Chapter 7 – Without You, We Are Nothing
[The Admiral’s mess, breakfast]
Oatmeal, europaischer Art: a sober grey lake and a fried egg parked on top like a provocation. Raeder looks at the plate the way he looks at an unauthorized modification to standing orders. The egg looks back. He eats it anyway: yolk first, because making a scene about breakfast is a weakness he does not permit himself before a staff meeting. Once the egg is gone, he stirs in some cream and sugar and eats the oatmeal without enthusiasm.
The room is quieter than the food deserves. Bismarck drinks coffee from the Admiral’s pot with visible enjoyment. Seydlitz has the day-book already open beside her cup. Strasser has not sat yet; she is still in the passage collecting the senior staff. U-47’s place is set and empty.
Through the tall window the courtyard is occupied. Geryon has arranged himself across the flagstones with the patience of a siege engine and the manners of a cat. He is not blocking the orderly-room door so much as declining to admit that the door is important.
Raeder sees the dragon. The dragon sees Raeder but pretends it does not, which is a lie they have both silently agreed to. “We will not discuss the animal,” Raeder says, without looking away from the oatmeal. “If your twin sister’s rigging wishes to sun itself in my courtyard, it may. I am not going to inspect it.”
Bismarck’s mouth twitches. “Understood.”
He finishes the oatmeal because it is fuel. The sharp look was the whole review.
[Staff room]
They stand when he comes in; he sits as if the standing had been optional. Maps of the Bay of Biscay and the western Med are already on the table. Strasser enters with the rest of the senior staff in her wake and takes her chair like a woman who has brought aviation whether anyone asked or not. Two minutes later U-47 appears, cap in one hand and coffee mug in the other.
Raeder does not ask why she is late. If she is anything like Prien, she would only tell him the truth in a form that would make him regret asking.
“No reinforcements today,” he says. “Readiness by unit. Short.”
Bismarck gives him steel first: who can raise steam, who is in the body & fender shop, who is in class or other training.
Strasser follows with a slide show of the air picture—scouts, land-based threat over the Biscay transit, why a U-boat support problem is an aviation problem whether the surface officers like it or not.
U-47 speaks last and least. She does not apologize for the empty chair at breakfast. She tells him what her boats can do with the screen they have, and what they cannot do if Vichya keeps being asked to cover water they no longer hold in any useful sense.
That is the opening he wanted. “Bismarck.” He taps the Biscay chart once. “Vichya is overstretched in the Bay of Biscay and will be redeployed to the Western Mediterranean – working with, not for, Sardegna. It is time to end this pretense that Vichya actually controls the Bay. You will detach a support squadron for the U-boat transit and on-station work. Three capital ships—one of them may be a carrier if Strasser can spare a deck that is not already promised to a lecture. One cruiser. Two destroyers. They replace Vichya’s pathetic excuse for a covering force; they do not absorb Vichya politics. I want them there to be seen and to be used, not to write notes to Toulon.”
Bismarck does not argue about the numbers. “Hulls?”
“I leave it to your discretion, but you will not send a parade. Battlecruisers or better for two of the capitals. If you include a carrier, I want aircraft that can hunt in the Bay, not aircraft that can pose on a postcard. Coordinate the destroyers with U-47 so the screen is not a surprise to the people it is supposed to protect. Strasser, you will advise. You will not turn this into a referendum on Fi-167s.”
Strasser’s jaw tightens a degree. She has a running argument with Graf Zeppelin and everyone in the room can smell the Stukas on it. “Zu Befehl, Grossadmiral.”
U-47 looks at the chart, not at him. “If they come, I want them where the boats actually run. Not where a staff officer thinks the Bay is pretty.”
“That is why I am giving Bismarck the order and telling her to coordinate with you,” Raeder says. “Do not turn it into theatre.”
Seydlitz waits until the pencils have stopped. She does not clear her throat. “Grand Admiral. This evening: Conte di Cavour and Trieste. Sardegna. They are on the list for dinner. They will ask what Iron Blood intends to say about Vichya in the Mediterranean.”
Raeder’s face does not change. The Biscay order and the dinner are now the same problem wearing two coats. “They will be received,” he says. “They will not be briefed from this table. No one in this room will invent a Vichya policy between noon and the first glass. Bismarck, the squadron order goes out before they arrive. I will not have Italians asking whether we still have a navy in the Atlantic while the order is still in draft. U-47, you will be present at dinner unless you are at sea. If you are at sea, send someone who can keep her mouth shut.”
He glances, once, at the window. Geryon has not moved. The dragon is still ignoring the orderly room. Raeder ignores him back, which is the only protocol either of them respects. “That is all for this morning. Bismarck, stay and brief me on who gets the Biscay duty. Seydlitz, put the Sardegna pair on my evening card. Dismissed.”
He does not look at anyone when he says the last sentence. The staff file out. U-47 is not first and not last. The egg has already been eaten. The Bay is about to acquire three capital ships with their screen and a problem that will still be waiting when the Italians sit down.
[Flag office, early afternoon]
Raeder does not ask them to sit until the door is closed. He does not comment on the pairing.
Brunnhilde remains on her feet long enough to make it an official sentence rather than a plea. “Herr Grossadmiral. The paper squadron needs to know what it is in this command. Not what it can steam, what it is. Lutzow meant well, but the word she used is accurate enough to be unusable. I am not asking you to keep us. I am asking you to say whether we exist here as a courtesy of the cubes, or as yours. Without you we are literally nothing. We are aware of that, and we are grateful for it. I will not dress it in anything else.”
Silence. He does not look away. He also does not soften. Seydlitz has seen this face in staff meetings; it is the hard face, the face that declines to perform.
When he speaks it is the same register he uses for a readiness deficiency: precise, complete, and finished. “You are not orphans. An orphan is what remains when the responsible authority is gone. I am here. You were called because this navy required hulls that history did not finish. That is not sentiment, that is command.
“You are not a curiosity and you are not a reserve of ghosts. You are shipgirls given a commission they were denied in steel. That commission runs through this office. If that is withdrawn, you do not become free, you do not vanish: you will wait for my successor. You already understand that. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise.
“Gratitude is noted. It is not required in my presence. What is required is that you stop letting other people’s kindness define your status. You will not get affection from this chair. You will get recognition: you belong to this fleet so long as I am responsible for it. That is the whole of it.”
He glances at the clock once. The Italians are still a problem for later. “Seydlitz will put it in the book as an administrative clarification, not as a personal interview. That is for your sisters as much as for you. They will not hear a speech. They will hear that the question was asked and answered. Dismissed.” He does not stand to see them out. He does not use their names again. The temperature in the room does not change.
In the orderly room, Seydlitz sits at her desk and closes the book on the line she will actually write: Paper squadron status affirmed as commissioned under Grand Admiral’s authority. No further personal audience required.
He sat back in his chair while Seydlitz busied herself with the never-ending paperwork. He was irritated at the category error. He has spent a career commanding ships as instruments and officers as functions. The cubes gave him both in one body and did not issue a manual. Brunnhilde standing in his office and saying “without you we are nothing” is not a readiness report. It is a girl telling an old man that he is the condition of her existing. He has no precedent, procedure, or regulation for that. What he has is annoyance, and it is genuine. He had a Mediterranean problem, a late U-boat, a carrier admiral with a slide deck (who had invented that atrocity, anyway? Probably the Americans, he thought) and two Italians at dinner. He had not budgeted a quarter-hour to certify the inner lives of girls who were hulls that were never launched. The fact that the request was clean—no aria, no tears, Seydlitz as ballast—did not make it less of an intrusion, it made it worse. A hysterical scene he could dismiss as indiscipline. A precise, grateful, almost legal formulation forces him to answer in kind.
Under the annoyance there was something he would not call disturbance and would never name as pity. Lutzow’s word—“orphans”—is militarily false and emotionally accurate, and he knows both halves. He is not their father; he is the remaining authority that keeps a file from collapsing into fog and nonexistence. That is a grotesque kind of responsibility: not for their performance, which he understands, but for their being. No academy taught him to be the reason a person continues. The steel navy never asked it.
He does not want to dandle them on his knee; the image itself offends him. What he wants is for the problem to remain operational: commissions, steam, assignment, chain of command. Brunnhilde dragged the ontological piece onto the rug but at least had the discipline not to weep on it. That combination—girl and officer in the same sentence, need stated as fact—is a new thing, and it is difficult because it is not improper enough to reject.
I should not have to be this for them. The acknowledgment he gave her is the most he will ever spend on the feeling. He already considered the matter closed.
[Behind the dorms]
They came because Brunnhilde had asked, and gone to see the Admiral, not because anyone posted an order. Prinz Adalbert with her hands in her coat pockets, Heinrich and Moritz a matched pair of sisters trying not to look like they hurried, Magdeburg perched on the step, Ulrich von Hutten standing as if the gravel were a quarterdeck, Z-46 a half-pace off the circle the way destroyers do, Zeppelin on the wall, Elbe beside her already restless.
Strasser is not here; she is across the field with Graf Zeppelin, arguing Fi-167s against Stukas for torpedo work as if the Med will be settled by wing loading.
Brunnhilde does not waste the light. “I saw him. Privately. I asked what we are to him. I told him Lutzow’s word is accurate enough to hurt and that I was not there to cry about it. I told him if there is no affection we will take recognition: without him we are literally nothing, and we know it, and we are grateful.” She lets that sit so nobody has to pretend they did not feel the word *orphans* land again.
“He did not warm. He did not flinch. He said we are not orphans, because an orphan is what remains when the authority is gone, and he is here. He said we were called because this navy needed hulls history did not finish. The commission runs through his office. If it is withdrawn we do not go free or disappear; we wait for the next Admiral. Gratitude is noted and not required in his presence. Affection will not come from that chair. Recognition will: we belong to this fleet so long as he is responsible for it. That is the whole of it. It will be written as an administrative clarification. There will not be a second conversation.”
Ulrich von Hutten nods once. “Then we are not just little wooden shipgirls, we are real after all.” She grinned for a moment, and the others flinched, because it was entirely lacking in warmth.
“No,” Brunnhilde says. “We are a responsibility he will not put down.”
Prinz Adalbert huffs, almost a laugh. “That is the most affectionate thing he is capable of. Typical.”
Heinrich glances at Moritz. “So we are his. Not his darling steel daughters, but his nonetheless.”
“His,” Moritz agrees. “I can live with his.”
Magdeburg tips her head. “He knows what we are.”
“He has always known,” Z-46 says quietly. “He just does not like saying it where it sounds like a person.”
Zeppelin and Elbe look at each other the same way they did the last time battleships started talking about souls.
“We still fly,” Elbe says.
Zeppelin shrugs. “We still fly. He did not ground the wing. He did not adopt us. I don’t need him to be my daddy if my catapult works in the morning.”
“That is because you have a sky,” Adalbert says, not unkindly. “We have a man who will not say father and will not say fiction.”
“Then take the sentence and eat,” Zeppelin replies, hopping down. “The Italians will be here and they will not care whether we were launched sometime in ancient history. Strasser is still explaining torpedoes to a woman who already knows how she wants to bomb. I am not standing in gravel for the encore.”
Elbe goes with her, already lighter. The carriers leave the ontology on the ground where it belongs.
Hutten watches them go, then looks back at Brunnhilde. “Was it enough?”
“It was the sentence I can carry,” Brunnhilde says. “He will never say it twice, but once is enough. Tell Strasser sometime: we are not ghosts on loan. We are the children of his imagination, a collection of blueprints and planning papers brought to life, and he has admitted the cost of that. After that we steam, or we fly, and we do not ask him to be gentle.”
She turns toward the lights of the Kasino. It is time for dinner, with Sardegna and Vichya in the Med. The paper ships have their recognition, and the Grossadmiral has already closed the book on the subject.
[Flag dining room, evening]
The sprats arrive in their tin-and-smoke honesty, more Baltic than banquet, and the beer is beer. No one has tried to turn it into a state dinner except by sitting down in the right chairs. Raeder at the head, Bismarck where a fleet flagship sits when the Grand Admiral is eating, Seydlitz off to his right with the card she will not open unless someone makes her. U-47 is present, which means she is at sea only in spirit. Conte di Cavour takes the guest’s place without fuss. Trieste sits too quickly, next to her, already smiling at the room as if it were a café.
Cavour does the courtesy first: the table, the smoke on the fish. He does not mention Biscay. He is old enough to know that a minimum of business is still business.
“We thank the Grand Admiral for the evening,” he says. “Sardegna prefers to hear things at a table before we hear them from a chart.”
Raeder nods once. He eats a sprat the way he ate the egg: as if the menu had been a test and he had declined to fail it. “You are welcome. The beer is not a slight. It is what we are drinking.”
Trieste laughs, which is almost fine. “I like it. It is honest. Like asking what you intend to do with Vichya in our sea.”
Cavour’s glance is small and immediate. Not flaming. A leash applied with two fingers on the stem of a glass. “Trieste,” he says, mild as weather. “We came to dine.”
“We came because the Mediterranean does not dine,” she answers, still pleasant, and then she hears herself and puts the glass down. “Forgive me. I am the junior. I will eat the fish.”
Bismarck’s eyes flick to Raeder.
“You will hear no new policy at this table,” the Admiral says. “Iron Blood has not spent the day inventing one for your benefit. Vichya is overstretched. That is a fact. What we do about facts, we do in orders. You may assume we prefer the Mediterranean quiet enough that Sardegna does not have to ask the question twice. You may not assume the rest.”
Cavour accepts that as the whole portion. “Then we will read tomorrow what we will not hear tonight.”
Trieste looks as if she has three more sentences and has been told she may keep two of them in her mouth. She tries the sprats instead. “These are good. I did not expect to like being this far north.”
U-47’s mouth twitches. It is not a smile anyone is meant to use in polite company. “The Bay is farther west. You would like that less.”
Cavour lets that pass as seamanship, not provocation. Seydlitz writes nothing. The card stays closed.
They talk, after that, like officers who have agreed to waste a little time on purpose: weather in the Tyrrhenian, the quality of the beer, whether a fried egg on oatmeal is a crime or a tradition. Raeder does not participate so much as permit. When Trieste leans forward again, interest bright, and starts “And as for the ships in—“
Cavour sets his knife down. “Trieste,” he says, still without heat. “The Grand Admiral has given us the sentence we can carry home. Do not make me carry a second one that you invented.”
Trieste colors, not from shame so much as from being accurately described. “Yes, Admiral.”
Raeder drinks. “She is not wrong to want the rest. She is wrong to want it here. Bismarck has work in the Atlantic that is not your business tonight. If Sardegna requires a fuller answer, it will come in writing, not as words over smoked fish.”
Cavour inclines his head. That is the handwave: acknowledged, contained, not ignited. “Then we will enjoy the beer and leave the writing to the people who get paid to regret it.”
The rest of the meal is allowed to be a meal. Trieste stays on the leash and hates it just enough to be charming. U-47 eats like a woman who may still have to sail and is enjoying fresh food while she can. Bismarck does not mention the three capitals, the possible carrier, the cruiser, or the two destroyers. Seydlitz watches the clock, and notices Brunnhilde in the back looking content.
When they rise, Cavour thanks him as if the evening had been ordinary. Trieste thanks him for the beer. Raeder does not walk them to the door. He has already spent the warmth he does not have.
In the passage, after the Sardegna pair are gone, Bismarck says only, “She almost did it.”
“I noticed,” Raeder says. “Cavour noticed first. That is why I can stand Italians.”
He does not ask how the Biscay order is proceeding. He does not ask how Brunnhilde’s sisters took their sentence. The sprats are finished. The Med has been postponed until it arrives on paper. That will have to be enough for one night.
Chapter 8 – We Regret To Inform You That It Is Monday
[The mole, late afternoon]
The wind has started to signal the oncoming autumn. Nothing dramatic—just the first chill off the Baltic, the kind that makes coffee worth holding in both hands. They do not take a room. Rooms require agendas; the docks do not.
Bismarck, Tirpitz, Lutzow, Strasser. U-47 arrives because Lutzow said there would be doughnuts and because she can smell good, fresh coffee a mile away through her Schnorkel. Seydlitz is not with them; her post is in the orderly room with the Admiral.
The courtyard is empty. Geryon went with the Type II and Graf Zeppelin when the Biscay squadron sailed. Strasser has the look of a woman who has ended an argument by exporting both sides of it.
U-47 lifts the lid of the tin. “Custard-filled Bismarcks? Where did you find these?”
Bismarck does not dignify that with an answer. Tirpitz almost does, then remembers the salt shaker and eats hers in silence. They look at the water for a while, which is the point.
“He will not learn the cubes from a briefing,” Bismarck says at last. “I have tried the short version. His eyes glaze over, he files it under witchcraft, and asks for the patrol bill.”
“He does not need to become a physicist,” Lutzow says. “He needs to see a girl take a hit and not be a hull in a yard. Once. In front of him. Or he will keep issuing commands and sooner or later we will pay in blood for his ignorance.”
Tirpitz watches a gull fail to rob U-47. “If we take him out on patrol, we take his authority with us. The paper ships have just been told the commission lives in the office. They can survive a successor. They should not get the idea that he is safer if he never leaves the jetty.”
“That is the other half,” Strasser says. “Harbor Admiral. Perfect paperwork. No Mirror Sea. He already walks as if the mole is far enough. If we leave him here he will become a shrine with a signature.”
U-47 licks custard off a thumb. “My girls do not need him in the Bay to sink things. Surface ships apparently do. If he comes, I want him on a deck that can run, not on a barge we pretend is the flagship.”
“He will not request it,” Bismarck says. “He will not refuse it if it is written as an inspection of the Biscay support group or the North Sea squadron. He understands inspections.”
Lutzow nods. “Do not dress it as concern; he will smell that and stay ashore out of spite. Dress it as the Grand Admiral seeing whether Bismarck spent his three capitals correctly. He already wants that answer. We only change the form it arrives in.”
Strasser crumples the napkin. “Graf Zeppelin is already out there finding out I’m right about the Stukas. If he comes north-about and looks at the air group working, I will not have to stand on his steps again.”
“And if a Siren appears?” Tirpitz asks.
“Then he learns, little sister,” Bismarck says. “or we learn he cannot. Either is better than another week of guessing games.”
They are quiet again.
U-47 reaches for a second doughnut. “So we take him to sea.”
“We take him to sea,” Bismarck agrees. “Short patrol. Open water, either Biscay or the North Sea. No speeches. Seydlitz puts it on the board as an embarked inspection and does not use the word ‘accompany’ where he can see it.”
Lutzow looks southwest, where the Biscay group has already gone, dragon and all. “If the orphans hear he is sailing, they will try to come. That is their new religion. Someone will have to tell them the office can travel without the whole congregation.”
“I will,” Bismarck says. “Once.”
U-47 closes the tin. “If there are no more Bismarcks in this box, I am done conferring.”
They do not shake on it. They do not vote. They finish the coffee because it will be colder tomorrow, and because the conclusion is already the order they are going to write. He must go with them. Not because they doubt the man, but because a Grand Admiral who will not look at the war except through a window will become the one thing this fleet cannot afford: a memory that signs papers.
Lutzow starts to say something about the congregation following the chair.
Prince Adalbert, who has been just inside hearing distance without actually being in the meeting, saves her the trouble. She has a P-class panzerschiff right to loiter on a dock. “We are not going to wrap him in altar cloth,” she says. “He is not Jesus. He is not Odin. He is the man who admitted we are his theoretical ships made steel and told Seydlitz to put a note in the files confirming it. If Bismarck is on the back line, that is enough. We are not a cult.” Heinrich and Moritz are not far away; they turn toward the senior staff and nod.
Bismarck lets that stand. Lutzow takes the correction with a smile. It was a kind mistake but it was still a mistake. “Then some of them come because the screen needs weight,” Bismarck says. “Not because the church needs choirgirls.”
This is the list they actually write:
Main force: Bismarck, Tirpitz, and Strasser. Flagship, second battleship, the carrier he has already promised work to. No Type II, no dragon, no Graf Zeppelin—those are already in the Bay ending the Fi-167 argument.
Screening force: Two Panzerschiffe - Prinz Adalbert and Prinz Heinrich. Punch, scouting, the kind of cruiser weight a screen needs to slap aside the usual mass-produced trash the Sirens deploy. Z-46 will come along to handle ASW if needed.
U-47 looks at the destroyer slot and nods once. “If she keeps station where the boats are, not where the battleships think the boats are.”
“She will,” Bismarck says.
Lutzow watches the chalk. “I stand corrected.”
“Good,” Adalbert says, not unkindly. “We already did the gratitude. Now we steam.”
The wind is still turning over toward autumn. The tin is a yawning void. Custard smears. One lonely grain of sugar. Tirpitz looks into it as if a staff exam has come back stamped insufficient. “That sneaky U-boat bitch ate all the crullers, too.”
U-47 is already halfway down the ladder to the basin, which is as close as she comes to an after-action report. Strasser pretends not to have heard. Lutzow does not bother. Bismarck folds the patrol list—inspection language on top, real hulls underneath—and puts it away for Seydlitz to make respectable later.
They pick up the cups. The wind does not care who ate the crullers. The base goes about an ordinary day, which is the rarest thing they have given the Admiral since he woke up the previous week.
[Orderly room, later that afternoon]
Seydlitz has the orderly room squared away: the proper ensign, the book up to date, and the look of a woman who has already finished tomorrow’s work. She had finished the orders regarding Sardegna, Vichya, and the Mediterranean, and sent them off with a visibly disgruntled Trieste while the Admiral ate his breakfast undisturbed.
Bismarck comes in from the mole with the wind still on her coat and a tin under her arm that is not regulation. She sets the notes down first. Inspection language, with a list of ships underneath. Adalbert and Heinrich on the screen with Z-46, back line as agreed. U-47’s concurrence. Then the tin. “I hid these from U-47 for you. The staff does not run on coffee alone.”
Bismarck’s wink is as big a surprise as the Grand Admiral’s appearance had been. Seydlitz stares at the box suspiciously. “Bismarck. That is—” She opens the lid because not opening it would be worse. A pair of jam Berliners lurk within. No custard. Someone has thought about blotters. “—not necessary.”
“It is notes and calories, and a gesture of thanks.” Bismarck says. “You were not on the jetty with us. You still have to make this respectable before he initials it. Eat.”
Seydlitz puts the tin on the side of the desk, square with the blotter, which is as close as she will come to accepting a gift, and a sign of how she was coming to resemble the man she worked for. “Tirpitz complained that U-47 ate the crullers.”
“She did. These were never in that box.”
A pause. Seydlitz looks at Bismarck with a thin smile of gratitude. “Thank you. I will log the meeting and cut the orders. I will not log the pastry.”
“That was the idea.”
Bismarck is already going. Seydlitz waits until the door is shut before she takes one Berliner, eats it in the three bites the day-book allows, washes it down with coffee gone cold, and writes embarked inspection where a softer woman would have written we are taking him to sea. The jam does not reach the page. That, too, was the idea.
She does not put any theological comments in the footnotes. She puts the Grand Admiral on Bismarck, the Panzerschiffe on the screen with Z-46, Strasser for the air, Tirpitz where a second capital hull belongs.
[Admiral’s Quarters, 1800]
One place. One lamp. Seydlitz serves and does not sit. Rye, butter, whitefish, a glass that will not be raised. He taps the roll once and eats as he has always eaten. “I understand Bismarck has requested an inspection for tomorrow?”
“Already logged, Herr Admiral. I will have the orders ready for your review by breakfast.”
That is the extent of the conversation. The courtyard is empty. The mole has gone dark. She keeps the plate from looking neglected. He folds the napkin and does not linger for company he has not asked for.
A knock. Lutzow comes only as far as the side table. The thing in her hands is not a dispatch. She sets it down: a small wooden box with its lid closed. She does not open it. She does not name it. “For you,” she says. “Not staff.”
He looks at it the way he looked at the egg on his oatmeal at yesterday’s breakfast. Then he looks at her. Lutzow says nothing else. “Very well,” he says.
Lutzow is gone before the sentence can grow a second half. The inner room takes him. Seydlitz clears the plate and does not touch the box. It is not hers, and she has no orders concerning it. It is not in the book.
Curiosity overcomes him, and he walks back to the outer room. He lifts the lid. Inside the box is another box, of metal and plastic, and a slip printed in the kind of German that has been through a factory in another language and come back only mostly alive. The slip still looks like a translation that survived an accident. “Charge. Slide. Play. Next. Please to enjoy classic.” There is a cord. There is no key. Still, it appears to be a music box of some sort.
He takes the inner box through to his bedroom and finds the slide. Bach, thin through a small speaker: the Toccata, then the first movement of the Fugue in D Minor. His breath stops, just for a moment, and he touches the control again. The organ dies. Beethoven’s Third Symphony begins—enough to fill a quarterdeck and not a cathedral. He stands with it. He does not sit on the bed like a man being entertained. When the movement ends he lets the next one run because stopping in the middle would be wrong. When that ends he slides it off.
Seydlitz is still at the table with the last of the fish when it starts: Bach, the Toccata, thin and exact, a cathedral forced through a too-small speaker. It gets as far as the idea of the Fugue, then it stops, then the Beethoven. Then nothing. She does not go to the door. She finishes clearing the plate, sets the chair square, and puts out the lamp in the dining room. She does not know the name of the machine. Neither does Lutzow, who only delivered a box.
The slip goes facedown on the dresser. The Admiral has learned that the box plays music, that it can be started and stopped, and that while he is not yet ready for Bach, he can allow Beethoven to finish. He prepares for bed, lies down, and stares at the ceiling for a few moments, thinking thoughts he hasn’t had the time or inclination for in the entire week that he’s worn S-COM’s khakis.
(…to be continued)