“Yes. I’ll take care of it right away.”
“Who was that?” Yael asked after Miriam set down the receiver. The conversation had lasted less than a minute, but whatever had occurred on the other end of the line was drastic. Ingrid Wagner’s face was tile white, corpse white, filled with anger and colorless fear.
“We’ve missed something.…” Miriam’s voice returned to its normal octave, clenched as tight as her jaw. She turned back to the filing cabinets.
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s something here, something important.” The meticulous order of the DP drawers crumbled as Miriam began pulling out envelopes, stacking them on the doctor’s desk. It was a random pile, containing a few files from every single drawer: early 1945 all the way to the Maskiertekommando profiles. Anguish abridged. “We need to take these. As many as we can carry. Find something we can use to secure them beneath our jackets. Hurry!”
Yael wanted to keep pressing for information, but her friend’s urgency was contagious. She searched the office’s other drawers and came up with two rolls of medical gauze. “This should do the trick.”
Miriam was already unbuttoning her jacket, shoving up her blouse, pressing as many envelopes as she could against her bare torso. Their block shapes, so crammed together, reminded Yael of explosives. The amount of gauze used to secure them was only excusable for a surgical patient.
Yael constricted her body a dress size in order to pack more papers between cotton and ribs. They managed to tie the entire pile from Dr. Geyer’s desk onto their bodies, plus some extra envelopes retrieved for good measure, before Miriam nudged the drawers shut. One by one they locked back into place, each a little emptier than before.
“We have to leave,” Miriam said. “Right now.”
“What do you—” Yael was still tucking her blouse back in, yet her friend was already at the door, peering between the shades’ slats into an empty hallway. “Miriam, your jacket isn’t even buttoned!”
The other girl’s fingers twisted the overseer uniform back into place. Her hidden papers crinkled.
“Careful! If you move too fast, they’ll hear you,” Yael reminded. “What’s going on?”
“Questions later.” Comrade Commander Mnogolikiy was back. (In spirit, if not in face.) Barking orders. “We need to get out of the camp.”
Miriam pushed open the office door before Yael could argue, conquering the hallway with clipped steps. Yael followed; scores of concealed pages rustled against her rib cage as the two made their way out of the medical block, leaving the drawn shades and scent of bloodless bleach behind.
It was night in full now, pressing down against poplar branches and barbed-wire barriers alike. The groans of barrack suffering from Yael’s childhood had thinned alongside the smoke, faded to the point that the camp almost seemed quiet. This made Miriam’s rush all the more noticeable.
“Slow down!” Yael struggled to keep stride with her friend. “If you move like prey, you get noticed.”
It was a quote from one of Vlad’s many lessons. One that had stuck with Yael through the years. One that rang true with Miriam now. Her steps slowed, though Yael could still see the throb of some emotion (Anger? Fear?) in Ingrid Wagner’s neck veins.
Yael grabbed her friend’s sleeve, pulled her to a stop. “We’re almost out, but you can’t walk through the gates looking like this. Breathe.”
Miriam did the opposite. Lungs seizing. Freezing. Pupils flaring as they fixed on the path ahead. Yael turned and felt her own lungs freeze, seize at what she saw.
The Angel of Death moved through the lamplight, white coat winking in and out of shadows. Like everything else in the camp, the years had made him smaller. Yael knew, logically, it was because she’d grown taller, but the thought that something inside Dr. Geyer had shriveled helped her.
—KEEP BREATHING—
In the ballroom, when Yael stood face-to-face with the man she thought was the Führer, the only emotion she’d felt was fury. Even then, surrounded by the enemy on all sides, it hadn’t occurred to her to be afraid.
She was now. This fear was far different from what she’d felt after Luka’s truck-bed confession. It was a child’s terror. Clawing through her stomach, up her throat, demanding to be felt.
The path’s crushed bricks and granite griped under Dr. Geyer’s shoes as he walked. Downcast stare. Arms tucked behind his back. He was only three steps away when he noticed the Aufseherinnen beneath the poplar tree.
—DON’T LOOK HIM IN THE EYES HE’LL SEE YOU HE’LL KNOW—
“Good evening, Fräuleins.” The doctor smiled and dipped his head in greeting. There was still a gap between his two front teeth. Yael found herself falling back into old habits, fixing her stare on this space instead of the eyes above.
He did not make me. He did not break me either, Yael thought so she might keep breathing. But with the files bound so tightly to her chest, all she could manage was “Evening” before her lungs crumpled.
Miriam couldn’t even manage that. She nodded.
He did not make me.
—KEEP BREATHING—
He did not break me.
Dr. Geyer passed them by without another word. His coat flared against the light of a second lamp, tapering off into darkness as he veered toward the medical block.
He was going to his office, Yael realized. They’d left in such a hurry… there was no way they’d put everything back exactly as it had been. The doctor would notice something out of place; an alarm would be raised.
This time, when Miriam broke into an almost jog, Yael joined, ignoring the rustle of papers under her wool blazer, putting as many steps as she could between herself and what had just passed. When they came in sight of the gate, they slowed. Light was everywhere, cutting details into vicious silhouettes. The muzzles of the guards’ rifles, tips of the dog’s fangs, barbed-wire edges—all looked extra sharp under the floodlamps. Waiting to impale her.
They did not make me.
—KEEP WALKING—
They did not break me.
Yael stamped her fear down, keeping every detail of Elsa Schwarz’s face calm. She did not look to Miriam to see if her friend was doing the same. Instead she nodded at one of the guards, gave him a half smile.
The gates swung open.
Yael took one step, then another and another, her Aufseherin shoes sinking into the tire grooves made by supply trucks. This tread kept her steady: past the pant, pant of the Alsatians’ hot breath, past the sizzle, sizzle of charged metal lines. Even when the electric fences and canine enamel were paces behind, Yael still felt the impossibility of escape at her heels. Death’s jaws following her, ready to snap and swallow.
But the Aufseherinnen’s way out was as easy as the nurse’s had been. There were no commands to “Halt,” no storm of guard-tower bullets, just the clang of the gate as it shut again. Miriam and Yael and their Aufseherinnen faces walked all the way to the fringe of the spotlights. Only here did Yael let her half smile slip. Achy hollowness took its place.
Once they were well out of sight of the gates, they melted back into the trees, returning to their cache of old clothes and passbooks. Miriam dismantled her overseer uniform all the way down to envelopes and gauze, remasking her features into her farm-girl face. Yael did the same, clenching against the breeze that whipped through the trees. Ash stale.
“Miriam?” she asked. “What happened back there?”
“These files are valuable.” The other girl was shoving the pine needles into piles. Small funeral mounds for their Aufseherinnen outfits. “Very valuable.”
Yael plucked her first-face photograph from her pocket before adding the jacket to the rest of the clothes. The image called to her, begged to be looked at, but she slipped it into her sweater pocket along with the thumbtack and the smallest doll and the TT-33 and everything else she carried. “Who was on the telephone?”
“It doesn’t matter,” her friend said. “We need to get these documents to Germania.”
“We need to go back to the safe house. I’m not—”
“Leaving Luka and Felix.” Miriam stopped tossing vegetation over the shallow grave and rose. “I know. I was planning on getting them anyway.”
“You were?” Yael couldn’t hide her surprise. It was the first time the subject of the boys had come up without a fight.
The night shadows of the forest shifted when Miriam began walking, settling all at once—dark and grim—across her face. “We need to get things sorted.”