The Secret of Lions (24 page)

“Heinrik?” Hitler said to the apparition. “I
have raised Peter well. You would be proud of him. You would be
very proud.”

Hitler closed his eyes for a moment. As he
opened them, the phantom of Gracy stood across from him. She was
nothing but bone: no skin, no blood, no hair, just bone.

And yet he knew that it was her. Her bones
saturated his thoughts. She said nothing. She simply stared at him
with lifeless eyes.

“Gracy,” Hitler said. “Peter is turning into
such a fine man. He is engaged now. You would approve. She is good
breeding material.”

The phantom cocked its head. Heinrik looked
over at Hitler. Both specters were silent.

“Damn it! Heinrik, say something! Say
something!” Hitler screamed into the empty room. For the first time
in ten years, he felt complete shame and spoke the name he’d tried
so desperately to forget.

“I’m sorry, Willem,” he said. “I’m sorry,”
he repeated over and over again.

Chapter
Nine

Fires Burn,

Fires Burn Out

Warsaw, 1939

72

Anna faced the entrance to the alley while I
pissed. I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t watching.
We’d drunk half the bottle of wine already. And we felt the
effects.

“I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk. I probably
should have told you this, but I’ve never had alcohol before,” I
said.

“I thought you said that you’ve tried wine
before,” Anna said.

“I lied. I was trying to impress you,” I
admitted.

“I already figured that you were not being
honest about that. Luckily for you, I’ve had a little more
experience,” she said.

I smiled and zipped up my trousers. I turned
around to find that she was no longer in the entrance to the alley,
but she was somewhere down the street.

“Anna?” I said. I called her name again
before sticking my head out from behind the alley wall.

She was standing in an open doorway to a
once luxurious apartment building across the street. Her eyes were
filled with lust. She beckoned me to join her.

I ran my hands through my cropped blond
hair. Then I followed her into the apartment. Inside she waited for
me near a nice sofa.

The apartment floors were hardwood. Some of
the edges of the room were scorched from the fires, but for the
most part it was still a nice room.

I drew near her. She pulled me into her. A
strong, enticing scent came from her body. Her lips glistened from
the light of the fires that burned in the buildings across the
street. We kissed. My tongue slid inside the wet caverns of her
mouth. My hands shook a little as I reached out to grab her upper
leg. She cocked her head back slightly and put her mouth to my ear
and nibbled on it.

I heard the jawbones in my head make a
slight cracking sound in sync with the movement of my mouth. Then I
heard her breathing in my ear. It was heavy at first.

“I want you inside me,” she whispered.

73

Hours later, I awoke face down on the sofa.
Anna’s warm, supple body lay next to me. Her hand rested on the
small of my back. I yawned. Darkness surrounded us. The fires had
burned out long ago.

The buildings across from us exhaled only
smoke and ash. The empty wine bottle rolled gently down the hall on
the hardwood floor. Wind blew through the shattered walls of the
building with a faint whistle through the bottle's neck.

I was still drunk. I stretched out. I felt
Anna as she shifted behind me. She faced the other direction. My
chest was covered with fresh claw marks. I peered down and slid the
tips of my fingers along the marks she’d left on my chest. Anna had
all of our clothes bundled over her.

I stood up and rubbed my eyes. A chill blew
along my spine like a cold breath from God. I shivered.

I looked out through an opening in the
ceiling at the night sky and guessed it was well into night.

Anna looked over at me.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Checking the time; we should head back
now,” I said.

“Why? Wait, you can tell time by looking at
the night sky?” she asked.

“From the stars actually. That was a part of
my schooling. We need to head back because it’s late and my father
will be looking for me if he discovers that we left. And if he
finds us, we won’t be able to see each other again.”

“Okay, but isn’t he away or something?” she
asked.

“Just to be safe, let’s return. I don’t
think there’s anything else to see out here anyway. We’ve been here
all night and seen a lot,” I said.

“Let me get my clothes on,” she said.

I was naked too. I didn’t even think about
that. What if my father came looking for me and found me stark
naked?

“Peter, there is something that I want to
say,” Anna announced.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think that I love you,” Anna said. “I’ve
wanted to say that for a long time.”

“You love me?” I asked.

She moved closer to me. She slipped on the
last article of clothing. I felt her breath on the side of my face.
The moment was sweet. It was perhaps the sweetest moment I can
remember.

“Aren’t you going to say it back to me?” she
asked.

“You know I do,” I replied. But this was not
the answer she wanted. I knew it. I felt it. Yet, she remained
silent afterward, and we just sat together and watched the darkness
through the bomb-made skylight.

I stood tall, looking out over the
buildings. The sky was brighter toward the east. I realized it
might have been closer to morning than I’d originally thought.

“Anna, let’s get moving. The morning isn’t
far away.”

She rose and we started the journey back to
the federal building in Warsaw, back to my imposter life.

74

As Anna and I approached the edges of the
German-made wall, we noticed the sky became brighter and brighter.
It was almost blood red. The ridged skyline was silhouetted with
the ashes of burned buildings in the reddest part of the sky. I
became suspicious of the faint orange color. Its aura signaled
within me a warning, an internal alarm.

“Wait, Anna,” I said. “I’m not sure that we
should go this way. Something’s wrong.”

She followed me as we went through an open
doorway. It led to the hallway of a building where half of the
upper floors were blown out from the shelling that had occurred
only days before.

“Where are we going?” Anna asked.

“To look for a different route,” I said.

I took her to the back window of the first
floor. We peered out and saw two Jewish girls. They were twins of
about fifteen or sixteen. Long dark hair fell down their backs.
They wore tattered clothing. They were covered from head to toe
with milky, black soot.

A result of the bombing
, I
thought.

Anna turned and ran out of the building to
the girls.

“Wait!” I shouted and remained inside.

“Come on; they are Jews, Peter. Let’s just
talk with them,” she called back.

She proceeded out the back of the building
and around the corner to the girls. I stayed inside and watched
through the back window. The girls were beautiful. For some reason
they were familiar. Some of their facial structures reminded me of
someone, but I couldn’t perceive who it was. And for the first
time, I wondered what it was that people found so wretched about
them.

I heard Anna’s voice coming from outside the
window. “Get up, Jews. You poison our minds. You destroyed our
lands. You are diseased. Now get up.”

I watched her. She started kicking one of
the girls repeatedly. The other sister protested Anna’s kicking,
but she was very weak and could barely move. A trail of blood ran
out from under the motionless sister’s dress. It created a
grotesque and crimson pathway to her thighs.

Anna stopped kicking her when she saw the
blood. She backed away slowly from the girl, horrified. I was also
horrified. Within moments the girl’s dress and legs were soaked in
blood.

“Peter! What is this? What did I do?” Anna
shouted. Remorse and regret burned through her like a fiery
explosion through a house. She had misunderstood. She had been
raised to believe in hate. I think that it that single moment, she
reversed all of her hate towards a group of people that she knew
nothing about.

I turned and ran out of the building and
around to the back toward them. Turning the corner, I came face to
face with the girls. Anna had thrown her hands up to cover her
eyes. She stood directly in my line of sight. Beyond her body’s
outline, I could only see the girl’s legs and the pool of blood
underneath them.

The walk toward the twins took on a kind of
slow motion. My heart pounded. It muffled my hearing. It was the
same as a wartime experience: Sounds are so intense that soldiers
temporarily lose their hearing. I had learned about it under the
tutorship of some of Germany’s finest military instructors;
suddenly my mind flashed back to a memory from long ago, a memory
of school life.

I remembered torturing my lion, Mocha. I
remembered how horrible it felt to destroy the creature I was
forever linked to.

75

The wind carried the smell of burning
cinders. Anna covered her mouth. She wanted to scream. I realized I
was lost in the memory of the lion. I shook off the memory of the
lion and returned to her side.

“Oh, God!” she exclaimed. She was
horror-struck. Never in her life had she experienced terror.

One twin was dead, or close to it. I was not
completely sure. Blood covered her legs. As I approached from
behind Anna, I realized what had happened to the twin. At first, I
thought someone had raped her, and perhaps they had, but that was
not what killed her. She was dead because of a series of large,
open gashes on her inner thighs.

Immediately, I recognized it was the work of
a chainsaw. A sudden fright came over me.

“We have to get away from here, Anna,” I
said. I glanced around the ruined buildings, some of which still
burned. There was no sign of the Todesgruppen. Still, I knew they
were near.

“Why? What is it?” Anna looked at me.

“We’re in danger here. They probably heard
us coming. They wouldn’t just leave the one girl alive,” I said and
then looked around in the windows, doorways, and rooftops. I
couldn’t see any of them. However, I was certain they were
there.

“Why? Why are we in…” Anna stopped dead in
her sentence. She saw something on one of the rooftops; a
reflective surface glimmered from the shards of fire lighting the
horizon.

A loud sound rang out through the air and
echoed in between the buildings. I looked up toward the sound’s
origin. It was a gunshot. It came from a sniper on the roof of the
building behind me.

I returned my gaze to Anna. I grabbed her.
Using the force of my body weight, I shoved the two of us behind
the remains of a burning car. The tires had long since
disintergrated. Another shot rang out. A bullet nicked the roof of
the car, just missing my head.

“Are you hit?” I asked Anna. She felt around
her body with both hands. She found no sign of injury.

“I don’t think so. Peter, what about the
twins?” she asked.

“What?” I asked.

“One of those girls was still alive. We have
to get her. They’ll kill her.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said.

“No, we can still save her.” Anna moved to
get a good look around the corner of the car. She saw the other
sister.

Anna raised her head a little higher so she
could get a better look. The girl twitched. The only sign of blood
came from around her head. The first shot fired by the sniper had
hit the girl in the head.

The sniper was not aiming at them. The
living twin was bait, used to draw us out of the building. And once
she was of no further use, he shot her.

“Stop firing! I am Peter Hitler, son of the
Führer. Don’t shoot!” I begged.

I pulled the Colt 1911 out of my coat to be
safe. I hid it down by my side.

Slowly, I began to pick my head up in order
to see if the sniper had lowered his rifle. Before I could look,
the sniper fired another round. This one entered the flames that
burned the interior of the car. The bullet was lodged somewhere
deep in the burning rumble.

My reflexes were honed. In an instant I
ducked back down by the side of the car. I neglected to consider
how hot the car’s steel was. It must have been burning for a while
because the heat from the steel quickly baked through the sleeve of
my jacket. I cursed.

“Did you hear what I said?” I screamed. I
squeezed the Colt’s handle tight.

“Peter, what are we going to do?” Anna
asked.

“I don’t know. He has us pinned down.”

“Why?”

I thought for a moment. The expression on my
face registered a side of me Anna had never seen before. It was
new. I searched my years of training for a solution. Then I
answered her, “So his teammates can sneak up on us. He shoots at us
so we can’t run, and then they come to kill us. We have to get
away,” I said.

I looked around for a way for us to escape,
but there was nothing close. We were trapped. The closest thing to
our location was an alleyway, but it was more than twenty meters
away. We would not make it, at least not both of us.

“Listen, we have to try for that alleyway,”
I said. “When I tell you to, run.”

“Okay,” she said.

A shot rang out. The bullet hit the ground
near Anna’s feet. She began to tear up. “I can’t go, Peter.”

She was right. That sniper was better than
I’d anticipated. Neither of us would make it.

We heard a door open from the building on
the other side of the car. Another sound followed. It was a
motorized sound, rough and violent. It sent terrifying images into
my mind. It was the sound I had feared hearing, a chainsaw.