The Commissar (45 page)

‘Not on your life,’ answers Tiny, grinning even more. ‘They go in the day the slaves pick up their coppers. They go quietlike into the pay office, pick up the shekels an’ off they go again. Easy as shittin’!’

‘What about if the wages are paid by cheque? That’s common practice nowadays,’ smiles Porta, sourly.

‘Nip down to the bank an’ cash ’em, then,’ shrugs Tiny.

‘Try that,’ suggests Porta. ‘You’d be sorry for the rest of your life!’

He picks up a tool, and does something complicated to the vault lock.

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I’ll have to drill again. This is what the trade calls a tricky box!’

‘Tricky?’ asks the Old Man, wonderingly. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘The tricky part is that there’s traps in it, and they’re what you’ve got to give a miss to,’ answers Porta, knocking on the door of the vault. ‘If I make a balls of it, at least ten big, wicked steel rods are goin’ to shoot out an’ lock that door so’s nobody in the world can ever open it. There might be one feller who could get in to the gold, and that’d be the bloke who made it in the first place.’

‘Why didn’t we bring ’im with us, then?’ asks Tiny irritably, throwing his arms out wide in despair.

‘Even if he was here, it wouldn’t help a shit,’ says Porta. ‘When those steel bars come out you need a special machine to break the wall down. A shit of a thing like that weighs Christ knows how many tons, an’ you don’t walk about with it under your arm.’

‘Sounds promising,’ moans the Commissar. ‘Time’s up! The key-boys need more gas! Get your arses in gear!’

‘Shall we give ’em the lot?’ asks ‘Frostlips’, from the cellar door. ‘Will it send ’em off for ever?’

‘It’s a humane way to die,’ the Commissar feels. ‘Everybody likes a good sleep!’

‘Damnation!’ hisses Porta, pressing his lips together. He picks up a tool. His grip is so tight that it hurts his hand. ‘Hell!’ he curses again. ‘I know all the most advanced ways of fixing a lock, and Egon and me’s tried ’em all! Give me that electronic listening thing!’ He puts the earphones on with the air of a famous surgeon who is about to cut the stomach out of a patient. He turns the combination lock carefully, listening for the pawls to drop. After a moment, which feels like a week, he tears the earphones from his head.

‘Somebody’s comin’,’ says Gregor, gazing up the stairs.

‘I belched,’ says Porta.

‘No, somebody
is
coming,’ mumbles the Commissar. He picks up his
Kalashnikov
from the floor.

‘Shut up, or I can’t think! If somebody’scomin’ then shoot ’em! I want quiet!’ says Porta.

‘So do we,’ says the Commissar, clicking off the
Kalash-nikov’s
safety.

‘Maybe it ain’t clever to shoot ’em straight off,’ says Tiny. ‘I’ve heard it’s best to greet God’s local representatives with a smile!’

‘An’ who’s God, then?’ asks ‘Frostlips’.

‘Depends where a feller is when ’e’s smilin’,’ grins Tiny. ‘Uncle Joe ’ere p’raps?’

‘I will go up and speak with our guests,’ says Igor, with a Siberian grin. ‘You look after things while I am gone!’

‘I’ve made my decision! I’m going to hit that vault in every way possible,’ rages Porta. ‘An’ I’m going to do it all at the
same time. I’m not going to let a shit like that fuck me!’

‘Right!’ says the Commissar. ‘What d’you want me to do?’

Porta gives him a funny look.

‘Watch your napper now,’ he warns, ‘’cos something’s going to happen! Make some coffee! It clear’s a feller’s head!’

‘To be quite honest I’ve begun to lose my liking for our planned life of luxury,’ says Barcelona doubtfully. ‘Maybe it ain’t all that much fun owning a little island over there by Haiti, where you run everything yourself and can be king, emperor, grand duke, general or anything else you want to be!’

‘Oxygen bottles and a burner!’ demands Porta, brusquely.

The flame hisses, and sparks fly round our ears. Soon after, Porta gives up the torch. It was about as much use as a dull cheese-knife.

Albert backs the T-34 in, and attaches the towing-wires to the three odd-looking cogs on the door of the vault. We hope he can loosen it from its hinges, but all that happens is that a wire snaps and causes a lot of damage.

When we try again, this time with triple tow-cables and the tank moving backwards in small jerks, all three cogs come away from the door.

We sit down, despondently, and drink coffee.

‘I could have made this coffee a lot better,’ grumbles Porta, sniffing at the dregs in his cup. ‘All I’d have had to do was to make it from dried-out cow-dung!’ He gets up, takes a bundle of dynamite charges and begins to affix them to the big door of the vault.

‘Think that’s all right?’ asks the Commissar, his right eye ticking away madly.

‘If it ain’t,’ answers Porta, ‘and we don’t get undercover in one hell of a hurry, then we’ll suddenly be dead, and won’t have to worry about this bloody door any more!’

The noise of the dynamite exploding is deafening, but when the smoke clears all that has happened to the door is that a large black spot has appeared in the middle of it.

‘Well, we’ll just have to get even tougher,’ hisses Porta,
shivering with rage. ‘Soup
*
, an’ a few more charges! That’s
got
to be able to leave that door lyin’ in peace with its backside up!’

The first explosion was like a paper bag popping in comparison to this one.

The cellar looks like a split melon. We scramble over collapsed walls to get to the gold. But when the dust finally clears away we stand choking and spitting in front of the vault door, which is standing where it has stood all the time.

‘I won’t take this from anybody, or anything!’ rages Porta. ‘My honour’s at stake now! I’ll show ’em who’s an Oberge-freiter by the grace of God!’

‘Get on with it, in the name of Hell!’ says the Commissar, spitting out brick-dust. ‘We’ve got to get out of here as fast as possible!’ He stares at Porta with his ticking eye and blows out more brick-dust.

‘Are we going to
live
?’ asks the Old Man expressionlessly, withdrawing slowly up the stairs.

‘I think so, yes,’ answers Porta. ‘It won’t be all
that
much of a bang.’ He presses plastic explosive on every available inch of the door. Tiny helps him, crimping the primers with his teeth.

‘I think you’d all better get up out of the cellar,’ Porta advises us, when he is ready. ‘One or two things might start rattlin’ around in here!’

‘I could do with throwing a few things around, myself,’ says the Commissar, running quickly up the stairs.

We wait tensely outside the cellar, while Porta completes the wiring of the door. Then he backs slowly up from the cellar with a cable in each hand.

‘All clear?’ he asks. ‘’Cos in a minute it’s goin’ to go bang-bang!’

‘Blow that fucking shit into bits and pieces!’ shouts the Commissar, going down on one knee.

‘Yes!’ mumbles Porta. He brings the ends of the two cables together.

*
Soup: Nitroglycerine

The explosion is so loud that none of us can find words to describe it afterwards. But we feel the blast. It comes roaring out of the cellar opening, and throws us across the parade ground and through the door of a guard-room on the far side of it. The room is full of sleeping soldiers – and smashed furniture after we arrive.

We pull ourselves together after a while. When we are back in the cellar and stand staring at the unharmed steel door the Commissar begins to sob.

‘The gun,’ says Porta sharply, and is already on the way over to the Panther with Tiny at his heels.

‘We certainly got all that rubbish cleared out of the cellar, anyway,’ says the Old Man. He kicks at the one remaining piece of brickwork the blast has not taken with it.

With rattling tracks the Panther comes rolling across the barrack square. It waddles into the cellarentrance, brickwork collapsing on all sides.

Porta puts his head out of the driver’s hatch.

‘Better take cover before I start bangin’ away! That door’d better tighten its ring, now!’

The long gun sinks down, with a humming sound, and traverses towards the armoured door.

We hold our ears and await the sound of the shot, tensely.

There is a heavy thud, and everything is suddenly blood-red.

We look at one another, and cannot believe our own eyes. We have become live, surrealistic paintings. Tiny has loaded with the wrong ammunition, as the Old Man has feared he would for some time. He has used a marker, and there is red paint everywhere.

‘Unmilitary, miserable drunkard!’ shouts the Old Man, trying to wipe the paint from his face.

‘I’ll strangle that cheeky Social Democratic son of a bitch!’ rages the Commissar, hitting a way madly ata dented bucket.

‘Take it easy, fellers,’ says Tiny, with his head out of the side hatch. ‘Anybody can make a mistake! I’ll soon get a couple of tins of paint remover, so you can begin to look ’alfway ’uman again.’

‘We’ll need new uniforms,’ says ‘Frostlips’, who is dripping with red paint. ‘We’ll be arrested, soon as they set eyes on us. Red as we are nobody
is
! Not even in
this
country!’

‘Back everybody!’ screams Porta, warningly, from the turret. ‘We’ll give it one up the arse now!’

‘Not
another
bloody marker!’ shouts the Old Man, nervously.

The pressure wave from the S-shell is terrific. It feels as if a giant warm hand clenches itself round our bodies. The deafening noise seems to split the air apart. When the dust disperses the powerful shell appears to have done little damage. There is a small hole in the door.

‘Got him!’ shouts a jubilant Porta from the turret hatch, grinning all over his face. Bluish-grey smoke seeps from the hole.

‘You bloody
did
it!’ shouts Gregor happily.

‘What’s that smoke coming out of there?’ asks the Old Man, in a frightened voice.

Suddenly an ominous silence sinks over the cellar. We all stare at the smoke issuing from the hole.

‘Can gold burn?’ asks Albert, blinking his eyes behind the mask of red paint which covers his black face.

The Commissar crosses the room in three long strides, and peers through the hole.

‘Hell! That rotten German shell has started a fire inside! Quick! Get some water!’

We fall over one another on our way up the stairs for water.

‘Fire!’ shouts Tiny. He comes dashing back with a hose and a ladder he has found hanging outside on the wall.

When ‘Whorecatcher’ turns on the water, the pressure on the hose sends Tiny tumbling over backwards, and the stream of water swills the rest of us out to the sides of the room.

With much shouting and screaming of threats we finally get control of the hose and direct the jet through the hole.

‘Give it two more shells,’ orders the Commissar, pressing his lips together.

Twice in succession the tank-gun fires. It seems as if the entire prison is falling down on our heads. We are totally deaf for several minutes, and pains wrack us through and through.

‘I’ll bet we’re the first people in the history of the world to have used a tank for a tin-opener!’ says Porta, with a short laugh, as he jumps down from the Panther’s turret.

‘Let’s go in and take a look at the goods,’ suggests the Commissar, rubbing his hands together.

The big vault door gapes open like a peeled banana”.

Porta stops to take a closer look.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ he mumbles, ‘it’s quite different! Never seen anything bloody like it!’

‘Jesus’n Mary!’ whispers Tiny, impressed. He stares in fascination at all the gold ingots which have been thrown down from the shelves in the vault. ‘I’m goin’ to buy the entire bleedin’ world, an’ kick all the arses I feel like kickin’ an’ never salute nobody, never again!’

‘Get moving!’ the Commissar chases them. ‘The gas’ll soon have stopped working, and there’ll be a crowd of sleepy-headed, panic-stricken idiots asking unpleasant questions! Get the Panther out, and back the waggons in so we can load up and get out of here!’

The Old Man is sitting on the big tool-chest, watching the loading with a peculiar look on his face.

‘Aren’t you going to help?’ asks Porta, wonderingly.

‘No!’ snaps the Old Man, making a face as if there were a bad smell under his nose.

Everybody stops work and looks at the Old Man, who is sitting carelesslyon the tool-chest, puffingat his silver-lidded pipe.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks the commissar. ‘You’ve got to admit we did it! It could easily have been a fiasco!’

‘I’m not with you any more,’ says the Old man, looking angrily at the Commissar, ‘and I’m bitterly sorry I ever was! It’s a load of shit, that’s what this is! Here we are, murdering right and left for some miserable gold! You can do what you like, but I’m
out
!’

‘You gonna shop us when we get back?’ asks ‘Frostlips’, his eyes narrowing.

‘I don’t understand your filthy way of thinking!’ snarls the Old Man contemptuously.