"Johnny,” Gisella said, her voice muffled,“I’ve been listening to the BBC.”
“You can go to jail for that,” he said tenderly, making it a joke.
“I wasn’t surprised when Peis brought the radio,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
"’Gisella thanks Eric for the radio,’ ” she quoted.
“Aren’t you afraid your neighbors will report you?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m careful.”
“I think it will be all right now,” he said. “Peis is afraid of me.”
“I should be afraid of you,” Gisella said. “Somehow I’m not. Quite the opposite. ”
He tightened his arm around her.
“That was a message to you, wasn’t it?” Gisella asked.
“Yes, we think so,” Müller said.
“We?”
“The less you know, the safer you are,” he said. And immediately knew that was nonsense. If they were caught, it wouldn’t matter how much or how little Gisella knew. They would both die, very slowly and very hard, at the hands of someone like Peis.
“I knew the other one was, I don’t know, a confirmation of the first.”
“What other one?” he asked.
“There were two messages.”
He looked down at her, saw her scalp where she parted her hair, looked down to see her breast half flattened against his abdomen.
He didn’t want to talk about messages. He just wanted to be where he was, with her naked against him, feeling her heart beat against his chest.
“Ach, Gott!” he said, and then: “I don’t know about a second message. And I have to know.”
“‘Bübchen wants to paddle Gisella’s canoe again,’” she quoted, so solemnly that he chuckled.
“What’s it mean?” he asked. “How do you know it’s for you? What does it mean, about a canoe? ‘Bübchen’?”
She was silent for a moment.
“Why did you have to laugh?” she asked.
“Sometimes I’m an asshole,” he said.
“I was older than Eric,” she said.
“And you called him ‘Bübchen’?”
She nodded her head “yes” against his chest.
“And the canoe? What’s that mean?”
She told him about the picnic on the bank of the Lahn River the day before Eric Fulmar had disappeared from Marburg.