She nodded. “I just met her today. We were sitting on a bench outside a park when the policemen came for us.”
So that was how it happened. The tutor, he recalled, was an Austrian. Rescuing his wife from the Nazis was his duty, but asking for the release of an Austrian was crossing the professional line he had set for himself.
“Please, my dear. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
He glanced back at the policemen, the squad cars, and motorcycles. “Grace, I think we should just leave.”
She gripped his hand with surprising strength. “She’s a lovely girl, very young and brave. We were brought here together and placed in a dungeon in the basement. I can’t just leave her alone. Please get her out. Please do me a favor.”
He sighed. His wife. He would do it for her. He pushed open the car’s door, entered the hotel, and went to the counter in the lobby. One of the guards approached him, but Eichmann gestured him away.
“Herr Consul General, it is my pleasure to see you again. How may I help you?” The man straightened his cap with the skull and crossbones. The skin around his mouth sprang to form a smile, but his gray eyes flashed coldness.
“Herr Eichmann, pardon me, I heard my wife’s tutor—Fr?ulein Schnitzel—was also detained. May I request your kindness in granting her release?”
He prayed that the tutor was not a supporter of Schuschnigg or a Communist, like the Austrian at the Soviet legation whose passport he’d been asked to provide. If she were, then his effort in rescuing her would be not only in vain but also messy.
“By any chance, does Herr Consul General mean Lola Schnitzler?”
Fengshan gave an affirmative nod. It was Schnitzler after all. “She’s my wife’s tutor.”
“Herr Consul General, perhaps it is not known to you that she’s a Jewess.” A note of warning had crept into Eichmann’s voice.
A Jewess. Not as serious as a supporter of Schuschnigg or a Communist, but still a point of concern. For about a year, he had read about the absurd rhetoric of racial purification in Nazi propaganda; since the Anschluss, however, instances of harassment and discrimination against the Viennese Jews had been unfortunately legitimized. Fengshan had deep misgivings about the race theory. In the course of China’s two-thousand-year history, the Chinese had conquered other races and had also been conquered by other races, and who could say which was superior? And Confucianism and Taoism, of course, always gave sage instructions of tolerance and coexistence. If there was one thing definitive about the argument of race, it was that it derived from the imbalance of power; in the world of Ruo Rou Qiang Shi—the strong devoured the meat of the weak—the weak were doomed to be vulnerable.
The ambassador hadn’t explicitly mentioned to stay out of the Jewish business, only that of the dissidents and the Communists, and Grace was waiting in the car. He didn’t have the heart to disappoint her after the ordeal she had gone through. “Is she? I didn’t know. I hope it’s not too much trouble.”
The look in Eichmann’s eyes grew intense—the man was calculating. It seemed to be of great interest to him that a foreign diplomat would care to meddle in his country’s domestic affairs, or maybe he was assessing the pros and cons of granting a diplomat’s request, and it was even possible that he was considering reporting him to his Japanese counterpart with whom the Nazi had rubbed shoulders. Then Eichmann shrugged with aloofness and callousness—it was only a Jewess, and the city was full of them. “No trouble at all, Herr Consul General.”
Fengshan let out his breath, and out of politeness, he smiled to express his gratitude. But he was warier than ever—Adolf Eichmann was not only sleazy but also callous. “Ich bin Ihnen dankbar. I’ll wait in the car.”
He went out to his car and sat next to Grace, nodding at her, willing her tutor to come out as soon as possible. It occurred to him that the Jewish business was also part of the Führer’s domestic policy. He had made a careless request that might have inadvertently conflicted with his superior’s order; he prayed he wouldn’t regret this.
It was growing dark when finally a figure staggered out of the hotel—a young woman in a dirndl and a black jacket. Stumbling, she didn’t see the car parked by the curb and hurriedly passed it. Grace bolted upright and called out, and the woman turned around, shielding her eyes with her hand against the bright headlights. Her face, Fengshan could see, was thrashed with red lines like whips, and there was a bruise on her forehead. With a gasp, she came to Grace, held her shoulders, and gave her a tight embrace, and Grace, his introverted wife who preferred to sit quietly on a chaise in the corner of a ballroom and who could only utter a few perfunctory German phrases, didn’t let the young woman go. They had just met, Grace had said, but he would have believed they had known each other for years. What had happened to these two in the dungeon?
After Grace’s tutor waved to leave, Fengshan told Rudolf to drive. His car started to roll, and he caught a figure in the rear mirror—Adolf Eichmann, a lizard of a man, lurking behind his car. There, in the stark light, turning up on his face was a smile, crooked, like a hook.
CHAPTER 3
GRACE
I turned around in the car and craned my neck to trace Lola’s figure weaving through the opaque haze of streetlights, diminishing as the distance between us grew and finally sliding into the dark velvet of the night. It occurred to me that I should have asked where she lived and how she could find a taxi or a coach at this hour. It was late, and it would be dangerous for a single woman to walk on the streets.
When we arrived at the hotel, we had been forced down a winding metal staircase to a claustrophobic dungeon in the basement with a bare light bulb. The air was musty, stifling, thick like leather; coils of shadows clustered in the corners. There was no chair or bench. Lola sat on the ground; I stood some distance away, feeling the strength drain from my legs, paralyzed by waves of regret and fear. I shouldn’t have come out today; I should have put off hiring a tutor for another year. And now, a simple mistake of sitting on a bench had gotten me arrested. What if Fengshan found me here? What if Fengshan couldn’t find me here?
“You should sit, Miss Lee.”
“I can’t.” The floor was certainly not an appropriate spot for a diplomat’s wife.
“You can’t stand there all night.”
“All night?”
Lola pulled her legs together and rested her head on her knees. “You were right. Vienna is strange these days. We have new laws devised every day. They are baked and rolled out faster than Apfelstrudel. But don’t worry. It’s temporary. Vienna is a lawful and sophisticated city. This will pass.”
Maybe it was the sincerity of her tone—no one in Vienna, or Istanbul, or China, had spoken to me this way—or maybe it was that she spoke in English, my mother tongue, the only language I knew. She sounded like a friend I hadn’t had in so long.
“I’m sorry I got you arrested.” Her voice was gentle, swelling to fill the room.
I looked down at my hands—my silk gloves were smudged. “It wasn’t your fault. I chose that bench. I couldn’t read German.”
“It wasn’t you.” She played with the two pendants on her necklace again, a cross and a star. “They don’t like me. I’m a Mischling.”