Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (2 page)

There was no sign of rescue. In the distance he could hear sirens, but he’d had to climb over piles of rubble to get this far, and as far as he could see the other end of the street was no
better. It would be an hour or more before anyone, any vehicle, got through.

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
Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich again. He would, almost daily, but he’d try not to.

In the back room Stahl found the body of Erwin Hölzel. At least he assumed it was Hölzel. There was a bloody fruit pulp where the face had been. The poor bugger had been blown through
from the floor above.

Stahl looked up, past the jagged edges of floorboards, through Hölzel’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 Hölzel’s clothes and dress the corpse in his own SD uniform. Roughly, the two men were the same size. Hölzel 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 Hölzel’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.

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 Spitfires 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.

And blue-lined paper on the legal pad upon his desk.

Alex had reached a natural hiatus in the writing of his
Sunday Post
editorial. It was known to working hacks as a ‘whip and top’, spinning the same words over and over again
– getting nowhere.

And on that word the axis of his thought, the top so whipped, spun to no conclusion. Time to read. When in doubt about your own prose, read someone else’s verse.

As ever he had a volume of poetry on his desk, next to the lamp. A blue-bound book. He riffled the pages to see if they fell open at a blue poem. He read a line of Lawrence.

The blue flowers in his window box were pansies. He could see them from where he sat. The first pansies of spring – a late spring, the first day of double summertime.
Long, light nights to come. A deep, velvety royal blue, not the sky blue of the Bavarian gentians Lawrence was describing. It had been years since old Troy had been in Bavaria. England had
gentians. He had vague memories of a pinkish plant with a Saxon-sounding name like blushwort or bladderwort – English was full of worts – but the ‘true’ gentian would not
grow in this climate. His country home in Hertfordshire was a high plateau, but high in English terms meant a couple of hundred feet. Bavarian gentians were subalpine. He was seventy-nine.
He’d probably never see one again. If the war ended tomorrow, he’d probably never see one again.

He read on. Few poets were so long a-dying, few poets had dealt in death so long as D. H. Lawrence.

‘What are you working on, Dad?’

His son Rod had come into the study. Doubtless sent by his wife to tell him lunch was ready. Old Troy looked up at his elder son, tore a page from his blue pad and balled it. Tossed it onto the
growing pile in his wicker wastebasket.

‘The old, old story,’ he replied, not meaning to be cryptic.

‘Russia,’ said Rod, not inflecting the word as a question.

‘Russia,’ Alex muttered.

‘Tough going, is it?’

Alex looked at the pile. He had balled twenty sheets or more already.

‘You could say that.’

‘What about Russia?’

‘I was thinking about when she would join us.’

‘Join us?’

‘Us. The war.’

Odd to be spelling out the condition in which they all lived, so simply, so bluntly, to a man in uniform. The war was total – the war was, without exaggeration, England. History
compressed. All history brought to fruition in this moment – this meaning. The meaning of England.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t being dense. I meant, isn’t it “if ” rather than “when”? Can we be at all sure they will join us?’

‘That’s the problem, my boy. I’m sure. Hardly anyone else is.’

‘I mean, one could pose the same question of the Americans, couldn’t one?’

‘Quite,’ said the old man. ‘When I get round to it.’

Rod opened his mouth to speak, but his mother Maria Mikhailovna appeared in the doorway and cut him short and soundless.

‘Vite!Vite!
Lunch has been upon the table these five minutes.’

Alex rose, gathered his dressing gown about him, rubbed with one hand at the two-day stubble of his beard. His
wife would give him hell if he were late for a meal; she would not dream of commenting on his appearance.

As they followed her down the corridor, he turned to his son and asked, ‘Will Freddie be joining us?’

Alex had two sons, Vienna-born Rodyon, and London-born Frederick. His ‘English child’, as he thought of him. Frederick was twenty-five, and had sloughed off his blue uniform, almost
as Rod had donned his, when Scotland Yard had made him first a detective and then a sergeant.

‘God knows,’ Rod replied. ‘Am I my little brother’s keeper?’

Stahl had been lucky. The morning after his departure from Berlin a Heavy Rescue lorry had hit the house next door and demolished the party wall. Twenty tons of rubble had
buried the late Herr Hölzel, and it was only on the day after that that a team of diggers finally recovered the body. Sergeant Gunther Bruhns, stuck with the task of reporting back to Heydrich
at SD HQ on the
Prinz Albrechtstraße
, had not been lucky. Herr Obergruppenführer had a headache.

‘Read it to me,’ he said when Bruhns stuck the report on his desk.

‘Read it?’

‘Aloud.’ Heydrich put his fingertips against his high forehead and proceeded to knead the skin with both hands, eyes down, not looking at the man.

The sergeant harrumphed and began.