The Swiss Courier: A Novel (11 page)

Kassler exhaled. “When’s Frisch due to report?”

“Six o’clock for dinner, unless we can locate him beforehand.”

“Very well.”

“One more thing, sir,” the fuzzy-cheeked aide said. “It seems that Sergeant Frisch and the night brigade captured one of the Stauffenberg plotters last night. He was caught leaving a sheaf of anti-Hitler handbills at a local hofbrau. Frisch searched his apartment and found a hand-operated duplicating machine hidden in the attic.”

“Where is the prisoner?”

“In the basement, where information is being extracted at this moment. The lead interrogator called. Says he needs to speak with you—in person.”

Kassler reached for his short-brim hat and leather belt, which holstered a 9mm Luger P.08. “You know where to find me if Himmler calls—or if Frisch shows up,” he said grimly to Becker.

Kassler descended three flights of stairs, each landing pumping more adrenaline through his body. He had long ago taught himself to ignore the wide-eyed looks of outright horror and inevitable shrieks of pain from his victims. Detached, emotionally remote—that was the persona he embraced whenever he approached the basement Interrogation Center. Kassler willed himself into a state of calm because he knew enemies of the Reich would slit his throat if given half the chance. Kill or be killed.

Still, there were always a few seconds of mental adjustment whenever he stepped inside the doors of the Interrogation Center, and this afternoon was no different. Kassler greeted the guard posted outside the entrance to the torture room. The guard acknowledged him, turned around, and looked through a peephole, then knocked twice. Sergeant Buchalter, a burly soldier in his early thirties, answered the door with a pair of pliers in his left hand. His blood-splattered gray tunic was half-unbuttoned, displaying a soiled white shirt.

Kassler entered. A single lightbulb illuminated a room that reeked of sweat, blood, and fear. In the far corner, a bony middle-aged man had been stripped to his waist. His arms were wrapped behind a post, and his wrists were bound by rope. Blood streamed from a gash on his left temple, flowing down the side of his face onto his chest. More blood dripped from his left hand. The prisoner’s whole body quivered, as if seizures overtook him. His knees trembled the worst, and he struggled to remain standing.

“I told him if his knees touch the ground, I’ll beat him to a pulp,” Sergeant Buchalter said.

“So why did you call me?”

“Because the prisoner hasn’t been giving me names. All I’ve gotten out of him is something about a church.”

“Have you employed more persuasive techniques?”

Buchalter shrugged. “He screamed after I yanked one of his fingernails out, but didn’t yield. There’s something different about this one. That’s why I called you.”

“His name?”

“Vinzent something.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Kassler knew from experience that interrogation sessions usually didn’t turn out this way. Most men cracked at the mere mention of things getting “rough.” Others sang like catbirds when nail-pulling pliers were produced. Sharp knives loosened tongues as well. Whatever the method, the vast majority of prisoners—under torture—blabbered everything they knew. Only a few were truly committed to keeping silent. Nothing moved them. In those rare cases, however, more stringent measures were required.

“Do you have a copy of the leaflet?”

“Right here.” Buchalter removed a handbill from his shirt pocket and pressed it into Kassler’s hands.

“Appeal to All Germans!” the headline shouted. Kassler read on.

The struggle for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary actions of our police state is happening at this very moment in time. The tide is turning against National Socialist Germany. The Bible says, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord,” and His vengeful sword of retribution will destroy the totalitarian regime that launched a global war and has killed millions and imprisoned millions of others, including God’s Chosen People. Support the resistance movement!

Kassler’s chest constricted, and he felt heat rising to his face. “He’s given you no names?”

“Not yet, Major. He keeps mumbling something about the church of Jesus Christ.”

Kassler balled up the leaflet and tossed it to the floor, sure he could turn this Vinzent character around. He approached the prisoner and grabbed a tuft of hair, jerking his head up. “You know what happens if you don’t give us what we want.” He tightened his grip.

The prisoner labored to speak.

“You want to say something?” Kassler demanded, shouting in the man’s ear. “Don’t you know what will happen to you if you don’t talk?”

The prisoner nodded. “Yes, I know.” It was no more than a whisper.

Kassler leaned forward.

“Victory,” the man mouthed.

Anger coursed through his veins. “Victory?” He slapped the man’s face. “Victory will be ours, not yours!”

Kassler unbuttoned the leather holster containing his Luger pistol and brandished the gun. He inserted the tip into the prisoner’s right nostril and rammed the extended black barrel deep into his sinuses. The man—unable to resist—screamed in pain.

“You have it all wrong!” Kassler roared. “The Third Reich will be victorious in the end!”

“Something . . . different . . . victory . . . in Jesus.” The prisoner groaned in obvious pain. “There is victory . . . in Jesus.”

“No, there isn’t!” Kassler’s heart pounded harder. “Death is the end. It’s over when you die!”

Kassler removed his pistol from the sinus cavity and planted the tip between the man’s eyebrows. The prisoner strained against the ropes, but then—as if taken over by another force— he suddenly calmed.

“I am prepared,” he said. “It is finished.”

“Okay, we’ll do it your way,” Kassler bellowed. “At the count of three—unless you tell me who is helping you—you will find out if your Jesus is waiting.”

“Eins . . .”
Kassler toggled the Luger.

“Knees?” the prisoner begged. “I want to kneel to meet Jesus.”

Kassler relaxed his grip and waved the gun toward the floor. The bound prisoner crumpled to the ground in a heap. Buchalter seized the man’s arm, pulling him to his knees and adding a kick in the man’s side.

Kassler lowered the gun to the prisoner’s forehead. “Where were we?
Ja,
I remember.”

He held the pistol steady.
“Zwei!”

The prisoner raised his head. His eyes looked above Kassler, as if he were fixated on something far beyond the clammy walls.

“You have five seconds to say more than ‘church.’ I want names!”

The prisoner shook his head, but now his piercing eyes locked onto Kassler.

A brave one
, Kassler thought. “
Auf Wiedersehen
, Herr Vinzent.”

The single shot to the forehead dropped the prisoner like a burlap sack of Alsace potatoes.

Kassler returned the pistol to his holster and turned on his heels with a twinge of regret. Not for killing the swine, but because the prisoner died without telling everything he knew.

Joseph Engel heard the heavy footsteps and knew who would be rapping on his office door.

“The door’s open, Hannes.”

“Ach—put the Bible away.” Hannes Jäger sneered. “Or is that silly book more important than reading the papers Heisenberg sent over?”

They’d been through this dance how many times before? Joseph’s roommate had a habit of barging into his office after five o’clock—just as he relaxed by reading the Bible. This often prompted a cagey comment or a pointed question from Jäger, and tonight appeared to be one of those occasions. Joseph had been careful not to read his Bible back at the apartment or get dragged into discussions about religion, but he wasn’t going to hide his light under a bushel, as he had read the previous day in Matthew 5:15.

“Listen, Hannes.” Joseph beckoned his roommate to take a seat in the sparely furnished office. “You study papers by Fermi, Weizäcker, and Hahn, hoping to learn something more about the half-life of natural uranium after it’s been bombarded with neutrons. I scrutinize those papers as well, but sometimes my brain needs a break, so I pick up my Bible. So much that is written here makes sense.”

A stunned silence filled the office. “You must be joking, Engel. There are only superstitions in that book—medieval ones at that.”

Joseph felt his face flush from embarrassment and hoped it didn’t show. “You can blame my father.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “He read the Bible to me every night as a young boy. Father said if I read the Good Book for fifteen minutes a day—plus one chapter of Proverbs—I would become a wise young man.”

“A wise young man,” Jäger repeated in a slightly mocking voice. “You’re a Lutheran, right?”

“That’s correct.” Joseph considered himself a Lutheran— and a conflicted one at that. His parents complained that the Lutheran Church in the 1940s wasn’t the Lutheran Church of their youth. After Hitler came to power, the Führer attempted to establish a German Reich Church, calling on all German Protestants to unite in the hour of national need. Although his effort was rebuffed, many Lutheran pastors—as well as Roman Catholic priests—remained silent or cooperative when Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that excluded Jews from public life, government, culture, and the professions. Nor did they offer a peep of protest after roundups of Jews and other “undesirables” gained momentum following Kristallnacht in 1938.

Joseph recalled sitting in the pews one Sunday morning before the war and hearing the pastor repeat Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic views that Jewish synagogues should be set on fire, prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, Jewish property seized, and homes vandalized—nostrums set forth in his tract,
Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen
—“On the Jews and Their Lies,” published in 1543.

He remembered his father twisting the church bulletin in his hands and threatening to walk out, but his mother shook her head. Father relaxed while inside church walls, but when they walked home afterward, he could barely contain his rage.

“This country is headed for a terrible fall,” his father had declared as they passed apartment buildings in Spandau. “Although Germany is the cultural and intellectual center of Europe, Hitler is persecuting the Jews horribly, and Germany will pay dearly for this mistake.”

“What did you think when the pastor said the Jews are the ‘natural enemies’ of Christian tradition, or that part about secular government having authority over religious institutions?” Joseph asked his father.

His papi’s face turned dark. “That’s when I lost my temper, when he quoted the apostle Paul from Romans 13:1: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.’ I have never heard a man of the cloth twist Scripture in such a way.”

After that, the escalation of anti-Jewish rhetoric and outright persecution of Jews never sat well with Joseph. He’d never forgotten the time when the Rosenberg family of six knocked on their back door, offering to trade two silver forks for a single meal. Within a week, the Rosenbergs were rounded up and shipped east to a “relocation” camp. Everything had been taken by the State: their house, their family car, their furnishings, and their clothes. Joseph shuddered at the thought of losing every possession and being forced at gunpoint to live hundreds of miles from home next to some armament factory.

The only light in the darkness, his father said, was a small band of Lutheran pastors, led by Martin Niemöller, who had formed the “Confessing Church” to oppose the Nazi regime. Their activities were covert, lest they be arrested by the Gestapo like one of the leaders, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Joseph thought his father was involved, but he knew better than to raise the topic with him. It was too dangerous, especially in case the Gestapo asked questions. And now Jäger was inquiring about him being a Lutheran.

Joseph cleared his throat. “I consider myself a follower of Christ, and let me explain why. You know how you believe an isotope of uranium will produce a new element?”

His roommate nodded. “That’s what we’ve been working toward the last year with Doktor Heisenberg.”

“Correct, but so far that is a theory. It’s a good theory and similar to the Bohr-Wheeler hypothesis that an uneven number of particles makes a good fissioner. But these are all theories that you and I are actively working to prove or disprove. Now this Bible”—Joseph patted his right hand on the brown leather cover—“is like a series of papers and proofs, but the same hand has written them all. And they are not theories but rather the thoughts and wisdom of a Power Source far greater than the atom. In fact, he created atoms and neutrons and protons, and he knows everything about them while we know so little.”

His roommate only seemed to be half listening, but Joseph continued anyway. “Think of how far quantum physics has come in the last twenty-five years. Many hundreds if not thousands of brilliant minds have tackled unbelievably complicated equations on blackboards, but to the God of the universe, our knowledge of quantum physics is similar to the thickness of one of these pages in the Bible.”

“That’s nice you feel that way.” Jäger smiled. “But it’s rubbish all the same. I don’t believe there’s a God, and you certainly can’t convince me that there’s one in the midst of this global war. The stories I hear of the brutality, hand-to-hand combat . . . We can end that, you know, by building this bomb. Then the world will know peace.”

The office fell silent once again.

What looked possible on paper—building a wonder weapon—was proving to be far more arduous than originally thought. Heisenberg had told Joseph and the physicists that when Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Arms and Munitions, asked for an update on the bomb’s progress, he downplayed the chances of exploding a Wunderwaffe before 1947, at the earliest.