Carefully and centimeter by centimeter, Toni pushed his head forward, just enough to see the two figures with his left eye against the twilight. Mr Feretti was wearing the same dusty, worn suit he had been wearing all day. His shirt was hanging out of his pants and the ends of the belt were dangling loose. The director was dressed in a short lace nightgown with a wide neckline. Mr Feretti’s hands rested at the sides of her body, somewhere between her hip and buttocks. The hug of the two was quick and stealthy, but unmistakable. Toni pulled his head back as Mr Feretti quickly peered up and down the passage to make sure that the intimate touch had not been seen by anyone. The soft smacking of a fleeting kiss, the rustling of cloth and the Director’s promise to again be ready to receive Mr Feretti tomorrow night, also reached Toni’s ear. She called him Nicolo. Then the door was quietly closed and Mr Feretti’s footsteps slowly faded.
There was Toni’s opportunity. Tomorrow night.
He peered out from behind the chest of drawers again and watched the fine Mr Feretti on the other side of the corridor, four doors down, enter his own premises.
Toni had to smile.
Life in the boarding school really was exciting.
***
The following night, Tony lay awake for a long time and made plans. He started putting them in motion when he noticed that Antoine´s breathing became less regular. More and more often the boy began to move in his sleep and change his position in bed opposite Toni’s own. He’d wake up soon. That was good. Slowly Toni began to rub his eyes. Just as firmly that it didn't hurt, but still colorful stars appeared in his field of vision. Then he tried to cry on command.
He, as someone who in his whole life hardly ever had cried, especially not in the last ten or twelve years, found it difficult. He tried it by evoking memories of his mother.
It didn’t work.
How could it?
He had not even felt anything when Father Bianchi had told him that she had gone into the lake. He simply could not feel what Toni thought another son would have felt in his situation. Toni was looking for something that could help him. Then his eyes grazed his toiletry bag. Yeah. A tiny amount of toothpaste would do. Not too much. Toni unscrewed the cap from the tube and stroked with the little finger along the inside. Then he brought it close to his face. It smelled slightly of mint, a chemical variant of it. It worked. After Toni had rubbed a hint of it in both his eyes, they began to burn and tear.
When Antoine woke up, Toni looked exactly as he had planned. He let the black-haired boy see his crying face for just a second. Then he turned away in acted shyness. At Antoine’s concerned tone Toni could immediately hear that his plan was successful.
“What’s wrong?” Antoine asked worried, still with some sleep in his voice. Toni did not answer, but produced a suppressed sob.
“Well, come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?”
Toni heard Antoine sitting up in bed and knocking back the blanket. Then he began to speak slowly and haltingly. Toni told the boy everything. Everything he had done, and everything Azrael had done. In the end, it was Antoine who had tears in his eyes. Real tears. But, as Toni had foreseen, he did not turn away in disgust, but towards him in affection. He must have a heart for broken things. Probably because he’s a broken thing himself. All the time Toni had been facing the wall, turned away from Antoine, because he did not know whether he could keep his facial expressions under control. Only when he had finished had he turned to his roommate. Even before his tears had dried on his face, Toni asked him quietly:
“And you? If we’re going to confess, maybe we should do it right. What about you?”
“I don’t know. But almost all of the psychologists my parents sent me to say that I seek attention with all my dealing, my drug escapades and brawls. More specifically, I want to force my parents’ to pay attention. Idiots. I hate those two. Money-loving buffers. The only good thing is I’ll inherit half of their bucks once they’re finally dead. No, Toni, I can’t serve you with an equally horrible story like you just told me. I’m just a little different from the other kids.”
He laughed sarcastically.
“Just a little... hungrier, I guess.”
Yeah, Toni thought. You’re a little hungrier. A little more ruthless. A little more wolf than lamb. Not quite as much as I maybe, but still.
“Okay. Thanks for telling me. You know, maybe there’s no point in worrying about the past all the time. Maybe we should move on.”
***
At breakfast in the large, noisy hall, newly bursting with two hundred boarding school students, Antoine and Toni sat together, but they didn’t talk much. Everyone clung to his own thoughts, and Toni just glanced at Antoine’s face once in a while and tried to find out whether the Franco-Swiss´ emotional world was moving in the right direction. However, he did not succeed in predicting. Antoine had again put on his mask of coolness and inviolability.
All right, Toni thought. That’s okay with me. Crying in front of him once will have to do. After all, he didn’t want a needy wimp as a friend, but someone who knew how to act.
Toni perceived the lessons on this day as heavy and dull. In biology and physics, an unannounced test was written. Toni answered the ridiculous questions without major problems, was the first to finish, and he even managed to help Antoine in an unobserved moment by skilfully handing him a piece of paper. Not that Antoine was stupid. Toni estimated that he too could have passed these tests with ease if only he had been able to concentrate. Toni blamed the fact that this was often not the case on a lack of foresight. All knowledge could once become important, Toni knew. Antoine hadn’t understood that yet. He only took part in the lessons that naturally interested him. But even with this handicap, he surpassed eighty percent of the other students. A fact that would probably not make him and Antoine any more popular in the long run. The vast majority liked very well to spit on those who make sure that it becomes aware of it’s ordinariness, Toni thought and basked in his arrogant uniqueness.
Then once again it was time for religion.
MADWORLD
It really felt good to be the hunter and not the hunted this time, I must confess. I followed the men who were walking in front of me in the goose march - occasionally grazing the wall on their left shoulder so as not to lose their orientation or stumble over the useless rails - with a generous safety distance through the orphaned subway corridors.
They didn’t make it hard for me.
Under the weight of their cluttered up backpacks, each of them loaded with more and equally stuffed bags, the three were neither able to move particularly quickly through the darkness, nor did I have to be particularly quiet myself. Their own gasping made it impossible for the men to hear my footsteps. It was immediately obvious to me that these people belonged here, because they moved with great certainty and confidence through the tunnels of the Frankfurt subway network that connected Ivan’s community with the rest of the destroyed city in uncountable ways.
Only now and then did the one who went ahead switch on his flashlight for a few seconds so that they could orientate themselves. But these short moments were always sufficient for me to recognize their contours and to keep the distance between me and them constant.
I could only hope that the lamp would flash again to mark the point where the three thieves would leave the subway network.
I was not worried for my safety at the moment. On the one hand, Stumptooth, as ordered, had given me all my equipment when he told me about Ivan’s order to monitor the tunnel, and on the other hand I found, along with bandages, disinfectant, a flashlight and spare batteries, nine bolts for the crossbow in my backpack. Those weren’t my bolts. Surely they had landed in my backpack on Ivan’s orders. Also my survival knife and a new machete had been among what Stumptooth gave me. But what contributed even more to my self-confidence was the knowledge, that the three men in front of me were indeed armed, but all so heavily loaded with stolen goods that - if they should actually discover me by some stupid
coincidence - I would have fled faster than they would be able to point their rifles in the right direction.
I had hidden in the shadow of a tent on the subway tracks, where the hurters whom Ivan gave shelter were accommodated to, and only could guess the contours of their weapons as the three sneaked into the tunnels. Nevertheless, I was quite sure that they were carbines or looted sporting weapons and not some of the assault rifles that I had discovered and that Ivan had since snatched under his nails and then distributed to his boys. In the beginning the three men in front of me had also worn the red armband, which marked the men and women who enjoyed the special trust of the big Eastern European. They took them off when they reached the tunnel. The treachery they committed against him had to weigh heavily. Personally, I wasn’t so stingy about Ivan’s property. Seen from afar, they did exactly what Wanda and I wanted to do once we had earned enough room for an own maneuver like this. I didn’t even want to imagine what he would do to those men when I´d be back to report to him. But first I had to find out more about the place they wanted to bring the food, equipment and ammunition they had stolen.
I was torn from my thoughts when the foremost of the men once again switched on his flashlight for a moment, this time a little longer, unknowingly marking the spot where they took an old emergency exit from the subway network to get to the surface. I fervently hoped that they would make chasing me in the streets of Frankfurt just as easy for me as they had done down in the tunnels.
When the light of the lamp had faded again, I counted to ten. Then I accelerated my steps so as not to let their lead become too big. I couldn’t afford to lose them. Also now and then pressing my left shoulder against the tunnel wall to make sure that it was still there and I hadn’t drifted off in the darkness, I rushed after them. When I assumed that they must have left the underground railway network by now, I dared to switch on my own flashlight.
I saw that I too had almost reached the emergency exit and carefully climbed up the weathered concrete steps. While I switched off the lamp and took the crossbow off my shoulder, I thought once again about the past events.
The time Wanda, Mariam and I had to spend in our tent, which compared to the general conditions in Ivan’s camp was a kind of golden cage, went by painfully slowly. And, besides physical training, improvised school lessons for little Mariam, and somehow taciturn and limited to the bare essentials conversations between Wanda and me, my thinking was determined only by a heavy, overwhelming boredom. I don’t know if Ivan intended it this way, but when he finally ordered me go on the first patrol, the relief I felt was overwhelming. Finally out of that fucking tent, finally start putting our plan into action. This relief almost triggered something like a strange gratitude in me.
Almost.
I knew that Wanda desired to do something at least as much as me, probably even more. But there was nothing I could do to help her. Ivan didn’t see her as relevant, but merely as a leverage to blackmail me into cooperation. And so she remained in the tent, cursed to more or less do nothing but wait. So I was sent on patrols. Sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. Sometimes even for a whole day on one occasion. I was fully aware that these first patrols were tests and that the constantly changing team not only had the task of guarding the one or the other road or securing the Holbein bridge or the tunnels, but that the men above all had instructions to grill me really good.
I was serious, taciturn and unwilling, reacted to provocation only with a snort or, I hoped, with evil looks. There were plenty of these provocations and they were mostly primitive sexual jokes about Wanda. When a skinny, red-haired guy, whose name I don’t even remember, announced that several of Ivan’s boys wanted to take on Wanda and also Mariam while I was on patrol with the group, and in addition even dared to ask me directly what it would feel like not to be able to do something about it, I had already knocked out several of his teeth and smashed the cheekbone with a tin canteen before his friends succeeded in restraining me.
Of course I knew he was lying but he had hit a nerve, because I was actually more than concerned and tense about the whole situation. And so, as I watched him humiliated, pain-bent and alone, being sent back to the camp at the main station and I had to stay on guard with the rest of the men, I hoped that the wild dogs, which had become an increasing problem in the last few weeks, would smell the blood dripping out of his smashed face and tear the damn bastard to pieces. And actually, I hadn’t seen the man again since then.
After some time had passed I thought I understood the system behind Ivan’s tests, because the next patrol team of his boys with whom I was sent outside was completely different. As if I had proved to Ivan that I really cared about Wanda and that he had me in his hands, the men now tried to fraternize with me, asked about my past, complained about Ivan’s style of leadership, made derogatory comments about the hurters on the tracks and so on and so forth. I was aware that any of my reactions would be immediately passed on to Ivan or his captain Rolf and I gave them what they wanted to hear, keeping as close to the truth as possible.
Yes, I wasn’t particularly happy about my situation, that’s true, but I knew that I could have done worse. Ivan gained my reluctant respect for the way he directed life in his camp and, yes, yes in the end I might really owe my life to him. Me be a good grateful slave. See? See?
Of course, I made no mention of my escape plans. On the contrary. The bigger the number of stakes with his boys, the more I seemed to lower my guard and now and then I even laughed with the others about this or that obscene joke. From time to time I drank with the men instead of, as before, returning to Wanda and Mariam in the tent immediately after the patrols. When I entered the camp I still had to give all my weapons and equipment to Stumptooth, who took them, mumbling moodily as usual, and always seemed to know exactly when we would return and which entrance we would take.
Back from the patrols, I told Mariam and Wanda what I had seen, experienced and learned about the political microcosm we were imprisoned in. Fortunately, the patrols themselves were mostly quite uneventful and except for a few minor clashes with members of other groups who luckily had been without casualties or seriously injured on either side, we confined ourselves to decimating the wild dogs when an opportunity arose and to keeping an eye on the area entrusted to us.
At the beginning Wanda and Mariam were always overjoyed to see me again being well and in one piece, but over the weeks a certain routine had set in. Soon it was almost as if I was going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening. A little bit of nine-to-five pre-war family joy, if you will.
Wanda became more and more inactive, and one day, after ignoring my return for hours, she expressed her frustration.
Whether I’d become one of them? Whether I had forgot our plan?
If I had forgotten Da Silva and his madmen, because if so, she immediately would shoot her way out of the camp, here and now, and would not feel the slightest sadness if I were to stand in her way.
I assured her that all of this was not the case, but it has not been easy to convince her.
When I had finished the next job - a watch in the tunnels leading to the damned barricade where I had been captured by Stumptooth and the bridgeman - I asked the patrol leader, who I now knew was friends with blond Rolf, for a meeting with Ivan. Wanda definitely needed something to do and with a little luck she would soon be able to earn herself some freedom of movement in the camp and push our escape plans on another front. But right now it looked like the audience I had asked for wasn’t going to happen. Ivan had more important things to do, they said.
Instead Rolf came along on the next patrol.
I banished all these thoughts from my head as I reached the top of the stairs, carefully looking for the men I was hunting. On the other side of the two-lane road, which lay strangely intact and quiet in the snow-bright and the moonlit night, I registered a gas station with an adjoining fast food restaurant. Three of the fuel pumps stood out in bizarre corners like overturned grav
estones in front of the bombed building. But the burger restaurant had taken the biggest damage and lay almost completely in ruins. The golden-yellow logo had fallen from the roof onto the small forecourt. An ironic reminder of better times, even though I hadn’t been a particular big fan of fast food before the war. Two more fuel pumps were undamaged, at least externally, and there wasn’t even the slightest trace of the last one. I marked the gas station in my brain, because maybe there still was fuel left to plunder. That would certainly get me some bonus points from Ivan.
Slightly shocked about the way my thoughts had taken, I remembered the reason for my being here.
Street signs, hardly readable. German Library. Eckenheimer Landstraße. Four-lane street. Green stripes, wildly overgrown. I started walking. The quiet crunching of feet in the snow. A big bird flew past me. Must have been an owl. The three men fought their way across the green strip on from there right into the thicket. What had once been a park had meanwhile turned into a snow-covered jungle, and that’s exactly where they wanted to go.
It was easy for me to follow their noises and footprints in the snow, and so as not to get discovered, I always took care to stand still when they did so too. Through the thicket and all the big, old trees that had to be circumnavigated, we only slowly made progress and I believed that we were moving east.
After a few hundred meters the thicket opened and the number of old trees suddenly decreased. I watched them crossing the new and slightly brighter ground. Were those dark spots between the crouched bushes gravestones? After watching the three disappear between the trees on the other side of the strange clearing and the cracking of small twigs reached my ears, I set out to also carefully cross this area. My first impression was right.
They were gravestones that rose up here in rank and file between the bushes. We were in a generously laid out cemetery. Using the gravestones as cover and watching every step I took, I continued my hunt. When the tree growth became denser again, I had lost sight of my prey.
Under Ivans Knout: The Gospel of Madness (Book 2 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 3