Devil Darling Spy Read online

  The door closed. The handle turned and locked.

  Sarah tensed.

  The engine on the right wing started up with a stuttering, coughing bark and, after a moment’s splutter, exploded to a caustic roar. Sarah was startled and her breathing quickened. The other two engines joined the cacophony, and it felt like competing orchestras of percussionists, coming together and then slipping out of sync with a clatter.

  Something about the noise, all around and filling every space, made Sarah want to flee, and the fact that she was restrained from doing so was a solvent to her intellect. She became a small mammal with one imperative.

  Lauf. Run.

  When the Luft Hansa airliner finally started along the runway and the engines opened up, the howling rose through two octaves and swelled to an earsplitting intensity.

  The airport began to slide past, and the ground became a blur, before falling away with a lurch.

  Sarah waited for her mother’s voice to cajole or soothe her, but she was still silent.

  Sarah had to deal with this alone.

  She watched the buildings become toys, then dots on a shattered chessboard, before the ground began to fade to white. Looking at the surrounding clouds, she suddenly imagined falling through them, like she had taken a misstep on the red roofs of Vienna. But this time there would be no impact, just more and more white air, sucking her stomach through her mouth as she dropped.

  She closed her eyes and dug her fingernails into the rubber armrest. She tried to be the inner voice herself.

  Rip yourself together, Sarah.

  She couldn’t hear herself over the inner screams of panic.

  Clementine leaned around Sarah’s seat.

  “What’s the matter?” she yelled through the roar. “You’re talking to yourself.”

  Sarah looked around, shaking, sweat stinging her wide eyes.

  “God, you’re pathetic.” Clementine sighed.

  She reached out and took Sarah’s hand. The skin of her palms was rough. Rough in a way no child’s hand should be. But it was warm and strong, so Sarah gripped it tightly.

  The Ju 52 carried them to Rome in an eight-hour rattling cocoon of noise and panic.

  * * *

  The Hotel Victoria was stuffy, the corridors dark and crammed with paintings in lieu of windows, scenes of Rome committed to canvas so no one need ever go outside.

  Sarah was physically exhausted by so many hours trapped on the edge of terror but found that her brain—soaked in that same fear—was now hissing like a frying pan. She dearly wanted to sleep, to cut her engines, but she couldn’t.

  The hotel had its priorities. The bar was fully stocked, but it did not have a library so much as a bookcase. The lounge was deserted, but the chair next to the shelves was occupied.

  “I’m not here on your time,” Clementine stated, looking up from her book and frowning.

  “I know, I’m not going to stop you.”

  “Not that you could,” Clementine muttered with raised eyebrows.

  Sarah did not know what to say, so she said nothing. She looked determinedly at the spines of the books, not really reading the titles. Something about Clementine, or her attitude, meant that Sarah felt obliged to try and . . . what was she trying to do? To convince her of Sarah’s good intentions? To convince her she wasn’t a Nazi? To win? What would she be winning?

  Was this how the Mouse felt all the time?

  Having decided she wasn’t going to order her around or treat Clementine like the Black Shame, even if the little monster Ursula would, Sarah was highly irritated that Clementine was being so . . . rotzig. The starving Sarah, the hunted Sarah, the abused Sarah . . . she had made herself small. Clementine was the opposite of this. Maybe this is what they meant when they called the Neger feral and primitive—

  They. Sarah shuddered at the way that thought appeared, unbidden.

  “The servant quarters are hot, and the company is terrible,” Clementine mumbled.

  This was the first volunteered piece of conversation, and Sarah didn’t know what to do with it.

  “The rooms aren’t much better.” Sarah laughed.

  “Is that what you think? You spoiled bitch.”

  Anger flared in Sarah and consumed all sensibility in its fire.

  “Think I haven’t lived in poverty? I’ve slept with cockroaches and eaten potato peelings and made bread out of sawdust, so get off your high horse.”

  “When were you poor?” Clementine scoffed. “I’ve seen your house.”

  Gottverdammte. Think it out.

  “My mother was very sick,” Sarah said as somberly as she could muster. “Things got very bad for a while, until my uncle came for me”—don’t lie if you can avoid it—“and he’s not really that rich. It’s all about looking wealthy.”

  “Rich enough.” Clementine laughed, but her tone had softened a tiny bit, like throwing a sheet over a rock.

  “I would like us to stop fighting,” Sarah said quietly. “We’ve got work to do and real enemies—”

  Clementine snorted without looking up. “I told you, you want a Hausneger, get a big knife.”

  “How have you survived this long as a servant?”

  “When they get the whip out, I stop. That’s always done the trick.” Clementine sighed theatrically. “Fine, we can stop fighting. But if you think I’m going to give you absolution, Nazi girl, think again.”

  “What are you reading?” Sarah tried again.

  “Maigret. Read it before.”

  “Did your father teach you French?”

  Clementine’s head snapped upward.

  “I taught myself French,” she growled. “Taught myself everything. You think I could learn anything at school while the children chanted bimbo, bimbo at me for hours on end . . .”

  Clementine seemed to struggle with something behind her eyes and then continued more calmly.

  “When I was two, my father took my mother—his wife, his German wife—back to Senegal to set up home. Their ship, some beschissener cargo freighter, sank with all hands just outside Dakar. My grandmother in the Rhineland was overjoyed to have to raise her family’s greatest embarrassment permanently and made sure that I understood, on a daily basis, just how difficult that was for her . . . I learned French to irritate her,” Clementine added, shrugging. “All I got was this camera.” She waved to a black-and-brass Leica on a side table. “He was going to get his things later. Things like his daughter.”

  The lounge clock ticked.

  “You read this?” Clementine said, suddenly, waggling her book. “Simenon has this whole thing about masks and alternate personalities. Who are you, really?”

  “Well, I’m a spy of sorts, so . . .”

  “What exactly is your job?”

  “I’m just cover,” Sarah said, shrugging. “They see a little girl, it makes them dismiss me, dismiss my uncle.”

  “You aren’t going to get away with that for much longer, you know?”

  The train rolled out of the station. The little girl waved at Sarah as she pulled away.

  “And you? Who are you really?” Sarah demanded. “With that education, that camera, and that attitude? Not actually a maid, are you?”

  Clementine looked to be on the verge of saying something vicious and cutting but then appeared to relent.

  “I am . . . employed as a maid occasionally. These big parties, you can avoid doing any work easily enough. But I’m nosy and sometimes I find out things that people want to buy. Rich people have dirty little secrets. They hate me for being a Rheinlandbastard and a chimney sweep, and they treat me like dirt. But they’re all rotten to the core, and I punish them for it. And make money,” she added.

  “It’s enough that there are secrets to be had . . .” Sarah mumbled to herself. “So you didn’t accidentally follow me to the record
ing room?” she asked out loud.

  “Sorry. Now you’re buying my silence, and I’m not living with my grandmother anymore. You stopped seeing the scared little maid, because you became my primary customers. I hit . . . what do they call it in America? Pay dirt. Pity you’re Nazis.”

  “You could have been killed, you know? Norris would have killed you—”

  “If you hadn’t been there to save me. Little Eva, are you proud?”

  “Another spy . . .” Sarah mused, ignoring the provocation. “Are you any good?”

  “Well,” Clementine said, dropping the book onto a nearby table. “The fifth floor is supposed to be closed. But there’s someone in five-oh-two. A communist. The owners of this hotel are anti-fascist sympathizers. Is that something the German Army wants to know?”

  “Maybe. We’ll . . . put it in the report. Thank you. See, that wasn’t hard, was it?”

  “Or maybe I should tell the SS officer in three-oh-six?”

  “There’s an SS officer—” Sarah stopped herself, there was too much concern in her voice. “Well, there’s an inter-service rivalry there.” She laughed awkwardly. “I suspect the Abwehr would rather know first.”

  “Why do you trust me?” Clementine asked abruptly.

  “I don’t trust you. At all. I just don’t distrust you enough to let someone push a needle into your brain to be on the safe side.”

  “Probably makes you a terrible spy. I’d have killed me.”

  * * *

  Sarah walked along the road, conscious that there should have been glass underfoot.

  “MUTTI!” She howled into the mist, but there was no reverberation, no sign that the sound had carried. She stood at the broken fence by the warehouses.

  Her mother was gone. The car, the crash, the dogs that had pursued her . . . all gone. Instead, in the center of the road was a hospital bed. Strapped to it was Elsa. Her hair was wild, eyes red, skin pale.

  “Where’s Mutti?” asked Sarah.

  “Where’s Mutti?” repeated Elsa, her voice cruel. “Like everyone else, she’s gone. Do you see what you do? Where you go, lives end, people suffer. I should have let my father—”

  “But you didn’t,” Sarah talked over her, gagging. She tried to free her, but the leather straps were tied, wrapped around themselves, the knots too small for her fingers.

  “You think you’re helping, but you’re not,” Elsa snarled through clenched jaws. “See, you’re not the innocent little girl.”

  “No—”

  “You’re the grinning maid at the port hotel . . .”

  “No!”

  “And you’re counting the dead. As. You. Go.”

  Elsa was free. She wrapped her hands around Sarah’s throat and dragged her down into the sheets.

  “Now . . . or later?” Elsa screamed.

  Sarah sat up in bed, teeth gritted, trying to pull Elsa’s hands from her neck.

  Gottverdammte.

  She lay back in the darkness, panting, and imagined a letter.

  Dear Mouse,

  Oh, Mouse, would it help to know that Schäfer’s dead? That Elsa shot her father before he could do . . . anything . . . to me? Or does that make you angry that no one came to save you? He can’t do what he did to anyone else, ever again. Does that help?

  Elsa was taken to a hospital, and she hasn’t come out again. Do you think that’s deserved? Is it punishment for all the lambs she led to the slaughter? Nobody thinks she killed her father, so if she can recover herself, she can have her life back . . . or a life back . . . a new life, anyway.

  I know you tried to warn me, the best that you could. I know that talking about . . . it . . . is hard. Even now I can’t put it into words. All those moments when you were quiet or staring into space, I had no idea what horrors you must have been reliving. I’m sorry.

  Maybe Elsa got her due, hat ihr Fett weggehabt, after all.

  A little bird twittered that Rothenstadt has closed and that Bauer has been taken to a camp outside Munich. Did you do that? I’m not criticizing you, that was always your job. Is your father proud now?

  Alles Liebe,

  Ursula

  TEN

  August 31, 1940

  SARAH COULD HAVE easily imagined that Rome was a hot summer’s Berlin. The smells, the parks, and most of the buildings could have been transplanted from Italy back to the Reich.

  Tripoli was something else entirely, the most alien place that Sarah had ever been to. It felt like somewhere she should not be.

  The heat was dry and endless, and the air tasted of the dust that collected in every fold, crease, and pocket. Amidst that sand, there was the scent of burnt toast and the smell of cinnamon.

  Tripoli appeared marshalled, landscaped, coiffured. The streets were wide, straight avenues of newly planted trees and heavily watered gardens, decorative walls and staircases, but these boulevards were an Italian facade, spliced onto the complex city behind it. Here the white-clad subjects of Italian Libya milled and crowded in the available space, a living, breathing host to the Italian parasite.

  Likewise the Grand Hotel was a fantasy of a building from the Thousand and One Nights seemingly created to pander to the white colonial masters and their sense of theater. It was inside this building that Sarah felt the sense of trespass most keenly, not just that she shouldn’t be there—the Jew, the spy, the actress—but that none of them should be there.

  The farther south they had traveled, the more the porters, maids, and waiting staff seemed to carry servility like a weight, and their treatment at the hands of their white patrons worsened, as if they weren’t people at all. Here in Tripoli, Sarah wondered what separated them from slaves. They weren’t “slaves,” there was no slavery. But those were really just words.

  As breakfast arrived on pristine crockery, Sarah wondered if this kitchen was run by a proud and argumentative Frau Hofmann, angry and damaged Clementines, or enslaved people? Arriving with a black maid, she felt complicit in the orders, the obsequiousness, and the fear. Sarah had watched the Nubian staff in Rome through a back alley door, sharing a cigarette and a joke, like their fez-wearing exoticism was an act for the tourists. She could draw no such comfort here.

  “Something wrong with your eggs?” the Captain murmured.

  “They’re bought with the blood of the oppressed.”

  The Captain spat his coffee back into his cup and coughed into a handkerchief. “So where’s Clementine? Stealing secrets somewhere?” he asked.

  “Off taking photos. She wanted to see the market, the Suk El Turc . . . Why did you bring her?” she asked suddenly.

  “Do you mean why did I let you make me bring her?”

  “All I wanted was for her to be able to work, because I felt sorry for her. Then I didn’t want her to be killed, which is why I was too scared to leave Norris with her, and too scared to have her loose in Berlin with what she knew, and . . . and . . .” Sarah stopped before continuing, shocked. “Why did I do all this?”

  “This is how she operates though, isn’t it? Look, there’s no harm done. She won’t sell us out to the Gestapo now, we pay better, and she’s too involved. And you were right, we do need an extra pair of hands. She’s a born spy . . . There is a communist in five-oh-two.”

  “I got caught up in her liking me . . .” Sarah said incredulously.

  The Captain snorted, then softened.

  “You are . . . human, Sarah of Elsengrund. It’s rare in my—our—line of work that this is a positive, but your talent comes from that place, I think . . .” he trailed off, on the cusp of a compliment. “Look, we’ve been spoiled of late. Got sloppy, got away with it. This trip is going to be good for us, you’ll see.”

  Sarah stared past his shoulder. “If Kurt Hasse were somewhere at the same time as us, that might be a problem, right?”

  “It w
ould make things interesting, yes.”

  “Because he’s standing. Right. Over. There.”

  The Captain picked up a knife and, while examining it for dirt, used it to see the room behind him.

  “He’s coming over,” Sarah whispered.

  “Yes, he is. Stop whispering.”

  “Herr Haller, may I introduce myself?” The SS officer stuck out a meaty hand. “I am Kurt Hasse. We’ve nearly met a few times, but I’ve never had the pleasure. Mind if I join you?”

  “Hello, erm . . . Sturmbannführer?”

  “Oh, never mind that, Haller, dummes Gewäsch,” he said, grinning, before continuing in English. “A lot of stuff and nonsense!” He switched back to German, supremely pleased with himself. “Can I call you Helmut? I’m a big fan of your work.”

  He sat himself at the table, with a wave of strong men’s cologne. He was wearing an immaculate civilian’s safari suit and clutching a pith helmet. It made him look like a tourist dressing for the tropics. Sarah suspected this, along with the extra weight he carried, was a deflection, a way to make people dismiss and underestimate him, in the way that his SS dress uniform had been worn to give the opposite impression.

  “Oh, and there I was thinking I was a capitalist parasite . . .”

  Hasse laughed heartily. “Ends, Helmut. The ends are important, not the means. We need wireless sets, you make wireless sets. We need barges for a suicidal and doomed invasion, you find barges.”

  “You don’t think Unternehmen Seelöwe is going to work?” the Captain murmured.

  “Shush, Helmut, that’s supposed to be a secret name.” He laughed. “No, Operation Sea Lion is not going to work. That fat Stück Scheiße Göering is merrily failing to establish air superiority, and if they think that they can bomb the English into submission, they don’t know them very well. You know they’re bombing London now? I spent many happy years on that blessed isle—do you play cricket, Helmut?”