Jackdaws

At the end of the corridor was a door marked Interrogation Center. He went inside. The first room had bare white walls, bright lights, and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room. Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric shock machine; and a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers so that they could eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.

There was a noise behind him, startling him. He spun around. When he saw what was in the doorway he took a frightened step back. "Christ!" he said. He was looking at a squat figure, its face thrown into shadow by the strong light from the next room. "Who are you?" he said, and he could hear the fear in his own voice.

The figure stepped into the light and turned into a man in the uniform shirt of a Gestapo sergeant. He was short and pudgy, with a fleshy face and ash-blond hair cropped so short that he looked bald. "What are you doing here?" he said in a Frankfurt accent.

Dieter recovered his composure. The torture chamber had unnerved him, but he regained his habitual tone of authority and said, "I am Major Franck. Your name?"

The sergeant became deferential at once. "Becker, sir, at your service."

"Get the prisoners down here as soon as possible, Becker," said Dieter. "Those who can walk should be brought immediately, the others when they have been seen by a doctor."

"Very good, Major."

Becker went away. Dieter returned to the interview room and sat in the hard chair. He wondered how much information he would get out of the prisoners. Their knowledge might be limited to their own town. If his luck was bad, and their security good, each individual might know only a little about what went on in their own circuit. On the other hand, there was no such thing as perfect security A few individuals inevitably amassed a wide knowledge of their own and other Resistance circuits. His dream was that one circuit might lead him to another in a chain, and he might be able to inflict enormous damage on the Resistance in the weeks remaining before the Allied invasion.

He heard footsteps in the corridor and looked out. The prisoners were being brought in. The first was the woman who had concealed a Sten gun beneath her coat.

Dieter was pleased. It was so useful to have a woman among the prisoners. Under interrogation, women could be as tough as men, but often the way to make a man talk was to beat a woman in front of him. This one was tall and sexy, which was all the better. She seemed to be uninjured. Dieter held up a hand to the soldier escorting her and spoke to the woman in French. "What is your name?" he said in a friendly tone.

She looked at him with haughty eyes. "Why should I tell you?"

He shrugged. This level of opposition was easy to overcome. He used an answer that had served him well a hundred times. "Your relatives may inquire whether you are in custody. If we know your name, we may tell them."

"I am Genevieve Delys."

"A beautiful name for a beautiful woman." He waved her on.

Next came a man in his sixties, bleeding from a head injury and limping too. Dieter said, "You're a little old for this sort of thing, aren't you?"

The man looked proud. "I set the charges," he said defiantly.

"Name?"

"Gaston LefŠvre."

"Just remember one thing, Gaston," Dieter said in a kindly voice. "The pain lasts as long as you choose. When you decide to end it, it will stop."

Fear came into the man's eyes as he contemplated what faced him.

Dieter nodded, satisfied. "Carry on."

A youngster was next, no more than seventeen, Dieter guessed, a good-looking boy who was absolutely terrified. "Name?"

He hesitated, seeming dazed by shock. After thinking, he said, "Bertrand Bisset."

"Good evening, Bertrand," Dieter said pleasantly. "Welcome to Hell."

The boy looked as if he had been slapped.

Dieter pushed him on.

Willi Weber appeared, with Becker pacing behind him like a dangerous dog on a chain. "How did you get in here?" Weber said rudely to Dieter.

"I walked in," Dieter said. "Your security stinks."

"Ridiculous! You've just seen us beat off a major attack!"

"By a dozen men and some girls!"

"We defeated them, that's all that counts."