by Sven Hassel
With exemplary zeal Alois started banging the keys. He beat out a spirited Hungarian waltz, Tiny meanwhile having switched over to a tango. Neither let himself be disturbed by the clashing rhythm. Paying no special attention to the music, Tiny did as he pleased, off and on twirling the helpless Lisa in the air like a propeller. She had lost a shoe. It was lying in the middle of the floor, blue and forlorn.
Lisa wasn’t dancing any more. Her legs had given way while they were doing a rhumba. Tiny continued dancing solo, meanwhile turning her around on his shoulders. Suddenly, he came to an abrupt halt and glowered round the room. ‘Is someone spoiling for a fight?’
No answer. He nodded, content. ‘I hope not, for your own sakes.’
The Legionnaire chuckled. ‘Come, put your lady on the counter.’
Puffing, Tiny chucked the semi-conscious Lisa onto the bar. He sat down beside her friend Gisela.
The Legionnaire looked at the panting woman in front of him on the counter.
‘Trude,’ he commanded for no apparent reason. ‘Madame needs a tonic.’
Another glass with a dash from Aunt Dora’s bottle.
Presently poor Lisa was again on her feet. She’d gotten drunk. Quite suddenly. Aunt Dora’s drops. She let herself go, forgetting all about her dignified arrogance. She danced with Bauer. She danced with Stein. She danced with an infantry sergeant.
The sergeant didn’t get to finish his dance. Tiny knocked him down and the Belgian threw him out in the back where others continued the transport further.
She danced once more with Tiny. She drank with the Legionnaire. She became very drunk. She threw her clothes into one of the small curtained-off rooms.
Aunt Dora’s subtle drops made people forget about regulations. An avalanche was in progress.
Lisa asked the Legionnaire if he’d bring her home.
‘You’re a slut,’ he said, and took another sip of vodka.
She cried a little bit. The Legionnaire didn’t pay attention to her any more. He told Aunt Dora that women who came to her dive to have an adventure were a bad lot. He told her about the women in Casablanca and Rabat. About women who loved and died. About men who were noiselessly murdered in a narrow passage between white houses. He related this jerkily, in a soft murmur.
Aunt Dora listened, her eyes screwed up. The smoke from her long cheroot bothered her.
Gisela attempted to leave. She’d suddenly been hit by an overwhelming desire for fresh air. The Belgian at the door – a revolving door – smiled amiably, but he shook his head. ‘You don’t leave a party this way, madame!’
He led her back to the bar.
A shrill laugh from Lisa struck the red lamps in the ceiling. She took another sip from her glass. Gisela didn’t drink. She was smoking, feeling very hot. She sat down beside me. I proposed we should take a trip upstairs together. I, too, had gotten a little drunk, and I felt like emulating the Legionnaire. I knew very well I didn’t behave nicely, but so what? Tomorrow we may die.
She shook her head and waggled her foot in a pink little shoe.
She must be rich, I thought.
‘Oh, go to hell,’ I said.
She pretended not to hear.
Tiny was yelling for whores. No one took any notice, because he was always doing that. He wanted to fight the doorman, who’d been a wrestler, but the Belgian had no desire to fight Tiny. One night they had fought. It lasted for more than an hour. When finally it was over, Tiny looked awful. The Belgian looked awful. Tiny told Dr Mahler he’d been run over by a carriage in the port. Dr Mahler pretended to believe him. One must pretend to believe many things when men from a penal regiment come to a big city with girls and schnapps after a long stay at the front. The grooms of death must live as they think they ought to. Death may come tomorrow.
Gisela vanished, but I had her handbag. Her identification card was in it, with her address. The Legionnaire carefully examined the contents. Then he returned the bag to me, after helping himself to a hundred marks.
Her name was something with ‘von’ and she lived on the Alster. So, she was rich!
‘She should be whipped,’ Ewald said. He licked his lips.
‘And you should have a bayonet in your belly,’ the Legionnaire smiled amiably.
Ewald was about to say something, but Aunt Dora removed the cheroot from her mouth and snarled a warning: ‘Shut your trap, you brute!’
Ewald said nothing. The Legionnaire hummed: ‘Come now, death, come!’
Ewald gave himself a shake as if he were cold. Aunt Dora felt nauseated by the cheroot and looked at the Legionnaire out of the corner of her eye. The scar from his knife wound, running from his temple to the edge of his collar, shone pale blue.
‘Oh, cut out that damn song,’ she whispered in her hoarse voice.
‘Scared of death, my girl? Death’s my friend.’
He laughed harshly and started playing with his battle knife.
Tiny startled. Making no attempt to cover up, he felt for his own knife, hidden in a secret pocket of his boot.
‘Would anyone care to be sliced up?’ he grinned, sticking his mouth out toward Ewald, who was eager to get away. A brutal punch tumbled him back against the bar.
‘You stay here,’ Tiny warned. ‘I might feel like making a few gashes in you. You’re a filthy bastard. Now, tell me what you are.’
Ewald let out a forced laugh. His small cunning eyes rolled in his head.
Tiny drove his knife in between Ewald’s fingers, but without giving him even a scratch.
‘What are you, you whoremaster?’
‘A filthy bastard,’ Ewald stammered, looking with glassy eyes at the quivering knife. Once this knife had belonged to a man from Siberia. The man had been kicked to death at Cherkassy for gouging out the eye of a lieutenant in the 104th Rifleman Regiment. Tiny had taken the knife from the leg of his boot. The knife had been made specially to slash the throats of other men. It was a good knife, and Tiny had learned to use it with amazing skill.
*
One time in the East we were going to reconnoiter at the far end of a bridge. It was an old and decayed bridge, because no one could be bothered to take care of it. Wood-and-iron bridges have to be taken care of to look nice.
We stepped briskly across the bridge. Our boots rang against the iron. The river grinned up toward us between the cross ties. It chuckled with suppressed laughter because it knew something we didn’t. It held a surprise for us.
As usual we were jabbering away. Tiny was walking at the very back. He was peeved because we had been without food for three days and because he was dead set on getting permission to rape one of the women rifle soldiers we had captured during the night.
‘She won’t give a twitter,’ he promised. ‘No one will know anything about it. A panty soldier like that, would it really matter?’
‘I’ll shoot you like a dog if you hurt any of those women,’ the Old Man threatened.
This was the reason Tiny walked across the bridge a little behind the rest of us. He kicked spitefully at a lump of clay, which enraged him by getting stuck on the toe of his boot. He kicked out several times, but the lump stuck. Red with rage he bent down, tore off the lump and hurled it far into the grinning river. By now he’d fallen even further behind. Morose, hateful and bloodthirsty, he slouched behind the patrol, which had vanished into the mist and was audible only as a pleasant buzz of murmured words.
Suddenly he stopped, gaping. Out of the fog, across the rail of the bridge, there emerged a figure, a lithe figure. With the nimbleness of a cat he glided after the patrol. Tiny speeded up. He seemed transformed. The gorilla had turned into a black panther. Both vanished in the fog.
A gurgling shriek cut through the clammy air and sent the patrol flying for cover. The buzz of their chattering had died away.
Groans and blows could be heard through the fog. Then footsteps clanked against the iron. We caught a firm hold on our sub-machine guns. The Old Man slit his eyes. The Legionnaire cocked his gun. P
orta pulled the pin of an egg grenade. True to pattern when something special was up, Stege trembled slightly.
Where the gray curtain parted, Tiny appeared, dragging a lifeless figure behind him. He threw it down before us in the middle of the bridge, like an angler who’s caught an unusually big pike he’d like to show off a bit. He grinned:
‘Seen the like of this before, eh?’
The throat of the dead Siberian soldier gaped red and made sucking motions like the gills of a big fish. The blood muddied up the iron of the bridge.
Using his sleeve, Tiny wiped some black blood off his face. It was from the foreign soldier, whose blood had spattered Tiny as he slit the soldier’s throat from ear to ear.
Tiny grinned apologetically. ‘Look how this pig messed me up when I knocked him off.’
The Old Man drew a deep breath. ‘How did you find him?’
‘He came up from the river, was going to play a trick on you, fellows. Haw-haw, I was too bright for him and made a slight gash in the Stalin beggar.’
‘You’ve saved us,’ the Old Man said, holding up a couple of high-explosive charges he’d found under the oilskin uniform of the enemy soldier.
‘A suicide rifleman,’ Stege shuddered and stroked his sub-machine gun.
Porta whistled long and pointedly.
‘Tiny,’ the Old Man said. ‘You saved our lives. If that fellow had caught us by surprise, we’d have been blown sky-high like a well-oiled rocket.’
Tiny was in contortions from embarrassment. He wasn’t used to praise.
‘I lunged my knife straight at his face and just gave a pull. It sank in so easily and gently, then he was dead. He yelled only once. And, d’you know, half his yell came out through the hole I’d cut in his throat.’
‘You’re good with the knife,’ the Legionnaire nodded proudly. He was Tiny’s teacher in using the knife properly.
Tiny swelled with pride and joy. He looked at the Old Man, narrowed his eyes a little and bent his head to a pleading angle.
‘After this, may I rape the rifle girl with the fat ass?’
The old man shook his head, slung his sub-machine gun across his shoulder and continued across the bridge. The rest of us followed in silence. Tiny shouted more loudly than necessary. His voice penetrated deep into the fog and must’ve been heard both by the Russians and by our own troops far on the opposite shore.
‘Christ, I’ll do it anyway. I saved you, and she isn’t so very tender, you know.’
The Old Man stopped, swung his sub-machine gun under Tiny’s nose and said quite low, but with so much weight that no one could mistake him, ‘You stay away from the flintlock girls, including the one you’re so sweet on. Otherwise you’ll go straight to hell and I’d be sorry to have that happen. I mean it, Tiny.’
‘Turds,’ Tiny growled. He sulked again like an offended child. He didn’t get his hands on those flintlock girls. But he became even more proficient with the knife. The Legionnaire was proud.
Neither Tiny nor the Legionnaire used the steel sling. They used only the knife. The rest of us preferred the sling; it was noiseless. But Tiny didn’t at all mind their screaming. He said that they seemed more dead when they’d screamed first.
Ewald well knew Tiny’s skill with the long battle knife. But Ewald, too, was handy with a knife. His own weapon, however, was a switchblade knife, of the kind fancied by the Portuguese and by pimps in Marseille. Sailors coming to Marseille from Oporto and Lisbon made good business with these switchblade knives. Ewald had received his from a sailor who’d gotten very drunk. It was on account of this sailor that Ewald, the pimp, served his twenty-first prison term. Something or other – it could never be established with certainty precisely what – had saved Ewald from the liquidation camps for habitual criminals. When questioned about this, Ewald sensibly kept quiet and casually shrugged his shoulders.
Criminal Secretary Nauer at Police Headquarters, Stadthausbrücke 8, had torn off one of Ewald’s ears and broken his toes. Not because of the murder of that sailor. That was of minor importance. He wasn’t the only sailor who was killed during that time. The mortuary chapel for unidentified persons had space for a great many cadavers, and as long as they didn’t have to be piled on top of each other there was no reason to make a fuss. But Herr Nauer at Police Headquarters believed that Ewald had some dope on Rote Kapelle, the large underground Communist organization. The dream of Herr Nauer was to be transferred to the Communist Section of the Secret State Police. This section was headed by Kriminalrat Kraus, the greatest criminal who ever held public office. But Kraus was a fine police officer, at least by the standards of the Third Reich, or even by police standards anywhere.
Kraus was hanged in 1946 in a cell in Fuhlsbüttel. It was raining. The weather was really dismal that day. He squeaked like a drowning mouse and looked like one, too. He had to be carried to the hemp rope, which smelled pleasantly new – that is, if you can stand the smell of a rope.
He was supported by two young men as he stood on the stool under the steel pipe in the ceiling to which the rope had been fastened. He jumped up and down on the stool like a rubber ball, sobbing: ‘No, no!’ But Fate said, ‘Yes, oh yes!’ The stool was kicked out from under his thick feet.
He gurgled a little. Sort of long and deep, like sour milk that can’t quite make it out of the neck of a bottle. His neck stretched and his eyes popped out of their sockets.
One of the young men let out a mere ‘Damn it!’ in his native English and went on his way. The other stayed behind to take a snapshot. Since this was prohibited by law, he had to make haste, but it was ‘a damned good souvenir,’ he later told his girl friend in Harburg. She was a nice girl who happened to love that sort of photograph. Her father was shot in the back of his head with a Nagan pistol somewhere in the East. Not because he had done anything, but because somebody had to be shot in the back of the head with Nagans now that the war was over. But at that time the girl didn’t know this.
The picture showed clearly Kriminalrat Kraus’ tongue hanging out of his mouth. Large, strangely swollen.
Laughing, the young man said to the girl from Harburg: ‘He doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. He sticks out his tongue at us.’
The young man didn’t know that Kriminalrat Kraus, from Gestapo’s department 6C, the so-called Communist department, would’ve sold his own mother, wife, and children to get into the secret service of his own country. Kraus had volunteered his services. He had talked and smirked every day for an entire year, and now he stuck out his tongue, like all snakes.
Ewald, pimp, murderer, sadist, and lady-killer, managed to get out of Police Headquarters without becoming acquainted with Kriminalrat Kraus. Dumpy Kraus. How? He was said to have talked both plenty and long, lies as well as truth.
Aunt Dora had taken some unusually powerful puffs at her cheroot and said: ‘None of my business. But if that swine starts speaking to “Lange Nauer” about anything that concerns me, then . . .’ She smiled and winked. Whether the wink was caused by the smoke from her perpetual cheroot, or by the necessity of signaling to someone in the soft darkness around the little tables – that couldn’t quite be determined.
Now, Ewald stood squeezed between two bar stools, afraid of what might come.
Everything about Ewald recalled a jackal. For one, he had all of the jackal’s cowardliness.
Tiny grinned as he played with his knife. He tossed it in the air and caught it again. He did it again and again. Ewald’s face bobbed up and down as he followed the knife with his eyes.
Tiny looked at him. ‘Would you care to fight Tiny, my lamb?’
Ewald shook his head.
Tiny leaned back and chuckled. ‘You’re a turd, Ewald. And no one fights a turd. It’s only good for spitting at.’
Tiny spat at Ewald. Ewald wiped the gob off his face with the back of his hand, then rubbed his hand clean on his trousers.
Aunt Dora was picking her teeth with a fork and looking from one to another. ‘No rump
us, boys. If you want to kill that swine, do it outside. But don’t play any pranks here.’
Ewald again made an attempt to get away, but Tiny tripped him up. He toppled over and slid some distance along the floor. When he got up and was about to run, a knife whizzed right past his head. It embedded itself in the door of the room where he used to flog the girls.
He pulled up with fright and whispered hoarsely, ‘I haven’t done any harm to you.’
‘We damn well hope you haven’t – for your own sake,’ Stein grinned.
Tiny motioned Stein to lay off and called quite loudly: ‘Come over here, you louse, we would just love to have a little talk with you. Come!’
Ewald walked slowly up to the bar, followed by all eyes. The girls nodded with expectant pleasure, gloating over Ewald’s unhappy predicament.
Tiny patted him lightly on the cheek, but finished it off with a terrific slap in the face which made Ewald topple over.
‘But good Heavens, what are you doing to baby-boy?’ Stein said, pretending to be shocked. He made as if to help Ewald get up from the floor, but suddenly the terrified Ewald was sent flying through the air by a judo grip. He crashed to the floor and lay there unconscious.
Tiny thought he owed him a last greeting. Big and heavy, he got up and bent over the curled-up figure on the floor. He squinted at the Legionnaire, who gave him a secret nod as he was taking a sip from his glass. Tiny winked and gave Ewald a kick in the groin. He doubled up like a sandwich that’s been lying around for too long.
We left Wind Force 11 proud of our work.
‘You are a business commodity,’ said Brandt, the cross-country truck driver. ‘Every Jew in Himmler’s camps becomes a first-class object of trade.’
‘That isn’t true,’ cried the old Jew in the striped prisoner’s uniform.
Brandt laughed. Heide laughed, All of us laughed, but joylessly.
‘You and all of you Jews will never be anything else than what you are right now – and have been for thousands of years – a plain commodity, a trump held by the rulers which they play or don’t play, depending on the needs of their tawdry market,’ Brandt continued.