Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Hall in the Alexanderplatz police station that showed framed photographs of unidentified bodies found by the police.

Horst Wessel. Young Nazi turned into a martyr by the Nazi party after being killed by a Communist. A song he wrote, "The Horst Wessel Song," became the Nazi party anthem.

jawohl. Emphatic form of yes.

Kaiser. Leader of Germany before the founding of the Weimar Republic. After World War I, the last Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicated his throne and fled to the Netherlands.

Kinder, Kche, Kirche. Children, kitchen, church. Policy of the Nazi party on where women belonged.

Kolnisch Wasser. Popular German cologne created in the early 1700s. Literally translated as "water from Cologne" in English and "eau de cologne" in French. Still sold today.

Kommissar. Rank in the police department similar to a lieutenant.

loden green. Grayish green color usually found in traditional Bavarian wool clothing.

Mosse House. Building that housed the Berliner Tageblatt, where Hannah Vogel worked. It was damaged during the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin in 1918 and restored by Erich Mendelsohn, a famous German architect. The building was again damaged during World War II and restored in 1990.

National Socialist German Workers party (Nazi party). Party led by Adolf Hitler that eventually assumed control of Germany.

Paragraph 175. Paragraph of the German penal code that made homosexuality a crime. Paragraph 175 was in place from 1871 to 1994. Under the Nazis, people convicted of Paragraph 175 offenses, which did not need to include physical contact, were sent to concentration camps, where many of them died.

Peter Krten. Serial killer from Dsseldorf. He was arrested, tried, and guillotined shortly before the novel takes place. Hannah Vogel would have covered his sensational trial.

pfennigs. Similar to pennies. There were 100 pfennigs in a Reichsmark.

Reichsmark. Currency used by Germany from 1924 to 1948. The previous currency, the Papiermark, became worthless in 1923 due to hyperinflation. On January 1, 1923, one American dollar was worth nine thousand Reichsmarks. By November 1923, one American dollar was worth a little more than four trillion Reichsmarks. Fortunes were wiped out overnight. In 1924, the currency was revalued and remained fairly stable until the Wall Street crash in the United States in 1929. When the novel takes place, one American dollar was worth 4.23 Reichsmarks.

Reichstag. Elected legislative assembly representing the people of Germany.

Schultheiss pilsner. Pale lager brewed at the Schultheiss factory in Berlin.

Schutz Staffel (SS or Blackshirts). Nazi paramilitary organization founded as an elite force to be used as Hitler's personal bodyguards. Led by Heinrich Himmler.

Sturm Abteilung (SA, Brownshirts, or storm troopers). Nazi paramilitary organization that helped intimidate Hitler's opponents. Led by Ernst Rohm.

Tempelhof Airport. Famous airport in Berlin. It was remodeled under the Nazis, used in World War II, and became the central airport for the Berlin Airlift of 1948. It is currently slated to be shut down.

Wannsee. Both a borough in Berlin and a pair of linked lakes. It is a well-known swimming and recreation spot in Berlin, with one of the largest inland beaches in Europe. Wannsee, however, is best known because it was at a villa on this lake that senior Nazi officials came up with the "final solution to the Jewish problem" (i.e., the murder of all of the Jews in Europe) on January 20, 1942.

Weimar Republic. Name given to the German government from the end of World War I until the Nazi takeover (19191933).

Wertheim department store. Large department store chain in Germany. The store in the novel was one of the largest department stores in Berlin at the time. The Nazis later seized the business, as the Wertheims were Jewish. In 2006, Wertheim's heirs successfully sued another department store chain that purchased the store after World War II. The property in the settlement is now valued at 350 million dollars.

Zehlendorf. Wealthy borough in Berlin. Boris's house is on Kronprinzen Avenue in this borough, later renamed Clayallee to honor General Clay, the American general who ordered the Berlin airlift in 1948.

Author's Note A Trace of Smoke is set in Berlin in 1931, the year Germany was lost to the Nazis. Although the characters are mostly fictional, their world is based on meticulous research. When I lived in Berlin for three years in the mid- and late 1980s, I became fascinated by the city, its history, and the German language. I graduated from high school and finished a semester of college there. When I chose 1930s Germany as the topic for my senior history thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, I remembered the city I loved, and a pink triangle I'd seen at the Dachau concentration camp that showed gays were imprisoned there. In 1989, I began to research what had happened to them. It was difficult, as not much had been written about it. When I returned to the topic years later to write this novel, I was pleased to discover a wealth of useful primary and secondary sources.

Many places in the novel existed as I described them. The novel opens with the main character viewing her dead brother's picture in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. This hall in the basement of the Berlin police station at Alexanderplatz where pictures of unidentified corpses were displayed was hauntingly described in a 1923 newspaper article by novelist Joseph Roth, in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 19201933.

The newspapers Hannah longs to hide behind, and many other visual details, appear in the movie Berlin: Symphony of a City. This 1927 documentary shows a day in the life of Berlin, filming everyday Berliners going about their business from early in the morning until late in the night. The newspaper she works for, the Berliner Tageblatt, was published by the Mosse House, which looks as I described. I don't know if they carried details from the trial of the Vampire of Dsseldorf, one of the earliest documented serial killers, but many German newspapers in mid-1931 covered this trial.

Hannah's apartment is similar to the mother's in the opening scenes of Fritz Lang's movie M, which was released shortly before my story starts. I saw comparable apartments while visiting student friends in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin, in the late 1980s.

The gay club where her brother sings, the El Dorado, existed in 1931, became a Nazi political headquarters in 1933, and is currently a gay bar again. I first came across it while doing research for my history thesis. Numerous pictures of its exterior exist on the Internet, and Mel Gordon's Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin contains photographs of the interior, as well as pictures of dancers and letters from the time, describing the activities there.

When I lived in Berlin, I often shopped at the Wertheim department store, but wasn't aware of its complicated history until I decided to send my main character there to face the Nazis. There are numerous pictures available of the department store on Leipziger Strasse. Its fascinating history-it was stolen from its Jewish owners by the Nazis, ended up being owned by the Communists in East Germany, and was recently the subject of a court battle by Wertheim's heirs-is documented online and in newspaper articles.

Ernst Rohm really did exist. He helped Hitler come to power and was one of his closest friends. A charismatic soldier decorated several times in World War I, he expanded the Sturm Abteilung (the storm troopers) in three years from eighty thousand men to over four million. He was unashamedly gay and was prosecuted for it in 1932, on the basis of sexually explicit letters similar to those in the novel, although less graphic. These letters were leaked to the press during histrial for offenses against Paragraph 175 and were published in the Munich Post in 1931 and 1932. He was acquitted. I was lucky enough to find and study one of the original copies of his 1928 autobiography at Berkeley's Doe Library. I don't think it's ever been translated into English or even published using modern German fonts. His tendency to staff his offices with attractive young men was commented on by socialite and journalist Bella Fromm in Blood and Banquets and a visit he made to the El Dorado is described in Sefton Delmer's autobiography, The Counterfeit Spy. There is no evidence that he fathered a child. All of the encounters he has in the novel are fictitious.

I found many old maps and photographs, including a subway map from the summer of 1931 that the main character might have carried around in her pocket and pictures of her office building, Wertheim, Wittenbergplatz subway station, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the gay club where her brother sings. All of the films, newspapers, and magazines in the novel existed at that time. Most of the consumer products mentioned by name, such as Elbeo stockings or Ravenklau cigarettes, were advertised in the Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung magazine in 1931.

While the boy in the novel is not based on a real person, I borrowed his manner of speaking from a minor character in the movie Emil and the Detectives filmed and released in Berlin in 1931. Karl May, the boy's favorite author, was the bestselling German writer of all time. His books set in the American West are very well known and were admired by Albert Einstein, Ernst Rohm, Adolf Hitler, and many other German schoolchildren from the 1890s through today.

General background information also came from primary sources I haven't already mentioned, including the diaries of Harry Kessler and William Shirer and a 1931 collection of the Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung. Additional secondary sources included The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer; When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany by Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossman, and Marion Kaplan; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider by Peter Gay; The Weimar Republic Sourcebook by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg; Weimar: A Cultural History 19181933 by Walter Laqueur; Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich; Marlene Dietrich by Maria Riva; and Lenya: A Life by Donald Spoto.

I read many wonderful novels set in Berlin, from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories to Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy and The One from the Other, to Joseph Kanon's The Good German.

Read on for an excerpt from the next novel in the Hannah Vogel series.

A Night of Long Knives available now from Forge Books 2009 by Rebecca Cantrell

1.

Wind rustled in grass browned by the drought plaguing Europe. Unseasonable heat and a parched smell invaded the gondola. The Graf Zeppelin's massive shadow stole over tidy Swiss houses, streets, and fields. I wiped my palms on my thin cotton dress, sweating as much from fear as heat. I had not been so near Germany since I fled three years before, after kidnapping the purported only son of Ernst Rohm.

Rohm was chief of staff of the storm troopers and commanded thirty times more men than Hindenburg, the president of Germany. And yet reports of homosexuality dogged him. Doubts that could be squashed by the small boy squirming in front of me. Anton provided final proof of Rohm's virility.

"Good day, Frau Zinsli," said Seor Santana. Like everyone else in the past three years, he used the name on my forged Swiss passport. I had left my real name, Hannah Vogel, behind. Except for brief visits to London to meet my lover, Boris, I had not had a true conversation with an adult I trusted in more than one thousand days.

"Good day." I looked out the window again. We were nearing a large lake. The zeppelin was scheduled to land in Zrich, Switzerland, but I could not remember any lakes near Zrich.

"How is the young man of the house?" Seor Santana nodded to Anton and snapped his fingers for Dieter, the waiter. Twice. "Bring me a cup of that excellent coffee!"

"Yes, sir." Dieter's gray eyes searched in vain for the beautiful Seora Santana.

"Have I told you that my plantation supplies the coffee for the zeppelin line?" asked Seor Santana.

"You have." Several times.

"Wonderful harvest this year." Seor Santana produced two sheets of stationery from the pocket of his cream-colored linen suit. Even at its hottest, Europe was no match for South America in temperature, and he always looked crisp and fresh.

"Will you show me a new plane?" Anton asked. "Please? Please?"

"Do not beg." I tousled his short blond hair. Without turning, he removed my hand. Too old for that, at nine?

"My husband loves being begged for his silly planes." Seora Santana, a former flamenco dancer, made her entrance. She paused at the edge of the viewing area, as if expecting applause, then patted her sleek black hair and dropped gracefully into a chair. Spicy perfume drifted over me, and I coughed.

Anton ran to her, hand out.

"That counts as begging." We had left Pernambuco, Brazil, five days ago and his manners had already deteriorated.

Seora Santana laughed and dropped a chocolate-covered ball of shredded coconut into his palm.

"Gracias," he said, around the sweet.

"Thank you," I said as well. The Santanas seemed harmless. They were traveling to Hamburg to visit his warehouses. Fashion interested her more than politics, he spoke only of the coffee business, and neither was outwardly pro-Nazi.

I turned to the window just as we floated north over the midnight blue mass of the lake. Cool air dried the sweat on my arms and raised goose bumps. The only lake this large in Switzerland was Lake Constance. Its depths were frigid in both winter and summer. But on the northern edge of Lake Constance lay Germany.

Dieter set Seor Santana's drink next to him and he took a large sip. He handed a sheet of paper to Anton with trembling fingers. Nervous energy, or too much of his own product?

"A drink, Frau Santana?" Dieter was besotted with the glamorous Bolivian and rarely let her out of sight. His fingers fidgeted with brass buttons on his jacket.

"Please." Her accent gave the German words an alluring lilt. "A cold lemonade."

I rubbed my palms along my cold arms, fighting to stay calm while we flew north. It was probably a sightseeing diversion. No need to worry.

Anton drew a feather, his Indian symbol, and scribbled his first name inside it. He loved Karl May's popular Westerns and wanted to become an Apache brave like Winnetou. He had invented an Indian communication system, complete with symbols, twigs, and smoke signals.

"Can you show me a new design?" Anton asked. "A plane I never saw before?"

Seor Santana tapped the sheet with his bitten fingernails. "Perhaps you have seen them all."

He and his wife exchanged a smile as Anton looked stricken. Watching him squirm was part of their game.

The northern edge of the lake came into view. Fishing boats dotted the beach, and dark pines surrounded a German seaside town. I stared down, heart racing.

"Maybe one more." I barely heard his words, but I knew that behind me Seor Santana folded a new plane, fingers quick and dexterous, and Anton copied each movement, tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated.

"Always straight creases," he said, before Seor Santana could remind him. I nodded in agreement without moving from the window.

The pines were beneath us now. We were in German airspace. I inhaled sharply.

"What's wrong?" Anton's voice sounded worried.

"I do not know yet." I never lied to him, although it would be easier. "But we are off course."

"Probably nothing." Seor Santana patted my arm. "A course correction. No danger. Zeppelins are very safe."

"Indeed." Did he know how easily the zeppelin's hydrogen-filled envelope could ignite? We might as well be riding a bomb. Into Germany. But at least we were not descending. Yet.

Seora Santana fanned herself with a painted black fan, nails flashing crimson. "Where is that boy with my lemonade?"

"A side trip could be an interesting diversion, don't you think?" Seor Santana set his airplane next to his empty coffee cup.

"I have an important appointment in Switzerland. Not Germany."

"Germany!" Anton gave me a worried look before tossing his new airplane out the viewing window. The greetings he sent to each country we visited spiraled down toward our homeland.

After we lost sight of the plane's white form, he waved to people below, as he always did. When we flew low over South America, everyone waved back: men waved tanned arms, housewives waved aprons, children waved handkerchiefs or leaves, babies waved sticky fists.

But in Germany only children waved. Adults scuttled into houses or under trees.

In spite of Hitler's rhetoric, Germany was at peace with her neighbors. What had its citizens to fear from the sky? I had more to fear from the land now that Nazis ruled it. If I landed in Germany, Rohm's men would kill me and snatch Anton.

I cursed the day I had accepted the assignment of chronicling the zeppelin's voyage from the Swiss magazine where I worked, under a pseudonym, as a travel writer. I had almost turned it down. But I longed to return to Europe. I wanted to see Boris. I missed him. I missed the feel of his body next to mine, his smell, the sound of his laugh, his tenderness with Anton, and his solidity. He was the only tie to my old self, and the one person I dared to trust. On the sultry streets of Rio de Janeiro, the danger of Germany had seemed very far away. Like a fool, I had agreed to go.

"We're docking," Anton shouted.

The zeppelin's motors had changed pitch. He was correct.

"Could you please keep an eye on him?" I asked the Santanas. "I must fetch my hat."

"But of course." Seora Santana laid her arm possessively across Anton's shoulders. "The boys will make more airplanes."

"Wait here, Anton. Until I come for you."

He nodded, and a grim look that should have belonged to an adult crossed his face. I trusted him to stay, brave but worried, until I returned. He caught my eye and winked. I touched my left eyebrow, our secret farewell gesture.

I walked out of the viewing room at a measured pace, but as soon as I was out of sight, I sprinted down the opulent corridor to our cabin. The carpeted floor swayed beneath me and I staggered.

When I opened our door, the scent of Argentinian roses enveloped me. Every day the steward replaced the bouquet. Just the kind of lovely and extravagant gesture my flamboyant brother had adored in the years before his murder. He hd been dead for three years; I grieved still.

The cabin looked in order: beds folded flush to the wall, neatly packed suitcases lined up by the door, camp stool covered with my contraband newspapers. Since suspending freedom of the press, along with most other freedoms, a prison sentence awaited anyone bringing foreign newspapers into Germany.

I glanced at the Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung from June 24, 1934. The Fhrer and Il Duce shook gloved hands. Mussolini wore a black hat set straight across his head, a well-tailored uniform, and the air of confidence that befits the fascist dictator of an entire country. Hitler carried his homburg half crumpled in his hand. He wore a baggy raincoat belted too high and an aggrieved expression. Someday, Hitler's insecure smile seemed to say, I too will sweep away the last vestiges of freedom and own my land as you do yours; remember that when you deal with me. Mussolini smiled back, unimpressed.

What had really happened at that meeting? The world might never know, with most once powerful political journalists dead, in concentration camps, or in hiding. If I had not fled Germany, I would be among their ranks and, while I was grateful for my freedom and the time with Anton, I felt guilty for not exposing Germany's sad and dangerous story to the world.

On top of the newspaper rested a twig with one bend in it, a secret Indian message that Anton had last stood here alone. One bend, one person. I slipped the twig into my dress pocket.

I scooped up the newspapers and dumped them on the floor at the end of the corridor. No point in going to prison for those, assuming I evaded prison for kidnapping. I grabbed our suitcases and hurried to the control room.

Captain Schmelling stood in front of the spoked wheel, gauges ranged on both sides. Struts angled off either end of the dash. Anton adored the captain and had spent every moment that he could in the control room, the top of his head barely level with the chrome compass. He even flew the zeppelin for a moment. After deeming the quietly anti-Nazi captain unlikely to have connections to Rohm's SA, I had felt safe enough to let Anton enjoy his time in the male world of zeppelin officers. I regretted it. Who had alerted Rohm?

Although it was strictly forbidden, I turned the round doorknob and entered. Captain Schmelling spared me a quick look. "Women are not permitted on the bridge." He gestured to his first mate.

"Why are we landing in Germany?" I sidestepped the mate.

"Engine trouble." Captain Schmelling looked straight ahead. "We must make minor repairs at the main hangar in Friedrichshafen. All passengers are to disembark."