take a bite of the soup. It’s made with beef, hearty and thick, and I eat half the bowl before I say another word. Lottie sits down across from me and waits. I can tell she’s anxious to hear why I’ve returned alone, but she doesn’t rush me. When I’m done, I push the bowl away. “We need to talk about what happens next,” I say. “Do you and Bernard have somewhere safe to go?”
“Safe?” Lottie says. “Safe from whom?”
“Too many people know about the weapon,” I remind her. I think about Jackson’s body lying in the trunk of the car. She can’t have forgotten what happened. “If someone thinks you know anything about where it is, they might try to harm you.”
Lottie’s face hardens, and I know she’s now thinking about Jackson as well. “There are places where we will be safe,” she says stonily. “And where we can bury Jackson.”
“Where?”
She looks like she doesn’t want to tell me. “In France,” she says.
“I’ll need to know where you are,” I say. “In case I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” I admit. “Maybe nothing. But when this is over, I know my family would like to meet you and Bernard.”
Lottie shakes her head. “I don’t think they would like that at all,” she says. “They will blame me.”
I can’t tell if she really believes this or if she’s the one who doesn’t want anything to do with us. I don’t argue with her. There will be time for that later. Right now, we both need to get going. There’s one more thing I need to discuss with her first.
“What can you tell me about Karl Ott?” I ask her.
Lottie shrugs. “I’ve known him since we were children. Our fathers worked together.”
I sense that this is something else she’s reluctant to talk about. But I need information, and so I press on. “What’s his real name?”
She hesitates a moment before saying, “Tobias Falkenrath.”
“Jackson said his father was imprisoned by the Allies.”
“Yes,” Lottie says. “The Soviets.”
“Could Ott be working with someone?”
Lottie looks at me and wrinkles her brow. “What do you mean?”
“Somebody tipped off the people who came and took you from the safe house,” I say.
“It could have been any number of people,” Lottie replies tersely.
“Yes, it could,” I say. But I have my doubts. I can’t help thinking about how Ott disappeared so quickly during the fight at the factory, and how determined he was to get the weapon.
“Karl wouldn’t betray us,” Lottie says, as if the matter is settled. She stands up. “I need to get Bernard ready to leave.”
I don’t argue with her. Now that I know Ott’s real name, I can find out more about him on my own. Still, I’m not happy having his whereabouts unknown. He’s a wild card, and I’d feel better if I knew what he was up to.
While Lottie goes and wakes Bernard, I wash the dishes and put them away. When Lottie and Bernard are ready, I make one last trip through the apartment, making things look the way they did when we arrived. My clothes are still damp, and I don’t want to put them on and risk being cold again, so I’ll be borrowing Anaïs’s friend’s clothes permanently. Hopefully, she’ll just convince herself he took them, and won’t even know someone has been here. Not that it matters. Still, I’ve been trained not to leave any evidence behind, and it’s important to stay sharp.
We leave the apartment and go down to the car. Before Lottie and Bernard get in, I give them each a hug. I also give Lottie some of the cash I took from the safe house. “This should be enough to get you to France,” I tell her.
She tucks the money into the pocket of her coat, then hands me a piece of paper. “The address where we’ll be,” she says. Then she kisses me on each cheek. “Good luck, Sam.”
She gets into the car, starts it, and drives away. I watch until she reaches the end of the street and disappears. Once she’s out of sight, I turn and start walking. I’ll be leaving Berlin myself shortly. First, though, I need to make a call.
Ariadne
The waters of the Aegean are choppy, as they often are in winter, and the caïque rocks a little as we make the crossing from Piraeus to Heraklion. But after more than 48 hours cooped up in a train compartment, it’s a pleasure to be out in the open air. I only wish my homecoming were under different circumstances.
Manos Theodorakis is at the helm of the Amphitrite, and as we motor, he talks to me and Cassandra about the civil war that has been waging in Greece for the past four years.
“I think we are nearing the end,” he says. “Now that Stalin has withdrawn support from Tito, the Communists will not be able to maintain their positions. Already they are calling for Vafiadis to be replaced. It’s only a matter of time.”
Ianthe Pavlou, who is sitting at the small table in the cabin with me and Cassandra, takes one of the pieces of the weapon from the box that sits open in front of her, and inspects it. “If the rest of the country had fought the way Cretans did against the Germans, the war would have ended much sooner.”
Ianthe is talking about the Battle of Crete, which occurred in the summer of 1941, when the Nazis sent paratroopers to invade the island in an attempt to secure it as a seaport. They were met with fierce resistance from the local population—most of whom are of the Minoan line—who defended their ancestral home and defeated the invaders. Cassandra and I were only 10, but we had already been training for several years, and we assisted the older fighters by acting as scouts and relaying information back and forth. Ianthe, who is older than we are by 15 years, killed a dozen soldiers herself, and has a thick scar running down the left side of her face as a reminder.
She sets the piece in her hand back in the box and stands up. “I need a break,” she says. “Ari, want to come outside for a smoke?”
I can tell that she wants to talk to me alone. I nod and follow her out of the cabin and onto the deck. Ianthe leans against the rail that runs along the side of the boat. She takes a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and taps one out. She offers it to me, but I shake my head. She puts the pack away, places the cigarette in her mouth, and cups her hand around it as she strikes a match and touches it to the tip. When it takes, she tosses the match into the sea and blows out a cloud of smoke.
Even though it’s winter, the temperature is warm and the skies are blue. The change from Berlin is remarkable. I realize how much I’ve missed Greece after more than half a year away. I look out over the seemingly endless expanse of the sea. We’ve been motoring for only a few hours, so Crete is not yet visible, but I search the horizon for its familiar hills anyway. At the bow, dolphins break the
