Code Name Verity(35)

(After my second escape attempt, while they were waiting for von Linden to turn up and pronounce punishment, a couple of his stupid subordinates casually blabbed a great many administrative secrets in front of me, not realising I understand German. So I know a lot more about their plans for me than I’m supposed to know. I fall under a sickening policy called Nacht und Nebel, Night and Fog, which allows them to do whatever the hell they feel like to people suspected to be ‘endangering security’, and then make them disappear – really disappear. They don’t execute them here, they ship them off without leaving a trace, into the ‘night and fog’. Oh God – I am a Night and Fog prisoner. It is so secret they don’t even write it down – just use the initials NN. If this manuscript survives me they will probably black out everything I’ve just written. It is not really Nacht und Nebel policy to grant interviews for radio broadcasts, but these Gestapo are opportunists if nothing else. They can always chop me into bits afterwards and bury the scraps in the cellar.)

If I cooperate with the propagandist I can have more time. If I tell the bleak truth – then no. And they’ll probably make the American broadcaster disappear too, and I’ll have that on my conscience.

The aspirin and kerosene are part of Operation Cinderella, a programme designed to transform me from a feverish, nit-infested, mentally unstable prison rat back into a detained Flight Officer of cool nerve and confidence, suitable for presentation to a radio interviewer. To add credibility to our story I have been given a sort of translation job copying Hauptsturmführer von Linden’s own notes from the past year here, with names (when he knows them) and dates and, ugh, some methods used, in addition to information extracted. Oh, mein Hauptsturmführer, you are an evil Jerry bastard. A copy is to be made in German for his C.O. (he has a Commanding Officer!) and another made in French for some other official purpose. I am doing the French one. Fr?ulein Engel is doing the German (she is back today). We are working together and using up all my ill-gotten recipe cards. We are both cross about that.

The job is both horrific and unbelievably tedious. And so deviously instructional it makes me want to put the man’s eyes out with my pencil. I am made to see into a small methodical corner of von Linden’s mind, not anything personal, but how he works. And also that he is good at it – unless of course it is all fabricated to intimidate me. I don’t actually think he is imaginative enough to do that – at least, not in the way I use my imagination, not to pretend anything, not to concoct a fake collection of half a dozen notebooks bound in calfskin and filled with tragic miniature portraits of a hundred and fifty doomed spies and Resistance fighters.

But he is creative in his own scientific way – a technician, an engineer, an analyst. (I’d love to know what his civilian credentials are.) His persuasive techniques are tailored to the individual as he gains understanding into the character of each. Those three weeks I spent starving in the dark, waiting for something to happen – he must have been watching me like a hawk, tallying my silences, my tantrums, my numerous half-successful attempts to clamber out of the transom window, the heating duct, the air vent, to pick the lock, garrotte and/or emasculate various guards, etc. Observing how I cower and weep and plead whenever the screaming starts in the next room. Observing how I frantically try to put my hair up whenever someone opens the door and sees me (not everyone is questioned in their dreadful undergarments – it is a special torment reserved for the modest and the vain. I am one of the latter).

It is comforting to discover that I am not, after all, the only Judas to have been interned behind these desecrated h?tel walls. I suppose von Linden would be sacked if his success rate were that dismal. And now I suspect, as well, that I am exposed to the stubborn ones on purpose to demoralise me, perhaps with the dual effect of humiliating them at their most vulnerable moments with an embarrassing and appreciative audience.

I am still quite presentable. They have always gone easy on my hands and face, so when I’m fully dressed, you’d never look at me and think I’d recently been skewered and barbecued – they’ve packed their partially dismantled wireless set into a smooth and pleasing case. Perhaps it has been v.L.’s intention all along to use me in his little propaganda exercise. And of course – I am willing to play. How did he know? How did he know from the start, even before I told him? That I am always willing to play, addicted to the Great Game?

Oh, mein Hauptsturmführer, you evil Jerry bastard, I am grateful for the eiderdown they have given me to replace the verminous blanket. Even if it is just part of the temporary scheme to rehabilitate me, it is bliss. Half the stuffing has come out and it smells like a root cellar full of damp, but still, an eiderdown – a silk eiderdown! It is embroidered ‘Cd B’ so it must be spoiling stock from this building’s former life as the Chateau de Bordeaux. I do sometimes wonder what happened to the hotel’s furnishings. Someone must have gone to a good deal of effort to empty all the guestrooms of their wardrobes and beds and vanity tables and to bolt bars across the window shutters. What did they do with everything – carpets, curtains, lamps, light bulbs? Certainly my little room has no Gallic charm to recommend it apart from its rather pretty parquet floor, which I can’t see most of the time (as with all the prisoners’ rooms my window has been boarded shut), and which is very cold and hard to sleep on.