The Dynamite Room Read online

  He walked over to the bicycle and opened up the panniers on either side of the rear wheel, pulling out undelivered letters and dropping some of them there on the drive. When he was done he came back and searched again inside the man’s clothes.

  “He had a pack,” he said. “He must have hidden it somewhere.”

  She nodded. “What was his name?”

  He told her. Diederich.

  “Was he German?”

  “Mm,” he said.

  “But what was his real name?”

  He was still rummaging around, undoing the man’s belt and feeling around the waistband of his trousers. He pulled out three more bullets.

  “His Christian name,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” He looked at her. “Lydia, listen, I had no choice. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  She said nothing as he hauled the man up so that he could feel around the back of him.

  “What happened to the marshes?” she said. “All that water…”

  “Flooded,” he said. “They’ve done it to stop gliders and tanks from landing.”

  “They did it on purpose?”

  He did not answer but let the body slump back into the gravel. He slipped the bullets into his pocket. Then he unbuttoned the man’s shirt and pulled out a dog tag from around his neck. He took it in both hands and snapped it in two; then replaced the chain inside the man’s shirt and did the buttons back up. He tucked the half tag he’d removed into his pocket; then he glanced at her over his shoulder.

  “You need to change your clothes. You’re wet through,” he said.

  She sat on the edge of the bath, the door locked and a chair wedged beneath the handle. The rain was easing off, pattering at the window, and inside the bathroom was gloomy. She was covered in fresh cuts and grazes; everything seemed to sting.

  For a while she cried silently to herself. She couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t be on her own. She thought about Alfie and whether he was lying under clods of earth in France somewhere or maybe scattered into pieces or maybe nothing but dust blowing across an empty field. She prayed for him and for her father because if there was a God and he was a good God, he would send her father back to her. He wouldn’t take her father and mother as well as Alfie. No God could be that cruel.

  Eventually she went downstairs in clean clothes and stepped out onto the soggy doormat. The last drops of rain were being wrung from the sky, plopping with a dull putt putt into the tin can in the gravel. The sky was gray and miserable but the air felt fresh at last.

  He had dragged the body across the lawn and under the trees, and now he was digging out a hole with her father’s old shovel. His clothes were soaked and darkened by the rain, and his face, hands, and arms were covered in mud. He looked more like a creature than a man. He turned his head and glanced at her; then he dug the shovel in deep and levered out some soil. She wondered if she should help him. There should be some sort of ceremony. They should say a prayer at least, make a cross, ask God for forgiveness; but she knew that Heiden wouldn’t and that she couldn’t either, and only when the hole was deep enough and she’d watched him push the body in with his foot did she step back into the house.

  Now she sat within the dark folds of the wardrobe and reached her hand out into the darkness in the hope that Button was there. The truth was this: if the boys hadn’t hurt Button they would have hurt her. That was what she had told herself and made herself believe. It was the reason why she’d let them do it sometimes, and why she had abandoned him. And now it was her that was abandoned; this was her punishment. What goes around comes around, her father had said.

  She sobbed quietly into her knees. She could hear the soldier in the bathroom and clamped her hands over her ears. She didn’t want him in her thoughts. She didn’t want him in the house. She didn’t care for him anymore. She wanted him to disappear—not die but to never have existed—and take all the bad things that he’d done away with him.

  After a while she came out of the wardrobe and stared blankly about the room, the space made for men who she wished would hurry up and come. And yet one man had come and Heiden had shot him. A German. A Nazi. One of his own. She slumped face down on her mother’s bed and tried to make herself cry again, but she couldn’t even do that. She clamped her mouth to the mattress and tried not to breathe, but even suffocation was impossible.

  She could hear him, his feet heavy on the floorboards. Cupboards banging shut. Footsteps in and out of the house, hurrying. Things being thumped into the wall. After a while she could bear it no longer and had to get up and see what he was doing, but the house was quiet and dark again, all the blackout boards put back into place, shutting the light back out as if it had never been allowed in at all.

  She found him in the kitchen, where he had lit two oil lamps. Handing one to her, he started off down the hall. She hurried after him up the stairs, and by the time she had caught up with him he was in the bathroom, his shirt draped over the side of the bath. He was studying the wound in his shoulder as if he had only just noticed it. He glanced at her and then turned his attention back to the wound.

  “We’re leaving,” he said. “So pack what you need.”

  She stared at him. “Where are we going?”

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s time.”

  He had woken with a jolt. The concrete floor of the annex room was frozen beneath him. He felt the grit and dust under his hand. He had been dreaming of Eva, of lying next to her, stroking her; his fingers still tingled with the memory of her skin.

  He listened for the gale outside but heard nothing and looked up from the floor. The window above him cast a trapezoid of light on the wall. He sat up, listening to the silence—the storm now gone—and shook out the coat he had been lying on. He was stiff and cold and aching. Through the window the sky was bright and everything was smothered in snow. In the distance the Ofoten Railway line slowly etched its way round the mountains. He scanned the track but there was no sign of any life.

  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 b
ox 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 t
he 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.