The Rendezvous by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online

want to put all this behind you and live your life like other people?’
    â€˜Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But it’s not possible. I know what I was like when I came here – I know what you and Dr. Kaplan have done for me. But I’m not a fool, Robert. I’m sick; I’ll never be normal. If it hadn’t been for you I think I would have killed myself. Life has nothing left for me.’
    â€˜Supposing I told you it had,’ he said. ‘Supposing I told you Kaplan could cure you, make you just like you were before anything happened. What would you say to that?’
    â€˜How?’ she said. ‘How could he do it?’
    Bradford took her other hand and held both in his.
    â€˜He can take the memory away. But it may mean that you won’t remember other things as well. You won’t remember who you are or where you lived or anything about yourself. You’ll have to be – re-born, Terese. But you’ll be well – cured. Will you let him do it?’
    â€˜It sounds impossible. And frightening. What will happen to me afterwards?’
    He bent his head and kissed her hands. ‘I love you.’ He said it very gently so as not to frighten her. ‘I’ll take care of you afterwards. Please, darling, let Joe do this.’
    â€˜All right.’ She said it simply and without hesitating. ‘If you’ll promise to be with me.’
    â€˜I promise,’ Bradford said. ‘Right the way through.’
    Colonel Baldraux lit a cigarette; he smoked continuously, lighting one Gauloise off the butt-end of the last. He sat in the Bradfords’ Paris hotel suite wreathed in blue smoke. He was a tall, thin man with sparse fair hair and blue eyes and an Alsatian accent.
    He was irritated by the American sitting opposite him; rich Americans annoyed him on principle, and he had found it difficult to track the Bradfords down. ‘You realise how difficult this sort of attitude makes our work, Major?’ he said. ‘All I ask is ten minutes with Madame Bradford to establish a few facts.’
    â€˜I’ve told you,’ Bob Bradford said. ‘My wife was tortured by the Gestapo and spent ten months in Buchenwald. I wouldn’t let anyone question her about it.’
    â€˜Very well,’ the colonel shrugged. ‘I can’t force you to let me talk to her. Perhaps you can remember something that might help us. Does the name Brunnerman mean anything to you? Did your wife ever mention him?’
    â€˜She’s never talked about it, not to me. She was too ill. Who was Brunnerman, anyway?’
    â€˜A colonel in the S.S., one of their best men,’ Baldraux said. ‘It’s on the Gestapo files that he questioned your wife. This was before she was tortured. We have arrested most of the Gestapo staff, including a man called Freischer who actually tortured Madame, and members of the Vichy Militia who were working with them, ex-criminals like Rudi de Merode – of course he had his own establishment at the Rue des Saussaies – your wife was lucky not to have been taken there; some of them were worse to their own people than the Germans.… But I am getting away from the point.…’ He lit another cigarette and swallowed a huge mouthful of smoke. ‘We are interested in any lead we might pick up on Brunnerman because he seems to have escaped. All the Allied Security forces are looking for him, but he operated mostly in France, and naturally we want him. He was transferred to a Waffen S.S. division on the Eastern Front and that was the last we can trace of him after the retreat began. His division was responsible for the murder of twenty thousand Jews during the Russian campaign. It would be a pity if he were to slip out to Spain, for instance. We’ve lost hundreds of the top men in the confusion just after the war ended. I would very much like to find this one.’
    â€˜I’d like you to find him too,