A Little White Death (65 page)

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.

‘Body found this morning in
Kopernikusstraße
. 9.53 a.m. Aryan male, approximately one metre nine, approximately seventyseven kilos in weight. No recognisable physical
features. Uniform of a Sicherheitsdienst Brigadeführer. Letters and notebook in inside jacket pocket are those of Brigadeführer Wolfgang Stahl. Body removed to city morgue. No time of
death established, but the house had been all but destroyed by secondary blast on the night of the seventeenth. The local warden said the bomb hit a house on the other side of the street about 9
p.m. I checked the duty log. Brigadeführer Stahl did leave here at seven fiftyeight. It is perfectly possible that he had arrived home before the air raid.’

Heydrich had stopped kneading his skull and was staring at the back of his hands – long, long fingers outstretched.

‘No recognisable features? What about the blood group tattoo?’

‘Not everyone has them, sir.’

‘They’re compulsory.’

‘I checked. He broke two appointments to have it done – didn’t show up for either. He was booked in to have it done next week.’

‘The face?’

‘There is no face.’

‘The hands.’

‘The hands?’

‘Bring me his hands.’

‘Eh?’

‘Bring me his hands! Go to the morgue and chop off his hands! I want to see his hands!’

Heydrich laid his own hands flat upon the desk, palms pressed, fingers fanned as wide as they would go. He called the sergeant back before he reached the door.

‘Bruhns, has the Führer been told?’

‘No, sir. Not yet.’

Not yet. Somebody would have to tell him. It was perfectly possible to keep secrets from the Führer. Often the only way to deliver what he wanted was not to tell him the bad news. If he but
knew it, the Führer was a man habitually lied to by every member of his entourage from his cook to the Chief of the General Staff – but this was unconcealable. Word would spread. If
Stahl had died in the raid, then he was, to date, the highest-ranking Nazi officer to die on the Home Front. There was propaganda to be made. If Stahl was dead, Hitler would notice his absence. One
day soon he would ask. But if Stahl was not dead . . . if Stahl was not dead. Heydrich found it hard to believe in such a coincidence. Stahl denounced to him as an enemy agent only hours after he
died in an air raid? The denunciation explained one thing – why Stahl had chosen to live in the East, in a petty bourgeois block off the
Frankfurter Allee
, when the Party had offered
him his own villa in Dahlem – one of those taken from the Jews. It was not fitting for an SD Brigadeführer – Heydrich had told him to move when they’d promoted him –
but it put distance between Stahl and the rest of the Party.

He spread his fingers that bit the more – it hurt.

Late in the afternoon Bruhns returned with a silver tray, draped delicately with a large linen napkin. He set it down on Heydrich’s desk. Heydrich was staring out of the window. Bruhns
whipped away the napkin. Whoever it was had done a neat job, a piece of surgery worthy of Baron Frankenstein. All the same Bruhns pulled a face behind Heydrich’s back, wincing more at the
gruesome notion of hands on a platter than at the sight itself. It inevitably put him in mind of John the Baptist – but the silver tray was all he could find to put them on. It was the tray
he used for the Obergruppenführer’s morning coffee. The pathologist had sent the hands over wrapped in brown paper like two bits of haddock fresh from the fishmonger’s slab.
Heydrich was a stickler for neatness – you didn’t serve up anything to such a fastidious man on a bloody sheet of wrapping paper.

‘Got ’em,’ he said simply.

Heydrich turned. One glance at the hands and then straight into Bruhns’ eyes.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing sir.’

‘Then get out.’

Heydrich waited for the door to close. The left hand was broken, the fingers splayed at unnatural angles, the flesh black and blue. He spread the right, free of rigor, as wide as it would go.
Then he laid his own hand across it. Cold. Softer than one would imagine. Dead meat. Nothing more than dead meat. Like picking up a pig’s trotter at the butcher’s. His own spread by far
the wider. He knew his capacity at a keyboard – a slightly better than average span at an octave and two. This man scarcely touched an octave. It was a fat stubby hand. Heydrich had watched
Stahl’s hands glide across a keyboard countless times. His span was an octave and four. There was no piece in the repertory of the piano the man could not play for want of the span of a hand.
These were not the hands of Wolfgang Stahl. Stahl was alive. Alive and with a forty-eight-hour start on him.

‘Bruhns!’

Bruhns appeared at the door, blankly expressionless.

‘Call the Chancellery. Get me an appointment with the Führer. And arrange a funeral for Brigadeführer Stahl.’