josé miguel tecles verdú
Governor
I remember the Larry Collins novel, "Deadly Game" or Operation Fortitude, where a brave spy is tortured by the Gestapo. Of this there is an adaptation for TV from 1994.
The book
TV movie.
Then he started walking toward his office and his latest victim.
His torturers had forced Catherine on top of a thick Paris phone book. They then looped a rope through an iron hook at one end to the grommet from which the chandelier hung from the ceiling. Their handcuffs had been driven through the chain until their feet barely touched the cardboard cover of the phone book. As an alternative, they began working on it, first using their fists, then the edge of their hands, and later some leather straps on which metal nails were attached.
Stromelburg slammed the door to his office behind him and walked across the purple carpet to that whimpering figure, suspended from the ceiling like an animal in the slaughterhouse. He was horrified at the transformation brought about by half an hour of work by his men, on his face and body. His nose was broken, his breathing came in labored gasps, his lips were bloody and small, and his eyes were barely visible because of the bruises around them.
The torturers made a respectful pause in their task as Stromelburg headed for that body. Catherine was only half conscious. She had the sensation of being wrapped in a red blanket of pain, with her body formed by a tissue of ganglia on the surface, in which the slightest touch or gesture managed to send discharges of agony throughout her being. Through the flickering film her eyes saw the outlines of the figure of Stromelburg approaching her. Then the man's face was in front of hers, his features contorted with such anger that they seemed more terrible to him than any of the martyrdoms endured. The head was thrown back and then forward like a snake. Her spit caught her on the cheekbones, as she howled:
-Bitch! You terrorist bitch!
Suddenly Stromelburg pulled away from her. He went to a wall in his office and took down an antique mirror with force. Turning to Catherine again, he placed it in front of his face.
-Look! -scream-. Look at yourself! See what they have done to you. What man will ever want to look at you again? Now you are a great beauty, don't you think? And they just started.
He was silent for a moment, then repeating to himself and throwing the words at the woman as if they were rivets.
"They've only just started!"
---------
Open the door.
"Take her upstairs," he ordered.
He stepped aside as his two torturers half carried and half dragged Catherine out of her office and into the upstairs attic. There was a circle of cubicles there, the rooms used by the servants of the wealthy pre-war owners of that building, now converted into cells where the Gestapo kept its prisoners between torture breaks.
Downstairs, the air in Stromelburg's office seemed to stink of sweat and tears, blood and fear. Her red carpet, under the chandelier, was obscured with Catherine Pradier's blood stains. All for nothing, he thought, for a tiny act of sabotage to aid an invasion that took place more than two hundred kilometers away from Calais. What an idiot I have been to be forced to do all this with her.
--------
Catherine's cell was a little larger than a wardrobe of unusual dimensions. Her bed was a rusty iron cot with wooden crossbars where a cotton mattress had been thrown. She had slept, she did not know for how long, on a plaintive tide of pain. Now she woke slowly, despite herself. High above her head, a fading sun filtered through a bare window. He deduced that it would be already noon.
Outside she heard only one sound: the monotonous, metronomometric drop of the SS guard's boots, as she walked slowly up and down the hallway in the attic of 82 Avenue Foch. Periodically, the guard paused to look at her through the peephole in the metal door of the cell. At first, those mocking eyes that devoured her crippled nakedness humiliated and angered her. Then she learned to ignore them: modesty, she told herself, was a state of mind, and not just the dress.
Someone had thrown her shoes and clothes in a heap in the corner of the cell. Occasionally, her eyes went to the same, to the golden tassel of her shoe with her promise of an eternal liberation from her suffering. However, she was already looking at him with detachment. She would no longer crawl to him and grab him for the release he offered her. I had endured it. And I would continue to endure it.
For what seemed like an hour or less, she lay awake on her cot, taking inventory, member by member, of the wounds and bruises her whippers of torturers had torn in her flesh. Across the cell, at the corner of the wall, was a water tap and a bowl. With a supreme effort of will, Catherine managed to get to her feet and lurch across the floor of the cell to the tap. If she was to survive, the fight for that survival would begin here in this cell. As best she could, she washed her wounds with cold tap water. Each application of the liquid to her open lacerations was painful; however, slowly, the shock of the water on her skin revived her.
She dried herself in the best possible way with the mattress cover and then dressed. She forced herself to sit on the cot to look toward the opening in the door, so that she could now answer the guardian's inquiring glances with her own, for the first time checking the exhilarating emotion that hatred had come to constitute.
------------
This time Catherine was taken not to Stromelburg's office but to one of the several interrogation rooms that lined the fourth floor of 82 Avenue Foch. The room had a terrifying imperonality, Catherine noted, when she staggered through the door. There she felt that a prisoner was no longer a human being, not even a number, but rather a kind of block of meat, which could be treated with the same detachment as a slaughterer regarding an ox with her hacksaw.
Stromelburg awaited her. She got up, almost respectfully, when she was thrown into the room and remained standing until she wobbled in her chair. Once again, the girl could smell her cologne and saw how impeccably manicured her hands were and how carefully her hair appeared combed.
Stromelburg watched her with his calm indifference. What they had done to her was a shame. Her face was swollen beyond any possible recognition, a series of protrusions of yellow, purple, and crimson flesh. Her lips were swollen out of all proportion from the blows she had received. She would have trouble maintaining a stiff upper lip, she thought cruelly. Only the eyes, those challenging green eyes, remained unchanged. She was still playing her role as a brave patriot.
She offered her a cigarette.
"No thanks," she replied. I have not changed my habits since yesterday.
-None of them?
The woman caught the sinister tinkle of his voice and shook her head.
-We'll see.
The two torturers who had treated her so brutally the day before had entered the room and were leaning respectfully against the wall, like silent sentinels of Gestapo sadism.
"I wasted a lot of my time yesterday when I had other things to do," Stromelburg began reproachfully. However, today I have nothing else to do except dedicate my full attention and energy to it.
He coughed politely.
"Or to be more precise, the energies of my subordinates here present."
She began to walk slowly around the room.
"Now we wish to review all things for you, Mademoiselle Pradier." I need you to answer three questions. What was he trying to sabotage in Calais? Where are the microfilms Cavendish gave him for the operation? Some simple questions that require simple and direct answers. So what was he trying to sabotage?
"I cannot answer that."
"Where's the microfilm?"
"I cannot answer that."
"What are your code messages from the 'BBC'?"
"I cannot answer that."
Stromelburg sighed. It was the wheezing of a poorly bred child who was denied the indulgence of an extra serving of dessert.
"It looks like a broken record." I'll give you a minute to reply before we get started.
Catherine collapsed in her chair. She felt her heart pound, and terrible cold seemed to embrace her entire body. She wanted to cry in fear, but she would not give him the satisfaction of her tears if she could help it. Please, my God, she begged silently, help me ...
The seconds ticked by until Stromelburg sighed again to close the course of his grace period.
"Very well," she said, nodding to her men.
One of them handcuffed his arms to the back of the chair. The other advanced towards her with a pair of pliers in hand. Stromelburg boiled inside. He should stay with the woman throughout the session, something he didn't have much of a stomach for.
"These gentlemen are going to pluck your toenails one by one," he announced. Slowly, because it's even more painful that way. This, I am told, is a particularly terrible experience. Once each nail is removed, I will repeat my questions. You can end this savagery any time you choose to answer them.
He ran his hand over his forehead as if to suppress from his head the ordeal he was going to attend.
"Most people pass out after three or four nails are pulled out." Don't let that worry you. If necessary, we will revive her with cold water and continue our work.
-------------------------
Her captors led Catherine up the flight of stairs that led to the bathroom, knowing that each of her steps on her bleeding foot was a painful ordeal. The bathroom was a Spartan chamber: a white painted room with a large bathtub along one wall and a series of whips along the other. The window facing the street was wide open. While one of her tormentors turned the cold water tap on the tub to the maximum, the other stripped her, a subtlety that her captors had neglected to carry out that day.
"What was he going to sabotage?"
Stromelburg seemed almost bored when asking that question.
Catherine simply shook her head in response. One of the two men picked up a whip from the wall and made a demonstration or two of his skill by clicking it in midair, then sent the rope toward her so that it crashed into her chest. Catherine screamed and saw the reddened marks left by the lash on her breasts.
"What was he going to sabotage?"
She was flogged perhaps twelve times before she heard the tap in the tub turn off behind her. Her captors sat her on the edge of the tub. One clutched a chain around her ankles. They turned her so that her chained feet were plunged into the icy water. Once again Stromelburg howled his question:
"What was he going to sabotage?"
In her silence, one of the tormentors tugged on her shackled feet while another caught her by the shoulders and forced her to dive into the water. With her hands cuffed behind her back, she was completely defenseless. She tried to kick and twist, but hands tugged on the chain so that her ankles emerged from the bath water. Her eyes were open and she saw the smiling faces of her tormentors above her and through the water that covered her head. Her lungs were about to explode, screaming for some air. Finally, his mouth opened in a terrible and involuntary gesture, and the cold water entered her. Her vision blurred, she suffocated, the force fled from her limbs. Drowning, he slid down a cesspool to death.
When she regained consciousness, the pain in her chest was excruciating, far worse than anything else she had suffered at the hands of her executioners. She felt how those hands pressed against her chest and how the water came out of her mouth. She was lying on her back on the floor. Images, bits of darkness and light, shadow and definition moved before her eyes. Gradually they merged into moving circles, then faces, and above all, she saw Stromelburg staring at her.
The book TV movie.Then he started walking toward his office and his latest victim.
His torturers had forced Catherine on top of a thick Paris phone book. They then looped a rope through an iron hook at one end to the grommet from which the chandelier hung from the ceiling. Their handcuffs had been driven through the chain until their feet barely touched the cardboard cover of the phone book. As an alternative, they began working on it, first using their fists, then the edge of their hands, and later some leather straps on which metal nails were attached.
Stromelburg slammed the door to his office behind him and walked across the purple carpet to that whimpering figure, suspended from the ceiling like an animal in the slaughterhouse. He was horrified at the transformation brought about by half an hour of work by his men, on his face and body. His nose was broken, his breathing came in labored gasps, his lips were bloody and small, and his eyes were barely visible because of the bruises around them.
The torturers made a respectful pause in their task as Stromelburg headed for that body. Catherine was only half conscious. She had the sensation of being wrapped in a red blanket of pain, with her body formed by a tissue of ganglia on the surface, in which the slightest touch or gesture managed to send discharges of agony throughout her being. Through the flickering film her eyes saw the outlines of the figure of Stromelburg approaching her. Then the man's face was in front of hers, his features contorted with such anger that they seemed more terrible to him than any of the martyrdoms endured. The head was thrown back and then forward like a snake. Her spit caught her on the cheekbones, as she howled:
-Bitch! You terrorist bitch!
Suddenly Stromelburg pulled away from her. He went to a wall in his office and took down an antique mirror with force. Turning to Catherine again, he placed it in front of his face.
-Look! -scream-. Look at yourself! See what they have done to you. What man will ever want to look at you again? Now you are a great beauty, don't you think? And they just started.
He was silent for a moment, then repeating to himself and throwing the words at the woman as if they were rivets.
"They've only just started!"
---------
Open the door.
"Take her upstairs," he ordered.
He stepped aside as his two torturers half carried and half dragged Catherine out of her office and into the upstairs attic. There was a circle of cubicles there, the rooms used by the servants of the wealthy pre-war owners of that building, now converted into cells where the Gestapo kept its prisoners between torture breaks.
Downstairs, the air in Stromelburg's office seemed to stink of sweat and tears, blood and fear. Her red carpet, under the chandelier, was obscured with Catherine Pradier's blood stains. All for nothing, he thought, for a tiny act of sabotage to aid an invasion that took place more than two hundred kilometers away from Calais. What an idiot I have been to be forced to do all this with her.
--------
Catherine's cell was a little larger than a wardrobe of unusual dimensions. Her bed was a rusty iron cot with wooden crossbars where a cotton mattress had been thrown. She had slept, she did not know for how long, on a plaintive tide of pain. Now she woke slowly, despite herself. High above her head, a fading sun filtered through a bare window. He deduced that it would be already noon.
Outside she heard only one sound: the monotonous, metronomometric drop of the SS guard's boots, as she walked slowly up and down the hallway in the attic of 82 Avenue Foch. Periodically, the guard paused to look at her through the peephole in the metal door of the cell. At first, those mocking eyes that devoured her crippled nakedness humiliated and angered her. Then she learned to ignore them: modesty, she told herself, was a state of mind, and not just the dress.
Someone had thrown her shoes and clothes in a heap in the corner of the cell. Occasionally, her eyes went to the same, to the golden tassel of her shoe with her promise of an eternal liberation from her suffering. However, she was already looking at him with detachment. She would no longer crawl to him and grab him for the release he offered her. I had endured it. And I would continue to endure it.
For what seemed like an hour or less, she lay awake on her cot, taking inventory, member by member, of the wounds and bruises her whippers of torturers had torn in her flesh. Across the cell, at the corner of the wall, was a water tap and a bowl. With a supreme effort of will, Catherine managed to get to her feet and lurch across the floor of the cell to the tap. If she was to survive, the fight for that survival would begin here in this cell. As best she could, she washed her wounds with cold tap water. Each application of the liquid to her open lacerations was painful; however, slowly, the shock of the water on her skin revived her.
She dried herself in the best possible way with the mattress cover and then dressed. She forced herself to sit on the cot to look toward the opening in the door, so that she could now answer the guardian's inquiring glances with her own, for the first time checking the exhilarating emotion that hatred had come to constitute.
------------
This time Catherine was taken not to Stromelburg's office but to one of the several interrogation rooms that lined the fourth floor of 82 Avenue Foch. The room had a terrifying imperonality, Catherine noted, when she staggered through the door. There she felt that a prisoner was no longer a human being, not even a number, but rather a kind of block of meat, which could be treated with the same detachment as a slaughterer regarding an ox with her hacksaw.
Stromelburg awaited her. She got up, almost respectfully, when she was thrown into the room and remained standing until she wobbled in her chair. Once again, the girl could smell her cologne and saw how impeccably manicured her hands were and how carefully her hair appeared combed.
Stromelburg watched her with his calm indifference. What they had done to her was a shame. Her face was swollen beyond any possible recognition, a series of protrusions of yellow, purple, and crimson flesh. Her lips were swollen out of all proportion from the blows she had received. She would have trouble maintaining a stiff upper lip, she thought cruelly. Only the eyes, those challenging green eyes, remained unchanged. She was still playing her role as a brave patriot.
She offered her a cigarette.
"No thanks," she replied. I have not changed my habits since yesterday.
-None of them?
The woman caught the sinister tinkle of his voice and shook her head.
-We'll see.
The two torturers who had treated her so brutally the day before had entered the room and were leaning respectfully against the wall, like silent sentinels of Gestapo sadism.
"I wasted a lot of my time yesterday when I had other things to do," Stromelburg began reproachfully. However, today I have nothing else to do except dedicate my full attention and energy to it.
He coughed politely.
"Or to be more precise, the energies of my subordinates here present."
She began to walk slowly around the room.
"Now we wish to review all things for you, Mademoiselle Pradier." I need you to answer three questions. What was he trying to sabotage in Calais? Where are the microfilms Cavendish gave him for the operation? Some simple questions that require simple and direct answers. So what was he trying to sabotage?
"I cannot answer that."
"Where's the microfilm?"
"I cannot answer that."
"What are your code messages from the 'BBC'?"
"I cannot answer that."
Stromelburg sighed. It was the wheezing of a poorly bred child who was denied the indulgence of an extra serving of dessert.
"It looks like a broken record." I'll give you a minute to reply before we get started.
Catherine collapsed in her chair. She felt her heart pound, and terrible cold seemed to embrace her entire body. She wanted to cry in fear, but she would not give him the satisfaction of her tears if she could help it. Please, my God, she begged silently, help me ...
The seconds ticked by until Stromelburg sighed again to close the course of his grace period.
"Very well," she said, nodding to her men.
One of them handcuffed his arms to the back of the chair. The other advanced towards her with a pair of pliers in hand. Stromelburg boiled inside. He should stay with the woman throughout the session, something he didn't have much of a stomach for.
"These gentlemen are going to pluck your toenails one by one," he announced. Slowly, because it's even more painful that way. This, I am told, is a particularly terrible experience. Once each nail is removed, I will repeat my questions. You can end this savagery any time you choose to answer them.
He ran his hand over his forehead as if to suppress from his head the ordeal he was going to attend.
"Most people pass out after three or four nails are pulled out." Don't let that worry you. If necessary, we will revive her with cold water and continue our work.
-------------------------
Her captors led Catherine up the flight of stairs that led to the bathroom, knowing that each of her steps on her bleeding foot was a painful ordeal. The bathroom was a Spartan chamber: a white painted room with a large bathtub along one wall and a series of whips along the other. The window facing the street was wide open. While one of her tormentors turned the cold water tap on the tub to the maximum, the other stripped her, a subtlety that her captors had neglected to carry out that day.
"What was he going to sabotage?"
Stromelburg seemed almost bored when asking that question.
Catherine simply shook her head in response. One of the two men picked up a whip from the wall and made a demonstration or two of his skill by clicking it in midair, then sent the rope toward her so that it crashed into her chest. Catherine screamed and saw the reddened marks left by the lash on her breasts.
"What was he going to sabotage?"
She was flogged perhaps twelve times before she heard the tap in the tub turn off behind her. Her captors sat her on the edge of the tub. One clutched a chain around her ankles. They turned her so that her chained feet were plunged into the icy water. Once again Stromelburg howled his question:
"What was he going to sabotage?"
In her silence, one of the tormentors tugged on her shackled feet while another caught her by the shoulders and forced her to dive into the water. With her hands cuffed behind her back, she was completely defenseless. She tried to kick and twist, but hands tugged on the chain so that her ankles emerged from the bath water. Her eyes were open and she saw the smiling faces of her tormentors above her and through the water that covered her head. Her lungs were about to explode, screaming for some air. Finally, his mouth opened in a terrible and involuntary gesture, and the cold water entered her. Her vision blurred, she suffocated, the force fled from her limbs. Drowning, he slid down a cesspool to death.
When she regained consciousness, the pain in her chest was excruciating, far worse than anything else she had suffered at the hands of her executioners. She felt how those hands pressed against her chest and how the water came out of her mouth. She was lying on her back on the floor. Images, bits of darkness and light, shadow and definition moved before her eyes. Gradually they merged into moving circles, then faces, and above all, she saw Stromelburg staring at her.
