Last Flight to Stalingrad Graham Hurley (sight word books .TXT) 📖

held her close, his hand in hers, her head on his shoulder, saying very little, knowing that whatever passed between them would find its way back to the Promi.

He still didn’t quite believe that Guram – so enterprising, so clever, so aware – could have found himself under a train in the Paris Metro. Georgians knew how to look after themselves. They recognised the smell of danger. Emptying French cellars of countless cases of fine vintage wine would never have endeared him to the Resistance but Guram would have known that from the start. So, if he was really dead, there had to be another explanation.

Did it involve Goebbels? Was this scrap of newsprint yet another piece of theatre he’d conjured out of thin air? Did it serve his purposes to gradually, item by item, strip Werner Nehmann of everything he held dear? First the woman he loved? Next, his oldest friend? And now the apartment he’d dared to call home?

Nehmann didn’t know, could never be sure, and what made this bombshell so especially painful was the knowledge that he and his master were fellow practitioners in the same dark arts. What was true, and what was false? Was Guram really dead? And if not, would he – Werner Nehmann – ever be certain where the truth lay?

The truth.

He and Maria were back in the apartment. It wasn’t late, barely ten o’clock, but Nehmann had opened one of Guram’s few remaining bottles and taken it to bed. She lay in his arms. He was right about the broadcast he’d heard on the radio. She hadn’t set foot in Austria. The whole interview had taken place not in the Promi, as Nehmann had suspected, but in another facility in the Ufa studios across the city.

‘And that village of yours? Down near the border?’

‘A fiction. It exists, of course, but not in my life.’

‘You’re really from Warsaw?’

‘I am.’

‘And your name?’

‘Maria. It’s on my ID. I can prove it.’

‘Your family name?’

‘Gaetani.’

‘So who gave you the ID? Who sorted out your papers?’

‘Goebbels, of course.’

‘And you’re happy being Maria Gaetani?’

‘Of course. She was my idea from the start. Szarlota Kowalczyk would have put me in a camp.’

‘Like your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘You saw that coming?’

‘My father did. He gave me the new name, the Austrian village, everything. He got me out, too. He taught music at the university in Warsaw, but I think he really wanted to be a novelist. He told a good story when he’d had enough to drink and when it came to this one, he put me in the middle of it. I saw him last week. He’s an old man now. What happened to my mother broke him.’

‘The Nazis broke him. We broke him.’

‘Not you, Werner.’

‘How can you say that? I work for these people. I tell lies for them every day. I make all that shit of theirs smell sweeter.’

‘No.’ She moistened a fingertip and traced the shape of a heart across the bareness of his chest. ‘You belong to no one. I knew that from the start. No one.’

‘I belong to you.’

‘You think you do. For now.’ She laughed softly.

‘Forever,’ he insisted.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re a beautiful man and I’d like to think you’re my beautiful man but if there’s one thing this war teaches you, this city maybe, certainly this life of ours, is never make assumptions. Assumptions bring nothing but grief. Do you believe me? Do I sound Georgian enough? All you have to say is yes.’

‘Yes.’

Her face was very close. Nehmann kissed her, told her he couldn’t help himself. Whatever the word meant, he loved her.

‘That’s nice.’

‘That’s everything. Believe me. Without it, without you, here, you, me, us, there’s nothing. Ask Goebbels. He knows.’

‘The man’s so lonely. And it shows. He’s been kind to me, believe it or not, and I appreciate that.’

‘Because he’s made you famous?’

‘Because he’s been honest with me. I haven’t got the talent he needs, not to get to concert standard.’

‘That’s not the purpose you serve.’

‘I know. He’s honest about that, too. That’s why he brought me out to Bodensee this afternoon, had the piano installed, and the buzzer thing, too.’

‘Buzzer thing?’

‘The button under his desk. It rings a buzzer in that huge reception room. It told me when to start playing.’

Nehmann nodded. He remembered Goebbels seated behind his desk, the spell that Hitler still cast on him, and then that tiny moment when he’d delivered his speech, appeased the gods of Providence and pressed the buzzer with his knee. So theatrical. So perfectly contrived. No wonder the man was fascinated by the movie business.

‘He says you’ve got a letter of his.’ Maria had abandoned the love heart on Nehmann’s chest.

‘He’s right.’ Nehmann nodded.

‘What sort of letter?’

‘It’s a letter he wrote recently to Baarova. She was his mistress once.’

‘I know. He talks of no one else. Why you? Why have you got the letter?’

‘He asked me to take it to her. In Rome.’

‘And?’

‘I failed. The letter is deeply compromising. This is a man the Führer has ordered to be in love with his wife. The letter suggests he doesn’t obey orders. That’s a capital offence in this city.’

‘You’ve read it? The letter?’

‘Of course, I’ve read it. At Goebbels’ level you’d never survive by playing the rules.’

‘And?’ She was up on one elbow now, hungry for more.

Nehmann kissed her again, said it didn’t matter. Just here, just now, there were more interesting things to do than discuss Goebbels’ love life.

‘Tell me.’ She pushed him gently away. ‘Just tell me what’s in the letter. Is it passionate?’

‘Of course.’

‘Romantic?’

‘Very.’

‘Undying love?’

‘Definitely.’

‘And does he mean it?’

‘I don’t know, and that’s the point because I don’t think he does either. If you want the truth, the letter is pathetic. It’s not about love at all. It’s about loneliness, about lostness, about need. In the hands of his enemies, it would kill him. That’s why he wants it back so badly. It’s like I have a gun, pointed at his head. Goebbels can’t live with that. No man could.’

‘Kill