Read on for an exclusive extract of The Moscow Cipher
Nazi-occupied France
July 16th, 1942
All four family members were at home when they came.
Monsieur and Madame Silbermann, or Abel and Vidette, were in the salon, relaxing in a pair of matching Louis XV armchairs after a modest but excellent lunch prepared by Eliane, the family housekeeper. Vidette was immersed in one of the romantic novels into which she liked to escape. Abel, meanwhile, was frowning at an article in the collaborationist newspaper Le Temps, in which he was reading of much more serious matters. Things in France were growing worse. Just a little over two years since the crushing might of the German Wehrmacht had rolled virtually unopposed into the country, each day seemed to bring a fresh round of new horrors.
Seated at the piano, framed by the bright, warm afternoon light that flooded in through the French windows, their seventeen-year-old daughter Miriam was working through the most difficult arpeggiated right-hand passage of the musical manuscript in front of her, pausing now and then to peer at the handwritten notes, some of which were hard to read on the faded paper.
Though she played the piano with a fine touch, Miriam’s particular talent lay with the violin, at which she excelled. The real pianist of the family was her little brother. At age twelve, Gabriel Silbermann’s ability on the keys was already outstripping that of his teachers, even that of his father. Abel had been a respected professor of music at the Paris Conservatoire for over twenty years until the venerable institution’s director, Henri Rabaud, had helped the Nazi regime to ‘cleanse’ it of all Jewish employees under the Premier Statut des Juifs law, which had come into effect the previous year, 1941.
Since losing his post, Abel Silbermann had managed