Journey to Munich (16 page)

But someone had tipped off the Gestapo.

There was nothing else of note in the room, apart from the broken sign that must have once covered much of the door, and which indicated that this was indeed the workshop of a tailor who took in all manner of work. Maisie's thoughts turned to the young needlewoman she had become close to in Gibraltar. Miriam Babayoff. She wondered what had become of Miriam, now that she was married. She pictured the small house on a narrow street, the way the sun cast its midday light across the cobblestones, and the warmth on her skin as she made her way from one place to another during her time there. She pictured the small kitchen; the table where Miriam worked, the stove with a kettle on the boil, ready to make tea. And then she remembered the narrow door that led from the kitchen to the upper floors of the whitewashed house. It hardly seemed like a door from one place to another; it was more like a larder. If she remembered correctly, it was even disguised with a curtain.

Maisie stepped back into the corridor toward the kitchen. Once again she moved the beam of her torch up and down and across the walls. She directed the light onto the door to what she had assumed was a large cupboard, and opened the door. It was indeed a cupboard. Flour spilled from an open bag; the shelves were sticky to the touch, and when Maisie brought her hand away, her fingers were covered in a thick, black moldy syrup. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket to clean her hands and began to turn away toward the sink, but instead returned her attention to the cupboard again. It was almost a reflex action that led her to rap her knuckles on the back of the piece of furniture. And the sound echoing back to her told her that this was one thing she had missed. There was no wall behind the wood.

Maisie thought back to her first visit, and what she had observed as she stood outside before making her way down the slippery green steps to the basement. There'd been nothing to indicate that this was more than a three-story building sandwiched between other three-story buildings in a row of ten. There was nothing to indicate that the basement rooms would have a means of access to other floors. At first she had wondered why there was a corridor along the lower ground floor at all; then she realized that at one point there might have been two rooms and a kitchen, with the corridor allowing access to both without walking through one to get to the other. But a wall had been taken down at some point—perhaps for the first artisan. It was along that seam in the ceiling that the curtain had been hung. She suspected that, if she looked hard enough, she might find evidence of a small cot having once been situated in the corridor.

The house had no indoor lavatory—she'd seen outhouses in the alleyway where the young girls had played. Now she thought she knew how to gain access to another part of the building.

She washed her hands in cold water, dried them with her handkerchief, and brought her torch back to the cupboard, paying attention to the sides, and running her fingers along the line of wood where it met the wall. She looked inside the cupboard again, trying not to retch as the smell of rancid food and dead rodents wafted up. Then she found it—a small lever. She pushed down, and the cupboard moved toward her, almost knocking her off balance.

She pulled back on the wood of the cupboard to reveal bricks and a narrow platform—just enough room to provide a hiding place for two or three, perhaps at a pinch four people. She flashed the torch up and down the walls. They were cold and damp to the touch. She aimed the light up toward the roof of the hideout and gave a knowing smile. Small ledges had been cut out of the bricks to form a ladder of
sorts, leading to the floor above. She could not climb the stairs today, nor would she need to—but she'd found an escape route for anyone who had been in the workshop when it was raided. Except for the one person who had been required to remain and close the door, to secure the lever, to disguise the hideout and draw attention away from it.

Maisie stepped off the platform and into the kitchen. She was about to close the cupboard and leave it as she found it when the torch caught something in its beam. It was not easy to see at first, but Maisie removed the small triangle of fabric snagged on a corner of rough brick, ran the cream silk with the remains of an embroidered red rose through her fingers, and knew she had seen it before. Of course, she could not be completely sure—but if she was right, Elaine Otterburn had taken refuge in the hideout. And Maisie had no doubt that she had been very, very scared.

Another piece of the jigsaw dropped into place as she retraced her steps. It was speculative, of course, but it was a thought inspired by experience. When she had worked as a nurse among shell-shocked men during the war, a doctor had advised giving the men a purpose, something to do—learning a new trade, perhaps. One of those trades was tailoring, learning to wield a needle and thread, and later, if the mind could bear the noise, a sewing machine. It was a job that could be done in solitude, that demanded one work only at one's own pace. There was much to recommend it. What if, she wondered . . . what if the man at Dachau had learned his trade following the war—or returned to it once his battles were over? What if he had allowed a press to be set up at the back of his workshop—and what if he had either volunteered to be the scapegoat or had been instructed in his role? What if he had believed that his army service on behalf of his country might save him? She closed her eyes, the what-ifs coming and going, as if stepping forward for consideration, then vanishing when they didn't hold water
in the face of scrutiny. What if the young Ulli Bader had known of the old soldier's affliction, and taken advantage of it? Perhaps the man was lonely, after all. And perhaps the man did not reveal everything to those who imprisoned him, because he'd forgotten. Perhaps his mind had cordoned off the workshop because it was a place where men with guns and a brutal way about them only sparked images of battles that were still too close. Maisie had known the man at Dachau had suffered a trauma to the mind—had speculated that he was shell-shocked. Now she was sure he had played a role in helping the others escape. Had Leon Donat been among them? He was not a young man, but not an old man either. He was not slim, but fear could have helped lever him up the notched ladder in the wall. Now she wondered if Donat had known exactly what he was doing, and taken the risk anyway.

As she took one more look around the basement, another thought struck her. It had been assumed that Leon Donat was an innocent caught up in the propaganda war against the Führer. But what if he wasn't? What if he had known exactly what he was doing, and come to Munich specifically to assist those who published the
Voice of Freedom
?
What if . . . what if . . .
Maisie's mind raced.

What if Leon Donat was not who she had thought him to be?

She'd allowed herself to imagine him as a somewhat avuncular character, a sort of father figure to workers and customers alike; a sharp but ethical self-made man, a man of commerce, but with something of the absentminded professor about him. An inventor with a touch of genius.

If Donat was not who she had believed him to be, he might well have heard about her, and known she was not who she'd claimed to be when she arrived in Munich. It was an unsettling thought. She might be in far graver danger than Brian Huntley had led her to understand.

I
t was a strong hand that took a firm hold of Maisie's arm, dragging her into a doorway. The cold metal pressing into her neck took her to the edge of fear, as if she were looking over a precipice, not knowing what was below. The voice was thick, guttural, as if uttered through clenched teeth. Now the man—for surely it was a man—had her arm twisted behind her back.

“Do not cry out, do not try to summon help—no help will come.”

Maisie felt nausea grip her, but without a second's delay, with no conscious thought, she twisted her heel into the man's foot and brought back the elbow of her free arm. Though she did not connect with the man's body, the unexpected movement was enough to loosen his grip. She took her chance, pounding on his foot harder with her heel as she turned. Her arm came free, and taking hold of his hand, she twisted his little finger backward. Not three seconds had passed since he first uttered a word.

“You speak very good English, sir,” said Maisie, facing her attacker. She did not have the advantage over him, but he was subdued and did not fight back.

“Who in hell's name are you?” he asked.

“You first.”

“Ulli. My name is Ulli.”

“Ulli Bader?”

“How do you know?”

Maisie loosened her grip on the man's little finger. He shook his hand and grimaced.

“Where did you learn to do that? It hurts.” Bader put the side of his hand into his mouth, as if to suck away the pain.

“Never mind that. Your finger is only strained. Don't be a baby, Mr. Bader.”

Bader had been slouching against the wall, but now straightened. He wore what appeared to be a shabby black suit underneath an overcoat a good size too big for him, threadbare at the elbows. His leather shoes were cracked and worn, and he had not shaved in a day or two. A black fringe of hair flopped across his forehead, and his eyes were red-rimmed and sunken.

“So how do you know who I am, Fräulein?”

“It was your illegal press that my father was supposedly imprisoned for supporting.”

“You're Leon's daughter?”

“Yes, and I have come to take him home.”

“What were you doing in that building?”

“I was searching for anything that might help me find him. I expected to collect him from the prison at Dachau, but another man had been incarcerated in his place.”

There was no indication that this news was a surprise to Bader—no flicker of the eyes, no lifting of the chin or shrug of the shoulders. He looked both ways, then up to the windows of the nearby houses, seeming satisfied that no one had seen them. Maisie wanted to look around too, but dared not take her eyes off Bader.

“So where is he, Mr. Bader? I understand I have you to blame for my
father's disappearance, and for the fact that our Nazi friends believed him guilty of supporting you, and then imprisoned a man they thought was Leon Donat. Another innocent man took his place, either willingly or because he'd been set up—and I would hazard a guess it was the latter.”

Bader shook his head. “Not quite, Miss Donat.”

“You speak English very well—where did you learn? In England?”

The man nodded. “I was schooled there for a while.”

“Where's my father, Mr. Bader?”

The man looked to the left and right again and stood up straight. He crooked an elbow for Maisie to take, but she shook her head.

“It might serve you to have it seem as if we are a couple on a Sunday afternoon walk,” she said. “But I would rather depend upon my own sense of balance, if you don't mind. And wherever we're going, we must take care—I was not followed here, but someone may be looking for me.”

“The SS?”

“And a few other people.”

“They're looking for me too—but come, make haste. I will explain, though not here.”

Maisie lingered. Should she go with the man who claimed to be Ulli Bader? What was the risk, and should she take it? But she had to find Donat, and get him back to England.

She nodded to Bader and stepped out alongside him as he beckoned her toward a path between the houses across the street. Soon they arrived at another house, where Bader knocked at the door. The man who let them in did not offer a greeting, and looked away as Maisie passed, as if he did not want her to remember him or be able to identify him in a crowd. Bader opened a door. It led down to a cellar. Another cellar, thought Maisie, descending the stairs into darkness.
Bader lit a lamp and pointed toward what looked like a tunnel. After several moments they came up into another house, where Bader let them out onto the street, and then toward yet another house, this one set on its own and not part of a terrace.

The process was repeated. As they descended a staircase into another cellar, Maisie thought that if someone were observing her from the sky, she would resemble a mole, going into a hole, coming up in another place, then boring down into the ground again. Finally Bader led her through a short tunnel into the basement of a house where the sound of machinery rattled into life.

“It's all right, Ulli—I think I've managed to get it going without that part from the old mach—” The man addressing Ulli Bader stopped speaking abruptly, seeing Maisie. “Who's she?”

“Leon's daughter. She came to Munich to take him home from Dachau.”

The man looked at Maisie. “Did you see Klaus?”

“Ah, so the man who was imprisoned instead of my father has a name. Klaus. Was he a willing replacement, or didn't he know what might happen to him if he was captured in my father's name?”

The man looked at Bader, who nodded. “It's all right, you can talk to her.”

“How do you know she's Leon's daughter?”

Bader flushed. “I—I . . .” He hesitated.

“Here,” said Maisie. “You can look at this.” She delved into her bag and brought out the passport bearing the name of Edwina Donat. She held it out for him, the feel of cold metal lingering on the back of her hand, where it had brushed against MacFarlane's pistol as she reached into the bag.

The man wiped his hands on a rag and took the passport. He held
it to the light, looked back at Maisie, flapped it closed, and handed it back to her. He stared at Bader.

“That was lucky for you, Ulli—she's who she says she is. This is a real passport.”

“I'm a writer, not a soldier, Anton,” Bader muttered in his defense.

“You have to be both. I'm not an engineer, but I've had to learn.” He turned back to the machine and sighed. “The parts you scavenged the last time seem to have done the trick. I've managed to get it to run, though I still think it's too noisy. Let's just hope it holds up, eh?”

Maisie stepped forward. “You speak very good English too—were you also schooled in England?”

“I
am
bloody English. One of King George's subjects. Trouble is, with a German father and English mother, and a nice German name, it was a bit tricky being in England when I was a child. My father was interned during the war, and my mother and I were ostracized.” He stopped, pausing for a moment, then sighed. “We came back here after the war, when it was hard for my father to gain employment in England. Neighbors who liked and respected us before the war were not so friendly after all. My father did not bear a grudge, nor did my mother—they understood, but it broke their hearts. So here we are—a little English boy with a German name, an Englishwoman, and her German husband, living in Munich. I met Ulli at the university, and we became friends, but now—well, we are brothers in arms, with a few helpers, and we know what we have to do.”

“You're both taking a dreadful risk,” said Maisie. “They'll kill you if they find you.”

“Some things are worth dying for. My father loved England, and was planning to return. But he and my mother were killed in a motoring accident a few years ago. They'd lingered because they wanted
to be sure they would not be shunned, though they knew what our Herr Hitler was doing to this country, and they desperately wanted to leave.”

“Would you have gone with them?”

The man Bader called Anton shrugged. “Yes, I would—they were my family, and there are cousins in England. I told my father we would have to be the Smith family if we went back. We'd have to rid ourselves of our German names. It was good enough for the king and his family to drop their German ancestry, and everyone conveniently forgot about the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.” He shook his head. “I would have been Anthony Smith in England, not Anton Schmidt, but now I am doing this, and I'm committed. I will die before I give up, and so would Ulli.”

Maisie said nothing at first, allowing a silence to descend upon Anton Schmidt's declaration.

“You're very brave, both of you,” she said quietly after a moment. Then she looked from one to the other of the young men. “But where is my father? And what happened in the shop where you ran the old press?”

Bader sighed. He looked around, pulled up a chair, then left the room and came back with two more. He nodded to Schmidt, who moved a small table strewn with papers and photographs so that Bader could set the chairs in a cluster.

“I'm sorry I can't offer you anything to eat or drink, Fräulein Donat. We subsist on very little.” Bader pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from inside his jacket and shook out the last three cigarettes. Maisie declined. Schmidt and Bader each took one before Bader returned the packet to his pocket. Schmidt reached for a box of matches on a shelf, picked out a match, and struck it on the wall. The two men lit their
cigarettes and drew deeply on the tobacco, seeming to hold on to the smoke until it filled their lungs, before exhaling.

“I don't know how much of the story you know, or even if it was the correct and true story, but here's what happened.” Bader took another draw on the cigarette. “Leon contacted me when he first arrived in Munich. He knows my father—my parents lived in Berlin, but they've moved to Geneva, where my father runs a business. It seems Father voiced his worries about me—as far as he is concerned, writing is not real work. Leon said he thought he might have something for me. I could continue with my writing, as the work had an element of leeway. Anyway, when we met, he explained that he was only here for three days, maybe four, and he wanted to discuss a job he thought I might be interested in. I wasn't making enough to get by, reporting for a newspaper. It was all parochial news, you know the sort of thing; births, marriages, deaths, meetings. But in the meantime, we had founded the
Voice of Freedom
, and every pfennig I earned was going into spreading the truth about our beloved Herr Hitler, and how our freedom of speech, freedom of movement, even our freedom to think as we wanted, were being crushed under his jackboots. He had shown our people that they should fear insurrection in their midst, that there was terror afoot, and he enacted draconian new laws supposedly to protect his people, but that only put us more securely under his thumb.”

Though she was taken by the young man's passion, Maisie was anxious to move Bader back to the issue of Leon Donat. “Yes, I know this, but how did my father fit into your plans?” She looked at Anton Schmidt. He had closed his eyes, but was not asleep; he continued to smoke his cigarette.

“The job he offered seemed a good one. I would visit our seats of advanced learning—universities and so on—discuss the company's li
brary of books, and hopefully the teachers would tell their students to go out and buy them. I also had to find some translators for a number of the books, and would work on building the company's ability to publish in this country. Leon told me that next time he would send the head of the publishing company to talk to me, to set up all matters concerning translations. I wanted to work for him. As he described the job, I realized it would give me some, well, room to maneuver. I would be working for myself and wouldn't have to go to a formal office; I would be responsible for my own time, as long as I did the job. I imagined that, in due course, the company would set up an office here, so it seemed to be a good position, with good money. More than anything, though, it would give me enough time to work on the
Voice of Freedom
with Anton, and the funds to support us.”

“Then what happened?”

“I suppose someone tipped off the Gestapo. They knew where to find the press. Klaus had already volunteered his rooms, using his business as a cover. He wanted the
Voice of Freedom
to flourish—he said he never wanted to see another war. And he was prepared for the worst.”

“Weren't you afraid he would crumble if he was captured and interrogated?”

Schmidt's eyes were open now. “No. The poor man becomes mute under any kind of pressure. Fortunately, this level of angst does not usually happen in the quiet life of a tailor—the job he came back to after the war—but I have seen him pushed too far during an altercation with one of Herr Hitler's Brownshirts, when he was unable to lift his hand in salute—he'd had problems with his shoulders due to the work he was doing, hunched over the machine. Klaus was shouted at, shoved against a wall, and could not hold his water. He was ridiculed by the men, and others joined in the humiliation.”

“Let me be clear on this.” She looked from one to the other. “Anton, Ulli—this man, Klaus, knew that he could be caught, and you took the chance because you knew his condition—caused by the war—would render him useless to his captors.”

Schmidt shrugged. “And, well, we know all old people start to look alike as the years begin to tell on them. So when the time came, and we knew we were minutes away from being raided, we pushed Leon's papers into his pocket and made our escape.”

“So my father was with you in the room with the printing press?”

The men nodded.

“Yes. Yes, he was,” said Ulli Bader.

“He knew all about the press, then, and your publication?”