“Why protect this man?” Shapiro protested. “Damn it, he’s one of them!”
“Soft interrogation works better than hard. Especially with a mere like Lessing.”
Shapiro uttered a dignified snort. “Not with these Nazis! Murderers!”
Sonny asked, “So do you want to do the torturing here?
“Me? Certainly not!” Shapiro bridled. “I am physically offended by violence. Elicitation of information…”
“Torture!”
“Interrogation. That’s your job, Colonel.”
“The one time I met Richmond, he told me a story,” Sonny said, “about some neo-Nazi back in Detroit. Pain didn’t faze him. Richmond’s people finally castrated him and shot him full of female hormones. He lost all his body-hair and grew teats like a cow! They dressed him up in leather and black lace and stuck him in a gay brothel in Vegas. Made him earn his bread and water packing fudge and playing flutes. After a year he started to sing… told Richmond everything he knew. Didn’t help him much; the sonuvabitch was ungrateful enough to die of AIDS.”
Shapiro eyed him wordlessly.
“Come on, Mr. High-buck Liberal Humanitarian! Your squeamishness stinks! You… and my bosses… give the orders, but you don’t see what happens! To you it’s all on paper, all orders and ‘implementation of Project HB, sub-paragraph C!’ It’s people like me who have to do the messy work… and listen to the screams. Those screams don’t stop when I get home at night. I hear them in my dreams.”
“Colonel, I’ll have to report…”
“Go ahead. My superiors know how I feel. They don’t care. Get the job done quickly and efficiently, they say. No crap about ‘human rights’; the people we interrogate aren’t Jews. We use tough methods, you use them, everybody uses them.”
“The security of Israel… of our enterprise…”
Lessing interrupted, “Isn’t that what you accused the Nazis of doing? Drab, faceless bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann? The men who were supposed to have sent trainloads of people off to the ‘gas chambers?’”
They ignored him. Shapiro drew a shaky breath and faced the Israeli eye to eye. “The State of Israel wasn’t built by turning the other cheek. Colonel! We Jews worked for it, we lived for it, and we died for it. In the process we made a lot of our enemies die for it, too. We did these things because otherwise we’d have been annihilated a dozen times over along the way, all through history… in Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Rome, medieval Europe, Russia, and Nazi Germany!”
Lessing tried to say something about “manifest destiny” and the “Chosen People,” but the smaller guard struck him judiciously on the buttocks with his club. It stung.
“You Americans!” Sonny banged a fist upon the peeling cement wall. “So easy to talk of ‘we Jews!’ So simple to advise us about what ought to be done over here, in Israel! I’m glad I’m just a glorified policeman!”
Shapiro’s face was a closed door, unseeing, unhealing. “You’ve been at your job too long, Colonel Elazar. Just get the relevant information out of this prisoner. I don’t need any lectures.”
“Fine. Agreed, damn it. But you’re coming with us. You’re the one with the authorization.”
“I refuse. I don’t have “
“Time? I think you have. For once one of you desk-soldiers is going to see what happens when you give orders!” Sonny snapped his fingers at his guards. The taller one stepped back to escort Mr. Shapiro down the steps.
The corridor at the bottom of the stairs opened into a long hallway lined on both sides with featureless, black-painted doors. Lessing noted cameras and spy-devices: everything that moved in these nether regions was watched. Sonny advanced halfway down the passage and spoke into a grill beside one of the doors.
“Guided tour?” Lessing inquired. “Now you show me the rack, the thumbscrews, the electrodes, the ball-snippers?”
“This is not my choice, Alan! We… I am no sadist.”
“Once a guest talks you put him back together and pay his hotel bill while he recuperates? Free drinks? Meals on the house? Ticket to the opera?”
“You’re not some Arab terrorist, some glittery-eyed ‘freedom fighter.’”
“Would that make torture okay if I were?”
Shapiro snarled at him. “Israel is surrounded by enemies, even after a century of war, after defeating all her foes… even after Pacov! And there is the Holocaust. That must never happen again.”
“Where was a ‘Holocaust’… the way you people say it was.”
“See?” Shapiro shrilled. “See? I told you so! He is a goddamned Nazi!” He looked almost gleeful.
The room beyond the door was perhaps twenty feet square. Its walls were white-painted concrete blocks, its floor a dull, resilient, brown plastic that deadened sound. A uniformed nurse, a squat, dark-haired woman in her fifties, laid down a book and arose from a desk by the door.
In the center of the room, partly hidden behind a welter of machines and consoles, stood a tilted metal table. An intravenous-drip hookup stuck up above this like some kind of futuristic gallows. Lights winked on a display board at the nurse’s station, and an EKG monitor screen splashed hollow, green light across the white-swathed figure upon the table. The air reverberated to a high, barely audible, wheezing susurration.
Lessing looked. He couldn’t help it.
Bare feet protruded at each of the table’s bottom comers. The ankles were wrapped — bound — with stretchy, soft, Ty-Do plastic straps, holding the legs apart in an uncomfortable “Y.” Tubes emerged from a thick diaper over the groin to disappear into an aperture in the table’s shiny surface. A padded belt like a Japanese sumo wrestler’s girdle crossed the prisoner’s stomach. Above this, the man’s black-furred chest had been shaved here and there to allow the attachment of monitoring devices. The victim’s arms, angled wide and bound like his feet, stuck up above the top edge of the table. The hands were shapeless lumps, the fingers kept apart with cotton pads. The head was a muffled globe, a faceless sphere of bandages, tubes, wires, and sensors. Swing lights and chrome-plated machines hung from retractable arms overhead, their cold glitter more fearsome than any medieval instrument of torment
Resistance was useless. These people played the latest games. He might hold out for a while, but sooner or later he’d crack. Anybody would. Then they’d reel him in like a fish. Nobody could withstand modem, sophisticated interrogation.
Lessing struggled for calm. He had already decided to sing like the proverbial bird. He had nothing to hide, no comrades or cause that would suffer if he confessed every sin all the way back to the third grade! He knew nothing of value about the Party of Humankind, Mulder, Liese, or the others. And he’d happily tell Sonny about Marvelous Gap, Pacov, Richmond — whatever he wanted to hear.
He gathered his courage. He’d just have to live through whatever they did to him.
Maybe he could fake it. He hoped they wouldn’t use sexual-sadistic techniques on him. Lessing had always thought of himself as tough, a loner who might not join the high school biker gang but who wasn’t to be messed with either. He could take — he had taken — wounds and pain and hardship. This was different. Castra-tion, impotence, and sexual humiliation were bugaboos for American males — for all males — and Alan Lessing was no exception. Whoever that hapless neo-Nazi in Detroit had been, he had had real courage to hold out against the things they had done to him.
The problem was making his “confession” ring true. Sonny was clever, but Lessing thought he could be convinced. Shapiro, on the other hand, wouldn’t believe him until he had screamed his lungs out for an hour or two first. Lessing discovered that he didn’t mind pretending to fear — to fake raw cowardice, if necessary — before Sonny, the guards, or even the woman; he’d still be able to live with himself. But he did not want to grovel in front of Shapiro like some poor Arab kid caught chucking rocks at an Izzie patrol.