The darkness and a sudden heavy shower of rain had deterred the usual lovers and happy wanderers and it seemed we had the place to ourselves. We stepped out of the car and I looked around. For a moment my eyes caught some awful sculptures of deer that looked more like camels and I wondered how it was that the Swiss had permitted such an important beauty spot to have these ugly ornaments. Whatever Schellenberg said about the Swiss, they were still capable of the most appalling lapses of taste.
At gunpoint, the two Gestapo men forced me to climb up the tower. I didn’t think it was to appreciate the spectacular night views of the city or the red rooftops of the hotel itself. I’ve never much liked heights and this one was already beginning to bore me.
“This is nice,” I said. “I needed some air.”
“There’s plenty of that up here,” said Nölle. “All the air anyone could want.”
“I assume we’re not here to enjoy the view,” I said when we had reached the top of the tower.
“You’re right,” said Nölle, and he produced the flask of rakija he’d found in my car. “This is journey’s end for you, Gunther, so drink up, there’s a good fellow.”
Reluctantly I took a swig. With a gun shoved in my face I could hardly do otherwise. The rakija tasted like liquid lava and was probably every bit as inflammable.
“You’re not drinking?” I asked.
“Not this time. Which is good because there’ll be more for you. I want you to drink all of it. All of it, you understand?”
Reluctantly I took another swig. “I get it. I’m going to get drunk and have an accident. Is that it? The way some communists used to fall in the Landwehr Canal and drown. With a little help from the Gestapo.”
“Something like that,” said Nölle. “As a matter of fact, this is a popular place for suicides. The Swiss have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Did you know that? Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that assisted suicide has been legal in this country since 1941.”
“Fascinating.”
“So what we’re doing, you might almost say it’s legal,” he said. “Helping you to commit suicide. You see, the local police will like it a whole lot better if you jump instead of them finding you with a bullet in your head. That is, when they eventually find you. Drink up. That’s it. You can take my word for it, the trees are rather thick down there. We’ll write you a nice suicide note when we get back to the house and leave it in your hotel room tomorrow.”
“That’s a nice touch. The lonely German abroad. Away from home, he gets depressed and starts drinking heavily. Maybe he had something to do with the deaths of those Americans. That would tie a nice bow on everything.”
“To understand all is to forgive all,” said Nölle.
“Drink up,” said Edouard. “You’re not drinking. You know, you’ll feel a whole lot better about this with a few drinks inside of you. I know I will.”
He was holding the bottle to my lips and tipped some more in my mouth. I gulped at the fiery liquid and retched over the railing a little. But already I was starting to feel a little drunk. I sank onto my knees, cowering in the corner against the railing. The Mauser was pressed right under my ear. I knew if I finished the bottle I would die anyway, that they wouldn’t have to push me off the tower to kill me.
“Don’t throw up,” said Nölle. “That will spoil everything.”
A faint breath of wind stirred the hair on my head but that was nothing beside the effect that the height was having on the sinews of my heart. I glanced over the railings. Through the glass rooftop of the hotel’s brightly lit winter garden I could see people enjoying drinks and cigarettes and reading newspapers with not the least clue of what was about to befall me.
“Listen,” I spluttered, “if you’re going to kill me, for Christ’s sake give me a nail. At least let me have a last smoke with my drink. I never much liked one without the other.”
“Sure. We’ll all have a cigarette. And then you can finish your drink. Before you take wing, so to speak.”
I stood up, fumbled a cigarette into my mouth with trembling hands, lit it, handed them the pack, and then took as large a mouthful of that filthy rakija as I could manage, only this time I didn’t swallow it. Neither of the two Gestapo men was looking at me. I waited just long enough for them to get a cigarette in their mouths and then dip them to the lighter now springing into life in Nölle’s hands. And then I spat the whole mouthful of rakija at the steady flame between their two bowed heads.
Even I was surprised at what happened next. I’d heard horror stories of what happened when a Flammenwerfer went in to clear a trench on the Western Front — horror stories of human torches and burning Frenchmen — but I’m pleased to say I’d never seen it myself. It wasn’t a weapon that I could ever have used with a clear conscience. It’s one thing putting a rifle bullet in a man’s head, or even a bayonet through his gut, but it’s something else to set him on fire. As soon as the rakija — which Geiger had said was more than eighty-proof alcohol — hit the flame from Edouard’s lighter, it ignited the hands, shoulders, jackets, faces, heads, and hair of both men; in fact, it set fire to anything that the rakija from my drunken mouth had landed on, including the railing. A ruthless Flammenwerfer couldn’t have done a better job. A strong smell of singed human hair and burning flesh filled the bright and fiery air alongside their screams. Edouard plucked at his burning hair and a piece of it came away in his burning hand. Nölle twisted one way and then the other in hideous slow motion like a living Roman candle. The next second the alcohol had burned off and the flames were gone. For a moment they stopped screaming. At the very least, I’d blinded them.
I hardly hesitated. I reached down, grabbed Nölle around the ankles, lifted him up and then tipped him over the railing like the trash from a ship at sea. Edouard guessed what had happened and lashed blindly out in front of him. I caught his wrist, twisted his arm hard around his back, bent him over the railing, and tried to get a hand under his knee. But like a stubborn mule, he splayed his feet and stayed put until I punched hard at his balls several times and then felt him relax a little. He puked some, I think, and then I lifted him off his feet.
“No, don’t, please,” he yelled, but it was too late. The next second he fell through the air, screaming like an injured fox, and it was only when he vanished through the treetops and hit the ground that the silence of the mountaintop was restored.
Horrified at what I had done and yet relieved still to be alive, I sat down and took another swig of the rakija. Then I threw up.
Thirty-three
Trembling violently as if I’d just touched a live electrical wire, I drove back down the mountain in the Citroën to the safe house in Ringlikon. The night was not yet over. A truckload of milk churns was parked on the edge of the field. The lights were on in the safe house and a man — the dairy farmer, I presumed — was moving between the kitchen and the farmyard. He was a tall, powerful man wearing a black, short-sleeved jacket with red piping, a white shirt, and black leather trousers. It was probably all the fashion in Zurich. I didn’t want to harm him — I’d had enough violence for one evening — but I wanted my passport and my wallet and my car back more, and I couldn’t see how I was going to get them unless I had a gun in my hand. So I sat in the Citroën for several minutes trying to compose myself and wondering if I could bluff him, but I wasn’t able to think of anything that stood even half a chance. You didn’t run a safe house for the Gestapo without being just a bit hard to fool, not to say treacherous. Nölle had described him as a die-hard Nazi and as someone who would have fed me to his pigs. Even though I hadn’t actually seen any pigs, that certainly sealed his fate as far as I was concerned. I didn’t think this man was going to let me go on my sweet way without a fight. At first I thought to sneak up behind him and hit him with something. But then a low bellow ripped through the Swiss night air and I asked myself if I could enlist the help of the bull in the shed. I knew nothing at all about bulls except that they were often dangerous. Especially when there was a big sign above a doorway into the yard inviting you to beware of one. There ought to have been a sign above my head, as well. Fed up with the way the day had turned out and deprived of a pleasant afternoon with a female of my own species, I was feeling kind of pissed off and dangerous myself.