Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  Out of the corner of his eye, Adam saw the SS officer looking thoughtfully in their direction. He had to end this dangerous encounter. Taking a business card from his pocket as though in response to a request, he said stiffly, ‘Zygmunt Morawski at your service. These are my office hours. My representatives will be happy to talk to you.’ And, raising his hat, he strode away, leaving his friend gaping at his retreating figure.

  That had been a close shave. Fortunately there was no one in the Carpathian Mountains who could blow his cover.

  Adam pulled off his walking boots, took a swig of water from his pannikin and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. As he lit another cigarette, he felt his whole body settle deeper into the forest floor and breathed in its earthy smell of fallen leaves, mushrooms and wild berries.

  Crouching beneath a nearby tree, Jacek chewed on a stalk of grass, casting occasional glances at Adam, who seemed in no hurry to move on. These city fellows were too self-indulgent, Jacek thought. They needed toughening up. He stood up and threw handfuls of dirt over their camp fire. ‘Time to go,’ he said.

  He’d brought many couriers across the border in the past few months but could never relax until they’d reached the inn across the river. So far, these remote mountain trails had always been secure but you couldn’t take any chances.

  With a sigh, Adam hauled himself up. He wanted to protest that there was plenty of time, but Jacek was striding down the slope so fast that twigs snapped under his boots.

  By the time he reached the river’s edge, Jacek was already sloshing around on the muddy bank, peering under the bunches of reeds.

  ‘Problem,’ he said, still poking about. ‘No raft.’

  He and the other guide who alternated on this route always left the raft for each other in the same spot, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Adam hissed. ‘What now?’

  Jacek looked around without replying. He reminded Adam of a woodland animal sniffing the air to detect which foreign species had invaded his territory.

  He scratched the back of his neck. ‘We should go back.’

  Adam couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Go back because you can’t find the raft?’

  ‘Go back because something’s wrong.’

  Adam was indignant. His mission wasn’t a tea party that could be postponed to another afternoon. The Commander-in-Chief of the Polish government in exile, which after the fall of Paris had moved to London, was waiting for the cylinder of microfilm with information about the Underground in Poland. Delays were unthinkable. This was only the first stage of a journey that involved catching trains and boats across Europe. He spoke quietly and succinctly. ‘It’s out of the question. We have to find another way of crossing the river.’

  Jacek shrugged, muttered something to himself, and pointed downstream. ‘Six miles further on, the river widens and might be shallow enough to cross on foot.’

  The last hour of the hike was the longest and, as they pushed their way through the tangled undergrowth, Adam’s pack dragged on his shoulders. Finally Jacek pointed at a spot on the bank and they clambered down the slope to the river’s edge, pulled off their boots and tied them onto their rucksacks. Adam stuffed his jacket into the rucksack to protect the microfilm.

  The fast-flowing water reached their thighs and, as he held his pack above his head, the current threatened to sweep him off his feet. Several times he would have lost his footing if Jacek hadn’t held out a hand to steady him, and he was gasping and shivering by the time he scrambled onto the bank on the other side. Following Jacek up a steep trail, they reached the small inn above the river. The old man who opened the door gave them a suspicious look until he recognised Jacek. He let them in and hurriedly closed the door. From their worried expressions and urgent voices, Adam realised they were discussing the disappearance of the raft.

  Jacek turned to Adam. ‘He says the other guide didn’t come back.’

  The innkeeper said something in Slovakian and gesticulated towards Adam.

  ‘He says we shouldn’t stay,’ Jacek said.

  From their gestures and voices, Adam sensed they were convinced some disaster had befallen the other guide. But there were other possible reasons why the man hadn’t returned, and Adam wasn’t prepared to jettison this vital mission on the basis of mere suspicion.

  ‘We’ll leave in the morning as planned,’ he said.

  The innkeeper poured glasses of homemade slivovitz, which was so potent that Adam barely managed to climb the pine staircase to the attic. He was asleep as soon as his head touched the feather pillow.

  He dreamed that he was in Kraków again, walking across the square when he suddenly realised he was being followed. He quickened his pace but his pursuer caught up and grabbed his shoulder, yelling ‘I know who you are!’ Adam looked desperately for a way to escape but the man had him pinned against a wall, yelling louder and louder.

  Adam woke with a start. Someone was yelling. He opened his eyes as two arms grabbed him, lifted him to his feet and threw him against the wall, head-first. While one man pinned him to the ground, the other slit open his rucksack with a knife and tipped it upside down.

  The room was spinning like a top.

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ he gasped, holding his head to stop it from bursting open. ‘You can have my watch.’

  The huge guy restraining him gave a sardonic laugh, while his companion continued to rifle through every compartment of his pack. Adam involuntarily glanced at the chair where he’d hung his jacket and quickly looked away again but his captor had noticed. ‘The jacket,’ he hissed to his companion.

  Adam’s heart sank. He shouted for help. Surely Jacek and the innkeeper would turn up any moment and give him time to grab the film.

  But his shouting provoked a hoot of derision, and struggling to free himself only resulted in a tight grip around his throat. ‘Go on, shout all you want,’ one of the men jeered.

  Adam listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs but all was quiet. It was dark outside. Where could Jacek and the innkeeper have gone at this time of night? The other guy was still going through the pockets of his jacket. Adam prayed he wouldn’t feel the small hard cylinder inside the lining. ‘I told you you’re wasting your time,’ he insisted. ‘I’m just a hiker; I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘Just an innocent hiker, eh?’ His captor’s voice had a menacing tone as he yanked Adam’s arms higher behind him.

  ‘Aha!’ The other man uttered a triumphant cry as he ripped the lining of the jacket and the small cylinder fell onto the floor. ‘What has our innocent young hiker hidden in there?’

  They grabbed his arms, tied them tightly behind his back, and shoved him ahead of them down the stairs. Adam was in despair. His mission was in tatters and his reputation would be ruined. He had no idea who these men worked for or what they intended to do with him, or with the film. If only he could leave a message for the guide.

  He supposed Jacek would use his contacts to find out where he’d been taken. As his captors pushed him towards the front door of the inn, he saw an overturned chair. Beyond it, Jacek and the innkeeper lay on the floor, their mouths gaping open like their necks.

  ‘Feel like shouting for help again?’ the big guy sneered.

  Ten

  Lying on his flea-infested pallet in a cell where the only amenity was a stinking bucket, Adam stared at the dried blood on the walls and alternated between self-recrimination over what had happened, and apprehension of what was to come.

  Apart from the screams that shattered the night and made the hairs stand up on his arms, the only sound was the regular click of the judas window through which unseen eyes peered at him. Every morning, the turnkey came in, a dour, shifty fellow who never looked him in the eye or answered his questions as he emptied the bucket and banged down a dinted metal dish with a slice of dry bread. In the evenings he would return with a bowl of greasy liquid that turned Adam’s stomach.

  The previous occupants had
scribbled messages on the walls, which oozed black mould. Someone had scratched one wobbly line for each day of his incarceration and Adam wondered what had happened to him after day seventeen. Had he been released, transferred, or bashed to death? His eyes kept returning to the blood stains. Did they belong to the person who had recorded the passing time or to the prisoner who had scrawled a phrase in Czech into the black sludge?

  The only word he could make out was honour, and each time he read it he recoiled as though it had lunged out of the wall and punched him. Honour was a sore point right now. So was his bad judgment.

  If only he had listened to the guide’s advice, he wouldn’t be in this mess, and Jacek and the innkeeper would still be alive. Shame shot through his body. They had been right all along. The other guide must have been caught and had betrayed the route. Adam felt contempt for him, but most of all he felt disgust with himself. His hubris had caused the death of two men and wrecked the mission.

  Time stretched ahead of him, and with every passing minute he felt more apprehensive as grim thoughts and frightening questions churned around his mind. How long would they keep him here? How much did they know? What would they do to him? Although he tried not to think about it, images of hideous torture through the ages flashed through his mind, making it impossible to sit still. He paced around the perimeter of the tiny cell until he was too dizzy to stand up, one thought drumming in his head. No matter what they did, they wouldn’t break him.

  The hours dragged on until he heard the door of his cell clang open and two guards burst in. One grabbed his arms and hauled him to his feet, then the other gave him a kick that sent him sprawling. They picked him up by his collar and dragged him along an endless corridor where the occasional light bulb cast a dull greenish light.

  At the top of a steep flight of stairs, they knocked on a door marked Lieutenant Otto Hausner, and pushed him inside.

  From the light brown hair combed flat across his forehead like the Führer, whose photograph hung on the wall above his desk, to the grey-green uniform that seemed moulded to his body, and the buffed nails at the end of his soft white hands, the SS officer was such a model of polished cleanliness that Adam had to stifle an impulse to apologise for his unshaven face, unwashed body and crumpled clothes.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Lieutenant Hausner in the jovial tone of someone welcoming a friend. ‘I hope you’ve been treated well. I know our accommodation leaves a lot to be desired and the menu is rather limited, but I’m sure you won’t have to suffer this inconvenience much longer.’

  Intrigued by this unexpected geniality, Adam waited.

  The officer picked up a silver cigarette box and held it out to him. When Adam shook his head, Lieutenant Hausner lit a cigarette and, tilting his head back, exhaled a long column of smoke towards the ceiling. Opening the small cupboard beneath Hitler’s portrait, he pulled out a bottle and poured two generous glasses. ‘Schnapps?’ he asked.

  ‘I demand to know why you’ve detained me,’ Adam said.

  The lieutenant drained his glass and uttered a contented grunt. ‘We know who you are and why you are in Slovakia.’ His smile reminded Adam of an alligator about to snap his jaws around an unsuspecting victim.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,’ Adam said calmly. ‘I’m a school teacher hiking around the mountains on my holiday.’

  The SS officer sat forward, his reptilian gaze on Adam’s face. ‘In that case, we need a little help from you, Herr Professor, and then you can go and hike to your heart’s content, ja? Although I wonder why a teacher would conceal microfilm in the lining of his jacket.’

  Adam started to protest and the smile disappeared from Lieutenant Hausner’s face. ‘Don’t insult my intelligence by denying it. Your microfilm is in code and we don’t have the time or the facilities to decipher it. Therefore we require your assistance.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The lieutenant sighed. ‘You are very tiresome,’ he said in the disappointed tone one might use on a wayward child. ‘We could have settled this like civilised men instead of which, I regret to say, things will become rather unpleasant. And in the end you will tell us what we want to know. So, for the last time, what’s on the microfilm?’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ Adam said through clenched teeth. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  Lieutenant Hausner picked up his black telephone and a moment later two men entered the room. In the past, Adam had sometimes wondered how he would react under torture, but speculation had failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing two grim-faced Gestapo agents opening a metal box and deliberating which of its instruments would inflict enough pain to make him talk. His imagination had failed to conjure up the terror he now felt as they tied him to a chair and selected their weapon. His heart thumped and he tried to comfort himself with the thought that the anticipation of pain was probably far worse than the reality. He soon discovered his mistake.

  The interrogator picked up a rubber truncheon and asked him once more to tell them what was on the microfilm. Adam gritted his teeth. At least it wasn’t the rack or the bastinado.

  As the truncheon struck him behind his left ear, he leapt up in his chair and heard an inhuman howl rip from his own throat. The world flashed with white light and every part of his body, from his toes to his skull, had become like one enormous tooth whose nerve had been pierced with a drill. The pain tore through him like lightning electrifying every tendon, joint and muscle. The scream was still reverberating through his head when the lieutenant asked him if he was ready to help them. Again he shook his head.

  He lost count how many times the interrogator struck him before he fainted. When he woke in his cell, his entire body throbbed and he couldn’t hear through his left ear. As he lay doubled up on the pallet, one thought drummed through his head: how long could he hold out? And if he couldn’t, he thought grimly, there was always the cyanide capsule.

  The following morning, they dragged him out again. He tried not to look at the hooks they fastened to the wall, tried not to envisage what would happen when they suspended him from them. Whenever he lost consciousness, they flung buckets of icy water over him so they could continue.

  Anything to stop this. Anything. He had become a wild animal caught in a trap, maddened by pain, an animal ready to gnaw through its own leg to save itself from certain death. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he could foresee how this ordeal would end. One more session and everything would tumble from his mouth like apples from a barrel. Like snippets of a disjointed movie fragmented by a faulty projector, images of his life flashed before his eyes. His dreams of being a pilot, of defending his country, of making his father proud. All shattered. He saw his life as a chain of bright hopes torn apart by his own defects. And it would end ignominiously, with him betraying everything he believed in and everyone he admired.

  If only he could die before he disgraced himself.

  Back in his cell, he knew he had to act fast, before they came back for him. Thank God for the cyanide capsule.

  Despite the searing pain, he gritted his teeth and groped around for the piece of tape with which he’d fastened the capsule to his perineum. It wasn’t there. Covered in sweat, he strained every tendon to bursting point as he tried to locate it. Had the capsule swirled away in the current while he’d waded through the river, or had they removed it while he was unconscious? He cast his eyes around the cell in search of a shard of glass or fragment of razor blade with which he might cut his veins but there was nothing. He fell back onto his pallet in despair. Any minute now they would come for him, and it would start all over again.

  The judas window slid back and he started. He’d lost consciousness again. A moment later the cell door opened and his heart lurched. This was it; they’d come for him. But the voice in his ear was whispering.

  ‘Can you stand up?’

  He opened his swollen eyes. The shape standing beside his pa
llet wasn’t wearing a guard’s uniform. It was the turnkey, and he was speaking Polish.

  ‘Can you stand up and walk if I help you? If you can, I’ll get you out of here.’

  Adam stared at him. Was this a trap? Who was this man? His head had turned to jelly and the slightest movement shot flashes of pain through his body.

  ‘How long have I been in here?’ he gasped.

  ‘Four days. But they’re going to start on you again tomorrow morning,’ the turnkey whispered. ‘Our people are waiting for you outside the gate but you’ll have to walk down the corridor, up one flight of stairs and then jump out of a window. Someone will be down there ready to catch you,’ he added quickly in response to Adam’s horrified expression.

  It was too much to take in and Adam sank back on the pallet. Perhaps he was dreaming. But the man’s face was close to his and his voice was low and urgent.

  ‘We don’t have much time.’ He pulled out a grubby cloth from his pocket. ‘Bite on this if you have to but, for God’s sake, don’t make a sound.’

  With each agonising step, Adam felt his bones grinding in their sockets. This must be how Christ had felt on the cross, he thought as he bit his swollen lips and groaned while he hobbled along, leaning against the turnkey’s shoulder. It seemed to take hours and they hadn’t even reached the stairs.

  ‘We have to hurry,’ the man urged. ‘The morning shift comes on in half an hour.’

  Adam leaned against the wall, beads of sweat pouring down his face. ‘It’s no good, I can’t make it.’

  The turnkey gave him a stern look. ‘Would you rather face another interrogation three hours from now?’

  With a groan, Adam shuffled forward.

  Soon he stood trembling on the window sill. In the faint pre-dawn light, he saw that two figures had crept out of the shadows and were holding out a blanket like firemen. It was a long way down. ‘Quick, jump!’ the turnkey hissed.

  Adam closed his eyes and forced himself to fall. A moment later his stomach slammed against his spine and he felt the blanket stretch taut under him. Someone hauled him over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes and staggered to a truck outside the prison gate.