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Papworth was bigger and stronger than him.

And Mengele was a psychopath.

He had been in better situations, put it that way.

“If this is your idea of a joke, Herbert,” Mary hissed, “it’s entirely tasteless.”

“Right,” Mengele said. “Give me the cane, and we’ll be done with this.”

“The cane is back in the first ward we went to. I’ll go and get it.”

Mengele smiled, as though Herbert was entering into the spirit of a game.

“And raise the alarm? You must consider me very stupid.”

Mengele looked around the room and, with a visible frisson of delight, he saw a trolley in the corner.

A hospital trolley, littered with various surgical paraphernalia; the kind of thing that should have been kept in the doctors’ quarters, but which during busy periods was liable to be left in odd places at odd times.

He went over to it and rummaged around.

A white coat was hanging from the side. He donned it, flicking at the collar to straighten it, looking for all the world as though it had been tailored for him alone.

Mengele, the
Malach Hamavet
, Angel of Death, assuming once more the form of a brilliant physician in order to continue cutting his endless swath of destruction.

He turned from the trolley.

“You have heard of the Inquisition?” he said. “Inquisitors used three degrees of interrogation. The First Degree was questioning the prisoner. So, I ask you again: where is the information?”

“And I tell you again: I don’t have it.”

Mengele sighed; the sigh of a disappointed schoolmaster faced with a habitual miscreant.

“The Second Degree,” he said, “is showing the instruments of torture.”

He picked up a surgical saw, went over to Hannah, grabbed one of her wrists, and laid the serrated edge of the saw against it. She did not respond.

“A conundrum,” Mengele announced. “How do you put out the eyes of a blind person? By cutting off their hands, that’s how. What would you do with a pair of stumps, my dear? How would you read? How would you hold your cane? How would you find your way around a room?” A scalpel appeared in Mengele’s palm, as though he were a magician. “Or perhaps I slice off your fingers, one by one? Ten amputations are much more challenging than two, no?”

“Why won’t you
listen?”
Herbert said.

Mengele looked at Herbert as if he could not have been less interested, and continued. “Perhaps the application of water torture would be effective. You know how the Inquisition did this, Mr. Smith? They tied the prisoner upside down to a ladder, forced his mouth open with an iron prong, and pushed a strip of linen down his
throat. Water was then dripped on the linen until the prisoner, desperate to avoid being strangled, swallowed the strip. Then the torturers gradually withdrew the strip, covered in blood and mucus; and the whole process began again. The amount of water was carefully measured, of course, or else the prisoner might suffocate. Eight quarts at a time, no more.”

It was nastiness for nastiness’ sake, Herbert saw, for there was no way that Mengele could possibly put all that into practice, not here and not now; and that made Herbert even angrier.

“Come
on,”
Papworth said, hurrying Mengele forward again.

Herbert knew what face Mengele would show America. He would have embraced Uncle Sam’s way of life with apparent eagerness: church every Sunday, popping down the coast to Mexico once in a while, picnics with his Caltech colleagues.

Herbert knew, too, that it was all a sham, because Mengele hated it; hated the carefree lack of discipline in prosperous, democratic America, where everyone was equal and everything allowed; hated the lack of spine in the new Germany; hated the way the authorities read his mail and dangled the carrot of American citizenship forever out of reach; hated the way the world had exulted at seeing the Third Reich brought to its knees; hated, hated, hated, because hate was the only thing that dried his tears.

Mengele looked again at Hannah. Herbert tensed, too obviously, for suddenly Papworth stepped forward, away from the door, and twisted Herbert’s right arm up between his shoulder blades, ripping splinters of pain through his ligaments.

Clearly, Herbert thought, Papworth did
not
consider Mengele beyond the pale; or else he felt himself so near his prize that he no longer cared.

Hannah looked wildly around, as sensitive to atmospheric changes as a barometer, but it was Mary who spoke.

“This is a land,” she said disbelievingly to Mengele, “of Goethe and Beethoven, Bach and Kant… and you?”

Mengele half-smiled, as though he had, intentionally or otherwise, misunderstood her tone and chosen to take it as a compliment, equating his genius with that of those great men. Then, with deliberation in every pace, he moved across to Mary’s bed and took from his pocket a large strip of cotton, which he rolled into a ball.

“The Third Degree is the torture itself.” He turned to her. “Open your mouth.”

“Whatever for?” she asked.

He hit her in the stomach, a punch that a fit young man might have shrugged off but which was more than enough for an old woman.

What little bronchitic breath Mary had whistled from her lungs. Her head came forward with her mouth wide open, as if trying to catch the escaped air, and Mengele jammed the cotton into her mouth and grabbed both her hands in one of his to stop her from removing it.

It was not Hannah he was going to torture; it was Mary.

She was older and weaker, and the very fact that she was here in the first place laid bare her most basic weakness: the fact that she could hardly breathe.

A good torturer knew his techniques as a mechanic knew his tools. Mengele could clearly judge suffering
as an engineer gauged the stresses and strains on a bridge.

He knew, too, that she was Herbert’s mother, and that all else paled before that.

Mary looked at Herbert, her eyes widening in fear.

To try and get air flowing freely through her nostrils, she snorted twice; a measure of her concern, as making such unladylike sounds would usually have mortified her.

Mengele leaned in close to Mary, the better to hear how labored her breathing was. Her eyes swiveled toward him and then back to Herbert.

Herbert saw her cheeks start to redden.

She knew, and Herbert knew, and Mengele knew, that it was a vicious circle. The less air she got, the more anxious she would become, and the more anxious she became, the less air she would get.

“Don’t even think about yelling for help, Mr. Smith. Papworth would cause you a lot of pain, and it wouldn’t do you any good anyway. People cry out all the time in hospitals, and no one pays them the slightest bit of attention.”

Mary oinked again, and a glob of mucus appeared above her upper lip. The folds of her nightdress shifted slightly as trapped air began to push her lungs outward.

She tried to cough, and gagged on the cotton, making bile flow from her nose and tears spring to her eyes.

Mengele reached into the pocket of his doctor’s coat and brought out a small cotton plug, which he held up to Herbert as if for his approval. Then, with quick precision, he wedged it in Mary’s left nostril.

“For God’s sake,” Herbert shouted, “don’t you think I’d have told you by now?
Why won’t you believe me?”

Even in Herbert’s desperation, he could see that the question was rhetorical. Mengele did not believe him because those who deceived for a living never did, and because this was too important for Mengele to take the slightest chance with.

His power at Auschwitz had been transient and limited, but this, the Holy Grail of science, would assure him immortality, a temptation surely irresistible to a man of such vaulting ambition. He must have chafed at working under a genius like Pauling.

This would be his vindication; this the one that put his name in the encyclopedia.

Josef Mengele, Herbert thought; the one man who had passed through the gate at Auschwitz above which was written
Arbeit Macht Frei
—“Work Makes You Free”—and believed the legend.

Mary’s shoulders were now hunched with the effort of breathing.

The sinews in her neck stood out like steel hawsers, tracing tight lines beneath her skin, and between these ridges the soft tissue was sucked into deep hollows.

Herbert imagined spots of black behind her eyes, an invisible iron clamp around her chest, and the final, coruscating blame, that he, her son, was somehow responsible for all this.

Mengele brought out a second, identical cotton plug, looked at Herbert, saw nothing that would convince him otherwise, and inserted it into Mary’s other nostril.

Herbert squeezed his eyes on tears of angry humiliation.

“All right,” Papworth said suddenly. “He’s telling the truth.”

Mengele looked at Papworth, ostensibly for confirmation that he could stop.

But Herbert, ever the Watcher, saw behind the look, and he knew what it had really been: disappointment. That was it; disappointment that Papworth had denied Mengele the chance to inflict more torture.

It had not been—at least, it had not solely been—about finding out where the cane was. Mengele had done it because he could, because he wanted to, because he enjoyed it.

Herbert clamped his teeth together so hard he was sure he would shatter them.

With the physician’s swift, clinical hands, Mengele took strips of surgical plaster. He cuffed Mary’s wrists to the bedhead and Hannah’s to the chair, gagged both women, and grabbed a stethoscope from the trolley, presumably to afford his disguise extra verisimilitude.

Ironic, Herbert thought, that it was the Jews who had the definitive word for that kind of behavior:
chutzpah.

Papworth opened the door, and the three of them walked back into the corridor.

Mengele shut the door behind him. There was no way of locking it from the outside, but that would, Herbert surmised, prove immaterial. By the time the ruse was discovered, Papworth and Mengele would be long gone.

They made it back to Hannah’s ward without incident.

The cane was there, on the floor by the side of the bed as Hannah had said.

Herbert picked it up and handed it to Papworth, who ushered them out of the room again before
unscrewing the top of the cane and tipping the contents into his hand.

“That’s it?” he said in astonishment.

Mengele took it from him and examined it.

“Microdots, there and there.” Herbert pointed to the legend
Ho. of Parlt.

“You’re kidding me,” Papworth said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Prove it.”

“One of them is some sort of X-ray photograph. The other’s a code which describes what the photograph represents.”

“And the code is?”

“Doctor!”

It was Angela, coming down the corridor.

“We’ve got twenty more patients just come in who really need…”

She stopped, peering at Mengele; trying to equate, Herbert saw, the white coat with the man she had seen in Mary’s ward, when Herbert and his two unwanted minders had first come looking for his mother.

“You’re not a doctor,” Angela said.

There was the briefest hiatus while Mengele tried to think of a response.

Then Papworth had his knife out again, and before anybody could react, he had carved a long curving line fast down Herbert’s cheek.

It had been done more to distract than to wound, Herbert realized, even as he clamped his hand to his face and felt blood gush from between his fingers.

Angela’s first priority, excellent nurse that she was, was to try and hurry Herbert to a tap, in order to wash
the gash out and try to stem the bleeding; but Herbert knew there was no time, and he pulled away from her.

“My mother. And Hannah—the girl with her. In her room. They need help.”

Faces bled easily, Herbert knew, but this was merely a flesh wound; he must have been jerking his head away even as Papworth had slashed.

It had been the shortest of delays, but it was still enough. By the time Herbert looked up, Mengele and Papworth were long gone.

Herbert ran down the stairs, pausing on every floor to look for Papworth and Mengele, in case they had switched escape routes; but they were nowhere to be seen.

He reached the main entrance, his heart sinking. If they’d made it back to their car, they could be miles away by now … And then he stopped.

The car was still there, parked where Papworth had left it.

Herbert looked up at the sky.

It might have been his imagination, but he fancied that the fog was beginning to close in again. Still, it would be possible to drive in. So why had they abandoned the car?

And without a car, where could they have gone?

To the train station, obviously.

Herbert went up through the back streets and into London Bridge station.

The concourse was almost deserted. The air in the station was clear enough, and Herbert’s vision keen enough, for him to make out faces, and neither Papworth nor Mengele were among the few people standing there. If not the railway, then where?

The river.

He ran through the concourse, out the other side of the station, and onto London Bridge itself, the downstream side, looking down the south bank of the Thames toward Tower Bridge.

Herbert saw a workmen’s café, less than a hundred yards down; and two familiar faces in the window.

Not Papworth and Mengele; Pauling and Kazantsev.

Pauling was talking to Kazantsev, who was jotting things down in a notebook on the table. It looked as though Kazantsev had got his interview at last.

Except Kazantsev was no journalist; not primarily, at any rate.

Did Pauling know that Papworth was a Soviet agent? Was he aware of Mengele’s true identity?

The first was possible, Herbert thought; the second unlikely.

Two men walked past the entrance to the café. Papworth and Mengele.

Tyce’s men would surely have been at Leconfield House by now, Herbert thought. What would they do, when they couldn’t find him there?

Where was the nearest police kiosk? Or even a public phone box, come to think of it? He needed reinforcements.