Riptide

§ 3

Stahl had been lucky. The morning after his departure from Berlin a Heavy Rescue lorry had hit the house next door and demolished the party wall. Twenty tons of rubble had buried the late Herr Holzel, and it was only on the day after that that a team of diggers finally recovered the body. Sergeant Gunther Bruhns, stuck with the task of reporting back to Heydrich at SD HQ on the Prinz Albrechtstrafie, had not been lucky. Herr Obergruppenfuhrer had a headache.

‘Read it to me,’ he said when Bruhns stuck the report on his desk.

‘Read it?’

‘Aloud.’ Heydrich put his fingertips against his high forehead and proceeded to knead the skin with both hands, eyes down, not looking at the man.

The sergeant harrumphed and began.

‘Body found this morning in Kopemikusstraße 9.53 a.m. Aryan male, approximately one metre nine, approximately seventy-seven kilos in weight. No recognisable physical features. Uniform of a Sicherheitsdienst Brigadefuhrer. Letters and notebook in inside jacket pocket are those of Brigadefuhrer Wolfgang Stahl. Body removed to city morgue. No time of death established, but the house had been all but destroyed by secondary blast on the night of the seventeenth. The local warden said the bomb hit a house on the other side of the street about 9 p.m. I checked the duty log. Brigadefuhrer Stahl did leave here at seven fifty-eight. It is perfectly possible that he had arrived home before the air raid.’

Heydrich had stopped kneading his skull and was staring at the back of his hands-long, long fingers outstretched.

‘No recognisable features? What about the blood group tattoo?’

‘Not everyone has them, sir.’

‘They’re compulsory.’

‘I checked. He broke two appointments to have it done-didn’t show up for either. He was booked in to have it done next week.’

‘The face?’

‘There is no face.’

‘The hands.’

‘The hands?’

‘Bring me his hands.’

‘Eh?’

‘Bring me his hands! Go to the morgue and chop off his hands! I want to see his hands!’

Heydrich laid his own hands flat upon the desk, palms pressed, fingers fanned as wide as they would go. He called the sergeant back before he reached the door.

‘Bruhns, has the Fuhrer been told?’

‘No, sir. Not yet.’

Not yet. Somebody would have to tell him. It was perfectly possible to keep secrets from the Fuhrer. Often the only way to deliver what he wanted was not to tell him the bad news. If he but knew it, the Fuhrer was a man habitually lied to by every member of his entourage from his cook to the Chief of the General Staff-but this was unconcealable. Word would spread. If Stahl had died in the raid, then he was, to date, the highest-ranking Nazi officer to die on the Home Front. There was propaganda to be made. If Stahl was dead, Hitler would notice his absence. One day soon he would ask. But if Stahl was not dead… if Stahl was not dead. Heydrich found it hard to believe in such a coincidence. Stahl denounced to him as an enemy agent only hours after he died in an air raid? The denunciation explained one thing-why Stahl had chosen to live in the East, in a petty bourgeois block off the Frankfurter Allee, when the Party had offered him his own villa in Dahlem-one of those taken from the Jews. It was not fitting for an SD Brigadefuhrer-Heydrich had told him to move when they’d promoted him-but it put distance between Stahl and the rest of the Party.

He spread his fingers that bit the more-it hurt.

Late in the afternoon Bruhns returned with a silver tray, draped delicately with a large linen napkin. He set it down on Heydrich’s desk. Heydrich was staring out of the window. Bruhns whipped away the napkin. Whoever it was had done a neat job, a piece of surgery worthy of Baron Frankenstein. All the same Bruhns pulled a face behind Heydrich’s back, wincing more at the gruesome notion of hands on a platter than at the sight itself. It inevitably put him in mind of John the Baptist-but the silver tray was all he could find to put them on. It was the tray he used for the Obergruppenfuhrer’s morning coffee. The pathologist had sent the hands over wrapped in brown paper like two bits of haddock fresh from the fishmonger’s slab. Heydrich was a stickler for neatness-you didn’t serve up anything to such a fastidious man on a bloody sheet of wrapping paper.

‘Got ‘em,’ he said simply.

Heydrich turned. One glance at the hands and then straight into Bruhns’ eyes.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing sir.’

‘Then get out.’

Heydrich waited for the door to close. The left hand was broken, the fingers splayed at unnatural angles, the flesh black and blue. He spread the right, free of rigor, as wide as it would go. Then he laid his own hand across it. Cold. Softer than one would imagine. Dead meat. Nothing more than dead meat. Like picking up a pig’s trotter at the butcher’s. His own spread by far the wider. He knew his capacity at a keyboard-a slightly better than average span at an octave and two. This man scarcely touched an octave. It was a fat stubby hand. Heydrich had watched Stahl’s hands glide across a keyboard countless times. His span was an octave and four. There was no piece in the repertory of the piano the man could not play for want of the span of a hand. These were not the hands of Wolfgang Stahl. Stahl was alive. Alive and with a forty-eight-hour start on him.

‘Bruhns!’

Bruhns appeared at the door, blankly expressionless.

‘Call the Chancellery. Get me an appointment with the Fuhrer. And arrange a funeral for Brigadefuhrer Stahl.’

‘Private, sir? Family and friends?’

‘What family? Stahl had no family. No man, public. Large, lavish and public. We are burying a hero.’