Chord of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘A kibbutz,’ said Father, his voice thoughtful. ‘It’s not something that’s always worked. And what you’re saying sounds a bit idealistic. A bit too romantic.’

  ‘Castles in Spain? Striving for Utopia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Many of the great philosophers have believed in the concept, though. Schelling, Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant. And in Germany at this very moment there are others working in secrecy to get your people away from danger. To keep them safe from incarceration in the camps. And from worse than incarceration,’ he said, in a voice so soft that Christa had to lean forward to hear. ‘What I’m doing is saving – trying to save – on a different level. I have good connections with the Torhaus – a distant cousin of mine is its housekeeper. Fräulein Elsa Frank. A taciturn soul, but reliable and trustworthy. Also …’ A deprecatory note was in his voice, ‘Also, she is almost embarrassingly devoted to me. She would do whatever I asked her.’

  ‘If I’m to even consider this, I need to know more about you,’ said Father. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘I could give you several names. I could show you papers that appear to confirm those names. But most of the papers are forged, and all of the names are false. Please believe, though, that I’m on your side.’

  In a voice Christa had never heard Father use, he said, ‘If I were to agree to go to this place, this Torhaus – you would expect me to work? To work on music? How, exactly?’

  ‘To compose.’

  ‘Compose?’ said Father, startled. ‘I haven’t any gift for composing. I’ve written a few scraps of stuff, but they’re very lightweight. Technical exercises, that’s all.’

  ‘Not so. You have skill and depth, Felix, I would have tried to save you from the Gestapo for your own sake anyway. And I would wish to save Christa as well, because of her youth and her intelligence.’

  ‘And the price is that I compose music.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The coffee was ready now, and Christa had to move away from the door to set the jug and cups on a tray. She missed the next part of the conversation, but by the time she went back to the room, the matter seemed to have been decided. The stranger said, ‘Christa, I’m afraid we have to leave Lindschoen as quickly as possible.’ He looked at Father. ‘Stefan will be better staying here with your cousin.’

  ‘No,’ said Father at once. ‘I couldn’t leave Stefan.’

  ‘It would be safer. But Christa,’ said the man, turning to look at her, giving her the swift, secret smile, ‘you are coming with us.’

  ‘But where will people think we are?’

  ‘That’s easily dealt with. We’ll let it be known that your health has been a cause for concern – or perhaps that it’s Christa’s health, and that you have taken her to friends – or family – in a different area. And when you return, your neighbours will welcome you back without the smallest suspicion.’

  ‘We would return here?’ Father almost sounded as if he was pleading; Christa hated hearing him speak in such a way.

  ‘Of course.’ The response came quickly – too quickly?

  ‘Back to Stefan? Back to this house?’

  ‘Most assuredly.’

  ‘I don’t know your name,’ said Father, again.

  ‘To people with whom I work – people who trust me and whom I can trust – I’m known as Brax.’

  ‘Brax.’ Father appeared to try the name out in his mind. ‘Just that? Nothing more?’

  ‘And nothing less.’

  Brax. It was a name that might belong to any nationality or any religion or any profession, or any era. You might see it inside a synagogue or a church, or above an ordinary shop doorway. You might as easily see it on an old manuscript, or in a book of ancient legends.

  Christa moved around the house, trying to think what they should take, folding things into the battered suitcases. The thought of leaving Stefan was almost unbearable.

  ‘We can’t,’ Christa had cried. ‘He’s too little. He won’t understand—’

  ‘You must. You can write to him to explain tonight,’ said Brax, very gently. ‘I’ll take the note to Velda’s house. And you will write to him from the Torhaus, of course.’

  ‘Can I do that?’

  ‘Of course. This won’t be for very long, you know.’

  ‘Promise?’

  His hand came out to touch her face, tracing the line of her jaw very lightly. Christa stood very still. It was as if tiny electrical shocks had trickled across her skin. ‘Christa, you have my word.’

  So Christa packed her things and Father’s, and wrote a careful note for Stefan, which Father and Brax took to Velda’s house. She thought Father was on the verge of tears when he came back, but he gave her his familiar smile, and said Stefan was all right – he thought he was having a little holiday with Velda. They must look on this as an adventure, and they must trust Brax.

  Throughout all this, two facts kept forcing themselves to the forefront of Christa’s mind. The first was that her mother had not died – she had run away with a lover, and the second was that the lover had been the man who had died in messy agony tonight.

  She knew it must be true, because Reinhardt had had her mother’s photo. As he died, he had held it before him, looking at it with an expression that might have been love.

  The Torhaus was larger than Christa had been expecting, and it stood at the end of a tree-lined track, which gave it an air of being apart from ordinary things. It was surrounded by a high stone wall, which must shut out a good deal of the light, and there were tall gates which had to be unlocked to let them in.

  And there, in front of them, was the house. It was built of the same dark stone as the wall, and it was four-square with small, frowning windows. It stood in a small hollow, so that Wewelsburg Castle seemed to rear above it. The castle itself was further away than Christa had thought, which was good, but it was still visible. Surprisingly, she did not mind it as much as she had expected.

  Her bedroom lay immediately under the eaves, and at some time in the recent past somebody had put up wallpaper with posies of cornflowers tied with pale lilac ribbon. Christa thought that it was incongruous to see such feminine wallpaper in such a dark old house.

  On the first night she knelt on the window-seat of her room, staring across the darkening landscape towards a huddle of buildings. At first she was not sure what they were. They were too large to be farm buildings, and too neatly laid out to be a village. She thought the word for it might be regimented. Might it be a factory? But as she went on looking, her eyes began to adjust to the darkness – or perhaps the moon simply came out from behind clouds – and she could make out tall gates. She was seeing more details as well now, and sick horror was starting to sweep over her. Because on the eastern side of the buildings, almost exactly as she had seen them in her nightmares, were jutting brick chimneys.

  It’s a concentration camp, thought Christa. It’s one of the places where people are shut away and where the skewer-eyed men and the humpback surgeons pull out their bones. Where the brick chimneys sometimes glow with heat, because people – dozens of people – are being burned. For the first time since leaving Lindschoen, she was grateful that Stefan was not with them.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Father had a room on the ground floor of the Torhaus – a kind of bedroom-cum-study. There was a small cottage piano with a walnut veneer with elaborate figuring and a candleholder alongside the music stand.

  ‘Where did the piano come from?’ he said.

  Fräulein Frank, who was thin and cold-eyed, and had wide bony shoulders like a coat hanger, said, ‘From a place where it’s no longer needed.’

  ‘Brax caused it to be brought here?’

  ‘He gave the order.’ Something approaching reverence showed in the cold eyes at the mention of Brax.

  ‘It needs tuning,’ said Father, disapprovingly, having tried a few bars of Chopin. ‘Particularly if it’s been moved—’

  ‘You must do your best with it as it
is,’ said Elsa Frank, and Father frowned, then shrugged as if in acceptance.

  ‘Brax wants me to write music while we’re here,’ he said to Christa after they had been given supper. ‘I think he sees himself as a kind of patron of the arts. He says he’s saving the artists from the Nazis.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘I don’t have much choice. He wants a particular piece of music – something military as far as I can make out. He’s quite – insistent about it. I shall have to make the attempt, I think. And he did get us out of Lindschoen – I mustn’t lose sight of that.’

  Christa’s mind went back to the night in The Music House, to the overheard conversation. It had sounded as if composing music for Brax was to be a kind of payment for him getting them out of Lindschoen after Reinhardt’s death. It was a curious way to settle a debt, but these were strange times.

  Father was saying, ‘The trouble is, Christa, that I’m not much of a composer – I haven’t the originality.’

  Christa thought they both knew this was true, although she would not have said it for worlds. Father was a very good musician indeed, but the few pieces he had written were a bit boring. It was disloyal to think this, but it was still true.

  It was slightly alarming to find that Fräulein Frank locked all the doors that night, and that they were not able to go outside.

  ‘There will be no need,’ she said when Father questioned her. ‘You have everything here you need. There will be books and school things for the girl—’

  Christa retorted coldly, ‘I’m not a child. My schooldays are behind me. I’ll be helping my father with his music, and perhaps sketch and explore the countryside—’

  ‘You will not explore the countryside,’ said Fräulein Frank. ‘You won’t go beyond the gardens of the house. The gates will be locked, and you will find the wall is too high to climb.’

  Father said, very politely, ‘I don’t think we realized this would be a prison.’

  ‘It isn’t a prison. It isn’t to keep you in, it’s to keep the world out – to hide you from it.’

  ‘For the time being,’ said Father.

  ‘Yes. And my cousin has gone to considerable trouble to bring you both here. His work is vital and he is inspirational.’ Again there was the change of tone. ‘You must not disappoint him.’

  It was not exactly captivity, but Christa thought it nearly was. However, as Father said, it would not be for very long, and he would have the musical project to absorb him. It might be that Christa could help with that. As for Stefan, Brax had promised to bring regular news of him, and Elsa Frank said Brax came regularly to the house. In any case, they would soon be back in Lindschoen and life would resume its normal course. Christa knew life would probably never resume its normal course, but this could not be said.

  Mother’s faithlessness could not be mentioned either, of course, but Christa would never forgive her for putting the bleak despair into Father’s eyes for ever, and for leaving Stefan bewildered and uncomprehending. I hate you, said Christa to the memory of the woman she no longer thought of as Mother, only as Giselle. I hate you and I’m glad your lover died in agony. She did not dare frame the thought that it could only have been Father who had killed Obersturmbannführer Reinhardt. She was horrified to realize she did not care that he had.

  There were three other people at the Torhaus; Christa supposed they, too, had been brought here for safety by Brax, although she did not like to ask them, or at least not until she had got to know them better. One was a painter who smiled vaguely and had paint stains all over his hands, and one was a writer who spent his time shut away in a small room at the house’s rear and who was very secretive about whatever he was writing, and seemed very angry about everything. The other was a silversmith, who had a kind of workroom adjoining the house.

  Unexpectedly, life inside the Torhaus had its own routine. Meals were taken with the writer and the painter, and with Jacob the silversmith. There was a girl who came and went, and who scrubbed floors and helped with the cooking, but it seemed to be expected that Christa would help with that as well. She did not mind, because she had usually cooked for Father and Stefan at home after Mother went. She tried to talk to Elsa Frank, but met only a cold response.

  Sometimes Christa heard piano music coming from her father’s room. It was not anything she recognized, so it seemed that he had begun work on the composition for Brax. Father had said Brax wanted something military, but this did not sound particularly military. It sounded flat and dull, as if Father had simply cobbled together bits of other people’s music. Christa did not think it was in the least what Brax wanted.

  Jacob turned out to be a nephew of Herr Eisler. ‘So I know your father’s work,’ he said to Christa. ‘All my family admire him very much and I’m very pleased indeed to meet him. He will compose something fine while he’s here.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think I can,’ said Father, when Christa reported this. ‘And apart from anything else, that piano is so out of tune that anything I play sounds like nails rattling, and even if it sounded like a Bechstein, I’m no composer.’

  ‘How bad is the piano?’

  ‘Come and try it for yourself.’

  The piano was fully as bad as he had said. Christa tried a scale and then the opening of Humoresque. The keys twanged with painful discordance. ‘It’s as if the hammers aren’t striking properly,’ she said. ‘I suppose the wires are all intact? Could we look inside?’

  ‘Could we? How could we?’

  ‘I don’t know, but – oh, wait, the lid’s hinged,’ said Christa. ‘Can we lift it? It might be stuck though, because it’s probably been closed up for years.’

  But the piano’s lid lifted smoothly and easily, and they folded it back against the wall. Father reached up to the wall sconce to tilt it slightly so that the light shone straight into the piano’s innards.

  ‘The wires look all right,’ he said. ‘At least – they look more or less as the one at home looks when the tuner comes in.’

  Then Christa, peering into the depths with him, said, ‘There’s something in there. Papers … They’re wedged against the wires – that’s what’s stopping the hammers striking properly.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake be careful.’

  But Christa had already reached into the piano, and pulled the thin sheaf of papers free.

  ‘Music,’ she said, spreading it out on the small side table. ‘Handwritten.’

  Across the top of the first sheet, handwritten, was a single word. Siegreich.

  ‘Victory,’ said Father, softly, then he drew in his breath sharply. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing, but Christa had already seen the tiny sketched outline at the foot of the page. The musical symbol called the ghost note. The small private signature her mother had always left on letters and note. ‘Because I’ll always be around like a ghost,’ she used to say. ‘Even though you mightn’t hear me, I’ll be there.’

  It seemed to Christa as if the two of them talked for most of the night. Several times she thought someone walked across the hall outside the room, and each time she tensed, expecting Brax or Elsa Frank to come in, but they did not.

  ‘Only your mother would have added that note,’ said Father, hope shining in his eyes. ‘And that means she must have been here or somewhere nearby. It might mean she didn’t leave us voluntarily.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Christa, as he looked up suddenly, clearly realizing what he had said. ‘I heard what Brax said about – um – about her having run away with that man. The one who was killed.’

  ‘Reinhardt,’ said Father. ‘I never wholly believed that letter, but it was her writing, so I didn’t dare hope too much that it wasn’t true. But seeing this, I do hope it. I think she was forced to write that letter telling me she had run away with a lover. What I don’t know is why she was forced to do such a thing.’

  ‘Do you really think the letter was a lie?’ said Christa, eagerly.

  Father smiled. He said, ‘At the
foot of that letter she had drawn the ghost note. That’s what gave me that tiny strand of hope. And now there’s this.’ He tapped the music, his fingers lingering on it, as if even by touching it he felt a link to Christa’s mother.

  Christa felt tears well up, but she fought them down. ‘Is it possible Mother could have actually written this music?’ I’m thinking of her as ‘Mother’ again, she thought with relief.

  Father was studying the music again. ‘I never knew her to compose anything,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean she never did, though. But as to where she is now …’

  He broke off, and Christa glanced towards the window, to the rearing iron gates and the brick chimneys of Sachsenhausen in the distance. A shiver of apprehension scudded across her.

  Then Father said, in a determinedly optimistic voice, ‘You know, Brax can’t have known this music was in here. Tomorrow, I’ll try it out, and if it’s any good— Christa, supposing I copied it onto clean score sheets? That I let Brax believe I’ve written it as the music he wants from me?’

  ‘Dare you do that?’

  ‘Yes, I do dare,’ he said.

  After their first week at the Torhaus, Jacob gave Christa the most beautiful silver bracelet, made up of smooth links of thin, satiny discs and loops.

  ‘It’s lovely.’ Christa was delighted. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, clasping the bracelet around her wrist with pleasure.

  ‘I enjoyed making it for you. A beautiful object for a beautiful lady.’

  ‘Oh, God, what a cliché,’ said the writer from his corner, and banged out of the room to go back to his room and write his angry prose.

  ‘It’s not so much a cliché as all that,’ said the painter, who was lounging on a window-seat, sketching the view beyond the window. His eyes flickered with something Christa could not understand, then he said, ‘Christa, can I paint you sometime? Or even just sketch you? Quite soon, I mean.’

  ‘I didn’t think I was particularly paintable,’ said Christa, trying not to sound pleased. ‘I’m not very pretty.’

  ‘You’re better than pretty,’ said the painter. ‘It’s something about your bones. Jacob, I’m right, aren’t I?’