Assignment Gestapo (4 page)

‘I haven’t got one to wear, sir. The Ruskies swiped it’

Lt. Ohlsen exchanged a despairing glance with Lt. Spät. They always gave up when it came to dealing with Porta.

‘All right,’ said Ohlsen, wearily. ‘Put it back on again – whatever it is! You can’t march bareheaded,’

‘Yes, sir.’

The deplorable yellow hat was once more crammed on to Porta’s head. The column moved off in the inevitable rain, which was blowing straight at us and stinging our faces. A moment of excitement was caused by a hare suddenly running across our path, almost upsetting the precious cooking pot as Porta, in his usual eagerness for food, made an involuntarily swipe as the creature shot by.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ shouted Tiny.

‘We could have skinned it and ate it,’ said Porta, regretfully. ‘We could have put it in the pot along with the booze.’

Tiny looked at him.

‘Who’d want to ruin good booze with a lousy hare?’

‘They do in high-class restaurants,’ said Heide, who always knew everything. ‘They’re regarded as a great delicacy, hare done in wine . . . jugged, they call it’

‘Sod the hare,’ said Tiny, suddenly. ‘I’d sooner have a bird . . .’

And with one hand, he demonstrated the kind of bird he meant.

‘I’ve almost forgotten what they look like, to tell you the honest truth . . . remember that Russian what had it away with a goose? Got hard up for a bit of the other, so he had to make do with a goose. Not sure I couldn’t do with a goose myself, come to think about it . . .’

‘Crap,’ said Heide. ‘You couldn’t do anything if it was handed to you on a plate. Not in this weather, you couldn’t.’

‘Who are you kidding?’ jeered Tiny. ‘The way I feel right now, I could do it stark bollock naked at the North Pole . . . what about that time at the Turkish frontier? You forgotten that have you? Snow was inches deep on the ground—’

‘That’s different. You could do it in snow, but you certainly couldn’t do it stark naked at the North Pole,’ objected Steiner, very seriously.

Steiner was a driver, who had been sent to us as a punishment for having sold an army wagon to an Italian in Milan. He tended to have a very literal mind.

‘Nobody could do it at that temperature,’ he insisted. ‘It’d be a physical impossibility.’

‘Speak for yourself!’ retorted Tiny, very much insulted ‘It’s the temperature inside you what counts . . . just depends how much you want it, don’t it?’

‘That’s just not true,’ said Steiner, obstinately. ‘I mean, for a start, you couldn’t even get the thing in . . . not in that weather you couldn’t’

‘Who says?’ Tiny swung round on him so violently that the contents of the cooking pot rose up and slopped over the edge. ‘You might not be able to, but I’m bloody sure I could! Why, I can still remember—’

‘Keep your voices down!’ snapped Lt. Ohlsen, a few paces behind us. ‘We’re not far from the enemy, we don’t want to advertise ourselves.’

We turned off the main road and began toiling up towards the mountains. We were walking on grass, now; thick springy stuff that muffled the sounds of our footsteps. Somewhere nearby, in the shadows, a cow blew contentedly through its nostrils and we smelt the warm milky smell of the beast. All orders were given in a low voice.

‘Single file from this point on—’

Oberfeldwebel Huhn lit a cigarette. Lt. Spät caught the flicker of the match and strode up in a fury.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You ought to have more sense than that, for Christ’s sake! Put the bloody thing out and get down to the rear of the column and stay there!’

Huhn disappeared, his tail between his legs.

Suddenly, through the misty gloom, we were able to make out the shape of a building. It was a farmhouse, with a faint light coming from one of its windows. Lt. Ohlsen held up a warning hand, and we shuffled to a halt. ‘We had had experiences with farmhouses before. They sometimes contained innocent farmers and their families; but on the other hand, they had been known to hide a platoon of enemy troops and a nest of machine guns.

Ohlsen turned and beckoned to us.

‘Heide – Sven – Barcelona – Forta . . .’ He picked us out one by one and we crept forward. ‘Go and get the place cleaned up. And watch your step: if the Ruskies are there they’ll have set up a guard for sure . . . don’t shoot unless you have to. Use your kandras.’

We pulled them out and slipped silently forward through the shadows. As always on these occasions, my whole body was taut and trembling.

We had covered only a few yards when I became aware that Tiny had joined us. He had a knife clenched between his teeth and his length of steel wire in one hand. He laughed delightedly at our expressions and put his mouth close to Porta’s ear.

‘Any gold teeth going, I claim half of ’em!’

Porta shook his head and said nothing. He was the first of us to reach the objective. Silent and supple as a cat, he hauled himself up to the window ledge and was inside the farm before the rest of us had even arrived. We followed him in and stood shivering in the dark. Somewhere in the house, a door creaked. Heide jumped several feet in the air and pulled out a hand grenade. Barcelona closed his fingers over his wrist.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool!’

Tiny, the knife still between his teeth, flexed his length of wire. Porta turned and spat over his left shoulder: he said it brought him luck.

We waited a moment, listening, and then Tiny suddenly plunged off into the blackness. After a bit we heard a faint sound; a faint gurgle, a faint choke. Then silence again.

Tiny returned, with a dead cat in the wire noose.

‘Poor pussy!’

He dangled it before Heide’s face, and we breathed again.

‘It could have been the Reds,’ muttered Heide, defensively, but he put the hand grenade away again.

Tiny laughed and tossed the dead cat into a corner.

Having disposed of the enemy, we began to make free with the place, opening all the drawers and cupboards to see what took our fancy. Tiny found a pot of jam. He took it away to a corner, sat down cross-legged on the floor and happily dug into it with his fingers. Porta picked up a bottle, looked at the label in the dim light and came to the conclusion that it was cognac. He took a large swig, then shook his head and held out the bottle to Heide.

‘Funny sort of cognac,’ he remarked, plainly very puzzled.

Heide sniffed at it, cautiously took a mouthful, swilled it round a bit, then spat it out in disgust. He kicked the bottle angrily across the room.

‘Some bleeding cognac! That was more like tetrachloride; you stupid sod!’

Tiny cackled contentedly.

‘Ought to stick to jam . . . know where you are with jam!’

‘Piss off!’ said Porta, furiously.

And now, again, we heard a door creak. Instantly we froze to the spot. A moment’s silence, then Tiny and Barcelona dived behind a cupboard. The pot of jam rolled across the room and the contents spilt out over the carpet Porta charged across to the door and kicked it open.

‘Whoever you are, we’ve got you covered!’

Silence.

I stood nervously fingering the hand grenade that I had pulled out. There certainly had been someone there. We could all feel it, and we crouched like wild beasts waiting to spring. We were in the mood where killing would be partly a necessity, as an act of self-preservation, and partly a positive animalistic pleasure, a release of tension and a source of deep satisfaction.

We listened.

We ought to call up the Company,’ muttered Barcelona.

‘Sooner set fire to the place,’ suggested Tiny. ‘Then we could pick ’em off like flies as they come out . . . Nothing like a nice bit of fire for flushing a place out.’

‘Oh, give your flaming arse a chance!’ snapped Porta. They’d only see the perishing flames for miles around, wouldn’t they?’

Again there came that creaking, as of a door or floorboards. Unable to bear the tension any longer, Porta switched on his torch and went charging out through the door at the far end of the room. We saw him, with scant regard for the possible consequences, flashing the beam into the shadows. He struck lucky. Pressed against a wall, seemingly trying to merge into the darkness, was a young girl. She had a large club gripped in one hand, and she was plainly terrified.

We stared at her, disbelievingly. Heide was the first to recover. He turned to Tiny with a suggestive smile.

‘There’s your bird,’ he said, simply.

Tiny walked across to her, chucked her somewhat brutally under the chin and tickled her behind the ear with the tip of his lethal steel wire.

‘You speak German, do you?’

She stared up at him out of wide open eyes.

‘I’m afraid I had to strangle your cat,’ said Tiny, gracelessly. ‘But I can always get you another, if you’re nice to me . . .’

The girl licked her lips with the tip of her tongue.

‘I – I not partisan,’ she stammered. ‘Nix, nix! I not Communist bastard -I like very much soldiers germanski . . . panjemajo
⁴
?’

‘Sure we understand,’ said Porta, with a leering laugh. ‘You’ not partisan, you not Commie bastard, you love German soldier . . . so what’s the idea of putting tetrableedingchloride in a cognac bottle, eh?’

She shook her head.

‘Njet understand, Pan
⁵
soldier.’

‘No one ever does understand when they’re being accused of something nasty,’ sneered Heide.

Tiny waved a hand towards the girl’s club.

‘What’s that great lump of wood for? Bit heavy for you to lug about, ain’t it? Here, give it me. I’ll look after it for you.’

He snatched the club away from the terrified girl, who shrank further back into the angle of the wall.

‘I not beat soldier germanski,’ she said, imploringly. ‘I beat only Russki . . . Russki wicked men. Germanski good, good men!’

‘More than that, darling, we’re bleeding angels!’

Heide laughed, sarcastically Barcelona moved closer to the door.

‘Are you alone?’he asked, in Russian.

The girl looked up at him, wonderingly.

‘Are you an officer?’

‘Of course,’ lied Barcelona, with his usual aplomb. ‘I’m a general.’

‘Well . . .’ She hesitated a moment, then seemed abruptly to make up her mind. ‘The others are down in the cellar. There’s a trap door beneath the carpet.’

She waved a hand towards a corner of the room, and on closer inspection, and rolling back the rug, we discovered that there was indeed a trap door sunk into the floor. It was well camouflaged and I doubt if we should ever have noticed it by ourselves.

‘Russian soldiers?’ asked Barcelona.

‘Njet, njet!’ The girl shook her head, vehemently. ‘Only family and friends. Not Communists. All Fascists. Good Fascists.’

Heide laughed and rubbed his hands together.

‘That’ll be the day!’

There were sudden movements in the room next door. We sprang round, gripping our kandras. The girl whimpered and made a sudden dash for the door, but Barcelona grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back.

‘You stay where you are. We like you here with us.’

A pause, and then Lt. Ohlsen appeared, followed by the rest of the section.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. His gaze swept round the room, taking in the empty jampot, the bottle of apparent cognac, and the girl. He glared at us. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? There’s a whole Company waiting out there, while you sit on your arses and stuff yourselves with jam and cognac!’

Porta put a finger to his lips.

‘Not so loud, sir.’ He nodded towards the trap door. ‘There’s a whole battalion of Russian Fascists stashed away down there . . . And as for the cognac— He kicked disdainfully at the bottle – ‘that was a filthy trick, if you like. It’s full of tetra-chloride. Could have poisoned ourselves.’

Lt. Ohlsen frowned, walked across to the trap door and squatted down to examine it. The Legionnaire and the Old Man came into the room after him, both of them preparing Molotov cocktails.

‘They’re down there?’ said Ohlsen. ‘In the cellars?’ He turned to Tiny. ‘All right, get it opened up.’

‘What, me? Tiny gasped, indignantly, and took a step backwards. ‘No, thank you very much! I may look simple, but I’m not such a fool as all that! Anyone opens that lid gets a bundle of fireworks in his face, seems to me.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ snapped the Legionnaire. He joined Ohlsen, bent down and seized the ring that opened the trap door. ‘O.K., here goes! Watch out for squalls!’

Before he had a chance to do anything, the girl had hurled herself towards him, screaming and knocking him off balance.

‘Nix, nix! Small child in there!’

The Legionnaire threw her impatiently away from him. Porta picked her up and pushed her to the far side of the room.

‘Come off it,’ he said to the Legionnaire. ‘You ain’t going to kill a kid, are you? I thought the bleeding Froggies was meant to be gentlemen, not child murderers?’

‘Have you finished?’ asked the Legionnaire, coldly.

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Porta. ‘Not by a long chalk, I haven’t I—’

Lt. Ohlsen, got to his feet, white with anger.

‘Look, we haven’t got all day to wait while you sit down and argue about the ethics of the thing! It’s either them or us, and it’s my job to make damned sure that it’s not us!’

Tiny, seating himself on the edge of the table and swinging his legs to and fro, began thoughtfully to rub his length of steel wire up and down his leg.

‘Sir,’ he said, hopefully, ‘I ought to report that I strangled a Russian cat just before you came . . . I could strangle the rest of ’em easy as pie if they’d only come up here and let me—’

‘I’m not interested in cats, Russian or otherwise!’ Ohlsen turned and jerked his head at the rest of the section. ‘Get the trap covered with light machine guns and PMs. The first man to come out with any sort of firearm and he gets what’s coming to him. And any funny business from any of ’em and they’ll find themselves blown out of existence.’

With a quick, determined gesture he whipped open the trap and called down into the cellars.