Gray ran, first mainly conscious of the voices behind him, then the wavering lights of Dunbar's limousine. He slipped and felt his knee against his chin and the pain as he bit his tongue. He was up again, running to the shrill peal of a whistle, to the clap of his heels on the cobbles. He heard a pistol shot, then his own voice screaming Dunbar's name.

He lowered his head, arms and legs pumping furiously but, as in any bad dream, he couldn't seem to close the distance, couldn't seem to keep the street from flowing like a river ... as the limousine pulled away . . . accelerating erratically because the bastard was obviously unfamiliar with the gears.

After that he supposed that he was running for nothing, entranced by the rhythm of his feet, lost in the night sky. Even later when they caught him, he was still running running—lying in a puddle of rainwater.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

THEY brought him to the compound at Doberitz, eight miles from the heart of the city. Although largely forgotten as a center of atrocities, there were actually more than three hundred political prisoners there in that summer of 1914. Most were confined in rows of barracks on a stretch of reclaimed marsh. Conditions were primitive. Above the marsh stood a thirteenth-century manor, a sprawling, gothic place where the formal interrogations were held, and there were also cells here, subterranean cubicles cut into the stone.

Gray, on arrival, saw very little: a strangled oak in the courtyard, a length of sooty wall, a staircase to the vaults, a windowless room, a cot and a bucket. He was abused with random blows to the groin, the stomach, the kidneys; and then was left alone. The room was cold and painfully small. The bedding was infested with vermin. Between long periods of silence there were echoes of a scream and the slow footsteps of guards.

They had taken his wristwatch, so measuring time was impossible.

For the most part he tried to keep his mind from it. He thought of his work, and imagined an ink-wash of the Brandenburg Gate. He thought about Paris and of his cat on the window box. He thought about Zelle, because at least the pain of that was real. And he thought about Dunbar, and fed on the hatred.

In the beginning, the fleas seemed to be the worst of it; at first they attacked his neck and wrists, then found their way under his clothes. But they came for him on the second day: two guards in uniform, a third watching from the dark staircase. They led him to a large empty room with bare floorboards and bare walls. There were three or four chairs in the corner, nothing else. One of the guards dragged a chair to the center of the room and told him to sit. His wrists and ankles were fastened with an electrical wire.