Audrey had no idea whether Claus’s wife knew of his involvement in the resistance, or what the authorities would tell her had transpired. Would there be anything left of him to identify? Audrey wondered with a surge of nausea. His family might not even know of his death for some time.
“Are you okay?” Ilse leaned forward. The golden flames illuminated her face, casting shadows around her brow and nose, the curve of her upper lip.
“No,” Audrey said, her chin trembling. “Ilse, we…”
“What?”
The tears slipped from the corners of Audrey’s eyes now. She wiped them away with a cold hand.
“We killed a group of children. By mistake.”
Slowly, she relayed the painful truth as Ilse listened in stunned silence. She was desperate to explain their actions, for Ilse to understand, because she already felt the seeds of this disaster sowing into her veins where their roots would burrow and spread, a great forest of guilt and doubt that would forever cast shade on her conviction.
“What would you have done if Hitler had been there with the children?” Ilse asked.
Audrey felt wretched. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t meet Ilse’s eyes. All she could do was bury her face in her hands and sob.
Ilse pulled her close then and Audrey rested her head on her shoulder as she cried out her grief and shame.
“So what happens next?” Ilse asked when Audrey’s breathing had steadied.
“I’ve no idea,” Audrey said. “I don’t know what Claus’s death or Friedrich’s injury means for our resistance efforts. Perhaps our cell has just run its course. We tried. We failed.”
She thought of how many lives had been lost in the attempt.
How much more death would there be until someone finally stopped him?
Upstairs, Daniel let out a little cry.
“He’ll be hungry,” Ilse said, rising. She looked at Friedrich, still asleep, her eyes clouded with concern. “I just hope—” Her voice broke. “I hope he makes it. I’m so grateful you both came home.”
Audrey couldn’t tell Ilse how imperative it was that Friedrich survive. They’d already been forced to dispose of one body from this house; their deniability would evaporate if another Nazi official was found dead on the premises. Audrey would certainly be investigated, and then where would they be?
Dead. All of them. Dead.
Audrey nodded. “Me too.”
Evening fell and the wind howled outside the window. Audrey knew she should try to sleep, but she was too restless, her body still humming with adrenaline and sorrow. She drank her way through a third of a bottle of Schwartzhog, trying to drown out the faces of the children. Wandering into the sitting room, she flicked on the lamps and slid onto the piano bench. She placed her glass directly over the water ring Vogt had left, as though she could cover up the stain, convince herself it wasn’t there.
She didn’t want to wake Friedrich or Daniel, so she set her fingers on the keys and began to play silently, moving them across the keyboard with a whisper-gentle touch. She could hear the piece in her mind, anyway, and the music blended with images of Ilse’s face. Her finger lifted off the ivory on the last note, and she slouched, staring into the middle distance. Drink in hand, she meandered back into the lounge. She listened for a while, but there was still nothing about it on the wireless. Her mind drifted, guided by alcohol, to a sweet fantasy that maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe this was a dreadful dream. She watched Friedrich’s chest rise and fall, willing him to live, and finally fell asleep just as dusk crept its way into the shadowy room.
Chapter 27
Kate
ALNWICK, ENGLAND | DECEMBER 2010
Is that what gives you the nightmares?” Kate asks Audrey, her words struggling up and over the lump of emotion in her throat. “The children?”
Audrey stares at the snowfall outside, her face paler than usual in the late morning light. Her knotty hands are clenched together in her lap, coffee long forgotten and cold in the blue ceramic mug beside her. “Mostly, yes,” she says. “I see their faces. Or at least, what my mind has created for their faces.”
Kate sets the pen down on her notebook, wondering what to say. When they sat down this morning, Sophie and Ozzie snoozing at their feet, Audrey had told Kate this would be one of the most difficult things for her to recount, and that Kate was the only person, aside from Ilse, that she had ever spoken to about it. Kate hadn’t known what exactly to expect. She’d wondered if perhaps she was about to hear how Audrey sustained the injuries to her fingers, or that Ruth and Ephraim were dead. But she wasn’t prepared for this.
She takes a deep breath and a bracing drink of cold water from the glass beside her. People use the term “collateral damage” in reference to war. So sanitized and unspecified. But the damage, the loss, are the real people who happened to be in the wrong place when others chose to kill each other. Human beings with names and families and dreams.
Children.
“It’s a very strange grief, you see,” Audrey says. “An incomparable guilt, really. There is no one in the world who could quite understand it. There’s no support, and certainly no sympathy. And why would there be? We killed children in the pursuit of something that might have been impossible from the start. There were two dozen attempts on Hitler’s life over the years—that we know about—and no one ever managed it. It’s incomprehensible that no one ever succeeded. Our cell got closer than many, but…” She clears her throat in one quick bark. “I haven’t ever forgiven myself for it, and it has been singularly lonesome to carry that burden. To be frank,” she says, “it will be a relief to be rid of it when my time comes.”
“You meant to kill Hitler,” Kate says quietly. “Who ended up murdering tens of millions, directly and indirectly, over the course of the war. Surely that intention counts for something.”
“I doubt the parents of those children would agree.” A log pops in the fireplace. “It will always have been worth it, Friedrich had said. But we didn’t make one modicum of difference. Hitler continued to live and breathe and kill whilst a dozen Aryan families mourned the deaths of their children, and, as we now know, millions of Jewish parents mourned the deaths of theirs, or were murdered right alongside them. Held their little hands as they were shoved in front of the same firing squads, or into gas…”
Her breath comes in heaving waves, her eyes wide and watering.
“Audrey—” Kate reaches for her hand, grasps the age-speckled skin in hers, fighting her own tears now.
“Me telling you all of this, and you recording it… it’s a reckoning. Finally.” Audrey takes another deep breath, as though trying to draw forgiveness from the air itself. “Those children formed the basis of my nightmares my whole life, but I would always wake, wait for my heart rate to still, and push it from my mind, like a fool.” She releases Kate’s hand and sits up a little straighter. “They were in training to be Nazis. So who knows what they would have grown up to be. But at the time, they were still only children. Just children. And no one ever took responsibility for their deaths.” She blinks rapidly. “It’s time someone did. That I did.”
Responsibility for their deaths…
“So… thank you for being willing to listen. And for, well…” Audrey’s lips pucker into a tight screw. “For not judging me too harshly, I hope.”
Suddenly, Kate is sobbing. She buries her face in her hands as she dips into her memories of the accident, that chasm in her mind where self-loathing and denial lurk at the bottom.
“Kate?” Audrey’s voice filters in. “I know this was upsetting. I’m so sorry. Let’s take a break, get some fresh coffee.”
