The Rendezvous (4 page)

The voice barked at him over the line; he could imagine Knochen sitting at his desk, making notes in his crabby handwriting. He very seldom lost his temper but when he did he was without mercy.

‘No, not yet, General, but any moment now.' It was dangerous but Brunnerman's own nerves were stretched like piano wires, and he couldn't help saying, ‘I'd have had it now, if your call hadn't interrupted me.'

‘You've had fourteen hours to break her,' Knochen snapped. ‘That's long enough. Send her upstairs and let Freischer see what he can do.'

The sweat came out on Brunnerman's face. ‘Give me another hour, half an hour. It's just coming – I'll guarantee it!'

‘Not another minute!' There was a moment's pause. ‘What the hell are you doing, anyway? What's all this fuss about the girl? She's to go upstairs, Brunnerman. Immediately!' The line clicked, and Brunnerman hung up. Terese Masson had gone back to her chair: she was sitting with her hands clenched on her knees and her eyes weren't looking at him. He went over and stood in front of her.

‘Get up!'

She did as she was told, and he could see that she was calm. His own hands were shaking. ‘That was my chief. He wanted to know if you'd co-operated and I had to tell him you hadn't. I even asked for more time, but he wouldn't give it. They're coming for you, Terese. For Christ's sake tell me, before they get here!'

She shook her head. ‘No,' she said, ‘I can't.'

‘You stupid little fool!' He shouted at her, overcome by anger. He did something he had never done since he joined the S.S. He hit her across the face.

‘Tell me the name!'

She had collapsed on the chair, covering her head with her hands, trying to protect herself. He stopped and turned away from her. He went back to his desk and lit a cigarette; it took some seconds before he got the lighter flame steady enough to light the end of it. ‘I'm sorry I did that,' he said. ‘It's never happened before.'

‘It's all right.' They were facing each other across a distance now, and she managed to smile at him. She looked very small and even younger than she was. The carpet was like an ocean between them.

‘It showed you meant what you said, in a funny way. That's why you hit me – as a last resort.'

‘I meant it all.' His anger had gone now; he felt a sense of total emptiness. ‘All I can do is advise you. Don't try and hold out. Don't get Freischer in a bad mood. Tell them quickly.'

There was a loud knock on the door; it opened and the two S.S. men in uniform came in and saluted. He saw the girl raise both hands to her mouth in a gesture of fear, and then get up without being told.

‘Major Freischer requests the prisoner Masson, Colonel.'

Brunnerman refused to look at her. ‘Take her.'

She moved to meet them, and at the door she turned. ‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘If I wouldn't tell you, I'll never tell them.' Then the door shut, and a moment later he heard the whine of the internal passenger lift as it went up.

There was a single low-voltage bulb in the ceiling; it hung on a length of flex and when she opened her eyes it was moving gently, backwards and forwards. She recognised the light as a sign that she was conscious for short periods; she tried to keep her eyes open so as not to lose it and slide away again. The descent into the dark was worse than the pain which was associated with the swinging bulb; it was like being drowned in that bath all over again. There were big oval blisters on her breasts where Freischer had burnt her with his cigar; they hurt, but the sensation ran into all the other feelings of injury in her body. They had broken the fingers of her right hand one by one and there was an intolerable ache somewhere at the end of her arm. It was over, that's why she was looking at the light bulb and slowly coming back to full awareness. She was in a cell, lying on a plank bed, naked except for a dirty blanket that was as thin as paper. She shivered continuously with cold and shock; she had vomited up all the water she had swallowed while they held her head under the water and she hadn't even the strength left to cry because of the pain.

‘Terese.'

It was impossible to turn her head; she could see him bending over her, but his face was blurred. It wasn't one of the others. It wasn't the man with the little eyes that had the cigar, or the thin one who turned out to be a Frenchman when she heard him speak. This was the other one, the one who had tried to help her. The kind one. Tears rushed up into her eyes and overflowed, running down her bruised and sunken face.

‘Don't cry,' he said. ‘It's all over.'

‘It hurts; my hand – everything …' She tried to speak, but it was only a whisper; he had to bend close to hear her.

‘I know, I'm going to send you to hospital.' He knew what they had done to her, because he had received a full report. He had put in a report of his own, written in desperate haste after she was taken away, saying that in his opinion she didn't have the information they wanted. But it hadn't saved her. He had stayed on in the office till she came down from the fourth floor, and then come down to the basement to see her. He hadn't been able to work all day, and he refused to go back to his hotel room and sleep. After a day and a night without going to bed he had reached a pitch of nervous exhaustion where it was impossible to sleep at all. His mind kept returning to Terese Masson, nagging him with questions about himself and his reactions. Why had he lied to try to save her from the ultimate interrogation – he wasn't in love with her, wanting to sleep with her wasn't love. He had never been in love with any woman and he had gone to bed with a great many and enjoyed them. It wasn't courage either, because a lot of the people who came to the Avenue Foch were brave; at least in the beginning. He didn't know what it was, but the effect upon him was obsessional. She had come into his life at a crisis point of which he was unaware; what happened to her was an extension of what was really happening to him. Even before he went down to see her he had decided to resign and ask to be transferred to a Wermacht combat unit. Now he couldn't bear to look at her; when he left the cell he was going to be physically sick. If he had come on Freischer at that moment he would have shot him.

There was another whisper, forced out with great effort.

‘Did I tell them?'

She hadn't been able to remember; she had a confused memory of someone screaming and screaming, but there were no words. She might have told them. She probably had told them, otherwise why had they stopped?…

‘No.' He said it very firmly and clearly so that she would remember. ‘You were very brave. You didn't tell them anything.'

It was true. Her contact at Lyons had given enough away to put a lead on the man in Paris. Even Freischer had to admit that if they gave the girl any more that day she'd be dead by the evening. She closed her eyes. ‘Thank God,' she said.

‘Major Bradford, could you come a moment, sir?'

Robert Bradford was sitting behind the desk in the S.S. Commandant's office; he had a huge pile of cards in front of him and he had been trying to go through them, checking them from a special list. So far he had ticked off four names and drawn a line through nearly a hundred others. These had been shot, hanged, or gone to the gas chambers, the other four had been discovered among the starving thousands in the camp. There were many more names still unchecked. They were supplied by the French resistance. Other officers were dealing with the Dutch, Belgian and Scandinavian survivors. He looked up at the young sergeant; his name was Broome but his grandparents had come to the States from Poland. He was only twenty-three and what he had seen in the twenty-four hours since his company liberated Buchenwald had put ten years on him. He was permanently green; nobody wanted to eat much, few of Bradford's men were even talking while they went through the camp, rounding up the prisoners, opening one Bluebeard's chamber after another in the building and finding walls of the dead and living piled in rows one upon another. The stench of the place alone was indescribable. They had found the guards too, and the camp commandant, and when he was confronted by them Bradford found himself too benumbed by horror to feel anything so human as anger or hatred. He had put them under guard, and then ordered them to begin burying the heaps of dead which lay round the compounds.

‘What's the matter, Sergeant?'

‘We were going through the block marked J, sir, and we found some women still in there. There's one we can't get out; she's crazy. If you try and get near her she goes berserk. The men don't want to manhandle her, sir, and I don't blame them. I guess we'd like you to come down.'

‘Okay,' Robert Bradford said. ‘I'm coming.'

‘She's over here, sir,' Broome said. ‘By those bunks in the corner.'

There was little light in the building; it was full of tiers of wooden bunks, and the atmosphere was thick and foul with human scents. He saw some women huddled together in a corner, all staring at him with eyes that protruded from their waxen faces. One of his men was trying to persuade them to have some of his chocolate ration.

‘In there,' Broome said. ‘In the bottom bunk.'

Bradford bent down and in the poor light he saw a girl crouching on hands and knees. The hair hung down to her shoulders and her eyes were fixed open in a glare of terror. She wore a filthy camp uniform dress and her body was thin as a child's under the rags.

‘I think she's French,' Broome said. ‘When you get too close she starts to yell at you.'

‘Right,' Bradford said. He moved in deliberately and held out a hand. ‘Mademoiselle?'

The girl sprang back, cringing. ‘No! Go away! Go away from me! I'm not going to tell you!'

He answered her in French. ‘I'm a friend,' he said. ‘I'm an American officer. You're free now.'

She used a filthy expression in reply. She shook her head at him and the ragged hair flew round her face. ‘I'm not telling you! Never!'

Bradford turned to the other women. ‘Anyone know anything about her?'

One of the older women took a pace forward. ‘She's been like this on and off since she came here,' she said. ‘Her name's Masson. I think the Gestapo had her first.'

‘Masson …' he repeated. ‘Masson – I think that name's on my list. Okay, Sergeant, it's not nice but we've got to do it. Get her out, and we'll send her back to the base hospital with the other sick.'

He went back to the office and crossed the fifth name off his list. Terese Masson, Resistance agent. Captured the 20th November 1943. Age eighteen years, hair blonde, eyes brown, height five foot four, no distinguishing marks or scars. Eighteen years old. ‘Jesus God!' he said out loud. She had been in that hell-hole for ten months. She must have been around nineteen and she looked an old woman. The improvised hospital just outside the camp was bursting with prisoners suffering from every variety of disease. Captain Joe Kaplan was the army psychiatrist in charge of the mental patients and Terese Masson would be under him when she got there. Bradford had tried to comfort her when they got her into the ambulance, but she only moaned and cried, repeating again and again that she would never tell them, never, never … he seemed to hear the cry following him as he went back to the office and the ambulance drove away, its red crosses looming like plague marks on its sides. He hadn't allowed himself the luxury of personal feelings since he had first driven into Buchenwald; he had done his job with his mind tight closed against sentiment or hate, but the pitiful cry of defiance and the miserable rag-doll body struggling against her rescuers haunted him, like the few statistics on his list. Two days later he drove out to the base hospital and asked to see her.

2

‘You know, Bob, this is a very interesting case.' Joe Kaplan took off his glasses, polished them on his handkerchief and then put them back on. Bradford knew the mannerism well; he had known Joe since they were students at Harvard together: he had always polished his glasses when he got excited about something. They had become friends and stayed friends, which was unusual, because the Bradfords were moneyed aristocracy and the Kaplans were Jews. The two sections of society seldom mixed socially even in New York, which was pretty liberal by Boston standards.

‘Most neurotic conditions are caused by guilt feelings, you know – but the point about this girl is, she didn't tell the Germans anything!'

‘I don't see why you have to wrap it up,' Bradford said. ‘It seems fairly simple to me; she's broken down because of what they did to her. For Christ's sake, what's so neurotic about that? Wouldn't you?'

Kaplan laughed. ‘No, I'd have opened my big mouth the first time one of them said Boo! Don't get mad at me, Bob. I know you're very close to this. I've tried a simple analysis, drugs and the usual stuff. You must admit I've made some progress; you can get the kid into a room with a bath without she has hysterics. But I have established that she's had some kind of sexual trauma with one of the bastards – no, it wasn't rape, I checked. She's a virgin. But something that makes her feel guilty. I said to her once, “You didn't give them any information, you must remember that. You didn't tell them anything!” She'd had a shot of pethedine and she was pretty woozy. Without the stuff she wouldn't talk at all. And she said, “I would have told
him
. They took me away from him … I wanted to tell him. I wanted to go home with him!” Then she got very upset, so I left it.'

‘All right,' Bradford said. ‘What's the outlook? What chance has she got of leading a normal life?'

Kaplan shrugged. ‘That's hard to say. It might take a year, two years, to get her orientated properly, and even then she'll probably have permanent nervous disabilities. You can't break a leg in six places and then expect to run a mile. If I had the time, and she was back home in a proper clinic with good psychiatric nursing and facilities, I'd say she might be able to live outside in about a year. But here – there's not a chance. Bob. I've got to tell you straight, the girl hasn't a hope in hell of anything but a life spent under care in some institution.'