AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes, of course I am! I’ll help. I was interrogated by the Gestapo, I escaped from them, and I didn’t tell them anything about who helped me in Berlin. Of course I’m up to it!”
Lucas looked at her steadily for a moment, then accepted what she said.
She peered down at Walter. He seemed smaller, now that he was lying crumpled up, with no person inside his body anymore. “The people in the photographs I sent, they look half human, half something unreachable. They were dancing and laughing. What can you say to people like that?” She stared up at Lucas intently, needing to hear his answer.
“Your photographs are superb…and terrible,” he said softly. “I wish I could tell you it’s going to get better, and there won’t be another war, but I don’t think that’s true. I also can’t tell you that I won’t fight against this new madness in every way I can. That wouldn’t be true either.”
She nodded very slightly. “I know. I’m going to fight, too. I’m scared stiff of them. But I know it’s real. I’ll tell you about Jacob, the Jewish friend Walter referred to. He’s still in Berlin.” She searched his face, his eyes. “I can do something, can’t I?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “You already are.” He moved toward the door. “Now come on, we can’t leave all of this to your grandmother. Right now, we need to start clearing this up. See how bad the damage is to the carpet.”
“People are being murdered in Berlin.” Her voice was suddenly out of control. “Old people, women, and children! What the hell does one bloody carpet matter?”
“It matters that we remove all trace of what happened here,” Lucas said firmly. “Spies operate in secret, Elena. Once everybody knows who they are, they’re useless. We’d better be busy doing what we can until Peter gets here. He’ll remove the body and probably my gun. No one should be able to find it here. I’ll have to get a different one.”
She said nothing, but drew a long, shaky breath, crushing down her feelings until she was in control again.
Josephine came back with a bucket of water. First, they rolled Walter’s body in an old picnic blanket, and then they worked for a hard twenty minutes to wash all the blood they could out of the Turkish carpet, which was fortunately a dark red and blue pattern.
Josephine took the bucket away to empty and brought back a tray of tea and insisted they each have a cup. “We’ll eat later,” she told them. “Need to keep our strength up,” she said calmly. “And you do know that you will tell your parents nothing of this, don’t you?”
Elena stared at her.
“They know now of your grandfather’s position during the war, but less of mine. It is totally necessary that we keep this from them, do you understand? It’s not fair or sensible to bother them with it. We each have our own load to carry, and our own secrets.” She reached across and pushed a stray strand of hair off Elena’s forehead. “You are now one of us, my dear, no longer one of them.”
Elena knew it was true. Perhaps she had known it since the night of the book-burning, but it was different hearing someone else say it, someone who had known her all her life. But she was prevented from replying to this immense statement by a ring on the front doorbell.
She froze.
Lucas climbed to his feet and went out into the hall to answer it. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed that there was a dead man lying in a blanket on the drawing-room floor, nor that his granddaughter had adhesive bandages on her cheek and throat where that dead man had intended to cut her.
Josephine sat motionless, her body strained with tension.
There were voices in the hall, Lucas’s and another man’s. Then the drawing-room door opened and the man came in, fair-haired, his face unremarkable. He moved with a certain grace.
Elena felt a wave of horror engulf her. It was the man from the Reibekuchen stall outside the embassy in Berlin. The man she had left slumped unconscious at the base of the tree. She tried to speak, but the words stuck in her throat.
“Elena,” Lucas said, “this is Peter Howard. I sent him to Berlin to get you out, but you rather got the better of him.”
The man looked at her with faint, rueful humor. “How do you do, Miss Standish?” he said, extending his hand.
Slowly, still shaking, Elena put her hand out and took his. It was firm and strong. “How do you do, Mr. Howard?”
To Anna Maria Palombi, who first introduced me to Naples
