Her backpack was stuffed with a warm eiderdown comforter, in addition to a jacket and a sweater she’d taken from her minuscule room at the Führerbunker, and a thermos of hot chocolate she had filled from the pot in the staff kitchen. She began racing back to the alley. She was taking a shortcut when a figure emerged from a narrow street called Kleine Gasse, which meant small alley.

  It was a woman. She was rushing, and her back was toward Alice. But there was something about the set of her shoulders . . . Alice knew without a doubt that it was Louise. Her face might have changed, but her shoulders, the way she was walking, had not.

  “Louise!” Alice called out. There was not even a hitch in the woman’s gait. Not a flinch in her shoulders. She merely walked on. Alice sprang toward her and struck her on the shoulder. “You!”

  Louise turned around, but her face was completely placid.

  “Yes?” She opened her wide gray eyes. Those hadn’t changed.

  “Louise, or sorry, Louisa, it’s me, Alice . . . your sister.” She whispered this in English.

  “I’m afraid I don’t speak English,” the woman replied in German—German with an Alsatian accent.

  “Are you going to deny this?” Alice continued in English.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about, little girl,” Louise answered in German. “Now I am in a hurry.”

  “I bet you are,” Alice hissed as Louise rushed ahead. “What are you? You can’t be a spy for them!”

  The woman turned. Her face seemed to have changed. It was filled with a new kind of anger—an anger that Alice had never seen on her old face or this new one.

  “And if I am?” she asked, still in German.

  “You’ll have to kill me, won’t you?” Alice replied.

  “Or you me?”

  Alice felt as if she had been punched. As if all the wind had been knocked out of her. She was almost surprised to find herself still standing. She took a few tentative steps, but she was shaking so hard she felt she might fall down. She tried to steady her breathing. She leaned up against a wall at the corner of the street where the skeleton of a bombed-out building stood. She looked at the jagged remains. She felt as if she was a ruin herself—the ruin of a creature who had once been a sister. The world suddenly seemed empty to her. Slowly she crumpled to the ground.

  “Oh my god, my god,” she whispered to the pavement. “My god . . . my god . . .”

  She stared at the place where she and Louise had stood glaring at each other. There was no sign of Louise, not even the sound of her high-heeled shoes on the pavement as she walked away. She had simply vanished.

  Alice was uncertain how long she remained on her knees, but finally the weight on her back, the backpack stuffed with warm things, reminded her. David was out here. David needed her. He needed the blankets, the sweater, the hot chocolate. Slowly she got to her feet and walked on.

  David peered out from the voluminous cloud of blankets she had wrapped him in. She held the thermos cup to his mouth.

  “So tell me more about this . . . this group, the Rasa. You said they started during the time of Henry VIII.”

  “Yes, it was the king’s spymaster, William Morfitt. It’s kind of a long story. I’ll try to make it short.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t have much to do. I have all the time in the world,” David replied with a wan smile.

  “Well, it really started around the time of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes, a bit. Henry VIII met with the French king.”

  “Francis I, near Calais. Sir William had been inserted as a spy. Unfortunately, he was caught and thrown in prison. A woman came into the prison. The way the story is told, she was a French peasant woman. She carried a basket full of mushrooms. She told William Morfitt that he must follow her. There was no moon, a very dark night, one she explained was called the Lune des Champignons. Which basically meant no moon at all except for the pale gray mushrooms, champignons, on the ground. Some said they resembled little moons. Instead of walking toward the forest where the mushrooms might grow, the woman led William to the beach, where a boat was waiting. And he escaped.

  “The entire way back, he tried to remember the woman’s face, but he simply couldn’t. It was as if it was erased like chalk on a blackboard. Then he recalled that a few months before, he had received some information concerning the Pope—not the king’s favorite.”

  David gave a short little chuckle. This encouraged Alice. He seemed to be feeling better. “So Morfitt tried to track down the source of this information. For some reason he thought he might have been from Scotland. But he could not seem to place his face. It bedeviled him for days. How could the face of someone who had brought such pressing intelligence to the court of Henry VIII be so forgettable?

  “He remembered this as he sailed back from France—twice within a very short time, someone had aided him, and yet he could not keep their faces in his mind. How odd! As a spy, he prided himself on his memory. It was vital to his duties. Due to the fact that these two incidents occurred in such close proximity in terms of time, those faces, or nonfaces, began to haunt him. He began to imagine how effective it would be if there was an intelligence operation, a network of spies whose faces no one could remember. They would be virtually faceless.

  “Eventually he found that original spy who had come with the information concerning the Pope. We call him Rob in Rasa history. Rob led William Morfitt to others who shared his condition. Most of them were thieves, and often grave robbers charging doctors high prices for the bodies they retrieved for medical studies. The thieves were rarely caught, and when they were, they proved to be masters in the art of escape.

  “Within just two years and with His Majesty’s blessing, Sir William—for he had been knighted by this time—had created a new secret intelligence agency, the most adept in the world. They were called Rasas for ‘tabula rasa,’ since the memory of their faces was always erased. Thus far, the Rasas have endured for almost four hundred years. So that’s my story, our story.”

  “Not for everyone,” David said.

  “Not for everyone . . . what?”

  “Your face was not erased for me. Not at all. I remember everything about you, since the first day we met, up there.” He pointed to the bare tree limbs above where they were now crouching.

  “I guess not. But believe me, you’re the exception.”

  “But you said that this was your first mission.”

  “True, but you know my mum and dad were often on missions where I would go with them. We’ve had to move around quite a bit—new schools, all of that. It took people a long time to remember me every time I started a new school.”

  “But now you are on a mission, with your parents here in Berlin.”

  She hesitated a moment. She should not be telling David any of this. But he was her best friend. Friends told the truth. Friends confided in each other. And right now, she felt she had nothing else to lose but a best friend.

  “We each have different tasks. Mum works at the OKH—the High Command of the General Army, with an attachment to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, another branch of the army. A lot of information flows through there. And my father is in the Reich garage, where all the official ministry cars are serviced.”

  “And you are an RP and get to be right in the thick of it with the man himself!”

  “Indeed.”

  “Does he remember you?”

  “Not exactly. He sometimes asks for the RP girl who plays one of the Valkyries. He seems to recall me only when I’m in full dress—cape, shield, a helmet, and wings on top. The whole rigamarole.”

  David laughed softly, which seemed to trigger a hacking coughing fit. He pressed the edge of the blanket to his mouth. Alice looked away. She knew there would be bloodstains.

  “I’m really okay, Alice. Especially since you brought all this warm stuff. I’m not nearly as cold anymore.”

  “All right, but I’ll be back tomorrow with more warm clothes, and I’m going to look for that medicine you told me about and see if I can find any at home. But in the meantime, I think you should sleep in that empty trash bin. We can turn it on its side, and I can help stuff you in there with all your blankets. It might rain tonight, or even snow. You’ll be protected.”

  David agreed. It took a few minutes as she carefully placed one blanket on the bottom. Then David crawled in, and she carefully folded the other blankets on top of him, tucking them tightly around his frail body.

  Alice prayed he would stay warm.

  She prayed it would not snow or rain.

  She didn’t pray for her sister. Her sister was gone. As good as dead. Praying for the dead always seemed stupid to Alice.

  As she got up to leave, David whispered in his hoarse voice. “Good night, Alice.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Nobody Charlestons Like Louise

  “I don’t approve, no, not at all!” Frau Weissmann made a tsking sound as Alice entered the Führerbunker. “Those parties at the chancellery are becoming very . . . very . . .” She seemed to be searching for a word.

  “Risqué?” Alice offered. Risqué was her mother’s favorite word for indecent displays.

  “Uh, worse . . . bawdy. Dancing ladies and drunkenness.”

  “So why do I have to go?” She had left David earlier to get some medicine, but a message had come through to the garage that her presence was required at the Führerbunker. “Rats!” she muttered, but tucked the bottle of cough syrup into a pocket and headed toward the Führerbunker. She would have to go to David later.

  As she stepped into the kitchen to find Frau Weissmann, she saw the woman hovering over a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Oh, thank goodness you came.” Frau Weissmann looked up. “The Führer’s secretary says there is talk about a performance here in the bunker tonight. So I put your costume out for you, but first, can you go over there, to the grand reception room? They need extra help for passing food, and I just made up two more trays of the little sandwiches.”

  “I’ve never served before in the chancellery. It’s much more formal than the Berghof. What do I do?”

  “Not formal anymore, with questionable women prancing about. There’s nothing to serving. Just go up with the tray and say, ‘Pardon me, would you like a canapé?’” She giggled. “And then you can say, ‘Please keep your cleavage out of the caviar.’”

  “All right.” Alice laughed. She couldn’t help but think that in many ways there was more to Frau Weissmann than met the eye.

  But why did she have to serve tonight, of all nights? David seemed so ill. This morning she was sure he had been running a fever. She wanted to get back one more time before it was dark. Nevertheless, she returned to her quarters and dressed in her uniform. Her white apron was a little less than crisp.

  “Shouldn’t I iron this apron?” she asked as Frau Weissmann handed her the tray.

  “No, never mind! They’re in a hurry. The people have already started arriving—early!”

  Was this a sign that they were getting desperate? The war had started to enter a new and critical phase. Things had not been going well since July, when the Red Army had established bridgeheads on the Vistula River. They were pushing, and pushing fast, toward Warsaw, and after Warsaw it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to Vienna, and after Vienna . . . well, no one wanted to think about it.

  A sort of manic frivolity was beginning to build, in indirect proportion to the decline of the German front. On October 21, the Red Army had taken Nemmersdorf, a German city in East Prussia that was not far from the Wolf’s Lair. It had been a massacre as the Russian slaughtered their way westward. So what else would one do in the face of a massacre but throw a party?

  Alice stood in the arched entrance to the grand reception room with her platter of canapés and observed the manic festivities. It was more than unbelievable. It was fantastically incredible as she watched people throwing back their heads, gulping glass after glass of champagne. A flash of white, and she quickly spied Fritz, who had dispensed entirely with his glass and was swigging directly from a bottle as he pointed to something at the center of a clot of people. At the edges of the crowd, a man was playing the trombone. Alice recognized it—

  It was the music for the Charleston.

  With her platter of sandwiches, Alice edged toward the fringes of the crowd. She was within inches of Fritz’s elbow. He turned to get a canapé, and handed the bottle of champagne to the fellow next to him.

  “Isn’t she a marvel?” he exclaimed. “Look at her! Just look. No one Charlestons like Helga.”

  Yes, thought Alice, no one does Charleston like Helga . . . except for Louise. And it was Louise who was doing the manic fast step, kicking her feet, both forward and backward, swinging her arms and tossing her head back with gales of laughter.

  Alice turned to a man with a silvery handlebar mustache. “Here, sir.” The man was startled as she handed him her platter and dashed out into the circle and began dancing side by side with her sister, who did not blink an eye. Alice knew all the steps—the Shorty George, where you kept your knees almost touching and stepped forward on the balls of your feet. Spank the Baby, where you slid forward with one foot, slapping your butt with your opposite hand. Apple Jacks, with knee slaps and cross touches. You name it, the sisters had it down pat.

  Soon the people were cheering, “More, more . . . those girls can dance!” They had been dancing for three or four minutes. Smiling at each other, kicking forward toward each other until they were just a foot away and slapping each other’s hands in the cross touches. Then stepping back and doing the knee knocks where they would crouch down side by side, each knocking her knees together and then crossing her hands. Idiotic looking but oh so fun!

  But did Louise ever betray even a glimmer of recognition? Never!

  But there was one person who did seem to have a trace of dim recollection. The Führer had stepped up to the edge of the circle. His eyes were fastened on Alice. He tipped his head toward his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Alice felt their eyes on her now. A dread began building in the pit of her stomach. He had never recognized her before, except for that night in the kitchen at the Berghof. But she had been wearing her Valkyrie braids then, certainly a memory prompt. Maybe he was recalling that night in the kitchen and not really seeing her but the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, that he had imagined her to be in the kitchen that night as she cut the apple cake. The Führer cake.

  Fragments of the kitchen conversation came back to her. The Führer had said, Mit den Zöpfen . . . . Brünnhilde! You have come to save me, you dear child. Dear Brünnhilde has come to save me with some apple cake. She could not let him observe her a second longer. “Bye-bye, Helga! It’s been fun.” Alice shimmied away from the center of the circle and retrieved the platter of canapés.

  Five minutes later she was back in the Führerbunker.

  “I’m afraid I have to go home, Frau Weissmann. I’m not feeling well at all. I think I might be coming down with something. I wouldn’t want to infect our dear Führer.”

  “Of course not, dearie. You probably just got sick watching those goings-on.” As she frowned, the lines in her face suddenly collided. “You run along. Would you like me to fix up a thermos of beef broth? I have some on the stove right now.”

  “Oh, that would be lovely, yes, please do.” When she had raced out of the chancellery to the bunker, a shroud of snow had been falling on the city, and all she could think of was David. Beef broth and more warm clothes would be perfect. She would go straight to the whipped-cream house. He’d been good about sleeping in the trash can. She hoped he was there tonight.

  The swollen moon was just a smear behind the scrim of snow that began to fall more heavily as she raced toward the alley. There seemed to be no separation between the skin of the earth and the grayness of the starless sky.

  Thirty

  Winter Bloom

  She turned into the alley and ran through the nearly blinding snow toward the overturned trash bin.

  “David!” she whispered as she approached. But there was no answer. No cough. Indeed, there seemed to be an odd hollowness that greeted her. She stopped a few feet away. She knew before she looked into it that the bin would be empty. There was not even a blanket, nor the old thermos she had brought with hot chocolate.

  “David!” she called louder. There was still no answer. Where could he have gone? He wasn’t strong enough to walk a block, let alone climb a tree. She stood completely bewildered in the alley.

  The snow collected in her collar. She could feel the heat of the thermos in her backpack. She felt a panic rising within her. Where could he be? Had he gone back into the house? But he had told her it was dangerous now, and the window well had been closed up tight with a thick board. He wasn’t sure why.

  She looked around. She called softly again. She had to do something. She walked along the back wall that continued the length of the alley. Two houses down from David’s house, she found one alley door that was open to someone’s garden. She walked through. The hedges that separated the back gardens of the neighboring house were covered in mantles of thick snow. But she could see that the hedge directly ahead had been broken through. Not only broken through, but as she approached, she saw that there was a tuft of eiderdown. She reached out and took it. This was not from a duck that had flown over the garden, but from the quilt she had brought David. She was sure.

  She pushed through the hedge. Then she saw the shallow depressions, like shadows in the snow. He had walked this way. It must be David. The snow was falling so fast that the shoe prints were being erased quickly. But there was a crust of bread. She bent over to pick it up. It was from the bread she had brought him before. She had been bringing him food whenever she could.

  Within a few steps, she stopped short. There were clear footprints with dark spots in the snow. She crouched down—blood! She felt a strange paralysis seize her. Eider fluff, bread crumbs, and blood! This was like a darker Hansel and Gretel story. Where would it lead? She heard a soft cough and raced across the next yard and through the hedge.