Chapter 9: The Gallows
The rain was a fine, freezing mist that seared the lungs more than it wet the skin. It was the only thing moving on her face as she stood paralyzed at the edge of the square.
The scaffold was crude, green wood already darkening with moisture. They hadn’t even used a proper noose. It was a length of coarse hemp, knotted clumsily, biting into the skin beneath his jaw. His head was tilted at an angle that was too final, too still. Black curls, matted with something darker than rain, stuck to his forehead. His face was a mosaic of violence—one eye swollen shut, a deep cut splitting his lip, bruises flowering like rotting fruit across his cheekbones. But it was him. Entirely him.
His uniform tunic was gone. He hung in his thin undershirt, which was stained and torn, revealing the pale, vulnerable skin of his throat and the stark line of his collarbone. His hands, those careful hands, were bound tightly behind his back. His feet were bare, dangling a foot above the mud-slicked cobbles.
A sign was hammered into the wood at the base of the gallows. The letters were harsh, black, dripping in the rain.
VATERLANDSVERRÄTER.
Traitor to the Fatherland.
Bile, sharp and acidic, rose in her throat. She swallowed it back, the burn a punishment she welcomed.
At the foot of the structure, kneeled a woman. Her coat was a drab, shapeless thing, soaked through. Her shoulders convulsed in silent, shuddering waves. One of her hands was pressed flat against the muddy ground, the other was stretched upward, fingers splayed toward his bare foot as if to warm it. A few in the gathered crowd of maybe two dozen glanced at her with a mixture of pity and disgust before looking away. Most just stared, hollow-eyed, at the spectacle. A deterrent. A lesson.
An old man next to Jennie hawked and spat into the gutter. “Serves him right. Selling rifles to partisans. My nephew died for lack of ammo at Stalingrad.”
A woman hushed him, her voice low. “Show some respect. That’s Marie Becker’s boy. She cooked for our block during the flu.”
“Then she raised a rat,” the old man muttered, but he fell silent.
Marie. Leonid’s mother. The cook.
Jennie’s legs were blocks of ice, heavy and useless. Her mission training screamed at her: Turn around. Walk away. The exposure is catastrophic. You are looking at a counter-intelligence wet dream. Every second her face was visible in this square was a gamble she had already lost.
But her heart, or the shattered, bleeding thing that had replaced it, had seized complete control.
She took a step forward. Then another. The crowd was thin enough to part without effort. She was just another curious, morbid citizen drawn to the state’s grim theater. The misty rain coated her lashes, blurring the horrific image, making it a watercolor of grief.
She stopped a few feet behind the kneeling woman. She could see the similarities now—the same dark hair, though streaked with gray, the same slope of the shoulders. Marie Becker’s knuckles, pressed into the mud, were white and raw.
The world narrowed to that point: the mother, the son, and the instrument of his death. The distant hum of the city faded. The jeers of the old man became static. There was only the soft, choking sound of Marie’s weeping and the creak of the rope as the body shifted in a slight gust.
I did this.
The thought was not an abstract realization. It was a physical invasion. It crowded her lungs, squeezed her heart into a numb, aching pulp. She saw her own hands placing the apple into his. She heard her own laughter, light and false, in his small apartment. She felt the heat of his skin against hers in the dark, a sanctuary built on a lie. Every tender word, every whispered confidence, had been a brick in the road that led him here, to this rope, barefoot in the rain.
Marie’s weeping hitched. She slowly, painfully, lowered her uplifted hand and placed both palms flat in the mud. She bowed her head, a posture of absolute defeat.
Without thinking, Jennie moved. She knelt in the mud beside her.
She didn’t speak. What language did she have for this? Sorry was a pebble thrown into a crater. She simply knelt, her own cheap coat soaking up the brown water, her presence a silent, wretched echo of the woman’s grief.
Marie sensed her. She turned her head slowly. Her eyes were red-rimmed caverns, sunk deep in a face etched with exhaustion and sudden, catastrophic loss. They held no recognition, only a blank, overwhelming question directed at the universe.
“He was a good boy,” Marie whispered, her voice shredded. “He brought me sugar when he could. He fixed Frau Heindrich’s door. He was… he was a good boy.” She repeated it as if it were a spell that could reverse time, unravel the rope, call him back.
“I know,” Jennie heard herself say. The words were ash in her mouth.
Marie stared at her, searching. For a moment, terror iced Jennie’s veins—did she know? Had Leonid shown her a picture? Described the girl from the factory?
But the woman only saw another mourner. A stranger sharing the burden. She gave a slight, broken nod and turned her eyes back to her son’s body.
“They came last night. Took him from the barracks. They said he was a traitor. That he let death pass through his gate.” A sob broke through. “He kept saying it was a mistake. He asked for… for paper. To write a note. They laughed.”
A note. Jennie’s breath stopped. For me. The final piece of him, and they had laughed.
A sharp whistle cut the air. Two military policemen were beginning to move through the square, shooing people along. “Clear the area! Nothing more to see! Go about your business!”
The spell shattered. The world rushed back in—the cold, the danger, Marco’s deadline ticking in her head like a bomb. She had to move. Now.
She reached into the deep pocket of her coat. Her fingers closed around the small cloth pouch of coins she kept for emergencies, and the hard, oily cylinder of the cyanide capsule. She pulled out just the coins, a small but significant handful of Reichsmarks. It was her last week’s food money.
She took Marie’s muddy, limp hand and pressed the coins into it, folding the woman’s stiff fingers over them.
Marie looked down, confused.
“For flowers,” Jennie said, the lie coming automatically, horribly. “For when they… when you can take him down.”
She stood up, her knees cracking, the mud heavy on her skirt. Her eyes lifted once, against every order of self-preservation, to Leonid’s face. The rain had cleaned a streak through the grime on one cheek, like a final, clean tear.
A policeman’s voice barked, closer now. “You! Woman! Move along!”
Jennie turned and walked. Not quickly, not slowly. She forced one foot in front of the other, each step a mechanical act of will. She did not look back. She crossed the square, turned down a narrow alley, and then another.
Only when the walls of the buildings closed in around her, smelling of damp brick and garbage, did she let the shudder take her. It started deep in her core and radiated out until her teeth chattered. She leaned against the wall, slick with moss, and slid down into a crouch, folding in on herself.
The image was seared inside her eyelids. The bare feet. The sign. His mother’ hands in the mud.
A dry, soundless scream built in her chest, a pressure with no release. She pressed her fist against her mouth until she tasted blood.
Marco was right. She had gambled everything on a ‘maybe’ and had lost more than she knew she had to lose. She had seen the cost, now, in the flesh. It had a face, a mother, and a pair of empty, swinging boots.
The capsule in her pocket felt heavier than a pistol.
She had twenty minutes to get to the tram depot. To safety. To a future of more lies, more targets, more apple trucks with fused bombs.
She pushed herself upright, wiping her face with a sodden sleeve. The cold shock of the action grounded her. The grief was a luxury. A tomb she could build for herself later. Now, there was only survival.
But as she walked, a new feeling began to burn through the numbness, small and fierce at first, then growing with every step that took her farther from that square.
It wasn’t patriotism. It wasn’t even duty anymore.
It was rage.
A pure, undiluted hatred for the men who had laughed while he asked for paper. For the system that hung good boys in the rain to make a point. For the war that turned love into a weapon and kindness into a death sentence.
She touched the cyanide capsule through the fabric of her coat. A last resort.
Not today.
Today, she would make the tram. She would disappear. She would live.
And the next apple she handed to a soldier would be full of something far sharper than shrapnel.