§ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE §
The small, beat-to-shit lorry rattled through the late-night hours over the dusty, rutted road running between Arnhem in the Netherlands and Munster, Germany. In the bed of the Resistant guide’s blue truck bounced crates of mushrooms, cauliflower, and leeks.
“You understand, once we get to Berlin,” the red-veined and bulbous nosed man told Romy, “I can drop you off at the Gartenstadtweg flats – but anywhere near Sachsenhausen, nein.” Marko’s grungy brown cap was tugged low, and his unkempt woolen jacket collar turned up. “That is not what I signed on for.”
“The apartments will do.”
“I will return to the Gartenstadtweg flats the day after tomorrow. Thirty-six hours from now. If you’re not there – ”
“I know – ye will leave without meself.”
Giorgio had arranged the expedition within minutes of her foolhardy declaration to return to Berlin. The entire trip her heart had been beating faster with each mile that took her closer to Berlin and Sachsenhausen. Flight in the opposite direction her body screamed for.
Opposing that was the strong pull of herself in another’s body, that of Luca’s. Somewhere in Sachsenhausen her twin suffered and endured. How could she endure the rest of her life, when a part of herself suffered?
Drawing closer to Berlin, she could only wonder what had happened to the rest of her clan, to querulous Florika, and old warty Marta, who had stubbornly remained with Old Duke’s body.
And Romy could only feel a cringing shame at her cowardice in fleeing Marzahn, in leaving behind precious others.
When late that afternoon she saw the Gartenstadtweg’s Easter egg-colored, fashionable units, she had to wonder why Irina Klockner would pick a place so ostentatious out of which to run a resistance group.
“The best place to hide something is in plain sight,” Irina said with an inscrutable smile that did not quite conceal her vigilance. The Polish woman, Gideon’s half-sister, was wearing a soft wool crepe dress that emphasized her wasp waist. Her gaze landed on the shabby suitcase and the purse, her purse, tucked under Romy’s arm.
“Brought yuir purse back for ye, I did.” Well sort of.
Irina’s smile was a less guarded one. “So, what Marko says is true? You want to spring your brother from Sachsenhausen?
Romy nodded. “Insanity, aye?”
Irina linked her arm with Romy’s. Let’s catch up over tea.”
Trying to get her bearings, she took an indicated chair at the small aluminum dinette table in the equally small and cramped kitchen with its high ceiling. Watching Irina heat up the brew, she was beset by questions. The most important one first.
“Then, ye hold no grudge against me, making off with yuir purse and identity and coat and things?”
The other woman’s classic features softened. “I may have you to thank that I am still alive. Had they taken me, I may not have escaped. You are quite the skilled illusionist, Romy.”
She accepted the porcelain cup Irina handed her. “And yet ye chose to stay rather than flee, when ye had the chance. Ye chose to continue to fight the Nazis?”
Irina slid into a chair diagonally from hers. “After that raid on your camp, I seriously do not know if I would have had the courage to continue. It was such a close call for me. But Giorgio made all the difference. I do what I do. Because of him.”
She gulped so quickly the weak tea burned her throat. “Giorgio? “
“Yes, he found me – I suspect he had come to the vardo to rescue you – but he hustled me off to safety.” Irina lowered her lids, staring into the cup her graceful hands enfolded. “And he reminded me there was life after the world had spun me around and broken me down. Giorgio built me back up into who I am now.”
At a loss for words, she took another sip of coffee. She knew she shouldn’t ask. “Ye and Giorgio were – ”
“Are lovers. Yes, I know he is married. And I know he has a child. But Giorgio helped me find my child before he left.” Irina nodded over her shoulder toward an adjoining room. “Adrian is taking his afternoon nap.”
She picked up a cigarette package on the table next to her and shook out a cigarette, lighting it. The brand was a German one, Roth-Händle, and Romy figured if the Germans could smoke that cardboard, they were indeed the master race.
Irina exhaled a plume of smoke that made Romy’s stomach roil. Nerves, surely. All these surprises, one after the other, were unsettling her. “You were right, Romy, when you told my fortune, back there at the Gypsy camp. When you said I would be happier than I have ever been.”
Romy recalled her card layout for Irina – and a child in the shadows. She had tried to postulate some meaning out of the spread that she could turn to her advantage. “Where was your son? Adrian?”
“Adrian was taken from my breast, even as I nursed him. As part of the Lebenstraum policy.” Her pretty lips thinned. “The project’s aim is to acquire and Germanize Polish children with Aryan-Nordic traits. Giorgio tracked Adrian for me to a German foster home and staged a phenomenal kidnapping.” She shrugged her shoulders. “After that, how could I not fall in love with such an epic hero?”
“Well, he is quite. . . eye fetching,” she conceded.
“But, alas, as you well know, Gypsies do not marry outside their tribe. We stay in touch, through the Resistance.” Irina allowed a wry smile to lighten her composed expression. “We count on the distance of four-hundred miles to short-circuit the magnetism coursing between us.”
Would life’s wonders never cease? She could only hope the same held true for her and Duke. Surely, fifty-five hundred miles could dilute their combustible chemistry.
From there the subject turned to rescuing Luca, with Romy sharing the latest information, from Moe, little though it was. “Moishe Klein is a collaborator of the Nazi’s. Until I killed him, that is.”
A delicate eyebrow arched. “You killed him?”
“Aye,” she said with a small, rueful smile. “With the help of your purse here. Flung it at him I did, as he was about to blow me brains to bits and pieces. After that, it was a tussle as to who fired the next shot.”
Irina nodded approvingly. “The Resistance could surely use your pluck.”
“Crazy, is it not? Me, wanting back inside Germany, when everyone with any common sense is wanting out.”
Irina stubbed her cigarette in the coffee cup’s saucer and, going to a small counter drawer, rummaged through it. She returned with pencil and paper. Reseating herself, she said, “Can you draw from memory the interior of Sachsenhausen?”
She considered. “I know but a wee part of what I saw the two times I was interned there, but every brick of those parts is tattooed on me brain and shows up in me dreams.”
She took the pencil from Irina. “This is the layout of Sachsenhausen. Now here is the intake room,” she said, sketching quickly a rectangle within the larger triangle that was Sachsenhausen.
“Beside the wooden barracks, constructed for us inmates, there are several bricks buildings built for the SS, as well as, a kitchen and laundry room. And, oh, aye, the infirmary, here.” She jabbed the pencil point at the southern portion of the triangle. “Also, Moe – Moishe – mentioned my brother was working during the day in the brick factory at Klinkerwerk.”
“Yes, from what we know, the prisoners are marched to and from the works each day, nearly three kilometers away, to build docks on the Havel River.”
Romy pointed her pencil at the base of the triangle. “Radiating from the main gate, I would guess there are seven or eight watchtowers and machine guns positioned around the camp.” She sketched this out, adding, “From what I remember, the barrack huts are in back of a roll call area directly behind the entrance gate. I could see the gallows from there, and the extermination banks, where some of the prisoners were occasionally shot.”
“And afterwards, their bodies are hauled off to a crematory in Sachsenhausen.” Irina shoved back a wave of soft butter-yellow curls that had drifted across her wide forehead and sighed. “That might be a possibility to explore – substitute your brother for a cadaver headed to the crematory. Still, how do we pull that off – and how do we then arrange for your brother’s escape from the crematory. So many angles to calcu – ”
A staccato three-rap-knocks on her apartment door, followed by a pause and two more, cut short her audible musings. “Most likely, it is one of us,” Irina assured, but Romy did not miss the strained smile automatically pasted onto the Polish woman’s lovely face.
As she rose with her skater’s graceful, gliding motion, she drew a fortifying breath, smoothed her dress’s soft pleats, then headed back into the living room.
From the kitchen, Romy heard Irina’s exclamation, “Giorgio! And Gideon! What are you – and who is this?”
At once, Romy was on her feet, sketch pad and pencil still in hand. She got no further than the kitchen doorway to see the three men. Irina was hugging Gideon with one arm and Giorgio with the other, while staring up and up and up at the third, as he doffed his straw Stetson.
Romy felt like a Fourth of July sparkler set alight. Heat flushed her skin.
“Name’s Duke McClellan, ma’am,” he told Irina. His jaw was beard-shadowed. His intense, slate-blue gaze swept past her to light on Romy. “I am that gal’s American sponsor.”
She braced a sweaty palm on the kitchen doorjamb to keep her knees from giving way.
Gideon flashed his engaging smile that jacked up his scar. “And if I have anything to say about it, I am here to persuade her to join me.” His grinning eyes took on a more meaningful look. “Well, me, I say – meaning myself and her grandfather. He is alive and still cantankerous, according to Giorgio here.”
Her heart nearly jumped from her ribcage. “Old Duke, he’s really alive, he’s here? In Berlin?” Unaccountably, her eyes blurred with dampness.
“Nearby, in fact,” Gideon said. “We three – your grandfather, you, and I — can light out for Ireland, Romy. Think of it!”
Now all eyes were focused on her, awaiting a response. She looked to Duke, half hoping he would intervene, step forward and swoop her up high against his chest and carry her off as charming prince had Snow White in the moving picture. But, of course, that was only a fairy tale, because Duke merely stood solidly in the door, giving her the option.
She was rooted. Ireland! In her mind’s eye, she saw once more the three Tarot cards – the High Priestess, the Magician, the Emperor – the Queen of Clubs, the King of Diamonds, and the King of Clubs.
And, always, that final card, the Ace of Spades. The Death card.
At last, she narrowed her eyes on Giorgio. “Why didn’t ye tell me about Old Duke?”
An offended look crossed his narrow face with its high, Slavic cheekbones. “You were in a hurry, to get here, remember? Besides, you should know we Gypsies know better than to mess with Fate. The decision had to be based on your intuition, Romy baby, not outside information.”
Her mouth twitched. “I want to see Old Duke.”
As if taking that as a signal she wasn’t committing to anyone, and certainly not Gideon, Duke slouched his length into the tufted chair opposite the sofa. His burnt-brown eyes shifted to her. “I don’t care who tags along, but I am determined you and I are hightailing it out of Europe.”
He would not have come all this way just to retrieve a fugitive employee, she told herself. She wanted to believe that. But she and Duke came from different cultures, looked at things in different ways. Mayhap, he did care. But did he care enough to marry her?
“All in good time,” Irina said, crossing to take her hand and leading her to sit beside her on the sofa. “First, we need to cobble some plans. A plan to spring Luca. And then another, how to get you, your brother, and your grandfather out of Germany.”
Her eyes fired salvos at both Gideon and Duke, both of whom Romy thought looked like they had been wrestling steers three days straight. “After that, with whom you go, Romy – and where – well, obviously, it is your choice.”
Gideon seated himself in the partnered chair, while Giorgio plopped on the sofa’s rolled arm rest and leaned with arms braced proprietarily over Irina, almost like her guardian angel with wings spread.
“Gideon,” she said, taking from Romy the sketch and shoving it across the coffee table toward her half-brother, “can you add anything to this from memory?”
His brows met over the bridge of his patrician nose. “Not that much,” he said, after studying it. “It seems I recall a newspaper article about a SS-owned bakery built next to the Klinkerwerk. Prisoners were to bake something like 10,000 loaves of bread daily.”
Irina considered this. “Yes, now I do remember that. All right. So, we have several options. Sachsenhausen’s kitchen, its infirmary, or its laundry room, anywhere of which we could try to plant an operative. Then there is the bakery. And Klinkerwerk’s dock. The march to and from? But after that?”
She turned an inspective gaze on Romy. “Well? What is it to be? Either way, the route out of Germany lies straight through to Rotterdam and on to the English Air Force Base at All Hallows in Kent. From there – Ireland or Texas? You do realize we need to know this now – how many and the destination – before we can go any further with our planning.”
Romy shrank from the demanding, collective gazes. In particular, Gideon’s and Duke’s. Who would have thought she would have been the object of desire of not one but two men? Desire. But love? Marriage?
And what would Old Duke want? Of course, he would want Ireland. As she did. But a stolen sidewise glance at this Duke’s uncompromising countenance gave her second and weakening considerations.
Wrestling with this life-changing dilemma, she shrugged, at last. Why not? Why not chance that at which she had always scoffed?
The cards.
The three of them together – herself, Duke, and Gideon – meant death awaited one of them – if she believed in fortune telling and fated events and such bloody rot as destined soul mates, which she didn’t.
But after Sachsenhausen’s atrocities, she was no longer certain she believed in prayer, either.
“Give me until tomorrow morning.”
§ § §
That night, Giorgio decamped with Duke and Gideon to a rundown, abandoned hunting lodge in the closeby, still green Grunewald Forest, where anyone could get lost, including Hansel and Gretel. The plan was to meet later the next day, at noon, at Café Central, a popular meeting point of young writers and painters, and within walking distance of Irina’s flat.
Duke’s scowl had made for an uneasy parting among the five. Clamping his Stetson low on his head, his eyes had singed each of the other four in turn, lastly Irina. “Just so you understand, I am not leaving Germany without Romy. After that, where she goes is her choice.”
To which, Gideon, doffing his own felt fedora that he favored, responded amiably, “The two of us may well need King Solomon to decide who gets her, cowboy, and I for one do not think our Romy would care to be severed in half with a sword.”
Her scowl matched Duke’s. “Will ye two stop speaking of me, as if I am not actually flesh and blood in the room! I will decide for meself, ye hear?”
Nevertheless, well past midnight, while others slept, she withdrew the deck of regular playing cards from Irina’s purse and shuffled, dividing the deck into three piles atop the kitchen table. The modern playing cards lacked the mysticism and magic of her mum’s ancient Tarot ones; however, Romy instinctively felt the American’s Bicycle cards still held a message for her.
Ridiculous, by any sane person’s accounting. But no one ever accused her of being sane.
Before she turned up the bottom card off each of the three piles, she once again, playing off practicality against the ethereal world of the metaphysical, took into consideration her three options. And there were always more than two options in life. It was never an ‘either or’. There were invariably, at least, three options awaiting any questing and questioning soul.
As far as she could determine by logic, the three options allotted her were: escaping with Gideon to lushly green Ireland, Old Duke’s querenica, that place that called to his soul; leaving with young Duke for dry and hot west Texas, the last place Old Duke would want to exhale his final breath; and then there was the lorry driver, who would be waiting for her, and Old Duke, on the morrow – admittedly, a Wild Card, but a path that allowed for further freedom of choice.
Hesitantly, she glanced at each bottom card of the three collected piles. But, of course, the King of Clubs. Creative, forceful, and charismatic. Duke. And the next one was, predictably, the King of Diamonds. Smart, communicator, diplomatic. Gideon. And then, naturally, the Queen of Clubs – Intuitive, artistic, and reliable.
Reliable? Would anyone with even an average IQ consider her reliable?
Scanning Irina’s well-appointed flat, with the infant Adrian sleeping soundly in one room, Romy grasped that the Queen of Clubs was surely, Irina and not herself.
Huge disappointment came crushing down on her. And she did not know why, since she didn’t believe in fortune telling. Did she?
The fookin’ cards!
Still, there remained one card that determined the fate of the three prior ones, whomever they represented. Some goodly long fifteen seconds passed before she could bring herself to turn over that fourth card, the one atop the three piles, now collected and reshuffled.
Not the anticipated Ace of Spades she turned over but the Ace of Hearts! The highest of happiness – if one but chose rightly. And it was up to her to choose.
She threw the deck against the wall – only to have one flutter atop the table. Aghast, she stared at it, the Ace of Spades.
By God, she would not let cards determine her fate. Nay, her fate would be influenced by Old Duke. She would demand to be rejoined with him before she made her own decision.
§ § §
As the October morning was crisp but rainy, the five met, not in the Café Central’s garden, but inside the hall itself. Over her steaming expresso, while watching Duke add his habitual two spoonsful of sugar to his café noir, Romy told the four she wanted to be reunited with Old Duke before any decision was made.
“Well, that is easy enough to do,” Irina said, holding up her demitasse cup daintily, with her little finger extended. “Your grandfather and Marta have an apartment near the upper crust Spandau’s Brauhaus. He’s not that far from here. Marta tells fortunes to support them.”
“Marta?” Romy asked, “Warty old Marta?”
Irina smiled serenely. “One and the same.”
The gothic Brauhaus was cited as the oldest building in Berlin, part of Spandau’s Renaissance fortress on the Haver. Once again, an in-your-face hiding spot. Together, the five climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the second floor flat.
When Marta opened the door, Romy thought the old woman had to keep Maybelline in business.
Beyond the heavily made-up old woman, a vision of familiar carnival duplicity presented itself to Romy’s innate skepticism, although a mark would behold with wonder the room’s multi-colored veils and scarves and crystal balls and be caught off guard by the strong smell of patchouli that rendered a pleasurable feeling. It also masked the smell of pot.
Then, too, the carnival-like mystery tended to attract fae creatures, flawed like Old Duke, Marta, and, most of all herself.
At once, her muscle-knotted shoulders lowered, at ease. She grinned at the mummified Marta, replete in gold headscarf and a flounced and sequined, long-sleeve dress. “So, ye did it, did ye? Outwitted those fookin’ SS troopers?”
Marta hugged Romy fiercely, her answering grin displaying a scattering of teeth. “Old Duke pulled off the sleight of hand. Told them we were infected with the white plague. Guess they figured it was a waste of their bullets to kill us then and there.”
Marta looked past Romy, Irina, and Giorgio, sighting the other two men. “You bring customers?” And before Irina could reply, Marta bobbed her scarfed head at Gideon and Duke. “Those two there will light a woman’s fire. Don’t need no crystal ball for that.”
“Collaborators, not customers,” Giorgio hissed in a lowered voice. “They are here to help get Old Duke’s grandson out of Sachsenhausen.”
Marta cackled. “Easier you get the Führer out of Krasberg Castle’s bunkers.”
“Can I see me grandfather,” Romy interrupted.
“Back there, girl,” she said, nodding over her shoulder at a rear room. “Meanwhile, tea leaf readings for you two gadjé?”
“I’d prefer just the tea,” Duke said, his mustache quirking at the absurdity of their situation, “and without the reading.”
“I’d prefer a sniffer of smooth brandy,” Gideon said, “but I have the feeling that will not be readily forthcoming.”
Romy found her grandfather in a wheelchair, facing a window that overlooked the drawbridge. At her approach, his head of grizzly Einsteinian curls swiveled in her direction. “Romy!” he breathed.
She crossed the room in three strides to kneel alongside his wheelchair and turned her face up to his shocked one. “Old Duke,” she joked, to keep from crying, “I thought for sure your carcass was fodder for the wolves.”
His veined hand trembled as he ruffled her hair. “Ye . . . ye came back, child.”
“For ye scurvy hide.” Her voice was thick with tears. “Come with me, will ye? Out of Germany. To the place of yuir heart’s desire. To la querencia, to Ireland.”
He laid his trembling hand over hers. “Me happiness is here. With Marta. Come what may. Ye got to find yuir own happiness, child.”
§ § §
Romy bounced Irina’s fifteen-month-old Adrian on her knee. His diaper was squishy with an odor that made her nauseous, and his mouth was drooling oatmeal on her blouse. And she was captivated. The bairn she would never have. The family she would never have.
And heartsick, too, because of her decision she would be delivering that morning to everyone.
Irina, still in a silk wrapper, her hair coiled in end papers with bobby pins, returned from the bedroom’s pram with a fresh linen diaper. “Thank you for helping me out. In the mornings, what with nursing Adrian, I invariably seem to run late.”
While Romy washed the tot off in the sink, Irina began loosening her pin curls. Looking under her upraised arm, she asked, “You have made your decision? Ireland or Texas? Either way, tickets are waiting at the Rotterdam Ferry Terminal. Once in Kent, at All Hallows Air Force Base – well, from there, it is up to you. Luca, I imagine, will make his own choice, as well.”
They both made no comment on the unspoken . . . that first they all would have to succeed in getting Luca out of Sachsenhausen.
“So?” Irina asked. “What is it to be? Your decision?”
Adrian was squirming in the water and chortling, but Romy went stone still. When Death seemed to follow in her footsteps, what choice was there but the blazingly obvious? Then, too, time would heal her heart, with or without the wretched luck of the Irish, and Gideon and Duke would be only shimmering memories.
“Tis neither Ireland nor Texas.” Her smile was strained. “Tis right here – in the midst of mayhem.”
A half an hour later, Duke, hands on hips in that familiar stance, weight planted on his back leg, looked her up and down. With everyone watching, he growled, “So that’s what you want then, Sunshine?”
Her shoulders hunched about her ears. That invariable card layout with that damnable Ace of Spades leapt to the backs of her eyes. She looked from the ever dapper Gideon, arms folded and leaning against the kitchen doorframe as he eyed her skeptically, to the amused Giorgio, the love of her Gypsy youth, and back to Duke, badly in need of a shave.
By damn, she would yet outwit that Ace of Spades.
She would go it alone. Let whatever be, fall on her shoulders only. She would take whatever consequence may come for all her frivolous prior actions. “Me clan’s here,” she said simply.
Duke tugged his Stetson low and said with a finality, “Then let’s get on with it. Let’s bust your brother out of Sachsenhausen.”
“You’ll have to get rid of that cowboy hat,” Irina interjected. “There would be no way you could pass yourself off as one of us.”
He looked decimated, and Romy made a tsking sound. Nevertheless, she watched with something akin to pity as he parted with his beloved Stetson, spinning it onto the sofa.
He drew a small pistol from his rawhide jacket and held it out to her. “For guarding yourself through this – and once your brother is free, well, then I’ll be done with my long-suffering affliction.”