A Thousand Devils (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 2)

by Frank Goldammer

  They crossed through two clearings before plunging into a dusky pine forest where Heller had to hold his arms in front of his face to protect against branches. Right as he passed through, he smelled fire. A sliver of smoke rose from a hollow. Heller took cover, hiding behind a fallen beech tree and pressing himself against the trunk. He watched the girl climb back down a slope. Something moved far below. He’d first taken it for a low mound or a boulder. Then he saw that it was a tent, camouflaged with twigs and leaves. A small child went up to the girl. Another child came, and the girl greeted it. Then she pulled something out of her overcoat and passed it around.

  Heller crept closer, crouching. He slowly made his way down the slope, approaching the primitive shelter with caution. No one had noticed him yet. He was about ten yards away when he realized that the hollow held more of these dwellings. Dug into the slope, and not visible from above, was a shelter secured with lumber and covered with blankets. Heller stood in the open and made for the camp. The little kids had already spotted him. They stared at him until he’d gotten within ten yards. One of them held up a hand without taking its eyes off him, which alerted the older girl to him. She turned and stared.

  It nearly scared him how filthy, unkempt, and feral she looked up close. The little kids were in the same wretched condition—undernourished, freezing, noses running.

  “What do you have under your overcoat?” Heller asked gently. He then felt a shove from behind.

  “Hands up!” shouted a young voice.

  Heller raised his hands above his head. “I’m not the only one here,” he said, without knowing whom he was talking to.

  “What do you mean?” asked the young voice behind him.

  “There’re Russians in the woods. If you shoot, they’ll come this way. You can be sure of it.”

  “I could stab you!” the voice replied defiantly. The opening to one of the tents shifted, and a boy of about ten came out carrying a machine gun that he pointed at Heller.

  Heller spoke clearly and gently, avoiding any quick movements. “They’d search for me. Listen, I don’t want anything from you.” He turned, very cautiously, his hands still up.

  Standing before him was a tall boy of probably sixteen. He had on a threadbare German military uniform stuffed with cotton in the arms and legs. He wore a German helmet as well and even had army boots. He, too, was armed with a German machine gun. He had eczema along his lip and was missing one of his lower front teeth. Heller noticed several decorations on his chest—an Iron Cross and two Russian medals. A big knife hung from his leather belt, and on his back, Heller was astonished to see, he wore a bow and quiver with arrows.

  “May I see your bow?” Heller asked. “Did you make it yourself?”

  “Keep them hands up!” warned the armed kid behind him.

  Heller obediently put his hands above his head.

  “Don’t let him out of your sight, Johann,” the taller boy said. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Max Heller. I’m with the police. I was pursuing a thief and got lost here. And you, what’s your name?”

  “You were chasing Fanny!”

  “Don’t you say my name!” the girl said, outraged. Only now did Heller see that she had psoriasis spreading from her temples below her hair.

  Heller looked around. More children crawled out of the other dwellings, slowly approaching. Heller guessed there was a dozen of them, maybe more. Most seemed barely four years old, very few of school age. They all looked haggard and hungry. They were covered in dirt and had blackened teeth and clogged noses. They wore ragtag clothing stitched together from old clothes, parts of uniforms, curtains, and bed coverings. Most had weapons on them—knives, pistols, spears, and lances. They looked at him with near apathy. Heller felt a heat rising through his jaw and behind his eyes. He didn’t dare blink.

  “What are you carrying under your overcoat?” he asked the girl again, his voice breaking.

  “Don’t show him!” the boy ordered.

  “Don’t make no difference, plus he needs feeding.” Fanny unbuttoned her overcoat, revealing a little bundle. She pulled at a knot and unwound a long cloth. A tiny, skinny infant appeared, wrapped up in a blanket, its little head bright red and its mouth contorting into a faint, weak whimper.

  Heller intuitively lowered his hands and reached out for the infant.

  “You can’t carry it like that,” he told the girl. “It’s barely getting any air that way. See?”

  “Hands off!” warned the tall boy.

  “I’m only trying to help,” Heller said, undeterred. He held the baby. It was as light as a feather and smelled as if it had been wearing the same diaper for days. Its eyes were stuck shut, and so were its nostrils.

  Heller sighed heavily. He would have to ask her. It wasn’t rare for infants to be left near hospitals by starving mothers unable to feed themselves, let alone a child. Had she found one and taken it? “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  “He’s mine!” Fanny shouted. “Had him myself, in that tent. Came right out of me, all on his own. Four days ago. All them here saw it. That right?” She looked around, and all the kids nodded.

  “You had it here? In the tent? Without any help?” The little thing trembled in his arms, or maybe his hands were shaking.

  “Wasn’t the first time. One girl here already had one. She screamed, but not me! I scream?” Fanny peered at the kids. They shook their heads.

  “See. Didn’t make a peep.”

  Heller nodded. His heart had tensed up. He could barely endure the sight of such neglected children. He carefully gave the baby back to Fanny. “So where’s she now, the other one?”

  “Back there.” Fanny and the other children pointed behind them. Heller looked in that direction and thought they meant one of the covered dwellings, but then he spotted a little mound of earth topped with a small cross made of tied-together branches. “We had to bury her. Poor Margi.”

  “Poor Margi,” the kids whispered.

  Heller couldn’t speak. He felt so helpless in the face of such indescribable hopelessness and poverty. Yet at the same time, he knew the pity overwhelming him wasn’t going to do any good. On the contrary. He needed to stay alert. He was still in danger. These kids weren’t living here in secret for no reason. In their eyes, he was an intruder and a threat. He turned to Fanny.

  “You have to give him something to drink regularly and wash him really well, with warm water, you hear me? And always keep him wrapped nice and warm. You have to keep his bottom clean and dry. Every day. Do you have any powder?”

  Fanny shook her head.

  “And when you hold him, always keep a hand under his head. He’s still too weak to hold his head up on his own. You see? Right like this.” Heller showed Fanny how she should carry the baby.

  They heard a noise, like the chirping of a small, weary bird. The tall boy with the machine gun listened up. “Someone else is coming,” he whispered.

  “Go look,” Fanny said and pointed her chin at Heller. “Johann and me’ll keep our eyes on him.”

  The boy hesitated, then darted off and climbed up the slope, barely making a sound.

  Heller relaxed a little. That boy had seemed to pose the greatest danger.

  “How old are you?” he asked Fanny, who had sat on a log, opened her blouse, and, without any embarrassment, bared her chest to breastfeed the baby. Her chest wasn’t fully developed, and her nipples looked sore. Heller could hardly stand to watch how helplessly and greedily the baby started wiggling its head when Fanny put it to her breast, hardly mustering the strength to suck.

  “Fourteen, I think. Not really sure. February now, right?”

  Heller nodded. “The ninth.”

  “Fifteen then.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My mother never come out of our cellar bunker, and Father went missing during the war. I was in a home at first, but when the Russians come, I took off.”

  Heller had already suspected as much, yet every one
of her seemingly unemotional words hit him in the heart. “So you’re all orphans?”

  Fanny stared at him.

  “I mean, none of you have any parents left?”

  “Well, most of them’re dead. And his parents, Alfons’s ones, took off without him.” Fanny pointed at a seven- or eight-year-old, his left hand clamped around a lance consisting of a bar with a bayonet fixed on the end. The boy’s right arm was missing.

  “I brought a few of ’em with me from the home; other ones we found and saved from the Russians. And now they got parents again. Me, I’m now the mom, and Jörg is their daddy.”

  “Why aren’t you in the city? There are places where people will help you. There are some good people. I know so.”

  “Russians are in the city. Plus, no one wants to have us. They all just beat us or run us off. You ever in a home like that? They hit you right in your trap, and you get nothing to eat, and then you’re taken off to Russia to be one of their slaves. Nah, we’re happier here. We’re doing good, aren’t we?” Fanny took another look around, and all the children nodded.

  Heller looked at the pathetic group of kids. “I don’t think you are. There are good homes, where you’ll be warm and get a real bed and fed three times a day. No one hits you. And the Russians aren’t all that bad. They don’t have any slaves. You have to believe me on that.”

  Fanny shook her head. “The Russians, they go eating children, someone even saw it! That right?” The kids nodded again.

  “No, that’s not true,” Heller replied.

  “You’re only saying that ’cause the Russians give you food. That true? What, you supposed to try and lure us out of the woods?”

  “Fanny,” Heller said gently. “That’s your name, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Fanny, you were there three days ago when they found that dead Russian on that slope above the Elbe. You wanted that backpack. Did you know what was inside?”

  Fanny hesitated, then shook her head. “I just saw it, wanted to have it.”

  “And I also saw you twice at Gutmann’s bar, at the Schwarzer Peter.”

  Fanny frowned and scratched at her scabs. “Nah, nah, got no idea who that is.”

  Heller raised his chin. “The tall guy, what’s his name? Jörg?”

  “He’s our leader, ever since Walter got shot dead. Poor Walter.”

  “Poor Walter,” the children whispered, and it sounded like an amen in church.

  “So you hunt animals? And you beg and steal in the city?”

  “We don’t filch nothing; we only take what we need. And Jörg, he goes hunting with Heinrich. Heinrich’s a good archer and stalks real good too. Heinrich’s good, isn’t he?”

  “Heinrich’s good,” the children replied.

  Heller looked into their dirty little faces and saw his son before his eyes. How Klaus had stood there in the kitchen with that despairing smile because his father hadn’t recognized him at first. These children were barely getting by in the woods, not even an hour by foot from civilization, left on their own, parentless, unwanted. Again he buried the thought. “May I look around?” he asked Fanny. “I won’t run away.”

  Fanny shrugged, took her infant from her breast, and started to lay it in a dirty old stroller with no wheels.

  “No, wait,” Heller tried. “Place it on your shoulder, like so, then pat its back real soft until it does a little burp. You understand? Until it belches.” He helped her and showed her how to pat its back. Once the baby gave a gentle burp, she giggled like a child, and the other children giggled along with her.

  “If he doesn’t do a little burp, he’ll get a tummy ache, that or he could vomit in his sleep and choke on it.”

  Fanny stared at him a moment, deep in thought. Her face lit up. “You mean when he pukes.”

  Heller nodded. Then he stood and went toward the dwellings.

  A pack of kids followed him. The small ones looked up at him, eyeing him with nervous curiosity and wonder. When he crouched to look into the tent, they did the same. The smallest one pressed especially close and observed his every move. Their penetrating reek brought tears to his eyes. They probably hadn’t washed since the last warm days of fall, not to mention ever changing out of their ragged clothes. Their heads were swarming with lice, and sometimes the bugs ran right across their faces. All the kids had some kind of skin rash, and they twitched and scratched themselves incessantly. A little girl stood off to the side, holding a twig in her arms. It had cloth wrapped around it and had become her doll.

  It stank inside the tents as well. Filthy blankets and pillows covered the floor, tin cans were piled up, old dolls and broken toy cars lay next to all manner of stolen goods—wire, batteries, and cardboard. In old pots and other containers, Heller found chestnuts, acorns, beechnuts, and frozen or dried lizards in a wooden box. In another tent, two children lay motionless under their blankets, seriously ill. Heller felt their heads—they were red-hot. A girl was cooling them with a rag she had soaked in cold stream water. In the shelter dug out of the slope, practically a cave, he discovered ammunition boxes with German carbines, Russian rifles, and hand grenades of German and Russian make. Several small fires burned in front of various shelters. Primitive stands held black pots. Heller picked up a big spoon and stirred around in one. It was apparently a soup. Small shreds of white meat and a little bit of green floated around in it; he took a cautious sniff. Their dishes consisted of odd plates, a few sawed-off steel helmets, and old tin cans. The children relieved themselves at a narrow stream. Heller tried to spot the one he had given his barley soup to. He thought it might give him some small comfort knowing that the child at least lived here with this group and didn’t have to roam the city like a lonely, lost creature. He didn’t see the child.

  Fanny was suddenly behind him. He hadn’t heard her coming. “Jörg, he says the Germans are gonna fight again and chase the Russians out. He says our soldiers aren’t defeated yet. They’re just resting and got new weapons built. He says, under the ground, Adolf’s building a secret weapon gonna make all the Russians dead with one blow. He says we always need to defend ourselves. He says, if the Russians do find us, that they gonna shoot us all dead.”

  “So does Jörg sometimes go off to battle?” Heller asked her.

  “Go, get away!” Fanny ordered the children around her. They obeyed and vanished into their tents without a word. She then puckered her lips and leaned her head to one side in an almost flirtatious way. “You secretly trying to question me, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m just interested.” Heller tried to placate her. “So, is he a good father to your child?”

  Fanny took a quick look around, then stepped closer.

  “He’s not the father; he just thinks so. But he’s got no clue how that works,” she whispered and giggled. “He thinks it comes from kissing.” She pulled Heller closer to her. “It’s a Russian baby,” she whispered in his ear.

  “You go see the Russians? They give you things for it? Or did they make you?”

  “Nah, didn’t make me. I wouldn’t put up with that. I’d kill any man dead who tries!”

  “But you do go sometimes?”

  “Sometimes, yeah, but don’t go telling Jörg. He says he’d slit anyone’s throat who touches me.”

  Heller took a deep breath. He’d like to know more, but he couldn’t risk asking too much. Fanny seemed to have a simple disposition, yet she was also a fighter who’d managed to survive nearly two years without outside help and even gave birth to a child. Did the boy truly not know how babies were made? It was hard to imagine.

  “And this Jörg is sometimes gone at night?” he asked, making it sound casual.

  “He’s gone a lot.” Fanny pressed her lips together, screwed up her eyes in mistrust. “You are trying to question me!”

  “Fanny, please listen. Your boy is sick. You need to get him to a doctor.”

  “He’s not sick. He’s got no fever!”

  Heller took her by the arm, looking
her firmly in the eyes. “Tell me, is there something running out of you down below, between your legs?”

  Fanny turned away from him with a disgusted look.

  “It’s flowing, you have discharge down there? White and slimy?” Heller asked.

  “Sometimes maybe, a little. That bad?”

  “Fanny, it’s what they call gonorrhea. The clap. And your boy has it in his eyes.”

  “Nah, that can’t be true, can it?” She added an incredulous laugh.

  “Fanny, I’m a policeman. You can believe me. And tell me another thing: Do you know Franz? They call him the one-handed man.”

  Fanny recoiled. “Best you get going now, before Jörg comes back. You never know what that one’s gonna do, especially if he gets mad. You shouldn’t be here no more.”

  February 9, 1947: Evening

  Using the last light of the day, Heller navigated his way back out of the woodland maze. Though he had always been able to rely on his good sense of direction, he was nevertheless relieved when he finally reached Priessnitz Creek. He followed its path and found himself back out on Bischofsweg.

  It was around 7:00 p.m. and fully dark when he reached the police station on Katharinenstrasse. There he got on the phone to headquarters and was grateful to hear that Oldenbusch was still working. Twenty minutes later, he picked Heller up in the Ford.

  “So where have you been?” Oldenbusch asked. “With Kasrashvili?”

  “I followed the girl, Werner. The one who tried fighting us for that backpack with Franz Swoboda’s head in it. Just imagine this: there’s a group of children living in the heath, led by a boy named Jörg. Some of them are little kids, orphaned, sick—breaks your heart.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you this troubled, Max.”

  “Werner, don’t you understand? Children. In the woods. In this freezing cold. No mother, no father. All alone, fending for themselves. They can’t even speak properly.”

  “Then we’ll need to get them out of there. Child Services office can take care of it.”