The Dynamite Room (29 page)

He found Harris laid out on the floor. Pendell too was wedged in the corner of the dynamite room, asleep. Gruber sat against the wall, picking a peach slice out of a tin with his grubby fingers.

He offered Heiden the slice as if it were a slippery fish. The juice dripped down his hand, leaving sticky trails through the dirty skin. When Heiden declined, he poked it into his mouth and swallowed it, then lifted the tin and drained the juice down his throat, shaking out the last drops.

Where's Bürckel?

Gruber shrugged.
That Englishman's dead as well,
he said, motioning to the man Harris with his foot.
Lucky bastard.

Heiden squatted beside the body. The man's eyes were glassy and his face was so white as to be almost translucent, a short beard prickling through the skin. He fastened the button on the man's jacket.

We should shoot the other one too and get out of here,
Gruber said,
while the storm has stopped.

Heiden took his Luger from his holster and pulled out the magazine. Three bullets left.

Yes. I'll do it,
he said.

As he shaved, his eyes felt puffy and swollen. The shovel he had used to dig the grave had given him splinters; he could see them like niggling little pellets of guilt tucked beneath the skin. He tried not to think about Diederich or the others. Diederich had been the last he needed to dispose of, but now at last they could leave. What was done was done.

He rinsed the knife in the sink—the water brought in from the pump in a bowl—then opened his mouth and dragged the blade down beneath his nostrils. Then he scooped water up to splash on his eyes and held his hands there for a moment, bathing his skin in the coolness and letting it trickle through his fingers and down his arms to the tips of his elbows. He took a breath—
God help us
—and dried his face with a towel.

He would put all of it behind him. Berlin, Poland, Norway, Normandy. The orchestra. The parks and picnics. Sitting on the bench in the institute garden waiting for Eva. He would box it up and bury it; he would turn and walk away.

If there was no God then what was it, he wondered, that had made him who he was? Who had cast him as German when he could have been a Pole, a Jew, or a Bolshevik, English even? This could have been his house, his home, his clothes, this girl could have been his daughter. This life here—and why not?—could have been his.

He turned his shoulder and looked at the wound, less raw and inflamed than it had been, and yet when he gently touched the skin around the edge he still flinched at its soreness. It looked like a toothless mouth and inside the wound was red and tender. In time it would heal and leave a scar. An overzealous new recruit on training. We got it out in the end, he would tell people, but it's left a bit of a hole. He put on a clean dressing, smoothed down his hair, and studied himself, straining his head to stare over his shoulder in the cabinet mirror this way and that.

He smiled, and then tried again, not raising the lips quite as far. All of these things he needed to perfect, if only just for the hours to come. Nothing—not a single thing—should be left to chance.

From the wardrobe he pulled out the last clean white shirt and a pair of mustard-colored tweed trousers and jacket. The shirt fitted as it should, as did the trousers (if slightly long). He found a brown knitted tie that was odd but he rather liked it. He tied it, tightening the knot and straightening it so that it was just so. Yes—everything would be put right. He was not Heiden anymore.

At the dressing table, he trimmed the sides of his hair with a pair of scissors, pushing the damp hair down with his fingers so that he had a better chance of cutting it in a straight line. He carefully combed it into place, giving himself a parting that in time his hair would get used to but at the moment it fought against. He picked up the photograph frame, unclipped the back, and took out the picture. Pendell and his wife on their wedding day, standing outside a church. He looked at himself and at the image; then he carved the same slightly startled expression out of his face, and then readjusted it.

“My son thinks war is an adventure,” he said, mimicking the man. “Is that what this is? This generation's great adventure?”

The likeness was better than he could have hoped. The man called Harris had mistaken him after all, so too had Gruber. Even the girl had said how much he reminded her of her father. People were being changed everywhere: identities, religions, politics, beliefs, opinions, loves—everything in a state of flux. A great and global redistribution of everything that they had known. Every man came back from the front different; it was the reason why half had signed up in the first place. They wanted the war to forge them into new men.

Eva. He allowed himself to think about her one last time: lying in the park, her head in his lap, her eyes shiny with sunlight, sparkling bright. That smile, that bubble of laughter. How she'd wrapped her arm around his neck and pulled him gently down, rising up from his lap so that their lips met, so that they would spark and fuse together.

But they didn't. Not when he thought about it now, not even when he tried to force it. She leaned forward but blurred away, and instead it was the face of George Arthur Pendell that he saw in the reflection—side by side at the window as they had been that day.

You want my knife?
Heiden said.

Yes. Don't you trust me?

And so he had given the man the knife and watched as he made the three incisions in the match, one up from the base to form two legs, one on either side for arms beneath the blackened head. Pendell had handed the knife back and prized open the bits of match until the figure was formed, then he propped him there against the glass.
A memento,
he had said.

He sat on the bed sorting through the documents. Two piles now. One pertaining to George Arthur Pendell: all the various naval certificates and documents he'd gathered, the letters and photographs, the Royal Navy certificate of service he'd taken from the man—all the evidence he'd need to get him across the line. The other pile related to Jack Henry Bayliss. A name, and nothing more than that, stitched into a dead Englishman's uniform. Fictional letters from a fictional family, identity cards, a soldier's service and pay book, an autographed photograph of a girl he'd never met but who was supposed to be his love, all the bits and pieces of a life created for him. He would need Pendell's identity to get him to the cottage, and there he would transform himself again, this time into Jack Henry Bayliss. And then later into someone else, and then someone else, and then someone else, using all the stories he'd gathered—the week's holiday in Southwold, the wedding in the New Forest, the Torquay Saloon bought from a dealer in Stowmarket—to make each new identity real, until Heiden was long left behind and forgotten, stubbed out almost as completely as Eva had been.

He took a match from one of his pockets and put it in his mouth to suck on; then rummaging around in his kit bag he pulled out his torch, a penknife, and the dog tags and distributed them into the pockets of his new clothes. He flicked through Pendell's certificate of service, seeing the entry where someone had written under distinguishing marks:
Bullet wound, left shoulder.

They had set off down the slope through the trees and across the snowy clearing. There was no sign of the dead boy called Lewis. His body was completely buried. They crunched through the cold, Pendell gathering his coat around him and Heiden following, his gun trained on him. The air was crisp. The world smelled clean and new.

At the other side of the clearing Heiden motioned him on into the trees. They pushed through the birch and the spruce, dislodging snow from the frosted branches until he told the man to stop and Pendell turned to look at him. He didn't seem afraid, but stood tall, letting his coat hang open, defiant even to the cold.

Was it foresight or divine intervention that had made him say it to the man?
Empty your pockets. Throw it all into the snow.

The man did—a Royal Navy certificate of service, some letters, a bullet, some coins—and then stood there with the insides of his pockets hanging out to prove he had nothing left.

They stood for a moment—a moment's indecision; then Heiden tossed him the remains of the chocolate.
Take this,
he said.
Now go on.
Go!

There was a slight flicker in the man's eyes.

Did you hear me? I said, go! Run!

The man glanced behind him, at the forest that was endless and silent and empty. He turned back, his eyes still uncertain.

I can shoot you if you would prefer,
said Heiden.

He held up the pistol, straightening his arm.

But…
said the man, then nothing more.

Heiden's finger found the trigger and started to slowly squeeze.

Wait,
he said.
Your daughter. Who sits and waits for you. What's her name?

Lydia,
said the man.
It's Lydia. Why do you want to know?

Heiden didn't reply. He just felt that he needed to know. He held still, waiting, clenching his teeth against the bite of the cold as he held the man steady in his line of fire. Then, just when he thought he would have to shoot, the man turned and slowly began to walk, his boots pushing deep into the snow.

He thought now of the man called Pendell disappearing into the trees, of the darkness slowly taking him until he was little more than a shadow and then nothing at all. Only then, when he had been sure that Pendell was gone, had he fired a single shot up into the branches.

He gathered the various documents, certificates, and papers up into his bag and fastened it, and then went to the window.

Bürckel had been shot as he stood outside the store, still fastening his trousers. He had found Gruber inside.

Oh. You. I almost put a bullet through you.
It's not very smart, looking like the enemy, you know.

Gruber laughed and turned back to his packing, stuffing the two remaining tins of food into his bag.

You actually did it then?

Yes. Didn't you hear the shot?

That was when Heiden fired his last bullet directly into the man's back and watched as Gruber's body tipped into the wall, then slumped to the floor. He remembered the sudden flush of silence, all sound suddenly gone, and he had stood there alone in the store for a moment before he finally turned Gruber's body over, the man's dead glassy eyes still registering his last moment of surprise.

Had it been a cowardice in him that had sent the man out into the snow? A moment's weakness? Or had he seen something in the man's eyes, had he recognized so much of himself in him that he couldn't bring himself to kill him, as if putting a bullet into the man's heart would have been like putting a bullet into his own? Sometimes he had fleeting moments of fear that the man might suddenly reappear, as if in his quiet defiance, he wouldn't even die. But he knew that was impossible. By the time he himself got back to Narvik, even wrapped in several coats, he'd been on the verge of hypothermia. It plagued him: the fact that he had not been able to shoot Pendell; and now, it seemed, he couldn't shoot his daughter either.

What had the girl taught him? That magic could be seen in the simplest things: the matchstick was a wooden man, the voice of the sea lived within the curls of a shell, the halls of the house were filled with angel dust that glittered in the sunlight. The house, Greyfriars, had been a sanctuary of sorts for them both; but now it was time to go.

He looked at his reflection in the mirror—the transformation was complete. He could not love another woman—that would be a betrayal—but perhaps he could love a child as if she had been their own. In that, there might be some happiness, even if it didn't last long, even if he had to leave her behind soon. For now, he would take her with him and love her as his own. He'd change her into someone different, and make her love him too.

She stood to one side as he hauled the stone cherub out of the way, then dug out the dead cauliflowers, flipping their shrunken heads onto the lawn with her father's shovel before digging the hole. She had heard people talk of treachery, and now that she had showed him where the petrol can was buried, she felt sick to her stomach about it. He was intent on them leaving though, and she had no choice but to help. She didn't want to give him any reason to abandon her there, and she didn't want to be left behind—she needed him to help her find her mother.

All the color of the day was fading, while out to sea rain clouds were brewing again, another storm on its way.

The shovel clanged against something metal and he got down on his knees to scuff the dirt away. The can was heavy and he struggled to pull it out of the hole by its handle, the petrol slopping around inside. Then with a spurt of laughter he held it up and said, “Your mother is a very resourceful lady. You know, I rather wish I'd met her.”

Lydia said nothing and stared at the hole.
I'm not helping him,
she told herself.
I'm doing this for me.

He threw the shovel in among the vegetables and set off towards the garage. She looked up at the house and was suddenly filled with a fear that she might never see it again.

She hurriedly collected her identity card, the maps, and her stories from beneath the broken floorboard under the piano, along with the crumpled and dusty documents—various marriage certificates and birth certificates—that had already been there. She packed them into her suitcase, along with some clothes; then she changed her mind and took the maps back out and, folding them, wedged them into her gas mask box, next to her mother's letters.

She watched him from the window tipping the broken radio into the hole in the garden where the petrol canister had been. He shoveled the soil back in and patted it down, and hauled the cherub back into place, straightening the boy until he was just so.