But this feels different. Ian is different. As he waits for her answer, she sees a vulnerability flicker in his eyes.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I would.”
Chapter 18
Audrey
BERLIN, GERMANY | FEBRUARY 1939
Abrams.
That was the name of the family who had lived—until the previous evening—in the large grey house in front of Audrey. A bitter wind gusted around her legs, lifted her hair.
“Two adults, four children, per the register,” Herr Weber had told her that morning when he handed her the file. He had been sitting at his desk, smoking a cigarette and squinting as though trying to see through her. “Big house, and we want it ready for Commander Haas by the end of the week, so work fast on this one, Jakob. I know you will,” he added with a wink.
Audrey had immediately pictured the family in her mind’s eye, a father and mother who looked like Ira and Ruth, and four children lined up beside them. Outwardly, she had beamed at him. “Of course, Herr Weber.” She grazed his hand as she took the file.
She had diligently completed all her administrative work in the morning, leaving the assessment for later in the day so that she could go straight home afterward. The evenings came so early in the winter, and she didn’t like the shadows that followed her around street corners. Her role in the Department of Property Reclamation and her false papers should have afforded her some ostensible sense of security. Yet she felt more exposed than ever under the gaze of the swarms of severe-faced men in starched uniforms who wove in and out of her office. She felt eyes everywhere. Berlin had been emptied of half of its residents, and those who remained were all supporters of, or feared, the Reich. People continued to disappear; neighbours turned against neighbours. Children were encouraged to report on their parents if they harboured any kind of anti-Hitler sentiment. Everyone was watching one another’s movements, their language. The city was a prison whose walls kept inching closer together.
Outside the grey house, she fingered the key inside her pocket, a morbid habit now. She had tried to harden herself, tell herself that she wasn’t really Ada Jakob and that she would never become her, would never lose herself in this persona she wore like a freshly skinned fur, carefully perfumed to mask the scent of the animal it had belonged to. But sometimes she wondered.
When she told herself it would be easier to do her job and help the Red Orchestra bring down the Reich if she simply turned off the human part of her, she wondered. When she ignored the family portraits on the walls, the engraved initials on the jewellery and watch backs, she wondered. She wondered sometimes what she might become if she survived all of this for too long.
There was just one person who knew who she really was—Ilse—but their relationship had altered. Audrey was out of the house most days now and the cell conducted strategy meetings on Friday evenings, which had once been enjoyable, quiet nights with the Kaplans as they observed the Shabbat. But now she sat with Claus, Ludwig, Aldous, and Friedrich in the chairs formerly occupied by Ira, Ruth, and Ephraim, whilst Ilse hid in the attic. Audrey chose to believe this was the reason her interactions with Ilse had changed, as opposed to Audrey’s disastrous admission. She continued to wrestle with her feelings—the love she felt for Ilse was deeper and more dangerous than any kind of love she’d known. It was worse late at night when there was no work to be done and the silence of the house provided no steadying point of reference for her spinning mind.
She rolled her shoulders back, shoving the thoughts aside. She had a job to do here, and there was no point loitering outside in the freezing cold. Scaling the steps, she pulled out the key. But there was no need; the door had been forced. It was splintered and stood a few inches ajar.
Audrey entered the home as she did all the others—quietly. The Nazis liked to break down doors when they came to call. Scream. Shatter breakable possessions and people. This felt like the last respectful act she could honour the family with, even though they were already gone.
She inventoried the sitting room and hall, and was entering the dining room when her eye caught a sudden movement. Yelping, she clutched her clipboard to her chest as a small brown mouse scurried onto the table and helped itself to the uneaten dinner. This creature had wasted no time moving in and stealing whatever it liked, she thought, then she realized—no matter how much she hated herself for it—she was doing the exact same thing.
With a sigh, she left the mouse and went about her task. She had it down to a mechanical method now, and quickly worked her way through the main floor before scaling the stairs to the second- and third-floor bedrooms. She had just popped her head into a bedroom when she heard a weak mewling sound. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
When she heard it again, her heart fell. This wasn’t the first time she had encountered a beloved family pet left behind in the raid. She’d discovered a cat a few weeks ago. It had lapped up the milk she poured for it, but stared at her as if it knew she had no rightful business there. After nearly an hour of wretched internal debate, she’d set it free outside even though its chances of survival in the freezing winter were slim. It was a kinder fate than what the cat would face at the hands of the Nazis, who treated its human owners like street rats.
Audrey followed the sound down the hallway to a bedroom, already preparing to set this pet free too. But when she opened the door, she gasped. The mewling sound wasn’t coming from a cat.
It was coming from a baby.
The child was lying on its side in the crib, its face pale, brown eyes half-open under swollen lids. Looking at the child, Audrey’s first reaction made her loathe herself perhaps more than anything she had yet done.
This baby would change everything.
“Oh no. God no,” she moaned.
She knew that she would have to take it, and hiding a child would put them all at even greater risk. A baby had constant needs. A baby could not control the volume of its own voice. A baby was too young to understand the concepts of death and evil, the lethal precariousness of existing as a Jew in Germany. Taking it meant gambling the exposure of Ilse and their little resistance cell, all they were trying to accomplish.
But wasn’t the whole point of their resistance to save lives just like this one?
Standing in this empty house in a city at once spotlit and cast into darkness, with this baby before her, Audrey understood that they could try to kill Hitler, yes. But what was truly going to matter by the end of all this madness was the actions of individuals.
Today, she could try to save this child.
She rushed to the crib and reached in. She didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl, but she guessed it wasn’t quite a year old. A stench told her it was badly soiled, but what was more pressing was how limp it was in her arms. The infant wasn’t crying, just whimpering into her shoulder. Her mind raced. The poor thing would have been alone since the arrest the previous evening, nearly twenty-four hours ago now. It must be hungry, and dangerously dehydrated. Panic crawled up her spine. Was it already too late? What might happen if she ended up with a dead child on her hands?
Audrey snatched a blanket from the crib to wrap around the baby, then fled down the hall to the stairs and out the front door. It was dark now. She hurried along the pavement, past the glowing yellow squares of the other houses’ windows to the Kaplans’ street a few blocks over, scanning her surroundings as she went.
She didn’t have a free hand to fiddle for the key in her coat, so she pounded on the door. No one answered. She hammered harder, her mind whirling. At this hour, Ilse would be making herself scarce upstairs, and Friedrich might not yet be home from work.
A door creaked behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Frau Richter, their neighbour who lived in Audrey’s childhood home, illuminated in the streetlamp. The woman stepped onto her stoop. Audrey silently swore, turning away. She shifted the baby as best she could onto one hip, fear cresting at how still the little one felt in her arm.
She wrestled with her pockets until she fished out her key. She rammed it into the lock, then slammed the door shut behind her.
“Ilse!” she screamed. “Friedrich! I need help!”
She heard a muffled scraping from above as she hurried into the sitting room and set the child down on the rug near the hearth.
“Ilse!” she yelled again.
The baby whimpered, staring up at her, and she knew she would never forget those eyes, that look, this moment, for the rest of her life. Everything she had tried to do but couldn’t, everything she feared, all the ways the world had failed its children were reflected in those two glassy orbs.
Soft footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Ilse!” Audrey gasped. “Thank God.”
Ilse glanced left and right as though waiting for an attack. “What is it? What’s wrong? What’s—oh!” Her eyes landed on the baby and she darted over.
