The Commissar (49 page)

‘Necker!’ says Porta, world-wise. ‘It’d be clever of us to shoot his balls off!’

‘
Propusk
!’ shouts the
polittruk
, holding out his hand in true policeman style.

‘Up my arse!’ screams the Commissar. ‘I am on special duty with some Volga Germans! God help you when I report to Moscow! You’re sabotaging a mission of national importance!’

‘I’ve got my orders,’ roars the
polittruk
. ‘Even if the great Stalin came past, he’d have to show a
propusk! Panjemajo
?’

‘A drink?’ asks Porta, with a false smile. He offers his water-bottle
from the driver’s hatch with a gesture of invitation.

‘Vodka?’ asks the wicked-looking
polittruk
. He grabs eagerly at the water-bottle, and takes a long drink from it. He hands it on to his two leather-clad minions, who swallow it down like thirsty horses. ‘Nice an’ warming!’ he says, and his tone has become a little milder.

Suddenly, something strange seems to be happening to his face. He goes white as a corpse, then scarlet. The red goes slowly over to a blue tint. He grasps his stomach and gives out some very strange sounds.

One of the black-leather fellows puts both hands to his mouth, and throws up like a man in the grip of seasickness.

‘Hell!’ gulps the
polittruk
. He feels as if the whole of his insides were being eaten away. He stares, confusedly, with eyes which seem about to fall from their sockets. The three men’s bowels give way. Their legs bend under them, and they collapse to the ground with long rattling groans.

Porta puts the water-bottle back under the driver’s seat, and makes a mental note to fill it up again with his special brand of grog.

The Commissar stares quite blankly at the three prostrate forms.

‘What the hell . . . .’ He has got no further when a sound reminiscent of distant thunder stops him. The earth under us begins to quiver.

‘What the devil’s that?’ shouts Porta, looking around confusedly.

‘Landslip!’ shouts the Comissar, in terror, and comes towards us on the run.

From behind the two motor-sledges barring our way come two new OGPU men. They shout in confusion as trees begin to sway and move as if they were stems of grass.

‘What the hell’s happening?’ shouts Gregor, with terror in his voice, as another row of trees comes crashing down.

‘Landslip!’ howls the Commissar, ‘fucking hell it’s quick
clay
! Run! Run for your lives!’

The whole forest dissolves before our eyes. A jumble of
rocks are thrown here and there. The earth begins to toss, like waves in a stormy sea. The noise is shattering.

In front of us the road begins to move like a plank caught in a whirlpool. Both of the OGPU motor-sledges slide down a deep incline which has appeared, and splash into a bubbling lake of mud and splintered trees. Through the deafening turmoil comes a new sound. A long, sucking noise, like that of a blocked pipe which can suddenly take air again. But a million times louder.

‘
Run!
’ shouts the Commissar, sprinting down the road with the rest of us at his heels, including the leather-clad OGPU soldiers.

The road begins to give way under our feet, and we jump up some inclines onto a narrower path which lies rather higher than the broad main road.

Apparently firm ground gives back hollow noises under our running boots. It is as if we were running in dough. Slowly the earth slips down and is churned into a muddy swamp.

Tiny gives a scream of terror when a large fir tree falls on him.

Gregor and I work desperately to release him from it, but it is only when Porta comes to our help that we manage to move the big tree.

A giant boulder comes careening down the slope and takes Boris with it. He gives one shrill scream, and is forced down into the ooze under its weight.

In desperation we run on down the narrow path, but it is like trying to cross a rushing whirlpool, which is continually attempting to suck us down into its depths. When we are only a short distance from the road fountains of mud and water spout up hundreds of yards into the air.

‘Where’s all that
water
coming from?’ asks Porta. He is clinging desperately to an uprooted tree, which is whirling round in the bubbling mud.

‘It’s being pressed up out of the quick clay,’ pants the Commissar. ‘There’s millions of gallons of it.’

‘How the hell’s it happening?’ asks the Old Man, helplessly. ‘I’ve never
heard
of quick clay!’

‘It exists in Russia,’ explains the Commissar, a little later, as we struggle through the slimy, boiling mud, slipping and sliding helplessly all over the place. ‘A remainder of the Ice Age. 50 per cent of it is water, which has been trapped in pockets of clay and rubble. It can hold on to it forever if only nothing starts it off. If something does, then what has seemed to be hard ground turns to mud which sucks down everything, as you have seen here. We’ve had whole towns disappear here in Russia when quick clay has started to move!’

‘What silly bleeder started it off ’ere then?’ asks Tiny, sneezing, and pulling himself up with difficulty from a sucking mudhole.

‘Those damned German bombs did!’ hisses the Commissar, savagely. ‘I had an idea of what was happening down in the town, when the streets started to disappear!’

Finally we manage to work our way up to the solid road. Completely worn out we drop to the ground. We are no longer red. We have been turned into mud-coloured statues.

‘
Job tvojemadj
!’ shouts Kostia, pointing over at the OGPU guard barracks. It has begun to move down the road like a house on rollers. It begins to break up. Walls fall in, tiled roofs shatter, and in the winking of an eye it has been sucked down into the earth.

The whole of the slope on the far side of the road begins to slip downwards with ever increasing speed. Great trees are thrown into the air, and huge boulders crash together, splintering one another.

The water pressed out of the clay spouts up towards the sky. Millions of tons of clay are moving like a storm-whipped sea.

‘It can’t be
true
!’ howls Porta desperately, hopping up and down. ‘The Devil’s come to steal our gold!’

Open-mouthed we stare at the heavily laden Studebaker truck, as it disappears quite slowly into the bubbling mud. Round about us geysers go roaring up. It is a fantastic sight, but we are too shocked to take in the splendour of the natural phenomenon which is going on around us.

A stream of mud and water roars down the road, and in a
matter of seconds both of the trucks loaded with gold have disappeared. A little later one of the T-34s slips down sideways from what is left of the road. With a deafening rattle it swings round and is sucked down into the mud. Its gun points upwards to the last like the bowsprit of a torpedoed warship.

‘There goes the rest of the gold!’ groans the Commissar, despairingly. He tears his fur cap from his head and tramples on it wildly, as if it were that which was to blame.

We struggle madly to get back through the seething mud to the Panther and the remaining T-34. They are jammed between two huge boulders.

Depressedly we walk round them to see how they have fared. The damage is a catastrophe. The tracks of the T-34 have been torn off, and lie spread in individual links down the remains of the road. The Panther’s rollers have been torn from their beds. Several shock-absorbers have been smashed.

I climb up in the turret to look at the gun.
That
seems to be undamaged.

‘
Can
these two shit-buckets be repaired?’ asks the Commissar, with a look of defeat on his face. ‘Without them we haven’t got a hope!’

‘How d’you think the foot-sloggers manage?’ asks Porta, nastily. ‘They’ve got nothing to carry their arses round in!’

‘They
don’t
manage,’ answers the Commissar pessimistically. ‘They walk till their ears are dragging on the ground!’

‘Well there’s not much left to talk about then, is there?’ replies Porta, taking off his muddy fur coat. ‘I’ll forget I’m only a driver for once! Let’s get the gas-cylinders out so’s we can start welding! Need teaches modest maidens to fuck! Really we need a whole workshops company to get these two tin cans on the road again!’

For two days we work literally incessantly, but at last both waggons are roadworthy. Porta wipes his hands on a piece of waste and looks sadly round at the crumpled, muddy earth in which all the gold is buried.

‘Well, now we know what quick clay is!’ he says and throws the waste from him, resignedly.

Tiny is inconsolable. He walks around all the time jabbing a long spike into the ground in the hope of striking the gold. He simply refuses to believe that it has gone forever.

‘Think we could organize an excavator?’ asks Porta, looking at the Commissar. ‘It must be possible to turn that forest upside down an’ find our gold again?’

‘Not a chance,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘I once saw a whole town disappear in Siberia. They dug for three months with an army of excavators and didn’t find as much as a brick of it. The Devil had swallowed the lot.’

‘I
won’t
believe it!’ shouts Porta, angrily. He pulls down a pickaxe from the T-34. He starts to swing it energetically at the hardened mud. ‘Think of all those dummies who dug up the whole of Alaska and half Canada in the hope of finding a handful of gold-dust! And those clowns didn’t even know if there
was
anything, there where they were diggin’! We have at least got the advantage of knowin’ there’s a hell of a big lump of the stuff down there! Come on boys! Grab a spade or a shovel! Don’t you
want
to go to Sweden and fish for salmon! It’s more fun than bein’ a German soldier in wartime!’

‘You got somethin’ there,’ cries Tiny, grabbing a spade. ‘When the Mafia ’ears about our gold they’ll all be down ’ere! An’ them white’eaded old bastards’ll be diggin’ too, even though it may ’ave been a long time since they used their ’ands!’

‘They’d have their
spaghetti carbonaro
goin’ down the wrong way!’ jokes Gregor, beginning to dig.

‘Shut up a minute,’ sighs the Commissar, resting his chin on his hands. ‘I’ve got to think!’

‘Don’t do it for too long,’ advises Tiny. ‘It can be dangerous to think too long! When I was with the military psychopaths they said I
mustn’t
think. Since then I ’aven’t done it, an’ it suits me down to the bleedin’ ground!’

‘The only way we could possibly get the gold back is with half a score of dredging machines,’ says the Commissar, in a voice which sounds as if it is coming from the depths of a tin can.

‘We can’t get
them
down here,’ protests Porta. ‘They’re
things that sail on
water
!’

‘That’s right,’ answers the Commissar. He is so depressed he looks like a whole town in mourning. ‘So forget the gold. We’ve lost it forever!’

‘I got a plan!’ shouts ‘Frostlips’, lighting up like a candle.

‘Both God and the Devil protect us!’ cries ‘Whorecatcher’, making a gesture of despair.

‘We could drill for the gold the way they drill for oil,’ ‘Frostlips’ goes on. ‘I know a feller who can get hold of a drill for us!’

‘Idiot!’ snarls the Commissar. ‘Why not a corkscrew?’

For a while we sit gazing miserably out over the dried-up sea of mud, which has swallowed up the gold which was going to turn us into good Swedish Social Democrats.

‘You thought what’s going to happen to us if they get hold of us, even if we’re not carrying any gold?’ Gregor throws out the idea. ‘I don’t reckon it’ll be nice!’

‘They’ll hit us with all sorts of nasty charges and things. More’n we could count,’ says Porta, heavily. ‘For a start: High Treason or whatever it is they call it when you don’t love the Fatherland enough! That gives you fifteen times life imprisonment, and that’s a good bit of forever! The fact of our having lost the gold we pinched don’t make a bit of difference!’

‘They wouldn’t even believe that rotten mud swallowed up the gold,’ says ‘Frostlips’, with a mien sad enough for a man sentenced to death. ‘They’d just keep on torturin’ us till there wasn’t nothing left
to
torture!’

‘One thing we must be in agreement on,’ says the Commissar, his face dark as summer thunder. ‘We keep our mouths shut and forget all about the gold! If they get just a sniff of it having been us who took it we’ll be chased by the lot of ’em. And they’ll be tough about it. Not only the OGPU but the Gestapo, and the CIA and MI5, and the yellow thought police, and even the solitary member of the Soviet Secret Service! They’d all be on our tracks!’

‘What about the Boy Scouts?’ asks Tiny. ‘I know a feller that’s a Rover Scout!’

Two days later we stop at a crossroads where there is a whole cluster of signs pointing to all sorts of places.

Porta sits on the front apron of the Panther, chewing at a sausage and washing down each mouthful with vodka.

‘What now?’ he asks, glancing at the Commissar, who is hanging out of the T-34’s turret hatch, looking miserable. ‘You still want to go back with us? Now we’re still as poor as we were when we started. Our fishin’ trips in Sweden we’re going to have to put off for a bit, I fear!’

‘It’s probably best we stay in our respective countries,’ answers the Commissar, jumping down from the tank. ‘I’ve heard a bit about what you Germans do to Commissars. And particularly
Jewish
Commissars!’