May 7, 1944
Vienna, Austria
"How did it go?" Francis asked when he answered the door.
Roderich put on his fake smile, pretending like he wasn't in tears twenty minutes ago. He'd grown rather good at hiding things, including his true feelings. "I'm thankfully a free man and the Führer doesn't want me dead. All they did was ask a lot of questions and give me their faked reports. I'm due for follow-up questions in June. I can't believe the two of them have dragged this case back up again."
"Oh, Roderich, I'm so sorry," Francis said. "I won't make you stay here if you want to go home."
"No, I'd rather be with you. I don't trust myself home alone. Are the others back yet?"
"Mathias is here in the back with the radio and everyone else is still in questioning. Mathias said it was someone from England, and someone important by the sound of it. Do you want something to eat? You've been in Gestapo Headquarters all day."
"I'm fine," Roderich said as he came inside, closing the door behind him. It was so strange to walk into Basch's house and not see Basch at the table with a makeshift explosive or a broken gun. And it was even worse to see Francis managing everything, the table covered in fake papers mixed in with plans for Operation Edelweiss and his actual accountant work.
"The recruits are here, if you want to talk with them. I sent them out to hang the laundry about an hour ago and I think they're just talking out there. I don't mind if you leave me alone," Francis said, going back to the paperwork on the table. Roderich watched for a moment as Francis switched between three different jobs, working for a second on one paper before moving to the next.
"Do you need help with anything?" Roderich asked, feeling almost obligated to help. Francis couldn't handle everything on his own. "I've never been too good with numbers, but I could probably write up the plans or make passports."
"I can handle it. And besides, I convinced Eduard to be my secretary. He's writing the plans when Mathias or I can't. I don't think the Gestapo can read Estonian, so it works out better that way," Francis said. "Although, none of us can read Estonian. He could be writing about Satan and ducks and I would never know."
Roderich sat down next to the man, distracting himself from the interrogation by looking through the mess on the table. "Hey, Francis," he said, pulling two ration cards from the papers. "Why do you have unused ration cards for meat lying around?"
"I'm planning on making boeuf bourguigon for all of us when this war ends," Francis replied. "Even if the Axis wins. I've been saving a few cards every so often, because I'm hopefully cooking for nine people."
That hopeful ninth person made tears come back to Roderich's eyes.
"And where's Lilli?" Roderich asked, trying to change the subject before he was crying again. He didn't want to show Francis how the interrogation had broken him.
"Writing another letter to Basch," Francis said. "This will be the 100th one. I don't even know where she's getting all the paper to write them, because I'm not giving it to her," he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. "I can hardly believe how big she is now. She'll be seventeen in July."
"Seventeen? God, that doesn't seem right," Roderich said. Where had little fourteen-year-old Lilli gone, the girl who wanted to be a nurse and helped Roderich paint horrible things on offices and shops?
"I know. She's grown up so much in the past three years. I hardly recognize her when she comes home from school. I think she's the lady who lives next door."
"And how's school going for her?"
"Horribly," Francis said. "I get a call from the school every other week saying that she refuses to do her work and won't talk to anyone. I've spent about ten hours in the principal's office getting yelled at. There's talk of suspension and there is a possibility that she won't be allowed to finish her last year of schooling."
"Oh," Roderich said, having no other words to use. Ever since Basch disappeared, Lilli hadn't been herself. However, Roderich didn't think it was bad enough to get her expelled from school. "Did you hear back from Team Weles yet?"
"Number 49 went surprisingly well," Francis said. They'd all thought that Operation Edelweiss' 49th mission would fail miserably, Mathias and Natalya going so far as to put money down on how many arrests there would be. "They got the shipment of weapons and are planning to start the uprising in August when the Soviets get closer to Warsaw. I'm going to Bratislava on Thursday to talk with some of the leaders about plans. I'm bringing the recruits with me to see if they can handle this before we let them try something on their own."
"God, that'll be fun," Roderich said, going back to looking through the papers. "I can't imagine they'll do very well on a train together."
"Um, Roderich, did the Gestapo give you a verdict yet?" Francis asked. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to."
"I was hoping you'd forget about that," Roderich admitted, looking down at the floor. "I've…I've been honorably removed from my propaganda position. Goebbels terminated the contract a few hours ago over the phone and said it was nothing personal and I wasn't going to be blamed for anything. Ludwig told me that if I want to stay out of jail, I should never go back to Salzburg. I'm still considered an Aryan because of my service to the Reich. But as for Operation Edelweiss…"
"I don't care about Operation Edelweiss," Francis said. "I care about you, Roderich. Are you sure you're alright? That's quite a big change for you and you don't seem upset."
Roderich didn't bother to look up; he couldn't have faced Francis without falling apart. "Ludwig was required to show me the autopsy papers. Hochstetter actually apologized to me for everything after he told me what happened. I've never heard a Gestapo man apologize. He's married now, Hochstetter. I saw a ring on his finger."
"That doesn't answer my question –"
"I couldn't hate him, Francis. I couldn't even get mad at him," Roderich said, wiping away a stray tear. "I wanted to and I couldn't. I couldn't hate my father's murderer."
"You don't have to hate anyone," Francis said as he put his hand on Roderich's shoulder. "No one is making you hate him."
"What sort of person doesn't get mad at a murderer? I should've been furious and I didn't feel much of anything."
Roderich had felt so empty in that office, not one thought coming to his mind. He'd been told his father died of an unnamed accident, not from a gunshot to the head. Roderich had gone to the Catholic funeral and cleaned up his father's house and left it there to fall apart. He came home and covered one mirror – he felt more than that would be dangerous if Ludwig showed up unexpectedly. For the rest of the week he sat on his living room floor wrapped up in a blanket, feeling there was nothing more he could do.
When Hochstetter explained what happened, Roderich went blank for the first time in his life.
"Everyone reacts to these things differently," Francis said. "You don't have to be mad."
"I want to be mad because I didn't get to say goodbye to anyone," Roderich said, looking up at Francis. He looked tired and frail and so many things he shouldn't have been. Francis was supposed to be the happiest person in the world next to Mathias. "The last thing I told my father was that I hated him. I probably said the same thing to Basch."
"Oh, Lord," Francis muttered. "Roderich, they both knew that you didn't mean it. Your father said that he loved you and he didn't blame you for anything. Basch told me thousands of times that he wished you would've met him sooner."
"I just want everything to be right again. I want my father to have a proper yeshiva and I want Basch to be here. I want to tell Eduard and Feliks everything about Toris. Hell, I even want to make music for Hitler. I want to keep running Operation Edelweiss. I don't want to be involved in some big investigation and I don't want to have to listen to Hochstetter and Ludwig ask me a thousand questions about if I was aware that my father was Jewish."
"This'll all be over soon," Francis assured him. "The Gestapo will close the case and we'll go back to normal. We'll figure out what to do with Operation Edelweiss. I'm sure Mathias can think of something to do. He's rather good with radios and hiding them. The wires for the one here lead to the capitol building if the Gestapo ever traces it. I can't say that we'll be able to tell Feliks and Eduard about Toris, though," he said, his voice losing its optimism. "They know too much already and it's too big of a risk to send them off to –"
"Francis, Eduard told me to jump off a cliff!" Feliks shouted at the top of his voice, running into the house. He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, his green eyes going from Roderich to Francis.
"It was a joke – what's going on?" Eduard said as he came in behind Feliks, giving Roderich the same look. "Is everything alright?"
"Everything's perfectly fine," Francis said.
"Roderich is, like, crying," Feliks said. "I didn't think he could cry. He doesn't even laugh."
"I am a human." Roderich swiped at his eyes with his sleeve. He didn't want anyone to see him cry, and now both Feliks and Eduard saw how fragile he really was. "How are you two doing? I haven't had the time to come and see you between Berlin, Paris, and the Gestapo."
"We're fine. You were in Paris?" Eduard asked, coming over to the table. Feliks rushed forward, taking Eduard's claimed chair. Eduard didn't put up much of a fight – he only punched Feliks' shoulder.
"Do you two ever stop fighting?" Roderich said.
"No. We've shared a bedroom for the past three years and that sort of turned us into brothers," Eduard said. "I don't hate him, though. We fight for the fun of it."
"Shut up, Glasses. I want to hear about Paris," Feliks said, giving Eduard a playful shove.
"I went there with Natalya for a few days, since she is supposed to be a Parisian. We met up with a few Nazi officials and got about six folders of classified information," Roderich explained. "Natalya talked to this Russian she found – I have no clue what they were saying and I don't think I want to."
"Didn't you do anything exciting?" Feliks said. "Paris is the city of romance and all that. Did you two even kiss?"
"No, and quite frankly, I don't want to. And the most exciting thing we did was take pictures of the classified papers."
"Wow, you've hit a new level of disappointing," Feliks mumbled, earning himself a slap from Eduard.
"At least he's not –"
"Francis?" Mathias interrupted, appearing in the hallway. He looked pale, his eyes wide. "I have Allied headquarters on the wireless. I've been talking to General Eisenhower for the past thirty minutes. I just thought you needed to know. Oh, and Roderich, the general would like to talk to you about music."
Ivan tried to calm his shaking hands as he painted yet another swastika on yet another metal panel. He couldn't have an uneven swastika, not if he wanted to get out of punishment labor before midnight.
His cheek stung from where the manager had slapped him, the rest of his face still red with anger. Being sent to punishment labor was the most degrading thing Ivan could think of – and he somehow found himself there every week. Whether it was for a real outburst or something the manager made up, he knew every week he would be holed up in a closet, painting swastikas.
It was much easier to get into punishment labor than it was to get out of it. First there was the questioning in the manager's office, where the disgusting man had no problem beating Ivan so that he was barely conscious. Then Ivan was locked in an almost claustrophobic room, forced to paint two hundred perfect swastikas in regulation size before he was let out. Armed with a broken ruler and a jar of black paint, he painstakingly marked each panel with the Nazi spider.
Ivan wasn't even sure what the panels were for. Panzers? Artillery guns? Planes? Or was all his work pointless, meant to shame him and waste his time so that he didn't get in enough hours and he had to work on Sunday? Sunday was the one day he could be a normal POW without having a German guard watching his every move. And he'd been promised that next Sunday he could go outside of the isolation block and talk to whoever he pleased.
And, God, did Ivan want to speak to someone other than a German.
"I hate this," Ivan whispered as he painted swastika 27. "I absolutely hate this. I want to go home and sleep, not stay here all night painting for the Nazis. I should get done with this by ten or eleven, which means I'll get back to the stalag by twelve. That's four hours to sleep before I have to come here again."
He finished swastika 27, making sure to measure it before placing it with the rest to dry. Leaving even a millimeter off added a hundred more swastikas to the pile. Once, he had to paint 1,000 swastikas because he painted one backwards. Then he had to stand out in the yard for hours until the manager told him he could come back in.
"I didn't even do anything but ask for the time," Ivan snapped, smearing a cross on a new panel. No one told him asking for the time was a violation of the "rules" that only pertained to him. Even the concentration camp prisoners who worked with them could ask for the time and not be sent to punishment.
"Stop talking and work!" the guard outside shouted, banging his fist on the door. Ivan immediately shut up – he could not go back to the stalag with a bad note.
Ivan had come back with plenty of bad notes before, most of which the commandant tore up and laughed about. Sometimes when he started a fight or had a mood swing or refused to work, the commandant didn't rip those notes up. He put them in a little book and sent Ivan to solitary confinement until he was called out to work again. What was he saving the notes for? More public humiliation?
Instead of talking to himself, Ivan focused on the sounds of the factory. He could hear the ever present hum of machinery, the loud clicks the conveyor belt made. There was the distant murmur of German voices and the sharp shouts of the floor manager. And there was a new sound: footsteps. Very rarely did he hear footsteps in the factory, as no one moved for hours, and these seemed to be getting closer. Was his guard changing shifts?
"Braginsky…Project Auto…experimental," a soft voice said, some parts drowned out by the sounds of the factory. Ivan concentrated every part of him on painting a perfect swastika so he couldn't be yelled at.
The door was pushed open, Ivan's guard glaring down at him. Ivan stopped painting mid-swastika, backing into the corner.
"I'm working, I'm working," Ivan assured the guard, holding up the panel to show him. His hands were shaking once more, and not from anger. "See? I have made 28! I can't work faster than this. Please, sir, don't make me go stand –"
"You don't need to explain yourself to me." A smaller, well-dressed woman stepped out from behind the huge guard. She took a wary step into the room, taking the square from Ivan's hand and putting it down. "You are Ivan Braginsky, yes?"
Ivan nodded. He could almost see the letter that would be sent to Stalag XVIII-A telling Colonel Beilschmidt that one Ivan Braginsky had died in a tragic accident. The woman had to have been sent to take Ivan to a concentration camp or shoot him in the back or perhaps both.
"Come with me, Braginsky," the woman said.
"But ma'am, I'm not done with my work," Ivan said, looking down at the floor. "I have to finish before I can go home."
"You will not be returning to this part of the plant. Your work here can be finished by some other man."
"Ma'am…I…" Ivan searched for the words to use, coming up with nothing. There was no way to fight his executioner. "I understand," he admitted weakly, getting up from his spot in the corner and walking out with the man.
They walked in silence for what seemed like years, Ivan coming up with a thousand different ways to overtake the woman. She was smaller than Ivan was and probably weaker. However, Ivan wasn't in the best of condition, since he usually didn't eat and got only a few hours of sleep. The woman looked like she'd been in the military – she wouldn't be so delicate. And she had a guard following at her side with a finger curled over the trigger of his rifle. Ivan was as good as dead if he so much as got too close to her.
The long corridors and production rooms started to get less and less familiar, until they came to places Ivan had never seen before. The woman stopped at a door covered with papers, some headed with a bold achtung or warnung. Ivan felt his heart stop as he put everything together.
He would not be put in front of a firing squad. He would not be hung. He would not be burned alive or thrown into a gas chamber or thrown into a river.
Ivan was going to be a Nazi experiment.
He should've figured it out sooner; the woman had mentioned an experiment when she was outside the punishment room, she told Ivan he would not be returning, and she didn't look like a person who would make panzers. The woman was the perfect image of a German doctor, with her blond hair and blue eyes and wire frame glasses.
It made Ivan sick to think that her face would be the last face he saw.
"You are not needed anymore," the woman said to the guard, waving him off. "I can handle this…man on my own. I will call you if necessary."
The pause before she said "man" confirmed all of Ivan's fears. That little German doctor didn't think of Ivan as another human, but another test subject. Ivan was destined to the same fate Toris faced all those years ago, and there would be no one to save him from it.
The woman ushered Ivan into the room – an office, strangely enough. It didn't look any place where he could dismantle Ivan. There was a big desk and a worktable in the corner covered with paper, and a huge bay window. When the woman looked away, Ivan dared a glance over at the outside. Seldom did he get to see the outside world, and Ivan almost never saw it during the day. It was beautiful that day, the sunset painting the sky so many colors and everything was green and bright and happy.
What a wonderful last sight.
"Sit down," the woman said, gesturing to a chair in front of the worktable. Ivan immediately followed orders, sitting up perfectly straight. The woman pointed to an instruction booklet and a strange looking box. "You have an hour to tear that apart and put it back together. Make a mistake and you will not be returning to Stalag XVIII-A. Start."
Ivan, like any normal man in his situation, panicked. He grabbed the tiny box and pulled it open without a second thought as to what could be inside, gently yet hurriedly pulling out the electrical looking pieces and arranging them on the table. Before long he was faced with an empty box and too many undistinguishable parts.
The instruction book wasn't helpful in the slightest, offering cryptic pictures and a few German words. Instead, Ivan took to shoving the parts back in where he remembered them being, praying that he was doing everything right. He tucked in electrical relays and wires, keeping his face blank so the woman would think that he wasn't terrified.
"I'm done," Ivan said as he put the cover back on the box, pushing it towards the woman. She looked him right in the eye – the Germans never made eye contact with a Russian like him.
"No, you're not," the woman spat. "Do it right. I can have you sent to Dachau or shot for making one mistake."
"I believe I did it right," Ivan said.
"Are you sure you want to spent the rest of your days in a concentration camp?"
"I did it right."
"That was only seventeen minutes. Our man did it in twenty-eight." She snatched up the box, pulling the cover back off and examining the insides. She put the box down on the table and grabbed a chart off her desk, double checking that everything was in its exact place.
"I don't understand," she whispered, looking up at Ivan. "You did this in exactly seventeen minutes. Have you seen a fuse like this before?"
"That's a fuse?" Ivan said. He'd expected it to be a radio part, not the internals of a bomb.
"How could you do this? Are you sure you've never seen a fuse before?"
"No, I haven't," Ivan said. "The military told me I was too dumb to work with explosives. They needed manpower."
The woman sat down in a chair next to Ivan, scribbling notes on her official looking report. "The military was wrong, Colonel Braginsky. You're a genius." She tore off a slip of paper, handing it to Ivan. "When you come to work tomorrow, take that to your manager. He'll have you sent here, where you're going to be working for the next few weeks. I'll drive you back to the stalag."
"Are you serious?" Ivan said. He'd never gone back to the stalag before eight – and if he went then, he would be back by seven. The woman nodded.
That day was the best day of Ivan's life.
"Elizabeta, did your husband tell you how my father died?"
"No," Elizabeta said, twisting the phone cord around her finger. "What kind of hello was that?"
"I don't have a lot of time to talk tonight. But I thought you should know that your husband was part of the group that shot my father," Roderich said with almost no inflection in his words.
Elizabeta couldn't think of a way to respond to that. She'd picked up the phone thinking Roderich would want to talk about trivial things and laugh with her, not make her feel guilty. He always called on Sunday evenings, no matter what. Every Sunday for the past three years, the two had fought out everything that hadn't healed since the divorce, talked about far off cities and the war, and made plans to meet in person again. Elizabeta had even gone through the trouble of getting Gilbert to go into town that night for a few hours so she could talk without risking being caught.
"Oh, my God, that's horrible," she said. "I…I had no idea. I mean, you told me he died and you went to the funeral. I didn't think Gilbert was involved, and I never would've figured that out on my own. Are you alright, Roderich?"
"I'm fine. I've been considering taking up drinking again, that's all. How have you been?"
"Are you seriously going to go back to being an alcoholic? I thought you got over that years ago."
"I did. However, that was when I thought my father died accidentally and Basch Zwingli was coming home and I could send Feliks to see Toris," Roderich shot back. "Now I don't know what to do."
Elizabeta held back a sigh. "Firstly, don't go back to drinking," she said. "Second, I have no idea where Basch is. Gilbert doesn't tell me anything about things like that. Lastly, you could always send Feliks here when Gilbert has a staff meeting."
"Feliks is coming?" Toris asked from Gilbert's office. "When?"
"No, Feliks is not coming," Elizabeta said. "And you better not be in Gilbert's desk."
"Tell that to Raivis and Heracles! Raivis is having Heracles read from papers that he found in your husband's desk," Toris said, appearing in the doorway. "And Heracles is drawing cats on all of them."
"Will you make him stop?!"
"Heracles does what he wants," Toris replied. "And he doesn't understand German yet."
"He was speaking it nearly fluently yesterday," Elizabeta snapped. "Get in there and make him stop."
Toris rolled his eyes and went back into the office, saying something to Heracles that Elizabeta couldn't understand. She prayed that Gilbert would be in an understanding mood when he came back and saw kittens scribbled over his reports.
"Do you even care?" Roderich said, his voice surprisingly rough. "I am keeping a boy here who thinks his friend is dead, and you couldn't care less. And all because we thought Toris was dead for three years until you brought him up again. I can't take that back after what that boy's gone through."
"Says who? Can't you say you've made a mistake?" Elizabeta asked.
"A mistake that I didn't correct for three years?"
"May I remind you that we were married for four years? That was a mistake all on its own."
"I don't think that was such a mistake," Roderich said. "It could've gone a lot better than it did."
"We're both happy now, aren't we?" she said, flinching at a loud crash from the office. Raivis shouted an apology, and Elizabeta prayed nothing was broken.
"Did you miss the part about my father dying?"
"That isn't what I meant. Everything that happened with the divorce was for the best. And Roderich, you can always tell Feliks the truth and I'll tell you when you can send him down here."
"Oh, sure, and then Feliks will try to kill me. I'd rather stay alive. Listen, Elizabeta, I should go. I'll talk to you next Sunday, alright?" Roderich said.
"Ja, that's fine. What are you doing that's so important, or is that information classified?" she said with a smile.
"I can't tell you much. Let's just say that I'm talking to someone on the same level of importance as Hitler," Roderich explained like that was an everyday thing for him. "Auf Weidersehen, Frau Beilschmidt."
"Auf Weidersehen, liebchen."
The word slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it. It was instinct to add a liebchen to the end of her goodbyes – the one other person she talked to on the phone was Gilbert. There was a long pause that followed in which Elizabeta was sure Roderich was either dying of laughter or too startled to reply.
"…You called me liebchen, didn't you?" Roderich sounded like he was trying his best not to laugh.
"It was force of habit," Elizabeta growled, feeling her face grow red. "I don't actually love you."
"Perhaps it was a Freudian slip. Goodbye, liebchen!"
"Roderich, wait –"
He'd already hung up.
Elizabeta slammed the phone down, covering her face with her hands and holding back a scream. That man could go from the nicest person in the world to the most irritating person alive in two seconds. He knew she hadn't meant to say liebchen, but he wasn't going to let her get away with it like a normal man would. At least Gilbert wasn't in the office, because there would have been several questions already.
"Toris," she said, "I better not come in there and find a mess. Do you want time to clean up whatever disaster you've made?"
"It actually isn't that bad," Toris replied.
"Good. Please have everything cleaned up before Gilbert gets back, or I'm going to catch hell for letting you three play in there."
"We're not playing," Raivis huffed. "We're learning."
"Whatever you're doing, just have it cleaned up," Elizabeta said, getting up from her desk. She glanced at the office door before deciding it better not to go in, instead going to the front window. The sun was starting to set in the horizon; soon all prisoners would have to go back to their barracks.
It took Elizabeta a minute to realize that Ivan was walking up to the front porch.
She looked over at the clock – it was seven, much too early for Ivan to be back. And the factory had called earlier, telling Elizabeta that Ivan should be expected to get back later than normal. But there he was, smiling like an idiot with a guard by his side.
"Did you get fired again?" Elizabeta asked when he came into the office. Why else would he be grinning?
"I'm smart, and I have a paper that says I'm smart." Ivan pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, showing it to Elizabeta. "See?"
She took it from his hands, reading through the dainty cursive. Ivan Braginsky is needed to work on Project Auto and will not be returning to his normal position. He is to be paid twice his normal wages and must be in good physical condition. Signed, Frau Moyer, head of Project Auto.
"Ivan, this just says that you're going to be getting paid a bit more," Elizabeta said as she handed it back to him.
"Except I put together a bomb fuse in seventeen minutes! The German did it in twenty-eight! I'm smarter than a German!" Ivan shoved the paper back in his pocket. "The lady I'm working with says she's never seen anyone like me, whatever that means. She bought me candy in Wolfsburg."
"You're twenty-six, aren't you? Is candy still a bribe for you?" Elizabeta asked.
"I haven't had candy in at least ten years." Ivan pulled the candy from his pocket, showing off the golden butterscotch disks. "I'm saving them for a special day. Well, I already ate one of them, so that's not exactly saving them. But I'll save the rest!"
"Fair enough," Elizabeta said. "I'm glad you've done something right for once, Ivan. Do you think you'll be able to hold this job?"
"Absolutely. As long as candy's involved," Ivan added, flashing her another smile that showed off his missing tooth. Elizabeta hadn't seen that smile in so long.
"Toris, look at this!" Ivan said as Toris stepped out of the office, running up to the man. "I'm going to get twice as much money and the lady in charge said I was a genius."
Toris didn't say anything as he got in front of Raivis, backing away from Ivan out of fear and instinct.
"Right, I..I forgot," Ivan said, his grin fading. He hadn't spoken to Toris since 1941, and their last conversation wasn't pleasant. "Um, I'm sorry. I'll be going now. Good night, everyone. I might see you tomorrow, if I can get home early."
With that, he left the office with the guard.
"I haven't been that close to him in three years," Toris said, his voice trembling. "And God, I never want to be that close to him again."
"He's trying to get better, and I think he's definitely improved," Elizabeta said. "You should at least make an effort to talk to him. Ivan only wants someone to talk to."
"He can find someone else. The last time he 'talked' to me, he told me that when the war ended, he'd shoot me."
"What's your sister like, 140084?"
Basch put the grip panel back onto a pistol, looking over at his partner. They'd been working together for years, and yet neither had learned each other's name. Basch thought the man's name might have been Dan – he'd heard it during a roll call – but to him, the man was Political Prisoner 140196.
"Why do you ask?" Basch said, running a hand through his blond hair. It was getting quite long, and soon enough he was going to be dragged out to the main plaza and someone would cut it off. "I thought you weren't one for family."
140196 shrugged. "Sometimes I want to think of you as a person. Not Criminal 140084, arrested for Underground activities and Jewish association. You are not just a criminal."
"If I tell you about Lilli, you have to tell me about your family, Political Prisoner 140196, arrested for Communist propaganda. I hardly know anything about you, and you've been sitting beside me for the past two years."
"Deal."
"Will you two shut up before someone hears you?" said the other man who worked with them. Basch hadn't even bothered to learn his number.
"What will they do? Shoot us?" 140196 asked. "Ironic."
"My sister is named Lilli," Basch said. "She should be seventeen, if it is July. She's got the prettiest blonde hair and green eyes like mine. We almost look related, and you wouldn't be able to tell she's adopted. I found her in an alley years ago and took her home. Lilli wants to be a nurse, and she helped patch me up when I got shot. She's the one who gave me the chocolate," he added, patting the pocket where he kept the two bars.
"Cute. My sister is Laura. Reddish hair. Green eyes like mine. Likes waffles," 140196 said. "My brother is Louis. He is little. Seven, maybe? Likes dogs and money."
"I didn't think you had eyes," Basch said. 140196 glared at him through his long bangs, brushing them back to show off the scar over his eyebrow.
"Bad joke," 140196 said. "German humor is the worst."
"Where's your family?" Basch asked before 140196 could get mad. He'd seen 140196 when he was angry, and Basch never wanted to be on the receiving end of it. The last man 140196 got in a fight with didn't come out of it alive.
"Amsterdam. Hopefully," 140196 replied. "Unless Nazis have found them."
"Lilli's still in Vienna, last I checked. My cousin, Francis, is taking care of her for me."
"Will you please stop talking?" the other man begged, looking around for guards. "I don't want to die today."
"Too bad," 140196 said as he picked up a rifle to inspect. Basch went back to work on another pistol, wondering what Lilli was doing. His mind always returned to the girl.
"Do you think we'll ever get out of here?" Basch asked in an attempt at keeping his mind from Lilli. Thinking about the girl made him angry and depressed and worst of all, hopeless. He could not be hopeless, not in a prison regiment where one word could have him shot.
"We will get out. Maybe alive. Maybe dead." 140196 smiled. "I do not care how."
"You must really hate your family."
"I really hate life. If I go back to Amsterdam, there is poverty waiting. If I stay here, I fix German guns all day. If I die, who knows? No matter what, it ends badly for me."
"Aren't you just a ray of sunshine," Basch muttered, going back to his pistol. "I'll be sure to tell your sisters how positive you were. You are on the kill list, after all."
"Yes, but I am not important enough to hang. Or waste bullets on. And 140084, what is your name?" 140196 asked. "In case you get put on the kill list. I will go back and tell Lilli."
"My name is Basch Martin Luther Zwingli," Basch said. He found it odd to say his real name – when asked for his name, he was required to answer with Criminal 140084. Saying his given name was like saying he was someone else. Basch Martin Luther Zwingli wasn't alive anymore. Criminal 140084 was.
"I am Daan van Dijk. Two a's. Cannot remember if I had middle name. Pleasure to meet you, Basch Martin Luther Zwingli." Daan stuck out his gun oil covered hand.
"Likewise, Daan van Dijk." Basch shook Daan's hand for only a second before he started laughing, something he wasn't allowed to do under normal circumstances. Even smiling was enough to get his name put on the watch list.
"Why are you laughing?" Daan asked with a rare grin of his own.
"I've known you for two-and-a-half years and I never learned your name. And I hate to break it to you, but that is the stupidest name I've heard in a long time."
Daan almost laughed for a second. "Basch Martin Luther Zwingli isn't good, either," he said, giving Basch a gentle shove.
"And Daan van Dijk is?"
"Better than yours."
"Please," Basch said. "I'm named after Martin Luther. I've got an interesting name with an interesting story and you're another Johann Schmidt. I'm positive there's a thousand Daan van Dijks out there."
"Daan is a very nice name," Daan muttered.
Basch shook his head, resisting another smile. "Let's stick to our numbers, alright?"
"Alright, 140084."
They worked in silence after that, Basch starting to get scared that he'd seriously offended Daan. Daan was the person who kept Basch alive. He could steal almost anything, always had cigarettes, and found loopholes in their gun work. Daan was the sole companion Basch had – if he lost him, it would be catastrophic.
"140084, are you working tonight?" a small voice whispered, the boy who delivered the mail stepping into the tent. "Oh, good! I snuck another letter through the censors for you," he said, coming over to Basch's workplace. He pulled a cream-colored envelope from his bag, handing it over to Basch.
"Thanks, kid. I'll be sure to get you something," Basch said as he took the letter.
"I'll get you something," Daan corrected. "You give."
"Whatever. Have any of my letters gotten through?" Basch asked. The mail boy pulled another letter from his bag, holding it up for Basch to see. Almost every word was stamped out in black ink, a few passages even cut completely from the page. At the top of the page, "reject" was stamped in bold red letters.
"I tried to sneak it into the box and they caught me," the boy said. "If you write a new one, I'll try again."
"I'm running out of paper, but I'll have to find something," Basch said, taking his rejected letter back. The boy said a goodbye and ran off to finish the mail before the night's roll call.
Basch ripped open the envelope, startled to find Francis' handwriting on the page instead of Lilli's. He'd grown used to seeing Lilli's letters full of flower doodles and adorable stories, and Francis' sharp cursive was a rather drastic change. And if Francis was writing, the news could not be good.
"Who wrote?" Daan asked.
"My cousin. Here, I'll read it. Basch," he started, unfolding the rest of the letter.
"Today is a very exciting day here in Vienna. Mathias has been using a wireless radio for a while now and got a very important message from a general. The general talked to Roderich for around thirty minutes about plans for his music and a certain date. June 5th. I can't wait until you hear the piece, it'll be phenomenal. Maybe even Roderich's last.
"In other less important news, I saw a bald eagle the other day and thought of you. We're all missing you greatly here. If you get the chance to come home, please do.
"From Francis with love."
"Does any of that mean anything?" Daan asked.
Basch shrugged, folding the letter up and tucking it in his pocket. "I have no damn idea. He made the words 'bald eagle' a little differently than the rest, so I think that's the code word. I don't remember that one, though."
"Hitler? Maybe Goering?" Daan suggested.
"No, he would've said their names. Francis is a brave bastard," Basch said. He recognized that code word, but he couldn't place it. Where had he heard that before?
He remembered looking at a newspaper with Francis and Mathias, laughing about someone. Francis said the man in the picture looked very American. Mathias had asked why, and Francis said that the man looked like a bald eagle. What was that man's name? He had to be the man Francis was talking about. It was Eisen-something-or-the-other.
Then it hit him.
"He's talking about Eisenhower," Basch whispered. "Oh, my God, he's talking about General Eisenhower! They contacted General Eisenhower!"
"Don't yell," Daan snarled. "You will get us in trouble. And your cousin is joking. No one talks to the Allied leader. Not anyone you would know."
"They talked to Eisenhower. That is a good reason to yell," Basch said. "Daan, this is huge. Something big is about to happen. I know it."
"They lied. No one talks to Allied leaders."
"My friends can do amazing things. Talking to Eisenhower would be like talking to a neighbor for them."
Daan rolled his eyes. "I doubt it."
"Just you wait, Daan van Dijk. On June 5th, something big will happen," Basch said. "The war might end."
"How much are you willing to bet on that?" Daan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"If I am wrong, I'll give you one whole bar of chocolate. If I'm right, you have to find me a whole box of cigarettes," Basch said. He was so confident that the Allies were planning a huge move for June 5th that he was willing to bet one of his precious chocolate bars that he was saving for the end of the war.
"What if I die before June 5th?"
"Don't be such a pessimist," Basch said. "You'll live. And if I die, I'm leaving everything to you in my will."
"I need written proof." Daan grabbed a report that was supposed to be used for gun parts and a pen, sliding them over to Basch.
"Alright, alright, here's my will. If I die," Basch said aloud as he wrote on the back of the report, "Everything I own goes to Daan van Dijk, who has the stupidest name in the world. Basch M.L. Zwingli."
"I resent that," Daan said, shoving the will into his pocket.
The deal was said and done.
Basch couldn't wait until Daan had to bring him a box of cigarettes.
A/N: No history notes this time! I'll talk about Eisenhower later (oh, boy, you are not ready for proud Kansan rambling).
Sorry this chapter is shorter than the others have been. I am under a ton of pressure and cannot continue to write huge chapters. This will most likely be the regular size for the rest of the story.
Thank you to exca 314, EllaAwkward, and Lunar Loon! You guys are amazing!
See you all next chapter!