‘You think so? What about Masin and Balaban? You couldn’t get them to talk, could you? You had those two Czechos for five months before you managed to get anything out of them.’
‘They were exceptionally strong and determined men, sir.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised, now that I’ve been in here. To me this hardly looks like torture. Somehow I imagined something much worse. Back at my gymnasium in Halle we used to do this sort of thing to other boys just for sport.’
‘With all due respect, sir, there’s not much that’s worse than the water bascule. Short of death itself, which would hardly be to the purpose, no other torture quite persuades as much that you are surely about to die.’
‘I see. So, what has she told us?’
Bohme approached the stenographer, who handed him a few sheets of typed paper; these he passed to Heydrich and, while the Reichsprotector glanced over what was written there, one of Arianne’s tormentors slapped her bruised cheeks to bring her out of a faint.
With the sleeves of their striped civilian shirts rolled up above their substantial biceps and their collars removed, Arianne’s tormentors looked ready for work. The man with his foot on the bascule was examining his knuckles, probably inspecting them for damage. His blond hair was almost white and he seemed indifferent to Arianne’s suffering. The other man was smoking a cigarette that stayed in his mouth while he was slapping her.
‘Come on,’ he said, almost kindly, like a father speaking to a child who was lagging behind on a Sunday afternoon walk in the park. ‘That’s it, Arianne. Wakey-wake. Say hello to our important visitors.’
Arianne retched bath water and some vomit that was part blood and then coughed for almost a minute.
‘Come on. Open your eyes.’
She started to shiver, probably from shock as much as the cold, but still she didn’t open her eyes; at least not until her fatherly interrogator sucked at his cigarette for a second, peeled it off his lower lip and then touched her breast with it.
Arianne opened her eyes and screamed.
‘That’s the girl,’ said the man who had burned her.
It was odd how sorry he looked, I thought; almost as if he regretted hurting her; as if he wouldn’t have hurt anyone by choice; right up until the moment he smiled a smile that was as thin as a razor and then burned her breast a second time, for the pleasure of it. I could see that now. He enjoyed giving pain.
Arianne screamed again and started to weep invisible tears.
‘Please, stop this,’ I pleaded.
Heydrich ignored me. He finished reading the transcript of the interrogation and handed the pages back to Bohme.
‘Is this really all that she knows, do you think?’ he asked.
Bohme shrugged. ‘That’s a little hard to say, sir. We’ve only had her for a few hours. At this stage there’s no telling how much she knows about anything.’
So it was true; her arrest had preceded Paul Thummel’s; in which case they couldn’t be connected.
‘Sergeant Soppa, isn’t it?’ Heydrich was looking at the very blond man whose foot was on the water board.
‘Sir.’
‘I believe you are something of an expert in matters like this. It was you who got Balaban to talk, wasn’t it?’
‘Finally. Yes sir.’
‘What is your opinion?’
Sergeant Soppa shifted his feet a little but still managed to keep Arianne’s head aloft. She looked like a human torpedo that, at any moment, he might launch into the water.
‘In my experience they always keep something back to the end, sir,’ he said ruefully. ‘There’s always one important thing that they’ll hold onto until the last. For their own self-respect, you might say. And they figure you’ll miss it because they’ve already told you absolutely everything else. It’s only when they’re begging to tell you something they think you don’t know – anything – that you can be sure you’ve got everything there is to be had out of them. Which means that it’s always best to keep the interrogation going for longer than seems decent.’
Heydrich nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean. So then, I think we shall have to know if she knows something that we don’t yet know.’
Heydrich nodded at Sergeant Soppa, who immediately took a step back so that the bascule carrying Arianne’s naked body tipped forward and hit the water with a splash, head first.
There was a horrible gurgling sound, like a drain trying to clear itself. Arianne was swallowing water. Her hands and feet flailed helplessly under their restraints like the fins of a landed fish. Then Soppa picked up a length of thick rubber cable that was lying on the wet floor and started to beat Arianne hard, the way no living creature, not even a stubborn mule, should ever be beaten. Each blow of the cable snapped loudly on her flesh and sounded like a dangerous electrical short-circuit.
