Assignment Gestapo (25 page)

‘O.K.’

The exchange was effected. Porta could hardly get his’ hands on the photographs fast enough. The driver sat holding his opium cigarette, watching Porta’s face change as his little elephant’s eyes gobbled up one piece of pornography after another.

‘Like ’em?’ he said, casually.

Porta swallowed a few times, cleared his throat, made an attempt to speak in his normal register.

‘Not bad,’ he allowed. ‘Some of ’em were quite horn-making . . . I suppose,’ he said, grudgingly, ‘I could always let ’em out for hire when I’ve had an eyeful . . . Tiny’s fool enough to promise me a year’s pay just to have ’em in his hands for a while . . . Yeah, all right, it’s a deal.’

The remaining eleven cigarettes were handed over. Porta put the photographs in his pocket and the driver produced three bundles of bank notes, each with a band round it. Porta stood stolidly counting them.

The driver sat and sniffed his opium cigarettes. They were firm and well packed, the best he had seen in a long time. He wondered if it would be worth the trouble and expense to get Porta drunk one day and try to discover where he obtained his supply of opium—

‘Hang on,’ said Porta. ‘I’m a hundred marks short.’

‘You can’t be. There’s a thousand in each pack, I counted them myself.’

‘Count again, then.’

He did so. Three times. One hundred marks short. He shook his head in bewilderment, but the call of the opium was strong and he had no mind to jeopardize his chances for the sake of a hundred marks. He handed over another banknote.

‘That’s better.’ Porta slipped an elastic band round the three bundles and buttoned them away in a pocket. ‘And don’t forget that address you promised me.’

‘I’ll give it you right away. It’s near the Alster. A white house with a black roof, you can’t miss it.’ He scribbled something on a sheet of paper and handed it over. ‘It’s a strange-looking place, it used to belong to some Chinks.’

‘Did they leave any of their birds behind? I could just fancy a nice little bit of Eastern Promise . . . They say,’ said Porta, carelessly, ‘that they can do it standing on their heads with their feet in the air.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, but you’ll get your money’s worth all right. Just tell ’em you’ve come from Rudolph. Rudolph Kleber. They know me. They—’ He broke off, suddenly stiffened. ‘Watch out, he’s coming back!’

Instantly, Rudolph was transferred into the perfect chauffeur, sitting patient and upright behind the steering wheel, his opium cigarettes disappearing into a hidden pocket by some practised sleight of hand.

Porta stepped back a pace or two and snapped into the regulation guard position. He looked as if he had stood without moving for a hundred years. Only his eyes swivelled round, watching as three men came out of the building. Paul Bielert, dressed in black from head to foot; the SD Unterscharführer, one hand on his holster; and Lt. Ohlsen walking between them. They stepped into the car and the long low grey Mercedes rolled majestically from the barracks.

Porta watched until it had disappeared. He wondered for a moment where they were taking the Lieutenant and why, but he had more pressing matters on his mind and he soon deserted his post, left the barracks to look after themselves and slipped away to the garages. There, crouched behind a pile of oil drums, he gloated over his spoils. He went through the photographs, studying each one in minute and luscious detail, until the excitement became unbearable and he had to put them away for a more auspicious moment. He took out his bundle of banknotes and counted them again. Then, from another pocked, he took out an odd hundred mark note. With a satisfied grin, he slipped it under the elastic band with the rest of the pile. That would teach that fool Kleber not to keep his eyes open!

Eventually, he deigned to return to his post, where he found Heide waiting for him.

‘Where the devil have you been?’ he snapped. ‘Tiny’s been along twice already and both times you weren’t here!’

‘Piss off,’ said Porta, in his usual amiable fashion. ‘You give me a pain in the arse . . . I had more important things to do than bugger about playing at toy soldiers.’

‘Sod that!’ cried Heide, growing excited. ‘You’re supposed to be on guard and you’ll bloody well BE on guard! You take your orders from me, you don’t make them up yourself!’

‘Who fucking says?’ jeered Porta.

‘I do!’ shouted Heide. He paused, took a deep breath, and continued. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know it, but we’ve had the Gestapo here today. They’ve just run through the barracks like a dose of salts. Looking for you, I shouldn’t wonder. I always said you’d end up with a rope round your neck.’

‘Not this time, chum. They’ve come and they’ve gone, and it wasn’t me they was after.’

‘Well, anyway,’ said Heide, sullenly, ‘I’m sick and tired of continually having to cover up for you. Next time it happens you can bloody well take the consequences and go hang for all I care.’

‘O.K. Suits me. I can look after myself.’

Nonchalantly, Porta slipped a hand into his pocket and brought out the photographs. Nonchalantly, he began to study them. He passed through them just fast enough to whet Heide’s appetite; just slowly enough for him to have a glimpse of the subject matter. Heide momentarily forgot his grievance. He leaned towards Porta, craning over his shoulder.

‘Where’d you get that lot from?’

‘Mind it,’ said Porta, at once shuffling the photographs together and holding them out of sight. He laid a finger on the side of his misshapen nose. ‘None of your business.’

Heide breathed avidly down his neck.

‘Let’s have a dekko.’

‘With pleasure. You can have them for an hour, if you like.’

Heide at once stretched out a hand, two patches of colour spreading fast across his cheek bones. Porta flipped casually through the photographs once again.

‘Smashing, ain’t they? Take a look at those tits . . .’

‘Well, come on, let’s have ’em, then!’

‘Mind,’ said Porta, judiciously, ‘it’ll be a waste unless you got time to enjoy ’em properly . . . If I were you, I’d take ’em down to the bogs and shut yourself up for an hour or two. Quick one off the wrist and you’ll be well away . . .’

Heide was beginning to sweat.

‘How much do you want for them?’

‘Nothing. They ain’t for sale. Only just got ’em, didn’t I?’

‘Well, then, what – what do you—’

Heide’s mouth was twitching so much he could hardly speak.

‘You can hire ’em, if you want. Hundred marks an hour for the whole lot, or five marks for singles.’

‘You what?’ Heide’s speech abruptly returned to him. ‘Hundred marks an hour to look at a load of scabby old whores? You must be bleeding joking!’

Porta hunched a shoulder and put the photographs away inside his empty gas mask case.

‘Take it or leave it, nobody’s forcing you.’

He strolled away again, leaving Heide in an indecisive heap of desire and indignation. It was not long before Heide had caught up with him and was muttering hotly into his ear.

‘Give them to me. Here’s your hundred marks. And I suppose you know that it’s daylight robbery?’

Porta looked round at him.

‘Well, if you’re so oversexed you can’t stop yourself looking at dirty pictures, it’s hardly any fault of mine, is it?’

His face livid with lust and burning with shame, Heide snatched at the photographs, thrust them deep into a pocket and walked off without a word. At the end of his guard duty he disappeared into the latrines and was seen no more for a full hour.

‘They’ve taken Lt. Ohlsen off with them,’ announced Barcelona, as Porta returned to the guard room.

‘Yeah? So what?’ said Porta. ‘He can take care of himself . . . What they nabbed him for, anyway?’

‘Nobody knows, but I can tell you one thing: all the top brass is up in arms about it.’

‘Fat lot of good that’ll do.’

‘Old Hinka’s foaming at the mouth, and the Adjutant’s flat put on the carpet. According to Feldwebel Grün, we shan’t be seeing Ohlsen back here again. Looks like we’ll have a new CO pretty soon.’

‘It’s obviously something serious,’ said the Legionnaire, who had just come in and had caught the tail end of our remarks. ‘I saw them as they drove off. An SS Mercedes with Auntie Bielert in the back of it. And you know what means . . . Section IV/2a. They’re only concerned with the big stuff there.’

‘What can he have done?’ I demanded.

Porta lifted one indifferent shoulder and pulled a face.

‘Trouble with flaming officers, they never know when to stop talking . . . Clack clack clack, here there and bleeding everywhere, anyone could be listening to ’em . . . But they’re so much in love with the sound of their own voices yapping on they don’t care if people do do a bit of the old eavesdropping. They LIKE ’em to eavesdrop . . . blimey, they sometimes talk so flaming loud you can’t HELP but eavesdrop . . . And then they sit back on their great fat arses with their chests covered in bits of tin and they think they’re safe and that nobody can’t touch ’em, just because they’re sodding officers . . . don’t seem to realize that when it comes to dealing with people like Bielert you might just as well be a private as a lieutenant for all the bleeding good it’ll do you.’

‘I’ll bet you a pound to a pinch of pigshit,’ said Steiner, ‘we won’t never see Ohlsen again.’

‘That’s for sure,’ agreed the Legionnaire.

Tiny suddenly clattered into the room, making more noise than usual and plainly spoiling for a fight. He tossed his rifle into a corner, bounced his helmet on to Barcelona’s feet and spat, en passant, into someone’s cup.

‘What’s eating you?’ grumbled Barcelona, kicking the helmet to the far side of the room.

Tiny swung round on him.

‘I’ll tell you what’s flaming eating me!’ he roared, like a bull in its death agony. ‘I’ve only spent the whole of my perishing guard duty chatting up a bird along by the electric fencing—’

‘What were you doing along by the electric fencing?’ demanded the Old Man, suspiciously.

‘Chatting up this bird, like I said. I—’

‘You had no right to be there,’ objected the Old Man.

‘Well, I was, so balls to that!’ retorted Tiny.

‘And what happened?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t she play?’

‘Oh, she’d play, all right,’ said Tiny, bitterly. ‘Only trouble was, just before I got started on the job I had mis mad urge to have a piss . . .’

‘So?’

‘So I pissed . . .’ He turned and held out his hands, appealingly. ‘You ever pissed on an electric fence?’

A great roar of laughter went up. Tiny scowled.

‘It’s not flaming funny! I damn nearly got myself burnt to a cinder . . . and her just standing there sniggering, with her knickers in her hand, laughing fit to bust, and me trying to stop pissing and not being able to . . . Jesus Christ almighty!’ He smote a fist heavily on to the table, furious at the injustice of it all. ‘A bird all ready and waiting to be screwed, and I couldn’t do nothing with it . . .’

‘Very frustrating,’ said Porta. ‘Accept my commiserations, mate. I know what it’s like, I’ve had it happen to me. Not because of an electric fence, of course, we’re not all that stupid, but the same sort of situation—’

‘And now I feel as randy as a goat!’ bellowed Tiny.

Porta put a hand on his arm and winked at him.

‘I’ve got the very thing you need to help you out of a fix . . . a set of photographs . . . all genuine, all unique . . . better than the bluest films you ever saw . . . I’ll let you have ’em for an hour for one hundred marks. Just as soon as Heide’s finished wanking over ’em . . . What do you say?’

Tiny abruptly forgot his accident with the electric fencing.

‘Can I have ’em on credit?’

Porta’s expression at once changed.

‘On credit?’ he said. ‘On credit?’ he repeated, his voice rising by half a horrified octave. ‘What d’you think I’m running, a bleeding charity or something?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Tiny, hastily. ‘No need to get your knickers twisted . . . Hundred marks, you say?’

‘A hundred marks,’ confirmed Porta.

‘I’ll get it!’ Tiny made for the door. ‘I’ll get it, I tell you! Just don’t let ’em out to anyone else before I get back!’

‘I wonder if I could get some photocopies made?’ mused Porta, returning to his seat. ‘That way, I could lend ’em round the whole barracks . . .’

11
German battalion of Communist volunteers

‘
Let me see,’ said the Legionnaire, ‘I was nineteen when I saw my first execution. It was at Casablanca, I remember. Some idiot who’d been twelve years in the army and suddenly gone berserk. Taken it into his head to go galloping off God knows where . . . Thought he could get away with desertion, poor fool . . . Of course, I’ve seen hundreds of others since then, but somehow you never manage to forget the first one
.’

‘
I was only eighteen,’ said Barcelona. ‘It was in Madrid, when I was with the Thälman Battalion.
11
We had to shoot a kid of about my own age behind the abattoirs. He hadn’t done anything, poor sod. He just had a rich father, that was all. So we shot him . . . and Christ, what a hash we made of it! No training, no experience . . . we blew half his head away!
’

Heide shrugged a contemptuous shoulder
.

‘
Personally, I never trouble my head over executions. Can’t see the difference between shooting a man who’s standing up against a brick wall and shooting a man who’s hiding in the trenches. It all comes to the same thing. It’s all war
.’

‘
You remember that time we had to shoot that telephonist bird?’ demanded Tiny, with his usual eagerness for recalling gruesome spectacles. ‘That was a right farce, that was! It was Sver’s fault. Him and Stege. Wanted to act the gentleman and save her unnecessary suffering . . . and while they was buggering about she took to her heels and scarpered
.’

Porta gave a loud crack of laughter
.

‘
I remember! We had to chase her back into the building and all up and down the bleeding corridors
—’