Caroline Woods - Fräulein M.

“Oh, Klaus,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, one slipping down her cheek, but she couldn’t be sure what caused them.

Butter, not guns.

No, that wasn’t right.

Grete couldn’t sleep. Goebbels’s slogan hammered against the inside of her skull. Klaus snored beside her. After his proposal, she’d finished the bottle of champagne.

Guns, not butter.

After a while she got up and pulled the curtain aside, letting in enough moonlight so that she could study him, his long white body immodestly draped in her sheet, his sticky genitals exposed. He’d drifted off immediately after they made love. His penis curled in its nest like a giant grub.

He wanted to take her to Poland. She could tell he meant it by the way he’d attacked her once they were alone in her room. They’d staggered to the bed, attached at the mouths. Kissing before intercourse had been tossed aside months or years ago. Normally he started at her nipples, or by dropping his pants. Tonight he held her, cradled her head between his forearms as he pushed himself into her. He teased her tongue with his teeth. Did it hurt, he wanted to know. Did it feel good? Just these questions were almost too much for her to bear. He’d never asked before.

Warsaw . Married at a Catholic church in Poland. She dug around inside the bottom drawer of her desk, careful not to make much noise as he went on snoring. She’d heard the wives, even the officers’ children, who went to Czechoslovakia had helped make Case Green a success. They flirted with, hosted, befriended the Slovak nationalists whom their husbands convinced to side with Germany.

She found what she’d been looking for and quietly shut the drawer. In Poland, Klaus had told her, she could surround herself with Catholics. He’d figured out how to give her the biggest assignment of all and offer it dusted in sugar.

What would he think if he could see her now, naked except for her thin pair of panties, her tired hands pointing a gun at his face? Hers was a Mauser C96. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain, not after the Night of Broken Glass; the government’s ban on Jews keeping firearms resulted in a surplus for everyone else. All the salesman told her was that it was preowned. She’d never fired it, or even held it for so long; it required both wrists steadying the wooden handle, and still the barrel shook.

As delicately as she could, she cocked her weapon, keeping her eyes on his face. Soon he would ask about Herr Reuter. He’d ask after Frau Blumenthal. He was smart enough to put it together. She either had to leave him or kill him. She took a step closer, watched his chest rise and fall. Her sweat took on a different smell, something animal. Her neighbors would hear and come running. She would have to take care of herself before they could break down the door.

She couldn’t have known, not at this point, just what she might accomplish in killing Klaus. The annexation of Poland still sounded fairly innocuous. She could not know where Klaus would be in three short years, his boots caked in Lithuanian mud as he watched an endless parade of Jews, stripped naked and holding hands, march toward Soviet-dug trenches. Watching his brows lift innocently as some dream took him by surprise—he let out a faint whimper—Grete could not have imagined he’d be one of the men standing on the perimeter of those pits. That on command he would empty his weapon into the crowd.

She did not know what was to come, and yet she did.

Spit foamed in her mouth, leaking from her lips and mingling with her tears. Even if she convinced Herr Reuter to take her to Sweden tomorrow, even if she never committed another evil act for Klaus, she wouldn’t have done enough to stop him.

These would be her last thoughts on earth, then. One she offered to God, a prayer for forgiveness that she didn’t expect to be answered or even heard, and one for Berni. Wherever Berni was—above her, watching; abroad, living another life—she’d want Grete to pull the trigger.

Do it, little bird. Squeeze. It’ll be over in a second. One squeeze is all it takes.

Counting, Grete thought, might help; she’d count to three, and then she’d do it.

Eyes pressed shut, she got to three, still stood there trembling.

First she would touch him one last time. One caress, and then she’d end it for both of them. She chose her favorite place on his body: the hip, white and smooth, blue veins under the skin. When she felt how warm he was she realized too late that her hands had frozen. He jolted, eyes fluttering, and she stumbled backward, the gun dangling in one hand at her side.

“What is it?” he said, smacking his lips. He rolled over, facing the wall. “While you’re up, bring me a glass of water, will you? Then come to bed.”

She stood there with the gun pointed at him, waiting for him to turn and see her. “Yes, Klaus.” Her chest heaved. What would he say if he could see her? Would his pulse even rise, or would he know she wouldn’t go through with it?

After a while his snores began again, and slowly, slowly, her arms fell. She felt as though her spine had been yanked from her, as though she were a fish who’d been gutted. The Mauser returned to its drawer. Perhaps she’d have another chance, tomorrow, or after he returned from his next trip abroad. She spread her limp body onto the mattress, and Klaus draped a hand over her waist.

Anita stood at the motel window, watching the bleary landscape of Levittown, Pennsylvania, bend sideways in the wind. Between the sheets of rain and frothing trees the hardware store and sad strip mall across the street became almost beautiful; she could imagine them as little white castles at the bottom of an aquarium.

“The news is on, Mutti!” called Janeen from one of the beds, and Anita turned, reluctantly, back toward the television. Her bowl of fluorescent orange macaroni and cheese, purchased from the diner downstairs, had grown cold and hard on her bed.

As expected, the anchors began with scenes of hurricane devastation, the reporters in the field blinking under the hoods of their yellow raincoats. Hurricane Curt, via mudslide, had killed over a dozen people in the Caribbean. Much of the South had lost power as the storm grinded its way up the coast, and train travel had been shut down at Trenton, forcing Anita and Janeen to find a motel the night before.

“Look at that,” Anita said now. “It’s turning.” The satellite image showed Trenton under one of the storm’s long fingers, its eye poised to follow a dotted-line path out to sea.

“That’s a relief,” Janeen said, chewing the straw of her Coke. The lights flickered, and both of them tensed, but the electricity held.

Neither of them said aloud what they both hoped: that the news would shift to other stories, that they’d hear Klaus had been apprehended. With every minute that ticked past, Anita wondered how much closer he could have gotten to freedom. A full day had passed in which Margaret could have turned him in, and hadn’t. The two of them could be on their way to a remote island—would the storm have stopped them? He could have driven west. By now he could be close to Alaska. In any case, Anita knew that wherever he went, this time, he’d be careful. He’d ensure nobody would ever find him.

After the storm coverage ended, the anchors relayed the news of a failed mission in Vietnam that had taken the lives of thirty-six helicopter pilots, then a report of a fire in Philadelphia at the home of four Penn students: fortunately, nobody was hurt.

“You see?” Anita said, swigging Coke. “Candles.”

When the broadcast ended, again with no mention of Henry Klein or Klaus Eisler, Janeen dropped her head. She sat cross-legged on the bed, her bowl in her lap. “ Liebchen ,” Anita began, her voice cracking. What to say? Apprehending Klaus will not bring your father back? “I do not want you to be disappointed if Grete lied to us.”