The Escape Page 9

  The princess made a sour face. “There are plenty of Nazi kids kicking around Paris, too, unfortunately. The Jeune Front, they’re called. Nasty crowd.”

  Kat pocketed the Red Dragons card. Then she pulled Gerta in for a long embrace. “Don’t forget about me when you’re getting tan and happy in Spain.”

  “Oh, Kat,” Gerta said, “I’m gonna miss sharing tiny rooms with you.”

  The princess laughed. “You’ve still got the entire night to be cooped up together in these tiny rooms. I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll leave here at eight and blend in with the morning rush. Till then—au revoir.”

  The princess grabbed an apple and left the room.

  The air felt immediately thicker in her absence. They fell silent, all of them bearing the weight of Kat’s decision. They would pass the time together in these dusty rooms beneath the eaves, low ceiling pressing down, until it came time to say goodbye to Kat.

  She went to the window and tapped out a light rhythm on the sill. Max watched her twig-thin limbs and remembered when she had first come to live with the Hoffmanns in the safe house. He’d never known the right thing to say to this girl who bore the raw pain of loss. But things had softened between them over the past few weeks, as Colonel Stauffenberg’s doomed assassination plot took shape and then fell apart. Now she was a second sister, and if he didn’t always know the right thing to say, it no longer scared him to reach for the words and fail, because he knew that she thought of him as a brother.

  He watched Gerta devour her apple with strange ferocity. He knew what his sister was thinking: Would they ever see Kat again? War scattered people like seeds. In just the past few days, Papa and Albert had been blown out of Max’s life, and soon Kat would be gone, too. He imagined a postwar journey east, retracing his steps through a hushed and ash-strewn Europe, picking up those he had lost along the way. But he also knew that was a rosy vision of something that would never be so easy.

  Mutti crossed the room. She leaned over, mussed his hair, and kissed his forehead. Then she went to Gerta and held her close.

  Suddenly, Kat quit tapping the windowsill and spun around. “Okay, Hoffmanns, I should have said this a long time ago, but I’m really sorry. You were nothing but kind to me—you saved my life, taking me in—and I repaid you by sneaking out and getting everybody into trouble”—Max could only watch as the words tumbled out faster and faster—“and this whole trip all I’ve been thinking is that if I never came to stay with you in the first place, you would all still be together in Berlin, Herr Hoffmann, too, and then maybe Albert wouldn’t be … wouldn’t be …” Tears came to her eyes, and she looked away.

  Mutti went to Kat, took her by the shoulders, and held her gaze. “Kat Vogel. Listen to me. It has been an honor to have you in our lives. You carry your father’s spirit in your heart, and we are all of us blessed to know you.”

  Kat’s lip trembled. “I’m sorry I’m not going with you to Spain, after all you’ve done for me.”

  Mutti smiled. “It’s quite all right. You stay here with the princess, and when the Allies come rolling in, you find yourself a general and you tell him to get his butt to Ravensbrück.”

  “You might want to learn how to say that in English,” Gerta said, “otherwise he’ll just stare at you.”

  Kat laughed, sniffled, and laughed some more. The air in the room didn’t seem quite so heavy anymore.

  “I’m not going to tell you goodbye,” Max said. Everyone looked at him. For a moment, he wavered on the precipice of you’re saying the wrong thing! But he kept going. “Because I’ll see you again in Berlin, as soon as the last Nazi flag is gone.” He picked up an apple. “To Frau Becker,” he said, and took a big bite.

  “To Frau Becker,” Kat said, lifting her apple core into the air. “To Claus von Stauffenberg. And to Ingrid, Karl, Max, and Gerta Hoffmann. See you after the war.”

  The freight train marshaling yard was several long blocks east of the Pigalle safe house. They left their bikes in the courtyard and joined the throng of Parisians making their way to work on foot during the morning rush hour. As they moved swiftly beneath an overcast sky, the princess explained the next leg of their journey.

  “The train will be carrying bags of mail south through the occupied zone. You’ll be riding in the second-to-last car—the mail bound for Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a village just over the Pyrenees Mountains from Spain. When you get there, a man named Benat will be at the station to unload the village’s mail. He works with us, and he knows you’re coming. He’ll take you to a house in the village where you’ll get ready to go over the mountains. Benat will be your guide. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be in Spain.”

  Max’s body tingled at the princess’s words. Over the mountains. It was like something out of Grimms’ fairy tales. He imagined a treacherous mountain path, gnarled staff in hand, otherworldly birds circling the treetops.

  “We don’t have—” Mutti began, then abruptly fell silent as they passed a trio of Wehrmacht officers headed in the opposite direction.

  “It’s okay,” the princess said. “Just like in Berlin, it’s not really the ones in the army uniforms you have to worry about. It’s the Gestapo who hunt us.”

  “We don’t have money to pay the guide,” Mutti said.

  “Oh, he does it for free,” the princess said. “He’s Basque, and his people have lived in the mountain regions between France and Spain for centuries. They stick their thumbs in the Nazis’ eyes by helping us get people—mostly downed British pilots—across the border.” She paused. “Fascinating crowd. They do it for fun, I think.”

  Max glanced over at the princess as he struggled to keep up the pace on the busy street. One part of him wanted to soak up as much of the Parisian atmosphere as he could—who knew when he would be back in the grand city, and who knew if it would ever be this grand again? But another part of him was entranced by the princess. Even as she spoke, her eyes swept the crowd ahead, darting this way and that, searching for something …

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Several things happened at once. Max followed her gaze to an older teenage boy sitting on a bench, reading a book. The boy nudged a middle-aged man next to him, who got up with a newspaper under his arm, trailed by a pretty young woman. The three of them moved toward the princess and the Hoffmanns, quickly overtaking them and falling in alongside—but just for a moment, because they were soon joined by a portly man in a jaunty hat. As soon as this fourth stranger was close, the princess led the Hoffmanns straight toward the edge of the boulevard. It turned out that this section of the street was actually an overpass, with four train tracks passing beneath.

  “Quickly!” the princess said. And then, to Max’s astonishment, she swung over the side of the railing and gripped the sides of a ladder that led down to the edge of the tracks. He couldn’t believe they were doing this on a crowded street in the middle of the morning. As Gerta swung down after the princess, his eyes searched the street for Nazis. But then he realized the purpose of the other “pedestrians.” The four strangers he’d noticed, plus a few others, were loitering in what looked like a haphazard way, while actually blocking the view of the ladder from the street.

  “Max,” Mutti said, “go!”

  Max climbed atop the rail, placed one foot on the first rung, and held the sides of the ladder and descended. The street disappeared, and a moment later, he was looking straight ahead, underneath the overpass, at the tracks vanishing into a tunnel. He glanced up to see Mutti begin to make her way down, then focused on moving as fast as he could. When he reached the bottom, his feet touched gravel, and he hurried to where the princess and Gerta were crouching in the desolate scrub grass. Above them, the concrete wall was tagged with a faded cross of Lorraine.

  He noticed that the princess now had a rifle strapped over her shoulder and guessed that it had been stashed in the grass. Mutti arrived a moment later. Max took a few deep breaths. It hadn’t been a long climb, but adrenaline was surging through his body
.

  “The freight cars are loading up over there,” the princess said, pointing down the tracks in the opposite direction of the tunnel. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for the gendarmes—French police in brown uniforms. Some love the Nazis and some don’t, but they all tend to do what they say. If they catch us here, they’ll turn us in or shoot us.” She paused. “One more thing before we go. The door on your car won’t open until Saint-Jean-de-Luz. When Benat opens it, he’ll say How’s the weather in Paris? in German, the only German words he knows. That’s how you’ll know it’s him.”

  “What if it’s not him?” Gerta asked.

  The princess unslung the rifle and handed it to Mutti. “That’s what.”

  Mutti held the rifle, blinking, as if it were an alien object. She opened her mouth, then thought better of it and slung the weapon over her shoulder without a word.

  “Stay low and follow me,” the princess said, slinking along the wall in a crouch. Max’s head spun. It was not yet mid-morning and the air was already sticky with that special Paris heat that glued his shirt to his back. High above, the city thrummed—the hustle and bustle drifted down and swept through the concrete valley in a low murmur. The coarse scrub grass thickened, and wispy branches snapped at his face. They rounded a bend and two idle freight trains came into view, boxcars snaking off into the distance. As they approached, Max noted a few gendarmes milling about, pistols holstered, along with a work crew hauling overstuffed bags and tossing them up through the open doors of the train cars. He also noted that each car was emblazoned with a swastika.

  Suddenly, the princess hissed, “Get down!”

  Max flattened himself out. The foliage was thicker here, but still full of gaps. It was hardly a worthy hiding place. A pair of gendarmes began poking idly around the nearest boxcar, shining a light into the dark interior, sweeping the beam across piles of stuffed burlap sacks. A workman came up to them, mailbag balanced on one broad shoulder, and said something clipped and loud in French. The gendarmes laughed and moved on down the row.

  “Okay,” the princess whispered. They made their way down the length of the train, trailing behind the gendarmes performing their inspection. The boxcars varied slightly in color, from dusky crimson to drab olive green, but they all featured a bright, freshly painted swastika glaring out from the faded slats. Finally, the gendarmes rounded the last car and headed for the second freight train. The princess once again called a halt. She pointed to the second-to-last car. The sliding door was wide open.

  “There’s your chariot. When I tell you to go, run as fast as you can, get inside, and duck down behind the mailbags. Somebody will be along to shut the doors in a few minutes, and then you’ll be off.” The princess turned and knelt facing the Hoffmanns. “It’s up to you what to do and where to go after the war, and I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to go home. But I can’t help thinking that Germany doesn’t deserve you.” She glanced at the train and waited a moment. “Now go.”

  Mutti led the way across the gravel to the tracks with Gerta at her heels. Max brought up the rear, eyes shifting from side to side as he ran, searching for a glimpse of a brown uniform. They crossed the short distance in half a minute. Mutti put her hand on the narrow ledge just below the open door and prepared to hoist herself up—

  And then a man came out of nowhere. Or, as Max realized a second too late, from the space between the cars, where they were connected by a steel joiner. A workman’s cap perched atop his bullet-shaped head. In his hand he held an enormous wrench flecked with rust spots. He froze when he caught sight of Mutti with her hand on the ledge. His eyes scanned the rifle. Then he strode toward them, hefting the wrench.

  Max stepped in front of his sister. Mutti fumbled with the gun.

  “Non!” the man said in a low yet insistent voice. He lifted the wrench so that it pointed into the door of the boxcar. “Rapidement!”

  Max knew the word: quickly! This man was no friend of the Nazis.

  “Go!” he said, and Mutti hoisted herself up onto the ledge and then tumbled into the boxcar. Gerta scrambled up after her and held out a hand to help Max up. As soon as he was inside, the workman gave them a crisp nod and slid the door shut behind them.

  The boxcar was plunged into darkness. After a moment, Max’s eyes adjusted and he was able to make out the piles of mailbags like misshapen, dormant monsters in the thin strips of daylight that came in through the slats. The air in the car was dense and smelled of mildew.

  “Back here,” Mutti said, sitting down cross-legged in a little nook formed by a pile of mailbags and the back wall of the boxcar. Max and Gerta joined her on the gritty floor.

  “It’s strange,” Gerta said quietly. “We’ll never see that guy again or know his name. He just helped us, and now we’re gone from each other’s lives.”

  “It’s people like that who are truly winning the war,” Mutti said. “I know things get all jumbled up when we’re on the run like this, and it’s hard to think straight when we’re bouncing from one place to the next and just trying to catch our breath, but there are moments we should try to keep with us. We’re going to tell your father the whole story one day, and you know what he always says.”

  “A story dies without details,” Max and Gerta said in unison. In the silence that followed, Max thought of his father. What was Berlin like now, in the aftermath of the attempt on Hitler’s life? He was ashamed to admit that he was glad he didn’t have to find out.

  “That could have been it for us back there,” Gerta said. “That guy could have yelled for the gendarmes.”

  “But he didn’t,” Mutti said, and that was that. How often, Max wondered, had their fate been decided by the whims of a stranger’s split-second decision? Probably more than they would ever know.

  The car shuddered. The train moved. Soon even his thoughts were drowned out by the chukka-chukka rhythm of wheels on tracks, and he said a silent goodbye to Princess Marie Vasiliev and Kat Vogel, two more seeds scattered in his wake. Then he leaned back against a mailbag and tried to get some sleep.

  The boxcar door slid open. Mutti was crouched in their nook, rifle trained on the tall, stocky figure that appeared against the darkening sky. They had been traveling for most of the day, and it took all of Max’s willpower not to fling himself out the door and into the fresh air of southern France. Instead, he forced himself to hold still. For a moment, the man just stood there, peering into the boxcar. Then he cleared his throat.

  “How is the weather in Paris?” he said in halting, garbled German. It sounded as if his mouth was full of pencil shavings. Gerta giggled. Mutti lowered the rifle.

  Max replied in French. “Chaud.” Hot.

  The man sounded relieved as he switched to French. But he spoke too fast, and Max could only catch a few words. He turned to his mother and sister. “It’s Benat. He wants us to follow him.”

  “We got that, Max,” Gerta said, rising from her place on the floor. Benat gestured to someone out of sight. A second man, squat and burly, hopped effortlessly up into the boxcar and shouldered a bag of mail.

  Benat reached up to help Max out of the car. His hand was massive and calloused—it felt like a loaf of bread wrapped in sandpaper. Outside it was much cooler than it had been in Paris, and the air was crisp. When all three Hoffmanns were standing in the dirt beside the train tracks, stretching their legs, Max looked up and down the freight yard of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The tracks were bordered by thick green undergrowth and curious trees with few branches that wore most of their leaves up top like a hat. The small station house flew a Nazi flag. A half dozen workers formed a line, and the burly man began tossing down mailbags from the door of the boxcar, which the others caught and passed along easily. The workers paid the Hoffmanns no mind.

  Benat eyed Mutti’s rifle and shook his head. The golden late-afternoon light seemed to settle in the deep wrinkles etched into his face. His skin was like a tanned hide, but his eyes twinkled with a spark of mischief beneath the short cap of his beret.
He held out his hand, gently but insistently. Mutti unslung the weapon, hesitated for a moment, and then handed it over. Benat led them across a second set of tracks to the tree line. A few paces into the woods, he knelt down, scooped out a shallow dugout with his huge hands, and buried the rifle.

  When he stood up, there was a rueful smile on his face. He spoke French again, and this time Max noticed that although he spoke quickly, his accent was strange. French isn’t Benat’s first language, either, he thought.

  Benat made them understand that the Nazis patrolled the village, and if they were caught with a weapon, it would be very bad. So they worked their way unarmed through the dense wood. It was quiet except for a chorus of chittering bugs and the occasional scuttle of small creatures. They emerged suddenly on a gentle ridge dotted with shrubbery. A packed-dirt road meandered through the hills toward the white cottages of a small farming village. A single church tower loomed over the houses. At first Max was struck by just how tiny Saint-Jean-de-Luz was. If there were Nazi patrols here, surely they would find Benat and the Hoffmanns in no time! But then his gaze traveled further, and all he could say was:

  “Oh.”

  The farming village was just a stop along the way. The real Saint-Jean-de-Luz unfurled along a vast bend in the French coastline, hundreds of orange-roofed houses cascading down to the horseshoe-shaped beach. Beyond the town itself, the Atlantic Ocean stole pastel hints of dusk from the sky and sparkled all the way to the horizon.

  Max had never seen the ocean before. Papa had always promised they would go to the coast one day. Here I am, Papa, he thought. Then he tried to picture the Allies landing at Normandy. He imagined the choppy surface speckled with aircraft carriers, destroyers, landing craft, as far as the eye could see …

  “It looks like it never ends,” Gerta said.

  “Not until it hits America,” Mutti said.

  Max watched his sister stare, openmouthed, until Benat’s gentle urging tore them away from the view. They followed their Basque guide down the path until he stopped suddenly. Max heard the low hum of an automobile engine. Benat beckoned for them to take shelter in the trees alongside the path. A moment later, a Škoda turned a corner and climbed the hill they’d just come down. Max caught a glimpse of the uniformed driver and his two passengers, all three of them SS men.