William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Standing outside the door, ready to ring the bell, he paused a moment, running through the plan of action he had made, mentally ticking off everything he had brought with him in the small grip he was carrying — every eventuality covered, he hoped. He took the revolver out of his pocket and rang the doorbell. After a while, he heard a voice close to the door.

“ Oui? Qui est là? ”

“I’m a plumber sent from downstairs. There’s a leak coming from your apartment.”

Lysander heard the key turn in the lock and the door opened. Glockner stood there in a silk dressing gown.

“A leak? Are you —”

Before Glockner could register that he didn’t look in the least like a plumber Lysander pointed his gun at his face.

“Step back inside, please.”

Glockner did so, clearly very alarmed, and Lysander locked the door again behind him. Gesturing with the gun, he steered Glockner into his sitting room. Glockner was recovering his composure. He put his hands in his dressing-gown pockets and turned to face Lysander.

“If you’re an educated thief you might find some books that are worth stealing. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.”

The room was lined with bookshelves, some glass-fronted, some open. A blond parquet floor with a self-coloured navy rug. A deep leather armchair set beneath a standard lamp with a pliable shade to direct the light for well-illuminated reading. A writing desk with a chair and on the one clear wall a line of framed etchings — cityscapes. An intellectual’s room — Florence Duchesne’s pen-portait was correct. Glockner spoke good French with a slight German accent. He was an even-featured, clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties with a slight cast in his right eye that made his gaze seem curiously misdirected, as if he wasn’t paying full attention or his mind had wandered.

Lysander pulled the hard chair away from the writing desk and set it in the middle of the room.

“Sit down, please.”

“Are you German? Wir können Deutsch sprechen, wenn Sie das bevorzugen .”

Lysander stuck to French.

“Sit down, please. Put your hands behind your back.”

“Ah, English,” Glockner said knowingly, smiling widely and nodding as he sat down, revealing some extensive silver bridgework at the side of his teeth.

Lysander walked behind him, and taking a short noose of rope from his grip, slipped it over Glockner’s wrists and pulled it tight. Now he could put his revolver down and with more short lengths of rope bound Glockner’s arms together and secured them to the back of the chair. He stepped back, put the revolver in his pocket and placed his grip on the desk, reaching in and removing the wad of 500 franc notes. He placed it on Glockner’s knees.

“25, 000 francs, first instalment.”

“Listen, you English fool, you moron —”

“No. You listen. I just need the answer to one simple question. Then I’ll leave you alone to enjoy your money. No one will know that it was you who told me.”

Glockner swore at him in German.

“And if you behave yourself,” Lysander continued, unperturbed, “then in another month you’ll receive another 25, 000.”

Glockner seemed to have lost something of his self-control and assurance. He spat at Lysander and missed. A lock of his fair, thinning hair fell across his forehead, almost coquettishly. As he continued to swear vilely at him the silver in his teeth glinted.

Lysander slapped his face — not hard — just enough to shut him up. Glockner looked shocked, affronted.

“It’s very simple,” Lysander said, switching to German. “We know everything — the letters from London, the code. We have copies of all the letters. I just need to know the key.”

Glockner took this in. Lysander would have said that this news had genuinely disturbed him somewhat, as if the full seriousness of his plight were suddenly made clear to him.

“I don’t have it,” he said, sullenly.

“It’s a one-on-one cipher — of course you have it. As does the person who is sending you the letters. We’re not interested in you — we’re interested in him. Give us the key and the rest of this Sunday is yours.”

As if to underline his words, the big bells from the cathedral a few streets away began to chime, sonorous and heavy.

“You’ve just signed your own death warrant,” Glockner said, with too evident bravado. “I don’t have the key — I just pass the letters on to Berlin.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Why don’t I believe you?”

Lysander took the wad of money off Glockner’s knees and reached into his grip and drew out a bundle of washing line, unspooling it and then roping Glockner securely to his chair — his chest and arms, his thighs and shins — bound tight like a spider spinning the filaments of sticky web around a pinioned fly. Then he tipped the chair back until Glockner was lying on the floor.

Lysander stood over him, looking down. In reality, he had no sure idea what he was going to do next — though it was clear that the bribe option had failed. However, having Glockner helpless like this served to make the obvious point that there would be alternative attempts at ‘persuasion’ imminently.

“It doesn’t need to be this hard, Herr Glockner,” he said, as persuasively as he could. “You don’t need to suffer. You shouldn’t suffer.”

He wandered round the apartment and looked at the etchings on the wall — street scenes of Munich, he saw.

“ Münchner? ”

“You’ll be dead by the end of today,” Glockner said. “They’ll find you and kill you — they know everything that’s going on in this town. I’ve an appointment at 11. 00. If I don’t show up they’ll come directly here.”

“Well, that gives us less than an hour for you to make up your mind and see sense, then.”

Lysander paced about the room. He drew the curtains and switched on the electric side-lights, wondering what to do. What was it Massinger had said? Cut off his fingers, one by one…Oh yes, very straightforward. Right, where do we start? Obviously, he wasn’t going to be able to mutilate the man and he felt a useless anger rise in him, directed at Massinger and his brutal complacency. This was exactly the situation he’d posited to Massinger — what if the bribe was not accepted? — and he had been mocked for his scepticism. In a mood of mounting frustration he walked out of the sitting room and went to find the kitchen.

The flat was small — apart from the sitting room there was a bedroom, a bathroom and a small clean kitchen with a stove and a soapstone sink and a meat-safe. He began to open drawers, looking for knives or shears — those kitchen shears for boning chickens — they’d snap a finger off at the joint. He would threaten Glockner — perhaps squeeze a fingertip between two blades of the scissors; perhaps that would work, terrorize him enough. The imagined snip would perhaps be more disturbing than anything real.

The first drawer revealed cleaning equipment — bleach, wire-wool pan scourers, scrubbing brushes of various sizes. In the second drawer he found the knives — no shears — but they were sharp enough. He looked under the sink and found a bucket — a bucket would be a good prop, as if there would be blood to mop up, that might add to the conviction of the whole charade, he thought. He stopped and stood up.

He was thinking. An idea had come to him — from nowhere. He opened the first drawer again and took out the two pan scourers and held them in each hand — a coarse steel mesh shaped into a squashy sphere. He began to think further — no need to shed a drop of blood at all…Then he ran them under the tap, shook the water from them, slipped them into his pockets and wandered back into the sitting room.