JOCCO HAD BROUGHT SOME BREAD AND CHEESE IN HIS satchel, some water and, blessedly, a mickey of Scotch. She slept some, curled up in her slip in the chair, while Jocco sat by the window and stared out into the night. She was awake by seven, her neck stiff, her mouth a desert. They didn’t talk much, though Müller’s muttering increased by the hour. Yet it was only when the minute hand on the desk clock hit quarter to eleven that Roxy really started to feel nervous. She felt that she would actually kill someone for a cigarette, but she couldn’t risk meeting the smoking soldier again on the terrace or lighting up inside.
It didn’t help that Jocco was pacing up and down, checking and rechecking his wristwatch, pausing to look out the window at the Spree below and curse the two patrol vessels that buzzed around the island like flies. Under the growl of their engines, sounds had been building from the front of the museum—vehicles drawing up, men in shod boots marching in formation across the Friedrichs Bridge, the swelling noise of a crowd. Adolf Hitler was visiting the museum, and wherever he went, mobs formed to adore him.
“For crissake, Jocco, will you just sit already?”
He stopped. “I can’t. If I sit, I think too much. If I think too much—” He broke off.
“You wonder just what the hell we’re doing?”
“Precisely.” He peered down at her, rubbed the morning shadow on his chin, a sound like sandpaper, eerily loud. For a pale northern European he sure grew a fast beard.
She crossed to him, took his hands. “Don’t think of the risk. Think of the result. All that money. Think what we can do with it. You can buy guns to free the workers from their oppressive overlords, while I…I can’t decide between Lockheed or Boeing. Monoplane or biplane? Which do you think will get me to Australia faster?”
He finally cracked a smile. And as the minute hand crept toward the hour and the crowd noise swelled, they talked world revolution and stalling speeds.
It was at five to eleven that Müller woke up.
His muttering hadn’t increased. There was no sign. One moment he was out, and the next he bolted upright and was staring at them. “Who are you?” he demanded in German. “What are you doing here?”
Roxy took a step toward him. “Remember me, Herr Direktor? Frau Winter? We had a helluva—”
It was as far as she got before Jocco moved past her. He didn’t talk. He just dipped his huge frame and uncoiled it, putting everything he had into the punch. His fist connected with Müller’s jaw and the man’s head snapped back. His body followed, rearing back from the cot to smash into the wall under the window.
“Jocco! What the hell?” Roxy was around the desk fast and bent over the crumpled German. His head lolled and blood ran between his shattered lips. That bubbled, so at least he was breathing. She took his body, lowered him to the ground, turning him on his side. “What have you done?” she shouted. “You might have killed him. It wasn’t necessary.”
“It was.” Jocco joined her and grabbed her arm, jerking her to her feet. “Look. Look!”
She looked where Jocco pointed—to the Friedrichs Bridge. Saw the soldiers, double ranked on each side of it, holding back the ecstatic mobs behind them, who screamed in joy just the one refrain, their arms shot out in one salute. “Heil Hitler!” they cried, again and again at the man dressed simply in battlefield grey, sitting in the open-topped Mercedes. Though perhaps some of the acclamation was for the man who sat beside him, who made him look small and perhaps a little dull—Reichsmarschall Göring, in his sky-blue uniform, sunlight refracting off the starburst of medals with which his chest was studded. Trumpets started blowing a fanfare of welcome.
“Quickly,” Jocco said, bending to lift the fake Bruegel.
She opened the door and led the way down the corridor. They were halfway along, when the voice came.
“Herr Direktor Müller?”
They froze—but Roxy only for a moment. Because she recognized the voice. Waving Jocco to a stop, she continued, turned the bend and saw her smoking companion of the night before, descending the stairs from the gallery. “Hey, just the guy I wanted to see,” she said, moving fast up to him. “Got a light?”
The soldier frowned at her. “What are you yet doing here, Fräulein?” he asked, doubt clear in his eyes. “Der Führer arrives. Der Direktor is requested. I must bring him.”
He went to step around her. She blocked him. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought he must hear it. She knew her face was wet with sweat, and her hand shaking like she had a palsy. “He’s, uh, he’s just getting ready. Asked me to stay. To meet der Führer.”
Something else came into the young man’s eyes. Contempt replaced doubt. He glanced down. “In this dress?” he said. “It is not…respectful.”
He was right. Herr Bochner had made a dress for a classy seduction, not a demure reception. “True. I’ll go back and get my coat, I promise. That, uh, light? I’m gasping for a smoke.”
His stare was as cold as his words. “There is no time. Der Führer is here. You and the director will come immediately.”
He went back up but stopped on the landing to yell “Rauchen Verboten” at her before he opened the gallery door and stepped through. Göring’s distinctive voice came, echoing through the galleries, amplified and a little distorted, some speech of welcome from the front steps of the museum. The door closed again, muffling the voice. She leaned over the stairs. “Quick now,” she said. Jocco came up and passed her, grunting. She followed.
Göring concluded his oration just as she opened the door set in the gallery wall. The excited buzz of people reached her, then quadrupled in volume as the front door opened. Hitler was entering the building. They had two minutes, if that.
She closed the door quietly, turned back. Jocco had put the painting down. “You’re up,” she said.
“I know. I…”
His voice sounded fragile. She peered at him in the corridor gloom. His face looked fragile too. He was running his tongue over his lips as if he was trying to lick them off. “It is the moment. I must—”
In all their time together, through some pretty hairy episodes, she’d never seen him hesitate. She didn’t want to see it now. “Baby,” she said, “let me do that.”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him hard. He held back for a moment—then gave, sinking into her. She pulled away a couple of inches, dropped her hands to his collar and did up the top button there, between the skull and the silver pips. “Off you go, Lieutenant,” she said. “Do your duty.”
He stretched to his full height, adjusted his cap, shot his cuffs. “I go,” he said, and marched out the door. Ten seconds later his voice came clear, cutting through the noise of the approaching party. The German was fast, barked-out militaristic commands she didn’t understand. She got the gist, though.
“The Führer approaches. You will line the balcony and greet him with salutes.”
“Jawohl, Obersturmführer.”
Four voices chorused their obedience; four pairs of heels clicked. She heard men marching away on the wooden floor. And one coming toward her fast. Jocco.
“Hurry!” he said.
He came through the door and set down his burden. She caught the briefest of glimpses—the anguish on Daedalus’s face as he watched his son die. Hoisting the fake again, Jocco made for the gallery. She followed.
A swelling noise came from the stairs. Jocco stumbled, nearly falling, but Roxy stepped up, took some of the weight. Together they ran the painting to the empty easel and heaved it up. As another chorus of “Heil Hitler” rose from behind them, they stepped back, preparing to flee—and gasped.
They’d hung the painting upside down.
Roxy had her hands on it one second before Jocco. They lifted, swivelled, placed. It wasn’t perfectly centred, but it would have to do. Flinging the shroud over the painting, they turned and ran.
As they left the gallery by one entrance, others came into it by another. And Roxy had the strangest sensation: that though all eyes were on the hero entering the space, the hero’s own eyes, Adolf Hitler’s, were on her, centred on her teal dress. Yet no cry came, no pack was unleashed to pursue them. They went through the doorway, closed it softly. Both sagged, leaning their butts against the wall. From the gallery behind them, his voice unamplified this time, they heard Göring speechifying again.
“Come,” Jocco said, bending, heaving.
Roxy lifted the back of the Bruegel and somehow they negotiated the stairs down. She unlocked and opened the terrace door, as Jocco hoisted the painting alone and ran it to the perimeter wall. He set it down as they crouched, peering over the parapet.
One patrol vessel was almost directly before her. One glimpse before she ducked showed her the faces of the crew—the helmsman staring ahead; two soldiers at the bow poised around a mounted heavy-calibre machine gun; an officer, judging by his braid and sleeve stripes, his hand sheltering his eyes, scanning the far bank. She peeped until its stern disappeared around the tip of the island to her left and then she looked right—where the bow of the other vessel appeared almost immediately. It had the same four-man crew, same set-up, but was moving a little faster, she thought.
As it passed them, approached the island’s tip, Jocco looked at his wristwatch and said, “Tell me when it vanishes.”
She watched. “Now,” she said.
She reckoned it was about a minute and a half before the first boat reappeared. It was less. “Eighty-three seconds,” he said.
They waited, until the second boat came and went again. “Now,” she said. He stood up and waved frantically. There was an immediate roar of an engine and in a moment the Fromer boat was powering toward them. There in less than thirty. Fifty left, Roxy thought, as Ferency jumped onto the steps, took the painting. Jocco leaped down and reached up for her. She used his hands but still landed heavily, her left stiletto heel snapping cleanly off. She kicked the other shoe into the river and climbed over the gunwale after the two men.
“Grab hold!” came a woman’s shouted command.
Which Roxy failed to obey, and thus tumbled into Ferency as the boat reversed fast away from the steps, bringing them both down. He cursed her in Hungarian, either for the pain of her landing on top of him or the further spoiling of his beautiful suit, stained now with diesel-rich water.
“Under, all of you!” the woman yelled.
Ferency grabbed Roxy and pulled her none too gently to a wooden hatching, a cover to some hold below. Jocco grabbed a large tarpaulin, flung himself down beside them and pulled the heavy, greasy material over them.
“What the hell,” Roxy began.
“Shsst!” Jocco hissed. “It is planned. Shsst!”
That’s when the engine cut out.