Robert Craven - Get Lenin

She held her breath and opened her mouth, fractionally improving her hearing. Silence.

In the envelope was a communique between Hitler, Himmler and Goering to Kincaid’s studios. It was an itemized bill for Kincaid’s services. Eva flattened it out and read it carefully. It totalled to nearly a million dollars. She ran into her private quarters, grabbed her box brownie and took photographs of the flattened sheet. She replaced everything as she found it, sliding the drawer back. She gave a cursory glance around, double-checking that nothing looked untoward.

She left through the bustling foyer and walked to the central train station. From Berlin Central she paid for her ticket in cash, giving a good, but not ostentatious, tip to ensure she had a private sleeping berth for the five hundred and thirty five miles to Krakow. Kincaid was by nature generous and she had a sizeable amount of dollars at her disposal without his asking questions as to how she spent it.

Over the past few months, he had schemed and promoted a heavy weight boxing match in Berlin with newsreel rights exclusively for the American market. German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling versus Joe Louis at the Berlin Olympic Stadium; billed ‘The Battle of the Bombers’. He’d negotiated a huge amount of advance money from the American networks for the rights and film reels to be produced by Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry.

Ticket sales sold the Stadium out for an event which Kincaid knew full well would never transpire. After Jesse Owens had won a gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games, Hitler was cagey about having coloureds beating white German athletes in sporting events. Under his pressure, the plug was pulled on the whole thing and everyone walked away with a sizeable profit, only the backers and fans getting stung.

Kincaid had pulled a similar stunt in the early 1930s in New Jersey and had to flee for his life, breaking speed limits through the turnpike running from the mob. After that, he always carried a gun, a Smith and Wesson, in a shoulder holster.

From this latest scam, Kincaid had handed Eva a bundle of US dollars to do with whatever she wanted which she had used to secure a berth on a ship departing Gdansk for Southampton for her grandfather and immediate family under the name of De Witte. Then she had obtained travel permits for them from the German underground which had formed once Hitler had taken power.

These perfectly forged papers had been paid for in cash by her and arranged for collection in one of the deposit boxes in the station. The key was slipped to her as she purchased her rail ticket by a female underground operative standing in the queue beside her.

Checking in her compact to ensure she wasn’t being followed, Eva went to the line of boxes and quickly found the locker. She removed the permits, ensuring her black fur stole and hat covered her face. In their place she left the brownie camera and four reels of Braille correspondence concerning her recent meetings. In the ladies toilets she handed the key back to the operative who was pouting into a mirror re-adjusting her make-up.

Before she boarded the train, Eva placed the hat and stole in a refuse bin. From her handbag she produced a beret and brightly coloured neck scarf, making sure she mixed with porters, milling passengers and the clouds of steam billowing from the locomotive.

Once settled into her compartment, she began to relax momentarily. She tipped the steward, ensuring she was not to be disturbed, and showed him her racial papers with Goebbels' stamp on them. He saluted straight-armed and promised her a peaceful journey, thrilled to be dealing with someone so close to the Reich's most powerful men. It was an early morning departure and not fully booked, mostly businessmen reading newspapers, but worryingly with a few SS, Gestapo and German Army officers dotted about the aisles.

On more than one occasion she was stopped in the Pullman lounge and her papers requested with a polite smile. Once they saw Goebbels signature clearing her racial status, they blanched and moved on from her with the briefest of salutes.

She sat alone at a pre-reserved table in the dining car and smoked, watching the countryside slip by, drinking coffee and reflecting. As the German countryside transformed into the Polish countryside, she watched the shimmering sunset across the fields and farms, glinting off farm machinery, buildings, streams and lakes. Whole communities passed her, some stopping from their labours to watch the steam train rush clattering past them.

She retired to bed. Beneath her pillow she kept a small thin stiletto in its sheath. Also, as a precaution, she jammed her overnight bag against the door. Being a light sleeper it would give her time to react if someone was to try to force the door.

Her grandfather’s house looked derelict, the facade and gardens in poor repair. She realised she hadn’t been home in two years. The neighbouring houses were pristine but his house itself reflected the demeanour of its occupant. Henk Molenaar shuffled to the door and opened it. Eva was taken aback. Her once tall, robust grandfather was now stooped and bedraggled. She could smell a blend of body odour, tobacco and whiskey upon him.

‘Oh Dziadzio,’ she whispered as he held out his arms. His bones seemed to be pushing out through his skin, his shirt and his cardigan. He summoned a smile from inside his beard. ‘Eva, my dear, what a surprise.’ His voice was a rasping whisper. ‘I was about to make some coffee.’

She guided him into the kitchen where unwashed pots, pans and crockery lay strewn across the counters and sink. He lit a cigarette, a racking cough arising from his lungs. Absently he spat on the floor. Agneska would have given him a reproachful look, but her absence was felt throughout the house.

Eva felt immense guilt for not having attended the funeral six months earlier while she tried to remain a cold dispassionate spy. Old cobwebs hung from window panes. The curtains had remained open since the funeral, and the windows were grimy. Henk had grown a beard in mourning. It sat about his face and chest unevenly, stained with tobacco around the mouth and nostrils. In the afternoon light, his skin looked seer, his eyes white balls with pinprick irises.

Opening every window, Eva cleaned the kitchen, swept the stone floor, and washed and laundered every piece of clothing and bedding. Then she ran a bath and tenderly bathed the old man, letting him sleep as she sat by the bed, reading to him and holding his hand. In the fading light, he seemed transparent on the pillow. She thought she could detect its intricate lacework beneath his features as his breathing came in short gasps.

‘Why didn’t you contact me, Grampy?’ she whispered, but understood after Aga’s death he had ceased living, enduring a lingering death that was taking longer than expected. Talking to neighbours, they told her that he rebuffed them at every opportunity. They eyed her suspiciously, this beautiful woman abandoning her family, her blood, then reappearing near the old man’s death.

She had organised to meet her cousins in St Mary’s Basilica in Krakow that afternoon, so she wrapped herself in Aga’s old great coat. It was dusty and still carried about it the faintest whiff of her favourite scent. A wave of nostalgia brought a smile to her face as she arranged a headscarf about her head and caught the bus to the city.

The Basilica’s interior shimmered in the candlelight. An organ was playing quietly, its mellifluous sounds echoing about the vaulted ceiling. Eva recognised the piece as being by Bach as she spied her two cousins — both girls — Michaela and Silvia — peeping out beneath modest shawls kneeling in pews in the shadows just off the main apse.

Eva genuflected for the first time in years in front of Wit Stowsz’s grand altar, reflecting on whether there was a place for someone like her in heaven, before slipping in beside them without making eye contact. The altar was quiet, the host covered, and the altar boys and deans went about their solemn duties. There were a few people sitting and kneeling in afternoon meditation, mostly elderly, though, possibly parents praying to God in whispered prayers for their children’s future.