The Librarian of Burned Books, page 29
The reporters would start filing in within the hour, but she had a feeling Senator Robert Taft had already arrived.
That suspicion was confirmed when she caught sight of Mr. Howard Danes leaning on the wall outside of Mr. Stern’s office.
When he noticed her, he held his hands up in exaggerated innocence. “Don’t sic the coppers on me, missus. I was invited, I swear.”
In his voice was the same irreverent humor from that night, and now it grated against Viv’s skin just like it had on the darkened street. “Don’t make me get my hat pin,” she threatened, sailing by him without waiting for an answer. His laugh followed her into Mr. Stern’s office.
Taft stood by the desk, his thick fingers curled tightly around Mr. Stern’s shoulder. Viv could tell she was interrupting some rant about the propaganda poster that hung on the wall. The one proclaiming books as weapons in this war.
Both men glanced up when she cleared her throat. Taft’s eyes traveled along her body, sending an unpleasant shiver along her spine.
“I take my coffee with milk,” Taft said, with that folksy drawl she knew disappeared when he became enraged.
Viv’s mouth pinched in so her rejoinder didn’t fall out and ruin the day before it had even started. With all the patience she could muster, she said calmly, “We have a coffee bar set up in the lobby. I’m sure someone can point you in the right direction.”
Mr. Stern disguised a snort of amusement with a cough, and he moved to reintroduce them. “Senator, I’m sure you remember Mrs. Childs, our publicity director.”
None of them mentioned the ambush at the restaurant.
“She’s been instrumental in organizing the event for today,” Mr. Stern continued.
“Mrs. Childs.” Taft sounded out her name with the same amount of disdain as he would have had he been saying Hitler.
“Senator Taft. I hope this program will be . . . educational . . . for you,” Viv said, letting her voice go syrupy sweet. “We’re so grateful you came so that you can truly see how much the ASEs mean to the boys overseas.” Viv paused. “That’s what you’re most concerned about, of course.”
“There are plenty of ways to help the boys,” Taft said, yanking at his lapels. “Perhaps you’ve heard of the G.I. Bill I sponsored, meant to help them continue their education after we bring them home.”
“I have,” Viv gritted out. “Isn’t it lovely how well the initiatives work in tandem?”
Taft’s eyes narrowed as if he were about to truly settle into this debate, but Mr. Stern coughed again to break the tension. “Wins all around.”
“Indeed,” Viv managed. And she knew Mr. Stern wanted to give the senator a way to exit this gracefully. Her better angels had her agreeing with him. The devil on her shoulder wanted her to verbally stomp all over this man who’d become her nemesis.
Without bothering to agree as well, Taft shifted to call out through the open doorway. “Danes. Coffee.”
Viv nearly smiled at the image of the sarcastic little man having to run the menial errand. When she caught Mr. Stern’s eye, he nodded once and she got the message that he was letting her escape. Since she had no interest in wasting any more of her own time with the smug, supercilious senator, she took the opening and slipped back out into the hallway.
She pushed the hateful man out of her thoughts, for now, as she made her way down to one side of the main theater, where the press had started to gather.
Among the nearly matching suits and heads of hair, she spotted Leo Aston. She wove her way through the little crowd, greeting the other reporters she knew and thanking the ones she didn’t for coming.
“Taft’s a sleazy, self-serving politician and he’ll show his hand today,” Leo promised her when she came close. “Too many people are watching for him not to slip up. And if we get one killer quote, you’ll have your public backing in no time.”
“He’s smart, though,” Viv said, playing with the pearl necklace she’d wound so carefully around her neck that morning.
“Eh.” Leo scrunched his nose. “He’s arrogant and not well-liked when you get outside the Capitol Hill gang. People are going to be looking for a reason to distance themselves from him as long as they have political cover to do so. This”—he gestured to the slowly filling seats, populated with lawmakers and literati, with notable public figures, and, most importantly, the wealthiest political donors in the city—“this is political cover. Well done, kiddo.”
Smoothing out her already smooth skirt with a shaking hand, Viv nodded. “Ears to the ground, yeah?”
“Always,” Leo promised, squeezing her shoulder once before melting back into the crowd of other journalists.
Viv moved through the aisles, surveying the attendees, pride and affection in equal measures blanketing her nerves. Leo hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d made note of the crowd. It hadn’t just been the media that had shown up in spades. There were a dozen women throughout the audience that Viv recognized as librarian volunteers; there was Harrison Gardiner and a cadre of other bright young things from the publishing houses along with their older, stodgier bosses; there was the elderly man from the Jewish Center where Hannah Brecht worked and several others whom Viv guessed were Hannah’s colleagues; there was Hale, and at least two dozen men Viv knew to be politicians. She sent Hale a grateful smile that he returned easily.
Betty Smith held court near the stage, her dark hair pinned back in a serious manner. Viv had met her a handful of times, and had been startled anew by her magnetism on each encounter. Her fame from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would have guaranteed her attention today, but it was her thoughtful demeanor that would keep it.
Betty nodded once when she caught Viv’s eyes, and the approval in the other woman’s expression made something warm bloom in Viv’s chest.
Viv thought about that drunken afternoon back in May when Harrison had jabbed a finger against the bar.
If this were a book, you know what point we’d be at right now? . . . It’s the all-is-lost moment.
Now, they had their spectacle. They had their army.
Viv just had to trust that it was enough to pull a happy ending out of thin air.
Chapter 47
Paris
March 1937
Hannah’s lungs collapsed on themselves, the air gone in one shaky exhale. “Otto.”
Dev watched Hannah, her hands lifted as if she was ready to catch Hannah should she fall. As if she hadn’t been the one doing the pushing.
For one startling moment Hannah saw herself using the pistol. Saw the blood that would spread from a gaping wound in Dev’s chest, the way her fingers would touch the torn flesh as if they could sear the pieces back together. That final realization that would flash across Dev’s face before she collapsed, lifeless, to the ground.
Hannah let the weapon drop. It clattered against the concrete, loud and jarring so that Dev flinched from the sound.
“Would you have done it again?” Hannah asked, hearing the question through an endless tunnel, her words soft and slurred. “Knowing how it turned out.”
“In a heartbeat,” Dev answered.
The answer didn’t surprise Hannah—she wasn’t sure she could be surprised any longer—but she’d needed to hear it.
Nodding, she turned, forced her legs to listen, and stumbled to the door that had led out to the hotel’s rooftop.
“Hannah,” Dev called from behind her, her voice laced with pity. “It wasn’t Otto’s fault. If you must blame someone, let it be me.”
Hannah didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, didn’t beg for more details about how her dearest friend for all her life had betrayed her.
Years before, on that sidewalk in Berlin when Althea had looked at her with watery, guilty eyes, Hannah had thought she’d lost every part of her innocence.
But like Dev had said, with Otto the trust was so innate, so much a part of Hannah, that she didn’t even think about it. It would be like wondering if her own hand could stab a knife into her heart.
Paris pressed in around her, suffocating and loud even on a quiet Sunday morning. Hannah knew she was walking, making the right turns, avoiding the cars and the bicycles as she went, but she didn’t feel anchored to her body.
She didn’t know how long it took, but she ended up at Otto’s door. The wood mocked her inability to raise her hand and knock. The sun baked the back of her neck so that sweat slipped down her spine, pooling in the small of her back. Her legs trembled with the weight of holding still for so long.
Finally, the knob turned, the door opened. Otto stood there, the bruises under his eyes, the thinness of his face, the frown lines cutting deep at the sides of his mouth making all the more sense now.
Otto hadn’t ever been the same after they’d left Germany. The drinking, the distance, the crying, the brawl with the Nazis, the goddamn gun. How had she not seen it?
Did he have debts even now that he couldn’t repay? He must. That kind of behavior didn’t disappear overnight.
He stared at her now, his gaze intent. Then he nodded once. “You know.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned, leaving the door open. Stumbling, he worked his way through the dark hallway back toward the kitchen of his little flat. There was a window seat there that she’d always adored curling up in so she could drink tea and watch the birds flit in and out of the lush little garden behind his place.
There was a mostly empty decanter of liquor sitting on the table in front of that window seat now. Otto threw himself down on the cushions, his body a lazy sprawl. But the casual splay of his legs belied a tension she could read so clearly in his face.
On his way down, he’d managed to snag the alcohol. Taking a swig directly from the bottle, he watched her with the indolent nonchalance of a young man tired of the world.
It was a facade, of course, but it made her want to slap him all the more. When she couldn’t take looking at him for a second longer, she shifted, walking toward the sink that had a window above it overlooking the roses that were not yet in bloom.
Hannah let the silence expand between them as she thought about every memory she had with him. Running through fields of flowers as young children, fishing in the stream behind his parents’ country home, practicing kissing and then realizing neither was very interested in the act, sneaking out on warm summer days to read books under trees, sharing secrets, sharing their biggest ones. Then had come university in Berlin and nightclubs and a freedom they’d only dreamed of having when they were growing up. Hannah attending Otto’s plays, and Otto keeping Hannah company at readings in bookshops. Drunken nights and then the aching heads that came with the mornings that followed.
Then Adam and Althea, the Nazis, and life falling apart around them. Building a new one in a foreign city that only ever felt like home when Otto was with her.
Hannah wanted to ask why, but she couldn’t get her lips to move.
And anyway, Otto broke first. He always did.
“Will you say something?” he finally yelled, flinging himself to his feet with the drama that was bred into his very bones. His eyes were wild, his knuckles white around the now-empty decanter. She wondered if he wanted to hurl it at the wall just to see something besides himself shatter.
“How much?” Hannah asked, knowing the very softness of her words would make them cut all the deeper. “What was the cost of my brother’s life?”
A gutted, brutal sound punched its way out of Otto’s chest. “Does it matter?”
Hannah closed her eyes against the unending waves of pain. “Yes.”
“Ten thousand,” Otto confessed on a whisper.
“Oh, Otto.” Hannah couldn’t keep the empathy from creeping in. Her beloved, her everything. He must have been so scared, so desperate.
But Adam had been scared, too. And desperate. Sitting across from her in that Nazi prison, his face broken and swollen and nearly unrecognizable.
“Why didn’t you”—Hannah forced the question out from a throat gone tight with grief—“say something.”
“What would it have changed?” he asked, the mania in his expression sliding into his voice. He was on the edge, tight as a drawn bow, all but shaking with it, drunk and guilt-ridden and trying to pretend he was neither.
“Maybe nothing,” Hannah agreed. She turned so she was leaning against the sink, arms crossed.
Otto looked away, his jaw tense. “What do you want me to say?”
Hannah huffed out a laugh. What did she want him to say? Sorry would be a start, but that didn’t seem like an option here. Beyond that, what was there to offer? She didn’t need his excuses or explanations. She knew why he hadn’t told her it was him instead of Althea who’d betrayed her—that would have been difficult and Otto never liked doing the difficult thing. Maybe he’d even convinced himself that it hadn’t just been him who had let the secret slip.
He’d seen the guilt in Althea’s expression just as she had. Maybe he had told himself a pretty story that the truth he had sold had been superfluous.
And maybe he truly believed it would not change anything. She hadn’t told him about Althea’s letters, after all, the way the woman had continued to write her for years following their brief affair. What if Hannah had been able to open even one of those messages?
What would it have changed?
None of that mattered, though. At the end of the day, Otto had chosen what was easy over what was right. And Hannah had watched her entire country make the same choice time and again. Maybe there were countless others out there who would do the same thing. But she found she had no tolerance left for them.
Had he been simply drunk and careless with the secret, maybe she could have found it in herself to forgive him. But he had made the callous decision, had calculated what her brother’s life was worth, and had made the most selfish choice he could.
“I want you to say goodbye,” she said, just as gently as she’d said everything else.
But she might as well have slit his throat open, given how his face crumpled and then the rest of his body followed. On the ground, he hugged the decanter like it would offer him some sort of solace as he wept, tears turning him ugly for once in his life.
“Hannah.” He sobbed out her name. “Don’t do this.”
She crossed the room, knelt before him, cradling his cheek in her hands. He nuzzled into it like a child seeking comfort. Swiping a thumb under his eyes to dry the wetness there, she leaned in to kiss his forehead. Then she sat back on her heels and made him meet her gaze.
“You have not asked for my forgiveness,” she told him. “I will give it to you anyway. But I do not want to ever see you again.”
A broken exhale was all that he could manage. She waited, giving him one more chance, seeing not him there, but Althea, apologizing for something she hadn’t even done. Apologizing for hurting Hannah, even though she’d been innocent of the crime. The contrast took the broken pieces of Hannah’s soul and stitched them together.
Not everyone chose themselves first.
When Otto said nothing, Hannah smiled sadly and stood and walked toward the hallway.
“He was going to die anyway,” he called, in that same voice he’d greeted her with. Young, brash, defensive. Again, her fingers itched with the desire to slap him. But she restrained herself.
She turned, studying the mess of him. “I blamed myself.”
He whimpered but didn’t say anything.
“For telling Althea about Adam,” Hannah continued, just in case he missed the implication. “I was never as angry at her as I was at myself. And you let me live with that for years.”
His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“Every single day you woke up and chose not to tell me was a day I could have hated myself a little less,” Hannah said, no longer interested in pulling her punches. “Every single day you woke up and chose yourself over me. Life is made up of those choices, you are made up of those choices.”
Otto curled further in on himself. “Now you can hate me instead of yourself.”
“You already do that enough for both of us,” Hannah said, letting her eyes drop to the decanter. “Goodbye, Otto.”
This time when she turned it was final.
Hannah didn’t let herself think, didn’t let her mind wander or worry or obsess; she just took the familiar route home, the one she’d walked countless times with and without Otto.
Without realizing it, she found herself back in her apartment, her spine pressed up against the wall, cradling the box of letters she’d never opened in her lap, the copy of Alice in Wonderland resting on top of it.
Methodically, she slit each envelope and read each message. She’d been expecting accusations, apologies, pleas even. Instead what she got was a story she now recognized as Althea’s second novel.
When she got to the last envelope, the one that had been heavier than the others, the one with the scrawled Don’t be stubborn on the outside, she found a visa to America, an open-ended ticket for ship passage, and one last single piece of paper.
On it was a dedication, which Hannah knew with certainty had never made it to the final copy of the book.
She swiped at tears as she read it.
To Hannah, for being the hero every story wishes it had.
Chapter 48
New York City
July 1944
Viv worried that Althea James might faint on her. The woman was far too pale, her mouth set, her hands clutched so that her knuckles were white.
“Breathe,” Viv whispered as she shepherded Althea into the backstage room where actors would have waited for their cues when the theater was operational. The location ensured that Althea wouldn’t be able to get a glimpse of the overwhelming audience before she had to go speak in front of it. “I’ve been told it’s helpful to picture everyone in their underthings.”
Althea’s eyes flew to hers, and Viv couldn’t help but be reminded of a spooked horse.
“Actually, no, absolutely not, don’t listen to me,” Viv said as she caught sight of Bernice Westwood in the hall. She heard the thread of panic in her own voice when she called out to the secretary. “Will you sit with Miss James, Bernice? Just for a few minutes.”
