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 removed, Arianne’s tormentors looked ready for work. The man with his foot on the bascule was examining his knuckles, probably inspecting them for damage. His blond hair was almost white and he seemed indifferent to Arianne’s suffering. The other man was smoking a cigarette that stayed in his mouth while he was slapping her.
‘Come on,’ he said, almost kindly, like a father speaking to a child who was lagging behind on a Sunday afternoon walk in the park. ‘That’s it, Arianne. Wakey-wake. Say hello to our important visitors.’
Arianne retched bath water and some vomit that was part blood and then coughed for almost a minute.
‘Come on. Open your eyes.’
She started to shiver, probably from shock as much as the cold, but still she didn’t open her eyes; at least not until her fatherly interrogator sucked at his cigarette for a second, peeled it off his lower lip and then touched her breast with it.
Arianne opened her eyes and screamed.
‘That’s the girl,’ said the man who had burned her.
It was odd how sorry he looked, I thought; almost as if he regretted hurting her; as if he wouldn’t have hurt anyone by choice; right up until the moment he smiled a smile that was as thin as a razor and then burned her breast a second time, for the pleasure of it. I could see that now. He enjoyed giving pain.
Arianne screamed again and started to weep invisible tears.
‘Please, stop this,’ I pleaded.
Heydrich ignored me. He finished reading the transcript of the interrogation and handed the pages back to Bohme.
‘Is this really all that she knows, do you think?’ he asked.
Bohme shrugged. ‘That’s a little hard to say, sir. We’ve only had her for a few hours. At this stage there’s no telling how much she knows about anything.’
So it was true; her arrest had preceded Paul Thummel’s; in which case they couldn’t be connected.
‘Sergeant Soppa, isn’t it?’ Heydrich was looking at the very blond man whose foot was on the water board.
‘Sir.’
‘I believe you are something of an expert in matters like this. It was you who got Balaban to talk, wasn’t it?’
‘Finally. Yes sir.’
‘What is your opinion?’
Sergeant Soppa shifted his feet a little but still managed to keep Arianne’s head aloft. She looked like a human torpedo that, at any moment, he might launch into the water.
‘In my experience they always keep something back to the end, sir,’ he said ruefully. ‘There’s always one important thing that they’ll hold onto until the last. For their own self-respect, you might say. And they figure you’ll miss it because they’ve already told you absolutely everything else. It’s only when they’re begging to tell you something they think you don’t know – anything – that you can be sure you’ve got everything there is to be had out of them. Which means that it’s always best to keep the interrogation going for longer than seems decent.’
Heydrich nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean. So then, I think we shall have to know if she knows something that we don’t yet know.’
Heydrich nodded at Sergeant Soppa, who immediately took a step back so that the bascule carrying Arianne’s naked body tipped forward and hit the water with a splash, head first.
There was a horrible gurgling sound, like a drain trying to clear itself. Arianne was swallowing water. Her hands and feet flailed helplessly under their restraints like the fins of a landed fish. Then Soppa picked up a length of thick rubber cable that was lying on the wet floor and started to beat Arianne hard, the way no living creature, not even a stubborn mule, should ever be beaten. Each blow of the cable snapped loudly on her flesh and sounded like a dangerous electrical short-circuit.