Rothenstadt’s driveway was filled with expensive cars and elaborate uniforms. There were subservient drivers and mothers who wore silk and fur. The fathers had surreptitious bodyguards and supercilious expressions. Girls ran in search of parents, thoughts full of ice cream and precious attention.
Sarah stood on tiptoes to peck the Captain on the cheek.
“Onkel,” she said formally.
“Ursula, I hope you are making me proud,” her uncle replied.
“Oh, yes, I am dedicated to my studies.” Sarah waited a moment for a boisterous Fourth Year girl to bounce past. When she had gone, Sarah went on in a sing-song voice. “A solid month of marching in circles, swallowing lies, tormenting the weak – I excel at them all. I’m the perfect little monster already.”
The Captain opened the car door. Sarah always felt that somehow she was cluttering the pristine, minimalist interior, but climbing into a safe space after the weeks of tension and miserable failure was like climbing into a pair of strong arms.
“So where is she?” The Captain climbed in and pretended to adjust his mirror to cover his visual sweep.
“She isn’t coming out. Professor Schäfer isn’t visiting today. It’s the Ninth of the Eleventh, remember? He’ll be in Munich for the speeches from the Führer, flags, marching, et cetera. The usual Nazi Quatsch.”
“Language,” he chided, starting the engine.
The car squeezed through the throng towards the gate, along the tree-lined avenue and past long, chauffeured vehicles.
“Why don’t you have a driver? It makes you stand out.”
“I’m quite capable of driving a car, thank you. Besides” – he pulled out of the gate and accelerated down the road – “we are short of friends right now.”
“We had friends?” Sarah thought she should have asked more questions before, but he had been so evasive that it had grown wearying. The car wound through country lanes as Sarah waited for a response. She pushed. “Close acquaintances?”
The Captain snorted. “There were other agents, but fortunately we were not close.”
“Were?”
“The Gestapo is cleaning house.”
For an instant, the mask slipped and Sarah saw an emotion on the Captain’s face. It wasn’t fear as such, more a sliver of discomfort. She remembered the nights she had left the Captain in an armchair and found him sitting in it again the next morning. It hadn’t occurred to her before that he had sat there all night, but now she thought about it, it had faced the front door.
“You have me,” she began to say, but let the sentence tail away to inaudibility.
They passed into the outskirts of Rothenstadt, a lacklustre town that showed few signs of the Führer’s economic miracle. The paint was peeling, the stone crumbling, and its inhabitants looked surly and underfed.
Did he need her? Or just an agent at the school? He sounded isolated. Did he need her the way she needed the Mouse—
The thought was like walking into a unseen door. Did she need the Mouse?
Did the Captain resent her the way she could not help resenting the Mouse – for being a sign of her weakness and a distraction? Was Sarah a responsibility he didn’t need? Like the Mouse, was she a vulnerability that led to impulsive action and failure?
There were too many threads in this tapestry and Sarah decided that she didn’t want to start pulling any of them.
The car purred down out of the town, refusing to fill the awkward silence with enough noise.
“So tell me about Elsa Schäfer,” the Captain asked.
The Schulsprecherin had been as good as her word, leaving Ursula Haller and her class alone. The court of the Ice Queen was often elsewhere and always unavailable when present. Elsa Schäfer was never alone and virtually untouchable.
She didn’t want to tell him anything. She didn’t want to admit what she had done.
She didn’t want to take responsibility for her failure because she could barely understand it herself. She didn’t want to cry and ask to be taken home. And she was scared that if she started to speak, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself.
“I had a chance to get near her, to be her friend, but I threw it away because I felt sorry for someone. I failed the mission.”
It leaked out of her, like she had wet herself. She felt humiliated.
Take me home.
She hadn’t had someone to confide in before, but, like letting the Mouse in and allowing the girl to mean something to her, it could only end badly.
The Captain was quiet. Then he reached over and put his hand on hers.
“All right,” he soothed. “But let me show you something. It’s a few kilometres ahead.”
Sarah felt a pricking at the edges of her eyes. Her guilt was swiftly soaked in bitter anger and she directed it at him.
“We’re wasting our time anyway. Say I get invited to her house, what then? What can I possibly achieve?”
Sarah sat in sullen and defensive muteness, arms folded. The Bavarian countryside failed to lighten her mood in the cold November light, neither crisp silver winter nor golden autumn. Then she became aware of something alien creeping into view, something that should not be there. An imposing stone wall loomed, a thick scar across the natural landscape, swallowing more and more of the sky until it filled the car windows.
The Captain turned the car onto the road that ran in its shadow. The barrier stretched and curved away to the horizon on either side.
“This is the wall of the Schäfer Estate.”
Now that she was closer, Sarah could see that the older stone was repaired and smoothed off, topped by barbed wire. The Captain drove on and the unchanging fortification rolled past. There were no overhanging trees or indeed life of any kind within touching distance of the barrier. Sarah began to understand why the Captain regarded the estate as inaccessible.
“If I managed to scale that wall – and that’s a big ‘if’ – I’m still three kilometres or more from the house.” The Captain pointed a gloved hand for emphasis. “The grounds are patrolled by guards. Not some local idiots, but by the Schutzstaffel. I only have the vaguest notion of what the house looks like, let alone the layout.” The wall slid by. “Want to see the way in?”
Up ahead there was some kind of military convoy. Trucks lined the road and soldiers were milling around them. As they got closer, Sarah realized that this was the gate. Any visiting car had to drive a zigzag path of short stone walls to reach the gate itself, where guards would check the driver’s identity again before opening a striped barrier. The soldiers were smart, alert, awake. They eyed the car with suspicion as it drove past. Sarah wanted to shrink from the window, to hide herself from view.
“This place is a fortress. Unless we are invited, we are not getting in.”
The wall resumed and filled the passenger door window.
“She hangs out with the Final Year girls. They’re in charge.” Sarah was defensive.
“Then join them. Make yourself interesting to them.”
“They’re monsters,” she complained.
“German High Command is full of monsters,” he pressed. “Do you want monsters dropping the Grapefruit Bomb on—”
“Fine, I get it. They’ve only just stopped harassing me. Do you know what that school is? It’s a lunatic asylum run by psychopaths, in the name of…bastards,” spat Sarah.
The car sighed across the tarmac. The Captain shook his head slowly, then straightened.
“How did you know that Schäfer is in Munich today?”
“Elsa has a loud voice, and I’m always around trying to make myself interesting,” Sarah sneered. “Anyway, it’s Memorial Day, so—”
“Shush,” he interrupted. “Did she—”
“Shush? Shush?” Sarah was really annoyed now.
The Captain raised a hand and made a conciliatory move of his head. “Did Elsa say anything else?” he asked with the suggestion of excitement. “Anything at all?”
“She doesn’t stop talking.” Sarah thought about the endless, meaningless discussions she’d listened to from a distance.
“About the house? About her father?”
“She talked about being left at school on Memorial Day. She talks about horses.” Sarah grew bored. “About Anne-something, about how the man who looks after the horses is a drunk and needs to be fired…”
The Captain started to laugh.
“Do you want to share the joke?”
“You are an excellent, excellent spy,” he said quietly.
Sarah didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to her.
The parked car grew cold as the winter sun vanished into the trees, the red ball strangled by thorns and swallowed.
“How do you know the stable master is going to come this way?” Sarah asked, snuggling down into her coat.
The Captain shrugged. “I don’t.”
“But you think…he’s going to go drinking in the town?”
“Possibly.”
Sarah thought all this was rather vague. “Not alone? In his bedroom?”
“Possibly.”
This reminded Sarah of the train carriage ten weeks ago and was even more irritating. “But you have a hunch,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And if he does?”
“Then he’ll probably do it tomorrow and the next night. Drunks are creatures of habit.”
Sarah snorted. “And they’re lazy and unreliable and unpredictable,” she muttered.
“True, but he’d already have lost his job at that point. He drinks enough that a fifteen-year-old girl has noticed, but he’s still employed. So my guess, my hunch, is it’s every night, in the beer hall. Social drinking.”
“Then what?”
“He has an accident walking home and I take his place.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m in and I can work.”
“Tonight?” Sarah was taken aback.
“No, I’m not dressed for it.” He smiled. “You know this…this profession, is a lot of educated guesswork and waiting around and being disappointed. You need to get used to it.”
This was the first time that the Captain had specifically referred to any kind of future. But before Sarah could mention it, there was movement ahead.
“Hello…” The Captain stirred and smiled. “There’s our stable master.”
A scruffy, red-faced man, approaching middle age, walked purposefully around the corner and towards the town.
“He’s half your height.” She laughed, incredulous.
“I’ll slouch.”
The car slowed to a stop in the crush of vehicles trying to drop off girls in the twilit driveway, headlights jostling for position.
“The town, the estate, they’re only a few kilometres as the crow flies. I want to come,” said Sarah, mind made up.
“Tomorrow? No. Ridiculous.” The Captain shook his head.
Sarah needed some control, some success, some say in the unfolding events. If she was not an “excellent spy”, then what use was she? She needed absolution.
“I’m a spy. I want to do spy…things.”
“You’re doing spy things.”
“I can’t stand it here,” she complained. “It’s like watching the old men scrubbing the streets of Vienna, but every single day. If I can hold your coat and it gets me out of here thirty seconds quicker, then I am going to hold your gottverdammten coat.”
He watched her glower at him, face on the verge of fury. He rolled his eyes. “Fine. You can get out of here tomorrow night?”
“In a heartbeat.” She smiled. “And if it means I don’t have to come back, then even quicker than that.”
Sarah almost jumped from the car, but as she closed the door she saw something that made her freeze. She began tapping on the car window with a knuckle. When nothing happened, she rapped more frenetically, all the while glancing covertly at the school entrance. The window lowered.
“What?” the Captain asked impatiently.
“Look,” rasped Sarah, jerking her head towards Rothenstadt.
On the steps of the school were Elsa and a man in traditional hunting clothes. Sarah knew, even at this distance, that it was Hans Schäfer.
“Well, look at that. The Führer wasn’t the big draw that we thought,” the Captain said. “Can you stop trying not to look at them?”
“She’s staring at me,” replied Sarah in a stage whisper.
“She isn’t, she’s just looking in this direction. Just…go back to school.”
Everything, everyone, was here in one place. It felt impossible that it couldn’t be finished right now.
“Can’t you just shoot him here or something?”
The Captain tutted and wound the window up, leaving Sarah feeling exposed.
This is stupid.
She plastered a big smile on her face and walked purposely towards the school, pausing only to turn and wave at the car, the Captain already invisible behind the glass. As she turned back, Elsa was pointing at her.
Sarah drove herself on, trying not to stare back.
She wasn’t pointing at me. She was pointing at someone nearby.
But there was no other Year Four Girl there and none of the Ice Queen’s attendants. Now Elsa was talking to her father.
Does she know?
How could she know? There’s nothing to know. Not yet, anyway.
As Sarah reached the entrance, Elsa’s father kissed his daughter on the cheek. Sarah concentrated on the steps. By the time she reached the top, Hans Schäfer was alone in front of the doors.
“Excuse me, mein Herr,” said Sarah, her voice squeaking. “Certainly, Fräulein.” He stepped out of the way.
As Sarah entered the school, it felt like being passed by a fast moving vehicle. The sense of power, the movement, the slight tug of the wind and the billowing aftermath. Once inside, she rested against the door frame.
One more day here. Maybe just one more day.