“As what?”
“An interrogator.”
“And the Arabic, was that all about the war on terror?”
“No, my third wife’s Egyptian,” said Schafer. “She speaks English, but I thought it would be fun to learn her language. We use Arabic in the house.”
“Children?”
“One daughter. Unexpected. My wife had been told she couldn’t conceive and at thirty-eight she suddenly became pregnant. She quit her job. I came out of retirement.”
“As an ex-interrogator who speaks fluent Arabic,” said Leena. “When was that?”
“2002.”
“Perfect timing.”
“I didn’t want to go back into the Company, so I joined a private security outfit. They paid more. I could get triple-time if I went to Afghanistan or, later, Iraq.”
“Abu Ghraib?”
“I was there, but not down in the cells with the 372nd Military Police Company,” said Schafer defensively. “The idea was to earn as much as I could as quickly as possible and get back to my retirement.”
“So they didn’t include a course on how money works on the human brain?” said Leena.
“How’s that?”
“The more you make, the more you need, the more you want.”
Schafer sipped his drink, shrugged. He felt something like the discomfort of incipient piles.
“So,” she said, “your spying days are over. Your interrogating days are finished. You don’t work for anybody anymore. You should be back in your retirement. So what are you doing in Hamburg, Roland?”
Silence. Not even traffic noise penetrated the density of the glazing. An invisible clock ticked somewhere. Maybe it was in his head. He didn’t know precisely why, something to do with their earlier intimacy and his strange, retrospective day, but he decided to do something uncharacteristic: to reveal himself.
“I’m atoning for my sins,” he said.
“That’s a strange thing to be doing here,” said Leena. “You’d be better off in Westphalia with Our Lady of Aachen for that kind of thing.”
“I was born in Hamburg,” said Schafer. “My parents moved to the States when I was twelve years old. Then I worked here in the eighties. It seemed like the perfect place to come to remember who I used to be.”
“And what are these sins?”
Schafer was surprised to find himself in exactly the mode he tried to engender in his interrogees: confessional. And he knew how she’d got him there. Because he wanted it.
“The company I was working for offered me a special assignment. It was a lot of money,” said Schafer. “You’ve heard of ‘extraordinary rendition’?”
Leena nodded.
“I operated in a number of ‘black sites’ in Eastern Europe.”
“What are they?”
“Places where terror suspects who’d been ‘extracted’ on the ‘extraordinary rendition’ program could be interrogated, using an ‘alternative set of procedures,’” said Schafer, the sweat coming up on his palms. “It had been decided that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to prisoners in the war on terror.”
“You don’t have to use military speak in here,” she said. “I was brought up on collateral damage.”
“After the London bombings in July 2007 I was offered another assignment that was so secret it was only referred to by its code name: Wordpainter. There were three of us. We were referred to as the Truth Squad. We were all outside contractors and we were given a special memo.”
His heart had gone into overdrive, and he was suddenly finding it difficult to get enough air. He sucked on the whiskey.
“The memo broadened the ‘alternative set of procedures,’ allowing us to use ‘extremely harsh techniques’ to extract vital information from ‘high-value detainees.’”
“What does that actually mean?” she asked. “The Bush administration had a talent for euphemism.”
“Electric shocks, heat, fire, bastinado, strappado, extreme humiliation . . . anything that pushed the limits of human tolerance. You know,” said Schafer, after a long, ruminative drink, “once you’ve decided that torture is okay it’s inevitable that boundaries get pushed.”
“Presumably you were paid extra to do all that?” she said.
“Seventy thousand dollars a month.”
He breathed in heavily, as if he had a weight on his chest. The phone rang. An answering machine cut in after seven rings. No message. The phone rang again. Still no message. It rang once more.
“I’m going to have to take that,” said Leena. “It’s one of my clients.”
She took the call in her office, closed the door. She came back out to explain that she was going to be a while and that he would have to entertain himself. She pointed him to the art gallery, poured him more whiskey
“Client?” he said. “Are you an analyst or something?”
“I told you, I’m an expert on the nature of guilt,” she said from the doorway to her office. “I know how to relieve its symptoms and what the consequences are if it’s ignored.”
He stayed on the sofa for a while, as if pinned by that statement and exhausted by his own revelations. Then his edginess got to him, and he socked down the scotch and went for another. He grabbed a handful of ice and poured a measure to the brim. He walked the length of the window, asking himself whether this had been a big mistake. Had his vulnerability this morning made him read too much into how he’d felt about her? He stared out of the huge panel of glass at a vast dark patch within the heart of the city. What did he feel about her? He wasn’t attracted to her, not sexually. Did he think she had some answers? Could she help him understand?
He drifted away from the window, let himself into the art gallery It was pitch black, with no visible cityscape. He flicked the switch. Only lights illuminating paintings came on. The windows were blacked out. He drifted through the maze of works. He wasn’t much interested in modern art. Too conservative. Didn’t get it. These were bleak landscapes. Large, white, unframed canvases with something gray and indistinct happening, or rather not happening, in various quarters. The only portrait was at the far end of the gallery. An old man in a business suit was sitting in a chair within some kind of cage. He was holding on to the arms and screaming. It made him shiver.
At the end of the gallery was a door, which gave him notions of escape. It opened onto stairs going up to the roof and down to the floor below. He went down, drink in hand, the ice tinkling against the glass. Another door opened onto a wide, wooden-floored corridor with a view of the city visible at the end. The lighting was utilitarian neon. He walked down the corridor, checked around the corner, realized there was a room set within the entire floor of the condo. Maybe, given her superb physical shape, it was her gym.
His palms were sweating again as he reached for the door handle, opened it. The air inside was cold and smelled of damp and something unpleasant like effluent. The surface of the floor was different; it had the grittiness of rough concrete. As he felt for a switch, the door clicked shut.
The strobe of fierce neon thrashed four images onto his retina. Ropes and pulleys over a large puddle. A metal frame in front of a cinder block wall. A bed with straps hanging from it. An uncoiled hose. Even before the neon had settled he fell to the floor unconscious.
* * * *
Someone was stroking his face with a wet washcloth and running a hand through his hair. It was so lulling it put him in mind of being pushed in a pram under trees. He came to, stripped to the waist, broken glass on the floor. The concrete bit into his back. His vision was blurred, but he could make out a face above him. His vision slowly cleared. Leena rested his head on the floor and took a seat on a stool at his feet. She was wearing an orange boilersuit, of the sort prisoners wore in Gitmo.
“What is this, Leena?” he asked, seeing blood on his chest.
“You fainted, dropped your glass of whiskey, cut your head and hand as you went down, and bled all over your shirt,” she said. “You must be familiar with this sort of room.
”
“What is this?” he asked, turning his head to take in his surroundings.
“I call it a return to equilibrium,” said Leena.
“It’s a treatment room for your clients?”
“I help people, mainly men, who feel that they have such a disproportionate amount of power to control the lives of others that they experience overwhelming sensations of guilt. By reducing them to a state of powerlessness, through the infliction of pain and humiliation, I return balance to their minds. This reduces their suicidal tendencies and, in some cases, reinvigorates their sense of belonging within the human race.”
“And who are your clients?”
“Mainly captains of industry, politicians, military men, policemen, and the odd prison governor, but no interrogators,” she said. “Or is that being too euphemistic? The idea is to face up to things, after all. I’ve never had any paid torturers among my clients.”
“I told you I’m atoning for my sins,” said Schafer. “I’m dealing with my guilt in my own way. I’m going to reveal myself to the world for the man that I am, for the work that I’ve done in the name of my government. I’m condemning myself by media. Do you think my wife will have me back? Do you think she’d want me anywhere near our daughter?”
“You’re not coping with it very well,” said Leena. “I don’t think last night was the first time you’d drunk yourself into oblivion. Everybody in the restaurant was concerned for me . . . not you. They could see that you’d given up on some essential human qualities. Then you walk in here and faint.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“That you have some of the experience of the victim,” said Leena. “I can’t simulate everything. I can’t keep you for days in a locked room with little food and in poor or extreme conditions with no sleep. I can’t reduce your humanity to the level of livestock and have you brought up to the light, immobilized into a state of total helplessness, and then, possibly the worst thing, have another human being do terrible things to you for hours and days, over which you have no control, not even if you tell the truth. I wouldn’t want to. It would reduce me, too.”
“So what do you do?”
“I can make you feel helpless and humiliated and deliver a certain level of pain,” said Leena. “There are psychological benefits.”
“It sounds like I have to trust you.”
“That’s not a common link between torturer and victim, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, but that’s part of it.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
Silence apart from the drip of water. They looked at each other for some moments.
“There’s not a minute of every day that I don’t think about what happened in the accident,” she said. “I went through a red light. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head was so full of what my father had done, killing himself, that I was in a state of distraction almost all the time. I was a careful woman driver, not a crazy kid, and my brain suddenly didn’t understand the difference between red and green anymore.”
“You’re punishing your father.”
“It’s the only way I can keep going,” she said. “Otherwise I have nothing. All the money, all the comfort, all the male interest in me, all the possibilities that life has to offer are meaningless.”
He stripped. She fastened his wrists and ankles into the four corners of a metal frame lying on the floor. They were silent and complicit. She stepped away from him, reached for a remote that hung from the ceiling, and pressed one of the buttons. One end of the steel frame started rising within some metal runners until it was vertical and Schafer hung spread-eagled within it. The pain in his shoulder joints was immediately excruciating. It was a technique he knew bore results.
Leena pressed another button on the remote, and the metal frame revolved through 180 degrees, so that Schafer was upside down and facing away from her. His hips felt as if they were about to dislocate. Leena selected a two-meter length of rattan cane and swiped the cold air, backward and forward.
* * * *
Foley had given the Turk the all clear once he’d heard that both Leena and Schafer were in the lower apartment and they’d lost sound contact. Arslan entered the elevator codes and went up to the top floor wearing a pair of latex gloves. He had a 9mm Glock 19 with a titanium suppressor, which he did not intend to use. In his pocket he had a twisted leather garrote.
The elevator doors opened onto the apartment. He went through the master bedroom to the en suite bathroom and put together a cocktail of Leena’s medications in one of her pill canisters. He picked up a bottle of scotch from the drinks tray and tucked it under his arm. He strode through the art gallery, down the stairs and into the apartment below. He walked silently on treadless sneakers, took out his Glock, and opened the door. The soundproofing of the room meant that he’d heard nothing of what was going on inside. He was momentarily stunned by the sight before him.
“That was the rattan cane,” said Leena, slightly breathless. “This is a sjambok. It’s made out of rolled rhinoceros hide. You’ll notice the difference.”
Nothing from Schafer, just gasping. Blood ran from the open welts across his back, buttocks, and hamstrings. It ran in tickling trickles down his body and over his face and forehead and dripped onto the concrete.
“Put that down,” said Arslan from the door, the Glock in his outstretched hand.
Leena spun around, her face livid from effort.
“What are you doing in here?” she said, like a teacher whose space had been invaded by a pupil. “Is he something to do with you, Roland?”
“Drop the whip and come to me,” said the Turk.
This was better than he could possibly have imagined. His mind opened up to possibilities for a clean finish. It could be a sex session gone tragically wrong.
“He needs this,” said Leena.
“He might,” conceded Arslan.
“One stroke,” she said, and before Arslan could protest she laid the sjambok across Schafer s back. It landed with a dull smack and was accompanied by a stunned silence followed by a gagging scream. Arslan slammed the door shut. Leena threw the whip to the ground.
“Let him down from there,” said Arslan.
Leena used the remote to turn Schafer upright and let him down. As his back made contact with the concrete an exquisite agony concentrated itself in Schafer s body. He gritted his teeth.
“Release his feet,” he said. “You got handcuffs?”
Leena pointed to the wall behind with its assortment of cuffs and shackles. Arslan threw her a set.
“Cuff his hands behind his back. Leave him on his front.”
Arslan looked around while Leena worked on Schafer. He put the bottle of scotch on the table, swung a pulley and rope into position over the two of them, moved the stool underneath. He took out the leather garrote and told her to connect it to the rope.
She knew her work, used a metal caliper to make sure the join wouldn’t slip, looped it over Schafer s head. Arslan pulled on the rope. Schafer’s head came up and he scrabbled to his knees.
“Sit on the stool,” said Arslan.
Schafer sat facing away from him, hands behind his back. His chest expanded slowly and shallowly, as if each breath was agony. Arslan told Leena to tie the rope off to a ring in the floor. He motioned Leena with his Glock toward the table, took the pills out of his pocket.
“You’re going to drink these down,” said Arslan. “It’s either that or . . . violence. I’m easy either way.”
The one thing Leena knew from her endless replaying of the car accident was that, while she could stand pain, she could not bear impact. She knew the consequences of impact, and just the idea of it induced a profound sense of dread in her. She looked at the pillbox, contemplated it for some long seconds. She opened the canister and poured out a handful.
Arslan unscrewed the top from the scotch.
“These,” she said, holding up a round white pill, “are to make me go to sleep. One is normally enough
for an adult to sleep a full night. If I take three of them I might get four hours.”
She took six and swallowed them with the scotch.
“These,” she said, holding up a half-red, half-gray capsule, “are antidepressants. The red part is the ‘anti’ and the gray part the ‘depressant.’ They’re supposed to make me happy, but all they do is turn dark black to overcast gray.”
She swallowed another handful; the whiskey seeped out of the corners of her mouth.
“Now these are the babies,” she said, holding up a rounded blue lozenge. “I take these all the time. They really work. Oxy-Contin 160 mg. Active ingredient oxycodone. Known in America as Hillbilly Heroin. These wrap you in cotton wool and tuck you away from life in a little drawer. They cure all known hurt except. . . the pain of loss.”
Agents of Treachery Page 35