The Execution Read online

  For Chris

  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

  Author’s Note

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The cramped upper rooms of the two-story flat in Prenzlauer Berg baked in the summer sun. Max Hoffmann never thought he would miss frigid winter nights, but the June heat was making him nostalgic for snow, ice, and the bitter wind that howled through the streets of Berlin. He mopped sweat from his brow with the edge of a bedsheet. The humid air of the safe house smelled of mold, despite the Hoffmanns’ best efforts to keep their new home clean and dry.

  Max, Gerta, Mutti, Papa—all of them attacking the nooks and crannies of the dismal old flat with brooms and dust rags, scouring the washroom with what little cleaning powder they received with their meager rations, stashed weekly in the flat’s overgrown backyard by the communist underground. Their benefactors might as well be ghosts. Max had never seen them.

  The Hoffmanns cleaned and cleaned. The mold persisted.

  Max remembered Frau Becker sliding the curtain of her car window aside to take in the view of her beloved Berlin back in February, when she had discussed plans with the Hoffmanns for exposing the Nazi spy in their midst. Smells like rot, she’d said. Max wondered if it wasn’t just their safe house that was redolent of decay, but the city itself. The entire Third Reich positively reeked of it these days.

  By now, Frau Becker was decaying, too, he thought darkly. A mound of bones in some unmarked traitor’s grave—if the Nazis hadn’t just thrown her corpse on the fire. The fierce old woman deserved so much better. Max felt a dizzying rush forming in the pit of his stomach. He sat cross-legged on his narrow cot with his back against the wall and clenched the thin sheet in his fists. He bunched up the fabric as if holding on tight could anchor him against what was about to happen. The wall across from his bed was no more than three or four paces away, but as dizziness took hold, the small room seemed to stretch out in front of him and the wall hazed into some unreal distance. It was as if he were looking through a telescope in reverse. Pins and needles shot down into his legs and prickled his chest as a peculiar weightlessness took hold.

  His knuckles turned white as he clung to the sheet and gritted his teeth. This was what happened when he thought too much about the Becker Circle’s demise. He was rocketed along at a million kilometers per hour, propelled by a deep and terrible sense of the sheer unfairness of it all. It was a sensation like nothing he had ever known.

  It wasn’t fair that Hans Meier, the person he had liked best in the Becker Circle, turned out to be a Nazi spy.

  It wasn’t fair that Frau Becker never got to see the Nazi flags torn down in the city that she loved.

  It wasn’t fair that Max, Gerta, Mutti, and Papa had been forced to leave their old lives behind and trade their airy villa in Dahlem for a smelly, old row house in Prenzlauer Berg, where they weren’t even allowed to go outside.

  It wasn’t fair that Herr Trott and General Vogel had been executed, and Albert and Princess Marie had vanished without a trace.

  Finally, it wasn’t fair that Adolf Hitler was alive and Frau Becker was dead. That alone was proof that the universe was tilted in favor of evil over good.

  The room spun. Max felt like he was in free fall, a pilot ejected from a burning plane without a parachute. Fragments of winter nights danced madly in his head—death in the shadows of the ruined opera house, wet chalk on blackened brick …

  “Stop stop stop stop stop,” Max said. If he didn’t pull himself back to reality, this little episode would leave him feeling awful for the rest of the day.

  He closed his eyes and tried to blank his mind. A few weeks ago, after an episode at the dinner table, Papa had taught him breathing exercises to help keep him tethered to the real world when his body and mind started to spin out of his control. He inhaled to a count of five and exhaled to a count of seven, the whole time thinking sloooowwwwdowwwwnnnnnn, stretching the word like a piece of toffee in his mind.

  After several long, slow breaths, he risked opening his eyes. The wall had returned to its proper place. He let go of the bedsheet and sat perfectly still for a moment, thinking: calm.

  He focused on sounds from other parts of the flat: Mutti and Papa puttering around downstairs, sipping weak ersatz coffee and munching on stale bread. Gerta and Kat Vogel talking quietly in their room across the narrow hallway.

  Here was another fine example of the unfairness of it all: Now that they’d moved to a much smaller house, Max had to share it with not one older girl, but two.

  He knew it was a horribly selfish thought. Kat’s father had been executed by the Nazis, her mother sent to a camp in Poland. Kat herself had narrowly escaped the same fate. He was glad that she was alive. But couldn’t she be alive somewhere else?

  There was barely enough food for the four Hoffmanns, and most everything came with substitute ingredients—sawdust instead of flour, roasted grain instead of coffee beans. They weren’t starving, but they had all lost a little bit of weight. Max’s hunger was a small bright pebble in his stomach, always there to remind him that he was surviving on scraps.

  It was time to go downstairs and force down a slice of dry, mealy bread for breakfast.

  He decided he would wait until Gerta and Kat went down, ate, and came back up to their room. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone this morning. To pass the time, he thumbed through one of the French theatrical programs some previous occupant of the safe house had left in a pile in the corner of the bedroom. Since the Hoffmanns had arrived at the house in February, Max had actually managed to teach himself to read a little bit of French, but today he just let the words of Le Coeur Dispose wash over him.

  A bead of sweat fell from the tip of his nose and splatted against the program, splotching the print. Max tossed the booklet aside and mopped his forehead with the sheet.

  It was hard to imagine a time when he had ever been cold. He hugged his arms to his chest and tried to make himself shiver, as if he could lower the temperature by memory alone.

  Suddenly, footsteps pounded up the stairs. Max hopped out of bed in alarm—the whole family was supposed to tread lightly in the safe house. Mutti appeared in his doorway, wide-eyed and breathless.

  “It’s begun!” she said. Then she turned and poked her head into Gerta and Kat’s room. “Get up, get up, they’ve finally done it!”

  “Done what?” Max said, going out into the hall. His mother took him by the shoulders and laughed.

  “They’ve just announced it on the radio!”

  Max was stunned by this abrupt burst of energy. His family had been moping around the house for weeks, barely speaking, and now it seemed as if Mutti had gone mad.

  “The Allies have landed in France!”

  The radio in the safe house was an old Volksempfänger, manufactured before the war. Its Bakelite plastic cabinet was scuffed and chipped, and the brown fabric that covered the speaker was peeling off. It picked up German stations well enough, but BBC broadcasts came through weak and patchy. The Hoffmanns sat as close as they possibly co
uld, and Max found himself holding his breath so as not to miss a word.

  Listening to the British reports—along with Hornet and Wasp, his favorite BBC serial program—throughout the war had given Max a basic grasp of the English language, but the radio’s poor reception tested his abilities. Papa, who spoke English and French fluently, along with little bits of Hungarian and Czech, translated the broadcaster’s words for the family.

  “D-Day has come,” Papa said, his ear pressed against the speaker cover. “Early this morning the Allies began the assault on the northwestern face of Hitler’s European Fortress.”

  D-Day, Max thought. To think that just a few minutes ago he’d been preparing himself for another boring morning in the safe house …

  “Under the command of General Eisenhower,” Papa continued, “Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies on the northern coast of France. This army group includes British, Canadian, and United States forces.”

  Max tried to picture the northern coast of France. He knew that Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, composed of cement pillboxes and bunkers bristling with heavy guns, stretched up and down the beaches for hundreds of miles. The Allied ships would have to unload their troops at the shoreline, and the men would have to fight their way up the beaches, exposed and vulnerable, while the Germans cut them down from the shelter of their fortifications. It was going to be a bloodbath.

  “Here’s a statement from General Eisenhower,” Papa said. “ ‘Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory.’ ”

  Mutti nudged Papa. “See what the German broadcasts are saying, Karl.”

  “Probably nothing,” Gerta said.

  “Probably, the Allies have fallen right into Hitler’s brilliant trap,” Kat Vogel said. Max glanced at their “houseguest.” When Kat had first moved in with them back in February, he had tried to pick up some hint of General Vogel in her features, to no avail. He figured she must take after her mother, because in Kat there was no trace of the round face, slightly bulging eyes, and well-fed plumpness of the blustery military man. This was probably for the best—imagining a thirteen-year-old girl with General Vogel’s features was a bit unsettling. Instead, Kat was fine-boned and long-limbed. She lounged about in a way that reminded Max of a skinny bug, like a praying mantis, folding her arms and legs as if they hinged on three joints instead of two. Her eyes were bright and searching, and she had a nervous habit of tapping out rhythms that only she could hear on her knees and the safe house’s shabby furniture.

  Papa turned the dial to a German-language news broadcast.

  To Max’s surprise, the newscaster was actually announcing the Allied invasion.

  “A battle for life and death is in progress,” the newscaster said. “Early this morning, American, Canadian, and British forces landed on the coast of France, from Cherbourg to Le Havre, preceded by large naval bombardments. They have now penetrated several kilometers between Caen and Isigny. Our forces are bringing reinforcements up the coast.”

  Papa turned the dial to another German news broadcast. This one was more strident, and Max thought the report must have come straight from the propaganda minister himself.

  “The combined might of the Allied forces are smashing themselves to pieces against the fire and steel of Field Marshal Rommel’s impenetrable Atlantic Wall! The Wehrmacht has repelled the first wave of the invasion, and expects to send the Allied fleet back across the Channel by nightfall.”

  There was a burst of static as Papa switched the dial back to the BBC. Mutti disappeared into the flat’s tiny kitchen and reappeared a moment later carrying a tin of black-market biscuits. She handed one to Max, Gerta, Kat, and Papa in turn, then bit into one herself.

  “I didn’t know we had biscuits,” Max said.

  Papa smiled. “We have been saving them for a special occasion.”

  Max took a small bite, savoring the taste of real sugar and butter. The communists had dropped off some ersatz biscuits last week, and they had tasted like pulped wood. These were the real thing, with actual flavor. He grinned at Gerta, who was chewing the entire biscuit at once. She stuck out her crumb-covered tongue and he feigned total disgust. Then he noticed that Kat was holding her biscuit uneaten in her lap, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring balefully at the radio as the BBC newscaster announced that His Majesty the King would address the nation later that day.

  Her hand darted up to the dial and she switched the radio off.

  “How far is it?” Kat said.

  “How far is what?” Papa said.

  “From the place where the Allies landed in France to Berlin.”

  “I’m not sure,” Papa admitted. “A thousand kilometers at least. Probably more.”

  “A thousand kilometers,” Kat said quietly. “And first they will have to go to Paris, I guess.”

  “Yes,” Mutti said. “First the Allies will liberate Paris.”

  “How long will it take them to get here?” Kat said.

  “I don’t know,” Papa said.

  Kat got to her feet. “Weeks?” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “Months? Years?”

  “He said he didn’t know,” Gerta said. “Put the radio back on, Kat.”

  “I can’t just sit around this place waiting for them!” Kat crushed her biscuit in her hand as she made a fist and pounded it against her hip.

  “Can’t you just be happy for two minutes?” Max blurted out. “The Allies are coming! They’ve actually landed! It’s what we’ve been wanting this whole time.”

  Kat stalked over to Max. He took a step back.

  “Do you know what I want, Max?” she said. There was a fierce twist to her face. “I want to see my mother again. I want her to live. And by the time the damned Allies get here, the Nazis will have killed everyone in the camps. So don’t tell me to be happy!”

  With that, Kat stomped upstairs. Max heard the door slam and the creak of springs as she threw herself down on the bed.

  His face felt hot. It seemed like he could never say the right thing around Kat. She could go from playful and giddy to raging and depressed in the blink of an eye.

  “I’ll go talk to her,” Gerta said, heading upstairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Max said.

  “Kat has lost so much,” Mutti said quietly. “You must try to imagine what it’s like for her to be around us all the time—a family that is by the grace of God still together.”

  “I know,” Max said. “I’m just excited about the news.”

  “So am I, Maxi,” Papa said, turning the radio back on. “So am I.”

  Kat hasn’t said a word to me,” Gerta whispered. “She’s just moping around.”

  Gerta was sitting on the only other piece of furniture in Max’s bedroom: a rickety wooden chair. It was the day after the Allies landed, and the news was mixed: According to the BBC, the Allies had taken casualties but had not been forced off any of the landing beaches. Some troops were beginning to move inland, but the beachheads were still isolated. Papa urged patience: The Wehrmacht was well fortified, after all. It would take time for the Allies to sweep them off the Atlantic Wall. But the important thing was that the Allies held the beaches, so they could unload the vast amounts of men and equipment they would need to begin their march across occupied France.

  “Don’t look at me,” Max said quietly. “I always say the wrong thing to her.”

  Gerta considered this. “You really do. It’s like a special skill of yours—Hornet can pick any lock, Wasp never backs down from a fight, Max Hoffmann has no tact.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Max insisted. “I just wanted us all to be happy, for once.” He sipped tepid water from a glass and made a face. Berlin hadn’t been bombed in several weeks—the RAF was focused on striking Nazi positions in France—but Max could still taste a hint of ash in th
e water. He handed the glass to Gerta, who drained it and set it down on the floor beside the chair.

  “Yum,” she said. “Bomb water.”

  “Fresh from the mountain streams.”

  Nobody laughed. Their jokes were as stale as the air in the safe house. If not for the relief of the D-Day interruption, they probably would have descended into silence for days. He went to the room’s single small window and moved the curtain aside. His bedroom faced the street, so he was forbidden to open his curtain all the way. When he peeked out, he had to be careful not to attract attention.

  The view wasn’t much. He scanned the midday street. A few Berliners passed by on their way to the market. There was a decent grocery store at the end of the block, but the Hoffmanns could never shop there. Only Papa had been able to get forged identification documents, and he never left the safe house during the day. It had been several months since the Becker Circle was betrayed, but the Gestapo wasn’t known for letting traitors slip away. They would not rest until all the conspirators—and their families—had been rounded up.

  Max let the curtain fall back into place and turned to his sister.

  “Do you think Colonel Stauffenberg is still alive?”

  Over the past few months, Max had often found himself thinking of the tall aristocrat. He had only met the man once, when Stauffenberg had visited Frau Becker’s sitting room, but the memory was etched in his mind. Sometimes, when he sensed a dizzy spell coming on, Max pictured Stauffenberg striding confidently into the room, radiating energy and resourcefulness despite his terrible injuries.

  Inviting Max, with a twinkle in his good eye, to commit high treason with him.

  “I don’t know,” Gerta said. “I guess it depends on whether Hans gave him up or not.”

  After General Vogel’s execution and Kat’s narrow escape, news had trickled in through the communist underground about Herr Trott’s arrest and the disappearance of Albert and the princess. But the Hoffmanns had not received any word about the Becker Circle’s military counterparts. Even Papa did not seem to have any idea if the plot to kill Hitler had been abandoned after the failure of the “fashion show” bombing, or if there was a new assassination plan in the works.