Colonel Sun

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘There is the question of accuracy. Here practice is important. I have accustomed myself to our example of the mortar during ten days in Albania recently. I understand now its peculiarities. You will realize that, when the firer cannot see his target, as in our case, he must employ an observer. This is the job of Willi here. The Albanian government kindly placed at our disposal a piece of ground very similar to this terrain. Willi and I have worked out our procedure. He will climb to the hillcrest, to the point we have established as being on a straight line between our firing-point and the target. Just below the crest he will install a light. This will be my aiming mark and will give me direction. I already have a precise knowledge of the range. Almost no wind is expected at the chosen time. We have practised a code of signals so that I shall be guided on to the target. Our proficiency has become so that within a minute three bombs out of four will hit the house or the area immediately surrounding it. This will prove sufficient.

  ‘The bombardment will commence at dawn. Upon its conclusion, you and your chief will enter the story. Or rather, your corpses will. Investigators will discover your remains on the firing-point. One of you has been careless with the ammunition and an explosion has resulted. This is quite plausible, since the detonation cap at the nose of the bomb is sensitive. To drop one on to rock from chest height would be fatal. Needless to say, the true course of events will be different. From behind cover I shall simply toss a bomb on to the firing point, where you and your chief will be lying disabled. This step has required some preliminary research. It would not do to damage your frame so superficially, Mr Bond, that evidence remained of your having been tortured before being killed, nor must you be rendered unrecognizable. Therefore I had to conduct experiments while in Albania. They were carried out with corpses. Very largely with corpses. There is a good supply of fresh examples of these in that country.’ Von Richter laughed heartily at this stroke, then became official. ‘That concludes my exposition of the military aspect of this operation.’ Without looking at his watch he added, ‘Just under five minutes, Colonel.’

  Bond’s mind had become preoccupied with the thought that Ariadne had again asked a highly relevant question: what there was about this project that required a man with experience of atrocities. The answer was plain enough now. Its implications were horrible.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Major. Now, do either of you gentlemen require further information?’

  M spoke up. ‘You’ll have prepared your fake documents, I presume?’

  ‘Very well taken, Admiral! Yes, a full operation order for your act of flagrant aggression has been run up in our Albanian office. Its remains will be found on your corpse. Your government will denounce it as a forgery, naturally, but what else could they do if it were genuine? Rest assured that their complicity will be proved. The injury to Russian prestige is straightforward enough not to need such artificial aids.’

  Bond said, ‘How did your people find out about this conference in such detail?’

  ‘Oh, one of the minor people concerned with it in Moscow became momentarily indiscreet, quite unintentionally, in the hearing of one of our operatives there. We made arrangements to interview this man and I was able to induce him to be indiscreet at great length, intentionally. And to convince him that we would know, and react most unfavourably, if he revealed his indiscretion to his superiors. But now, please let us have done with such affairs and move on to something more interesting. Are there any further questions?’

  Silence, because no words were any good. And absence of movement, because no action was any good. Powerlessness. Hopelessness.

  ‘I recommend that you say goodbye to your chief now, Mr Bond. You will probably not be able to when you see him again.’

  19

  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TORTURE

  The cellar was small, not more than ten feet by twelve feet by six and a half feet high. The floor bulged and sloped, and an irregular column of living rock leaned across one corner. Whatever had been left here by previous occupants was here no longer; the place was bare, swept and scrubbed. A stout wooden ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Along one wall lay a schoolroom bench; by another a small collapsible table and a kitchen chair had been placed. An unshaded but rather murky bulb burned in a bracket on a third wall.

  Resist as he might, Bond had been unable to prevent himself being bound securely into a heavy, old-fashioned dining-chair set in the corner opposite the tongue of rock. The material used to tie his wrists and ankles was strips of towelling; as he struggled with De Graaf, Evgeny and Willi, Bond had half-heard parts of a careful explanation from Sun about ropes causing chafing and the undesirability of pain not deliberately inflicted. Chains running from ringbolts cemented into walls and floor would keep the chair stable however much its occupant might throw himself about.

  Left alone for the moment, Bond sat and waited for Sun. More than anything, he longed for a cigarette. A jumble of images circled in his brain: the delicate moulding and coloration of Ariadne’s face – M’s firm handclasp of ten minutes earlier – the wordless plea Gordienko had made in his last seconds – the blood on Litsas’s head – the game of golf with Bill Tanner, half a century ago – the terrible bewilderment on the face of the Russian as the rifle-bullet struck him – von Richter’s amusement as he remembered his ‘experiments’ in Albania – the sprawled bodies of the Hammonds in the kitchen at Quarterdeck – Ariadne again. Then the figure of Sun, the loose powerful movements, the metal-coloured eyes, the sloping teeth, the dark lips. The man who was going to start him on an agonizing road to death. Bond found he was sweating with fear.

  Footfalls sounded overhead. Bond forced himself to begin taking some deep breaths. The trapdoor was pulled back and Evgeny came down the ladder. He was carrying a wooden tray which he put down on the small table. Without glancing at Bond he went back to the ladder and ascended. Bond studied the objects on the tray: two metal meat-skewers of different sizes and a wooden one, a bottle of colourless liquid, a funnel about the size of a coffee-cup, what looked like a bunch of bristles from a broom, a knife with a six-inch blade in the shape of a slim right-angled triangle, several boxes of matches. His breathing became heavy.

  After a dreadful minute of utter silence, Sun arrived. He smiled and nodded at Bond, like somebody greeting a favourite acquaintance, and sat quietly down next to the table.

  ‘Before you start, Sun,’ said Bond in a level tone, ‘I want to ask you a favour.’

  ‘Ask away, my dear Bond. You know I’ll do anything I can.’

  ‘The girl. What’s happening to her?’

  ‘I believe De Graaf is with her now. Or perhaps Evgeny. Or even both of them. The other girls may be participating too. On a night like tonight I suppose a certain amount of licence is to be expected.’

  Bond tried to ignore this. ‘In the morning, let her go. Drop her off somewhere. Whatever she says afterwards she can’t threaten the success of your project, and you and all your team will be safely out of the way.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sun, shaking his head and sighing. ‘Believe me, I wish I could help you, but it’s impossible. You must see that. What would those unimaginative bosses of mine have to say if I allowed any sort of witness to survive after an operation on this scale? The rule-book says that must never happen. So I’m afraid she’ll have to die.’

  ‘Then could you have it done quickly? Cleanly?’ Bond hardly noticed the abject appeal in his voice. ‘There’s nothing against that, is there?’

  ‘Of course not. I am no barbarian, Mr Bond, whatever you may think. I’ve always opposed needless suffering. I’ll see to it that De Graaf, who’s an expert in these matters, shoots her in the back of the head. She’ll know nothing about it. I’ll supervise the whole thing personally. You need have no fears on that score.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’ Bond believed him and was grateful. Then rage and loathing filled him. ‘Now get on with your squalid sadistic charade. Have yourself your messy little kicks. Enjoy them whi
le you can.’

  ‘It seems, Mr Bond,’ said Sun judicially, ‘that your ideas on the nature of sadism are in an unformed state. You said –’

  ‘Never mind the state of my ideas. Bring out your thumbscrews and your hot irons. They can’t be much more painful than having to sit here listening to you.’

  The colonel did his smile. ‘Your defiance does you credit. But you’ve no conception of what you’re defying. In a short while you’ll be wishing with all your heart and soul that you’d encouraged me to delay your pain by just a few seconds, just one little remark about the weather.

  ‘Now, James …’ Sun got up and paced the tiny area of floor in front of Bond’s chair. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I call you James. I feel I know you so well.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’

  ‘No, there isn’t, is there, James? Anyway, it’s appropriate, don’t you think? Sets the right tone of intimacy.’

  ‘I was wondering when we’d get to that,’ said Bond with revulsion. ‘I suppose people who look like you can’t find any willing partners, so they have to tie someone up and –’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ Sun sounded genuinely distressed. ‘I knew you were on the wrong track there. True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex. The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way. In the divine Marquis de Sade’s great work Justine there’s a character who says to his victim: “Heaven has decreed that it is your part to endure these sufferings, just as it is my part to inflict them.” That’s the kind of relationship you and I are entering into, James.’

  Sun went on pacing the floor, frowning in concentration, a passionately serious thinker intent on finding the precise words to impart his ideas. After a while he shrugged, as if finding the struggle for expression on the highest level beyond him.

  ‘You must understand that I’m not the slightest bit interested in studying resistance to pain or any such pseudo-scientific claptrap. I just want to torture people. But – this is the point – not for any selfish reason, unless you call a saint or a martyr selfish. As de Sade explains in The Philosopher in the Boudoir, through cruelty one rises to heights of superhuman awareness, of sensitivity to new modes of being, that can’t be attained by any other method. And the victim – you too, James, will be spiritually illuminated in the way so many Christian authorities describe as uplifting to the soul: through suffering. Side by side you and I will explore the heights.’

  As if flushed with excitement or some deeper emotion, Sun’s cheeks seemed to have turned a darker yellow. His broad chest rose and fell under the white tee-shirt. Reversing an earlier judgement, Bond said critically, ‘You’re boring me, Sun. Because of your mental condition. There’s nothing more totally uninteresting than a mad-man.’

  Sun chuckled. Suddenly his manner speeded up. His arms moved jerkily. ‘Predictable reaction, my dear chap. Let’s get on, shall we? Here we are, James, the two of us, in a cellar on a Greek island. Not a very lavish scene, I’m afraid, such as some of your earlier opponents have provided. But then you and I aren’t opponents, are we? We’re collaborators. Right, then. What shall I do to you? Whereabouts in your body shall I attack you? And with what?

  ‘First, the apparatus. Electricity can provide some of the most exquisite anguish known, if applied in the right place. But it’s too easy. No scope for finesse. And, let’s face it, here in Eastern Europe the supply isn’t too reliable. No, I feel strongly that any self-respecting security officer ought to be able to make do with what the average kitchen provides – knives, skewers, broom-straws, such as you’ve no doubt noticed on this tray. I’m going to have to cheat a little when I give you the final injection that will send you into convulsions. The chemical isn’t found in any average kitchen. But it is derived from a mushroom that grows in China, so one might semi-legitimately say that it’s possible to imagine a kitchen that contains this particular essence.

  ‘Now, the all-important question of where I’m to locate my assault. The obvious, all-too-obvious place is the genital organs. I’m sure experience has taught you that tremendous pain can be inflicted on them, plus the very valuable psychological side-effect whereby the victim fears for, then laments over, the loss of his manhood. But that won’t affect you very much. I trust I’ve convinced you, James, that it’s not your manhood I’m going to deprive you of, but your life. And the whole idea of a genital assault is so … unsophisticated.’

  A pause. The blood thudded in Bond’s ears. From his slacks Sun brought out a tin of Benson & Hedges and offered them.

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’ll be your last smoke.’

  ‘I said no thank you.’ Bond had almost forgotten his nicotine-hunger. And the thought of those yellow fingers putting the cigarette in his mouth, helpfully removing it to shake off the ash, as he could so clearly imagine them doing, was not to be borne.

  ‘As you wish.’ Sun operated a leather-bound Ronson and puffed out smoke. ‘So then. Where? Where does a man live? Where’s the inmost part of a man, his soul, his being, his identity?

  ‘One can do very unpleasant things to a man’s fingernails, for example. Or to his genitals, as we were saying. The knee-joint is a neural focus and the most surprising results can be obtained by interference with it. But all this happens, so to speak, somewhere else. A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror, as well as pain from the experience. But it’s going on at a distance. It isn’t taking place … where he is.’

  Sun came over and knelt beside Bond’s chair. He spoke in a half-whisper. His throat trembling. ‘A man lives inside his head. That’s where the seat of his soul is. And this is true objectively as well as subjectively. I was present once – I wasn’t directly concerned – when an American prisoner in Korea was deprived of his eyes. And the most astonishing thing happened. He wasn’t there any more. He’d gone, though he was still alive. There was nobody inside his skull. Most odd, I promise you.

  ‘So James, I am going to penetrate to where you are, to the inside of your head. We’ll make our first approach via the ear.’ Sun got up and went over to the table. ‘I take this skewer and I insert it into your skull.’ The thin length of metal gleamed in the muddy light. ‘You won’t feel anything at first. In fact, in the true sense you won’t feel anything at all. The tympanic membrane, which I’m about to stimulate, has no touch receptors, only pain ones. So the first you’ll know will be when … well, I leave it to you to put a name to your experience. If you can.’

  Crushing out his cigarette beneath his heel, Sun gazed over at Bond with a sort of compassion. ‘Just one more thing, James. This cellar is well on the way to being sound-proof, down here in the rock. And blankets and rugs have been laid on the floor overhead to seal it even further. Our tests showed that virtually nothing can be heard at a hundred yards. So you may scream all you wish.’

  ‘God damn you to hell.’

  ‘He can’t do that, James. He can’t reach me. It’s I who am damning you to hell.’

  Then, with the brisk stride of a man anxious not to be late for an important engagement, Colonel Sun came over to the chair, with ferocious efficiency he seized Bond’s head in a clamp formed by his powerful left arm and his chest. Bond strained away with all his strength, but to no purpose. In a couple of seconds he felt the tip of the skewer probing delicately at the orifice of his left ear. Teeth clenched, he waited.

  It came without warning, the first dazzling concussion of agony, as instantaneously violent as the discharge of a gun. He heard himself whimper faintly. There was an interval just long enough for the thought that the cessation of pain was an infinitely more exquisite sensual thrill than the wildest spasms of love. After that, pain bursts and thrusts and sheets and floods, drenching and blazing pain, pain as inexhaustible as the sea or the sands of the desert. Another interval, another thought: this is as bad as it can get. Immediately, worse and worse pain. Breathe in; whimper. Breathe
in; whimper. Breathe in …

  The scream ceased. Sun felt Bond go limp and released him. The head, running with sweat at every pore, fell forward on to the labouring chest. With a gesture like that of an adult to an engaging child, Sun ruffled the saturated hair. He turned away abruptly, climbed the ladder and pushed hard at the trapdoor. It rose a few inches.

  At once a muffled voice spoke. ‘Yes sir?’

  ‘You may come down now, Lohmann.’

  ‘Right away, sir,’

  The doctor, carrying his black leather case, appeared and descended. He was followed by von Richter and Willi.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind our joining you, Colonel.’

  ‘Of course not, my dear Ludwig, I appreciate your interest. As you see, provision has been made for spectators. Do please sit down.’

  ‘This …’ The doctor cleared his throat and started again. ‘This man is unconscious, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree with me. Now sit down and prepare to observe closely. This is good training for you. If you want to be of further service to our movement you must allow your inhibitions to be broken down. You appreciate that?’

  Dr Lohmann hesitated, nodded, and took his seat on the bench next to Willi.

  ‘Well, what have you in store for us, Sun?’ Von Richter drawled the question. ‘We expect great things of you, you know. Everybody tells me that Peking leads the world in this field.’