Pavel & I (26 page)

So I went down into the basement and stood over him for what seemed like an age, my face pressed against the bars of his cage, reading his dream off his lids. He slept like an infant, his face crushed into the ground, fingers bent and his hair limp from the cellar's infernal climate. Even so he was a handsome man; a hollow-eyed beauty at once effete and masculine. Haggard, in any case. I was tempted to touch, and encourage him to claim the mattress's comforts that he had either abandoned or altogether spurned. In the end I stayed my hand, already halfway through the bars. It wasn't the time for a first touch. Instead, I straightened and patted my pockets for cigarettes.

The cellar's heat soon peeled me out of my overcoat. There must have been no other house in Berlin as well heated as the Colonel's, and no other cellar so in thrall to a furnace's pent-up fury. The wall was parched by it, a spider's web of cracks running floor to ceiling, with the exception of one corner where a water pipe leaked and bled a patch of wet onto the plaster. It was a curious detail of that winter's work that the poor souls we dragged down into the basement for interrogation or intimidation experienced, in the first few minutes and hours of their stay, the uneasy joy of finally, miraculously feeling
warm.
It was their flesh that betrayed them: after weeks of cowering, it unfurled itself and rose to meet wire, fist or knife with the moronic
flush of well-being. In time, no doubt, the Colonel's visitors came to despise the heat, along with the hulking shadow of the cast-iron stove and the smell of dry brick, and began to long once again for the sterile cold of winter.

Meanwhile, my brow and underarms were running with sweat. I was loath to soil my freshly ironed handkerchief that early in the day, so I wiped my brow with my coat-sleeve instead. Still Pavel Richter would not wake. I went back into a crouch and tried to read his features. It was a mystery to me how I should get him to talk. I didn't even know what it was I could say to him.

In the end I didn't. Speak to him. The whole of that first day. There were no threats I could make and be held to, and I was unsure whether I was allowed to use techniques that left little or no mark on a man's body. Also, his face unnerved me, those dark, teary eyes that shone hard as moist granite. By the end of the afternoon, I began to fixate on his wedding ring. He did not strike me as the kind of man who would cheat on his wife (though all men did, during the war, and excused themselves by their fear of death). It came to be the only question I could formulate. What he thought about his wife. I did not do it very well and he sent me packing. I had hoped he would be polite enough to offer an answer. Then again, it was an unusual circumstance, a dead boy between us, and a lover who slept with the enemy. In any case, when I went home that evening, I earnestly hoped the Colonel would lift his restrictions upon my work. It wasn't that I had any special desire to hurt Pavel, but we needed his secret, and I for one was becoming increasingly curious to learn more about our quiet, patient friend.

I rose at half past five the next morning, and repeated my morning rituals. Then: a hasty drive, worn tyres skidding over snow-covered roads. When I entered the villa's kitchen, I surprised the Colonel's wife who, dressed in a silky morning gown with an oriental design, was preparing a family breakfast. She gave a start and dropped a butter knife, then collected herself and stooped to retrieve it. Her neckline gaped in response to her movement. I was polite enough to avert my gaze.

‘Very sorry to march in on you like this. I trust the Colonel is upstairs?'

She shook her head.

‘No. He called late last night and said to tell you he had to fly out to London. And to give you this.'

She wiped her fingers on her gown, picked up an envelope from the top of the breadbin and passed it over by one corner. As I accepted the letter, we exchanged a glance and shared her statement's implication. She had flown in, two days previously, to celebrate Christmas with her husband. Now she was stranded in Berlin, and acting as his messenger boy.

‘Anything I can do for you?'

‘Why thank you, but no. My husband said his chauffeur would fetch us whatever was needed.'

I nodded my acceptance of the arrangements and allowed her to pour me a cup of coffee.

‘I understand you work in the basement.'

‘Yes.'

‘Feel free to join me and my children for lunch.'

‘Much obliged, but I fear I will have to take my meals downstairs.'

‘As you wish.'

I wondered whether her coolness came naturally to her, or at some strain. One could adduce arguments for either.

I took my coffee in the drawing room and read over the note the Colonel had left. It added little to what she had already told me. He
had left for London, to report at headquarters. I should proceed as discussed. His wife was not to leave the house. He'd return as soon as possible. Kind regards, etc.

The letter seemed to confirm a budding theory of mine, that the Colonel's ‘private' activities had begun to draw the attention of his superiors; he might be hard pushed to smooth things over. If so, he would certainly have no wish for the maltreated body of a United States national to surface in the villa's basement, along with a surgical bowl full of toenails and viscera. I was stranded then, with a silent prisoner and no leverage to make him talk. It was a question of breaking him, I guess: I needed to produce in him that peculiar blend of isolation and self-doubt that blossoms in detainees and makes them feel guilty before their jailers. Try as I might, the one thing that kept popping back into my head was the question of his wife.

‘Just a name, Mr Richter, that's all I want. A name. It's utterly useless to me. Make one up if you like.'

‘Charlotte.'

‘Very well, Charlotte. A beautiful name. Is she pretty?'

‘It's none of your business.'

‘Ah, go on. It's just a conversational question. Nothing in it. All you need to do is say yes.'

But he just stared at me with that haggard, patient face, and waited me out. His eyes, I noticed, were on my boots again. I wished there was some way of getting past his suspicion of me.

‘Are you scared, Mr Richter?' I asked after some thought.

He snorted, took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled.

‘I saw Boyd's body,' he said. ‘I saw what you did to him. That was you, right?'

I waved away the question.

‘Half of what you saw was put in place after the fact. The Colonel gave orders, you see, to make it look savage. “Make it look Russian,” he told us. Our boys had never seen an NKVD corpse, so it came down to guesswork.'

Pavel gave a nod, but I could see he wasn't listening.

‘It was you,' he repeated. ‘Say that it was you.'

‘We don't want to hurt you, Pavel,' I told him. ‘You just have to start talking.'

‘You are a coward,' he raged at me, and ground his cigarette into the floor. The voice no louder than if he'd asked a waiter for the bill.

I kept at him. Asked the same question over and over. The whole of that morning, cigarette after cigarette.

‘Is she pretty?' I asked.

He only frowned and told me to ‘leave him alone'.

I must have asked a hundred times before lunch. After lunch, I asked a hundred times more. It was mid-afternoon by the time I finally managed to make him respond.

‘Is she pretty?' I asked. ‘Charlotte, I mean. Your wife.'

‘What is it to you?'

‘I'm only asking. Is she pretty?'

He shrugged his shoulders, his brow clammy with the heat. ‘Yes. She is.'

‘I knew she would be. What does she look like?'

‘Leave me alone.'

‘All I'm asking is what does she look like? That shouldn't be so hard.'

‘Short, slender. A blonde. Will that do?'

‘It's not very poetic, but it'll do. I have a lively imagination. Do you miss her?'

‘Leave me alone.'

‘I'm just trying to figure it out, Mr Richter. You're decommissioned and there is a pretty wife waiting for you back home. No earthly reason why you wouldn't be with her. And yet you are here.'