After an inconclusive half-hour, the door opened and Globus appeared, swinging a long truncheon of polished wood. Behind him stood two thick-set men in black uniforms.
Krebs leapt to attention.
Globus said: “Has he made a full confession?”
“No, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer.”
“What a surprise. My turn then, I think.”
“Of course/ Krebs stooped and collected his papers.
Was it March’s imagination, or did he see on that long, impassive face a flicker of regret, even of distaste?
After Krebs had gone, Globus prowled around, humming an old Party marching song, dragging the length of wood over the stone floor.
“Do you know what this is, March?” He waited. “No? No answer? It’s an American invention. A baseball bat. A pal of mine at the Washington Embassy brought it back for me.” He swung it around his head a couple of times. “I’m thinking of raising an SS team. We could play the US Army. What do you think? Goebbels is keen. He thinks the American masses would respond well to the pictures.”
He leant the bat against the heavy wooden table and began unbuttoning his tunic.
“If you want my opinion, the original mistake was in “thirty-six, when Himmler said every Kripo flat-foot in the Reich had to wear SS uniform. That’s when we were landed with scum like you, and shrivelled-up old cunts like Artur Nebe.”
He handed his jacket to one of the two guards and began rolling up his sleeves. Suddenly he was shouting.
“My God, we used to know how to deal with people like you. But we’ve gone soft. It’s not ‘Has he got guts?’ any more, it’s ‘Has he got a doctorate?’ We didn’t need doctorates in the East, in “forty-one, when there was fifty degrees of frost and your piss froze in mid-air. You should have heard Krebs, March. You’d’ve loved it. Fuck it, I think he’s one of your lot.” He adopted a mincing voice. “ ‘With permission, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer, I would like to question the suspect first. I feel he may respond to a more subtle approach.’ Subtle, my arse. What’s the point of you? If you were my dog, I’d feed you poison.”
“If I were your dog, I’d eat it.”
Globus grinned at one of the guards. “Listen to the big man!” He spat on his hands and picked up the baseball bat. He turned to March. “I’ve been looking at your file. I see you’re a great one for writing. Forever taking notes, compiling lists. Quite the frustrated author. Tell me: are you left-handed or right-handed?”
“Left-handed.”
“Another lie. Put your right arm on the table.”
March felt as if iron bands had been fastened around his chest. He could barely breathe. “Go screw yourself.”
Globus glanced at the guards and powerful hands seized March from behind. The chair toppled and he was being bent head first over the table. One of the SS men twisted his left arm high up his back, wrenched it, and March was roaring with the pain of that as the other man grabbed his free hand. The man half-climbed on to the table and planted his knee just below March’s right elbow, pinning his forearm, palm down, to the wooden planks.
In seconds, everything was locked in place except his fingers, which were just able to flutter slightly, like a trapped bird.
Globus stood a metre from the table, brushing the tip of the bat lightly across March’s knuckles. Then he lifted it, swung it in a great arc, like an axe, through three hundred degrees, and with all his force brought it smashing down.
He did not faint, not at first. The guards let him go and he slid to his knees, a thread of spit dribbling from the corner of his mouth, leaving a snail’s trail across the table. His arm was still stretched out. He stayed like that for a while, until he raised his head and saw the remains of his hand — some alien pile of blood and gristle on a butcher’s slab — and then he fainted.
Footsteps in the darkness. Voices. “Where is the woman?” Kick.
“What was the information?” Kick.
“What did you steal?” Kick. Kick.
A jackboot stamped on his fingers, twisted, ground them into the stone.
When he came to again he was lying in the corner, his broken hand resting on the floor next to him, like a stillborn baby left beside its mother. A man — Krebs perhaps -was squatting in front of him, saying something. He tried to focus.
“What is this?” Krebs’s mouth was saying. “What does it mean?”
The Gestapo man was breathless, as if he had been running up and down stairs. With one hand he grasped March’s chin, twisting his face to the light. In the other he held a sheaf of papers.
“What does it mean, March? They were hidden in the front of your car. Taped underneath the dashboard. What does it mean?”
March pulled his head away and turned his face to the darkening wall.
Tap, tap, tap. In his dreams. Tap, tap, tap.
Some time later — he could not be more accurate than that, for time was beyond measurement, now speeding, now slowing to an infinitesimal crawl — a white jacket appeared above him. A flash of steel. A thin blade poised vertically before his eyes. March tried to back away but fingers locked around his wrist, the needle was jabbed into a vein. At first, when his hand was touched, he howled, but then he felt the fluid spreading through his veins and the agony subsided.
The torture doctor was old and hunch-backed and it seemed to March, who brimmed with gratitude towards him, that he must have lived in the basement for many years. The grime had settled in his pores, the darkness hung in pouches beneath his eyes. He did not speak. He cleaned the wound, painted it with a clear liquid that smelled of hospitals and morgues, and bound it tightly in a white crepe bandage. Then, still without speaking, he and Krebs helped March to his feet. They put him back in his chair. An enamel mug of sweet, milky coffee was set on the table before him. A cigarette was slipped into his good hand.
FOUR
In his mind March had built a wall. Behind it he placed Charlie in her speeding car. It was a high — wall, made of everything his imagination could collect — boulders, concrete blocks, burnt-out iron bedsteads, overturned tramcars, suitcases, prams — and it stretched in either direction across the sunlit German countryside like a postcard of the Great Wall of China. In front of it, he patrolled the ground. He would not let them beyond the wall. Everything else, they could have.
Krebs was reading March’s notes. He sat with both elbows on the table, his chin resting on his knuckles. Occasionally he removed a hand to turn a page, replaced it, went on reading. March watched him. After his coffee and his cigarette and with the pain dulled he felt almost euphoric.
Krebs finished and momentarily closed his eyes. His complexion was white, as always. Then he straightened the pages and laid them in front of him, alongside March’s notebook and Buhler’s diary. He adjusted them by millimetres, into a line of parade-ground precision. Perhaps it was the effect of the drug, but suddenly March was seeing everything so clearly — how the ink on the cheap fibre pages had spread slightly, each letter sprouting minute hairs; how badly Krebs had shaved: that clump of black stubble in the fold of skin below his nose. In the silence he actually believed he could hear the dust falling, pattering across the table.
“Have you killed me, March?”
“Killed you?”
“With these.” Krebs’s hand hovered a centimetre above the notes.
“It depends who knows you have them.”