The Man Who Loved Mata Hari by Dan Sherman

Author:Dan Sherman [Sherman, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

THEY brought him to the compound at Doberitz, eight miles from the heart of the city. Although largely forgotten as a center of atrocities, there were actually more than three hundred political prisoners there in that summer of 1914. Most were confined in rows of barracks on a stretch of reclaimed marsh. Conditions were primitive. Above the marsh stood a thirteenth-century manor, a sprawling, gothic place where the formal interrogations were held, and there were also cells here, subterranean cubicles cut into the stone.

Gray, on arrival, saw very little: a strangled oak in the courtyard, a length of sooty wall, a staircase to the vaults, a windowless room, a cot and a bucket. He was abused with random blows to the groin, the stomach, the kidneys; and then was left alone. The room was cold and painfully small. The bedding was infested with vermin. Between long periods of silence there were echoes of a scream and the slow footsteps of guards.

They had taken his wristwatch, so measuring time was impossible.

For the most part he tried to keep his mind from it. He thought of his work, and imagined an ink-wash of the Brandenburg Gate. He thought about Paris and of his cat on the window box. He thought about Zelle, because at least the pain of that was real. And he thought about Dunbar, and fed on the hatred.

In the beginning, the fleas seemed to be the worst of it; at first they attacked his neck and wrists, then found their way under his clothes. But they came for him on the second day: two guards in uniform, a third watching from the dark staircase. They led him to a large empty room with bare floorboards and bare walls. There were three or four chairs in the corner, nothing else. One of the guards dragged a chair to the center of the room and told him to sit. His wrists and ankles were fastened with an electrical wire.

At least another hour passed before Spangler and a woman appeared. She was young and actually quite pretty with white-blonde hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a tweed skirt and jacket, thick spectacles, and some sort of medal. Spangler brought over a chair from the corner for her and put it against the wall just on the edge of Gray's vision. As she sat down he caught a glimpse of a stenographer's pad and a fountain pen in her hand. Spangler positioned the third chair directly in front of Gray's. Then he sat, like the girl, with his knees crossed and his hands in his lap.

"You don't look well, Nicholas. You don't look well at all."

Gray shut his eyes, with a quick vision of the room as if viewing it from the ceiling: three chairs on an empty floor, one perpendicular to the other two.

"There's also the matter of your mental health, a matter which becomes increasingly delicate the longer you stay here."

Gray opened his eyes and looked at him. "Why don't you just tell me what you want?"

"Your trust, then answers to some questions.

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