Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

She crouched there silently. The blood from the cut across her cheek was dribbling down her face. She rubbed her chin against her shoulder, smearing a streak across her collarbone.

“Isn’t that so, Captain?”

When she looked up, he started urinating in her face. She tried to move away, but he kicked her in the stomach with the toe of his jackboot. The pain seared through her insides, and she collapsed in her corner, retching like a run-over dog, coughing up blood.

“As you know, Captain Erin, you are being charged with espionage and acts of sabotage against the Third Reich,” Hoffer informed her. “Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, spies have no rights. Your existence is not even acknowledged by your own country. You will be hanged. You will be forgotten. But we will remember you for our own records. Sergeant.”

The sergeant readied his camera. Hoffer reached over and pulled her head up by her hair until she screamed. He turned her battered face toward the camera, and an explosion of light burst from the flashbulb. She blinked, and Hoffer let go of her hair. Her head fell to the floor.

“Sergeant, leave us,” said Hoffer. “Tell the others to join us in a few minutes.”

She heard the sergeant leave the cell and lock the door. She and Hoffer were alone. Perhaps she still had a chance to come out of this alive.

Hoffer said, “Tell me the other names in your network, and perhaps we can reach accommodations.”

She thought of the LaRoches, who had been hiding her and little Michelle. “I’m the network,” she said, and spat a ball of blood in Hoffer’s face.

He wiped the blood off his cheek, looked at his red fingertips, and cursed. “You little bitch.”

“Guess you’ll have to kill me, Frederick.”

Upon hearing his first name, uttered with such haunting familiarity, Hoffer suddenly went cold.

“That’s right,” she said. “I know you. You’re the son of Mark Hoffer, the Lutheran pastor.”

His eyes narrowed into slits, his pupils shifting to the right and the left, as if he were afraid they could be overheard. Then he grabbed her throat and started shaking her. “Is that what those British bastards told you?” he demanded. “It’s a lie!”

“Nobody told me, Frederick.”

After a few moments the pupils rested on her, and his eyes grew wide with recognition. “Oh my God,” he muttered in horror, taking his hands off her. “You’re Francis Whyte’s daughter!”

“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me without my Sunday-school dress,” she said. “Then again, it was over ten years ago when your village church helped my father build his little school for Chinese peasants. We were just sixteen.”

Hoffer looked terrified, his eyes rolling like those of a fox caught in a snare. He started pacing the cell, clutching his head between his hands. “This isn’t happening!”

“Oh, yes it is,” she said. “Just look at me.”

He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

She watched him with contempt, wondering how the handsome young man she had once admired from a distance could have become such a cowardly monster. A surprising number of former Protestants from independent churches-Lutherans, Presbyterians, Evangelicals-had joined the SS. That was because in the early ’30s, Hitler still carried a Bible with him during public speaking engagements and appealed to their love of country and hatred of the urban radicals, the Jews, the Communists. Most of all, unlike Catholics, these young Protestants professed no allegiance to the pope or any other spiritual or political leader outside Germany. By the time they had suspected Hitler’s secret agenda was to destroy Jews first and then the Church, these SS men had been brainwashed into professing faith not in the person of Jesus Christ but in an impersonal deity or destiny.

“How can you live with yourself?” she asked him.

He turned and glared at her, hatred filling his eyes. “We’re just two good soldiers who happen to be on opposite sides of the war, Captain.”

“What’s the good soldier going to do now?” she asked. “Hit me again? Spit on me? Beat me? Crucify me, Centurion?”

He pointed an unsteady finger at her. “We both know you’re no innocent victim,” he said. “You knew what you were in for when you signed up for this war.”

“So what’s your excuse?”

Hoffer opened his mouth to say something, but footsteps could be heard rumbling down the passageway. He stiffened with iron resolve and told her, “We all have our jobs to do.”

The cell door swung open. Six young SS men entered the cell. What stone they had crawled out from under, Erin could only guess. Their faces looked flushed from drink, and none of them seemed to be in his right senses. Their eyes flickered with hatred, their mouths twisted in perverse smiles.

“She won’t talk, gentlemen,” said Hoffer, assuming an impersonal air. “Perhaps you can persuade her.”

Erin had heard how the Gestapo broke female agents down: multiple rape. But until now she had refused to believe it. I won’t break down, she resolved, I won’t.

Even Hoffer couldn’t stomach what was about to happen. “I’ll return in thirty minutes,” he told the others. Careful to avoid looking at her, he walked out and closed the cell door.

She heard the key turn with a sickening click. There was a great cry, and the six guards rushed to her. She felt their hands crawling all over her, squeezing her, hurting her.

“Let’s take her for a ride!”

“I bet she hasn’t had a ride in years.”

“Take a number, men,” shouted the first one, a chunky, red-faced youth. “I get her first! The rest of you get what’s left.” He clutched her breast with his greasy, stubby fingers. She squirmed out of his grasp. “Where do you think you’re going?” He unbuckled his belt and slid it off. Coiling it like a whip, he shouted, “Come back here!”

She felt the cold buckle bite her back as he flogged her. She let out a cry and slithered toward a corner of her cell, trying to get away.

He whipped her in a frenzied fury. “I’ll beat you to death!”

“Stop it!” warned one. “You’ll kill her.”

She had reached the corner when she felt the cold hands grab her feet and drag her back. The first guard seized her shoulders and propped her up against the stone wall.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said, slamming the back of her head against the stone. “When I’m finished, my friends are going to rape your corpse!”

She felt him hard against her, trying to get in. She screamed in pain.

“What’s this?” he shouted, trying to part her thighs, but her ankles strained at the ends of the chains. “Unlock her leg chains! Hurry up!”

She felt the chains loosen and slip off. Then came two quick kicks to spread her legs. Before she could respond, she felt a searing pain as he thrust himself into her. She gasped in agony and stared into his crazed eyes. His sweaty face dripped, and his tongue flicked across his wet lips. He crushed his mouth onto hers.

“Save some for us!” cried the others.

“There’s plenty to go around,” the first one yelled. “Isn’t there, bitch?”

The laughter in the cell was deafening, and the crude brute on top of her thrust deeper, harder, as if he could drill through her to the wall.

“My turn! My turn!” shouted another, aroused simply by watching her.

“She’s all yours.” The first one pushed himself away from her. “Take your turn, she’ll take you all for a ride.”

There was an outbreak of laughter, and she felt a dozen hands converge on her at once. She made a feeble attempt to ward them off, but they all collapsed on her, pinning her to the floor.

It was feeding time at the zoo.

Two of them pinned her legs down; a third sat on her face. The others took turns entering her, howling in laughter, shouting some crude song.