The Colour of Fire by Michael Asher

Author:Michael Asher [Asher, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2018-11-27T22:00:00+00:00

29.

Gestapo Headquarters, Strasbourg, France. September 1944

It was an ordinary-sized bathroom, with a bath of chipped and stained porcelain and light coming in through a barred, opaque window. Four men were crowded in there with her – two of them Gestapo, one French Milice, the fourth, a senior SS officer. The SS officer was the one they deferred to – a tallish man, fit-looking, forty-odd, dark hair with a widow’s peak, carefully shaven jowls, eyes like diamonds. His gaze was keen – he seemed to study Blaney, to examine her, to dissect her. He looked more like a science professor than an SS man, she thought, but his rank insignia showed that he was an SS-Standartenführer – a full colonel. At his collar he wore the ribbon of the Knight’s Cross – the highest award for service to the Reich. …well in with Hitler, she remembered André saying …wears the Knight’s Cross on his jacket. An SS concentration camp commandant who’s also an engineer or scientist… Boelcke, I think it was. That’s it… SS-Standartenführer Franz Boelcke.

Knight’s Crosses weren’t ten a penny. This chap was the right rank, and he looked just what André had said he was – a self-opinionated and arrogant intellectual rather than a soldier. If he was Boelcke – and she was almost sure of it – he was not only the commandant of KL-Natzweiler, the only Nazi death camp in France, he was also in charge of whatever strange alchemy was going on at Wallenbach – a process that had led to the starvation, death by overwork, beating, hanging, torture and murder of tens of thousands of slave workers. Wears an SS uniform, acts like a civilian… used to see him sometimes… it was him who ordered the starvation and the killings… didn’t do it with his own hands… the bastard enjoyed it… used to watch.

Blaney shivered.

‘Take your clothes off,’ a Gestapo man said.

She hesitated, her dove-grey eyes downcast. The men were leering at her. One of them was thin and sallow-faced, the other squat and overweight. The Frenchman, a swarthy, red-faced, middle-aged fellow with glittering eyes, licked dry lips. Blaney forced her mind away from them, away from her body. In interrogation resistance training, she’d been taught to – disassociate – that was the word. Why should she feel humiliated standing here naked? After all, they’re not even real men. She removed her overalls with dignity, then her underwear, let them fall to the floor at her feet. The men stared at her breasts, the V of red pubic hair at her crotch. The Milice collaborator wet his lips again, visibly aroused. Boelcke’s eyes moved from the wedge of pubic hair to the scar tissue on the milk-white skin of her chest. ‘A gunshot wound,’ he said in French. His voice was deep but cultivated. ‘You have been shot, I think?’

Blaney stared back at him, said nothing.

Boelcke smiled sadly. ‘We know you were one of the group who tried to sabotage Wallenbach,’ he said. ‘What was

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