Twice she had waited for Louise outside her building, but she had never gotten up her nerve to actually confront her again. She couldn’t bear to have Louise look through her again. The nothingness in those eyes, the absolute void, was excruciating. Alice felt it was as if she had endured an amputation of sorts, as if a limb had been severed. She had to think of something else.
But at the same time, she knew she should go visit David. He needed something for his cough. She had bought some sort of disgusting tonic the other day but had become so obsessed with her thoughts of Louise that she had actually forgotten to go see him. She would go now.
“Going out?” said her mother when she had retrieved the cough syrup and tucked it into her jacket.
“Yeah, just for a little bit. I said I’d help Lena with some homework.”
Lying, she thought. It comes so easy now that I’m a spy. But if her parents knew that she was protecting a little Jewish boy in hiding, they would be out of their minds with fear—fear that their covers would be compromised. They would all be endangered. There were simply too many risks involved in telling her parents. And she remembered something that Louise had told her when she had decided to leave the Rasa service and have her surgery. I’ve grown tired of it. I was always living this lie. Then Louise had said the thing about the cute Norwegian guy who was trying to woo her. What could I tell him? This isn’t really me?
But this new Louise didn’t even recognize her own sister. Well, Alice thought, she had to push that out of her mind. She had to go over to the whipped-cream house and see David. David, who never seemed to forget her face. The thought still startled her. David indeed never ever forgot her face. He always seemed to recognize her. How very odd. Was it because he led such a solitary life, always in hiding? His world had shrunk to the hidden cubbyhole in the cellar of his house, the alley, and the trees. And she was the only person in that little world.
Usually David perched up in a tree during the daylight hours. Together they had constructed a little platform in his favorite tree. It was more visible now as autumn progressed and the leaves began to fall. Maybe things were too visible, as she now heard a cough from behind a pile of rubbish. She walked over.
“David?”
“Good evening.” He coughed again. “Well, not quite evening, I guess, though the days are getting shorter.”
“David, what are you doing here? Why . . . why aren’t you in the tree? Yes, it’s daytime, but still.”
“Don’t worry. The leaves are dropping and . . . and . . .” His voice, which was very thin and gaspy, dropped off. “I was just too tired, Ute.”
“David, it will be November soon and it’s cold and you don’t sound good. You need to be inside somewhere.”
“They’ve moved back in temporarily, I think. The Schmellings.” He nodded toward the house.
Alice felt a panic rising in her like a fast incoming tide. She was almost gasping herself. David looked feverish, and his eyes were glazed and almost too shiny. This was dangerous.
“Here, I brought you some cough syrup.” She took out the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and held it out. He didn’t reach for it.
“Can you help me?”
“Oh . . . oh, sure. Of course.” She put one arm around his back and lifted him; then, supporting him, she tipped the bottle to his mouth. He scrunched up his face and gave her a kind of half smile. “Worse it tastes, the better it works. That’s what my father always said about medicine.”
“I hope he’s right.” Alice was thinking that she had to do something and do it fast. She wished she could bring him back to the garage, but there was no way. If they were discovered harboring a Jew in the Reich garage, the game would be up. But what about Louise? She lived in that rather nice apartment building. Couldn’t she tuck away one very ill child? But what if Fritz was there? Oh God, thought Alice. Panic was engulfing her.
First things first, her mum always said. She had to find something warm for him. She needed to get a blanket or something. She couldn’t go home and take one of theirs. Her mother would immediately become suspicious—but what about the Führerbunker? Her own little cubbyhole of a room. She could surely sneak out one of the comforters from her bed. She also remembered that she kept a warm jacket there.
“David, you stay right here,” she said, peeling off her own jacket.
“You think I’m going somewhere?” He laughed but began coughing again. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. She saw blood streaks.
“I’m going to get you something warm to sleep under. It won’t take me long.”
“Ute?”
“Yes?”
“Ute, we don’t know much about each other . . . but do you think you could take me home with you?”
She felt as if her heart dropped out of her body. The seconds dripped by, and a silence filled the air between them. And then a maverick breeze blew through the alley and erased the quiet. All she could hear now was her own heart beating, beating, clamped around its dark and very dangerous secret.
Her voice was guttural as she spoke. “David, my name is not Ute. It is Alice. And I’m a spy.”
“Alice,” he said softly. “I love your name, Alice. I love saying it. It’s . . . it’s delicious.”
“And what does it taste like, David?”
“Like lingonberry jam on buttered toast.”
Twenty-Eight
“You’ll Have to Kill Me, Won’t You?”
Her backpack was stuffed with a warm eiderdown comforter, in addition to a jacket and a sweater she’d taken from her minuscule room at the Führerbunker, and a thermos of hot chocolate she had filled from the pot in the staff kitchen. She began racing back to the alley. She was taking a shortcut when a figure emerged from a narrow street called Kleine Gasse, which meant small alley.
It was a woman. She was rushing, and her back was toward Alice. But there was something about the set of her shoulders . . . Alice knew without a doubt that it was Louise. Her face might have changed, but her shoulders, the way she was walking, had not.
“Louise!” Alice called out. There was not even a hitch in the woman’s gait. Not a flinch in her shoulders. She merely walked on. Alice sprang toward her and struck her on the shoulder. “You!”
Louise turned around, but her face was completely placid.
“Yes?” She opened her wide gray eyes. Those hadn’t changed.
“Louise, or sorry, Louisa, it’s me, Alice . . . your sister.” She whispered this in English.
“I’m afraid I don’t speak English,” the woman replied in German—German with an Alsatian accent.
“Are you going to deny this?” Alice continued in English.
“I don’t know what you are talking about, little girl,” Louise answered in German. “Now I am in a hurry.”
“I bet you are,” Alice hissed as Louise rushed ahead. “What are you? You can’t be a spy for them!”
The woman turned. Her face seemed to have changed. It was filled with a new kind of anger—an anger that Alice had never seen on her old face or this new one.
“And if I am?” she asked, still in German.
“You’ll have to kill me, won’t you?” Alice replied.