The Rendezvous (2 page)

‘Ruth – darling! How are you? How wonderful to see you – you look divine!'

Mrs. Ruth Bradford Hilton had a handsome weather-beaten face and a loud laugh; she was a small woman who looked much older than American women usually did; she couldn't have been more than forty-five. He could imagine her going on a tiger-shoot in India or crossing the Sahara with whichever husband she happened to be married to, and enjoying every moment of it. She was very typical of a certain type of very rich American woman. Tough as hell, and born out of her time. She was the direct descendant of the old pioneers who founded America, and the fact that she was worth fifty million and dressed at Balenciaga didn't make her any different. The man she introduced as her husband was a pleasant, well-bred Englishman with a stupid face, who hardly said a word.

She turned to Amstat, taking in everything about him. He could see her doing it, making a thorough judgment of Julia's new boy friend – he hated that expression with its patronising implications. He smiled at her and asked her how she enjoyed India.

‘It was fabulous, fantastic. Have you ever been there, Mr. Amstat?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Please call me Karl.'

‘Karl then, how nice of you! Well, you really must go. We stayed with the Jam Singhs, you know – Aysha's an old friend of mine, we spent a summer in Europe together as girls – she's such a beauty – you know how dainty Indian women are – well, George just adored the idea, he's a wonderful shot, you know, so we thought we'd go and pay the Jam Singhs a visit for our honeymoon …' She talked on and on, interrupted by people rushing up to kiss her and scream the same old inanities about how marvellous it was to see her and how divine she looked. She kept coming back to him, going on describing the palace where they stayed, and how her hostess had become a political power in India, and then she was telling him about the tiger-shoot. He had lost Julia, and he couldn't see her anywhere. Suddenly Ruth said, ‘That's enough about us, Karl; tell me about you. What do you do, and where do you come from? You're German, aren't you?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I'm Swiss. I'm an architect, Mrs. Hilton.'

The sun-tanned face opened out in a dazzling smile. She had a compelling charm. ‘You must call me Ruth, if I'm going to call you Karl. I hate formality, so does George – don't you, sweet?'

Her husband looked down at her. ‘Yes, I do. Can't stand it.'

From the way he looked at her Amstat thought he hadn't married her just for her money. He might end up by staying with her for it, though.

‘And you're an architect – how fascinating. How long have you known Julia?'

‘Two years,' Amstat said. He wondered if she were going to ask him if they lived together. She was the kind of woman who might, if she wanted to know.

‘I'm so glad,' she said. ‘She's looking marvellous. That last husband of hers was a drag – thank God she had the sense to get divorced. Are you married? Oh, George, get that waiter, darling, he's taking the champagne away and I'm just dying for a glass …'

‘No, I'm not married. I'm a bachelor. Confirmed, I'm afraid.'

The smile came at him again. ‘Don't count on it. I know little Julia. Oh, there's my brother, and his wife. Damn, where's George – no, don't go, Karl, I want you to meet them. Robert, sweetie; Terese – Robert, this is Karl Amstat.' He shook hands with a tall, good-looking American man, and then he heard Ruth Hilton say, ‘And this is my sister-in-law, Terese Bradford. Mr. Amstat.'

The woman had been half turned away from him, speaking to someone. Now she came round and held out her hand. Her blonde hair was cut short, her eyes looked straight at him. ‘How do you do,' she said. After twenty years he found himself face to face with Terese Masson.

‘What's your name?'

‘You know it. You have my papers.'

He saw Willi Freischer make a move beside him.

‘No,' he said. ‘Leave her alone.'

Freischer always began an interrogation by hitting the prisoner. If it was a man he punched him and kicked him in the kidneys or the groin. He slapped the women backwards and forwards till they had bloody noses and split lips. If they answered back he thumped them in the breasts. It was a good idea to let the girl see Freischer so she would know what to expect if she didn't co-operate. He looked up at her quite calmly; it was his function to be calm, to maintain a balance between the big, beefy Gestapo butcher standing behind him at the desk and his own polite line of questioning.

She was very young, the girl they had arrested when she got off the train from Lyons. Her papers said she was eighteen. If she hadn't been so frightened she would have been very pretty. Fear made the human face ugly, it stretched the skin, turned it sallow, hollowed out the eyes.

She was terrified; he could tell by the way she held her hands tightly together on her knees. They were shaking and she was tensing up, trying to control them. Two years in the S.D. section had taught Alfred Brunnerman a lot about human reactions to things like pain and fear. It was his job to assess the individual, to judge how strong or weak they were, how long he needed to break them. If he hadn't the time to waste on them he passed them on to Willi Friescher who took them up to the fourth floor. This girl, Terese Masson, was an important prisoner. Not important in herself; she was little more than a courier, taking messages from place to place, but it was her bad luck to know something which really was important. That was why General Knochen had sent her up to him first and not left her to Freischer to interview. Freischer was apt to overdo it; many of his prisoners died. Knochen believed in Brunnerman's intellectual approach to his job; he held a long list of successes behind him since he joined the Gestapo in 1940.

‘Your name is Terese Masson, you are eighteen years old, you were born at Nancy on June 18th, 1925, your father is dead, and you live with a Mademoiselle Jerome at 22 Rue Bonnard. This is all in front of me. Major Freischer, that's all for the moment.'

Freischer saluted and went out. As he walked past the chair where the girl was sitting he looked at her. He hoped she stuck it out; he hoped he got his hands on her. He'd make the little bitch squeal. He hated the French more even than the Poles or the Jews or any of the inferior races. He couldn't have explained why, but it was something to do with their culture and their good cooking, and the way everyone talked about Paris as if it were something special, better than other cities. He was not, unlike two of his assistants, one of them a Frenchman, a homosexual, but he enjoyed roughing up French women. They were supposed to be so smart, so pretty, so hot in bed. He felt really savage towards them. He went out and shut the door. Brunnerman didn't speak, he wrote something down and waited, as if he were thinking.

He had enjoyed his work with the S.S. for the first year. He liked counter-espionage and he had been rapidly promoted because of the new, intellectual approach he brought to it. Politically he and his family were dedicated National Socialists; his father held the post of Professor of Philosophy at Frankfurt University which had been vacated by a Jew who fled from Germany. The Brunnermans were members of the élite, and the sons of the élite went into the S.S. If they showed real ability they went on to the Gestapo. Brunnerman was a colonel at twenty-four because he was one of the best administrators and interrogators in this particular section. Unlike Freischer and the old beer hall Nazis, he despised brutality and insisted that it was unnecessary and often ineffective. As a young man he had studied psychology and philosophy, and become fascinated by the Russian scientist Pavlov's theory of conditioned reflex. From the thesis that the human being was governed by a series of automatic impulses, and his behaviour could be totally conditioned by interfering with the brain mechanism controlling the reflexes, Brunnerman had gone further still into the structure of the human personality. He believed, and he had proved his point over and over again in dealing with prisoners like the one sitting in front of him, that it was possible to break down resistance without physical pain, and often to transform an enemy into a useful and obedient tool.

He hated brutality and despised his colleagues who resorted to it because they lacked the skill and patience to try other methods. Cruelty was degrading for both sides; he had seen a great deal of it since he was posted to Paris and he was increasingly disturbed by what he saw. This interrogation was going to be more difficult than most because Terese Masson had been brought straight to Gestapo Headquarters on the Avenue Foch without the usual ten days' softening up in Fresnes prison. Fresnes was a filthy, overcrowded relic, full of women suspected of every kind of crime from prostitution to Resistance work. After ten days the suspect came to the Avenue Foch in a condition which made it much easier for Brunnerman to work on them. They were starving, and the first thing they were offered was a meal, and it was a meal of pre-war quality. If they ate it, and many did, they were one step nearer giving way. And one of the most important factors in dealing with women in his kind of work was that they had had time to get dirty and bedraggled, often lousy. Mentally they always saw themselves facing interrogation decently dressed and clean, even attractive; it was easier to be heroic when you looked normal. Rags and stink and vermin did something more fundamentally damaging to a woman than to a man, who didn't care so much how his enemies saw him.

Terese Masson had spent the night in a cell in the basement, with an S.S. man on duty to see she didn't try to lie down or sleep. For the last three hours he had made her stand upright against the wall. Brunnerman glanced up at her; she was looking over his head with an expression of frightened obstinacy on her face. She was a very pretty girl; he could think, quite dispassionately, what a pity it was that she should end up in the Avenue Foch. She was the sort of girl he might have met at a party and taken out to dinner.

‘Now, mademoiselle, I've sent Major Freischer away so that we can talk. Would you like a cigarette?'

‘No,' Terese Masson said. ‘And you're wasting your time. You'll get nothing out of me.'

He smiled at her and lit his own cigarette. ‘You don't have to be aggressive with me; I'm not going to hurt you. And it's foolish not to have a cigarette if you want one – you'll be here a long time. You must be hungry by now. Of course, you probably had something on the train coming back from Lyons, a sandwich perhaps – who sent you to Lyons, mademoiselle?'

‘Nobody,' the girl said.

She didn't even pretend to tell the truth. She had large brown eyes, which were a surprise because she was so blonde, and they stared at him fiercely, like a cornered animal. A lot of people cursed and swore at him within the first hour; some of the women stood up and shrieked obscenities at him just to destroy the atmosphere of normality he was creating. This girl was going to fight him as hard as she could because he wasn't behaving as she expected. Nobody had threatened her or hit her. He was relaxed, almost friendly. ‘How old are you?' he said suddenly.

‘You know,' she said. ‘You've got my papers.'

‘Eighteen,' Brunnerman said. ‘You're very young to be mixed up in this. You should be out with your young man this evening, enjoying yourself.'

‘I haven't got a young man,' she said. ‘You've taken them all for your filthy labour camps.'

He ignored the remark. ‘You went to Lyons,' he said, ‘to give a message to a man at the Café Madeleine on the Rue Castigilione. You sat at a table and he sat down and tried to pick you up. You moved to another table, but you left a piece of paper for him under your plate. Then you had your meal, walked round the town for a while and then took the train back to Paris. This is what you did. When you got to the barrier at the Gare du Lyon you were arrested and brought here. Do you want to know how I know all this?'

‘No,' she said. ‘No, I don't want to know anything.'

Her hands had moved from her lap and were holding the sides of the chair seat.

‘I'll tell you anyway,' he said. ‘Because I think you ought to know. You were betrayed, mademoiselle. One of our agents was waiting at the Café Madeleine – he saw you meet the contact, leave the message for him. Your contact was arrested the moment he left the place. Everything you did was known; we wanted you for interrogation here in Paris, that's why you were allowed to catch the train back. The man you met at Lyons is being interrogated at Lyons now. I shall ring up in front of you and find out what he's told them.'

‘He won't have told you anything,' Terese Masson said. ‘You needn't lie to me. I'm not afraid of you.' She leant back against the chair; her whole body ached with tiredness.

He picked up the telephone and spoke into it in German.

‘You don't have to be afraid of me,' he said. ‘I told you, I'm not going to hurt you. But you ought to be afraid of Major Freischer.'

There was some delay in getting through; he held on, smoking his cigarette. This was the first part of the technique. The girl had been told what would happen to her if she were caught. She was emotionally prepared for violence, for suffering; she was ready to resist and some of the frailest physically hung on for days, often till they died. There was a spirit in this girl that would take a lot of crushing. But already she was a little shaken, a little disarmed by his approach. And she knew now that she had been betrayed; someone she had trusted had landed her in the mess she was in – a friend, not an enemy, had let her down. And the man she had met in Lyons was being questioned too. How much had he told them – how brave was he being? Her own ordeal hadn't even started. He had confused her already, and he had slipped in the threat without making it seem obvious. ‘You ought to be afraid of Major Freischer.' It took time, this new technique of his, but once it worked it worked for ever. It was very simple in theory and immensely complex in practice. Take one frightened human being with something to hide. Isolate them, weaken them physically by keeping them awake and without food, destroy their self-respect by making them evacuate where they stood, surround them with hostility and the threat of agonies to come. Then give them to an interrogator who was kind and even sympathetic; they would feel hate for him, resentment at their own degradation, but finally a pathetic dependence would creep up on them, focusing on the one human contact they had which was showing them understanding. At all costs they must become involved with the interrogator, that's why one man, and not a team, was so essential to this particular method. It was a great strain on the man, but there wasn't a substitute. At the crucial moment, when they were still resisting, the interrogator's patience would come to an end; his friendliness would change to anger, he would reproach his victim and threaten to withdraw altogether. And his replacement was someone like Freischer, the symbol of hate and torture. With only two exceptions in two years Brunnerman's prisoners had all collapsed at this point; a high proportion of them had gone to work for the Gestapo afterwards.