He stepped into the remains of the concierge’s sitting room. The old woman sat at her piano, her forehead resting on the upturned lid, symmetrically between the candlesticks, dead. There didn’t seem to be a mark on her. What had killed her? Had her heart simply stopped at the sound of the bomb? Had she hit middle C and died? She sat in a ring of rubble but, it seemed, all of it had missed her, falling around her as though some invisible shield had guarded her body even as her spirit fled. He had liked the old woman. He had played this piano many times at her request. She had let him play simply for the pleasure of it, not caring what he played, but Stahl had seen tears in her eyes when he played Mozart. Mozart-Mozart had been the first snare. He had used Mozart to snare Heydrich. He had attracted his attention by appealing to the man’s taste, by playing Mozart and by playing upon the man’s childhood memories. Heydrich had grown up with music-his father had taught music in Dresden-he played the violin well, not as well as Stahl played the piano, but well nonetheless. It was the weak link in a man not known to have weaknesses, and Stahl had used it to work his way into Heydrich’s confidence. Not his affection. He had never seen affection for anyone in Heydrich. All the Nazis were mad-Heydrich no more nor less mad than Hitler or Himmler, but he was, Stahl thought, cleverer, more self-contained. Whatever lurked in Heydrich was well battened down. He threw no tantrums. He had his emotional outlet-music.
When, one day in 1934, after dozens of impromptu pootlings by Stahl, Heydrich had asked him if he knew a Mozart piece for violin and piano, the A major Mannheim Sonata, Stahl knew he had hooked him. They had played the piece at least fifty times over the year-many others besides, but Heydrich always came back to the Mannheim Sonatas as his starting point as though the duets, those sparse dialogues between the violin and the piano, held a significance for him that he would not utter and of which Stahl would not ask.
It was a pity. Stahl liked them. He’d never play any of them again now. They would be for ever associated with Heydrich in his mind and he had no wish to see a mental image of Obergruppenfuhrer Keinhard Heydrich again. He would, almost daily, but he’d try not to.
In the back room Stahl found the body of Erwin Holzel. At least he assumed it was Holzel. There was a bloody fruit pulp where the lace had been. The poor bugger had been blown through from the floor above.
Stahl looked up, past the jagged edges of floorboards, through Holzel’s apartment, through his own, into the night sky. Then it came to him. He could scarcely believe his luck. Perhaps there was a God after all?
He climbed carefully up the staircase, testing each tread with one foot before putting his whole weight on it. From the top floor he looked out across the street. There were half a dozen people milling about-but distractedly, unfocused, bewailing their lot and crying for the dead and missing. If he was quick he would not be seen. They were all looking down, not up.
He clung with one hand to the steel conduit that ran the electric cable to the light switch, and with his other hand reached into the wardrobe. He tried to grab a plain, black suit and missed by inches. He lowered his grip, clung as tightly as he could, braced one foot against the wall and thrust out with his right hand. It was too sharp a movement. The floor sagged, the wardrobe wobbled. His fingers locked onto the suit. He pulled it towards him to find the whole wardrobe tilting and the suit still attached by its hanger. He pulled again. The suit jerked free and the balance of the wardrobe shifted, tipping it into space to tumble four floors and splinter on the mound of rubble below.
Stahl found himself clinging to the conduit, the suit flapping like a flag in his hand, all his bodyweight poised over the void. He pushed with his feet, pulled with his fingers, and regained the wall. He grabbed his coat from the door and ran down the stairs, not caring if they tumbled behind him step by step like a house of cards.
It took a quarter of an hour or more to strip off Holzel’s clothes and dress the corpse in his own SD uniform. Roughly, the two men were the same size. Holzel was ten years older, but that would only have shown clearly in the face, and he had no face. With a little luck it would be days before anyone figured out that it wasn’t Stahl. He had no tattoos, no blood group written on the sole of his foot, no SS insignia on his arms. If they had any doubts when they found the body, they’d have to turn to dental records.
He could not leave his Ausweis-or his Party membership card. They’d be the clinchers, but he’d need them to get wherever he was going. But if a body of his size and age were to be found in the remains of his apartment building, wearing an SD uniform, who wouldn’t draw the immediate, the wrong conclusion?
Stahl stepped into the street, buttoned his overcoat. He had no hat. He wished he had a hat. A hat was an identity. He had lost one when his cap rolled on to the S-Bahn track. The black suit, the black coat, another damn disguise, seemed incomplete without a hat. Two doors down was a channel that led back towards the Frankfurter Allee. It wasn’t blocked, it was strewn with broken brick but it was passable. He picked his way along, clutching the rolled ball of Holzel’s bloody suit, dropped the suit down an open coal chute, cut across the side streets and emerged into the Frankfurter Allee just in time to see a fire engine roar past.
Some part of his mind, less clear than a voice, less formed or shaped than an idea, more resistible than an impulse, wanted to turn-to turn and look back. But he had promised himself when he had joined the Nationalsozialistiche deutsche Arbeiterpartei in 1929 that he never would. To look back was more than an indulgence, more than a parting whim-it was to die of pain and grief and irredeemable heartbreak.
§ 2
It was going to be a blue day.
Alexei Troy had spent a morning looking back. It was heartbreak, heartbreak of the sweetest kind.
A cloud-puffed blue spring sky outside his window. Great bouncy billows of cumulo-nimbus. For the first time in weeks the skies over north London blissfully free of aircraft. Not so much as a training flight-all those young men, boys, boys, boys, those Poles and Czechs, the odd Canadian, the odder American-clocking up the hours on Hurricanes and Spifires before they got into a real dogfight. Only the barrage balloons, hawsers taut, tethered as though to some giant hand, broke the skyline.
And blue flowers in the window box that hung on the wall of his Hampstead home.
And a blue uniform clothing his elder son. Flying Officer Rodyon Alexeyevitch Troy, RAF. Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago.
‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer-and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?”’
There were times when this seemed to Alexei Troy to be an apt summation of the precarious state of Great Britain a year or so after Dunkirk-a year in which the British had fought on alone. Finest hour stretched out to breaking point. All that stood between them and defeat was his son’s moustache (which he had never grown)-symbolic of the colossal bluff the nation and its leaders seemed to be perpetrating on the world stage.