A Game of Lies (Hannah Vogel)

About the Author:

Award-winning author REBECCA CANTRELL majored in German, Creative Writing, and History at the Freie Universitaet of Berlin and Carnegie Mellon University. She currently lives in Hawaii with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
 

The crowd pushed the three of us between the Marathon Towers toward the Berlin Olympic Stadium. The left tower displayed a simple clock. On the right, both politically and geographically, hung a twisted iron cross—the swastika. I understood the message: It was 1936, and the time of the Nazis had come.
Inside the stadium, I shied away from the enclosed white cabins that signaled press boxes. The journalists inside knew me as German crime reporter Hannah Vogel, wanted by the Gestapo for kidnapping the young son of the now-deceased Ernst Röhm. I nervously tilted my wide-brimmed hat to conceal my face and moved with the crowd down the stairs. Surely I would be difficult to notice among so many faces.
My current identity was Adelheid Zinsli, neutral Swiss reporter and, hopefully incognito, part-time spy for the British. I looked over at my contact, SS Hauptsturmführer Lars Lang, as we moved toward our seats in the stadium. Years of our deadly game made most trips feel routine, but this time I was frightened.
Lars and I pretended to be lovers, a fiction he enjoyed, and every few months, we switched off weekends in our home cities of Berlin and Zürich. But instead of a few days, my editor had insisted that this time I stay in Berlin for a full two weeks to cover the Olympic Games. To keep my job, I had agreed to attend events clogged with my old colleagues.
The crowd stopped and I bumped against Lars’s friend, chemistry professor Andreas Huber. When he caught my arm, his sweaty hand lingered there.
I pulled my arm free. He let go reluctantly, and I shot him an inquisitive glance. Lars did not seem to notice. “Forgive me for running into you,” I said.
“Of course.” Andreas looked down at me with a crooked smile. “Quite a crowd.”
“I believe that the German government expects one hundred thousand people for the opening ceremony.” I quoted the statistic just to make conversation. I did not add that what the Nazis expected, they too often made happen.
“I hope it doesn’t rain on them all.” Andreas looked at the overcast sky.
“We will have to hope for sunlight,” I said. “Even the Führer cannot control the weather—”
“There’s a bar nearby,” Lars interrupted. He pushed his black hair back. Longer now than he usually kept it, the new length made him look less militaristic. “We have time for another belt.”
“I must stay in the stadium. For the paper.” I hiked my leather satchel up on my shoulder. A drink sounded like just the thing to calm my nerves, but Lars did not need another one.
“So dedicated.” Lars glared at me. “To your job.”
“Not such a bad quality, dedication.” Andreas took Lars’s arm and led us down the nearest row to a seat at the end. A staunch party man, he understood the possible consequences of Lars’s indiscretions. And his own responsibility to report them.
Lars sat, peeled off his dark brown suit jacket, clumsily folded it in half, and rolled up his wrinkled shirtsleeves. He caught me watching and blew me a sloppy kiss. If my life did not depend on the world thinking we were lovers, I would have left without a backward glance. Instead I put a warning hand on his bare arm.
Although he was not, he looked harmless in civilian garb. Ordinarily, he cleaved to his black SS uniform, but an order had come down, requesting all SS and SA members to refrain from wearing uniforms to the Games.
The German government had issued the order in response to criticism from the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen the previous winter. Reporters had commented on the number of uniformed Germans in the crowds. This time we would have to guess how many men were trained for warfare.
Although I noted the new order, I would not write about it. If I did, I would not be able to move freely into Germany. Instead of exposing Nazi politics, any story I wrote would have to extol Nazi pageantry.
Indeed, it felt like a royal court with the peasants awaiting a thundering and massive coronation. I spotted a complete orchestra, several military bands with gleaming brass instruments, and a choir dressed in white that must have numbered a thousand. All calculated to impress German and international spectators. Nazis staged spectacles as cleverly as ancient Greeks.
My eleven-year-old adopted son, Anton, was far fonder than I of such events. He would have adored it. I wished I could take photographs for him, but foreign journalists were forbidden from taking pictures at the Games. I would tell Anton details when I got back home and retrieved him from Boris, my onetime lover, but for now I tried not to think of him. Superstitious, I knew, but I did not like to bring even thoughts of Anton into Germany these days.
As I searched for a pen, my fingers rolled over my perfume atomizer, a costly French gift from Boris. The tiny mother-of-pearl creation was called a Le Kid and evoked memories of the Charlie Chaplin movie and happy times together.
When this assignment came up, Boris had begged me to stay safe in Switzerland. After I refused, he ended our five-year relationship. It had been more than a month, but I still felt unmoored. I woke every night with my hand searching for him across empty sheets.
I dropped the atomizer and rooted around until I found my pen. I sketched the arc of the stadium first, then the crowd, the bands, the special booths, and the far-off oval of the field. I had often drawn pictures of courtroom scenes in my days as a crime reporter, and I enjoyed using the skills again. A shadow fell across the page and I looked up.
Overhead, the Hindenburg ponderously circled the stadium. A white Olympic flag, bigger than a house, flapped under her gondola. The familiar black swastika stood out on her tail. The Nazis owned even the skies.
Although Anton and I had traveled by zeppelin from South America to Germany a few years before, the giant silver shape made me nervous. One spark in the wrong location, and explosive hydrogen would ignite and shower a stadium of eager spectators, including me, with flaming debris.
Andreas followed my gaze. “They are very safe. All precautions have been taken to ensure it.”
“Yet hydrogen is quite flammable, is it not?” I countered.
“Under the correct conditions, everything is explosive.” Lars draped a heavy arm across my shoulders and I gave him an annoyed look. “And don’t I always protect you?”
“So far, we have escaped fiery death,” I said. “But that is no reason to let our guard down.”
Andreas laughed.
“Must you always keep your guard up?” Lars leaned in close and mouthed the word Hannah.
If he said my real name aloud, fiery death might look like a good option, and he knew it. I turned the worry in my voice to anger. “It has served me well so far.”
In the past, I had relied on his natural reserve and the caution he had cultivated during his years as a policeman to maintain enough discretion to keep us both out of trouble. But, as with everything else, those rules had changed. I had to figure out a strategy to deal with him before he got us both killed.
To spite me, he kissed me on the nose. I smelled Korn schnapps. “Back in a flash, Spatz.”
I wanted to tell him that I was not his sparrow. Instead, I smiled so unconvincingly that he snorted out a laugh. He forced his way down the row and hastened up the stairs. I hoped his destination was the men’s room and not the bar. I yearned to abandon everything and head back to Switzerland, but I worried about how I could support Anton without the newspaper job. We did not have Boris to rely on anymore.
I moved to the seat next to Andreas, leaving my satchel to hold Lars’s seat from the crowds that thronged into the stadium. The smell of the antiseptic tar soap Andreas favored drifted to me. He and Lars seemed like an odd match. They had met back when Lars was still a policeman and Andreas often testified as an expert witness about the presence of poison in corpses. I wondered what they had in common, save an early interest in National Socialism. Perhaps they had grown close during those protracted and fevered meetings.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked in a low voice to prevent those nearby from overhearing. The noise of so many excited voices chattering made it unlikely, but you always had to be careful in Germany these days.
“Off and on for about two months. Worse in the past month.”
My stomach sank. He had been drinking and perhaps indiscreet for over a month. “Do you know why?”
“Do you?” His brown eyes were curious and perhaps accusatory. What had Lars told him about our relationship? Did he know it was a sham?
“Should I?” I met his challenge with one of my own.
He spread his thin hands wide in a gesture of peace. “I am not trying to make problems. I fear you have enough of your own.”
“Have I?” I struggled to appear calm while I wondered what he thought my problems were. Had Lars told him the true reason for my trips to Berlin?
“I apologize.” Andreas kept voice low as well. “I did not intend to imply anything.”
“What would there be to imply?”
“Indeed,” he answered.
We sat in awkward silence until Lars slid in next to me, face shades paler. He gave me an apologetic look. “I might have a touch of stomach flu.”
“I hope you feel better soon,” I said, as if I believed that his trip to the men’s room had more to do with flu than it did with alcohol. At least now he seemed fairly sober.
When the orchestra curtailed our conversation, I closed my eyes in relief, concentrating on the music and the weak sun on my arms. With my eyes shut, I did not see the swastikas, and I pretended that Germany was as free as it ha...

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