As she took one more look around the basement, another thought struck her. It had been assumed that Leon Donat was an innocent caught up in the propaganda war against the Führer. But what if he wasn’t? What if he had known exactly what he was doing, and come to Munich specifically to assist those who published the Voice of Freedom? What if . . . what if . . . Maisie’s mind raced.
What if Leon Donat was not who she had thought him to be?
She’d allowed herself to imagine him as a somewhat avuncular character, a sort of father figure to workers and customers alike; a sharp but ethical self-made man, a man of commerce, but with something of the absentminded professor about him. An inventor with a touch of genius.
If Donat was not who she had believed him to be, he might well have heard about her, and known she was not who she’d claimed to be when she arrived in Munich. It was an unsettling thought. She might be in far graver danger than Brian Huntley had led her to understand.
CHAPTER 15
It was a strong hand that took a firm hold of Maisie’s arm, dragging her into a doorway. The cold metal pressing into her neck took her to the edge of fear, as if she were looking over a precipice, not knowing what was below. The voice was thick, guttural, as if uttered through clenched teeth. Now the man—for surely it was a man—had her arm twisted behind her back.
“Do not cry out, do not try to summon help—no help will come.”
Maisie felt nausea grip her, but without a second’s delay, with no conscious thought, she twisted her heel into the man’s foot and brought back the elbow of her free arm. Though she did not connect with the man’s body, the unexpected movement was enough to loosen his grip. She took her chance, pounding on his foot harder with her heel as she turned. Her arm came free, and taking hold of his hand, she twisted his little finger backward. Not three seconds had passed since he first uttered a word.
“You speak very good English, sir,” said Maisie, facing her attacker. She did not have the advantage over him, but he was subdued and did not fight back.
“Who in hell’s name are you?” he asked.
“You first.”
“Ulli. My name is Ulli.”
“Ulli Bader?”
“How do you know?”
Maisie loosened her grip on the man’s little finger. He shook his hand and grimaced.
“Where did you learn to do that? It hurts.” Bader put the side of his hand into his mouth, as if to suck away the pain.
“Never mind that. Your finger is only strained. Don’t be a baby, Mr. Bader.”
Bader had been slouching against the wall, but now straightened. He wore what appeared to be a shabby black suit underneath an overcoat a good size too big for him, threadbare at the elbows. His leather shoes were cracked and worn, and he had not shaved in a day or two. A black fringe of hair flopped across his forehead, and his eyes were red-rimmed and sunken.
“So how do you know who I am, Fräulein?”
“It was your illegal press that my father was supposedly imprisoned for supporting.”
“You’re Leon’s daughter?”
“Yes, and I have come to take him home.”
“What were you doing in that building?”
“I was searching for anything that might help me find him. I expected to collect him from the prison at Dachau, but another man had been incarcerated in his place.”
There was no indication that this news was a surprise to Bader—no flicker of the eyes, no lifting of the chin or shrug of the shoulders. He looked both ways, then up to the windows of the nearby houses, seeming satisfied that no one had seen them. Maisie wanted to look around too, but dared not take her eyes off Bader.
“So where is he, Mr. Bader? I understand I have you to blame for my father’s disappearance, and for the fact that our Nazi friends believed him guilty of supporting you, and then imprisoned a man they thought was Leon Donat. Another innocent man took his place, either willingly or because he’d been set up—and I would hazard a guess it was the latter.”
Bader shook his head. “Not quite, Miss Donat.”
“You speak English very well—where did you learn? In England?”
The man nodded. “I was schooled there for a while.”
“Where’s my father, Mr. Bader?”
The man looked to the left and right again and stood up straight. He crooked an elbow for Maisie to take, but she shook her head.
“It might serve you to have it seem as if we are a couple on a Sunday afternoon walk,” she said. “But I would rather depend upon my own sense of balance, if you don’t mind. And wherever we’re going, we must take care—I was not followed here, but someone may be looking for me.”
“The SS?”
“And a few other people.”
“They’re looking for me too—but come, make haste. I will explain, though not here.”
Maisie lingered. Should she go with the man who claimed to be Ulli Bader? What was the risk, and should she take it? But she had to find Donat, and get him back to England.
She nodded to Bader and stepped out alongside him as he beckoned her toward a path between the houses across the street. Soon they arrived at another house, where Bader knocked at the door. The man who let them in did not offer a greeting, and looked away as Maisie passed, as if he did not want her to remember him or be able to identify him in a crowd. Bader opened a door. It led down to a cellar. Another cellar, thought Maisie, descending the stairs into darkness. Bader lit a lamp and pointed toward what looked like a tunnel. After several moments they came up into another house, where Bader let them out onto the street, and then toward yet another house, this one set on its own and not part of a terrace.
The process was repeated. As they descended a staircase into another cellar, Maisie thought that if someone were observing her from the sky, she would resemble a mole, going into a hole, coming up in another place, then boring down into the ground again. Finally Bader led her through a short tunnel into the basement of a house where the sound of machinery rattled into life.
“It’s all right, Ulli—I think I’ve managed to get it going without that part from the old mach—” The man addressing Ulli Bader stopped speaking abruptly, seeing Maisie. “Who’s she?”
“Leon’s daughter. She came to Munich to take him home from Dachau.”
The man looked at Maisie. “Did you see Klaus?”
“Ah, so the man who was imprisoned instead of my father has a name. Klaus. Was he a willing replacement, or didn’t he know what might happen to him if he was captured in my father’s name?”
The man looked at Bader, who nodded. “It’s all right, you can talk to her.”
“How do you know she’s Leon’s daughter?”
Bader flushed. “I—I . . .” He hesitated.
“Here,” said Maisie. “You can look at this.” She delved into her bag and brought out the passport bearing the name of Edwina Donat. She held it out for him, the feel of cold metal lingering on the back of her hand, where it had brushed against MacFarlane’s pistol as she reached into the bag.
The man wiped his hands on a rag and took the passport. He held it to the light, looked back at Maisie, flapped it closed, and handed it back to her. He stared at Bader.
“That was lucky for you, Ulli—she’s who she says she is. This is a real passport.”
“I’m a writer, not a soldier, Anton,” Bader muttered in his defense.
“You have to be both. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve had to learn.” He turned back to the machine and sighed. “The parts you scavenged the last time seem to have done the trick. I’ve managed to get it to run, though I still think it’s too noisy. Let’s just hope it holds up, eh?”
Maisie stepped forward. “You speak very good English too—were you also schooled in England?”
“I am bloody English. One of King George’s subjects. Trouble is, with a German father and English mother, and a nice German name, it was a bit tricky being in England when I was a child. My father was interned duri
ng the war, and my mother and I were ostracized.” He stopped, pausing for a moment, then sighed. “We came back here after the war, when it was hard for my father to gain employment in England. Neighbors who liked and respected us before the war were not so friendly after all. My father did not bear a grudge, nor did my mother—they understood, but it broke their hearts. So here we are—a little English boy with a German name, an Englishwoman, and her German husband, living in Munich. I met Ulli at the university, and we became friends, but now—well, we are brothers in arms, with a few helpers, and we know what we have to do.”
“You’re both taking a dreadful risk,” said Maisie. “They’ll kill you if they find you.”
“Some things are worth dying for. My father loved England, and was planning to return. But he and my mother were killed in a motoring accident a few years ago. They’d lingered because they wanted to be sure they would not be shunned, though they knew what our Herr Hitler was doing to this country, and they desperately wanted to leave.”
“Would you have gone with them?”
The man Bader called Anton shrugged. “Yes, I would—they were my family, and there are cousins in England. I told my father we would have to be the Smith family if we went back. We’d have to rid ourselves of our German names. It was good enough for the king and his family to drop their German ancestry, and everyone conveniently forgot about the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.” He shook his head. “I would have been Anthony Smith in England, not Anton Schmidt, but now I am doing this, and I’m committed. I will die before I give up, and so would Ulli.”
Maisie said nothing at first, allowing a silence to descend upon Anton Schmidt’s declaration.
“You’re very brave, both of you,” she said quietly after a moment. Then she looked from one to the other of the young men. “But where is my father? And what happened in the shop where you ran the old press?”
Bader sighed. He looked around, pulled up a chair, then left the room and came back with two more. He nodded to Schmidt, who moved a small table strewn with papers and photographs so that Bader could set the chairs in a cluster.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to eat or drink, Fräulein Donat. We subsist on very little.” Bader pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from inside his jacket and shook out the last three cigarettes. Maisie declined. Schmidt and Bader each took one before Bader returned the packet to his pocket. Schmidt reached for a box of matches on a shelf, picked out a match, and struck it on the wall. The two men lit their cigarettes and drew deeply on the tobacco, seeming to hold on to the smoke until it filled their lungs, before exhaling.
“I don’t know how much of the story you know, or even if it was the correct and true story, but here’s what happened.” Bader took another draw on the cigarette. “Leon contacted me when he first arrived in Munich. He knows my father—my parents lived in Berlin, but they’ve moved to Geneva, where my father runs a business. It seems Father voiced his worries about me—as far as he is concerned, writing is not real work. Leon said he thought he might have something for me. I could continue with my writing, as the work had an element of leeway. Anyway, when we met, he explained that he was only here for three days, maybe four, and he wanted to discuss a job he thought I might be interested in. I wasn’t making enough to get by, reporting for a newspaper. It was all parochial news, you know the sort of thing; births, marriages, deaths, meetings. But in the meantime, we had founded the Voice of Freedom, and every pfennig I earned was going into spreading the truth about our beloved Herr Hitler, and how our freedom of speech, freedom of movement, even our freedom to think as we wanted, were being crushed under his jackboots. He had shown our people that they should fear insurrection in their midst, that there was terror afoot, and he enacted draconian new laws supposedly to protect his people, but that only put us more securely under his thumb.”
Though she was taken by the young man’s passion, Maisie was anxious to move Bader back to the issue of Leon Donat. “Yes, I know this, but how did my father fit into your plans?” She looked at Anton Schmidt. He had closed his eyes, but was not asleep; he continued to smoke his cigarette.
“The job he offered seemed a good one. I would visit our seats of advanced learning—universities and so on—discuss the company’s library of books, and hopefully the teachers would tell their students to go out and buy them. I also had to find some translators for a number of the books, and would work on building the company’s ability to publish in this country. Leon told me that next time he would send the head of the publishing company to talk to me, to set up all matters concerning translations. I wanted to work for him. As he described the job, I realized it would give me some, well, room to maneuver. I would be working for myself and wouldn’t have to go to a formal office; I would be responsible for my own time, as long as I did the job. I imagined that, in due course, the company would set up an office here, so it seemed to be a good position, with good money. More than anything, though, it would give me enough time to work on the Voice of Freedom with Anton, and the funds to support us.”
“Then what happened?”
“I suppose someone tipped off the Gestapo. They knew where to find the press. Klaus had already volunteered his rooms, using his business as a cover. He wanted the Voice of Freedom to flourish—he said he never wanted to see another war. And he was prepared for the worst.”
“Weren’t you afraid he would crumble if he was captured and interrogated?”
Schmidt’s eyes were open now. “No. The poor man becomes mute under any kind of pressure. Fortunately, this level of angst does not usually happen in the quiet life of a tailor—the job he came back to after the war—but I have seen him pushed too far during an altercation with one of Herr Hitler’s Brownshirts, when he was unable to lift his hand in salute—he’d had problems with his shoulders due to the work he was doing, hunched over the machine. Klaus was shouted at, shoved against a wall, and could not hold his water. He was ridiculed by the men, and others joined in the humiliation.”
“Let me be clear on this.” She looked from one to the other. “Anton, Ulli—this man, Klaus, knew that he could be caught, and you took the chance because you knew his condition—caused by the war—would render him useless to his captors.”
Schmidt shrugged. “And, well, we know all old people start to look alike as the years begin to tell on them. So when the time came, and we knew we were minutes away from being raided, we pushed Leon’s papers into his pocket and made our escape.”
“So my father was with you in the room with the printing press?”
The men nodded.
“Yes. Yes, he was,” said Ulli Bader.
“He knew all about the press, then, and your publication?”
“Yes.”
Maisie shook her head and folded her arms, looking away from the two men. Then she brought her attention back to them. “And he gave you money to continue your work?”
Again the two men looked at each other.
“He gave us money, but not when we were seen in the café,” said Bader. “No, he passed it on before that, as he was instructed.”
“As he was instructed?”
“Yes,” said Bader. “Well, perhaps ‘requested’ would be a better word. I mean, he was quite genuine in his offer of a job, but he was also bringing us funds from another source.”
“What other source?” Maisie was beginning to feel uneasy in the confined space. She knew, intuitively, that her presence in Munich was about to become more complicated.
“I don’t know his name,” said Bader. “But he has a printing company in England, and some overseas, I think. And they’re not small—big concerns.”
A feeling of dread washed over Maisie. She shifted her gaze from one man to the other. “Do you know a woman named Elaine Otterburn?”
“Just tell her the whole bloody story, Ulli—you might as well. It doesn’t do any good dropping in a bit here and a bit there and giving us your life story into the bargain. Just tell her—and if she gets caug
ht, well, we’ll keep on with our work until they come to get us.”
“I won’t get caught anywhere, Mr. Schmidt. I just want to know what I’m dealing with.” Maisie looked from Schmidt to Bader. “Now just go on and tell me everything.”
“All right,” said Bader. “The money came from Elaine’s father—well, to tell the truth, it was her mother. Her father knows nothing, but her mother would do anything for her, so she asked her for money. Anyway, her mother sent the money. Leon brought it to Elaine, acting as the postman as a favor to her mother. I know Elaine was not on good terms with her family—that’s her business. She used another address for their letters. I think they were sent poste restante or via friend; Elaine didn’t want her parents to know where she lived. But money was different. You can’t just send cash to a post office to be collected by the recipient, but it was safe if Elaine knew where Leon was staying, so she could collect the money.”
Maisie frowned. “Enlighten me, if you will—how did you all know each other? How did you know Elaine, and how did she get involved with the Voice of Freedom?”
“A mutual friend.” Bader looked away as he spoke. “We have other supporters of the Voice. And Elaine mixed in all sorts of circles—she had a way of finding out many things, so she knew about us, and we’d all met. And when she learned we were about to be raided, she came to our aid.”