The Commissar (36 page)

The road has begun to improve, and everybody gets back up into the vehicles. Before we cross the pass, the Commissar orders us to rope the waggons together with double towing-wires. The path will become so steep that there is danger of the vehicles toppling over backwards. Their theoretical angle of climb we have long ago exceeded. The new T-34 is in the lead with Albert driving. It is a tank which has everything the others ought to have but haven’t. It can climb like a chamois on its incredibly wide tracks, and Albert knows how to drive it; but we have to fill him up with plenty of liquor to make him forget his constant fear of death. When he has got half a bottle of vodka inside him he is on top of the world. Only Porta is a better driver.

‘Take it easy now, black-arse! No further’n the edges,’
Porta warns him from the Panther’s turret. ‘Don’t get to thinkin’ that Russian thunder-box can scramble down sheer rock faces!’

Albert gives him the international ‘Up you’ sign, with a slap of his hand on the inside of his bent elbow.

The tow-wires break twice, as if they were cotton, and the Panther slides back down towards the dizzying abyss.

‘Don’t we soon get a break?’ says Barcelona, dog-tired. ‘Hell, it’s black as the inside of your hat!’

‘A break? Here? At three in the afternoon?’ shouts the Old Man angrily. ‘You must be off your rocker!’

The Commissar orders us to tie outselves to one another with our climbing-ropes, in order that nobody get lost in the roaring hell of snow.

‘I just can’t go on any more,’ moans Gregor. ‘You can have my share of the gold! If this had been a legal job, they’d have had to strike a new medal for it. We deserve one!’

‘An’ if it goes wrong,’ laughs Tiny, raucously, shaking chunks of ice from his shoulders,’ they’ll tie 120 years on our back, with a little bit of a chance of gettin’ out on parole when we’ve done 80 of ’em an’ ’ave forgot entirely what cunt’s all about!’

‘Save your breath!’ snarls the Old Man sourly. ‘Stay here,’ he orders, shortly, releasing himself from the safety-rope. ‘I’m going forward a bit to have a look. Don’t blow me away when I come back!’

With his binoculars bumping against his chest, he climbs on up, and is hidden, in a few seconds, by the driving snow.

‘He’s that bloody careful, he wipes his arse an hour before he goes to the shithouse,’ snarls Porta irritably, taking a big bite of frozen brawn, and washing it down with a swallow of vodka.

‘There isn’t a chance of Ivan Baggytrousers laying an ambush for us. It’s overcareful sods like that who slow down the war effort. If it was up to me it’d be off we go for Uncle Joe’s gold as fast as the tracks’d let us! That’d soon
make the neighbours take off, if they really
were
crazy enough to be sitting nursing their frost-bitten pricks and waitin’ for
us
.’

‘How cold
is
it?’ asks Gregor, shivering.

‘
Je ne sais pas, mon ami
,’ answers the Legionnaire despondently, beating his body with his arms. ‘But I have never been through anything like it!’

‘48 below,’ reports Heide, arrogantly.

‘You’re barmy,’ protests Tiny, hopping on the spot and swinging his arms. ‘You mean 148 below at least! My toes’ve turned to icicles inside these felt boots, and my blood thinks it’s become part of the bleedin’ Arctic Ocean!’

‘Oh, no!’ groans Barcelona, brushing icicles from his face. ‘It’s not worth it. Who the hell’d ever believe it could
get
this cold?’

‘Pack yourselves out with paper,’ orders the Commissar, throwing down some bundles of old newspapers which he and ‘Frostlips’ come up with. ‘Rub yourselves down with snow all over first, then pack yourselves in a layer of newspaper!’

‘You must be round the bleedin’ bend,’ screams Tiny. ‘Take our clothes off at 148 below? We’ll go off bleedin’ bang like the soddin’ trees!’

‘Wait till it gets
really
cold,’ laughs the Commissar. ‘This is only the beginning!’

‘If it’s goin’ to get colder’n this then my share of the gold’s goin’ cheap,’ declares Tiny, through chattering teeth, while he packs a few copies of
Pravda
round his stomach.

‘No, not like that,’ ‘Whorecatcher’ warns him. ‘First you’ve got to rub yourself down with snow. It’s not near as bad as you think. Feet most of all’. Rub ’em till you feel they’re glowin’!’

‘Oh Jesus!’ sobs Gregor, rubbing snow all over his naked body. ‘Some ski tour this is. And we’re doing it as volunteers!’

‘Yes, you don’t ’ave to go to the soddin’ psychopaths to be certified as a bleedin’ super-idiot,’ rages Tiny, struggling
with his frozen fur jumpsuit.

‘Who the hell would’ve thought it could get this cold any place on earth,’ pants Porta, pushing an extra copy of
Izvestia
down round his chest. ‘I’m cured of winter sports for the rest of my life!’

‘I can’t help wondering, man, whether that fuckin’ gold’s really worth all this trouble?’ chatters Albert. ‘You want to hear what I think, we’d turn back now, before the new Ice Age overtakes us!’

‘
I’m
not givin’up
my
gold,’ shouts Porta. ‘If I have to roll on my bollocks through ice an’ snow all the way to where it’s hidden, an’ do it on my own, I’ll still do it! But if you want to go on living your little lives out in lousy, stinkin’ poverty, then step off now before you’ve got too far into the Ice Age!’

The Old Man comes back, blue in the face with cold.

‘Why the devil didn’t you take me with you?’ asks the Commissar, smearing frost salve on his face. ‘Never do that again! You don’t know how easy it is to get lost. You can’t count on the compass. The mountains make the readings go wild!’

‘Give me a drink,’ says the Old Man, brusquely, reaching for Porta’s water-bottle.

‘D’you know this area?’ he turns to the Commissar.

‘No, I’ve never been here. But we save about 400 kilometres by going over the pass. Everybody says it’s impossible from October to the end of May. I chose it for safety. Nobody would dream that anybody would try it in winter-time.’

‘The devil,’ curses the Old Man. ‘Let’s get out of here. We’ve got to get through that pass quick as possible. There’s a storm on the way. Just on the far side of the pass, there’s an old fort, or a monastery or something, where we can tank up and get a breather for the night.’

When we are halfway up the pass, one of the half-tracks skids off the path and we have to dig it out of the snowdrifts.

Porta wants to push it over the edge, and is on his way
with the Panther, but the Commissar protests violently. The truck cannot be done without, if we are to bring back the gold.

Then the older T-34 gets stuck. We weep with rage and despair and are ready to give up completely. Finally we get the new T-34 backed into a position from which it can pull its elder brother out of the snow. The tow-wires stretch and hum.

‘Back!’ shouts ‘Frostlips’ warningly, jumping behind a snowdrift.

‘Somebody comin’?’ asks Tiny, confusedly, staring from behind a large tree.

The wire snaps with a whining crack and the pieces fly close by Tiny’s head. A fraction of an inch to one side or the other and he would have been beheaded. A madness of rage grips him. With a shovel in his hands he rushes towards the T-34, where Albert’s black face is just visible above the turret coaming.

Like lightning Albert has the hatch slammed to and dogged fast from the inside. Tiny smashes the shovel down on the closed hatch cover in a mad rage.

‘Come outside, you black cannibal, so’s I can kill you!’ he roars madly.

‘Knock him out!’ shouts the Old Man. But none of us dare go near him when he is like this. A mad grizzly is a lapdog compared to him.

‘Come out, you black ape,’ he screams, pulling the cord of a grenade and swinging it round his head.

‘Hell! Get rid of it,’ warns Porta from the Panther’s hatch.

‘’Ere then!’ shouts Tiny, throwing the grenade at Porta, who is down under cover inside the tank with the speed of a ferret.

The grenade strikes the top edge of the hatch coaming, but the antenna causes it to change direction and it goes off with a sharp crack.

‘The devil take me if I’m going to stand for this any longer.’ rages the Old Man. He grabs his
Kalashnikov
by the
barrel and swings it round his head. The butt comes down with a hollow thud on the back of Tiny’s neck. With a long, hoarse exhalation of breath he goes down in the snow. His arms and legs jerk a few times, then he lies still.

‘Shoot him,’ foams Albert from inside the T-34, ‘shoot that mad bastard.’

‘Where
did
you catch
him
?’ asks the Commissar, shaking his head wonderingly. ‘He ought to be kept in a strait-jacket for the rest of his life!’

‘Tie him up,’ orders the Old Man, grinding his teeth together. ‘Tie him up like a Christmas tree! When he wakes up he’ll be worse than a ton’of HE. Tie him to the gun. Even he can’t shift that!’

‘What was up with him?’ asks Porta, putting his head up again cautiously through the hatchway.

‘He nearly got his napper chopped off when the wire went,’ explains Gregor, with a laugh. ‘Now he thinks Albert did it on purpose. They had a bit of an argument over some black puddin’ earlier on.’

‘It’s what I always say,’ laughs Porta. ‘He’s too touchy, that boy!’

It is well into the night before we are through the pass and go slipping and sliding down the far side. The huge fort rises before us, dark and threatening. It is built of great, shaped blocks of stone, piled upon one another without any kind of mortar. If mortar had been used it would have crumbled away long ago. Frost has bitten deeply into the corners of the blocks.

‘That’s what I call building blocks,’ cries Heide, for once really impressed. ‘How on earth did they manage to get them up on top of one another?’

‘Slaves,’ replies ‘Whorecatcher’, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Never been a shortage of them, here in Russia. They’re willin’ and effective, and there’s plenty of ’em. People can be made to do most anything, if you know how to apply a knout to ’em, or cut ’em a bit with a Cossack knife!’

‘I’ve always been a great admirer of your humanitarian
principles,’ says Porta, sarcastically.

The Old Man wants us to tank up before resting, but he has to give in to our wild protests.

‘Frostlips’ and Gregor get a huge fire going inside the great hall.

‘Stinks o’ dead men in here,’ says Barcelona, sniffing the air.

‘To hell with that,’ hisses the Commissar. ‘Dead men aren’t dangerous!’

‘You’re that ugly a feller could spew up just lookin’ at you,’ shouts Tiny angrily. He hits out at Heide with his machine-pistol.

‘Stop that everlastin’ squabbling,’ shouts the Old Man. ‘Now I want quiet! One word more and you get guard duty!’

‘That Nazi shit looks like ’e’s on ’is way to a funeral,’ roars Tiny, pointing at Heide with his mpi. ‘’Is own funeral, too!’

‘Shut up and come over here. Let’s have a game of idiot bank,’ suggests Porta, shuffling the cards. ‘How many’s in?’ he asks, looking around him.

‘I’m too bloody tired,’ moans Barcelona, dropping down heavily on the packed earth on the floor.

‘There’s two things a man’s never too tired for,’ says Porta, cutting the cards into talons. ‘Gambling and shagging! I can tell you a story about what can happen to people who think they’re too tired to fuck!’

‘The very widely-known
Wachtmeister
, Alois Fresa from the “Alex” station, got temporarily posted, one Palm Sunday it was. to the plain-clothes branch. He put on his good pin-striper, and then got himself an Afro hair-do -that’s a typical symptom of paranoia. When he found it not so easy to pick up a bit o’ the other, he got hold of a roupie of yellow leather shoulder-holsters an’ stuck a roupie of P-38s into ’em. He’d seen that was how the tough rops on the films did it. Of course, this made a hell of an impression on the shield-struck floozies. He let the word go round he was Gestapo, but that was a lot of balls. He was
on the bicycle-theft flying squad, really. Then his lucky day rolled round. He met three villains’comin’ out of the
Commerzbank
in
Hohenzollem Damm
, each with a bagful of shekels in his hand, and he blew ’em away with his hand-artillery. This blood-bath got itself talked about all over Berlin, and the women were soon standin’ ten-deep round Alois. After a bit of this, though, he found it was more’n he could manage and wished they’d all get to hell out of it and leave him be. So there he was, late one night, sitting in “The Crooked Cop”, head down, an’ fucked all to pieces. Up came a little made-up doll from the Wedding district, totterin’ along in heels like stilts, an’ began touching him up for starters.

‘“How’d you like to show me your
other
gun?” she whispered, passionate as all hell. “I’ve heard a lot about
you
! You know you look the way Clark Gable always wanted to look!” She touched him upa bit more then, and got one of her long, painted nails inside, and started working direct on John Thomas with the roll-collar. But Johnny T. wasn’t havin’ any. He was limp an’ wrinkled as a 90-year-old eunuch.

‘“Sod off!” snarled Alois, giving her a push. “If I was to really get hot for you, you’d have to look a lot different!”

‘This Wedding bint started givin’ him mouth then, which Wedding bints have a way of doin’!