by Richard Wake
When the next two prisoners finally arrived, I don’t know if I was relieved or even more worried when neither of them was named Max.
22
It was the same drill. Right at 9 o’clock again, the five of us were shackled into the back of an open lorry. None of us knew each other, so no one talked. It was the same fear, that a Gestapo informant had been planted among the group. And while there was a very human need to make contact with someone, to share the experience as a way of alleviating some of the terror of the unknown, simple common sense meant that the sharing would have to be in silence. The grinding of the lorry’s gears, the whoosh of the wind, the noises of the city — those would fill in the gaps.
Again, we took the same stupid route. While the guards at Montluc had changed over to the Gestapo, the driver and the guard running the transport to Avenue Berthelot were French. I still couldn’t tell if there was some security reason for going this way, or if it was just a time-wasting opportunity to prolong the minutes the French guards were out from under the Gestapo’s noses. But it was the same odd lefts and the same strange rights, eventually taking us through the place with the sign that said “Fort La Motte.” I still didn’t know what it was. Without the military buildings, it could be a park.
It still made no sense. It should have been a 10-minute ride, tops, and that was if you got stuck behind one of those buses with the hybrid engines, running sometimes on petrol and sometimes on burning wood, the smoke belching out of what amounted to a furnace bolted onto the front of the engine. If the wind was wrong, I wondered how the driver could see, or how the passengers could breathe. Without the hindrance of a bus, the more direct route would have been five or six minutes. But we took more than 20 minutes, or at least it seemed that way.
It was all sickeningly the same as the last time, including the unloading process. We all had been unshackled from the lorry and jumped down into the courtyard at Avenue Berthelot when a uniform with a clipboard arrived and asked, “Killy, Alain?”
I stepped forward. As the lorry drove off, he shouted over the noise, “The rest of you will go with my colleagues here. Killy, you are to come with me.” And from there, it was in through the familiar door, up the familiar flight of steps, and into the same chair in the same outer office, next to the same desk manned by the same factotum. I was waiting for Klaus Barbie, again.
As it turned out, he was already behind the closed door of the inner office. A buzz at the secretary’s desk was the signal for me to enter. Barbie was seated at the desk, the lamp on. He was leaning over, straining to read what must have been some small print on a document he was holding up to his face. Hildy the German shepherd was snoozing on the rug behind the desk. It was all as I had left it.
“Sit, sit, Herr Killy,” Barbie said, not looking up from the paper, just waving vaguely at the chair. “Or should I call you Herr Kovacs? Or perhaps, if you don’t consider it too familiar, I should call you Pops?”
Whatever color remaining in my face at that point had almost certainly vanished. Pops. Shit. There were two possibilities. Maybe, or probably, they had Little Max and had forced him to talk — although I’m not sure he knew my real name. The other possibility was the group of telephone operators. It had dawned on me as I walked to Venissieux in the dark, replaying the operation in my head, that a mistake had been made. Little Max had called me Pops in the operators’ presence. He had said “Wait, Pops,” before asking the women where the nearest house was. They had undoubtedly been questioned by the Gestapo in the hours after the explosion, and one of them had likely offered up this tidbit — Pops — as a way to please the interrogators.
The more I thought about it, the more sense that made. Where the name Kovacs had come from, though, was the mystery. I hadn’t used it on an official document in nearly two years. One of our friends might have slipped up and said Alex instead of Allain, but almost nobody knew Kovacs.
Not that it mattered, though. I was sitting in Barbie’s office again, wearing handcuffs again. Whatever the name, he had me.
After several uncomfortable minutes — although I’m not sure what a comfortable minute in Barbie’s presence might have felt like — he put down the paperwork and snapped off the switch on the desk lamp.
“Where were you last night, Allain Killy?” he said.
“Home with my wife.”
“And why the cafe in Venissieux? It’s a long way from home.”
“Eggs,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Two days a month, they have eggs on the menu. I was craving one.”
“Cooked how?”
“Poached.”
“Hard or runny?”
“Runny is the only way,” I said. “With a baguette to mop up the yolk.”
“And did you get your egg this morning?”
“No, I was interrupted.”
“A pity,” Barbie said.
He stood up. The dog did too, with a growl. “Now, now, Hildy, you remember our friend here. Mind your manners.”
Barbie motioned for me to walk ahead of him. We left the inner office, and then the outer office, and headed into a stairwell at the end of the hallway. We walked up to the fourth floor and, when we arrived, Barbie moved in front of me and opened a heavy fire door.
23
There were no offices on this part of the fourth floor. There were no walls. It was a big, open space with unfinished floors and industrial lighting fixtures. It had likely been used for storage at one point. That was no longer the case, though.
There were no other people there, only Barbie and I — and Hildy, let off her leash to run around and sniff and growl.
“Come, come,” Barbie said. “I must give you the tour.”
It was a torture chamber. There was no other way to describe it. I sensed it as soon as we entered and knew it for sure as we approached the various stations, all equipped for horror.
“Have you noticed?” Barbie said, patting the wall as we walked. “Such beautiful stone walls. So strong. So thick. With only a couple of windows up here, all at the far end, you can’t hear a thing outside.” He stopped and patted the wall again. “So, so thick,” he said.
Our first stop was a gas stove that was blazing even with nobody up here. The warmth it gave off felt good, almost comforting. Sticking out of the opening were a half-dozen metal rods with wooden handles. They looked like the pokers you would use to tend a wood fire in a fireplace. That they had a different use in the hands of the Gestapo was soon more than clear.
Barbie removed one of the pokers from the stove. He held it up, admiring it. The iron glowed red.
“Do you know,” he said, “that the very sight of this simple implement is enough to get a man to answer a question he might otherwise prefer to skip over, or to entice him to recall a detail that he thought he had forgotten. Sometimes all you need to do is to hold it, red and hot like this, up to the man’s face. Not even to touch the skin. Just to hold it at eye level.”
He did that to me. I did everything I could not to move.
“Turn around,” Barbie said, and I did. He lowered the poker and held it against my ass. I could smell my trousers burning, and then my underwear, and then my skin. The whole thing didn’t take 15 seconds before he removed it. I would undoubtedly have a scar, but I doubted there was any permanent damage. Ass fat would likely grow back.
He had not yet asked me a question beyond the initial couple in his office. But after he had put the poker back into the stove, he merely motioned for me to follow him to the next station on the hellish assembly line. It consisted of an examining table, like you might see in a doctor’s office, but with leather restraints for the hands and the feet.
I began to hoist myself on the table, but Barbie said, “No, no. Just look. And over there,” he said, pointing at the wall opposite the foot of the table. There were tools hanging on a pegboard as if it were the side wall of a farmer’s barn. There were two small saws and a half-dozen cutters, the kind you might use to pr
une bushes, from fine hand nippers to a great set of loppers that would cut a three-inch tree branch.
He reached for the loppers, examined them up close, and shook his head. “Such sloppiness,” he said, and wiped something from the crux of the two blades with a nearby rag. He showed me what was on the rag, and while I couldn’t tell for sure, it appeared to be a combination of blood and tissue.
I could barely breathe at that point, but I continue to look around. I didn’t see my greatest fear, which was electric wires that could be attached to my balls. I didn’t doubt that they had them, but I didn’t see them.
“Come along now,” Barbie said, and we walked to the far corner of the vast space. There were two battleship-sized bathtubs, side by side. There also was another gas stove with enormous pots, presumably to boil water. Then, next to them, was the last of a melting block of ice.
“Look, look up,” Barbie said, pointing to the space above the bathtubs. There was a pulley contraption bolted to the ceiling, with a thick rope attached to one wall. On the other end of the rope, a long metal bar was attached at both ends. The bar had two cross-pieces attached about three or so feet apart.
I looked a little quizzically and Barbie said, “Imagine being stripped naked. Now imagine being tied to the metal bar, trussed up, your arms attached to the one crossbar and your feet attached to the other.
“Now,” he said, and Barbie grew even more enthusiastic here. His tone until then had been that of a proud homeowner showing off his new paint job. But this was different. I had been afraid of him the whole time, and more afraid when he burned my ass with the poker, but this was a different level entirely.
“Now,” he said, “imagine one of these tubs filled with boiling water and the other filled with ice water. Now imagine, trussed onto the bar, being lifted up by the pulley and then lowered into the boiling water. You don’t drown — you can’t drown, because the crossbar catches on the sides of the tub and prevents you from being lowered too far — but you are completely beneath the water level. Your face might be covered for a short time. And then you are lifted out of the boiling water, hoisted up on the pulley and then lowered into the ice water.”
He stopped and closed his eyes. It was as if Barbie was replaying the vision in his head.
“Boiling and freezing is usually enough,” he said. “We usually don’t even have to dunk him into the boiling water a second time to get what we need.”
He looked at me as if he was expecting me to say something. But I had nothing. I mean, nothing. And Barbie seemed somewhere between annoyed and disappointed.
“Okay, the tour is over, Herr Killy,” he said. “Come, come — but be careful. Don’t trip on those things. This place is a pig sty. My men will hear from me about this.”
I turned without looking and barely avoided what Barbie had been indicating. It was a pair of trousers, laid haphazardly on the floor. What caught my eye was the hem on one of the pants legs, and how it was completely undone, about three inches of extra pants, the bottoms roughly and unevenly cut, worn out in one place, as if it had been trailing beneath the back heel of a pair of work boots.
I threw up where I stood, then leaned over and retched some more. Hildy ran over and fussily sniffed my vomit, then backed away.
“This way, Pops,” Barbie said.
He walked me down to his office and handed me off to the secretary without comment or even a glance in my direction. The secretary called for a guard to walk me back down to the courtyard. There, though, instead of waiting for another trip on a lorry back to Montluc, the clipboard came over and said, “You are free to go, Herr Killy.” He pointed me toward the front gate.
Free to go? What the hell?
As I walked, I began to feel the burn on my ass a little more — I guess the remaining fabric was irritating it as I moved with each step. But it was only an irritation. For the second time, I was being allowed to leave — and this time, I didn’t even have to go back to Montluc. And then there was Max. God, those pants. He was a tough little fucker, but it was hard to imagine surviving some of those tortures. I wanted to hang around in the courtyard and see if he was brought out for the ride back to Montluc, but the clipboard was having none of it. He rushed me along and watched me as I walked.
I don’t know if he saw me look up at one of the second-floor windows near the gate. The person who stood there and watched me from behind the window was maybe 20 feet away, glowering down. He stared at me, and I stared at him. He didn’t react, and I didn’t react. He didn’t lower his eyes or look away, and I finally did. I couldn’t believe it, and I would have thrown up again if I thought I had any ammunition left.
As I was going through the gate, I took one more look over my shoulder to be sure. Unfortunately, I was. Standing there, still staring, was Werner Vogl.
24
It was in Cologne, in the days before the Anschluss, when I hatched the plot to kill Werner Vogl. After an adult life that was the opposite of audacious, my plan was to murder a Gestapo captain on German soil as revenge for the role he played in killing my Uncle Otto.
Leon, whose life was defined by its audacity, thought I was crazy — although he did acknowledge that the plan wasn’t half-bad. Vogl was an odd one. He was trying to catch a spy, an Abwehr general who happened to be an old friend of my uncle. Because of the family connection, he suspected me of espionage, too — but when he wasn’t trying to scare me, he was showing off to me. Vogl was a Nazi pseudo-intellectual, and couldn’t understand why the occasional application of electric wires to the gonads wasn’t seen as a good thing by the citizens of the Reich.
He could quote from Nazi tracts. He made elaborate comparisons to the Roman empire. When he wasn’t doing that, he was showing off his own little jail, in the basement of his headquarters building in Cologne. He allowed the prisoners to write on the walls and he allowed their words — some hopeful, some despairing — to remain for the next poor saps to see.
It was as if he was showing off his place in history when he gave me the tour of the cells. And because he talked to me, I learned a couple of his fastidious habits. I knew the bar where he drank and played chess on Tuesday nights, and I knew the place where he always parked his big black Gestapo Daimler, and I knew the alley he walked through to get from the bar to his car. I was waiting for him in the alley one night with a knife that had belonged to Otto, a bad-movie cliche. And I would have killed Vogl, too, if the Abwehr general had not intervened with the police at the last second, setting me up as the patsy in a plot to frame Vogl as the traitor. And while anyone who knew Vogl would have thought it was absurd — he was the straightest of arrows, a Nazi true believer to an absurd level — the frame-up worked just fine. Vogl ended up being arrested, and I was shipped back to Austria, just in time for the German invasion.
The last time I had seen him was back then, in 1938, when he was being led away and presumably booked for passage to Dachau. The last time I had heard his name was in 1940 when a man I trusted from Swiss intelligence told me that Vogl had made inquiries about me to the German consulate in Zurich. He said that Vogl was attached to a Gestapo unit in Warsaw — that’s where the telegram to Zurich had originated. It scared the shit out of me that he wasn’t in jail, that he had somehow rehabilitated his reputation with his bosses, but I was out of Zurich within days and I hadn’t heard his name since.
But now it was 1943 and there he was, staring down from that window on Avenue Berthelot. There was no doubt that it was him, and there was no doubt that he had seen me. Suddenly, it made perfect sense that Barbie had known my real name. But that was the only thing that made perfect sense. The rest was a fog — and any hope I might have had of working my way out of it had vanished when the sight of Vogl left me feeling concussed.
I walked in circles for hours. I didn’t see anyone following me, but I didn’t trust anybody anymore, least of all myself. I once thought I was good at this, and it wasn’t that long ago. It was hours ago, actually. I had always felt the adrenal
ine rush of espionage, and while I hated it when spies or Resistance fighters referred to it as “the game,” I understood it because I had felt it. I still felt it. The urgency of running back to the orchard, the elation when the bombs exploded, the camaraderie with the two Max’s — there was no doubt that it was a rush, and that it was a feeling that my body had begun to crave.
I was good at it. I was making a difference. That was what I’d felt not 12 hours earlier — and I was going to get to eat an egg besides. Now everything was in question, all of it. Because for the second time, my sabotage crew had been betrayed — either by Max, or someone else, or by my sloppiness. And now the Gestapo was, well, they were just fucking with me, arresting me and then releasing me back into the world. It was as if they believed I was doing them more good on the outside than in a cell at Montluc. And maybe I was. Maybe I was an amateur after all. Except that made no sense, either. I mean, the little stone bridge and the telephone exchange building, both lying in rubble, were a testament to something. If I were such an incompetent why didn’t they stop me before the bombs went boom?
My mind raced from anecdote to anecdote, from scene to scene — but the fog and the fear were preventing me from making any connections between them and constructing a narrative that made sense. From scene to scene. On one of our little jobs a few months earlier, I’d asked Max an apparently absurd question as he removed some explosives from a box. They were perfectly safe to handle without the detonator attached, which I knew but forgot. Anyway, Max looked at me as if I were 85 years old and addled, and he said, “Don’t be a dumb fuck, Pops.” And, well, maybe I was a dumb fuck — a dumb fuck who was now in Werner Vogl’s sights.