She looked at Hess expectantly, as if waiting for him to state his business. He had been given this address, but no name or code word. He didn’t even know whom to ask for.
“May I help you?” the girl asked in heavily accented English.
Hess immediately recognized her accent as Polish. He studied her face, taking note of the high cheekbones and cornflower blue eyes. She might have been one of those rare Slavs who could pass for an Aryan.
He replied in English just as halting as the girl’s. “I was expecting someone German.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed. “Come in,” the girl finally said, stepping back from the doorway. “Wait here.”
Hess watched the servant girl disappear into one of the roofs off the front hall and waited, hat in hand, until she reappeared. “Stand on the rug there,” she said crossly. “You are getting water on the floor.”
Hess looked down at his shoes, wet with melted snow. He stepped onto the throw rug. “Well?”
“I think that mud is not the only thing you are bringing into this house,” said the girl, her eyes suddenly hard as stones. “Come with me.”
Hess followed her down the hall. They entered a large room with tall windows that reached from floor to ceiling. Faded velvet curtains blocked most of the winter light. The wallpaper seemed to belong to another century and the walls were otherwise bare, except for an enormous painting that showed a battle scene in murky brown tones. A fire blazed in the fireplace but it did little to warm the room. It was the drawing room of a faded aristocrat, Hess thought, which was why he was taken aback at the sight of the woman standing before the fireplace. Blond and beautiful, there was nothing faded about her. She held a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her clothes were every bit as fashionable as the women he had passed on the street.
She turned as he entered the room and appraised him with frank eyes. Hess, in turn, studied the woman. Her oval face and pale complexion were oddly familiar, though he could not quite remember where he had seen her before. She drew on the cigarette with such force that her cheeks sucked in with the effort, then exhaled the smoke from between deep red lips.
“So, you are the one they sent.”
“Yes,” was all he could think to say.
She inhaled again, looking him up and down. “Impressive. What should I call you?”
“Bruno Hess.”
Hess was aware that the Polish girl stood behind him, just beyond his line of vision. He turned slightly so that she was in view.
“Don’t worry about Petra,” the woman said in German. “She is very loyal to me.”
“Is it just you?” Hess was confused. He didn’t understand how this woman was supposed to help him assassinate General Eisenhower. He had the sinking feeling that he had been sent on a fool’s errand. He thought of the crew of U-351, all lost with the submarine. What a waste.
“Were you expecting a Panzer division?” the woman said, then made a noise halfway between a laugh and a snort. She exhaled through her nostrils this time and took a sip from her glass. Ice cubes clinked. “Leave us, Petra.”
The Polish girl swept out of the room as quickly as if the woman had wielded a whip.
“Who are you?” Hess asked. He was taken with her blue eyes and ruby lips. The thought that he had seen her before nagged at him. He suddenly felt self-conscious standing in front of her. Hess had changed his clothes, but he felt grubby from living in the open for three days. A heavy growth of stubble covered his cheeks. He felt like one of those bums one sometimes saw on the streets of Berlin in the years after the Great War, when good German veterans had been reduced to beggars. Then Hitler had come to power and the world had changed.
“I am many things, Herr Hess,” she said. “Did you ever go the movies?”
“Not since the war,” he said.
She sipped from the glass again, and Hess could see that she was a little bit drunk. “I was once an actress, but now I serve the Fatherland just as you do. I am Eva Von Stahl.”
Naturlich! The name and face came together in Hess’s mind like a flash. He recalled her public denouncement of the Nazi party and how she had fled to America. The newspapers had called her a traitor. Her films were banned from theaters across Germany.
“I don’t understand.”
“My greatest role,” she said. “I played the femme fatale so that I could be the secret heroine.”
“My God.” The enormity of it came crashing down on Hess. She had traded wealth and fame — everything — for this opportunity. Suddenly his harrowing journey across the Atlantic and then the Maryland countryside seemed like a small sacrifice. And the German leaders he might have branded as fools a moment ago now seemed impossibly clever, thinking many moves ahead in a game of chess whose outcome might decide the war.
“No, not God,” she said. “Just Eva.”
Hess drew himself straighter. “Frau Von Stahl, I am honored to meet you.”
She put her drink on the mantel and flicked what remained of her cigarette into the fire, then took his hands in hers. “You are so cold!”
“It is nothing compared to Russia,” he said.
“Has the war really gone so badly there?” she asked.
Hess closed his eyes. Instantly, a dozen images of Stalingrad came crashing into his mind at once. Blood on the snow … frozen bodies. He looked at Eva and shook his head. “We must not fail here,” he said.
Eva unfolded his hands as if to study them. He felt the warmth of her touch and realized that they had been holding hands longer than was polite. But neither of them made an effort to let go. “Cold hands, cold heart,” she said. Then she smiled up at him. “You’ve brought winter with you, Herr Hess.”
In the doorway, Petra cleared her throat noisily. “I have put out some soup for you,” she said in her thick English.
Eva finally released her grip. “Go and eat,” she said. “Petra will fix you a hot bath. Then we will talk.”
Hess followed Petra to the kitchen at the back of the house. Where the drawing room had been vast and seemingly from a faded era, the kitchen was surprisingly modern and small to the point of being cozy. There was a shiny toaster on a spotless counter and a new enameled stove, on which percolated a pot of coffee, filling the kitchen with a caffeinated steam. Hess nodded approvingly and sat down to an enormous bowl of oyster stew, thick with cream and butter. After living on withered turnips and frost-touched vegetables for the last few days, Hess doubted he had ever tasted anything so good. Petra took the pot off the stovetop and filled a mug with the thick, black brew. He couldn’t help but notice that she kept her distance from him. Even as she moved around the kitchen, she managed to keep the table between them. He was too tired and hungry to think about it. Hess held the mug and breathed deeply. Aaahh.
He was halfway through the bowl of stew when the doorknob rattled and a man came through the doorway. Hess slipped his hand into a pocket of the suit and drew his Luger.
Petra, busy at the stove and her back to the doorway, called out, “Is that you, Mr. Dorsey?”
An old black man walked into the kitchen and froze at the sight of Hess leveling the pistol at him.
“Lordy,” the man said, his eyes big as saucers.
Hess put down the pistol and returned his attention to the bowl of oyster stew. The old man stared at the pistol on the table but didn’t venture any further into the room.
“This is Mr. Hess. He is a friend of Frau Von Stahl,” Petra said. “This is Mr. Dorsey.”