Shanghai Shadows (6 page)

Gerhardt seemed to be in charge. He passed a bowl of something around. Each of the others reached into the bowl and drew out a piece of paper, read it, and tore it into confetti, tossing the scraps into a blue-speckled tub. I watched the leader's eyes move from one person to the next; each one nodded as the leader tossed a lit match into the tub.

Suddenly something caught my eye outside the warehouse. Liu was cutting the rope that tied Peaches to the post! I tore over to him and leaped on his back. “Get away from that bike!” I shouted in German, in English, and I don't even know
what
I said in Chinese.

Surprised to find a girl nearly choking him, Liu dropped his knife. I let go of him and snatched it up. His eyes blazed. He seemed paralyzed, expecting me to slice him in two. But I just passed him the knife, handle first, the way Mother had taught me to hand scissors.

With the hilt of the knife firmly in his palm, he shook a head full of filthy hair and said, “Whiskey? Schnapps? Dollar for shoeshine, missy?”

“Go away, I'm just as poor as you are,” I grumbled, slapping his hand with my palm rather than a coin.

He flashed me his grin again and flexed his muscles.
What
muscles? He was all bones, no meat. “I know tap-tap code,” he said.

I shook my head. “Not a good idea.”

“Okay, missy.” Liu tugged at my sleeve again and led me around the building. The window I'd peeked in only moments before was now covered with Chinese newspapers. Had they heard me? Seen me?

Liu scaled the side of the building. Clinging to a rotted windowsill, he wedged his knife in a slot where the window didn't quite meet the sash. The window slid up, and Liu disappeared inside the warehouse.

I circled the building again. By the time I'd worked my way around to the front, Liu was standing at the open door grinning. A slight jerk of his head instructed me to follow silently.

Voices. I followed Liu up metal steps to a dark mezzanine overlooking the main open space of the warehouse. We hid in shadows, behind a couple of the beams. I had a clear view of Erich and the others below.

They had a huge map spread across several crates. The leader tapped a spot on the map. “The pharmaceutical plant, right here.”

“Not impressed,” the other man said.

“I say we go for a military plant—ammunition, explosives, blast 'em all to hell and gone,” one of the boys said.

The second man said, “You crazy? Whatta we know about explosives? We'd be dead before we blew the hide off the first Jap.”

The leader took a pen from his pocket and circled a spot on the map. “This is it, Red Poppy Pharmaceuticals up here in Chaipei. You think they're really making medicines out of those little red posies? Morphine? Before the occupation, maybe, but now it's all chemical warfare. We blow the plant sky-high!”

“And release poison gas into Shanghai?” Erich said. “That'll help Hitler along. It'll kill ten thousand Europeans and countless Chinese, too, along with the Japs. Smart.”

The leader shrugged. “Chance we take. No war without risks. You in, mates?”

“That's way out of our range,” the second man said, wiping his forehead with a red handkerchief. “Lunatics, the lot of you. Especially you, Gerhardt.”

The leader, Gerhardt, lifted the map and held it like a shield in front of him, jabbing at the circle he'd drawn. “I say we wipe out the whole installation. We're men, and this is war. I'm right, Rolf, admit it.”

“Right game, wrong playing field,” Rolf said.

One of the boys thumped the map. “I still say hit the explosives. Light up the sky at midnight so the Japs can't miss the show.”

Erich's voice was calm and measured, the way he got when his fuse was about to blow. “You said we'd be doing things like crossing wires, jamming radios, smuggling messages in and out, planting false intelligence. That's how we were going to help the Allied war effort. You never said anything about explosives and poisonous chemicals.”

Gerhardt glared coldly at Erich. “This is war, Shpann, not a Boy Scout field trip. Last chance. In, or not?”

Just then a brown rat scurried across my feet, lashing my leg with its rubbery tail. I released a tiny whimper of revulsion—just enough to cause Gerhardt to look up.

“Who's there?”

Silence. Could they hear us breathing?

“Shpann, go up and look.”

Liu and I plastered ourselves to the back of the beams. I willed my heart rate to slow with shallow breaths. Erich clambered up the steps, the noise resounding off the metal walls. His flashlight painted the corrugated walls with a hard yellow light that darted into every dark corner. Rats raced to get out of the glare.

I was blinded by the light when it finally found my hiding place.

“Ilse? My God,” Erich whispered, clicking off the flashlight.

Liu silently crept up behind Erich with his knife drawn. He recognized Erich, but his eyes asked,
Right now, enemy or friend
?

“Liu, no!” I whispered frantically, and he lowered the knife—a hair's width away from Erich's shirt.

My outburst brought Rolf tearing up the stairs. “You again?” he snarled.

“My sister,” Erich said miserably.

“Yeah, we've had the pleasure. Is your shadow around here, that Chinese kid?”

I shook my head, watching Liu move in the dark behind Rolf.

Rolf said, “Give me some light, Shpann. I should have drowned your sister when I had the chance. Okay, spill it. What'd you hear?”

You'd expect to panic, but instead, I took a deep breath and went absolutely calm. No sudden moves. “I heard everything.” Erich spun on his heel, furious, but there was no stopping me now. “I heard enough to know that you're soldiers in the war against the Japanese.”

“Yeah? What else?” He stepped on my foot to lock me in place, and I forced myself not to respond, no matter what. I kept my eye on Liu, hovering in the shadows, waiting for a signal from me.

Erich's flashlight darted around the dark space we occupied.

From below, someone called, “What's up there?”

“Under control.” Rolf assured them.

Whose control
?

A thousand emotions flooded Erich's face—horror, rage, regret. I feared he'd try to wrestle Rolf to the ground so I could run. Erich was outsized, and what good would it do anyway? I'd be caught in a flash. I signaled in the silent language of brothers and sisters:
I'm okay
. And I was, really. My fear had burned off.

Erich tried to coach me with his whole face. His eyes flamed. “Just let my sister go. She doesn't know what she's doing. She'll keep her mouth shut. I can handle her.”

“Well! When have you been able to do
that
?”

“Shut up, Ilse.”

I looked Rolf right in the face. “I guess you'll just have to drown me in the Whangpoo after all because I know too much, huh?”

“Are you insane, Ilse? Keep your stupid mouth shut,” Erich warned.

I put my hand out to silence him. It glowed white under his flashlight. “I'm old enough to know what I'm doing.” Erich's flashlight jumped around until it fell steadily on Rolf's hip. A gun! I didn't bargain for a gun!

Puddles pooled under my arms. Streaming through my mind at lightning speed were images of Vienna and the life we Jews left behind: our home and Pookie and Grete and her family, maybe dead by now. The scene changed violently to fierce Japanese guards booting and spitting on the Chinese whose country they'd taken, and stripping all of us of our metal, our cooking fuel, our gasoline, our bread, and our dignity.

In the split-second it took these pictures to cascade through my mind, my resolve hardened. “I want to help. I can. I'm quick and smart.”

“You think we need
you
? A snively girl who hides under a bench?”

“You do,” I said confidently. “I can't blow things up, or drive a truck, or carry four hundred pounds of explosives, but I can sneak around and bring you valuable bits of information.”

Erich was shaking his head.

“Who'd suspect a girl?” Brave words. My voice wobbled. I couldn't hold it together much longer, but in that one frantic moment, I
knew
I had to work for the underground.

Last chance. My eyes were fixed on that gun at his hip, as I stuck my hand out to Rolf. It branched out there, small and steady, totally alone.

He paused, considering the options. “Depends on what Gerhardt says.” Keeping his boot on my foot, he leaned over the railing and shouted down, “Hey, Gerhardt, better come up here.”

I moved only my eyes to watch Gerhardt run up the clanging steps. Spotting me frozen in Erich's spotlight, he started laughing. “I knew you'd be back, Miss Shpann.”

Rolf's shoulders went limp with relief. He stepped back, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing broken. Rolf swaggered a little, clearly trying to look much more important than he was. “Just yesterday you were telling us we needed somebody skinny to slip through the cracks.”

“Yeah,” Gerhardt said, “she's a runt, all right.” I was surprised to see that my hand was still sticking out when he grabbed it in the big mitt of his own hand, shook it vigorously, and said. “Welcome to the team, Shpann Number Two.”

I was in! I glanced over at Erich and saw two messages in his eyes:
You did a crazy, stupid thing, Ilse
, along with,
I'm proud of you, little sister
.

Liu slid silently away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1942–1943

Mother and Father were sitting at the table when I burst into the apartment, gasping for breath. Also, Dovid was there, which caught me by surprise. It wasn't his time. I immediately smoothed my hair and bit my lips to give them some color. Odd that Father didn't let go of Mother's hand. Erich and I almost never saw them touch when they were awake, even though we knew they loved each other. But to be holding hands in front of a stranger? Unheard of. Something was terribly wrong.

Erich? I'd just left him with Gerhardt and the others. What could have happened in twenty minutes? “What is it?”

News far more urgent than our family troubles. Father said, “Hitler is gassing people in Poland. Dovid has heard.”

I jerked my head toward Dovid. “Gassing?”

“At deportation camps in Chelmno, Belzek, Sobibor,” Father said. “Hundreds of thousands already. Not only Jews. Gypsies, also.”

“Dovid?” I asked. “Your people?”

He shook his head, and Mother said, “No one knows.”

I sank into a chair. “Can't anyone else escape?” I asked in a whisper.

Father pulled his hand away from Mother's. “There's no way to get out now.”

I looked from face to face. All three of them were stricken with grief. My head throbbed, but I didn't how to feel. And then Father said, “Last month many Jews were sent … to camps.”

My breath was sucked out of me. “To Chelmno?” I gasped.

“We don't know where they are.” Mother clasped Father's hand again.

He said, “The Nazis want to erase Jews from the face of the earth. My God, Frieda, what are our people going to do?”

Stalling for time, I said, “They'll do what we did, Father.” I turned to Dovid. “We took an Italian liner here. Can't they do that?”

I watched anger, maybe disgust, cross Dovid's face. He saw me as a spoiled brat, jabbering on about our sea voyage.

Father shook his head. “No ships, not since Italy entered the war. Those Jews are trapped in Europe, Daughter. Dead.”

“No!” I shouted. “Oh, I'll never see Grete again.”

Mother's hand flew across my face in a sharp crack. “Selfish child. You, it's always you! Think about Grete and her family. Think about Dovid's family.”

My cheek stung more from the embarrassment of being slapped in front of Dovid than from the slap itself. I ran into my closet, slammed the door, buried my face in my pillow. Father's words echoed in my head. “
Those Jews … trapped … dead
.”

I heard the murmur of voices in the other room, then a chair scraping across the wood floor. In a minute a slice of light brightened my room and Mother knelt across my bed with her arms outstretched.

I followed her out and splashed water on my face. My eyes were probably bloodshot, my cheeks all stretched and raw from crying. Dovid was still rooted in his chair. I sat down in Erich's place at the table and asked, “What about your people, Dovid?” My voice echoed tinny in my own ears.

Dovid splayed his beautiful fingers on our table and began. His English had improved so much—a tribute to Mother and to his own hard work.

“I am alive today because of soccer. Soccer and Sugihara. The ball game you know. Sugihara I will have to tell, but later.”

Father asked, in German, “Where is your home, Dovid?”

Dovid kept reaching for English vocabulary to tell us: “A small village sixty kilometers from Kraków. For five generations my mother's and father's families live in that village.”

A hundred questions tumbled out. Some he'd already answered on other visits, but now it seemed important to get every single detail. “You left when? How old were you? How did you get out? How long did it take? Where did you go?”

He went on with his story. “Nearly two years ago I leave, summer, nineteen forty. I am sixteen then.”

Perfect. A boy should be a few years older than his girlfriend
. Quick, I asked another question so he wouldn't see me blushing over that thought. “You went to school? That's where you learned to draw?”

“Drawing, before I can read a word. But school, different. It is nineteen thirty-nine. Already the Jewish school is closed, but the soccer team at Saint Ignatz Catholic School is happy to let me play. The coach says, ‘You are a good goalie, for a Jew.'”

“The nerve!”

“Daughter, be quiet and listen,” Father said.