in the flat. It was the silence of nothing at all being said, a silence that had come to signify over the past months that the opposite was true, that things of great consequence were being said, only behind locked doors.
She went into the parlour and found Pepik beneath the oak table, holding Der Struwwelpeter. “I’m busy,” he said.
She crouched down and kissed his forehead. “What time is it, miláčku?”
“Tick tock,” he said.
He wrinkled his brow and pretended to be reading, but he was, she saw, holding the book upside down. She kissed him again and turned it right side up. He made a little humph and turned it upside down again.
Stubborn, like his father. She heard Pavel come into the dining room behind them.
The light bulb of happiness flicked on inside her. She stood to move towards him, then saw the man behind Pavel. Ernst. She backed up quickly to behind the wall, out of view. Crouched down and leaned her cheek against the cool plaster. She could hear her heart in her ears. What was Ernst doing here? He had obviously not yet succeeded in getting hold of all of Pavel’s assets; Marta surmised that Ernst knew there was more money hidden away. He would need to work quickly now that Prague had been taken. He was doubling his efforts.
Ernst had already visited the Steins’ flat, of course, the day he came to ask Marta where the Bauers had gone. But from her hiding place she could see he was letting Pavel give him the tour, show him around as though he’d never seen the place before.
He stood at the mantel and looked at the photo of tiny Eva Stein.
He picked up the heavy silver menorah as though for the first time. There must have been something in its weight he found compelling.
Pavel sat down on a dining room chair, crossed one leg over the other, and got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco. “Now that we’re done our business,” he said, “are you on your way to the town square to salute Blaskowitz’s honour guard?”
Ernst was reaching for his own pipe. Marta saw lines in his hair where the comb had been pulled through. She shifted on her haunches; her leg was falling asleep, but if she stood, she knew, they would hear her.
“I suppose all the German soldiers will be required to stop and salute,” Pavel said. “And Blaskowitz’s proclamation—that the Germans are here not as conquerors but to create ‘conditions for the peaceful collaboration of the two peoples’! How inane! Does he think we’re completely blind?”
Marta recalled the most recent sad radio broadcast by President Hácha. He had defined independence as a short period in Czechoslovakia’s national history that had come to an end.
Ernst tapped down his tobacco; the two men sucked their pipes in silence, their cheeks moving in and out like codfish.
“There will be lots of Germans at the ceremony tomorrow,” Ernst said mildly.
“Because of von Neurath?”
Baron Konstantin von Neurath, even Marta knew, would be appointed the new leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Ernst nodded. “They’re sending in special trains from the Sudetenland to greet him.”
“They’re worried the new Reichsprotektor won’t be welcomed by us Czechs?” Pavel’s voice was gleeful. “There must be fewer Nazis in our midst than we think.”
Quite the contrary, Marta thought as she crouched behind the wall. Ernst kept quiet too, and she understood this was his strategy: let his silence be taken as agreement and he would not have to lie outright.
“And what about you?” Pavel asked his friend again. “The powers that be at the factory have sent you up with the schoolchildren to greet the former foreign minister?” He was trying to keep his voice light but he clearly wanted to know what, exactly, Ernst was doing in Prague.
Ernst had a leg crossed over his knee and was bobbing it slightly, like an old lady. “That’s right. I’m here to welcome the Reichsprotektor.”
It was obvious that Pavel wasn’t satisfied, but he could not press the matter any further. Ernst must have sensed his friend’s uncertainty though, because he said quickly, “Herrick needed someone to do damage control with our supplier in London, and it’s easier from Prague. At least, that’s what I told him.”
He winked at Pavel—Marta couldn’t see it but she felt the gesture inhabiting the moment of silence. “I wonder what Masaryk would think if he could see Hácha,” Ernst continued.
“They say he fainted and had to be revived by