an unusual lightness in his step, the carefully benign mask he wore on the streets falling away to reveal cautious anticipation. “Rudolf Heberle came to see me today,” he said. “I invited him to join us for supper, but he couldn’t come.”
“Oh, I wish he had,” said Mildred as she set the table. “We haven’t visited with him and Franziska in ages. It would be so lovely to talk over old times in Madison.”
Like Arvid, Rudolf had come to the University of Wisconsin as a Rockefeller Fellow to study with Professor John R. Commons, and the two couples had become friends through the Friday Niters. Rudolf was a Privatdozent in sociology at the University of Kiel, but also like Arvid, he had been denied a professorship because of his political beliefs. His most recent book, a study of the rise of National Socialism amid the rural population of Schleswig-Holstein, was unlikely ever to be published in Germany while the Nazis remained in power.
“Rudolf agrees that opposition to the Reich is too weak, too scattered and directionless,” Arvid said.
“Yes, but how do we unite when anyone we approach might be a Gestapo agent?”
“We begin with friends we trust, and then friends of friends. Franziska has a second cousin in the intelligence office of the Air Ministry.”
“And we should start with him?”
“I know it sounds unlikely, but apparently he despises the Nazis as much as we do. Rudolf suggests we collaborate.”
Arvid explained that he had agreed to meet with Franziska’s cousin, Harro Schulze-Boysen, at their flat the following evening. “He and I shouldn’t be seen together in public, in case we need to deny knowing each other later,” Arvid explained. “I want you to meet him too, Liebling. If your intuition tells you we can’t trust him, I won’t.”
Mildred’s intuition told her she could trust Franziska and Rudolf, but Arvid’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the new risks he was prepared to accept sent a shiver up her spine. She consented, but throughout the next day, as she cleaned the flat and baked an Apfelkuchen from Mutti Harnack’s recipe, her hopes warred with apprehension, and she was tempted to phone Arvid and beg him to call off the meeting. Instead she busied herself with work, translating paragraphs of Stone’s Lust for Life until Van Gogh’s world seemed more vivid than her own.
The sound of Arvid’s key turning in the lock broke the spell. She set aside her books and papers and hurried to meet him, but they had only a few minutes to confer before a knock sounded on the door, precisely at the appointed hour. When Mildred answered, Rudolf quickly led a tall man in his midtwenties into the foyer. Although he wore black slacks and a black sweater beneath his black wool topcoat rather than a uniform, Harro Schulze-Boysen otherwise could have stepped right out of a Luftwaffe recruiting poster. He had broad shoulders and a military bearing that seemed to add inches to his height; handsome, patrician features; a strong chin and a confident smile; dark blond hair, a bit thin but not a strand out of place; and a keen blue-eyed gaze that, Mildred suspected, missed nothing. When he removed his hat, she quickly hid her surprise—part of his right ear was missing.
Rudolf waited until she had locked the door behind them to greet her fondly, but it was a brief, insufficient reunion, with little time to spare for family news. Mildred showed them into the sitting room where Arvid waited. Rudolf made introductions, Arvid and Harro shook hands heartily, and as they seated themselves, Mildred returned to the kitchen for Kaffee und Kuchen. By the time she returned, the men were so engrossed in their conversation that they scarcely glanced her way when she poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a seat. Arvid had asked her to observe and evaluate the Luftwaffe officer and she intended to do so.
She soon concluded that Harro despised the Nazis with such palpable antipathy that it could not possibly be a ruse. Although he was an avowed Communist, his patriotism sprang from an illustrious family military tradition; his great-uncle was the renowned Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, and in the Great War, his father, Commander Edgar Schulze, had served in Belgium as chief of staff to the German naval commander. Harro explained that he had joined Göring’s intelligence office not to serve the Reich but to hasten its demise, preserving Germany as a sovereign nation, governed by Germans. He was deeply