‘We didn’t know why, damn you.’
Muller’s voice was slow and calm, like a surgeon’s. ‘We must
‘I don’t know -’
‘Why was it necessary for us to kill Linden?’
I shook my head desperately.
‘Just tell me the truth. What do you know? You’re not being fair to this young woman. Tell us what you found out.’
The shrill whine of the machine grew louder. It reminded me of the sound of the elevator in my old offices in Berlin. Where I should have stayed.
‘Herr Gunther,’ Muller’s voice contained a gramme of urgency, ‘for the sake of this poor girl, I beg you.’
‘For God’s sake…’
He glanced over at the thug by the control panel and shook his squarely-cropped head.
‘I can’t tell you anything,’ I shouted.
The press shuddered as it encountered its living obstacle. The mechanical whine briefly rose a couple of octaves as the resistance to the hydraulic force was dealt with, and then returned to its old pitch before finally the press came to the end of its cruel journey. The noise died away at another nod from Mxiller.
‘Can’t, or won’t, Herr Gunther?’
“You bastard,‘ I said, suddenly weak with disgust, ’you vicious, cruel bastard.‘
‘I don’t think she’ll have felt much,’ he said with studied indifference. ‘She was drugged. Which is more than you will be when we repeat this little exercise in say – ’ he glanced at his wristwatch ‘ – twelve hours. You have until then to think it over.’ He looked over the edge of the vat. ‘I can’t promise to kill you outright, of course. Not like this girl. I might want to squeeze you two or three times before we spread you on the fields. Just like the grapes.
‘On the other hand, if you tell me what I wish to know, I can promise you a rather less painful death. A pill would be so much less distressing for you, don’t you think?’
I felt my lip curl. Muller winced fastidiously as I started to swear, and then shook his head.
‘Rainis,’ he said, ‘you may hit Herr Gunther just once before returning him to his quarters.’
36
Back in my cell I massaged the floating rib above my liver which Nebe’s Latvian had selected for one stunningly painful punch. At the same time I tried to douse the lights on the memory of what had just happened to Veronika, but without success.
I had met men who had been tortured by the Russians during the war. I remembered them describing how the most awful part of it was the uncertainty – whether you would die, whether you could withstand the pain. That part was certainly true. One of them had described a way of reducing the pain. Breathing deeply and gulping could induce a light-headedness that was partly anaesthetic. The only trouble was that it had also left my friend prone to bouts of chronic hyperventilation which eventually caused him to suffer a fatal heart-attack.
I cursed myself for my selfishness. An innocent girl, already a victim of the Nazis, had been killed because of her association with me. Somewhere inside of me a voice replied that it was she who had asked for my help, and that they might well have tortured and killed her irrespective of my own involvement. But I was in no mood to go easy on myself. Wasn’t there anything else I could have told Muller about Linden’s death that might have satisfied him? And what would I tell him when it came to my own turn? Selfish again. But there was no avoiding my egotism’s snake’s eyes. I didn’t want to die. More importantly, I didn’t want to die on my knees begging for mercy like an Italian war-hero.
They say impending pain offers the mind the purest aid to concentration. Doubtless Muller would have known that. Thinking about the lethal pill he had promised me if I told him whatever it was he wanted to hear helped me to remember something vital. Twisting round my handcuffs, I reached down into my trouser pocket, and tugged out the lining with my little finger, allowing the two pills I had taken from Heim’s surgery to roll into my palm.
I wasn’t even sure why I had taken them at all. Curiosity perhaps. Or maybe it was some subconscious prompt which had told me I might have need of a painless exit myself. For a long time I just stared at the tiny cyanide capsules with a mixture of relief and horrific fascination. After a while I hid one pill in my trouser-turnup, which left the one I had decided I would keep in my mouth – the one that would in all probability kill me. With an appreciation of irony that was much exaggerated by my situation, I reflected that I had Arthur Nebe to thank for diverting these lethal pills from the secret agents for whom they had been created to the top brass in the SS, and from them to me. Perhaps the pill in my hand had been Nebe’s own. It is of such speculations, however improbable, that a man’s philosophy consists during his last remaining hours.
I slipped the pill into my mouth and held it gingerly between my back molars. When the time came, would I even have the guts to chew the thing? My tongue pushed the pill over the edge of my tooth and into the corner of my cheek. I rubbed my fingers over my face and could feel it through the flesh. Would anyone see it? The only light in the cell came from a bare bulb fixed to one of the wooden rafters seemingly with nothing but cobwebs. All the same I couldn’t help thinking that the outline of the pill in my mouth was very much visible.
When a key scraped in the mortice, I realized that I would soon find out.
The Latvian came through the door holding his big Colt in one hand and a small tray in the other.
‘Get away from the door,’ he said thickly.
‘What’s this?’ I said, sliding backwards on my backside. ‘A meal? Perhaps you could tell the management that what I’d like most is a cigarette.’
‘Lucky to get anything at all,’ he growled. Carefully he squatted down and laid the tray on the dusty floor. There was a jug of coffee and a large slice of strudel. ‘The coffee’s fresh. The strudel is homemade.’
For a brief, stupid second I considered rushing him, before reminding myself that a man in my weakened condition could rush about as quickly as a frozen waterfall. And I would have had no more chance of overpowering the huge Latvian than I had of engaging him in Socratic dialogue. He seemed to sense some flicker of hope on my face however, even though the pill resting on my gum remained undetected. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘try something. I wish you would; I’d like to blow your kneecap off.’ Laughing like a retarded grizzly bear he backed out of my cell and closed the door with a loud bang.
From the size of him, I judged Rainis to be the kind who enjoyed his food. When he wasn’t killing or hurting people it was probably his only real pleasure. Perhaps he was even something of a glutton. It occurred to me that if I were to leave the strudel untouched, Rainis might be unable to resist eating it himself. That if I were to put one of my cyanide capsules inside the filling then later on, perhaps long after I myself was dead, the dumb Latvian would eat my cake and die. It might, I reflected, be a comforting thought as I left the world, that he would be swiftly following me.
I decided to drink the coffee while I thought about it. Was a lethal pill hot-water-soluble? I didn’t know. So I popped the capsule out of my mouth, and thinking that it might as well be that pill which I used to put my pathetic plan into action, I pushed it into the fruit filling with my forefinger.
I could happily have eaten it myself, pill and all, I was so hungry. My watch told me that over fifteen hours had passed since my Viennese breakfast, and the coffee tasted good. I decided that it could only have been Arthur Nebe who had instructed the Latvian to bring me supper.
Another hour passed. There were eight to go before they would come to take me back upstairs. I would wait until there was no hope, no possibility of reprieve before I took my own life. I tried to sleep, but without much success. I was beginning to understand what Becker must have felt like, facing the gallows. At least I was better off than he was: I still had my lethal pill.
It was almost midnight when I heard the key in the lock again. Quickly I transferred my second pill from my trouser-turnup to my cheek in case they decided to search my clothes. But it was not Rainis who came to fetch my tray but Arthur Nebe. He held an automatic in his hand.
‘Don’t force me to use this, Bernie,’ he said. ‘You know I won’t hesitate to shoot you if I have to. You’d best get back against that far wall.’
