Laugh of the Hyenas

by Ivan Roussetzki

Helen had won the first round in the battle, but that night, hidden from her lover’s eyes, she wept for Manol and his family. Perhaps they had all been tortured to death, and all because of her.

  Jean was right—Helen felt horribly guilty. She had betrayed Manol for their own ends, righteous though they may have been. The responsibility for their tragic ends lay at her feet, and there was nothing in the world she could do now to change the facts for them or for her, unless Manol was still alive.

  Helen understood Jean’s reluctance to let her go. But she was determined—now more than ever—to go back to Sofia. If Manol had been arrested, there was nothing they could do, but she was not prepared to give up if there was still a chance that he was hiding somewhere, most likely in Sofia.

  Helen stared at herself in the mirror. “I will save you, Manol, if I can. Just give me a little more time! Just hang on. Just hang on.”

  Dark circles surrounded her puffy eyelids, and wrinkles lined her once smooth skin. She saw that she was not as young and beautiful as she used to be, and wept again, this time for herself. Helen finally fell asleep around dawn, but awoke at 8:00 a.m. Jean had been quiet all morning and she knew that he had been thinking about what she had said yesterday.

  Time was running out for Manol. Helen was about to tell Jean that with or without his blessing, she was going back to Sofia to look for Manol. Before she could speak, there was a knock at their door. It was one of their couriers with a message scribbled in French on a small piece of paper.

  Gestapo after me. Need help. Hiding in Theater Garden in Sofia. Hurry! DONKEY

  “Thank God!” Helen cried. “Manol’s alive or was still alive as of last Saturday. He knows too much to be left in the hands of the Gestapo. Besides, Jean, we promised him that if he ever got into trouble, he could count on us to help. We can’t go back on our word to him now, especially after what he has done for us.”

  After a long pause, Jean finally spoke.

  “All right, Helen, you win, but only under these conditions. We’ll leave for Sofia on tomorrow’s train. We’ll travel separately and have no contact until we get inside the train station. We’ll return the next day, with or without Manol.”

  She nodded and then said, “We?”

  Jean leaned over and kissed her. “You don’t think I’m going to let you face this alone, do you?”

  CHAPTER 38

  I am fourteen years old. My father and I are at our home in Baden-Baden. He is wearing a brown wool suit and standing on a balcony filled with red roses. He calls to me as I play with our dog in the yard below the balcony. I hear my father’s voice, and I look up to see him.

  Another man appears on the balcony behind my father, but I do not know who it is, because a bright light makes it impossible for me to see. But I know that something is wrong. “Father! Father!” I scream. Then Manol Belevski comes out from behind my father, and suddenly he is sitting beside me in the yard. He leans over to me and whispers, “Helen, why did you betray me? Helen, why?”

  I look behind me at our house and see that its walls are on fire and crumbling around my father and Manol. My dog barks incessantly for me to do something, but I am frozen, unable to move. Manol looks into my face with his accusing eyes “It’s your fault. It’s all your fault,” he says. The whole house collapses around us in a pile of flames, smoke and dust.

  

  “Is this seat free?” a man asked.

  His German accent woke her with a start.

  “Oh … sorry,” Helen said. “I must have been dozing. Yes, it is.”

  The tall, blond, blue-eyed man moved to the seat across from Helen in the private first-class compartment of the train. Then he removed his dark overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, and carefully set them along with a newspaper and small suitcase on the rack behind and above his seat. When he turned to face Helen she gasped ever so slightly. His gray-green uniform had white embroidered SS emblems on his jacket collar and a red swastika armband on his sleeve—he was a Gestapo officer.

  Helen hoped that she didn’t look nervous. She told herself that he was just another passenger on this train from Istanbul to Sofia, but the way he looked at her made Helen wonder if he suspected her of something. Then she reminded herself that people like him suspected everyone of something. Helen wanted to get up and find another seat, but instead she just smiled, opened her purse and removed a silver cosmetic case to touch up her lipstick. When she put the cosmetic case back into her purse, she checked the six-inch metal knitting needle that she had concealed inside the lining.

  “I trust that our train will arrive in Sofia on time,” he said. “The Führer insists on punctuality, and I mustn’t be late. It’s important to be prompt, don’t you agree?”

  Like all Gestapo, he was trained to probe, test, search out lies, and create fear.

  “Of course,” Helen answered in perfect German. “With Hitler in charge, even the trains in the Balkans will run on time.”

  He raised one eyebrow as he looked at her wedding ring. “Are you traveling to Bulgaria on business or pleasure, Frau …?”

  “Welsbach, Eva Welsbach. I’m meeting my husband in Sofia and stealing him away from his business for a few days. We are going to a small chalet on the slopes of Mount Vitosha. The war seems to be taking up all his time, and a wife can get lonely in Vienna.”

  “Oh? I find it hard to believe that a beautiful woman such as you would ever be lonely,” he said. “But excuse me, Frau Welsbach, for my poor manners. I know your name, but I haven’t introduced myself. Major Hans Eisenberger, at your service.”

  His clammy handshake made her skin crawl.

  “And Herr Welsbach’s business is what, may I ask?”

  “Something to do with transportation, Major, but my husband never tells me much about it, and I don’t ask. You see, we never discuss his work.”

  “Well, I understand. My wife is bored by my work, too.”

  Helen felt the knot in her throat grow tighter as his eyes roamed around her body like a dog sniffing for a buried bone. To break the silence and perhaps learn something useful, she asked, “And what takes you to Bulgaria, Major?”

  He said nothing, but only offered her a cigarette and leaned close as he lit it. Then he spoke in a hushed voice.

  “Oddly enough, Bulgaria has proven to be a good place to recruit a large number of young men for our special kind of work. They make particularly good agents because they are well disciplined and very trustworthy. You see, we need to keep a close eye on our ‘friends’ in this region and make sure they don’t get tempted to forget whose side they are on. Alliances in war can change overnight.”

  “Oh, is that so?” she asked.

  “And it wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. “Why, I remember when I first joined the Nazi Party as a young Gestapo agent back in 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag.”

  Those words sent a stabbing pain into Helen’s heart, but it was the sadistic look on his face that made her ears burn. She clinched her fists and dug her nails into her palms.

  “Oh really? What happened?” she asked.

  “Frau Welsbach, I wish I could explain to you how proud I was to be a young Nazi helping to round up the Communists, Jews, and other common criminals who claimed to be good citizens and friends of Germany, but their allegiance was clearly elsewhere.”

  Behind her smile, Helen’s jaw tightened as she gnashed her teeth. She wondered if this bastard could have been one of the Gestapo officers who arrested her father.

  “I cannot describe to you the pleasure I had making those scum confess to lighting the fire at the Reichstag. Of course, they didn’t do it, but once we took them to Moabit Prison … I especially remember one old man …”

  Her head was spinning and she felt sick as he told her in vivid detail how he interrogated one of the prisoners who Helen knew very well could have been her father. Anger and nausea welled up in her again like a gushing fountain. This monster as much as admitted to being one of the animals who had tortured
and killed her father.

  “You should have heard him squeal!”

  He laughed even louder as he gazed at her legs.

  “Did the stubborn fool think that he could resist me?” he asked.

  It was at that moment Helen made a decision.

  “I don’t see how anyone could resist your charms, Major,” she said with smiling eyes.

  As the train chugged along, he moved to Helen’s side of the compartment and sat so close to her that she could feel the heat of his thigh through his uniform. He reached up to the rack and took a large unopened bottle of schnapps, two glasses, and the newspaper from his suitcase.

  “Let’s drink to our journey together and to the Führer,” he said displaying Hitler’s photo on the front page of his German newspaper. When he reached over to touch Helen’s partially revealed leg, she looked at his hand, smiled, and said, “Oh Yes, Major, that’s a wonderful idea.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and stood up to close the curtain to the compartment so that they would not be disturbed. Helen had made up her mind about what she was going to do.

  She offered no resistance as he reached his hand under her dress. He groped between her legs and slipped his hand into her panties, sinking two fingers deep inside her. He groaned when she rubbed the hard lump in his pants. He must have thought that this was going to be his lucky day when she opened her blouse, unhooked her bra, and pushed his head down between her breasts. He never noticed her reaching into her purse.

  As the man’s tongue eagerly licked one of her nipples, Helen looked down at the top of his head and carefully aimed the metal knitting needle at the opening of his ear. The revenge that had been buried deep in the pit of her heart for the last eight years was about to burst forth. Then, just as Jean Lopié had shown her, she jammed the needle into his ear, through his eardrum and into the base of his skull. He jerked his head upward, his mouth agape, and stared at her, wide-eyed in disbelief. When a small trickle of blood filled the space in his outer ear, she slowly removed the needle, and his body went limp.

  Helen’s heart was beating so fast that she could barely breathe. Her scalp dripped with sweat. “Count yourself lucky, you Nazi bastard! My father’s end was slow and painful, thanks to you.”

  She closed her eyes, recalling her father’s warm smile when the train’s shrill whistle blew and the brakes squealed, signaling their approach to the Bulgarian border. Helen gave her head a quick shake to eliminate the image from her mind as the train rolled to a halt, and several border guards approached the cars carrying passengers. A young soldier pulled open her compartment door from the outside of the train and looked inside.

  “Passports,” he said.

  He glanced at Helen’s passport and then at the man’s head resting on her shoulder.

  “You are traveling to Sofia?” he asked. “And … ah … your companion?”

  Helen put her index finger to her lips as she handed the guard the Nazi’s passport, which she had only seconds before slipped from his breast pocket. “Here, Corporal,” she said as she gave him a coy smile. “The Major gave me express orders to let him sleep until we reach Sofia. We… I mean … he had rather a late night and drank just a little too much schnapps. I’m sure you understand.”

  Helen tenderly adjusted the overcoat she had just snatched from the rack above their seats around his shoulders. She pulled the collar of his uniform up around his neck so that the guard could see part of the SS emblem, but only one side of his face. She could feel the warm blood dripping from his ear on the other side of his head onto her breasts.

  As the guard looked at the picture on his passport, he gazed at the side of the man’s face resting peacefully in the crook of her neck. As the seconds ticked agonizingly by, Helen tried to think of what she would do if the guard stepped inside.

  “If you awaken him, he’ll be as angry as a bear,” she said.

  The guard perched silently on the steps outside the car, not sure whether or not he should wake the sleeping Gestapo officer and risk an angry rebuke.

  “I’m sorry, Madam, but my orders are to check the papers of every passenger.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, and was about to reach into her purse for a small revolver when the train’s whistle blew several times. An impatient shout from a Bulgarian officer behind the guard made him turn around. After staring at them for another long moment, he handed her back the passports, quietly closed the compartment door, and disappeared.

  Relieved, Helen sat and looked at the lifeless body of the man propped up on the seat next to her. She took his hat from the rack above the seat, put it on his head, and pulled down the brim to cover his face. The blood from his ear left a crooked red line that trailed down his neck and under his collar. She’d never killed anyone before, but she felt strangely calm and unafraid as they pulled into the Sofia train station.

  Helen straighten her clothes and hair. Then she took a long pull from the nearly full bottle of schnapps that lay on the seat beside him. She poured what was left on his coat and the newspaper strewn around the body. After placing the empty bottle in his hand, she gathered her belongings and was about to open the compartment door.

  The dead man appeared to be nothing more than a sleeping passenger. Instead of leaving the compartment, Helen pulled a cigarette and pack of matches from her purse. She lit the cigarette and let the match burned down. When it nearly singed her fingers Helen set fire to the remaining matches in the booklet and tossed them onto the newspapers. When she saw his coat catch fire, Helen exited the compartment, slammed the door shut, and joined the other passengers walking down the platform toward the train station waiting room.

  Helen heard shouts coming from the train platform behind her. Pandemonium broke out inside the waiting room when a squad of German soldiers and several Bulgarian policemen ran past her toward the newly arrived train, where billows of black smoke belched from the window of a compartment in a first-class coach.

  CHAPTER 39

  Catching Belevski had become a matter of life and death—George Milev’s life and Dr. Manol Belevski’s death. After Milev left the hunting lodge, he spent every waking minute guessing where the doctor might be hiding. By the time Milev got back to Sofia, he decided to set his entire police force on the doctor like a pack of dogs. Then all he could do was wait and hope that his men would find Belevski before Lupus and the Gestapo.

  Sunday passed without a hint of the doctor’s whereabouts, but the next day brought an unexpected twist in the situation. Sofia’s major newspapers ran front-page stories about Belevski’s disappearance and ran his photograph. Since Milev hadn’t given any order to leak the story to the press, and no one else other than Lupus knew that the doctor was missing, it was obvious that his German boss was behind the article.

  While Lupus seemed desperate to arrest Belevski, something told Milev that there was more to this story than the mere hope that someone might report something useful about the missing doctor to the police. Was it not possible that Lupus really wanted bigger fish to fry? Had he, in fact, set a trap using Belevski as bait, with the hope of luring Helen Noverman and Jean Lopié back to Sofia to rescue their beloved agent? In any event, it was clear that Belevski was not in the hands of Lupus, so Milev could breathe easier, at least for the time being.

  By Tuesday, May 20, the police chief’s men still had nothing to report, and he was getting nervous. Milev knew that with all the German sympathizers, informants, agents, and his police force hunting for the doctor all over Bulgaria, it was only a matter of time before someone would spot him. The question was, who would get to Dr. Belevski first?

  Milev closed his eyes and shuddered at the thought of Belevski in Lupus’s hands—not for the doctor’s sake, but for his own. Given the constantly shifting political sands in Bulgaria and throughout Europe, Milev was again considering possible escape routes from Sofia to the West when there was a knock on his office door. He slipped the map and train schedule into his drawer.


  “Enter,” he said.

  Letchkov approached, clicked the heels of his boots, and snapped a brisk salute.

  “What have you got for me?”

  “We’ve spotted the doctor, sir!” he said.

  Hearing that, Milev jumped to his feet.

  “Finally! Where? Where is he?”

  “Right under our noses in the Theater Garden, but …”

  “You’ve arrested him, of course.”

  “No sir.”

  “Why not, man, for God’s sake? I told you I wanted you to arrest him!”

  “Yes sir. But when I first saw the old man in the filthy hunting coat hanging around the fountains, I thought he was just another gypsy looking for a handout. Then I noticed two of Colonel Wolff von Schjoderberg’s agents watching him from across the garden. I couldn’t imagine why the Gestapo would be so interested in this derelict, so I ventured a closer look.”

  “Get to the point, Sergeant!” Milev’s shrill voice caused the young man to cringe involuntarily.

  “Yes sir. Sure enough, it was Dr. Belevski, but how he has changed!”

  “You idiot! Don’t you realize that …?” Milev stopped himself. “Go on.”

  “Yes sir, but you know that I cannot overrule German orders, and I thought it best not to arrest him with the Gestapo on his tail. So I left my assistant to watch him and came to you right away for further orders, General, sir.”

  Milev wondered why Gestapo agents would follow but not arrest Belevski, especially with the story about him in the newspapers, unless Lupus was using him as bait to trap Noverman and Lopié. But there was something else that remained a mystery.

  How did Lupus manage to find Belevski with only his small cadre of agents, when the Bulgarian Chief of the Secret Police couldn’t find the doctor with his entire force at his disposal? Maybe the German was just lucky, or maybe someone …

  Milev glared at Letchkov and then sighed. He couldn’t waste time trying to answer that question. His top priority was to permanently silence Belevski. The problem was, now he had two Gestapo agents for bodyguards.