Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘Sit down, please, Herr Kapitän.’

And this time Mohr stepped forward to pull out the chair, his face white and drawn.

‘How long were you on the staff at U-boat Headquarters?’

‘Can I have another?’ And he pointed to the cigarettes.

Lindsay nodded and pushed the cigarette case back to him.

‘A little over six months.’

‘And you joined?’

‘For the second time, in the autumn of last year.’

‘The second time?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are reading our signals?’

Mohr drew on his cigarette and looked away. Then, planting his elbow on the table, he bent his head to cover his face as if in prayer. A few seconds more and he muttered something that Lindsay did not catch.

‘Are you reading our signals?’

‘Yes. Yes, damn it.’

‘How many?’

‘Most of them.’

‘Most of them?’

‘Most of them.’ He lifted his head from his hand and there was a small tight-lipped smile on his face. An involuntary smile, the pleasure of revealing a shocking secret.

‘I will talk to you here and now in this room. That is all. And to no one else. Do you agree?’

‘Yes.’

‘Only in this cell.’

‘And there will be no mention of the source?’

‘No.’

Mohr gave a painfully heavy sigh and leant forward, his hands clasped in the middle of the table: ‘You changed the Naval Cipher last summer. It didn’t take the B-Dienst long to break into the new one. And the other one — the Naval Code — you introduced two basic books. We broke into those in just six weeks. Old habits. Too many short signals sent the same way. Your codes changed but the word patterns and most of the wording remained more or less the same. So it was simple.’

‘And that means you know…’

‘Convoy routes, lone ships, battleships, any kind of ship, times of arrival, times of departure. I expect we knew all about your convoy…’

Lindsay looked at him and for a desperate moment he wanted to cry. Madness. Why? He must take control of himself. He reached down to the briefcase at his feet to search for his notepad. As he lifted it to the table he noticed that his hand was trembling.

‘All right. Let’s start at the beginning.’

‘Do you know why I’m telling you this?’

‘Please tell me.’

‘For my men. I don’t care for myself. Believe me. I don’t care. But they deserve better than to…’ He swallowed hard, then coughed in an effort to disguise the emotion that was written plainly enough on his face. ‘Heine is enough. A terrible, tragic mistake. But no more, I don’t want any more deaths… and…’

Again he could not finish. For a few seconds they sat there in silence looking everywhere, anywhere but at each other. But in an hour, maybe less, Mohr might regret his decision. It was important not to give him the time to reconsider it : ‘I want to start with the first code-breaks.’

‘Your Merchant Navy Code was the easiest. We use it like a railway timetable, convoy departure and arrival times, call signs, and the routes.’

‘How many Merchant Navy signals are you decrypting?’

‘Sometimes two thousand a month with only a short delay.’

Lindsay wrote it down. Questions, then more questions. And notes in a small neat hand, the pace quickening as the minutes ticked by, sweet tea and cigarettes, and occasionally Mohr would push back his chair to walk about the cell. He spoke of code books captured from British submarines, and of the signals that had betrayed the Navy in Norway the year before, of Atlantic convoy traffic and lone ships tracked and sunk in African waters. At a little before four o’clock he was escorted to the lavatory and Lindsay stood by the door watching the second hand on his watch as if waiting for Cinderella to come home from the ball.

‘And your mission to Freetown, what was its purpose?’

‘It was my idea. Ha.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘I’ve only myself to blame. I wanted to leave the Staff and return to my boat. So it was agreed I would co-ordinate attacks off Freetown. The wireless operators spoke English and were trained to intercept and decode the signals. I would then direct the nearest U-boat to attack, more than one if it could reach the convoy in time. It was happy hunting there.’

It was at a little before six o’clock when Lindsay put down his pencil. Doubt and fear were crystallising in Mohr like frost and for almost an hour he had refused to say much more than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. The emotional effort had left him exhausted, slumped on his chair like a sack of potatoes.

‘You will honour your promise to release my men? And no one will know I’ve spoken to you?’

Lindsay picked up the pad and began slowly turning the pages of cream paper carefully covered with his pencil notes. Mohr had given much. One of the promises he had made to him would be easy to keep.

‘Yes, your men will be sent back to the camp. They won’t be charged with murder.’

‘We aren’t murderers, you know that.’

It was feeble-sounding from such a man.

Lindsay stared across the table at him. Why had he done it? Was it loyalty to the crew or vanity and a fear of disgrace and death? Perhaps a deep, deep weariness. It was impossible to be sure because there was often no answer to the difficult questions, the things that really mattered — duty, loyalty, love — only a confusing tangle of feelings and thoughts pulling in many different directions. Mohr would reflect on it for the rest of his life, the answer always different, changing year on year.

‘No. You aren’t murderers,’ he said coolly. ‘You won’t be taken to court. You are not murderers because no one was murdered.’

Mohr frowned and leant forward a little to study his face: ‘But Lange was…’

‘Leutnant Lange is recovering in hospital.’

The nails of Mohr’s right hand cut into the fist he had made of his left. He closed his eyes, his jaws were clenched, his face stiff with anger. Picking up the pad, Lindsay pushed back his chair and stepped over to rap once on the door: ‘All right, take him away.’

Mohr was still sitting at the table, his head bent back a little, his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Keys tinkled in the lock and the door began to open.

‘The two of us are the same, you know.’ Mohr’s eyes were still shut. ‘You are a hunter.’

A prison warder was standing at the edge of the table waiting for him to get to his feet. He opened his eyes, the mask back in place, he was ‘the Buddha’ again.

‘Come on.’ The warder took his arm but he shook it free impatiently and, pushing his chair away, he got quickly to his feet.

At the door he stopped and turned to stare at Lindsay again, an outstretched arm apart. For a few seconds his dark eyes roved about Lindsay’s face as if searching for some common feeling or warmth. He looked sad and tired and almost desperate. Then he was gone. And Lindsay listened to the disciplined beat of his footsteps retreating along the landing until they were lost in the echo of the prison.

And he was alone in the cell with the table and the chairs and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Triumph? No. A little quiet satisfaction, perhaps. Above all, bone-numbing exhaustion and a deep sadness. Pulling the door to, he walked over to the table and sat down. His eyes were swimming so he closed them and bent to rest his head on his arm. Almost at once he began to slip into that half-world between sleep and consciousness, to a place that was always the same, a cold place where the wind whistled and hissed and cut at the skin. And floating in darkness, a shape spinning and bobbing towards him, he touched it again and it turned its black burnt face to him, its eyes dull and empty. And as he pushed it away he wondered if it would ever be different.