8

The first thing Corey noticed in the Sharps’ apartment was an echo of muffled, scratchy classical music, like a piano trapped in a tin can.

As he walked past Leila’s mom’s room, he could see her through the open door. She was listening to a vinyl record on a turntable, her eyes closed as she swayed to the tune. He followed Leila down the long hallway into her bedroom. Her pillows were covered with old photos, in and out of frames. Sheet music lay neatly arranged in a checkerboard on her bed, around a toy piano. Ticket stubs, trinkets, jewelry, notebooks, silverware, and broken statuettes were strewn about her floor. “I think we have some good artifacts,” she said. “I don’t know where you’re going to put your backpack, though.”

“I’ll keep it on,” Corey said.

He ran his fingers along the piano. It was sturdy, made of wood and steel. He picked up a faded medal Leila had draped over the top. It was still attached to a shredded ribbon. “‘Frederick Scharfstein, Erster Preis,’” Corey read slowly. “Does that mean ‘first prize’?”

“Yup,” Leila said. “Frederick was my great-grandfather Fritzie’s full name. The music coming from Mom’s room? That’s Fritzie playing Bach. They recorded him a few months before he was killed. If you listen closely, you can hear his voice. Just a hint of a soft ‘uh . . . uh . . . uh’ in rhythm. He did that, kind of quietly grunted along with the music.”

Corey stepped back into the hallway. The piano was really racing now, the notes spilling out fast and furious. Through the hisses and crackles of the old recording, Corey could hear a human voice humming along, low and soft. It gave him a chill. “That’s actually him.”

“The family managed to hide away some recordings,” Leila said, “and all this other stuff. I’m not sure how they did it.”

“Or why,” Corey said. Much of the artwork was crude, street scenes with buildings that slanted the wrong way, portraits with crooked eyes and weird smiles, animals that seemed to be floating above the pastures. “Most of the art is pretty ugly.”

“It’s got to be, like, refrigerator art. The parents saving the kids’ masterpieces.”

Corey held up a metal-framed drawing of a horse in a field, not much bigger than a cell phone. At the bottom it was signed FS 1908. “Or their own.”

“FS—Frederick Scharfstein,” Leila said. Her face brightened as she ran her fingers along the metal frame. “Corey, this is amazing. This could take us back!”

“What would we do in Poland in nineteen-oh-eight?”

“Not Poland—Vienna,” Leila said. “Opa’s family traveled a lot. That’s why he knew so many languages. They were living in Berlin when Fritzie was old enough for high school. Back then, if you had some money and your kid was an artistic genius, you packed that kid off to Vienna, in Austria. It was really the center of culture in Europe. Fritzie dreamed of becoming an artist. His parents, my great-greats, knew Fritzie’s greatest gift was music, so they sent him to a place where he could study both. Vienna had a famous music conservatory and an academy of fine arts.”

“Okay, so how does this help us?” Corey said.

“Did you pay attention at all in World History class?” Leila said.

“No, I’ve been too busy changing it,” Corey replied.

With an exasperated sigh, Leila pocketed the small framed photo and darted over to her desk. Her fingers flew over her laptop keyboard, and when she was done she turned the screen toward Corey. On it was a Wikipedia entry adorned with the brooding, familiar face of Adolf Hitler.

“Hitler spent many years in Vienna, trying to be an artist,” Leila pointed out as she scanned the piece. “Hitler was born in eighteen eighty-nine, Great-grandpa Fritzie in eighteen ninety. Many years later, Opa would shake his fist and say, ‘If only we’d known what he would become, Papa could have poked his eyes out!’”

“Did they know each other?” Corey asked.

“I don’t think so,” Leila said.

“But they were studying in the same town, and that’s good enough,” Corey said. “Which means that if we go there, we could get to him before he became . . . Hitler Hitler.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Okay . . . we need a plan for this . . . we can’t just hop into Vienna and smack him over the head with a big sausage.” Corey began pacing the room. “Or maybe we could. It wouldn’t leave a trace.”

“Maybe we can do this without killing him,” Leila said.

“But he’s Hitler!” Corey protested.

Leila exhaled. “Okay. Close your eyes. Imagine you have a gun in your hand. Somehow, conveniently, you’re face-to-face with Hitler.”

“How?” Corey asked.

“I don’t know, he comes out of the men’s room—this is a thought experiment!” Leila said. “Now. There he is. Inches away. He smiles and says ‘Guten Abend.’ Which means ‘Good evening.’”

“What if it’s morning?”

“The point is . . . do you see yourself lifting the gun and killing him? Even though he’s Hitler? Are you capable of that? Or does your hand start to wobble? Do you have second thoughts? I mean, be truthful. Because if you don’t shoot instantly, and even if you do, those Nazis are all over you. And that doesn’t turn out well.”

Corey nodded. She had a point. If they were going to meet Hitler as a student, maybe there was a way to defeat him with a more normal, non-killing plan. “Okay, he dreamed of being a famous artist, right? If he succeeded, maybe he wouldn’t have become Dr. Evil. What if we were able to nudge him in that direction?”

“How? Like, promote his paintings?”

“Yeah, that was a dumb idea.”

“No! It’s got potential.” Leila began pacing, which in her room meant three steps forward and three steps back. “We could bring money into the past. We’d have to get hold of old-fashioned German currency—marks. We could buy up lots of his paintings. People will get the idea he’s really popular. We’ll drive up demand and maybe he’ll actually become a famous artist and not need to go into politics.”

“Unless,” Corey said, “his stuff really sucks.”

“It’s not about quality, it’s about popularity. We’ll do a social media campaign, using . . . whatever they used. This could work, Corey.”

“Really?” Corey said.

Leila fell silent. As the strains of Bach wafted through the door, Corey could read her mind. They wanted this thing to work, but it was really sketchy.

“We’ll keep thinking,” she said.

Corey scanned the debris in the room again. His eye went right to a twisted hunk of rusted metal, which looked like it had been chewed up by the Incredible Hulk. As he picked it up, an old envelope dangled from it on a string.

Carefully he reached into the envelope. Its edges disintegrated into flakes and dust as he pulled out an old photo, which had a handwritten message on the back.

The photo showed two older women standing at a gate marked with a sign in another language. They wore sunglasses and their white hair was done up in a sixties-style beehive. “Do you know who they are?” Corey asked.

“No clue,” Leila replied.

Corey turned over the photo. On the other side was a handwritten message:

CLARA, MEIN LIEBCHEN:

VERGISS NICHT.

HÖR NICHT AUF ZU VERSUCHEN

11/39

—M. STROBEL

Leila came closer. “‘Dear Clara’—the chen at the end is what you add when you like someone a lot—‘Do not forget. Do not stop trying.’ I don’t know who M. Strobel is. I guess these are the two people in the photo.”

“What wouldn’t they want to forget?” Corey said. “It sounds ominous.”

“November nineteen thirty-nine . . .” Leila was already flipping through her phone. “It was a really bad year over there. It’s when the Nazis started conquering Europe. We didn’t enter the war until nineteen forty-one, but horrible things were happening.”

Corey looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through a history of World War II. “Kristallnacht was November, but nineteen thirty-eight, a year earlier,” Leila said. “When the Nazis destroyed Jewish shops, breaking glass and kidnapping people, forcing them to go to death camps. Maybe this was a one-year anniversary? This could be something left over from the destruction.”

“Maybe we should go back to nineteen thirty-eight,” Corey said.

“Like, just some random time in nineteen thirty-eight?” Leila asked. “Why?”

“To help out,” Corey said. “If we get there, I can do some microhopping to get us back to before Kristallnacht. Then we can warn people, convince at least some of them to escape before it’s too late.”

“But . . . what about Hitler?” Leila asked.

“One step at a time,” Corey said. “Maybe when we’re there we can do some spying, meet some people in the Resistance. Time travelers make great spies, Leila. You and me, everyone in the twenty-first century, we know where Hitler went and what he did. We may have to snoop around in the past, then come back and do research so we can really nail a plan. But if we make friends with the right people, if we tip them off, they can do the dirty work.”

“You really think that would work?” Leila asked.

Corey shrugged. “At least as well as trying to turn Hitler into Mona Lisa Guy.”

“DaVinci,” Leila said. But she didn’t look convinced.

Corey knew if he hesitated, they’d never do anything. He held tight to the metal thing. It was beginning to feel warm. “Um, I’m needing an answer now, I think.”

“Corey . . . ?” Leila said.

It didn’t take long before he started to see white and feel like his own body was about to fly apart. “Hold on to me,” he said.

“You’re not actually doing this?” Leila said.

“Not by myself!”

“We haven’t talked it through—”

“Hold on to me! Now!”

He felt Leila’s fingers clasping his arm. He turned to face her, but all he saw was a field of white.

And all he heard was a sound like a jet engine.