The Soul of a Thief

by Steven Hartov

  “What is this exactly about?” Himmel asked without so much as a greeting.

  “You have your orders.” The Gestapo officer looked not at my commander, but simply gazed out over the night’s panorama.

  “And I shall follow them, as always,” Himmel growled. “And as always, I will know the intent of my mission before its commencement.”

  The Gestapo officer did not turn his head nor change his expression. He merely placed his hands behind his back, and lifted his nose as if sensing something foul on the wind.

  “These men are British and Canadian flying officers,” he said. “They have escaped from Stalag Luft Six.”

  “Then why not simply return them to Stalag Six?”

  “They have escaped four times. The rest are to be furnished a lesson.”

  Himmel lifted his chin a bit, then nodded once in understanding, if not heartfelt compliance. He snapped open the order sheet and pulled a pen from his pocket.

  “Sign the orders, Hauptmeister,” he said.

  The Gestapo officer turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “They have already been signed by the Führer.”

  “Then you should have no issue with signing them as well.” Himmel’s tone left no quarter for quarrel. He extended the papers and the pen. The Gestapo officer snatched them up, signed them with a scrawl and handed them back. He then marched to his staff car, leaned inside and placed a radio handset to his head. I watched my Colonel as he turned and strode off to Captain Friedrich, who had now formed our men into the ranks, where they waited with their weapons slung, stamping their boots a bit to ward off the bitter chill.

  It was not long before the strain of heavy engines reached us. More headlights appeared from the far side of the wood, and a pair of unmarked trucks made their way into the clearing. As they stopped, a small unit of Luftwaffe field security guards hopped from the trucks, opened the tailgates, and began helping the passengers down onto the grass. These men, perhaps thirty in all, were dressed in all manner of civilian coats and sweaters, some with torn woolen trousers and more than a few missing a shoe here and there. A pair of the prisoners had apparently been wounded somehow, as white soiled bandages were tied about their arms and thighs. None of them had shaved or washed in at least a week. All of them were blindfolded.

  It was then that my heart began to hammer in my chest. Until that point, I had not truly fathomed the conversation between my master and this arrogant secret policeman, and now my mind could not accept what my intestines began to grasp. This was not possibly the mission that had been thrust upon us at the climax of our merriment. It could not be that a hero such as Himmel would be rewarded for his gallantry and glories by this horrible staining of his honor. This Germany that I had come to know within a cocoon of dedicated patriots could not in any way acquiesce or participate in cold-blooded murder!

  The scene before me began to blur then, like a half-remembered nightmare on the edge of waking. My eyes began to fill and I could not breathe, and my hand gripped the ledge of the vehicle door, my knuckles white and my nose snorting steam into the air. I watched as Himmel issued an order to Friedrich, and the Commando moved silently forward, taking up a long position in line abreast. Across from them, atop the rounded summit of the clearing, the Luftwaffe troops almost gently formed the prisoners into a similar line. Himmel then strode to the Gestapo officer, who frowned at him, and then the two were engaged in some sort of row. Yet at last, the leather-frocked policeman hissed at his own adjutant, and this young man hurried to the Luftwaffe guards.

  He returned leading a tall Allied pilot by the elbow. This man was clearly the ranking officer of the prisoners, and he stepped carefully and with the lanky North American grace I’d observed in films, until at last being left off to one side, alone.

  Himmel approached him. The blindfolded airman lifted his head as my master spoke, so quietly that none of us could hear the exchange, nor whether it was in English or German. Though transfixed by the scene, I realized that in the background the Luftwaffe guards had quickly withdrawn, leaving nothing between the prisoners and our troops, who were now silently unslinging their weapons. I saw the flash of a cigarette as Himmel offered it to the tall Canadian pilot. He touched the man on his forearm, and my throat constricted as I was swept with the vision of my father once treating our mortally ill German shepherd just so. And I remember something of a small smile appearing on the pilot’s lips as he declined the smoke and said something, and then Himmel suddenly drew his pistol, cranked back the slide and shot the man directly in his forehead.

  I believe that I yelled. I do not really remember. But I do recall that Edward’s hand smacked down onto my leg and gripped me so hard that I bit my lip. Yet my exclamations were irrelevant, nor were they heard, for in concert with the Colonel’s gunshot our commandos cocked their own weapons and opened fire. I squinted and groaned, and my entire body shook as if I in fact was the recipient of every bullet, and the entire meadow exploded with hundreds of horrible flashes, and I wept as the silhouettes of those men danced macabre pirouettes and smashed to the earth.

  It was over in less than ten seconds. The wind quickly snatched away the echoes of gunfire and the stifling smoke, and all that was left were our troops; erect, silently lowering their weapons, clearing and checking their breeches. Himmel stepped forward toward the ragged line of corpses, and Friedrich made to join him but the Colonel waved his captain back into place. My master strode carefully; I could see his back bend a bit here and there. Something moved then among the tangle of bodies, and he walked to that slim evidence of life and quickly snuffed it out with another pistol shot, and I jumped and gripped the door ledge once again.

  “Wipe your eyes.”

  Edward was whispering something.

  “What?” I could barely breathe.

  “Wipe your eyes, damn you!” he gritted.

  I swatted my gloves at my eyes, and then my cheeks. They came away wet and I smeared them on my trousers.

  Himmel was striding back toward the car, his face set in an expression I had never witnessed as he holstered his pistol. The Gestapo officer was standing alongside his own car, his fists to his hips, and he jutted his chin at our commander as he passed.

  “What about the burial, Herr Colonel?”

  “That is not my department,” Himmel snapped, and immediately he was flinging open the door to our car and slamming himself into the rear seat. Already our troop was remounting the trucks, the engines revving. The Gestapo officer was an ignorant and foolishly brave man, for he was shortly beside our staff car, thrusting a hand and an envelope into Himmel’s lap.

  “There will be more of this,” the secret policeman said, and I fought the urge to thrust my own hand out and choke him as he nearly smiled. “The program in the camps is falling behind. You and your ilk will be expected to help out.”

  “Drive, Edward,” Himmel nearly shouted as he snatched the envelope from the Gestapo man, and Edward gunned the engine and spun the wheel, and I heard a spew of curses from that horrid fascist as he was engulfed in a spray of mud.

  But I did not look back. And I was frozen in that physical pose and paralyzed state of mind for so many hours, that I absorbed nothing of the return trip to Bad Tölz. In those few minutes on that windswept hill, everything had changed, and nothing in my life or in that of those around me would ever recover to dance or sing or celebrate anything again, as we had done only so few hours before.

  We stopped once en route, so that the men could stretch and relieve themselves and partake of some cold combat rations. There was none of the usual roadside banter customary to these excursions. The few men who attempted a joke were met with cold stares through clouds of cigarette smoke.

  I stood shivering at the roadside ditch, my fists clenched inside my trouser pockets, staring off into nothing. Himmel turned me around with a hand on my shoulder, and a small shock coursed through me with his touch.


  “A letter arrived for you yesterday, Shtefan,” he said. He was not looking at me, but watching his troops for the signs of cracks in their demeanor. “It had been opened by Field Security, but I returned it. I said it was an error, that it must have been intended for some other Shtefan Brandt.”

  I looked up at him, watching his face, waiting. His black eye patch had frayed at the edges, and I reminded myself to furrow in his cache for a fresh one, then felt a wave of nausea sting my gullet.

  “This war has turned to something else,” Himmel said quietly. “But it will not matter. There will be more of such crimes, yet some of us must execute our duties.” His gloved hand gripped my shoulder briefly, and I winced, though not from any physical pressure. “You know, Shtefan,” he stated, “a warrior may send out his falcons. But he also knows that they may well come home to roost.” He paused for a moment, exhaling through his nose. “In the end, your kind will find my kind. Yes, you will.”

  He turned from me then, and I was left attempting to decipher in a rush the intent of his words. It was as if he were assigning to me the care of his soul, or perhaps, the role of his judge in what might come to pass. He already knew that, in time, he would receive his due for his crimes, be they reluctant or not. Yet I could not fathom that I would be his paymaster.

  “Herr Colonel,” I managed to say. Himmel stopped in his tracks. “What was in the letter, Sir?”

  I faced his back, and it rippled with a sigh.

  “The Shtefan Brandt, to whom it was addressed,” he said flatly. “He received a note from a cousin in Vienna. Apparently, that Shtefan Brandt’s mother was sent last week to Dachau.”

  V

  IN JANUARY OF 1944, I began to covet my master’s mistress.

  As I regard the past now with a well-worn eye, I marvel that the time from September until January was comprised of so few days. Yet I know that there are periods of a young man’s life, some of them lasting for years, in which much of his person remains in an idling gear, without great changes or altered views of the world. Then, there may be only a few months of compressed time, during which adventures and occurrences can alter his character forever, as if the urgent hands of some greater power have suddenly pounced upon a half-formed statue of clay and chosen to madly remold its shape. Such was this period of my life, when the hesitant youth that had been Shtefan Brandt became a young man determined to rein in his own fate.

  I never loved my Colonel, no, but trembling in the presence of his professional courage, I will confess that I regarded him always with awe and respect. He engendered a sense of loyalty, induced by his charismatic manner and his own dedication to his profession and his men. I shall not deny also, that his protective attitude toward me automatically returned a dedication in kind. Yes, of course I observed the fissures in his character with dismay, and at times, even disgust, but I saw him as no less entitled to faults than any other man. When he betrayed his wife with whores of convenience, he did so without a wink or murmured excuse, displaying no more apology than would a wild dog for snatching up a rabbit. When he fought and killed his enemy, he did so with a sense of enthusiastic accomplishment, though without taking glee in the blood of the vanquished. And from the date of the murders at the Hassberger Forest, though he was ordered to execute more such assignments, I thanked him silently and many times for assigning me to other duties and forgoing my witness.

  One night, just prior to the Colonel’s departure for one of those shameful killing fields, he was clearly distraught with the assignment. I supposed this to be the result of a twinge of conscience, yet in truth he regarded such tasks as beneath the dignity of soldiers of SS caliber. Mistaking his mood for one of troubling guilt, I imposed upon the armorer, Heinz, to provide me with half a dozen rounds of blank ammunition, which we used occasionally in training. I then retrieved Himmel’s spare pistol magazine from his combat harness, loaded it up and waited for a moment to be alone in his presence. I trembled a bit with emotion as I showed him the magazine, clearly topped off with the ineffectual rounds, and entreated him to use it and absolve himself, at least once, of a crime.

  He took the magazine from my hand, and for a moment he turned it and stared at the blanks. He nodded slowly, and then he slapped me across the face with the force of a lightning bolt.

  I was stunned and speechless. My cheek flamed with pain and humiliation, and I could not help the tears that sprang to my eyes.

  “Would this not be a betrayal of my men, Shtefan?” Himmel demanded quite simply.

  “Yes, Sir,” I barely muttered.

  “Would this not be a dereliction of my duty, as a German officer?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  My head was bowed, the tears ran down my cheeks, and I was quivering, awaiting at the very least another slap. But instead, the Colonel grasped my shoulder.

  “I thank you for your gesture, my young corporal,” he said in a hoarse growl. “But this is a soul you cannot save, nor should you try.”

  He placed the magazine in my hand, squeezed my fingers around it, and left without another word. I understood, then, that these few months had brought irrevocable changes upon only me, for Himmel himself would never change. The time for the construction of his character had taken place long ago. He was a being of power, an example to be beheld, for its rejection or embrace of my choosing. He was an Abraham to my Isaac, and I had no doubt that he might give up his life for me in combat, or sacrifice me in the wink of a second, should the Gods of Battle deem it so.

  Watching my master fall in love, then, was a new chamber of his complex mind to which I became privy. I believed already that he loved his wife and daughters, but I was also convinced that said affection did not approach his feelings for the army or his troops. His caring for other beings seemed compartmentalized, each dependent upon the role played by that person in the larger scheme of life. He appeared to have a fixed lexicon of manners and displays for various individuals. His family received the gentler, though hardly sentimental, Himmel. His men received a harsher and more brittle love, though deeper in its devotion. And I received something of a mix, and I knew not why.

  As for Gabrielle, when I first realized my master was smitten with the girl, I winced for her inescapable fate, for I assumed it to be the lust I had witnessed once by virtue of my own indiscretion. We had, by that time, repositioned ourselves to France and had occupied an abandoned farmstead south of Dijon. The main house of this once lovely estate had been partially burned, though its ground floor was essentially intact, and Himmel occupied the large salon, while I was relegated to the separated kitchen, along with “Mutti” the cook, whose corpulent form and wild beard seemed anything but motherly. The commandos had taken over the empty barn.

  On the very first day of this occupation, a sunny and bright winter morn, Himmel had ordered Edward to stop the staff car as we passed a pair of young French farm girls walking along the access drive. The one was brunette and puffy, while the other was comely and freckled and sprouted a mane of carrot hair. Neither of them appeared to be yet eighteen. Himmel produced a pair of red apples and, presenting a charming grin rarely seen, chatted a few words in French and made his gift. The redhead returned his smile, curtsied, and apparently agreed to a nocturnal “chat.”

  That night, I was well into my second hour of sleep in the kitchen when the screams of an animal surely being skinned alive snapped my head up from my woolen bedroll. I dragged on my trousers, yet some instinct prevented me from lighting a lamp. I glanced back at the snoring form of Mutti and then followed the rhythmic echoes of torture. Tiptoeing in the dark, I pushed through the kitchen door and reached the frame of the entrance arch to the salon, and there I stood, transfixed.

  There was a large, rough wooden table in the center of the room. During the day, it had been spread with tactical maps and plotting pens and compasses, which were now strewn about the floor as if having been swept off by a wave.
Upon the table, the redheaded girl lay on her back, completely naked, her young pale skin mottled pink and gleaming with sweat. Her arms were flung above her head, her small fists clenched and her sinews rippling, as her wrists had each been buckled into a leather belt, then tied off to the table legs. Below, Himmel stood at the edge of the table, his breeches about his boots, his braces quivering on the wooden floor like beached eels. He was gripping the girl’s ankles in his hands, spreading her legs too wide even for a ballerina, and for want of a more eloquent description, he was fucking her with all the delicacy of an oil derrick.

  My mouth dropped, and I was totally immobilized by this vision and its accompanying, unearthly score. I had never seen my master’s nude form, and his muscled back displayed a pair of puckered pink nipples, clearly the exit wounds of an enemy marksman, while upon his left shoulder was a long white scar, no doubt from the blade of a cadet duel. Shining rivulets of sweat slithered from his neck and over his skin, and his rump bunched over and over as he pistoned himself in and out of the girl, and with each piercing her young breasts bounced and she jerked her head upward and squealed with nothing like pleasure. Her eyes were slammed shut and with every wrenching twist of her neck, her tears were flung across the stained wood of the table, and as Himmel’s iron thighs bucked against the furniture and his purpling penis plunged again and again into her flesh, the table legs thumped the floor, adding a chorus of thunder to the girl’s aria of pain.

  I suddenly felt myself being dragged backward, and nearly losing my footing, a momentary fright stabbed into my chest. Yet I found Mutti’s fist gripping my forearm, and I did not resist as he silently pulled me through the kitchen door, closed it carefully and released me. We stood there, toe to toe, and my shocked expression did not amuse the cook for even a moment. He quickly flung a finger to his pursed lips and then drew that same finger across his throat. Then, he pointed at my bedroll, and I nodded and skulked back into my cocoon, as he did the very same. For an endless hour, we each lay there in the dark, listening to those ungodly cries, until at last they crescendoed and subsided into stuttering weeps, and we stole into sleep before another round might commence.