The Execution Read online

  When she had raised it as high as it would go, stretching her arms up above her head, she pulled her hands away from the window.

  It slammed shut with a loud BANG.

  Kat scrambled down into the dirt beneath the hedgerow, cursing herself. She watched the house, waiting for narrow bands of light to appear behind the blacked-out windows.

  Several minutes passed. Just as she was about to creep from the shelter of the hedgerow, the sound of a door opening made her freeze. Footsteps came across the cobblestones of the front walk, and then stopped. She could just barely make out a solitary figure in the darkness, clothed in a dressing gown. For all Kat knew, he was staring right at her hiding place.

  The man stayed like this, motionless, and Kat imagined he was listening intently to the sounds of the city, trying to identify what had torn him from sleep. She kept very still, taking slow, silent breaths. After a while, the man went back into the house. Kat waited another few minutes, then began searching the dirt beneath the hedgerow until she found what she was looking for: a long stick.

  With the stick in hand, she went to the window, slid it open, and wedged the stick between the sill and the bottom of the raised window. It didn’t feel very secure, but it would have to do. Careful not to disturb the stick, she hoisted herself up and over the windowsill and into the garage, landing on a cement floor.

  The garage was pitch-black and smelled of oil. She had to risk using her torch. When she clicked it on, the beam illuminated the shiny passenger door of the wine-colored Mercedes. The owner of the car clearly took very good care of it. The vehicle was buffed to a high sheen.

  Rage tapped out its skittering rhythm in her mind.

  The urge to find something sharp to scratch the car with was nearly unbearable. She imagined how satisfying it would feel to flake off the paint with a nail, etching a red dragon into the door.

  Kat banished the thought to focus on the mission at hand. The beam of her torch played along shelves holding all manner of odds and ends—wrenches, gardening tools, a bicycle seat. Next to the shelves were buckets of paint, neatly stacked, along with a few silver canisters the size of soup cans.

  She knelt down and examined them. Each canister was labeled Benzin—gasoline. With Germany’s wartime oil shortage, scientists had rushed to create alternative sources of fuel to power the Wehrmacht’s tanks and the Luftwaffe’s planes. Like ersatz bread and coffee, it worked well enough but was no substitute for the real thing. That was okay. Kat didn’t need to start the engine of a Panzer tank. She just needed something that burned bright and hot.

  She picked up one of the canisters. It was heavier than it looked. Liquid sloshed around inside.

  There were seven canisters of ersatz fuel. Would the owner notice if some of them were missing? Her gut told her that three was too many to steal. She would settle for two. Even a small amount of fuel was a million times better than a dusty bottle of absinthe.

  She unfolded a small cloth bag she’d jammed into her pocket. She set two canisters into the bag and bundled it tight to keep them from knocking together. Then she went to the window, leaned out, and dropped the bag softly into the grass. Careful not to disturb the stick, she climbed through the propped-open window and landed outside next to her bag. She paused for a moment, pressed against the outside wall of the garage, listening. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. With one hand supporting the underside of the window, she pulled the stick away and quickly tossed it aside so that she could support the window with two hands. Then she lowered it down softly.

  Bag in hand, she slipped through the gap in the hedgerow and headed for home.

  The Americans have taken the town of Saint-Lô,” Mutti said. She slid a map of France across the table, full of squiggly lines and tiny print, which Max had to squint to read.

  “Mutti,” Gerta said, “did you make this?”

  “Ingrid has become quite the cartographer,” Papa said, munching on a crumbly biscuit.

  “It passes the time,” Mutti said. “But look!” She passed the map pointedly to Kat. “They’re making progress.”

  It was the evening of July 19. Six weeks had passed since the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy. If the map of France was the size of a hand, it looked like the Allies had advanced the length of a thumbnail. The town of Saint-Lô was on the little spit of land that jutted out into the English Channel. The Allies were still hundreds of kilometers from Paris, thousands of kilometers from Berlin.

  To Max’s surprise, Kat actually studied the map with interest and agreed with Mutti—or at least pretended to. “I’m sure they’re going as fast as they can,” she said, passing the paper back across the table.

  For the last few days, Kat had been in suspiciously high spirits, flitting in and out of Max’s room, tapping out a quick rhythm on his shoulders, humming to herself. Something was going on, but whatever it was, she hadn’t shared it with him.

  He lifted his spoon from his watery stew and bit into a parsnip. Oh, how he missed the kitchen garden at the villa in Dahlem! These vegetables the communist underground delivered were always the runts of the litter, shriveled and tasteless.

  He forced himself to chew, swallow, and take another bite without making a face. He knew what Mutti would say: We are lucky to have anything at all.

  Except these days, he thought, she probably wouldn’t notice if he dumped the bowl of stew over his sister’s head. He watched his mother as she ignored her own food, bent to her map, and shaded in a little piece of French territory with the stub of a pencil.

  “Ingrid,” Papa said.

  “Karl,” she muttered, blackening the line.

  Papa’s hand settled gently over Mutti’s. Only then did she stop working on the map and look up. She blinked as if seeing her husband for the first time. Then she glanced around the table.

  “Sorry,” she said with a weak smile. “I’ve been getting a little carried away.”

  “Maybe we need a night away from the radio,” Papa suggested.

  “Maybe you could use a little fresh air,” Gerta said cautiously.

  Mutti put down her pencil and straightened her posture. “We are to stay inside. I don’t know what’s so difficult to understand about that.”

  Max was relieved to see his mother’s old spark return, even for a moment. Lately she had been little more than a ghost, haunting the radio dials and working on her maps.

  “Brave people have sacrificed to keep us alive and out of the camps,” she continued. “It’s our responsibility to respect the danger that we’re in, not to increase it by being reckless.” She peered intently at Gerta, then at Kat. “Where do you go, when you sneak out at night?”

  Max froze with his spoon halfway to his mouth.

  Mutti laughed. “Did you think I didn’t know?”

  “Ingrid,” Papa said softly.

  “Karl.” She looked at Max. “Your father thinks you are little adults. He’s forgotten that you are the children and we are the parents.”

  “You’re not my parents,” Kat said. There was no malice in her voice; she was simply stating a fact.

  “Be that as it may, we are responsible for your safety,” Mutti said. “I have let this go on for far too long. From now on, you are to stay inside at night, in your beds, sleeping.”

  “We just went out a few times to get some air,” Kat said. “That’s all.”

  Mutti laughed again, though Max didn’t think she found this very funny. “I was your age once, too, Kat.” She sighed. “I know this is hard. Every night before I fall asleep I lie there thinking that it’s monstrously unfair that you have to spend your childhood dodging bombs and hiding indoors. But—”

  “So many people have it so much worse,” Gerta finished the thought.

  “Yes,” Mutti said. She smiled sadly. “You see how repetitive I am these days. How boring. Just like our mornings and our afternoons. But all I want is for us to hold on to what we have.”

  Papa kissed her on the cheek. After they had f
inished eating, Max, Gerta, and Kat cleared the table and washed the dishes while Papa and Mutti settled in beside the radio. Evidently, Papa’s suggestion of a night off from the broadcasts had been forgotten.

  Upstairs, Max retreated into his room for the night. He was suddenly very tired. The safe house could simmer for days without his parents saying much of anything. When Mutti suddenly laid her feelings bare, there was a special rawness to it that made him vaguely ashamed.

  Kat and Gerta followed him into his room.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I just want to go to bed.”

  “Listen to me,” Kat said quietly, curling her fingers around his arm. “I got us some fuel.”

  “What? How did you do that?”

  The absurd notion of Kat walking into a store and plunking down a pile of Reichsmarks came and went.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The point is, now we can really burn the Midnight Hunters!”

  “I’m not burning anybody!” Max said.

  “She means burn down their stupid headquarters,” Gerta said. “The hunting lodge. Right?”

  “Oh,” Kat said, letting Max’s arm go. “Right. I mean we can burn down the hunting lodge.”

  Max turned to his sister. “Did you not hear what Mutti just said?”

  “This will be the last time,” Gerta said. “Promise.”

  He looked from Gerta to Kat. Both of the girls’ eyes shone with the same kind of inner fire. Mutti’s words hadn’t meant a thing to them. They were swept up in the Red Dragons, in the excitement of their missions, in the promise of fire and blood.

  Max opened his mouth to remind them that last time he’d almost been caught by the Midnight Hunters, and it was only through sheer luck that he’d been able to slip away into the night.

  “If we don’t do this,” Gerta said quickly, “if we let the Red Dragons just disappear, then Heinrich wins. The Hitler Youth win. They’ll think they scared us off for good.”

  “We came this far,” Kat said. “Now we just have to finish it.”

  Max thought of Mutti downstairs, bent over her map, charting Allied troop movements. Was it his imagination, or was she turning even paler than usual? Her skin had a sickly pallor.

  Maybe they were all going crazy in their own ways.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay, but after tonight, I’m done.”

  Kat clapped him on the shoulder. “Last ride of the Red Dragons.”

  The knife in Max’s pocket weighed as much as an elephant, a Panzer tank, a Lancaster bomber. He felt it with every step. Its hilt stuck out so far that he untucked his shirt to hide it. He thought it would be obvious to anyone if it wasn’t pitch-black on the streets of Berlin.

  It had been a simple matter to slip into Mutti and Papa’s room while they were downstairs listening to the radio. As before, the knife was in the drawer in the nightstand. This time, Max took it back to his own room, where he slid the blade all the way out of the scabbard and carefully tested the edge.

  It was very sharp.

  Now, as they turned onto Stargader Strasse—Kat in the lead, Gerta following, Max bringing up the rear—he wished he had put the knife back in Papa’s nightstand. He didn’t want to stab anybody. He didn’t think he could stab anybody, not even Heinrich, not even in self-defense. And besides, a street fight would bring the Gestapo running …

  Then again, so would bombs.

  Kat had made them in the back hallway of the safe house, working by the light of Gerta’s small torch. She had scavenged three small glass bottles of unknown liquid from a dusty cabinet, dumped the liquid in the sink, and filled the bottles with foul-smelling ersatz fuel from two silver canisters. Then she had stuffed strips of torn bed linen into the top of each bottle and stoppered them so that the linen stuck out like a kite tail.

  This was the wick. All they had to do, Kat said, was put a match to the wick, set the linen on fire, and hurl the bottles into the hunting lodge. As soon as the glass shattered, the fuel would spray everywhere, igniting and spreading the flames.

  Kat was carrying the bombs in a small bag stuffed with a towel so the bottles wouldn’t knock together. Gerta was carrying the matches.

  And I have the knife, he thought, following the girls down the empty street. Dense clouds hid the moon, and he could just barely make out the spire of the Gethsemane Church. The saint was shrouded in darkness.

  Kat came to a sudden halt. Across the street, where the low-slung buildings flanked the hunting lodge, a tiny orange dot floated in the air. It glowed brighter for a moment, then plummeted to the ground and winked out.

  “A match,” Kat whispered. That was all she needed to say. Max knew what it meant: One of the Midnight Hunters was outside guarding the group’s headquarters.

  “We need to distract him,” Gerta said.

  Even in the dark, Max could feel the eyes of both girls on him. He sighed. “Fine. I’ll go to the end of the block and do … something.”

  “What?” Gerta said.

  Max had no idea. “You’ll know when it happens. As soon as he comes over to see what’s going on, throw the bombs and run back the way we came. I’ll circle around and meet you at home.”

  “Okay,” Kat said. “Gerta, the second the guard moves, light the wicks.”

  Gerta touched his arm. “Luck be with you, Hornet.”

  “I don’t need luck, Wasp.” And with that, Max was off, hurrying to the end of the block.

  The best distraction would be to shout wildly for help. That would probably bring the boy running, along with every policeman in Prenzlauer Berg. He had to make just enough noise to draw the guard away from his post, but not enough to wake up the neighborhood.

  When he judged that he was about twenty or thirty paces away from the boy, he stopped. Kat and Gerta were nowhere to be seen, concealed by the moonless night. But the boy lit another match, and Max watched the orange dot hover in the darkness.

  Gerta’s parting words had given him an idea. He knew the triumphant Hornet and Wasp theme song by heart—a galloping tune sung by a choir of men with deep, powerful voices. He cleared his throat and began to sing.

  “When … there’s … trouble afoot down in old London town—”

  The orange dot spiraled to the ground. “Who’s there?” the guard hissed.

  “And the crim-in-al element’s taunting the crown—”

  “Reinhardt, is that you?” the guard’s voice drew closer. Max took a few steps back, leading the boy as far as he could from his post before it was time to take off running.

  “Two heroes stand tall—”

  The boy was close enough for Max to see a vague shape in the night coming toward him. Max kept backpedaling.

  “Where others may fall—”

  “Show yourself!” the boy said.

  “It’s Hornet! Hornet! Hornet and Wasp!”

  “Heinrich!” the boy called out. “They’re here!”

  Max nearly froze in his tracks. Had the Red Dragons just walked into a trap? He opened his mouth to scream at Gerta and Kat to run—

  Torches blinked on up and down the street.

  At the same time, a ball of flame soared through the air, searing a bright arc into the darkness. The bottle-bomb crashed through the window. A radiant flash lit up the street, and in that instant Max glimpsed a dozen Hitler Youth boys swarming their headquarters.

  Kat and Gerta were surrounded.

  Flames shot out of the broken window and began to lap at the awning of the bakery next door.

  The boy who yelled for Heinrich abandoned his hunt for Max and turned back toward his burning headquarters.

  The whole street erupted in shouting. Torchlights waved in wild patterns as the boys ran to save their hunting lodge. Above the din, Heinrich’s voice rang out loud and clear.

  “Don’t let them get away!”

  Max hoped that Gerta and Kat had the sense to drop the two unexploded bombs and run for their lives. He turned his back on the chaotic scene, sprinted tow
ard a bend in Stargader Strasse, and slammed into something that knocked him off his feet.

  Dazed, he went to his knees and started to push himself up, when a meaty hand grabbed his arm. He was hit by the smell of onions and mustard. A face loomed in the darkness. Firelight flashed across a pair of spectacles.

  “Gerhard!” Max said, flooded with relief. “It’s me, remember? I helped you after those boys beat you up in the garden.”

  “I remember,” Gerhard said. He tightened his grip on Max’s arm.

  “Listen, I really need to get going,” Max said. He tried to stand up, but Gerhard shoved him back down.

  “Gerhard,” Max said, “I’m your friend.”

  “You’re a Red Dragon,” Gerhard said. Max’s eyes swept across the boy’s crisp brown uniform. He moved his shirttail aside and clasped the hilt of the knife.

  “Heinrich!” Gerhard’s cry was piercing and shrill.

  “Shhh!” Max said. “You don’t have to do this!”

  Gerhard hesitated. Then he yelled even louder. “Heinrich, I caught one of them! Over here!”

  Max pulled the knife out of his pocket, unsheathed the blade, and held it up to Gerhard’s belly. Gerhard yelped in surprise, released Max’s arm, and raised both hands above his head. Max got to his feet.

  “I felt sorry for you,” Max said. “But you’re nothing but a Nazi.”

  Suddenly, something cold and metallic pressed into the back of Max’s head. Heinrich’s voice in his ear sent a chill down his spine: “And you’re a traitor to your race.”

  “Heinrich!” Gerhard cried happily. “I found him!”

  “Very good work, Gerhard. You can put your hands down now. I’ll take it from here.”

  Gerhard eyed the knife and hesitated.

  “I’ll cut him up,” Max warned. It didn’t sound very convincing.

  Heinrich laughed. “With such a shaky hand?”

  Max winced as Heinrich pressed the barrel of his pistol hard into the back of his head. “Drop the knife, now.”

  Max’s thoughts raced, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t outrun a bullet. Heinrich would shoot him before he moved a muscle.