He hadn’t seen her all day and he realised he missed her badly. Not simply the conversations they were beginning to have, increasingly long, increasingly frank, but the knowledge that she was with him, a fellow presence in this house. The toilet was at the end of the corridor. He knew now that this arrangement was highly unusual in the village. According to Agustín, most houses had a toilet on the ground floor, making the pipe runs easier, but when Tomaso had first fallen ill he’d occupied the room where Stefan now lay and it had been Ignacio – at the old man’s request – who’d installed the new toilet. Not that Stefan minded. Not in the least. Anything to avoid sharing the room with his own shit.
He began to shuffle down the corridor, then paused. There was another door across the corridor. It was always shut. For some two weeks now, lying alone through the long days and nights, he’d wondered exactly how this household worked. Tomaso slept somewhere downstairs. Of that he was sure. But where was Eva’s bed? He’d never heard her footsteps outside his door but that meant nothing because the woman moved like a cat, barely stirring the air. Maybe this was the door to her bedroom.
He tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked. He pushed at it very softly, praying he wouldn’t find her inside. The door swung open and he found himself looking at a room the size of his own. The double bed hadn’t been slept in for a while. The flowers in the vase on the windowsill were long dead. The tall doors of the wardrobe were shut and there was no sign whatsoever of occupation. The room smelled stale. No way would Eva be sleeping here.
About to close the door, he noticed the tiny framed photograph hanging on the wall above the bed. It was sepia. It showed a young girl. She was wearing a lacy white dress with a tiny silver crucifix around her neck. Gap-toothed, pleased with herself, head slightly cocked, she was smiling shyly at the camera. Even at this age – ten? Younger? – she was unmistakably Eva. The same eyes. The same tilt of the chin. The same fall of black hair. Her first communion, Stefan thought. Before real life took her somewhere rather different.
A little later, safely back in bed, Stefan heard male voices down below then footsteps on the stairs. It was Agustín. He’d come to check on Stefan’s leg. He folded back the blankets and the top sheet and unrolled the bandage. Close inspection brought a smile to his face. The wound was healing beautifully.
‘No need for another bandage,’ he said. ‘She must feed you very well.’
‘She does. A fine hotel. No complaints.’
The smile widened. Agustín unbuckled the splint and then Stefan watched his fingertips dancing up and down his lower leg.
‘That hurts?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Good.’ His put his hand flat on the sole of Stefan’s foot and asked him to push hard against it with his damaged leg.
‘Well?’
‘Good. It feels good.’
Agustín nodded. He asked Stefan to swing his legs out of bed then stood squarely in front of him, his hands extended.
‘Grip hard,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’
‘You want me to stand up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Both legs on the floor?’
‘Yes.’
Stefan shrugged. Agustín, after all, was a doctor. Would he ask the cook to surface the submarine? No. Would he expect the navigating officer to make an omelette? Nein. So trust this man. All the same, he knew he felt nervous. His bad leg hadn’t taken any weight for nearly a fortnight. The last thing he wanted was more pain.
He caught hold of Agustín’s hands, then slowly he got to his feet. His lower leg hurt, no question, but it was completely bearable. Even his knee appeared to have returned to its normal size.
‘You want me to try and walk?’
‘No. You go back to bed. Tomorrow, maybe. But not now.’
‘The leg’s not broken?’ Stefan pointed at his shin.
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. Badly bruised but no break.’
Secretly thankful not to try walking, Stefan sat down again, watching Agustín rearranging the blankets.
‘No brace?’
‘No brace. Just in case, we keep it. Maybe next week it goes on the fire.’
Stefan nodded. He’d always hated the device, not least because he didn’t much like the man who’d made it. Ignacio, he thought. Telling Eva what not to wear.
Agustín asked whether he needed anything. Stefan shook his head. Then, when Agustín turned to go, he called him back.
‘One thing,’ he said. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Where does Eva sleep?’
‘Sleep? Eva? With Enrico. Down the street.’ The smile had returned. ‘I leave you now. Back tomorrow.’
The rain got heavier. By seven, night had fallen. Stefan lay in the dark, trying yet again to get his bearings. He’d always assumed that Eva was living alone, unattached, either in the room along the corridor or somewhere downstairs. That was lazy thinking on Stefan’s part and he knew it. This was a woman who’d seen a great deal. Who knew a great deal. Who had so much to offer. She was also beautiful. What man could resist all that? Especially in a village as remote and probably as backward as this one?
He lay back against the pillow. He didn’t blame her. Not in the least. It was Enrico who’d helped him so willingly when he’d arrived, who’d virtually carried him up to this little room. He was strong, and cheerful. He was a handsome man, and generous with his time. He’d also refused even to entertain the offer of any reward.
Alone, then. Marooned. Totally at sea. Stefan found the prospect profoundly depressing. There were, after all, only two people in this house, both men. One was dying. And the other, in ways too numerous to list, was probably already dead, if not in body then certainly in spirit.
Downstairs, Tomaso was coughing again. Stefan tried to blank out the noise, to pretend he was somewhere else, Germany maybe, where he spoke the language and knew the people and wouldn’t be feeling quite so lost. But that, too, was a path that only led backwards, to countless images he was trying so hard to forget.
He shut his eyes, turned his head to the wall, tried to pretend he was physically exhausted, tried to trick himself into sleep. Sleep, at the very least, might give him an hour or two’s grace before, awake again, he could summon whatever strength he had left and make some kind of peace with where he now found himself. But it was hopeless. The harder he tried, the more the memories crowded in.
He was back in Hamburg, months before the firestorm. It was a black time at sea, blacker if you happened to be with Rommel in North Africa or – God help you – on the Eastern Front. The Sixth Army had surrendered at Stalingrad, frozen half to death, starved of food, out of ammunition, fodder for the Russian guns. Nearly 100,000 men had surrendered. Countless more had been killed. And among those who had simply vanished was his own brother, Werner.
Werner, he thought. A year older. Always wiser. Always bolder. Always confident of victory. He’d been so, so wrong. Nineteen forty-three? Another year of seamless victories? Nein.
It was the same at sea. The years of German submarines feasting on poorly protected Allied convoys were over. The British and the Americans had learned how to find U-boats, and how to destroy them. The losses mounted and mounted until Admiral Doenitz had to withdraw the wolf packs altogether. Back at their base in Lorient, Stefan and his fellow Kapitäns sat around in the mess at Kernevel and licked their wounds. The unthinkable had happened. The Allies were everywhere. Putting to sea against odds like these was suicidal. And so Stefan applied for leave and took the train to Hamburg.
Listening to the rain and the sound of the old man downstairs, Stefan stared at the ghostly oblong of the window. His memories of that evening when he’d arrived at the Hauptbahnhof were all too clear. This was before the bombing. Hamburg was still intact but the people were like wraiths. They’d never much liked Hitler, never much trusted the upstart Austrian with his gangster cronies, but they’d buttoned their lips during
the good times and worked hard to ensure a constant supply of new U-boats from the yards along the Elbe.
Now those times had gone. Stefan’s mother had lost so much weight he scarcely recognised her. His father was finding it hard to get fuel for his motorbike. The winter had been bitterly cold and the flat was unheated. Most of the family’s spare clothes had gone to the Winter Appeal for the boys in the east, and the rest were already at Stefan’s grandparents, in case one day they had to abandon the city and head north. Only there, on the farm, did Stefan find any semblance of the life he’d left before the war started. Food on the table. Logs piled by the roaring fire. Just like the old days. Except his grandmother spent a great deal of time fussing around the POWs who’d been drafted into the countryside to help with the heavier work.
He nodded to himself, remembering the journey back to the city. It was May, late spring, and before returning to France he was staying one last night at the family apartment at Hammerbeck. His sister-in-law was living there with his mother and father. Angelika hadn’t seen Werner since he’d left for Operation Barbarossa, the start of the push to the east. That was more than two years ago. She and Werner had married by telephone, one of thousands of such unions. She’d put her hand on a German helmet and sworn her oaths of undying affection and now she had no idea whether she was a widow or a wife.
That last evening in Hamburg, he and Angelika had talked long into the night. Stefan’s father had left them a bottle of schnapps. Around three in the morning, with the bottle nearly empty, Angelika had asked whether the war was lost, whether it was all over for the Fatherland. Even then, deep in his heart, Stefan suspected the answer was yes but he remembered shaking his head, putting his arm round her, explaining that secret weapons were on their way, wonders of German design and engineering that would turn the tide of war and restore the Reich to its former glory.
‘And Werner?’ She’d been hopelessly drunk. ‘You think he’s alive?’
‘I know he’s alive. One day he will be back. I know Werner. Werner is a survivor. Like we all are.’
Really? In the darkness, for the first time, Stefan managed to turn over and lie on his side. On his good leg, admittedly, but it still felt comfortable. He pulled the blankets around him, trapping the warmth, shutting his eyes. He found himself in Hamburg again, but this time it was a very different city. It was August last year. He was standing in the rubble of Hammerbeck, wondering what was left of his life. The apartment block where he’d lived no longer existed. It was simply a gaunt ruin, black against the sky, eaten alive by the deluge of high explosive and incendiary bombs that had torched whole neighbourhoods. He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t fit the images together, couldn’t tease any sense out of the desolation and the smell.
After days of wandering, of making enquiries, of begging for information, he’d found someone he knew, a teacher from the local school. She said she thought his parents and most of the neighbours had perished in the firestorm but she’d also heard a rumour that Angelika, his sister-in-law, had somehow made it out. Word was that she was badly injured but still alive.
It took a week to find her. She was at a sanatorium in the country run by nuns, one of dozens of badly injured refugees from the catastrophe that had laid waste to the city. The sister in charge of the ward took Stefan aside and warned him about what to expect. She’d touched Stefan’s back between his shoulder blades. Her spinal cord is broken, she’d said. The nerves will never mend.
It was true. From the shoulders down, Angelika was paralysed. Stefan sat at her bedside for the rest of the afternoon. She couldn’t move, couldn’t feel a thing. The night of the biggest raids, she said, the sirens had gone off around midnight. She and Stefan’s parents and the old couple from the next apartment had gone down to the communal shelter. The bunker was very crowded. When the bombs began to fall people held each other, especially the children, but there was no panic. The bombs kept falling, closer and closer, and then came the incendiaries and the gathering roar of scalding air that became the firestorm. It grew hotter and hotter. Smoke was curling into the bunker through every crack and the roar of the firestorm became something worse. It was an animal, she said. It wanted to devour us. You could hear the devil laughing.
Angelika was desperate to try and escape. Stefan’s father said they had to stay for the sake of their elderly neighbours. When Angelika insisted, Stefan’s father soaked a sheet in water from the fire bucket and wrapped it around her. She remembered a sea of white faces staring at her. The women were weeping. When she opened the big, heavy door, she could see nothing but flames. She took a step forward, blind panic, and heard the door clang shut behind her. Shielding her face, she plunged forward. The sheet acted like a sail. Buoyed by the firestorm, she found herself on a piece of open ground beside the Mittal Kanal. At her bedside, Stefan had nodded. He knew the Kanal. He’d played there as a kid. He asked her what happened.
‘The roads were on fire. The asphalt. People were trapped. It was like treacle. They were burning to death.’
She found a way through. She threw herself into the water. Even the water was on fire, blobs of burning phosphorous and fuel oil, and people were dying just metres away.
‘When you die,’ she said, ‘the sound is horrible. In the movies people are brave and die beautifully. When it happens for real it’s different. At first you scream. And then you whimper. Then … nichts.’
Nichts. Nothing.
Angelika was lucky. At first. Her burns were superficial. Within days, she returned to Hammerbeck to see what was left. Even now, the rubble was still warm to the touch. Amid the ruins she worked out where she’d once lived, where the shelter might have been. The local wardens were trying to keep people away from the remains of the apartment blocks but Angelika managed to give them the slip. Determined to find the barest trace of her former life – anything – she began to poke through the wreckage. In so doing, she dislodged a heavy baulk of timber. Half buried by a sudden tumble of masonry, she tried to struggle free but her legs didn’t work any more. And neither could she feel her arms.
Stefan remembered her face against the sheets, white and drawn, and the whisper of the nuns in an adjoining room.
‘So …’ she’d said, ‘the war got me in the end.’
Stefan had taken her hand, not realising the futility of the gesture. The sister was right. Her back was broken. No sensation, no control. From the neck down, she could feel nothing. Not even Stefan’s hand.
‘And the shelter?’ he’d managed at last.
‘They got it open days later. Everyone was dead. Some of them had taken their clothes off. Their flesh was the colour of toast. Bombenbrandschrumpfleischen. They’d cooked to death.’
Now, in the darkness, Stefan heard a door open downstairs. He was on his back again, staring into nowhere. So much death. It was everywhere. It was a given. It was what you got used to. It was what happened. And the Germans, his fellow countrymen, even had a word for its latest party piece. Bombenbrandschrumpfleischen: the shrunken bodies of the firebombing. So precise. So matter-of-fact. So logical. The fate of an entire nation captured in a single phrase. Only the Germans, he thought. Bombenbrandschrumpfleischen. You reap what you sow.
After a while, there came the lightest of footsteps on the stairs, then a face at the door. Eva.
‘You’re asleep?’
Stefan turned his head away. He didn’t know what to say. Eva stepped closer. He could feel her presence beside the bed. She reached down and touched his face.
‘You’re crying. What’s the matter?’
‘It’s nothing.’ He shook his head. He didn’t want to meet her gaze.
‘Agustín says you’re nearly better.’
‘He thinks so?’ He managed what might have been a laugh. ‘He thinks I’m better?’
‘He does. He says tomorrow you will walk again.’
At last he turned his head. She was kneeling beside the bed now, her face inches from his. She looked pleased with him. She lo
oked proud.
He reached out, touched her face.
‘I didn’t know about Enrico,’ he said.
‘Enrico?’
‘Your boyfriend …’ he shrugged, ‘… maybe your husband.’
She gazed at him. Then it was her turn to laugh.
‘You think Enrico’s my husband?’
‘Sí.’
‘Then you’re wrong.’ She caught his hand and kissed it. ‘He’s my brother.’
*
Gómez had trouble finding the rendezvous in Alexandria. The cab driver had never heard of the place and dropped Gómez off at the tram depot. Beaman had been right about the government building program. The area was a construction site: cranes everywhere and the potholed roads further ploughed by heavy trucks. Even now, mid-evening, work was continuing under the glare of the arc lights. Finally, a white woman with a couple of kids directed him to Rattlesnake Joe’s.
The place looked new and trade was good: construction workers on stools at the bar, business types hunched over plates of steak and fries, couples studying the menu, not a black to be seen. At first Gómez thought he must have got the wrong diner but then he caught sight of Beaman. He was occupying a booth at the very back, alongside the washrooms. He was deep in conversation with the faces around the table, his skinny hand stabbing at the air as he made point after point. There were three other guys and a woman. All the guys were black and two of them wore suits.
The woman was Hispanic. She was getting to her feet as Gómez approached, and she was eyeing the door to the washrooms. She was tall, commanding. Gómez stared at her. She was wearing a fullish dress cut low round the neck. She had the chest of a diva and shoulders that might have belonged to Spud Murphy but the hands – already extended – were what really caught his eye. Beautiful hands, lacquered nails, and a thin silver chain looping around one wrist.
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