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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Hannelore had never seen so many swastikas in her life. They were stitched into curtains. Painted on tablecloths. Arranged into the fruit platters. The tables in the dining room were shoved into a swastika shape. The silverware, wrapped in napkins, was laid out in swastikas. The most shocking, though, was a freshly painted symbol, still wet, in the middle of the ballroom floor. It had the look of haste and secrecy; the legs were different lengths and one of them was quite feathery, as if the painter had taken flight before doing a second coat.

Everyone was talking about the last one as the music played and the wine flowed. It was mentioned in the same breath as a décor item that the staff had placed on each table that morning: candle centerpieces fashioned of rustic wood and metal. They were quite odd-looking, featuring special matchsticks with red, white, and blue heads that were displayed in purpose-made holes on top of the base. Each bore a printed inscription that read:

ONLY FOR BLACKOUT!

Made especially for John Willy, Hotel Monthly , Chicago, Ill

Remember Pearl Harbor, Sun. Dec. 7, 1941

Buy Defense Stamps

The painted swastika, Hannelore understood, was somehow a punishment for these candles being placed on the tables. Both were acts of war in a battle that, until today, the last day, had been unspoken. Now, it was not quite spoken, but it could not be denied, either.

It seemed to Hannelore like someone should be punished for something—either the staff for the somehow shocking candles, or the Germans for the definitely shocking swastika—but the hotel whirred in an odd in-between. The diplomats were there, but they were also almost not-there. A train was on its way to them right at that moment, and although they had not yet removed everything from their rooms, they had put their heads on those pillows for the last time. There were no classes for the children, no more meetings with the Swiss. No more conversations with the waiters over tomorrow’s breakfast, no more asking the shopkeepers what might come in at the end of the week. The board that had previously advertised which movies would be played in the theater room was empty.

So the staff saw the swastika on the floor, whispered hastily among themselves, and did not raise a fuss. They simply vanished quietly. Yes, scurry scurry , said one of the consuls. They can do nothing to us now. But later, Hannelore saw one of the porters urinating into one of the German suitcases in the hall. He saw her catch him, cock in his hand, but he didn’t flinch. He just shifted slightly to hide his member and finished what he was doing. He buttoned his fly, flipped the case closed, then turned to give Hannelore a look of pure acid. She just stared.

He left without a word.

The hotel was different. Every font she passed vibrated with sullen, crackling energy. Every diplomat hummed to match. The air shimmered. She could smell the sweetwater with every breath. Run. She could not run. Where would she run to? She was going to Germany.

Sterilization.

In the hallway, Hannelore saw Erich von Limburg-Stirum and the friendly waiter, Sebastian Hepp, talking together in German. Ordinarily Sebastian would have had a kind word for her, but today, he didn’t seem to see her when she passed; he was looking into nothing, listening hard to Erich saying, We should make a promise—

Uneasy, she scurried until she found her father and Lothar in the bar, talking in low voices. The lights of the space were turned low and everything was painted green-blue, like they were underwater. Difficult to tell if it had simply not yet opened for the night or was not going to open at all for the rest of the detainment. They were alone apart from Citizen sitting at their feet; there was neither bartender nor customers in the booths. No, not entirely alone. As she stepped in, she saw that Sandy Gilfoyle sat in his wheelchair, facing a blank wood-paneled wall—a boring place to leave him, but Stella, too, had seemed out of sorts. Earlier that day, a staff member had put a book in her hand and pushed her into one of the quiet sitting rooms.

Hannelore’s father reached a hand to her and said, “Sing the song for us, Liebchen, before your mother gets here. Show me how well you know it.”

She did not feel much like singing, but, casting a suspicious look at Sandy, she sang, “ H 1 6 89 L / R Y W 1 2 / Q U 49— ”

As she sang, she heard her father talking to Lothar. “…is that sufficient for you? I am the only one who knows how to decode it, and she is the only one who has the entire list now that the embassy paperwork is gone.”

“Why are you telling me now?” Lothar said.

“In case I am made to vanish once we arrive,” her father said.

They would ordinarily never have spoken like this in front of her, but it was as if they thought she could not hear them because she was singing. Couldn’t she count thousands of numbers while also listening to a conversation, though? Of course she could easily recall these stanzas while listening.

“Why would you be made to vanish?”

“Why would anyone, Lothar?”

Lothar laughed, but it was an unfunny laugh. Hannelore knew the difference.

Run.

“Is this the time or place for that?” Sabine’s voice cut through the smoky air of the pub. She snapped, “Hannelore, stop singing.”

Her mother was dressed for the journey, in her favorite traveling suit coat and skirt; she once told Hannelore that, on a long journey, it was important to be both comfortable and dressed appropriately for a social gathering. People treated you as you asked them to, she had said, and clothing was the first demand you made of them.

Sabine’s hands, however, were not dressed for the journey. Hannelore watched them tremor by her sides.

“They are getting your gun out of the basement. Go make sure everything is in order with our luggage,” Sabine told Friedrich.

This was the sort of order Lothar would have teased Friedrich over, but today, the men meekly took their leave. Sabine crouched before Hannelore and put her hands on either side of her face. Hannelore was aware this was a gesture of closeness, so she held quite still, even though she did not like it. The silence in the pub only accentuated the loudness of the whispering water; the brightness of her mother’s red-gold hair only accentuated the darkness of the close wood paneling around them. Hannelore looked into her mother’s eyes and counted seconds until Sabine finally sighed and released her.

“Mrs. Wolfe, can I have a word with you?”

It was the State Department man, Benjamin Pennybacker. Citizen ran up to him, and, unthinkingly, he bent to rumple the dog’s ears.

“Did Miss Hudson send you?”

“What? No. No, I don’t think so,” Pennybacker said. “It is about…”

A complex silence stretched, the sort Hannelore was not yet good at interpreting. The two adults’ expressions gave nothing away, no matter how hard she looked.

“Sit at that table, Hannelore,” Sabine said. She unrolled a napkin and put it in front of Hannelore on the table so that she could pretend to draw on it. “Don’t get up until I tell you to.”

Then she retreated farther into the pub with Pennybacker. There they whispered, but Hannelore could still hear them quite clearly.

“Now is the time, Mrs. Wolfe, to tell me if there is anything, absolutely anything, that might help me to help you,” he said. “If there is anything you might be willing to share with the US government about your husband’s work, it is possible they might be willing to keep you both.”

Sabine’s voice was chilly. “I think you have completely misunderstood my intentions. I am not seeking amnesty. I am trying to protect my child. Not to betray my husband. Is this conversation even appropriate for the State Department to have with a member of a diplomatic legation?”

This was the version of her mother who had stepped forward to calm the fractious Hungarians on the very first day. Sabine Wolfe, the diplomat’s wife, representing German ideals. That seemed like a very long time ago. Back then, Hannelore had not always known how long they would go between moves, but she understood that they would move, from post to post, country to country, being German for the rest of the world to see. Now she wasn’t sure what the future held.

“Of course, of course, I did not mean to imply your husband was doing anything, uh, untoward. I was merely seeking creative solutions. You understand my hands are quite tied. But I just…I didn’t sleep last night, Mrs. Wolfe. I didn’t sleep. I was thinking about Hannelore. I look at her and I see…”

“Hannelore is a very special child,” Sabine interrupted.

“I know,” he said hurriedly. “That is what I was going to say. When she watches a room, it is really something to see. I can tell she is taking in everything, cataloguing it. I have seen her working away at her lists. She is quite a marvelous child. I am sure she will be an interesting woman.”

Hannelore had watched Benjamin Pennybacker, too, as she had watched everyone in the hotel. Now she recalled his breakfast-taking, his fingers sticky with jelly or syrup as he used a pen to carefully turn the page of whatever file or book he was looking at. She recalled his clumsiness in the hall, the other federal agents talking easily to each other as he shoved words into all the wrong places. She saw his hand rested gently, instinctually, on Citizen’s head as he spoke to her mother.

Her mother fell silent for a moment and then said, in a different voice, “Can she not just stay with you, just for a few months?”

Her mother offered it so casually, as if Hannelore was a piece of luggage. Could you keep this behind the front desk until we return?

Hannelore traced the shape of his crumpled mouth on her napkin.

“I have agonized over this very question,” he said. “I cannot keep her off that train when I have been expressly told to put her on it. It would be an act of war. I can continue to work after you have gone, hoping that I might get satisfaction before you leave New Jersey, but I…I would not have asked you about your husband if I had any better choices.”

From deeper in the hotel, voices rose in momentary hostility before ebbing away. The sounds of discord. Hannelore hadn’t realized how unusual such sounds had become to her; the Avallon had repelled them for a very long time. She understood now that it was coming to an end. Hannelore drew an invisible drawing of herself standing in one of the hotel windows. Water poured over the sill. Her hand, like her mother’s, was trembling.

Sabine said, “You ask me to give up one or the other.”

“No,” Pennybacker replied, gravely. “I’m afraid your country is doing that.”