Conspiracy Read online

  For Mark

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Author’s Note

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The all-clear signal screamed across the city of Berlin. Its single sharp note was a welcome change from the eerie howl of the air-raid warning siren.

  Max Hoffmann, his sister, Gerta, and his mutti and papa emerged from their cellar. While Max lit the living room’s lamp, its bulb filtered blue according to the rules enforced by the neighborhood luftschutzwart—air-raid warden—Gerta gave a sudden cry of alarm. Papa froze in place, a portly silhouette in the doorway to the kitchen. Mutti gripped her husband’s arm.

  Max blinked. He felt like his thoughts were moving slowly, out of sync with his family. The night’s air raid had come perilously close to the Berlin district of Dahlem, where the Hoffmanns’ neat villa sat nestled at the end of a leafy street. His head throbbed with the lingering echoes of the bombs, dropped from the bellies of the British Royal Air Force Avro Lancasters that had blanketed the night sky. The flak fire from Berlin’s air defense towers—monstrous 128-millimeter guns sending up great explosive cloudbursts—only added to the gut-rattling cacophony. And so it took Max a moment to separate the sound that had caught his sister’s attention from the blasts still ringing in his ears.

  “Someone’s at the door,” Gerta whispered.

  Max’s face reddened. He was grateful for the blackout so that Gerta couldn’t see him flush. While it was Gerta’s job to turn off the villa’s water, gas, and electricity at the beginning of a raid, it was Max’s job to open the doors and windows. This was part of the official air-raid procedure all across the city—opening doors and windows kept the pressure waves caused by bomb blasts from taking down entire buildings.

  Maybe the wind slammed the door shut, Max thought. It was November, after all—and a bitter one at that.

  Papa pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, gently removing Mutti’s fingers from his arm. He brushed plaster dust from the front of his rumpled shirt and went to the door. There he stood for a moment, listening, hand poised on the doorknob.

  KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

  Max’s father peered into the peephole.

  A muffled voice came through the door. “Herr Hoffmann. Bitte!”

  Max pictured a surly air-raid warden accompanied by a pair of grim SS storm troopers. Maybe the sandbags hadn’t been properly secured, and light from the grates had caught the all-seeing eyes of the neighborhood’s fanatical Nazis, so quick to denounce their neighbors for the slightest infractions. Repeat offenders even had their homes plastered in big, eye-catching signs designed to inflict maximum shame:

  Dieses Haus ist schlecht verdunkelt!

  (This house is poorly blacked out!)

  But instead of muttering a curse and slowly opening the door to accept an official scolding, Karl Hoffmann flung it open with a look of alarm. He glanced back at his family and called for help.

  Gerta and Mutti sprang into action, but Max was rooted to the floor by a brief glimpse of the figure outside. Staggering out of a nightmare of ash and smoke, the stranger was covered in blood.

  He was a young man, tall and lean, with a jagged gash cruelly sliced into the side of his head. His face was a mask of blood, gleaming darkly—almost jet-black—in the blue-filtered lamplight.

  A chill wind swirled in at his back, icy fingers plucking the unruly strands of Max’s hair.

  Numbly, Max stepped aside as Mutti and Papa carried the limp stranger into the kitchen, slumped across their shoulders. Gerta slammed the front door shut, but it was too late—the damp November chill had crept in like an insidious spell.

  Max met his sister’s eyes in the gloom. Before he could ask if she had any idea who that man was or why he was here, Papa was calling for him.

  “Max, we need light in here, please.”

  Karl Hoffmann’s voice remained soft, measured, and patient, even when the rest of the world seemed to be frantically spinning off its axis. It was this grace under pressure that made him an indispensable surgeon, tending to the many thousands of Berlin’s injured and afflicted civilians, from the bomb-ravaged to the disease-infected to the malnourished.

  “Yes, Papa.” Max rushed into the kitchen, where his parents were carefully laying the man out upon the kitchen table. It wasn’t quite long enough for his lanky frame, and his arms and legs dangled off the edges. Max fumbled about in the drawer full of candles and matches, wondering if he would ever be able to eat at the table again without thinking of blood soaking the wood.

  “Ach, Maxi,” Mutti said, “just bring in the—”

  “I’ve got it,” Gerta said, accompanied by a dim blue glow. She set the living room lamp down on the counter next to the sink.

  “Over here, please,” Papa said, waving a hand above the man’s chest. Gerta brought the lamp over to the kitchen table and held it up as high as she could. As if the light itself had prodded his wounds, the man groaned in pain.

  Now illuminated, Max noticed that the man’s overcoat was in tatters, and the shirt underneath was in no better shape. With steady hands, his father gripped the center of the man’s shirt and ripped it open. The man gave a strangled cry. His chest rose and fell with his rapid breathing, and his bare skin was slick with blood.

  Light-headed, Max turned away.

  “Max,” Papa said, “I need you to get my bag from the study.”

  Grateful for a reason to leave the kitchen, Max scurried through the living room, past the bathroom, and into his father’s cozy study, which smelled of the citrus cleaning solution Papa used to polish the desk. Even years after strict wartime rationing made such luxuries impossible to find, his father had always found a way. The black leather bag with its twin handles was in its right place, a snug cubbyhole beneath the desk.

  Before the war, Papa had brought the bag with him when he made house calls to wealthy patients in Dahlem and Zehlendorf, and in the stately row houses of Charlottenburg. These days, Papa carried his bag to streets where entire apartment blocks had been reduced to rubble by a direct hit from an RAF bomb, or gutted from the inside out by the spread of a blaze sparked by an incendiary weapon.

  Back in the kitchen, the stranger had taken a turn for the worse. He was shaking his head from side to side and muttering what sounded, to Max, like utter nonsense.

  Max handed the bag to his father. His mother dipped a cloth into one of the buckets they’d filled with water and placed around the house, in case they had to put out a fire in a hurry. Mutti mopped blood from the man’s brow. She did not flinch when he cried out. At the same time, Gerta held the lamp with unwavering concentration while Papa rummaged through his bag until he came up with several morphine syrettes—needles with a little tube at the end that you squeezed, like toothpaste, instead of using a plunger.

  For a moment it looked as if the Hoffmanns were posing for a painting, lit by dramatic blue-tinted light and deep shadow. Strangely, Max was struck by how normal the scene felt
to him. Before the war, it would have been unthinkable for his father to let him witness even a minor medical operation. But lately, as the RAF bombings sent thousands of Berliners scrambling into their cellars, and the air-raid sirens turned from nuisances to harbingers of fire and blood, Max’s father had quietly enlisted the help of each member of the Hoffmann family.

  There had been no earnest conversation about their new responsibilities. No family meeting. That was not his father’s way. Instead, Max and his sister had simply found themselves pitching in, following their father’s example, helping tend to the wounded as they were carted out of apartments with walls blown to pieces but rooms very much intact, like giant crumbling dollhouses. Max had taken note of his mother’s wartime activities, too—watching as she secretly delivered bits of bread and cheese to ostarbeiter, the foreign workers from conquered nations forced to clear rubble until their backs gave out.

  “Is he a neighbor, Papa?” Gerta asked.

  Max saw the briefest flicker pass across Mutti’s face as she met Papa’s eyes.

  Papa shook his head. “He was out in the street during the raid. Look.”

  Gerta leaned in fearlessly. Max took a deep breath and moved closer to the table. He would not let his sister be the brave one while he skulked in the shadows.

  There was a peculiar smell coming from the stranger, which Max quickly realized was actually the mingling of several familiar war smells—acrid smoke mixed with metal, and the earthy, rusty tang that meant blood.

  Papa’s hand hovered over a gash in the man’s chest that ran from his collarbone to his stomach. Just below his belly button, a twist of metal like a spiky corkscrew stuck out.

  Max felt his dinner of turnip soup and ersatz bread—mostly made of sawdust—roil his stomach. He glanced at his sister, whose face mimicked the clinical detachment of their father’s, and pulled himself together.

  “This is shrapnel from an antiaircraft shell,” Papa said, pointing at the corkscrew.

  “He was caught in the steel hail,” Mutti said. Max knew what she meant: the pitter-patter of exploded metal bits that rained down on their roof during a raid, when the flak guns defending Berlin opened up and dark cloudbursts filled the skies.

  Suddenly, the man stopped writhing. He steadied himself, began to speak, stopped, and began again. His voice was low and hoarse, but now, at least, his words made sense.

  “Look in the pocket of my overcoat, Herr Hoffmann.”

  Carefully, Papa reached into the half-shredded pocket and removed a neat bundle of folded papers secured with twine.

  Max longed for his father to give some indication of how he knew this man, but Papa’s face was impassive. His mother wrung out the cloth on the floor next to the table, dipped it in the bucket, and resumed gently washing the stranger’s face.

  Papa placed the bundle of papers in his doctor’s bag. He did not undo the twine or betray the slightest curiosity about the papers’ contents. He simply glanced at his wife and nodded. Mutti bent a little closer to the man and began to softly sing.

  Good evening, good night

  With roses covered,

  With cloves adorned,

  Slip under the covers.

  Gerta reached out for Max, and instead of pulling away in his usual half-mocking brotherly disgust, he held her hand. The song was “Brahms’s Lullaby,” and Max and Gerta knew it well. Mutti had sung it to them when they were very little, drifting off to sleep in their apartment in Neukölln. This was long before their father’s promotion to head of the trauma surgery at the university hospital, and their move to the villa in Dahlem. Long before the war.

  Max watched Papa break the seal on one of the syrettes, sink the needle into the flesh of the man’s thigh, and flatten the tube.

  The man closed his eyes, and a smile played at his trembling lips.

  Then, suddenly, he seemed to fight against the calming tide of the morphine flooding his bloodstream. He came abruptly to life and struggled to sit up, as if waking from an uneasy dream. But Mutti pressed his shoulders down to keep him lying flat. His dangling arm shot up, and Max jumped back, startled.

  The man’s hand gripped Papa’s, and he pulled Karl Hoffmann down toward him until their faces were nearly touching.

  “For the sake of humanity,” he said in an astonishingly clear voice, “the Führer must die. Finish it, Karl!”

  Stunned, Max turned to his father and watched as Papa met the man’s eyes. He gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then the man’s entire body seemed to deflate. He let go of Papa’s hand and fell still.

  Max swallowed. His throat was as dry as the sawdust in the ersatz bread. He had just watched a man die on their kitchen table.

  His heart was pounding so hard he thought the whole neighborhood would be able to hear it. He glanced at his sister. Gerta didn’t have to say a word—Max knew they were both wondering the same thing.

  The Führer must die …

  Was their father plotting to kill Adolf Hitler?

  In his bedroom on the second floor of the villa, Max sifted through his collection of wooden miniatures, which had been knocked off their shelf. His uncle Friedrich had whittled the knights, horses, pikemen, catapults, and other medieval figures from blocks of wood and given them to Max for him to paint. He had managed to finish only a handful of them before the war. His set of tiny brushes, which could detail the pupil of an eye with pinpoint accuracy, sat useless and unused in the drawer of his small desk. There were no tubes of paint to be had—everything the city’s factories churned out, from paints to the soles of shoes to safety pins—supplied the Nazi war machine. The ordinary citizens of Berlin were left to fight over black-market scraps.

  “Maybe you should glue them to the shelf,” Gerta said, appearing in his doorway.

  In tonight’s raid, bombs had fallen close enough to rumble the earth around the foundation of their house. Max imagined that his room had been like a snow globe, violently shaken, then left to settle. Now it looked even messier than usual, with miniatures scattered across the floor. His soccer cleats were nowhere to be found, and a plate he’d stupidly left on the dresser was now a mess of jagged shards between his bed and the door.

  “Careful!” Max said as Gerta stepped into his room. He winced as she crunched little bits of porcelain with every step.

  “First rule of air raids: Wear shoes,” she said.

  “You’re trying to make Herr Siewert proud, I see.”

  Franz Siewert was their neighborhood air-raid warden. He was also the blockwart—the block warden responsible for keeping eyes and ears on his neighbors and reporting any suspicious behavior to his Nazi Party superiors.

  In the Hoffmann family, there was an ongoing and spirited debate over who hated Herr Siewert the most. Max was sure it was him—the blockwart stuffed himself into a brown uniform that was one size too small, and his beady eyes gave Max the creeps. Plus, he was really just a grown-up version of a tattletale.

  “Blech,” Gerta said. “Don’t speak his name aloud in this house, please.”

  She sat down on Max’s bed, made a face, stood up, and plucked a small wooden figure from the bedspread.

  “I didn’t know you had a queen,” she said.

  “Beatrice!” Max exclaimed, snatching the miniature from her hand. “I was looking for her everywhere.” He placed the queen carefully up on the shelf next to a king with an oversized gold crown that glinted eerily in the blue-tinted light.

  The raid was over. By now, the bombers would be returning to their bases in England, but the city’s air-raid rules stated that as long as it was still dark outside, the blackout must remain in effect.

  Gerta raised an eyebrow. She seemed about to say something, then shook her head and went to the doorway. She leaned out into the hall and listened for a moment. There were voices downstairs. Two men, Max thought. More strangers.

  Gerta shut the bedroom door.

  “Okay, little brother,” she said quietly. “We need to talk about the man in our ki
tchen.”

  Max closed his eyes and fought back a wave of nausea. He had been alarmingly close to throwing up from the minute the man crossed their threshold, and he didn’t want to do it in his bedroom. Especially not in front of his sister.

  “You can’t just pretend this isn’t happening,” Gerta said.

  Yes, I can, Max wanted to say—watch me! The bombing raids had forced him to become an expert at pretending life was completely normal. At night he huddled in the cellar while death rained down from the fiery sky; in the morning he walked to school down a sidewalk pitted with craters, past piles of rubble that used to be Meyer’s Candy Store and the Cinema Français.

  Berlin was a city that swept up and got on with it, and it was impossible for Max not to soak up some of that attitude.

  Besides, he really did not want to think about the dead man in the kitchen.

  “Max,” Gerta said.

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. She was standing with her arms folded.

  A loud thump came from downstairs. Max swallowed. “What are they doing?”

  “It’s two orderlies from the hospital that Papa trusts. They’re helping him move the body.”

  Max grimaced. The body. His vision swam. “To where?” he asked weakly.

  Gerta shrugged. “Not here, anyway. So that’s good news.”

  Max held up a knight whose silver armor he was especially proud of. “Do you think he should be guarding the king or the queen?”

  Gerta snatched the knight from his hand. “Don’t change the subject.”

  She set the miniature on the shelf next to the king, then took a step closer to Max. “That man went outside during a bombing raid just to deliver those papers to Papa,” Gerta said. “I think that was very brave.”

  Max frowned. During the sporadic, lighter bombing raids of 1941 and 1942, it had become something of a spectator sport to go outside and watch the action—the flak bursting like popcorn, the searchlights piercing the darkness to trap bombers in webs of light, the orange glow of incendiary fires across the city—but November of 1943 brought a new reckoning down upon Berlin. Where the RAF had once seemed half-hearted, it now seemed focused and committed, sending thousands of long-range bombers to strike the heart of the German capital. Walking the streets during one of these massive raids was suicide.