Flight from Berlin (21 page)

‘Please listen to me. I don’t know—’

‘If you don’t open up to us, I’m sure your American lady friend will.’

Denham stared at him. ‘She has nothing to do with anything. I warn you—her father is a powerful senator, and she’s the guest here of the ambassador . . .’

‘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 Obergruppenführer.’

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 Führer, 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 Obergruppenführers. 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.

‘Rausch here . . . No, Herr Obergruppenführer. Not yet.’

The interrogator replaced the receiver and looked at him. The last thing Denham remembered before the room went dark was the worry in the man’s eyes.

W
hen he came round, his body was a flowering garden of agony, from the crown of his head to the balls of his feet. Even the smallest breath came with a shot of hot pain.

Denham could hear a radio in the guards’ room tuned at high volume to coverage of the Olympics. He had no idea how long he’d been out.

‘ . . . I have the honour now of speaking to twenty-five-year-old Berlin policeman Karl Wöllke’—
a cheer from a couple of the guards—
‘who earlier won a gold medal for Germany in the shot put . . .’

He lay on his side on the fold-down cot and stared at the white brick wall. His brain felt as though it was listing to one side, like a boat taking on water, and there was only partial vision in one eye.

‘ . . . The Führer waved to me from his box and then I knew I could beat the Olympic record of sixteen point zero three metres. It was all down to the Führer . . .’

He had some confused notion that he might have died if the telephone hadn’t rung, but the sequence of events was too difficult and tiring to recall. His entire attention was focused on the pain. If only they’d give him a glass of water. He’d do anything for that.

‘Saved by the bell, eh?’ said a familiar voice.

He mustered his strength to turn over on the cot. Dr Eckener was standing in the door. He was swinging Arthur Denham’s pocket watch, like a hypnotist. ‘You’ve got the luck of the devil, Richard, my boy.’

‘Yes,’ Denham mumbled through swollen, bloodied lips. ‘I’m on a real winning streak today.’ He looked out of the corner of his puffy eye to get a better look at the old man, but Eckener had gone. And Tom had come, dressed in his school uniform and cap. His shorts were covered in grass stains and dirt.

‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ Denham said.

‘You know where,’ whispered his son, grinning. His two front teeth were missing and his face had caught the sun, with more freckles on his nose. ‘Look, I’ve made a drawing for you to give to those men. But you mustn’t hold it and smoke at the same time or it might burn.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ whispered Denham, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Wonderful to see you, son.’ He tried to get up on his feet, holding his hand out to Tom for support, but it wasn’t Tom who helped him. ‘Who are you? Where did my son go?’

A man with a stethoscope around his neck was standing in the cell. The coat might have been white once but was covered in stains.

‘Did they find their dossier?’ Denham said vaguely, feeling the room begin to turn.

The man raised a finger to his lips. ‘No speaking allowed with prisoners,’ he said, and began opening a black medic’s bag.

‘No, oh no,’ Denham whispered, recoiling into the corner and beginning to weep. He had a sick dread that the man was reaching for a small saw to amputate his fingers, but instead he took out a bottle of iodine and some cotton swabs and began wiping the worst wounds above and below Denham’s eye, around his lip and on his gashed cheek. Then he tapped a nickel syringe, injected a local anaesthetic, which felt cold, like meltwater, and stitched the wounds. When he was finished he helped Denham take off his bloodied shirt and soiled trousers, and gently touched each rib to see which were broken. Chest and arms were black and blue, yellow and purple, silver and grey. He was nacre that had yielded no pearl.

The pain in his left hand was acute, so the doctor rubbed it with a cool ointment and wrapped it up in a tight clean bandage.

‘Nothing to be done about the cracked ribs. Time will heal them,’ he said, his face without expression, and left the cell, taking the bloodied clothes with him.

Denham lay down and pulled the blanket over him. His teeth no longer fitted together when he closed his jaw, and every limb throbbed. In places the pain was dull and constant; in others it was sharp and intolerable only when he moved, but everywhere there was pain.

Chapter Twenty

W
ithin an hour of leaving Denham’s apartment Eleanor herself entered Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The man at the reception desk looked up in surprise at the American woman in the broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and clothes from a fashion magazine. He scratched his jaw, dialled a number, spoke to someone, and told her she couldn’t see Denham under any circumstances.

Smoking one cigarette after the other, she’d returned home to the Dodds’ residence to ask the ambassador’s advice, the price of which was Martha’s finding out about her involvement with Denham.

‘Best inform the Brits tomorrow,’ Dodd told her in his dry voice. He was brushing his tailcoat, as if it were an act of extreme penance, in preparation for another diplomatic function. ‘They’ll make enquiries, although if your friend’s lost in that system’—he glanced up at her, looking like a long-suffering horse—‘information could be hard to come by.’

‘Couldn’t you ask Sir Eric Phipps to do something?’

‘You could ask him yourself if you’re coming with us to the Chancellery reception tomorrow night, although, my dear, you’re perfectly excused from another night of all those nodding penguins talking bunk . . .’

T
he next morning, hoping she might encounter Roland Liebermann and find out if there had been any repercussions since her visit with Denham yesterday, Eleanor headed to the Reich Sports Field, where Hannah was competing in the fencing finals.