Ratlines (18 page)

“Is he …?”

Weiss nodded. “Yes, I believe he leads the band of merry men who’ve been dealing with Ireland’s Nazi problem.”

“How do you know this?”

“A South African information broker. He let me know that a certain Captain John Carter, quite by coincidence, had been showing an interest in Otto Skorzeny. He had procured some small arms through a mutual contact in the Netherlands. At the same time, Carter let it be known that he had a spot to fill on a small team of former comrades he had gathered. He wouldn’t be drawn on the nature of the team’s work, other than it would be most interesting.”

Ryan traced a fingertip across the image. “It has to be him.”

“Of course. I couldn’t expose my own mission by going to either the British or Irish intelligence services about this. Thus the rather elaborate means of getting you here.”

“Well, you got me here. What now?”

“Now we each set about finding Captain Carter and his men. We’ll continue to keep an eye on you. If you want to make contact, place a copy of the
Irish Times
on the dashboard of your car wherever you have it parked. I’d appreciate it if you share anything you discover. I will do likewise. But one thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t let Skorzeny know about me, or what I’ve told you. Don’t let him know about Carter, or anything we’ve discussed here. If you tell him, he’ll want to know how you found out. If he suspects you’re holding anything back, then believe me, the discussion you have with him will not be as cordial as this one.”

“And what if I don’t want to cooperate with you? What if I tell Skorzeny everything?”

Weiss leaned forward, the broad grin returning to his lips. “Then I’ll kill you and everyone you love.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

F
OSS WOULD NOT
break.

Even as his second thumbnail peeled away, he resisted. He cried, babbling in his native tongue, the dogs across the yard replying with their own howls. He bucked and writhed until the guards had to hold him down. But still he would say nothing. Always the same denial.

Two more fingernails, more screaming, more writhing, and no confession.

“This is going nowhere,” Skorzeny said. “Take a finger.”

Lainé suppressed a smile and placed the penknife back on the table. He lifted the secateurs, gripped the little finger of Foss’s left hand between the blades, just below the knuckle, and squeezed the handle.

Foss opened his mouth, a high whine from his throat, as the blades closed on bone. Lainé applied more pressure until the bone gave way. The amputated finger rolled away from the spray of blood.

Lainé returned the penknife’s blade to the jet of the blowtorch. When it glowed, he pressed it to the stump on Foss’s hand, ignored the smell as it cauterised the wound.

Foss’s head sagged back, his shoulders slumped.

“Have we lost him?” Skorzeny asked.

“I don’t know,” Lainé said. “He is strong, but he is tired. Let me see.”

He rummaged in his bag until he found a small brown glass vial. The ammonia stench made him recoil as he undid the stopper. He held the vial under Foss’s nose.

The Norwegian’s head jerked away from the smelling salts. He gasped, snorted, coughed. A thin stream of bile spilled from his lips, beer and undigested cheese sauce.

Skorzeny stood and walked away from the table, the corners of his mouth downturned in abhorrence.

“Enough,” he said. “We will continue tomorrow. Give him the night to think about his fate.” He addressed the guards. “Don’t let him leave this room. If he tries anything, wound him, but keep him alive.”

The guards nodded their acknowledgement, and Skorzeny marched to the door. Outside, Lainé caught up to him.

“Are you sure it’s him?”

“Of course,” Skorzeny said. “He pissed on himself and ran. He is guilty. And you will make him talk.”

“I’ll try,” Lainé said. “But he’s strong.”

“Even the strongest man has a breaking point. You will find that point. Good night.”

Lainé watched Skorzeny stride towards the house, the Austrian’s head held high, his shoulders back, his coat-tails billowing behind him. Lainé hated and admired his arrogance in equal measure.

He went back to the outbuilding and found one of the guards giving Foss water. The Norwegian pulled his head away from the cup.

“Célestin,” he said. “Please, Célestin.”

Lainé ignored him as he washed the penknife in the bucket of water that sat on the ground. He scraped the blade on the bucket’s lip, charred flesh falling away.

“Célestin, help. Help. My friend. Help.”

Lainé rinsed the secateurs clean of Foss’s blood. He gathered the tools and returned them to the leather bag, then extinguished the blowtorch’s flame.

“Help, Célestin. I talk to no one. Tell him. Célestin.”

Lainé set the blowtorch on a shelf and carried his bag to the door.

“Célestin, please.”

He walked from the light to the darkness, back to the house. The kitchen stood dark and empty. He lifted a small plate from the drainer on his way to the cellar. He emerged a few minutes later with a 1950 Charmes-Chambertin under his arm. He carried the wine, the plate and his bag upstairs to his small room.

The puppy pawed at Lainé’s shins when he entered. It had messed in the corner, but he didn’t mind the smell. It would do until morning. He set the plate on the floor, then placed the piece of schnitzel he had saved from dinner upon it. The puppy sniffed and licked the meat.

Lainé used the corkscrew he kept in the top drawer of his bedside locker to open the bottle. Perhaps he should have let it breathe, but thirst insisted that he drink now. As he did so, he noticed the puppy struggling with the pork, the piece too large for it.

He reached down, lifted the schnitzel, bit off a piece of grey meat and breadcrumb, and chewed. When the meat had turned to a warm mush, he spat it onto his fingers and lowered it to the puppy.

Lainé smiled as it ate.

He hardly thought of Hakon Foss at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

R
YAN CHECKED THE
time as he entered his hotel room. Half past one in the morning. He didn’t undress, just removed his tie and lay down on the bed.

Weiss had reapplied the blindfold, guided Ryan outside and into the van. They had driven for at least forty minutes, but Ryan had felt his weight shift from side to side with constant turns, so he guessed the garage to which they’d brought him was much closer to the city centre.

When the van stopped, the blindfold was removed. Weiss crouched beside Ryan.

“Remember what we agreed, Albert. You help me, I’ll help you.”

Ryan did not reply. They left him in an alley off Grafton Street, a few minutes’ walk from Buswells.

The night porter opened the locked doors of the hotel for him. Ryan gave him the room number, and the porter fetched the key from behind the desk.

“Rough night, was it?” the porter asked.

Now Ryan lay in the dark, his head throbbing, the room swaying around him in sickly waves. He tried to think only of Celia, but sleep crept up on him like a thief, and he dreamed of children and the flies on their dead lips.

B
ATHED AND SHAVED
,
but weary—he had been woken by the light from his window not long after seven—Ryan walked the paths of St. Stephen’s Green, thinking. He found a quiet spot, a bench shaded by trees, overlooking the pond and the ducks swimming there.

Weiss had let him keep the photographs. He studied them now. The men in the group portrait—were any of them part of Colonel John Carter’s team? Ryan looked at each man in turn, committing their faces to his memory. The photograph was marked June 1943 on the back. Carter, all of them, would be twenty years older than in this picture.

He had spent the morning turning it over in his mind. How to find one man who could be hiding anywhere in the entire country?

Carter had left the military two years ago, Weiss said. He had married a woman from Liverpool, fathered a boy, but the mother and child had perished in a car accident. The last twenty years of his duty had been as part of the Special Air Service, the most secretive branch of the British Army. Any attempt to trace him through his service record would be futile.

But Weiss had dropped a thread for Ryan, something to tug at. The Isreali had made it appear incidental, a throw away comment, so that it would plant a seed in Ryan’s mind. But Ryan knew it had been deliberate. When he drove to Otto Skorzeny’s country home this evening, he would see whether or not the thread led to the destination he imagined.

“Albert.”

Celia’s voice startled him, first in the fright it lit in him, then the pleasure it brought. He looked up, saw her approach from the western end of the park, dressed in a manner that would have seemed businesslike on any other woman. She had been placed in one of the nearby government offices while she awaited a new foreign posting. Practically a secretary, she’d said, and deathly dull.

Ryan tucked the photographs into his pocket and got to his feet. Celia stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, her hand on his arm for balance, warm and delicate.

“You were looking terribly thoughtful,” she said.

“Was I?”

“What were you thinking about?”

Ryan smiled. “You.”

Celia blushed.

S
HE ORDERED
E
GGS
Benedict. When the waiter reminded her that the Shelbourne Hotel’s breakfast service ended at ten o’clock, Celia pouted.

The waiter crumbled. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “And for you, sir?”

Ryan ordered the salmon, and the waiter left.

She sipped her gin and tonic. He took a mouthful of Guinness.

Celia asked, “Really, what were you thinking about in the park?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Work, that’s all.”

“You looked troubled.”

Ryan couldn’t hold her gaze. He studied the fibres of the tablecloth.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I don’t like the job I’m doing.”

She laughed. “Nobody likes their job. Apart from me, but I’m an exception. Everybody hates getting up in the morning and going to work.”

“I don’t mean it that way,” Ryan said. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Not even to me?”

“The job I’ve been ordered to do. It’s wrong.”

“How?”

“I can’t say any more.”

She reached out and placed her hand on top of his. The slenderness of her fingers made them appear brittle, fragile things. He turned his palm upwards, let her fingers slip between his.

“If it’s in service of your country, how can it be wrong?” she asked.

Ryan met her eyes. “You’re not that naive.”

“No, I suppose not. If you really can’t bear it, then tell them no, you won’t do it.”

“I have no choice. Not now. It’s gone too far.”

“Albert, stop talking in riddles.”

He ran his thumb across her fingernails, felt the smooth polish, the sharp edges.

“Yesterday, I watched a woman commit suicide.”

Celia’s fingers left his. Her hands retreated to her lap. She sat back.

“Where?”

“The other side of Swords,” Ryan said. “In her home. She did it out of fear.”

“Fear of who? You?”

“I tell myself no, not of me, but the people I’m working for. But then I remember, if I work for them, I am one of them.”

Celia shook her head. Her eyes stayed on him, but her gaze elsewhere. “No. That’s not true. We do things for people. It doesn’t mean we like it. It doesn’t make us the same as them.”

Ryan watched as she returned to herself. “Even if you know it’s wrong?”

Celia turned away, looked towards the kitchen. “I wonder where the food is.”

“We only just ordered. What’s the matter?”

She turned back to him. “Nothing. Albert, I shan’t be able to come to the dinner party tonight.”

Ryan felt something fall away inside him. “Why not?”

“Mrs. Highland needs help around the house. I promised I’d do it for her.”

“When did you promise her?”

“Last week. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“All right. Maybe we can do something else tomorrow evening.”

“Maybe,” she said with a flicker of a smile.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

S
KORZENY WAS EATING
alone in the dining room when he heard the telephone ring, followed by Esteban’s soft knock at the door.

“Enter,” Skorzeny said.

“Is Miss Hume,” Esteban said. He pronounced it
joom
.

Skorzeny wiped his lips with a napkin, then followed the boy out to the hallway where the telephone waited. He lifted the receiver. He heard the distorted noise of a street.

“Miss Hume?”

“Sir, I need to speak with you.”

Her voice resonated in the telephone box.

“Go on,” he said.

“I no longer wish to carry out the assignment you gave me.”

“Why not?”

“I met with Albert Ryan for lunch today. He told me someone has died because of what he’s doing for you. I don’t want to be a part of that.”

Skorzeny lowered himself into the chair that stood beside the telephone table. “Who died?”

“A woman. Near Swords, he said. She committed suicide.”

Skorzeny thought of Catherine Beauchamp, her fine and delicate features, the hard intelligence of her eyes.

“What else did Lieutenant Ryan tell you?”

“Nothing. Only that he’s unhappy doing whatever work it is he’s doing for you. He feels it’s wrong.”

“Lieutenant Ryan is confused. He is protecting people in his work. Saving lives. Perhaps you could remind him of that.”

“No. I won’t see him again.”

“But you must. There’s the dinner tonight.”

“I told him I wasn’t able to come.”

Skorzeny kept his voice even. “That was foolish.”

“I only took this assignment as a favour for Mr. Waugh. I’ve let men take me to dinner before, drinks and such, to find out things about them. But they were diplomats or businessmen; all they talked about were negotiations and deals. Never anything like this. I won’t be a part of it.”