The Prisoner (7 page)

Marc nodded eagerly. ‘I’m sure I’d be useful, madam.’

‘Was Herr Vogel’s trust in you well placed?’ Eiffel asked, raising one eyebrow as she flicked her cigarette end, clumsily missing an ashtray.

Marc tried to hide his discomfort. ‘What do you mean?’

‘All departments send prisoner transfer logs to Reich Labour Headquarters in Berlin,’ Eiffel explained. ‘Every movement is logged and our system is robust. It’s rare that the numbers don’t tally.

‘But shortly after I began here, I received a letter asking me to investigate an anomaly with three prisoners. They were transferred to Cologne, but never arrived.’

Marc gulped, Eiffel smiled. She liked making him squirm.

‘I couldn’t get any information on the prisoners, because their records had vanished from the card index – to which you had frequent and easy access. However, a transport official remembered a slightly unusual transfer request, and Osterhagen recalled that
you
tried to leave with three prisoners bound for Cologne. Apparently you were stopped at the gate, but your three friends vanished into thin air.’

Marc thought about lying, but Eiffel had clearly investigated thoroughly. He was worried not just for himself, but because he could potentially be tortured into revealing the new identities and locations of his three friends.

‘I miss my family,’ Marc said meekly, hoping Eiffel would take pity. ‘I just wanted to go home.’

Eiffel shrugged disinterestedly. ‘I’m sure the Gestapo Security Office would be intrigued by all these details. Fortunately for you, I have no desire for a large-scale Gestapo investigation of my department. I’ve reconciled the prisoner numbers with Berlin. The matter is closed and you’ll be assigned to a new job where you’ll have no access to prisoner records.’

Marc didn’t want to seem cocky, but couldn’t completely disguise a relieved smile. ‘Thank you, madam. Has my new work assignment been selected?’

‘A senior guard mentioned that he has communication difficulties and could use someone like you who speaks French and German.’

Marc’s heart plunged. ‘Which guard?’ he asked, though he was sure he knew already.

‘Herr Fischer will be here to deal with you shortly,’ Eiffel said.

Marc got a strong-armed shove, making him stumble back towards a chair in Fischer’s office.

‘Sit,’ Fischer barked.

Calling it an office was a stretch: the wooden hut had a hammock strung across, an old door laid on trestles for a desk, empty cans and beer bottles stacked to the ceiling and a smell like wet dog.

As the thuggish former dock labourer reached up to screw an electric cooking ring into the light socket, Marc noticed a photo of his new tormentor in his prime: bare chested, muscular tattooed arms leaning cockily on the ropes of a wrestling ring.

‘Ma said I was sick in the head ’cos Old Fischer used to mess with cats,’ Fischer said, as he ran water into a saucepan, using a standpipe poking through the hut’s wooden floor. ‘I’d throw knives at ’em. Or grabbed the little bastards and slit their guts open.’

As Fischer chuckled to himself, Marc didn’t know where to look or what to say. He felt uncomfortable, not just because he’d been released into the custody of a nutter, but because the hospital had badly shrunk his brown suit when they’d boil-washed it to kill off all the bugs.

‘You French kept Old Fischer prisoner for two years in the last war. You think it’s bad here? You should have seen how you treated us.’

Fischer worked around a tin of tomatoes with a can opener and began tipping them down his throat.

‘Vogel sent Alain off to punishment camp,’ Fischer said, as he held the can out towards Marc. ‘Tom toms?’

No prisoner ever turned down food, but as Marc reached for the can, Fischer snatched it, then gobbed a big mouthful of chewed-up tomato into Marc’s face.

‘I hold my grudges,’ Fischer said, grunting with laughter. ‘Alain may be gone, but there’s still plenty of his mates on the
Oper
. I’ll put you in with ’em if you muck me about. Got it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Marc said, as he wiped tomato juice and spit on to his sleeve.

‘Old Fischer’s in charge of the
Oper
, the main prison barrack behind Großmarkthalle and three other prison boats. Now wherever you go, there’s always prisoners with a racket. Prisoner knows how to get extra food. Prisoner with gold hidden in his mattress. Your job is to find ’em and come tell me all about it.’

Marc looked stunned.

‘I thought you liked flapping your trap, snitching to your boss?’ Fischer teased. ‘You snitched me to Vogel well enough, didn’t you? Earned me and the other guards a right bollocking.’

‘Prisoners who snitch get their throats cut,’ Marc said weakly.

‘Best be careful then,’ Fischer said, with a laugh. ‘But keep information coming my way, ’cos if you’re no use to Old Fischer …’

The guard finished his sentence by swiping his finger across Marc’s throat. As Marc sat there trying to think up a plan, Fischer opened another tin of tomatoes. This time he let Marc dip his fingers in and take a couple.

Marc scoffed the bitter tomatoes so fast that juice ran over his wrist into the cuff of his shirt. Then Fischer yanked his arm and sadistically bent back his fingers.

‘You’ll do what
I
say, when
I
say it.’

As Marc writhed off his chair and hit the floor, a small glass jar rolled out from the inside pocket of his suit. Fischer snapped it up and roared.

‘Yoghurt!’ he shouted. ‘Haven’t seen that since before the war. Did you steal it from the hospital?’

Marc flinched, expecting a boot in the gut, but Fischer unscrewed the cap, dipped in two fingers and sucked the creamy liquid off his fingertips.

The reaction was explosive as the foul-tasting substance burned Fischer’s throat and tongue.

‘Christ,’ Fischer roared, banging his fist on the desktop, then swirling juice from the tomato tin around his mouth to clear the taste. ‘What kind of filth is that?’

Marc would have laughed, but Fischer didn’t need much provocation to smash your brains out.

‘It’s the ointment they gave me for my eye,’ Marc said, trying to keep his voice neutral as Fischer scraped his tongue on a tobacco-stained handkerchief.

‘Why didn’t you say before I licked it?’ Fischer asked. ‘Think you’re funny, do you?’

Marc hoped the question was rhetorical and didn’t answer.

‘I’ll get one of my men to find you a bed aboard the
Adler
,’ Fischer shouted. ‘Report back here at eight tomorrow. Make sure you’ve got something I’ll want to hear.’

*

Adler
was the largest of the prison boats moored in Frankfurt’s East Docks. She had three levels above the hull and four below, and while
Oper
was usually bedded in mud,
Adler
was moored on the riverbank and floated free.

The ship’s gentle swaying made Marc queasy as he lay on the second bunk in a stack of five, two decks beneath the nearest fresh air. There was no ventilation and the build up of cigarette smoke and stench of toilet buckets made it feel like breathing soup.

Marc’s mood was black. He’d gone from top to bottom. From friend of the commandant with a cushy job, to number one enemy of a sadistic and unstable guard. From having good mates and an escape plan, to being alone and as far from getting home as he’d ever been.

Adler
’s prisoners were older than the crowd on the
Oper
. Dutch, Poles and Slavs all mixed together. If any of the fifty bodies packed in Marc’s cabin spoke French, he didn’t hear them.

The evening meal arrived in a big drum, with black loaves floating in the soup and every man fighting for his share. Marc had left his mug, spoon and mess tin back on the
Oper
, so all he could do once he’d pushed through a greedy mob was grab a chunk of bread and dunk it.

He was no weakling, but had reason to be scared as a new arrival in a cabin full of grown men. Nobody bothered him though, partly because he’d emerged from hospital with nothing worth stealing, but mainly because poor food and heavy work meant the men climbed on bunks and fell asleep, most fully dressed in stinking clothes and boots.

These prisoners were like the living dead: worked to exhaustion, given just enough food to stay alive. Their joyless existence had more in common with that of the cattle Marc looked after before the war than with normal human life.

As Marc lay awake, dripping with sweat and with the fleas in his mattress eating him alive, he realised the prospect of keeping his head down and ending up like his new cabin mates was more dreadful than any threat made by a thug like Fischer.

Escaping now would be almost impossible, but Marc’s brain kept cycling back to the same questions: What would Commander Henderson do? How would
he
get out of this?

*

The guards decided it was a good day for a roll call, so at four thirty the next morning five hundred and fifty men who bunked aboard Adler were dragged out of bed to the sound of ringing hand bells, before lining up in rows on the dockside.

The count required every inmate to recite their prisoner number in turn and took forty minutes. When that was done the men were left standing to attention while a small team of guards worked their way through seven prison decks, supposedly searching for contraband, but mainly just throwing mattresses around and occasionally finding something worth stealing.

The guards on the
Adler
were significantly nastier than those on the
Oper
, even when their boss Fischer was nowhere to be seen. As time passed, anyone who scratched, stretched, slouched or moved got slapped with a leather glove if they were lucky, or a rifle butt slammed in the guts if they weren’t.

After two and a half hours at attention, the prisoners were sent off to their work details without breakfast. With no work assignment, Marc found a balding guard screaming in his face, calling him a
lazy turd
.

‘I have a meeting with Fischer at eight,’ Marc said.

‘Liar,’ the guard shouted. ‘Fischer isn’t even working today. What’s your prisoner number?’

Marc wondered if the guard had made a mistake about Fischer having a day off, or if Fischer’s idea of him being his snitch was just an extra way to put the frighteners on him.

He got his answer after several minutes of being yanked around the dockside by his collar, jabbed in the back and shouted at by two different guards until someone found some paperwork with Marc’s new work assignment on it.

‘Gang sixty-two,’ the guard read. ‘Get moving.’

The guard who’d been shoving Marc about broke into a high-pitched laugh,

‘I don’t think Fischer likes you,’ he explained, in broken French. ‘And such a shame to spoil those nice shoes.’

Before Marc grasped what was being asked, he got smacked up the side of the head.

‘Give us your shoes,’ the guard shouted. ‘How stupid can you bloody French be?’

After handing his shoes to the guard, Marc was dragged over the quayside in socked feet to join up with a dozen wretched-looking prisoners standing under a dock crane. Their clothes were no filthier than any of the construction workers, but the smell of sewage hung over them, even in open air. Worse, many had chunks of missing hair and sores on their skin.

The men began shaking their heads with disgust when they saw Marc. They were mostly Polish, but a couple spoke French, including a red-haired fellow.

‘Leonard,’ he said, by way of introduction. ‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen,’ Marc said, figuring it best to stick to his official age.

Leonard translated into Polish and the other men groaned with disgust.

‘I can pull my weight,’ Marc said defensively.

‘It’s not that,’ Leonard explained. ‘We don’t like the fact you’re so young. Our line of work isn’t good for your health.’

War production put Frankfurt’s industry at full stretch. Factories worked 24/7. New facilities opened all the time, staffed by slave labourers living in hastily built camps. This all-out effort led to water shortages and a sewage system on the verge of collapse.

Gang sixty-two weren’t trusted to walk the streets in prisoner jackets. They got an armed escort on an uncomfortably brisk three-kilometre walk from the dockside to a Frankfurt Water Company maintenance depot.

Leonard stuck close to Marc as they were assigned a job list and sent out with two other prisoners and a pistol-toting supervisor. Their open-backed cart was packed with shovels, rakes, pipes, hoses and tubs of chemicals.

Marc’s first taste of his new job was an open sewer run-off at a women’s prison camp. The stench was familiar from every toilet he’d encountered since being taken prisoner, but rolling up trouser legs and wading into a rat-infested lagoon of human waste was all new.

Marc fought dry heaves as he joined the other three prisoners on his team, using rakes and shovels to dig out a soggy blockage made up of newspaper and card that the women had used to wipe themselves.

The next two jobs on the work list were similar. Marc felt sick most of the time and was terrified by the obvious risk of disease, standing barefoot in open sewage. The fourth and final job of the day was a factory, where instead of dealing with sewage they had to clamber into a fume-filled outlet pipe and shovel a build up of toffee-like sludge into wheelbarrows.

There was a disinfectant hose down when they arrived back at the water department at the end of their shift, but it was nowhere near enough to get the stench off clothes and skin.

Marc’s second day on the job began well enough when his German supervisor dug out a pair of rubber boots for him, but by afternoon he had a fever and was doubled over with stomach cramps.

Leonard said everyone got sick in this job. He reckoned the first few weeks were worst for picking up infections because you gradually built up immunity. The big long-term danger was exposure to chemicals in the factory run off.

‘Losing all my nails,’ Leonard said, proving his point by peeling back a yellowed thumbnail that flipped up like a car door. ‘A lot of long-termers get problems with their breathing. So far I’ve been lucky with that.’