The Dynamite Room (4 page)

He looked up at the ceiling again. The child. The bloody child! His hands were clammy and tacky with blood, and his heart hammered. He could feel the grit and sweat in his hair, the taste of salt still on his lips. Stay calm, he told himself again. He couldn't afford a mistake.

After a couple of minutes he pulled his kit from the corner. His pack was sopping wet, but when he unfastened the buckles and opened the drawstring the contents were still dry, carefully wrapped in their oilskin bags. He emptied a box of cartridges out from one of them and took out a handful. Taking the spare magazine from its carrier hanging on his belt, he fed the bullets in and exchanged the magazine for the one already loaded into the butt of the pistol. Four bullets used already; he would have to be more careful.

He pushed his pack back into the corner, stepped lightly to the foot of the stairs, and listened. The girl would not be asleep. She'd have buried herself in the bed or would be crouching behind the door, listening to him listening to her, and neither would make a sound. He could sense her, just as she no doubt had sensed him: the pulse of another heartbeat, the soft breeze of another's breath.

He edged his way around the house, counting off the rooms as he passed through them: hallway, dining room, kitchen, study, sitting room, back to the hall. He pulled a small torch from one of his pockets that gave off a light so fine and sharp that it could make the smallest incision in the dark, and with it he checked in cupboards, cabinets, and corners, behind the three leather chairs, cautious all the time that something might jump out. He had learned over the last few months that if you find one child in an abandoned house, there were usually more, hiding away somewhere. He saw the flash of torches, frightened white faces, heard a rattle of gunfire, shouts, and screams, then sudden desolate silence. He tried to blink the images away. You shouldn't think back. Ohlendorf was right. Don't ever think back.

As he moved about the house, he could feel his shoulder seizing up, as if inch by inch, minute by minute, the pain was closing him down. He opened drawers, rummaging around, putting his whole hand in and feeling awkwardly along the top for things stuck there or secret catches; listening all the time for her, for any movement. In the study he flicked through the leather-bound books along the bookcase, his torch held between his teeth while he thumbed hurriedly through the pages or opened the books by their spines and shook them out. He pulled up the sitting-room rug, upturned ornaments, and poked around the soil of dead pot plants with his blade, foraging about in the corners of this other family's life. He tried the cupboards of the Welsh dresser, feeling for false backs, looking for even just a slip of paper—a document, a letter, a photograph, anything useful—pushed so far into a crack that only the tip of a corner might be visible.

In the sitting room, he stood at the side table and picked up the telephone receiver and listened to the buzzing crackle; then he quietly replaced it, pulling out the cord from the back and curling it into a loop, and with a sharp yank he severed the line. He switched the torch off and pocketed it, then paused again, scanning the darkness. He was already beginning to feel acquainted with the house. He had a sense of the space settling around him.
Greyfriars.
It was not at all what he had expected.

He went back to the window where he had cut a slit in the blackout material and perched on the ledge. He had already hauled the sash window open, and, stooping a little, he pushed the knife through the slit and levered up one of the wooden slats of the shutter with the blade. He looked through the narrow gap and almost instantly felt the hot smog of the night slipping in, the slight drift of air from the coast blowing across his hands.

Beneath the blanket of clouds, everything was gray. The mound of the air-raid shelter. The meshed structures of the chicken coop and rabbit run. The stone angel statue in the middle of a vegetable patch where the ghostly circles of vegetables looked as if they were made of ash and the slightest puff of wind would blow them into dust.

Over the treetops the sky flared silver, then died again. He felt the tremble. An explosion out at sea. He wondered if the girl had noticed.

He scanned the trees, waiting for movement, a sense of something watching.

Their forms remained still and thick and heavy against the night: great English sycamores, oaks, and firs. And beyond them the marshes, the mudflats, the beaches, the coiling wires, and concrete blocks, pillboxes, and buried mines.

He left the window, going light-footed into the hall and up the stairs, moving from room to room and along the corridor, past family photographs on the wall.

When he was a boy growing up this had all been played out as a game. He and the other boys running around among half-built, abandoned buildings, shooting at each other with their stick guns and scrambling over the brick piles and timbers. They imagined that a new war was raging, greater and wider than the World War had ever been; that the abandoned building sites were not abandoned for lack of money but were bombed-out streets, that they were clambering up and down broken stairs, that the half-built walls had been blown away, allowing them to sit on bedroom floors, swinging their legs out into infinity.
I claim this half house in the name of the Republic!
And if a boy they didn't know strayed onto their street—perhaps a Communist—they would capture him and beat him and shoot him until he was dead.

Those were just games though. Taunts wouldn't kill a boy. The guns weren't real. You could point at another child's head and say “bang” and nothing much would happen, except maybe a fake slumping to the ground, followed by a giggle or, better still, a groan. Now there was a real pistol in his hand. He was standing over a bed with a child asleep in it. He held the gun to her temple, feeling the softness of the skin there through the metal, as though the weapon were an extension of his hand. There was no choice with this one; there had been no choice before.

Early the next
morning he went from room to room taking down the blackout frames and hauling up the sash windows in the hope of admitting the thinnest lines of sunlight from between the shutter slats. Even with the windows open the rooms remained hot and airless. He felt along every floorboard, shining the torchlight between the gaps and testing each board with the blade of his knife to see if it was loose. The wound in his shoulder was still painful, searing like a burn, and every time he lifted his arm it felt as if he were being cut anew.

In one of the bedrooms he found a wardrobe of men's clothing. There were shoeboxes in the bottom with brogues and boots but little else, and nothing in the pockets of the trousers, jackets, or coats but a penny coin, a few seeds, and some fluff and sand. He pulled one of the jackets out and held it up against him. It was well stitched and of a fine thread, and when he lifted the arm to his cheek he could smell the warm fug of its wool, as if the heat of the man who had last worn it were still trapped there.

A model boat stood on the windowsill, and he picked it up carefully in both hands, the torch clasped between his teeth. It was skillfully made with canvas sails and cotton thread for ropes, now slightly grubby. Every detail was delicately crafted: the varnished rim around the deck, the fine wire rails, the intricate etching around the wheel. He would commit it to memory like every other detail in the house, every knickknack, trinket, treasure, and vase. Nothing would go unnoticed. Nothing would be left to chance.

He lifted one of the wooden rungs of the shutters and looked down across the garden at the birdbath, hollyhocks, and buddleia below, the trees casting early morning shadows across the lawn. He couldn't let the girl go. Why hadn't he shot her when she was just a dimly lit face, a figure and no more than that, standing there in the sitting-room doorway?

In the master bedroom, pictures of flowers dabbed in watercolors hung from the picture rail: clutches of foxgloves, lilies, and bluebells, tiny thunderflies like pinpricks caught behind the glass. He ran his hand over the bedspread, searched under the pillows and mattress, but there was nothing. The wardrobe in the bedroom was empty too, as were the drawers of the dressing table, bar a few bits of makeup and a jewelry box pushed to the back. He took it out and opened the lid with a click. The gears coughed rustily inside, and three figurines stood frozen mid-dance on the circular mechanism. The device chimed once, then was silent, and he shut the lid and returned it to its drawer.

He picked up a wedding photograph from the dressing table: a bride and groom beneath the crumbling arches of a church door. The man looked mildly surprised, as if the camera had flashed before he'd had a chance to compose himself, while his bride smiled demurely, head cocked to one side like a bird. He studied them closely: the bride with her curls and coils of hair pinned elegantly; the groom's own hair slick and shining, his face sharp and youthful, with prominent cheekbones. He put the photograph down and looked in the mirror at his own face, the contours of his own skin. Sometimes he barely recognized himself.

In the bathroom, he took off his jacket and shirt and removed the dressing from around his shoulder. The blood was now clogged and black around the wound, which seeped a clear sticky liquid; every time he moved his shoulder the pain forced air through his clenched teeth. He gently bathed the wound in cold water, wincing as he went. The hole was deep, and he was worried that the knife had not been as clean as it had looked and that infection might be setting in. He could feel the throb of it, the pain of its pulsing, tiny spasms like fissures splintering down his arm and through his chest. He dabbed it dry with the corner of a towel and applied a fresh dressing from his kit bag, wrapping it around and tying it tight; then he tested his fingers, bending and straightening them.

She woke with a start. He was sitting in the chair beside her, his pistol in his hand. One finger tapped rhythmically on the arm of the chair, and a collection of wooden splinters were piled like a tiny bonfire on the other arm. Outside, the morning was silent. Behind him, a sharp rectangle of sunlight burned its outline around the blackout fabric at the window. He looked right through her.

She clamped her eyes shut, but when she opened them again he was still there.

“Get up.”

He hauled the bedclothes off her and she sat up blearily.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Up, up!” He bent down for her suitcase and threw it on the bed beside her. “You can't stay here.” He pocketed the gun and flung open the case; then he gathered the clothes up off the floor and threw them onto the bed.

“You have to leave.”

Barely thinking, she scrabbled things into her arms and scrunched them into the case.

“Do not tell anyone that you have been here,” he said. “Or that I am here or that you have seen me.” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her so close to him she smelled his dirty breath. “If you tell anyone about me I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand?”

She nodded and he released his grip, then gathered more clothes up, squashed them into the case, shut it, and threw it to the floor.

“Go on,” he said. “Go!”

She stood looking at him, suddenly unsure.

He picked up the case again and grabbed at her wrist.

“Come on. Get out! Go!”

He hauled her out of the room and down the stairs, her feet barely touching them and the case dragging and scraping down the wall. At the bottom he pulled the front door open, and she expected him to push her out but he stopped short. She tried desperately to yank herself free, but he held her tight as he looked down the drive and across the road and fields. And then he muttered something—a curse, a word she didn't recognize—and suddenly pulled her back in and slammed the door shut.

“No!” she shouted. “Let me—”

But one hand was already clamped against her mouth and, with the other holding her around her stomach, he hauled her off her feet so that she hadn't the air or time to scream before she was being pulled—half-carried, half-dragged—down the hallway, her feet scuffing and kicking at the floor, and him puffing and struggling as if in some pain. He shoved her into the kitchen and kicked out a chair from beneath the table. Throwing her down on it, he took his gun out and pointed it at her. Then, withdrawing it again, he paced up and down. His breath was ragged. Finally he turned to her.

“You are making my life very difficult,” he said, catching his breath. “And I can still kill you. It doesn't take much. If you make me angry or nervous, anything but perfectly happy, the bullet will shoot into your stomach”—he gestured with the gun barrel—“or your face or your skull. You understand?” She stared at him, and he kicked the leg of the table. She flinched. “Do you understand?”

She nodded. Hot tears were running down her face.

He sat down opposite her then, nostrils flaring, face black with anger. His hands were dirty, nails black. His eyes were dark in the dim light and his hair hung damp over his lashes.

“I can't let you out,” he said. “It's too dangerous. If you step outside this house, I will have no choice but to kill you. Do you understand that?”

She nodded.

“I don't trust you out there,” he said. “And, you will get yourself killed.”

She stared at the corner of the table where the varnish was worn away and tried to stifle her sobs, then raised her eyes to him. She could hear his breath slowly calming; she could smell his skin, his sweat.

“Where is everyone?” she said.

He held her firmly in his stare, the gun still pointing across the table.

“What have you done with them?”

He sat back in his chair.

“You're not English,” she said. He sounded almost English—but something about his accent wasn't right, the care with which he worked his way around certain words. She wiped at her eyes. “Did Mr. Hitler send you?”

He laughed.

“You're coming, aren't you—the Germans? Everyone is saying it.”

“Yes,” he said. “England is shut, but, as you see, we are already here.”

“I need to find my mother.”

“You can't,” he said. “I told you…if you try to leave the house, I will shoot you. And if I don't, someone else will.” He laughed again. “I'm rather surprised you are not dead already.”

She could taste tears in her mouth, breaths coming huge and ragged. “But…”

His eyes widened, questioning her.

“You don't understand,” she said. “I don't know where she is.”

“You will not leave this house,” he said. “You will stay right here. You will not be seen by anyone. These are the rules. Do not stand at the windows. The shutters stay closed. If you disobey me in anything at all, if you try to leave, if you do anything to anger me, I will shoot you. Is that understood?”

He waited for her to respond.

“I said, is that understood?”

She slowly nodded again. She could hear it in his voice now. That slight accent, like the faint lingering of a smell, not noticeable unless you already suspected or knew it to be there.

His face showed a slight twist in his mouth, as if perhaps he was in pain. His hands kept the gun on her. Had he already shot her mother? Mr. Morton? Joyce? Bea? Had he shot the Local Defence boys from their bikes?

He poked the gun at her. “So,” he said. “We have an agreement. These are the rules. Yes?”

She nodded.

“Good.” He placed the gun down on the table and slowly leaned back. “So,” he said, with a faint smile. “Here we both are…”

In the sitting room he pulled the sheet off the piano and opened the lid. He ran his fingers lightly along the chords, making the strings strum faintly. There was nothing hidden inside. He opened up the gramophone and emptied all the shellac discs, abandoning them on the floor, then went to the dining room and broke open locked drawers and cupboards with such force that the silverware fell out, clattering over the floorboards.

The drawers of the writing desk in the study were sticky and jammed, and he loosened them with his knife as he maneuvered each one free. Inside, he found letters, postcards, bank receipts, and mundane correspondence about village fetes and cookery recipes and an evacuee with an Eastern European name that he could barely read let alone pronounce. Between the edge of the drawer and a tin of ribbons and pins was a small leather address book, probably forgotten in the rush to leave. He slipped it into his pocket.

Back in the sitting room he tidied up the shellac discs, carefully inserting them into their respective sleeves. When he tried to slip them back into the cabinet beneath the gramophone, something was in the way. He got down on his hands and knees and shone his torch in. At the back, tipped on its side, was a small brass metronome. He took it out and stood it on the window ledge. He wound it up and turned the dial, setting the arm in motion so that it ticked steadily back and forth. The arm of the metronome swung this way and that.
Tick, tick, tick.

If he shut his eyes he could hear it, the concerto swelling to fill the template of the metronome's beat, the auditorium reverberating to its ornate rafters in that glorious wash of sound. He could feel the cello vibrating as if it were alive, trembling through his arms, his chest, his knees, the sound of the strings rising up high into the empty space above.

In the block-booked party seats at the front, rows of uniformed men sat, their caps resting in their laps or hanging from the arms of the seats, one or two of them actually enjoying it, patting their knee with their hand or gently nodding their head. Further back in the stalls were families, a further scattering of uniforms, husbands with wives, fathers with sons, the buttons of their jackets sparkling beneath the chandeliers. The concert house had an opulence so fitting of Bach—the plush red of the seats, the golden columns and carved ceiling.

As her bow pulled across the strings of her violin, her eyes caught his beyond the swing of the conductor's baton, just as they had the first time he'd noticed her, two—maybe three—years ago now. She smiled at him, then tipped her head back a little as the adagio swept her up; her blonde hair pulled into a bun and tied with a black ribbon, her neck angled and taut so he could see the tendons as tense as strings, her black dress with its ribbed bodice tight around her breast and ribs, opening up into swathes of silken material that fanned out around her feet.
Eva.

Her arm furiously worked the bow. His own arm ached, the tip of his elbow writing out the notes, his fingers pressing and squeezing the strings. And then the final note and the explosion of silence that followed, hanging delicately in the air for a moment like a held breath—before it was swept away by the applause and he could feel his arm relax.

The tram back to his apartment had rumbled through the dark streets of Berlin, the rain typing on the roof. Eva rested her head against his, keeping her hand warm under his coat. They passed lines of barricaded apartments, most of them empty and abandoned.

They made love that night. And when they were finished they slept soundly, waking to the sun streaming through the garret window. He got up. He dressed in his uniform. He left her in bed. But he took her scent with him, between his legs, on his breath, and just there, where he could still smell it now, in the warm curl of his hands.

Alfie was obsessed with German spies. He said that those who weren't already hiding in our communities would land by parachute under the shroud of night so that you would hardly be able to tell them from the darkness; and those who landed by day would be disguised as policemen, or nurses, or bus conductors, or teachers, complete with satchels and truncheons and ticket boxes, so that as they hit the ground and disposed of their parachutes they could walk out into the street and no one would think anything different of them. Before long, they would be everywhere, he said, and then, when the time was right, they would open up their satchels and truncheons and ticket boxes and inside would be guns.