“Ah, no need to decide, Fräulein. You’re welcome to take them all home with you. We have it all—Bienenstiche are our specialty, buttercream with vanilla custard. Yes, we can still get milk and cream. Our cows have not been bombed yet. Just our weapons factories. And so we have our own version of the German bee sting cake. No bees, though. Don’t worry. And here, take some of our famous anise cookies—our gift to you. You must be new to the neighborhood, right?”
“Yes, we are,” Posie replied.
The man then went behind the counter and began selecting a variety of cookies.
“Danke, das ist aber sehr nett . . . thank you, that is so kind of you, sir,” Posie said. “And I shall take one of your bee sting cakes. It looks irresistible with that whipped cream.”
“Ah yes,” the proprietor replied. “Mit Schlag. What’s life without Schlag?”
He put the cake and cookies in a box and handed it across the counter to her as Posie counted out the reichsmarks. “Here you go. I guarantee that you’ll be back for more.”
And indeed they would be. Each time, Herr Zeiberg thought they were brand-new to the neighborhood and give them a sampling of his best cookies. They did not abuse this privilege, though. They were careful to visit other bakeries as well.
But now, as they walked down Filderstrasse, the smell of the still-warm cookies was so tempting that they each had to have one.
They walked along for a block or two.
“Very fancy neighborhood,” Alice said, looking at the grand houses. Many neighborhoods had suffered immeasurable damage from the Allied bombings four months earlier. But this one appeared untouched.
“Oh yes, all these houses near the Tiergarten are owned by wealthy people. It’s rather like Kensington or Knightsbridge in London. What a lovely house we had back there on Eaton Square,” Posie mused.
“Just two years ago, Mum.” They spoke in low voices, even though they were alone on the street.
“Seems longer,” her mother replied.
“That’s a lovely one, isn’t it, Mum? Looks like vanilla custard and with its edges trimmed in whipped cream. Haus mit Schlag.” Alice laughed softly.
“I think we can cut down this alley and perhaps see it from the back.”
“Oh, let’s do it!” Alice said.
They had walked perhaps halfway down the alley when Alice glimpsed a fleeting shadow that seemed to pop out of a garbage bin. She stopped abruptly.
“Why’d you stop?” her mother asked.
“I swear I thought I saw something.”
“Something?” her mother asked, scanning the alley.
“I’m not sure. But it was a person, and maybe a child. The person was there and then just vanished. I . . . I think he or she came from that garbage bin.”
“You mean out of it? Whoever it is must be very small.”
“I don’t know, but wait here while I go see.”
Alice strode over to the bin. The lid was off. She peered in. Orange rinds, a few champagne bottles, the end of a loaf of bread, a roast chicken just half eaten, four empty caviar jars. This was a rich person’s house, Alice thought. But had she interrupted someone’s dinner—someone who was dining in the garbage bin?
“What are you doing down there?” her mother called from the other end of the alley.
“Just looking.”
There was a gate in a wooden fence that must lead to the backyard of the beautiful house—the Whipped Cream House, as she now thought of it. She tried the gate, but it was locked. The cookies were still warm in the box she was holding. Their redolence made her very hungry. She was tempted to eat one right here in the alley. But something stopped her. Was someone watching her? Hungrier than her? She stole a glance at her mother, who was looking at another house across the alley. Putting her hand in the cookie bag, Alice drew one out, then carefully placed it in the bin, between the champagne bottle and the caviar jar.
“Find anything?” her mother asked.
“A rich family’s house,” she replied. Her mother chuckled. “What’s so funny?”
“You know what the very old Rasa term for trash picking was?”
“What do you mean?”
“For what you just did—picking through trash.”
“No, what?
“Trash picking . . . sgudail. That’s what they called the trash of rich people.” She dropped her voice to a bare whisper. “An excellent source for intel.”
Oh yes, Alice thought. Now she remembered the head counselor at Rasa summer camp talking about this. Some story from the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII and the French were fighting. The spymaster himself had lauded the accomplishment of one Rasa on the intelligence he’d uncovered by examining a trash bin near the French king’s palace. The golden nuggets of the poubelles. Poubelles was the French word for trash cans. It was such a lovely word for such an unlovely thing.
“Come along. Let’s get home with the cake and cookies.”
“Yes, of course,” Alice replied vaguely, looking back. Whose shadow was that? She could not help but think of Peter Pan, the part where Peter lost his own shadow at the Darlings’ house. Nana the dog had snagged it when Peter had leaped from the Darling children’s nursery window. That was why Peter returned—to find his shadow. And then Wendy had sewn it back on for him. How ridiculous, she thought. A fairy tale at best. And this was not a fairy tale but an A-level mission. She could not be sidetracked by sprinting shadows. Why, then, had she left that cookie?
She must not be distracted. The Jungmädel games were in less than three weeks. She would be practicing gymnastics every day starting tomorrow, and then there was homework too. She found out that the grades from her Swabian school would count. She was unsure how MI6 had arranged this, but she sensed that Count Stauffenberg had taken care of it. She was now certain he must be her fios, and not simply her case manager or contact.
“Yes, Herr Minister, I think the suspension needs adjustment. I drove it around the Tiergarten myself. Can you leave it here tonight? It will be as good as new in the morning.”
Another shadow spread across the cement floor of the garage. A shadow that was somewhat askew. It seemed bent, as if it were somehow folding in upon itself. This was Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda. The Winfields had a code name for him: the P of D, or Prince of Darkness. One of the most vicious of all Hitler’s ministers.
It was Goebbels who decided the curriculum that would be taught in all the schools. This small man had a mind that was as twisted as his body. He had become the authority on all things Aryan and cultural. He himself had been born with a condition that made his legs uneven in length and caused a severe limp. The irony that he was now the judge of what defined physical perfection seemed to have escaped notice.
Alice knew that he was often called “the dwarf” and that he was at least a head shorter than her father, yet he was no dwarf. He suffered from a clubfoot, for which he had been operated on as a child. The operation was not really successful and only resulted in shortening his right leg dramatically. He was actually about the same height as Alice. But it was his face that stood out—his thin mouth stretched into a peculiar grimace, and he appeared to be almost lipless.
Her father had warned them about Goebbels. It was he who had first called him the Prince of Darkness. In Alan Winfield’s mind, he was at the very center of this evil government. Why? Because he knew how to create a deadly infection of hatred among the people and make it spread through his propaganda machine.