His Majesty's Hope (3 page)

“What kind of paperwork?”

The gray-haired woman, Nurse Flint, gave Elise a sharp look. “The kind that keeps me here, instead of at home with my husband and children, that’s what kind,” she snapped, stacking Gretel’s file on top of similar folders.

Elise caught sight of Frieda, rounding the corner; her friend pointed up with one finger. Elise caught her meaning and nodded. She held up one hand, palm out—their code for meeting on the roof in five minutes.

Before she met up with Frieda, Elise wanted to check on someone. She walked down the corridor and into a ward filled with wounded soldiers in narrow white beds. Some moaned in their sleep, some stared listlessly out the windows at the leaden sky, others sat up in their wheelchairs and played cards.

Elise wanted to check on the temperature of a young man all the nurses called
Herr Geheimnis
—Herr Mystery. He’d been running an intermittent fever over the past few days. The patient had curly brown hair, an angular face, shoulders full of tension, and eyes wild with fear. Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have a girlfriend? Was he married? Why couldn’t—or wouldn’t—he speak?

“Is he all right?” Flight Lieutenant Emil Eggers asked, indicating with his chin the bandaged body asleep in the narrow bed next to him. Eggers, a beefy, blond man with the face of a cherub, was a Luftwaffe commander. He’d had a close call in France but survived his crash landing and had been brought back to Berlin to convalesce.

“Is that any business of yours, Lieutenant Eggers?” Elise admonished as she shook a thermometer and slipped it into Herr Mystery’s mouth. She might be young, but she was strict with the men, who often seemed grateful to be ordered about as they convalesced.

“Well, there’s not much to do in here …” Eggers said, trying his best to look winsome and failing.

“True,” Elise agreed in gentler tones, picking up the chart hanging at the end of the bed frame. “He’s one of yours—a pilot. Had quite a bad crash landing. A veterinarian from somewhere
outside Berlin found him and patched him up as best he could and brought him in, but he had a lot of internal injuries.”

“Is he going to make it?” Eggers asked. He didn’t recognize the man, but there was a code of solidarity among pilots.

Elise may have been young, but she was also a realist. “I hope so.” She removed the thermometer from his mouth and looked. A hundred and one. “His temperature’s still a bit elevated.” She made a note in the pilot’s chart, then walked over to Eggers. “And how’s your leg today, Lieutenant?”

Eggers pulled back the rough sheet and gray wool blanket to reveal a bandaged stump. “Still gone, I’m afraid.”

After, Elise met up with Frieda on the hospital’s roof. The tar paper was littered with cigarette butts. A crumpled packet of Milde Sorte was stuck under a drainpipe. The sun was blisteringly hot—1941 was turning into Berlin’s warmest summer on record. Frieda lit a cigarette and took a puff, then handed it to Elise. “I hate this place.”

Elise accepted the cigarette and took a long inhale. “Charité? Berlin? All of Germany?” she asked, blowing out rings of pale blue smoke.

“Everything. All of it.”

They leaned over the railing. The city of Berlin spread out before them: the river Spree glittering in the harsh sunlight, long red Nazi banners snapping in the breeze, the black, burned-out dome of the Reichstag.

The parade was still marching down Unter den Linden, the sounds of cheering and music and hobnailed black boots goose-stepping on the pavement muted now by height and distance. Directly below them in the hospital’s circular driveway, a bus idled. It was dark gray, with white-painted windows.

“Especially since Dr. Brandt and his cronies arrived here.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Frieda’s slim fingers shook as she took another drag on her cigarette.

“What do you mean?”

“Have you noticed how patient charts now have the attending physician mark a red
X
or a blue minus sign on them?”

“Yes,” Elise replied. “I had a third red
X
on a patient’s chart today. I asked Dr. Brandt about it—he said it had something to do with paperwork.”

“Paperwork, right.” Frieda picked a stray fleck of tobacco from her tongue. From below, the noxious bus fumes drifted upward in the heat. The two young nurses watched as a cluster of children was herded inside a bus by orderlies in white coats.

“Maybe it has to do with the compulsory sterilization,” Elise suggested. Under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, all Reich doctors were required to report the retarded, mentally ill, epileptic, blind, deaf, physically deformed, and homosexual—and make sure they were unable to procreate. As a Catholic, Elise was adamantly opposed.

“Something like that.”

“How’s Ernst?” Elise asked, deliberately changing the subject.

Frieda’s face, pale as milk, flushed red in anger. “He’s all right—at least as all right as a surgeon who’s not allowed to operate anymore can be.” Ernst Klein, Frieda’s husband, was Jewish, and now prohibited from practicing medicine.

“I’m sorry. I can only imagine how hard it’s been.”

Frieda pressed her lips together. “The Codex Judaicum is a nightmare. They’re taking away our pets, now—can you believe? Pets! No Jew is allowed to own a dog, cat, or bird. And they’re not just given to some nice gentile family—no, they might be ‘racially contaminated’ somehow—God forbid! So, they’re all killed instead.” Frieda kicked some of the gravel with her foot. “Four SA
officers came to take Widow Kaufman’s cat last night. Can you imagine—four men for
one
cat? Widow Kaufman was crying, but little Bärli didn’t go without a fight. We didn’t dare open our door, of course. But from the noise, I think she managed a few good scratches.”

“And Marthe?” Elise asked. Marthe was Frieda and Ernst’s small white dove, named after Marguerite’s guardian in Charles Gounod’s
Faust
.

“She’s safe—for now.”

“Would you like me to take Marthe in? I’d take good care of her until she can return to you.”

“Of course,
you
can still have a pet.
You
can do whatever you want.” Frieda brushed some loose, pale hair out of her eyes and wiped away hot tears. Then her face softened. “Of course, it’s not your fault, Elise.” She added, “Have you heard anything?”

Berlin’s Jews were slowly but surely being called to ghettos and work camps. Letters told them where to report, what to bring with them, and which train to take.

“I’ll ask my mother,” Elise said. “I know she can help.”

Elise’s mother actually had refused to look into it. But Elise, normally cowed by her domineering mother, was determined to bring it up again, and not take no for an answer this time.

“Thank you,” Frieda said with palpable relief.

The two young women smoked in silence, passing the cigarette back and forth, as a long-necked heron flew by in the distance.

Elise ventured, “Do you ever—”

The words hung in the air for long seconds.

“Think about divorcing him?” Frieda finished. “
Nein
. Never. We love each other. I just wish we’d left Germany when we still had the chance. To think I was afraid to move to Hong Kong.” She gave a bitter laugh.

“Sorry.” Elise crushed the cigarette out under her heel. “I
shouldn’t have even asked.” In the glint of the morning sunlight, Elise caught a glimpse of a young girl with blond hair in the line to board the bus below, holding a tattered brown teddy bear.

“I think that girl’s my patient,” Elise said, blue eyes darkening. Together they watched as the patients and nurses boarded, then the bus’s engine revved. It pulled away, belching thick, black smoke from the exhaust pipe as it made its way down the drive. “Those buses,” Elise said, “they call them the Ravens. Why?”

Frieda shrugged. “The color.”

Elise was confused. Surely the child she’d glimpsed below was Gretel. Had she missed something? Had the girl taken a turn for the worse?

Clara Hess was wearing a mask. It was pure white, like Kabuki makeup. Her eyes were closed.

She was draped, catlike, over a divan in her office at the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence agency, wearing only the mask, a scarlet silk robe, and Chanel No. 5. One woman was painting her toenails, while another was rubbing lotion into her hands. Still another was taking curlers out of her hair, leaving glistening platinum ringlets.

Taller than most women and slim as a ballerina, Clara looked like Jean Harlow crossed with the warrior-goddess Brünnhilde, as seen through the lens of Horst P. Horst. She favored Chanel’s androgynous suits in jersey, which she wore with ropes of pearls and gold chains. It was a look not often seen on women in Berlin. But with her height, excellent posture, and entitled attitude, she was never questioned. Being good friends with Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels, and being photographed with them frequently at the Opera or Philharmonic, didn’t hurt either.

Although lately, such photographs were less frequent. Clara Hess’s last mission, the assassination of King George VI and the kidnapping of Princess Elizabeth, intending to pave the way for the eventual German invasion of England and the crowning of Edward and Wallis Simpson as Great Britain’s new King and Queen, hadn’t happened. In fact, it had been a complete and total
failure. Since her fall from grace, it was whispered about the halls of the Abwehr that Clara was losing her magic touch—as well as the Führer’s favor.

The heavy door opened and her secretary announced, “Admiral Canaris to see you, as you requested, Frau Hess.”

“Come in,” Clara said.

Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was a distinguished-looking man with white hair and shaggy white eyebrows. He walked in and stopped in front of her divan.
“Heil Hitler!”
Images of Clara were reflected back to him in the many beveled mirrors the office had on the walls, along with an oil portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Her eyes were still closed. “Our agent in London is in place, Wilhelm. He’s just waiting for my go-ahead.”

“Good,” Canaris said, taking a seat as one of the women finished massaging Clara’s hands and began to remove the mask with cotton pads soaked with witch hazel. “We’ll coordinate with Göring and Halder. It’s high time Britain surrendered. And Operation Aegir plays an important role.”

“I’m no admirer of Mother Russia,” Clara said, sitting upright, the mask now removed, glacier-blue eyes open. While they were undisputedly beautiful, one wandered just slightly, the gaze of each pupil focusing on a different point in space. “But when we went into Poland, the Russian General Staff shared their methods for population control with us. And what they accomplished with their workers in the gulags is nothing short of inspiring.”

One of the women opened a black crocodile makeup case, extracting pans of foundation, compacts of powder, tins of rouge, and tubes of lipstick.

“Yes, I’ve heard they’ve already started using it in the camps,” Canaris said, as the woman began to paint Clara’s face.

“We can control any population through medication of its drinking water supply. And by our releasing this poison into London’s
water supply before the invasion, British morale will be destroyed. Churchill’s great speeches will be useless. The population will put up no resistance.”

“Just by adding a chemical to the water supply?” Canaris didn’t sound convinced. “This is all on you, you know. If this mission should fail …” The silence turned ominous.

Clara didn’t answer as the woman finished applying her makeup; then she barked, “Mirror!” The woman handed Clara a silver hand mirror. She studied her visage in the reflection, turning this way and that. “It will do,” she said to the woman, who nodded and began packing up.

“Aegir won’t fail,” Clara assured Canaris. “I went over the facts with one of the top chemists at I.G. Farben.” She smiled, a gorgeous smile of crimson lipstick and pearly teeth, a smile that used to bring audiences at the Berlin Opera House to their feet, applauding madly, back in the day when she was a soprano famed for her Wagnerian roles. “And now, I must get dressed to meet Herr Goebbels at the cinema. We’re seeing a preview of
Ich klage an
—it’s his favorite.”

Frieda knocked on the door to the servants’ entrance to the Hess house in Grunewald, a leafy, wealthy suburb of Berlin. Joseph Goebbels’s family lived in a large house nearby.

Unlike her Jewish husband, Frieda was allowed to be out after curfew. Even so, and even with her Aryan features and identity card, it terrified her to be in such close proximity to high-ranking Nazi families.

Elise, who’d been waiting for her friend, opened the door within moments. “Good to see you,” she said, giving her friend a hug the best she could, considering the other woman was carrying a covered birdcage and a brown paper bag filed with seed.

“And you, too,” Frieda said, wiping her feet on a coconut mat and then walking into the kitchen, which smelled of baking bread. “And here is the lovely Marthe.” She set the cage down on the long wooden table and pulled back the protective covering. Marthe, a white-feathered dove, stared back at the two young women with shiny black eyes and cocked her head.

Elise bent down to the cage to address the bird. “Hello, little Marthe. I hope you’ll be happy here. That is, until you can get back to your real home.”

Frieda snorted. “As if that’s going to happen anytime soon.”

“Come, sit down,” Elise urged, pulling out a chair for her friend. “I’ll get us something to eat.”

Frieda sat as Elise made ham sandwiches with dark, grainy mustard and poured two glasses of milk.

Although many foods in Germany were rationed, for the well-placed Hess family nothing was in short supply. Along the shelves, Frieda could see the tribute from the conquered: long, slim bottles of apricot schnapps from Austria, stout bottles of horseradish vodka from Poland, boxes of chocolates from Belgium, and magnums of champagne from France.

As Elise sat down, Frieda took a huge bite, cramming as much as she could of the sandwich into her mouth. With a pang, Elise realized how hungry her friend must be. “I’ll give you some to take home, for you and Ernst.”