“‘B-b-but . . . but . . . I might not find you when I come back.’
“‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right here.’
“But of course he wasn’t. By the time I came back, the street was empty. Everyone had vanished. They had been put on a transport train.” He paused a long time. “And now I know why he told me to buy pork. Nobody would believe I was Jewish if I had pork sausage on me.”
“So that was the last you saw of your father?”
“Yes. I became an instant orphan. And almost instantly stopped keeping kosher. Oh, I tried not to eat the sausage. That lasted all of maybe a day and one night. But then I decided God wouldn’t care.” He paused a moment. “No, actually that’s not quite right. God would care. That’s why we were created. God means for us to live.” He paused. “And you know something? If he thought it would save one child, God would eat a pig.”
Alice remained silent for nearly a minute. As a child of Rasas, she had heard a lot of incredible stories, but this was beyond anything. “But I don’t understand. How can you live in that house? You said you did.” David nodded. “But without them knowing?”
“I only started living there recently. For a long time, I hid out in friends’ houses. They were good to me. Many had known my father, as he had been their doctor. I remembered some of their names. And then my mother had taught music to a few as well. But it became too dangerous for them to hide me. So early last winter I moved back in here.”
Alice blinked. “But how can you? How can you live right under Reichsführer Schmelling’s nose?”
“I remembered a room—well, not really a room, but a secret space. It’s behind a panel in the cellar of the house. On most nights, very late, I can get there. It’s warm.”
“How do you get in?”
“The window well.”
“Window well?”
“At the base of the house there is a dugout spot. I’m sure you’ve seen them. They put a window right on top of the foundation of the house so light can come in if someone needs to go to the cellar. That’s how I get in. The glass is broken. It was repaired, but just temporarily with some plywood. Very easy to remove.”
“But you don’t stay down there all the time, I guess.”
“No, the hidden space is so small I can’t lie down in it or stand up. Barely sit up. I just sleep there on really cold nights.”
“And on other nights?”
“Oh, I just ramble around. The Tiergarten is good. But the best trash—the best food is in the garbage bins in this alley. Gourmet eating, I tell you.”
“What about real gourmet restaurants? They must have great garbage bins full of fantastic food.”
“Too much competition. Every street kid, beggar, whatever, is eating out of those bins. The Orpo is always patrolling those places.”
Alice knew about the Orpo. It was short for the Ordnungspolizei, or the green police, as they were often called because of their green uniforms.
“Thugs, the whole lot. Every Orpo is hoping to get to be in the secret police, the Gestapo. That makes them extra brutal. Imagine wanting to grow up to be a thug in a green uniform. Not me!” he said, and laughed harshly.
Alice had never thought of herself as an impulsive person, but she suddenly blurted out, “Then what do you want to be when you grow up?”
A smile broke over David Bloom’s face. A kind of unnameable joy spilled from his eyes.
“Ute, you really think I can grow up?”
Thirteen
A Sunflower Blooms
Her parents were still out when Alice returned. She was tired and went straight to bed. But she could not fall asleep. She was haunted by David Bloom. His story of escape and survival haunted her. How had he done it? He had been barely eight years old when his father sent him off with the money for the pork sausage, and now he was just ten—three years younger than she was. She could not help but wonder how quickly her face would fade from his memory.
Now, after more than a month in the Haupt school, people were beginning to know her a bit. But if they were out of school—out of context, was the Rasa phrase—they hardly ever recalled her name. Just yesterday she had been going into a shop for her mother, and she ran into Birgit and her mother. Birgit, her Schwesterführerin, sister guide, did not recall her at all!
If Alice and David encountered each other outside the alley—outside the tree, for that matter—would he remember her? What if they encountered each other in the Tiergarten, where she liked to run? What would happen then?
She yawned. But still sleep was far away. Soon, very soon, the details of her role would come through. For she had now officially qualified as an RP, a Reich Praktikum student of the Jungmädel—one of two from the elite Hermann von Haupt school. She couldn’t sleep. She was very excited about the role that would soon be revealed to her. She was equally curious as to who her fios, her mission contact, would be. She felt certain it must be Stauffenberg.
The code name for her fios was Wotan. In one version of the old Norse myth, Wotan’s name was Odin, and Odin had only one eye. It was so obvious to her now. Why had she never thought of it? When they had first met, she had wondered if he would be wearing an eye patch or have one of those eerie glass eyes. And she had worried about how one could shake hands with a man who only had one hand with three fingers remaining. She’d met many men and woman who came to the garage. There were the chauffeurs of men high in the government. But not all were official government people. Even the famous and very beautiful Leni Riefenstahl, the Führer’s favorite filmmaker, had brought in her Daimler. Yet not one of those people could she imagine betraying the Führer by being her fios.
But she wondered not only about her fios, but her brush contact—would Stauffenberg be that too? Brush contacts were very important, as they provided a method for two seeming strangers to pass each other on the street and exchange, through a single word or a scrap of paper, vital information. And she hadn’t yet received any instructions about dead drops, as they were called, secret locations where she could leave urgent encoded information. Nor did she know the signal spots where she could make her chalk marks if she needed to contact her fios or other agents in the spy circle.
These were methods that they had all practiced at Rasa camp in Scotland. She knew the tricks well. She had been quite proficient with the brush contacts, but you never really knew until you did it for real. It wasn’t like a parachute practice jump—if you landed wrong, you could break a leg or an arm. Instant feedback. But dead drops and brush byes were different.
Alice’s thoughts turned to the very first Rasas, the ones from almost four hundred years ago, in the time of Henry VIII. None of these methods had been invented then, or if they had, they were in their infancy. Every Rasa child at some time during summer camp read the diary of William Morfitt to learn the Rasa history. And then on Morfitt’s birthday, August 18, portions were always read aloud.
As I sit here tonight on the eve of my eighty-eighth birthday—nearly a century old—it is difficult to believe that it has been sixty-eight years since I began my service in the court. I started as a groom of the stool in the court of Henry VIII’s father, when Henry VIII was still married to Catherine of Aragon. Groom of the stool is a rather elegant title for an inelegant position—one who attends to the king’s bodily functions. In short, shit and piss.