The Traitor's Emblem Read Online Free Page A

jumped away, falling backward and covering his face with his arms. There was a tremendous crash.
    The doors to the hall had been slammed shut.

2

    Eduard von Schroeder was not the only child to return home that day, a week after the government had declared the city of Munich secure and begun to bury the more than twelve hundred Communist dead.
    But unlike that of Eduard von Schroeder, this homecoming had been prepared for in minute detail. For Alys and Manfred Tannenbaum, the return journey had begun on the Macedonia, from New Jersey to Hamburg. It continued in a luxurious first-class compartment on a train to Berlin, where they found a telegram from their father ordering them to take up residence at the Esplanade until they received further instructions. This, for Manfred, was the happiest coincidence of the ten years of his life, because Charlie Chaplin happened to be staying in the room next door. The actor gave the boy one of his famous bamboo canes, and even accompanied him and his sister to the taxi the day they’d finally received the telegram saying it was now safe to undertake the last leg of their journey.
    So it was that on May 13, 1919, more than five years after their father had sent them off to the United States to escape the impending war, the children of Germany’s most important Jewish industrialist set foot on platform 3 of the Hauptbahnhof station.
    Even then, Alys knew that things were not going to end well.
    “Hurry up with that, will you, Doris? Oh, just leave it, I’ll take it myself,” she said, snatching the hatbox from the hands of the servant her father had sent to meet them and placing it on top of the trolley. This she had commandeered from one of the young station assistants who buzzed around her like flies, trying to take charge of the luggage. Alys shooed them all away. She couldn’t bear people trying to control her or, even worse, treating her as if she were incapable.
    “I’ll race you, Alys!” said Manfred, breaking into a run. The boy didn’t share his sister’s concerns, and worried only about clinging on to his precious walkingstick.
    “Just you wait, you little squirt!” shouted Alys, launching the trolley in front of her. “Don’t get left behind, Doris.”
    “Miss, your father wouldn’t approve of you carrying your own luggage. Please . . .” begged the servant, trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the girl while glaring at the young men who were nudging each other mischievously and pointing at Alys.
    It was precisely the problem Alys had with her father: he programmed every aspect of her life. Although Josef Tannenbaum was a man of flesh and bone, Alys’s mother had always maintained that he had gears and springs instead of organs.
    “You could set your watch by your father, my dear,” she’d whisper in her daughter’s ear, and the two of them would laugh—quietly, because Mr. Tannenbaum didn’t like jokes.
    Then, in December 1913, influenza took her mother. Alys did not emerge from her shock and sadness until she and her brother were on their way to Columbus, Ohio, four months later. They lodged with the Bushes, an upper-middle-class Episcopalian family. The patriarch, Samuel, was director-general of Buckeye Steel Castings, an establishment with which Josef Tannenbaum had many lucrative contracts. In 1914, Samuel Bush became the government official in charge of arms and munitions, and the products he acquired from Alys’s father began to take a different form. To be precise, they took the form of millions of bullets that traveled across the Atlantic. They traveled westward in crates while the United States was still supposedly neutral, then in the cartridge belts of the soldiers traveling east in 1917, when President Wilson decided to spread democracy across Europe.
    In 1918, Bush and Tannenbaum exchanged friendly letters, bemoaning the fact that “owing to political inconveniences” their dealings would have to be suspended temporarily. Trade resumed