Ken Follett – Jackdaws

The woman came forward, shooting a look of hatred at Stephanie. “Very good, monsieur.”

“And some cognac. She’s had a shock.”

“We have no cognac.”

They had cognac, but she did not want to give it to the mistress of a German. Dieter did not argue the point. “Just coffee, then, but be quick, or there will be trouble.”

He patted Stephanie’s shoulder and left her. He passed through double doors into the east wing. The chƒteau was laid out as a series of reception rooms, one leading into the next on the Versailles pattern, he found. The rooms were full of switchboards, but these had a more permanent look, the cables bundled into neatly made wooden trunking that disappeared through the floor into the cellar beneath. Dieter guessed the hail looked messy only because it had been brought into service as an emergency measure after the west wing had been bombed. Some of the windows were permanently blacked out, no doubt as an air-raid precaution, but others had heavy curtains drawn open, and Dieter supposed the women did not like to work in permanent night.

At the end of the east wing was a stairwell. Dieter went down. At the foot of the staircase he passed through a steel door. A small desk and a chair stood just inside, and Dieter assumed a guard normally sat there. The man on duty had presumably left his post to join in the fighting. Dieter entered unchallenged and made a mental note of a security breach.

This was a different environment from that of the grand principal floors. Designed as kitchens, storage, and accommodation for the dozens of staff who would have serviced this house three hundred years ago, it had low ceilings, bare walls, and floors of stone, or even, in some rooms, beaten earth. Dieter walked along a broad corridor. Every door was clearly labeled in neat German signwriting, but Dieter looked inside anyway. On his left, at the front of the building, was the complex equipment of a major telephone exchange: a generator, enormous batteries, and rooms full of tangled cables. On his right, toward the back of the house, were the Gestapo’s facilities: a photo lab, a large wireless listening room for eavesdropping on the Resistance, and prison cells with peepholes in the doors. The basement had been bombproofed: all windows were blocked, the walls were sandbagged, and the ceilings had been reinforced with steel girders and poured concrete. Obviously that was to prevent Allied bombers from putting the phone system out of action.

At the end of the corridor was a door marked Interrogation Center. He went inside. The first room had bare white walls, bright lights, and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room. Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric shock machine; and a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers so that they could eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.

There was a noise behind him, startling him. He spun around. When he saw what was in the doorway he took a frightened step back. “Christ!” he said. He was looking at a squat figure, its face thrown into shadow by the strong light from the next room. “Who are you?” he said, and he could hear the fear in his own voice.

The figure stepped into the light and turned into a man in the uniform shirt of a Gestapo sergeant. He was short and pudgy, with a fleshy face and ash-blond hair cropped so short that he looked bald. “What are you doing here?” he said in a Frankfurt accent.

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