Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles) Read online

  And so she had, selling over twenty-five million dollars in war bonds over the last ten days in her tour across America. More than any other Hollywood star. Surely that would convince the Navy that she was serious in her intent to help them win the war against Hitler.

  Hitler. Adolf. Even his name sent a flutter of icy and loathsome remembrance through her body. The way he’d watched her in those meetings with Friedrich and Benito. Watched her with those steel-blue, half-mad eyes. She was accustomed to receiving and holding the gazes of men, and returning them unflinchingly. But not his, for even a single glance was enough to glimpse the nightmares that skated just beneath the surface with an unyielding resolve.

  Hedy put the finishing touches on her makeup and headed down to her waiting car. The California sun occupied a keen sky as she drove the streets of San Diego to the naval base for her meeting with Commodore McCandless. She would convince the Commodore of the importance of her invention in winning the war.

  She would sleep with him if necessary.

  An attentive lieutenant escorted her to the base offices through a sea of hungry smiles and wolfish stares. Being a Hollywood star conveyed some advantages, and she put an extra sway in her step and come-hither-look in her eye as she strode through the ranks of men. For confidence. For luck. Her appearance still her best weapon for vanquishing her opponents, her fears, even as using it vanquished her soul.

  The man who met her in McCandless’s office, behind the broad wooden desk where McCandless’s gold name plaque sat, was not McCandless. He wore no uniform and gave her no name, his face the forgettable, shadowy blend of everyman, of one who did not really exist and was used to pulling the strings from inside.

  This man would not sleep with her.

  “Your invention is quite interesting. Tell me, how involved were you in your husband’s business?” He paused and regarded her with red-rimmed, blue eyes.

  She kept her voice steady, firm. “I attended some meetings.”

  “And have you had contact with your husband since you came to America?”

  “You mean, Friedrich? My ex-husband?” she said.

  The man elevated a slender brown eyebrow, and retrieved a lit cigarette from an ashtray on the desk.

  Hedy felt her heart rate accelerate. “I have not had any contact with him since I fled from him in 1937. Where is Commodore McCandless? I had an appointment with him.”

  The man with no name ignored her query. “I understand you have been very helpful in the war bond effort,” he said. A curl of smoke spiraled above his head. “There’s no reason we should question your loyalty to our country should we, given your background and all?”

  Bitter anger burgeoned in a small dark seed in her gut. How dare he, after everything she’d done? But at the same time, fear traced its icy fingers down her vertebrae. She knew of the internment camps and the manner in which those whose loyalty to the United States was in question were treated. Friedrich had been in business with both Adolf and Benito. She lifted her chin. “Absolutely no reason. I’m here to talk to Commodore McCandless about using my technology to ensure the defeat of der Führer.”

  “Would you be willing to help us in another way?”

  “I’m not selling any more kisses.”

  No Name formed his lips into a thin smile. “I’m not talking about war bonds. We’d like to see your technology put to use. You know the leader of Germany, no? You and he have a relationship… of sorts?”

  * * *

  Hedy hurried down the walkway of Bosques de Palermo, Buenos Aires in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. The breeze lifted her hair beneath the heavy scarf. How many more days did she have to absorb the fresh scents of autumn? To walk free and temporarily be an object to no one.

  It was disconcerting to be in a country not at war. Pearl Harbor had galvanized a nation, and her adopted country’s focus on defeating the dictators had become singular. But soon she might be in the center of the conflict, in the European Theater, where life, if it could be called life at all, had become unimaginable and desperate, where cities had been reduced to rubble, and where boys and men of all nationalities butchered each other daily to serve the ego of one man.

  Where, according to the man with no name, to be a Jew was akin to death.

  Her humiliation was complete: fired from MGM, accused of working with her ex-husband Friedrich the Austrian arms dealer all along, of spying on the country she’d invented for and made her home, of stealing the plans to her own invention from an inventor she allegedly seduced, and then of fleeing to South America with the information.

  Friedrich had been summarily shot outside a Buenos Aires theater a week ago, and she was to wait here in hiding, in disgrace, for Adolf to find her. To retrieve her.

  Would he even remember her?

  She remembered his cold fishy hands, his scent, his long underwear, and how dirty she had felt when he was done. She remembered it all too well.

  Hitler, who hated Jews, but had made an exception for her because she was a converted Catholic, and because she was beautiful. She suspected that he, like Benito, had a private copy of Ecstasy, one of the few that Friedrich didn’t demand to purchase and destroy. The man who expounded on the need for purity and modesty could watch her naked any time he wished.

  Beauty was all about exceptions.

  The man with no name had stressed the importance of being patient, that she might need to remain in hiding for several months, but that the intelligence would reach Hitler, and her contribution to the war effort wouldn’t be forgotten, even if she failed.

  They wouldn’t be able to extract her once she was in Germany, if she ever made it to Germany. Not until the war ended, presuming the Allies won.

  She was to pass information via an operative who was stationed in Berchtesgaden posing as a baker, by paying him with hollow coins that would be given to her as change after her first visit. The war was turning, No Name claimed, and they expected Hitler to make his last stand at the Berghof, his home in Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden.

  If getting to the operative was impossible, she was to suggest to der Führer that she entertain the troops and raise money for war bonds just as she had done in America. She was to encode her messages in the price of the kisses that she sold. Key words had been assigned prices and arm gestures, and she was to suggest increments that were the square and cube of the original price to provide additional information.

  Nobody would suspect a woman of doing math, No Name had declared.

  * * *

  They took her under cover of darkness from the apartment at which she’d been staying. She pretended to be relieved to see them. They allowed her to pack a small bag. She was taken by skiff to the Komet, a German auxiliary cruiser flying the Spanish flag, and then across what must have been a boat-, plane-, and torpedo-filled Atlantic to Hamburg.

  She dined with Kapitän Brocksien every night of the fifteen-day sailing. He fell in love with her before they passed Cape Verde. She tried not to be too eager in her queries with regard to how the war was going as she attempted to discern whether the U.S. Navy had put her invention into use, as the man with no name had promised. Every morning, she hoped to hear that the course of the war had been turned, that the Allies had gained the advantage. But Brocksien delivered no such news, preferring to speak of his time in Vienna as a youth and the property he hoped to purchase in Bavaria when the war ended.

  Hedy’s cheeks ached from smiling encouragingly without being encouraging. She would almost feel sorry for the man, if it weren’t for the fact that rejected suitors were often dangerous.

  She tried to maintain the initial bravado she’d experienced at the prospect of being an American spy, of helping to defeat Hitler. Aside from the diesel fumes, nausea, cramped quarters, and all too omnipresent nature of Brocksien’s hands, her time on the ship was tolerable. Despite a few alerts, the voyage didn’t feel truly dangerous until they passed into the English Channel, where planes from both sides soared overhead and the da
rk shapes of other vessels had to be dodged.

  But far greater trials awaited her in Germany.

  Once ashore in Hamburg, Hedy was retrieved, frisked, and had her belongings searched by a Major von Kleist. She had said “Heil Hitler” to the men on the Komet many times, and could now say it without flinching. But Brocksien had been relaxed on protocol, especially after becoming taken with her, and von Kleist cast a gimlet eye on her execution of the greeting. But apparently satisfied, he nevertheless escorted her to a jeep.

  They didn’t go south as she expected toward the Berghof. They drove east toward Berlin. When she asked where they were headed, von Kleist would only say Rastenburg. Hedy hadn’t kept track of Hitler’s renaming of cities in annexed countries, but she suspected Rastenburg was somewhere in Poland, which was nowhere near where the Americans thought she’d be, and nowhere near her contact in Berchtesgaden.

  Poland, where millions of Jews were being systematically exterminated, according to the man with no name.

  A small furrow of alarm started to work its way into her reserve.

  Life in Berlin was disturbingly normal. The streets bustled with shoppers, music poured out of the beer halls, and throngs of people gathered outside the theater at which she’d once worked. Only the crumbling remains of a few buildings, groups of uniformed men in formation, and pervasive swastikas served to remind one that a war was happening at all. But as night fell and they headed into what was once Poland, the buzz of aircraft choked the sky, and the thunder and flash of bombs and return fire punctuated the darkness over Berlin. Hedy shrank deeper inside her fine woolen coat.

  After what seemed like an interminable drive, they arrived in Rastenburg at dawn and headed deep into the woods. Hedy’s stomach bubbled with fear. No Name had told her what was happening to Jews in Eastern Europe. Perhaps she was simply being taken to a labor camp or for execution. Perhaps she and No Name had overestimated her allure.

  All of a sudden, thick walls jutted up out of the dark gloom, and they proceeded through first one manned security checkpoint, then another, into a dark, wooded compound occupied by oddly-shaped, low cement and brick buildings with treed roofs and swathes of netting that connected the structures to the surrounding forest in an intricate web. Bunkers. Carefully disguised bunkers.

  An eerie silence dominated. Although there was a faint glow coming from some of the buildings and dark figures moved about, it felt deserted, almost dream-like. There would be no selling kisses here. There would be no hope of rescue either.

  So this was one of Hitler’s compounds. A compound that the Allies clearly didn’t know about. Or if they did, No Name had felt no need to tell her about it.

  If she had been a man, or even an ugly woman, she wouldn’t be here. If she were a man, she’d be part of the U.S. National Inventors Council helping to develop technologies to thwart Hitler. If she were an ugly woman, they at least might have taken her invention more seriously. There certainly would have been no point in sending her here to try to seduce the most evil man in the world. It was her beauty that had brought her here to serve her new country.

  Then again, if she were a man or an ugly woman, she’d have no new country to serve. She would never have married Friedrich, nor had the opportunity to escape Austria. She may well have been rounded up with the other Jewish people of Vienna, like her mother would have been if Hedy hadn’t intervened.

  Beauty. It was paradoxical that way.

  The Major drove her to a low cement bunker where she was summarily unloaded and taken to a reasonably appointed room with a single bed and bathroom—guest quarters. She was not yet a prisoner. A small ember of hope flickered somewhere inside her.

  The Major stepped back and examined her through narrowed eyes, his boots tapping smartly on the cement. “You will be under guard at all times, you aren’t to speak to anyone, and der Führer will receive you in his private quarters tomorrow at 4:00 pm. Heil Hitler!”

  * * *

  Hedy prepared carefully for her meeting with Adolf, applying a fraction of the mask of cosmetics she’d grown accustomed to wearing on the screen, and donning one of the two pretty dresses she’d been permitted to pack, a sleeveless floral chiffon that flowed from her curves. Her body jangled with nerves and outright terror.

  She placed the cigarette case with a diamond swastika that she had brought from home in her purse, trying very hard not to let her mind even graze the twisted memories that it contained. It would be impossible to carry out her mission if she did.

  Her guard, Soldat Schmitt, a boy of about nineteen who blushed furiously in her presence and rebuffed her attempts at conversation, led her through another checkpoint in a steel fence to the inner circle of the compound.

  Hitler’s bunker was the largest building in the enclosure, a massive, windowless edifice of cement. She followed Soldat Schmitt down a narrow hallway to a spare but elegant office with dark curtains, a desk, and a single table surrounded by chairs. Hedy’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of der Führer with his swoop of brown hair, pasty skin, and unnatural mustache over bad teeth… the face of evil in an unremarkable package. Except for those eyes.

  She formed her lips into a smile and tried to control the trembling of her knees. Ironic that she’d never been considered much of an actress, and yet here she was playing the role of a lifetime.

  “Hedwig Kiesler,” Adolf said as he rose from his desk with his arms extended. “Or, should I say Hedy Lamarr?” An edge entered his voice, his faint fractious insanity even more pronounced ten years and so many occupied countries and slaughtered people later.

  Hedy lifted her own hands, which seemed icy and leaden. Hitler took them, but did not bring them to his lips as most men would. His eyes swept her with a supercilious sort of hunger, pausing in the vicinity of her tiny breasts, which he’d no doubt seen many times in Ecstasy.

  She wanted to spit in the face of this man, this monster. To do so would mean certain death. But surely she was slated for death anyway in this inescapable compound.

  She heard her own voice. “Adolf, so lovely to see you. It has been too long.”

  Adolf gestured to one of the chairs at the table. “Sit, and tell me about Friedrich. I understand he met an untimely demise.”

  Hedy sat. She was accustomed to obeying the orders of men, at least outwardly. Her defiance and agency were those of guise and backrooms, including the bedroom. But what to answer? Although Adolf and Friedrich had at one time been friends or at least colleagues, the Nazis had seized Friedrich’s business assets and properties in 1938. She didn’t know whether she should act sorrowful or relieved regarding his death.

  She crossed her legs seductively and offered what she hoped was an enigmatic smile. “Yes, the Americans believed him a spy.”

  His probing eyes never left her face. “You too, I understand.”

  Hedy felt her cheeks color involuntarily. “I haven’t forgotten my roots,” she said.

  “I see,” Adolf replied. “Despite the glamor of Hollywood?”

  “The United States is a country of loose morals and questionable values. It cannot compete with the Fatherland,” Hedy declared, trying to inject feeling into her words, her lies.

  A small mean smile crept over Hitler’s face. “I’d have thought that would suit a woman willing to appear naked in a movie.”

  Hedy bit her tongue to stop herself from snapping back a sharp reply. Instead she lowered her lashes seductively and looked up at Adolf. “I’ve only ever wanted to do that for one man.”

  He jerked his head, and briefly there was a rawness in his eyes. She’d taken him by surprise. He covered it quickly with anger. “Tell me about this technology you have allegedly stolen and patented.”

  The folly of her actions and the betrayal by her adopted country were all too stark to her now. No Name’s intelligence had been flawed and she had been abandoned. She was alone in highly secure compound with only her beauty as a weapon.

  Her beauty… and her invention.
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br />   No Name’s plan was for Hedy to admit that she’d stolen some plans for radio communication technology, but to feign ignorance regarding their content. After all, who would believe that a starlet had invented something of value? No Name had assumed that her idea was something she’d stolen from Friedrich, and thus was probably something she’d be unable to replicate and hand over to the Nazis. Or, she realized with sudden bitterness, maybe he didn’t think it was an invention of any value anyway.

  But there was a major flaw in No Name’s plan. She could provide all of the details of her invention to Adolf. She could turn the tide of the war the other way. She could… Perhaps the Germans would recognize her and George as the true inventors of frequency-hopping technology. Perhaps they’d accept her into their National Inventors Guild.

  No. She could not.

  But No Name had promised that he’d see to it that the U.S. Navy put her technology into use. It had been over two years since she and George had presented their ideas to the Navy. Would that allow them to be well ahead of the Germans in developing it if Hedy were to share some of her ideas in order to buy her own life?

  A look of impatience had slipped over Adolf’s face, and Hedy pressed her damp palms together. She could just tell Adolf about her ideas for tracking torpedoes using frequency hopping, and not George’s solution of using punched paper like the roll in a player piano to switch frequencies—the part of the invention that the Navy had scoffed at.

  How could we put a player piano roll in a torpedo? Your invention can’t be operationalized. She didn’t know how they could put a piano player roll in a torpedo, but she was confident that with a little inventiveness they could have found a workable solution. If they’d tried.

  She needed to buy herself some time to figure out an escape, a way out. Not that time would necessarily help, but it was better than no time.