Code Name- Beatriz

by Lou Cadle

  But the whipping went on, and that corner shrunk, and then the pain intruded into it.

  She thought of Will, and how he’d survived. She pictured his smile, and how he’d been able to laugh and joke even after his wounds had been cleaned up. She thought of his breath against her face and ear as he’d touched her. Their first kiss. The pain did not fade—he’d been right about that—but it took up only part of her mind while Will took up the other.

  The whipping stopped. There were more questions then, and she kept up her act, moaning and pretending not to hear them. Or maybe it wasn’t an act. She was not able to focus as she should be focusing.

  A meal was delivered to Meyer. “I’m sorry,” he said, when she looked at it. “Not enough to share.”

  She hadn’t been wanting food. She was just surprised he could eat while watching this. She shouldn’t be, though, should she? But she pretended that she was hungry and cared. “What is it? It looks good.”

  “A bunting.” He said it in English.

  “I don’t know any English,” she said.

  “You’ll remember it soon,” he said in English, with a pleasant tone, and he picked up a whole songbird and popped it into his mouth. Bones crunched.

  She looked back to the interrogator and spoke to him in French. “You can beat me until I’m dead, but it won’t change what I’m saying.”

  His expression was blank. He watched Meyer.

  “Please,” she said to him, “Imagine I’m your sister.”

  Meyer said something in German to the man, an order.

  The interrogator said, “What about codes? Do you have a code book?”

  “My shorthand book?” she said, feigning confusion.

  “Fingers,” Meyer said in German, sounding bored.

  The interrogator took out a chain and wrapped it around her neck. The steel links were cool on her neck. He tightened it, and she heard a lock snap shut, leaving the chain snug around her neck. He left the end dangling. “You can go where I say, or I can pull you,” he said, without feeling. He sounded bored as well. Maybe all this was tiring. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, not exactly. Maybe he’d done it too often to feel much of anything about it.

  The woman stood back and said nothing.

  Using the chain, the lieutenant tugged her over to the table and opened the drawer. He grabbed her wrist and put her hand inside.

  When she understood what he was going to do, she fought him. But all that did for her was that the woman stepped forward and held her against the table while the interrogator positioned her hand again. She pushed back, but that only made the woman push forward. She was big and strong, that German woman. She’d been eating better than Antonia had been.

  Antonia made her hand into a fist.

  “Then you will have many broken bones,” the interrogator said. “Give me your first finger, and you will only have the one broken.”

  She shook her head.

  “Have it your way,” he said. And he yanked back the heavy drawer and slammed it on her wrist.

  She felt bones give way, at least two of them. She heard the dull snap, and she felt it.

  He yanked open the door again and said, “I’ll do it until your hand is ruined. Give me your first finger.”

  She shook her head.

  He did it again, and she flinched but could not pull her hand away in time. A third bone broke, and this time the pain shot up her arm, all the way into her brain.

  The next time he asked for her finger, she gave in. Her first time to give in to them, and she understood now that it would not be her last. When he took her throbbing hand out of the drawer and straightened her first finger she let him. And then he slammed the drawer viciously on it, and it snapped.

  She should have done it the first time. Her wrist breaking had hurt more.

  Then he sat her naked on the chair again—her whipped back and buttocks hurt at the least contact—and took her finger in his hand and started asking her questions again. The touch of his hand on the broken finger was a threat that he did not need to speak.

  She let her tears fall freely. “I am a secretary. I am French. Why are you doing this to me?”

  He twisted the finger and she screamed, not from the pain so much but from the sickening feeling of bone shards twisting inside her hand.

  How long had Will endured this sort of thing?

  Will endured worse, for days. And for you. So do your job and stay strong.

  Lovely speech to herself, but it was marred by the fact that tears and snot were running down her face and she was breathing hard.

  Behind Meyer, a window showed her that daylight was still in the sky. It had only just begun.

  Chapter 35

  There was more torture, much more, two days of it, and one hour flowed into the next like a muddy river she could not make herself rise from. It was hard enough to keep her nose above its surface to draw breath. She was taken to a lower room than the level of her cell, a room without windows, so she could not know the time of day. She found out what the studded truncheons felt like on her raw buttocks. She was raped by three men, but compared to some of what was done to her, it seemed not the worst crime against her. Strange. Had she been raped in civilian life, it would have been the worst thing that ever happened to her. Here in the dungeon it was one violation among many, melting into the next violation and the next. It was always the freshest pain that held onto her mind.

  The worst pain, she thought later, was perhaps when she was punched repeatedly in the face by a man holding a sack of coins. Francs, perhaps. She didn’t ask to see inside the sack. In fact, she could barely speak at all after he had hit her a dozen times. Her face didn’t work right.

  Blood filled her mouth, and she spat it out, exhausted. She had not slept in two days.

  But still she did not talk.

  It was not easy, but after the truncheons, she felt closer and closer to Will, and that helped, helped just enough to make her hold on. She thought of him often, and in her dazed, sleepless state, she felt as if she were touching him across the Channel with her mind. I can make it another few hours. Just another few hours before my false confession is torn from me.

  When they beat her broken hand with the truncheon, she screamed her willingness to talk. It took them many minutes to understand what she was saying.

  She was left alone then, and a doctor came in a half-hour later. “Your jaw is dislocated,” he said. “This will hurt.”

  He did not ask why she laughed at that. When he jerked her face back into place, she no longer felt like laughing. She vomited, but as she had not been fed, it was but a thin bile that burned her throat.

  She was taken, in a shift again, back up to Meyer’s office. There, she confessed to him about her role as a part-time Résistance courier in Marseilles.

  “Who do you know here?”

  “No one. I was waiting here for information.” She did not have to pretend to feel exhausted and defeated. Her body was, though the spark of rebellion in her mind was still—barely—alight. Remember Will.

  “You will feel better once you confess.”

  “No I won’t. But you’ll quit hitting me, and I want that. Do you promise to quit hitting me?” She made her voice querulous and girlish.

  “Of course,” he said.

  She knew he was a liar. They would not stop. “What is my guarantee?”

  “My word.”

  “I need more than that.”

  “I tell you what. I’ll order some food as a sign of our new friendship. And some wine. You like wine, do you not?”

  She said nothing.

  “So some—what? Cassoulet? Chicken in cheese sauce?”

  “I couldn’t,” she said, lowering her eyes and pretending meekness. She had to act the broken woman, shamed, and exhausted, and cowering with confused gratitude for such an offer. “I couldn’t eat anything heavy.”

  “No, I suppose not.” He considered that, and she wondered if she’d just given him a new way to to
rture the next person. “If you tell me all about yourself, I’ll feed you. Soup, bread, nothing heavy. And if you tell me names, I’ll give you warmer clothes.”

  “What do I have to do to be let go?”

  “You know that will never happen. You’re a spy. You might be shot, and your death will be quick and painless. Or you might be put in prison, and it will not be.”

  “Here?”

  “No, not here. Tell me,” he said, his mood souring for some reason. Maybe he wanted to keep her here because he enjoyed torturing her? “Start with your real name.”

  “My first name is on my identity card. My true last name is Fabre.” It was a common enough surname.

  “I can find out if you are lying.”

  “I know. I am not lying.”

  “It’s hard to believe you’d tell the truth. Aren’t you worried about your family?”

  “I have no family. I was an only child, and the war killed my parents when I was but fifteen.” That much was true about Antonia herself.

  “And you work for the Résistance.”

  “In a very small way only,” she said. And she told him the lie she had concocted about her being the part-time courier from Marseilles who had only moved at the edges of Monk circuit.

  “I find this hard to believe.”

  “I can’t help that,” she said. “I have told you the truth.” Her jaw was throbbing, even worse for all the talking. “Could I possibly have an aspirin?”

  “No,” he said. “Tell me your contacts.”

  “I won’t do that.” She looked up.

  He stared at her. “I find this implausible. The whole tale. Why would a very occasional courier for the Résistance fight off her confession for so long? Why not confess at the first slap?”

  “Because I hate you Germans. You killed my family. Do I need more reason?”

  “If you hate us that much, why confess at all? You were doing so well,” he said, as if disappointed she had broke.

  “You make a good point, Nazi,” she said. “I am done speaking.”

  He called out, and a man stuck his head in the office. “I want chicken soup for two, and plain bread. A light white wine. Pate for one.”

  The man disappeared.

  “So, your parents died how? In a bomb? Shot for resisting arrest?”

  “I’m done talking,” she said.

  “It is boring anyway. I know this is not the truth. Not yet.”

  “There is no way I can win this game,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “So quit playing.”

  “I’ve quit. I told you who I am.”

  “You know more.”

  She shook her head. Even that hurt her to do. It hurt to sit. Her hands throbbed.

  They sat together in his office for a time in silence, and then he began going through papers on his desk. She kept sitting where she was. There was no reason to run out the door. Too much space between here and the street, and too many Germans once she made it to the street. A bloodied woman in a thin prison dress would not get any help out there. But she’d never make it to the street anyway.

  The pain left her face and traveled again to her ruined hand. She’d never paint again, would she? No matter. She would not live through this. Another prisoner transfer, if they didn’t just kill her here, would not be so lightly guarded as Will’s was.

  A woman in an apron came in with a tray of food and left it on Meyer’s desk and then walked out again without a word.

  The pain in her buttocks and thighs screamed for attention. It was a challenge to her mind to hurt badly everywhere at once. The pain seemed to jump from place to place instead, one pain fading away when the next flared up.

  He glanced up, looked at the food, then over at her. “You were rather beautiful before. I think not so much in the future.”

  “I will heal. France will heal too, of your fouling of it.”

  “France has ceased to be France. It is and will be Germany, a province, if a minor one far from the center of the empire. We will keep Paris whole, I think. For the wine and whores and art.”

  He stood and came around the desk. She made herself not cringe away from him.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  She stood shakily, wishing she felt more strength flowing through her. She’d fight him the best she could, but she knew she couldn’t fight off a five-year-old child right now. She could barely stand.

  But all he did was pick up her chair and move it up to his desk. “Go on and eat,” he said. “I’ll pour the wine.”

  She wanted to refuse, but her body wanted sustenance. And her mind did too. If she had food in her, she might be able to resist their tortures better. She had no delusions about running away. But her mind was strong. She could fight them off.

  She had to use her left hand to eat, and she was not very good with it. She put her face closer to the bowl, and that helped her spill less soup.

  “Your kind is so disgusting,” he said, watching her fumble with the soup spoon.

  She wanted to snap back a response, but even more, she wanted the food while it was offered and still warm. A hateful response might make him snatch the bowl away.

  “Don’t you want the wine?” he asked. He had poured two glasses and was sipping his own. “I prefer red, a hearty red with wild fowl.”

  She wanted the soup. The wine might help her with the pain, but it might loosen her tongue or bend her resolve. She kept eating, spoonful after spoonful.

  Soon she was finished with the soup, had eaten as much bread as her sore jaw would let her chew, and he kept pressing her to take wine, but she refused.

  Again he returned to working on his papers. He glanced up once, saw the tray with the empty food bowls, and yelled at his adjutant to come in and get the tray.

  Antonia sat there, the pain making it impossible to nap, but her body wanted sleep. A heavy dose of laudanum and some sleep. Wouldn’t that be a sweet respite? She closed her eyes and remembered, again, Will’s hands on her. Kind hands. Gentle hands. So different from the touch of the Nazis. The strength of a caress from a lover was more powerful in so many ways than the strength of a fist gripping a truncheon. The Nazis could touch her skin and split it. They could touch her muscles and tear them. But they could not touch anything important in her, not if she held it safe from them.

  The memory of other kind touches swept over her like a tide. Her mother’s hands, her father’s. Her girlhood friend Garbi, with whom she sometimes traded fingertip strokes of the back. Reg’s trembling hands the first time they made love. Will’s hands. Will’s.

  Her own hand throbbed where they had broken it. Her own touch in the future—no. Don’t think of that. Think of the good memories. Hold to them. The quiet, contented sounds of the hens in the barn at night. The smell of straw. The sound of Will’s breathing near her ear. Think of that. Think of that.

  She managed to doze. She was carried to a cell and slept, fitfully, waking often as she shifted and pain flared again, but she slept.

  Chapter 36

  The next morning, once again, Meyer made her sit in his office while he worked. She didn’t know what game he was playing. She could feel the urge toward gratitude, to feeling grateful to him for not beating her for a day, and she knew it for a weakness in her, for an enemy within.

  A knock came at the door. “He is here,” the adjutant said in German.

  Antonia schooled her face into a blank mask. Whoever “he” was, she must not react to him.

  She was glad she had told herself that, for in a moment, a Vichy gendarme walked in with his hand on Leonce’s arm.

  Had he been taken? Was the circuit all known?

  In French, Meyer said, “How do you know this woman? You, spy, turn your head more so he can see your face.”

  He was talking to Antonia, and she obeyed.

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” Leonce said, looking right at her. He turned his glance back to Meyer.

  Antonia admired his acting a
bility.

  “Are you certain?” Meyer said.

  Leonce glanced at her a second time, and nothing at all showed on his face. He shrugged. “Relatively certain.”

  She would have to do as well as he had in pretending they were strangers.

  “Imagine her with hair,” Meyer said.

  She had completely forgotten they had shaved her. And her face would be swollen from the beating. Perhaps Leonce actually did not recognize her.

  He looked at her again, more carefully, but she did not see so much as a spark of recognition in his face. “No,” he said. “I doubt very much she is from this town. I’ve been here my whole life and do not recognize her. I’ve never seen her. Is she a criminal of some sort?”

  “Yes,” Meyer said. “Of the worst sort.”

  “I do not associate with criminals,” Leonce said.

  She remembered him staggering about in the street, pretending to be drunk. For her sake. Today as well, he was acting on her behalf. The thought came yet again: Perhaps I look so terrible, he does not know who I am.

  But no, no. Genevieve saw her being taken. She would have told Claude. Edgard, Leonce, Madame Charlevoix. They would all know she was in the hands of the Gestapo.

  She gave a tiny shrug herself, and turned away, facing Meyer again, as if she had lost interest in this useless exercise.

  Meyer stared at her, as if trying to bore into her mind. He glanced back at Leonce and gave a gesture to the gendarme.

  She heard the door close behind her.

  Meyer went back to work. After more than an hour of silence, he said, “I must meet someone for lunch. I cannot offer you any today,” as if speaking politely to a houseguest. He called to his adjutant. A few minutes later, she was led back to her cell.

  She spent the rest of the day fretting about her circuit. Leonce, Claude said, was no longer suspected of anything. So why had they brought him in to see her? Was it a test of her, or a test of him? Both, perhaps. She wondered how Genevieve was faring, if she was angry and fuming, if seeing another wireless operator captured may have broken something in the young girl beyond all hope of repair. She worried about Claude, and the old farmer woman, and Madame Charlevoix. She had not given them up. There was that. And she would not. She swore to herself that she would not.