The Dynamite Room Page 21

  He had put this conversation out of his mind. After all, there had been Eva to think of then. He would put himself at no more risk than necessary. He needed to make it home. But now she was lost—gone—and in losing her he had lost himself, too. What was there to go home to now? Who was there for him? Who was he anyway? He no longer seemed to know.

  In the dynamite room he stared blankly across at the figures he barely knew huddled and sprawled around him.

  We’re out of matches, Gruber announced, and he tossed the empty box at Heiden’s feet. He had been trying to relight the fire.

  You fucking idiot, murmured Heiden, standing up. You’ve fucking wasted them, that’s what you’ve done.

  Oh, stop your whining. I wasn’t planning on us being here this long.

  Well, we have been. And who knows how much longer we will still be here.

  In that case, it looks like we’re going to freeze.

  Shut up.

  Well, stop your bloody whinging. I’ve had enough of you and your goody-goody attitude. What do you think you are, some sort of fucking crusader?

  Before Heiden knew what was happening he had launched himself across the room and had shoved Gruber hard against the wall, his arm held against his throat and his knife pressed against Gruber’s side.

  Don’t fucking speak to me anymore, he said into the man’s face. If you say another stinking word to me, I’m going to gut you like a pig. Do you understand?

  And it was only when Heiden finally released him and stepped back and stared at the startled faces of Bürckel, Pendell, and Harris that he realized there were tears on his cheek.

  He rushed into the annex room and stood there, arms outstretched and palms pressed against the cold of the wall. He took several deep breaths, his eyes squeezed shut, his head between his arms, and tried to compose himself.

  If Ziegler and the Brandenburg battalion were looking for men with nothing to lose, let them take him, he thought, and erase him completely, because it was this—his identity, everything he had ever been—that he now realized he most wanted to be rid of. Without Eva, there was nothing left for the man he had once been. She was all that he was holding on to, everything, and now with her dead he was null and void.

  As he opened the attic hatch he came face to face with an army of animals, each no more than two inches high. They were spaced out in their pairs around the opening in lines of defense: lions, tigers, penguins, rhinos…As his torchlight shone through their formation, their painted skins gleamed. Each was exquisitely carved, presumably by the same hand that had crafted the boat on the windowsill. He quietly climbed up through the hole into the attic, carefully picking his way through the barricade of toys. He looked about the room, at the small window high up in the roof, and the wooden box beneath it that had probably been put there to stand on. Beneath the window was a wooden ark, Noah and his wife standing outside like generals behind the serried ranks of animals.

  He sat on the floor beside them, picking up the wooden figures and holding them in his torchlight. They reminded him so much of his grandfather’s wood carvings, the fairy tales etched into strips of oak, maple, and ash; tales of heroics and magic and beasts, and of the man who had turned into a bear.

  He took a matchstick from his pocket and put it in his mouth and sucked, gently softening the wood. He would shape it with his knife and leave it in the ark. A sign perhaps. A message. A little bit of Norway that he had brought home to her.

  Sometimes when he closed his eyes he saw Pendell’s face as if it were his own reflected within the glass window of the dynamite room. There was more than a similarity; there was an understanding.

  Resting the match on the floor he made the three incisions, one up the middle forming the legs, another on each side; then he opened it up to form two arms and two legs. He took the lid off the ark and propped the matchstick man inside so that one day it could be found.

  When he had managed to get himself out of the mountains and back to the burned wreckage of Narvik, he sent a message to Ziegler: I’ve reconsidered our discussions in Voreifel. Please put me forward.

  The Brandenburgers, he was soon to discover, were a special commando force led by Admiral Canaris—a former ship commander with considerable experience in espionage. It was within this division that a new sabotage unit was being formed, one that would in time be called Pioneer Group 909. This phantom unit would consist of a handpicked selection of multinational soldiers who would be trained for a landing on British soil ahead of the planned invasion. Secrecy would be the main tactic. Any missions would be carried out deep within enemy territory and should pass by unnoticed and without any use of weapons.

  The weeks of training at the battalion’s training grounds near Brandenburg were brutal and intensive, but by early July he was in Aachen as part of the 11th Company under Lieutenant Schöller. From there, while the first and third battalions of the Brandenburg Division were being sent to train on the Heligoland rock in the middle of the North Sea, he and the rest of his company were sent on to Dieppe.

  He remembered the first night there well: men sprawled out on the pebble beach passing the bottles around. Had that really only been two weeks ago? There had been a sense of euphoria among the boys that night. The Channel Islands had fallen—the first chink in the British armor. Quartered in the château of La Chapelle, they had gathered around the wireless, cheering as the Führer’s final offering to the British was broadcast from the Kroll Opera House. Churchill would surrender. The men could sense the end coming, as if all that was left to do for the war was a bit of tidying up around the edges. There was singing, dancing, everyone getting drunk. Even Lieutenant Schöller was seen staggering about with a half-drunk bottle of claret in his hand.

  For several days the hundred or so men there relaxed, sunning themselves on the beach and swimming in the sea. Heiden tried teaching a young Austrian called Leibnitz how to swim, but despite the boy’s best efforts he couldn’t keep his head above the surface—and he swallowed so much water that he ended up being sick. Like many others before he had arrived, he had no idea that the sea was salty. Men play-wrestled among the pebbles and sand or jumped on each other’s backs and raced along the shore, tipping each other into the surf and laughing. They drank and smoked and lolled around, sprawled like basking seals. They played card games or told filthy jokes or just dozed in the sun. The beach was littered with bottles they’d raided from houses, cafés, and bars.

  One night, as the sun finally began to fade, he sat for a while on his own, swigging from a carafe of Bordeaux. The horizon was beginning to blur, his drunkenness and the rippling of the sea making him feel unsteady. Something made him stagger to his feet; a thought, or a decision. He couldn’t remember now but he had stumbled down the beach, between the drunken layabouts and sunbathers, still clutching the half-empty carafe in his hand, and he had walked, fully clothed, into the water. He pushed his way through the waves, feeling the swell of the sea slopping against him and splashing up into his face, and it was only when he felt hands grabbing at his arms and pulling him back—Hey, sir! Where are you going?—that he had realized where he was.

  His thoughts slipped back to that blown-out beach café, its shattered windows and the sand blowing in, the broken chairs and light fittings, the bar already raided. It was a Thursday when they had gathered around the table looking out at the rubble strewn across the patio. Six men were being sent on a mission. Lieutenant Schöller had said, I want you to be one of them.

  She sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, her toes barely touching the floor. If she could conjure Button out of the wardrobe she would, just to have someone with her. There were strange noises about the house, creaks that should have been familiar but weren’t, the man prowling in the night. She sat quite still and waited for the door handle to turn, for the door to quietly open. It had not crossed her mind until then that she should have something to protect herself with. He had told her that in Norway they had raped a woman. If more men came, ho
w could she possibly defend herself? She might scream and scream and scream but nobody would come. She got up and wedged a chair under the door handle, then piled all of her heaviest books on the seat. She sat back down on the bed and pulled the end of her nightdress firmly over her knees. She stared across the room at the door handle and quietly waited.

  They had all spent time living in England: Lehmann as a doctor, Kappel as a journalist, Diederich and Pfeiffer, like Heiden, had studied in London, and Theissen had worked as a German lecturer for one of the universities. The men enlisted in the Brandenburg Division were mostly fanatical nationalists or idealists or, in the case of Theissen, just sharp-witted adventurers. Others, such as Heiden, felt they had nothing left and simply wanted to lose themselves somewhere within the chaos of the war. As with all the division, their command of English was impeccable, particularly Lehmann, who had been in England since he was twelve and, like Heiden, had a number of English relatives.

  A bucket car would pick them up and drive them to Zeebrugge, Lieutenant Schöller said, where an S-boat would transport them across the Channel, weather permitting. It was a night raid, and it needed to be swift. It should take no more than a few hours, he told them.

  The British, it was believed, had also developed a way of detecting aircraft using radio waves; some examples of their rather inferior technology had been found during the British retreat from France. If the invasion was to be a success, a coordinated attack on British airfields first needed to be executed, to take out their listening stations. Schöller showed them on the map spread across the café table. There were tall masts along the coast: Hopton, Dunwich, and here, at Bawdsey Point. He circled it. This is your target, he said. You land here—Shingle Street. Bawdsey Point is a mile or so away.

  Heiden stared. It wasn’t the target or the beach with the odd name that had caught his eye. It was the village a short distance northwesterly from their landing point. The name, Willemsley, seemed to be singed into the map, drawing his eye to it, no more than a mile, a mile and a half at most, away from where they were to land. It couldn’t be the same place, and yet he knew that it was. Schöller was still talking. A manor house. High security. Previous air raids on it over the last two weeks had done little damage. So they would go in by water this time, he said, right under their noses—scale the cliffs directly below the east wing of the main building, find the transmitter block and disable it, and then leave. There should be no sight or sound of them. No gunfire. The raid should be silent and secret.

  Schöller eyed them one by one over the rim of his pince-nez. All of you on joining have surrendered your personal belongings: wedding rings, pay books, photographs, identity documents, etcetera. You will be receiving new documentation in due course. Nothing should be retained that might identify you as German. Is that understood?

  Lehmann, Diederich, Kappel, Pfeiffer, and Theissen. An hour later, with Lieutenant Schöller gone, they were still mapping out the details of the mission, the sunlight burning bright through the shattered windows of the blown-out café as outside the waves broke on the shore.

  It’s a suicide trip, said Theissen. I know that coastline. They’re not going to leave it wide open. It’s too obvious a landing point.

  That’s why we swim the last stretch, said Kappel.

  Diederich, the youngest, sucked on his cigarette and casually blew the smoke through the broken window. With all our gear? We’ll drown before we get there.

  Not if we only take the absolute minimum, said Heiden. We swim from the boat, we fan out, no communication. As Schöller says, the whole mission needs to be silent.

  He spent the rest of that afternoon trying to sleep but the château had been too hot and noisy, and his room had twenty camp beds or more squeezed into it. He lay sweating on the top sheet. The sun belted through the window. A group of men argued at the far end of the room about which one of them had left a bottle of Calvados on the beach and had to go back to find it, while halfway along the camp beds another group were sitting with a pack of cards, playing a boisterous game of Skat. Dieppe was infested with flies. Every time he opened his eyes he could see a cloud of them above his head. Outside were shouting, voices, gun blasts, laughter, and, in the distance, great chundering booms. He lay for several hours in a state of semi-shutdown, but in the end it was impossible to sleep.

  Later that evening, he stood at the water’s edge with the soft foam swilling around his jackboots. He watched the white sea wash up the beach, the water hissing as it dragged the shingle out from under his boots. He looked out across the water in the fading light, staring at the murky horizon and the vague promise of another not-so-distant coastline.

  She was standing in Alfie’s room, just standing, and it was dark. Model planes lined up along the shelf. The carved wooden soldier. The poster with the pointing finger. All of Alfie’s things. The picture frame above the bed with butterflies, moths, dragonflies, and bees. There was now even a silver-studded blue in the center and, although it was pierced through its body with a pin, it was still alive and flapping, trying to wriggle free. She walked across the room to pick the wooden soldier up from the desk, but when her hand went to it, the soldier wasn’t there but a few inches away, as if by the blink of her eye everything around her had shifted. She turned then and saw him: Alfie sitting on the sill with his feet on the bed, as if within that same blink, he had appeared; her Alfie but different, for he had such glorious wings that reached almost to the ceiling. The feathers were so fine and white as to hardly be there at all but for a shimmering of light. They spanned out in three layers, turning tawny brown where they joined his shoulder blades, while the lower feathers at the end were torn and ragged but glowed a soft-hued silver, and within them the bones burned bright white. He wore his cricket white trousers but his feet and chest were bare. Alfie, her Alfie, and yet more perfect. He had muscles in his chest and stomach and arms that she had never seen before, and he gave off a vague light so that even from within his cricket trousers she could see the glow of his skin. His hair was longer than she had ever known it, falling across his eyes and down to his nose and hanging in wet, dripping threads. He tilted his head as if to take her in and his cheeks swelled as he smiled at her. And she was not afraid; she was happy and safe—and even when, in another blink, he was gone and the room was dark and empty again, she could still feel his smile wrapped warm across her face.

  Monday

  She skulked aimlessly about the house, slumping heavily into chairs or slouching against door frames. Once, a long time ago, after a bad dream, her father said, missy, you can’t be scared forever, and she was only now beginning to believe it. Boredom was something else though; there was no limit to it.

  She watched him from her bedroom window, filling her mother’s watering can from the pump and walking up and down the vegetables with it, trying to bring them back to life. Eventually he came back in and she lolled about on the four-poster bed, listening to him downstairs. She imagined him lying next to her, his arm around her waist and how it might feel. If, in years to come, she had to marry him, she supposed that she would. He had wrists she wanted to curl her hands around, a face that she wanted to touch. She wondered if thinking things like that made her a traitor. Perhaps God would send her to hell. After all, she had spied on him in the bath. She had seen his naked body and had even caught herself thinking about it since: his pale white bottom, the scratches and cuts on his thighs, the wound in his shoulder that even now still looked sore.

  In her bedroom she bent her hair clip in such a way that she could sit on the floor and flick it across the room at the window and hear it go tink against the glass. Every time she went to retrieve it she glanced down into the garden and hoped to see soldiers coming through the woods and across the lawn, half crouching, rifles at the ready, but the garden was always sunny and empty. She wondered if Rosie or any of the others were missing her, whether Miss Mountford was worried, whether any of them cared. Perhaps someone had come looking for her, whilst they ha
d been out in the wood—searching for her, but she hadn’t been here.

  She tried walking on the paint pots, but her feet kept slipping out of the handles and she wasn’t in the mood. She did handstands against the landing wall because there was no one there to tell her not to, and it was only when her dress slithered down over her head and she realized that her underwear was showing that she got embarrassed and tipped herself upright again. It was too hot and tiresome anyway. All she really wanted to do was sleep, but she didn’t dare in case he was no longer there when she woke again.

  She took another turn of the house, this time taking Mr. Tabernacle with her for the ride. Occasionally she would catch the man’s eye as their paths crossed. Or she would walk into a room and see him there, hunched over his maps again, or repacking his kit bag, or sitting on the front doorstep, relacing his boots.

  “Will you play cards with me?” she finally asked. “I know Snap and Beggar-My-Neighbor. Or we have Happy Families.”

  “Later,” he said. “I have to concentrate. I don’t want you playing by the windows either. I don’t want you being seen.”

  She nodded and hung about in the hallway for a while, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs and watching him on the doorstep.

  He had told her that they were to get the house ready for when the rest of the men arrived, and now the house was as ready as it could be—but nobody had come. Together they had pushed the beds in her parents’ room and the spare room against the wall to open a big space where they would lay down blankets, towels, and coats for the soldiers to sleep on. With all the furniture pushed to one side, the bedrooms echoed and seemed emptier than ever. There would be tents in the garden, he told her. Stolen cars and trucks parked on the gravel. They’d need diesel, oil lamps, torches, food. They would have to loot the houses in the village for anything else they required: extra plates, bedding, toothpaste, shampoo, socks, towels…