Presuming the claim of his spy work is true, Houdini raised the act of misdirection to an astonishing level. Now even more, I understand Hutton’s obsessive drive, as well as his impetus to recruit me. My own crate trick in New York must have struck him as nostalgic. Perhaps my patter about Houdini even seemed a sign.

My belly growls, interrupting the thought. While embarrassingly loud, the sound is drowned out by girls’ giggles. As my only company in the room, the manager’s daughter and her two friends—all around eight or nine years old—are playing a board game on the floor. A fire crackles in the hearth, scenting the air. One of the girls flaunts a card that gets her out of jail free.

I smile wistfully, wishing the release of Allied prisoners could be just as easy.

“Pamela!” a woman calls from the next room.

The manager’s daughter sits up. “Yes, Mum?”

“Time to feed the animals, love.”

The girls squeal. Scrambling from the room, they divvy up assignments for the inn’s cat, dogs, and pigeons.

Left to the quiet, I gaze at the abandoned Monopoly game. How differently I’ve come to view such pastimes, now as delivery mechanisms for war. Dominoes, cribbage boards, chessmen. All those and more have been exposed. German guards are growing ever wise to game sets capable of hiding escape aids, leaving scant new options. Most are too small or thin to rig. Like Monopoly, for instance. There’s no compartment to be squeezed into its tiny houses and hotels, its trinkets and slender board.

Or…is there?

Houdini thrived on defying the impossible. While varied in forms, I’ve been doing the same since childhood, often for survival.

In this instant, I consider a potential reason my life has been repeatedly spared. Could it be to attain justice for the victims of a cruel and callous enemy?

As a young girl, I had no power to retaliate against the anti-union murderer who yelled “fire,” or the crooked sheriff and his vicious deputies, or the company management that would have sooner let us starve than pay miners like Papa a decent wage. Maybe I still don’t.

But I have a chance now, if even in a small way, to strike back at Hitler for all the horrors he’s wrought on the world and families and countless innocent lives.

The revelation draws me to kneel beside the game. Hoping the girls are forgiving, I slide the pieces off to examine the cardboard base. No thicker than one-quarter inch, it couldn’t conceal any bulky tools. Yet slim ones just might go undetected, if cut precisely into the liner.