Early One Morning (33 page)

Sitting on the other side of Williams’ bars—one wall of the cell was a grid of metal-framed squares which opened on to the concrete gallery—keeping an eye on Robert, whom he had put next door, Lock shamelessly explained that he had wanted to change sides before the Allies reached Paris, but knew that too many people in the city had a grudge against him.

He had put them on SS rations and offered them decent cigarettes which they consumed hungrily and guiltily, especially when fellow prisoners demanded they pass them along. They took three or four big drags and did so. There were other Allied officers in the block—RAF, SAS, SBS, SIS, Commandos, Parachute Regiment, all those whom the Germans thought deserved harsher treatment than a POW camp. But out of all of them, what did Lock want with Robert and Williams? On the third day he began to tell them, after a fashion.

‘The Russians are coming. You know that. You can hear their guns at night. A week. Maybe two. Before the month is out, certainly. This uniform will be a death sentence when they get here.’

‘You’ll be here?’ asked Williams.

‘I hope not. I hope not. We’ll talk again.’

‘Lock?’ asked Williams as he turned to go.

‘What?’

‘Keppler?’

‘Oh, he’s around. In charge of “liquidating” several camps. Keep out of his way. He’s not the nice man you once knew.’

Williams heard Robert’s snort of laughter.

Through whispered conversations and Morse tapped on the pipes or bars, Williams pieced together where Robert had been. Buchenwald, mostly, a grisly camp whose main aim was to provide labour for a munitions factory and to get rid of Russian prisoners. As in Station Z at Sachsenhausen there was a
genickschuss,
a measuring device for checking height, which concealed a small calibre pistol in the wall, with which the prisoner was shot in the back of the head. The small, soft bullet never exited, so blood was minimal, and German patriotic songs drowned out the shots. But, as at Sachsenhausen, this was deemed too slow and hanging, shooting and gassing were stepped up.

A week previously he and thirty-six other Allied officers had been selected for slow hanging with piano wire. Several managed to swop identities with men who had died of TB or typhus in the infirmary. Robert hadn’t. But Lock got him on a convoy transferring prisoners between camps. As far as he knew, the others had gone to their terrible deaths, strangulation that lasted ten or more minutes.

‘Then we got shot up on the way here. Ironic, eh? Survive a year or more of German prisons. Get blown to bits by your own side. But one thing worried me. When I was checked in here, my name was logged in pencil.’

Williams laughed. ‘Mine too. We all are. It means we can be rubbed out at a moment’s notice. God, my stomach aches.’

‘Too much food. Eat it slowly.’

Williams lay down on his bunk and said softly, ‘What’s Lock up to?’

He could almost feel Robert’s shrug in the darkness. ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’ There was a pause. They could hear the usual sporadic coughings and sobbing, the intimidating sound of hobnail boots, distant gunshots, the crump of bombs falling on some hapless target. ‘Will.’

‘Quiet!’ A guard.

‘It’s good to be with you again.’

Williams smiled to himself. ‘Yes. Yes it is.’

There were no more work details. For the next four days the pair were allowed exercise, food as good as the guards, even coffee, although it was all but undrinkable. They saw Lock looking at them every now and then, smiling as if at some kind of private joke.

That evening he came to them, had them released and marched down to the interrogation cells, where he dismissed the guards and gave them both another cigarette. American cigarettes.

‘God,’ said Williams as the real tobacco made his senses explode. ‘Where did you get these?’

Lock shrugged and said cautiously, ‘We have some contact with the Americans. Go-betweens. Just putting out feelers.’ He lit his own cigarette. ‘It has some side benefits for the runners if they make it back. They get to sell us these. At prices that’d make you weep.’

‘What could the Americans want from you?’

‘Oh, they have a list. People they want to put on trial, people they want to find and keep from the Russians, people who can help them identify the good and bad Nazis.’

‘And that would be you?’

‘It would. I have been in what they call deep cover since 1940. An audacious agent of the crown. Burrowed deep into Gestapo HQ. Saved countless lives.’

‘This is a joke, right?’ asked Robert.

Lock shook his head. ‘No,’ he said with practised sincerity. ‘I can prove it if some idiot doesn’t lynch me first.’

‘You were a double agent?’ asked Williams, almost believing him.

‘Of course. What kind of monster did you take me for? Who do you think told Keppler that deals were the best way of interrogation? Not torture.’

There was a snort of disbelief and derision from Robert. ‘I wish you’d told Neumann,’ said Williams rubbing his still scarred scalp.

‘So. Gentlemen. I need character witnesses. People who saw me at Foch. Who will say nice things about me. Fellow secret agents.’

Williams put his bony elbows on the table. ‘Why should we?’

‘Because I can get you out of here. Over the next twenty-four hours thirty thousand prisoners will be marched north to the sea. Those that make it will be loaded on to ships. The ships will then be scuttled. Himmler’s orders. You do not want to be on that trip, believe me. The remainder of you have been marked for special treatment. That’s … well, you know what that is. I can keep you off that list as well.’ He leaned over and said pointedly to Robert, ‘Can’t I?’

Robert nodded and said: ‘Go on.’

‘We take a half-track. There is one in the storage sheds. The morons they use for guards can’t get it going. You two, I would think, easy. We head west to the Americans. You confirm my story, I join OSS, you go home. How does it sound?’

Williams closed his eyes and imagined Eve, at the kitchen table, looking up at the ghost in rags, unshaven, bleeding gums, protruding ribs, shot libido, wondering why this old, old man was bothering her. He opened his eyes. ‘How does it sound? Sounds good to me.’ But Robert just ground out his cigarette and sniffed.

Sleep was never very deep, but the roaring from the courtyard woke them, and the deep crimson shapes dancing across their cell walls took them to the window. A huge bonfire of documents was piled in the centre of the yard where the hated roll-calls usually took place, and they were being consumed by a gasoline-fed conflagration, the most damning of documents turning to ashes and floating up into the night sky. Williams watched the small figures moving around, throwing more and more files and directories on to the bonfire in an increasing frenzy.

Down in the yard itself Keppler stood back away from the heat, keeping to the shadows, selecting which documents were to be incinerated and which packed into the special steel containers he had been issued with.

Lock looked perplexed. ‘Why keep any documents at all?’

Keppler shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Orders. Perhaps they want to learn from their mistakes for the next time.’

Lock laughed. ‘You think you’ll get a second chance at this?’

Keppler looked affronted. ‘Who knows? We should be ready for the eventuality. Now, I want the huts emptied before dawn and the march to begin. You will then execute the remaining terrorists. Do you have a list?’

Keppler took the clipboard from Lock and ran his eyes down it, recognising several names, those who passed through his hands in Paris, and some later in Berlin. The squeamishness had long gone from him. He now knew what had happened to most of the men and women he had promised good treatment at Foch. Lethal injections. Shot in the head. Slow hanging with piano wire. Once it had happened to a few, who would believe him that it was beyond his control? ‘I thought Williams was here? And Benoist, you told me?’

Lock cursed his big mouth. ‘They are.’

‘Add them, add them. I want them all dead. I’ll be back to check after I have liquidated Eberslitz.’ Another camp, just to the east, almost within sight of the Russians. ‘Then we can plan our escape and our story. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ said Lock, as if he would be waiting for Keppler who, he was certain, had no intention of going to another camp and certainly no intention of returning. He knew he wouldn’t in Keppler’s place.

Williams and Robert were locked in their cells all the next day as they watched the camp emptied of most of its population. Not from the big cell block, but from the huts, Jew and non-Jew herded into raggedy lines and propelled forward through that hateful gate with its clocktower and its vile slogans exhorting work and cleanliness. Those who could not walk were shot on the spot.

All day long, the men and women in striped uniforms were lined and moved forward, too weak to resist, and driven forward by randomly wielded clubs, pushed to their death along the road. Even the hospital and guinea-pig blocks were emptied, their inmates contriving to make even the usual skeletal souls look positively healthy. It was amazing that such creatures could move at all.

As each column marched off they could hear an accompanying tattoo of pistol and machine-gun shots as every few yards another manor woman was murdered. And so, as dusk approached, the last stragglers left and the doors finally closed on the camp, now strangely silent for a moment, with no more wheezing and pacing and coughing and the million other little sounds of misery that filled every moment. Thirty thousand out on the road, a shuffling column of death. Perhaps three or four thousand left in the camp, mostly those too weak even to leave their filthy bunks. Some had been shot where they lay, and with the
Totenrager
, the corpse shifters, gone, they stayed there.

Now the dogs began to bark with a worrying urgency, picking up their handlers’ mood. Williams heard the running crunch of boots and the opening of cells, the swish of clubs and the confused screams of men being dragged away. He ran to the doorway and shouted, ‘Robert. What is it?’

‘Don’t worry, we aren’t on the list.’

Gunshots, loud in the confined space. A ripple of machine guns. Someone had tried to jump a guard. More barking, getting closer on this landing. Williams backed away from the entrance, waiting for them to pass, like the Angel of Death, hoping he had a symbolic cross of blood on his cell. Next door now. No. Not next door.

‘Robert.’ He flung himself against the bars. He could hear the dog, snarling. ‘Lock, Lock. Where are you, damn you? Lock.’

He glimpsed Robert being bundled out, his face set in determination. They caught each other’s eye and Robert shouted his watchwords: ‘Never give up. Never confess. Never surrender.’ The club hit him between the shoulders and he slumped forward and was gone, whisked away.

Six SS guards appeared outside Williams’ cell, two rifles poked through the grill. The door slammed back and the alsatian was in, teeth bared, rearing up on its leash, willing its handler to let it loose. Clubs were raised and he ducked and instinctively raised his arms to protect himself when the sergeant shouted an order he didn’t catch. As rapidly as they had entered they withdrew, locking the door and moving on.

‘Wait. Wait. You’ve made a mistake. Both of us. Two of us.’ He fell to his knees. ‘We’re together. We stay together.’

The noises switched to outside his window. The big sodium lights came on and bleached the courtyard in their dazzling glare as the men were herded into a rough formation. Williams pulled himself to the bars and shouted Robert’s name again. His friend looked up, shading his eyes against the dazzle and raised a hand.

‘Goodbye,’ said Williams softly.

The group were turned by the guards and marched across to the bunker in the corner, where the studded steel gates with the big rubber seals had been drawn back to welcome them into the dark tunnel.

Schutzhaftlagerführer Ressen stepped into his white overalls with the elasticated arms and legs and slipped the gasmask over his head, checking the fit carefully. He wriggled his hands into the big red rubberised gloves, put on the heavy boots, scooped up the canister and stepped out into the eerie silence of the courtyard. The only sound was the muffled yells of the men in the bunker, now closed tightly shut, and some lunatic yelling from the cell block. Damn fool. Should count his lucky stars he wasn’t in there with the rest of them.

This was to be Ressen’s last task. Do this job and catch that truck heading for Berlin, ostensibly for the final defence of the capital and the Führer. Ressen would make sure he was over that tailgate well before they reached the city limits. He might not be the sharpest dagger in the SS, but he knew when it was time to cut and run.

He climbed the six rungs of the steel ladder that took him on to the roof of the bunker and walked across to the nearest square wooden chimney. The voices were louder now, the sounds carrying up the ventilation shaft. They sounded calm, resigned, but he couldn’t be sure. Ressen didn’t speak English.

He reached the first chimney and levered off the big square cap. From inside he pulled up the long pole connected to the wire basket and set it down next to him. He took the steel canister and unscrewed the lid, holding it at arm’s length. The moment the pellets hit air they began to smoke as the sublimation process began—straight from solid to gas.

He shook out half the pellets into the basket, then lowered it down into the darkness below, closing his ears to the sudden panic that ignited below, the yells and the shouts and curses and then the screams. They wouldn’t last long. Ressen quickly replaced the cap and strode across to the second shaft, where he repeated the process. After the canister was emptied and the lid replaced he took it and flung it across the rear of the bunker to the pile of identical containers that had grown larger and larger over the last few years, a mass of yellow labels, some peeling and faded, others still bright yellow, but the type on most quickly fading, so that it was almost impossible to read all but the most recent, like the one he had just used: Danger de Mort. Alphachem-IG Farben, St Just, France.