“What are those evergreen trees over there with the droopy branches? They look like they’re crying.”
David laughed. “Well, actually they are called weeping pines. But they kind of remind me of old rabbis. Some had long beards that swayed while praying, like the one I was learning Torah from for my bar mitzvah. We all began our bar mitzvah studies early because all Jewish children were expelled from public schools. Before my studies were completely interrupted by the Nazis.” He paused. “You know about bar mitzvahs, don’t you?”
“Of course.” Alice laughed.
“But here’s something I bet you don’t know.”
“What’s that?”
“Even in winter, certain things bloom in this garden. Winter bloom, my mother called it.”
“What kinds of flowers bloom in winter?”
“More than you might suspect. Hellebores, quince, heather—all kinds of flowers. So you like this secret garden?” David whispered.
“I love it. It’s . . . it’s so wild. It just rambles.” She was searching for other words. “It’s not . . .”
“Not what?”
“Spick-and-span.” The words were from her favorite book, The Secret Garden.
“Spick-and-span?” David asked.
Alice turned to him. His face had changed. There was a new brightness in his eyes.
“It’s from a book that I read a long time ago. There was a boy and a girl who helped bring a garden back to life. And the boy, named Dickon, said he wouldn’t want a gardener’s garden. All clipped and spick-and-span. That gardens are nice when things were running wild.”
There was a sudden gust of wind. A smile broke across David’s face. “Look at that!” He pointed at a tree where a stand of ferns at its base suddenly snagged and the vines of white flowers clambered up a tree. “Those vines caught hold just like my mother said they would.”
“Oh, those are lovely. What kind of flower?”
“A star clematis. Very rare. She found it in the woods near our summer home. My mum wasn’t sure it would grow here.”
“But it did!” Alice exclaimed.
“And she never saw it,” he said softly. Alice turned her head. She couldn’t look at him. There was a silence—the silence of profound grief.
Twenty-Two
The Sweet Taste of Death
The night before she was to leave for the Wolf’s Lair, Alice leaned against the open garage door and watched as lightning flashed in the sky. “Sounds like the ‘Anvil Chorus’ up there!” her father said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Better come in. It’s going to be torrential.”
Wind tore through the city, and just across the way, two shutters ripped from a building and clattered to the street. But Alice was still engulfed in that silence of David’s grief. She thought of that pale yet somehow luminous face. She remembered the first time she had seen him. She had thought he resembled a changeling from one of her fairy-tale books. What would happen to him tonight? She hoped he was inside. The air had turned chilly. Then a downpour began. He’ll be cold.
“Who will be cold?” her father asked. She was sure that she hadn’t spoken out loud. “Oh . . . oh . . . nothing . . . just a cat I saw this afternoon. That’s all.”
“Believe me, cats are going to survive this world more than humans. The Russians have just destroyed the German Fourth Army, along with the Panzer units. I think they’ll be here by March.”
“Really, Papa? But what about us?”
“I’m thinking, dear. I’m thinking.” Was he thinking about Louise? How often Alice had been tempted to tell her parents of that sighting near the newsstand. That girl whose face floated out of the crowd. She could almost see it now, like an image in a disturbing dream. A dream that was not really a nightmare, but so disturbing still. As if her mind was being torn apart.
Thinking meant he was planning. A strategy of some sort was most likely in the works. Timing would be everything. And it would depend on a lot of spy work and high-quality intel. And that was exactly why she had to do her job. She had already received a sweet paper concerning the planned assassination, the Feallmharù, as they were calling it. The last bits of the paper had dissolved in her mouth hours ago.
The trip to the headquarters on the Eastern Front would be a long one. She would use the time to review every bit of information that she had read and then eaten.
She could not help but think of Mr. Churchill. She recalled so vividly how she and her mum and her father had gathered around the wireless for Mr. Churchill’s first address as Prime Minister. Britain had declared war on Germany just eight months before, two days after the Germans’ invasion of Poland. And things were not going well. The Nazis march to the west seemed inevitable. On the evening of May 19, 1940, the radio crackled and then the BBC News reader’s voice came on. “Ladies and gentlemen, the next voice you shall hear will be our prime minister, Winston Churchill.” The slightly nasal voice of the prime minister issued forth.
“I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our empire, of our Allies, and above all, of the cause of freedom. A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armored tanks, have broken through the French defenses . . .”
His speech built to a crescendo as he called upon countries to rescue “not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.”
For eight minutes he spoke. Her father had embraced them. It was as if Alice could still feel his fingers gripping her shoulder. She was only ten years old then. Barely up to her father’s shoulder. Then the prime minister finally came to those fierce, final words, the clarion call to honor, to courage—to valor.
“Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the will of God is in heaven, even so let it be.”
Now, four years later, less than half a mile from the very center of that foul and soul-destroying tyranny of Adolf Hitler, Alice Winfield stood tall beside her father and thought, I am a girl of valor and almost a woman. I shall do all I can do to help that man of valor, my fios, Claus von Stauffenberg, code name Wotan, fulfill his mission. So help me God.
Twenty-Three
The Wolf’s Jaws
Alice had boarded the train at midnight, along with perhaps seventy-five others of the Hitler’s entourage. For close to ten hours, the Führer’s train snaked through the gloomy forests of East Germany. It was a moonless night in mid-July, and their departure time was critical. It must be dark with no moon. The inky night was still scattered with pinpricks of light. But they were prepared in case of a devastating attack by the British aircraft. Mounted on each end of the train were four-barrel guns that could fire twenty-millimeter shells if attacked.
The train was in fact a perfect target for an assassination attempt, according to her father. Thus far there had been more than twenty attempts to assassinate Hitler since 1937. But this one planned for the Wolf’s Lair had to work. Tap wood, Alice thought, and lightly touched her fingers to the armrest of her seat in the train. Stupid! Magical thinking! She remembered her mum’s reprimand once to Louise about such nonsense, when her sister had showed her a rabbit foot someone had given her for good luck.