Wolf by Wolf

  “Of course he will! Has the heat spoiled your brain, Fräulein? Did you forget all I taught you last year?” Luka threw up his hands. “Katsuo’s pride is everything to him. Why do you think I’ve been holding back this whole time? Because two is my favorite number? The best way to handle Katsuo is to let him think he’s winning.”

  “You’re ahead of him now,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah. Well. The last time I let you out of my sight it almost killed me, and I lost the race. I’ll be damned if it happens again.”

  The image of Luka, arms outstretched, started to swim. As if he were being swept away by a mirage. The sand beneath Yael was beginning to tilt. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep standing.

  “Katsuo has at least two more allies left,” she said. “The Axis Tour isn’t even half over. If I fall behind now, you’ll be Katsuo’s only real threat. He’ll come at you with everything he has. You’ll be out of the race before New Delhi.”

  Yael watched the possibilities of her words playing out behind Luka’s face. The road ahead: dusty Baghdad, razor rocks threading past caves and mountain passes, so many places to slip or be ambushed.

  “I suppose I could stand a bit of scruff. Some girls love the wilderness wastrel look.” He rubbed his jawline again. “I’ll give you one of my canteens on two conditions.”

  Yael stood, waiting. Trying her hardest not to collapse.

  “The first: You will owe me a favor. One I can cash in at any time.”

  She nodded. Her world scattered with the motion. “As long as it doesn’t involve me letting you win without a fight.”

  “Fair.” Luka held up his next finger. “Second: You will sit right now and have a smoke with me. A real smoke. With real words. The way we used to.”

  Yael’s knees were quick to crumple. Even when she was sitting the earth seemed to spin beneath her, silver moonlit sands jumping at her like waves. She spit her pebble out, afraid she might swallow it.

  Luka knelt in front of her. His arms were still outstretched. Canteen in one hand, cigarette in the other.

  She took them both.

  The water was warm and tinny, but it was life. Yael took two deep swallows, and though her throat ached for more, she fumbled the cap back on. She had to make it last.

  Luka sat close, leaning against his rolled-up sleeping bag. It was like magic, the way he lit his cigarette. He flicked his match against the heel of his boot. Let the flame’s glow flare and fade as the ash lit bright.

  Yael’s attempt was clumsier. Her match took two strikes. She blamed the thirsty shake of her fingers. When her cigarette finally lit, Luka sighed, brought his own to his lips.

  “I thought I had you all figured out,” he said after a lingering draw. The way he watched Yael reminded her of a lion. Eyes brave and visceral. “For nine months I lay awake at night and remembered what you did. But now… now I don’t know what to make of you. A girl who leaves her own brother for dead in the desert, but feels a guilt trip for a boy she doesn’t even know?”

  “I left Felix incapacitated. Not dying.” Yael lifted the cigarette to her lips. It tasted awful. She wondered how people could keep inhaling it. Cigarette after cigarette. Package after package. How they could let the smoke live inside them like it was nothing.

  “A blow like that to the temple? One kilo too much pressure and bye-bye, brother-dear.” Luka made a slick cutting motion across his throat. Embers scattered off his cigarette, bursting to the ground like angry stars. Dying one by one.

  “You think I’d kill my own brother?” Yael spit the words out, but the taste of ashes stayed: clinging, rotten.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past you, Fräulein.” Luka’s eyes narrowed, still examining her in that lion-smart way of his. “You’re an absolute verdammt mystery to me. Every time I think I’ve uncovered the true you, I find a whole new layer of secrets. After the race last year, I always wondered if there was ever an honest moment between you and me.”

  “Honestly? I think smoking is disgusting.”

  “The real Adele emerges!” Luka laughed and took another drag from his cigarette. “So all those nights we sat together under this sky and you smoked nearly half my pack, you were just pretending?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You owe me about two cartons of cigarettes, then. They aren’t cheap, you know. Especially since Hitler banned them.” Luka huffed out a lungful of smoke. “As our dear Führer tends to do with anything remotely interesting or worthwhile.”

  “I’ll pay you in Tokyo. With part of my winnings,” Yael told him, even though she knew it would never happen. While the Iron Cross was presented at a ceremony before the Victor’s Ball, the money was awarded later. After her waltz with the Führer and the fall of an empire. She’d be long gone by then.

  “I still expect you to finish that one,” Luka said.

  “A deal’s a deal.” Yael took another tongue-curdling breath in. She’d need more water after this.

  He laughed again. More sparks tumbled to the sand, fading in silence.

  Silence. All silence. It screamed between them.

  “Sometimes I miss this. You. Me. Secrets. Stars.” His words curled out with the smoke—wisps of burning air that actually looked pretty. “I thought I was invincible. Before you.”

  “Katsuo beat you before I ever competed,” Yael said.

  “I’m well aware of my losses, Fräulein. Even if I don’t show it.” Luka’s hand went to the back of his neck, rubbed the chain there. “You know I’m not talking about the race.”

  There were so many versions of Luka Löwe—the National Socialist and the racer, the vicious and the proud, and then this… the moreness—all snapped up inside him. Shells different every minute. Faces within faces. Masks within masks. Dolls within dolls.

  Which version was the real one? All? None?

  But this Luka Löwe, the one sitting in front of her now, had loved the real Adele. Yael could see it in his eyes—where Adele’s face was captured in indigo and intimate—in the tremble of his fingers around his cigarette, in the tortured twist of his lips.

  He’d loved her enough to hurt.

  “When I woke up in Osaka last year, I thought an army had blitzkrieged my head it hurt so bad. But that was nothing. Nothing compared to how I felt on the inside—” He stopped short. “I should hate you. I’ve tried. Sometimes I even think I do. But the feeling never sticks.

  “Who knows, maybe you never cared for me. Maybe you were playing me the whole time. Or maybe you just saw your chance to win in Osaka and you took it. But there are two truths I’m sure of.”

  “What?”

  “I care for you.” It was the most sincere, unflinching thing Yael had ever heard him say. For a moment she forgot the taste of ash that coated her tongue.

  But it was still there. Sticking to the roof of her mouth. Sliding between her teeth.

  Yael tapped her cigarette clean. It was down to the nub. Luka’s cigarette was fading, too. The amber glow on his face was dying. Pulling him out of her twenty-twenty sight. “What’s the second thing?” she asked.

  “This race—the Axis Tour of 1956—is mine.” There was no threat in his voice. Just a deep certainty. “I will not let you win again.”

  Yael’s cigarette had burned out. Deal done. She buried it in its own sandy ashes and stood.

  Luka didn’t bother getting up. New shadows grew across his face, closing between them as he watched her. “You’re a dangerous breed, Adele Wolfe. But I’m always up for a challenge.”

  And then the darkness came in full. Snuffing his cigarette with a smoky hiss.

  CHAPTER 19

  THEN

  THE FOURTH WOLF: AARON-KLAUS PART 2 SPRING 1952

  The beer hall basement was a lonely place without Aaron-Klaus. Most days it was just she and Henryka. The contacts who came through never stayed for long. A dinner or two, some talk of distant red-mapped places, and they were off. They never said where, but after they left Henryka
always switched the numbered thumbtacks around on her map. P5 to Paris. T11 to London. A32 to Cairo. The numbers hopped like pieces in an intricate game of Stern-Halma. Over former borders, crossing paths, a dance of pinholes through Henryka’s wall.

  Yael studied as much as she could. Every subject in every language Henryka could get her hands on. The card table buckled under the weight of all her books. The corner radio was replaced with a television screen. (The novelty!) It, too, was always on.

  Red still soaked the world.

  Months passed, rolling through years.

  1950… 1951… 1952…

  Calculus was just as hard as Aaron-Klaus had always groaned it was. Measuring change with numbers and symbols cramped Yael’s fingers. Spun her brain. Yael usually got lost in the equations, chewing on her pencil as she tried to make sense of them.

  She nearly bit through the soft wood when she heard his voice drifting from the hall.

  “It’s been six years since the Great Victory. What have we been doing this whole time? Skulking in basements. Scuttling messages back and forth. Hoping every day not to get caught.”

  Aaron-Klaus was back! But he sounded different. There was a depth in his voice—a rage she’d heard only in hints and jags before, now beached. A leviathan of emotion: whole and rotting.

  This kept Yael sitting in her chair, pencil jammed between her teeth. Listening.

  “We’re building the necessary framework for a putsch. We’re getting closer.” Reiniger was back, too. It had been months since Yael last saw him. A snowy Christmas Eve. He’d brought her a parcel full of sweaters and scarves. When he left, Henryka had placed his pin (A1) in Rome. It had jumped around a lot since then—Paris, London, Tripoli.

  “NOTHING HAS CHANGED! Everything has gotten worse. We’ve forgotten Valkyrie—”

  “The world isn’t ready, Klaus.” Reiniger’s voice was commander cool. “Operation Valkyrie was drafted for a smaller, more concentrated Reich. In the event of the Führer’s death, a military emergency would be declared, and the Territorial Reserve Army would secure all government operations. A putsch was difficult enough to accomplish when the Reich was contained in Europe. But the New Order has grown. There are too many variables now. We must continue to build our network of allies and unite the various resistances. This is what you’ve been trained to do.”

  So that was Valkyrie. Not a woman of war—bearer of life and death—but a military protocol. Still, the picture stayed in Yael’s head. She’d flipped to it so many times that the encyclopedia’s spine had a permanent trench.

  “And when will the time be right?” Aaron-Klaus kept shouting, but in a terrible, hushed kind of way. “The longer we wait, the more people die.”

  “If we strike at the wrong moment, we could all die,” Reiniger said. “Just like the conspirators who implemented the first Valkyrie. Everything we’ve worked for would crumble to pieces.”

  “You know what I think? You’re scared. You saw what happened to those first conspirators, and it paralyzed you.”

  “You’re angry,” Reiniger replied. “You need to compartmentalize.”

  “Millions of people are dying! I can’t just keep hiding in here!” Aaron-Klaus’s words stung through walls. Slipped like wasp venom into Yael’s veins—all burn.

  She dropped her pencil.

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do until you get a handle on yourself. Stay here. Run drops for Henryka. Cool your head,” Reiniger said. “Once you prove to me that you’ve managed to contain your emotions, then we can talk about your next serious operation.”

  “But—”

  “This conversation is finished.” Reiniger must have been wearing his military jackboots. They made distinct sounds on the concrete floor: tap, tap, tap. Away.

  The door from the hall slid open.

  At first Yael thought she’d misheard Reiniger’s steps. A man stood in the doorway. He was tall and tight shouldered, with a flushed face and thinned lips. But it was Aaron-Klaus, she realized as he stepped into the room. Aaron-Klaus without the boyness she’d seen by the river.

  “Yael?” Aaron-Klaus paused. The features of his face softened, remolding into a smile. “You look different.”

  Don’t show anyone.

  Yael’s heart twisted. Her eyes glanced to the mirror behind Henryka’s desk (the one the older woman used to gauge her need for a hair bleach). No, she hadn’t changed.… She’d kept Miriam’s command. Hers was the face Aaron-Klaus had found her in. The face they’d always known her as.

  “I’m a teenager now.” As her gangling limbs attested. Whenever Yael stood in front of her reflection, she was reminded of the encyclopedia entry on Annam walking sticks. Insects with twig bodies, twig legs. Practically invisible.

  “And Henryka’s already got you doing advanced mathematics?” Aaron-Klaus sat down in his old seat, across the card table. He smelled like the outside: pine and rain and clouds. “What are you? Some sort of prodigy?”

  “How was Vlad’s farm?” she asked, because she wanted the time they’d missed to not be between them. She wanted to understand his change. Trace it and solve, like the calculus problems.

  “Hard. But I have muscles now.” He flexed his arm and grinned. Both actions seemed empty, echoing the shouts Yael had just heard from the hall. The real measure of him.

  “What happened?”

  Yael was not asking about the farm, and Aaron-Klaus knew it. “I took the train back. There were magazines and coffee. Cushioned seats. A woman across the aisle was flirting with me.

  “And then a transport came, on the other side of the tracks. I could see them through the cattle car’s cracks. Fingers. Eyes. Just a few, but I knew there were hundreds. Hundreds going off to die. No one else in my car even batted an eye. The woman across the aisle kept talking about how excited she was the Führer had decided not to ban makeup.”

  Memories of her own cattle car rattled back: days of dark dark, wails, sick, stench. They chugged through Yael. Trackless. Tearing up her insides. It was so easy not to think of it here, with a belly full of spätzle and new sweater sleeves.

  It was so easy to pretend she was normal. Not special. Not marked.

  But she wasn’t. She was. She was.

  Memories, words, numbers, monster. All just under her sleeve. Tucked inside her skin. Hiding. Her own leviathan. So, so large.

  “Vlad taught me lots of things. Shooting. Lying. Killing. I thought I was training for something important.” Aaron-Klaus’s face gleamed: anger and sweat. Not a lamp this time, but a torch. Hungry to set something ablaze. “But Reiniger just wants to use me as a messenger boy.”

  “That’s important.” Yael looked over at the map, the pins that riddled it like acne. There were more every day. Pushed into all corners of the globe. “The Gestapo reads the mail. Taps the telephones and telegraphs. We need people to deliver things so they stay secret.”

  The corner television was on, glowing its endless loop of propaganda. An old reel was playing, one Yael had seen many times over. It was the Führer’s first speech after the Great Victory. Where he stood in front of “my fellow victors,” ushering in “a new era of man.” The volume was muted, but every word shone through the tremble of his mustache.

  These pictures flickered black and white over Aaron-Klaus’s face. “We can’t be scared anymore. Someone has to do it. Step up and change things. Kill the bastard.”

  Not for the first time Yael wished that Valkyries were real. That one would blast through the windows of the Chancellery—all skin, fury, and feathers—and wing the Führer away. Choose one final death.

  Yael knew it would happen before it did. Aaron-Klaus never told her anything, but she heard it anyway, crammed between the words he didn’t say. She saw it in the tight of his fists, the hard of his eyes as he watched the propaganda reels.

  When Aaron-Klaus didn’t show up for breakfast, Yael knew he wasn’t sleeping in. He was not off retrieving files from the drop spot by the florist on Leipziger
Street. He was not on an assignment out of Germania; if so, he would’ve said good-bye.

  Yael hoped she was wrong as she hunched over her graphing paper. Working through another list of Henryka’s calculus problems. The Reichssender channel flickered, a constant pilot light. There were no propaganda reels today. It was a live recording: Hitler was giving a speech in front of the old Reichstag. The building he torched to secure his power sat in the shadow of the Volkshalle’s newly finished behemoth dome.

  “The communists thought they would raze our great country to the ground. More than twenty years ago they set fire to this building, the heart of German government. But the Aryan race has arisen victorious. We’ve left the ruins of old Berlin behind, embraced the monumental splendor of Germania.…”

  The Führer’s words always sounded the same, no matter what he said. His voice was always brassy, laced with fire. Predictably hypnotic.

  And then—a different noise. A startling pop through the speakers. Two. Three.

  Yael looked up from her equations and slopes. There he was somehow, Aaron-Klaus. In front of the stage. His face ablaze—set on the Führer. There was a gun in his hands.

  Dark spots bloomed through Hitler’s uniform. One, two, three.

  He bled like the world.

  The Führer crumpled. The silence of the crowd shattered. Jagged, glass-sharp screams stabbed through the speakers. Aaron-Klaus seemed frozen. Unable to run or shoot or speak. Even the SS men seemed to move slowly. They came from every side—like a flower furling in reverse. Ringing in. Tighter, tighter. Aaron-Klaus’s gun swung up to his temple.

  No one wants to die.

  But what was it the nurse had said? Sometimes people have to die to make things better.

  Someone has to do it.

  Another pop. So small. So deafening.

  A sacrifice.

  For the good.

  Dusty moon gray flooded her mouth. Graphite. She’d bitten all the way through her pencil.

  Yael couldn’t spit it out. She couldn’t move at all as she watched the SS swarm over the two bodies. The crowd was roaring around them. Roaring. Roaring. Roaring. And then it wasn’t human voices at all. The picture cut out, and there was only static. Consuming everything.