Istanbul (31 page)

Nick went along with this charade. He made up some names and addresses, stalling for time. He included the name of a known Abwehr double agent to add to the confusion.

When he finished, Overath’s eyes were cold and the gentleman’s smile was gone.

His new home was a dank cell with an iron bunk and a hole in the cement floor for the toilet. During the night a stale hunk of black bread and a pannikin of evil-smelling water were pushed through a small hatch at the bottom of the steel door. Dinner.

He froze under a thin, louse-ridden blanket, while rats scuttled across the floor in the darkness. He imagined they got in through that same hole in the floor that had been provided for his sanitary needs.

He thought he heard a scream in the night and sat suddenly upright, a cold grease of sweat over his body. They were torturing her. He sat there with his heart bounding in his chest, waiting for a second shriek.

Just silence. Perhaps he had imagined it.

He lay down again and tried to make sense of what had happened. Was Maier behind this? He didn’t think so; this was an SD operation, and they had used Daniela as bait. These people were Maier’s enemies as well as his.

He examined his plight from every possible angle, but saw no way out. Torture, then death. That was always the way of it.

The sound of heavy boots in the corridor woke him form a dreamless sleep. The metal door slammed open, voices shouted at him in German and a bright light was shoved into his face. Two guards hauled him to his feet and dragged him out of the cell and down the corridor.

They threw him into the room where he had first been interrogated that afternoon, and hauled onto a wooden chair.

‘You are playing games with us,’ Overath said.

‘I told you everything you wanted to know.’

Overath picked up a pack of cigarettes and shook one into his hand. He put it in his mouth and lit it with a gold lighter. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs. He smiled through the wreath of smoke, the smile of a patient man with plenty of time.

‘We know you used a Romanian girl called Daniela Simonici to spy on an Abwehr colonel called Siegfried Maier.’

Nick flinched at the mention of her name. ‘Where is she?’

‘That is no concern of yours.’

‘She’s not a spy. We were using her for disinformation, that’s all. We let her see various documents and we knew she was copying them and taking them back to Maier. She was not our agent.’

Overath gave him a look of supreme forbearance. ‘We will find the truth from her, in due course.’ He must have seen the look of panic on Nick’s face because he added, ‘Unless you want to spare her that?’

‘I told you, she doesn’t know anything.’

‘Perhaps we are saving her interrogation for you.’

Nick had prepared himself for his own ordeal; but if they brought Daniela in and brutalised her in front of him, would he betray others for her? Overath saw the look on his face. ‘We want to know the names of your agents in Istanbul,’ he said.

‘I gave you their names.’

‘You pretend to be afraid of us, but that is just your training, correct? Give us a lot of names, pretend to co-operate, stall for time, while your colleagues work out what you know and what you might tell us and react before we can move against them. Is that not true?’

‘I’m not a brave man, Major Overath, I know my limitations. You’re making a big mistake here. I’m not as senior as you seem to think.’

‘Let me be blunt. The Abwehr has failed the Führer and the German people here in the Balkans. They have allowed themselves to be compromised. Now we must redress the balance.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Tell us what you know about Admiral Canaris.’

‘What?’

‘We believe certain influential men are plotting against the Führer and against Germany. Is this not correct?’

‘Actually, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Overath looked at the two guards and he nodded in silent command. They lifted Nick by the elbows and pulled him out of the chair, ran him backwards down the corridor, his arms wrenched behind him.

The torture room was empty except for a single wooden stool. A thick iron bar was cemented into the wall near the ceiling with two strong ropes attached to it, each ending in a slipknot. He was hauled onto the stool and a noose was pulled over each wrist.

Another guard entered the room holding a rubber truncheon. His appearance was terrifying, as Nick supposed it was meant to be: a Cro-Magnon with a bullet-shaped head and lips like raw liver. The stool was kicked out from under his feet and he swung in the air, helpless. He grunted as his shoulders took the strain of his weight.

Overath walked into the room.

‘Begin,’ he said.

The man with the truncheon stepped forward and swung the bat into Nick’s kidneys. The result was startling. It was like an electric shock. For a moment he could not breathe.

His whole body went into spasm. He felt himself jerking and twitching at the end of the ropes like a puppet.

Overath stepped in front of him. He had his hands in his pockets. His tone was conversational. ‘Now. Do you see the position you are in?’

Nick closed his eyes, tried to breathe through the pain.

Overath sighed and lit another cigarette. ‘Can we get this business over with? I don’t much enjoy it either. Do you wish to co-operate?’

‘I’ve told you . . . what I know.’

‘If you are going to be difficult, you leave me no choice,’ he said and the beating began in earnest.

Nick lost track of time. Perhaps the whole ordeal lasted just a few minutes, or perhaps it was hours. He remembered screaming so loudly that it hurt his throat.

Finally, he passed out.

When he came around, he was lying on the cold cement floor, and Overath was leaning over him. ‘These heroics won’t do you any good. We have all the time in the world.’

Nick tried to sit up but even the slightest movement sent a shock of agony through his body. He couldn’t even speak. And they had only just started.

If they did this to Daniela he would tell them anything they wanted. The world was a black and infernal place. There was no way out.

CHAPTER 75

They took Nick back to his cell and threw him on the iron bunk. He was passing blood, couldn’t even drag himself to the hole in the floor to urinate. He didn’t care.

He lay in the dark, trembling from shock, unable to move, unable to sleep because of the pain. He shivered in the cold.

He thought about Daniela; if they did not bring her in for his interrogation, it meant she was dead. He guessed he would know soon enough.

Light leaked under the door; it must be near to dawn. He heard boots coming down the corridor. The door swung open and two Romanian soldiers hauled him to his feet. He cried aloud at the pain.

They held him upright between them and dragged him back down the corridor. He tried to prepare himself, determined to hold them off as long as he could.

The same room, the same SD major. But this time Overath was not alone. There were two other men in dark suits arguing with him in German. He recognised one of them; it was Stanciu.

When he saw Nick, Stanciu’s face twisted in shock and disgust. Must look a sight, Nick thought. He was covered in filth from the cell and his clothes were stained with blood. He supposed he didn’t look quite as dashing as when Stanciu last saw him at the Park Hotel.

The argument recommenced, voices raised even louder now. Eventually Stanciu walked across the room and said: ‘You are coming with us.’

‘What’s happening?’

‘You are a guest of the Romanian Government and you have been treated abominably.’

Stanciu snapped an order and the same Romanian guards who had hauled Nick to the torture chamber now guided him gently down the corridor, murmuring words of encouragement. Stanciu and his colleague walked ahead of him. They stepped outside and he felt a startling dash of rain on his face.

He wondered if this was part of the strategy. A trick. In a moment he would be dragged away to another cell, another torment. He did not allow himself to hope that it was over.

The guards helped him into a waiting black saloon, and Stanciu jumped in beside him. His colleague sat in front. A uniformed Romanian officer got in behind the wheel. They drove across the muddy yard and out through the gates.

Any moment he expected they would turn around and drive back into the barracks. Overath would be waiting, and he would be taken back to the torture room and it would all begin again.

‘You need a doctor,’ Stanciu said.

‘What’s happening?’

‘We are getting you out of here.’

‘Why?’

‘The Germans are going to lose this war. They don’t seem to understand that.’

The car hit a pothole. Nick cried aloud at the pain in his kidneys. Stanciu shouted angrily at the driver. He slowed down.

‘We want you to talk to your government,’ Stanciu said. ‘Negotiate a truce.’

‘When you do, you have to remember that it was us who saved you,’ the other man said in heavily accented English.

‘Tell your people we want the Germans out of our country. We don’t want the Russians marching in here.’

So, it was not a trick. He was not going back to the prison, there would be no more beatings.

‘Are you very badly hurt?’ Stanciu said.

‘I’ll be all right,’ he said but every jolt of the car felt as if someone had touched an electric wire to his kidneys.

‘Where’s Daniela?’ Nick said.

‘Who?’

‘There was a woman kidnapped with me. Her name is Daniela Simonici. They think she’s an English agent. We have to go back for her.’

‘There are no other prisoners,’ Stanciu said.

‘They’re holding her in the barracks.’

‘No, you are the only one.’

So, she was dead. They had murdered her and tossed her from the boat into the Black Sea. Time to stop pretending there could be a happy ending to all this.

All the way to the border, Stanciu talked to him about how a deal might be brokered between his faction and the Allies, how an envoy might be sent to Istanbul and how negotiations might be opened. Nick saw Stanciu’s lips moving and he heard the words, but grief and pain numbed him and later he could barely remember a word that was said.

They were waved through a German checkpoint, past a column of German infantry travelling on open trucks, boys most of them. They must feel like I do, he thought; they cannot believe the future had turned out the way it had, when once it had looked so assured.

CHAPTER 76

The sheets were soaked with sweat, had stuck to his body. He tried to kick them off. He heard a woman’s voice and his eyes blinked open.

A nurse took his pulse, her fingers pressed to the carotid artery in his neck, counting out the beats on the watch pinned on her uniform. It was the only place she could take his pulse as both his wrists were heavily bandaged.

He tried to remember where he was. It was like peering through fog. He remembered Stanciu walking him to a border post, and two Turkish police half carrying him to an army jeep.

‘Where am I?’ he said. His throat was dry as bone, and his voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

‘You’re in the American hospital,’ the nurse said in a heavy French accent.

‘I’m in Istanbul?’ A part of him still suspected some kind of trick.

‘Of course.’

Other fragments returned: he remembered a tortuous drive from the Turkish border across badly made roads, and stopping frequently to pass blood. Perhaps he fainted, for he had no recollection of arriving in Istanbul.

‘Can I have . . . some water?’

She poured a little water from a jug beside the bed into a glass. She supported his head and held the glass to his lips. He had never been an enthusiast for water, but right then it tasted better then than a cocktail at the American Bar.

‘What time is it?’

‘Five o’clock.’

‘In the afternoon?’

She nodded.

‘How long . . . have I been here?’

‘You were brought here last night. You were in great pain. The doctor gave you something to help you sleep.’

His body felt curiously light. They had given him morphine, he supposed. His unshaven cheeks prickled against the sheets. More memories came back: an empty border crossing, rolls of barbed wire and guards with machine guns slung over their shoulders. It could have been years ago.

The door opened and a white-jacketed doctor walked in, Abrams with him.