Free The Traitor's Emblem by Juan Gómez-Jurado

years—were dead, turned to ashes.
    I’ll kill Paul Reiner for this.
    Now I am the heir. But I will be the baron.
    He couldn’t make out which of the two competing thoughts excited him more.

9

    Paul Reiner was shivering in the light May rain. His mother had stopped dragging him, and now walked by his side through Schwabing, the Bohemian district at the heart of Munich, where thieves and poets sat side by side with painters and whores in the taverns until the early hours. Few of the taverns were open now, however, and they didn’t go into any that were, as they didn’t have a pfennig.
    “Let’s take shelter in this doorway,” said Paul.
    “The night watchman will throw us out; it’s happened three times already.”
    “You can’t go on like this, Mama. You’ll catch pneumonia.”
    They squeezed into the narrow doorway of a building that had seen better days. At least an overhang protected them from the rain that drenched the deserted pavements and uneven flagstones. The weak light of the streetlamps cast strange reflections on the wet surfaces; it was unlike anything Paul had ever seen.
    He was afraid and pressed even closer to his mother.
    “You’re still wearing your father’s wristwatch, aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” said Paul, alarmed.
    She had asked him this question three times in the past hour. His mother was drained and empty, as though slapping her son and hauling him through the alleys far from the Schroeders’ mansion had used up a reserve of energy even she hadn’t known she possessed, and which was now lost forever. Her eyes were sunken and her hands trembled.
    “Tomorrow we’ll pawn it and everything will be all right.”
    The wristwatch was nothing special; it wasn’t even made of gold. Paul wondered if it would pay for any more than one night in a boardinghouse and a hot dinner, if they were lucky.
    “That’s a great plan,” he forced himself to say.
    “We need a place to stay, and then I’ll ask for my old job back at the gunpowder factory.”
    “But, Mother . . . the gunpowder factory doesn’t exist anymore. They demolished it when the war ended.”
    And you were the one who told me that, thought Paul, now extremely concerned.
    “The sun will soon be up,” said his mother.
    Paul didn’t reply. He craned his neck, alert to the rhythmic steps of the night watchman’s boots. Paul wished he would stay away long enough to allow him to shut his eyes for a moment.
    I’m so tired . . . And I don’t understand any of what’s happened tonight. She’s behaving so strangely . . . Perhaps now she’ll tell me the truth.
    “Mama, what do you know about what happened to Papa?”
    For a few moments Ilse seemed to awake from her lethargy. A spark of light burned deep in her eyes, like the last embers of a bonfire. She held Paul’s chin and stroked his face gently.
    “Paul, please. Forget it; forget everything you’ve heard tonight. Your father was a good man who died tragically in a shipwreck. Promise me that you’ll cling to that—that you won’t go looking for a truth that doesn’t exist—because I couldn’t bear to lose you. You’re all I have left. My boy Paul.”
    The first glimmers of dawn cast long shadows on the Munich streets, carrying away the rain.
    “Promise me,” she insisted, her voice fading.
    Paul hesitated before answering.
    “I promise.”

10

    “Whooooah!”
    The coal merchant’s cart screeched to a halt on the Rheinstrasse. The two horses stamped restlessly, their eyes covered by blinkers and their hindquarters blackened by sweat and soot. The coal merchant jumped to the ground and distractedly ran his hand along the side of the cart, which bore his name, Klaus Graf, even though only the first two letters were still legible.
    “Clean this, Hulbert! I like my customers to know who is bringing them their raw material,” he said almost amiably.
    The man in the driver’s seat removed his hat, pulled out a rag still bearing distant memories of the original