by Gerald Kersh
Adolf threw down his books and ran away. He was found in a doorway at three o’clock in the morning. The little boy was weeping with dreadful bitterness, occasionally raising his head to listen to the heavy, steady ticking of a big old silver watch.
An SS man took him home.
Hero-Worship
“How many hours to dawn?” asked the thin boy.
“Scared, eh?” said the man with the battered face, laughing. “Don’t feel so sure of yourself now, do you, eh?”
“I’m not scared,” said the thin boy; but his voice was much too loud. “I don’t care. A short life and a merry one. What’s the odds?”
“Tough, eh?” said the other, and curled a cruel lip.
“My name’s Tito, see? I ran with Three-Finger Casca’s mob. See? They wouldn’t have got me alive, only I was drunk at Red Hannah’s place.”
The man with the battered face laughed again, and said: “Never heard of you. Tito, eh? Wipe the milk off your lip, baby-face! Do you know who I am?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care, see?”
“Did you ever hear of a man called Kamzan—Johnny-the-Tongs. Shall I show you my grip, eh?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know. I heard a lot about you, sir. They say you once broke a bullock’s neck with your hands. I heard—”
“That was nothing—just a little friendly bet, kid.”
“I didn’t know you’d been caught, sir. They must be getting pretty good if they can catch a man like you.”
“Somebody turned me in. I wish I had him here! It took twelve of ’em to hold me: they broke three clubs over my head. Ah well, I’m not the first good man that came to a bad end on account of a woman, and I won’t be the last. It’ll be dawn soon, kid; and then up we go.”
The boy licked dry lips. “Does it hurt as much as people say?” he asked.
“What the hell?” said Kamzan, shrugging his immense shoulders. “It happens to us all sooner or later. I’d sooner have gone down fighting. Women! Women are bad luck. I ought to have learned my lesson. But there it is. Why, when I was your age—you’re about twenty, aren’t you?—didn’t I see what happened to Little Mannie and Davie the Schemer?”
“Did you know Little Mannie?” asked the boy, with awe.
“Know him? He was my pal. So was Davie.”
“Lord, I wish I’d known you then, sir! Why, Little Mannie’s famous, all over the world.”
“The cleverest thief I ever knew, son.”
“And you’re famous, too, aren’t you?”
“They won’t forget me in a hurry,” said the man known as Johnny-the-Tongs, with a satisfied grunt.
“Were you always as strong as they said you were, sir?”
“Son, when I was your age I could break a man’s back with one hand. I got my living that way.”
“Was it sheer strength, or a knack?”
“Both, plus speed. Why, once a royal mob sent a Greek wrestler against me, a real all-in Pankration-grappler. The idea was, that this fellow was to get me to wrestle for a friendly bet, and then crack my neck. I cracked his, in fifteen seconds, without knowing the first thing about wrestling either. That was down in Alexandria. A decent sort of town, Alexandria.”
“Lots of nice girls, eh?”
“Much good they did me. Women! Pah! They were the ruin of me, the same as Little Mannie and Davie.”
“They were . . .” The boy choked on the word.
“Sure they were,” said Kamzan. “Twenty years ago. And they died the same way as they lived—hard. And game, too. They never yelled for mercy, like some I’ve known. They bawled each other out—blinding and cursing and shouting dirty names at each other to the bitter end. And all for a flat-faced Gippo girl, a black-eyed Gippo dancer. Two men like that! I worshipped the ground they trod on, especially Little Mannie. And I was never afraid of any man in my life, except Davie the Schemer. I could have killed him with a finger and a thumb, easy as putting out a light; but I was scared of him—you just had to do what Davie said. Everybody was afraid of Davie. And then this girl beats him in the end! My mother always warned me against women. Ah, she was a woman, if you like! I wish there were more like her. She used to run a House on the waterfront: they called her Mary the Battering-Ram. Whenever there was a rough house she’d butt with her head—she could knock two strong men stone cold with a kind of left-right jerk, so fast your eye couldn’t follow it. She was a fine woman. But that Gippo girl . . .”
“What happened to her in the end?” asked Tito.
Kamzan uttered a wordless growl. There was silence for a few seconds. Then the boy murmured: “It must be getting near dawn. . . . I’m glad we’re together: I always wanted to meet you. Can I call you Johnny?”
“Sure you can, kid, sure you can. Don’t let it get you down. Little Mannie always used to say to me: ‘Kamzan,’ he used to say, ‘mark my words, it’s easier to die than to live.’ What a man he was! He taught me all I ever knew.”
“How did he come to get caught?”
“Why, like I told you; he went silly on this Gippo girl. Picked her up off the wharf. She’d been knocked about by some Italian sailors. Mannie took her in, got her a doctor, gave her food and clothes free of charge. When she got better she followed Mannie about like a dog. He couldn’t bear the sight of her at first; kicked her out more than once, but she always came back, begging to be allowed to stay as a servant. Then Davie took a fancy to her, and so she and he got together. She was clever, sharp as a needle; not pretty, but she had a way with her. Most men came running when she lifted an eyelid. Yes, she was smart, that Gippo girl; she could twist men round her finger. She could take a watchman’s mind off his job while the mob got to work on a house. She could do anything she liked with most men. But she was no good.
“As soon as she got thick with Davie—that’s the way things are—Mannie sort of decided that he’d wanted her all the time. Said he’d found her in the first place. There wasn’t much ill-feeling at first, but later it turned out that she was carrying on with Mannie and Davie at the same time. Then there was nearly murder. The knives were out, when Davie—he had the coolest head of the lot of us—Davie said: ‘What the hell is the use of letting a skirt interfere with business? Let’s throw dice for her.’ Mannie agreed to that. They got out the dice, and threw. Davie won the first game of the three: he was using loaded dice. Mannie guessed what he was up to, and changed dice: he was the cleverest man with his fingers in the whole world. He could distract your attention just for one split second, no matter what you were doing, while he got at your valuables. He could steal the liquor out of your mug or the rings off your fingers, and you’d never know. So he got Davie’s dice and won the game. Davie saw what had happened when it was too late, and he went white as ashes, but never said a word. Only from that time on, there was bad blood between them.
“Then a rich young fellow, a Greek who’d just come into his father’s money, he fell in love with this Gippo girl. Mannie let her go to him, the idea being that one nice dark night she was to let us into the house. There was a ton of money in a strong-box, and any amount of other stuff worth picking up—jewels and what not. There was a fortune in it. She was willing to work with us on the job. She was all sorts of things, but she’d never let us down in a matter of business.
“So the job was organised, and it was only a matter of waiting for the right time to do it. Do you follow me?”
The thin boy, Tito, said “Yes.”
Kamzan took a drink of water and looked towards the narrow barred window of the cell.
“Getting near daylight,” he said. “To cut a long story short, Mannie and Davie and me, with three others, went into the house at the time the Gippo girl had arranged, and when we got inside the big gate slammed and was bolted behind us, and all of a sudden, from nowhere as you might say, twenty or thirty armed men jumped out on us. Mannie and Davie were taken, the other three were killed, and I smashed my way out by brute force with a cut in my head that you could
have laid three fingers in. And the last thing I saw in that house was the Gippo girl, laughing like a devil, and screaming: ‘Tie them tight! Bind them fast!’ She’d double-crossed us. She’d got rid of the whole mob, so as to be free with her rich Greek. And he actually married her: he owned the biggest perfumery business in the world, and was worth millions. But Mannie and Davie were sentenced to death as common thieves. Little Mannie and Davie the Schemer! It nearly broke my heart. That’s what women do for you.”
Tito sighed. Kamzan grunted: “Trust a woman!”
“And so they died,” said Tito, “the same way as you and I are going to die.”
“I hope you and I die as game,” said Kamzan. “They argued to the last. Davie blamed Mannie, Mannie said it was all Davie’s fault: they’d have torn each other to pieces, given half a chance. What men they were! And to think that I’ve got to hang next to such as you! Oh well . . . what’s the odds? Yes, like brothers one day, and at loggerheads the next; that’s how it was. There was a chance that one of them, either Davie or Mannie, might get a pardon. There was a religious ceremony going on about that time of the year. ‘I’ll see you hanging yet,’ Mannie said. And Davie said: ‘Yes? Don’t be too sure. I’ll be on the ground when you’re up there in the air.’ But they were both wrong. It was a stroke of bad luck: everything turned unlucky after that Gippo girl came on the scene. Some dirty politician was under sentence, some politician with influence in the City. He got let off scot-free, and Davie the Schemer and Little Mannie and some other bloke went up the Hill to die.”
“Who was the other one?” asked Tito. “One of the mob?”
“Nobody in particular,” said Kamzan, “a tub-thumper or a preacher of some sort. Davie the Schemer cracked jokes about him while he was hanging there—Davie had guts, son; he was a man!—and Mannie, even in his agony, answered back. But the other fellow just took it and said nothing. I don’t know who he was. The bloke that got reprieved at the last moment, he was the lucky one. They made a sort of hero out of him—a big bragger, a loose-mouthed geezer with a loud voice. He was in the crowd next to me. ‘See what it means, to be highly regarded by a discriminating public,’ he said to me. And I said to him: ‘You?’ I said, ‘who are you compared with Mannie?’ And he said: ‘I, my good fellow, I am Barabbas.’ And I said——”
Footsteps sounded. Armour clanked and a bolt rattled. The door opened. A black figure appeared against an oblong of grey half-light, and a voice said:
“Dawn. Get outside, you two.”
Wolf! Wolf!
“A wolf is nothing,” said Adze; “I could kill one wolf myself with a stick.”
I believed him. Adze feared nothing, and, in spite of his seventy-five years, he was as strong as a lion. His real name, I think, was something like Khakabadze, but the abbreviation was remarkably apt. He must have been forged on an anvil, not born. I have never seen a man with a more impregnable air of cold, tempered hardness. Look for comfort in the rocks and warmth in the snow—then expect kindness from Adze. There was no pity in his bleak black eyes, and under his heavy white moustache, harsh as an iron-wire pot-scourer, his mouth was merciless like a rat-trap.
His face might have been cut out of white stone. Life had finished with him; Death did not want him, but still he spat in the face of time and sneered at human virtues. Caring nothing for your good opinion, Adze never lied; but in his bitter and contemptuous veracity, he demonstrated how the truth can be more barren than Siberia. Adze told me this story. I cannot convey the offhand, brusque way in which he muttered it at me, but I believe it—every word of it.
“I fear nothing. Nothing in the world but wolves,” said Adze. “Not one wolf. Not two wolves. I mean a pack of wolves in the winter, five hundred of them, all hungry. Nothing can stand against them. They are as strong as the devil. Writers say that one wolf alone is a coward. That is a lie. A wolf is not a coward, only cautious.
“You think a fox is cunning? Then you do not know wolves. The wolf is clever. Watch a wolf hunt a stag. He wastes no effort. No theatricals like a lion; no boasting, like a bear. One jump—one bite through the big vein in the thigh—then, trot-trot-trot after the trail of blood till the stag falls down from weakness.
“This is science. Or else he jumps, and twists in mid-air as he jumps, the same way as a shark turns; opens the stag’s belly, and clings. A wolf is clever and brave. He never gets tired. Good horses move fast with a good sledge over frozen snow, and when horses smell wolf, they don’t run, they fly. But a wolf can run down the fastest horses.
“Listen. I was going between home and Bakay. It was deep winter, frozen hard. Wolves were out. We had a heavy load: me, my father, and three Tckerkess girls—very good-looking girls, sixteen years old. We were taking them eastward.”
“What for?” I asked.
“What do you think? For sale. What else should they be for? Tcherkess girls are plump. There used to be a big demand for them in the harems. These girls had nice figures; but no light weight to carry. We had a fast sledge and three fast horses—a real Russian troika.
“We left early. We wanted all the daylight. We took good care to arm ourselves well. My father and I each had two American revolvers and a Turkish rifle. We got well out. It was good running. We covered twenty miles. Then the old man turned to me and said: ‘Boy, I smell wolves.’
“I said: ‘What do you mean, you smell wolves? Leave it to the horses. They don’t smell them.’ The old man said: ‘No, but I do.’ I said: ‘Nonsense. Anyway, we have fifteen miles start of them, and the horses are as fresh as a daisy.’ ‘There’s another sixty miles to go; maybe seventy,’ the old man said, ‘and I know wolves. This is the pack that ate up a company of soldiers last week: nothing was left but their buttons and their guns. So you see that the rifles are loaded.’
“I broke open the revolvers. They were all right. So were the rifles. I said: ‘All right. Now you’d better hand me the ammunition.’ ‘What do you mean, hand you the ammunition?’ ‘The cartridges,’ I said, ‘two boxes full of cartridges.’ The old man swore: ‘You this, and you that; I gave them to you—one box of Colt’s revolver, and a bag full of German cartridges for the rifles!’
“I felt in all my pockets. Only a dozen loose rifle cartridges. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you had them.’ My father felt in all his pockets. Nine or ten revolver cartridges, but no boxes or bags. ‘You lie, you son of a dog,’ he said, ‘I gave them to you.’
“But all the same, they weren’t there. ‘When we get to town,’ the old man said, ‘I’ll take the skin off your back for this!’ And just as he said this, the horses threw back their heads and began to whinny. ‘If we get to town,’ he added. I listened. Miles and miles away I could hear a noise, very, very faint, like wind in an empty house: Whaaaaaaaaa—like that.
“ ‘Wind,’ I said. ‘Wolves!’ said my father, and slashed at the horses. But they didn’t need the whip. They could smell wolf; that was enough. In the distance I could see a black patch moving: on that flat snow you can see miles. It was moving fast, like the shadow of a cloud on a wind. The old man said: ‘The moment they get within range, let them have it. Waste one bullet, and I’ll tear your heart out.’
“Then the girls started to get close together and whimper. ‘Stop that,’ I told them, ‘or I’ll kick you all out.’
“The wolves came on. We flew and slashed the snow to ribbons; but they cover the country like ghosts. The old man held the reins loose and got his revolvers ready. I got the rifles ready. Me, I used to hunt wild geese in half-light with an old muzzle-loading carbine, and hardly ever missed a shot. Hah! What Adze aims at, God forgets!
“At four hundred yards I opened fire. Bang! Down went the old leader of the pack, and turned a somersault like an acrobat; then another. Crack-crack went the whip over the horses. They ran like mad. Foam flew out of their mouths like snow; and as they ran they screamed. Fools to waste breath! The wolves came nearer.
“They ate the fallen ones without stopping. They scooped them up as an
express train scoops up water. Then the old man opened fire with a Colt over my shoulder. Boum-boum! I still have the scars of the powder-burns—look at my neck. I used up the cartridges. I didn’t waste one. Sixteen wolves in sixteen rifle-shots. Good, eh? The old man got six. Still the rest came on. ‘Take these revolvers,’ he said, ‘I’ll handle the horses.’
“I was good with a pistol, too. I gave the empty gun to one of the girls—‘Anna, load!’ She was a nice girl. She loaded. I fired. I killed thirty-two wolves with the Colts alone. I dropped them like skittles, boum-boum-boum! ‘Used up,’ I said, ‘but it holds them back.’
“The old man laughed: ‘That won’t hold them back. But whether we get out of this alive or not, with my dying breath I’ll say that there never was such shooting from a moving sledge.’
“He was a tough handful, the old one.
“Well, the wolves had fallen back a bit. They had a little meat. Crack-crack went the whip; but in five minutes they were after us again. They were within two hundred yards, and still gaining. The old man said: ‘Only one thing for it, loose a horse.’ I said: ‘What? And trust to two horses to drag this load?’
“The old man said: ‘All right. Chuck ’em a girl.’ I got hold of one of the heaviest girls and chucked her out. You never saw anything like. Hai, the Tcherkess woman! Give her sharp teeth and she would be equal to any wolf! She ran, then she realised that running was no good; turned round and caught the first wolf by the legs with her hands. But what was the use of that? Pfaff! Gone, as if she had fallen into a pit! gone from sight. The sledge rushed on. We got away. But a few minutes later the wolves came back.
“ ‘Another,’ said the old man. But this time I said to him: ‘And where do all our profits go? Do we make this trip for fun? Loose a horse!’ ‘All right. Cut one loose.’ I loosed one of the horses. She rushed off screaming, and the pack swerved after it. There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He said: ‘That was a lovely grey, a jewel of a horse.’ ‘But we’re saved,’ I said. ‘No, not yet,’ said the old man; then whaaaaaaaaa! the pack came back. ‘Hell’s fire!’ I said, and lashed the horses until they dripped blood.