In the deepest pit of her stomach, she was terrified. ‘What do you-what do you want of me?’
‘Little enough,’ said Eckart, as hospitable as if this were a light-hearted tete-a-tete. ‘We are not interested in you at all. We are interested in Professor Stratman. Your value to us is only as a means to an end.’
‘You still haven’t said-’
‘What we are after?’ Eckart pressed his monocle into the ridges below his brow and above his cheekbone. ‘You are correct to be so businesslike. You want to have this-this unusual drama done-so that you may return to your author friend. Yes.’ He took a chained gold watch from his vest and studied it. ‘There is not much time from now to the Ceremony, so I will be as businesslike as you.’ He leaned back in the swivel chair, and the spring protested twice. ‘Your uncle is a German who turned his back on his Fatherland in its hour of most dire need, to lend his support to exploiters and capitalists, the warmonger clique, who are the masters of so called democratic America. His genius, in a wrong cause, distresses us in East Berlin deeply. We have one object, and I have one assignment-to make Professor Stratman cease his dangerous tinkering-so harmful to world peace-for an irresponsible society, and to make him come to his senses and return to his beloved Fatherland. He is a German, and-’
‘He is
Eckart scowled. ‘You think you can change your blood with a paper of naturalization? I did not take you for a foolish child. Your uncle himself, Professor Stratman-in the latter days of the war, when we were at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute together-used to tell a story. I have not forgotten it. His story makes my point. One day, a wealthy American businessman was strolling with Professor Charles Steinmetz, the famous engineer who was deformed, past a synagogue in New York. “You know, Steinmetz,” said the businessman, “I used to be a Jew.” And Steinmetz said to him, “Yes, and you know, I used to be a humpback.” There is the story. Your uncle is a German, and before the eyes of the world, he shall be again-when he defects from the decadent West.’
Emily heard this out with smouldering anger. ‘Nothing-nothing on earth-would make him go back to you.’
‘I hope you are wrong, Miss Stratman. And I hope I am
‘About what? I still don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
‘I’m only trying to say in my diplomat’s way-forgive the verbosity-that there just may be something on earth that might help Max Stratman make the change.’
‘No.’
‘If not something, then someone. For someone, to save someone, perhaps Max Stratman might reconsider.’
Emily’s mood of fearlessness, fanned by hatred and a feeling of unreality that isolated her from this improbable interview, persisted. ‘Am I the someone?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Are you threatening to hold me, abduct me? Is that what?’
Eckart removed his monocle, shaking his head as if genuinely offended. ‘My-my-Miss Stratman-America has spoilt you, too. I believe you are all victims of those glorifying gangster films on television and in the cinema. I promise you-we do not drop hostages in canals and such nonsense. We have more civilized means.’
‘There’s nothing you can do to me to make me or my uncle-’
‘Nothing, Miss Stratman? No barter at all? Are you so certain?’
Suddenly the self-righteous fury went out of her, and she was less certain. ‘I repeat it-nothing. You can kill me-’
‘Please, Miss Stratman, do not offend me again. I am a scientist and a scholar, not a savage. You are my guest, and I am your host. In the end, you shall see, we will both benefit from this brief meeting. You have someone I want-your uncle-and I have someone you want.’
Eckart had been leaning forward, but now he was erect in the chair, adjusting his monocle to its place. Deliberately, he rose, pulled his short suit jacket straight, and slowly he came around the desk, ignoring Emily as he went to the door through which she had entered.
Emily’s hands tightened on the arms of the chair, and the pulses of her wrists throbbed, as she turned to watch him.
He opened the door to the reception room, and he was nodding to someone out of sight. ‘All right,’ he was saying, ‘she is ready to see you.’
Eckart stepped aside, almost deferentially (how curious), like a chamberlain about to announce the entry of nobility, and at once the figure of an elderly man filled the doorway. The light of the reception room was behind him, and the office was darkened, so that momentarily he was only an outline in black.
Slowly, he shuffled-was there a barely perceptible limp?-into the room, towards Emily, the colourless black of his outline giving way to human features and figure. He came past Emily, and then hesitantly around in front of her, and a few feet before her he halted, as if to inspect her and himself be inspected.
Now, at last, he was clearly visible to her troubled eyes, a stocky old man, slightly bent beneath time, attired in a heavy dark grey unfashionable worsted suit, the suit wrinkled and rumpled as if he had travelled steadily in it and had had no time to send for the valet. She stared without embarrassment, not because he was unusual, but because he was so usual, so almost known and faintly familiar, like one whose face you cannot quite place or whose name is almost at the tip of your tongue.
His head and face held her. The head was massive on a short thick column of neck. The hair was sparse but sufficient, shining white and carefully combed sideways from a wide part above one ear. The face was chapped rough red, all symmetrical and firm despite streaks of age, except for the prominently bulbous nose, which disconcerted her because it was known to her.
Still mystified and curiously detached, Emily could see that the kindly red face-so familiar, so once-known-was alive with emotion, the eyes watery and blinking, the bulbous nose sniffling, the lips trembling.
The familiar stranger swallowed and shook his head. ‘You do not recognize me, my little goose?’
That instant she recognized him, or thought she did, and even as her knotted fists pulled her to the edge of the chair, looking up at him, she rejected the possibility. Yet the bulbous nose, the timbre of his voice, the intangible cord between them that was drawing her out of the chair and unsteadily to her feet, could not be dismissed. Above all, the phrase of endearment this stranger had used so easily, so naturally, as if this was homecoming and they had simply resumed again.
His caress of love. Only his. No other.
She stood before him now, clamped immobile by a paralysis of disbelief. The massive, venerable face blurred an instant and then an instant stood in bold relief, as if cut from granite and now weather-beaten: the matted white hair, the tear-filled brown eyes, the working stubbled jaw.
Eckart’s brisk voice was behind her, engulfing the incredible seconds and dim years, captioning the moment. ‘Miss Stratman-you must know him, of course-Walther Stratman, your father-’
‘Papa.’ Her voice spoke, not she, to herself, not to the familiar stranger.
‘-missing, but not dead, it turns out,’ Eckart went on behind her. ‘He’s been alive all these years-in custody of the Russians after he helped your uncle escape-working for his captors. But now he is here in neutral Stockholm. It is a miracle I have managed for you-he is free at last.’
The face of the old familiar stranger was nodding, nodding. ‘Yes, Emily, it is Walther-your papa. I know how you feel this minute-as I feel-the shock, the incredibility-but we are alive, my little goose-and together-the darkness gone, forgotten-from now on together, always. I am free, Emily.’
‘Papa,’ her voice said aloud.
And suddenly his rough red face slipped away, sucked slowly into the gaping vortex of the spinning room, and she felt herself moving into the vortex, too. Desperately, she tried to keep her balance, hold on to the something inside, the upright thing you held to keep straight, but she felt it crack beneath her, and she let go and abandoned herself to the airiness of the spinning room. For the eternity of a second, she hung suspended and legless, and
