The campers always giggled about the rude language.
At Rasa camp, a play was always performed on the night before Sir William’s birthday. It was based on his time as a spy when Morfitt had actually been caught for spying and imprisoned in France. This was the second time Morfitt had been aided by a person whose face he simply could never remember, even though they had provided crucial help for him.
Because Alice had received such a high score in her language studies and had mastered the dialect of northern Brittany in France, she played the role of the woman who helped Morfitt escape. “Ha deuit ganin.” Follow me, monsieur.
She wondered if any of her fellow campers had received an A-level mission yet. Most likely they had, as this was war. The most dangerous war in the history of the United Kingdom. She recalled that her friend Peter Jenkins had been dispatched to someplace in North Africa. He had picked up Arabic quickly and had mastered a range of dialects.
She heard the front door of the apartment open and close. Her parents must be home. Less than a minute later, there was a light tapping on her door.
“Ja.”
“Noch wach?” her mother asked. Still awake?
“Ja, Mutter, herein.” The German word “Mutter,” for Mother, was not nearly as cozy as Mum. But it was necessary that they speak only German.
“Haushaltsdienst,” her mother said. Housekeeping services.
Alice whistled softly. So she was to be in domestic service of the Reich. One could not get much closer to the center of things. It was the very belly of the beast—Hitler’s houses and apartments.
“The details will follow tomorrow.” This meant that, most likely, her fios would be revealed.
“Thanks, Mum—oh, and can you put on the third record of the Ring cycle?” Alice took her headphones and climbed back into bed. By this time the nasty dwarf Alberich had stolen the gold ring that the Rhine maidens guarded. Wotan, the one-eyed king of the gods, had now taken it from the dwarf, who then cursed the ring. Always a curse, Alice thought. Standard operating procedure in myths and fairy tales.
The gods were always flawed, but Wagner’s Ring cycle was Hitler’s favorite. He was said to play the records constantly and often staged parts of it in his various residences. It had an almost gravitational pull on him—this mythic story of gods and giants, mystical mountains and caves, of dragons and Valkyries, the winged heroines who transported slain heroes to Valhalla.
But mostly the story was about power. Power and madness. No wonder Hitler loved it. Alice settled herself under the covers. Most people would not find this music soothing for sleep, but it was while she slept that her brain was, in one sense, most active. She had learned foreign languages this way, even retrieved the visual memory of the most intricate details of maps.
A ghostly face drifted through the fog of her dreams—David, poor David. . . . She shut off that part of her brain and let the rising crescendos of the Valkyrie battle cry fill her head.
Some said that if sung by the right soprano, the sound could peel the paint off walls. But Alice slept on in her own kind of peace as her brain whirred, absorbing every note and musical phrase. She smiled in her sleep as she felt a twinge in her back. Am I sprouting wings?
When she awoke in the morning, Alice had a deep inkling of her exact role in the mission. She was not an opera singer by any stretch of the imagination. But that wasn’t the point. In the story, it was the Valkyrie Brünnhilde who brought down the gods and brought the slain heroes to Valhalla! She wouldn’t have to be a soprano. Just clever. It all fit together now. The words she had read on the flight from England to Germany came back to her.
You are now officially part of Operation Valkyrie. OV is a plan first devised by the German Reserve Army to support Hitler, in case there was a general breakdown in civil order as a result of the possible Allied bombing of Berlin or an uprising of the millions of foreign forced laborers. . . . This plan has now been revised completely under the direction of Secret Germany, an anti-Nazi movement, to not only focus on a takeover, but on the assassination of Hitler. As you can see, the mission has been reversed. The target is now Hitler and the Nazis. Operation Valkyrie is a revolt.
But what the mission statement hadn’t said was that she was the Valkyrie. She would not be the one to carry out the assassination of Hitler, but somehow she would move him toward his death. She would carry him to Valhalla on the wings of other Valkyries. In this sense she was to be his “winged servant.” If he died, he was to be admitted to Valhalla, carried there on the wings of a Valkyrie. And she, Ute Schnaubel, was to become the substitute for the Valkyrie.
“Yoo-hoo! Ute! Darling, you have a visitor.”
Alice, with the battle cry of the Valkyries still ringing in her head, got out of bed.
“Who, Mum?”
“A surprise. Wear your nice pinafore dress and the lovely eyelet-collar blouse.”
“Ugh! That’s so babyish.” What was it with these German people and their little aprons?
“Believe me, this is hardly baby business.” Her mother’s eyes narrowed until they were fierce little slits of sparkling gray light. “Don’t complain. This is important.”
Who could this be? A surprise. Well, she could think of one person who would definitely be a surprise. Louise!
She quickly got herself dressed and came out with her hair neatly braided Brünnhilde style. All the Valkyries were usually shown with long blond braids. Her braids were not so long, nor so blonde.
She walked into the parlor of the garage apartment. The floor trembled slightly, as the parlor was directly over the car lift.
“Oh!” She gasped slightly. It was Colonel Stauffenberg. He stood erect, holding a lovely bunch of flowers—sunflowers! So she was right. He was her fios. The oak leaves of his handsome uniform seemed to glitter, as did his eye patch. He was her Wotan, from the opera! Of course, Wotan, king of the gods, who had given his eye to drink from the spring of knowledge. He was her fios as well as her case handler. Wotan must be his field name. In the myth and in the Ring cycle operas, Wotan was the god of war and the hero. And hadn’t Stauffenberg been considered a warrior hero too? He had even lost his eye in this war. And now he was ready to turn on the evil leader, Adolf Hitler.
“Congratulations, Fräulein. A sunflower for a sunflower.” He winked at her with his single eye. The effect was odd. It was as if his entire face went blank for a split second. Almost like that of a Rasa.
As she took the bouquet of flowers, she could feel that the paper they were wrapped in was sweet paper. She was excited. Maybe she would learn about where to put chalk marks or where to find dead drop locations. These were tricks she had mastered in Rasa camp. She had received the highest marks, plus fives, in all of these operations during war games the last week of camp. And when you won, you could be a spymaster during the games the following summer. It also meant that your bunk got double pudding at the final banquet. But darn it all, the real war had broken out by then. No camp. No double puddings. Pudding for the banquet was always Molly Morfitt’s chocolate-and-raspberry triple layer cake squared. Which meant nine layers of the most delicious pudding ever created. Molly was Sir William’s wife. Hence, the dining hall was called the Molly-Wills.
“And,” Stauffenberg added, almost reading her mind, “the official certificate with the accompanying papers of instructions. Where to report and so forth.”