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CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Images

The siren seemed muffled. It was absorbed by the seemingly endless hills of mud, or it fled into the big grey sky and was gone. Either way it didn’t seem particularly auspicious. It couldn’t even startle the few disinterested seagulls that continued to squat on the grey metal tube, as if it really was just a drainpipe left lying on the side of a hill. They failed to notice the cables and wires that straggled into the mire along its length, or the branches and offshoots of pipework welded into the main cylinder at regular intervals.

However, the grey tube and muddy slope did have a more interested audience elsewhere. The cables trailed away to form an intricate path of black rubber lines, down into the valley and back up the facing slope. At their end, five hundred metres away, was a concrete blockhouse sunk into the hilltop. Through a small slit running horizontally across its length, a dozen eyes watched and waited.

The darkness inside managed to be both stuffy and damp. The boards covering the floor were ill-fitting and filthy, marked with muddy footprints, the walls bare and unadorned. A rusty radio hid in a corner, emitting a quiet metallic hiss.

“Zehn,” a voice crackled through the speaker.

The men straightened up and crowded towards the light. Their uniforms varied in colour and design but shared a predominance of gold and silver braid, medals and epaulettes, and a thick sense of entitlement.

“Neun… Acht… Sieben…”

Even the least theatrical jackets had a great number of hoops, lines and decorations. One man stood apart, in a dark suit, expensive coat and hat.

“Sechs… Fünf…”

The man stared over someone’s garishly braided shoulder-board at the opposite hill, his bright blue eyes piercing and unreadable.

“Vier… Drei… Zwei…”

There was a shuffle of anticipation.

“Eins… Null!”

A swiftly rising whine built into separate hissing screams. Then sparks escaped from each of the pipe’s tributaries in an almost simultaneous cascade, creating one roaring sound from a chorus of individual howls. Fire exploded from the pipe’s summit with an unmistakable thunk, moments before the opening belched a cloud of thick black smoke.

The squarking of the scattering seagulls filled the sudden silence. There were a few tuts and disappointed noises from the assembled officers. Certainly the event seemed deeply anticlimactic.

“Did it work?” complained a portly Luftwaffe officer.

“Of course it worked, Oberst,” snapped a Heer Generalmajor. He looked to one side. “How far?” he barked.

A nervous soldier sitting next to the radio coughed.

“One moment.” There was some excited chatter through the speaker. He adjusted his headphones. “Approximately seventy – seven-oh – kilometres, General.”

The general swung around and, with a triumphant smile, opened his arms to the waiting officers.

“Seventy kilometres, gentlemen. Seventy…and this is just a quarter-sized scale model. As you can now appreciate, a full-sized example would have a range of some two hundred and forty kilometres, deliver a shell weighing some half a ton…and fire every twenty seconds…”

“…if it’s reliable enough,” whined the Luftwaffe officer.

“The finished cannon will fire every twenty seconds and unlike the Paris Gun, the K-Five or any other traditional artillery piece, this gun barrel will not degrade and will not be damaged by repeated fire…”

“If it can be fired repeatedly…”

“On-kel!”

The distant scream tore through the room and stopped the argument dead.

A Schutzstaffel officer leaned towards the viewing window and started. “What on earth?”

Across the muddy valley a small figure in a red coat could be seen running from the cannon towards the blockhouse. She skidded and slid, almost toppling over in the deep sludge, but she remained upright and began to climb the hill.

“On-kel!”

She was pursued by two soldiers, themselves incapable of staying on their feet, twice falling into the sludge in their haste. The child’s beret fell off as she clambered up the slope, long braids of golden hair swinging as she moved.

“Gottverdammte…” swore the man in the dark suit loudly. “Herr Generalmajor, that is… She… Take me out there immediately.”

He turned for the door and began shooing the officers out of the way. They tried to move, but the room was crowded, so they bumped into one another in the gloom. Those furthest away were confused and everyone began asking questions. By the time the door was opened and the man reached the top of the steps to the open air, trailing the Generalmajor, the girl had summited the brow of the hill.

She was maybe twelve years old, small and slight. Mud was plastered up her legs and the hem of her coat was thick with sludge. Her eyes were red with tears and her face was contorted in hysterical panic. Glistening snot ran from her nose.

“Onkel…” she howled, spotting the man and charging the final few metres towards him. She leaped onto him, forcing him to stagger back a few steps, almost crashing into the collection of officers who had gathered behind him. He managed to catch her weight in his arms and hugged her close.

“Ursula! I told you to wait in the car.”

“You were gone so long I didn’t think you were coming back,” she wailed, hyperventilating and hiccupping in her rush to spill the words out. “So I went looking for you and there was a big bang and then these soldiers started yelling at me and—”

“Apologize to the general at once!” the man in the suit growled.

“Herr Haller…” The general coughed.

“Now, Ursula…”

“What was your daughter—” the general tried again.

“My niece, Herr Generalmajor…” Then he snapped at the girl: “Ursula!”

“Sorry, Herr Generalmajor,” the girl wailed and, with a shriek, began to sob again.

“We must leave… Gentlemen.” The man nodded to the crowd of uniforms behind the general and began to stride away over the hilltop.

“Herr Haller…”

“A most exciting test, Herr Generalmajor. I look forward to the contract,” the man called over his shoulder and the crying of the little girl.

The general found himself staring at the retreating figure, as did the guards and officers. After a moment the spell broke and everyone shambled back to the bunker, murmuring as if nothing had happened at all.

The man closed the car door and started the engine. The Mercedes grunted in the cold air and came to life. The little girl in the passenger seat stopped crying and tossed stray hairs away from her face. After a long, wet snort, she snapped her fingers at the man. He handed her a folded handkerchief that she shook loose before blowing her nose noisily.

“I’m getting too old for this Quatsch,” she spat.

The man smiled. “Did you get it?”

“Of course,” she murmured, pulling what looked like a large grey firework from her coat.

“Then you aren’t too old.”

She made a face before holding the device up to the daylight that limped through the windshield. “I don’t understand the fuss. This is just an oversized firecracker.”

“Rocket-propelled shells. Bad news for London,” he said, and then glanced down at something else that Sarah was holding. “What’s that?”

It was a piece of porcelain, like part of a large cereal bowl.

“They were everywhere,” Sarah said, holding it up to the light. “Hundreds of pieces. Is it important?”

“Maybe… You measured the barrel?”

“Hm-hm.” She teased phlegm from her hair. “And I’d have rewired it, too, if that Schwachkopf hadn’t stumbled into me.”

“Language.”

“Yes, right.” She laughed.

“Seriously. You better not talk like that at the next party, Sarah Goldstein of Elsengrund. What will the cream of Berlin high society think?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be there. I’ll be bringing Ursula Haller, the sweet little National Socialist darling instead.”

Images

Sarah had insisted they leave the apartment behind.

It didn’t matter how much she had scrubbed, disinfected or bleached the floor, she could still see Foch’s blood there. It was like a glossy, dark and stagnant lake that reflected the room. In this mirror world, the moment of his murder in her arms repeated endlessly. The SA officer had unmasked them and had been about to shoot the Captain; but self-defence or not, she had been complicit in the horror.

She had eventually rubbed off the varnish and begun to tear into the surface of the wood, but she could still see the blood. It was on her shoes, under her fingernails, in the creases of her skin. She couldn’t tell where the remains of the SA Sturmbannführer ended and her own raw and bloody fingertips began. As for the bathroom where the Captain had dragged the corpse and then emerged over the course of two days with a series of old suitcases… Sarah couldn’t even enter that room.

The Captain was reluctant to move at first – the apartment had several advantages for an agent, including an escape route, radio antenna and false walls. But returning one day to find Sarah had torn up the floorboards and was bleaching the undersides, he was finally convinced that a fresh start was needed. Besides, that minimalist apartment was no place to entertain.

Sarah passed through the halls and palatial rooms of their new townhouse as the staff busied themselves around her. She paused here and there, to have chairs rearranged or to make a suggestion, but in reality their work was practised, seamless.

The parties she and the Captain had held as the spring of 1940 turned to summer had been a huge success, as Germany had celebrated a seemingly endless series of military victories. Any initial concern among the German people about what this war might cost in men or resources had evaporated as the days warmed. The national atmosphere was buoyant, jubilant. For the generals and staff officers at the Captain’s soirées, the mood was triumphant and overwhelmingly self-satisfied.

They had good reason for this. The Third Reich, and its allies, had swollen and consumed Europe. It now stretched from Poland to the Atlantic coast of France and north through Denmark and Norway to the top of the world. It was all actually happening.

Sarah caught sight of herself in a mirror and looked away. At almost sixteen, she still looked twelve, dressed like a Hollywood child star, with frilled ankle-socks and a knee-length dress with puffed sleeves and petticoats. The Nazi Shirley Temple. The Little Princess of the Reich. Darling of the Wehrmacht and Berlin high society.

It put the men at ease. It made them feel grown-up. Superior. Magnanimous. They talked to her without thinking, answering her precocious or innocent-sounding questions with a chuckle. Or they talked around and over her like she wasn’t there. She didn’t understand half of what she heard, but this hadn’t made it less valuable – according to the Captain.

Sometimes, the men took a special interest. They brought her gifts. They wanted her to sit with them, on them. They wanted her to talk about meaningless things, or sing to them, but sometimes they wanted her to listen as they unburdened themselves of their darkness. They wanted to hold someone. Someone pure? Or was it something else?

The proximity made the saliva turn sour at the back of her throat. It made her want to hurt them.

But it was the job.

In truth she wondered how much longer she could play this part. Nine months of good food had given her an extra six centimetres in height. Her body was filling out. No amount of tight blonde curls and ribbons could conceal what was coming. She was watching her little-girl act receding like a railway station platform, and she needed to stop leaning out of the train window.

By the mirror were the two leather armchairs where, at their party three months ago, Sarah had goaded the portly Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall in his garish white uniform into a wager that had backfired. He had waved her over to join him and a surly looking Generaloberst, who did not welcome the distraction.

Images

“Come and sit on my knee, Prinzessin… I’m just telling Walther here how he should deal with the fleeing British.”

“I don’t need any advice, thank you.”

“Certainly you do. You want to risk your tanks in the streets of Flanders?”

“I want the enemy out of action, yes.”

“Nothing puts a defeated army out of action like bombing them into surrender.”

“They’ve got their backs to the sea and they’ve no way home. They’ve abandoned all their heavy equipment, they’re going to surrender anyway. We just need to press the point.”

“Yet you want to waste German lives at the hour of our victory. Let the Luftwaffe deal with it.”

“This is all hypothetical—”

Sarah interrupted. “Walther, it sounds like you should let him try.”

“Sorry?”

“You say they can’t go anywhere, what does it matter if you let him bomb them into surrender?”

“See, Walther. The little girl has courage that you lack.”

“Yes, Generalfeldmarschall, but you need to risk something, too…”

“Yes! Jede Wette! Leave them to me and I’ll have them surrender in three days. Shall we say a hundred Reichsmark? Prinzessin, you shall be the bookmaker…”

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Sarah hadn’t seen the Generaloberst – Walther – to give him his money. The crumpled fifty Reichsmark notes sat unclaimed as most of the British Army slipped across the Channel from Dunkirk in little boats, battered but undefeated by the Luftwaffe, while the tanks had sat and waited. Had she done that, even in some small way? According to the gossip, Göring, now the Reichsmarschall, was busy failing to defeat the Royal Air Force in the skies over Britain, as he had failed at Dunkirk, so maybe he needed no help making his mistakes.

But mistakes from the German military had been thin on the ground. Despite everything Sarah and the Captain had apparently achieved, the secrets they’d uncovered, the nebulous manipulations they had wrought, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the work of one British spy and his…apprentice, a small Jewish orphan, didn’t amount to anywhere near enough.

She felt they were standing waist-deep in a fast-moving river, trying to stop the current with their fingers. It swept over and around them like they weren’t even there. And all this time, Sarah wore pretty dresses, curled her tresses and ate sumptuous food. She might have stopped Professor Schäfer and his bomb – her first mission alongside the Captain – but that hadn’t prevented the Wehrmacht from tearing across the fabric of the earth.

However, it was what Sarah saw on the streets of Berlin that affected her the most.

The Jews had been on curfew and denied wireless sets, jobs, businesses and citizenship. Now they were at risk of being rounded up for no reason, ordered to train stations with one suitcase each, and disappearing. They lived in fear, increasingly hungry and desperate.

Sarah the Jewess, posing as Ursula, the Nazi’s Aryan darling, watched all this from the wrong side of the glass. She wore the finest clothes at lavish dinners, when just a year before she had worn rags and eaten scraps from bins.

But what made her most uneasy wasn’t the guilt, as much as its absence.

Those dresses – the softness, the crinkling thickness and gentle perfume – had become routine. She had to admit to liking it all at first, and it was an important part of the job. Then she had come to expect the pampering. But this wasn’t what Sarah Goldstein was – whatever that really meant – this was Ursula Haller. Sarah increasingly struggled to reconcile the two.

Even the food – the greasy, tender, fluffy, flaky, sweet, sour, crunchy nourishment at all times of the day and night – had begun to pall, turn bland and insipid, no matter how much Sarah pushed into her mouth. She remembered the hunger and knew she should be feeling guilty about eating while others starved, about feeling nothing while others endured that aching, empty desperation.

Sarah had stolen and lied to survive before and had felt no guilt. But this was different.

She had once kept a box deep inside her in which she locked every horror and humiliation, every trauma and fear, so that her mind was clear enough to think without dread and anger. Since leaving the charnel house apartment behind, she didn’t seem to need that any more. Increasingly Sarah felt…not nothing, but intense shades of grey rather than colours. She knew that this should frighten her, but the emotions appeared to just pass through her. She was like a wireless set with the volume too low, rather than switched off. She was aware of the vibrations, but could make out no detail.

Likewise, the violent visions she had been experiencing from time to time since her stay at the Schäfer estate had ceased to bother her. It was like the drone of beehives on a summer’s day that you stopped noticing after a while. Was this boredom at the uniformity of her new life, the normalization of constant fear, or had she suffered so much she had broken herself? She saw the same thing in the Captain, who only came alive when he was in danger.

Now Sarah could hear raised voices coming from the stairs to the kitchens. Frau Hofmann was vexed about something again. The housekeeper used her terseness to control the motley collection of part-time staff, porters and other domestics wheeled in for the parties. But this time, her anger had a serrated edge to it that Sarah had not heard before. She descended to investigate.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking bringing that Schornsteinfeger here. This is a decent house, not a Hottentotten encampment,” the woman barked.

Frau Hofmann stood with rough hands on hips, dominating the kitchen, while in front of her stood Herr Gehlhaar, the little man from the domestic agency. A step behind him and to the left stood the so-called chimney sweep: a young black girl.

She was very young for a servant, no older than fifteen or sixteen, Sarah’s real age. She was slight in a way that Sarah recognized as underfed. She watched the floor intently, again a tactic that Sarah knew all too well from a childhood dodging vengeful Hitler Youth and inquisitive stormtroopers. She could have been looking at herself a year ago.

“Meine Frau.” Herr Gehlhaar sighed and ran the rim of his bowler hat through his fingers. “There are no restrictions on the employment of—”

“Yet.”

The young maid glanced up. Her eyes were full of fear, the look of someone trapped and on the verge of panic. Sarah remembered the Captain wore that same expression of a cornered animal on the docks a year ago, and she had been unable to stop herself from helping him then. There was something else there, too. Anger.

“Frau Hofmann, she can stay,” Sarah called out.

The woman spun around, glaring, but seeing Sarah, checked herself before replying. “Fräulein…this is nothing to concern yourself with, let me take care—”

“Oh, then I could fetch my uncle,” Sarah interrupted, eyebrows raised.

“I think, considering tonight’s guest list,” the woman pressed on, “having a young Neger about the place—”

“Well, she can stay down here. There’s plenty to do. And I’m sure she knows her place,” Sarah added, feeling an unpleasant tug inside as she said the words.

“But, Fräulein, this is a Rheinlandbastard. What if one of the soldiers from the last war sees her…”

“Girl?” The maid was already staring at Sarah. “You’ll stay out of the way…promise?”

She nodded vigorously. Sarah had imagined gratitude, but all she saw was the same fear, or fury, as before.

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The availability of champagne in the summer of 1940 was a symbol of Germany’s victory and the subjugation of the hated French. Herr Haller’s parties, where the traditionally rich and powerful – the Upper Ten Thousand – rubbed shoulders with industrialists selling things and the military who bought them, made a statement of it. The Captain ensured that a guest could have bathed in the yellow bubbles and still drunk their fill afresh afterwards, so most were inebriated shortly after arriving. Drunk tongues were, after all, loose ones. Sarah watched a neglected bottle on the carpet, pulsing its contents into the pile. The smell made her feel both nauseous and vulnerable.

By 9 p.m. the party had become an animal. It bucked, roared, went quiet, stretched, shook and rested, before staggering to its feet once more.

The Captain leaned against the drawing-room mantelpiece, simultaneously towering over the room and yet hidden from it, like a long forgotten park statue. His habitual mask of disinterested amusement sat crookedly on top of another expression as he noticed her, one that Sarah had come to understand in the last few months as a look of faint disapproval. Sarah obediently drifted over for her admonishment. He acknowledged her, and then they stood side by side.

“Frau Hofmann tells me we have a Neger in the kitchen,” he murmured.

“No doubt defiling the Strudel and mongrelizing the Schnitzel, like a bad little Untermensch.”

The Captain snorted before leaning towards her. “It’s compromising. Even dangerous.”

“Like acquiring a Jewish orphan, you mean? Come on, she’s a servant. And we’re not running an underground railroad,” she added in English. “Anyway, there’s no law against it.”

“Yet.”

“Well, Captain Jeremy Floyd, maybe we need to decide what kind of Nazis we’re going to be. There doesn’t seem to be much alternative any more.”

“That’s pessimistic.”

“I mean, it’s all over already, isn’t it? Just that one little island. Against everywhere.”

He shook his head. “Britain is more than a little island. It’s an empire that covers the globe. Do you know how many soldiers the British could muster in India? Don’t underestimate them because they’re brown; that’s Hitler’s mistake. And the Royal Navy is better than anything that the Reich can dream of. The Wehrmacht thinks it can invade by floating over the Channel in barges and the British are just going to watch.”

“Which is why you’re selling them barges?”

“Of course. They’re going to get slaughtered. And how do you think I’m paying for this house? No, it’s not over, Sarah of Elsengrund.”

He fell silent as a group of officers, reeking of beer, stumbled over to shake his hand. Sarah smiled beatifically and curtseyed. A swollen hand patted her head and even before she could picture herself sinking her teeth into the thick fingers, it was gone.

The Captain waited a moment and continued. “If Britain can get what it needs past the U-boats, that is. However, we have a more pressing problem. What’s wrong with this party?”

“It’s really dull.”

“No,” he said flatly.

“It is, trust me.”

“Look around, tell me what’s wrong. From our perspective.”

“Oh, I like this game.” Sarah chuckled.

She scanned the room.

It was heaving with uniforms, of different ranks and colours. Flushed, sweaty faces, laughing too loud, drinking too quickly. There were plenty of civilians, too, businessmen and chancers, the well-connected and the want-to-bes, side-by-side. Crowds of wives and mistresses, exchanging glances of jealousy and pity.

The drinking songs had not yet started, but the piano was already lost in the hubbub. The room stank of cologne and alcohol.

Uniforms.

“What do we have…not so many Luftwaffe. Busy over Britain?” Sarah asked. The Captain nodded. “All right, Kriegsmarine out in force… Oh, who is that coming in? Lots of gold braid on his shoulders?”

“Admiral Canaris. We’ll get to him in a moment.”

The admiral did not command a lot of attention on entering. He had the look of a small, kindly old man, which made Sarah instantly suspicious. His skin was a little yellow and unhealthy, with age pulling at his jowls. His eyebrows were untidy in a way that suggested someone meandering his way to retirement, but his pristine dress uniform did not. It was the darkest navy blue, so dark it was nearly black—

Sarah looked around the room again. “No black. There’s no Schutzstaffel, no SS. Presumably no Gestapo?”

“Exactly,” the Captain said, clapping. “Although you don’t see them in black any more – they want to wear grey like real soldiers. We have here a very narrow subset of the Nazi machine. One of the reasons our parties have proven popular with the Wehrmacht is the absence of the monsters. They make people nervous. This is somewhere they can feel free to have a good grumble about everything. But this means that we have, inadvertently, chosen a side.”

“Monsters who don’t like monsters?”

“Different circles of hell,” the Captain muttered.

Sarah huffed and narrowed her eyes. “Have you actually read Dante’s Inferno? There’s a whole ring for the Jews because they lend money. The same circle as the murderers, the warmakers, thieves and tyrants. It’s Quatsch.”

“I’m not sure that’s what Dante meant, or where God puts the Jews.”

“God doesn’t put the Jews anywhere, Captain Floyd. We have no hell.” Sarah relaxed a little. “Just shame, in the here and now. Do you know where Dante puts the traitors against the state?”

“In the ice.”

“In the ice,” she agreed. “Up to our necks, eating each other. For ever.”

“They’re the traitors,” the Captain said, waving at the soldiers that surrounded them. “Not you.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“Talking of traitors…” the Captain said, straightening up. “Here comes the messenger of one in particular.”

Admiral Canaris’s young naval adjutant was weaving through the crowd towards them. He was evidently sober and his politeness was an impediment to his movement, surrounded as he was by swaying, braying drunks.

They found a set of armchairs by pulling rank on some junior Kriegsmarine officers.

“Admiral, may I present my niece, Ursula.”

Sarah curtseyed and conjured up her widest winning smile. The admiral looked at the Captain in momentary confusion, then nodded to Sarah. The Captain waved her onto the floor next to the admiral’s chair.

“A fine party, Haller,” the admiral declared. “Thank you for the invitation. Holstein, find me something that isn’t champagne.”

The adjutant seemed about to ask a follow-up question, then realized his absence would be sufficient.

“We’re honoured by your presence obviously,” the Captain said.

“That’s nice for you,” the admiral said, before stretching, a pretext to look around before speaking. “I received your gift earlier today. I must applaud the quality of your industrial espionage.” He leaned in slightly. “Haller, I know from our time in Spain that you can be counted on to get things done, outside of official channels of course.”

“Of course,” the Captain confirmed.

“You sent me a fragment of a ceramic bomb. These are used to drop disease agents on your enemy. They are the work of our anti-Bolshevik friends, the Japanese. In particular, one Shirō Ishii, an army surgeon in Manchuria. I’m guessing you got this somewhere closer to home?”

The Captain nodded. Sarah stared at the Captain, trying to understand the unfolding events. He gave the fragment she found to an admiral—

Shush. Listen and learn.

“The Reich has any number of research projects, some of which are independently funded,” the admiral continued more softly. “There is a preoccupation with Wunderwaffen – rockets, giant cannon, Superbomben – which our leaders encourage, none of it very well organized. It seems one of our chemists blew up his own house recently.” The admiral chuckled and shook his head like a tolerant uncle.

Sarah had to squint against the white light of her memory. The house vanishing in an instant, taking with it Schäfer’s body and his work.

She shifted her weight and settled back onto the floor. The admiral continued.

“One of my…colleagues in the SS, one Kurt Hasse, has been empire-building in this fertile, clandestine area. He and Ishii met in 1929 and I’m…interested to discover that Surgeon Colonel Ishii is in Berlin right now, at the same time as his bombs, and they’re meeting at the Japanese Embassy tomorrow night. I would very much like to play the mouse at that appointment, but all my usual friends there have been asked to make themselves scarce after 10 p.m. Haller, you know people who aren’t above a little burglary, don’t you? Maybe have a listen to something in the ambassador’s office?”

“I’m surprised you don’t know someone yourself…”

“This isn’t something that I can involve myself in directly – the armed forces keeping tabs on the SS? That would not go down well. In this case, you are the person I know.”

“What might they be discussing, that you need to know so much?” the Captain asked.

“Hasse has been communicating with a group of German missionaries in Africa. They have been there for some years researching tropical diseases—”

Sarah was having to make herself concentrate as Canaris spoke. Like much that she overheard, it seemed dull and parochial, or too distant to be of interest. She knew this made her a bad spy.

“If they’ve stumbled on something especially nasty in the jungle,” he continued, “there are those who would like to use it. Being outside the Reich, their activities fall under my purview. I find myself responsible for them but cannot draw attention to them because, of course, our sagacious Führer does not believe in gas or germ warfare—”

“Why not?” piped up Sarah, her curiosity overcoming her caution.

Canaris paused, staring at her. He seemed to hover somewhere between ignoring and indulging her, before answering.

“Our war hero was gassed by the British in 1918. I think he found the experience less than pleasant.”

“No war is pleasant though, surely?”

Canaris laughed and slapped his thigh. “I think, in a rare moment of pragmatism the Führer has grasped that the British have a large gas stockpile and were we to use something similar, it would just stab a wasps’ nest. We supply our armies using horses, and horses cannot wear gas masks. However, he may be persuaded to use something untraceable or at least apparently natural in origin. In fact he might already have been so persuaded. And that is an unpleasant thought. Jesus…” Canaris noticed something behind them and sat back in surprise. “Your clientele just expanded.”

Sarah turned and started. Like finding three crows at the window watching you with unblinking black eyes, she saw three SS officers in meticulous dress uniforms by the door. Sarah had once been told what the collective term was for crows in English. A murder.

“May I introduce SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Hasse,” the admiral murmured with a sigh.

“A coincidence?” the Captain asked.

“No such thing,” growled the admiral.

“The monsters are here,” Sarah said, under her breath.

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They stood behind the glass doors to the stairs and watched the crows move through the party. The soldiers drifted aside as they approached and closed ranks behind them. Sarah had once seen a cat pad across a town square of pigeons who acted the same way.

“So the SS came. That’s lovely,” Sarah said brightly.

“Not especially. That one, next to our new friend,” the Captain said, pointing to the older, better-fed of the three crows. “Sicherheitsdienst, SD, SS intelligence. We are now being watched.”

For a moment, a sliver of a second, and for the first time in months, Sarah felt fear. It was like someone had opened a door onto a winter’s evening, then abruptly shut it. It woke her from her stupor. She could feel things coming alive inside her mind, like warming valves in a wireless set.

“Who said, ‘There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about’?” she mused.

“One day, Sarah of Elsengrund, you’ll quote a famous British homosexual in the wrong company.”

“Until then, life will continue to excite… So, who does Admiral Canaris work for?”

“He is chief of the Abwehr. Military intelligence.”

Sarah’s mouth dropped open. “Military intelligence?” she growled. “We work for German military intelligence?”

“No, we work with German military intelligence.”

“Whose side are we on?” she cried. “Whose side are you on?”

“Remember what you told me from the Arthashastra? ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Well, Admiral Canaris is an enemy of Hitler.”

Sarah pointed back into the drawing room, where a disordered marching song was breaking out. She watched champagne running down a well-fed face.

“Oh yes, the German military looks horrified at what’s happening.”

The Captain placed a finger against his lips and moved closer. She had been getting careless in the last few months, so secure had their operation seemed.

“Not everybody is happy, but nobody feels comfortable to speak out…and some don’t get involved in politics.”

“They don’t get involved…” she mocked. “Politics is everything.” She stopped so she could vocalize the next thought coherently. “I heard some of the soldiers talking about Poland, about the Einsatzgruppen? They rounded up school teachers, priests, Gypsies and Jews…and shot them. Thousands and thousands. The army helped.”

“And that was enough for Canaris,” the Captain told her. “An eye-opener for the professional soldiers. They don’t like Slavs or Jews, but shooting civilians en masse… This is not what they signed up for.”

“Still doing it though, aren’t they?” Sarah snarled. She waited a moment for some guests to pass them. “Look me in the eye and tell me that this admiral is on our side.”

“He’s not. He’s on his side. He’s a right-winger, and I don’t know if he’s more upset by the murders or because the army got involved. But either way, if he’s worried about Hasse, Ishii and these missionaries, then we should be, too. This is not the first time I’ve heard them mentioned.”

“Who does he think you are?”

“A businessman, a fixer, more interested in money than politics but with no love for Hitler for practical reasons. I do the odd job for him.”

“What do we get out of this arrangement?”

“Good question. We’re being fed information. We’re undermining the National Socialists and we get help when we need it.”

“How? How do we get help? How do I tell people that I’m actually an Abwehr agent?”

“Well, you don’t do that for a start.”

“How do I ask for help?” she insisted.

“There’s a code word. Die Drei Hasen. The three hares.”

“Der Hasen und der Löffel drei…” Sarah sang, thinking of the stained glass they’d seen at Rothenstadt, the school for the Nazi elite that she had infiltrated to get to Schäfer. “Is that for me? Am I the three hares? My, you’ve got sentimental.”

“Not really, it’s quite descriptive. We have limited resources and we make it count double.”

“But what—”

“For god’s sake, can’t you just accept—” he snapped, then stopped. Sarah noticed the line of sweat on his top lip.

“I’m—” he began.

“It’s fine,” she interrupted. She waved her hands at him. “Go do what you need to do.”

He turned and headed for the stairs. Again? How many times has he lost his temper recently, over nothing? she thought.

The clock rang out as he climbed. Only 11 p.m.

And it’s happening earlier and earlier.

Sarah pushed open a heavy door that made a sighing groan as if unwilling to move. It chivvied her into the dark space as it closed. Enough moonlight seeped through the papered windows to illuminate the contents. Furniture, paintings and rugs slept under dustsheets, as pots of paint and ladders waited.

Like everything else, this arrangement was a sham. There was no grand furniture under the sheets, just piled junk and cheap chairs. No decorating was going to take place. Beyond this suggestion of renovation lay empty rooms of peeling wallpaper and crumbling decay. The house, its luxury and expensive sumptuousness was a theatre set.

Sarah felt an absence at odds with her usual need to be left alone. She found she needed to talk. Not about anything in particular. Just talk. When the Captain could not, and he had been increasingly unavailable, Sarah struggled with the isolation of her secret life.

She had once had other voices in her mind, that argued and berated. They had been still for a long while, and she missed them. She also struggled with that silence, because the mission that took her to Rothenstadt had, for all its violence and terror, given her other people to think about, to care for.

There was the Mouse, the tiny, weak, bullied little girl who had clung defiantly to Sarah, even as the monsters had circled around her. Then there was Elsa, a monster only because her father was one, who had betrayed Sarah but saved her at the end.

Sarah had sent Elsa away out of necessity, to get the hysterical, damaged girl to safety, but the Mouse… Sarah wanted to see the Mouse, to reach out, knowing that the girl would eventually stop talking about puppies and listen. Sarah desperately needed to unburden herself upon someone.

Sarah was lonely.

She entered a third room that was pitch-black, but she walked into the gloom, confident of her steps. She reached out for the back wall and ran her fingers across the torn wallpaper, until she found a crack. She pushed the wall and, finding it immovable, she felt for a small hole at waist height.

She crouched and, sliding two hairgrips into the opening, cocked an ear to listen.

Click.

CLICK.

A section of the wall swung towards her, the room filling with a blinding yellow light.

Inside, surrounded by whirring, clicking, moving machines, a man pointed a revolver at Sarah where she was crouched.

“That door was locked for a reason,” he growled.

“Come on, it was barely locked,” Sarah scoffed as she entered.

The man lowered the gun and dropped it onto a table. He pulled a pair of oversized headphones over his curly hair as he muttered to himself and scratched his beard.

Sarah walked among the racks of machines, watching their matching metal discs spinning and lights twinkling. They buzzed and rustled. The air smelled like the inside of a wireless set, like electricity and thunderstorms.

“Anything good tonight?” she asked.

She leaned in and gently turned a knob on the nearest Magnetophon, watching the dancing needle grow more frenzied.

The man pushed past her and returned the control to its original position.

“No. There are too many people here,” he complained. “I can’t make anything out. I’ve said this before, I don’t know why no one listens to me.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Stukas are too slow to fight over England, but we knew that. Fighter Command knows that. By the time we tell anyone, they’ll have been withdrawn.”

“So this is a waste of time?” she enquired, half statement, half question.

“No, this is a brilliant plan, really badly executed.”

Sarah flicked a switch and the room filled with noise. Drunken singing, tinkling glasses, a distorted piano, two distant voices—

“—insistent on withholding strategic bombing, or rather he has to be the one to order it.”

“No, it has to be the airfields—”

He turned the speaker off and glared at her.

“That sounds useful—” she ventured.

“Well, it’s not,” he snapped.

He was a small man, but there was a fury behind his eyes that made his presence unnerving. Sarah pushed on.

“What is your problem with me?” she demanded.

“Other than you coming in here to needle me?”

“I’m not needling you,” Sarah stated calmly. “I just want to know—”

“You’re dangerous and I don’t trust you,” he blurted out. “You’re at best a child, who can’t be expected not to make mistakes, and at worst, you’re some kind of plant. Where did you come from? How did you get your claws into him?”

“I’m dangerous?” Sarah was incredulous. “What about you, walking around Berlin with that accent? You might as well be in a British uniform, Sergeant Norris.”

“I’m not a Jewess swanning around dressed as a doll in a room full of Nazis.”

“At least I don’t sleep in my clothes and forget to bathe,” she sneered.

“You’re going to get us all killed. They’ll torture us all first, then they’ll kill us.”

Sarah looked at him, trying to see past the anger, the unkempt beard and the sweat spots. “But you’re a wireless operator. If any of us are going to be arrested it’s you. A short life expectancy is in the job description. I can’t be that much more threatening.” Sarah paused, her mind cycling through the options. “No, you aren’t scared of what I’ll do, it’s something else.”

Norris opened his mouth to speak but stopped. Sarah saw the uncertainty behind the rage.

With a snap and a flutter, the nearest reel sucked up the last of its tape and accelerated to a blur. He switched the machine off and began to remove the spool.

“Haller. He’s…different. You’ve changed him. It’s like he can’t take any risks any more.” He thrust the large metal reel into Sarah’s arms. It smelled of nails. “Always double-checking, weighing the options—”

“What? He’s more dangerous because he’s more careful?”

“He’s thinking too much, not acting on instinct. Like he doesn’t trust himself. Those little windows of opportunity that he used to seize upon, they’re gone before he can make a decision.” Norris pulled the new tape through the rollers. Under, over, under, over… “One day that’s going to be an escape route that he dawdles next to. Second thoughts kill.”

“He’s not committing to the move,” murmured Sarah.

“And these parties – they’re just an excuse to have the house. He wanted a house. He’s sleeping at night—”

“You mean he’s happy…?” Sarah laughed.

“No, I mean he’s become emotional. The danger used to be a piece of mathematics, a puzzle to solve. He liked it. Now it’s a threat. He’s more preoccupied with you than the job. As for that bullet he took,” Norris continued, “he’s a shell of the man he was. If you can’t see what’s happening to him, you’re more stupid than I thought.”

Sarah had seen. She just didn’t want to think about it—

There was a noise behind them. They spun round to see the new maid standing by the open door.

Images

For a moment no one moved. Then everybody moved at once.

Norris lunged for the maid as she took a step backwards. Sarah tried to stop him but couldn’t prevent him dragging her back into the room.

“Close the door,” he growled.

Sarah pulled the door closed and turned to find the maid held around the middle, arms pinned to her sides. Somehow Norris now held a knife, a long, thin spike like a knitting needle. He pushed it under her chin.

“NO!” Sarah screamed.

“She’s seen too much.”

“She has a name!” shouted Sarah.

Norris paused. “Well, what is it?”

Gottverdammt.

“Girl, what’s your name?”

“Clementine. My name is Clementine.” Her voice reminded Sarah of the Mouse. The fragility was the same. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see anything, I won’t say anything—”

“You’re right there, Clementine,” Norris interrupted.

“You can’t—” Sarah cried.

“If you hadn’t unlocked the door, I wouldn’t have to…”

Sarah leaned into the storm of culpability she was experiencing. Not another innocent death. Not one more…

“Don’t do it to punish me… Look at her. LOOK. AT. HER.” Norris glanced down as Clementine looked up, wide brown eyes full of panic. “She’s just a little girl.”

He sneered, but looking again into Clementine’s face below his, he hesitated.

“Have you ever killed anyone before, Norris?” Sarah asked more quietly.

One of the reels pulled the last of the tape from its machine and spun wildly, the tail of the tape making a phut noise with each revolution.

Phut.

“I’ve killed chickens.”

Phut.

“Did the chickens have names?”

“Yes,” he hissed.

“Did the chickens look at you like that?”

Phut.

“No.”

Another machine ran out of tape.

Phut. Phut.

“But if she tells anyone about this, anyone at all…” Norris groaned. “I’ll make it quick.” He closed his eyes.

“NO!” shrieked Sarah. She thought quickly, carelessly, looking for a way out. She clasped onto the first idea— “She can join us, work for us…”

“You’re kidding.”

“No… Clementine, listen.” Sarah took a deep breath. “We work for the Abwehr, for military intelligence. We listen in to the army, make sure there are no traitors to the Führer. Do you understand?”

Phut. Phut.

Clementine nodded carefully, glancing down at the shining blade.

“Do you want to help?” Sarah continued, edging closer to Norris. “Do a special job for the Reich? Work for Herr Haller?”

Clementine nodded as emphatically as she could.

“But it’s secret,” Sarah stated clearly. “No one can know. Ever.”

Another nod. Sarah reached up and gingerly pushed the steel spike down and away from Clementine’s throat, feeling its wafer-thin edge on her fingertips.

“So that’s it, we just let her go?” Norris muttered.

“No, we don’t just let her go,” Sarah said in exasperation. “We keep her here until the end of the party. My uncle speaks to Herr Gehlhaar and she moves in. If she’s useless, you can kill her then.”

“Haller decides. Not you,” he conceded.

“Fine. But you know he’ll agree with me.”

“She could be a spy.”

“Then she’s in good company.”

Sarah objected to locking Clementine up, but there didn’t seem much option until the guests had gone and the Captain had resurfaced. The room was little more than a broom closet, but it had a light and it was warm. It would have to do.

Before she locked the door, she stepped inside.

“This is just for a few hours,” Sarah whispered. Clementine appeared downcast and motionless. “Are you all right?”

The girl reached out and shoved Sarah against the wall. “Who are you, Evangeline St. Clare? You think you’re my little Eva? Get your daddy to buy me up and live happily ever after? You read too many stories, Nazi girl.” Clementine released her and stepped back with a derisive noise.

Sarah stood, shocked and open-mouthed. She was also confused by the reference to little Eva, until she remembered Onkel Toms Hütte, and the little white girl who befriended the slave Tom.

“Didn’t I just save your life?” Sarah protested finally.

“Oh, and I should be so grateful that now I can be your Hausneger

Clementine curtseyed in melodramatic fashion.

“You weren’t so mouthy with a knife at your throat,” Sarah said.

“You want the quiet little girl? Get a knife.”

Sarah began again, still thrown off-balance. “If we’re going to make this work, I’m going to need you to—”

“I get threatened all the time. I am not scared of you,” Clementine spat.

“You looked scared earlier,” retorted Sarah, getting irritated again.

“I can pretend. It makes people like you and Herr Hairy feel more important. Less likely to cut me open with a knitting needle. So get yourself a knife, Nazi girl.”

Sarah was lost for words.

She stepped out of the room, wondering what she had done bringing this Clementine, rather than the one she thought she had met, into the house.

She locked the door, tempted to turn off the light as she did so.