An Alien Enemy

A porcelain-skinned flapper christened Neysa von Igel pirouettes through the twilight of Wilsonian America, her heart tattooed with star-spangled ardor yet her passport inked with the black eagle of Deutsches Reich. She twirls under the gothic eaves of Adolph Schmidt’s manse—an industrial baron masquerading as doting patriarch—ignorant that her cradle was rocked not in the Rhineland but in a New Jersey brownstone whose walls were splintered by a saboteur’s bomb. That saboteur, Emil Koenig, a Teutonic revenant in celluloid collar, was exiled across the Atlantic as punishment for the very murders that orphaned her; irony, wearing jackboots, now stalks the same foundry where Schmidt forges shells for the Allied war machine. When Koenig attempts to conscript Neysa as a mole inside the munitions labyrinth, her patriotic blood rebels; she bolts through coal-smoke alleys to the brownstone of David Hale, once a modest trust lawyer, now a covert operative whose briefcase hides ciphers for the fledgling Bureau of Investigation. Their elopement is no moonlit idyll but a clandestine dash across submarine-haunted waters to the shell-cratered Marne, where Neysa—veiled as a Red Cross nurse—again confronts Koenig amid the phosphorous glow of no-man’s-land. In a ravaged champagne cellar, she drives a trench dagger through his sternum, the act both filicide and christening: by slaying the architect of her past she reclaims her birthright as daughter of Columbia.