‘You’re warning me, are you, Denham?’ Rausch jumped out of his chair
Slap. Slap.
‘You’re keeping me on my toes, are you?’
Slap. Slap. Slap.
He was panting now, face a livid pink, hair dishevelled.
‘Did you examine the dossier?’
Denham said nothing. This was hopeless.
‘Or did the warm boy tell you the content?’
‘No,’ Denham yelled. ‘Nothing. Why don’t you ask him yourself?’
‘Oh, believe me-we will.’
But Denham had clocked the half second’s hesitation. You haven’t found him.
At that moment the telephone rang. Rausch stood up and answered it.
‘Rausch here… Right away, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer.’
He took his jacket off the back of the chair, put it on, and walked to the door. ‘And just as we were warming up. Don’t go anywhere.’ Denham heard the click of the lock slide into place behind him.
Outside he could hear rain. He wanted to touch his face. It felt delicate in the extreme, an exposed membrane, as if the skin on his cheeks, chin, and forehead had chafed and broken. The handcuffs were cutting into his wrists. He needed the lavatory. But worst of all was his thirst. They’d given him no water.
This was surreal. Dismal and surreal. It was the insane nihilism at the heart of National Socialism. He’d been on the verge of getting a story out there that would have ruined their Olympics, but they were devoting time and manpower to some wild goose chase after a lost file. For all he knew it contained Hitler’s mother’s recipes, or a collection of banned jokes. Eckener cracks one of his gags about the Fuhrer, and a whole SD department is set up to trace its origin.
We did. The poems were by Stefan George…
Double passwords? What was Friedl mixed up in? It would explain his eagerness to introduce himself that evening in the bar at the Hotel Kurgarten-he’d thought Denham was someone else. Farcical, and yet they’d become friends. God alone knew what noodle-brained naivety it took to join a resistance group. But then, warm boys generally were probably no strangers to courage. For any chance of success a group had to remain small, with contacts few and anonymous. Friedl, he guessed, would know the name of only one other member, perhaps. Two at the most. Double-password precautions. But Friedl was lucky. He’d been tipped off and fled.
Denham turned the sequence of events over in his mind. To think he’d once suspected Friedl of being a police snitch.
He sighed and shut his eyes. Another thought crossed his mind. Who telephoned Rausch just now? There couldn’t be many Obergruppenfuhrers. He looked up at the photograph on the wall.
The hitting and slapping didn’t scare him. What scared him was how long he’d be able to hold out. Exhaustion would get to him soon, and pain and hunger.
His head fell forwards. He tried to empty his mind for a while and not focus on the pain in his wrists.
The door unlocked.
Rausch strode in with a dour expression. He had changed into a black uniform with silver epaulettes. And he wasn’t alone. Four SS followed him, stony-faced, also in black, and Denham caught a glimpse of the rubber blackjack in the hand of one of them, with one end of it tucked up a sleeve. Each SS man took a chair, and they positioned themselves around him; two immediately behind where he couldn’t see them, and two slightly out of his line of vision on each side. One of them yawned, and there was beer on his breath.
This is bad, Denham thought numbly. This is very bad.
Rausch resumed his seat behind the table and looked at Denham. He seemed paler, his face set grimly to his task.
‘Are you going to put yourself through this?’ he said, tapping the tips of his fingers together. He inhaled and asked again, ‘Where is it?’
‘If I knew, believe me, I would tell you.’
Rausch kept his gaze on Denham, then flicked a glance at the man to the left behind him. A chair scraped back. Leather creaked. Something swished. The blackjack struck him across his left ear.
His vision went blank. He hunched over, wanting to jam his head between his knees. The detonation in his ear was paralysing his brain, short-circuiting it.
I do not fear this, he thought, through the blinding white pain. An old soldier does not fear this.
‘Sit up,’ said Rausch. ‘Look at me. Where is it?’
Denham shook his head.
Another flick from Rausch’s eyes and this time all four men set upon him, bludgeoning him with blackjacks: on his head, neck, and shoulders. When the chair went over, and Denham with it, Rausch stepped in to remove the handcuffs, and the beating continued with relentless ferocity: on his shanks, back, hands, and face. A searing burn across his neck made him cry out, and he saw that one of them held a length of wire cable, which was soon lashing across his back.
Rausch shouted, ‘Shall we keep going?’
I do not fear this.
But his mantra could not suppress the terror rising inside him.
‘Up,’ said Rausch. The four men uncoiled the ball of torment he’d become on the floor and pulled him back onto the chair. He felt a spreading gush of warm piss in his trousers. One of them grunted, ‘ Ach. ’
The interrogator was standing, leaning against the wall beneath the photograph, giving Denham time to absorb and savour the pain. He was holding a small rust red book.
‘At Heidelberg I admired this poet. We all did. He was a cult figure, Stefan George, something of a mystic, a seer who felt the tides in the German soul. What appeal he’d have to your gang of criminals I had no idea, but listen to this.’
In a piping voice he recited:
‘The Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich;
All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might
Down, down with the handful who doubt him!’
‘ “The Anti-Christ,” from 1907. It has power, does it not? It has prophecy.’
Still looking at the book he said, ‘It’s going to get much worse if you don’t tell me. Now, Herr Denham, cigarette?’
Denham shook his head.
Rausch lit one for himself with a steel lighter. ‘Once again,’ he said softly. ‘Where?’ He was studying his victim through the puff of yellow smoke, and Denham returned his gaze, thinking that he detected less certainty in his tormentor’s face, a little less resolution in the voice. ‘Where?’
Denham gave his head a tiny movement. No.
He was punched right off the chair.
He tried crawling under the table but was dragged backwards by his ankle. The blows came down with monstrous savagery now, and they began to kick him as well: in his ribs, in his stomach, in his face. He howled for them to stop. Anything if they’d stop… Ribs cracked like ice under foot. Whip, blackjack. A forest of high boots. His kicked-in stomach winded him; he couldn’t breathe. One of them pulled his head back by his hair, the flash of a dagger, a slash across his cheekbone. Behind it all Rausch was shouting, reciting from the little book.
‘You’ll hang out your tongues but the trough has been drained
You’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze
And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.’
Whatever hope he’d had of getting out vanished. He was going to die in this room.
And suddenly they stopped.
The telephone was ringing.
Rough hands heaved him off the floor and onto the chair. He spat out a great gob of blood and pressed his tongue against loose teeth. Blood poured into his right eye from where the wire cable had caught him on the eyebrow; it spattered to the floor from the gash in his cheek. Vision in the other eye was out of focus. He was soaked with piss, sweat, blood.
