‘Tell Colonel Bohme to come and fetch us,’ Heydrich told the NCO. And then to me: ‘I’m lost in here.’
‘A common experience, I imagine.’
‘Bohme is the one who thought he could solve Kuttner’s murder,’ said Heydrich.
‘Are you going to tell him or shall I?’
‘Oh, I know you find it hard to credit, but I take a lot of vicarious pleasure in your solving Kuttner’s murder. I mean I can admire it as a piece of reasoning. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing the expression on his stupid Saxon face.’
‘I’d been kind of looking forward to that myself. Bohme was the other officer who straightened Kuttner’s tie after your speech the other night. When he rescued the maid, Rosa, from Henlein’s clumsy drunken pass. I shall miss the opportunity of making him feel like he had something to hide.’
‘You’re a natural contrarian, Gunther,’ observed Heydrich. ‘I think your problem is not with the Nazis, it’s with all authority. You just don’t like being told what to do.’
‘Maybe.’
I glanced around.
‘Major Thummel’s here?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Is Bohme questioning him?’
‘Abendschoen is leading the interrogation. He’s much more agile than Bohme. If anyone can trip Thummel up without breaking skin, it’s Willy Abendschoen.’
A minute or two passed before we heard footsteps coming up the broad stairs.
Bohme arrived at the top of the stairs and marched smartly across the hall and into the reception area. He saluted in the usual Nazi way, and under the circumstances I didn’t bother returning the compliment; but Heydrich did.
‘Let’s go and see the prisoner, shall we?’ said Heydrich.
Bohme led the way back across the hall and downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs we walked on through a warren of unpleasant smelling and dimly lit corridors and cells.
‘I hear it’s down to you, Captain Gunther, that we found Thummel was the traitor,’ Bohme told me. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’
Bohme paused outside a cell door. ‘Here we are.’
‘Not only that but he has also solved the murder of Captain Kuttner,’ said Heydrich.
‘Then you’ve really covered yourself in glory, haven’t you?’ said Bohme. ‘So who did it?’
I glanced at Heydrich.
‘What’s the game, General?’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a card to play here, then you’d better play it, only don’t treat me like an idiot.’
‘In spite of all that, an idiot is what you are,’ said Heydrich. ‘A very clever idiot. Only a clever man could have deduced who murdered Captain Kuttner, how and why. But only an idiot could have behaved as you did.’
Heydrich pushed open the door to a large interrogation room that was complete with stenographer, several wooden chairs, some chains hanging from the ceiling, and an en suite bath. Besides the stenographer there were two largish men in the room and a naked woman.
‘Only an idiot could have been so easily duped by the Czechs,’ said Heydrich. ‘By her.’
He pointed at the girl.
It was almost as well he identified her because she was nearly unrecognizable.
The naked girl was Arianne Tauber.
As soon as I saw Arianne I moved to help her and found myself solidly restrained by Bohme and another largish man who’d been standing, unseen by me, behind the heavy wooden door of the interrogation room; restrained and then, on Heydrich’s order, searched for a non-existent weapon and quickly manacled on a length of chain to a cast-iron radiator as big as a mattress, safely out of harm’s way.
I hauled at the chain attached to my wrists and swore loudly, but no one was paying much attention to me. I was like a dog that had been safely kennelled, or worse.
Heydrich laughed, and that was the cue for the others to do the same. Even the stenographer, a young hatchet-faced woman in SS uniform, shook her head and smiled as if she was genuinely amused by my threats and bad language. Then she straightened the little forage cap she was wearing and adjusted the grip that kept it on her head. She must have sensed me wishing I could have smacked it onto the floor.
I glanced around the windowless room. It was as big as a chapel in a disused church. The walls were tiled in pea-green. Dusty bare light bulbs hung from the heavily cobwebbed ceiling. The floor was covered with pools of water. There was a slight smell of excrement in the cold air. I hauled some more upon my chain, to no effect. It seemed my situation was as helpless as Arianne’s seemed hopeless.
She did not move. Her battered purple eyes remained closed like sea anemones. Her wet hair was coiled around her face like dark yellow snakes on the head of a dead Medusa. There was blood in her nostrils and she appeared to have lost some fingernails, but she was not dead. The edges of her bare breasts shifted a little as breath entered and left her body; she could not move because she was strapped onto a wooden bascule. She was not, however, about to be guillotined, although that was the point of the bascule: to restrain the body and transport the head of a condemned person smoothly through a lunette so that he or she might be quickly decapitated by the falling axe.
Arianne was strapped onto the bascule for an altogether different but almost as unpleasant reason.
The bascule was positioned precipitously over the end of a bath full of pinkish-brown water so that it worked very like a lever. One of Arianne’s torturers had his foot on the end of the bascule just under her bare feet and all he had to do to allow the wooden board carrying her body to tip forward on the fulcrum that was the lip of the bath was to move his black boot a few centimetres; then she would fall head first into the water and remain there until either she drowned or her torturers decided to lift the bascule up again. It was ingeniously simple, and although the bath was smeared with blood, as if the bascule sometimes fell awkwardly — and perhaps that explained the several contusions on her eyes, cheeks and forehead — it was obviously effective.
At the end of my chain I was at least a metre away from everyone and this seemed to suggest that others before me had stood where I was, chained to the same radiator and obliged to watch friends being tortured. I couldn’t even kick the edge of the stenographer’s neat little corner-table with its typewriter, pencil, notebook, magazine, coffee-cup and nail-file; but I promised myself that if the bitch started filing her nails while Arianne was being tortured, I would take off my shoe and throw it at her.
Looking at Arianne, it was impossible to believe she was the same woman I had left behind at the Imperial Hotel that morning. Somehow Heydrich, or the SD or the Gestapo had discovered something about Arianne that had persuaded them to arrest her. But what? Only she and I knew about Gustav and the envelope he had asked her to give to Franz Koci. Nobody else knew anything. Nobody but Gustav. And even if Paul Thummel was indeed Gustav, it seemed impossible that her arrest could be connected with his. Not yet. They had to have picked her up at the station before I had identified Paul Thummel as traitor X.
‘Has she talked?’ Heydrich asked Bohme.
The other man pulled a face. ‘Well, of course, sir. What a question.’
‘You think so? What about Masin and Balaban? You couldn’t get them to talk, could you? You had those two Czechos for five months before you managed to get anything out of them.’
‘They were exceptionally strong and determined men, sir.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised, now that I’ve been in here. To me this hardly looks like torture. Somehow I imagined something much worse. Back at my gymnasium in Halle we used to do this sort of thing to other boys just for sport.’
‘With all due respect, sir, there’s not much that’s worse than the water bascule. Short of death itself, which would hardly be to the purpose, no other torture quite persuades as much that you are surely about to die.’
‘I see. So, what has she told us?’
Bohme approached the stenographer, who handed him a few sheets of typed paper; these he passed to Heydrich and, while the Reichsprotector glanced over what was written there, one of Arianne’s tormentors slapped her bruised cheeks to bring her out of a faint.
With the sleeves of their striped civilian shirts rolled up above their substantial biceps and their collars
