Winter Sniper: A World War II Novel

Chapter 22

They put Keller in the back of a car and he was surprised when they pulled up in front of the National Institutes of Health Building. Keller recognized the building and felt a sense of relief at the thought that maybe this had all been some mistake, but changed his mind when the big man dragged him out of the car and pushed him toward a side entrance. The other man knocked on the windowless steel door, it opened from within, and they were inside a dimly lit hallway covered with yellowing Linoleum tiles. Keller found himself shoved again, this time into a cramped room. The two men pointed him to a wooden chair pulled up in front of a long table, with a pair of empty chairs facing him in the other direction. Then the two thugs stood against the wall, arms crossed on thick chests. One shook out a Lucky Strike and lit it; the other unwrapped a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and chewed noisily, snapping the gum between his teeth.

After half an hour, two men came into the room. The thugs who had picked him up at Union Station walked out without so much as a backwards glance, leaving Keller alone with the newcomers. One of the men wore a gray suit to match his gray hair and had the kindly look of a long-dead uncle Keller had known. He actually gave Keller an apologetic smile. The other man was shorter and younger, with shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal hairy forearms. He wore a sour look. Keller knew what this was. Good cop, bad cop. He had seen it before in the movies. Neither of the men made any effort to introduce themselves as they settled into the chairs opposite him.

“What’s going on?” Keller asked, focusing on the avuncular one. “I demand to know.”

“Shut up,” the younger man said. “You’re not in a position to demand anything, you fucking Nazi.”

Keller blinked; the words fucking Nazi hit him as hard as one of those kidney punches. The man had spoken it with such blatant hatred and disdain. Keller was surprised to find it made him angry.

“Go to hell.”

The two interrogators looked at each other, seeming to exchange a silent communication that this wasn’t going to be as easy as they thought.

“What my colleague means is that this was found on you,” the gray-haired one said, taking the sheets of paper that had been found in Keller’s pocket and putting them on the table. He smoothed out the wrinkles; he had very pink and soft hands.

Keller noticed that he had not produced the papers tucked into the telephone book. A sense of relief washed over him. Whatever happened to him now, he didn’t care. The information that really mattered was likely being retrieved at that very moment by Eva. Beautiful Eva. They would have to kill him before he gave her up.

“I needed something to write my shopping list on,” Keller said.

The older man sat back, blinking at him. The younger one reached across the table and grabbed Keller by the shirt collar. He tried to pull the man’s wrists away but they gripped like iron. “You think this is funny, Herr Keller?” the man demanded, so angry that spittle flew from the corners of his mouth. “Since when is it funny to steal national secrets from the War Department?”

“I’m sure Mr. Keller has a perfectly good explanation,” the older man said. He leaned across the table. “Don’t you, Mr. Keller?”

The door opened. The colonel who walked in was tall and raven-haired, with the sort of sharp features that made him resemble Clark Gable. At his appearance, the other two men subsided their questioning and returned to their chairs like the tide going out. Keller had the distinct impression that they were disappointed. The colonel’s arrival had cut short their fun.

“Who are you?” Keller asked.

“My name is Colonel Fleischmann,” he said. “Unlike these two gentlemen, I’m not here to play games. I know all about you and Eva Von Stahl.”

Keller kept his face expressionless. “Who is that?”

Fleischmann’s face lost its Gable-like smirk and he stepped around the table. Keller thought at first that the colonel was going to hit him. Instead, the colonel stopped and said, “Hold him.”

The younger interrogator got up and stood behind Keller’s chair to grab his arms. In one fluid motion, the colonel took hold of the membrane separating Keller’s nostrils between his thumb and forefinger, then squeezed and twisted with a grip hard as a vise. The pain was excruciating. Keller writhed in his chair, pinned down. He was blinded by the tears in his eyes. The colonel’s thumbnail dug harder into the soft tissue and Keller heard himself making a soft animal whimper. When Fleischmann finally let go, Keller was gasping. His eyes ran and something hot dripped down his upper lip. He tasted blood.

The colonel looked down at Keller, amused. The young guy released him and returned to his chair. Both of the interrogators looked nervous, as if they were worried about Fleischmann. “The United States government isn’t like Nazi Germany, Mr. Keller. It doesn’t sanction torture. But I’m not the United States government.” The colonel studied his thumbnail and noticing the wet blood on it, he took the end of Keller’s new tie and wiped off his nail.

“We’re going to take a break now. When we come back, I want to hear all about you and Eva.”

Eva hung up the telephone and stared at it in disbelief. Keller had been followed! If he were caught spying, she knew it would be a simple matter to make the connection between them. The thought of entrusting her life to a man she barely knew was frightening.

“Petra!” she called out. Eva rummaged in the closet for her second-best coat, the dark gray wool one. Fur would have been warmer, but there was no point in attracting attention to herself. She was going to the train station, not a ballroom.

“What is it, Frau Von Stahl?” Petra hurried out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. Since the incident with the fire poker, she had been nothing but obedient. Eva thought there must be some truth to the adage about dogs and servants needing to be beaten once in a while.

“Is Mr. Dorsey still here?”

“He is in the kitchen.”

“Tell him to get the car ready, and then put on this coat.” Eva handed the puzzled girl her own fur coat. “Then I want you to go out the back door and get in the car.”

Petra looked surprised. “What is going on, Frau Von Stahl?”

“Tell Mr. Dorsey to drive you across the river to Alexandria. You know the little shop there that sells cakes? I want you to buy me a chocolate one.”

“Right now?”

“Do as I say!”

Petra hurried back to the kitchen as if Eva had cracked a whip at her. Fortunately, Colonel Fleischmann had given up on posting soldiers to watch the house. He had accepted that his sniper was long gone. That did not necessarily mean that the house was not being watched. She heard Petra’s frantic orders and then Dorsey’s muttering — she was sure that she had interrupted him in the middle of coffee and a sandwich — and waited until she heard the sound of the kitchen door closing. Standing in the darkness of the front parlor, she nudged the curtain aside to study the street out front.

Night was falling quickly so it was not possible to see if anyone was sitting in any of the cars lining the street. There was a chance that the colonel had posted two watchers — one each for the front and back of the house — but she thought it more likely that there was just one, probably on the street out front, positioned so that he could keep an eye on the entrance to the alley that ran behind the row of houses. In a moment, he would see the Cadillac pull out from the alley. Eva waited anxiously, wondering if she was overreacting. Soon her own car went past with Dorsey at the wheel and Petra in the back seat, wearing Eva’s coat. For a moment, all was quiet, and then headlights flicked on as a car started up and accelerated after the Cadillac.

Then she put on Petra’s plain winter coat and pulled on a shapeless wool cap to hide her blond hair, and then went out the front door. The cold bit at her face and Eva tugged up the coat collar to cover her cheeks. She walked a couple of blocks and turned the corner, ducking into the shadow of a building. It was cold, but Eva’s heart pounded so hard that she barely noticed. She waited for a minute in the darkness. No cars crept along behind her and she could not see anyone walking behind her. Satisfied that she was not being followed, Eva walked to the next corner and managed to flag down a taxi.

“Where to, lady?”

“Union Station.”

They drove through the evening traffic to the train station. Eva gave him ten dollars, a huge sum. “Wait for me,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, then got out and swiftly passed through the wood-and-glass doors with their big brass handles.

Inside, Union Station was just as busy as she might have expected on a weekday evening. She had a brief memory of the train station at Berlin, an enormous cavern compared to the smaller Union Station. She had always loved train stations, ever since she was a little girl. People coming and going, in a hurry on their way to somewhere else. A train station, she thought, was like a promise of better things to come. As a little girl, she had dreamed of being famous. She had gotten her wish, and then given it all up. For what? So that she could play at being spy on a cold winter’s night? But this was no game. Eva forced herself to scan the faces in the crowd. All she saw were tired commuters.

There was a possibility that this was all a trap. How better to catch a spy than in the act? Keller’s words echoed in her mind: I’m being followed, Eva. As an actress, Eva knew something about tone of voice, and poor Keller had sounded like he was on the edge of panic. If it was a trap, Keller was far more clever than she might have thought.

She found the row of telephones easily enough but someone was talking on the middle phone. When he got off, she walked over and opened the telephone directory. At first, there seemed to be nothing there but the pages of phone listings. With a growing sense of dread that someone had beat her to it, she went through the book more carefully. There. Tucked deep into the book was a packet of papers, folded in half. Eva did not dare to look at them here, but slipped them into her coat pocket.

Her back still turned to the crowd, she felt someone take her by the elbow. Eva gasped and whirled around to face a young man in uniform.

“Hey lady, are you gonna use that phone?”

“Don’t touch me!” Eva snarled.

The young man was surprised and no wonder — the old coat and hat did not go with the lovely face, contorted now in anger. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and backed away. “I can wait.”

Getting control of herself, Eva walked off, her heart hammering so hard in her chest that all she could hear was the thump, thump of blood in her ears. She hurried away, leaving the chastised soldier staring after her.

To Eva’s great relief, the taxi was still waiting where she had left it outside the station. She practically dove into the back seat.

“You ain’t meeting nobody?” the taxi driver wondered.

“Go,” Eva fairly shouted, then added a line straight out of the movies. “And step on it!”

They had left him alone. Keller realized he was shaking and forced himself to stop. After a while, a uniformed soldier took him down the hall to the bathroom but told Keller he would have to leave the door open. It took Keller a long time to urinate with the soldier watching him, but he finally succeeded. He had never felt so undignified and small. His knees nearly buckled when he saw that he was urinating blood. The ache in the small of his back told him that the blood was from those kidney punches. When he was finished, the soldier came into the bathroom to get a look at the blood in the toilet bowl. “Goddamn,” he said.

Keller felt sick to his stomach.

He was left alone in the interrogation room. He realized two things about himself then. The first was that they would wear him down. They might not torture him, exactly, at least nothing like the Iron Maiden method from medieval days, but it would be enough. The other two he might be able to hold off for a long time, but not that colonel. He took too much pleasure in causing pain.

The second realization was that he wouldn’t let them get at the truth. No way was he going to let himself be forced to implicate Eva as a spy. They could go to hell.

His mind made up, he sat in the chair, gathering his strength and thinking about how to go about it. Earlier, he had noticed how the exposed heating pipe ran near the wall, a foot or so below the ceiling. Like a lot of things, if you told yourself it was all just theoretical, it made going through the motions much easier. Keller dragged a chair over, just to see if he could reach the pipe. It was still too high up. He took off his new tie, now spotted with blood, and then found his old tie still in his coat pocket. That still wasn’t long enough, so he took off his shoelaces and knotted everything together. He was able to throw one end over the pipe, knot it with a slipknot, and pull it tight. He considered the dangling shoelace at the end of his makeshift rope. How did one make a noose, exactly? He didn’t need anything fancy.

He had chosen the shoelace end because — theoretically, he reminded himself — the waxed string would choke him quickly as a garrote whereas the thick tie might prove to be too padded. He tried not to think too hard about what he was really doing.

Keller knotted the shoelace around his neck and then tugged at the pipe, testing everything. If he failed, he would look like a fool. His hands shook as he worked the shoelace tightly around his windpipe. He had no great final thoughts, convincing himself that he wasn’t really hanging himself but was just going to see if it might work.

And then he stepped off the chair, making sure to kick it away so that there was no chance of saving himself. If the chair made much of a clatter going over, Keller never heard.