Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

With one eye on the cellar stairs in case one of Nebe’s men should come looking for me now that my presence upstairs was overdue, I knelt down in front of her and surveyed the wound and the instrument that had caused it. It was an ordinary-looking corkscrew, with a wooden handle now sticky with blood. The sharp business end had been screwed into the side of her knee-joint to a depth of several millimetres, and there seemed no way of removing it without causing her almost as much pain as had been caused by screwing it in. The slightest touch of the handle made her cry out.

‘Please take it out,’ she urged, sensing my indecision.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but hold on to the seat of your chair. This is going to hurt.’ I drew the other chair close enough to prevent her kicking me in the groin and sat down. ‘Ready?’ She closed her eyes and nodded.

The first anti-clockwise twist turned her face a bright shade of scarlet. Then she screamed, with every particle of air in her lungs. But with the second twist, mercifully she passed out. I surveyed the thing in my hand for a brief second and then hurled it at the man whose ears I had boxed. Lying in a corner, breathing stertorously between groans, Veronika’s torturer looked to be in a bad way. The blow had been a cruel one, and although I had never used it before, I knew from my army training that sometimes it even caused a fatal brain haemorrhage.

Veronika’s knee was bleedily heavily. I searched around for something with which to bandage her wound, and decided to make do with the shirt of the man I had deafened. I went over to him and tore it off his back.

Having folded the body of the shirt, I pressed it hard against the knee and then used the sleeves to tie it tightly. When the dressing was finished it was a good looking piece of first-aid work. But her breathing had turned shallow now, and I didn’t doubt that she would need a stretcher out of there.

By this time, almost fifteen minutes had elapsed since my signal to Belinsky, and yet there was no sound that anything had yet happened. How long could it take his men to move in? I hadn’t heard so much as a shout to indicate that they might have encountered some resistance. With people like the Latvian around, it seemed too much to expect that Müller and Nebe could have been arrested without a fight.

König moaned and moved his leg feebly like a swatted insect. I kicked the dog aside and bent down to take a look at him. The skin underneath his moustache had turned a dark, livid colour, and from the amount of blood that had rolled down his cheeks, I judged that I had probably separated his nose cartilage from the upper section of his jaw.

‘I guess it’ll be a while before you enjoy another cigar,’ I said grimly.

I took König’s Mauser out of my pocket and checked the breech. Through the inspection hole I saw the familiar glint of a centre-fire cartridge. One in the chamber. I hauled out the magazine and saw another six neatly ranged like so many cigarettes. I slammed the magazine back up the handle with the heel of my hand and thumbed back the hammer. It was time to find out what had happened to Belinsky.

I went back up the cellar stairs, waited behind the door for a moment and listened. Briefly I thought I heard breathing and then realized that it was my own. I brought the gun up beside my head, slipped the safety off with my thumbnail, and came through the door.

For a split second I saw the Latvian’s black cat, and then felt what seemed like the whole ceiling collapsing on top of me. I heard a small popping noise like a champagne cork, and almost laughed as I realized that it was all the sound of the gun firing involuntarily in my hand that my concussed brain was able to decode. Stunned like a landed salmon I lay on the floor. My body hummed like a telephone cable. Too late I remembered that for a big man the Latvian was remarkably light on his feet. He knelt down beside me, grinned into my face before wielding the cosh again.

Then the darkness came.

There was a message waiting for me. It was written in capital letters as if to emphasize its importance. I struggled to make my eyes focus, only the message kept moving. Blearily, I picked out the individual letters. It was laborious, but I had no choice. Finally I pieced the letters together. The message read: ‘CARE USA’. It seemed important somehow, although I failed to understand why. But then I saw that this was only one part of the message, and the second half at that. I swallowed nauseously and struggled through the first part of the message, which was coded: ‘GR.WT 26lbs. CU.FT. 0’ 10“.‘ What could it all mean? I was still trying to understand the code when I heard footsteps and then the sound of a key turning in the lock.

My head cleared agonizingly as I was hauled up by two pairs of strong hands. One of the men kicked the empty cardboard Care package out of the way as they frogmarched me through the doorway.

My neck and shoulder were hurting so bad that my skin turned to gooseflesh the second they held me under my arms, which I now realized were handcuffed in front of me. I retched desperately and tried to get back on to the floor where I had felt comparatively comfortable. But I remained supported and struggling merely made the pain more intense; and so I allowed myself to be dragged along a short, damp passageway, past a couple of broken barrels and up some steps to a big oak vat. The two men sat me roughly in a chair.

A voice, Müller’s voice, told them to give me some wine. ‘I want him to be fully conscious when we question him.’

Someone put a glass to my lips, and tilted my head painfully. I drank. When the glass was empty I could taste blood in my mouth. I spat in front of me, I didn’t care where. ‘Cheap stuff,’ I heard myself croak. ‘Cooking wine.’

Müller laughed, and I turned my head towards the sound. The bare lightbulbs burned only dimly but even so they managed to hurt my eyes. I squeezed the lids hard shut, and then opened them again.

‘Good,’ said Müller. ‘You’ve still got something left in you. You’ll need it to answer all my questions, Herr Gunther, I can assure you.’

Müller was sitting on a chair with his legs crossed and his arms folded. He looked like a man who was about to watch an audition. Seated beside him, and looking rather less relaxed than the former Gestapo chief, was Nebe. Next to him sat König, wearing a clean shirt, and holding his nose and mouth with a handkerchief as if he had a bad attack of hayfever. On the stone floor at their feet lay Veronika. She was unconscious, and but for the bandage round her knee quite naked. Like me she was also handcuffed, although her pallor indicated that this was an entirely redundant precaution.

I turned my head to the right. A few metres away stood the Latvian and another thug whom I hadn’t seen before. The Latvian was grinning excitedly, no doubt in anticipation of my further humiliation.

We were in the largest of the outhouses. Beyond the windows the night looked in on the proceedings with dark indifference. Somewhere I could hear the low throb of a generator. It hurt to move my head or my neck, and it was actually more comfortable to look back at Müller.

‘Ask anything you like,’ I said, ‘you’ll get nothing out of me.’ But even as I spoke I knew that in Müller’s expert hands there was no more chance of my not telling him everything than there was of me naming the next Pope.

He found my bravado sufficiently absurd as to laugh and shake his head. ‘It’s quite a few years since I conducted an interrogation,’ he said with what sounded like nostalgia. ‘However, I think you’ll find that I haven’t lost my touch.’ Müller looked to Nebe and König as if seeking their approbation, and each man nodded grimly.