Page 16

Please, God. Please, let it be so.

Those silent words, more a prayer than he’d uttered in far too long, made his throat ache with the yearning to speak them out loud.

He hadn’t wanted to pray, not since his world went so silent.

But here, now, surrounded only by people he didn’t dare to trust.

..he needed that, at least. One friend who would never betray him.

A friend he knew would forgive him for the long year of silence. Who stood always with arms stretched wide to receive him, wide as the cross on which he’d hung for the sake of that forgiveness.

Kraus let out a long stream of breath, and his arms relaxed on the wheel. “So...we should talk to the mademoiselle ? Win her over?”

They should do no such thing. But he smiled, just as he would for a student who had ventured to answer in class for the first time. It didn’t matter what they said, only that they were saying it. Thinking it through. Taking a risk. “Win the youth, and you win the country.”

Hitler had proven that in Germany too. It was the students who had led the book burnings, the bannings. The children, like Kraus, who had shamed their families into complying with each new regulation. If it weren’t for the Hitler Youth, the German army would be a much smaller force.

But he hoped and prayed that the students of France wouldn’t bend so easily. They would be a force—students always were—but it was yet to be seen what kind of force they would be.

Resistance? Or true surrender?

Kraus pulled over in front of the H?tel Lutetia, now the headquarters of the Abwehr —German Intelligence. This time, Christian had no trouble waiting for his aide to come and open his door for him. The trouble was in convincing his legs to hold him when he climbed out of the auto.

He’d been doing his best for the past seven years to stay out of buildings like this, out of the attention of the Abwehr, of the Gestapo, of the Party in general. He chose his words diplomatically...most of the time. He kept his true opinions to himself—with perhaps one or two exceptions.

And look where it had landed him. Not in a Gestapo holding cell, it was true—but striding into an interrogation of a man who’d once been a friend, wearing the uniform that would tell Abraham Cohen in a glance that they were enemies now.

They weren’t. But Christian couldn’t let him know that.

Thank God, his legs were as well accustomed to striding forward when his mind was a million miles away as his lips were at smiling when he felt a blink away from tears. He was inside the hotel in seconds, striding straight for the lift. He knew what floor he needed, what room.

He knew that Ackermann would be there, along with at least one of the intelligence officers who had dined with them on Saturday, and likely an SS officer. Christian was to be the representative of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda.

Such irony. Such horrible, hideous irony.

The room was, at least, not an interrogation cell. No bare bulbs swaying dramatically overhead, no blood stains on the floor. It was just a hotel room, with the beds moved out and a table moved in.

Abraham Cohen sat on one side, blessedly free of bruises and blood—his hands were in cuffs on the table, but that was all. He didn’t look up, but he appeared unharmed.

Christian’s muscles relaxed just a bit. Perhaps they would be civilized.

He was the last one to enter, apparently—only one chair remained unfilled on the Nazi side of the table. And for whatever reason, they’d left him the middle seat. He took it, offering no apology for his lateness.

Apologies showed weakness. And while he strangely didn’t mind revealing that vulnerability to his book-loving neighbor on Boulevard Arago, he wouldn’t show even a scrap of it to these colleagues.

He simply sat, opened his briefcase on his lap, pulled out pen, paper, and the file he’d requested that morning on Cohen,and then reclasped the case and set it on the floor beside his chair.

Ackermann cleared his throat. “I thought we said ten-thirty.”

This time, he pulled out the smile he reserved for other faculty who meant to belittle him and thereby advance their own prospects. “Does Herr Cohen have another appointment to keep?”

Ackermann’s smile was stiff, but the Abwehr man on Christian’s other side, Wagner, laughed. “We waited for you, Bauer, since you’re most familiar with Cohen’s...body of work.”

“Indeed.” He didn’t look over at Abraham, but he could see the man shift and knew Abraham was looking at him now.

Christian prayed he’d have the wherewithal to keep his recognition from his face.

Rather than glance up to see, he flipped through a few pages and made a few notes in a shorthand that the others wouldn’t be able to make sense of.

Largely because it was senseless scribbles. He already knew what he meant to say here, just as he already knew every article, poem, treatise, and book the man before him had written.

But there was a script to follow. One he’d written himself as he lay awake in the predawn.

Scribbling complete, he finally looked up, careful to keep his expression bored.

He met Abraham’s eyes. And he willed the man to see the truth hidden beneath the layers of role in his own.

“Could you please state your name for the record?”

Abraham didn’t move. Didn’t draw in a breath. Didn’t so much as blink for ten long seconds. And when he did, he shifted his gaze to Wagner, then to Ackermann. At last, he said, “Abraham Cohen.”

“Residence?”

Another hesitation.

Christian looked up once more from his paper. “We already have it down as 39 Rue de Tolbiac, per your papers at the checkpoint and our own records. Your silence speaks only of your intentions not to cooperate, which I do not advise.” Just follow my lead, Abraham, he silently willed his old friend.

Abraham cleared his throat. “Your records are correct. I live at 39 Rue de Tolbiac and have done so since I first arrived in Paris in October of 1933.”

Ackermann shifted beside Christian but didn’t speak. He was there, Christian suspected, solely to oversee him. Report on him. Tell Berlin whether or not he could do this job.

He couldn’t. But he would anyway. Somewhat.

“I have here a list of known associates and colleagues of yours.” He slid the sheet across the table, full of names of other writers who had left Germany for Paris in the thirties.

..and who weren’t currently in the city.

“Do you know the whereabouts of any of them?”

Abraham took the paper with his cuffed hands, read through it slowly. Shook his head. “It was chaos. I thought to meet up with a few in the country, but I didn’t. I don’t know where anyone is.”

It could be a lie, but it could sadly be true too. Either way, Christian was satisfied with the answer, and neither of his companions interjected.

He pulled forward another sheet of paper with three long columns on it.

“We have already visited your flat and confiscated the following verboten literature.” He passed the paper over to Cohen.

“You will see there that the list includes the manuscript you’d left behind when you fled Paris—no great loss to you, as all publishers have been issued orders to refuse contracts to any Jews—as well as the book that came out in.

..” He consulted his notes, though he didn’t need to.

“February of 1939.” It had been April by the time a disguised copy had made its way to Berlin and into Christian’s hands.

“Are there any other books, articles, or other writings that you have published in the meantime?”

He looked up, met Abraham’s eyes. The man slowly shook his head. “The new book took all my time and attention. I’d only just finished it.”

Christian nodded. “Very good then.”

Wagner leaned an arm onto the table, looking at Christian rather than Abraham. “The new manuscript—you have it?”

Another nod.

Wagner lifted his brows. “And? Have you reviewed it?”

“Not in full, but I’ve got through half of it.” Bored, he told himself. Unimpressed.

Wagner raised his brows. “Well?”

The smallest, most disdainful shrug. “I found it to be just like his previous works, of which my opinions ought to be known.” Brilliant had been his exact words in his last review for his favorite literary journal—in early 1933, before the burnings, before Abraham fled.

He hadn’t dared publish such opinions since.

Abraham knew, though.

And he was wagering that neither Wagner nor Ackermann did. Neither were avid readers, so far as he could tell. Certainly not Ackermann, with his muttered bücherwurm insults.

Wagner pursed his lips. “Cohen’s writing itself isn’t incendiary, correct?”

“Nothing but useless philosophical drivel. His crime is his heritage, not his words.” To punctuate his point, Christian shuffled the pages together again.

“I advise that he be entered in the Jewish registry once it’s operational, of course, but otherwise released.

With, naturally, the instruction that he neither write more nor attempt to refill his bookcases with verboten literature.

” He offered a sardonic smile. “I can provide a list of approved books, Herr Cohen, if you need a few recommendations for better reading material. Mein Kampf earns our highest praise.”

He, Abraham, Josef, Father, and Earnst had torn it to literary shreds when it released in 1925.

Even if Abraham didn’t remember the literary review Christian had written of his 1933 book, he would remember that .

There was no way he could forget the laughter, the hours of conversation, the foamy beer and pretzels that went stale in their basket as they pointed out the fallacies of each argument and opinion the upstart politician had written.