The Rendezvous Read Online Free PDF

quickly.’
    There was a loud knock on the door; it opened and the two S.S. men in uniform came in and saluted. He saw the girl raise both hands to her mouth in a gesture of fear, and then get up without being told.
    â€˜Major Freischer requests the prisoner Masson, Colonel.’
    Brunnerman refused to look at her. ‘Take her.’
    She moved to meet them, and at the door she turned. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘If I wouldn’t tell you, I’ll never tell them.’ Then the door shut, and a moment later he heard the whine of the internal passenger lift as it went up.
    There was a single low-voltage bulb in the ceiling; it hung on a length of flex and when she opened her eyes it was moving gently, backwards and forwards. She recognised the light as a sign that she was conscious for short periods; she tried to keep her eyes open so as not to lose it and slide away again. The descent into the dark was worse than the pain which was associated with the swinging bulb; it was like being drowned in that bath all over again. There were big oval blisters on her breasts where Freischer had burnt her with his cigar; they hurt, but the sensation ran into all the other feelings of injury in her body. They had broken the fingers of her right hand one by one and there was an intolerable ache somewhere at the end of her arm. It was over, that’s why she was looking at the light bulb and slowly coming back to full awareness. She was in a cell, lying on a plank bed, naked except for a dirty blanket that was as thin as paper. She shivered continuously with cold and shock; she had vomited up all the water she had swallowed while they held her head under the water and she hadn’t even the strength left to cry because of the pain.
    â€˜Terese.’
    It was impossible to turn her head; she could see him bending over her, but his face was blurred. It wasn’t one of the others. It wasn’t the man with the little eyes that had the cigar, or the thin one who turned out to be a Frenchman when she heard him speak. This was the other one, the one who had tried to help her. The kind one. Tears rushed up into her eyes and overflowed, running down her bruised and sunken face.
    â€˜Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘It’s all over.’
    â€˜It hurts; my hand – everything …’ She tried to speak, but it was only a whisper; he had to bend close to hear her.
    â€˜I know, I’m going to send you to hospital.’ He knew what they had done to her, because he had received a full report. He had put in a report of his own, written in desperate haste after she was taken away, saying that in his opinion she didn’t have the information they wanted. But it hadn’t saved her. He had stayed on in the office till she came down from the fourth floor, and then come down to the basement to see her. He hadn’t been able to work all day, and he refused to go back to his hotel room and sleep. After a day and a night without going to bed he had reached a pitch of nervous exhaustion where it was impossible to sleep at all. His mind kept returning to Terese Masson, nagging him with questions about himself and his reactions. Why had he lied to try to save her from the ultimate interrogation – he wasn’t in love with her, wanting to sleep with her wasn’t love. He had never been in love with any woman and he had gone to bed with a great many and enjoyed them. It wasn’t courage either, because a lot of the people who came to the Avenue Foch were brave; at least in the beginning. He didn’t know what it was, but the effect upon him was obsessional. She had come into his life at a crisis point of which he was unaware; what happened to her was an extension of what was really happening to him. Even before he went down to see her he had decided to resign and ask to be transferred to a Wermacht combat unit. Now he couldn’t bear to look at her; when he left the cell he