Read Online Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke by Anne Blankman - Free Book Online

Himmler’s police appointment. Apparently today’s events had been a surprise for Munich’s residents. How like Hitler to strike quickly before anyone anticipated his plan, and then strike again, before anyone could react. Clever. But she could be clever, too. And she had an advantage that few people did: She’d spent years at Hitler’s side, drinking in his advice as though it were water. She knew how his mind worked. That knowledge might be the only thing that kept her alive.
    So many people saw him shouting during his speeches and thought he was emotional. Spontaneous and authentic. But she’d sat in a corner of the parlor, playing paper dolls or sketching, while he’d agonized over the proper words to use at his next appearance. She’d watched as he practiced hand gestures in front of a mirror—a closed fist smashing into an open palm for emphasis, a hand soaring at the end of a sentence—while Papa nodded in approval. Behind that passionate facade lurked a calculating brain. He knew what reaction he wanted from his followers and how to provoke it. There was very little he did that was unrehearsed. She suspected that was why he seemed to disappear socompletely into each role: One moment he was the red-faced, shouting speaker; the next, he was the gentle savior, accepting a bouquet of wildflowers from a child with a soft smile. He knew how to vanish into whichever person a particular crowd wanted him to be.
    She crumpled the sodden newspaper in her hand. Very well. She would become like him. She’d transform into whatever role she needed to. She’d put feeling aside and reason things through, like he would. Beginning with: Could she trust Eva?
    There was no way of knowing for certain. Once, though, they had shared so much. Several months after Eva’s parents had temporarily separated—Gretchen had never found out why—Eva had journeyed to Dachau for the summer with Gretchen and Reinhard to stay at their grandparents’ house.
    It had been a magical time. They had slept in a narrow bed beneath an open window, and every day they woke to the cackle of chickens and the rich scent of manure. They’d played hide-and-seek with the local children in the abandoned munitions factory, and the days had been long and shaded green. Years later, when Eva had been stuck at a convent school in far-off Simbach, they’d written each other faithfully every week, and Eva had once mentioned how much she’d treasured Gretchen’s kindness during the strangest time of her life.
    Maybe Eva still remembered.
    In the distance, church bells pealed, slow, solemn notes that hovered in the air before fading. Half past four. At least another thirty minutes before she could telephone Eva—it would probably take that long for the Munich Post reporters to be hauled to the city jail and processed. She prayed Eva still worked at HerrHoffmann’s photography shop; so much could have changed in the year and a half she had been gone. Shivering, she crouched in the shadows and waited.

    The bells were ringing five o’clock when Gretchen emerged from the alley. The streetlamps hadn’t been switched on yet, and only the illumination from lit windows broke apart the descending gloom.
    She darted into the first beer hall she came across to find a public telephone. Inside it was smoky and warm. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that banners of different political parties were draped across each of the long trestle tables. She had forgotten the custom—each party or workers’ union had their own table at beer halls, strictly reserved for its members. When she was younger, Reinhard and his SA comrades had sometimes taken her with them to the National Socialist table at the Hofbräuhaus, where they could eat cold cuts on rye bread and pretzels for almost nothing, while a brass band played.
    Now the political tables were empty, except for a few men in SS uniforms, hunched over their beer steins. Nobody sat at the workers’ union tables,