The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [96]
Christopher went downstairs and checked the locks on the steel door. Through the peephole he could hear Frankie Pigeon breathing, heavily and quickly, and the shuffle of his bare feet over the stone floor. Christopher had transferred some electronic music from a record to a tape, playing the record over until the tape contained twelve hours of harsh, dissonant noise. He switched on the tape recorder, which was attached to the loudspeakers inside the interrogation room, and turned the volume to the maximum. The music was so loud that it set up vibrations in the steel door. Before he went to bed, he turned on all the alarm systems.
Christopher was drinking coffee the following afternoon when Glavanis and Eycken came downstairs. They had coffee with cognac in it, and Glavanis put two large steaks under the broiler.
Christopher said, “How much money did the man have on him?”
Glavanis shrugged. “None. The bodyguards had about two thousand in dollars, plus maybe two hundred thousand lire.”
“It’s yours.”
“What about our pay?” Eycken asked.
“That, too.”
“What do you want him to spill?” Glavanis asked.
“I’ll ask the final questions when you think he’s ready. Just work on him.”
“We have to ask him something,” Glavanis said. “Otherwise one can’t make the psychological progression—there’s no reason to put on more pressure if he isn’t asked a question he refuses to answer. It’s not logical. There’s no focus of fear.”
“Keep asking about a million dollars. Tell him you know he received it. Just keep hammering on that.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, for now. Talk to him through the loudspeakers—I’ve rigged a microphone. There’s a light for his eyes if you want it.”
“What about the water?”
Christopher hesitated. “If you need it, but be careful. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”
Eycken sipped his coffee, making a windy noise with his lips. “I have a lot of faith in water,” he said.
Glavanis washed the dishes before they went downstairs. They wore woolen ski masks that concealed their faces and muffled their voices. Eycken’s black beard curled from the bottom of his mask.
They worked for almost three hours. No sound of any kind filtered into the upstairs. Christopher watched a Clark Gable movie, dubbed in Italian, on television. Finally he heard the steel door scrape over the stone floor of the cellar, and Glavanis’s light footsteps on the stairs.
Glavanis came into the sitting room with his mask still on. “He’s ready,” he said. “Jan is with him. He’s a mess, Paul—he can’t control himself.”
Glavanis pinched his nostrils shut through the mask, laughed when this reminded him that he still had it on, and stripped it off his head. He smoothed his short black hair with both hands.
“He’s primitive, that man,” Glavanis said. “At first he kept screaming that he was going to kill us. Jan kept pouring water down his throat through the tube. In the end, he went to pieces in a bad way, he kept on saying ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was very strange—we gave him no pain, just the water.”
“Is he coherent?”
“More or less. He’s afraid Jan will drown him again. The water is very effective.”
“All right, let him rest for a few minutes. Turn off the lights and lock the door. I’ll be right down.”
Christopher went upstairs and put on an Italian suit, with the ribbon of a decoration in the lapel. With a gray wig and mustache and rimless spectacles Christopher looked different enough that Glavanis reached for his pocket when he saw him coming down the stairs. Christopher was carrying a small leather case, the kind used by doctors to transport hypodermics. He had draped a heavy dressing gown over one arm. Before he went into the cellar he removed his wristwatch and put it in his pocket; there were thousands like it, but he did not want Pigeon to remember it.
3
With the door closed and the lights reflecting from its polished white walls, the interrogation room looked like the inside of a dry skull. Frankie