No. No. No. They were all still here.
She was going to find them herself. And then what?
And then what, Magda?
The woman from the square stood next to her.
“Who’s in charge here?” Magda asked.
The woman grinned. She was in her thirties, and she was missing a lower tooth. “The Revolutionary National Committee, that’s who. To hell if we’re going to let the Soviets take control of what’s our business.”
The truck slowed as it reached the bottom of the mountain and shifted gears to start the climb. Magda looked ahead. Two vehicles were haphazardly stopped on the road.
“That’s us,” the woman said, and some of the men nodded.
Magda recognized the mishmash of Czechoslovakian, Soviet, and German army uniforms. A man with a film camera stood off to the side and tried to wave the truck Magda was in to a stop. The revolutionaries were shoving a group of men and women—three of each—into a line on the road, their sacks and belongings scattered behind them. The couples had their hands above their heads as they were pushed and shoved to line up along a ditch. Together they turned away from the partisans and faced the northern fields and the mountains—the direction Magda and Karol had run off to so long ago. The driver revved the engine.
The people in the truck cheered and pumped their arms, some with rifles above their heads. “Collaborators! Collaborators!”
The man with the movie camera crossed before the truck, and the driver started to crawl past, maneuvering around the two cars.
Magda frowned as they inched by. She looked closer as they came level to the group. A woman among the military personnel. A mop of dark curly hair beneath a beret. The stature of a Viking. Magda tried to find her voice, to call Renata’s name, but she came up short. Next to Renata, his weapon drawn and aimed at the back of a man’s head—Collaborators! Collaborators!—was Aleš in an officer’s uniform.
“Aleš,” Magda shouted. “Renata!”
Renata turned her head, and her shoulders fell back. Magda locked eyes with her. Aleš’s pistol popped. The man before him fell. Renata said something, and Aleš turned toward the truck. But the man to his left sprinted into the field. Renata raised her weapon. The shot sliced the air. The man jerked to the left and sprawled forward. Aleš swung back and marched to the next victim. Magda saw his pistol kick back. She clasped a hand over her mouth.
God was angry. They were angrier.
17
May 1945
They were not the first to arrive at Villa Liška. The iron gate to the service road stood agape. A couple of men were smoking cigarettes in the stand of cedars, near Eliška’s play area, berets slanted on their heads. The red-and-white toadstool pattern on the stumps and the table that Aleš had painted, were faded, cracked, and peeling. Furniture from the house lay out on the sloping lawn. A handful of men loaded a dresser onto a truck. Frau Tauber’s dresser. A portrait of Hitler lay ripped and torn beneath shattered glass where it had been dropped from a second-story window. Other pieces, a foyer table included, lay broken and splintered on the stones of the veranda. Doors slammed inside the house somewhere. A woman screamed. A child shrieked.
It was happening all over again. The day Walter had led the Nazis here—it was happening again but in reverse now. Now she was one of “them.” Now she had control.
Magda clutched her rucksack and staggered from the truck. She hurried up the lawn to the parlor doors. Inside, people were looting in a frenzy. Two women stuffed books from the library shelves into bags. One wore a linen tablecloth around her shoulders and carried a silver candelabra. A man hurried through the dining room door and walked past Magda as if she were not there. In his arms, a box of china. “Put that down,” Magda yelled at him. She tried to block the man’s way.
“There’s plenty more where that came from.” He veered away with a look of disbelief.
Again the woman’s scream. Magda dashed into the foyer and halted at the bottom of the stairs. The rebels had Frau Koenig. She was trying to wrest herself from the hold that three men had on her. They dragged her from Frau Tauber’s bedroom, along the landing and to the top of the stairs. Frau Koenig’s hair had been shorn off. Robert clung to her neck, howling, his legs swinging wildly. He had grown. “Let them go,” Magda cried. She gripped the banister to steady herself as she charged up the stairs, but the men shoved her out of the way. They nearly lifted Frau Koenig and the boy into the air as they rushed down the stairs with her. Magda followed them. They pushed the woman into the dining room and then out the French doors. Was this not Magda just a few years ago?
Frau Koenig stumbled forward but regained her balance and fell onto her knees. Robert was shocked into silence, his eyes wide with fright. He stared at Magda for a second and then shrieked again.
“What do you want with her?” Magda cried. “Koenig’s left his family behind.”
The three men swung their rifles off their shoulders. Frau Koenig shrieked covering her head and bending over the boy.
“That’s right,” one growled. “He left her here for us. Put the bitch out of her misery.”
“She might know how to get to him though,” another one said.
“Yeah,” the third agreed. “We should take her in for questioning.”
Frau Koenig looked pleadingly at all three, but when her look landed on Magda, her face changed. She lifted a shaking finger and pointed at
