The light was changing in blocks of shade.
The pair of them gravitated toward the immaculate, bulky house. They rustled their thoughts.
“You hungry?” Rudy asked.
Liesel replied. “Starving.” For a book.
“Look—a light just came on upstairs.”
“I see it.”
“Still hungry, Saumensch?”
They laughed nervously for a moment before going through the motions of who should go in and who should stand watch. As the male in the operation, Rudy clearly felt that he should be the aggressor, but it was obvious that Liesel knew this place. It was she who was going in. She knew what was on the other side of the window.
She said it. “It has to be me.”
Liesel closed her eyes. Tightly.
She compelled herself to remember, to see visions of the mayor and his wife. She watched her gathered friendship with Ilsa Hermann and made sure to see it kicked in the shins and left by the wayside. It worked. She detested them.
They scouted the street and crossed the yard silently.
Now they were crouched beneath the slit in the window on the ground floor. The sound of their breathing amplified.
“Here,” Rudy said, “give me your shoes. You’ll be quieter.”
Without complaint, Liesel undid the worn black laces and left the shoes on the ground. She rose up and Rudy gently opened the window just wide enough for Liesel to climb through. The noise of it passed overhead, like a low-flying plane.
Liesel heaved herself onto the ledge and tussled her way inside. Taking off her shoes, she realized, was a brilliant idea, as she landed much heavier on the wooden floor than she’d anticipated. The soles of her feet expanded in that painful way, rising to the inside edges of her socks.
The room itself was as it always was.
Liesel, in the dusty dimness, shrugged off her feelings of nostalgia. She crept forward and allowed her eyes to adjust.
“What’s going on?” Rudy whispered sharply from outside, but she waved him a backhander that meant Halt’s Maul. Keep quiet.
“The food,” he reminded her. “Find the food. And cigarettes, if you can.”
Both items, however, were the last things on her mind. She was home, among the mayor’s books of every color and description, with their silver and gold lettering. She could smell the pages. She could almost taste the words as they stacked up around her. Her feet took her to the right-hand wall. She knew the one she wanted—the exact position—but when she made it to The Whistler’s usual place on the shelf, it was not there. A slight gap was in its place.
From above, she heard footsteps.
“The light!” Rudy whispered. The words were shoved through the open window. “It’s out!”
“Scheisse.”
“They’re coming downstairs.”
There was a giant length of a moment then, the eternity of split-second decision. Her eyes scanned the room and she could see The Whistler, sitting patiently on the mayor’s desk.
“Hurry up,” Rudy warned her. But very calmly and cleanly, Liesel walked over, picked up the book, and made her way cautiously out. Headfirst, she climbed from the window, managing to land on her feet again, feeling the pang of pain once more, this time in her ankles.
“Come on,” Rudy implored her. “Run, run. Schnell!”
Once around the corner, on the road back down to the river and Munich Street, she stopped to bend over and recover. Her body was folded in the middle, the air half frozen in her mouth, her heart tolling in her ears.
Rudy was the same.