them. There was one kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Everybody teased him for pinning up a picture he’d ripped from a women’s magazine.
Jakob bolted upright. He tore away the blankets, knocked over the lamp in search of his crutch, and limped into the hall. He hammered on the neighbor’s door.
“Herr Relling?” Frau Kreuz squinted in the light. “It’s the middle of the night, are you mad?”
“Tell me you’ve still got that collection of the NS-Frauen-Warte you always displayed when you had visitors.”
She peered at her bare wrist. “What time is it?”
“Those magazines. The ones you hid from the Tommies so you can use them as toilet paper. Any left?”
“You drunk? What do you want a women’s magazine for?”
He searched his pockets for a cigarette and held it out to her. She stuck it behind her ear and lumbered into her bedroom, rummaging quietly under the bed where two of her daughters slept. She emerged with a moldy cardboard box full of the magazines. For another cigarette, she carried them into his parlor.
Quietly he inspected the NS-Frauen-Warte, the National Socialist women’s magazine. A typical cover from the early years showed a fat-cheeked baby in the arms of a young woman in a field of daisies. Caption: Mother, you carry the Fatherland. He examined every picture, then shifted to the next one, and the next, sure that when he saw the woman he was looking for, he’d know her instantly.
In 1944, the propaganda machine was well into Total War mode. No plump baby now, but a girl in a bomb factory and not looking too happy about it. German women didn’t exactly line up to build bombs. Jakob searched every page for Margarete Müller, then tossed the issue aside.
The cardboard box was nearly empty. He lifted out one of the remaining few, and there she was. On the cover, the last ’44 issue. It wasn’t the same photograph he’d seen in Russia, but it was the same woman. She posed at the open door of a Mercedes. The landscape behind her was smokestacks and brick factories. Her platinum-blond hair was straight out of a bottle and the wave from a Hollywood poster. Her eyes were as pale and hard as that diamond on her finger.
Caption: Clara Falkenberg—the exceptional duties of the German woman at war.
“Jesus, Maria, and Joseph.” He stared at that picture. That name.
Clara Falkenberg, the Iron Fr?ulein, the former Reich’s most eligible heiress.
13
The villa in Bredeney was a powder-blue confection, just the place for her mother, who was far too fine to share an attic room or a cellar. But then, in the doorway, Clara saw the list of names on bits of paper or scrawled directly on the wall. The villa had been divided into flats, and by the look of it, not enough to fit the number of families who lived inside it. Her mother’s name wasn’t there, but Max assured her they were in the right place. He pushed open the door without ringing, and she saw in the narrow foyer that someone had cut away the wires to the buzzer.
Max deposited his bicycle under the stairs and then led the way up, moving stiffly and gripping the banister. There was something alarming about seeing him like this, worn out after the frozen ride across the city. Energy was the one thing he had always counted on, even in the war when they worked devilish hours and hardly slept.
“Are you eating enough?” she asked.
In the stairwell, he paused by the strip of painted flowers, chipped and worn, that ran along the wall. “I’m better off than most. They feed me at Falkenhorst, but I skipped it today.”
Nobody skipped a warm meal. As she followed him up the next flight of stairs, she guessed what he hadn’t told her. He had packed up his food to take home to his family.
He led her to the second floor, and they paused in the hallway to catch their breath. A bulb burned on the ceiling, shaded by a thick round of paper. The door on the right was badly scuffed at the bottom. Clara tried to imagine her mother kicking it open every time she went in. After knocking, she waited, feeling that this must all be a mistake. Her mother couldn’t possibly live in a place like this.
Anne Heath Falkenberg opened the door, and then stood there as if frozen. Her face was pouched and sagging, the eyelids, the mouth, the chin. Clara didn’t recognize the wattle of skin,