‘They’re going to play one more piece of the opera before the news,’ he said.
His colleague was fumbling with the record he’d pulled from the stacks. He got it on a turntable and squinted at it, counting to himself.
‘They’re going to play the immolation scene,’ Shirtsleeves said.
The third technician scoured the sleeve notes.
‘Track three, side one,’ he said.
The man at the turntable picked up the stylus arm with trembling hands and counted in.
‘Track three?’ he asked.
‘Track three,’ the technician confirmed.
‘Wait for it,’ Shirtsleeves said. Let them play five seconds, let’s make sure.’
The woman stopped talking, and there was a brief pause. Opera music filled the booth again.
‘Is that it?’ the man holding the stylus asked.
‘I don’t know, you’re the bloody Wagner expert,’ Shirtsleeves snapped. ‘Do it.’
The technician lowered the stylus onto the record, and a smaller speaker on his side of the booth started to play music.It was the same track, slightly out of sync with the version being broadcast from Germany.
The three technicians looked at each other with wide grins. They looked like schoolboys about to play a prank on the master.
‘Do it,’ Bunny said.
Shirtsleeves reached across the control board to a large control knob. Two strips of paper, with neat type, were stuck onto the control board. The knob currently pointed toTHEM.The other available setting wasUS.
Shirtsleeves looked at Bunny, who nodded, then he turned the knob.
There was a moment of static from the large speaker, and the music returned. Now it was perfectly in sync with the smaller speaker.
The piece of music finished, and Shirtsleeves moved a slider on his equipment, fading it out. He held up a hand to the man and woman the other side of the glass. He counted down with his fingers. Five, four, three, two, one, then he pointed at them.
‘Guten Abend,’ the man said, leaning into the microphone. He sounded exactly like the newsreader from Berlin we’d been listening to only minutes before. He continued talking in German. The woman joined in, a soothing conversation for the listeners, late in the evening as they listened to their wireless, all across the Reich, in quiet farming towns no different from mine, in big cities, with people hurrying home after a late shift at the office. Loudspeakers broadcasting, part of the wallpaper of sound that people heard but didn’t think about.
Bunny motioned to me to follow him out of the booth. I joined him in the lobby he’d called the cinema.
‘Surely the German broadcasters know you’ve taken over as soon as you do it,’ I said to Bunny.
‘Oh they hate it,’ Bunny said. ‘I’ve got it on good authority that Hitler had a tantrum about it last week. Smashed a nice Etruscan vase and had the man responsible for their radio network thrown into prison. The manformerlyresponsible for their radio network, I should say.’
‘Why don’t they stop you?’
‘They can’t!’ Bunny was gleeful. ‘This facility’s the most powerful radio transmitter in the world. Five hundred megawatts! It was built for a station in America that wanted to drown out its competition but they got cold feet, so we snapped it up. We call it Aspidistra. Like the song.’
I wasn’t a devotee of music on the wireless, and I certainly didn’t visit the dance halls, but even I had heard of the song. It had been difficult to escape. A breezy tune with nonsense lyrics about the biggest aspidistra in the world.
Besides the song, it wasn’t the first time I’d heard about Aspidistra. Washington, the butler, had mentioned it. He’d been testing me. Was he working with Bunny? I thought about telling Bunny I’d met one of his men, but I stopped myself. I was out of my depth, and it wasn’t my secret to give up.
‘You’re hijacking the Germans’ airwaves from a top-secret facility,’ I said, ‘but you send your agents out to local pubs to look suspicious. You identify the local fifth columnist and you lure him in. You give me the guided tour. Hitler’s on the French coast and the invasion’s probably weeks, if not days away. I’m assuming there’s some kind of a plan?’
‘I’ve got one more thing to show you,’ Bunny said.
I expected him to turn back to the submarine door, but instead he led me to the far corner of the cinema lobby. A metal ladder was fixed to the wall, leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. It looked precarious, but Bunny took to it like a rat to a drainpipe.
