The Interrogator

by Andrew Williams

  Lindsay stared at him, slowly turning his lighter over and over in his right hand, trying to catch and hold his eye. He failed.

  ‘Do you think they would hang you from this pipe if you told me the truth?’

  Lange looked up for a second: ‘I . . . I . . .’

  Then he changed his mind and hunched forward over the table, his hands twisting in his lap.

  ‘You know I’ll protect you.’

  The propaganda reporter made a noise in his throat that was something between a grunt and a hollow laugh, rather like the neighing of an asthmatic horse.

  Lindsay picked up his cigarettes and shook one from the packet. He was on the point of lighting it when his hand stopped and he lifted his head to look at Lange again: ‘Why did you tell Kapitän Mohr that I had taken you to a jazz club? It made things very difficult for me.’

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry.’ Lange was looking at him now and there was a very pained expression on his open face. ‘I know I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It was unfortunate.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant, really I am.’

  Lindsay shook his head, ‘All right, we’re friends. Forget it.’

  Neither of them spoke and their eyes met for a moment before Lange looked down in embarrassment. Then he took a deep breath:

  ‘Perhaps he did kill himself – in the end. Perhaps. But it was murder.’

  Lange closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his lips with the back of a shaking hand. A tap was dripping into a cistern close by, drip, drip, drip, the echo bouncing off the hard wet walls of the washroom.

  ‘Senseless bloody murder. He was found guilty of treason by the Council of Honour, you see.’

  ‘The Council of Honour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had to drag the words out of himself, his body rocking to and fro on the chair. ‘The Ältestenrat discovered he’d given information to the enemy.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The pipes above them clanked as they flooded with hot water.

  ‘And the bruises?’

  ‘He was interrogated.’ Lange sighed – his breath long and shaky – then covered his face with his hands like a child hiding from an angry parent.

  ‘You were there?’

  He nodded without moving his hands from his face.

  ‘And others?’ Lindsay’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

  And he nodded again.

  ‘Who?’

  Lange dropped his hands and there were tears on his face: ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘Who beat him?’

  ‘I . . . I can’t say.’

  ‘Schmidt?’

  ‘I . . . can’t . . .’

  ‘Did Mohr know about it?’

  ‘God forgive me. It was my fault,’ and he threw his head back and groaned long and loud, until the walls and pipes beat it back hollow and despairing. Lindsay got up and walked round the table to put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Lange reached up to touch it: ‘Thank you.’

  Almost a minute passed before Lindsay spoke again, his hand still on Lange’s shoulder: ‘Did Mohr authorise this Council of Honour?’

  ‘No,’ Lange shouted the word. ‘No . . . I don’t know, I can’t say.’ He placed his elbows on the table and pushed himself upright, then wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘They don’t trust me you see. If I say anything more I will be a dead man.’

  ‘I’ve told you, we’ll protect you. Isn’t it your duty? Your duty to all I know you believe in – that you still hold dear.’

  Lange’s body stiffened and he shrugged Lindsay’s hand from his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t talk to me of my duty, of my faith,’ and his words rasped like grinding metal. ‘Don’t. You don’t care if I live or die.’

  The silence filled again with the clanking of the pipes. Lindsay stepped away and walked round the table to look down at him. Lange lifted his chin a little, his jaw firmly set, his eyes almost lost beneath a heavy frown: ‘Heine means nothing to you, does he?’

  ‘If he was murdered, yes he does.’

  ‘I don’t know if he was murdered. I have nothing more to say.’

  Lindsay pulled out the chair, its legs grating harshly across the stone floor, and leant on the back of it to look at him across the table:

  ‘All right Helmut. You decide. You said it was your fault. Think about it. We’ll leave it – for now.’

  Then he half turned to shout at the door. A moment later Lieutenant Duncan came in with the guard, peaked cap neatly tucked under his arm. He stood at the table and watched as Lange was led from the washroom.

  ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to deliver this,’ and he pulled a small grey envelope from his pocket. ‘The office received it this morning, something from your lot.’

  Lindsay took it and tore open the sleeve.

  ‘I think Schmidt will be a waste of time,’ he said. ‘I’ll see Mohr next.’

  It was written in the camp secretary’s fine hand:

  A Dr Henderson rang from the Admiralty. She wanted to speak to you in person but I said you would be busy all morning. She said she had sad news. Your cousin’s ship has been sunk and there are no survivors. Your family has been informed. Major Benson has asked me to pass on his condolences.

  A. B. P.

  Lindsay stared at it blankly for a few seconds. What was he supposed to feel? For a time they had done everything together, like brothers. It was Martin who had taught him to sail and Martin who had introduced him to his first girlfriend. They shared the same dark sense of humour, the same shoe size, the same taste in music, and they had enjoyed taking risks together. And now he was dead, lost in the Atlantic like thousands of others. And he could feel only a deep grey emptiness like the ocean itself. God. What was left but pain and loss?

  ‘Is something the matter?’ It was Duncan.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lindsay glanced up, then handed him the note. Duncan looked at it carefully and when he had read it he folded it gently in two:

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He cleared his throat nervously: ‘It’s a war crime, a bloody war crime.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The U-boats. The attack on our merchant ships.’

  Lindsay felt an urge to laugh. Instead he looked away, an angry knot in his stomach. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through a high window on to the wall at the end of the washroom, bleaching the colour from the blue-grey tiles. And then the room was plunged into shadow again.

  ‘Shall I tell them to take Mohr back?’

  ‘No. I’ll see him now.’

  ‘Are you surprised to see me, Mohr?’

  Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr raised his dark eyebrows and his lips twitched in a small smile: ‘No. I’ve been looking forward to talking to you again, Lieutenant.’

  He was standing in front of the table. The guard had removed the other chair. ‘But couldn’t we have met somewhere pleasanter than the shithouse?’

  Lindsay glanced up at the pipe above their heads and Mohr followed his eyes: ‘Terrible,’ and he shook his head a little. ‘And it was terrible news about the 330. No survivors. Oh, you’re surprised? You shouldn’t be. Your BBC has been gloating about the sinking for nearly twenty-four hours.’

  Lindsay stared at him coldly. ‘Isn’t the BBC propaganda?’

  ‘We sort the truth from the fiction,’ he said with a smile. ‘The 330 was a fine boat. You should be proud of Schultze. He died with honour for his Führer and Fatherland – they all did.’

  ‘Honour?’ Lindsay almost spat the word at him. Leaning forward to the table, he flipped open the brown cardboard file that was lying in front of him, then slid it towards Mohr. ‘And was this for Führer and Fatherland too?’

  Mohr glanced down at the swollen blue face of Heine, his tongue hanging obscenely from his mouth.

  ‘No. Take a good look, Herr Kapitän,’ Lindsay snapped.

  Without taking his eyes off him,
Mohr reached across the table for the picture, lifted it deliberately and looked at it again. And for a fleeting moment his expression changed as he struggled to maintain his composure, his weathered face cut by lines of pain and regret.

  ‘Poor man.’

  In an effort to disguise his feelings he casually tossed the picture back on to the table, sending it spinning towards Lindsay.

  ‘The sinking of our boat. The humiliation. And prison drives men to terrible things.’

  ‘Spare me the lies. You pushed him very hard, didn’t you?’

  ‘Pushed him?’

  ‘You interrogated him. You interrogated a number of the prisoners. The evening with the PK man at the jazz café – remember?’

  Mohr smiled: ‘Leutnant Lange is fond of the story, he tells it to everyone.’

  Lindsay lifted his hand and rested it on the thick file in front of him: ‘I’ve spoken to the other U-boat officers and I know the Ältestenrat wanted to know what they’d said to us. You were looking for someone who gave away just a little too much and you thought you’d found him – Heine. But this . . .’

  He pushed the picture back across the table: ‘You authorised this senseless killing, this murder.’

  ‘Is this going to go on much longer? Perhaps I can have a chair?’ There was an impatient, contemptuous note in Mohr’s voice and he turned to look at the guard who was standing stiffly to attention at the far wall.

  ‘A chair, please,’ he shouted in English. The soldier did not move a muscle.

  ‘Well?’

  The guard just stared back at him belligerently.

  ‘You’re a prisoner, Mohr,’ said Lindsay coolly. ‘Remember?’

  Mohr flinched as if the words had stung him between the shoulders and he turned quickly to face Lindsay, his boots squeaking sharply on the stone floor. Was it the affront to his dignity? Something inside him seemed to snap. ‘You’re the murderer, Lieutenant. You drove him to it.’

  Mohr didn’t shout or thump the table, his voice was only a little louder but his face was livid and blotchy red and there were anxious scratch marks on his throat, a sort of wildness in his eyes. The quiet military veneer had cracked for the first time.

  ‘You interrogated Heine, you threatened him. He told me you were going to tell me he was a traitor. He was a vulnerable prisoner. His mind was clouded – he was sure he’d betrayed his U-boat comrades and his country. He could not live with the guilt and he took his own life. So you put the rope around his neck, Lieutenant, you did – not me.’

  Mohr looked down at the photograph still lying in the middle of the table between them and his shoulders seemed to drop a little as if the anger was draining from him. When he spoke again his voice was cool and reflective: ‘Heine was a casualty of your war.’

  And he lifted his head to make firm eye contact with Lindsay: ‘Our war. The dirty little war we’re fighting.’

  Their dirty war. The thought beat long after Mohr had been led away. It was beating in the mess over lunch and in the camp commandant’s office as Lindsay said goodbye to smug, self-satisfied Benson. It was beating in his head now as the jeep swung him backwards and forwards along country lanes to the station. Was it dirtier than the one being fought in the Atlantic? Perhaps Mohr had become the demon he was fighting inside himself. But it was the same war, it was cold, it was ruthless, and to the victor the spoils – there were always casualties.

  AUGUST 1941

  TOP SECRET:

  Characteristics of an Interrogator

  A breaker is born and not made. Perhaps the first-class breaker has yet to be born. Perhaps he has yet to be recruited from the concentration camps, where he has suffered for years, where, above all he has watched and learnt in bitterness every move in the game.

  Lieut.-Col. Robin Stephens, Commandant of MI5’s Camp 020,

  The Interrogation of Spies, 1940–47

  Top Secret ‘C’

  The security of a source is worth more than any product or by-product, however spectacular.

  Admiralty NID 11

  Assessment of German Prisoner of War Interrogation, 1945

  40

  U-115

  06°54S/07°35W

  South Atlantic

  T

  he last of the sun was settling into the ocean behind the ship, painting her high funnel and masts an eerie tropical orange. She was an old liner of more than twelve thousand tons, perhaps a troopship, zigzagging defensively in 40-degree turns. Hartmann adjusted the focus on the bridge’s firing binoculars: ‘Careless.’

  Her deadlights were not pulled down over the ports and she was twinkling provocatively at the 115.

  ‘Have the crew eaten?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Kaleu.’

  ‘Good. She’ll turn south-westerly and cross our course within the hour.’

  The sea was building, a summer gale forecast. He would attack from the surface, the dark grey hull of the U-boat lost in the restless night.

  The U-115 had found her at a little before ten that morning. Her smoke was drifting in a long tail across the ragged tops of the ocean at the very edge of the horizon. A large ship, and where Kapitänleutnant Paul Hartmann expected to find her.

  ‘Full ahead both engines. Course two-one-zero.’

  The deck beneath Hartmann’s feet had trembled, the diesels hammering their battle song as the U-boat plunged forwards at attack speed, its bow rising in fine clouds of spray that swept across the foredeck and into the faces of the men atop the tower. Urgent, incessant, beating the length of the boat, from the crew quarters aft to the forward torpedo room, and every man’s heart beat with the engines, faster and faster and faster, an end to the poor hunting, an end to idle days of African sunshine. And the excitement had been plain in the faces of the watch and of the men squinting at the horizon from the rail of the gun platform, older than their years, weathered and lined by the sea and the tropical sun, their beards flecked white with salt. It was Hartmann’s first patrol as their commander but they knew of his record, that he had served with one of the great U-boat heroes – with Kapitän Mohr.

  He had followed the wisp of grey smoke through the bridge’s firing binoculars until his eyes began to water and late in the afternoon he sent a signal to U-boat Headquarters:

  TARGET LOCATED GRID SQUARE FF 71. IN PURSUIT. NO ESCORT. COURSE SOUTH WEST. FOURTEEN KNOTS.

  And headquarters had replied:

  AT THEM. ATTACK THEM. SINK THEM.

  He had smiled quietly to himself because he knew it must have been written by the Admiral. It was pure Dönitz.

  ‘Tubes one and three ready?’

  ‘Tubes one and three ready, Herr Kaleu.’

  ‘She’s turned. Steering 200 degrees, approximately twelve knots.’

  Yes, she was a big ship, close to 20,000 tons, roughly camouflaged in grey, deck guns fore and aft and a watch searching the dark surface of the sea for an enemy bow wave.

  ‘Take her hull down.’

  The order was repeated to the control room below and as the waist tanks of the submarine flooded the sea swept up the foredeck until only the tower was breaking the waves. They would catch the ship just before she turned again, broadside on, in – he glanced at his watch – perhaps six minutes.

  ‘Half engines.’

  He could sense the intense excitement of the men about him, as they turned stiffly through the points of the compass, their glasses hunting the darkness for escort ships. He bent to the voice tube:

  ‘Stand by tubes one and three.’

  In the ‘cave’ for’ard, the torpedo men would be clutching their stopwatches, ready to count out the seconds from release to impact. Anything between a thousand and three hundred metres would do. She was edging into the spider lines of Hartmann’s firing sight now, rising and falling gracefully in the swell, her bow cutting a crisp white wave. And as he followed her stately progress the heavy night cloud parted, catching her in silhouette against a bright sickle moon.

  ‘Twelve hundred metres.’ />
  He could see sailors moving about her foredeck. There was a small yellow flash of light – one of them must have lit a cigarette.

  ‘A thousand metres.’

  He heard a sharp intake of breath at his side and his heart leapt into his throat. Was she beginning to turn?

  ‘Steady, steady, there’s still time.’

  Final bearing check, final distance check, and with his eyes still on the target he reached for the firing handle and pressed down with the full weight of his body.

  ‘Tube one: fire!’

  The first torpedo was on its way.

  ‘Ready tube three: fire!’

  And the second in its wake. Steel fish they called them for’ard, seven metres long, contact detonation and enough explosive to blow a hole in the side of the ship a bus could drive through.

  ‘Hard rudder right.’

  The 115 began to turn sharply away but Hartmann’s eyes didn’t leave the ship.

  ‘Two minutes. One minute. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten.’

  Had he made a mistake? No. A hard little explosion, a column of white smoke and water rising like a glorious fountain up her side and cheering, he could hear the men cheering in the control room below. Thank God. Then the second torpedo burst through her plates and almost at once she began to heel to starboard. It was a small miracle. Twenty thousand tons of steel and wood brought to a standstill in seconds. The first torpedo must have struck her amidships in the hold – he could see the ragged hole in her side – and the second in or close to the engine room. A cold inexorable tide of water surging into her hull: the ship was surely doomed. He lifted his head from the glasses and leant over the tower hatch.

  ‘Has she given her name yet?’

  ‘No, Herr Kaleu.’ It was his first officer, Werner. ‘Will she need a third?’

  ‘No, she’s finished. Let’s take the boat a little closer and pick up her captain if we can.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve bagged a regiment of British soldiers with two torpedoes.’