to a narrow room with a bed and washstand. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said before closing the door.
Eleanor did not sleep in the cold, sterile barracks, but waited for the hours to pass. She lay awake, imagining her girls arriving at the camp as the laborer’s testimony had described. She took small comfort in the fact that several of them had come together. How had they found one another? It seemed unlikely they had been arrested in the same place. Eleanor wondered over and over: What would have happened if they had received word sooner that the radio had been compromised and it was a trap? They might have split up and gone to ground. Instead, they were arrested and, in most cases, killed. It was her fault. She could have pursued her doubts, forced the Director or someone above him to listen sooner. But she hadn’t—and her girls had paid the price.
When at last the sky began to pinken over the pine-capped Bavarian hills, Eleanor washed as well as she could and changed her dress. She started outside. The air was crisp with a hint of dampness, as though it might snow again, but not right away.
Mick was waiting for her in the predawn stillness, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward as he opened the door to a jeep. Eleanor fought the urge to ask him for one. They climbed into the jeep, letting him drive again, and he navigated to the gate where she’d arrived the previous day. Neither spoke as they passed through.
He parked the jeep and stepped out. She followed, the edges of her skirt pulling from her boots where she had tucked them. They were inside the camp now. He led her wordlessly through the arch in the guard house, only the crunching of their boots against the snow breaking the silence. She looked for the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the entranceway, but it was gone. Inside the gate, there were rows and rows of barracks. She stared as though one of the girls might walk from one of the buildings at any moment. Where are you?
“Show me,” she said to Mick. Though it would tell her nothing, she needed to see where the girls had died. “Show me everything.”
He traced a line in front of them from left to right. “Arrivals came down this road, through the entrance with the railway station by the SS barracks.” Eleanor imagined her girls, exhausted and dazed, being forced to march down the path. The girls would have walked with heads high as they had been trained, showing no fear.
Mick led her down the semicircle of barracks, stopping at the final one. “This is the interrogation block where they would have been questioned and killed.” His voice was factual, emotionless. “There’s a crematorium out the back where the bodies were taken.” Eleanor had asked for everything and he would spare her none. She touched the bricks in horror.
“Is that it?” She gestured to a low building with a telltale chimney stack.
“The crematorium. Yes. The prisoners referred to it as ‘the shortest escape.’”
“I want to see.” She walked around to see the twisted, charred metal then knelt in the earth, sifting the gravel through her fingers.
“Come,” he said finally, helping her to her feet. “We only have a little time before they will take Kriegler for questioning. No one can know that I’ve let you in.”
He led her to the right, where a section of barracks had been cordoned off with barbed wire. “This is where we keep him and the other prisoners awaiting trial.”
“Not in the interrogation cell then?” she asked. It would have seemed fitting.
“If only. We need to preserve that for evidence.”
The soldier guarding the barracks eyed them uneasily. “It’s all right,” Mick said, flashing credentials at him. The guard stepped aside. Mick turned to her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
She crossed her arms. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I’ve been at this a long time and it’s been one heartbreak after another. The truth,” he added darkly, “is sometimes the very opposite from what you expect it to be.”
And once out, Eleanor thought silently, you can’t put it back any more than returning a mist of perfume to a bottle once it has been sprayed. She could walk away now. But she thought about Marie, who with her endless questions had always wanted to know the truth, about where the agents would be going, what they would be