“I think that girl’s my patient,” Elise said, blue eyes darkening. Together they watched as the patients and nurses boarded, then the bus’s engine revved. It pulled away, belching thick, black smoke from the exhaust pipe as it made its way down the drive. “Those buses,” Elise said, “they call them the Ravens. Why?”
Frieda shrugged. “The color.”
Elise was confused. Surely the child she’d glimpsed below was Gretel. Had she missed something? Had the girl taken a turn for the worse?
Chapter Two
Clara Hess was wearing a mask. It was pure white, like Kabuki makeup. Her eyes were closed.
She was draped, catlike, over a divan in her office at the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence agency, wearing only the mask, a scarlet silk robe, and Chanel No. 5. One woman was painting her toenails, while another was rubbing lotion into her hands. Still another was taking curlers out of her hair, leaving glistening platinum ringlets.
Taller than most women and slim as a ballerina, Clara looked like Jean Harlow crossed with the warrior-goddess Brünnhilde, as seen through the lens of Horst P. Horst. She favored Chanel’s androgynous suits in jersey, which she wore with ropes of pearls and gold chains. It was a look not often seen on women in Berlin. But with her height, excellent posture, and entitled attitude, she was never questioned. Being good friends with Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels, and being photographed with them frequently at the Opera or Philharmonic, didn’t hurt either.
Although lately, such photographs were less frequent. Clara Hess’s last mission, the assassination of King George VI and the kidnapping of Princess Elizabeth, intending to pave the way for the eventual German invasion of England and the crowning of Edward and Wallis Simpson as Great Britain’s new King and Queen, hadn’t happened. In fact, it had been a complete and total failure. Since her fall from grace, it was whispered about the halls of the Abwehr that Clara was losing her magic touch—as well as the Führer’s favor.
The heavy door opened and her secretary announced, “Admiral Canaris to see you, as you requested, Frau Hess.”
“Come in,” Clara said.
Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was a distinguished-looking man with white hair and shaggy white eyebrows. He walked in and stopped in front of her divan. “Heil Hitler!” Images of Clara were reflected back to him in the many beveled mirrors the office had on the walls, along with an oil portrait of Adolf Hitler.
Her eyes were still closed. “Our agent in London is in place, Wilhelm. He’s just waiting for my go-ahead.”
“Good,” Canaris said, taking a seat as one of the women finished massaging Clara’s hands and began to remove the mask with cotton pads soaked with witch hazel. “We’ll coordinate with Göring and Halder. It’s high time Britain surrendered. And Operation Aegir plays an important role.”
“I’m no admirer of Mother Russia,” Clara said, sitting upright, the mask now removed, glacier-blue eyes open. While they were undisputedly beautiful, one wandered just slightly, the gaze of each pupil focusing on a different point in space. “But when we went into Poland, the Russian General Staff shared their methods for population control with us. And what they accomplished with their workers in the gulags is nothing short of inspiring.”
One of the women opened a black crocodile makeup case, extracting pans of foundation, compacts of powder, tins of rouge, and tubes of lipstick.
“Yes, I’ve heard they’ve already started using it in the camps,” Canaris said, as the woman began to paint Clara’s face.
“We can control any population through medication of its drinking water supply. And by our releasing this poison into London’s water supply before the invasion, British morale will be destroyed. Churchill’s great speeches will be useless. The population will put up no resistance.”
“Just by adding a chemical to the water supply?” Canaris didn’t sound convinced. “This is all on you, you know. If this mission should fail …” The silence turned ominous.
Clara didn’t answer as the woman finished applying her makeup; then she barked, “Mirror!” The woman handed Clara a silver hand mirror. She studied her visage in the reflection, turning this way and that. “It will do,” she said to the woman, who nodded and began packing up.
“Aegir won’t fail,” Clara assured Canaris. “I went over the facts with one of the top chemists at I.G. Farben.” She smiled, a gorgeous smile of crimson lipstick and pearly teeth, a smile that used to bring audiences at the Berlin Opera House to their feet, applauding madly, back in the day when she was a soprano famed for her Wagnerian roles. “And now, I must get dressed to meet Herr Goebbels at the cinema. We’re seeing a preview of Ich klage an—it’s his favorite.”