at the Falkenberg Iron Works.”
“I didn’t—” She bit her tongue.
“Didn’t . . . import men and women from across Europe to work for you? Didn’t keep them in labor camps under guard or behind barbed wire?” Fenshaw rested his elbow on his files. “You didn’t starve them?”
No. She wanted to say she had never done these things. At least, not willingly. Not . . . with the intent to do harm. And he didn’t tell the whole story. How the government controlled the labor system in the war. Most of the foreign workers had been forced to come to her, yes, but she had tried to avoid it, to fill her vacancies any other way she could. She could inform him about the recruitment drives in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the wages she had promised and paid, the workers free to rent flats like a German anywhere in the city. Men did come voluntarily. That had existed too, she wanted to tell Fenshaw. Though as the war went on, if a highly skilled man asked to leave . . .
She folded her hands in her lap, ashamed of the trick played on some of the workers, their voluntary contracts changed to forced ones by the government. All she had been able to do was quietly warn them it was about to happen. She had planned to seek out each man herself, as head of the Labor Office, to give him any outstanding wages and the advice to not come to work the next day. But when she told Elisa, by now one of her assistants, the plan, Elisa had said it was nonsense. Fr?ulein Falkenberg couldn’t do such a thing in person. “Leave it to me,” she’d said, a twinkle of mischief in her eyes. Clara had reminded her friend that this wasn’t a game. By helping workers escape, they were undermining the war effort.
She was trembling more violently now. “Sir, why are you doing this?” She showed Fenshaw her hands, how stiff the fingers were. “Why are we sitting out here in the cold?”
“You’re uncomfortable?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Answer my questions and I’ll take you somewhere warm.”
He’d said it in a friendly fashion, but his words sent a shiver of warning through her. This roadside interrogation—it was part of his calculations, a way to wear her down.
“I’ve been cooperating as best I can, sir.”
“Tell me.” He was fingering his files again as if looking for some fact he had lost. “Those poor sods you shipped in from Poland and the Soviet Union—did you see them as humans at all?”
Of course. She was so outraged, she nearly got up from her stool, ready to walk away from him. But when she moved, Fenshaw did too, close enough to catch her by the arm. Behind her, she sensed the soldiers closing in.
“You have nothing to say?” Fenshaw asked. “About the transports, the hunger, the deaths?”
It was true, there had been—she touched a throbbing ache that had developed in her eye—casualties. Illness, injury, starvation. She had desperately appealed to the authorities for more rations. She had sent Max and Elisa to find any sources of food they could—nearly impossible with supplies vanishing all over the city as the war went on. Now and then, they risked buying from shady men who hoarded food or sold it on the wartime black market. But it wasn’t enough. Clara couldn’t supplement the rations of thousands of people out of her own pocket, even if there had been food to buy. And so people had sickened under the double weight of hunger and hard work. Some had died in her care. Did he think she had forgotten that?
“I don’t know what you want me to say, sir.”
Fenshaw rested his fist on the table and, for a moment, she thought he would lose his composure. “At the end of the war, why did you run?”
She curled her fingers in her gloves. She couldn’t feel them any longer. She thought of the Ukrainian girl in the kerchief breaking into a smile, her third upper tooth on the left missing, giving her whole round face a kind of dogged, childlike hope. Clara closed her eyes. Oh, Galina.
“Are you so afraid of prison?” Fenshaw asked.
She nearly snapped at him: You don’t know me. All your files, and you still don’t know me.
“You were always a private person,” he said. “Are you afraid of the attention? The press hounding you. The trial. Is that what you’re scared of? The exposure?”
In the distance, the lights