K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

The woman in the photo held the little boy in her arms, leaning backward to balance him against her breast and shoulder. The shutter had snapped as she had smiled and said something to the boy, his gaze still dubious as he looked into the lens and sucked a fingertip of one chubby hand.

“Do you see, Fraulein Helle?” The consulate official spoke softly. “Look carefully. The eyes – look at the eyes.”

Not the eyes of the woman in the photograph. The little boy; Marte brought the photograph closer to her own face, searching it.

And finding…

“Now you see. Don’t you?” The official whispered to her.

She nodded. “Yes…” The photo held her, so that she could barely speak. But she saw. There in the little boy’s face, gazing silently back at her.

One eye light in shade. That was the blue one, blue as her eyes. And the other, the little boy’s left eye – that was darker, almost black in the photograph. That was the golden-brown one.

How old was the child? He looked to be about three years old, with a serious, unsmiling expression. That would be the right age. Three years – so much had happened in that time, but so little as well. Nothing had happened at all, she was still exactly the same, still the girl in the bed with her swaddled newborn in her arms, listening to the step of the hostel’s director coming down the hallway outside the door, coming toward her and the infant with eyes of mismatched color, one blue, one brown…

Marte turned back to the first photograph, where the woman’s face could be seen more clearly. “I remember her.” Not the girl’s name, but the way she had laughed and spoken. “She was there… she was at the Lebensborn hostel…”

“That’s right.” The consulate official nodded. “She bore a child for the Fuhrer. And she was given another child to raise with hers. Your child, Fraulein Helle.”

The top photographs slid off the stack and dropped to the floor at her feet. A close-up of the child’s face was revealed, showing the bicolored eyes even more clearly. Marte touched the glossy surface of the photo, as though she could reach through and stroke the child’s soft cheek. She could see behind the child’s face, to an even younger one, an infant, its pink cheek pressed against her own skin…

“You’re lying.” She snapped her head erect, trembling as she glared at the man sitting across from her. “This is some kind of a trick. This could be anyone’s child. You retouched the photos, you found another one. You did… you did something…”

“ Fraulein Helle – please calm yourself.” Again, the consulate official touched his fingertips together. “I assure you that the Schutzstaffel keeps excellent track of its own. The ties of blood are important to us.” He had dropped all pretense of being other than SS himself. “This child is the son of an officer in the Leibstandarte SS , now serving at the Eastern Front. A child conceived in further service to Germany, a child to whom you gave birth, with no shame. The shame, the Rassenschande, was in your concealing of your racial background. But that’s of little concern to us now. What is important now is that your child is alive, and in good health, I might add – the foster mother has taken excellent care of him. Though none of us expected that the child’s true mother would become a film star of note one day, and even more importantly, the object of a Reichsminister ’s desire. That made it easy for us to render this valued service to him. To come to him and tell him that here is the way to bring the woman he loves back to Germany. For surely this means more than even being die Konigen des deutschen Filmes, does it not? To be close to your child once again, whom you had thought was lost forever to you – I don’t believe Herr David Wise can offer any enticement to match that.”

The rest of the photos had slipped from her grasp, scattering across the floor. She watched helplessly as the consulate official bent down and picked one photo up, then held it out to her.

“You know it’s true, don’t you?”

She tried to turn her face away from the photo, the face of the little boy, but couldn’t.

The consulate official’s voice whispered at her ear. “You must think with your blood, Marte. Then you’ll know this is your child.”

Her sudden tears blurred the photograph. The child’s somber, unsmiling face turned to nothing but muddled shades of black and white, then vanished as she broke away her gaze. A sob rose in her throat as she turned her own face against the chair, as though she could hide in its depths, falling into the darkness that would welcome and forgive her.

The shades had been drawn, sealing out the merciless bright sunshine of the morning. A little piece of night remained inside the room that Ernst von Behren used as his study. He sat deep in brooding thought behind the desk. One of the few books he’d managed to bring with him from Berlin lay on the desktop, a black silk ribbon marking his place halfway though the yellowed pages. The book was a favorite, he’d read it many times through since he’d been a boy. But there’d be no reading of old tales set in thorny black-letter, this day. Perhaps for many days to come.

“It is true -” Marte sat curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, her legs tucked up beneath her, a wet handkerchief squeezed into a ball in one hand. Her face was still puffy and reddened from her crying, though the tears had stopped hours ago. “I know it is.”

She had said those same words over and over, and each time von Behren had felt a knifeblade touch his heart, the edge dulled to ache rather than cut. He slowly rubbed a fingertip on the only other thing on his desk, a photograph of a child lifted up in a another woman’s arms. The corner of the photo had been crumpled where Marte had clutched it tight; he watched his own hand trying to smooth out the frayed creases.

There was nothing he could do about the things of which she told him. His brooding was a pit that opened wider beneath him. Working on a screenplay with Wise or anyone else, he could slash a red pencil through the bad parts, or crumple into his fist a page that was beyond redemption and hurl it toward an overflowing wastebasket. The SS were considerably more difficult to dispose of.

Von Behren roused himself from his brooding. The man from the German consulate, who’d come to Marte with the photos of the child, had displayed a fine sense of timing. David Wise wasn’t here in Los Angeles at the moment; he wasn’t even in California, but had just left on a two-week business tour of the movie theaters under the control of the Wise Studios – a separate corporation was about to be set up, to avoid getting hit with the same antitrust pressure that Roosevelt’s Attorney General had brought against MGM and Warner Brothers. He would have been the only one who could keep Marte here; he would have been able to wrap his arms around her and hold her, let her cry against his chest, tell her that he and his money and all his powerful friends would do something, he’d go up against the iron weight of the Reich, against Goebbels and the SS, he’d find a way to get the little boy out and bring him here…

It wouldn’t have even mattered if Herr Wise had lied to her about those things, about what he could or couldn’t do. He would at least have found a way of keeping Marte here. Told her that it would be better if she stayed here, in this safe country, while he pulled strings, all his great net of connections and influence, to find the little boy, Marte’s child, and trade whatever else Goebbels and the SS might want for him.

Which was the problem, of course; von Behren’s heart slowed and grew heavy inside him. He knew there wasn’t anything else that the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment wanted. He had done his job all too well, when he had set out to have Goebbels fall in love with his protegee. Only one love greater, the interlocking of obsessions between the Reichsminister and the Fuhrer, that could have made Goebbels send Marte away. And now things had changed; Goebbels had paid his penance, the Fuhrer ’s gaze had turned elsewhere – and now the Reichsminister would have her back again.