father were formidably tall, making Arne seem short at an inch under six feet.
“I’ve got something to play you,” Harald said. Arne got off the stool and Harald sat at the piano. “I learned this from a record someone brought to school. You know Mads Kirke?”
“Cousin of my colleague Poul.”
“Right. He discovered this American pianist called Clarence Pine Top Smith.” Harald hesitated. “What’s the old man doing at this moment?”
“Writing tomorrow’s sermon.”
“Good.” The piano could not be heard from the parsonage, fifty yards away, and it was unlikely that the pastor would interrupt his preparation to take an idle stroll across to the church, especially in this weather. Harald began to play “Pine Top’s Boogie-Woogie,” and the room filled with the sexy harmonies of the American South. He was an enthusiastic pianist, though his mother said he had a heavy hand. He could not sit still to play, so he stood up, kicking the stool back, knocking it over, and played standing, bending his long frame over the keyboard. He made more mistakes this way, but they did not seem to matter as long as he kept up the compulsive rhythm. He banged out the last chord and said in English, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” just as Pine Top did on the record.
Arne laughed. “Not bad!”
“You should hear the original.”
“Come and stand in the porch. I want to smoke.”
Harald stood up. “The old man won’t like that.”
“I’m twenty-eight,” Arne said. “I’m too old to be told what to do by my father.”
“I agree-but does he?”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Of course. So is Mother, and just about every other person on this island-even you.”
Arne grinned. “All right, maybe just a little bit.”
They stood outside the church door, sheltered from the rain by a little porch. On the far side of a patch of sandy ground they could see the dark shape of the parsonage. Light shone through the diamond-shaped window set into the kitchen door. Arne took out his cigarettes.
“Have you heard from Hermia?” Harald asked him. Arne was engaged to an English girl whom he had not seen for more than a year, since the Germans had occupied Denmark.
Arne shook his head. “I tried to write to her. I found an address for the British Consulate in Gothenburg.” Danes were allowed to send letters to Sweden, which was neutral. “I addressed it to her at that house, not mentioning the consulate on the envelope. I thought I’d been quite clever, but the censors aren’t so easily fooled. My commanding officer brought the letter back to me and said that if I ever tried anything like that again I’d be court-martialed.”
Harald liked Hermia. Some of Arne’s girlfriends had been, well, dumb blondes, but Hermia had brains and guts. She was a little scary on first acquaintance, with her dramatic dark looks and her direct manner of speech; but she had endeared herself to Harald by treating him like a man, not just someone’s kid brother. And she was sensationally voluptuous in a swimsuit. “Do you still want to marry her?”
“God, yes-if she’s alive. She might have been killed by a bomb in London.”
“It must be hard, not knowing.”
Arne nodded, then said, “How about you? Any action?”
Harald shrugged. “Girls my age aren’t interested in schoolboys.” He said it lightly, but he was hiding real resentment. He had suffered a couple of wounding rejections.
“I suppose they want to date a guy who can spend some money on them.”
“Exactly. And younger girls. . I met a girl at Easter, Birgit Claussen.”
“Claussen? The boatbuilding family in Morlunde?”
“Yes. She’s pretty, but she’s only sixteen, and she was so boring to talk to.”
“It’s just as well. The family are Catholics. The old man wouldn’t approve.”
“I know.” Harald frowned. “He’s strange, though. At Easter he preached about tolerance.”
“He’s about as tolerant as Vlad the Impaler.” Arne threw away the stub of his cigarette. “Let’s go and talk to the old tyrant.”
“Before we go in. .”
“What?”
“How are things in the army?”
“Grim. We can’t defend our country, and most of the time I’m not allowed to fly.”
“How long can this go on?”
“Who knows? Maybe forever. The Nazis have won everything. There’s no opposition left but the British, and they’re hanging on by a thread.”
Harald lowered his voice, although there was no one to listen. “Surely someone in Copenhagen must be starting a Resistance movement?”
Arne shrugged. “If they were, and I knew about it, I couldn’t tell you, could I?” Then, before Harald could say more, Arne dashed through the rain toward the light shining from the kitchen.
2
Hermia Mount looked with dismay at her lunch-two charred sausages, a dollop of runny mashed potato, and a mound of overcooked cabbage-and she thought with longing of a bar on the Copenhagen waterfront that served three kinds of herring with salad, pickles, warm bread, and lager beer.
She had been brought up in Denmark. Her father had been a British diplomat who spent most of his career in Scandinavian countries. Hermia had worked in the British Embassy in Copenhagen, first as a secretary, later as assistant to a naval attache who was in fact with MI6, the secret intelligence service. When her father died, and her mother returned to London, Hermia stayed on, partly because of her job, but mainly because she was engaged to a Danish pilot, Arne Olufsen.
Then, on April 9, 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark. Four anxious days later, Hermia and a group of British officials had left in a special diplomatic train that brought them through Germany to the Dutch frontier, from where they traveled through neutral Holland and on to London.
Now at the age of thirty Hermia was an intelligence analyst in charge of MI6’s Denmark desk. Along with most of the service, she had been evacuated from its London headquarters at 54 Broadway, near Buckingham Palace, to Bletchley Park, a large country house on the edge of a village fifty miles north of the capital.
A Nissen hut hastily erected in the grounds served as canteen. Hermia was glad to be escaping the Blitz, but she wished that by some miracle they could also have evacuated one of London’s charming little Italian or French restaurants, so that she would have something to eat. She forked a little mash into her mouth and forced herself to swallow.
To take her mind off the taste of the food, she put today’s
Glancing up, she saw a short man of about her own age coming toward her, carrying a cup of tea, walking briskly but with a noticeable limp. “May I join you?” he said cheerfully, and sat opposite her without waiting for an answer. “I’m Digby Hoare. I know who you are.”
She raised an eyebrow and said, “Make yourself at home.”
The note of irony in her voice made no apparent impact. He just said, “Thanks.”
She had seen him around once or twice. He had an energetic air, despite his limp. He was no matinee idol, with his unruly dark hair, but he had nice blue eyes, and his features were pleasantly craggy in a Humphrey Bogart way. She asked him, “What department are you with?”
“I work in London, actually.”
That was not an answer to her question, she noted. She pushed her plate aside.
