Chapter 4

Dear Anne,

It's been a long day, and I'm as weary as I've ever been since stepping off the ship in Bergen's harbor to take up this post. The slow drip of the war is tiring—the daily briefings that bring endless counts of ships, planes, men. The maps with their color-coded dotted lines crossing miles and frontiers. The conversations and arguments. The warnings and justifications. You grow numb to it if you're not careful, so then when events occur that require decisive action and quick thinking, it's like trying to jump-start one of those old Ford ambulances of ours in a heavy January freeze. I'm not sure whether I'm the ambulance or the frustrated, desperate driver. I suppose history will tell...

"T he Blücher . The Lützow . The Emden . The Kondor , Albatros , and M?we ." Daisy read off the list as she pinched the bridge of her nose in an effort to alleviate a blossoming headache.

"And those are just the cruisers and torpedo boats," Mr. Whitney sniped from his chair across the room, brows beetling as he read from the file.

"I can read," she replied mildly, flipping through the report.

Part of the foreign service boys club, the vice consul had been a thorn in her side since she'd arrived in Norway. More recently, he'd been furious when he was passed over for transfer to another posting, blaming her for submitting a poor service evaluation. In fact, it had been her recognition that, despite his insubordinate attitude, he was too valuable to lose. Looking back, it might have been smarter to praise him to the skies and suggest he might put his superior diplomatic skills to better use somewhere else—Outer Mongolia sprang to mind. None of those thoughts ever made it to her face or crept into her tone. What was the saying? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? Daisy wouldn't go so far as to label Mr. Whitney an enemy; he remained a valuable part of the chancery staff. But he was someone she managed with a careful hand.

"Bloody Norwegians." Whitney flung down the folder. "How'd they let it come to this?"

"We're privy to the same intelligence as they are," Daisy replied calmly. "How did we ?"

He clicked his jaw shut, but his face grew red with swallowed words. Daisy sighed. Arguing got them nowhere. He was clearly as frustrated as she was and subsisting on little more than coffee and cigarettes. She pushed aside her irritation and smoothed her face into conciliatory lines. "Opinions aside, what's your professional assessment?"

Mollified, he leaned back, steepling his fingers under his chin in thought. "I'd lay odds they're heading out to meet the British, ma'am. The Jerries won't let their mine laying off Narvik stand."

"Perhaps. But that doesn't explain why they're grouping at the mouth of the Oslofjord, does it?" She consulted her map, scanning the long, jagged waterway that drove straight north to the capital's heart.

"You asked for an assessment," Whitney argued. "If you choose to ignore it, that's up to you." He heaved himself to his feet. "Good thing the builders finished that new bomb shelter in the basement. I expect you'll be sleeping there tonight; rest those old bones of yours while you have the chance." He smiled to make it seem as if he was joking, but Daisy wasn't fooled.

She answered him back with a smile of her own. "Old is for others, Mr. Whitney. I'm getting younger by the day. Must be the climate. That being said, I'm long past the age where camping is enjoyable. If those ships are aiming for Oslo, they won't be here before tomorrow at the earliest. I'd rather start a war after a good night's sleep in my own bed, wouldn't you?"

After he left, she choked down her lunch in between phone calls to the Foreign Office, the legations in Copenhagen and Berlin, the consulate in Bergen, and her contacts in Trondheim, Narvik, and Stavanger. Was this a German feint to draw the British into battle? Or was it something bigger? Bolder? It was like staring at the scramble of scattered puzzle pieces. Trying to fit them together until the picture emerged. So what piece was she missing? What clue didn't she have?

Rubbing her tired eyes, she snapped on the radio, settling into her favorite chair to gaze on her favorite view: the mountains to the far west, hanging like hazy shadows against the pale sky. She took up her embroidery, sorting and matching threads, another pattern with blank spaces and missing pieces that would take work to bring into focus.

At one point, she spied Cleo passing outside the door. A light step, a sultry whiff of Tabu perfume.

The girl always had been a chameleon. She could slide through a space without notice or draw every eye if that was her intention. She'd certainly not inherited that mercurial quality from either parent. Both Letitia and Paul were as easy to read as a pair of children's primers. But Cleo was quicker to find the angle and turn a moment to her advantage. In a man, it was a trait that would win praise. But women were still raised to be timid approval-seekers, which made Cleo's ingenuity a blot on her copybook. Normally Daisy would have fostered Cleo's clear thinking. Turned against her, she found it as irritating as everyone else did.

Movement flickered at the edge of her vision. "Do you plan to hover all night, Clementine, or is there something you wanted?"

She could practically hear the huff at her use of that detestable name.

Cleo's hair was damp and dark as if she'd just left the bath, those short choppy curls of hers barely touching her ears. They made her look painfully young and far more like her father. Paul's hair had been that same shade of expensive Swiss chocolate. He'd had the same long straight purposeful nose, those green eyes flecked with gold. In fact, there was very little of Letitia in her daughter except perhaps for her boyish slenderness, not at all the fashion these days when luxurious curves were all the rage.

"I only wanted to say how much I appreciated what you did for me in securing that ticket." In and out like the threads of Daisy's embroidery, Cleo's fingers laced and relaxed. The pulse in her throat as rapid as a bird's. "But in the end, I couldn't use it. Not without feeling like I was abandoning Micky. You understand, don't you?"

By the time Daisy had learned of Cleo's deception, it had been too late to call ahead to Bergen and explain the situation. That ship had sailed—literally. Miss Kristiansen's grandmother was on her way to New York. Daisy could rant and fume or she could find the angle and adapt. Perhaps Cleo was more like her than anyone.

"Have you written your mother to explain?" Daisy looked down at her own hands, which lay relaxed upon her lap. An old woman's hands, she realized with a start. Freckled. Knobby. She never felt old, so it was always a surprise to see herself in a mirror and notice the gray hair, the sagging neck, the thickening of her body.

"Not yet." Cleo studied the tops of her shoes. "I will. It's just hard to find the right words."

Daisy's gaze narrowed. "They don't need to be perfect. They just need to be from you." Cleo nodded and started to turn away, but Daisy stopped her. "Do you know what an SS-Junker School is, Cleo? It's used for training by Germany's secret police forces. Gestapo. The SS-D. One of these schools opened in Zakopane shortly after the invasion. Did you know about the school? Or the other Gestapo facilities located in Zakopane as part of the German annexation of that country?"

Cleo's answer was clear in the way she closed her eyes, knuckles white, body rigid.

"How well did you know your trumpeter?" Daisy continued. "Did he ever talk to you about what took him to Poland in the first place?"

"Work, of course. He'd hired on with a jazz band out of Kraków."

"My information says that his father's family was from Kraków. He had relatives there."

"Sure, but nobody Micky had ever met. His grandparents emigrated ages ago."

"Did he ever speak about the invasion of Poland? How he felt about it?"

"He griped about the inconveniences, the new regulations. Nothing that could have been seen as treasonous or worth being arrested over. And it was only to me. He never spoke out where anyone might hear him."

Daisy took up her hoop and needle. "Let's hope so."

C leo slipped out of the residence in the confusion of dinner preparations for the new French ambassador. It didn't take her long to find herself back at the same smoky nightclub with its flickering candles, hothouse flowers, and starry-eyed couples rocking against one another on the tiny dance floor as the band played.

The same ma?tre d' met her at the door, glancing over her shoulder in search of her date.

"Bord til en, v?r s? snill." Cleo held up a finger. "Table for one."

He sat her near the kitchen, bringing her a bottle of wine and a bowl of creamy fish soup. She sopped it up with a thick hunk of crusty bread and tried not to think about similar nights in similar clubs listening to similar bands. It wasn't until the group bowed their way offstage for a break that she realized they were speaking English—American English.

Homesickness twisted her gut.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she followed the familiar rise and fall of her mother tongue backstage to a cluttered dressing room that doubled as a storage closet. Brooms and mops stood in a corner beside a mirrored vanity ringed with Hollywood lights where the singer checked his thick wavy chestnut hair. The horn section slumped together on a broken sofa heaped with cushions—one reading a battered copy of War and Peace , the other juggling a dinner plate on his lap. A third man, bony and tall with a bird's sharp face and skin as dark as mahogany seemed to be sleeping on a pile of old newspapers tied with twine, his arms crossed corpse-like over his chest. Seated on an upturned bucket, another lighter-skinned man in a jaunty green bow tie tapped out a jazz beat on the wall.

"Well, hello there." Spotting her lurking in the doorway, the drummer paused in his tapping, his smile slow and lazy, his gaze roaming over her body even beneath the shapeless coat she wore. If he hoped to surprise a blush out of her, he was doomed to disappointment. She'd been ogled by far more experienced lechers in her twenty-five years.

"Excuse me," she said. "Not to intrude, but I'm looking for someone."

"Aren't we all, sweetheart?" The drummer laughed.

"His name is Micky Kominski. He plays trumpet. Maybe you've heard of him?"

"Depends. What do you want him for? Has he skipped town? Does he owe you money? Are you"—his gaze settled on her stomach—"in the family way?"

She wrenched her coat tightly around her. "He went missing in Poland."

The man reading looked up from his book. "Poland? What the hell was he doing there? Doesn't he know there's a war on?"

The drummer leaned against the wall, sticks still tapping. "Sorry, doll. We've been working here in Oslo since the beginning of the year. Sam over there doesn't like to drive his precious rattletrap van into battle zones."

The man reclining on the newspapers opened one sleepy eye. "Make fun of Athena all you want, but she gets us where we need to go."

"Athena?" Cleo ventured.

"The van," Drummer explained with a roll of his eyes and a flutter of his sticks. "Sorry, doll. Hope you find him, though."

Cleo should have expected it. She'd received the same answer everywhere she went. Common sense told her to give up. Even if Micky hadn't died in the café's bombing, there were a thousand different ways he could have been hurt or killed in the weeks since. But giving up on him—on her search—meant saying goodbye. She couldn't do it. Not yet. Not so long as there was a chance he could still be out there. A chance he needed her.

Not many people did.

After the snug warmth of the club, the wind slapped her awake. Streetlights reflected golden off the snow and bounced back from dark windows of neighboring apartment buildings. Cleo burrowed her hands into her coat pockets and hurried back to the legation, slipping up the drive and hoping to sneak in through the kitchens and up to her room without being seen. A rustle in the bushes and a crunch of a boot heel on the gravel checked her pace. A dark figure stood in the shelter of the portico. "We need to quit meeting like this, Miss Jaffray."

Even with only the glow of his cigarette to illuminate his features, it was easy to see the lines dug into the lieutenant's face, the way he stood tense and angry. Or was it fear that held him taut as a wire? "You look as if you've seen a ghost."

His gaze met hers, his eyes wide and almost lost. "I don't know what I just saw, but it sure as hell wasn't good."

Whatever had him jumpy as a cat, she wasn't going to stand out here and interrogate him. Her feet were already frozen, and the cold was making its way simultaneously up her legs and down her back. "Come on. I have a surefire remedy for chasing away ghosts."

"Brandy?"

"Better."

The kitchen was quiet and dark but for a few lamps left burning in case the minister woke and wanted a glass of milk or a cup of tea in the middle of the night. The smells of bread, sugar, and gravy lingered in the warm air.

Bayard fell into a chair as Cleo moved around the kitchen, searching out milk, cocoa, sugar, a saucepan. Two mugs. "I want to thank you for helping Petra," he said, color slowly returning to his face. "After the way she treated you, I didn't expect it."

"I didn't do it for Petra. I did it for me. It was a selfish act—pure and simple."

"If you say so."

"Here." She pushed a mug across the table at him, hoping to change the subject. "Mother always says a good cup of cocoa makes bad things go away."

He sipped cautiously before smiling his thanks. His shoulders lost that hunched defensive posture. He rubbed his face with his hands, erasing the tension though shadows continued to cloud the edges of his gaze.

"Care to tell me what's going on, or is this one more thing I'm not supposed to know or can't know or everyone's too busy to tell me?"

"Might as well. If it's what I think it is, we'll be up to our necks in it sooner rather than later."

That was ominous. Cleo sipped at her own cocoa, for the first time wishing she was back in the nursery with Mother tucking her up with a kiss to keep the monsters away.

"I just got back from the German embassy." Bayard stared into his mug, a frown between his arrowed brows. "A friend of mine in the Norwegian foreign office invited me along to watch a peace movie the Germans were showing."

"Sounds dull. What was it? Rosy-cheeked blond children frisking in an Alpine meadow? Hearty hausfraus and their polka-loving husbands eating sausages and clinking frothy tankards at Oktoberfest?"

"I wish." His haunted look was back, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. "It was a documentary film about the bombing of Warsaw. It was horrible. So much devastation and death. You wouldn't believe it."

"Wouldn't I?" She gripped her tea towel like a lifeline. "Though I can't imagine why they'd show such a film."

"They explained it was a way to promote peace, for God's sake. They claimed it was to show what would happen to anyone who resisted the Nazis' attempts to defend it from English aggression. We were all so shocked, no one knew what to say. It was... it was..."

"Absolutely bonkers?"

That surprised a faint smile. His brown eyes softened. "You could call it that." They finished their cocoa in silence. He set his mug in the sink. "You may regret you gave that ticket away."

"I'm not leaving until I find out what happened to Micky. Is he alive? Is he dead? Has he been detained or imprisoned? Someone out there knows."

"That reminds me." He sat up, fishing in his pocket. "A courier dropped this off for you." He handed her an envelope.

Cleo slid a finger beneath the flap, unfolding the heavy, expensive stationery. The handwriting was bold and black and arrogant. "It's from Herr Brauer's secretary. I'm to meet with him tomorrow morning at the German chancery."

"He has news?"

"I'll find out tomorrow." Her words were cut off by a low moaning wail that skittered up her spine. She locked her knees together to keep from diving under the table.

Bayard's face assumed his earlier stricken look of shock. "Stand to. Here we go."

M idnight and the streetlights still burned.

Cleo stood at her window, fingertips pressed to the cold glass as she strained to catch the drone of aircraft, the whistle of falling bombs. This wasn't the first air raid drill she'd lived through—there had been one while she was staying in a town near the Slovakian border and two more as she passed through Austria along with a stream of fellow refugees. She'd followed instructions and the crowds as they made their orderly way to the designated shelters and waited patiently for the authorities to tell them it was safe to go home. There had been no real sense of alarm or panic. Poland had given the Germans confidence. The West's subsequent inactivity had boosted it.

In Munich, where she had been dozing in a railway station, the sirens had wailed again. By then she'd grown used to them so, with nowhere to go, she'd simply pulled herself deeper into her coat and continued to sleep. In the German city of Kiel, there had been no sirens, but whispers of an attack had sent people into the street to search the night skies along with the antiaircraft batteries.

One a.m. and Oslo was finally plunged into darkness. Cleo could hear the staff scrambling in the blackout, laughing and chatting as if they were enjoying a children's parlor game like sardines or hide-and-seek.

There was a suffocating claustrophobia that came with being unable to see. It stole her breath. An eerie numbness crept into her fingers and feet. Using the faintest overlap of shadows as a guide, she worked her way from the window to the bed, settling back on the duvet, digging her fingers into the fabric as if it might anchor her in place and keep her from simply fading away to vapor. In her fancy, she imagined them coming to wake her in the morning and finding her vanished into thin air—disappeared like Micky.

Would they spend any more time looking for her than they had for him? How much did her name count? Her pedigree? Her Sutton Place relations?

Silly question: if war spared those with the proper connections, her father would have lived to come home rather than ending in a French military cemetery, one name among thousands, among hundreds of thousands.

A phone rang and was quickly answered. Hurried footsteps passed by in the hall outside her door. The earlier laughter died out, replaced by a murmur of conversation. The phone rang again. A car arrived in a crunch of gravel. Doors slammed. Voices rose and fell, though she couldn't make out what they said. At one point, Cleo heard Bayard shouting blackout instructions.

Aunt Daisy's voice—sharp but not frantic—cut through them all.

Silence resumed.

Did you know about the school? Or the other Gestapo facilities located in Zakopane... ?

Not at first. The war had come on them so suddenly, waves of infantry and tanks streaming through town in the first wave of invasion, that they'd had no time to be afraid. It wasn't until the flood of refugees from the devastation in Warsaw and Kraków, Grodno and Katowice began to arrive that fear sat in her belly like a rock. Micky let them sleep on the floor of their apartment while she offered up what money she had to help them on their journey. But that had been before the Germans and the Russians cemented their grip and the stream of refugees seeking shelter in Zakopane thinned then stopped altogether.

Whenever she talked about following those making their escape, Micky convinced her it was safer to stay put rather than venture out onto the choked roadways and overcrowded trains. It would be fine, he reassured her. Just don't be smart, don't break any laws, and, last but not least, don't draw attention to yourself.

It had worked.

Zakopane, isolated among the forests and peaks of the Tatra Mountains, grew quiet. The shops and cafés that had closed during the invasion reopened. At the Czarny Kot, the band's jazz set was replaced by military marches and Vienna waltzes and music straight out of the last century, but the German officers on leave lapped it up, paying for endless rounds, each toast to victory sloppier than the last.

Then the crackdowns began.

The arrests started.

And even quiet, out-of-the-way Zakopane grew dangerous.

She closed her eyes, but now the unrelenting black was shot through with afterimages of broken bodies and fire-blackened beams that, even months later, made her pulse flutter and slithered icy over her skin. Twenty dead, most of them German officers. Was Micky among them? She'd assumed so until a letter had been pushed under her apartment door, sending her out of Zakopane to risk the road at last.

She opened her eyes, hoping to erase the memories that came with the darkness, and pulled a blanket around herself. The cold continued to seep into her bones until she shivered, unable to get warm.

A knock at the door brought a clerk with a flashlight asking if she wanted an escort to the new basement shelter.

Cleo shielded her face against the blinding light. "Has Mrs. Harriman gone down?"

"No, miss," he replied. "She's on the phone."

"Then it must not be too bad. I'll stay here." She refused to hide in a basement while the rest of the city remained unfazed though, once he was gone, she wished she'd asked him to leave his flashlight.

Two a.m., and the lights flickered back on in the residence followed by a slow cascade as switches were thrown and fuses reset all over Oslo.

The phones quieted. Conversations dwindled. The residence settled into sleep.

All except Cleo.

She returned to her window and watched as the city's shadows shrank back into alleys and doorways like the monster receding back under her bed.