“I think he had help. Somebody here found him, they fixed him up, and . . .” The boy shrugged.
“When was this?”
“About twenty-five years ago. He met my mother, they married, and so on.”
“How’s he doing now?”
“Oh, he’s been dead ten years now. One day he just walked off into the woods and shot himself.”
“Shot himself,” Peter repeated as he struggled to massage away his pain.
“Yeah, guess he had had enough.”
“Shot himself,” Peter whispered despondently.
“He was a coward,” the boy asserted as he ground out his cigarette on the rough wood of the log.
50
THE BOY LEFT HIM AT THE EDGE of a road a safe distance from his destination, and Peter made his way on foot, alone and deliberately obvious. As he approached the camp, a sentry challenged him and asked the password.
“Haven’t a clue,” Peter answered. “I was due here yesterday but some idiot shot my motorcycle out from under me. Banged up my legs. Had to hobble here on foot. I’m tired, I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I want to see your commanding officer now!”
It worked better than he had expected, and he was courteously led to the subcommander’s tent.
“Where’s the commander?” Peter demanded.
“Sleeping, sir.”
“Well, get him up!”
“It’s four in the morning, sir!”
“I’m well aware of that!” Peter snapped. “I spent half the night trudging here. Your roads are inadequately patrolled, no one was sent out to find me, and I haven’t slept, so I don’t expect your commander will want to sleep either!”
His Berlin charm continued to work like magic, and the commander was roused and greeted him sleepily only fifteen minutes later. Peter upbraided him for sloppy security and for not sending out a search team for him.
“But you should have been seen, we checked that road earlier,” the commander argued, his breath still heavy with alcohol.
“Obviously you didn’t do a very good job. Here!” Peter slammed down the documents he was carrying. “You need these.”
The commander sighed, scratched his head, and groaning, opened the packet. “Get Schweig,” he told one of his men, then explained to Peter, “This is his department.”
Peter and the man called Schweig seated themselves at a side table in the tent and consulted over the contents of the packet while the commander drank coffee and feigned activity at his desk. The sky lightened, the sun rose behind heavy clouds, and slowly the camp came to life.
Being an attachó rather than a courier had made it easier for Peter to bully his way into the camp, but it did leave him with the obvious problem of how he could discreetly leave. It would serve no purpose to stay past the time when the altered plans would be used—and that was scheduled for noon—nor would his cover last much beyond that time; nevertheless, they expected he would stay some days, and he was not sure how to get around that problem. He was just deciding to delay thinking about the logistics of leaving in order to solve the more immediate one of his hunger when he heard a familiar voice talking to thecommander. While continuing his dialogue with Schweig, he listened to the urbane speaker to try to place him.
“What about it?” Schweig asked, indicating a point on a map where Peter’s finger rested.
“Huh?”
“What about it?”
Peter fell silent again. That voice! Where in the world? “Do you think you could find some coffee for us?” Peter asked Schweig suddenly.
“Sure,” Schweig answered agreeably, and left.
Peter remained hunched over the maps, his back to the speaker. The voice sent shudders through him. He listened to the words and realized they were talking about some prisoners.
“We’ve waited long enough! They must be interrogated,” the voice demanded.
“We’ve already questioned them,” the commander insisted wearily.
“You’ve got nothing out of them,” the voice sneered. “Now it’s my turn.”
The commander sighed and Peter imagined he was scratching his head again. “Look, I know they sent you out here just for this sort of thing, but I don’t really want that in my camp. I’m not all that comfortable—”
“Your level of comfort is not the point,” the other interrupted in his well-bred and highly educated voice.
A chill of terror ran down Peter’s spine. Shocks and burns and beatings. Drug-induced illness, hallucinations, mind games. Humiliation, indoctrination, the rantings of lunatics in power. Brutality and inhumanity too vicious to describe or even remember. And over it all, this little lord of terror lecturing him, convincing him that somehow it was all no more than he deserved. How dare he!
Peter leapt to his feet. “If you have prisoners here, they are the province of the RSHA, and I have first access to them and the right to determine their fate.”
The speaker turned to face him and Peter confronted his erstwhile torturer. The tall, handsome young man was a little older than when he had overseen Peter’s reeducation but was otherwise unchanged. “And who might you be?” the man asked with suave self-assurance.
The commander introduced Peter, explaining his presence, then introduced the officer to Peter as a Herr Lederman. As the two greeted each other, the commander slurped his coffee worriedly, unsure of what to do next.
Lederman spoke first. “I’ve come from Breslau explicitly to oversee the gathering of information . . .”
Peter was not listening. He stared into the face of his torturer. Though Peter had not seen him often, the man’s features were seared into his brain. An unreal fear gripped him, and he felt himself detaching from the scene, rising above it as if floating out of harm’s reach. He could not hear the words being said, could hardly see the faces of the others. Blackness hovered at the edges of his perception, his vision narrowing to a tunnel that was focused on that one face, thatmouth, those words. His mouth was dry, and he nervously licked his lips, trying to feel the reality of his own body, the lack of chains or walls or even pain. He glanced down at his uniform and took comfort in the quality, the cleanliness, the imposing insignia. His hand strayed mindlessly to his gun, and as he felt the reassuring coldness of the metal, he regained his composure.
“. . . haven’t come all this way . . . ,” Lederman continued lecturing.
“Enough!” Peter snarled with an anger that surprised the others and implied irrefutable authority. “You can have your chance after I’m through with them.”
“I don’t have time for—”
“Don’t worry,” Peter said calmly, “I won’t take long. Then you can have your flies so you can pluck off their wings, if that’s what you need to do to preserve your manhood. Such as it is.”
The commander snickered. Lederman sputtered, but then the commander interceded, “It’s my camp here and you’ll obey my orders. Obviously, our comrade from Berlin has priority.”
Schweig returned with the coffee even as Lederman harrumphed angrily and left.
“Who the hell is he?” Peter asked.
“Oh, somebody who’s supposed to be an expert in breaking people.”
“Hardly seems like something that takes expertise,” Schweig commented. “We’ve got whole countries full of broken people.”
The commander shrugged. “I heard he’s supposed to be really very good at it, is able to spot fake information a mile off.”
“I heard,” Schweig interjected, “that he really screwed up with one of his subjects and still hasn’t lived it down.”
“Oh, how so?”
“Don’t know. Just heard that it led to some sort of international embarrassment. God knows how. Must be just talk.”
“Must be.” Peter smiled, then returned the conversation to the business at hand. “I want to see to those prisoners now. Where are they?”
“Now?”
“Before he does something stupid,” Peter explained.
“What about the
orders? We’re supposed to move soon,” Schweig asked.
Peter brushed off his concerns. “Oh, you can handle it. They’re selfexplanatory.” Indeed they were; he had only managed to explain their contents by reading a paragraph ahead as he had spoken to Schweig. “Where are the prisoners?”
The commander told one of the guards to take Peter to their prisoners. He found them, nine in all, sitting outside, huddled together against the cold. Their hands were bound behind them and a single guard kept watch. Peter scanned them but did not recognize anyone. He glanced around at their location and the proximity of other soldiers and decided there was nothing he could do for them at the moment. He thanked the soldier who had led him to the prisoners and made his way back to the commander’s tent alone.
At the entrance to the tent, he stopped and debated what he should do next. He had taken an insane and unnecessary risk speaking directly to Lederman, and there was no way he could justify a further confrontation, yet the opportunity his presence in the camp afforded was unparalleled. Peter’s mind worked frantically as he plotted one scenario after another trying to work out how he could carry out his mission, free the prisoners, and take some sort of revenge on his erstwhile torturer. Killing him was the most practical but least satisfactory option. Better yet would be to take him prisoner, hold him in the mountains and . . . There was a problem there. He would never be permitted to do what seemed most appropriate. So, keep his prisoner a secret, perhaps with a bit of help from one or two of Zosia’s friends. Then what? Four months of torture was the obvious and rather unappealing answer.
Peter was not a torturer. As seductive as the idea of revenge was, there was no way he could do to someone else what had been done to him. It would be too humiliating. He was left with the option of killing the man. Given the circumstances, it would have to be a hasty execution with only the briefest of explanations possible: a swift murder as a ghostly reflection of the fury and hatred that motivated him. Would that suffice?
He sighed. He would have to jeopardize his mission and significantly lower the chances of freeing the nine prisoners in order to carry out an act of vengeance. If he failed, it would cost him and nine other people their lives, and it would ruin the very mission he had come here to fulfill. Even if he succeeded, he risked court-martial if anyone found out. He swore quietly and thought some more, but he could see no way around it: it was the opportunity of a lifetime and he would have to let it slip through his fingers.
He stood there in the dark and the cold, silently seething. Such a petty, banal man. A banal man in a banal uniform with a banal job and a banal name! The sort of man other officers made fun of. A nobody. For some reason Peter did not quite understand, he felt incredibly foolish. His torturer was nothing more than a tedious, insignificant officer, a nonentity who earned the scorn of his comrades. That his life had been in the hands of that nobody! Worse than that, his soul was still ravaged by what he had experienced at that man’s hands. He felt humiliated, as if his god, which he had prayed to and offered sacrifices to for generations, had suddenly been shown to be nothing more than a bit of scrap metal dropped off a passing train.
The attachó had a pack of cigarettes, and on an impulse Peter lit one for himself. He looked at the gold lighter he had found in the coat pocket and read the inscription: To Robert, with love always, Sybille. Deeper in the pocket Peter found a small building block—the sort of thing a child gives a father as a present. At first it is carried as an indulgence, then a fond memory, and at last as a talisman. He pulled out the attachó’s bulging wallet and opened it. A number of photographs were stuffed into it, and Peter leafed through them. He found one of Sybille, a pretty woman, or rather, widow. Children, too; at least five. The photoswere of various ages—apparently Robert did not discard old photos even as the child grew. There was Hedwig at three and again at eight and again with her siblings when she was eleven. From the date, he guessed she had just turned thirteen recently. Just looking at her picture, Peter felt sure she would miss her father and would not understand why he had had to die.
He finished the cigarette and turned his thoughts to what he should do next. As he stood there, debating with himself, still trying to find a way to get his hands on his erstwhile torturer, he overheard the commander talking to Schweig, and intrigued, he listened.
“. . . fucking sitting ducks, if you ask me,” the commander was saying.
“I do wonder, sometimes, what they have on their minds in Berlin,” Schweig agreed cautiously.
“All I want is someone to explain to me what the hell we’re doing here, fighting-some bandits over a bunch of useless rocks. Politics, if you ask me. Pure politics—and that makes bad strategy.”
There was no response and Peter imagined Schweig was reduced to nodding.
“Have you seen the orders we’ve been getting?” the commander asked his friend. “First one plan, then another, then back to the first, like we’re dealing with some sort of schizophrenic.”
“Or too many bosses,” Schweig agreed.
“For all the decisions I make,” the commander sighed, “I could be a robot. The couriers are tripping over each other trying to get orders in here, then we get that clown from Breslau, and now this joker from Berlin . . .”
Peter smiled and entered the tent; they both glanced up at him guiltily. Before they could say anything, Peter said, “I want to take the prisoners to the nearest mountain stream. Where’s that?”
“What? Whatever for?”
“In this weather, standing in a foot of water can be extremely painful,” Peter explained without telling them he knew from personal experience. “It will make them more likely to talk,” he finished, ignoring the commander’s look of disgust.
Schweig walked to the entrance of the tent and pointed to the left. “About a half a kilometer, that way.”
“I’m not sanctioning this sort of thing,” the commander said with surprising courage.
Peter scratched his head. “That was an interesting conversation I interrupted, but I’m having trouble remembering it all.”
The commander glared at him, then after a moment of silence conceded, “Fine. But just take one, we don’t want you to have difficulties.”
“There won’t be any trouble,” Peter assured him. “I want them all to witness everything: torture the weak if you want the strong to talk, that’s what we always say back at home office.”
“I can’t spare more than two men,” the commander said, trying a different objection.
“I don’t need anyone.”
The commander looked disappointed; he changed tack slightly. “They’re my prisoners, they’ll be watched by my soldiers, understand? Besides, as you so clearly pointed out, I’m responsible for your safety. You will have two soldiers accompanying you.”
Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “Just the officer from Breslau. He’s an expert, after all. He and I can handle them alone.”
“I won’t have interoffice rivalries played out in my camp. Lederman remains here and you will be accompanied by two of my men, otherwise you will be denied access to these prisoners. Understood?”
Peter hesitated, then deciding that he could push the commander no further, he gave up on revenge and gave in. “Fine. Two men. I’ll take them now.”
51
THE UNWIELDY DOZEN made their way out of the camp and to the stream. They stopped in a small woods near the banks of the stream, and there Peter singled out the strongest-looking captive, ordering the other eight to sit on the ground. He told one of the guards to remain with them, and then taking the selected prisoner and the other guard with him, they set off a short distance around a rocky outcrop and out of sight.
“Hold him for me,” Peter ordered as he shoved the prisoner toward the guard. As the guard held the man from behind, Peter approached to face him. The man winced in expectation but said nothing. Suddenly Peter drew his gun and held it to the man’s head. “I don’t have time for any nonsense. Tell me everything you know.�
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“It’s not me you want,” the prisoner volunteered. “It’s the other one—the short man with the black hair. He’s a group leader, he’s got information. Question him!”
Peter felt disgusted by this unexpected response, and for a moment it threw him off his stride. He backed away as if contemplating the information, then stepping behind the guard, he grabbed the barrel of his pistol and swung it with full force into the back of the guard’s head. There was a sickening crunch, and as the man crumpled silently to the ground, Peter wondered if he had not hit him too hard.
“What the hell?” the prisoner stammered.
“I’m from Central,” Peter said as he drew his knife and began cutting the man’s bonds. “I want you to take me hostage, then we’ll go back and free the others. Hold the gun on me and I’ll order the other guard to drop his weapons, then place me behind him and I’ll knock him out.”
“Why not just shoot him?” the man asked, overcoming his surprise.
“They’ll hear the shot.”
“You have a knife.” The man made a motion with his finger across his throat.
“No! I want to keep my cover; if they remain alive, they can corroborate that I was not involved in your escape. They’ll think we were attacked by a partisan here, then when I disappear with you all, they’ll think I was taken hostage.” Peter chose not to add that he was loath to add another couple of corpses to the mangled body of the boy he had slain.
They disarmed and tied the unconscious guard and returned as Peter had planned. The other guard looked up questioningly as he saw the two approach, then in alarm as he realized what was happening. Before he could raise his gun, Peter ordered him to set down his weapons. When Peter saw his hesitation at obeying such dubious orders, he added, “We have their word they won’t harm us.”
“Their word?” the guard asked.
“Yes. Now do as I’ve commanded.”
The guard set down his gun and Peter sighed his relief. The partisan who was holding him hostage ordered him to stand by the guard and he did so. The partisan began speaking, and as soon as the guard’s back was to Peter, he struck him a hard blow across the back of the head. The two of them began hurriedly freeing their comrades, immediately detailing someone to keep an eye on each guard to make sure neither awakened and raised an alarm. There were quick explanations and a debate about the fate of the two guards. Peter was adamant that not only was it strategically important the two remain alive, but that he had also given his word, and eventually his argument prevailed over the bloodlust of several of the captives.
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