the way she had laughed and spoken. “She was there . . . she was at the Lebensborn hostel . . .”

“That’s right.” The consulate official nodded. “She bore a child for the Führer. And she was given another child to raise with hers. Your child, Fraulein Helle.”

The top photographs slid off the stack and dropped to the floor at her feet. A close-up of the child’s face was revealed, showing the bicolored eyes even more clearly. Marte touched the glossy surface of the photo, as though she could reach through and stroke the child’s soft cheek. She could see behind the child’s face, to an even younger one, an infant, its pink cheek pressed against her own skin . . .

“You’re lying.” She snapped her head erect, trembling as she glared at the man sitting across from her. “This is some kind of a trick. This could be anyone’s child. You retouched the photos, you found another one. You did . . . you did something . . .”

“Fraulein Helle – please calm yourself.” Again, the consulate official touched his fingertips together. “I assure you that the Schützstaffel keeps excellent track of its own. The ties of blood are important to us.” He had dropped all pretense of being other than SS himself. “This child is the son of an officer in the Leibstandarte SS, now serving at the Eastern Front. A child conceived in further service to Germany, a child to whom you gave birth, with no shame. The shame, the Rassenschande, was in your concealing of your racial background. But that’s of little concern to us now. What is important now is that your child is alive, and in good health, I might add – the foster mother has taken excellent care of him. Though none of us expected that the child’s true mother would become a film star of note one day, and even more importantly, the object of a Reichsminister’s desire. That made it easy for us to render this valued service to him. To come to him and tell him that here is the way to bring the woman he loves back to Germany. For surely this means more than even being die Königen des deutschen Filmes, does it not? To be close to your child once again, whom you had thought was lost forever to you – I don’t believe Herr David Wise can offer any enticement to match that.”

The rest of the photos had slipped from her grasp, scattering across the floor. She watched helplessly as the consulate official bent down and picked one photo up, then held it out to her.

“You know it’s true, don’t you?”

She tried to turn her face away from the photo, the face of the little boy, but couldn’t.

The consulate official’s voice whispered at her ear. “You must think with your blood, Marte. Then you’ll know this is your child.”

Her sudden tears blurred the photograph. The child’s somber, unsmiling face turned to nothing but muddled shades of black and white, then vanished as she broke away her gaze. A sob rose in her throat as she turned her own face against the chair, as though she could hide in its depths, falling into the darkness that would welcome and forgive her.

THIRTEEN

The shades had been drawn, sealing out the merciless bright sunshine of the morning. A little piece of night remained inside the room that Ernst von Behren used as his study. He sat deep in brooding thought behind the desk. One of the few books he’d managed to bring with him from Berlin lay on the desktop, a black silk ribbon marking his place halfway though the yellowed pages. The book was a favorite, he’d read it many times through since he’d been a boy. But there’d be no reading of old tales set in thorny black-letter, this day. Perhaps for many days to come.

“It is true –” Marte sat curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, her legs tucked up beneath her, a wet handkerchief squeezed into a ball in one hand. Her face was still puffy and reddened from her crying, though the tears had stopped hours ago. “I know it is.”

She had said those same words over and over, and each time von Behren had felt a knifeblade touch his heart, the edge dulled to ache rather than cut. He slowly rubbed a fingertip on the only other thing on his desk, a photograph of a child lifted up in a another woman’s arms. The corner of the photo had been crumpled where Marte had clutched it tight; he watched his own hand trying to smooth out the frayed creases.

There was nothing he could do about the things of which she told him. His brooding was a pit that opened wider beneath him. Working on a screenplay with Wise or anyone else, he could slash a red pencil through the bad parts, or crumple into his fist a page that was beyond redemption and hurl it toward an overflowing wastebasket. The SS were considerably more difficult to dispose of.

Von Behren roused himself from his brooding. The man from the German consulate, who’d come to Marte with the photos of the child, had displayed a fine sense of timing. David Wise wasn’t here in Los Angeles at the moment; he wasn’t even in California, but had just left on a two-week business tour of the movie theaters under the control of the Wise Studios – a separate corporation was about to be set up, to avoid getting hit with the same antitrust pressure that Roosevelt’s Attorney General had brought against MGM and Warner Brothers. He would have been the only one who could keep Marte here; he would have been able to wrap his arms around her and hold her, let her cry against his chest, tell her that he and his money and all his powerful friends would do something, he’d go up against the iron weight of the Reich, against Goebbels and the SS, he’d find a way to get the little boy out and bring him here . . .

It wouldn’t have even mattered if Herr Wise had lied to her about those things, about what he could or couldn’t do. He would at least have found a way of keeping Marte here. Told her that it would be better if she stayed here, in this safe country, while he pulled strings, all his great net of connections and influence, to find the little boy, Marte’s child, and trade whatever else Goebbels and the SS might want for him.

Which was the problem, of course; von Behren’s heart slowed and grew heavy inside him. He knew there wasn’t anything else that the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment wanted. He had done his job all too well, when he had set out to have Goebbels fall in love with his protégée. Only one love greater, the interlocking of obsessions between the Reichsminister and the Führer, that could have made Goebbels send Marte away. And now things had changed; Goebbels had paid his penance, the Führer’s gaze had turned elsewhere – and now the Reichsminister would have her back again.

As Marte wept quietly, curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, von Behren reached out and turned a few pages of the old book before him. He stopped at the woodcut print of the cloaked and hooded figure, stalking with a crossbow through a night-dark forest. The figure leaned forward, the hidden face intent upon its prey. Der Rote Jäger. The story and the image had sealed itself into von Behren’s dreaming years ago, when he’d been a child and his grandmother had first read it to him as he’d sat in the safety of her lap. The red hunter, the hunter of men. The one from whom there was no escape, no matter where you fled. As the nobleman who’d broken the ancient laws ran through the entangling branches, seeking the shelter of daybreak, only to find an endless night and a red-cloaked figure barring the path before him, the same faceless image that had strode unstoppable behind him . . .

Perhaps it was unavoidable, and always had been. Von Behren closed the book and let out a pent-up sigh. “We had better pack, then. You will only need to take a few things. I’m sure the gracious folk of the consulate will take care of all the rest.”

Marte raised her head. “You would come with me?”

He nodded. “Yes, of course.” He picked up the old book; that was one thing he would take with him, back to that land from which he had brought it. A rueful smile came to his face. “How could I not?”

After she had hurried away, back to her little house to throw a few things into a suitcase, he went on sitting at the desk, mulling over answerless questions.

He supposed he loved her as well. But he hadn’t realized it, until after he had given her to the eyes of other men.

The forest snared him in its branches, as he closed his own eyes and ran toward the waiting figure.

* * *

The house felt empty. Except for the man standing in the middle of the living room, the exact center of the little house with the other empty rooms echoing around. A man with necktie loosened and pulled askew, and a two-day stubble on a face trembling with anger.

“Well?” David Wise turned, his fists tightened. “Any word?” His voice was a demanding bark.

The head of security for the Wise Studios had left the house’s front door open behind him. With somebody in the state that his boss had worked himself into, Wilson knew it was best to keep his own options clear.

“It’s pretty sure they went through Mexico, and probably on to Buenos Aires.” He glanced at a piece of paper he took from his shirt pocket, though he’d already memorized what was on it. “Apparently von Behren tried to cash a check in Tijuana. At a hotel – the clerk remembers a group of about six people speaking German, and one of them was a woman. He didn’t see her face; they hustled her in and out before he got a good look at her.”

“How long ago was that?”

The security head shrugged. “Three days. Possibly four.”

“Damn.” Wise’s glare swept across the house’s doorways. “Those bastards kidnapped her.” His nostrils flared, as though catching a trace from a perfume bottle that Marte might have left open on her dressing room table.

“Come on – we don’t know if that’s true or not.” Wilson folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. “I talked to the cab driver, the one who brought Marte home that night – he told me about seeing the man waiting inside. And that there’d been a sedan with German diplomatic plates parked across the street; you don’t see that very often. You gotta face the facts, David – they might’ve found some way to talk her into leaving. Why else would von Behren have been with them?”

“I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.” Wise’s face looked as if it were about to explode from the pressure building up inside. “Look, you hire whoever you need, anybody who knows his way around down there. You can raise a goddamn army and send ’em if you have to. But I want you to find her and bring her back here. Got it?”

“If that’s what you want. But the chances are good she’s already on her way back to Europe. She steps off a plane in Lisbon, or more likely, off a boat in occupied France, you really think I can have a crew waiting there to throw a blanket over her and freight her back here? If somebody thought she was important enough to sic their operatives in the consulate on, they’re not going to hand her over with a smile.”

Wise raised a straining fist, as though he were about to cock it and throw a punch. His eyes were red slits. Wilson took a step back, getting his own hands ready to fend off the blow.

“David . . . come on.” He kept his voice low and soothing as possible. “How much of a mess do you want to make this? You want to blow this up into some kind of international incident? This is already going to hit the papers pretty soon. We’ve already called in every favor we had on the books, to get all the gossip columnists and movie mags to play her up as a refugee. They’re going to tear into this like a pack of wolves, just ’cause we’ve made ’em look like fools now. And how’s it going to play when the Germans get Marte to lay out some cozy spiel about why she wanted to go home again? It’s going to be more raw meat thrown to that pack if you go carrying on like some kind of jilted lover.”

“Screw that,” muttered Wise. “Look, I’m telling you, I don’t give a damn about any of that. I just want to find her and bring her back here, and I don’t care what it takes. And if the people I thought were my friends aren’t going to help, then fine, I’ll do it myself. But I’m not letting her go.”

The other man shook his head. “And I’m saying you can’t do it. Don’t you understand? She’s already gone. They got something on her, they told her something to make her want to go. Even if you found her and talked to her, are you sure you want to find out what it is you didn’t know about her?”

“The hell with you.” Tears welled up in Wise’s eyes. “Get away from me. I don’t want to hear any more crap from you.” He jabbed a finger at the security head. “You’re fired. I don’t want some disloyal bastard like you working for me.”

“Fine.” Wilson stepped toward the door. “You want to talk to me again, you can call me at home. Or don’t; it doesn’t matter to me. But just don’t make a bigger fool out of yourself than you absolutely have to, okay?” He turned and walked.

At the curb, pulling open the door of his car, he heard the sudden crash of sound from inside what had been Marte Helle’s house. He knew what was going on; he could see it unreeling on the screen inside his head. The overturned furniture, the lamps crashing against the walls, the manic fury pulling the heavy draperies from the windows, trampling them before smashing the glass panes themselves. David Wise was taking the place apart, stick by stick. Like a blinded, enraged Samson pulling down the temple, without benefit of two stone pillars to bring the whole thing crashing down upon his head.

Nothing more he could do for the poor bastard. He slid behind the wheel, twisted the key in the ignition, and drove away . . .

* * *

“I had the strangest dream.” Marte raised her head from the back of the airplane’s seat. She stayed curled up, legs tucked beneath her, the thin blanket sliding away. The only light came from the stars arrayed in the little window close by. “Ganz befremdlich . . .”

“Oh?” Von Behren stirred in the seat beside her, a thick book on his lap, his finger marking the spot where he had stopped reading. He raised his voice just above the drone of the airplane’s engines. “And what happened in it, child?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out at the immobile night. Where were they? Somewhere above South America, she supposed. It didn’t matter. “I saw David.”

“That would seem unsurprising. For him to be in your thoughts.” Von Behren rubbed his eyes; he had probably been asleep as well. “What was he doing?”

“That was what was so strange.” Marte slowly shook her head. “He was just standing there. In that little house, the one he gave to me. Only everything . . . everything all around him . . . it was all in ruins. Everything was smashed and broken . . . in bits . . .”

“Hmph.” Her director was unimpressed. “Perhaps it wasn’t a dream.” A finger tapped the corner of his brow. “Perhaps you saw him, as he is. It happens. When you are, shall we say, close to someone. However far away.”

She hoped that wasn’t true. Because there had been more to the dream, that she hadn’t told. When she closed her eyes again, she could see, from memory this time. The image seemed so real that she wanted to reach out to touch David, lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him around to face her. But she knew she couldn’t. All she could do was watch him as he stood in the middle of the little house’s ruins, the palm of his hand slashed by the shards of a crystal vase. The trickle of red spattered drop by drop upon the polished floor, as he gazed numbly down at the wavering reflection of his own face . . .

What does it matter? Marte pressed her face into the angle of her shoulder, trying to block out even the faint stars outside the airplane. It seemed so stupid now, so false and childish, to ever have dreamed of anything. She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for sleep, letting the world below ebb toward wherever it might take her.

GERMANY

1943

The world and its inhabitants pass before my vision like shadows; to myself I seem but a shadow playing a part, coming and going and doing without knowing why.

– Ludwig Tieck (1773 - 1853),

William Lovell (1796)

FOURTEEN

The guards pulled back the canvas flaps, and sunlight flooded the rear of the truck. Pavli blinked and squinted at the figures outside, gesturing with their rifles.

“Heraus –” The lead guard’s voice sounded bored. “You’ve arrived, time to get out. Come on, move along.”

“Watch your head,” whispered the young man who sat next to Pavli on the truck’s splintery plank bench. “Don’t let them slug you with a rifle butt. And if they do, don’t fall down, no matter what. They’ll kick you in the spine until it snaps.”

Pavli didn’t think any of that was going to happen. Only a handful of guards; two of them had slung their rifles back over their shoulders and now stood by the fence topped with barbed wire, idly smoking and talking to each other. The third one made little marks on a tally sheet as the Lazarene men and women began clambering off the back of the truck. The mothers handed the infants and smaller children to the fathers.

“Don’t let them fool you.” The fellow sitting next to Pavli kept his head lowered, eyes darting quickly to follow everything that happened. He had grabbed Pavli’s arm, holding him back as the others had jostled their way out. “They act nice to you, so they can trick you into doing something stupid. Then they work you over until you’re all blood and bruises.”

The warning, and all the others before, confused Pavli. “Why would they do that?”

“Because they like to. They don’t need any more reason than that.” He jumped to his feet, jerking Pavli upright by his jacket collar. “Hurry – it’s best not to be the last ones out, either.” He shoved his way past the knot of elders awkwardly dismounting from the truck.

Outside, in the middle of the fenced compound, Pavli kept close to his new adviser, the better to hear whatever came out of the corner of the fellow’s mouth. They worked themselves into the center of their crowded brethren, as far as possible from the lackadaisical scrutiny of the guards.

“This is a new camp –” The fellow raised himself on tiptoe, to see past the others. “They’ve never brought anyone here before.”

“How can you tell?” Pavli tried to keep his voice as low as possible, but still caught an angry glare from the other.

“Idiot – can’t you smell it? The wood, the fenceposts. It’s all fresh stuff.”

Pavli filled his lungs, and he caught the raw scent of new-cut lumber, like the odors that had spilled from the doorways of the carpenters’ shops back in Berlin. He hadn’t even noticed it before; he wondered how many other clues he missed, that his nervous, twitching companion seized on. Past the legs of the surrounding Lazarenes, he could see sawdust scattered around the fenceposts, that hadn’t yet been trod into the mud.

“Is that good?” He lowered his whisper to hardly more than an exhalation.

“I don’t know –” Pieces of the other’s face jerked, as though they had been snagged by fishhooks under the skin. “I don’t know, it all depends. If they brought the guards here from the other camps, or if they’re new as well . . . I don’t know, I don’t know –” His voice had risen, until the man standing in front had looked over a shoulder at him. He’d clamped his mouth shut, biting off the rush of words, and shrinking into himself where he stood, his dirty jacket swallowing him like a turtle’s shell. Pavli tried to ask another question, but the fellow just shook his head, a quick snap to either side as he anxiously watched the loitering guards.

Pavli concentrated on keeping himself upright on his weakening legs. The long ride in the truck had tired him as much as the small children who leaned against their mothers’ skirts. He would have fallen asleep on the way, despite the jouncing of the truck as it had traveled over the rutted dirt roads, if it hadn’t been for the other’s string of murmured warnings and bits of advice. He’d latched onto Pavli even before they’d gotten onto the truck, back in the widest street of the Bayerisches Viertel, where the SS troops had rounded up the Lazarenes, turning them out of their beds into the grey morning light. The other had bumped into Pavli’s side as the uniformed men had squeezed the cluster of people tighter.

“That won’t do any good,” the other had muttered, gazing scornfully at the few women who’d started crying. “They’ll just think it’s funny.” A nod of his head had indicated the hard faces of the soldiers.

It had taken Pavli a few seconds to recognize the fellow, he’d changed so much. Der falsch Zigeuner. A Lazarene such as himself – the eyes of two colors told that – but one who’d always slipped away to spend days and weeks and even months with gypsies in the camps at the city’s wooded edges. With his darker skin, he’d even looked as though he’d had a tinge of those other tribes’s blood. That had been his misfortune, when the gypsies had been rounded up and sent southward in locked boxcars; he’d been caught with them. Only when his shirtsleeve had been ripped open, so that a number could be tattooed in the crook of his arm, had the error been realized. A doctor had seen the Lazarene tattoos, the blue markings of Christ’s stigmata, at the young man’s wrists, and had arranged for his release from the camp. But it had taken months for the order to work its way through the maze of paper between Berlin and the camp in Silesia, a camp near a little village that the Poles who lived there called Oswiecim. And in those months, the fellow had seen things, terrible things that he could darkly hint at, or that could be read in his haunted eyes or deciphered from the shouts with which he woke, struggling or cowering from invisible blows, while his one relation, a spinster aunt, wept and tried to soothe him, telling him that it was all right, he wasn’t behind the barbed wire any more . . .

One time, a few days after the false gypsy had come home to the Lazarenes, the family in the flat next to his aunt had stupidly left a flame beneath a skillet with a scrap of fatty pork in it, and the smoke and stench of something burning, something that had once been alive, had rolled through the hallway. The fellow had run screaming into the street.

When his keepers had let him go from the camp, they had warned him not to speak of the things he had seen there. To speak, to put into words the memories shouting inside his skull, would be crime enough. They would come for him again and take him back there. And he wouldn’t leave another time, except the way the others in the camp did, by way of the smokestacks. The birds of the sky would learn his name in the grey stormclouds. So he had kept silent, and Pavli and his brother Matthi and all the other Lazarenes kept their questions inside themselves, and let the trembling, hunch-shouldered figure pass among them like one who had returned from the dead.

The lock of the fellow’s silence had broken underneath the canvas arch of the truck. In the moonlight that had angled through the truck’s canvas flaps, Pavli had seen the fellow’s hands clenching, the tendons drawing tight beneath the skin. Then at last his sharp-boned fingers had clutched Pavli’s forearm, drawing him closer so that he could whisper his warnings, everything that he could no longer keep inside.

“You’re lucky you look so young . . . that helps.” The fellow’s lips had brushed against the curve of Pavli’s ear. “But not a child. They get rid of children first, because they’re weak and cannot work. So you must always try to look strong and healthy. Throw your shoulders back when they line you up, and don’t start coughing no matter how sick you are.” The fellow’s breath had broken into panting, from the effort of imparting all the life-or-death information he had brought out of the camp. “When you grow pale, slap yourself, or rub your cheeks with little twigs, anything to get the blood up into your face. The pale ones are Muselmänner, they’ve already died, everybody knows it . . .”

All the way, during the long night hours of the journey in the truck, the whispers had continued. Once the fellow had started, once broken the commandment to remain silent about what he’d seen, he couldn’t stop. Everything the false gypsy said made the assumption – a truth so obvious, like the dawning blue of the sky above the newly fenced enclosure, that it didn’t need to be spoken – that they had entered into a world ruled by murderers. The same as the world outside, but here, behind the keen-toothed wire, the murderers no longer had to pretend to be anything other than what they were. And one had to throw one’s shoulders back and rub blood up into one’s face, to please them and be allowed to live another day.

A trill of birdsong sounded from the tops of the trees beyond the fence. Pavli looked up and saw a flash of green and black darting into the sky, scared away by the gate being pulled open to admit another truck. Two more were visible farther along the road, working their way along the narrow forest road. The trucks held the rest of the Lazarene Community, the men and women and the children of his blood. He wondered if any had escaped, had managed to hide in the city’s back alleys before the rounding-up had begun. Would it matter if there had been? He knew that he wouldn’t have wanted to be such a one, sneaking from one dark corner to another. If his brother had tried to send him away – and Matthi had spoken of it – he would have come back, he would have run toward the crowd in the street, surrounded by the hard-eyed SS men. He would have pushed his way between the rifles and taken his place with the rest.

Because I wouldn’t want to be left behind, thought Pavli as he watched the bird flicker and disappear into the sky. He kept silent; the other wouldn’t have understood. I’d rather be here than be left behind, all alone.

The guards began unloading the people from the newly arrived truck. The younger men jumped down and helped their elders. Pavli stood on tiptoe, craning his neck, despite the desperate tug on his sleeve and hissing from his companion. He managed to catch a glimpse of his brother. Matthi had been separated from him in the confusion of the street, the press of bodies lashed by the orders barked at them. Pavli couldn’t tell if Matthi had spotted him in turn; before he could call out his brother’s name, he was nearly knocked off his feet by the crowd surging backward like a single creature.

A scuffle had broken out at the back of the truck, and the guards waded into it, the stocks of their rifles raised in their hands. Pavli stood where he was, letting the crowd thin before him so that he could see what was happening.

A man with his head swathed in dirty bandages, his clothing torn and darkened with his own blood, knelt on the muddy ground, his broken hands clawing at the belt of the uniformed figure standing before him. The SS officer gazed down with cold disdain as a sobbing cry emerged from the toothless mouth.

“Ich bin kein Jude!” The words rose to a howl. “I’m not a Jew!” The figure managed to drag himself upright, eyes taking in with horror the sea of watching faces and the barbed wire written along the sky. “I’m not, it’s a mistake . . . it’s always been a mistake, I tell you . . .”

The officer struck the figure across the face, sending him sprawling. “Why do you speak such nonsense?” The officer glanced at the huddled Lazarenes, then back to the sobbing creature at his feet. “There are no Jews here at all. Why would there be?”

No words came from the mouth of what had been a human being, only red spittle and a moan of terror.

Pavli watched, feeling his own hands grow damp with sweat. The broken man hadn’t been with the Lazarenes when they’d been driven into the street. A black car had pulled up and the two men in the back seat, in civilian clothes – the car had came from the direction of the Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße – had dragged the silent figure out between them. A chill scent of prison cells, an odor of damp iron in darkened spaces, had clung to the near-unconscious man. He’d dangled limp as dirty laundry as he was handed over to the SS guards manning the trucks; his last beating had rendered him mute.

Two guards hoisted a ragdoll up by its arms. The eyes in the black-and-red face looked beseechingly at the crowd, as though someone might step forward and bestow his freedom.

Before, in the street back in Berlin, Pavli had caught only a glimpse of the man before he’d been loaded into one of the trucks. Now Pavli recognized him. Underneath the bruises and crusted blood was a face he’d seen in his uncle’s camera shop, a face that had once glowed with smug self-satisfaction, the knowledge of one’s own cleverness. The man once had bragged of the plans he’d made, that would save him and his family from the knife-edged winds that were already blowing across the land, a storm that would batter his foolish and improvident brethren . . .

The thing of dirty rags and swollen flesh was the father of the angel in the shop’s window. Marte Helle’s father.

“What a fool,” muttered Pavli’s dark companion. His voice held the perfect contempt of one who’d steeled his heart for survival, despising those who stayed human and fated for death. “He’s in for it now.”

The broken man had achieved freedom of a sort: the gate had been opened long enough for the two guards to drag him out, his heels inscribing two lines in the mud. The guards disappeared with him into the dark ranks of trees.

Pavli whispered from the corner of his mouth. “Will they shoot him?”

“No –” The other shook his head. “They won’t waste a bullet on him. One of them can just stand on his throat until he’s quiet.”

The guards came back a little while later, by themselves, one of them smoking a cigarette, the other wiping his hands with a cloth he tucked back into the pocket of his uniform jacket.

Some of the elders and the women with small children had sat down on the ground. The mothers kept the restless children close to themselves, hushing them when they cried, rocking the infants in their arms and shielding their pink faces from the sun.

It was close to noon when the car arrived, a high-fendered cabriolet from the Bayerische Motoren Werke, the whine of its supercharger cutting through the distance before it could be seen. The guards stiffened to attention, a couple of them hurriedly fastening the tight collars of their uniforms, as the driver held the door open for his passenger.

The Scharführer, the sergeant in charge of the guards, extended his arm in salute. “All shipments of the subject population have arrived and been accounted for, Herr Doktor Ritter.”

The false gypsy hissed in alarm. “It’s him!” He clutched his fingers tighter on Pavli’s arm. “He was there, at Auschwitz!” That was the other name, the German one, for the little Silesian village and the camp from which the fellow had been returned. “In Block Ten –”

There wasn’t time to ask what Block Ten was. The officer – Pavli could see the insignia of a Hauptsturmführer SS on the man’s uniform – acknowledged the guard’s salute with a nod, as he pulled the gloves from his hands. His gaze moved across the crowd behind the fence.

“Line the males up.” The gate swung open to admit the officer. He pointed to the open space a few yards away. “Right there will do nicely.”

The Scharführer presented the tally sheet to the officer. “You will find the group to be short one subject, sir. A death occurred during transport; the man was not well.”

“Oh?” The officer raised a skeptical eyebrow. He smiled coldly at the guard. “During transport, you say? How unfortunate. What was done with the subject, upon your learning of his demise?”

“The body was removed –”

“But not yet buried? Good.” The officer gestured with a flick of his hand. “Have it brought inside. We shall waste nothing here. Every one of our guests, breathing or not, is of value.”

They made no effort to lower their voices, to keep the Lazarenes from overhearing. Pavli let himself be herded forward with the other men. The guards kept their rifles slung behind their shoulders as they shoved the group into a rough straight line.

Pavli could see the officer better now. He stood only a few feet away, running a finger across the names on the tally sheet. Shorter than all but one of the guards, with eyes of watery blue socketed in finely wrinkled skin. He had the thin lips of an unloved woman. He didn’t seem to Pavli like a doctor, but these things were hard to tell anymore. In this world, he had already learned that all words were arbitrary; they could easily mean the opposite of what they had meant the day before.

The officer and the Scharführer started at the left end of the line. “Your arm, bitte.” Before the Lazarene could respond, the Scharführer had grabbed the man’s forearm, twisting his palm upward. The tight double row of buttons were torn open, exposing the white skin of the Lazarene’s wrist.

“Ah . . .” The officer breathed a connoisseur’s sigh of appreciation as he looked at the blue-inked tattoo that ran toward the inside crook of the elbow. He reached out a forefinger and traced the length of the representation of Christ’s stigmata. “A fine specimen.” To Pavli, watching from the corner of his eye a few places farther down the line, the officer did seem like a doctor now, examining an interesting skin condition. “Open your shirt.”

The Scharführer let the Lazarene male undo the buttons himself. Herr Doktor Ritter pushed the cloth aside with one hand. The Lazarene drew in a sharp, involuntary breath as the officer’s fingertips brushed the tattoo running vertically across the ribs.

“Perfect.” Ritter stepped in front of the next in line, who’d already had his shirt pulled open by the Scharführer. He gave a cursory glance to the traditional Lazarene marking, then moved on.

When it was Pavli’s turn, the officer’s face darkened into a scowl. “What is this individual doing here? He’s not Lazarene!”

It was the first time he’d ever heard the word spoken by someone not of his blood. He wondered what other secrets were known by this man who was somehow both a doctor and an SS officer.

The Scharführer looked confused. “I don’t understand, sir . . .”

“His arm, idiot. Look at his arm!” Ritter grabbed Pavli’s forearm, yanking it up to the sergeant’s baffled inspection.

The white skin, from the delicate veins at the bend of the wrist, up to the elbow, was completely unmarked. There was no tattoo of the Savior’s holy wounds.

“Your instructions were to bring only the members of the Lazarene Community here.” Ritter’s cold voice lashed the other man. “This individual is obviously old enough to have been received his initiation into their faith, yet he does not bear the ritual markings.”

“No, sir . . .” The Scharführer mumbled his response.

“Therefore, he cannot be Lazarene, can he?” Ritter slapped the rolled-up tally sheet against his palm in irritation. “I did not anticipate errors cropping up quite so soon. But I suppose it’s inevitable.” He glanced at Pavli, then back to the sergeant. “I suppose it was his eyes that misled you. Well, he’ll have to be taken care of,” said Ritter in a lower voice. “You and your men seem capable of that, at least. You can mark it down as another loss in transport . . .”

A shock of panic hit Pavli, freezing him where he stood. He could see, as though it were happening to someone else, the two guards dragging him out the gate, as they had done with the bandage-swathed broken man, and out to the distant trees. From which they would return by themselves, without him.

Another voice spoke up. “Excuse me, mein Herr . . .”

The Scharführer turned on his heel, face furious. “Silence!” He raised his hand to strike the Lazarene who had shown such daring.

Matthi, a few places farther down the line, ignored the Scharführer. He looked straight at the SS officer. “But the boy is Lazarene, sir. He is my brother –” His head snapped to one side as the back of the sergeant’s gloved hand hit his jaw.

Another blow was stopped by Ritter grabbing the Scharführer’s arm. “Just a moment.” He stepped in front of Matthi. “Your brother? Why hasn’t he been given the markings?”

Though he met Ritter’s gaze without flinching, Matthi hesitated a moment. “He has not been initiated into the Lazarene faith at all. The elders and I thought it best not to do so.”

“Oh?” One of Ritter’s eyebrows lifted. “Why is that?”

Another heartbeat of silence. “What my brother does not know, he cannot be forced to tell.”

That brought a grim half-smile to Ritter’s face. “How clever of you. I had heard rumors that the Lazarenes were aware of my interest in them – but this is the first confirmation I’ve had.”

“We knew nothing like that. But these are times of war. Best to be cautious.”

“Such wisdom.” Ritter nodded in appreciation. “Perhaps that alone explains the survival of your people. But as of now, there is no war for the Lazarenes.” He took a step backward, raising his voice to address the line of males and the huddled group of women and children a few yards away. “You are all under the protection of the Ahnenerbe, the department of research into ancestral heritage of the Reich’s Schützstaffel. You will come to no harm, provided, of course, that you remain cooperative and follow all orders, precisely as they are given to you.” He made a gesture of welcome, a sweep of one hand that was almost a bow. “You should consider yourselves to be guests, not only of me, but also Reichsführer SS Himmler and even the Führer himself. I apologize for the inconvenience and discomfort you may have suffered thus far. But I promise that all efforts will be undertaken to make sure that your time spent here will be more congenial.”

Pavli’s companion hazarded a mutter under his breath. “Lying son of a bitch . . .”

“Take them inside.” Ritter handed the tally sheet back to the Scharführer. “I’ll inspect the rest of the males later.”

The guards moved the Lazarenes in two groups, the men still separated from the women and small children. Pavli tramped along in the middle, aware of his brother’s presence ahead of him.

“There is your new home.” One of the guards pointed ahead of the group. “As Herr Doktor Ritter said –” There was a sour note of sarcasm in the guard’s voice. “Welcome.”

Pavli looked past the shoulders of the other Lazarene men, and saw a four-story building, white with green shutters. It looked like a hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium or perhaps an asylum for the insane. New-looking iron bars had been welded into place over the windows.

His companion, the false gypsy, was unimpressed. “They can make anything look wonderful,” he whispered. “If they want to.”

Inside the building, there was an odor of carbolic acid. Standing in the entrance hallway with the others, Pavli caught glimpses through partly opened doors, of rooms whose walls and floors were covered with the same pale green tiles, with a tarnished brass drain plate set in the center. Other rooms were filled with wicker-backed wheelchairs, piled into rusting mountains with broken gurney carts.

“Move along.” The guards jostled against the rear of the crowd. “Keep going.”

The interior grew dimmer, farther removed from daylight, as they shuffled down a central corridor. Electric lights had been strung along the ceiling, with black cables snaking overhead. The lights flickered and buzzed; somewhere outside, a petrol-fueled generator chugged steadily. In the cavernous spaces, echoing against the tiled walls, came the distant voices of the women and children, taken to a separate wing of the building.

“Stop here.”

The Scharführer had to shout to be heard over the voices of the Lazarene men; they had been put sufficiently at ease by the SS doctor’s assurances to have begun talking among themselves, even joking and laughing.

This room smelled of damp and soap. Along the concrete walls, near the ceiling, were patches of black mold.

“You are to undress,” ordered the Scharführer. “Remove all articles of clothing, fold them neatly, then place them on top of your shoes or boots against the wall. Remember where you place your own things – thievery will not be tolerated . . .”

He didn’t hear the rest of the words being barked at the group. His attention was distracted by the false gypsy, the man of warnings and whispers. Pavli looked to his side and saw the fellow panting rapidly, face drained white and eyes widened in sudden fear.

“. . . after washing thoroughly, you will line up here, at this spot, for application of the delousing compound . . .”

The false gypsy screamed.

“No!” He propelled himself shoulder-first against the man at his other side, scrabbling with a terrified animal’s clawed fingers to find a way through the press of bodies around him. “He’s lying, they’re all lying –” His words were lost in the rising pitch of his cry.

The crowd of Lazarenes parted, each pushing to get away from the contagion of the fellow’s madness. A hubbub of mounting voices battered against the tile and concrete. Pavli tried to grab the fellow’s arm, to pull him back and clap a hand over his mouth, but he had already broken through. He stumbled onto his knees, then scrambled upright, throwing himself toward the room’s open doorway.

The other guards caught him, pinioning his arms and wrestling him clear of the floor. His legs kicked furiously.

“They’re lying!” He was no match against the guards, a bear hug squeezing the breath from his lungs. “The showers!” He dug his fingernails into the uniformed sleeves wrapped around his abdomen. “That’s . . . how they do it! The showers . . . and the gas . . .”

Another guard swiped the back of his fist across the fellow’s mouth, silencing him in a spatter of blood. He crumpled to the tiled floor when he was let go.

Pavli was almost knocked from his feet as the crowd of Lazarene men surged toward the doorway. Their voices had risen into shouts, deafening in the enclosed space. The guards scrambled for their rifles, raising them chest high and bracing themselves.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The voice of Herr Doktor Ritter struck the men like a whiplash across their faces. The SS officer pushed his way past the guards, confronting the milling crowd of Lazarenes.

As they clustered tighter against each other, their voices falling to silence, the Scharführer drew Ritter to one side. The guards kept the false gypsy on his knees as the officer listened to the Scharführer’s whispered explanation. Ritter nodded, glancing at the individual in question.

“So.” Ritter strode before the Lazarene men. “I see that my assurances to you are doubted. You would rather listen to the slanderous rumors spread by cowards and lunatics such as this.” His voice boomed in the tiled hollows. “To doubt the honor of an officer of the SS – that is an un-German thing.” He shook his head, contemplating the grievous insult. “You bring shame upon yourselves, upon the name of your people, by doing so.”

A spattering rain-like noise followed the quick gesture Ritter made to the Scharführer. Clear liquid streamed from one of the washroom’s metal fixtures. Ritter leaned forward, holding his hand beneath the pipes, the sleeve of his uniform darkening in the spray. He drew his arm back, studying his own wet hand for a moment, then touching a finger to his lips.

“This is water, is it not?” He smiled, his voice calm and measured. The water ran down his wrist as he thrust his palm before the nearest of the Lazarene men. “It is not heated, I grant you – the boilers have not yet been returned to service – but surely you can endure that slight discomfort, that small sacrifice for the benefit of all Germany? It’s not too much to ask, is it? And this –” He bent down and picked up a thick grey lump from just inside the raised edge of the shower area; he held it to his nose and sniffed. “It seems to be soap. Not of the finest quality . . . but your homeland is at war.” The smile disappeared from his face as he squeezed the rough block in his fist; the soap crumbled between his fingers, bits falling to the damp floor. He wiped the mess off with his handkerchief.

Ritter had spoken softly. The sudden change in his voice snapped the Lazarenes awake again.

“I promised that no harm would come to you.” The anger spoke in the officer’s booted stride as well. “But then, that depends upon you, does it not? Upon your cooperation, upon your following orders, upon your trust.” Ritter’s voice dropped to a whisper once more. “You do not know, from what dangers I have already saved you. And this is how you repay me . . .”

His steps took him to the guards and their kneeling prisoner. Pavli could see the cringing fear in the eyes set in the blood-spattered face.

“There are none of you so valuable,” said Ritter, “that I can tolerate the spreading of falsehoods.” He didn’t turn to address the crowd of Lazarenes. He nodded to the guards, who yanked their prisoner to his feet. “You should learn from this one’s example.”

Herr Doktor Ritter strode out of the room. The guards dragged between them the false gypsy, no longer struggling, another thing of rags.

The Lazarene men didn’t speak among themselves as they stripped off their clothes. They listened even as they lowered their heads beneath the icy sting of the showers.

Pavli heard the distant rifle shot, as did the other men, from out in the forest, beyond the walls of the building. A sound that Ritter and the guards had wanted them to hear.

The cold water trickled into the corners of Pavli’s mouth. When he closed his eyes, he could see the startled birds wheeling up from the tops of the trees and vanishing into the sky.

FIFTEEN

Pavli stood among his Lazarene brethren, with the wet smell of the showers and the cloying, sickly odor of the delousing compound drifting between their bodies. They had all submitted to their genitals being swabbed with a fluid the bright orange color of iodine, a bored-looking male nurse dipping a rag on a stick into the bucket beside his wooden stool. No resistance or jokes had been made, not even by the younger men; the echo of the rifle shot from out in the woods, faded except from memory, still oppressed the group.

His brother Matthi had taken advantage of the milling about that had followed the men’s emergence from the tiled washroom, to come close to him and lay a hand on his bare shoulder. “Are you all right?” Matthi whispered close to his ear.

Pavli nodded. “I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about . . .” He was trying to be comforting in turn. He craned his neck, trying to look past Matthi and the other Lazarene men, back to where they had left the little mounds of their folded clothes near the entrance to the showers. Something did indeed worry him: a secret treasure tucked inside the lining of his boots, a precious thing of paper curved against the worn leather. Perhaps all the boots and shoes, and the good coats and other bits of clothing, were to be gathered up and shipped off as part of the Winterhilfe, the charity for poor deserving Germans, the real ones. Or one of the Lazarenes might steal Pavli’s boots, leaving behind a shabbier pair, without a treasure hidden inside. The thief might never even discover what he had taken, the only thing of value that Pavli had left to him.

Would one of his own kind, his brethren, do that? Steal from him? He didn’t want to think so, but he couldn’t be sure; there was an empty place near his heart, where there once had been the sure knowledge of being one of them, of being Lazarene. That had leaked away, a hidden wound of his own, when his brother and the elders had determined not to initiate him into the faith upon his coming of age. Matthi had explained it all to him, that these were bad times, the worst since the Catholics in France had washed the streets with the blood of those they called heretics; to be marked with Christ’s stigmata was to draw the wolves upon oneself through the dark corridors of the forest . . .

Pavli got a grim satisfaction out of the failure of his brother’s plan. All the elders and Matthi had conspired to cheat him of his rightful heritage, and for what result? Here he stood with the other Lazarene men, stripped naked under the hard eyes of the SS guards, their skin turned to gooseflesh by the winds that sifted through the cracked and dusty windows high above the walls’ green tiles. Rounded up with the others and brought here, the eyes in his face enough of a mark to claim his place among them. With the young men, some only a year or so older than him, the muscles of their legs and arms grown lean and taut on the meager diet their ration cards had allowed them; and the true elders, the greybeards, wisps of white hair across brown-spotted skulls, sunken chests and spindly legs bowed by the weight of years. The old men folded their gnarled, large-knuckled hands over their shriveled privates, bearing the shame of their nakedness with silent endurance.

“Silence!” The Scharführer shouted, unnecessarily; his voice slapped against the damp walls. “You, the first ten – step forward.”

Using the muzzles of their rifles, two of the guards separated a small group out from the rest of the Lazarene men; both Pavli and his brother Matthi were part of the chosen number. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of his belongings left piled against a far wall, to see if the treasure hidden inside one of his boots was still safe. The broad chest and scowling face of the nearest guard blocked his view.

“You heard the order,” said the guard. He jostled the wooden stock of the rifle against Pavli’s shoulder blades. “Move!”

Another room, smaller, the naked forms of the ten Lazarenes filling one side. An eye of glass, a little curved window, stared at them; Pavli blinked at the distorted reflection of his own image before he realized that it was a camera lens. It was like a piece of another world, the one that had been left behind on the other side of the truck journey, the world that had held his uncle Turro’s shop on a narrow street in Berlin.

The guards shoved the Lazarenes in a line against the wall; the camera, mounted on a heavy tripod, stood only a few feet away from Pavli. A model he’d never seen before, a big professional machine, the likes of which had never been displayed in his uncle’s shop. At the front of the black folding bellows, the Zeiss lens seemed nearly as broad as his flattened palm; behind the blue glass, the blades of the shutter could be seen.

Raised voices, the harsh words of Ritter and the Scharführer, brought Pavli back from his study of the camera.

On the other side of the room, near the doorway that led to the building’s central corridors, Ritter gestured with an upraised hand, his face darkened with anger. “Where is he? What’s wrong with him this time?”

The Scharführer echoed Ritter’s demand, turning to call down the corridor. Another pair of guards appeared, dragging a man between them. A drunken man, from the looks and smell of him – the acrid scent of schnapps and sour vomit curled in Pavli’s nostrils as the man was thrust forward. He caught himself against the camera, nearly toppling himself and the tripod over to the floor. He swayed unsteadily, fumbling a hand across the stains that covered the front of his uniform jacket, the tight-fitting military collar loosened and flapping open. From just the color of the uniform, Pavli could see that the man was not SS, but regular German army.

“Get to work!” Ritter confronted the drunkard; a backhanded slap across the face brought the bleary eyes open wider, head wobbling upon the man’s neck. “There’s much to do. You’ve shirked your duties long enough.”

The other smiled, eyes slitted and red. “Put me on report, then . . . Herr Doktor Ritter. Send me to the Eastern Front. I don’t give a damn –”

“Shut up!” The Scharführer’s voice barked out, and the two guards lifted the drunkard even higher between them, so that his feet dangled, barely touching the floor.

“And to hell with you, too.” The drunken man’s gaze grew sharper, nostrils flaring as he looked down at Ritter. He knew how far he had already gone, that there was no turning back, no begging forgiveness. “I don’t care what you bastards do. But I’m not part of it anymore –” He struggled against the guards’ grasp upon his arms. His voice was raw with alcohol. “You hear me? You can send me back to the camps, you can put me on the other side of the wire, I don’t care. I’m not going to help you –” He started to kick, and the toe of one boot caught a slender wooden strut of the tripod, sending the camera crashing onto its side. “I’m not –”

Ritter struck the man with his fist this time, hard enough to knock him free from the support of the guards and send him sprawling against the corner of the floor and wall. The man suddenly burst into sobbing, his hand smearing tears through the blood pouring from his nose and torn upper lip.

“Get him out of here.” The guards scrambled to carry out Ritter’s orders. The drunken man was dragged out of the room while the Scharführer righted the fallen camera. Ritter’s expression changed to one of exasperated disgust. “Cable the Ahnenerbe offices in Berlin; tell them we’ll need another photographer sent out. He’ll have to have the same security clearances as this last one . . . Scheiß!” Ritter ground his teeth together. “There’s no telling how long that will take.”

Another voice, one that had not spoken before. “Sir . . .” One that was neither a guard or an officer. “Excuse me, sir . . .”

All eyes, those of the uniformed men and the Lazarenes alike, turned toward Pavli, making him feel even more naked and exposed.

“Get back in line!” The Scharführer gestured angrily at him. “Speak when you are spoken to!”

“Pavli . . .” His brother’s whisper hissed behind him, Matthi grabbing at his elbow to pull him back with the others.

He shook off his brother’s hand. “Sir, I can operate the camera. Any camera – I can do it –”

“Silence!” The Scharführer slammed the heel of his hand against Pavli’s shoulder, knocking him back a step.

“Wait.” Ritter laid the tips of his fingers on the Scharführer’s arm, forestalling another blow. He turned a bemused smile toward Pavli. “Who is this, who volunteers his services so eagerly? What is your name, boy?”

“Iosefni, sir – my family name. Pavli . . .”

“Ah, yes.” Ritter nodded. He took his hand from the Scharführer’s arm and touched Pavli’s wrist. “Our rara avis, our oddity, the unmarked Lazarene.” His fingertip traced the path along the underside of Pavli’s arm, where the tattoo of Christ’s wound should have been. “Perhaps you are a surprising creature in more ways than one.”

“Sir . . .” The Scharführer tried to butt in. “I’ll take care of this interruption. This impertinence –”

Ritter ignored him, continuing to gaze straight into Pavli’s eyes. “Do you claim to know something of photography, boy? You might be bluffing about that, for all I know. Or perhaps you overestimate your skills. What is required here is a technique suitable for a rigorous medical and scientific investigation. Not the snapping away of a few holiday shots with a cheap box camera, while on holiday on some sunny lake shore.” The needle of Ritter’s examination shifted from Pavli’s right eye, the golden-brown one, to the left eye, the blue. “What is the source of your supposed expertise?”

Inside Pavli’s head, he heard two voices, the one of the SS doctor murmuring questions almost at his ear . . . and the false gypsy’s whispered advice and warnings. Make yourself useful to them. That is how to survive . . .

He found his own voice. “My uncle owned a camera shop . . . back in the city. It was the best one in all Berlin.” He knew that would sound like boasting, but it had been true. “I worked there, with my uncle. He showed me everything. People came from far away, to buy, or with cameras that needed to be repaired. My uncle taught me how to do that, how to fix them, how they worked –” Pavli bit his lip, to keep the words from rushing out so fast. “I know these things.”

Herr Doktor Ritter nodded slowly. “Iosefni . . . yes, of course, the Josefsohn premises. A pity your uncle is no longer alive; I’m sure we would have found his expertise to be of value.”

“I know as much as he did, sir. He showed me.”

“Oh?” One of Ritter’s eyebrows lifted. “This is specially designed equipment, boy. Crafted for military requisition. I doubt if you ever saw its equal in your little shop.”

The false gypsy’s words, the whisper in his memory, prodded Pavli forward. “All cameras are alike, sir. They work on the same principles.”

Ritter smiled. “Very good –” He nodded in satisfaction. “If you are as much a craftsman in the darkroom as you are a budding scientist, you will serve well.” He crooked a finger at the Scharführer. “Take him back out and get him his clothes. We can’t have him standing behind the camera completely bare-assed.”

Under the gaze of the Scharführer, Pavli quickly drew on his trousers and shirt. He only had a moment to check the lining of his boots – the precious objects were still tucked safely there – before he was ordered to hurry up. He finished tugging on the boots and stood up, away from the little piles of the other Lazarene men’s belongings against the wall. Buttoning his jacket, he ran to catch up with the Scharführer’s long strides.

The camera hadn’t been damaged when it had been knocked over by the drunkard. He’d been worried about that, that the camera would turn out to be inoperable, and that he would have to tell the SS officer that; Herr Doktor Ritter would accuse him of being a liar and a time-waster, a useless creature. But there had only been a spot of black enameling knocked off a corner of the case, exposing the bare metal beneath, and a dent in the folding bellows that Pavli was able to straighten between his thumb and forefinger.

“Bist du fertig?” Ritter used the familiar mode of address, the way one would speak to a child. “I hope you are ready, that you’re done fiddling around with that device. We’ve all waited long enough.”

Pavli nodded quickly, as he rotated the take-up spool until the film had tautened snug inside the camera body. He made the adjustments to the lens and shutter, estimating the brightness of the overhead windows’ light by the edge of the shadows cast upon the floor. One of the guards shoved the first naked Lazarene into place.

“Hands at your side,” instructed Ritter. “Turn your wrists outward so the markings may be seen.”

The Lazarene complied, maintaining his dignity by the lack of expression on his face. In the camera’s mirrored viewfinder, Pavli adjusted the upside-down image until it was precisely centered, then cocked and triggered the shutter. He breathed a small prayer, hoping that his skills hadn’t left him, that he’d remembered all his uncle had taught him. That the picture would come out perfectly exposed and in focus, and precisely what Herr Doktor Ritter wanted . . .

“Turn and face the other wall.” Ritter’s voice sounded behind Pavli. “Raise your arm above your head.”

The stigma of Christ’s wound, the cut of a Roman centurion’s lance rendered in blue ink, was revealed upon the Lazarene’s ribs. Pavli advanced the film and took another shot.

“Bring the next one forward.”

His hands, his fingers, became things separate from him. Clever things, that went about their business as he watched from a greater and greater distance. They would serve him well; they would save him. They were useful, at least; Herr Doktor Ritter would see that.

“Turn . . .”

The line of naked men shuffled forward, their bare feet making tiny noises against the slick floor. In silence, without protest, as though their cooperation were the price of the contract into which they had entered. They merely had to do as they were ordered, and a thread of hope was extended to them.

“The next one . . .”

Pavli didn’t hope. He dreamed as he let his hands go on automatically with their tasks. He dreamed even as his brother’s face, inverted, appeared in the camera’s viewfinder. His thumb tripped the shutter.

Hours later, he saw his brother’s face again, the image of Matthi standing unclothed and somber-faced, slowly emerging in a shallow pan of chemicals in the darkroom. When the photograph had finished developing, Pavli lifted it out with a set of wooden tongs and hung it on the thin line with the others.

In the room’s red light, Herr Doktor Ritter inspected the photos. He nodded with satisfaction. “These will do very well indeed.” He turned to the Scharführer beside him. “As soon as the boy is finished, take him down to the men’s dormitory. He’s earned his rest.”

The hallway outside the room had been kept completely dark. Ritter paused as he opened the door, directing his thin smile back to Pavli at the workbench. “You’ve saved me the trouble, and the delay, of having another photographer sent to this project. Your continued efforts will not go unappreciated.” He stepped out and closed the door behind him.

Pavli put the developing chemicals back onto the darkroom’s shelves, working carefully and taking his time. Until he could delay no longer, and he had to let the single remaining guard take him back to where the other Lazarene men were sleeping.

He heard a key turn in the lock behind him, and the echoes of the guard’s heavy boots retreating down the corridor. His fatigue and the thin cold light of stars and moon sliding through the high, barred windows told him that the time was well past midnight. All he could see were rows of bunk beds, each with a human form beneath thin blankets. Snoring, muttering, the protests and entreaties of those mired in dreaming. Despite those sounds, he knew that some of them were awake; he could feel their unseen gaze turning toward him, heads lifting from pillows to study him, to mark the one who had fallen even farther from their number.

“Pavli . . .” His brother’s whisper slid through the low noises. He saw a hand silhouetted in moonlight, beckoning to him. Silently, he made his way through the narrow spaces between the beds.

“Here.” Matthi reached out and took hold of his forearm. “You can sleep next to me.”

He sat down on the edge of a thin, hard mattress and rubbed his legs. His muscles ached from standing so long behind the camera and in the darkroom.

Matthi raised himself, wrapping an arm around Pavli’s shoulders. “It’s all right.” He brought his whisper close to his brother’s ear. “Everyone understands. It’s why you weren’t brought into the faith. If this Ritter and all the others should be lying . . . if the worst should happen . . . you might at least have a chance.”

Nodding, Pavli slowly began unbuttoning his shirt. He wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t wonder about the things of which Matthi spoke. “But why?” He kept his voice low. “Why would it matter? If all the rest of you were gone, and I was left behind . . .”

The words were like a kiss, breath against the curve of his ear. “If our blood survived . . . even just a little bit of it . . . then perhaps He would still come someday. Even without the marks of His suffering, without the knowledge of the true faith . . . still, one would be waiting for Him. You would still be waiting, and bearing your people’s blood.”

Perhaps that was true. He didn’t know; he’d like to believe what Matthi told him, but he couldn’t think about it now. The weariness claimed him, dragged him under its slow, dark waves. Half-undressed, he lay down on the hard, narrow bed. With the last of his strength, he bent his knees and pulled his boots from his feet. He rolled to the other side, toward the wall, so that even his brother couldn’t see what he was doing.

His fingers pried apart the leather at the top edge of one boot, and pulled out the treasure hidden within. The papers, a few newspapers clippings, and a glossy photograph. Bent and wrinkled, but in good shape otherwise.

Pavli laid his head on his arm. In the blue light of the moon and stars, the night sky’s thin radiance seeping through the high windows, he gazed at the face of the angel. The angel of the shop window . . .

SIXTEEN

For a moment, as Ernst von Behren gazed up at the faces before him, he felt that he had just woken up from dreaming. He slouched down in the screening room seat, his thoughts drifting to memory. The sunshine of Hollywood, the palm trees like a child’s drawing of what a tree should look like, the flowers like bright soft wounds, achingly beautiful . . . and, of course, the money. Even though he had gotten just a taste of that, the little bit that the powerful ones such as Herr David Wise doled out to their faithful underlings, it had still translated to that pretty cottage in the hills, and a car with a driver from the studio, and restaurant meals where the bill never came, just more strangely weak American coffee, poured by a smiling waiter from a silver pot.

He sighed, feeling an ache of longing in his heart. Beyond the walls of the screening room – and a cramped little space it was, a far cry from the airy, cushioned spaces he had gotten used to at the Wise Studios – were all the rest of the buildings of the UFA complex, and beyond that was the suburb of Neubabelsburg, and beyond that, the city of Berlin. Just as though he’d never left.

When he’d been in Hollywood, one of that band of happy exiles, those smart enough to bless their luck rather than curse it, all of this had seemed to be the dream, a bad one. The kind from which you woke with gratitude, bathed in sweat. It still amazed him that he had made this return journey voluntarily.

“So you should always remember, dear Marte –” A moment of silence had come on the film’s soundtrack, just long enough to tempt him into speaking aloud. “You should remember that I do love you, in my own way.”

She didn’t answer him back. On the screen, Marte Helle was dressed in a period ballgown that exposed a good deal of her rounded cleavage – he could appreciate that on a purely aesthetic basis, like spring flowers on a grassy hillside, a meaningless bounty of nature. A costume like that was, of course, the preference of the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; the Reich’s other noted cinema aficionado, the Führer himself, was stirred more by the sight of long bare legs, a taste that he’d cultivated with showings of dreadful musicals at the Reich Chancellery for himself and his ‘chauffeur gang,’ his lower-ranking aides and their secretaries. That had been before the start of the war, when there had still been time for trifles such as that. Since then, things had become a lot grimmer, a bad dream, for the Führer and everyone else.

Perhaps that was another reason for this show of Marte Helle’s flesh. Her face, and that radiant field from her throat to the center of her breasts, like the sun finally emerging after a night wracked with storms, would be something to counter the sense of dismal foreboding that had settled upon the Reich’s citizens. The Rundfunk, the broadcasts of Goebbels’ speeches, had grown shriller and more impassioned, the newsreels in the theaters even more boastful of every military triumph, as the whispers of the Mundfunk, the radio that went from one person’s mouth to another’s ear, had grown more dismayed and anxious. Dreadful stories had begun to circulate, of the horrors of the Eastern Front, of German soldiers, some hardly more than boys, lying dead, their mouths and eye sockets filled with drifting snow. Smoke rolled over blackened skeletons in the hatches of broken Panzer tanks. Seaweed tangled in the hair of U-boat crews sleeping in each other’s arms, while their mothers wept and ate brown bread thickened with sawdust. A clubfooted death’s-head had asked, Wählt ihr den totalen Krieg? And all, or enough, had answered that yes, of course they wanted total war, and it had been given to them. How silly it would be now, for them to complain that the splinters in the bread cut their mouths. Better to swallow one’s own blood and listen for the drone of the bombers coming from the west.

Proof of the old adage that you should be careful what you wished for, since you might get it after all. The National Socialists had painted a picture – or perhaps it was the screenplay that Reichsminister Goebbels had written for his leading man to star in – of a Germany encircled by vengeful enemies, a noose tightening around the Herrenvolk’s neck. Now, that had come true. There was no denying that it made for an epic film, a true spectacle, with a cast of thousands – everything that one of von Behren’s own heroes, the great American director de Mille, might have wished for.

Of course, the ending of the this particular film might be less pleasant than in a de Mille production. It didn’t bode well for Germany that Goebbels had a taste for classical tragedy. His barely readable novel Michael, the product of his student days – the Reichsminister had bestowed a signed copy upon von Behren at a UFA reception – with the misunderstood, beleaguered hero dying a martyr’s death, gave some notion of what the final scenes might be.

Von Behren sighed, watching his protégée waltz with an actor dressed as a nineteenth century Prussian cavalryman. He could hardly remember directing the scene, or writing the stilted dialogue. In the midst of the great tragedy, the film that was not a film but was this world, the Propaganda Ministry dictated the making of such lightweight fluff as this. Costume dramas, the comforting dreams of a glorious past. Or modern trifles such as Die große Liebe, all about the romances of Luftwaffe pilots on leave, torn between a woman and duty. Goebbels’ Ministry had cited that one as a film of particular artistic merit, though when von Behren had finally seen it, he had been bitchily fascinated by how much weight its star, the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, had put on while he had been away in America.

He pulled his attention back to the images on the screen. This raw footage would have to be edited into more of the same, a place to which the German audiences could escape for an hour or two, sitting together in the darkness, dreamers all, while the fires of Europe burned closer. Marte looked so sad as she waltzed with the cavalryman. But not sad, really; more as if she were dreaming, too, dancing in her sleep, her eyes half-closed, her body weightless in the arms of men.

Perhaps it wasn’t too much different from the films he would have been making with Marte if they had stayed in America; Herr Wise’s tastes were close enough to those of the Reichsminister. He could at least comfort himself with that notion.

“The question, Marte, is what comes next.” Von Behren spoke through the lilting Strauss music. As the war went more and more disastrously for Germany – as any fool could tell, despite all the Propaganda Ministry’s trumped-up news of victories and assurances of secret weapons being developed – what kind of films would he be allowed to make? He remembered talking with Herr Wise, the American screenwriter, in the parking lot of the Wise Studios, as the desert winds had drifted through the warm California night. About how the great tradition of the German cinema of the fantastic had died, or rather been put to death, in the new Reich. Perhaps that would change, now that so many could feel their dark collective fate pursuing them, like the relentless Rote Jäger of the old stories. The punisher of those guilty of breaking the ancient laws of the hunt, those who had washed their hands in the blood of the innocent . . . perhaps there were others now who dreamed each night, as von Behren did, of the hooded figure dressed in tattered animal skins, striding through the forest, as close to one’s heels as one’s own shadow . . .

That image, the woodcut in his childhood book of Märchen, haunted him. The face hidden in darkness, and one hand reaching out for the fleeing huntsman, the other drawing a knife from the scabbard on the leather belt, its point sharpened for skinning prey . . .

Von Behren felt a familiar chill crawl up his spine. The memory of the woodcut, that piece of his childhood that had always stayed with him, had blotted out for a moment the swirling ballroom on the screen.

The room was suddenly bathed with light as the reel came to an end; he could hear the fluttering noise from the projectionist’s booth behind him. He knew there were more sets of rushes to be gone through, but he wouldn’t watch them now; they would be too much to bear. To see Marte, with her sad, dreaming face, caught in the motions of that other world, the one he had created for her . . .

He shook his head. Perhaps later, tomorrow or the day after. Right now, he only felt like going back to his flat, the same one he’d had before – before he’d fallen into that brief dream of sunshine and exile – and writing a few more pages of the script that he still hoped to be given permission to film. As dreams and nightmares becoming increasingly real, in both the night and the day, the time to suggest his pet project might be approaching. If the Reichsminister wished to see his mistress clothed in a brocaded medieval gown, imprisoned in a stone castle, then it would come to pass. The Teutonic heaviness, that dreaming deeper than all others, would appeal to Goebbels’ Wagnerian predilections.

Von Behren closed his eyes. He already had it worked out, inside his head, how he would light Marte, the first time that anyone would see her in the film. She would be at an arched window, gazing out across a forest that stretched to the horizon, a dark world where a hooded figure in animal skins waited for the transgressors of his laws. She would turn from the window, slowly, as though she and the audience in the theater were waking for the first time. Turn, and then her downcast eyes would raise, bringing her devastating beauty straight into the vision and hearts of all who saw her.

Another chill ran across his shoulders. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. The projectionist had switched off his machinery, leaving the screening room in darkness.

He sat for a while longer, in silence, waiting for the image he had conjured inside his head to fade.

* * *

The little boy lifted the ball up and, grinning, threw it at the camera lens. She leaned toward the flickering black-and-white image, as though she could bring her own hands up and catch the ball.

“You see?” A man’s voice came from somewhere beside her. “He is healthy and happy. Does he not look well fed? You should be proud of such a sturdy lad.”

Marte could barely hear what Joseph said. All her attention was drawn to her son. This bit of him that she was allowed to have.

“His hair is the same color as yours.” Joseph spoke as if the resemblance between mother and child pleased him. “And there – you can see it – just when he turns. His eyes. One brown, one blue.” His voice went softer. “So you know this is your son, don’t you?”

She didn’t need any proof like that. She could feel it inside herself, the drawing short of her breath, the trembling of her pulse. She wanted to cry out to the little boy, and reach through the screen and gather him to her breast.

“Every provision has been made for his care. Both he and his mother – I mean, the woman who looks after him – have been issued supplemental food authorizations. I had my staff make the arrangements; you can be sure that your little boy receives tidbits that a general’s wife would be hard-pressed to find here in Berlin.” Joseph leaned back in his chair, nodding sagely as he placed the tips of his fingers together. “And of course, as you can see, they are billeted far from any city or industrial center, so they are free of any danger from the Allied bombing raids. Where your son is, one could barely tell that we are at war.”

Marte knew that was true as well. There were still places like that. This little film, taken by one of the Reichsminister’s technicians, without sound – she couldn’t hear her child’s voice or laughter – caught a piece of that other world. Her child had grown older – more than a year and a half, closer to two, had gone by since the consulate official had ensnared her, brought her back here with the only possible enticement. The film showed a little boy growing up, time racing by him as he ran after a bird hopping across the ground.

There had been other photos, images of her child, that had been doled out to her since her return. She had begged for something more, and Joseph had finally relented, and this was what she had been given. Not the child himself, a living form that she could wrap her arms around and hold so tightly that he could never be taken away again, her tears darkening the child’s fine white-blonde hair. But this, a film, a thing of light and shadows. Several minutes of it had gone by already, the projector rattling behind them – Joseph had threaded the machine himself, taking the film from a small metal canister sealed with his security chief’s initials. She wondered how much more of it there was, how much longer it would be before the tail-end passed through and blank light filled the screen.

“I want to see him.” Her own voice, her wish, broke the film’s silence.

“But you are seeing him, Marte.” Beside her, Joseph reached over and squeezed her hand tight in his. “You’re seeing him right now. Look –” He gestured with his other hand, catching a corner of the projector’s beam, throwing a shadow across the bright world. “There he is. Your son. You know he is healthy and happy . . . and safe. What more do you want?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“I want to see him.” She turned her wet-streaked face away from the child’s image on the screen; she couldn’t bear to watch any more of his laughing and playing. “I want to hold him. I want him to be with me.”

“That’s impossible.” Joseph’s voice became stern. They had talked of these things before, many times since she had returned to Berlin and found no child waiting for her. “It cannot be done. I have forbidden it.” His voice softened to pleading. “Don’t you see, Marte? I have made you the queen of the German cinema; every eye gazes upon you. You are one of the most famous women in all the Reich. Do you really think you could have this child with you, a child of . . . such a background . . .”

She knew what he meant when he said that. Something that he could never speak aloud: a child, whose very eyes gave away the secret of his Mischling genetics, the scandalous cross between Aryan purity and her alien blood.

“You wouldn’t be able to hide it – we wouldn’t be able to. The scandals would blow up once more. The Führer’s attention is consumed by the war now, but he wouldn’t be able to ignore what would be told to him by my enemies – and I have many of those, greedy and unscrupulous power-seekers, right up to the top levels of the Reich. Goering and Bormann and all the rest . . . they would love to see me fall, to no longer have the ear of the Führer, so they could tell their lies to him without hindrance from me. Everyone knows that I brought you back here because I love you, that I can’t exist without you.” Joseph’s voice became even more fervent. “For now, as long as we are discreet, that can be tolerated, they’ll let us have our little bit of happiness. But if the wolves at my heels were to find out your child exists, then they would discover all the rest. The Rassenschande, the crime of racial pollution . . . and then the wolves would be upon me, they would be at my throat. I would be torn to bits by them.”

She turned from the screen and gazed at him. “You say you love me . . . that I mean more to you than anything else . . . and you wouldn’t do that for me?”

“But you don’t understand, Martchen –” Joseph took her by the shoulders, drawing her closer to his face and words. “I am doing it for you. Everything! I must protect you from these people. Himmler . . . if he were to find out the arrangements, the deals I have made behind his back, with his underlings in the SS . . . the bribes and favors I continue to bestow in order to keep your child a secret . . . if he knew, there would be no place you could hide with your little boy. He would find you and destroy you both.” Joseph shook his head, voice turning bitter. “These politics of race, they are just something I have used to achieve power, to make the Führer strong; the people need an enemy, if they are to flock to someone who can protect them. The Jews and the gypsies, and your own people – they are just scapegoats, so that the whip can be placed in the Führer’s hand for their scourging. You understand, don’t you?” His gaze drew inward for a moment. “My sins may be greater than Himmler’s – at least he believes the things he says. His skin crawls when he speaks of Jews and other creatures. But I . . . I am just an actor, a traveling player such as yourself; no less so, even if I have written the words I’ve placed in my own mouth and in the mouths of others.” His words had grown softer, his eyes turning away. Suddenly, his gaze snapped back to her; his voice shook with emotion. “You understand, don’t you? – you have to understand. I’m protecting both you and your son. Perhaps later . . . when the war has been won, and the Führer no longer needs me . . . then we can be together, all of us. We can go away, you and your little boy . . . far from here. To the embassy in Tokyo; I asked him before, to make me the ambassador. He’ll do that for me, I know he will . . . when the war is over . . .”

She understood. The things that Joseph said, and the things he didn’t; the things inside his heart. A heart that was no different from David Wise’s, or any other man’s. For all his impassioned speech, just like lines from a film – an actor, yes, but a bad one, a scenery-chewer as Herr Wise and the others would have called him in Hollywood; she’d almost expected Joseph to place both his hands over his heart, to swear his undying love – for all the lofty words, she could still hear the silent voice behind them. The one that spoke the truth: that he could never share her with anyone else, not even her own child.

Marte closed her eyes, letting herself fall away from him, into that empty space inside her own heart, where no one else would ever come now. She wondered what Joseph saw on the screen – not this one, with the little boy laughing and running – the screen with her face magnified upon it. Or rather, not what he saw, but who did the seeing. Perhaps there was no one in the theater with him, no human presence, nothing at all. But only him, alone in that dark empty world, where her face was the only light, the moon that he fell toward, as those in dreaming fall from the earth and into the hollow night sky.

“You’ll see, Marte. Everything will be fine . . .”

The room was completely silent and dark now, the last of the film having run through the projector; Joseph had switched off the machine. Now she felt his arm wrapping around her shoulder, drawing her to him, as the fingertips of his other hand drew gently down the curve of her neck.

His whisper, a breath at her ear. “You saw your little boy. I didn’t lie to you.” His hand moved lower, under the neckline of her dress. “That was real . . . you know it was. I gave him to you . . .” He brought his head down to kiss her throat.

She let him go on. Joseph’s words echoed inside her head. That was real . . . She knew he meant the little film, the images of the child laughing and running and throwing a ball. That was as real for him as if the child had been here in the room, and she could have knelt down and gathered him into her arms.

And when he saw her on the screen, the larger one, with all the faces in the theater audience turned toward it . . . then that was real as well. Or perhaps that was the only time she was real to him. The woman in his arms, with the face of the luminous being on the screen – the woman whose dress had been unfastened at the back by his careful hand, to expose her skin made even whiter by the black lace of the Parisian finery he’d given her; the woman whose bare shoulder he kissed, murmuring her name – that woman was the creature made of shadows, the ghost, the insubstantial thing. The woman on the screen, that other Marte, would exist long after this one had slipped from his arms and dissipated like smoke in the still air.

She dreamed that sometimes, or let it dream her, an image that came unbidden whenever she kept her eyes closed, while the embrace of Joseph or David or any other man tightened around her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it comforted her. To see a thing of translucent silk with her face, rising above the sweating arched back of the man and the pale form he crushed beneath himself . . . to see it rise and drift, to slowly become less and then nothing, gone . . .

Now, in this room, Joseph had laid her down against the sofa’s cushions, his hand brushing the bare skin above her stockings. Another part of her, the smallest, coldest part that stayed locked inside her head, in a little room that no one else could enter, watched her and this man in the slow measure of their coupling. Watched and calculated, and kept its silence. That part knew this was something it endured, or less than that, what he did with her was something that didn’t matter at all. It was how she kept Joseph bringing her photos of her child, news of him, and this time, the gift of the film. Something real, or close to it.

Marte turned her head away from the sofa cushion and kissed him, feeling how avidly he set himself to consume her. His jacket and the shirt beneath dropped onto the rumpled fall of her dress upon the floor.

Later – she didn’t know when; she had retreated into that small, hidden part of herself – she opened her eyes when she heard a distant keening sound, a high-pitched shiver in the air. It took her a moment to realize that it was an air-raid siren, that urgent cry that had become so familiar in the last few months, bringing Berlin from its sleeping dreams to a waking one.

Past the screen on which she had seen her child, and past the drawn curtains of the tall windows of the Joseph’s Ministry office, she saw the beams of the searchlights sweep across the sky. The bass drone of the bombers mounted beneath the wail of the sirens. With the first impacts, that rattled the glass in its frames and sifted a fine plaster dust from the ceiling, Joseph raised his head. His hands still gripped her bare arms as he gazed out toward the city’s luminous night. Above the clouds, the distant, ghostly forms of the bombers passed in and out of darkness.

She watched, looking up at Joseph’s face, as his feverish gaze followed another perfect drama.

* * *

He lay on the narrow bunk, his eyes closed, dreaming. Though not yet asleep; awake enough to know that his dream was part memory. Of a time when he had sat in a darkened theater, surrounded by others, all of them gazing up at the screen before them, at the faces that were so much more real than they themselves were.

One of those faces, the most beautiful one of all, was tucked inside the curl of his arm, his hand clutching tight the wrinkled photograph. Pavli held on to the little piece of brightness, the image of her face, the angel of the shop window. He would have to hide it again before the dawn, before anybody in the dormitory of the Lazarene men could see him with it, even his own brother. None of them would understand. They had shut him out, made him an outcast from their faith . . . it didn’t matter why they had done that, to protect him or not. It didn’t matter because he had a faith of his own to comfort him.

He would hide the photograph of Marte Helle, perhaps back in the lining of his boot, or some other place he would find, that would be as safe. But for now, he wanted it here, close to him, so he could see her face in the faint moonlight that came through the barred window high above his head.

All over the world, in this world and the next, people dreamt and remembered. Even here, among these who were still his brethren somehow, still his blood. In the night’s darkness, in their dreaming, they were all denizens of that other land, moving among the shadows and ghosts that called their names, that bent forward from the bright heavens and bestowed a kiss upon their upraised lips.

And farther . . . beyond the breathing and murmurs of the Lazarenes . . . in Berlin and across the fields of night and of the coming day. There were others – he could sense their dreaming as well.

Some dreamt of her. The angel. Awake or in sleep . . . in the small theaters bound by their skulls, or on the great luminous screens rising before them . . . they dreamt of her.

As he did.

Pavli squeezed his eyes shut tighter and whispered her name. So softly, that no one would hear.

No one but the angel . . .

SEVENTEEN

A bird – tiny, brown, indistinguishable from the others – pecked at the bread crumbs that Pavli had scattered through the bars onto the stone ledge outside. He stood far enough back so that it wouldn’t be frightened away, and watched and listened. The bird hopped from one crumb to the next, but made no other sound.

Matthi had told him that birds could speak – really speak, not just a parrot’s idiot squawk – if they wanted to. He hadn’t been able to tell if his older brother had been joking or not. A little story, something else the Lazarenes knew: that when the Savior had hung upon the cross, blood trickling from his wrists and brow and side, the anguished cry to His Father hadn’t been His last words. The crows and ravens of Golgotha, that stripped the dead flesh from the bones and perched upon the skulls that gave the hill its name, had perched upon His outstretched arms – the thieves on either side of Him were already dead and couldn’t hear – and leaned close to His whispering mouth, so they might be told the last of His secrets.

“And from the ravens,” Matthi had said, “all the other birds learned to speak. So when St. Francis had a flock of birds before him, he hadn’t been preaching to them, but listening. And learning . . .”

A silly story. Perhaps it was true. The brown wren-like bird clicked its beak on the last crumb, glanced back at Pavli with one bright-bead eye, then flew away to the grey-barked trees in the distance.

It was time for Pavli to go as well. He turned and opened the door behind him, just far enough to slip through. He closed it carefully and silently behind himself, then turned and ran down the asylum’s corridors.

He had the freedom of the building. Within its walls at least, he could move about as he wished. The privilege that came with what he had attained, the niche he had clawed out for himself. The false gypsy’s advice had been right – to survive, you had to make yourself useful. To them, the guards and the other SS men, from the officers down to the lowliest rifle-toter. The least of them was more powerful now than even the most exalted Lazarene elder; they could do anything for you, from looking the other way when you walked into some restricted area of the building and its grounds, to increasing your rations. If they wanted to; if you were useful to them.

But most important of all, you had to be useful to him . . . to Herr Doktor Ritter. No one outranked him here; no one was more powerful, more capable of deciding your fate. Into this sealed little world, he brought the atmosphere of a darker and colder sphere beyond the fences topped with barbed wire, like a wind drifting through mountain crevasses where the sun never penetrated. Especially when Ritter came back from his weekly trips into Berlin, where he met with his colleagues in the Ahnenerbe. Working in the darkroom – or pretending to, when there was no real work to do – Pavli saw through the open doorway whenever Ritter returned, his boots shiny as black mirrors as he strode past to his office and laboratory at the end of the corridor. The next morning, the doctor’s studies would resume, and Pavli would receive his instructions about what photographs to take, what film would be used, every little detail.

Perhaps the angel of the shop window was looking out for him, guarding Pavli from whatever misstep would reveal him to be a fraud, an ignorant youth who was desperately using his few scraps of knowledge to pass himself off as someone useful. He knew it was foolish to think of her that way – he knew it was nothing more than the picture of a film actress, one who was distantly related to him by blood – but it comforted him to do so. It also explained his run of luck, that everything to which he’d turned his hand, everything that Ritter had told him to do, had meet with enough success to make the doctor nod in satisfaction. When something had finally gone wrong, a whole day’s worth of test shots turning out over-exposed and black in the darkroom trays, Ritter had scowled at the wet prints but had said nothing. Pavli’s gut had crawled with apprehension, as he’d expected any moment to be sent back to the dormitory with the others, while Ritter sent for a real photographer to be sent to the asylum. But nothing like that happened; they all had carried on as before, with nothing but a sharp comment from Ritter the next day, for him to avoid wasting the Reich’s precious technical resources.

He turned a corner and saw the Scharführer waiting for him outside the door to the darkroom. The resolve to be more careful tightened inside him. It would never do for him to keep anyone waiting, anyone who could put a boot on his throat.

The Scharführer was all smiles. “Do you have it ready?” He even gave a pleasant nod of his head as Pavli approached.

“Yes . . . yes, of course.” Pavli opened the darkroom, switching on the light as the other man followed him inside. “Here it is.” He took a flat square parcel from a hiding place behind the ranks of the dark-brown bottles of developing chemicals and handed it over.

“Ah. Wonderful.” The Scharführer had on his finely tailored dress uniform, the one in which he traveled to the city, to visit both his wife and his mistress. He set his peaked cap, with its skull-and-crossbones emblem above the visor, down on the workbench and unwrapped the parcel. He held up a framed photograph, admiring the image of his own face. “Ausgezeichnet.”

Pavli had no idea which woman would receive the Scharführer’s present. That was none of his business, anyway. Enough that he had found this means of ingratiating himself with the guards. Another Lazarene, who had been a carpenter in the larger world beyond the fences, made the frames from bits of scrap, carving a grapevine pattern into the wood with a stolen penknife and staining them with a concoction of boiled leaves and pine needles. For himself, Pavli had made a rough studio, a replica of the one that had been at the rear of his uncle’s camera shop, in the storage area behind the darkroom; he had even been able to nail up a backdrop, a piece of canvas daubed with random splotches of paint. To his own eye, the results were little more than adequate, but the guards who came and posed were pleased enough with them.

“This will do very nicely.” The Scharführer smiled and winked at Pavli. “I’m sure she’ll keep it right by her bedside.”

The mistress then, guessed Pavli. He said nothing, keeping himself from being lulled by the SS man’s confidences and friendly show.

“You do admirable work.” The Scharführer laid a hand on Pavli’s shoulder. “Come with me. I have a small token of my appreciation.”

On the graveled drive in front of the building, the Scharführer reached inside one of the staff cars, turned and bestowed a grease-stained package into Pavli’s hands. The rank smell of the sausage it held made his stomach clench with hunger.

Before he could tell the Scharführer thanks, a commotion sounded from the building’s door. One of the Lazarene women, shouting and with distraught face, jerked her arm away from the female guard who had been trying to pull her back inside. The sweep of the woman’s arm knocked the guard sprawling. In a few seconds, before Pavli could react, the woman had run to him and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Where are they?” Her greying hair come loose from its knotted kerchief. “My babies –” Her fingers dug into Pavli’s upper arms as she forced him back against the fender of the staff car. “They won’t tell me – they say they don’t know – but you know, don’t you? Because you’re close to him, to Ritter –”

The woman had knocked the breath out of Pavli. Through the spatter of black spots in his vision, he could see the Scharführer trying to break her grasp, to pull her away from him.

“Give them back to me!” The woman’s voice had turned into screaming, her head tilted back as the Scharführer and another female guard dragged her along the side of the car. The first guard had regained her feet; standing in front, she leveled a backhand slap across the woman’s face. The Scharführer let go of her arms, and she dropped to her knees on the gravel, the tangle of her hair falling across the angry mark reddening her cheek and jaw. Her spine bent catlike as sobbing tore from her throat.

The Scharführer grabbed Pavli by the elbow and pushed him toward the asylum’s door. He twisted his neck to look back. “What’s wrong –”

“It’s none of your concern.” The Scharführer’s face was rigid with anger. “Get back to your work.” He shoved Pavli stumbling against the building’s front step, then turned and strode back to where the two female guards were hoisting the crying woman up between themselves.

The sausage that the Scharführer had given Pavli, as payment for the photograph, had been dropped and trampled in the melee; the paper wrapping had come undone, its greasy contents smeared into the dirt. He didn’t care about that. When the shock had passed, he had recognized the woman, and had even known what she had been questioning him about: she was the mother of a pair of twins, nearly the youngest of all the Lazarene children who had been brought here with their parents. Toddlers, little more than a year old . . . but what had happened to them? Why had the woman been screaming and carrying on? There was no place in the asylum building where they could have strayed, where they wouldn’t have been found. Had someone taken them from her?

He looked up, aware of others watching him. In the windows above were the faces of the Lazarenes, the men peering out through the bars. He could just see, farther away, a few of the women held in the distant wing of the building.

They had seen what had happened, and now had turned their attention to him. He wondered if they, too, would demand an answer from him.

He stepped back into the doorway, where they could no longer see him. Then turned and ran into the building, toward the shelter of the darkroom.

* * *

The mystery of the woman and her vanished children deepened through the afternoon and into the evening. Pavli lay on the cot tucked into a corner of the storage area – that had been a benefit of his success with the photography, to have been moved here by himself. He could be put to work at any hour, without the need for one of the guards to go into the lightless dormitory to fetch him. He didn’t mind that, as it allowed him some privacy and the ability to hide his few small treasures where no one would be likely to find them. The angel’s photo was tucked in a niche behind the highest stack of crates; none of the guards had arms skinny as his, to reach into the narrow space.

From here, he could also hear the comings and goings of the guards and others, and listen in on scraps of their conversations as they passed by the darkroom’s door. Something had happened that had hushed them all to whispers. While Herr Doktor Ritter was away in Berlin . . . and it had to do with the crying woman’s babies. Pavli lay on his cot, eating a few scraps he had stolen from the kitchen, and wondered what the answer to the riddle might be.

Voices shouting outside woke him up. He could tell from the chill of the air that it was well past midnight. From the darkroom he crept into the hallway, where a window overlooked the graveled drive. He could see Herr Doktor Ritter, still wearing his black gloves and belted trench coat, gesturing angrily at the Scharführer and the other guards behind him; the whole scene was caught in the bright angle of headlights from Ritter’s BMW cabriolet. Pavli listened carefully, keeping well to the side of the window so he wouldn’t be seen, but could make out only that Ritter was chewing out one of the guards, the next in rank behind the Scharführer. The guard tried to give some kind of explanation, some reason as to why he had disobeyed one of Ritter’s orders, but finally fell silent, shrinking beneath the tongue-lashing. Ritter turned on his heel at last and got back into the cabriolet. Its engine growled through the night’s silence as it picked up speed through the gates and out onto the road leading back toward Berlin.

Pavli drew away from the window and returned to the darkroom. The scene in front of the asylum had seemed so strange, like a dream from which one wakes and can only partly remember. The glare from the cabriolet’s headlights had turned Ritter and the guards into ghostly figures, drained of color.

He crawled beneath the cot’s blankets. There had been enough mysteries twining around each other for one night. Answers might come with the day – he closed his eyes and wished for sleep.

* * *

Daylight brought nothing but more whispers and the grim silence surrounding them. The guards knew what was up, but were no more likely to tell him than he was to ask. In Ritter’s absence, the Lazarene men and women were left in their separate dormitories, to speculate among themselves as to what had happened. And what would happen next.

Pavli remained undisturbed, even forgotten by the guards and the others, in the retreat of the darkroom. In another night’s darkness, he raised his head from the rolled-up jacket he used as a pillow. The faint sounds from the end of the corridor outside had woken him from the sleep into which he had fallen.

Light slipped beneath the door to Herr Doktor Ritter’s office and laboratory. Pavli hesitated, coming close to drawing back inside the darkroom and the safety of the cot . . . but only for a moment. He stepped out into the corridor, his bare feet making no sound upon the floor.

“Ah. There is my trusted assistant.” Ritter had his boots up on the desktop as he leaned back in his chair. A bottle and a half-empty glass sat close at hand. “Don’t be afraid.” He made a welcoming gesture to the face that had peered around the door. “Come in. Join me.”

“Pardon me, sir . . .” Pavli froze with his hand on the doorknob. “I didn’t mean to disturb you . . . I just wanted to make sure everything was all right . . .”

“Yes, yes; of course you did.” A note of impatience entered Ritter’s voice. “Of course you weren’t snooping around – why should you?” He picked up the glass and tossed back its contents. “But I’m not asking you to come in here; I’m ordering you to. There, does that make you feel better?” A loose smile raised a corner of Ritter’s mouth.

As he stepped closer to the desk and the circle of light thrown by its lamp, Pavli could see that Ritter still had on his trench coat, the belt unfastened so that the garment was cast back from his uniform jacket beneath, the dark leather draped over the chair’s arm like wings. His high collar was undone, showing more of the unshaven stubble of his neck and chin. Alcohol and fatigue had reddened the rims of his eyes.

“Sit down, Iosefni. Here, you should be drinking, too.” Ritter reached back and fetched another glass off the shelf behind him. “We have a victory to celebrate.” He poured, then pushed the glass across the desk.

Perched at the chair’s edge, Pavli sipped something that tasted like fire on his tongue. It burned all the way down his throat.

Ritter held his own glass up to admire the inch of clear liquid. “You’ve made quite a favorite of yourself among my men. With your little photography studio . . . very admirable.”

“I meant no harm –”

“Oh, stop trembling like that. Your constant attitude of fear offends me.” Ritter filled his glass again. “What cause have I ever given for you to mistrust my assurances of your safety? I value the work you do for me. Even these portraits you do for the guards – they show a good eye. You Lazarenes are a clever race; much like the Jews in that regard. This shows the principle of selective breeding in action, I suppose. The more attempts are made to exterminate such so-called ‘lesser breeds,’ the surer it will be that the ones who are left are even cleverer and more given to survival. You see –” Ritter broke off, smiling ruefully at the sound of his own lecturing voice. “I shouldn’t tire you with my pet theories. Let us just say that I have some differences with those colleagues of mine who see murder as the only possible response to the challenge presented by the non-Aryan races. You have no idea of the struggle I went through to have your odd tribe rounded up and brought here, rather than sent to . . . another place. You should thank me, Iosefni; I have kept the lives of you and your brethren safe in the palms of my hands.”

Pavli nodded slowly. He knew that much was true.

“So you will have to forgive me if I deal harshly with those who endanger my research.” Ritter tilted his glass, swirling its contents around. “One of your customers will not be coming back for another portrait sitting. Jürgen – you remember him, the very stocky one? – I’ve had him transferred to the Eastern Front. I don’t imagine he’ll return from there. But that is the consequence of his having disobeyed my express orders. The unpleasant encounter you suffered, the woman bewailing the loss of her twin babies . . . Jürgen was responsible for that.”

“What –” Pavli looked up from his glass. “What happened to them?”

“The babies?” Ritter’s face darkened with anger. “Waste. Idiocy.” He knocked back the dregs in his glass and slammed it down upon the desktop. “Here, I’ll show you something you might find . . . instructive.” He reached down beside his chair, into an open satchel of black leather, the kind that ordinary doctors carried. From it he took a heavy glass jar, sealed with a stopper and a smear of wax around the edge. A fluid clear as alcohol but thicker sloshed inside.

For a moment, Pavli thought he saw a pair of goldfish swimming languidly in the jar, the fancy kind with a long trailing tail at the end of their bulbous forms. But they weren’t quite the right shape, and he could tell, even as unlit silhouettes, that they weren’t alive.

Ritter turned the lamp so it shone straight upon the jar sitting in the middle of the desk. “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “Look more closely.”

Pavli leaned toward the jar. The thickness of the glass distorted the two objects floating inside. He saw a milky-white sphere streaked with red, then, as it turned, a circle of jewel-like blue. The other drifted toward him, its red tail twisting behind, exactly the same but that it bore a circle of golden-brown, a dot of black at the center . . .

Then he knew what had happened to the woman’s babies. Or to at least one of them.

“Those fools,” murmured Ritter, as he laid his hand on the side of the jar, contemplating the pair of eyes suspended in preserving fluid. “This is the use they make of my lovely children . . .”

This is a dream, thought Pavli. I’m still asleep. I didn’t wake up. I never woke up, I just went on sleeping and dreaming, not even in this bed here . . . I’m not here, I’m in my bed with my brother Matthi sleeping next to me. The eyes – a child’s, smaller in diameter than an adult’s – gazed back at him, as though he were part of the dead child’s dreaming. And I’ll wake up, and I’ll get dressed and walk out onto a little narrow street in Berlin. And that will be real . . . not like this . . .

“He had already dissected this one.” Ritter’s voice sounded far away. “The other child had already been given its injection and was dead, but hadn’t had the knife taken to it yet.”

Not a dream. Pavli drew back from the jar, feeling dizzy and nauseous. “Who . . . who did this . . .”

Ritter’s expression turned to disgust. “That idiot Mengele. At the camp in Auschwitz –”

Pavli had heard the name before. Not the man’s name, but the word that was the German for the Slovenian village – Oswiecim – from which the false gypsy had returned with all his whispered stories. “It was in Block Ten,” said Pavli. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.” Ritter nodded. “That is where my esteemed colleague Mengele performs what he likes to think of as his experiments. It’s all just butchery. I’m appalled to think that the man actually has a medical degree, that he studied with Mollinson and von Verschuer. When I heard some of his crackpot notions . . .” Ritter tilted his head back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I knew of the man’s obsessions with twins – he sorts them out himself, as each new trainload is brought in. The little ones call him Onkel, he treats them so well, with bits of candy in his pockets for them. Pets and fusses over them, right up until the moment he takes them into the dissection room . . .” A shrug. “He fancies himself an expert on the matter of human eye coloration – he has some notion that he can change brown eyes to blue, by injecting coal tar dyes directly into the pupils. Perhaps he thinks he can turn dark-eyed Jews into Aryans that way. That’s the level of his scientific thinking. Of course, he just winds up blinding the poor little bastards with his needle.”

“So he came here.” Pavli had begun to understand. “This Mengele – he came here. Because of us . . . because of the Lazarenes . . .”

“I’d warned him off. I told him there would be hell to pay if he tried to snatch any of my heterochromes for his stupid experiments. He wouldn’t be able to resist – his obsessions have reached the point of madness by now. That’s why I gave specific orders to all the guards here. If Mengele turned up with transfer orders for any of my research subjects, nothing was to be done in my absence; it didn’t matter from how high up the orders came, how urgent he made them sound.” Ritter laid his hand on the jar’s curved stopper. “Whatever he used to bribe that fool Jürgen, to let him in here and take away those twins, I hope Jürgen found the price satisfactory.”

The things of which Ritter spoke still sounded dreamlike. It was as if he and his rival dealt in some rare form of livestock, an unusual breed of rabbits to be kept in cages at the back of their laboratories.

“This time, however, that quack Mengele overreached himself.” A thin smile formed on Ritter’s face, his eyes half-lidded, as though contemplating some pleasant memory. “I don’t think he realized how highly my research is regarded by the officers of the Ahnenerbe. The greatest degree of personal support is afforded to me by Reichsführer SS Himmler himself. And why wouldn’t it be so? Mengele amuses himself, down there in that little hellish empire he has created in his Block Ten, with his muddleheaded injections and dissecting sprees; that is all that having power over human lives means to him. While I . . .” Ritter nodded slowly, savoring his own words. “I will penetrate to the heart of that life. The seal of the scrolls will be broken, and every mystery will be read out to me . . .”

The doctor’s voice dwindled to silence. In his nervousness, Pavli had drunk most of the fiery alcohol in his glass. Its warmth spread across his chest and through his limbs. The room seemed bigger now, its walls fallen away, leaving him and Ritter in a space bound by the glow of the desk lamp. At the center was the jar with the child’s eyes inside, turning and gazing upon them in wordless judgment.

“Do I frighten you with such wild talk? My apologies.” The alcohol made Ritter clumsy; his hand knocked over his empty glass, and he watched it roll off the desk’s edge and fall to the floor. “You must understand, Iosefni . . . there is no one else to whom I can speak of these things. Not of how they really are. I’ve managed to convince Himmler of their importance, so we won’t be bothered by that butchering clown in Auschwitz again. But Himmler – he’s a simpleminded mystic, always listening for voices from beyond. He can’t tell the difference between what I’m doing and all his collection of ancient runes and horoscopes; it’s all the same to him. The entire Ahnenerbe is that way; there’s no one who understands. But you, my invaluable photographer . . .” Ritter leaned forward, head lowered to the level of his shoulders, his face heavy with drink. “You understand . . . because you and I are so much alike . . .”

“What . . .” Pavli’s tongue thickened in his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“We are both so close . . . to knowing.” Ritter spread his hands against the desktop, to keep himself from falling forward and knocking over the jar. “I have spent the better part of my life studying the Lazarene Community. Everything that could be learned, from the outside. The history, the legends, the lies. And you, Iosefni . . . you were born in it. You are of the Lazarene blood. Yet neither one of us knows. The secrets . . . the truth. Mysteries.”

The other man’s words sobered Pavli. He felt a touch of fear, as though he had been walking in a dark forest and had spotted, far off among the dense, moss-covered shapes, another shape, one that moved and then disappeared. “Perhaps . . .” Pavli spoke carefully, treading in silence, waiting to see if that distant figure would show itself again. “Perhaps there is nothing to know. Perhaps it’s all just . . . nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You show a commendable loyalty to your brethren.” A lopsided smile twisted Ritter’s face. “But you can’t fool me. My study of the Lazarenes extends to you as well, Iosefni. I can sense how you feel. How you look at the other ones, the words – or the lack of them – that pass between you and the rest. How it must feel to have been cheated that way . . . to have had the great pearl of knowing snatched away from you . . .”

He spotted the figure in the darkness again, closer. “They did that . . . they did it to protect me.” He stopped himself from saying the words from you.

“Yes . . . of course they would say that. Your brother would tell you that, wouldn’t he? Even if – let us say – even if they weren’t concerned about you at all. About what happens to you. Perhaps they’re just concerned about their precious secrets. The secrets of their faith. And if they thought that you were weak . . . that you couldn’t be trusted with those secrets . . . that you could be made to tell them . . . to me, let us say . . .” Ritter raised an eyebrow as his smile widened. “Then that’s different, isn’t it? From what they told you.”

He could almost see its face. “But . . . that’s not true. It’s not. My brother didn’t lie to me.”

“Very good.” Ritter nodded appreciatively. “I should have expected as much from you. This loyalty. Just like the rest of your tribe, you are a tough nut to crack, Iosefni. Come –” He stood up, grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself. “I have something else to show you.”

Pavli followed the doctor into the rooms behind the office. He had only caught glimpses of these before, through the doors opening, then swinging shut. Now he found himself surrounded by the white-tiled walls, the air itself smelling of disinfectant, the odor of asylums. Ritter turned on the lights, the sudden glare dazzling Pavli. He could just make out a narrow, chrome-legged table in the middle of the room, with a small tray next to it, filled with what at first seemed to be kitchen cutlery. When he blinked away his tears, he could see that the glistening objects were surgical tools.

“I had an airplane sent down there, to pick up the remains.” Ritter leaned over the table, parting a small cloth-wrapped bundle. “I didn’t want that fool Mengele to have any souvenirs to add to his collection. They brought the jar back – and this.” He gestured to Pavli. “Come and see.”

He stood at the edge of the table as Ritter folded back the last bit of cloth. A naked child, only a year or two old, lay there as though sleeping. On its side, legs drawn up – its skin seemed white as porcelain, touched with pink at the center of the little fist tucked against its cheek and in the creases of its elbows and knees. Beneath the fall of blonde hair across its brow, marks had been made around one closed eye with a grease pencil.

“Pretty little thing.” Ritter stroked a fingertip along one of the small corpse’s eyebrows. “A waste, really.”

Pavli wished that he were dreaming. That it were possible to be dreaming.

Ritter’s hand gently moved the fragile arm, exposing the underside of the wrist. “Unmarked, of course; as is to be expected in one so young. That’s what makes you so unusual, Iosefni – that you came of age and yet didn’t receive the ritual tattooing. So you are Lazarene and yet somehow not.”

He remained silent. There was too little oxygen underneath the cloying asylum smell for him to breathe and speak.

“I wonder . . .” Ritter drew his hand over the small breastbone. “I wonder how much more you know than I do. I wonder if you’ve seen the things that I have only heard about. The old stories about the Lazarenes . . . the secret that Christ or the Devil whispered into a pale gypsy’s ear . . .”

The figure in the dark forest stepped closer. Pavli could almost see the face beneath the hood made of ragged animal pelts. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .”

“Yes, you have; you have seen it.” The drunken slurring had ebbed from Ritter’s voice, replaced by a taut ferocity. A fingernail drew a red line down the center of the dead child’s abdomen. “You’ve seen the skin part like a suit of old clothes and the reborn life emerging. Like a snake wriggling free, like a chrysalis being torn open by the moth inside –”

“No . . .” Pavli shook his head. “I didn’t . . .” The white-tiled room and Ritter’s piercing gaze blurred in his sight. He saw instead the vision he had stolen, the figure surrounded by the elders of his blood, luminous silk peeling away from the youth’s arms and chest, his nakedness wrapped in a drifting smoke that bore the image of his face.

And then another memory. Of his own brother Matthi, drawing the same transparent substance away from the freshly tattooed markings on his wrists. And Matthi whirling around when he’d suddenly felt that he was being watched, his face angry, shouting at Pavli that he shouldn’t have seen those things, it wasn’t the time yet for him to know.

“Don’t lie to me – you’ve seen it –”

“No!” Pavli turned away from the table, reaching for the handle of the room’s door. “I didn’t! I didn’t see anything!”

Ritter’s voice called after him as he ran from the office into the corridor beyond. “You will see it, Iosefni – I promise you that. Together we . . .”

He couldn’t hear any more. He clapped his hands to his ears, blocking out everything. In the storage area behind the darkroom, he threw himself upon the cot, burying his face in the rough blanket. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the ghosts, the things of silk and smoke and memory, still battered his sight with their soft hands.

Even when he fell into exhausted sleep. Even then, in his dreaming.

* * *

Toward noon, one of Herr Doktor Ritter’s assistants gave Pavli his instructions.

“Set up the photographic equipment in the dissection room.” The assistant wore a white laboratory coat and a cold lack of expression. “You know where that is, I assume.”

Pavli turned away from the trays on the workbench and nodded. “Why?” The feeling of dread, that had been with him all morning, tightened in his stomach. “What’s happening there?”

The assistant’s glance turned harsher. “That’s not for you to ask. Just get your things there, and be quick about it.”

Ritter, also garbed in white, glanced up at Pavli as he came into the room behind the office. “There at the corner of the table should do fine.” His voice revealed no emotion. Whatever had been set loose during the night had once again been brought under leash. He turned his attention back to the object upon the table.

It wasn’t the dead child lying there – that much Pavli could tell. That was what he had been expecting. He lifted the tripod from his shoulder and set it in position. An adult’s bare feet, so much rawer and bonier than the child’s had been, protruded from beneath the sheet stretched over the body’s face. He took the lens cap off the camera and began adjusting its focus.

“Raise it as high as you can,” directed Ritter. “I want as much of an overhead angle as possible.” He turned back to conferring with his assistant.

Pavli watched over the top of the camera as the sheet was pulled back from the naked form. A woman then, or what had been one, now reduced to an object without sex. That was all right; he could control the sick, light-headed feeling he’d brought with him into the room.

The assistant finished marking the body, the black lines to direct the scalpel cuts. He straightened up and turned toward the chrome tray, from which Ritter was already selecting his tools. Pavli could see the dead woman’s face then.

“Is there something the matter?” Ritter’s cold voice cut through the nausea that distorted Pavli’s vision. “This is a simple enough task. If you are too squeamish for it, then perhaps I will be forced to find a replacement for you.”

“No . . . no, I’m all right.” Pavli tightened his grip on the tripod, to keep his balance. “I’m sorry. I’ll try . . . I’ll do my best. Please . . .”

Ritter and his assistant regarded him. Then both men turned and leaned over the body of the woman. The mother of the twin children, the woman who had accosted Pavli, screaming for him to tell her what had happened to her babies. As Ritter made the first incision between her breasts, his assistant leaned forward, watching with clinical interest.

The camera’s shutter clicked as Pavli pressed the trigger button. That was the first photograph; he closed his eyes and took another . . .

In the evening, when Pavli brought the new prints to Ritter’s office, the doctor spread them out upon his desk. He studied them for a moment, then looked up at Pavli.

“You needn’t harbor such suspicions.” Ritter smiled, pleased at his ability to tell what Pavli was thinking. “The woman’s death was at her own hands. She hung herself after receiving the news of what happened to her children. Perhaps we should have been more cognizant of the extent of her grief and taken greater precautions, watched her more carefully. But we are limited in our resources here, and such unfortunate incidents are bound to happen.” He straightened the edges of the photographs lying before him. “Though I do not abide such waste as that in which some of my colleagues indulge, nevertheless I must take advantage of any opportunities for my research.” He looked up at Pavli. “Does that disturb you?”

“No –” Pavli shook his head. “Whatever you wish, sir.”

Ritter nodded. “Exactly so.” He picked up a magnifying glass and leaned over the desktop, the better to study the details of the eviscerated carcass. In the last of the series of photographs, the images were no longer recognizably human. “You should think, Iosefni, upon those matters we spoke of last night. We have much work ahead of us. And . . . there is not much time.” His voice sank to a murmur. “There is never enough time . . .”

“May I go now?”

“Yes, yes,” said Ritter irritably. “Leave me.”

Resting on his cot in the darkroom’s storage area, Pavli wondered why Ritter bothered lying to him at all. The photographs had caught clearly enough the imprint of a man’s hands circling the woman’s neck. Her death had been written in the blood pressed beneath the surface of her skin. Why lie about it, when there was nothing that could be done? Such was the nature of this world. It wasn’t up to him.

He rolled onto his side, using his forearm for a pillow. Only a little effort was required to set aside the images of the woman and what was finally left of her. Beyond that was darkness and sleep.

As he fell, he could just hear the echo of Ritter’s words.

Much work to be done . . .

And little time.

EIGHTEEN

Pavli looked on as the doctor washed the blood from his hands. At the basin on one side of his office, Ritter carefully scrubbed his palms and his long, delicate-seeming fingers beneath the trickle of water from the tap. He paid great attention to the task, bending his head close to examine his nails.

The smell of soap drifted to where Pavli sat on the wooden stool near the desk. He turned away, nauseated. The alcohol that Ritter poured out and set before him always made his gut queasy. To begin with. Not much later, a few minutes, the warmth would spread up his throat, a numbness that was not pleasant so much as necessary. Blurring the images caught by the camera inside his skull, so that the things he had seen in the tile-walled surgical laboratory behind the office, were harder to discern. They could even be forgotten, if only for a moment.

His stomach had already begun to calm. Pavli looked up and saw Herr Doktor Ritter drying his hands. The ritual was coming to an end. Inside this room, and inside all the asylum, there was no time. Time had stopped for the Lazarenes, the dwindling numbers of the men and the women and children in their separate dormitories. Their lives, their little comings and goings in the streets of the distant city – all that had ended. They did not live, but existed, in a world without clocks or calendars, waiting for the moment when the guards would come and fetch one of them, take the man or the woman or the child up to Herr Doktor Ritter’s surgery. Most often, the chosen ones would merely shuffle obediently between the guards, head down in a stunned daze. Other times, there had been unfortunate scenes, commotions, a Lazarene male kicking and shouting, one of the mothers screaming as she clutched her child or tried to drag it back from the grasp of the guards. A spark of hope or desperation, or some other unreasoning emotion, springing into a flame that would have to be beaten out with the guards’ truncheons. One rebellion had taken place, when the Lazarene men had barricaded the entrance to the dormitory. Starving them out had not been as effective as Ritter’s announcement, shouted through the door and the stacked-up beds on the other side, that he would simply work his way through the women and children before returning to deal with the men. That had broken the last trace of their resistance; the beds and other scraps of lumber had been pulled away from the door. Now the men accepted their martyrdom with whatever comforts their faith could provide.

Ritter tossed the damp towel beside the basin. “Ah, my good photographer –” That had become his oddly affectionate term for Pavli. “We have worked hard this day.” He poured himself a glassful from the bottle before sitting down behind the desk. “As every day.” He drew his research journal to himself and flipped it open to the next blank page.

The alcohol made Pavli drowsy. It helped to dull the ache along his side, the rib he was sure was cracked, if not broken. A jagged piece of tooth in his lower jaw panged in time to his heartbeat; that, too, had receded a bit, the raw nerve softening.

“We still have so much to learn . . .”

The doctor’s murmur drifted past Pavli’s ear. Ritter said the same things after each session in the surgery; that was time repeating itself. Pavli raised his heavy eyelids and watched Ritter inscribing a date at the top of the journal page. December something – he couldn’t make out that part of the upside-down writing – nineteen-hundred and forty-four. Pavli frowned as he mulled that over. A year had gone by – close to two, perhaps – since he and the rest of the Lazarenes had been brought here. In the world beyond the fence topped with barbed wire, it might be 1944; in this little world, Herr Doktor Ritter washed the blood from his hands and wrote his findings down in the research journal, over and over.

“So much . . .” The nib of Ritter’s fountain pen scratched against the page. “So much work . . .” He wrote and drank. Pavli set his own glass back down.

In the world outside, where time moved, the war went on. Here, they caught only little glimpses of it, like lightning flashes in storm clouds mounted up on the horizon. More than once, in the middle of the night, the drone of the bombers coming from the west had broken all sleep. Pavli had risen from his cot in the darkroom and stood at one of the corridor’s barred windows, looking up at the dark shapes spreading their arms against the stars. They passed the hospital by, as though the Angels of Death had noted a mark of blood on the great front door. The bombs had fallen upon the distant city’s outlying districts, and the glow of the fires could be seen, an orange-red shimmering above the forest surrounding the building. In the morning, flakes of ash, a black snow, had drifted onto Pavli’s hands as he’d stood in the hospital’s courtyard. The guards had turned their faces up to the sky, silent as they sniffed the air, nostrils flared for the scent of the war.

The guards were soldiers, and knew. Even here, in this little pocket, that time and the black angels had overlooked. Pavli had come upon the guards in their barracks, huddled near a radio receiver, listening to the forbidden broadcasts of the enemy. They had hardly looked up as Pavli had come into the room and laid another framed photograph upon one of the empty bunks. They ignored him, intent as they were upon the news of the armies that had landed on the shores of Normandy, the Russians who had left the German corpses in the snows around Stalingrad and now marched in the muddy tracks of the tanks heading toward Berlin; a fist of iron squeezing around the Fatherland’s heart, blood leaking between the fingers; the blood of soldiers like them . . .

“Let us review the state of our knowledge.” Ritter laid his pen down on the journal and sat back in his chair. He drained his glass, leaned forward and refilled it, nodding slowly, deep in thought, as his rubbed his thumb over the glass’s rim. “Those things we have determined to be true . . . and those which are still a matter of speculation.”

More ritual, more repeated non-time. Pavli wanted to lay his head down on the corner of the desk, let the alcohol combine with his own fatigue to blot out the aches left from the beating he had received in the Lazarene dormitory a week ago. The blows from those who had been his brethren once . . . it didn’t matter. What was important was to not fall asleep in front of Ritter, to make a show of interest in the doctor’s little lecture, the one he had heard so many times before. The broken tooth in Pavli’s jaw had its uses; he prodded it with his tongue and the resulting stab of pain dispersed most of the fog inside his head.

“The Lazarenes are an ancient breed; that has been established.” Ritter had taken another swallow from his glass, and a flush of blood had risen beneath the greying skin of his face. He looked older now, as though more than two years had settled upon him. “We knew that when we started these most critical investigations.” His gaze looked beyond Pavli, as though he were addressing a lecture hall full of medical students. “Yet at the same time, the general awareness of even their existence is minimal. In this, they show a circumspection, a caution lacking in die Juden.” His voice took on a tone of admiration for his research subjects. “Every effort is made to blend in, to seem no different from the Germans around them. The only distinguishing marks, the ritual tattoos upon the wrists and one side of the ribs, are kept carefully hidden. Undoubtedly, the great majority of Berliners who have come into contact with these people, either socially or on business, were completely unaware that they were talking to members of a distinct genetic and cultural group.”

Pavli nodded, as if he were hearing all this for the first time. Well, of course, he wanted to murmur aloud. With so much murder in their history, the washing of streets with the blood of their ancestors – why wouldn’t the Lazarenes wish to go unnoticed? Do you think we’re such fools? A corner of Pavli’s mouth raised, a smile loosened by the warmth in his gut. The doctor’s proud knowledge – it was all so obvious.

“Thus we see . . .” Ritter took another drink, his gaze glittering brighter, as though the alcohol had begun to seep from beneath his eyelids. “Thus we see how the Lazarenes disappeared into folklore . . . into myths and old legends . . .” He spoke slowly, laying a hand upon the already-written pages of the journal; he might have been piecing together for the first time these words from before. “Stories of pale gypsies who lived forever . . . who shed their skins like snakes and became young again. Some versions maintain that it was the serpent in the garden of Eden who showed the trick to the first Lazarene, the third son of Adam. Others speak of Satan disguising himself as Christ and teaching an unholy, self-inflicted crucifixion, the stigmata of which the Lazarenes still inscribe into their flesh.”

No . . . it was the true Christ, whispered Pavli to himself. He still believed the little scraps of faith he had gleaned from his brother. A few coins of the inheritance that had been stolen from him. It was He who taught us.

Ritter nodded, as though he had heard a respected colleague’s differing opinion. “The Lazarenes, of course, maintain otherwise. They regard themselves as the only bearers of Christ’s actual gospel. The secret of eternal life. The kingdom of God inside the human breast.” He shrugged, taking his hand from the glass to make a dismissive gesture. “But that is all mysticism. Of no . . .” He looked momentarily confused, words eluding him. “Of no value. For we are men of science. Nicht wahr?”

Pavli looked up. “If you say so, Herr Doktor.” The man was drunk; he could see it in the sweating face, the tongue that seemed to have swollen up too large for the other’s mouth. That, too, was time repeating itself. “Whatever you say.” He helped himself to more from the bottle on the desk; this was the point at which Ritter no longer noticed things like that.

“A certain body of knowledge has accrued over the years . . . the Lazaranology, if you will . . .” The lecture to the imagined audience continued. Though now Ritter’s voice seemed to be moving through the incantations of a religious service. “I am not the first to investigate these matters . . . though I have the great fortune of being in a time and place where the truth may be at last determined. The Ahnenerbe has given me its blessing, placed these resources at my disposal. Every resource . . . including the human one . . .” His face darkened, brooding. “Himmler and the others . . . all the leaders of the SS . . . none of them can tell the difference between what I’m doing and their own pet theories. The fat little chicken farmer thinks vegetarianism and mumbling over old runes is as important as this work.” Contempt curdled in Ritter’s voice. “That charlatan Mengele sends them a Jew’s head pickled in a jar, and they’re happy. They add it to their silly museum of such things and think it’s all very scientific.” He snorted in disgust. “No matter. As long as they leave me alone . . . as long as I have been given what I require . . .”

Pavli knew what the doctor meant. What a strange world this was – the small one behind the fences topped with barbed wire – where all these people, the people of his blood, could be given to someone like Herr Doktor Ritter. As something merely required, like the crates of film that arrived from the Agfa labs or the Zeiss lenses wrapped in tissue paper, so that Pavli could carry on with the work he did with the cameras.

There had been changes, though. Ritter had asked if he had any experience with cine cameras, the kind with which motion pictures were made, and he had answered yes, a little. The doctor had smiled and told Pavli that he knew he was lying. But that it didn’t matter; Ritter had already arranged for a Wehrmacht technician to come and show Pavli how to work the clever machine. The instruction had taken no more than a week, but that had been enough. Now Herr Doktor Ritter had films of his surgical procedures to study, as well as the shots that Pavli took with the still camera he had used before.

“No matter . . .” The bottle on the desk was now only a third full. Ritter set his glass back down. “We shall proceed under these circumstances.” His head wobbled a bit as he looked at Pavli for confirmation.

“Yes, Herr Doktor.” A ritual. “As you say . . .” He longed more than ever to lay his head down, or slip from the chair and curl up on the floor, knees close to his chest, forearms hiding his face from the glare of the electric light over Ritter’s desk; burrowing toward the anesthesia of sleep. Though sometimes it seemed like there was no such thing as sleep here – how could there be, when time itself didn’t really exist? Just a wearying round of bad dreams, visions of the things he had seen through the cameras’ viewfinders, sights that woke him trembling and sweating on the narrow cot.

Ritter placed the tips of his fingers together. “Previous investigators into the Lazarene mysteries have speculated that the essential corpus of the faith predates Christianity . . .”

He listened and didn’t listen to the doctor’s voice, the familiar words. There was some comfort to be found in seeing that others, the guards, suffered in ways similar to his own. The lack of true sleep, the immersion into non-time. The soldiers listened to their illicit radio, not to Herr Goebbels’ lies, but to the broadcasts of the Americans and the other armies cutting their way across Europe. They listened though they knew that the words were meant to erode their morale, hollow the courage from their chests; they listened because they knew it was the truth from that other world, the world in which time moved and was real. The world that would swallow this one . . . someday. Matthi had promised him that.

“One researcher into the myths theorized that the Lazarene religious practices dated back to the neolithic shamans. The snake-like shedding of the skin, the indefinite prolonging of human life – these were characterized in certain records as being techniques of both great antiquity and great danger. The skin was characterized as being part of the soul. To remove it, layer by layer, was to become progressively less human; to become a thing without a soul . . .”

The voice droned on, far away. Pavli preferred to think about the guard, one of the younger ones, barely older than himself, who had broken from his suffering. Who had run away, into the forest beyond the fences topped with barbed wire. And had been caught and dragged back to the former hospital; his SS uniform had been torn by brambles, the dirt on his cheeks muddied by his frightened tears. Pavli had watched from the window overlooking the courtyard as Ritter had slapped the boy across the face while two other guards had held him upright between them. The doctor had then placed the muzzle of a pistol over the boy’s heart and fired. The shot ringing out had snapped all the assembled guards’ heads back, a little piece of the war they’d heard approaching on their radio had leapt out of the charred hole in the breast of the boy’s uniform, leapt out and slapped them like the flat of Ritter’s hand. The ones on either side had dropped the corpse between them, a bundle of rags with a boy’s face still registering bewilderment and the beginning of an understanding that could never be put into words.

“Is it the actual, physical skin that the Lazarene beliefs refer to? Or some other, less material substance? Or some combination, a muddling-together of matter and spirit? This is what we must determine . . .”

The SS uniform had been stripped from the boy’s body, but not more than that. The white form had been dragged, with no frightened resistance this time, out to the newest pit that had been dug in a clearing of the forest, and thrown in with the red things lying tangled together there.

“It is at this point that the figure of Christ enters the Lazarene mythos.” Ritter gazed up at the ceiling for a moment before continuing. “Not the pale, ambiguous miracle-worker of the Catholic and various Protestant churches, but a teacher of a specific knowledge. It is unclear whether the Lazarene Christ was one historical personage or a school devoted to the ancient mysteries. That is not important, however. The Lazaranology claims that their Christ, the true Christ, discovered the means of taming the dangerous, soul-destroying practice of shedding the human skin. A spiritual technology was developed that became the rituals of the Lazarene faith; the most visible manifestation of this is the tattooed stigmata that the individuals receive as part of their initiation into adulthood. It is claimed that these marks are not just reminders of Christ’s suffering, but are instrumental in controlling the undesired effects of the skin-shedding. Though there is seemingly no limit to the number of times one of the Lazarenes might undergo this process, the faith requires the members to accept their own eventual deaths, though in the cases of certain of the Lazarene Community’s spiritual elders, this may be after lifetimes measured in centuries.”

Ritter cleared his throat after taking another sip from the glass, as though it contained nothing more than water. “The nature of the Lazarene rituals demands a great cohesiveness in the community. Though the shedding of the skin, and thus the indefinite extension of human life, may be performed without assistance by an individual well-versed in the technique, the controlling rituals must be administered by others. Thus, a Lazarene unwilling to accept his or her death might turn apostate and flee the group, practicing the shedding of the skin on an individual basis – but only at the cost of that person’s soul. Without the controlling rituals given to the Lazarenes by their Christ, the individual suffers the inevitable spiritual degeneration, the loss of one’s human nature.” Ritter nodded slowly. “This is, perhaps, the origin of various folk legends regarding the existence of evil and immortal creatures, both male and female, in human form.”

He believes, thought Pavli. There had never been any question about it. Here in these rooms, Ritter’s office and the surgical laboratory, the smallest of all the worlds where no time moved – a religion of the doctor’s own making was practiced. Herr Doktor Ritter’s faith, the rituals performed with his glittering scalpels and the tweezerlike forceps that gently and with infinite patience pulled the delicate skins away from the flesh beneath. Until where there had been one human form on the narrow table, there was then two, a red thing seeping blood into the cloth beneath it, and an empty skin floating in the shallow basin that Ritter’s assistant had prepared. The face could still be discerned, a man’s or a woman’s or a child’s, a mask with no eyes behind the two holes, no tongue inside the larger opening beneath. Hands like translucent gloves at the end of the hollow arms, long incisions running from the tops of the ribcage to the palms. Breasts and genitals, soft empty things, soaking in the chemical bath that would preserve the thin tissue, keep it pliable and safe from decay, a silken thing that Herr Doktor Ritter could add to the others in his collection. That he could take out and study, bending over it with a jeweler’s loupe set in one eye, noting the subtle variations of the tattooed wounds still visible on what had been the abdomen and the wrists . . .

Pavli felt suddenly nauseous, the alcohol rising up his throat, a choking sourness at the back of his tongue. He shouldn’t have thought of these things, remembered; the solace of being drunk had been burned away by them. He could feel again his cracked rib, the broken tooth in his jaw, the ache of his bruised flesh; for a moment, he felt himself falling to the wooden planks of the dormitory floor, curling into a ball under the blows and kicks from the Lazarene men. From beneath the arm shielding his face, he had been just able to see their faces twisting with rage, nostrils flaring at the smell of blood they caught from him. And farther back, against the wall of the spinning room, his brother Matthi, struggling against the others that restrained him, kept him from coming to Pavli’s aid. The Lazarene men, the ones who were left of their number, had continued pouring their revenge out on Pavli, their fists like rocks tumbling down a mountainside. The toe of a boot had lifted him up for a moment, before he had collapsed to the floor again; that had been the impact that had broken his rib. The lance of pain had blinded him; through a red haze he had seen the guards, alerted by the shouts, rush into the dormitory and pull aside the Lazarenes before they had been able to kill him. Their shouts, not his; he had stayed silent the whole time, though the words had filled his mouth. He had wanted to cry out that it was their fault, they had spurned him, cast him aside, refused to make him one of their own, a bearer of the secrets they shared among themselves. They had only themselves to blame if he had let the doctor have his way, make him into an accomplice, the camera as much an instrument of murder as the scalpel in Ritter’s hand. The thin blade lifted the skin away from the flesh, looking for the secret of life, and the lens peered into the wound, finding only death.

“What we must determine . . .” Ritter slouched lower in his chair. “We must not rest until we find . . . until we . . .” His slurring voice could barely crawl across his tongue. “Until . . .” His hand knocked over the empty bottle. He gazed stupidly at it rolling off the edge of the desk and thumping on the floor.

Until what? The words were loud inside Pavli’s head, words that were even harder to hold back than his accusation against his fellow Lazarenes. You fool – he wanted to reach over the desk and slap the older man’s face, snap him awake from his alcoholic fog. The drink in Pavli’s veins had turned to fire. He could have stood up and towered over the doctor, sodden head drooping over the scribbled pages of his research journal, reached down and snatched the book from Ritter’s hands, flung it against the office’s wall. A fool, an idiot, to think that his scalpels could find that for which he searched. There was no way to make them tell, to force the Lazarenes to reveal their secrets. Neither their living tongues or their mute corpses spoke of these things – Pavli could testify to that.

The foolish doctor had thought he could raise ghosts through surgery, set free the wavering forms that drifted in the night sky, the murmuring voices, the sleeping faces of memories and dreams, the thin, insubstantial fragments of the deaths the Lazarenes had discarded. Perhaps Ritter had thought he could capture them like smoke in a bottle; pull the cork and drink of them, death in his mouth making him as immortal as the alcohol in his gut had made him wise. The lecture he gave to the eager medical students he imagined before him would be his triumph and vindication; his words would ring out louder and more compelling than those of the Führer; he’d rip open his SS officer’s uniform and stand before them in pale, radiant nakedness, the emblems of Christ’s passion writhing under one arm and over both wrists, the visible sign of his hard-won immortality. The students’ mouths would gape as wide as those of the red, wet faces in the forest’s pit, as he would split open his own skin, fingers tugging inside his breastbone, and step forward reborn. A ghost with his face would slide its empty hands across the ceiling of the lecture hall . . .

“It’s dangerous to know such things . . .” Ritter’s voice moved even more slowly, a blind man fumbling at the doors inside his skull. “There are reasons that the Lazarenes, when they could be found, were persecuted over the centuries. Their faith . . . they believe that Christ Himself was murdered by the Roman authorities for imparting the secret of the controlling rituals. The shroud that was found in the tomb three days after the Crucifixion was in fact His skin, the final mortal part of Him left after the spirit had departed . . .”

It had only been from Ritter that Pavli had heard that story. His brother Matthi had never spoken of such things.

“Once there might have been whole tribes who shared the Lazarene knowledge, entire cities that other so-called Christians reviled as dens of heresy . . . their stones were pulled one from the other . . . mounded corpses put to the torch . . .”

Pavli could close his eyes and see that, the flames and the black smoke. As easily as closing his eyes and seeing in memory the pit dug in the forest clearing, the raw-fleshed bodies that had been hauled there by the guards, the fire leaping up with the toss of a burning rag. The guards had stepped back with the empty petrol containers in their hands, raising arms to shield their faces from the sudden wash of heat, or turning away to gag and then vomit, spines hunched and guts rebelling against the smell too much like charred bacon.

They had made him help carry the bodies to the pit. Those who had once been his brethren. That was why he had gone to the dormitory of the Lazarene men. He had wanted to see his brother, to talk with Matthi, but he had known that the stink of the burning was still upon him, the mark of the black angel’s hand, the angel that had mounted across the forest’s tangled sky like a shroud. That stink, and the smell of the blood and chemicals from the surgery. The men had been surprised by his coming among them; the guards had let him past and he had closed the door behind himself. In the darkness, the first part of the night, he had felt their eyes turn toward him, the gaze of the few scattered among now so many empty beds. Then the men had fallen upon him, as his brother had shouted and tried to reach him, to stop them from killing him in their wrath. And he had said nothing, he had accepted their blows and kicks. There had been no words in his mouth, no accusation against them. He had known, as he had tumbled into unconsciousness, that this was the absolution he had come to the dormitory to find.

Matthi had come to him before dawn. As Pavli had lain on the cot in the darkroom, he had heard his name whispered. He had opened his eyes as best he could – the left one was swollen nearly shut from the beating – then winced when Matthi had touched his brow. “I’m sorry,” Matthi had said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

It didn’t matter. Pavli had wondered if he were dreaming – how had his brother gotten out of the Lazarene dormitory? Then he had seen, through the darkroom’s open doorway, one of the guards nervously keeping watch down the corridor. Several of the SS men had begun doing such little services for their captives, currying favor with those who might soon be their accusers.

“You’ll be all right.” Kneeling beside the cot, Matthi had drawn the thin blanket under Pavli’s chin. “Just rest.” He had leaned closer, his voice soft and urgent. “Listen. It won’t be much longer. It can’t be. Things are happening, great things – out there.” He hand nodded toward the corridor’s window. The hard, cold moonlight of winter slipped through the bars. “Then it will be all over.”

Pavli sat close to the edge of Ritter’s desk, his hand upon an empty glass, and remembered what his brother had whispered to him in that night. How strange, that his brother still believed that time could move again. That it had not been killed, taken apart by the doctor’s scalpel, the same as those who had slept in the now-empty beds.

His brother’s voice had touched his ear. “You must hold out just a little while longer. The Americans or the British or the Russians – one of those will reach here soon, and then the war will be over for us. We’ll be free.”

Silly Matthi – Pavli smiled to himself. Matthi believed the things that happened in that world beyond the barbed-wire fence – the armies whose advance was noted on the guards’ hidden radio – all that could somehow come inside this little world. How could they? Those things happened in time, and here there was no time.

“We must survive . . .” His brother’s whisper, even softer in his memory. “Soon . . . any day now . . . it’ll be all over. And we’ll still be alive. Pavli . . .” A hand had prodded the shoulder beneath the blankets. “Do you hear me?”

Yes . . . He hunched forward in the chair by Ritter’s desk, listening. “Yes . . .” He had turned his bloodied head upon the cot, his cheek against his brother’s palm.

“You must do whatever it takes,” had said Matthi. “To survive. You understand that, don’t you? The others . . . they’ll understand someday. There’s so few of us left now . . .”

Perhaps there would be only the two of them left, at the end. After all the others, the Lazarene men, the women and the children, after they all had been brought, one by one, up to the surgery. And after what was left of them had been taken away. After the red things in the forest pit had been set alight and the black smoke had spread across the sky. Ritter knew that Pavli and Matthi were brothers, the closest possible blood; he knew all things like that, they were written down in another one of his black-bound notebooks. Perhaps that would be Pavli’s reward for his faithful service to Ritter, for his working with the cameras in the surgery and later with the film in the darkroom. Ritter would spare Pavli’s brother, and the two of them, he and Matthi, would walk out the gate of the fences topped with barbed wire. That would be in the spring that would follow this endless winter. When time stepped across the land again . . .

“There is no time.”

The remembrance of Pavli’s brother whispering to him in the night now slipped away, the same as Matthi stepping back into the darkness and returning to the Lazarene dormitory. Pavli raised his head and gazed at the man on the other side of the desk. The doctor had drunk too much and it hadn’t helped.

“No time,” mumbled Ritter again. His face seemed even older and more leaden. “No time to waste . . . if we are going to find out . . . everything . . .”

You poor fool, thought Pavli. The doctor still didn’t understand, didn’t realize how mired in non-time he was. Months ago – or had it been years? – Pavli had pried open the last crate that had been delivered to the darkroom and had found, not cartons and reels of blank film, ready to be used, but rubble and bricks wrapped in crumpled newspapers. He’d examined the crate more closely and had seen the marks of where it had been opened and re-nailed, the contents looted somewhere between the Agfa factory and the asylum. The black market in the cities devoured everything. That had presented Pavli with a dilemma: what use would Ritter have for a photographer with an empty camera?

“No time . . .”

For the last two months, long after his stock of film had been exhausted, Pavli had gone on recording the sessions in the surgical laboratory – or pretending to; first with no film for the stills, then none in the chattering cine camera. Pavli had offered up for Ritter’s inspection prints made from old negatives, segments of film that had been made at the beginning of the doctor’s research. The dissection of one corpse looked much like another; Pavli varied the old photographs and reels of film he showed to the doctor, being careful to match the pictures of a previous male subject to the latest one, and female to female, one child to another of roughly the same age. Ritter had suspected nothing – by now his obsessions had locked around him. He gave only a cursory glance to Pavli’s work, late at night in this office, then returned to the collection of skins, each with the Lazarene tattoos at the wrists and along the larger thoracic sections. The empty human forms floated in their basins of preserving chemicals or, the process completed, lay folded like strange, pale banners in the surgery’s neatly labelled cabinets. Only Ritter’s loving touch gave them any life, as he lifted the thin tissues closer to his gaze.

He didn’t know; Pavli felt sorry for him. Time and its ghosts had escaped from the doctor. Leaving him with the dead, that could not be brought to life again. No Christ would reach his hand down into the burning grave. Ritter would cut, the scalpel lifting the skin on its narrow blade, and it would be the same corpse before him, over and over, this world without end . . .

“Yes . . .” Pavli nodded slowly, feeling how old and tired he himself had become. A thread of dawn light had appeared at the window, like an incision. “Yes, you’re right, Herr Doktor.” Ritter had fallen asleep at last, the lecture over, except perhaps in his muddled dreaming; he’d lain his head on his arm upon the desk.

“You’re right . . .” Pavli reached down and picked up the empty bottle, setting it where Ritter wouldn’t trip over it when he awoke. “There is no time.”

NINETEEN

“Where is she?”

The assistant director looked over his shoulder at von Behren. “I don’t know.” He had his right arm in a sling, a casualty of last night’s bombing raid on the city. With an awkwardly balanced clipboard and the messy pile of the shooting script, he was trying to inventory the damage to the studio, which sets had been damaged and which were still intact enough to be filmed around. “No one’s seen her since we left the shelter.”

Von Behren spine bent beneath the tonnage of his worries. His nerves were still on edge from the hours of darkness, crouched like a rabbit in a hole while the earth shuddered with concussive blows. Concrete dust had sifted down from the cracks spreading through the shelter’s arched ceiling. The smell of human sweat in a closed space, a sputtering paraffin lamp that had been lit when the bare overhead bulbs had dimmed and finally gone out, a woman – not one of his actresses, thank God – who had gone hysterical in the brief interval of darkness, her half-drunken husband ineffectually soothing her, screams turning at last to a muffled sobbing . . . and all the while, listening to a giant walking the empty streets above them, each bomb impact a footstep that leveled a building. The giant had stridden off to the east, the night bombers completing their pass and wheeling over empty countryside, away from the flak guns, to head back to their home bases. One of the worst raids so far – von Behren, his crew and actors, had emerged from their hole in the ground, half-expecting to see nothing but rubble in all directions.

He was grateful that the studio with his sets had taken only an indirect hit. The banks of skylights had all been shattered, a layer of broken glass sparkling across the floors and props. The carpenters had worked all morning covering the empty frames overhead with thin canvas; it gave the interior of the studio a muted yellowish light that reminded him of the age-browned pages of the book of old folk tales sitting on his desk. Perhaps it would show up well on film, softening the edges of the captured images; he had asked one of the cameramen to set up for a test reel. The most important thing would be how Marte would look. Only when he had sent instructions for her to be made up and laced into the period medieval costume had he found out that she was missing. Again.

“Send someone out to find her.” Von Behren looked across the sound stages and the hum of activity they held, push brooms sweeping up the last of the debris, the set painters mending a backdrop that had fallen and snagged on a brace of floodlights. “I suspect we’ll have a few hours of quiet before the Americans come overhead.” That was the schedule by which everyone in Berlin lived now: the British bombers concealed in darkness, the Americans flying brazenly by daylight. As winter began slowly unlocking into a damp spring, the pounding of the city had become such a regular occurrence that any respite, a day when the sirens didn’t herald the planes’ approach, seemed more agonizing than an actual raid, nerves tightening in anticipation. “Perhaps we can get something on film before we all have to scurry away into that wretched burrow.”

“Of course.” The assistant director raised an eyebrow. “And where should we have someone look for Fraulein Helle?”

The other’s smile annoyed von Behren. “Please. The usual places – all right?” On top of his other burdens, he didn’t need all these arch, knowing comments. “If you’re not aware of them by now, I’m sure we can find someone on the crew who is.” Any of them, as a matter of fact; Marte’s renewed affair with the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the main topic of the whispered gossip on the set.

That affair, the secret and public love between Reichminister Goebbels and the actress he had made the queen of the German cinema – just as he had promised – was both a curse and a blessing to von Behren. How could a mere film director interfere with the Reichsminister’s demands upon his leading lady’s time and body? It made the shooting schedule difficult, trying to squeeze moments between the air raids and Goebbels’ lusts – it was no wonder the frustrated crew was given to remarks.

At the same time, they all wouldn’t be here, in the first stages of filming Der Rote Jäger, if it weren’t for that affair. The little favor that Marte owed to von Behren, or that he had managed to convince her that she owed, or that she had been willing to pretend that she believed she did, had come in at last. It had taken this long, the four years and more since they had returned here to Berlin, he to his old office at UFA’s Babelsberg complex, she to Goebbels’ feverish embrace –

(And where was the little boy, for whose sake Marte had come back? That lying bastard, von Behren thought whenever he saw a newspaper picture of Goebbels or heard his ranting voice on the radio. But he also noted the still sadness grown even more visible in Marte’s face, that made her even lovelier and more devastating to all men’s hearts.)

– and the dreaming of those who saw her on the screens of the darkened theaters. They bought their tickets and vanished for a few hours into that darkness, into that light, once more into the stillness of Marte Helle’s gaze. She had returned to them, and that was all that mattered; the words that von Behren wrote for her to say were unimportant. The Reichsminister, in his role as de facto head of the German film industry, had more than personal reasons to give her anything for which she might ask. She had given him von Behren’s script for Der Rote Jäger, with her part carefully noted in the margins. Goebbels’ antipathy for the fantastic, that deep Teutonic world of witches and demons, Faust and Der Golem and old Murnau’s Nosferatu, had finally been overcome; he had commissioned Münchhausen to commemorate UFA’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a special effects showpiece using Agfa’s newly developed color film, all intended to outshine the Englishman Korda’s Thief of Bagdad and even Gone with the Wind, that the American Jew Selznick had produced so brilliantly. The premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo, just before that theater had been lost to the bombs, had been enough of a success to justify more things along those lines. Perhaps Goebbels had decided that if those were the films that the German people wanted to see now, that’s what they should be given. The more time they spent in the dark shelters of the theaters, the less they would see of their own city streets, battered by the fleets of planes overhead, that Goering’s Luftwaffe was powerless to stop.

Or perhaps there was no calculation at all on Goebbels’ part; von Behren wondered if the Reichsminister had lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Perhaps it had all become the same to him – the great cynic, the manipulator of men who could have just as easily pulled the puppet strings for the Communists or been a film director himself. Whole divisions of the German army, or what was left of it, had been taken away from fighting real battles and then been costumed like Prussian regiments of the Napoleonic Wars, charging up and down hills for the big scenes of that pandering hack Veit Harlan’s Kolberg epic. Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi bigwigs obviously preferred the heroic past to this present that was falling in rubble around their ears. Of course, that golden past was as much a fantasy as any specter concocted in a film story. Once the door into those other worlds had been opened inside Goebbels’ head, then it had been easy enough for Marte, at von Behren’s off-screen urging – she still did what he asked her to; she was still grateful to him, though he was no longer sure why – to whisper to her lover, across the pillow of whatever bed she and Goebbels shared. About the script von Behren had written for her, the medieval fantasy concerning the red huntsman, the punisher of those who violated the ancient laws that bound men and their prey together. She had even given him a set of photographs from the costume test that von Behren had arranged, showing her in the long period gown, with its belt knotted intricately at her waist, her white-gold hair braided in the fashion of the maidens in the old woodcuts. Von Behren suspected that it was those photos alone that had secured Goebbels’ approval for the project; the Reichsminister wanted to see that vision of beauty come to life on the screen. Not enough to hold her naked in his arms, the woman all men desired; every fantasy had to be made real.

That was the insanity of the National Socialists, their Frevel, and now Goebbels had succumbed to it with the others. Very well; in that sense, the head of the German film industry was no different from Herr David Wise or any other man of power and money whose approval von Behren had to obtain before making a film. The Reich’s film office, upon the instructions of its head, had bestowed a nice fat production budget upon von Behren – this close to the Apocalypse that everyone could sense was coming, what did mere money signify? – with the only condition that the principal shooting was to be done here in Berlin. Of course, the only reason for that was to keep her here, close by Goebbels – it was so obvious that any other explanation wasn’t even bothered with, nothing about her wanting to remain and boost morale among her fellow Berliners or some similar nonsense.

Von Behren had had no objection; there was more than enough money in the budget to have the sets built on the UFA sound stages, elaborate reproductions of a medieval castle’s parapets and banquet halls, massive stones that were really nothing more than wood and canvas daubed with clay. And it kept him and his crew here in Berlin, where there was still a semblance of order and the familiar, despite the bombing raids; the electricity cut out for only a few hours each day, and the food rations were small but still obtainable. God knew what the conditions had become out there in the Reich’s shrinking empire; terrible stories of starvation and grislier deaths were carried into the city by the refugees streaming in from the east. A good number of Berliner Hausfrauen had taken to carrying knives in their handbags, not to defend themselves with, but to slash their own throats before the inevitable rape at the hands of the Russian soldiers. All Goebbels’ propaganda had successfully terrorized the women about what their fate would be; the men merely expected to be killed, and perhaps dismembered and eaten. Von Behren knew that wasn’t likely, but as a practical matter, there wasn’t a real castle where the shooting could have been done that hadn’t already been overrun and turned into a command headquarters by the Allied armies.

“So what shall we do now?” The assistant director, with the script cradled in his plaster armcast, was still standing next to von Behren; one of the assistant’s assistants had gone to snoop after the missing Marte Helle. “While we wait?”

Von Behren sighed as he looked around the studio interior. Most of the cleaning up had been finished, just in the last few minutes. That same sense of urgency – of time running out, life and work that had to be squeezed in between bombing raids – motivated everyone here. It seemed strange, but not really when he thought about it, how much more he himself had accomplished, scripts on paper and films in the can, since he had come back with Marte to Berlin and the war. When he had been in Hollywood, that sunny paradise, it had been easy to believe that time was infinite, stretching out in all directions like the golden light that buttered the hills. Even with no money in the bank and dependent upon the continued indulgence of Herr David Wise, he had taken whole days and weeks off to sit in the backyard of his little bungalow and re-read his childhood book of Märchen. When the thick, warm air had sent him drowsing, the old stories had come into his dreams; the red hunter had stalked him through a sun-dappled forest, not to catch and punish him, but to gather him up, a child again, and lift him to the face concealed inside the hood of stitched animal furs, a kiss in that small darkness . . .

“Sir?” The assistant’s polite, patient voice broke into von Behren’s drifting thoughts, the memory of a dream that had always ended before the last of its secrets had been revealed. “What is it you would like us to do now?”

He wasn’t blinking into the soft Californian sunshine, just thrown out of his own dreaming; he was in Berlin, always in Berlin, in what everyone knew was the last and hardest winter of the war. A wind sharpened with ice cut through the canvas nailed over the broken skylights.

“Yes . . .” He nodded slowly, rousing himself. “I’d like to . . . I’d like to do some exterior shots.” He knew there would be time enough for that, at least; it would be hours yet before Marte returned and any filming could be done with her. “Out in the streets. There were things I saw this morning . . . they might be something we can use.” A sector of residential blocks near the studio had been transformed by the bombs and fire, from Berlin of 1945 to a blackened, timeless vista, the bones of the city stripped of their modern flesh. He would have to see how they looked on film; the ruins might serve better than any construction from the carpenters and painters, for the final sequences of Der Rote Jäger, when the spectral figure’s wrath had laid waste the village and countryside of the sinning lords of the castle. Further proof, if any were needed, that Goebbels had not even read the script that Marte had taken to him; he had merely given his approval as a present to her. If poor Frank Wysbar could get into trouble for the black horsemen in his Fährmann Maria, those bringers of death too close to the real SS to be allowed, then surely the Reichsminister would have suspected a metaphor in the Rote Jäger script, a defeatist prediction of the Reich’s encircling fate.

Or perhaps Goebbels had indeed read it. Von Behren wondered if the dramatist inside Goebbels’ soul had embraced the apocalypse as the fitting conclusion to this great film he had written, the one that had taken all the world for its sets.

It little mattered now. His old friend Wysbar had made his escape to America, where he at least had had the good sense to hunker down and stay. The last von Behren had heard, Wysbar had been having a hard time finding work; there were too many German refugees under the palm trees for all of them to be hired. And here I am, he mused, and I can make all the films I want. For a while, at least; while there’s still time. So who’s the fool now? Von Behren pulled his coat tighter around himself as he watched the studio doors being rolled back, the cameras being readied for the grey, wintry light outside.

* * *

He had made love to her in so many different rooms. And outside as well, on the grounds of his Schwanenwerder estate, soft grass still warm from the passage of the summer day, the lights of a reception inside the grand house visible through the overhanging branches of the night-shaded trees. Everywhere it had happened, where she without will had let it happen, on velvet couches or beds that he had once shared and would share again with his wife – they were all the same place, the tiniest room, the darkness behind her eyelids. She closed her eyes and went in there, leaving him in the world outside that held her body.

“It is sad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s voice came to her, close beside where she stood on a carpet littered with rubble. “I can barely stand to look at it myself. They’ve done such damage here . . .”

Marte opened her eyes and looked across the high-ceilinged room. The intricate cornices and plasterwork above had come crashing down, into dust and white crumbling fragments, revealing the skeletal girders and ragged patches of sky beyond. Snow had fallen through, melting and then freezing into grey mirrors on the floor. Through the frames of the shattered windows that had filled one wall, scraping mechanical noises and faint voices could be heard, the clean-up squadrons filling in the bomb craters on the Wilhelmstraße below. The corpses had been dug out from the hills of fallen brick and taken away, in the first hours of quiet after the planes had departed, while the fires in the other parts of the city were still being extinguished.

A gloved hand ran across one of the empty shelves; Joseph looked at the dust on his fingertips. He had on his trench coat, belted over his severe National Socialist uniform. “You see?” He turned back toward Marte. “This is why we had to move the ministry’s staff down to the basements. Impossible to do any work here, under these conditions; my own home is now an annex for at the ministry’s senior officials. But this arrangement will not last forever.” His gaze swept across the room, taking in the now-ragged wallpaper, the blank spot where the portrait of the Führer had hung, the empty space where his own ornate desk had stood. She could see him transforming it all in his mind, one set being struck and a new and grander one being erected in its place. “When the war has been concluded, and we can turn our attention once more to the rebuilding of our nation . . . this will all be different. And better.” Joseph nodded in satisfaction at what he alone could see. The future. A gesture of his hand took in the entire room. “There are great plans . . . the ministry, this building itself will be gone, replaced by one of such splendor . . .” He smiled at her. “Those whom you knew in America, those Hollywood Juden such as David Wise . . . nothing of theirs will compare to what we will achieve here. Soon . . .”

Strange, to hear David’s name come from Joseph’s mouth. She knew there was still some jealousy there, even though he had been the victor. One thing to share her in the dreams of men who saw her on the screen, another to think of a Jewish film mogul – a real one, a prince of Hollywood, the exact creature Joseph had modeled himself after – running his manicured hands over her skin, drinking in her kiss. Joseph had all that now, but he could still speak his rival’s name with venom.

She thought about him, the other, for a moment. David . . . she had seen him last in a newsreel, one of the many that Joseph’s propaganda writers and filmmakers churned out for the German theaters. A piece about how the American film industry was controlled by Jews, all part of that great international conspiracy. The wicked lies they used to deceive the American public – or at least that fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan part of it – so they could go on raking in their bloodstained profits while sending innocent, handsome youths to their senseless deaths in Europe. The narrator had been some anonymous UFA hack, but Marte had heard Joseph’s voice, speaking his strident, battering words. He must have had a hand in it, or even written it personally; her own image had shown up on the screen, old footage of her disembarking at the Templehof airfields, a virtuous German heroine who had fled in disgust from Hollywood and the rich, hook-nosed lechers who ran it. Her face had looked tired as she had come down the steps from the JU-52’s door, from the long flight out of Lisbon, but the voice – Joseph’s voice – had hinted darkly of some lingering sadness at what the judischen Zuhälters had forced her to do while she had been in their thrall. No doubt the blood of the German males who watched the newsreel had quickened at the thought, and they could even feel virtuous while their groins tingled; such was Joseph’s mastery with words. The newsreel had ended with a still photo, taken from an American newspaper, of those rich Jewish film moguls, all in dinner jackets and with thick cigars in their hands, smiling and laughing among themselves at some USO fundraiser. David had been the youngest man in the photo, but even so, she had barely been able to recognize him. He had put on weight, and the dark, curly hair she remembered had thinned and greyed, just in these last few years of the war – as if he were turning into one of the men on either side of him, men old enough to be his father. His eyes hadn’t been laughing; even in the grainy newsprint blown up on the screen, Marte had been able to see the simmering anger under his brow. They seemed hard, mean-spirited eyes now, a rich man’s eyes, as though he had become exactly that which Joseph’s propaganda spoke of, a grasping figure of money and power.

“Yes,” said Marte slowly; she felt Joseph watching her, waiting for her to speak. “I’m sure it will be . . . magnificent . . .” She drew the fur wrap closer around her shoulders, against the chill lancing in through the broken windows.

Joseph went on talking; she watched him now as he stood overlooking the street, his raised hand and words sketching in the wonders that would be built in the new Berlin. He had changed as well, but not the way David had; Joseph’s face looked as if the flesh beneath the skin had been cut away with an invisible knife, the edges of bone growing sharper, ready to break through. She had been sitting a few days ago with some of the actors and stagehands at the studio, drinking ersatz coffee and waiting for von Behren to finish blocking out a sequence of camera movements, when Joseph’s voice had replaced the music coming from the radio. “That ranting skull,” a younger actress had sneered, glancing from the corner of her eye at Marte, as though defying the other woman to say anything. But Marte had said nothing; it was true, Joseph did look like a death’s-head. The shrill fury of his voice, when he spoke over the radio or at a mass rally, had burned away all the soft tissue, like a rendering fire. When he kissed her now, his fingertips stroking her cheek and neck, she would close her eyes and be unable to keep from seeing an old woodcut, Dürer’s Tod und das Mädchen, a skeleton embracing the flesh of its love.

“You’re so quiet.” Joseph stood before her, hands touching her hair on either side, his face lowered to try and look into her eyes. “I’m sorry I brought you here . . . I didn’t realize it would upset you so.”

“It’s all right . . . I don’t mind . . .” She wasn’t upset; it was merely an empty room, filled with broken rubble. There were spaces like this all over Berlin. The streets themselves were graveyards and ruins. “If this is what you want . . .” The building itself was silent, though she knew there a few of Joseph’s trusted men nearby, standing guard to ensure that no one intruded upon them. “To be here . . .”

He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close to himself. “But of course, this place has such memories for us – does it not?”

His voice had become an actor’s now, a leading man mouthing bad dialogue. What Herr Wise and the others she had worked with in America would have laughed at and called pure corn, even when they had written it themselves. But she knew things like that, old movies, were there inside his head, a sentimental streak that revealed itself when he lapsed into being human for a moment.

“Of course, Joseph . . .” She closed her eyes at the nearness of him. “Whatever you say . . .”

“We’ve had many hours together here. That’s why it grieves my heart to see it this way.”

That was true; there had been many times when she had come back with him to this office, late at night when there had been no one about to see them. After one of his speeches or a broadcast or some other moment of triumph, his voice hammering the souls of German men and women into the shapes he wished them to take; she would wait for him in his chauffeured car outside the Sportspalast or the Rundfunk Haus, wait for him until he was finished and ready for her alone, the blood surging in his thin body. While his wife Magda and their brood of blond children slept at home, a bottle and a tray of cold delicacies would have been set out here for him and his personal guest, his aides withdrawing discreetly behind the ministry’s tall doors.

He led her to the couch at the side of the room. It had already been cleared of the debris that had fallen from the ceiling and walls, but the embroidered cushions were still coated with plaster dust. Even as she let herself be drawn down beside him, his hand pushing the wrap away from her neck, part of her was making a mental note, to remember to brush off the back of her dress, to make it easier for Joseph’s driver and anyone else to pretend not to know what had taken place.

“You’re so lovely,” he murmured at her ear. “That hasn’t changed . . . that never changes . . .”

She knew that was true; she could see it in the mirror of his gaze. It must be true; she wouldn’t exist otherwise. If her beauty had died, she would only have been the ghost of that woman she had seen in Joseph’s and David’s eyes, and up on the radiant screen in the darkened theaters.

He pressed her down against the cushions, his other hand having drawn up the hem of her dress, his palm and trembling fingers curved against the bare skin above the top of her stocking.

“Always . . .”

She didn’t know what he meant when he said that. Inside herself, in a little room behind her closed eyelids, she waited until it would be all over. Over for that other woman, the one with Marte Helle’s face.

Afterward, Joseph drew his trench coat, that he had unbelted and discarded on the floor, over them like a blanket. He held her close, the disarray of her dress and his uniform crushed between them. The winter chill in the ruined office had made it impossible for him to have her naked, as was his usual preference.

In that, he was like David, or perhaps like all men – she didn’t know. And in another way, the darkening of his mood when it was over, as though some bright and still-living part of him had died.

“How many more times,” murmured Joseph. “For us . . . to be like this.” He smiled sadly as he brushed a lock of her hair away from where it had fallen across her eyes. “Perhaps . . . perhaps this is the last time.”

He had said that before – his taste for the dramatic, the gestures and words of tragedies – but now Marte wondered if it might have become true. There was so little time left; everyone knew that. For the war, for everyone here in Berlin.

There was a question she had to ask him, the same one as before, the one she always asked afterward. She let that happen, she waited in the little room inside herself until it was all over, and she could have what she wanted. An answer.

“Where is my son?” She laid the side of her head against his chest, a pillow of stone. Careful to avoid letting him look into her eyes, to see anything there. Her voice as well; she had learned so much about being an actress from von Behren, about hiding things rather than showing them. “My baby . . .”

She had received different answers to that question before, some more satisfying than others. Sometimes Joseph had had photographs, rushed-looking blurry ones or those that had been carefully posed, all of them showing the same little boy, her child. There had even been one, a studio shot, with him in miniature Alpine lederhosen, white stockings drawn to below his knees, his face bright and laughing at whatever funny business the photographer had used to catch his attention; Joseph had had it enlarged and mounted in a frame bright with gold leaf, and had urged her to take it as a gift. But she wouldn’t; she had known it would have broken her heart every time she had taken it out of some secret place and looked at it.

Joseph stroked her hair. “I’m sure the child is all right –”

His soft words made her stiffen in his arms. She pushed herself away so she could look into his face. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing; nothing at all, my love.” His voice became even more soothing. “There’s nothing to worry about –”

“Something’s happened to him.” It would have been so easy for Joseph to lie to her, to lie completely, to have spoken the same words he had used so many times before. But there was a reason for every word from his mouth; he must have wanted her to catch the thread of doubt in these. “Where is he?” The winter air from the empty window-frames chilled her skin as she raised herself against the back of the sofa. “Where’s my son?”

Joseph shook his head. “You must remember, Marte, that we are in wartime. The Reich is pressed from all sides by its enemies. The Bolshevik hordes march in from the east . . .” His voice had risen, as though he had been addressing a rally or the microphone of one of his radio broadcasts. “You must understand; until we have turned the tide, until that victory is ours – and it will be – and we can sweep the interlopers from our soil . . . until then, there is confusion and disorder. You know how the refugees have come streaming into this city . . . my city; you’ve seen them. Where did you think they came from?” Shrill now, even a little angry, as though he were chiding her for her foolishness. “They are the lucky ones, those who managed to get away with their few scraps of belongings, their suitcases and their handcarts, all that they could manage to carry away with them – and sometimes not even that, nothing more than their empty hands and bellies. They ran from the animals in their tanks and heavy boots, Asiatic beasts . . .” Joseph’s lip curled in disgust. “And some were not so fortunate; some waited too long to gather their things and flee. The women make their way here with the blood still running down their legs, their white breasts clawed by black fingernails, their eyes still vacant from the sight of their husbands and brothers killed for attempting to protect them, and what happened to them after their murderers stepped over those corpses.” He nodded, his own eyes grim-set. “So be it; I will take them in and care for them, and soon there will be revenge for such violations. But in the meantime . . .”

She had heard those stories before, the sexual appetites of the Russian soldiers. That was what women spoke of, in the shelters during the air raids, as if to make welcome a direct hit from a bomb, one that end their lives in quick fury, before the rape-mad armies could enter the city. She had paid little attention; none of it mattered to her. It was all like the recounting of another person’s dream, news from a world barely connected to this one. But now . . .

“That’s where he is, then.” Her voice sounded hollow, lifeless, even inside herself. “That’s what has happened to my baby. Left behind, forgotten . . .” Abandoned. Snow drifted across the glass teeth set in the jaws of the window-frames. All this world was in winter, from which it could never awaken.

“No, no; you’re wrong.” Joseph held her by the shoulders, a doll limp in his hands. “She’ll bring him here. The one to whom he was given – she’s strong. Stronger . . . stronger than you.” He said the last in a whisper. “You’ll see. She’ll take care of your child. She’s devoted to him, she always has been, from the beginning; she loves him as though he were her own child. Your little boy’s safe with her, wherever she is. Tomorrow, or the next day – soon – she’ll be here with him. There are still divisions of the German army in those regions to the east; their duty is to protect the civilian population and see that they reach sanctuary as quickly as possible. They’ll arrive here in Berlin safe and sound, and –” His voice rose, trying to instill his own excitement into her. “You’ll be able to see him! Not just a photograph, but a child you can hold in your arms! She’ll give him back to you . . . her task will have been completed . . .”

You liar. She hated him now, knew that she had always hated him. For lying to her, for telling her the truth, for any word that came from his thin-lipped serpent’s mouth. He had wanted her to know that her child was lost, that the war had broken over him like an ocean wave, the tide that now was flooding this little island’s shores; a wave red as blood, that had dragged her child out into the depths to drown. Perhaps it had happened already, weeks or months ago – why would Joseph tell her now? To crack open whatever was left of her heart, to kill her . . .

To say goodbye to her.

To say goodbye to everything; he knew, he had read the last pages of the filmscript, the one he himself had written, the one for which he had cast the Führer as the leading man. Though that was a star that had flickered and gone out, run to ground in a concrete hole beneath the Chancellery’s rubble-strewn garden, a sick and aging little man pushing imaginary armies across tattered maps; Joseph had told her what had become of him. Now, in the midst of the burnt or crumbling stage-scenery of Berlin, Joseph was himself the star; he was the only one of the Nazi hierarchy to show his face in the battered streets of the city, going from one bomb site to another, the center of the crowds pressing close to him, the ones who had always adored him and the grumblers who now had to confess they admired his strange and persistent courage . . . or craziness, whatever one wanted to call it. The smoldering ruins suited him; they were sufficiently dramatic. Most of the other bigwigs had fled, looking for safety in the west; when the end came, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Russians. Only a few had gone underground with the Führer. Joseph’s cast had failed him, abandoned their roles, even the one for whom he written the grandest, most heroic part. To save the production, as Marte had heard von Behren and the others mirthlessly joking at the studio, Joseph now had to play everything himself. He was enough of an egotist to do that. The final scenes could now be shot, with no camera but the human eye, here in the streets of Berlin.

This great film, the warping of reality to the vision unreeling inside Joseph’s head – she knew that was all that mattered to him now. And perhaps now there was no role in it for the Reichsminister’s romantic infatuation. She would have to be eliminated, this illicit affair clashing with the hero’s public image he attempted to project.

There was only one way Joseph could do that. In this he was weak, that he couldn’t say goodbye to her, he couldn’t turn her away. He had stretched his hands halfway around the world, to gather her back to himself; there would be no way he could give her up with a few curt words. But other words could do it for him. The truth, when he could so easily have lied to her again, told her that her child was safe, here is another photograph of him, doesn’t he look happy? Joseph was a master of words; he had meant to let it slip out – I’m sure the child is all right – those words just enough to tell her, to tell her everything. And to let her hate him, to let that hate free at last. A hate that freed her from him.

Without her child, that small life, in his grasp, he no longer had any hold over her. With just those few words, he had told her as much.

He didn’t try to stop her as she pushed herself out of his arms. With his trench coat draped across his bare chest, he silently watched as she stood up to put her dress and undergarments back in order, then sat down on the edge of the dusty sofa to slip on her shoes.

“Marte . . . I’m sorry . . .”

She was at the door, her hand on the brass knob turned cold as ice by the winter that had invaded the empty building. She looked over her fur-wrapped shoulder at him.

That had been weakness, too, for him to have said anything now. To have spoken words that had no meaning.

She was not that weak now. She regarded him for a moment, then pulled the door open, stepped through, and closed it behind herself. Her footsteps echoed through the vacant corridors.

TWENTY

When she lifted her face from the ground, she saw the imprint her jaw and mouth had made in the trampled snow between the wagon tracks. Liesel touched her lips with her fingers; the snow where she knelt was muddied with the tramping of so many boots across it, and now the bright red of her blood released a wisp of steam before it froze into sharp-edged ice. Under the skies crumpling with clouds of dark silver, clouds heavy with more bone-chilling snow and sleet, the crystals looked like black diamond chips. For a moment, she wanted to scoop them up in her hand and hold them tight, as though she had discovered a treasure in this road’s slush-filled ruts.

“Mutti –” A child’s voice whined close to her ear, like a buzzing summer insect. The heat that pulsed behind her brow and parched her tongue was fever, she knew. The blood that had frozen on the ground might not even have been from splitting her lip against a stone when she had tripped and fallen; she had been coughing for days now, and after every spell she had tasted hot wet salt on her tongue. “Mutti, they’re leaving us –” Desperation rose in the child’s voice. “We have to catch up with them!”

Dizzy, she managed to get to her feet. The ice and dirty snow sifted from the heavy coat and the layers of clothing that shapelessly swaddled her body. A soldier had given her the coat to keep her warm on the long trek westward; she had gotten that much at least, and a share of the blackened and withered potatoes that he and his squadmates had with them, a few mouthfuls for herself and for the two little boys she had with her. All she’d had to do in return had been to go with each soldier out of reach of their little fire’s wavering light, open her legs or kneel before them, their grimy woolen gloves pressed hard against the sides of her head. The coat had belonged to the last of the soldiers, the one who hadn’t taken her for his few minutes in the darkness, the one who instead had lain down by the fire, knees drawn up and face ghastly pale, the one who’d died with a sudden burst of blood from his mouth and nose, his lungs giving way like rotted burlap sacks. He had come all the way from Russia, he had escaped when the German lines along the Dnieper had collapsed – and he had at least made it this far home. They had stripped the coat from his corpse and given it to Liesel, and had left him curled like a child beside the ashes of the fire.

The coat and the few bits of potato . . . it had been one of the better transactions she had engaged in recently. At least she had gotten something from it besides a fist across her mouth and a warning not to move.

Again the child’s voice, without words this time, just a keening note of anxiety as he tugged at her sleeve, trying to get her to stumble a few steps forward. She shook him away angrily; that was what had caused her to fall in the first place, the burden of the two children with which she had been saddled, the one little boy who could still walk, and the other, the useless one she had to carry. She’d held that one cradled against herself for mile after weary mile, her back aching with the weight that had seemed so little when she had started out, but had grown heavier and more leaden with each step. Her shoulder was numb from the pressure of the sling she’d improvised from torn strips of cloth, looping it between her son’s legs to take some of the load from her own arms.

Her son . . . where was he? She had stood up without him; the sling’s knot had broken, the ragged ends of cloth dangling against her stomach. The other little boy, the bastard Mischling she’d raised, scurried ahead a few steps, to the crest of the road; he hesitated there, torn between running after the others, the men and the women and the few other children slogging through the rutted mud with the wagons creaking before them, or staying with the only mother he had ever known. He squatted down on his haunches and chewed the knuckles of one hand, as though that could fill his hollowed belly; his eyes of two colors, china-blue and golden-brown, watched to see what she would do.

“There you are . . .” Her voice rasped painfully in her throat. Liesel had found her own true son a few feet away, lying on his side as though sleeping. The soldier whose coat she wore had lain just like that, knees toward chest, babyish, before he had died. She bent down, pulling aside the knitted muffler she had wrapped around the child’s face and throat. He was alive, his breath panting fast and shallow, his nostrils and the corners of his eyes crusted with phlegm. His face had turned white and transparent as rice paper, the only color a hectic spot of blood under his cheeks. “Yes, yes; there you are . . .” She crooned to him as she got her grip beneath his spine, raising him up; he flopped backward for a moment, then the small hands let go their fistfuls of frozen mud and grabbed her arm, clutching with the unconscious reflexes of a panicked animal.

A wave of light-headedness swept over her. Just the effort of picking up her son, who had dwindled down so small, like a fledgling bird that had fallen from its nest, had taxed the limits of her remaining strength. The fever wrapped a heated metal band around her head, blinding her. She could only feel the child slipping out of her fumbling hands.

“Mutti . . . come on . . .” The other little boy, the Mischling, had returned, tugging at the thick fabric of the coat. He had been alarmed, no doubt, by how she swayed as she stood, but his pulling at her only made that worse. She slapped him, sending him sprawling, before he could topple her again. Through the black spots dancing before her eyes, she could see him skitter away on his hands and knees, getting out of reach of another blow or a kick from her. He crouched on his hands and knees, regarding her with the careful wariness that came with the experience filling the few short years of his life.

She wondered what she was going to do now. If she held very still, breathing slowly and carefully so she didn’t start the racking cough again, she could hear the little caravan of wagons and people, the creak of the wheels and the muddy ice cracking beneath the slow boots, fading in the distance. Even at their laborious pace, they would be gone soon, beyond any chance of her catching up with them. In some ways, that was what she wanted, to never have to see any of those beaten-down, hunched-over human figures again. She had felt them all dragging on her arms and shoulders, oppressing her with their sullen weight, their envy and malice; they wanted to make her one of them, another broken and frightened refugee, scrabbling for bits of food, clothes and skin turning the dun color of ingrained dirt. There were a few women in the caravan who had come the same way with Liesel, fleeing from the SS housing estate when the war’s front had suddenly surged closer, the German military units being pulled back almost overnight, with no warning. They had been left on their own, a disorganized band of women and children and a few elderly shopkeepers, to make their escape as best they could. Some of the women had been too paralyzed to move, hunkering down in their flats with the curtains drawn, minds blanked with fear as they waited for the Russians to come pouring over the hills to the east. The ones who had set out on foot, tugging their children with them, the ones who hadn’t dropped by the wayside – those jealous bitches enjoyed seeing her ground down to their level. They had always been envious of her beauty and the privileges it had rightly brought her. Now, to see her transformed into a shapeless, bedraggled lump like themselves – of course, they were all enjoying that. She was sure she had heard, through the daze of the fever, their cruel laughter as she had fallen with her son. They had gone on laughing as they had trudged on, leaving her sprawled across the frozen mud with the two little boys.

Perhaps more soldiers would come along; they were at least still capable, no matter how ragged from their own long marches, of seeing what she was, desiring her, helping her. Even if they did no more than slap her and hike the layers of her skirts up around her hips – that at least proved she was still beautiful to them. For anything more, such as the coat, she had to be quick about it, to catch them while the lust still ebbed in their blood. Afterward, they were useless, thinking only of themselves and saving their own skins. They were all like that; it was why the abandoned women and children were on foot. The army had requisitioned all the trains and motorized vehicles for their own evacuation, even the horses that might have pulled the wooden carts. The peasants from the village near the estate had yoked their thin-flanked cows to the carts and plodded with them over the fields and the narrowest lanes; the main roads were unpassable with broken tanks and heavy equipment left behind. One silly SS wife had kept on crying and sobbing about how her husband should have been there with her, to rescue her and their children, instead of sitting in some warm and cozy headquarters barrack in Berlin. All that useless fussing had gotten on Liesel’s nerves. She had least been spared that illusion, that she had anyone to rely on but herself; she had received the notification of her Heinrich’s death, and a tiny box of his medals from somewhere outside Stalingrad, nearly a year ago.

Thinking of other people’s deaths, Heini’s and the ones yet to come, those stupid laughing women who had been her neighbors, cleared Liesel’s head a bit. She regained enough balance to stand on tiptoe, scanning the direction from which she had come and to either side. There was no sign of any soldiers in the vicinity. The only indications of life in the wintry landscape were the sounds of the refugee caravan, even fainter now from the other side of the hill’s rise. Even at their slow, head-down pace, the others would vanish entirely. Nightfall was only a few hours away; then she would never be able to find them.

“Mutti . . .”

She didn’t bother to cuff the child away. “Sei ruhig,” she ordered. “Your mother has to think.”

Her own child was dying; she could see that, anyone could. That had to figure into her calculations. The frailty of the small body disgusted her. Perhaps he had inherited weak lungs from his father; the SS couldn’t be expected to weed out every genetic flaw. The boy certainly hadn’t gotten it from her; feverish as she was, and even hacking up blood, she knew that would pass, she would survive. So would her child, if there was a doctor with medicines, perhaps even a little clinic bed with clean, warm sheets, in whatever village might lie ahead of the trudging caravan. But what were her chances of getting him there, or the doctor and all the villagers not having already fled themselves? They were all such cowards . . .

If only there had been any more soldiers in sight, ones with a truck or even a commandeered automobile. She could have played on their sympathies for the little boy; that, and the usual trade in kind, might have accomplished everything. But without them, she knew she couldn’t carry him all that way, however far it was, not in her present weakened condition. It would kill her to try, and what good would that accomplish?

And there was the other child to consider, the one watching her with his rounded, apprehensive eyes of two colors. The Mischling . . .

It was painful to admit, but he was more valuable than the product of her own womb. There was his real mother, the scheming little bitch she remembered from the Lebensborn hostel, who had cheated her once and gone on to become such a famous actress – it still amazed Liesel that there were so many men who’d want to sleep with such a drab and skinny thing, men who’d be willing to advance her career. Though it only took one, if it were the right one, and everybody in the Reich knew who that was. So this child had powerful protectors, perhaps even more powerful now than the dark godfathers who had brought about his birth. Reichsminister Goebbels was interested in the child’s welfare; she had found that out from his agents who had come prowling around the SS housing estate, cameras in hand. Liesel had entered into a small conspiracy with those men – it was always so easy to do that – making sure that they got the photographs they needed of a happy, laughing – and healthy – child. One that was being well looked after . . .

That was a worry. The Mischling had gotten so pale since they had started walking, and had now picked up a cough, not as bad as her own son’s, but placed the same, deep in the chest. His mismatched eyes were rimmed with red, and he constantly wiped his nose across his sleeve. Going hungry hadn’t helped; when Liesel had gotten the bits of spoiled potato from the soldiers, that had been when she had first thought of what a waste it was, to give any to the weakest among them. The least likely to survive . . .

He had started to suck his thumb, hunkered down in his misery. He stared sightlessly before himself, no longer listening to the faint noises of the other refugees in the distance.

She had come to a decision. The only possible one. She gathered her strength, enough to reach down once more and gather up her own son. She knew the other boy was watching her as she carried the small burden toward the tangled bushes a few yards from the side of the path.

Her son woke up from his feverish dreaming as she laid him down. She had hoped that wouldn’t happen, that he would have gone on sleeping until she gone, and after as well. He clutched her arm, trying to pull her closer, so he could see her face.

“No, no; it’s all right . . .” She laid her hand against her son’s cheek; it was like touching a red-hot oven. She controlled her reaction to snatch her hand away, stroking his cheek and brow until his eyes closed again. “It’s all right . . . everything will be good again.” She crooned the words as though they were the last whisper of a lullaby. “Mutti just needs you to wait here . . . until she comes back. That’s a good boy . . .” Her shoulder trembled the branch above him, and a dusting of snow fell across his face; she brushed it away. “You go to sleep now. That’s right . . .” He was quiet for a few moments, his grip relaxing from her forearm. She stood up and hurried back to the other child.

“Come on.” She jerked him upright and tugged him stumbling behind her. “Now!” He dangled on tiptoe like a puppet. “You wanted to go with the others, didn’t you? What’s wrong?”

He looked behind him at the small form only partially concealed by the bushes. “My brother –”

“Never mind him.” She had looked behind as well, toward the eastern sky. She had seen something there, or thought she had. A trace of fire against the banks of clouds, that might have been lightning but wasn’t. If there was a low rumble – she strained to make it out – it would have been artillery shells rather than thunder. Had the fighting come that much closer? There was no time to waste. “Come along.”

On the other side of the hill, she saw the refugees far ahead. She hurried, pulling the child into a trot behind her. The other one was already gone from sight, hidden by the rise of the rutted path.

She had done what was necessary, Liesel told herself. She had saved this one. The valuable one, the one that would repay her for all the trouble she had taken on his behalf. She squeezed the child’s hand tight, to make sure she didn’t lose him in the gathering dusk.

TWENTY-ONE

“This is the last one. The very last.” Under his breath, the Scharführer muttered, “Thank God for that.”

The last was spoken too low for Herr Doktor Ritter to catch, but Pavli heard it. The Scharführer stood only a few feet away, between the tripod-mounted camera equipment and the door to the surgery, fingering the pistol slung from his belt of black leather. It was the first time any of the guards had brought a weapon into this antiseptic sanctum; he kept glancing at the open doorway, trying to catch a glimpse of the window beyond Ritter’s office.

Pavli knew why the Scharführer and all the others were so nervous. They had stopped huddling around their forbidden radio and had turned up its volume so that the British and American voices spilled through the silent corridors of the asylum. The voices spoke in German, spoke of the things the soldiers could already tell by sniffing the wind or looking into each other’s anxious eyes. The collapse of the Reich, the armies surging forward from all sides, the tightening noose. There were no longer any protests that the voices on the radio were lying, attempting to demoralize their enemy. The guards and the other SS men, with no means of defending this obscure post other than the rifles and pistols they carried and a solitary machine gun in the gate tower, were beyond demoralization. The asylum lay in the path of whatever final push would be made toward Berlin’s southeastern underbelly; the treads of the Russian tanks would roll over their corpses without even stopping.

That was why they had turned the radio louder, Pavli figured; to get his attention, Herr Doktor Ritter’s. Their commanding officer, the only one who could give the order to leave the asylum, to scurry behind the defensive lines circling the distant city. Perhaps there they would be able to survive long enough for the generals and the Führer himself to come to their senses and sue for peace. It was just a matter of time . . .

Ritter sorted through the sharp-edged tools in the tray beside the dissection table. He examined the scalpels with particular care, testing their bright metal against his thumb. Pavli watched him, the familiar ritual, the small actions outside of time. How could the Scharführer and the other guards ever penetrate that world, the same one they were trapped in here, with their urgent warnings? Ritter had locked himself into this infinite room where nothing mattered beyond its walls, beyond the fences topped with barbed wire. Not all the other world’s armies combined could break in upon him. Nothing mattered but the research, the sharp bits of metal in the tray, the soft and still-warm flesh upon the table. The incisions along the forearm and down the center of the breastbone, at which he had become so skilled, it was like a silken garment being unfastened – Pavli, watching through the camera’s viewfinder, was always surprised to see blood welling up from such gentle wounds. And then afterward, when the procedure was completed, and there was only a raw red thing in the shape of a human being on the table, its skin and peaceful, empty face floating in the basin of preserving chemicals – that surprised him as well, that there were two dead things where there had been only one before. The Lazarene ghost did not rise up like smoke and clasp its transparent arms around Ritter’s neck, whisper its blessing to him, tell the secret of how to become one of them, the birthright of knowing that Pavli had been denied. All of them remained mute and flaccid, the blue words of Christ’s stigmata upon the papery wrists and torso still indecipherable. The guards fretted, listening for the approach of armies, while Herr Doktor Ritter carefully filled in another page in his journal.

“Bring him in.” Ritter turned and nodded toward the Scharführer. “We are all in order here.”

The last one . . . Pavli, behind his cameras without film, wondered what had been meant by that. It implied the passage of time, a coming to an end. And that was impossible. How could this end, while Herr Doktor Ritter’s hand could still reach down and pick up a scalpel and hold it up to catch the light? The dormitories on the floors below, with their barred windows and rows of cots, had all grown silent, the muttering or crying voices melting away to whispers and then to silence. But still the guards had each day brought up another Lazarene, a man or a woman – there hadn’t been another child since the onset of winter – each held with arms pinioned behind so Ritter could insert the needle between the ribs and inject the standard 20 cc of phenol. Even before the body had finished struggling, it would have been stripped naked and lifted onto the table. And always another one, the next day and the day after, another for Pavli to pretend to catch on film, the transformation to a wet, red thing. Ritter hardly glanced anymore at the old stills and reels of film that Pavli showed him, only nodded his approval before opening the first of the night’s bottles and beginning his rambling, disjointed lecture. Pavli would drink and let the words drift over him, a voice of non-time . . .

A scuffle in the surgery’s doorway broke into his slow thoughts. He took his eye away from the viewfinder and looked behind him. Two of the guards had a struggling Lazarene male between them, his arms twisted into the small of his back; the man was young and strong enough to slam one guard against the door with a sudden thrust of his shoulder. The other guard swung a fist across the Lazarene’s face, stunning him, blood spattering from his nose to his ear. The Lazarene sagged between the guards, though he was still conscious; drops of red spotted the white-tiled floor as his head lolled forward. Pavli could see who the man was now. It was his brother Matthi.

“Over here.” Ritter already had the hypodermic in his hand; he set the vial of yellowish pink liquid next to the tray. “While you have him quieted down.”

“No –” The one word from Pavli’s mouth echoed off the surgery’s hard surfaces. The last one – he knew what that meant now. He stepped from behind the cine camera and laid his hand on the doctor’s forearm. “Don’t – you promised –”

Ritter looked at him in astonishment, as much as if one of the devices, a tripod or the table on which the tray of instruments rested, had suddenly addressed him. “‘Promised?’ What are you talking about?”

The thoughts tumbled inside Pavli’s head, making it hard to put together any more words. “My brother . . . you promised that you would never . . . you would never touch him . . .”

“Get away!” The Scharführer raised his arm, palm outward to push Pavli back from the dissection table.

“It’s all right. I’ll take care of this.” Ritter smiled as he turned back toward Pavli. “I’m afraid our good photographer has gotten confused. Perhaps it was something you dreamed.” He tilted his head, the smile even more kindly now. “You dreamed I promised you something . . . and now you think that was real. Is that it?”

For a moment, Pavli wondered if he were dreaming now. The surgery seemed to fold in on itself, a space too small to breathe in, with Ritter’s smile at its center. “No –” He shook his head. Beyond Ritter, he could see Matthi raising his bloodied face, his dazed eyes looking toward him. “You did promise . . . I remember . . .” Ritter must have gone mad, that was the only explanation. Pavli saw that he believed what he had said.

“How could I promise something like that?” Ritter’s voice stayed patient. “I’ve told you – I’ve told you so many times – that each one is important. I need every one of them. For my research.” The voice curled inside Pavli’s ear, as though he and Ritter were the only ones in the room. “How can we find out otherwise? What we need to know . . . their secrets . . . everything. That was what I promised you. That you and I . . . together . . . we’d find out.”

The words spun inside Pavli’s head. He couldn’t remember which were true and which were Ritter’s lies. What Ritter had promised him . . . and what he had imagined, dreamed, what he wanted to have been true.

Matthi hung suspended between the two guards, the blood twisting a line around his throat. The blow had taken the fight out of him, made him see – as the others had seen before him – how useless it was to struggle.

The last one . . . thank God . . .

A wordless shouting rose inside Pavli’s skull. It must have been true, Ritter must have promised him; why else would he have spared Matthi until now? Until all the other Lazarenes had been taken, their skins and stigmata separated from the wet red things inside. Until there was none of them left, none at all; only the last of them, the last of the Lazarenes. His brother Matthi, the one Ritter had promised to him –

A promise that Ritter was breaking now. All along, Ritter had been lying to him, so he would make no protest, would go on doing his work behind the cameras and in the darkroom.

Or else he had dreamed it, imagined it. Ritter could never have promised anything like that. Pavli had just wanted it to be that way.

He didn’t care anymore which was true. There were more lying words coming out of Ritter’s mouth, but he didn’t hear them. The doctor smiled and led him away from the dissection table, back to his position behind the cine camera tripod. Even as Ritter was doing that, Pavli saw that he had gestured to the guards; they lifted Matthi higher between them and dragged him forward.

Pavli cried out his brother’s name. With both fists doubled together, he struck Ritter across the chest, hard enough to stagger the doctor back. Ritter’s fall, arms flailing behind in an effort to catch his balance, toppled the stand beside the table; the scalpels and other instruments clattered across the floor as Ritter’s shoulder struck the white tiles. Pavli had already hurled himself past Ritter, his fingers clawing toward the arms and faces of the guards, to pry their grasp away from his brother –

He didn’t reach them. Something caught him by one ankle, bringing him down hard upon his chest and hands. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. He rolled onto his side, vision blurring, and could make out Ritter behind him, the doctor’s hand locked upon his foot and shin. At the same moment, the Scharführer kicked him in the head, the point of the glossy boot hitting just above his ear. The surgery, that had shrunk so small, now exploded, the walls rushing outward, the floor giving way beneath him. Above, he could see the Scharführer landing another kick, into the side of someone with his face. Herr Doktor Ritter, now standing up and straightening his white laboratory coat, watched for a moment, then gestured to the other guards. Pavli saw his brother Matthi, the shirt torn away to reveal the tattooed wound, and the hypodermic in Ritter’s hand. Then a third kick seemed to separate Pavli’s head from his body. It rolled into darkness where nothing more could be seen.

* * *

Thunder . . . it sounded like thunder. As if time had broken open, the pent-up days spilling out, the first rainclouds of spring mounting on the horizon. Pavli could even feel the heat against his face and chest, as though the sunlight were pressed its weight upon him.

“Where are they?” A voice shouted, close enough that he felt across his cheek. “The other photographs, the films . . . where have you hidden them?”

Why were they shouting at Matthi like that? Pavli could see the figure held up between the guards, the legs bent limp and dangling, head slumped forward. And why had they brought him from the surgery into the darkroom? It didn’t make any sense – Matthi wouldn’t know anything about what happened here.

The Scharführer grabbed the figure’s hair, pulling the head back. Pavli saw that it wasn’t Matthi’s face, and at the same moment, realized that what he could see were two reflections of his own bruised and bleeding face, caught in the black mirrors at the center of the Scharführer’s eyes. There was no Matthi in the darkroom; he was the one held up now by the guards’ hands, the Scharführer gripping his hair.

A fire burned in one of the darkroom’s deep basins; the heat Pavli felt against his skin came from there. Black, acrid smoke billowed upward and spread across the ceiling as one of the guards dumped more photograph prints and negatives into the flames. Loops of cine film spilled over the basin’s edge like nesting snakes, the heat twisting them into spirals as though they had come alive.

The thunder sounded in the distance outside the asylum. Pavli heard it for only a moment before the Scharführer slapped him across the face. “Where are the other photos?”

Pavli shook his head. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean . . .”

“Liar!” The Scharführer brandished a book in front of Pavli’s eyes; he recognized it as Ritter’s leather-bound research journal. “Every procedure the doctor performed is noted; you photographed every one – and now we can find less than half of what should be here!” He twisted Pavli’s head to one side. “Why are you hiding them? You think the Americans will be interested in them, don’t you? A neat little bundle of evidence to show your liberators, proof of what was being done here!” Fury reddened the Scharführer’s face. “All the better to hang us with – that’s what you want, isn’t it!” He landed another blow across Pavli’s jaw, then bent down and scooped up the journal he had dropped at his feet. He threw the book into the basin fire. “Search everywhere,” he ordered the other guards. “Anything you find is to be burned.”

The guards let go of Pavli. He sprawled on the darkroom floor, unable to stand, his vision a blur of red and the dancing black that threatened to swallow him again. It’s not thunder – he lay still, hoping the guards would forget about him, step over him as if he weren’t even there. The distant booming that came from outside the asylum, the rumbling in the ground that shook the walls – he’d realized what the sounds were. Not thunder, but the roaring of great weapons, the vomiting forth of the shells and bombs that tore open the earth like a giant’s hand. They’re here. Time had started again, had broken into the asylum’s timeless world. That was why the Scharführer and all the others were so agitated. The war itself had arrived on their doorstep.

He could hear glass shattering, could smell the photographic chemicals splashing onto the floor. His eyes could focus enough when he opened them, to see a guard sweeping the butt of his rifle along the shelves that lined the darkroom. The others had flung open the cabinets, gathering up the contents in their arms and dumping them into the basin. The fire sank under each new load, then burst upward again, ashes laced with sparks. Smoke had covered the room’s ceiling, low enough to roll out the open doorway into the corridor.

One guard pulled the cot from the far wall and threw it onto its side; a moment later, he had toppled the stacks of empty crates away from the wall. Pavli saw him begin to turn, then hesitate. He had spotted the loose board covering the hiding place. With a sharp tug, the guard snapped the board loose and flung it behind him; Pavli’s breath stopped as the guard reached inside the hole.

“Look at this.” The guard displayed the only thing he found there. “The photographer’s secret love.” The frayed newspaper clipping, the actress’ image fading from grey to brown, received only a glance from the Scharführer before being snatched away, crumpled into a ball and tossed into the fire. The dry paper flared immediately, tumbling upward as it was consumed.

A blast of heat washed across Pavli; he could see the sudden explosion stagger the guards backwards. The darkroom filled with a churning orange glare. “Scheiß!” – a guard batted the rush of smoke and flames away from himself. A spark from the basin had landed on the spilled chemicals; the fire raced across the floor and licked up the walls. The fumes ignited in the petrol can that the guards had brought in with them, a jagged edge of metal ripping across one man’s shin, exposing the red bone beneath the knee. He howled in pain and fell, clutching his hands around the wound.

“Get out of here!” The other guards were already fighting their way out to the corridor, coughing and covering their eyes, as the Scharführer slung the injured man’s arm over his shoulders. “Leave everything!” They stumbled in tandem toward the doorway.

Beneath the smoke, Pavli crawled away from the flames. The corridor’s windows had been broken out; the rush of cold air into the asylum filled his lungs.

The guards had forgotten about him; no one saw as he raised himself onto his hands and knees. Yards away, the guards pulled Ritter from his office, wrapping his trench coat around him. The doctor looked confused; he fought weakly against his rescuers, as though he were trying to return to his private sanctuary.

“You don’t understand –” Ritter pushed vainly at their arms. “I can’t leave now – I’m so close –”

They overpowered him. The war’s thunder shook the building, closer this time. Ritter fell to the press of the guards; Pavli saw only the doctor’s hands, raised imploringly above the men’s heads, as they bore him toward the stairs at the end of the corridor.

Pavli looked over his shoulder. The darkroom was engulfed in fire, the flames threading the smoke pouring through the doorway. He got to his feet, the wall hot to his palm as he balanced himself against it.

Other things had been forgotten. He felt his way toward Ritter’s office. He leaned inside, hands out to either side of its doorway. The fire had broken through the wall between the office and the darkroom; papers swirled from Ritter’s desk, charring in midair. Pavli lowered his head and pushed through the smoke.

The electrical generator had failed; he could barely see in the surgery’s dim space, the only light that from the burning office. He stepped forward, hands outstretched.

His fingertips hit something wet and yielding, warm not from the fire, but from the heat still fading from its core. “Matthi . . .” He whispered the name aloud, though he knew it was not his brother, only the red thing left behind by Ritter’s scalpels.

Blind, he turned and bumped into a wheeled cart, the one he had seen so many times before through the camera viewfinders. He heard liquid slosh inside a shallow basin; it smelled of chemicals as well, but different, the preserving ones that Ritter had used on the valuable part of his subjects. Wetness, warm as blood itself, soaked through Pavli’s shirt and spread across his stomach. He reached forward, the fluid lapping up to his wrists. He felt something soft beneath his fingertips, something that floated and drifted in the basin, like a suit of some delicate fabric that had been discarded in a pool of ocean water.

His hands raised, palms upward. Draped across them was a sleeve of silk, empty now of any other substance. A long incision, the work of Ritter’s scalpel, ran along its length, curving at its narrowest taper, where the hand, a vacant glove, rested its fingers against Pavli’s. The fire’s glow brightened in the surgery’s doorway, and he saw the tattooed wound at the wrist, the stigma black in the partial light.

The last one . . . his brother. He brought his face down toward the mute object, as though he could lay his cheek against it, to comfort his grief. Still submerged in the basin, Matthi’s face, eyeless, mouth parted, watched him.

Pavli . . .

Beyond the roaring of the flames, trembling of the earth under the asylum; and closer, past the hissing of the liquid spilled over the heated instruments – he heard his own name spoken.

Go . . . you cannot stay here. His brother’s face, beneath the preserving fluids, gazed up at the smoke mounting against the ceiling. You must go now . . .

The surgery fell to silence, the hidden walls drawing away from the dissecting table. Pavli listened but heard no more. His heart slowed from its panic. He felt as if he could close his eyes and his brother would wrap him in embrace, arms things of flesh again, rocking him to sleep in the bed they had shared so long ago.

Go . . .

He tilted his hands, letting the wet silk slide from them. It drifted in the water ghostlike, the motion of the fluid swelling the hollowed chest, then letting it sink once more. He turned away from the basin.

The smoke in Ritter’s office had become so dense that he could barely feel his way through. Coughing, eyes watering, he found the desk and stooped down. The object he sought was still there, left behind by Ritter. He grasped the handle of the leather bag and stood up with it.

In the surgery, the flames had grown bright enough for him to see by. He set the open bag next to the basin, then reached into the preserving chemicals. The weight of his brother’s skin, as he raised it from the fluid, surprised him. It hung awkwardly from his grasp, the torso with its rib tattoo dangling between his hands. The shoulders, neck and face at one end, and the empty legs, splayed by the incision flaps at the ankles, at the other, draped into the basin. The fluid ran down to Pavli’s elbows as he lifted the skin higher. He didn’t know how much the chemicals had already done to preserve the thin tissue; it had been only a few hours at most, since Ritter had carefully peeled it away from the flesh beneath. The fear of damaging the skin seized Pavli, a vision of it shredding to tatters in his hands, rags that bore no human resemblance.

He managed to lay the face and neck at the bottom of the bag; the preserving chemicals seeped out into the black leather. Then the shoulders, folding them toward each other to fit them into the cramped space. The flaccid arms and hands slid across his as he placed them inside. The torso, the hips and groin, followed; Ritter’s deftness had rendered the skin into a pliable substance. At last the legs, folded at the knee. The final layer came close to the top of the bag; Pavli carefully closed it up, drawing the strap across and snugging it tight with the metal buckle.

The delicate task had required all his attention. Now he turned and saw how the fire had swallowed the office, the doorway filled with smoke. He tucked the leather bag under his arm, lowered his head and ran toward the flames. His breath scalded his throat; he found the door and stumbled out into the corridor. There the walls were charred and blackened as well. He gulped in air at the broken window before pushing his way through the smoke toward the stairs.

Outside the asylum, he fell onto the muddy, snow-patched ground. The wetness cooled his singed face and hands. The buckle under the bag’s handle raised blisters on his palm; his clothes smelled like scorched wood and paper, overlaid with the chemical scent still dampening his sleeves.

Pavli raised his head and rolled onto his back. The glare from the burning asylum washed over him. Through its windows he could see the second floor, the corridor down which he had run just a few moments ago, give way. The heavy beams, crawling with flames, crashed into the darkness below with a explosion of sparks. The fire had spread through the levels above, the roof breaking open to spew out the reddening clouds of smoke.

Knees trembling, he stood upright. The gates of the barbed-wire fence had been left open; through them, he could see the shadows of the surrounding forest. In the courtyard of the asylum, the trucks and other vehicles had been left behind by the fleeing guards. The earthshaking thunder and flashes of light came from the direction in which the narrow road curved. The guards hadn’t wished to be caught between the approach of the Allied armies and whatever German divisions were still in the area. Pavli could see the guards’ bootprints in the trampled snow, heading for the refuge of the dense trees and brush.

He stood still, letting a wall of silence form around him. In it, he heard a voice whispering once more.

Yes . . .

His brother Matthi’s voice. He tilted his head, straining to catch every word.

Now you’ll see. I’ll show you . . . I’ll show you everything . . .

He nodded slowly. He had waited for this, his birthright, for so long. Another time had begun.

Flames roared higher, engulfing the asylum and its empty world. He reached down and picked up the bag of black leather and started walking, following the others’ trail into the forest.

* * *

Moonlight broke through the bare trees, scattering like coins across the ground. He had come to a place where the silence was outside him. The eyes of the night creatures, owls and woken ravens, and the creatures that hid among the twisting roots, watched him without fright. They knew as well.

Pavli turned his head, listening. The others were nearby, concealed – for the moment – by the darkness. Ritter and the guards, making their way to some imagined safety. The clashing sounds of war had died away, the retreating army having either made its own escape or been annihilated by the advancing forces. Pavli’s nostrils flared, catching a trace of death stench, the smell of flesh burned and blackened, of bowels torn open by sudden metal. The quiet would make it more difficult for the others, to keep from blundering into the front lines. He would have to be careful, to avoid revealing himself to them; it wasn’t time for that yet. That was what his brother Matthi had told him, as he had fled the burning asylum. The guards would be on edge, raising their weapons against the slightest sound they heard around themselves; a few isolated shots had already rang out, close to him. They were not far away. They would be in reach . . .

He knelt down, setting the bag of black leather in front of him. Then undid the buckle, drawing the strap out from beneath the handle, and pushed the bag open.

Yes . . .

His brother’s voice no louder than before. The words breathed at his ear.

That’s right . . .

He lifted out the skin, taking the empty wrists in his hands and raising the glove-like hands to the height of his own shoulders. The translucent substance unfolded, the torso straightening from the cramped space. The skin was lighter now, most of the preserving chemicals having leaked through the bag’s stitching. It was still damp to the touch, clinging to Pavli’s own wrists and forearms. He stood up, carrying it with him, until it was completely revealed, a naked ghost, the tattooed wounds drawn stark upon the pale silkiness. His brother’s face lolled forward, cheek against the place where his breastbone had raised two shallow curves.

The skin lay along the ground, a shadow reversed in a photo negative. Pavli stepped back from it. Matthi had told him what he had to do next.

Beneath the trees, he found the fallen branches he needed, one taller than himself, the other a little wider than his shoulders. With a strip torn from his shirt, he bound them into a crucifix. He used the jagged point of one of the branches to dig a hole in the frozen ground, deep enough to hold the cross up when he scraped a mound of dirt and pebbles around its base.

He hung his brother’s skin upon the cross. The forearms dangled from the ends of the horizontal branch, the motion of the night air spreading the empty hands in a gesture of benediction. The hollow legs twisted and caught against the rough bark below. Matthi’s face was held upright by the wood that could be seen behind the holes of mouth and eyes.

Pavli stood before the cross, his eyes raised to meet his brother’s gaze. He closed his own eyes and listened.

Everything . . . I promised I would tell you everything . . .

A raven passed beneath the moon. He felt its shadow upon his brow. Around him, in the forest’s silence, the small animals, the toads and winter-starved mice, crept out to watch.

His brother’s hand touched his, the silken fingers soft upon his still-mortal flesh. For a moment, one that didn’t end, as he kept himself unseeing, it was as if his brother had stepped down from the cross, freed himself of it, skin filled with a radiant flesh, bones of diamond light.

This is how . . . Matthi’s voice spoke stronger at his ear. These are the secrets . . .

He stepped closer, his brother’s arms folding softly around his shoulders. He didn’t know if it was his hand or his brother’s, that parted his shirt, bared his chest.

Here. Fingertips touched his unmarked ribs. And here. They traced unseen wounds upon his wrists.

Pavli stood half-naked in the forest’s cold and silence, listening to his brother’s voice. There would be things he must do, a great task; that would come. He stood and received his heritage, that which had been denied him, the faith of the Lazarenes.

* * *

He woke from a new dreaming. One in which he had never been before.

The birds of the night had shouted in triumph, far above the forest. He had heard them wheeling against the sky, their black wings blotting out the stars. Even before his brother had finished speaking to him, before he had felt the soft, empty hands clasp around his neck, drawing him toward his brother’s face, as though for the kiss of peace.

Pavli sat up from the ground, feeling its wetness beneath his palms. Grey morning light sifted through the trees. He shivered in his nakedness, the cold drawing ice through the centers of his bones, his jaw trembling uncontrollably. He looked to one side and saw someone else still sleeping, body sprawled across a mound of rotting-black leaves; farther away, under a thicket of close-knit twigs was another one.

He stood up, crystals of ice stinging his bare feet. With his arms tight around himself for warmth, he looked down at the nearest sleeper. It was one of the guards; he could recognize the SS uniform. Or what was left of it – the trousers and jacket had been slashed to ribbons. Blood had soaked through the ragged edges of cloth, spreading in a pool beneath the shoulders and the backs of the legs. The chest and abdomen was exposed, revealing the diagonal wound, pink coils of viscera loosened beneath the shattered ribcage. The stilled heart had been cut nearly in two, a red fist now spread open.

The other guard’s throat had been slashed, deep enough to show the hard knots of spine below the trachea. His eyes were still open, registering shock; Pavli looked down at him, remembering the same face, the same expression, from his dreaming. The guard had looked over his shoulder and had screamed, trying to raise his rifle, but it had been too late.

There were others scattered through the forest; Pavli could see them now, as the dawn spread more light. One sat with its back to a tree, hands mired in the blood collected in its lap. Another curled in fetal position around a useless rifle; its eyes were filled with wonder, as though it had seen a miracle in the moment of its death.

Pavli wondered if any of the guards had managed to escape. It didn’t seem likely to him; the forest’s silence told him that he and the smaller creatures were the only things left alive in it. He looked down at himself. His own chest and arms were smeared with blood, a red hieroglyphic roughened with dirt and broken twigs. He brushed away as much as he could, his fingertips dragging against the sticky markings.

The marks of his feet in the snow patches led him back to the cross he’d made. His brother Matthi’s skin was no longer draped upon it; that lay a few feet before it, the arms carefully outspread, the empty face gazing up at the clouded sky. Its chest and hands were daubed with red as well. The voice that spoke at Pavli’s ear had been a thing of the night, now silent in the first shadows of day.

Threads of blood spiraled around the upright branch of the cross. Impaled at the top was the head of Herr Doktor Ritter, the wooden end thrust up through the gaping throat. The eyes had been torn out, the sockets weeping red into the mouth dangling open. A few yards away was the rest of the corpse, lines across the ground showing where it had been dragged from elsewhere.

Bright metal glittered at the base of the cross. Pavli bent down and picked up an ornate knife; he recognized it as Ritter’s dagger, that he had kept on his desk at the asylum. Of all the things there, he had taken this, the ceremonial emblem of his membership in the SS. Pavli rubbed a finger along the words inscribed on the blade. Meine Ehre heißt Treue. His fingertip came away marked with blood still wet.

He found his clothes and the black leather bag farther away. A streamlet of melted snow trickled nearby; he broke the ice covering it and washed himself, the cold tightening his flesh.

He debated throwing away Ritter’s dagger, but finally tucked it inside his shirt, snugged against the waistband of his trousers. Alone, and with far to go, he might have need of it. He knelt down with the bag beside his brother’s skin; he carefully folded the silken matter and placed it inside, then drew the strap through the buckle. There had been no possibility of his leaving this part of his brother behind, with the profane corpses lying among the trees.

Standing up, he held the bag close to his chest. In the distance, he could hear the faint noises of machinery, the rumbling of tanks and heavy artillery vehicles. He had no way of knowing to which army they might belong. If the battle began again, it would sweep over him like a fiery tide, crushing him beneath its treads. He would have to hurry, reach some kind of sanctuary before the earth split open once more.

His exhausted brain could think only of the way back to Berlin, the narrow roads by which the trucks had brought the Lazarenes to the asylum so long ago. If he could reach the city, there would be places he could hide, the curtains drawn over the windows of the bedroom he had shared with Matthi, the cellar of his uncle’s house, the alleys twisting around themselves, where he could elude any pursuers . . .

There was nowhere else to go.

Pavli wished his brother would speak to him again, tell him what to do, as Matthi had told him during the long dreaming night that had just ended. But he couldn’t wait for another night to come. The images of that dreaming – the shadows of ravens, the terrified faces of the guards before the blood was made to leap from their throats – tangled inside his skull. There had been another, whose face had been impossible to see beneath a darkened hood, a figure striding through the forest, implacable in the stalking of its prey. He tried to remember, but that was all, only that glimpse as he had fallen beneath the heavy sky.

His legs ached with the temptation to lie down, to curl next to the crucifix with the blind head staked above. To sleep, and wait, to let his dreaming unravel itself and become a memory he could grasp. But there was no time for that.

The bag of black leather, with its silken weight inside, dangled from his hand as he started walking toward home.

TWENTY-TWO

“This is impossible, Herr von Behren. We cannot shoot in these conditions.”

He looked up from the pages of the script. His hands trembled with fatigue; he had to force his grip tighter, to keep the papers with his own typed words from slipping away and scattering at his feet. The assistant director’s accusing, impatient glare met his own red-rimmed gaze.

“Oh?” Von Behren rested his elbows on the wooden arms of the folding chair. He received the impression that the young man standing there blamed him for everything that happened. “And why is that?”

The assistant director stared at him in disbelief. “Are you mad?” He shouted to make himself heard above the sounds that battered the studio’s walls. “The Russians are outside the city!” His hands lifted, shaking in agitation. “It’s not a matter of weeks or days now – it will be only hours before they’re in the streets!”

“Yes . . . yes, of course . . .” Von Behren slowly nodded. He found the other’s voice more exhausting than all the bombs and artillery shells. How could the fellow raise his voice so? His own lungs were silted with ash, from the breathing of the smoke that darkened the Berlin air. When he could sleep, curling up on a pile of mildewed stage curtains that served as a bed for all the actors and crew, he would awake panting, his heart as loud as the explosions that strode among the burning buildings. The littlest of his actresses, a skinny creature of barely fifteen years, had crept into his arms, whimpering with fright, and he had rocked her until dawn, kissing her on the top of her head and telling her that everything would be all right. That was why he had not left to go to his own flat for . . . he couldn’t remember how long it had been. For all he knew, his flat, with his shelves of books and desk piled with unfinished scripts, all his memories, no longer existed. That district had taken a pounding from the American night bombers; he had been able to see the flames mounting up from outside the studio, the fire spreading from one building to the next, smoke roiling through the beams of the flak searchlights. He hadn’t even sent one of his assistants to check whether his flat had survived. It didn’t matter; he belonged here, with the ones who had come – it seemed so odd – to depend upon him. In the morning, after a particularly bad night, their hands would shake as they sipped at cups of ersatz coffee, their eyes dark-rimmed from lack of sleep. And they would turn and look at him, waiting for his instructions on what to do next, to flee or carry on with the filming of Der Rote Jäger.

“Herr von Behren – are you listening to me?”

He stood up, laying the script, with its notations on camera angles and lighting in the margins, on the chair behind him. “I heard you. God knows I should be deaf by now, with all this racket, but I’m not.” He pushed his way past and strode out to the middle of the studio space. He clapped his hands once for attention, though he knew he didn’t need to. All eyes turned toward him, those of the crew behind the lights and cameras, the carpenters and painters repairing the damage to the scenery flats that had been knocked over by the shockwaves, and the actors, already in costume and ready to take their marks. The shooting schedule, after so many delays, had last come round to the script’s grand banquet scene. Heavy, medieval-looking tables were laden with the clever imitations of food that the propmakers had cobbled together from colored plaster and modeling clay. “Please, everyone – I have an announcement to make.”

The actors appeared surreal against the machinery of filming, a confusion of time and place; the men in their doublets and hose, chains of faux gold brightened with glycerine around their necks, dangling barbaric emblems of rank, the women’s long gowns heavy with intricate embroidery, their hair upswept and laced with the beads that would photograph as strands of pearls. Outside the studio, the twentieth century collapsed in flame and ruin, while this little bubble of the middle ages shivered with each blow.

“I have been advised –” He glanced sidelong at the assistant director for a moment. “That the world is coming to an end.” No one smiled; he was merely stating the obvious. “I can assure you that it makes little difference to me. But I am willing to concede that there may be those among you would feel more comfortable, or perhaps even safer, in one of the underground shelters our thoughtful Reich has provided for the citizens of Berlin. If so, I would suggest that you leave now and make your way there, while there is still light to see by. Your doing so will, I am sure, greatly oblige the Russian army that presently knocks upon our gates; you will have conveniently buried yourselves and thus saved them the trouble.” Von Behren clasped his hands together and looked across the faces watching him. With exquisite dramatic timing, a distant volley of artillery fire sounded, followed by a rapid sequence of explosions, the last of which shook dust down from the studio’s overhead beams. The little actress – he felt so sorry for her – bit her lip to hold back her frightened tears, averting her face so none of the others would see. “Well? Those of you who do wish to leave should do so as a group; I would imagine your chances would be better that way.”

The actors and crew glanced around at each other. After a few moments of silence, the chief grip stepped forward. “Herr von Behren –” The man hadn’t shaved or washed in the last several days; his overalls were stained with black grease. “We have enough petrol to keep the generators going for eight, possibly up to ten hours. If we take down the canvas from the skylights, we might be able to shoot by daylight for an additional four to six hours – if we get started right away.” He looked at the others for support, then back to the director. “We’re wasting time, Herr von Behren.”

“Very well. You’re right, of course.” The show of loyalty touched his heart, though he knew at the same time it would have been easier if they had all leapt up and rushed outside, hurrying to the nearest shelters. Now he would be forced to show as much courage as they had, to carry them all upon his shoulders. He turned to the assistant director. “You’re free to go, of course. I would understand.”

The assistant director, arms folded across his chest, looked sullen. “There’s someone else whose decision you should ask. We won’t be able to accomplish much if she decides to leave.”

Von Behren knew that accomplishing anything at all was not the issue. Under these circumstances, if they produced even a few minutes of usable film, that would be a miracle. Der Rote Jäger was a long way from being completed; there were weeks, if not months, of primary shooting to be done on it. Who knew if there would be one brick sitting on top of another in Berlin, this time tomorrow? The Führer and his remaining staff, those too blindly faithful or stupid to have flown to refuges in the west, had already been sequestered for months deep inside the earth, in the fortified bunker beneath the Chancellery yard. Even the Gauleiter of Berlin, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was there with his wife Magda and their blond children, awaiting the end. Goebbels had long ago ordered all the theatres closed, part of his dedicating the Reich to total war. Even if they were to complete the film of Der Rote Jäger, there would be no place to show it, other than a private screening for the Reichsminister himself, the images flickering against the concrete wall of his cramped, stale-smelling burrow. Perhaps that was what Goebbels wanted; the equipment and the supplies, more valuable than money, had kept on arriving at the studio, so von Behren and his crew could continue with the filming. Or else they had been forgotten about, and the Reich’s machinery had carried on with the orders it already had been given, a captainless train bound to iron tracks, hurtling toward its fiery destination.

Now it was too late for any of them to jump off. They might as well stay to the end of the line. Von Behren looked past the crew and actors to where Marte sat on a spindly wooden chair in the shadowed area beyond the lights. She was in costume, a gown of white that turned her skin even paler. The bodice and high neck had been loosened, to make it easier for her to breathe; the wardrobe assistant would have to stitch it tight again before Marte could go before the camera. Her profile was turned toward von Behren, her eyes closed, lips slightly parted; she looked as if she were dying, and was more beautiful than ever before.

Von Behren supposed he had the Reichsminister to thank for that as well. It served the purposes of the script, the lady of the castle wasting away beneath the curse that had befallen the land, the sins of Jagdfrevel punished by the hunter cloaked in red. Just as in the book of old Märchen, every branch would wither, the crops blacken in the fields, the women mourn their children . . .

Marte had had one last meeting with her precious Joseph; she had told von Behren everything that had been said. The lies, and then the truth. That was when the silence had folded around her. She could speak the lines he wrote for her to say, and move from mark to mark on the stage, all in a dreaming, otherworldly quiet. The empty sadness behind her eyes, which had always reached out and laid a hand upon the hearts of those who saw her, now engulfed the onlookers, drawing them in and leaving them broken in a lightless room, the burial place of their own dreams. He had seen the other actors turn away, unable to bear such annihilating grace; even the cameraman had been forced to take his eye away from the viewfinder, to brush away a blurring tear. Von Behren knew that if he could capture that on film – and he had; the first reels he’d had printed and screened in private had caught her face perfectly, her silent, judging gaze like a knife to be embraced – it would be his masterwork. That by which he would be remembered, if any of it survived the last days of the war. To his own shame, he had rearranged the shooting schedule, to get as much footage of Marte as possible, before she died. In this, he knew he was as other men, even the Reichsminister he so despised. He wanted something, perhaps the same thing they all did, though the taking of it might destroy her. And as with the others, in this he was helpless. There was nothing else he could do.

“Marte?”

She opened her eyed, turned and looked at him, then nodded slowly to indicate that she had heard every word that had been spoken in the studio. “Yes . . .” Her voice came from that hollow space inside her. “I’ll stay. It’s all right.” Her gaze shifted away. “There’s no place else for me to go . . .”

With each of her words, von Behren had felt himself turning into a thing of lead, his own weariness encasing his shoulders and spine. He managed to look over at his assistant director. “If you wish to go, I won’t hold it against you. But you will have to decide for yourself.”

The other managed a rueful smile as he shook his head. “She’s right –” He looked up, listening to the clashing sounds that had already grown closer and louder. “There really is nowhere else to go.”

“Very well.” Von Behren turned away, clapping his hands once more for attention. He raised his voice. “Let us get to work, then.” He glanced up at the clouded sun that had leaked through a corner of the overhead canvases. “While we still have light . . .”

* * *

He was so faint from hunger that he could no longer feel the ground beneath him as he walked. The only food he’d had on his long trek from the asylum had been a few green shoots pushing through the melting snow. That, and a few scraps of charred pork he’d found in the ashes of a fire left behind by Russian soldiers. His stomach had clenched around the strong-tasting meat and he’d been sick, vomiting it all back up. After that, he’d felt odd and feverish, the world shimmering uneasily in his sight.

From the hiding place of a muddy ditch, Pavli had witnessed the Red Army crossing the Oder, the heavy tanks splashing across the wide, shallow river. Nobody had detected his presence, though he had been close enough to hear the rough voices shouting incomprehensible words, the harsh laughter of the troops who had come so far from the east and were now within sight of their enemy’s capital. They were all blinded and deafened by the roar of cannon fire, the shouting rush of the Katushka rocket launchers, the ‘Stalin organs’ – that was what he had heard them called by the guards back at the asylum, the ones who had served time on the front. Even before the shelling of the German defenses on the opposite shore had ended, the Russians had plunged into the water, some swimming across in full gear, others in tiny, gun-laden boats or pushing rafts of supplies. Pavli had raised his head above the crumbling dirt rim and had watched the thousands of men swarming insect-like through the churning river. When silence came again, the artillery ceasing its bombardment, he had felt a scalding wind die against his face, the air tortured by the massed explosions.

He had made his own way across in the wake of the advancing army, floating with his arms wrapped around a shattered tree trunk, pushing away the ragged corpses of those who had been crushed by tank treads or had caught a bullet from the fleeing Germans. Their bearded faces still looked fierce, teeth clenched with vengeful desire. With the bag of black leather still clutched in his hand, he had staggered onto the other shore, coughing up the water made salty with blood.

That had been days ago. The Red Army was somewhere to his right now; he had drifted a little to the south as he had continued stumbling westward. That’s good, he told himself, the words creaking in his weary brain. You mustn’t let them catch you . . . That was his greatest fear, that he might fall into the Russians’ hands. He spoke only German and a few words and phrases of the gypsy-like tongue his uncle and the others occasionally had used. Would they think he was a deserter, or a scout from some nearby Wehrmacht division? From what he had already seen, these soldiers were given to making no distinction between one German male and another; it was obviously easier, and safer, to shoot anything that moved and then examine the corpses for items of value. Pavli still had Ritter’s SS dagger tucked inside his shirt; the blade bumped against his protruding ribs. If they found that on him – if he were still alive when they found it – it would be excuse enough to kill him and take the knife for a souvenir. Still, he hadn’t been able to throw it away. In the darkness, he could clasp both fists around its handle, ready to swing the glittering edge across the face of anyone who might chance upon him.

His heavy eyelids drew closed, involuntarily, as he kept walking. The smell of burnt wood and the buzzing of flies brought him awake again. He stopped, shoulders hunched and mouth open to draw in one slow breath after another, and looked around.

He recognized the place; he was in the open square of one of the little villages just outside Berlin. He had come here with his uncle a few times, for photographs to be made into postal cards. The clock tower had a distinctive ornate design, the circle of numbers mounted with a scowling sun and smiling moon on an iron grille through which doves could reach their nests inside. There was no cooing and fluttering of wings now; silence, shaken only by the distant thunder of the war. A closer, almost electrical vibrating, hung over the broken and smoke-blackened buildings.

As his foot struck a hand outstretched upon the cobblestones, a cloud of flies burst into the air, then settled back down upon the corpse’s wounds. Pavli saw the dead now, scattered in the open or in the doorways. Most of them in uniform, darkened by the bleeding around the bullet holes; a few were civilians, without any rifles lying nearby.

“Wer bist du?”

Startled, Pavli turned toward the voice. For a moment, he couldn’t locate its source. Then he saw a woman peering from behind one of the doors. She emerged slowly, staring at him. Her hair was dusted with grey ash, her face smeared with soot.

“Who are you?” she demanded again. She had already crossed the square, her hands with their black-rimmed nails reaching up toward him.

He stepped backward, away from the woman. “No one –” The word, the first he had spoken in weeks, cracked in his throat. He shook his head. “I’m no one –”

Her hands darted out and snared upon the black leather bag he had clutched to his chest. Her eyes grew wilder, the thin arms in the torn sleeves shaking in desperation.

The woman had taken Pavli by surprise. He had almost lost his grasp upon the bag before he was able to push her away. He turned to run, but she caught his shoulders, the crook of her elbow around his neck.

“Give it to me!” She wept with frustration. “You must –”

They toppled together onto the stones, Pavli landing hard against his chest, the handle of Ritter’s knife shoving into his gut. The sudden pain flared into anger. He pushed himself onto one arm and swung his other fist across the woman’s face, knocking her from him.

He stood up painfully and reached down for the leather bag. As his breath returned to his aching lungs, he turned toward the woman.

“I’m hungry –” She knelt, arms clasped around her nonexistent breasts, rocking back and forth as the tears striped the dirt on her face. “I was hiding for so long – down there. Vati told me to, he told me not to come out until it was quiet – and now I can’t find him . . .”

He had thought she was an old woman, and now he saw that she was younger than him, almost a child.

“I . . . I can’t . . .” Her pleading gaze clove his heart as he stepped backward. “I can’t . . .” He turned and ran, holding the bag tighter to himself.

She had just been hungry; that was all. His own stomach had contracted to his spine. In a thick stand of pine outside the village, he slowed down, the smoke-laden air a rock between his lungs. She thought I had something . . . that’s all. He stopped, trying to keep exhaustion from felling him to the ground. In the branches above his head, the birds watched him.

Too dangerous to continue on, carrying the leather bag with the skin of his brother Matthi inside. Not that he was afraid of being caught with such a thing, of what would happen to him – they could only kill him – but what they would do with the skin, the remnant of his brother. He couldn’t bear the thought of it being violated, thrown aside in disgust and trampled into the ground, or tossed onto a smoldering fire.

Pavli knelt down. The knife’s sharp point broke open the ground, softer now that the spring thaw had set in; with his hands, he scooped out a hole deep enough in which to hide the bag of black leather. When he stood up, he memorized the location of where he buried the leather bag, an outcropping of rock serving as a marker. The time might come when he would be able to exhume it, have his brother with him once more, in the hope that Matthi would once more speak to him. But if his own death came instead, better that his brother’s skin lay in the earth undisturbed.

He heard a rush of wings overhead. The birds scattered, disturbed by the concussive sounds of the artillery to the north. A lull for several minutes, but now the bombardment of the city had begun again. The clouded sky flared white with each explosion.

With his boot, Pavli smoothed the dirt over what he had buried. Then he started walking again, toward the flames mounting in the distance, and the place where the earth split open to receive him.

TWENTY-THREE

“There!” The assistant director pointed to the streets below. “You see? We waited too long – we should have left hours ago!”

Von Behren leaned closer to the glass. The head grip had led the way, up the shaking metal stair and across the catwalks above the stage, to the studio’s highest window; the canvas that had covered it lay crumpled at their feet. “It is dangerous, Herr von Behren –” The grip held the director’s arm, pulling him back.

He paid no heed to the warning. From this vantage point, he could see for blocks around the studio. The streets were lit red with the flames from burning buildings, broken by the quick, glaring white of artillery shells. With each nearby impact, the studio trembled, the catwalks creaking and rattling, the window glass shivering, ready to burst into razor shards. Beneath the smoke mounting to the dense clouds filling the sky, running figures were cut down by shrapnel, momentum rolling the suddenly lifeless bodies into the gutters and against the lampposts.

Inside the studio, the filming had come to a halt long ago; it had been impossible to continue beneath the thunder of the Red Army’s bombardment of the city. The actors had no longer been able to hear von Behren’s shouted instructions, the quaking floors rattling the cameras out of focus.

“We must get out of here!” The assistant director shouted into von Behren’s ear. “The shelling is getting thicker – it’ll only be a matter of minutes before the studio is hit!”

Von Behren nodded. “All right –” No more that could be done here, no reasons for staying. He turned away from the window. “Go down and tell the others. We’ll try for the shelter beyond the rail station. It’s the largest, they might still have room for –”

The words were torn from his mouth by a blinding explosion. He was knocked back against the window frame; over his shoulder, he could see the glittering pieces of glass swirling out onto the street below. He clung to the assistant director’s arm, the two of them falling onto the catwalk as it heaved and buckled, bolts tearing out of the wall.

Now the flames were inside; he could feel the heat surging through the grillwork beneath his hands. Smoke billowed around him as the head grip took his arm, raising him from his knees. “The petrol – for the generators!” The grip pointed below. The fuel had been stored at the farthest end of the building, away from the stage; it was from that direction the fire rolled across the floor. “It must have been hit straight on!”

The screaming from one of the actresses cut through the shouts of the others. At von Behren’s side, the face of the assistant director appeared, bleeding from a gash across the brow. Von Behren pushed him and the grip toward the wobbling stairs. “Get everybody out!” More smoke welled up as the painted scenery flats caught fire. “Keep them all together – don’t let anyone run away!” Coughing, he grabbed the catwalk rail and followed after the two men.

On the stage floor, the actors and crew had already rushed toward the tall sliding doors, locked against intruders. The assistant director fought through the mass of bodies, key in hand; as soon as the heavy padlock fell from the hasp, the flames behind leapt higher with the rush of air inside. The opening was pushed wider, the closest ones spilling out into the chaos of the street.

Another explosion, an artillery shell or the last of the fuel canisters igniting, bellowed through the studio. The stairs to the catwalks tore free, ripping down banks of lights as they crashed to the floor. An iron pole struck von Behren across the shoulder as he threw himself to one side.

He could still hear screaming as he got to his feet. Covering his mouth against the smoke, he saw his youngest actress standing in the middle of the stage, slapping at the flames licking up from the hem of her costume. He staggered toward her and grabbed the skirt, tearing the embroidered fabric loose at her waist and revealing the makeshift petticoats beneath. The cloth burned his wrist as he threw it aside. “Go!” He shoved her toward the others milling at the doors. One of the men at the back of the crowd looked over his shoulder, grabbed the weeping girl by the arm and pushed her ahead of himself.

“What are you doing?” Von Behren had started toward the doors and had run into his cameraman. “Get out of here!”

“No –” The cameraman shook his head as he clutched a stack of flat metal canisters tighter in his arms. “Not until I get the rest of the film out of the storage vault!”

The words were at von Behren’s tongue, to tell the other to forget about such unimportant things; he had started to reach for the canisters and send them clattering across the ash-darkened stage floor, but stopped himself. “All right, fetch them!” He shouted over the fire’s roar, the earth-heaving blows of artillery shells. “Then get out the back way and come around – don’t try to go through here –”

The cameraman was already gone, head lowered against the heat, stumbling blindly toward the other end of the studio. Von Behren lost sight of him in the smoke, then turned away, his singed palms raised to feel his way toward the doors.

He was the last to reach the outside. The glare from the buildings on fire and the continuous bombardment was bright as daylight; knife-edged shadows danced in all directions from the crew and actors’ silhouetted figures. The assistant director and the head grip had already begun to lead the crowd toward the shelter several blocks away. Von Behren’s foot caught against a corpse sprawled on the sidewalk, its face and bared chest ripped by flying pieces of metal. He knew it wasn’t one of his people; the blood had already been scorched black against the pallid flesh. He stepped over the outflung arms, spreading his own out to gather up any stragglers.

Something shrieked overhead, splitting the red-tinged clouds. A second later, the shockwave rolled over von Behren, knocking him onto his hands and knees. He scrambled to his feet and saw the studio building breaking open, a swelling column of flames mounting through the shattered roof. The walls tottered for a moment, each brick outlined by the fire within, then fell back in upon themselves, each collapsing upon the next. He stood paralyzed, unable to make out any sign of the cameraman.

“Come on –”

He looked down and saw his youngest actress tugging at his arm.

She pulled harder, straining toward the others disappearing into the smoke. “You must –”

“Yes . . .” He turned away from the studio’s ruins, letting himself be pulled toward the distant refuge.

* * *

He walked through the end of the world.

Beneath Pavli, the ground erupted into flame, the explosions a fist of air that battered against his heart. The high buildings crumbled toward where he cowered in the street. Night had become harrowing day, as though a fierce sun had risen behind each shattered window.

A horse ran toward him, its mane and tail on fire. The hooves struck sparks from the cobbles, the ground shaking beneath him with each hammer blow. But that was the bombs, he knew. An iron rain, as the night’s birds cried out in fear and triumph. He shielded his face, and the birds’ song beat against the inside of his skull. The horse was upon him then and he fell beneath it, seeing the red flames bannering from its neck, a flap of torn skin revealing the steaming wet muscle of its shoulder, pink-flecked foam coursing its jaw. In the mirror of the burning horse’s crazed round eye Pavli could see his face reflected . . .

He had come into the city from the southeast, climbing over an abandoned row of tank barriers, nothing more than broken slabs of concrete stacked haphazardly at the edge of a shallow trench. The old men and children of the Volkssturm guards had run away, leaving behind the antiquated rifles they had been given. A shop window had been broken out, the stock inside looted; all he could find was a jaw of preserves that had smashed upon the doorsill. He had picked out the glass shards and eaten, scooping up the dark berry pulp with his fingertips. The sweetness had made him dizzy for a moment, then had given him enough strength to continue on into the Berlin he no longer recognized.

Blood leaked through the teeth of the fallen horse, and then the creature was still. Pavli pushed himself out from beneath its weight, his elbows scraping on the stones. Too dazed to stand upright, he crawled away, up onto the sidewalk, sitting at last against a wall of charred brick.

The sounds of the birds came to him then. He looked up and saw them overhead, their wings dark shapes against the churning red clouds. Not just the birds of the forest, or the small wrens and sparrows of the city; he saw a mad profusion, great swans and long-necked egrets, storks of Africa, fierce-eyed hawks, eagles whose beating wings cooled his heat-scarred face. The zoo, he realized. That’s where they’ve come from. The cages had been torn open, and they had burst into the sky in their own bright, chattering explosion. For a dizzying moment, he watched the swirl of the birds’ brilliant plumage, the jewels of their eyes, the inside of his skull singing with their unexpected beauty.

A raven swooped by, close enough that he felt the brush of its wing against his brow. Its rasping metallic voice shouted his name. He wondered if it had followed him all this way, if it had been the one that had flown above the cross he made from fallen branches in the woods, if it had listened to his brother whispering those secrets to him . . .

The black wings settled along the raven’s back as it perched on top of the horse’s head. It darkened its beak in the blood still welling over the broken flesh, then turned the hard gems of its gaze toward him again.

He’s here! The raven’s voice jabbed a rusting nail into Pavli’s eardrum. The prince has come, the prince is here!

His hands pushed him away from the wall. “What do you mean –” The words made no sense to him. “Who is it –”

The little one! An idiot chant. The little one! The raven’s eyes sparked with fervor. The prince, her son – he’s come!

“I don’t understand . . .” He raised his palm toward the creature, hoping that it would hop onto his wrist, so that he could bring it to his ear, where it could explain these mysteries to him. “Please . . .”

The raven spread its ragged wings and flapped into the air. Pavli turned and saw a hunched-over figure moving out of the shadows. The bursts of artillery shells illuminated a man with a drawn knife, a butcher’s tool, bigger than the dagger inside Pavli’s shirt.

He drew back against the wall as the man sprinted toward the horse. The knife rose, then sank into the animal’s haunch, blood gouting over the man’s forearm. The red weight of flesh that the blade carved away was large enough that the man had to sling it over his shoulder to carry.

“What’s wrong with you? Eh?” The man, stooped beneath the oozing burden, stared at Pavli. “Are you crazy?” The man’s eyes glittered brighter than the raven’s had.

“No . . . I don’t know . . .” The birds, all of them, the storks and eagles and the shrill-voiced raven, had wheeled about in the sky and vanished, specks against the storm clouds and then gone from sight. The man with the butcher knife hadn’t seemed to be aware of their presence. “I’ve come from –” He couldn’t remember its name, or if it had ever had one.

“You must be crazy! To be outside in weather like this!” The man looked up at the fire-reddened sky, cocking his head to listen to the war thunder, then broke into harsh, barking laughter. He came and grabbed Pavli’s arm, pulling him upright. “Come on – you’ll be killed if you don’t!”

The man led him to an open doorway, steps leading down into a cellar’s darkness. “There you are! That’ll do for you!”

“But what about you?” Pavli turned and saw the man scuttling away. “Where are you going?”

“I can’t go in there!” His eyes widened, his hands clutching tighter upon the bleeding horseflesh. “There’s too many of them down there – they’ll take it from me! Let them get their own!” He broke into a stumbling run, close to the crumbling buildings, his head down to avoid any stray bullets.

Pavli lost sight of the man in the banks of smoke rolling across the wreckage-cluttered streets. Another wave of the bombardment swept across the area, the impact of the explosions striking him in the chest. The front of one building gave way like a mountain avalanche, bricks and stone burying an abandoned truck and the body of its driver lying a few yards away.

Scalding air filled Pavli’s nose and mouth. He covered his face and grabbed the iron rail, hot against his palm, leading down into the shelter. The air was only a few degrees cooler with each step downward, but breathable.

He halted at the bottom of the steps to get his bearings. In the close-ceilinged darkness, he could see a few scattered candles and lanterns. Faces turned toward him, some showing fear, others beyond caring. Women held their hollow-eyed children close to themselves, one mother rocking a fitfully squalling infant against her breast.

Head lowered, Pavli squeezed between the rows of wooden benches lining the shelter’s walls. Away from the steps, the air grew staler, smelling of sweat and the zinc buckets in the corners, overflowing with urine. He went onward, looking for something but not knowing what. Dust fell on his neck, the mass of earth and brick above shuddering with each unseen blow.

He found them then, at the farthest reach of the shelter, where the curved walls were damp with seeping water. On a box set in the middle of the packed-dirt floor, a single candle guttered in a tin holder. A bearded man leaned forward, trying to read a book by the flickering light. Pavli’s eyes adjusted to the dimness; beyond the man were figures from a dream. Huddled against each other on the benches, or lying close upon the floor, were knights in doublet and hose, court ladies in elegantly embroidered gowns and hair bound up in gems and pearls. As if the shelter’s tunnel had been dug so deep into the earth, that it had uncovered the ancient centuries buried here, and the ghosts had stepped forward to take up bodies once more.

He held still, not even breathing, marvelling at their strangeness and beauty. Wherever they had come from, they had become mired in this place and time; Pavli could see now how tattered the women’s gowns were, the fabric defiled with dirt and scorch marks; the men’s torn leggings revealed the pale flesh beneath. One knight had an arm in a sling improvised from a handkerchief, another had his head bound with a ragged bandage. A young girl, with only the top half of her gown intact, lay with her head against a man’s chest, her red-rimmed eyes now closed in exhaustion, his arm clasped around her shoulders for protection.

He’s here! Pavli remembered the raven’s cry. The prince has come, the prince is here! He peered through the darkness, across the faces, sleeping or gazing numbly before themselves. He still didn’t understand what the raven had meant.

The man reading the book – dressed, like some of the others among the knights and ladies, in modern garb – looked up at Pavli. “Do you want to sit here with us?” The man’s voice was soft, burdened with fatigue. “There’s not much room, but you’re welcome. You look tired.”

“Yes . . .” He nodded. “I’ve come a long way.” He could see the pages of the book spread upon the bearded man’s lap. An old woodcut illustration showed a medieval court, the men and women dressed in the same finery as their counterparts here in the shelter. They had all turned to look in dread and wonder at a hooded figure that had appeared in the banquet room’s arched doorway. “A very long way . . .”

The man set aside the book and studied Pavli. “Why?” He touched Pavli’s hand. “Why did you come?”

“I was told . . .” He swayed where he stood and smiled in rueful acknowledgment of his own madness. Who could understand that he had heard his dead brother upon a cross, whispering the secrets of eternal life to him? That the birds of the night had cried out mysteries? “I thought . . . that she might be here . . .”

“How remarkable.” The bearded man smiled, a partner in madness, though his eyes remained filled with grief. “That you should find your way to this place.” He set aside the book of old tales and stood up. “I know the one you mean.” He took Pavli by the hand. “Be quiet.”

The fragile light of the candle was left behind as the man led Pavli farther into the darkness, past the knights and ladies. The crying of children, the murmur of prayers, even the volleys of artillery shells overhead, grew remote.

“There . . .” Pavli’s guide whispered at his ear. “You see her, don’t you?”

The shelter tunnel angled to one side, the curved wall hiding them from the view of the others. Enough illumination slid along the damp bricks to allow Pavli to see the figure of a woman lying on the wooden bench.

“Is she the one you seek?”

Pavli knelt down by the bench. The woman’s shallow breathing barely lifted the white fabric of her gown. Her white-gold hair spilled across her bared shoulder and alongside her arm, the back of her pale hand resting on the dirt floor.

The man’s voice came even softer. “Of course she is.”

He felt his heart swell and crack inside his chest, the narrow vault of the shelter seeming to fall away to a perfect night sky. The birds shouted inside the chamber of his skull. The raven, poor foolish creature, had known, but had not known what she was. He took the woman’s fallen hand and placed it on her breast. An angel . . .

He was close enough to have kissed her, if he had dared. The face of Marte Helle, the angel of his uncle’s shop window, the face in the silver frame, the newspaper photo that had flared into smoke and ash in the asylum’s darkroom. All of those, and now here before him. Now he knew why he had come, what vision had guided his steps.

His hand reached down and brushed a strand of golden hair away from her brow. She made no sign of awakening, her eyelids not even fluttering. “What is the matter with her?” He looked over his shoulder at the man who had led him to this place.

“Isn’t it obvious?” The bearded man regarded her with his sad eyes. “She’s dying. She didn’t even try to get out of the studio when the shells hit – you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Two of the grips carried her here.” He shook his head. “I suppose it’s better this way. I would have been tormented by the thought of her burning.”

Pavli felt as if he had stepped through the pages of the book the man had been reading by candlelight and into one of the woodcut pictures. The old tales were the real world now, and the other merely empty dreaming. “What is the spell that has been laid upon her?”

“Ah . . .” The bearded man understood. “Of course. The spell . . . an evil magician has stolen her son from her. The young prince was killed, and his bones ground up and scattered to the winds. And now she’ll die of her grieving.”

No – Pavli shook his head. The prince is here. Somewhere in the city; that was what the raven had told him. He knew if he could wake her, tell her, she would live.

“Leave us.” He looked up at the man standing behind him. “I can help her. But you must not watch.”

“What do you mean –” The bearded man suddenly reached down, his hand laid against the side of Pavli’s face. “Your eyes,” he said wonderingly. “You must be one of them . . . one of her people.”

He brushed the man’s hand away. “There isn’t time to waste. You must go away.” He pointed to the angle of the tunnel, concealing the other part of the shelter. “And keep anyone else from coming back here.”

The bearded man hesitated for only a moment. “Very well. She spoke to me – a long time ago – about legends, secrets known to the ones from whom her father had taken her. What harm can it do now?” He stepped back, away from the bench with the dying woman upon it. “As you wish; I’ll stand guard for you.”

Pavli waited until the man had disappeared around the curve of the wall, then turned back to the angel lying on the bench. It struck him as something inevitable, as preordained as one page following the next in the book of old tales, that he would have come upon her in this place. She needed him, as much as he had needed her, the mere image of her face in the frayed newspaper photo and in his dreams, that had kept him alive in Ritter’s asylum.

Carefully, tenderly, he undid the ornate belt knotted at her waist. A cleverly sewn fold of cloth concealed a long row of hooks and eyes at the side of the gown. When he had separated those and unbuttoned the tight cuffs beaded with seed pearls at her wrists, it was an easy matter to remove the garment from her. He had to raise her up with a hand between her shoulder blades, so he could draw her white arms from the gown’s sleeves; as he laid her back down, leaning over her, the bloodless lips parted, whispering a man’s name.

“David . . .”

His heart constricted for a moment, in a pang of jealousy. He wondered who the man was, who could be so fortunate as to have her dream of being in his embrace as she lay dying.

There wasn’t time to consider such things. Not now.

She lay before him, the antique gown rumpled beneath her, its hem draped over the edge of the bench and across his knees. She had tried to speak once more, but no sound came. The effort seemed to exhaust what little strength she had left; Pavli could see her sinking deeper into unconsciousness, beyond dreaming. And closer to death.

From inside his shirt, he took the SS dagger. His thumb rubbed across the words inscribed on the blade. Meine Ehre heißt Treue. He remembered everything that Matthi had taught him, the secrets whispered by a silken thing with his brother’s face, hanging from a wooden cross in the forest. His inheritance at last, the secrets of the Lazarenes.

With the dagger’s sharp point, he drew a shallow cut along her left wrist, then the other. In the dim light, the blood seeped out black as ink. Another wound, along her ribs; this one flowed more, the blood trickling down and soaked up by the gown beneath her. The stigmata were complete.

The wounds, the brief pain that he had been unable to avoid causing, roused her for a moment. Her eyes opened partway, her gaze out of focus as she tried to see him. She lifted her hand and grasped his arm, leaving a red mark upon his sleeve. Then she let go, her hand falling as if already lifeless.

Pavli knew there was little time left.

He reached behind Marte’s neck, to the first small points of her spine; as if they were buttons as well, that he could undo as easily as those of the gown. His fingertips dug deeper into the flesh above the bone. Something parted, her skin but not her skin; he felt the weightless substance, lighter than smoke, gathering in the crooks of his fingers. He shifted his hands, laying his palms flat against the backs of her shoulders, then drawing them slowly apart.

As his brother had taught him, had promised him – he saw it then, the skin of her death, the silken translucent matter separating from her body. She moaned, at first as though the process pained her, then a sigh, the ending of pain. He brought his hands down the smooth roundness of her arms, a silken ghost rising piece by piece from her naked form. The floating image snared for a moment at her wrists, the blood from the wounds mingling as red threads in both flesh and the slowly drifting essence. The connection thinned and then broke, the ghost hands opening like pale flowers.

Beneath her breasts, at the side of her torso, Pavli stroked his hand across the larger wound, the blood smearing against his palm. She arched her back, eyes still closed, in a dream or memory of a lover’s touch. He brought his hands lower, the dead skin parting from her throat to the soft, darker-gold hair between her legs. That flesh swelled beneath his fingertips; it was the first time he had ever touched a woman in that place, and a dizzying flush rose up across his own throat. He forced his breath deliberate, his brother’s words repeating inside his head. The moment passed, and he was able to draw his hands over her hips and across the front of her thighs.

The face was the last. A ghost floated above Marte, bound to her as though locked in an unending kiss. Pavli reached up and stroked his fingertips across her cheeks and brow, his thumbs moving along the angle of her jaw. The silken mask gave way. The ghost with her dreaming face rose higher now, faint luminous smoke caught against the low stonework of the tunnel.

He sank down upon the floor, feeling his own tiredness well up inside him. The administering of the sacrament to her, the angel that shared his blood and heritage, had taken what had been left of his strength. He could barely keep himself sitting upright as he watched the silken image slowly dissipate and vanish in the darkness overhead.

The sound of the woman’s breathing brought his gaze back down to her. Her breast rose higher now; he could see the force of her heartbeat, the pulse strong at the sides of her neck.

“I told you,” mumbled Pavli, his heavy eyelids lowering. “I told you . . . I could save her . . .”

His head snapped erect, startled, as he felt his arm seized. His eyes opened wider, and he found himself gazing into the angel’s awakened face. She raised herself from the bench, her fingers still tight above his elbow, and looked searching into his eyes.

“Who are you?” Her words rang sharp and clear.

He shook his head. “No one . . . it’s not important . . .”

She let go of him, looking down at herself now. In wonderment, she touched her naked flesh, glowing as though the life within had become fire.

“Why?” Bitterness rose in her voice as she turned her gaze to him again. “Why did you bring me back here?”

TWENTY-FOUR

Von Behren had found for her a soldier’s winter coat, stripped of all its military emblems; the thick woolen fabric came down nearly to her ankles. Marte sat bundled up at the edge of the bench, sipping the cup of tea, lukewarm from an insulated flask, that her director had also managed to beg from a family clustered together in the shelter. She supposed they were all eager to help, having recognized her when she had been carried in, and having seen how close to death she must have looked then. A few of the braver ones had satisfied their curiosity by working their way through the crowded space, shoulders hunched against the battering noise of the bombardment in the streets above their heads, and peering around the tunnel’s angle at her. She could even hear them whispering of the miracle that had occurred, that she had somehow come back to the living.

The young man she had found kneeling beside where she lay – hardly more than a boy, but with an old man’s eyes in his starved-looking face – now sat on the shelter’s dirt floor, his hands clasped around his knees. She had seen him fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, his head nodding forward, but in a few minutes he had snapped back awake. He kept watching her as though she might disappear at any moment. His eyes of two colors, one blue and the other golden-brown – the sight of those, so like the eyes of the baby she had held in her arms so long ago, had stabbed her to the heart – had told her he was of the same blood as herself, that strange, inward-turned community that her father had abandoned. The fact that Pavli – he had told her his name at last – had taken the skin of death from her proved that he knew the ancient Lazarene secrets.

The memory of what he had done, the image, like a fading dream, of a ghostlike form with her face, floating above her . . .

She turned those things over in her thoughts and set them aside; they held no importance for her. If that dream had become real, it was no different – and no more real – than anything else. In this chamber in the earth, a tomb, sitting in darkness with all these others who believed themselves to be alive, she listened to the explosions and distant cries of the meaningless war overhead.

“You should have let me die.” She raised her head from the dented metal cup in her hands. “That was what I wanted.”

Pavli’s brow creased. “Why?”

She kept her voice low, to avoid von Behren hearing her. He had gone with a couple of the grips, to climb up the shelter’s stairs and see what was happening above, as though they might hold out the palms of their hands and find that it had stopped raining, the sun breaking through remnants of storm clouds. That had been during a few minutes reprieve in the bombardment; the ground-shaking explosions had started up again, and von Behren might already be around the concealing angle of the tunnel, come back to see if she were still all right. She didn’t need his fussing attention now.

“Why shouldn’t I want to die?” She let him gaze into the emptiness behind her own eyes. “I was dead already. And it was easier that way.” The brief smile faded from her lips. “They just thought I was alive. All of them . . . von Behren and Joseph . . . and David . . . they believed it because they wanted to. But they were lying to themselves, as much as they lied to me. I knew better, though. I knew all along . . . even before Joseph told me my little boy was lost . . .”

“No –” Pavli raised his head, eyes widening. “That’s not true. He’s not lost. He’s here, in Berlin.”

A wave of disgust moved through her; she could have reached out and slapped him, sent him sprawling across the dirt, stood over him and screamed in anger. “And now you’ll lie to me as well.” She shook her head. “About things of which you know nothing . . .”

“I do know.” His voice trembled with fervor. “The prince is here. The raven told me. Your son isn’t lost, he’s alive, he’s here in the city – I know it.”

The other’s sudden passion confused her. “What do you mean . . .”

“Can’t you sense it? Can’t you hear him, feel him, close to you?” He was pleading with her. “That was what the dead skin kept you from knowing. But I took that away from you. Now you can tell for yourself.” He put his fingertips against the side of her face. “Close your eyes. Then you’ll know.”

She did as he instructed. Another darkness, even deeper, folded around her. She could still hear Pavli’s voice.

“It’s different when that skin has been taken away . . . from your eyes, your ears . . . all your senses. You were blind and deaf; you were wrapped in your own slow dying. But now you can see everything. Hear everything.” His voice became a whisper. “Everything . . . from the least to the most important. Listen . . .”

The sounds were no louder, the breathing and murmuring voices inside the shelter, the artillery shells and bursts of rifle fire up above. But now she felt herself moving among them, as though she were stepping between the rows of huddled people and out into the open. Each word, each noise, from the collapse of a building wall to the hissing of a cinder extinguished in a wet gutter, came sharp and clear to her.

And farther. She could imagine herself floating beneath a sky reddened by fire, as though she were the ghost that had been liberated from her flesh and risen through the dead earth. She could see the streets of Berlin laid out beneath her, the ranks of burning buildings pulling a stormwind of heated air through the open doorways and jagged windows. The flames silhouetted the tanks breaking through the outer ring of the city’s defenses, the soldiers moving from one block of flats or office building to the next. The smell of fire and explosives, the sudden stink of a German bullet ripping open a Russian’s intestine, the cry as his hands clasped his gut, blood streaming between his fingers . . . the smell of sweat acrid with fear and adrenaline and hastily swigged alcohol, bowels loosened by terror. And subtle traces, mixed in with the rest – Marte could hear a fourteen-year-old boy agreeing to the orders given him by his Volkssturm commander, to hold his position no matter how many of his enemy came rushing toward him; she could tell that the boy was lying, that as soon as the fool of a commander’s back was turned, the boy was going to throw away his antiquated, useless rifle and the two bullets he’d been issued, tear the Hitler Jugend insignia off his jacket, and run and hide in the deepest hole he could find until the battle was over. He didn’t care if it was right beneath the corpse of some deserter who had been hung from a lamppost days ago. Coward, read the signs around the necks of those corpses. I Was Afraid to Fight for My Country. Those things didn’t matter now. Everyone was afraid; the only thing to do was to find a way to survive until the shelling and the bullets stopped.

Marte breathed in the mingled odors of the dying city. Closer, in the other part of the shelter, a young woman was soothing the two frightened children clinging to her knees. At the same time – Marte could tell, without even seeing the woman, just from the tremble in her voice – she was getting ready to cut off all her long, dark hair, to dig open wounds in her face with her nails and rub dirt in them, to make herself appear so diseased that the Russian soldiers wouldn’t be interested in dragging her out and raping her. She would lie to them and tell them she had syphilis, from the last soldiers that had had her, and maybe that would stop them.

They were all lying. They had to; it was no sin. But for others . . .

She sat on a splintering wooden bench, deep in a shelter, the air stale and damp. And at the same time, with her eyes closed, she turned slowly in the night sky, her back to the fire-tinged clouds, her hand reaching across the broken city.

“You can sense him out there, can’t you?” Pavli’s whisper. “The young prince. The child.”

Lying . . . he had lied to her. Joseph . . .

She cried out as her eyes flew open. Her hands clutched the shoulders of Pavli kneeling before her. “He is here! I can feel him . . . my baby! He’s here, he’s in Berlin!” She stood up, dragging Pavli with her by his arm. “We have to go find him!”

“Marte –” A man’s silhouette stood in front of her, blocking her way; she realized that it was von Behren. “What are you doing?”

“Get away from me.” A new strength welled up inside her limbs; she was easily able to push the director back. He fell sprawling against the angle of wall and floor. “I have to find him . . . my son . . .”

Von Behren scrabbled onto his knees and grabbed her hand. “Marte – stop it! You can’t go out there – the tanks and the soldiers are only a few blocks away –”

She could feel the faces in the shelter, the actors and crew from the studio, the others who had been here before them, turning toward her, listening open-mouthed. “You can’t stop me.” She pulled her hand from von Behren’s grasp and turned toward Pavli, now standing a few feet from her. “You must help me. You know it’s true, that my son is alive, that he’s here – you showed me. Now you must help me find him.”

Fright and doubt showed in Pavli’s eyes. “But how? In the whole city . . . he could be anywhere . . .”

“There is one who would know.” The one who had lied to her; a fury of hatred leapt in her heart. “And there’s only one place he would be. Come.” She turned and strode toward the steps leading out of the shelter, brushing past the close figures watching her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Pavli hesitate for a moment; then he nodded and followed behind.

Von Behren called desperately after her. “Marte – don’t . . .”

An explosion, louder than all the ones preceding, rocked the shelter. Women screamed as the dirt floor heaved, bricks from the ceiling’s arch cracking and raining down with mortar dust upon the cringing shoulders. The impact knocked Marte to one side of the stairwell; from the open doorway above, a blinding light washed over her, then darkness, as though the sun itself had surged against her face. Behind her, Pavli caught her by the waist and kept her from falling.

Her ears rang with the shell’s echo; through it, she could still hear the coughing rattle of nearby rifles, the shriek of artillery cutting open the sky. “Come on –” Her own voice sounded distant beneath the barrage of noise. She regained her balance and reached back to grasp Pavli’s arm, pulling him with her to the street.

Figures ran between the buildings, several blocks down. The rolling smoke obscured them and prevented any from spotting her and Pavli as they pressed themselves against the wall by the shelter’s doorway.

Beside her, Pavli leaned forward, his anxious glance searching in all directions. He held her back with a protective hand across the front of the soldier’s coat,

Impatiently, she pushed his arm away. She began running; in the center of the street, it was easier to dodge past the mounds of rubble and overturned vehicles. Behind her, she heard Pavli’s footsteps and his panting breath as he tried to keep up.

They were far from the center of the city. That would be where the Red Army tanks and soldiers would be pressing toward; the fighting would be heaviest in the blocks surrounding that area.

Underneath the fiery sky, she headed in that direction, ducking from the shelter of one crumbling wall to the next, and in the open between the scarred faces of the blocks. The eyes of both the living and the dead watched as she passed by.

* * *

It ended in a place he could recognize. Pavli had been there with his uncle, long ago, so long that it seemed as if it had happened in another life. When his uncle had first taken him out of the Bayerisches Viertel, the closed-in neighborhood that had been home to the Lazarene community, and on the way to the little camera shop had shown him Berlin’s great wide avenues, Wilhelmstraße and Unter den Linden, and the massive buildings lining them. The centers of power, the Reich Chancellery, the Leopoldpalast and the others, that the old regime had handed over to the National Socialists, and that had been transformed even grander with stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons, and flags snapping in the wind blowing across the land.

The flags were gone now, and the buildings were so battered and blackened by the storm passing over them, that he knew them only by their shapes, black, broken-windowed hulks outlined by the glow of fires in the distance.

He wondered where the angel was leading him. She had seemed to know where she was going, heading there with urgent purpose. Even when their progress had been halted by collapsed buildings or abandoned barricades, or they had circled blocks out of their way to avoid being seen by the few German military units or Volkssturm brigades milling chaotically about, Marte had kept on pressing toward the center of the dying city.

The bombardment had been interrupted, long enough for breaks to appear in the clouds overhead, stars and a pale wedge of moonlight silvering the rubble-strewn ground. Pavli caught up with Marte as she turned, gazing quickly across the streets pocked with craters. Her white-blond hair had come loose, lying tangled now across the collar of the heavy coat.

“There’s no one here.” Pavli took her arm, as though he might lead her away, back to safety. “There can’t be –”

“Not here.” She raised her hand toward the abandoned buildings, then pointed to the ground. “But below. That was what Joseph told me, that he’d never leave Berlin. He’d stay in the Führerbunker with the rest of them, until the end. Hurry –” She pulled away from him, heading down one of the dark gaps between the crumbling stone facades.

“Ah, Fraulein, you’re too late –” A drunken voice called out of the darkness. “You’ve come too late for the party!” The voice broke into coarse laughter.

Pavli looked across the small open space behind what had been the Chancellery building. A garden of some kind, for the private enjoyment of the ministers and their staff. Little of that remained, though; the grounds were strewn with twisted metal and wooden planks, some still smoldering from where a shell’s impact had ripped them from a flat-roofed structure, a square of thick, rough-surfaced concrete.

A soldier lay in the doorway, his back against the slanted edge of the wall. The dim light glinted off the bottle he waved toward Marte. “All gone, they’re all gone . . . nobody left but me.” His voice turned to sodden self-pity. “And I would’ve gone, too, if I could have.” One leg of his uniform was in tatters, his exposed shin raw and bloodied; Pavli knew that there would be no point in trying to help him stand upright. The soldier took another drink, tilting the bottle nearly vertical. He started to laugh again, the alcohol bubbling out the corners of his mouth. “I’ll just have to do for you, then, won’t I?” He gazed blearily at Marte standing before him.

“There’s no one down below?” She pointed to the steps leading into the darkness. “You’re lying –”

The soldier had slumped onto one arm, the bottle falling from his grip and clinking against the broken cement. “See for yourself,” he mumbled, eyelids drifting shut. His stubbled face grew slack, mouth falling open.

A pocket flashlight lay near the soldier’s outstretched hand; Pavli bent down and scooped it up. It emitted a weak, yellow beam, the batteries close to dead. He pointed it down the steps. “I don’t see anyone.” He turned to Marte. “Maybe he’s right –”

She pushed past him. “Joseph!” Her voice echoed against the walls as she descended.

He followed her, trying to shine the light past her so she wouldn’t trip and fall. The bunker’s narrow corridors were littered with papers and other rubble; with each step, he seemed to kick away another empty bottle. The smell of spilled alcohol in the trapped air choked his breath in his throat.

“He was here . . .” Marte stopped and looked across the open doorways surrounding her. “I can still feel him . . .” She stepped closer to one. The flashlight beam revealed a table covered with maps, a few spilling onto the trash-strewn floor. She stepped back into the corridor and closed her eyes, raising a hand before himself.

Pavli felt his chest tightening, his lungs straining for whatever oxygen was left in the fetid air. The walls and ceiling pressed tighter around him than the shelter had. The human smells, and the shouting voices, the screams and hysterical laughter, now reduced to whispers embedded in the earth.

“There –” Marte pointed down the corridor. A spiralling set of stairs curved beyond the door to which she ran.

They were still underground when they stepped into the next level; Pavli could sense the weight of stone and concrete above his head. He followed Marte through a doorway on the left.

At first, he thought the flashlight, slowly growing weaker, had picked out a set of dolls on the beds against the room’s walls. Large ones, but still smaller than adult figures would have been. Six of them, the golden hair of the girls spilling across the pillows.

He tried to keep Marte from touching any of them, but she pushed away his arm. She leaned down, her fingertips brushing the cheek of the oldest girl’s corpse. The younger girls and the boys looked peaceful, but Pavli could see the dark bruises on the one’s shoulders and throat, showing the struggle she must have put up.

“Joseph did this.” Tenderly, she stroked the girl’s hair, a deeper, more sunlike golden than her own. The hair of all the dead children were the same blond shade; that was what had told Pavli that Marte’s child wasn’t among them. “He and Magda . . . they didn’t want to leave them behind . . .”

The sight of the small corpses made Pavli dizzy. He had seen so many worse things, in the war-torn streets of Berlin and on Ritter’s surgery table at the asylum, but the peaceful faces in this tomblike chamber, looking as if they were merely asleep, wrapped ice around his heart. Present time ebbed away; Marte was no longer there with him, and he could watch in silence as a woman in a dark blue dress, with hair as golden as that of the children, bent forward to wake each child in turn. The woman of the room’s past placed capsules in their mouths, one after another, telling them to be good and to bite down and swallow their medicine, that soon they would be getting ready to go on a long airplane ride, to go far away, to someplace much sunnier and prettier. Only the eldest girl woke before her mother reached her; she started sobbing in fear as she watched her brothers and sisters fall back into a sleep from which they would never waken. She had sobbed and cried out, her mother had slapped her, forced her mouth open and pressed in the capsule with her thumb, then pressed a hand over her face to make her swallow . . .

“Joseph!”

His head swam with the images of another’s memory, the deaths of the golden-haired children, as he heard Marte scream the single name. He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the center of the room, looking wildly about herself, as though she expected an answer to the shout still echoing in the bunker. She burst into tears as he placed his arm around her shoulders.

“He was here –” She struck a weak fist against Pavli’s chest. “He knows, he’s the only one who can tell me –”

Marte was still weeping as he led up into the cold night air, still thick with smoke but breathable. She slipped from his grasp and knelt beside the drunken soldier.

“Where is he?” She pulled the man toward her by the front of his uniform. His head lolled back, eyelids fluttering open. “Where is Reichsminister Goebbels? Where did he go –”

The soldier laughed. “He went nowhere, Fraulein. The bastard’s still here.” He reached for Pavli’s hand. “Help me up. I’ll show you.”

Leaning his weight on Pavli, the soldier hobbled with his wounded leg dragging behind. “This way.” He nodded toward the corner of the rough concrete structure.

They had come around the other side when they had entered the remains of the Chancellery garden; if they had gone by this side, they would have stumbled across the two corpses to which the soldier brought them.

“There – you see?” The soldier’s rank breath was right against Pavli’s face. “He wanted to go the same way – they both did, him and his stuck-up wife – the same way the Führer did. We burned that bastard yesterday, broke up what was left with a shovel handle, and then we scattered the ashes all around, so the Ivans wouldn’t be able to get their hands on any piece of him. So of course your precious Reichsminister Goebbels would have to have the same thing, wouldn’t he?” The soldier’s voice sharpened with scorn. “Burn ’em up, soon as he and his wife had killed themselves, those were his orders. But we’d already used most of the cans of petrol on his boss – it takes a lot of fuel to get to ashes. And there wasn’t time to stand around watching these two burn. Just doused ’em and threw the match, and then everybody was gone. Everybody but me.” The soldier’s weight sagged against Pavli; he had to catch himself to keep from falling. “I had to smell ’em all this time, ’til the flames died out.” He spat on the ground. “Made me sick, it did –” His head wobbled, and Pavli let him slip unconscious onto the ground.

More of the clouds parted, letting through enough moonlight to show the two charred bodies. They lay on their backs, one barely recognizable as a woman, the golden hair gone, blackened bone visible through the scalp. Pavli could even see where a bullet had cracked open the skull close to the burnt scrap of ear cartilage. The other corpse, though its skin had turned dark as a piece of bacon that had fallen from the skillet into the fire, was still recognizable as the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Gauleiter and defender of Berlin. Goebbels’ mouth was drawn open in a silent grimace, his eyesockets scorched hollow. Scraps of his dress uniform’s collar and sleeves were still in place above the sunken chest.

Marte dropped to her knees. “Joseph –” She shouted the living’s name into the face of the dead. She placed both hands against the protruding knobs of the corpse’s shoulders, looking for a reply that could never come. “Joseph!”

The burnt smell thickened in Pavli’s nostrils, suffocating him. He felt Marte grab his hand, saw a hysterical angel tugging him down beside her.

“You –” Both her hands gripped his forearm, her fingers clawing in desperation. “You can bring him back! You have to – so he can tell me where my son is!”

He shook his head. “No . . . I can’t. It’s impossible.” He stepped back, trying to pull Marte away from the blackened object before her. “Don’t you see? He’s dead, there’s nothing left to bring back –”

“Try! You must try!” Her hands stayed locked upon his arm. “I was dead . . . I was . . . and then . . . you did that . . .” She glanced down at Goebbels’ sightless visage. “Even for a moment . . . a few seconds, anything . . . that’s all it would take . . .”

“All right –” His will left him, sapped away by the angel’s tear-wet face and her pleading words. How could he refuse her, when her mere image had kept him alive for so long at the asylum? He sank down beside her. “I’ll try.”

He had no knife with him; Ritter’s SS dagger had been left behind on the floor of the shelter. But none was needed. With his thumbnail, he broke a line through the charred undersides of the corpse’s wrists, then along the ribs of the exposed torso. Flakes of black ash clung to his hand; he shook them away before going any further.

Again, he heard his brother’s voice whispering at his ear, the pale thing upon the makeshift crucifix imparting the secrets of the Lazarene faith. A sacrament to be administered to the dying, not to the dead. To take the skin of death away . . .

But here there was no skin, no life inside the husk of ash and cinder. This was sacrilege; he knew that even as he obeyed the angel’s command and set his palms beneath the withered form’s shoulderblades. He drew his hands apart, away from the spine, feeling a crumbling, mortal substance peel away and gather against his fingertips.

His brother had given him his inheritance, given him the power to take away death, bestow life. He closed his eyes and let the sacrament move inside his arms, down to his own unscarred wrists. Without Christ’s stigmata, the emblems of sacrifice that had brought the ancient craft into the light; darkness welled up inside his head, pushing away all thought, even the memory of his own name . . .

The weight against his hands shifted. He heard something tearing, like fire-blackened paper.

“Joseph . . .”

Her whisper brought Pavli’s eyes open. He looked down at what he held, saw the corpse’s chest swell, a white angle of breastbone protruding through the charred flesh, vertebrae cracking as the spine arched into a bow.

Marte reached past him, trying to touch the corpse’s face. A spark moved inside the blind sockets; the lipless mouth opened wider, the black tongue thrusting against the splintered teeth. A hissing sound came from deep inside the throat. Pavli watched as its left hand rose, brushing against his own chest, the fingers like a withered tree branch as they tightened into claws, struggling to touch the hand of the woman above.

The hissing changed, the remains of lips and tongue pressing against each other, to form a single word.

Her name . . .

She screamed and pushed Pavli away from the corpse; she screamed the dead man’s name as he fell back, twisting onto his side.

“Joseph!” She gathered the corpse into her arms, her face close to its sharp-edged mask. “Tell me . . . tell me where he is . . . my baby . . .”

On his hands and knees, Pavli saw the last ember die in the hollows of its skull. The hissing noise stopped, the clawing hand frozen an inch from touching her.

The last of its death; he knew that. He got to his feet and stood behind Marte, reaching down to pull her away from the lifeless form. “Don’t . . . it’s no use . . .”

She knew it as well. The corpse slid from her hands. It lay with the one hand still raised, the fingers curved toward the palm, the thing it had desired now beyond its grasp.

With his arm around her shoulders to hold her upright, Pavli turned and looked behind himself. In the distance, he heard the sound of artillery fire. In a few seconds, the ground beneath them would tremble and split open beneath the force of the bombardment. And after that, a matter of hours, the Russian soldiers would stream across the ruins of their enemy’s capital.

“Come.” He guided her out of the rubble-strewn garden, toward the narrow passage that opened onto the broken streets. “I think I remember the way.” He wondered if they would be able to reach the shelter before the last tide of the war surged over them.

It didn’t matter. The angel wept against his neck as he led her through the dark.

TWENTY-FIVE

Herr Wise found him poking through the ruins of the studio. I must look so shabby to him – von Behren’s coat was grey with dust from crumbling plaster and concrete. As the American picked his way over the slabs of broken walls and fire-twisted window frames, he spotted the director through the open doorway of one of the still-standing buildings, prodding the debris with the point of his cane, then bending down and picking up some small glittering object.

“Ah, Herr Wise –” Von Behren turned and smiled, as if caught in some mildly embarrassing folly. He held up a framing viewfinder, the enameled metal scratched, but the lens still intact. Its glass shone in the sunlight piercing the soundstage’s damaged roof. “You see? Who knows how many more treasures are waiting here to be discovered?”

He had his reasons for being in a good mood. Wise had been with him the day before, when the film salvaged from the studio’s underground storage vault had been screened, for the first time since the end of the fighting in Berlin. Wise had commandeered an editing suite over at the UFA complex in Babelsberg, at the edge of the city, just for that purpose. All the reels that had been shot of Der Rote Jäger, his work in progress, had survived in good enough shape to be used. The artillery shells that had hit the studio during the last days of the battle for the city – he had told Wise about getting the actors and crew out to the nearest shelter – had buried the vault in layers of brick and plaster, keeping the fires away from the irreplaceable celluloid. Von Behren’s cameraman had died there, skull and spine broken by the walls collapsing just moments after he had secured the film canisters; that sacrifice had been the somber edge to the director’s relief at finding the film intact.

“You must excuse me.” Von Behren made a formal nod of his head. “I keep forgetting your exalted rank – I see you always as when we were in Hollywood. Is it a colonel you are now? Or general?”

Wise smiled at the joke. “Hardly. Believe me, it’s not going to be much longer for this get-up.” He brushed his hand across the front of his uniform. “My head’s already a civilian. When we get back to the States, I’m planting myself behind my studio desk for good.”

“Oh?” Von Behren raised an eyebrow. “When we get back? What do you mean?”

“That’s why I came out here. Got some more good news for you.” Wise took off his cap and wiped his brow. Summer had made the rubble-filled streets hot and even dustier, the humid air buzzing with midges breeding in the craters filled with stagnant water. Outside, the studio’s wreckage made a mound of broken concrete high enough to climb upon and look down the surrounding streets. A few blocks away, a line of Trümmerfrauen, ragged figures with their hair covered in kerchiefs, shuffled bricks from one woman’s hands to another’s, slowly clearing one of the bombsites. “I’ve been pulling some pretty big strings in Washington on your behalf. But then, those people owe me a lot of favors for all the fund-raising I did during the war.”

Only a small lie, thought von Behren. He knew that the American film producer’s favors weren’t being called in for his sake, but for Marte Helle’s.

“Everything’s settled,” continued Wise. “We got the okay to ship you out of here. Final stop on your itinerary will be Los Angeles.”

“Indeed.” Von Behren watched the point of his cane knock aside a few more bits of plaster. “And will I be unaccompanied on this voyage?”

“Of course not. We talked about this already, Ernst. It’ll be you and Marte and this kid you told me about –”

“Pavli.” The director nodded. “Yes, that will be absolutely necessary. I doubt if Marte would consent to go, otherwise. She relies on him a great deal. As distantly related as they are – some type of cousins, I understand – they are the only family each of them has left now. They spend long hours in conversation with each other; things that I suppose are not to be shared with me.” Von Behren voice turned wistful for a moment. “No matter. Young Iosefni has proved himself valuable to me as well. Did I tell you we started shooting again, with him as my new cameraman? Extraordinary – he seems to have had experience with cine equipment, but he won’t tell me from where. His father or his uncle – somebody – ran a photographer’s studio; that’s all I’ve been able to find out.” A shrug. “He picked up quickly the few things I was able to show him, but his eye for angles and lighting – that is a gift. He should do well at your studio in Hollywood.”

“That’s fine. Happy to give him a chance. Since it’ll be a while before there’s any more filming going on around here.”

“I suppose that’s true, Herr Wise.” It would have been easier if his old studio, plus his crew and actors, had all wound up in the American or British zones. Getting anything done through the Russian headquarters was nearly impossible; truckloads and freight cars full of loot, everything from factory machines to a shiny brass mountain of marching band instruments, were already heading eastward, never to be seen again – not to mention any human resources the Russians thought might be of value to them. “But it seems a shame. I realize that is callous of me, but I almost feel as if the destruction we see around us –” He gestured toward the empty windows and fire-blackened buildings nearby. “It is as if I had designed it all myself, the most elaborate set a filmmaker could ever devise. You recall, in the last pages of the script, how the land is cursed for the sins of its noblemen? The red hunter exacts a terrible retribution. What better way to show that than to point our camera toward these photogenic ruins that have been provided for us? Really, Herr Wise, there are sections of the city where one would hardly know they were still part of the twentieth century.”

Such would be easily believed by the American producer; Wise had no doubt seen as much for himself. Since Wise’s arrival in Berlin on the coattails of the U.S. Army, after the Russian artillery had at last gone silent, there would have been plenty of time to tour the devastated areas, the streets that still stank of corpses not yet dug out from the rubble. Long before now, von Behren had grown sick of the war and its aftermath; he could barely wait for the day when he’d step off the the train at Union Station and walk out underneath the palm trees and caressing sunshine. The reports were already circulating through the Military Government offices about how many deaths from cold and starvation were likely when winter rolled across Europe; the sites where the mass graves would be dug had already been marked on the Occupation maps. He was planning on being well away before that grim time came.

“Guess you’ll be glad to get out of here.”

“How soon?” He asked the most important question. “Before we leave?”

Wise shrugged. “Might be a few weeks yet. I tried, but I couldn’t arrange a flight out for us. There’s a limit to what I can do. We’ll have to wait until there’s a ship sailing out of Marseilles, see if we can squeeze onto that.”

“It is perhaps for the best.” Von Behren lifted the viewfinder to his eye and sighted through it. “A shame that my film will remain unfinished. Wouldn’t that have been an excellent item to bring back with us to Hollywood? A print of the rough cut of Der Rote Jäger.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Wise scanned across the ruins, then turned his gaze back to him. “There are always other movies to make. As long as you’ve got your talent lined up.” He frowned. “Actually, that’s why I came looking for you. I was thinking Marte might have been here.”

“Ah, yes. Our leading lady.” Von Behren smiled again. “I’m afraid I can’t help you at the moment. She and her cousin, young Iosefni, disappeared this morning on one of their mysterious errands.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Why should they tell me anything?” He shrugged. “But you have no reason to fear. Pawli is quite devoted to her. What harm could come to them now?”

Wise nodded, though his expression remained troubled. Von Behren could tell what the man was thinking. Mysterious was indeed the word for Marte Helle now, even more so than before. Her quiet beauty was even more evident, but in a way that had somehow touched a cold hand to his heart when he had seen her again. Perhaps something had formed inside her, like ice, where there had only been emptiness before. That was to be expected, he supposed; no one could walk through the war and come out unchanged. He hadn’t.

There was one physical change in Marte that von Behren had pointed out to Herr Wise, the director’s hand gesturing toward the image on the screen. Her eyes, that had both been blue before. Something had happened, as in old stories of a person’s hair turning white in one day. Now her eyes were like those of her distant relation, one still blue, the other transformed to golden-brown. As if a mask had been stripped away, revealing the true face, the cold, level gaze beneath . . .

In black-and-white, the change was noticeable only in extreme close-up, and he had already made plans to work around those, using outtakes from the reels he’d shot before. When Der Rote Jäger was completed, it would be unlikely that anyone in the audience would be able to tell what had happened.

Small details; Wise had shrugged them off. “You better have a talk with her,” the American said now. “This city’s still hardly the safest place in the world in which to go wandering off. And if you’re going to have your things pulled together before the ship sails – all of you – you’d better get busy.”

“Yes, yes; of course.” Von Behren slipped the viewfinder into his pocket. “She has already made a promise to me about that. I expect she will keep it.”

Herr Wise left him still poking through the studio rubble. As he watched the American thread his way through the wreckage in the streets, he tried to push Marte’s face out of his thoughts.

Another remembered image rose inside him, unbidden, evoked by a glimpse down one of the rubble-filled streets, of the burnt and twisted ruins of the Reich Chancellery. That was where he had been, before making his way over here to the remains of the old studio. A group of Russian soldiers, their rifles slung behind their backs, had waved him over. They had known he was German, but it hadn’t seemed to matter to matter to them now. Alcohol made them friendly and expansive; von Behren had handed their schnapps bottle back, nodded and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and let himself be led by the elbow toward something lying on the ground. The other Russians had drawn back so he could have a clear view.

“Alles kaput,” the Russian soldier beside von Behren had said. He spat at the dark, elongated object at their booted feet.

It had been a corpse, charred by gasoline, but not enough to have done more than blacken and shrivel the flesh upon the skeleton within. The first indication that von Behren had received, of what had happened to the bunker’s occupants. He had looked down at the corpse lying on its back, its slitted eye-sockets staring up at the sky above the shattered city. It’s Goebbels, he had thought suddenly; he could recognize the former Reichsminister, even in this state. Von Behren’s stomach had coiled into a sour knot as he sensed the vestiges of evil and desire still emanating from the dead thing before him. One of its hands, coal-black as the rest of the body, had been raised up into the air, as though trying to claw a hold upon some vision above it . . .

An angry Soviet political officer had suddenly arrived on the scene, shouting and waving von Behren back from the corpse on the ground. The other soldiers, one of them hastily concealing the bottle inside his heavy woolen greatcoat, had retreated, looking embarrassed. He’d made his own retreat then; a few of the Russian soldiers had waved goodbye to him, receiving sharp glares from the officer as reprimand.

The image of what had been the Reich minister remained sharp in his mind, Goebbels’ face reduced to blackened ash. Von Behren made his way down from the ruins of the studio, back to the street. He kept walking. There were other things that were more pleasing to dwell on. Such as leaving here at last, and going anywhere else.

* * *

“This is the place.” Pavli looked up at the block of flats. The buildings on either side had been gutted by fire, and the windows of this one had been shattered. A few had been boarded up, but most still gaped empty, or with broken-armed crosses dangling from their centers. He checked again the tattered scrap of paper. “She said to come here.”

Beside him, Marte nodded as she gazed up at the facade blackened by smoke. She had turned up the collar of the soldier’s coat and covered her hair with a rough woolen scarf, so nobody would be likely to recognize her. They had taken back alleys and picked their way across the streets where the mounds of debris were highest, keeping their faces averted from any others wandering the city.

“I remember . . .” She touched Pavli’s shoulder. “Her name. When we were at the Lebensborn hostel. It was Liesel.”

The note that had been delivered to her bore no signature. Pavli had been with her when a silent Wehrmacht veteran, with a head swathed in dirty bandages and limping along on crutches, had brought it. The words it had contained, about her son, had been enough. Marte had nothing with which to pay the soldier but a stone-hard heel of bread, but that was enough. He had turned with a bare nod of thanks and disappeared back into the shadows of the cratered streets.

“Let me go first.” The aspect of the building, the dark entrance hallway behind the front door, aroused misgivings in Pavli. He stepped through, regretting now that he hadn’t brought any matches or a candle stub to light the way. Marte followed close behind him as he groped for the railing of the stairs.

He heard laughter and the voice of an American, footsteps coming heavy toward them. At the landing, he drew Marte back against the wall; a G.I. with his cap pushed far back on his head, his arm around the shoulders of a German woman, tromped past without seeing the two of them, trailing the smell of alcohol and raw-scented eau de cologne. When their raucous noise had gone out into the street, Marte could no longer be restrained; she pushed Pavli aside and ran up the rest of the steps.

“Ah – and here is our famous actress! How thoughtful of you to pay a visit.”

Pavli caught up with her at the end of the top floor’s corridor. Daylight poked through the charred roof timbers. He leaned into the room with his hands braced against the doorway, catching his breath, and saw Marte standing before another woman lying with her back against the arm of a stained Biedermeyer sofa. The woman’s mocking smile revealed a tooth missing at one corner of her mouth.

“Where is he?” Marte’s hands trembled at her sides. “My son . . .”

“Such impatience!” The woman turned her smile toward Pavli, trying to draw him in. “All these years that when she couldn’t have cared less about her little boy’s welfare, and now everything has to be done at once.” The smile disappeared as she looked again at Marte. “Years when I took care of him – when he was as much my child as yours.”

Pavli saw the room’s contents now, the cases of canned goods with markings in both English and German, the unopened bottles of liquor, cartons of cigarettes and the flat, dark bars of American chocolate. An untidy heap of women’s clothing lay on the floor, some new looking, other pieces shabby and worn. The woman herself had streaks of grey in her blond hair, though Marte had told him that she was the same age as her; her cheeks bore patches of rouge nearly as bright and unnatural as her reddened lips. He could easily guess that the girl with the American soldier, who had passed them by on the stairs, was in this woman’s employ, in one of the few businesses that could flourish between the victors and the defeated.

“Your note said you have him here with you –” Marte turned her head, her eyes puzzled, as though she were trying to catch a more elusive scent through the room’s cloying perfume. “I don’t . . .” She brought her gaze back to the woman. “Where is he? I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you anything you want –”

“Yes, of course. You will pay me. You’ll pay me a great deal.” The woman poured from a bottle into a teacup on the low table before her. She held the liquor up toward Pavli, smiling coquettishly, then shrugged and set it back down on the floor when he shook his head. “And that’s as it should be, isn’t it? Because everything you have is stolen from me.” Her voice became tight and harsh, her eyes glaring now at Marte. “Everything – right down to that fool who fathered your bastard. He should have been mine as well, but you stole him from me, with your coy little ways and your pretty face –”

“Please . . .” The woman’s vehemence seemed to stun Marte. “I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .”

“Yes, you do – you’ve always known. He should have been the father of my child, so you see, it makes sense, doesn’t it – the boy is my child, isn’t he? And all your money and fame – it should have been me up on the screens, with everybody looking at me and adoring me. You’re nothing, a mongrel bitch, compared to me. So everything you have is stolen, it’s mine, and now it’s time to pay it back to me. Everything.”

“Where is he?” Marte’s expression became even more frantic, the room trapping her. “I don’t . . . I don’t feel him here.” She turned back to Pavli in the doorway, tears trembling in her eyes. “My child . . . I don’t feel him anywhere! I knew he was alive . . . when you first came to me . . . but now –” Her voice broke into a cry. “I don’t know! I can’t feel him anymore!”

He wanted to wrap her in his arms and take her away from the glutted, shabby room and the cruelly smiling woman. He’d already stepped toward Marte when the woman raised herself from the sofa, pulling a thin silk wrap closer about herself.

“Oh, very well – you want to see your little boy, than you shall.” The woman’s voice twisted with contempt. “I brought him a long way, I carried him here; I’m not about to lose track of such a valuable little item. Come along – I’ll show him to you.”

They followed her down another corridor, to the back of the flat. The woman’s hand, with its nails painted bright red, gestured over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work out some suitable arrangement. Of course, I can’t let you have the boy, to keep all to yourself. I’m not a fool. You must come and visit him, and take care of him – I’m tired enough of that, God knows.” The woman rattled on, as though talking to herself. “It’ll be in a much nicer place, though; with your money, we’ll see to that . . .”

Behind the last door, a small room, the only light that which spilled in from the hallway; it revealed a small figure lying on a rumpled bed. Marte rushed past the woman and knelt down, her fingertips reaching for the sleeping child’s face.

“A mother’s love.” The woman leaned against the side of the doorway, her sneer directed at Pavli. “How charming. You would never know from the way she acts – but then she is an actress, isn’t she? – how she abandoned her child all these years.”

Marte suddenly cried out. “No –” The word was muffled by her hand against her mouth as she stepped back from the bed. The blanket that had been pulled to the boy’s chin slid to the bare planks of the floor. Her eyes widened as she gazed down at the small body.

He shoved past the woman. Before he reached Marte’s side, he saw the pillow and the bare mattress dark with dried blood. The child’s face, the cheeks and neck whiter than paper; the blood, thickened with phlegm, dried to reddish dust.

“You see?” The woman reached between Pavli and Marte, and stroked the child’s cold brow. “I took good care of him. Fed him and bathed him and carried him – oh, it was such a long way – and did everything for him. As if he were my very own. So he is my own. Of course he is.” The woman’s voice softened, as if she had become a child herself, her fingers ruffling a doll’s white-gold hair. “They lied about him, about my baby, right from the beginning. This is my little boy, he always was, you stole him from me, the way you stole everything. It was the other one, the ugly little one, that I left behind in the snow –” She shook her head, face clouding with confusion. “But this one is your little boy, too. I don’t understand how that can be. But look – he has those eyes that he got from you, from being a Mischling. See?” The woman pulled back the child’s eyelids with her thumb and forefinger; the pupils had begun to cloud over, but the colors of blue and golden-brown were still visible beneath the milky-grey film. “You see?”

Pavli looked away from the child’s corpse, turning toward the woman. Her prattling voice went on, each syllable a soft tapping against his brow.

“So now you must give back everything you stole from me. Everything. So my child and your child and I can live in a large fine house, where it isn’t cold and there’s plenty to eat, and everyone will see me there and they’ll know it’s mine, it always was mine –”

He could see the woman’s eyes now; he had leaned forward, drawn to look, as if mesmerized by the spiraling words. He saw there, not the blind gaze of death, but something sharper and brighter, glittering like the points of needles. The woman’s madness pierced the world, showing another, where the dead were merely sleeping, ready to wake and reach for only her with their small hands.

“I took such good care of him.” The woman smiled tenderly at the face crusted with blood. “He was running a fever, and he had a nasty cough, but I knew those would pass and he would get better, and he did. You feel fine now, don’t you, sweetheart? Wake up, there’s someone come to see you –”

“No . . .” Marte touched the woman’s arm. “Let him sleep.”

Pavli wondered if she had gone mad as well; her voice was calm and untroubled.

“Let him sleep . . .” Crooning, the words falling as a song. Marte’s hand drew away. “You took care of him, you brought him here to me . . . I owe you so much.”

The room became still and small, the space between the two women vanished, their faces close together, as though Marte had stepped forward to bestow a kiss. Pavli couldn’t breathe, there was no air in the room, not even enough to shout a single word as Marte’s hand drew something bright from the pocket of the soldier’s coat.

“So much . . .” A whisper.

The other woman’s mouth parted, a smile tracing its corners, her eyes closing to savor her triumph.

A red flower blossomed on the woman’s lips.

She fell backwards, eyes still closed, her body crumpling away from the shining object that Marte had raised between them. Pavli could see it now, he could even read the words inscribed on the metal.

Meine Ehre heißt Treue.

The knife was a memory that could never be erased. He had gone back to the empty shelter to look for it, days after the fighting had stopped, and been unable to find it on the wet, dirty floor. He had thought then that some Russian soldier had taken it for a souvenir, a trophy of their victory. Now he saw that it had been Marte who had found and kept the thin weapon.

A larger flower, red and wet, leapt through the slashed front of the woman’s wrap as Marte jerked her arm, the dagger moving without resistance toward the center of the white breasts.

The glistening vine of the flower twisted snake-like around Marte’s wrist, the coat’s sleeve darkening with the growing stain.

For a moment longer, the woman hung upon the knifepoint. Flesh gave way and she sank, first against the side of the bed, then sprawling at Pavli’s feet. The dagger dropped from Marte’s hand and clattered across the floor.

Two dead things in the room now. For a second, Pavli’s vision filled with an image of scrubbed white tiles, his nostrils catching the scent of preserving chemicals in a metal basin. The knife wasn’t the ornate SS ceremonial dagger, but a gleaming scalpel raised in Ritter’s gloved hand . . .

The vision faded, and he saw Marte standing before him, her hand reaching down to stroke her dead child’s brow. At the same time, Pavli heard the sound of a door opening, and laughing voices, in the distance at the building’s street entrance. Another woman, perhaps the same one they had passed before on the stairs, with another customer; likely an American soldier. That would be trouble, whether the man were drunk or sober.

He looked down and saw that the pool of blood from the dead woman had reached the edges of his boots. He stepped backward, grabbing Marte’s arm and pulling her away from the bed. “We must leave here.” He bent down and scooped up the dagger, wiping its blade quickly on the bedcovers before slipping it inside his shirt, where he had carried it before. “Quickly – before anyone finds us.”

Marte’s gaze snapped round at him, like another, even sharper knife. She drew in her breath, controlling her flare of anger, and something more, that he had not seen in her eyes before. “Very well.” She had turned her back on the dead, the child and the woman, as if they no longer existed. “You know the way better than I do.”

Going down, they had already passed the landing when they bumped into the laughing woman and her customer, a new one, a broad-shouldered American sergeant black as coffee. The pair hardly even noticed Pavli and Marte, her hair covered again by the kerchief, as they drew back against the railing to let the couple by.

On the street, Pavli looked up at the building’s broken windows. The faint glow of a candle moved behind the ragged cloth that had been nailed over one empty frame; again he heard the sound of laughter.

The room with the dead woman and child was far at the rear of the building; it might be hours, or even days, before the corpses were found. He and Marte would be well away by then. And what did two more dead matter in this city? Nothing; nothing at all . . .

He took the angel’s arm and walked with her, guided her, between the mounds of rubble and the shell craters, carefully and slowly, so that anyone who might have been watching them would not have the least suspicion –

And at that moment, he was happy.

At that moment, his life began. Everything before then had been but a dream, that he could hardly remember now. From which most people, he knew, never woke. They never lived at all.

But I’m the lucky one, thought Pavli. He had woken, been born, to hunger and cold and a drizzling rain that sluiced tarry black ash through the broken streets, filled the bomb craters with shimmering dark mirrors, like fragments of a starless night turned upside-down. His hair hung in wet traces along his neck.

“Don’t worry,” murmured Pavli. He sheltered the angel’s cold hand in both his own. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Will you?” She turned her gaze toward him. “Yes . . .” She nodded slowly. “You will . . .”

His heart swelled beyond the walls of his chest, beyond the walls of the cold, black world through which they made their way. He had been born, and born for this.

She stopped and looked around them, her gaze searching the unlit buildings, the sharp-toothed broken windows glinting as they caught an angle of moonlight.

“You must help me.”

“Yes . . .” Pavli tried to draw her away from the spot, before anyone might see them. “Of course . . .”

“The studio . . . you must take me there . . .”

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “It’s all in ruins. I saw it –”

“I don’t care!” She snatched her hand away from his grasp. “And the director – you must bring him there, too!”

“Von Behren? But what can he –”

“It must be finished! Everything must be!” Her rain-damp face was painted bright by the sliver of moon above. “You don’t understand . . . but it must!”

“All right . . .” He tried to soothe her, stroking a trembling shoulder with his hand. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Marte collapsed against him, as though the burst of anger had consumed the last of her strength. He held her and kept her from falling, her face pressed against the side of his neck; he felt the brush of her lashes as she closed her eyes.

“Come on, then.” He pulled her with him, bearing her fragile weight with each step across the rubble. “It’s not far . . .”

* * *

The broken metal of the roof creaked as the night wind pried at it. Von Behren glanced up at the noise, then drew his jacket tighter about himself. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “There is a military curfew in this area – and patrols.”

“Then we should work fast.” Pavli kicked aside a few pieces of brick and settled the legs of the camera tripod on the studio’s floor. “It will only take a few moments.”

“Just about as long as it takes for a Russian soldier to put bullets through our skulls.” He sighed and shook his head. “What is it that she wants, anyway?”

“The same that you do. To finish the film.”

“I had no idea she even cared about that.”

“But you do, Herr von Behren. Der Rote Jäger is your film. All that Marte can do is play the part you gave her. To the end.” With a bit of rag, Pavli wiped the camera lens clean. “The last scene.”

“If only.” At any moment, von Behren knew, there would be footsteps outside, and guttural Slavic voices. “From what I’ve been able to see, none of this ever ends. It just goes on and on.” He glanced toward the battered scenery, the painted castle stones, barely visible in the shadows. “I shouldn’t have let you drag me here.”

“I didn’t have to drag you.” Pavli turned away from the camera and showed a thin smile. “I couldn’t have kept you away.”

That was true. I’m an idiot, thought the director. Madness within madness. The world was in ruins all about them – what better than to film some scrap of legend from the Middle Ages? The red hunter had seized its prey in the forest of the city’s streets, had placed its skinning knife to the throats of those who had thought they could outrun their fates. Von Behren knew he could hardly escape his own; he had to be here.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get this over with. Is she ready?”

Pavli nodded. “We found one of the gowns. It will do.”

“And petrol?”

“Enough.”

He supposed that if one dug around in the rubble long enough, one could find anything. Pavli had located a generator that had been used for outdoor shoots; von Behren watched as the cameraman sloshed the fuel dregs from several metal canisters into its tank. It took several attempts for Pavli to start it up, then the chugging rumble broke the empty studio’s silence.

“Scheiß –” Von Behren cringed at the noise. “That will bring every Russian from here to Moscow around.”

Pavli appeared unconcerned. He looked through the camera’s eyepiece as he turned it toward the pool of light that had unfolded against the mock stones. A single light, rigged to a dangling iron rail; it brought the shadows in its beam to razor sharpness.

“Yes,” whispered von Behren. His breath caught in his throat. Suddenly, he didn’t care if a entire battalion of Russian soldiers was outside. The illusion was perfect; it was real. Just as he had seen it, on the screen within his own thoughts and dreams. Light and shadow. The final scene, the last glimpse of another world, that never ended. “Bring it closer.”

He didn’t need to look through the camera, to see what it saw, even as Pavli adjusted the lens. “That’s fine.” He called out her name: “Marte . . .”

She stepped forward from the shadows. The hem of the white gown floated luminous above the stage’s rubble-strewn floor. Von Behren had to close his eyes for a moment; time and loss had made her that much more beautiful. To gaze upon her would blind the unwary, as though the moon and its attendant stars had been revealed for the first time. The blind would see; darkened theatres would be temples. And he who showed the rapt, grieving audiences this face – he would be immortal as well. Von Behren leaned the side of his face close to the camera, making its eye his own.

“Hold.” He laid his hand upon Pavli’s shoulder. “Just hold.”

No need to tell the cameraman. He saw as well.

She turned her annihilating gaze straight toward them. The hearts of men would shatter, knowing how they had failed her, as they had failed the ones sitting beside them in the dark. Who wept at small graves, the freshly turned earth sifting through their empty hands . . .

All that was in her gaze.

“Hold . . .”

Marte turned away from the camera. To profile; her golden hair, which would be pure light on film, on the screen, drifted against her throat as she reached up and loosened it. Silently, she looked before her, seeing nothing but her own memories. Her fingertips moved downward, pushing aside the gown’s thin substance, baring her white shoulders.

He watched. And saw all that happened next. Light and shadow.

Something more weightless than silk, more colorless than air, brighter than star and knifeblade. That was not skin, but for a moment held the shape of the naked body from which it had risen. As though it were smoke; or what was left after smoke had drifted into the night sky.

He watched, as the camera watched. He saw what it saw.

“Closer . . .”

Pavli reached up and adjusted the lens, a fraction of an inch.

Silk and smoke, tracing upward into the darkness, out of the single light’s gaze – such a thing had not been in the script. But that will work, thought von Behren. Better than anything he could have devised.

This was why Pavli had brought him here. To see this, to make it part of his film. His masterpiece.

Her masterpiece. This moment when she become nothing but light. That drifted upward, luminous, weightless. Casting no shadow, to mingle with the other shadows close about her.

He watched as her hand drew softly down to the hollow of her throat. Parting the silk that clung to her white breast for only a moment, as though she were discarding another gown from her body. A gown that no night wind caught, but which drifted away from her, tangling with the other strands that had already been laid upon the darkness.

He knew already how the scene would end. The only way it could.

Silk and smoke. Light and shadow. Until nothing was left. Her hand had already reached her heart, a pale thing that trembled. For only a moment, before it unlocked itself and leapt slowly upward, mingling and disappearing with all that still bore some fragment of her image.

“Pull back . . .”

The camera saw it all. Light and shadow . . .

TWENTY-SIX

“Herr Wise – I have something for you.”

Pavli watched as von Behren reached inside the duffel bag he had carried for him across the city’s ruins, and then inside this room.

“Something,” continued the director, “I believe you might want.”

“What, a souvenir?” Wise looked up from the papers spread out before him. Not on a real table, but a door taken from the rubble heap across the street, the bricks and plaster that had once been a stylish block of flats here in Berlin, then laid across two stacks of empty ammo canisters. The yellow papers looked like telegrams; Pavli remembered hearing the American producer say something about a sackful having finally caught up with him, and that while the war might be over, the task of running a film studio in faraway Hollywood still went on. “Thanks, but I’ve already got enough to remember this place by.”

The duffel bag was just about empty, only one thing in it, flat and round. Von Behren drew the metal object out, stepped away from Pavli, and laid it down in front of Wise. He stood back, folding the stiff grey-green canvas in his hands.

“This some kind of a joke?” With one finger, Wise prodded the film canister as though it might have been some kind of bomb. Battered and dented, wide enough to cover the papers on the desk – a streak of something that might have been rust discolored the lid. “Movies, I’ve got already. Back at home. That’s what we do there, remember?”

“It’s what’s left,” said Wise quietly. “Of her.”

Wise’s hand froze, one finger touching the ridged edge of the film canister. “What’re you talking about?”

“Marte.” The single word, the name, was all that von Behren needed to speak.

Wise rose from his chair, hand flat on the film canister. “Where is she?”

“Someplace . . . I couldn’t follow. Nobody can,” said von Behren. But we filmed her –” The director pointed behind himself, toward Pavli. “We did what Marte wanted us to do.”

“Filmed her doing what?”

“The last scene. Of the film. My film.”

“That Red Hunter thing? Or whatever the hell it’s called –”

“Der Rote Jäger.” Wise nodded. “Yes. We finished it. At least we can say that much.”

“How? The studio’s in ruins –”

Von Behren gave a small shrug. “We managed.”

“Huh. I seem to have underestimated you.” Wise seemed genuinely impressed. “Is it any good?”

To Pavli, that seemed so unimportant. There were other things that he himself might have told the American producer, of what had happened, and what von Behren had seen as the camera had clicked away, its lens carefully wiped clean of dust and ashes and focused on the woman in the empty, broken soundstage. A little of the medieval scenery had survived the bombings, enough to suggest the final ruin of those who set their hearts against their own fate. That pursued them, relentless. The dark forests filled the streets of the city . . .

“I don’t know,” said Wise. “I haven’t seen it.”

But von Behren had told him what the camera had seen. Of Marte undoing the belt knotted around her waist, so that she could then reach up and slide the gown free of her shoulders, so it could fall about her feet, a pool of glistening silk . . .

“What, you needed a projector or something there?” Wise frowned in puzzlement. “But . . . you filmed it . . .”

Pavli kept his silence. When he closed his eyes, he could see what had happened, the scene in the studio, as the director had just spoken of it. Marte touching the skin beneath her breast, and another silken layer coming loose at her fingertip. That drifted free, a weightless and translucent pennant; then more, tatters of a substance finer and deeper than skin, warmed by her slowing pulse . . .

“Then we can watch it right now. There’s a projector out in the truck; we can get it set up –” Wise’s voice halted in mid-sentence, as he picked up the film canister and felt its weight in his hands.

Pavli opened his eyes again. The scene played out to its final frames. The silken fragments, all that was left, caught by the wind through the studio’s crumbling walls, and carried like spider threads out to the night. Dispersing like mist, so that even that last little bit was gone. The camera turned to the empty gown on the stage’s floor, where the woman had stood. Gone now; the night wind fluttered the delicate cloth, then stilled itself . . .

“This some kind of a joke?”

He saw now Wise’s anger-reddened face.

“A joke . . .” Von Behren nodded. “Yes, perhaps it is.”

Pavli watched as Herr Wise pried the film canister apart and its two empty sections fell open on the desk.

“Everything is,” said von Behren.

“There’s nothing here.” The American’s gaze was murderous as he looked back up. “You didn’t film anything, did you?”

“Das stimmt. That is correct.” The director nodded. “There was no film in the camera. It was . . . unnecessary.”

Pavli still didn’t know if von Behren had been aware, when it happened, of the subterfuge he had committed. Sometimes he thought that the director must have known – how could he not have? – that no one other than the two of them would see his masterpiece’s final scene. And that would be enough.

And perhaps Marte had known as well. He had already thought of that. And that it wouldn’t have mattered to her, either. The scene would be played out, and the movie finished. The camera had witnessed it, and that would be the end. No lights would come up in the theatre, the audience hurrying away into the night…

“Why the hell did you do that?”

Neither said anything. He should know, thought Pavli. It was there to see, not in von Behren’s haunted gaze, but in his own, peaceful and silent at last. I have her now, Pavli told himself. Safe from all the world. Locked in memory, where none could touch her.

“I don’t know,” said von Behren, after the empty moment had passed. “Why do people do anything?”

“Get out of here.” Wise swept the empty metal clattering to the floor. “You’re just in my way now. I need to go find her.”

“You won’t.” Von Behren wadded the duffel bag tighter in his hands. “She’s gone. Where nothing more can happen to her . . .”

“What?”

Pavli spoke. “You don’t need to go looking for her,” he said quietly. “You already have what’s left of her. Go home, Herr Wise. You can watch the film you do have of her. The one that was sent to you before the war. And there was another, nicht wahr? That you made with her. You can watch those forever. Those were the only real part of her, anyway. All the rest . . .” Pavli shrugged. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Get out.” Wise had gone pale, his voice taut and trembling. “Just get out.”

“Very well.” Von Behren tossed the duffel bag onto the floor. “Please – take care of yourself. Nothing that happened was any fault of yours. Of anyone’s.”

They left the American where he sat in the little room, the empty film canister before him.

Von Behren looked over at the one beside him. “Are you all right, Pavli?”

“Yes. Of course.” He managed to smile. “Alles in ordnung. Everything is as it should be.”

“And then what?” Von Behren studied him. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” A shrug. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Yes . . . you’re right.” He gazed down the street of ruins. “Everyone is gone, sooner or later.”

“No –” Pavli spoke up, his voice no more than a whisper. “Niemals –” He shook his head. “Never. They might leave . . . but they are not gone.”

The director stopped and raised a hand to shield his eyes. The sun was so bright that it banished every shadow, at least while the cameras rolled.

END

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