Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke by Anne Blankman Page B

streets. Biding his time.
    She couldn’t leave. For Daniel’s sake, for the sake of everyone who had fallen under Hitler’s hand, she had to stay and help prove that the National Socialists were behind this unknown woman’s murder. She remembered sitting in Hitler’s parlor, listening as he thundered on about the Jews. The parasites are poisoning us from within , he’d said, one hand punching the air. Germany will never regain her health until she rids herself of her most noxious pest . Gretchen’s stomach twisted at the memory. She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know how deeply Hitler hated Jews—and that he wanted them dead. He had to be stopped. As the leader of a Party publicly tied to a murder, he would be.
    She looked at Daniel. “I’m going with you.”
    His face tightened. “No. If you come, I won’t be able to protect you. Gretchen, you need to go back, so you can be safe—”
    “Final boarding!” the conductor shouted.
    Gretchen gripped her bag tightly and rushed across the platform before Daniel could stop her. As she climbed the train’s steps into the dimly lit corridor, she heard him breathing behind her, quick and hard, as though he were angry. Or frightened.
    Together, they walked down the corridor flanked with first-class compartments, finally stopping when they found an empty one. He didn’t speak as he loaded their bags onto the overhead luggage racks, but a muscle clenched in his jaw.
    Silently, they sat on the velour seats, Gretchen taking his hand, needing to maintain a physical connection with him. The train lurched forward. She leaned against him as the train picked up speed, watching the twinkling lights of Munich fall away as they raced into the darkness.

8

    DANIEL PULLED DOWN THE WINDOW SHADES, closing out the night. As he slipped off his coat, Gretchen studied him: Although only two weeks had passed since they’d seen each other, he looked thinner, the hollows beneath his cheekbones more pronounced. He must have had to go hungry many nights.
    “We ought to move to a third-class car,” he said. “This carriage is far too expensive.”
    The thought of sitting in a compartment where the seats were crammed closely together, unable to speak freely for fear of others overhearing, and sleeping among strangers made Gretchen’s flesh crawl.
    “We need the privacy—” she began as their compartment door opened and the conductor poked his head inside.
    “Tickets?” he asked.
    Daniel reached for his wallet, but Gretchen shook her headand paid with some of the Whitestones’ money. Daniel opened his mouth to protest, then looked away. She could imagine how it wounded his pride, to have her pay for him, but he probably didn’t have more than a handful of coins at this point.
    Once the conductor had left and Daniel had closed the compartment door, they sat beside each other again. He wrapped his good arm around her shoulders, drawing her close, and she rested her head on his chest, listening to the reassuring beat of his heart against her ear.
    “Tell me everything,” she said.
    “Aaron’s dead.” Daniel’s voice was thick. When she twisted in his arms to look at him, she could see his eyes shining with unshed tears. “He died before I reached Munich. Ruth and his parents had him buried in the Jewish cemetery. Then they emptied out their apartment and moved back to Frankfurt. I hadn’t told them I was coming—I was concerned someone might intercept a telegram. So when I showed up in Munich and found everyone gone, I had to talk to Aaron and Ruth’s neighbors to find out what had happened. They said Ruth had told them she couldn’t ever return to the city where her brother had been killed.”
    His arm fell from her shoulders and he dropped his head into his hands. “I went to the Munich Post offices,” he said quietly. “I wanted to ask my old colleagues to dig up information about Aaron’s assailants. They said these kinds of attacks have been happening all over