Assignment Gestapo (45 page)

Lt. Ohlsen wiped his eyes on his sleeve and listlessly took the letter. Stever watched him with narrowed eyes.

‘Just read it,’ he said. ‘Don’t try eating it.’

The Lieutenant ran his eyes quickly over the few lines of writing. They were from the Old Man, but nothing could interest him, nothing could comfort him, now that his capsule was gone.

Stever held out an impatient hand, snatched the letter back and began himself to read it.

‘Who’s this bloke Alfred he’s on about? It’s that character with the scar, ain’t it?’ He looked across at Ohlsen, who nodded. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Stever, ‘but I still got the feeling he holds a sort of grudge against me. I don’t see why he should. After all, I’m only an Obergefreiter, it’s not my fault if people got to die . . .’

He brooded uncomfortably a few moments, then his face slowly cleared.

‘I tell you what. You could do me a good turn, if you felt like it. After all, I done you a good turn bringing you this letter . . . All you’ve got to do is write a few words about me on the back of it. Obergefreiter Stever is a good soldier what always carries out his orders . . . He has treated me well . . . Something like that. How about it? Eh? With a PS saying about how I’m a friend to all the prisoners . . . And then put your name and rank and the date and all, that’ll make it official, like.’

Stever pulled out a pencil and offered it to the Lieutenant. Ohlsen raised an eyebrow.

‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘Prove you are a friend to a prisoner and I’ll do it for you.’

‘Prove it?’ Stever laughed. ‘You’ve got a nerve!’

‘You don’t think you’ve got an even larger one?’ mildly suggested Ohlsen.

Stever bit his lip. He looked down at the letter and read again the dreaded name of the type with the scar.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, sullenly.

‘Give me back the capsule. That’s all I ask.’

‘You must be raving! I’d be for the high jump myself if they found you’d gone and killed yourself before they could get their hands on you.’

Lt. Ohlsen shrugged. He was suddenly past caring.

‘It’s up to you. I’ve got to die anyway, so I’m not that interested. I thought I was, but I’m not. Now that it’s actually come to the point, I’m not . . . But if I were you, Stever, if you value your, life at all. I should think very seriously about getting a steel corset made for yourself . . . You can’t escape from the Legionnaire, you know. He always catches up with people sooner or later.’

Stever gnawed anxiously at his bottom lip.

‘I’d like to help you, I really would. I’d do anything to get you out of this fix . . . only I can’t give you the capsule, it’s more than my life’s worth . . .’

‘Please yourself,’ said Ohlsen, turning away and not bothering to stand to attention. ‘I couldn’t give a damn either way.’

They came for him just after the evening meal. They took him out to the courtyard through an underground passage. The priest led the way, intoning a mournful prayer. The executions were to take place in a small, enclosed courtyard mat was safe from the prying eyes of unauthorized persons. The scaffold was set up, and on the platform were the executioner and his two assistants, dressed in frock coats, top hats and white gloves.

The condemned men were to be executed in pairs, and Lt. Ohlsen’s partner in death was already waiting. When they were both present, the prison Governor checked their identities and the first assistant stepped forward and cut off the epaulettes, depriving them of their rank and finally dishonouring them.

Lt. Ohlsen stood watching as his partner slowly climbed the ladder. The priest began to pray for the salvation of his soul. The two assistants helped the man to position himself and tied him down. The executioner raised his axe. The crescent-shaped blade flashed bright in the sinking rays of the sun. The executioner opened his mouth and shouted out his justification of the deed he was about to perform.

‘For the Führer, the Reich and the German people!’

The axe fell. It met the resistant flesh with a faint thump and sliced straight through it. It was a clean blow. Strong and well placed by a man who was an expert. The head rolled neatly into the waiting basket and two jets of blood spurted from the surprised neck. The body twitched and contorted. With quick, deft movements the assistants tipped it off the platform and into the waiting coffin. The head was snatched up and set between the legs of the corpse.

The audience relaxed. Oberkriegsgerichtstrat Dr. Jeckstadt, President of the court which had passed sentence, slowly lit a cigarette and turned to Dr. Beckmann.

‘Say what you like about execution,’ he remarked, ‘but you can’t deny that it’s quick, efficient and simple.’

‘When it goes according to plan,’ muttered a Rittmeister, who was standing behind Jeckstadt and had overheard him.

‘I must confess,’ said Dr. Beckmann, ‘that I find it an unpleasant spectacle. I never seem able to stop myself wondering how it must feel to be up there, waiting for the axe to fall . . . a curious sensation—’

‘My dear fellow,’ said Jeckstadt, comfortably, ‘why torture yourself with fruitless speculation? These people have betrayed their country and they deserve their just punishment. But you and I—’ He smiled, as at an absurd idea – ‘you and I are never likely to find ourselves in such a situation! One thing is quite certain, my dear Doctor; if it weren’t for us legal fellows, the country would soon be in chaos. We are, if I may make so bold, virtually indispensable.’

‘Of course, you’re quite right,’ agreed Beckmann, turning back to watch the second show of the evening. ‘No country can survive without its legal system.’

Lt. Ohlsen climbed slowly and steadily up the ladder. The assistants positioned him. His mind was a blank. Almost a blank . . . He remembered that in the seconds before dying a man’s whole life is supposed to pass before his eyes, and he wondered ahnost fretfully why his own life was not even now unfolding before him, spreading out its memories for his last minute contemplation.

He began consciously to force his mind back into the past, back into his own previous private memories, his own personal history, but before any very vivid pictures could come to him the axe crashed down and his life was over.

18
You’re lucky with women, my friend . . .

†
Dear friends we’re fine today, but tomorrow we die . . .

Down in the depths of Porta’s stomach, fourteen pints of beer, nine vodkas and seven absinthes were fighting for possession, while Porta himself staggered across the room towards the piano. He walked bow legged because he was too drunk to control his muscles. He rolled pom side to side, belching and clutching at tables and chairs to support himself. Now and again, during his passage across the room, he swept bottles and glasses to the floor. Three times he himself fell to the floor and had to be picked up again
.

At last he reached fas goal, but the effort had proved too much for the disputatious contents of his stomach. Sprawling across the piano, Porta opened his mouth and let everything pour out
.

The pianist fell backwards off his stool
.

‘Filthy sodding shit!’ he cried. ‘Look what you’ve done to my flaming piano!

By way of reply, Porta merely shot out an involuntary hand and swept a full glass of beer over the keyboard. He rolled round to the front of the piano and collapsed heavily on to the stool. With a frown of concentration on his face and his fingers large as pork sausages, heavy as lead weights, uncertain of their direction as straws in a gale, he began drunkenly to play the semblance of a well-known tune
.

Bernard the Boozer jumped upon a table and thumped at the ceiling with two bottles of champagne. The room rang with the sound of drunken voices in something roughly approaching unison:

‘Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor,
stand eine Latent und steht sie noch davor
so woll’n wir uns da wiedersehn
bei der Laterne woll’n wir stehn
wie einst, Lili Marleen
.’

Only Tiny did not join in. He had a girl on his knee and was steadily undressing her, with the same careless determination with which one might pluck a chicken. The girl was alternately kicking and screaming, not sure whether to enjoy herself or to be outraged
.

The pianist, unable any longer to stand the sight of his piano covered in beer and vomit, made a determined effort to oust Porta from the stool. Porta stopped playing, wound his arms lovingly about the man’s neck and hung on. Seconds later, the unfortunate pianist found himself flying headfirst across the room in the direction of the kitchen. He fetched up against the wall, at the feet of Heide and an almost comatose Barcelona
.

At the same time as these festivities were taking place, a procession of people trod solemnly along a passage in the prison of Fuhlsbüttel. There were six SD soldiers, a priest, a doctor, several court officials and an old lady. They walked haltingly, almost reluctantly, towards a green baize door at the end of the passage. It seemed that they were anxious to postpone the moment when they would have to turn the handle and enter. But the moment inevitably came, and the procession moved slowly through the door and into the room beyond
.

Quarter of an hour later, the door re-opened and the procession re-appeared. They were walking faster now. Six SD soldiers, the priest, the doctor and the several court officials, Only the old lady was no longer with them
.

CHAPTER NINE

A Birthday Party

T
HE
noise that poured out from the ‘Three Hares’ on the Davidstrasse could be heard in hideous clarity several streets away, even as far as the infirmary on Bernhard Nocht Strasse, where envious patients tossed and turned and cursed. it was the noise of sheer, exhilarating, incapable drunkenness and it bellied forth into the night in a continuous crescendo of sound.

The owner of the ‘Three Hares’, popularly known as Bernard the Boozer, was celebrating his birthday in a private room at the back of the bistrot. Only the most favoured of the establishment’s regulars had been allowed in.

Tiny was one of the first to arrive, early in the afternoon. He had found the Boozer enthroned on a small step ladder, directing the operations for the evening’s entertainment. Paper garlands and Chinese lanterns were being strung across the room, crates of beer and champagne stacked in the corners.

‘Someone told me it was your birthday,’ began Tiny.

Bernard nodded.

‘Someone was right.’

‘O.K.,’ said Tiny. ‘In that case I’d like to wish you many happy returns. Just wanted to get my facts right first’

‘Yeah?’

Bernard looked at him and smiled knowingly, then swung round on his ladder and shouted at a youth who was staggering beneath a crate of beer.

‘Not out there, you fool! Over there in the corner!’

Tiny’s eye hungrily followed the crate on its journey across the room, then switched back casually to the Boozer.

‘You – ah – having a bit of a do, are you?’

‘That’s it.’ Bernard blew his nose between his fingers, directly over a large pan of meat. He looked down at it, indifferently. ‘It’s all right, it’s only a stew, it can do with a bit more seasoning. In any case, everything tastes pretty much the same once it gets into that lot . . . One of the girls emptied the coffee grounds into it last week – nobody said a thing. All mixes in together, you can’t taste the difference.’

‘No,’ said Tiny. ‘I guess not.’ He gazed in wonderment at the rows of bottles ranged behind the bar. ‘Who’s going to get through all that lot, then?’

Bernard looked at him a moment, then turned and spat through the open window.

‘My mates,’ he said, simply.

Tiny grunted, not sure whether to lay immediate and automatic claim to being amongst the Boozer’s most intimate circle of acquaintances or whether to pursue some other tactic.

‘We’re going away again soon,’ he ventured, wiping the back of his hand across his panting mouth.

‘Yeah. That’s the way it goes.’

The Boozer nodded his head without sympathy. Tiny persevered.

‘We’re being sent back to the front. The battalion’s almost up to full strength again. We’ve got a whole lot of new tanks and all . . . only keep that under your hat, it’s supposed to be top secret. It’s all right telling a pal like you, I can trust a pal like you to keep his trap shut, but don’t go gabbing it around, like.’

‘Shouldn’t dream of it,’ said Bernard. ‘Don’t know anyone who’s interested.’

He pulled himself upright, stepped on to the top rung of the ladder and casually attached a paper chain to the portion of the ceiling immediately above his head. The ladder remained firm, but the Boozer wobbled perilously. He had been drinking beer since long before breakfast.

‘Watch it,’ said Tiny, stretching out an enormous calloused hand. ‘Don’t want to go breaking your neck on your birthday, do you?’ He settled Bernard back on his perch and gave him an ingratiating smile. ‘How many years does this make, then?’

‘Forty-two . . . and you can get a couple of bottles of beer over here and drink my health if you like.’

Tiny’s arm instantly stretched out to the nearest row of bottles and his vast hand closed over two of them. He passed one over to the Boozer and raised the other to his mouth, closing his teeth over the cap and starting to prise it off.

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Bernard. He held out a hand and looked Tiny squarely in the eye. ‘Where’s my present? You can’t come here drinking my booze and saying happy birthday without bringing me a present’

Tiny lowered the bottle.

‘You’re quite right,’ he agreed, cordially. ‘Got it right here with me, as a matter of fact. Good thing you mentioned it, I got a memory like a sieve.’

He sunk a hand into the depths of a trouser pocket and emerged with a minute packet done up in crude pink paper. He held it out to Bernard, who examined it with interest.