The film wasn’t difficult to remove. Yael had watched the Reichssender crew do it plenty of times after her on-the-road interviews as Adele Wolfe. She tucked the reel under her arm and started for the door. Her steps shook, from the very marrow out, not because she’d been wounded, but because the room around her felt less than real. She felt less than real, a hollow girl among corpses.
White men smeared in so much red. The truth spooled tight under her arm.
Was this enough to change things?
Adolf Hitler was long, long dead and Aaron-Klaus had made a difference. Not such a useless death after all. But what about all of this? What about Luka? What was the use? Why did he have to die?
Why was she always the only one left?
The film crew had almost made it to the door before being shot down. The boom operator had been hit in the neck. Instantaneous. The cameraman was… not dead. The man stared at her. A low groan left his lips: pain.
Pain meant life.
Yael stopped and knelt down, turning the man over to appraise his injuries. He’d been shot—once—in the back. The bullet had passed through, leaving an exit hole in the cameraman’s right shoulder. Bleeding was a problem, but if Yael helped stanch the flow, he just might make it.
“Do you want to live?” Again, her voice felt apart from her. As if another being were forming the words just above Yael.
The man nodded.
“The only way that might happen is if we air this on the Reichssender. If I patch you up, can you help me?”
He nodded again.
Life. Yael needed it now. Life and the truth out there. Which was why she tore off a portion of the dead boom operator’s undershirt, wadded it into a ball, and pressed it to the cameraman’s wound.
His name was Dietrich. Dietrich Krauch. He’d been a cameraman since the war, one of the Reichssender’s first employees, which was why he’d been chosen as one of the select few to record the reclusive Führer’s Chancellery Chats. It was the highest of honors, veiled in unusual amounts of confidentiality.
“We never actually filmed in the Ch-ch-chancellery,” he explained through chattering teeth (shock setting in). “The lighting is n-no good there, can’t get the same picture q-quality. But the Führer encouraged the rumor that he was a recluse, s-said it was safer if no one knew he came to the Ordenspalais to film. Hitler always had his SS guards clear extra personnel out of this wing for productions. Didn’t even want Goebbels p-present.”
So that was why they were still alone. Ever since the last shot, Yael had been listening for the footfall of SS, but reinforcements never came. Himmler had cleared this area of the building so thoroughly that no one had heard the firefight. The Reichsführer had buried himself in his own crypt of secrecy.
And he was about to take the Third Reich with him.
“Now you know why.” Yael crammed the cloth against Dietrich’s shoulder. “Himmler and the Maskiertekommando wanted as few witnesses as possible in case they were exposed. The Reich needs to know this, too. We need to get Himmler’s secret on the air.”
“Werner and I were supposed to deliver the film to the master control room once everything wrapped,” the cameraman explained. “It was to air immediately.”
“How many men are in the control room?”
“There’s just one operator. His name is Bernhard. But the control room is on the other side of the annex.” Dietrich frowned. It was clear even to the cameraman that he was in no condition to walk that far. “Bernhard won’t recognize you.…”
“That won’t be a problem.” Yael surveyed the boom operator’s face: chicken pox scars, a dash of gray on the eyebrow, lips of average plumpness. Through the glaze of death, his eyes shone blue.
Dietrich’s shock grew twofold as he watched Yael adopt his dead cohort’s features. She stripped the boom operator, trading in her SS-Oberschütze uniform for his outer garments. There was a bloodstain on the back of Werner’s collar. Still wet. It stuck to Yael’s neck as she bent down to retrieve the film reel.
“Keep pressure on the wound,” she instructed the cameraman. “Don’t let up, or you’ll bleed out.”
Once the Chancellery Chat aired, the studio would be swarming: Dietrich’s help, her doom.
The halls were empty, empty, echoing. In order to reach the master control room, she had to go back the way she came, pushing past Luka’s 1953 poster. The boy he never was. The boy she’d never speak with, laugh with, cry with, see again.
But why, why, why?
So much loss demanded an answer. All of Yael’s insides ached for it. Her fingers went white against the film casing, and she kept walking, past the service entrance, all the way to the master control room. She found Bernhard in a rolling chair, legs propped on the control console, nose deep in a book. He leapt to his feet when he saw Werner, reading material flying. “Scheisse! Sorry, Werner. Didn’t hear you come in.”
Yael grunted. She kept her back to the door, hiding the dark splotch left by the boom operator’s death. Bernhard was too flustered to notice. He held his hand out for the reel. “Finished, already? That was fast.”
—ALL READY TO FINISH—
She passed him the film.