The flight was called at eleven-fifteen. I walked out to the plane with four other passengers. As we queued up to enter the aircraft my heart was in my mouth. An attendant was checking the names of the passengers. Beside him stood a man in a grey trilby. I was certain he was from the S.N.B. At last my turn came. ‘Name, please?’
‘Farrell.’ My mouth felt dry. The man in the grey trilby looked at me with cold, hostile eyes. The attendant made a tick against my name. I hesitated. The man in the trilby made no move. My leg seemed more awkward than usual as I negotiated the three steps of the ladder. I found a seat well up towards the front of the fuselage and slumped into it. I was sweating and I wiped my face and my hands with my handkerchief.
I got my paper out then and pretended to read. The crew came in and went through to the cockpit. The connecting door slid to. I sat there waiting. I could feel the draught from the open door of the fuselage blowing on my back. Would they never close it? The suspense was frightful. To get so far…. The devil of it was that I knew this was just the sort of cat-and-mouse game they loved. It was all part of the softening-up process.
The port engine turned over and started into life. Then the starboard engine. The door to the cockpit slid back and one of the crew looked in and ordered us to fix our safety belts. Now was the moment they’d come for me. I heard a sudden movement by the entrance door. I couldn’t control myself any longer. I swung round in my seat. To my amazement the steps had been taken away. The door shut with a clang and was closed on the inside. The engines roared and we began to taxi out to the runway.
The feeling of relief that flooded through me was like the sudden plunge into unconsciousness. There was a pleasurable chill feeling along my spine and the back of my eyes were moist. I don’t remember taking off. I felt too dazed. I only know that the roar of the engines changed suddenly to a steady purr and the seat was pressed hard against the base of my spine. Automatically I fumbled at the locking device of my safety belt, only to find that I’d never fastened it. Through the window at my side all Pilsen was spread out below me, tilted at an angle as we banked. I could see the onion-shaped dome of the water tower of Pilsen Brewery and the miles of sidings alongside the big factories. Through belching smoke I caught a glimpse of the Tucek Steel works. Then Pilsen vanished beneath the plane as we straightened on to our course.
My sense of relief was short-lived. There was still Prague and Vienna. At each of these stops they could arrest me. But nobody disturbed me or even asked for my papers, and 25 we rose into the clear sunlight over Vienna with the snowcapped gleam of the Alps ahead I lay back in my seat, relaxed for the first time in two days. I was the right side of the Iron Curtain. They couldn’t touch me now. I slept then and didn’t wake until we were in Italy.
The plane skirted the foothills of the Dolomites and then we were on the edge of the Po Valley headed west towards Milan. I began to think of what lay ahead, of my meeting with Reece. It was odd that it should be at Milan, so close to Lake Como. It was there, at the Villa d’Este, that I had last seen him.
It had been in April, 1945, that he and Shirer had escaped. And it was that little swine of a doctor who was so like Shirer who’d fixed it for them. He’d helped them to escape and then he’d blown his brains out.
The mere thought of him brought the sweat prickling out on my forehead. Giovanni Sansevino — il dottore, they’d called him. I could hear the orderly’s voice saying, ‘Il dottore is coming to see you this morning, Signer Capitano.’ How often had I heard that, and always with a sly relish? The orderly — the one with the wart on his nose who was called Luigi — he’d liked pain. ‘Il dottore is coming to see you.’ He’d stay in the ward after that, watching me out of his unnaturally pale eyes, watching me as I lay sweating, wondering whether it was to be one of the doctor’s little social visits as he called them or another operation.
Starting out through the window of the plane to the serrated edge of the Alps, it wasn’t my reflected face that I saw in the perspex, but the doctor’s face. I could remember it so clearly. It didn’t seem possible that he’d been dead over five years. It wasn’t an unpleasant face at all. Except for the moustache, it might have been Shirer’s face, and I’d liked Shirer. It was a round, rather chubby face, very blue about the jowls with a broad forehead and an olive complexion below the black sheen of his hair. Only the eyes weren’t right somehow. They were too close together, too small. He hid them behind dark glasses. But when he was operating he abandoned the glasses and I could remember staring up into those small, dark pupils and seeing the strange, sadistic excitement that stirred in them as his hands touched my skin, caressing with beastly enjoyment the flesh he was going to cut away. His breath would come then in quick, sharp pants as though he were caressing a woman and his tongue would flick over his lips.
Sitting there in the plane I felt my muscles contracting as I relived the touch of those hands. It wasn’t difficult for me to recall the feel of them. My trouble had been to forget. Too often I’d wakened in the night screaming, with all my body tense, forcing myself to realise that my left leg was no longer there, that it had gone in shreds down the drains of the Villa d’Este, and that the touch of those hands, which I could still feel even on waking, was just a trick of nerve threads that had been severed long ago.
It is extraordinary how nerves can recall touch in such detail. The slow, stroking movement of the tips of his long, sensitive fingers was indelibly fixed on the nerve record of my brain. The man had been a fine surgeon and his fingers had been clever and strong. Yet somehow in their touch they had managed to convey a subtle enjoyment of pain. He must have done hundreds of operations, and all the time I felt he had been patiently waiting for the moment when I should be delivered to him and he could demonstrate his skill to the patient by operating without an anaesthetic.
And always as his fingers stroked my flesh he had said, ‘You think I enjoy operating on you without an anaesthetic, don’t you, Signor Farrell? But I am a surgeon. I like to do a good job. This is not necessary, you know. Why not be sensible? Why not tell the Gestapo what they wish to know, eh?’ It had been a formula run off like a magician’s stage patter. He hadn’t wanted me to talk. He’d wanted me to remain silent, so that he could operate. I could tell that by die way his breath came in his gathering excitement and by the narrowing of the black pupils of his eyes. Soon it had been only the remains of a leg that he had stroked so gently, so caressingly. Then there had come a day when he had said, ‘There is not much left of this leg. Soon we must begin an the other one, eh?’ His gentle, sibilant voice was there in the drone of the engines and I could feel the whole of my lost leg as though it was still flesh and blood and not a tin dummy.
I put a stop to my imagination, wiping the sweat from my forehead and dragging myself back to the present by leaning forward and gazing out of the window. Padua was below and beyond the starboard wing the white teeth of the Dolomites fanged a dark cloudscape. But staring at the.Alps didn’t blot the thought of Reece from my mind. He was there in the past, as he’d always been. And now he was ahead of me, too. When I reached Milan I’d got to face him, give him Maxwell’s message — and somehow I didn’t feel I had the courage to face him. They’d brought him to the Villa d’Este with a bullet in the lung only a few hours after that last operation. They’d put him in the next bed to mine and let him find out gradually how he’d come to be picked up.
Shirer they had picked up about the same time. But he went to a P.O.W. camp. He was brought to the Villa d’Este early in 1945 after a course of poison gas treatment. It was a burning gas and they’d used him as a guinea pig, partly to make him talk, partly as an experiment. They put him in the bed on the other side of me and il dottore was put to work on him. There in the plane I could still hear his screams. I think they were worse than my own remembered screams. And all the time, through the barred window, we looked out on to the blue of Lago di Como, with the white villas opposite and the Swiss frontier only a few kilometres away.