Madrigal

by John Gardner

  ‘It must be all strange for you, Boysie. Difficult to comprehend. But, as the Christian Bible says, “In, the fullness of time all things shall be accomplished.”’ Warbler wore the same blue denim uniform as the two soldiers who had frog-marched Boysie into the office. Of course the quality of the denim was better and the cut almost as good as anything from Savile Row. He leaned forward to switch off the stereo set. ‘I prefer Shostakovitch myself’—smiling—‘but that is considered decadent.’ Hand thumping the table at the final syllable. ‘You wish to see your Consul. There is an Embassy and an Ambassador in Peking. Not far from here, but quite honestly we would rather keep this in the family. Our little family.’

  ‘How come you’re a German and a Chinese, General?’ Boysie weak and beginning to lower himself into a chair before Warbler’s desk. Gazpacho’s fingers closed about his neck, pulling upwards. ‘Stay on your feet, bud.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, K’u. Let him sit.’ A pause augmented with a grin powerful enough to turn Frankenstein green with envy. ‘For the meantime he can sit.’

  Boysie sat, a heap of dejection. He looked around. Grief, those pictures were atrocious. Children’s drawings in garish colours with overt, simple revolutionary messages. Below one of them hung a scroll of Chinese characters looking like preliminary architect’s drawings for some new housing estate.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ All track of the predicament and seriousness of his circumstances seeping from Boysie.

  ‘Quotation from the great leader. From Chairman Mao. Translation: This army has an indomitable spirit and is determined to vanquish all enemies and never to yield.’

  ‘Thought you’d had troubles over Mao’s doctrines.’

  ‘Chairman Mao’s battle and thought will always continue. If it came to it, we would continue underground. You asked how I can be German and Chinese. In fact I am Chinese. Officially. I am a believer—’

  ‘Good number. The Monkees. Top of the hit parade earlier in the year,’ muttered Boysie.

  ‘—a believer that China will, as Chairman Mao has always maintained, eventually master the world.’ Warbler bit lightly on his right-hand index finger. ‘You ask how I can be Chinese when I am so obviously German.’

  ‘It’s not so obvious now. I can see you’re a mongrel.’

  ‘Mongrel is good. And right.’

  ‘The answer is easy. German father and Chinese mother. Mixed marriage.’

  Warbler sighed. ‘Unfortunately no marriage. A convenient arrangement, that is all.’ He allowed himself another smile. ‘Funny, it all happened in Paris. They were both students—’

  Gazpacho interjected, ‘Shouldn’t we be getting on with the biz?’

  Warbler placed his hands together in an attitude of prayer. ‘Yes. There is not much time and many questions.’

  ‘Your snatcher said Warren wanted to talk with me?’ Time was a factor Boysie should play on.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Warbler saddened. ‘They are such liars, those men. Warren is here. I doubt if he is in a fit condition to talk with you. But I suppose they were telling the truth. In a warped way. I am certain he would like to talk with you. You will see him. But there are matters which must be cleared up.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. There are things I want to know as well. That firing-range farce. Was that your fix?’ Warbler nodded. ‘We had to play you along.’

  ‘And the dummy ammunition? The dummies in East Berlin so that I couldn’t carry out the operation even if I wanted to?’

  Warbler silent, choosing the correct sentence. ‘Yes, it was us. But that still does not rule out the fact that you were being sent on a suicide mission anyway.’ He waved his hand, dismissing that portion of the events. ‘What we really want to know is your connection with the Warren business. What you talked about with Khavichev. Why you were allowed to leave the East at all after facing such grave charges. Also, how much you know. If you know as much as Warren.’

  ‘Look.’ Boysie thrashing around with his fingers and hands. ‘Okay. I was sent in to do a job. Subversive activities between Great Britain and the USSR. We wanted Warren out, they wanted Iris in.’

  ‘Iris MacIntosh?’ Warbler.

  ‘Yeah. Iris MacIntosh. We couldn’t afford to let her go. It was the only way. Sure they arrested me. But there was no evidence. I wasn’t caught in the act. They couldn’t make it stick. The Ambassador intervened. They let me out, then your hoodlums jumped me, souped me up with Aztec purple hearts, and I ended up here. I want to see the Ambassador.’ Why should he tell them about his talks with Khavichev? High-powered suppositories to the lot of them.

  ‘You cannot see the Ambassador, I must make that plain. And you expect me to believe you knew nothing of the information Warren was taking out of Moscow?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘Through Khavichev. The information concerned us.’

  ‘You mean the Jen—’

  ‘The Jen Chia. Chinese Intelligence. You know that much.’

  ‘I’m trained.’

  Warbler shrugged. The two guards nudged in on the chair. Gazpacho moved round the desk to stand behind Warbler, who stared with a freezing scepticism at Boysie. ‘Why then were you booked to fly to Albania? To Tiranë?’

  ‘I was routed back to London. Via Frankfurt.’

  ‘I want to know how much of Warren’s information you have and what went on between yourself and Khavichev.’ As an aside he added, ‘You know Khavichev has been arrested and returned to Moscow?’

  Boysie did not speak, lowering his head. Damned if he was going to tell them.

  ‘It is very strange,’ continued Warbler. ‘The truth we need.’ Five seconds by the sweep hand of the Navitimer.

  ‘One way or another. You see, all sources of this information must he cut off. We must have the truth.’

  Boysie clenched his fists tightly, forcing his brain on to simple things like trees and meadows, soft summer rain to lay the dust of terror welling up inside him.

  ‘I wish to see the British Ambassador.’ For the third time. ‘And while we’re at it, where am I? What is this place?’

  Warbler spoke without hesitation. ‘You’re quite near Peking. It is a camp. Our main interrogation centre, so please do not try to escape. The guards are good, and at night we have watch dogs of great efficiency. Actually they are watch cats, six of them. The cat family. Pumas. We ship them in from South America and train them to kill people. Our own men they will not touch, but—well, they cannot resist prisoners. Very vicious, the puma.’

  A buzz from the intercom. A winking red light. Warbler pressed the Speak button. A short conversation in Chinese. Then Warbler spoke to Gazpacho. ‘Get Oakes changed. Start the process. Information quickly. Within twenty-four hours. He is on the way here now.’

  ‘He is coming here?’ Gazpacho accented the he as though it was God.

  ‘Within two hours. Get Oakes changed and—the truth. We must have the truth.’

  Boysie had no chance to think. The musclemen took over, bodily lifting him from the room. The ceiling swayed and swivelled, walls angled, glimpses of floors as they half dragged, half carried him down endless passages. The atmosphere was of a hospital; tiles, scrupulous cleanliness. Boysie’s head clouted a door as Gazpacho led the party into a small room.

  ‘Strip and put these on.’ Gazpacho’s face tight with hatred. The guards dropped Boysie. Throbbing bruises on shoulders and back. Gazpacho was pointing to a light-yellow, thin denim outfit, slacks and a jacket that buttoned to the neck. Sandals and a straw coolie hat lay nearby. Boysie rolled over slowly. ‘What the hell’s this meant to be?’

  ‘Prison uniform, boy. You’re in the cooler so you wears the clothes.’ Gazpacho’s smile edged across his face like a tombstone engraver’s chisel. ‘Help’s our pets as well. The pumas.’ He pronounced it ‘poomaws.’ ‘The prison gear gives off a scent. Makes ’em real hungry. Now move.’

  ‘Horlicks.’ Boysie quivering with the rage of indignity. ‘If you want me in that stinking fifth-
rate Carnaby Street stuff, you’ll have to get me into it yourself.’ Which was precisely what Gazpacho and his brace of yellow gorillas did. Boysie completely helpless. These boys were pros. Struggling and kicking made no difference. They knew all the holds and counterholds. Within minutes Boysie lay on the floor in shame, clothed in the ill-fitting chill yellow garb.

  ‘Now get up.’ Gazpacho administered a light kick with his right heel,

  Boysie painfully rolled over and got to his feet. ‘Sandals,’ snapped Gazpacho.

  Boysie shuffled into the sandals as someone jammed the coolie hat on to his head, the loose chin strap hanging forward. Boysie moved his head back and the hat slid behind his neck, the strap loose against his throat. In spite of everything he opened his mouth. ‘I feel a bloody twit in this, and there’s nothing I can tell you. Told old Warble-face everything.’

  ‘We shall see.’

  The guards put on the forearm locks and held him to lead him out of the room. A few paces and they were out of the building and walking over a strip of grass towards a small square brick building. Boysie tried to get his bearings. He could see the track of road to his right, on the wrong side of a high barbed-wire fence. The light was beginning to fail and a low mist rose from the ground. He glanced back. Over Gazpacho’s shoulder, about a hundred yards away along the wire fence, was the main gate—a crude structure of rough poles and spiked wire, low huts on either side, and at least one armed sentry on view.

  ‘Back to the drugs I suppose,’ said Boysie to Gazpacho as an excuse for looking back.

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Well, you want to check out if I’m lying or not. Thought that was the latest kick. Even the Russians used mescaline in Hungary for extracting the old unvarnished.’

  ‘Shut up and look to your front.’

  Boysie was quite pleased that he had remembered that bit of useless information about the mescaline, gleaned from a Department file and stored by accident in his grasshopper mind.

  ‘There are more exact methods,’ Gazpacho said. A few steps later he added, ‘Still got a long way to go on the drug techniques. Never be certain a client’s telling the truth. Maybe he just imagines he is. Pain threshold’s still the best.’

  Sickness, always Boysie’s reaction to anxiety and fear. Next to, and in line with, flying and spiders, his greatest terror fell into the physical-torture category. Tremors, the recognizable desire for a private or public convenience, and the soft impression that stomach and legs were made of frog spawn.

  The hut was bare except for a powerful pair of lamps and a chair that looked suspiciously like the hot seat Boysie detested at his dentist’s. The last time he had come across a chair like this was in similar circumstances—a cellar in the south of France. A man called Sheriek. That was during the disastrous Operation Coronet. A million years and two million blunders ago. A stampede of terror as Boysie realised he was about to get the works. He pushed back with all his weight. One of the guards lost footing for a second, but Gazpacho stepped in. It took only about thirty seconds before Boysie was strapped into the chair: metal clamps on wrists, ankles, thighs, and throat.

  Gazpacho stood before him. ‘The questions are simple, fella. I wanna see ya get top marks. Alpha plus. One hundred per cent in this examination. So let’s go. Do you know about Warren’s information? What passed between you and Khavichev? Why were you going to Tiranë? Answer.’

  ‘I told you all I know.’ Despite the terror, Boysie held on. Grim determination was the cliché underlying the sweat now oozing from him.

  ‘I’ll count to three, buddy, and you’d better talk. One...two...three...’

  Boysie remained silent. The back of Gazpacho’s hand caught his right cheek, then the palm on the left. Again and again. Boysie thought his cheekbones were cracking. There was a definite trickle of blood from his face. Gazpacho wore two rings on the right hand; they glistened as he rubbed the hard skin.

  ‘Talk.’

  A precise halo of stars spun inside Boysie’s head. He still held on. ‘Nothing.’ Barely able to get the word out. Gazpacho’s hand swung again and again. Five seconds pause. Then again. Again. Again. The hard swing. Partial knockout.

  Boysie came to with water dripping from his face. A couple of satellites joined the stars. Foolishly Boysie found himself trying to identify them. Warbler now stood with Gazpacho. Boysie could just make out what was being said.

  ‘We’ll make it one every hour.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ Gazpacho. ‘In my experience I really think this guy’s gonna be tough to break. Or he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Start with the third upper molar. The right one.’ Warbler clipped out the words like a callous NCO on parade.

  ‘Okay.’

  Before Boysie had a hint of what was to happen, two pairs of hands, palms like steel, closed in on his head and jaw. So weak was he from Gazpacho’s workout that the two Chinese guards prised his mouth open with the ease of experienced music-hall strong men ripping telephone directories in half. It was impossible to close his mouth. Boysie felt a metal clamp, encased in firm rubber, pulled down tight on the inside of his lower gums; then a similar appliance on the upper. Grunting noises from the back of his throat as it filled with saliva. A choking sensation, and Warbler’s voice loud against his ear.

  ‘Stop those noises. If you are willing to talk, signify by opening your eyes. In the meantime, close them tight. If you open them under false pretences things will be worse.’

  A touch of metal on Boysie’s lips. With shrieking terror he knew the truth and what the metal object was—a pair of dental pliers. Certainly. Their milled jaws were closing hard over one of the big upper teeth at the rear of his mouth. They were going to pull a tooth without anaesthetic. Slow, unbearable. Eyes jammed closed. Try to operate psychologically. Try, Boysie. Try. For Elizabeth. For pride. Stand it. Pretend there is sticking plaster over the eyes. The pliers moved and the first stab of pain shot through his head like an arrow. The pain grew, a balloon of expanding revulsion. He could hear the pain screaming, increasing as the tooth was slowly twisted. God, would they ever stop! The nerve ends seemed to reach right up through the scalp as though part of the brain were slowly being torn away. Excruciating agony. Searing. Burning. Stabbing and stabbing. Boysie braced and strained against the metal bands binding him to the chair. Christ, they were doing it slowly! Twisting the tooth to and fro. Loosening it, playing with this one tiny piece of dentine, jiggling at the sensitive nerves so that the anguish smothered his whole body. Never in his whole life had he felt such positive sensations. Through the blinding convulsions Warbler’s voice came trickling out of a mist that endlessly crucified exposed nerves in spasmodic nightmare rashes.

  ‘Talk, Oakes. Talk.’

  The over-all ecstatic raw flogging of Boysie’s entire nervous system continued. Don’t open the eyes. No. Stop. For Jesus’ sake, stop! Pain. Pain. PAIN. So he could see it and hear the soundless screech. Rolling, systematic, electronic screams of pain. Then a last crisis, shooting like white hot needles from gums to brain, then traversing the body. Blackness. Dark grey. Grey. Light grey. Terrible throbbing and raw bruises filling his mouth, now freed from the damp. Miles away through the grey well Gazpacho’s voice. ‘Threshold’s pretty high.’

  Boysie heard his own voice, weak signals, blurred by the singing in his ears and bloody saliva washing round his exploding mouth and gums. ‘Don’t know a bleeding thing. Why are you doing this to...?’ Dark grey again, then back to light. Warbler’s voice.

  ‘Take him to join his friend. In one hour we will try the upper third left molar. I noticed it was in need of attention anyway.’

  Distantly Boysie felt the shackles being unclamped. Dreamingly, even distantly, he sensed the bruising. Semi-consciousness. The idea that they were carrying him from the room. Then fresh air and light. Night had not yet come. The sound of an engine. Warbler’s voice.

  ‘He’s early. Just coming in to land. Carry on with Oakes. I must be there to meet him.�
��

  Full, though ruined, consciousness returned. They were carrying him back towards the main gate. Past the gate. He had thought the agony over, even if only temporarily, but now reaction grew to full flower; the definite hard sore points where they had clamped wrists, ankles, thighs, and neck burned, worse. The inside of his mouth—as though claws had torn and ripped ribbons of skin and flesh from the gums, roof, and sides of his cheeks, all exploding in fire reaching up into his head.

  They had let his feet down and pulled him, holding him up, trying to make him walk. Boysie could not even grit his teeth for the pain inside the mouth. They were coming up to a large building. Concentrating hard, almost in hysteria, Boysie tried to retain a sense of direction. The main gate was about fifty yards away directly behind. Music—a blare of music coming from the building, which looked like an aircraft hangar, the double doors partly open. A long block of brilliant light cut from the space between the doors. It was like going into a refrigerator. Inside Boysie felt the bitter cold, like plunging into a vat of ice cubes. The dash of music, martial and strongly Chinese, thumped against his ears, pile-driving, making his head grow and expand until he thought it would shatter into fragments.

  Boysie was beginning to succumb to weakness, with the ragged mouth, bruised body, and now the cold and cranium-splitting music amplified from at least six speakers. The building was a converted hangar, stone floor sharp with reflections from a dozen or so tower lights, almost a film studio. The great lamps all mounted at different heights and angles in the same direction, yet even the terrific heat generated by them had no effect on Boysie’s freezing temperature.

  Amid the litter of what appeared to be scrap metal, aircraft parts, and work benches, Boysie’s eyes beamed in on a sight of fantastic horror. To the left stood a circular cage: steel bars, set at one-inch intervals round a circumference of about eight feet, the whole contraption rising in a curve, like a parrot’s cage, to a height of around ten or eleven feet. Inside the cage was a man, feet on the floor but arms raised and hands cuffed to a chain hanging from the top centre. He was thinner than when Boysie had last seen him passing through one of the passages of Department Headquarters. Now, dressed like Boysie, Rabbit Warren looked at the point of death. Body sagging and head drooping. The face painted with parchment pallor, dried patches of blood on clothing and face. An arm pulled Boysie roughly to the right. Ten feet or so away from Warren’s cage stood an identical enclosure, its steel door open and dangling handcuffs spread wide to receive a new victim.