Chord of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  Once he said, in a harsh voice, ‘I am satisfying a need, nothing more – you must understand that is all this is. And I will stop before … You understand that, as well? There will be no consequences.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Giselle. ‘Yes, I understand.’ She came up out of the shameful, sinful passion for a moment, to make a frantic calculation. Two weeks since her last monthly bleed. She had coldly requested one of the guards to send a female officer to her at the time, merely saying she required some private attention. The necessary items had been brought, and Giselle, hating the need to ask, had tried to remember that they would be used to such a request from female prisoners.

  But two weeks meant this was now mid-cycle, which was supposed to be a likely time to conceive. Good.

  Reinhardt was moving faster now, but when he gasped out, ‘I must stop – in a moment, I must …’ Giselle thought, not if I can help it, you won’t, and writhed against him. He cried out, and drove harder into her, and she felt his final jerking spasms. He cried out again, his voice a mixture of pain and pleasure, then slumped heavily on to her, his head against her neck.

  Giselle did not dare move, but at last he raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her. She had no idea what he would say, but his words startled her.

  ‘You have tears on your cheeks, Giselle. For your home? For your husband?’

  It would be too easy, but also too dangerous to say yes. Giselle said, ‘The French call it la petite mort.’

  ‘The small death,’ said Reinhardt, softly. ‘The tristesse; the little melancholy following love-making.’

  ‘Yes.’ How many men would have known that and, more to the point, understood about it?

  Reinhardt said, ‘I promised you I would stop in time, and I didn’t.’ A brief impatient gesture. ‘I lost all control. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  But Giselle was not sorry at all. It was a very long shot indeed – the chances of conceiving from a single encounter could not be very high. But it was not impossible. And surely pregnancy would make them change their minds about that eventual execution?

  As for Reinhardt himself – mightn’t he feel very differently towards his own child? Mightn’t he want to set free the woman who had given birth to his son? Or his daughter?

  It was ridiculous, after that frenzied intimacy, to feel shy with him the following night, but Giselle did feel shy. She found herself looking at him differently, thinking: I know how you look when you are in the grip of helpless passion. I know how your body feels inside mine, and how you cry out and grip my shoulders when you reach a climax.

  If Reinhardt was thinking similar thoughts, it did not show, and the cold, courteous mask was more firmly in place than it had ever been. He asked, politely, if she had all she needed, and whether the Siegreich was progressing.

  ‘I have most of what I need,’ said Giselle. ‘The Siegreich progresses.’

  He glanced across at the piano, where only two sheets of music score were on the stand. ‘But still very slowly,’ he said. ‘Or so it seems.’

  Giselle shrugged, and Reinhardt looked at her for a moment, then went out without speaking. But on his next visit, his expression impassive, he said, ‘An order has come to move you out of Wewelsburg tonight.’

  Terror clutched at Giselle’s throat, but she managed to say, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you have only written a very small amount, and it’s thought that you are being uncooperative and defiant. We do not want any more delay; the Führer is impatient to begin preparations for the invasion of England. So someone else will be found to compose the Siegreich.’

  Without realising she had been going to say it, Giselle said, ‘I could be pregnant. That night with you—’

  A faint colour came into his face, but then he said, ‘I am aware of that. If it proves so, you will be allowed to have the child. But I shall disclaim all responsibility. I shall let it be believed that one of the guards violated you. The child would be taken from you straight after the birth.’

  Giselle thought: Well, at least I might have bought nine months more of life. But she felt a sharp pang for the child who would be summarily handed to strangers. Would they let her know what happened to it, that little, lost creature, conceived in that strange, desperate passion?

  He said,‘You are not going to be executed.’

  Relief washed over Giselle in huge waves, but she would not let him see it, and she said, ‘Is that because you and I made love?’ Hateful to call it that, it had been sex, farmyard rutting, a million light years and worlds away from what she and Felix had had.

  ‘Emotion is something that must be controlled,’ said Reinhardt. ‘I can’t – I daren’t –ignore the order I’ve been given. Nor can I countermand it. But all the same—’

  ‘Yes?’

  His voice softened. ‘I can’t let you be shot, Giselle.’

  ‘You could let me go.’ It came out too eagerly. ‘We could fake an escape. And if I promised – swore on whatever you hold most dear …’ She would have sworn on the name of Adolf Hitler himself; she would have sworn on the Nazi swastika. ‘I would swear never to divulge where I had been, or anything about the Siegreich …’ She hated herself for pleading with him, but the words tumbled out.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘All the vows in the world won’t help. The order has gone out, and the arrangements to move you out of Wewelsburg are already under way.’ He frowned, then suddenly said, ‘I would wish for a memory of you. A photograph—?’

  Hardly believing it, Giselle said, ‘There’s one in my bag.’

  ‘I would like that.’ He sounded grateful. Almost humble.

  It was a photo of Giselle standing outside the shop. The wind had been blowing her hair, and she was laughing. Reinhardt took it and said, ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  He put it into a pocket, then said, formally, ‘You will be taken from here in the next hour. Your belongings will be brought out to you later.’

  Giselle said, in a whisper, ‘Where am I to be taken?’ But Reinhardt only shook his head, and went out.

  Through the churning fear, one thing was at the forefront of Giselle’s mind. There were two sheets left of Andreas’s music, and one was that damning last sheet, with Silke’s name on it. They were still in her bag, those two pieces of paper, and they must not be found.

  But the guards were already stamping around outside the door and there was the sound of sharp orders being barked out. The hour Reinhardt had referred to must almost be up. Giselle did not think there was enough time to shred and eat those two pages. She had managed it with the others, but each time she had had to force herself to it and it had made her retch. Once she had been actually sick. And the memory of Andreas, tortured and struggling against the vicious strappado that night – the memory of how he had wanted his music to survive – was still deep in her mind. She would not destroy those last two sheets, but she could remove and destroy the part that had Silke’s name on it.

  She folded the bottom two inches of the final page to make a sharp crease just above Silke’s name, then tore the strip off, using the crease as a guide. It was not as crisp as if it was the real edge of the page, but it would pass. She tore the shreds twice more, and pushed the pieces into the pocket of her skirt. It ought to be possible to drop the torn fragments somewhere later on without anyone seeing, and leave it to the wind to blow them away.

  But supposing this was not enough? Supposing Andreas wrote in some particularly individual way that could be recognized? She looked helplessly around the room, and her eyes lit on the piano. Where did you hide a leaf except in a forest? And where did you hide music except in a musical instrument?

  It was relatively easy to prise up the lid of the piano, and to see at once that it would be simple to thrust Andreas’s music so far down inside that it would not be seen, except by the most rigorous of inspections. Giselle put all the sheets together – Andreas’s and the ones she had transcribed – then hesitated. Hardly knowing
why, she reached for the pencil and in the bottom corner drew the ghost note. Felix would never see it, of course, but it felt extraordinarily reassuring. It felt as if she was sending a message to him. She slid the music down inside the piano, and closed the lid. She did not think it would be noticed that those two pages she had seemed to be working on were no longer here. Everyone would assume that someone else had taken them.

  The guards came in then. They did not clamp her wrists this time, but they held her so tightly there was certainly no chance of escape. They pushed her from the room, down the steps to the courtyard, and into the waiting jeep. Giselle, half falling into the back, fumbled in her pocket for the torn-off paper. It was easier than she had expected to clench the pieces in her hand, and to let them go before the door was slammed. She did not see the shreds blow away, but a wind was whipping through the courtyard, and it would carry the fragments far from Wewelsburg.

  The jeep moved off, jolting across the uneven roads, and then down hedge-fringed lanes. At length, its dipped headlights swept across high iron gates.

  The tall brick chimneys of Sachsenhausen came into view.

  NINETEEN

  Lindschoen, November 1939

  Christa sometimes had nightmares about tall brick chimneys that jutted up into the sky. For most of the time, they were black and silent, but there were times when they glowed with a dreadful heat and belched out flames and bad-smelling smoke. When that happened, it meant something terrible had taken place. Sometimes she tried to see deeper into the dream, to see what the terrible thing might be, but she never could. After a while she stopped trying, because it might be better not to see. It was only a dream anyway – well, it was a nightmare, but it was not real.

  Stefan had nightmares as well, but they were not about the chimneys; they came from a game he and his school friends sometimes played in the lunchtime break. You had to cross a piece of ground that was chalked out into squares and triangles, and if you accidentally stepped on a piece that was forbidden you were counted out of the game. Christa used to play it as well when she was at school.

  But in Stefan’s nightmares, the forbidden ground of the game was a frightening and very sinister place, and it was called the death strip. If you ventured on to it, you were murdered. You were shot with huge, powerful guns that splattered your blood and bones everywhere. Or you were tied up by your wrists and all your bones were pulled out of their places.

  Mother had been able to bring Stefan out of his bad dreams, and Christa tried to do the same. She ran into his bedroom and hugged him to her, and she thought it calmed him down, although she did not think she managed it as successfully as Mother had always done. Sometimes Father came in, but his bedroom was at the very top of the house, so he did not always hear Stefan’s sobs. Christa thought Father often took pills to help him sleep, as well.

  But he would sit on the edge of Stefan’s bed and say that although bad dreams were horrid, they went away when you woke up. Nobody was going to hurt either of them, not ever. There were a lot of things going on in Germany at the moment, but they were all safe here in The Music House. Life would go quietly and peacefully on. But, even as he said it, something flickered in his eyes, and Christa knew that no one was really safe any longer. She found a lot of what was happening difficult to understand, but she tried to listen to what was said in the streets, and they had a wireless, which broadcast news reports. Father hardly ever listened to it, because he said it was too depressing.

  Since Mother had left them, Father had seemed to step back from the world and everything it held. He had not shut himself away in the sense of going into a room and locking the door, but Christa knew he had shut the door of his mind against most of the world. She knew he did not want to be in a world that no longer had Mum in it, and she understood this, because she did not want to be in that world, either. The trouble was that it was the only world there was. She wanted to ask exactly what had happened, because Father had only ever said there had been an accident on the way to the wedding of Mother’s cousin, Silke, so Christa supposed it had been a train crash. But she never found the courage to ask, because she could not bear the pain in his eyes. Telling him she was having nightmares would only make that pain worse.

  Their cousin, Velda, who lived on the other side of the square, told Christa her father was starting to come out of his shut-away state. He was not exactly recovering from losing Giselle – nobody could really ever recover from losing somebody like Giselle – but he was coming to terms with it. Just a very little. They must all help him back into the world, said Velda.

  Velda’s idea of helping Father back into the world was to bake cakes and savoury stews and walk across the square to the music shop with them. No good ever came from starving yourself, she said. She was inclined to be disapproving of the fact that Father’s friends – the musicians and the teachers and the people who simply liked listening to music – still came to the shop on Friday evenings. It was not showing respect, said Velda. But Christa knew they all came because they wanted to help Father; they wanted to offer their companionship and their friendship, and anything else they could think of that might ease the loss.

  Shortly after Christa’s sixteenth birthday, Father said she could stay up for some of these Friday evenings, which was very good indeed. It meant Christa was grown-up, and that she could be part of grown-up things. She looked forward to Fridays all week, partly because they were lively and interesting, but also because of one of the men who had appeared a few weeks earlier. He did not come to The Music House every week, but when he did, he usually sat quietly in the corner by the bookshelves, his face half in shadow. Christa did not know his name, and he did not speak very often, but if he did say anything, everyone listened. His voice was nice; it made Christa think of stroking a cat’s thick fur or putting on a soft silk scarf.

  Sometimes she caught him looking back at her, and when that happened he always smiled, not with a stupid grin or with the kind of forced smile that grown-ups sometimes wore for people who were much younger, but as if he might really want to talk to her. Christa hoped she did not blush when this happened, but she had a worrying suspicion that she did.

  On some nights, if there had been more wine than usual, the talk among the musicians would become very animated, with some of them saying be damned to Herr Hitler’s disapprovals and bans: they would play whatever music they liked at their concerts.

  ‘And didn’t you say you were going to include a Mendelssohn piece next time, Felix?’

  ‘You’re not, are you?’ said somebody, sounding worried.

  ‘Well, I say we show the Führer what we think of his bans,’ said someone else. ‘Silly little man with all that posturing and ranting.’

  ‘If we do the Mendelssohn we’d have to keep Eisler sober beforehand, of course.’

  ‘I drink to celebrate the joy of life and the joy of music,’ announced Eisler, grandly, positioning his chubby fingers on the keys again.

  The unknown man leaned forward to pick up his wine glass, and smiled at Christa, as if he might be inviting her to share the affectionate amusement at Herr Eisler. Christa supposed she ought to ask somebody who he was, but she liked to keep him as the mysterious man of firelight shadows.

  Then came an evening when several bottles of wine had been drunk, and Christa was curled up on the chimney seat, enjoying listening to a friendly argument that had sprung up about the interpretation of some nocturne or other. Herr Eisler was preparing to demonstrate the nocturne, providing somebody would find the music and refill his glass.

  The stranger was sitting near the door, and firelight washed the walls, making the room warm and safe. The shutters were partly open, because Father liked seeing the lamplight on the old square outside. Soon, they might have to not only close all the shutters, but also cover the windows with black material because the Royal Air Force might send over planes to drop bombs on Germany, and no lights must show anywhere that might help them pick out targets. But tonight the lamps were
lit and Lindschoen had its look of belonging to some distant age.

  And then, without warning, came the sounds of footsteps marching across the cobblestones – sharp, rhythmic footsteps that rang out harshly on the ground. Marching. Christa’s heart bumped with fear, and she huddled back against the wall. Everyone was listening to Eisler and no one else seemed to have heard the marching steps. Or had the stranger heard them? It seemed to her that he turned his head towards the door.

  Eisler played a final cascade of chords, then swept his hair back in a deliberately over-dramatic imitation of a famous soloist. There was a shout of appreciative laughter, but as it died away, they all heard the sound they had grown to dread over the last few years: a loud, imperative knocking on the street door. A leather-gloved fist hammering for admittance.

  No one moved or spoke, but Christa’s father got up and said something about it being a latecomer, and he would open the door. But fear was pouring into the room, and Christa knew it was not one of Father’s friends at all.

  It was the Schutzstaffel.

  One of the men said, very softly, ‘Don’t open the door, Felix.’

  ‘Of course he’ll have to open it. It’s worse if you ignore them. If it’s the Schutzstaffel they might just break in anyway.’

  ‘And they’ve probably seen the lights.’

  Christa wondered if she was the only one to believe the Schutzstaffel didn’t always need lights, because they could see into all the hiding places with their skewer eyes … No, that was only in Stefan’s nightmare.