“Ask him if he’d like a sandwich.”

Ellen exploded in fizzing nervous laughter.

The man drank off the rest of the pint. Ellen backed up and collapsed into my empty chair, at the table across from Jane. She told us, “He’s waiting for a toff from Intelligence to meet him here. If his contact doesn’t turn up, he has to fly off at the crack of dawn tomorrow, and we’re to let him. He’s a spy, or a double agent or some such. He has a code name, they said. ‘Odysseus.’”

I read a lot, I read all the time, and I knew who that was. I thought of the Trojan Horse.

So did Jane.

“‘Odysseus, man of many wiles,’” she said. “From Homer’s Odyssey.”

He must have known we were talking about him, because Odysseus sounds much the same in English and German and I expect Norwegian too. He pointed his gun at Ellen again.

“You bloody Nazi bastard,” she spat, her voice catching in a sob. “What can I do? You’re the one with the gun.”

He glared at her and handed his glass back to the landlady.

While Mrs. Campbell refilled his glass with beer and resentment, the German pilot crossed the room to the piano.

He took his wooden case with him. The polished blond box looked like a small gramophone, much like Jane’s, but without the loudspeaker. The pilot placed his box on the piano next to Jane’s gramophone and laid his gun on top of the box. The two cases looked like a mother and child gramophone sitting side by side.

With his hands free, the German opened the piano lid. His left hand pulled out a hesitant arpeggio of low notes from the keyboard.

Almost as if he were surprised to find the piano in tune, he coaxed out a few more handfuls of sound, repetitive and dark and insistent. Then he added a high, sustained trill in the right hand. It was Mendelssohn—the Hebrides Overture.

His fingers moved like wind over the keys, and the music was heartbreaking, heart-stopping, filling the damp walls of the old house with beauty and longing and a crashing of waves.

It was not a piece I usually think of when I think of Mummy. It is an orchestral piece. But the last time I heard it, Mummy was playing it on the school piano.

I don’t remember crossing the room.

I stood next to him at the piano, tears streaming down my face, and watched his hands, long, bony, strong fingers and a plain gold ring with a bear engraved on it, flying over the keys.

The German pilot suddenly realized I was there beside him.

He broke off playing to snatch up his pistol so I couldn’t pick it up myself. The music stopped abruptly, and as he grabbed at the gun he knocked it against his wooden case.