Then Stefan entered the interrogation room and smiled at the man. “Possession of illegal radio electronic devices in addition to the crate of Wehrmacht ammunition we discovered on your property.” He clucked his tongue. “You have been a busy man, Georges-Yves Sauvage. Let’s find out what more you’ve been up to.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

DANIEL

“You’re always one to burn the ships,” his mother once said. She was reading—always, her evenings filled with stacks and stacks of books in three different languages that disappeared at alarming rates—and this time, she was drumming her fingers against a copy of Homer’s Odyssey.

Daniel frowned at her from behind the sheet music he was studying. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You force yourself to move forward by taking away your escape route. Burning the ships you arrived in so you can’t sail back to safety.”

Daniel twiddled his pencil, uncomfortable with his mother’s stare. Besides, she didn’t have it quite right. He didn’t sabotage things so he was forced to be brave. He just ruined whatever he touched.

The thing about playing viola was that not every great composer knew how to write for it. Sometimes you played Vivaldi, who teased beautiful harmonies out of every part, fitting them together like architecture, scaffolding. Bliss. Then other times you played Pachelbel. Wagner. Haydn, even. Those composers who didn’t know what else to do with you, so they slapped you on an ostinato line, sawing back and forth like the metronome for other, more important roles.

In a sense, then, it was Pachelbel’s fault that Daniel had time to stare off into space, to start memorizing the lines of the second violinist’s face. Daniel was fourteen, and he was overflowing with yearning, a fire in want of a wick.

Ernst—that was the second violinist’s name in the youth chamber orchestra. Like the flamboyant late leader of the Sturmabteilung—the stormtroopers—Ernst Röhm, the other chamber orchestra members would darkly joke. In the windowless practice hall, Ernst was sunlight, never serious, never satisfied, wearing his superiority and glibness like a suit of armor. (Daniel didn’t know, then, the difference between true light and a false, furiously stoked glow.)

He should have recognized the warnings. He should have done the calculations. The snarky utterings after their practice sessions as Ernst smoked and chatted with Liesl and Rudolf, the way they would cut their eyes toward Daniel and change their posture whenever he approached.