“Or you me?”
Alice felt as if she had been punched. As if all the wind had been knocked out of her. She was almost surprised to find herself still standing. She took a few tentative steps, but she was shaking so hard she felt she might fall down. She tried to steady her breathing. She leaned up against a wall at the corner of the street where the skeleton of a bombed-out building stood. She looked at the jagged remains. She felt as if she was a ruin herself—the ruin of a creature who had once been a sister. The world suddenly seemed empty to her. Slowly she crumpled to the ground.
“Oh my god, my god,” she whispered to the pavement. “My god . . . my god . . .”
She stared at the place where she and Louise had stood glaring at each other. There was no sign of Louise, not even the sound of her high-heeled shoes on the pavement as she walked away. She had simply vanished.
Alice was uncertain how long she remained on her knees, but finally the weight on her back, the backpack stuffed with warm things, reminded her. David was out here. David needed her. He needed the blankets, the sweater, the hot chocolate. Slowly she got to her feet and walked on.
David peered out from the voluminous cloud of blankets she had wrapped him in. She held the thermos cup to his mouth.
“So tell me more about this . . . this group, the Rasa. You said they started during the time of Henry VIII.”
“Yes, it was the king’s spymaster, William Morfitt. It’s kind of a long story. I’ll try to make it short.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t have much to do. I have all the time in the world,” David replied with a wan smile.
“Well, it really started around the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Do you know about that?”
“Yes, a bit. Henry VIII met with the French king.”
“Francis I, near Calais. Sir William had been inserted as a spy. Unfortunately, he was caught and thrown in prison. A woman came into the prison. The way the story is told, she was a French peasant woman. She carried a basket full of mushrooms. She told William Morfitt that he must follow her. There was no moon, a very dark night, one she explained was called the Lune des Champignons. Which basically meant no moon at all except for the pale gray mushrooms, champignons, on the ground. Some said they resembled little moons. Instead of walking toward the forest where the mushrooms might grow, the woman led William to the beach, where a boat was waiting. And he escaped.
“The entire way back, he tried to remember the woman’s face, but he simply couldn’t. It was as if it was erased like chalk on a blackboard. Then he recalled that a few months before, he had received some information concerning the Pope—not the king’s favorite.”
David gave a short little chuckle. This encouraged Alice. He seemed to be feeling better. “So Morfitt tried to track down the source of this information. For some reason he thought he might have been from Scotland. But he could not seem to place his face. It bedeviled him for days. How could the face of someone who had brought such pressing intelligence to the court of Henry VIII be so forgettable?
“He remembered this as he sailed back from France—twice within a very short time, someone had aided him, and yet he could not keep their faces in his mind. How odd! As a spy, he prided himself on his memory. It was vital to his duties. Due to the fact that these two incidents occurred in such close proximity in terms of time, those faces, or nonfaces, began to haunt him. He began to imagine how effective it would be if there was an intelligence operation, a network of spies whose faces no one could remember. They would be virtually faceless.
“Eventually he found that original spy who had come with the information concerning the Pope. We call him Rob in Rasa history. Rob led William Morfitt to others who shared his condition. Most of them were thieves, and often grave robbers charging doctors high prices for the bodies they retrieved for medical studies. The thieves were rarely caught, and when they were, they proved to be masters in the art of escape.
“Within just two years and with His Majesty’s blessing, Sir William—for he had been knighted by this time—had created a new secret intelligence agency, the most adept in the world. They were called Rasas for ‘tabula rasa,’ since the memory of their faces was always erased. Thus far, the Rasas have endured for almost four hundred years. So that’s my story, our story.”
“Not for everyone,” David said.
“Not for everyone . . . what?”
“Your face was not erased for me. Not at all. I remember everything about you, since the first day we met, up there.” He pointed to the bare tree limbs above where they were now crouching.
“I guess not. But believe me, you’re the exception.”
“But you said that this was your first mission.”
“True, but you know my mum and dad were often on missions where I would go with them. We’ve had to move around quite a bit—new schools, all of that. It took people a long time to remember me every time I started a new school.”
“But now you are on a mission, with your parents here in Berlin.”
She hesitated a moment. She should not be telling David any of this. But he was her best friend. Friends told the truth. Friends confided in each other. And right now, she felt she had nothing else to lose but a best friend.
“We each have different tasks. Mum works at the OKH—the High Command of the General Army, with an attachment to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, another branch of the army. A lot of information flows through there. And my father is in the Reich garage, where all the official ministry cars are serviced.”
“And you are an RP and get to be right in the thick of it with the man himself!”
“Indeed.”
“Does he remember you?”
“Not exactly. He sometimes asks for the RP girl who plays one of the Valkyries. He seems to recall me only when I’m in full dress—cape, shield, a helmet, and wings on top. The whole rigamarole.”
David laughed softly, which seemed to trigger a hacking coughing fit. He pressed the edge of the blanket to his mouth. Alice looked away. She knew there would be bloodstains.
“I’m really okay, Alice. Especially since you brought all this warm stuff. I’m not nearly as cold anymore.”
“All right, but I’ll be back tomorrow with more warm clothes, and I’m going to look for that medicine you told me about and see if I can find any at home. But in the meantime, I think you should sleep in that empty trash bin. We can turn it on its side, and I can help stuff you in there with all your blankets. It might rain tonight, or even snow. You’ll be protected.”
David agreed. It took a few minutes as she carefully placed one blanket on the bottom. Then David crawled in, and she carefully folded the other blankets on top of him, tucking them tightly around his frail body.
Alice prayed he would stay warm.
She prayed it would not snow or rain.
She didn’t pray for her sister. Her sister was gone. As good as dead. Praying for the dead always seemed stupid to Alice.
As she got up to leave, David whispered in his hoarse voice. “Good night, Alice.”
Twenty-Nine
Nobody Charlestons Like Louise
“I don’t approve, no, not at all!” Frau Weissmann made a tsking sound as Alice entered the Führerbunker. “Those parties at the chancellery are becoming very . . . very . . .” She seemed to be searching for a word.