It had been so—so weirdly unlikely a thing to happen, especially in a country such as France, whose people had seen the light in time and saved themselves and were happy in the New Order and safe in the protection of the Reich. It had happened during those seventy-six hours of pleasantly lionized leave he had enjoyed in Paris after he had safely landed the British plane in Calais, mercifully saved from anti-aircraft fire by the fact that the Channel fight had been witnessed and his nationality guessed. He had been fêted and complimented by an Air-Marshal, and taken to Paris and shown the sights, and dined and wined, and had songs sung to him from the stage of a theatre, and been presented to a lovely chanteuse whom he had come to know well and who had been very, very nice to him. He had had, indeed, the time of his young life. Until the morning when, his leave expired, he ceased with automatic suddenness to be a hero and became again a young Flight Commander under orders to proceed immediately to Berlin and report himself. He had, it turned out, the whole forenoon to himself, for the plane that was to carry him to Berlin did not leave until the early afternoon. He determined that it would be interesting to see Paris, or some of it, unheralded, unescorted and afoot. He realized, not without a twinge of well-earned headache, that he had not, really, seen any Paris at all. So he left his hotel, and sent his newly acquired baggage to the Air Field, and went out into the streets and drifted—a common enough sight in these days, a tall, beautifully built young Aryan warrior, very smart in his uniform, very military in his carriage.
He was passing the Madeleine when it happened. There was a high curb, and a little press of people, all natives, in front of him. They surged forward—and the girl, twisting her foot in its high-heeled shoe upon the edge of the curb, collapsed in front of him and would have fallen had he not, very quickly, put an arm around her. It was an instinctively helpful act and one impossible to construe in any other way. She was a very pretty girl, literally alight with the quality to which her countrymen gave the word chic so frequently mistreated in other lands. To keep her uptight, Otto was forced, as his arm went around her, to swing her about, slightly clear of the ground, and set her down upon her feet again face to face with him, It was also necessary, if she were to retain her balance after this whirligig rescue, momentarily to keep the rescuing arm around her. So they were chest to chest, with Otto’s arm around her waist, supporting her. He smiled happily down at her and tried to say something in very halting, inadequate French—but before the initial ‘Mademoiselle’ was completely uttered, he was seared by the blazing, contemptuous hatred which flared up at him from the dark eyes. He was so staggered, so astounded, so mentally shaken, that he did not even think to remove the arm. He just stared. And then there had been three hissing words between the clenched white teeth, and small hands which thrust against his chest with surprising, hurtful force. He removed the arm. It dropped nervously to his side and hung there while he went on staring. And then the small face, contorted by a passion of disgusted hatred, was thrust upwards towards his own—and she spat!
In the attic room of the house of Axel Christensen, Otto Falken stared with unseeing eyes at his reflection in the spotted mirror on the dresser and raised a hand to his face and rubbed at his cheek just as he had done as he stood by the curb near the Madeleine—and as he always did, though he never wanted to, he saw vividly in his mind the beautiful little face again, twisted with that deep, utterly irrational, soul-shaking hatred.
He went down to breakfast, very determinedly Nils. Uncle Axel was there now, and all four of them sat down to the meal, Aunt Kirsten and Gertrud sharing the work of serving. It was a very good meal, despite the prevailing shortage, at which Axel grumbled unceasingly, in some things like butter and preserves. Nils ate largely and did not talk. Axel buried himself behind the Stockholm newspaper, passing sheet after sheet to Aunt Kirsten as he finished them. Gertrud made a tentative remark or two, mostly to Nils; then gave up as he merely smiled in her direction without replying.
The meal was nearly over when Aunt Kirsten exclaimed in horror at something she was reading. Everyone looked at her curiously, even her husband lowering the page he was intent upon.
“Oh!” said Aunt Kirsten. “Oh, it’s . . . it’s dreadful! Dreadful!”
She had chanced upon a description of the plight of some Norse families in the bitter country around Narvik; families who, in the fighting months before, had been bombed out of their homesteads and then decided, with more bravery than sense, to stay where they were and remake something of what was left rather than join the swelling tide of refugees to the south.
She began to read aloud the passages that had moved her to horror—and then was stricken with remorse as Nils, with a mumbled apology, pushed aside his coffee, unfinished, and hurriedly left the kitchen.
“Tchk, tchk!” muttered Axel, and went back to his reading.
Gertrud’s brown eyes glistened with tears. “How could you!” she said to her mother. “How could you be so callous! To remind the poor boy like that!”
Kirsten shook her head. She said sadly:
“I don’t know what I can have been thinking of! . . . And not a twelvemonth since the poor laddie’s own parents were struck down in their own house. . . .”
Otto went straight to the workshop. He was pleased with himself. That had been very Nils-like behaviour: he believed, when he came to think it over, that he had even felt, as he left the kitchen, like a man whose beloved parents have recently been slaughtered in an accident of war.
He rolled up the sleeves of his blouse and began to set out his tools. He paused suddenly, smitten by self-criticism: ‘an accident of war’! That was not the right thought for Nils. If there were a Nils, and his parents had been killed by a necessary German bomb, Nils would not think of this as any ‘accident’—he would inevitably see this personal and unavoidable disaster as a fiendish crime, sadistically planned and executed by brutal barbarians. . . .
It was cold in the workshop, and Otto shivered. He came out of the immobility of thought and went to work. He must be careful to repair immediately this mental attitude of Nils: it was, after all, only what he had been told—first in the upper room of the Berlin suburban house, latterly and all the time by Axel Christensen. While he worked upon a slab of pine with the big plane, warmth creeping back to his body with the powerful strokes, he pondered upon the subject of Axel. A remarkable person! Who was he? Of course, in some way, in the service of the Reich—but exactly in what way? And in what standing? And what, really, was his nationality? And were Kirsten and her daughter Axel’s wife and daughter? And, whether they were or not, did either or both of them know what Axel’s real work was? Did Axel have the power to pass finally upon the ability of Otto Falken to perform, in the shape of Nils Jorgensen, the work for which he had been selected? What, exactly, was this work? Granted that it must be in England, what did it entail? And what would be its effect at the end? . . .
Axel came in as the planing was nearly done. He nodded to Otto, and crossed to his own private bench, where he stood, looking down at his tools in his habitual, somehow minatory silence. He was a tall, solid, stoop-shouldered man with a dense thatch of grey-brown hair, his eyes dark and unreadable and staring behind thick-lensed, iron-framed spectacles.