Maisie lingered. Should she go with the man who claimed to be Ulli Bader? What was the risk, and should she take it? But she had to find Donat, and get him back to England.
She nodded to Bader and stepped out alongside him as he beckoned her toward a path between the houses across the street. Soon they arrived at another house, where Bader knocked at the door. The man who let them in did not offer a greeting, and looked away as Maisie passed, as if he did not want her to remember him or be able to identify him in a crowd. Bader opened a door. It led down to a cellar. Another cellar, thought Maisie, descending the stairs into darkness. Bader lit a lamp and pointed toward what looked like a tunnel. After several moments they came up into another house, where Bader let them out onto the street, and then toward yet another house, this one set on its own and not part of a terrace.
The process was repeated. As they descended a staircase into another cellar, Maisie thought that if someone were observing her from the sky, she would resemble a mole, going into a hole, coming up in another place, then boring down into the ground again. Finally Bader led her through a short tunnel into the basement of a house where the sound of machinery rattled into life.
“It’s all right, Ulli—I think I’ve managed to get it going without that part from the old mach—” The man addressing Ulli Bader stopped speaking abruptly, seeing Maisie. “Who’s she?”
“Leon’s daughter. She came to Munich to take him home from Dachau.”
The man looked at Maisie. “Did you see Klaus?”
“Ah, so the man who was imprisoned instead of my father has a name. Klaus. Was he a willing replacement, or didn’t he know what might happen to him if he was captured in my father’s name?”
The man looked at Bader, who nodded. “It’s all right, you can talk to her.”
“How do you know she’s Leon’s daughter?”
Bader flushed. “I—I . . .” He hesitated.
“Here,” said Maisie. “You can look at this.” She delved into her bag and brought out the passport bearing the name of Edwina Donat. She held it out for him, the feel of cold metal lingering on the back of her hand, where it had brushed against MacFarlane’s pistol as she reached into the bag.
The man wiped his hands on a rag and took the passport. He held it to the light, looked back at Maisie, flapped it closed, and handed it back to her. He stared at Bader.
“That was lucky for you, Ulli—she’s who she says she is. This is a real passport.”
“I’m a writer, not a soldier, Anton,” Bader muttered in his defense.
“You have to be both. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve had to learn.” He turned back to the machine and sighed. “The parts you scavenged the last time seem to have done the trick. I’ve managed to get it to run, though I still think it’s too noisy. Let’s just hope it holds up, eh?”
Maisie stepped forward. “You speak very good English too—were you also schooled in England?”
“I am bloody English. One of King George’s subjects. Trouble is, with a German father and English mother, and a nice German name, it was a bit tricky being in England when I was a child. My father was interned during the war, and my mother and I were ostracized.” He stopped, pausing for a moment, then sighed. “We came back here after the war, when it was hard for my father to gain employment in England. Neighbors who liked and respected us before the war were not so friendly after all. My father did not bear a grudge, nor did my mother—they understood, but it broke their hearts. So here we are—a little English boy with a German name, an Englishwoman, and her German husband, living in Munich. I met Ulli at the university, and we became friends, but now—well, we are brothers in arms, with a few helpers, and we know what we have to do.”
“You’re both taking a dreadful risk,” said Maisie. “They’ll kill you if they find you.”
“Some things are worth dying for. My father loved England, and was planning to return. But he and my mother were killed in a motoring accident a few years ago. They’d lingered because they wanted to be sure they would not be shunned, though they knew what our Herr Hitler was doing to this country, and they desperately wanted to leave.”
“Would you have gone with them?”
The man Bader called Anton shrugged. “Yes, I would—they were my family, and there are cousins in England. I told my father we would have to be the Smith family if we went back. We’d have to rid ourselves of our German names. It was good enough for the king and his family to drop their German ancestry, and everyone conveniently forgot about the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.” He shook his head. “I would have been Anthony Smith in England, not Anton Schmidt, but now I am doing this, and I’m committed. I will die before I give up, and so would Ulli.”
Maisie said nothing at first, allowing a silence to descend upon Anton Schmidt’s declaration.