Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

time he’d drawn the cork and returned to the lounge with a couple of glasses, she was poised to begin.

‘Schubert,’ she said. ‘An impromptu. You want to know the number?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘It’s number three. If you don’t like it, I can play something else.’ She accepted the glass and took a tiny sip.

Nehmann made himself comfortable on the sofa and asked her to start. At the club in Moabit, and now here, she always seemed to defer to the music, barely moving on the stool, using her hands and feet to tease out the composer’s intentions, an almost invisible presence on the margins of the performance. Nehmann, who had become used to a degree of showiness in his women, loved this about her. Listen to the music, she seemed to be telling him, because I’m only here to do its bidding. So modest. So respectful.

He leaned back, half closing his eyes, enjoying the last warmth of the sun on his face. The impromptu, like the wine and the sunshine, seemed to settle deep within him. After the opening – reflective, plangent – came a ripple of something a little more urgent, and he watched her as she caught the rhythm, rode the wave with the faintest backwards motion of her head, then stilled it again. When she’d finished, he asked her what ‘impromptu’ meant.

‘It means improvised. It means the composer’s making it up as he goes along. It means free form. It’s a joke, of course, but in good taste. The piece is perfect. Schubert thought hard about every note. Everything is there for a reason. You liked it?’

‘Very much.’

‘And this?’

She began to play a jazz piece Nehmann had first heard barely weeks ago when he’d gone down to the club on the recommendation of one of the secretaries from the Promi. Very pretty girl, she’d warned him. And she’d been right.

Nehmann got to his feet and fetched the bottle. When he offered her more, she shook her head. Then, in the middle of a deeply promising riff, she stopped playing.

‘Where did it really come from?’ She was looking at the piano.

‘I told you. Little place off the Ku’damm.’

‘Not true. There are no little places off the Ku’damm. Not with room for something like this.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it does. It matters that I know where it came from. And it matters even more that you tell me the truth.’

Nehmann nodded, recharged his own glass, remained silent.

‘You’re not going to tell me?’ She was frowning now.

‘No.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I think I can guess.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Why? Would it make a difference?’

‘To what? To me sitting here playing it? Or to us?’

Us. Nehmann acknowledged the word with a smile. So far he’d told her nothing about the Promi. About the life he led feeding the propaganda machine. About the lengths he’d happily go to, gleefully twisting the truth in the service of God knows what. Instead, he’d told her about growing up in the mountains back home in Georgia, about the father who’d left the family to fend for itself, and about the uncle who’d owned the abattoir in Svengati, and had insisted that his little cast-off nephew become a butcher. His uncle, he told Maria, had paid him well. He’d hated butchery but by the time he was seventeen, he’d saved enough to take the bus out of the mountains. He’d made his way first to Istanbul, and then to Paris, and there he’d discovered a talent for writing that began to shape the rest of his young life. Language, he said, had become his friend, his passion. And on good weeks, when he was lucky, it even paid a bill or two.

Listening to these stories of his, half true, half not, Maria had shown endless patience and what he liked to believe was a genuine delight, but the more he got to know her, the more he sensed a fellow traveller. She guarded her own secrets with a playful deftness he rather admired. One day, if he was lucky, she might tell him a great deal more but for now she seemed happy to enjoy his versions of what might, or might not, have happened. Which, in the light of her next question, was deeply ironic.

‘I met someone last night who knows you,’ she said. ‘She was in the club with her boyfriend. They bought me a drink. We talked.’

‘She has a name? This person?’

‘Birgit. She works in the Promi and when I mentioned the apartment, she said she knew it.’

Nehmann was staring up at the ceiling. The gods of coincidence had always treated him gently. Until now.

‘And what did she tell you?’

‘She told me you work for Goebbels. Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do for him?’

‘I lie.’

She nodded, unsurprised, and then one hand reached for the keyboard again. A single chord. Dark. Ominous. Slightly out of tune.

‘And the piano?’

‘It probably came from a Jewish family.’

‘At a fair price?’

‘I doubt it.’

She turned to look at him. Then she smiled and beckoned him closer.

‘There.’ She kissed him on the lips. ‘Not so painful, after all.’

6

VENICE, 9 AUGUST 1942

It took Werner Nehmann nearly three weeks to track down his Coquette. A telephone call to the Cinecittà film studios in Rome confirmed that Hedvika had recently finished a movie under director Emilio Brambilla and was expected back from a well-earned vacation any day now. Nehmann left his name, and a hint that Hedvika might welcome a conversation, and waited for the phone to ring.

When nothing happened, he tried again. This time he got through to an executive in the publicity department who’d recently read an article of Nehmann’s in Das Reich. The piece, typically playful, had made her laugh. Nehmann had set out to ponder the current appetite in both dictatorships for show and spectacle, for huge parades, for wardrobes of fancy costumes, and for the public’s apparent willingness to go along with this pantomime. As always, Nehmann had trodden the high wire between treason and entertainment with immense panache, though his first draft, submitted