Assignment Gestapo (46 page)

‘What is it?’

‘You’ll never guess,’ said Tiny, wrenching open his bottle. ‘Not in a million years . . . It’s just what you’ve always wanted.’

Bernard tore open the paper to disclose a cheap bottle opener. He hurled it across the room with an oath.

‘That’s the tenth bloody bottle opener I’ve received today! Don’t you load of imbeciles have any imagination?’

‘It’s the thought that counts,’ said Tiny. He tipped back bis head and poured half the bottle of beer straight down his throat. ‘Didn’t no one ever tell you that?’

‘Sod the thought!’ growled Bernard. ‘Who wants five hundred bleeding bottle openers?’

‘Ah, well,’ said Tiny, wisely. ‘It’s always the same on birthdays, ain’t it? You don’t never get what you really want.’

Tiny stayed on after drinking Bernard’s health. He stayed on to help with the stage managing and to drink his host’s health a few more times in a goodly variety of beer and spirits. And when he had done all that, the first of the guests began to arrive and he stayed to look after them and make them welcome. And then the guests drank Bernard’s health, and Tiny joined in, and then more people came and more toasts were drunk, and even before the celebration had officially begun Tiny had his head out of the window and his fingers down his throat, making way for the next round of drinks.

Porta arrived mid-way through the evening. It was evident that he had stopped somewhere en route. He forged through the crowd and hit Bernard lustily on the back.

‘Many happy returns! Many many happy returns! Many many – did you get my present, by the way?’

Bernard blinked, at once suspicious.

‘What present would that be?’

‘Well, it was a bottle opener in the shape of a woman – Tiny was going to bring it—’

‘Yeah, I received that piece of crap,’ said Bernard, contemptuously.

‘That’s O.K., then. It was from Tiny and me both. Joint present. We chose it together. Just what old Bernie the Boozer could do with, we said. Save his teeth. Save his false teeth. We thought you’d go for that. We thought you’d—’

‘Ah, give your arse a chance!’ snarled his host, pushing him to one side.

At some stage in the evening, before we became paralytic, we sat down to dinner. There was much pushing and jostling and general vituperation, one or two fights broke out and one or two chairs were broken, but finally everyone was seated more or less to his satisfaction. Bernard called on the two serving girls, who were dressed – overdressed, according to some people present in black briefs and tiny aprons the size of postage stamps.

‘Hey, Helga!’ Porta called out to one of them as she came towards him with a plate. ‘Tiny tells me you gone and shave yourself like a French tart! That right? Can I have a feel?’

Helga slammed a plate of cabbage in front of him and stalked away without a word, her buttocks moving haughtily from side to side in their tight black pants. Porta whinnied like a horse and slapped a fist straight into his dish of cabbage.

At the end of the meal we fêted Bernard with a birthday boozing song. It had nothing whatever to do with birthdays, being almost exclusively preoccupied with sexual contortions and the perversion of a language, but Bernard accepted it as a fitting tribute to a man celebrating his 42nd year on earth.

We drank so much there was not one amongst us who had not yet vomited. With an inebriated sense of our own powers, we snatched up our host, tossed him into the air and caught him as he came down. The third time we all collapsed heavily to the floor, with Bernard buried beneath us. Porta staggered on to the table and stamped for silence. Heide supported him by banging two bottles together. The bottles promptly broke and a shower of glass rained down upon the group on the floor.

‘Shut your bleeding cakeholes!’ shouted Heide. ‘Joseph Porta wants to speak!’

At last we sorted ourselves out again and a sort of silence fell upon us, broken only by belches and the breaking of wind, by the sound of a man retching or by the pouring of beer.

‘Bernard the Boozer,’ began Porta, in stern, serious tones, ‘Bernie the Boozer, old pal Bernie, you’re forty-two today and we all know you’re the biggest shit that ever walked this flaming earth, but we love you for it all the same!’ Porta threw out his arms in an expansive gesture and almost fell off the table. ‘We’re all shits together!’ he cried, in tones of ringing exultation. ‘That’s why we’re here tonight, drinking the health of the biggest shit of the lot! And now we’ll have another song . . . one, two, three!’

He beat time with his feet on the table. One foot he raised too high and brought down too hard. It missed the table altogether and crashed down in to Heide’s lap. They disappeared together in a cursing tangle over the side.

At the far end of the table, Tiny had taken possession of Helga and was tugging manically at her black pants. Helga was kicking and biting for all she was worth. One or two people were placing bets on the probable winner.

Heide stayed under the table, leaning drunkenly against someone’s legs and talking to himself. He talked about war and being a soldier. It was all very tedious and it was not surprising that he soon fell into a stupor.

Barcelona, finding himself next to Bernard the Boozer, began compulsively to tell him about Spain. Barcelona always told anyone who would listen, or at least keep a decent silence, about his experiences in Spain. He demonstrated bull fighting and a battle with tanks somewhere near Alicante, and the two activities became somehow inextricably merged until Barcelona was charging up and down the room with his head lowered in imitation of a bull and an imaginary sub machine gun firing straight into the floor.

‘What the hell’s that meant to be?’ demanded Porta, crawling out from under the table and blinking as Barcelona flashed past.

Barcelona screeched to a halt, regarded Porta with drunken dignity and sat down.

‘It was at Alicante I scored one of my greatest military successes,’ he said, very coldly.

He picked up a spare glass of beer and poured it down his chest, then wiped his mouth with an air of apparent satisfaction.

‘Sod your successes,’ said Porta. ‘What about that Spanish whore you screwed? Tell us about her.’

Barcelona hiccuped so violently in remembrance that had the Old Man not kept a firm grip on his collar he would have fallen to the floor.

‘Drunk as a lord,’ said Porta, in disgust.

Barcelona leaned towards him, with the Old Man still hanging on to the back of his neck.

‘Obergefreiter Joseph Porta,’ he said, slurring everything into a single word of elephantine proportions, ‘for the one hundred and twentieth time I’m warning you: address me correctly when you speak to me. I am a Feldwebel, the backbone of the German Army.’

‘Backbone, my arse!’ said Porta, scornfully. ‘An old soak like you?’

He rolled across to the bar, collapsed against it, clawed up the nearest bottle and wrenched off the top. It went off like a gun, it was champagne, and half the guests instantly dived beneath the table. Porta raised the bottle to his lips and drank in great gulps.

‘I am a lover of the Arts!’ screamed Barcelona, into the hubbub.

Porta turned back to look at him a moment.

‘Well, get you!’ he said. ‘Feldwebel, sir,’ he added, sarcastically.

‘Not only me,’ continued Barcelona, ‘but my very dear friend Bernard, as well. He also is a lover of the Arts.’ And he leaned across and planted a heavy wet kiss on the Boozer’s forehead as a mark of their great friendship. The Boozer smiled, foolishly. As he swayed back to his original position Barcelona crashed into the Old Man and they seesawed perilously for a while on the edge of the bench. ‘Who,’ shouted Barcelona, recovering his balance, ‘who in this drunken band of cretins and sex maniacs has ever been into a museum and tasted the beauties of Art? Who,’ he went on, growing rather muddled, ‘has ever drunk at the tree of knowledge? Which of you lousy philistine bunch has ever heard of Thorvaldsen? Eh? Which of you has ever heard of him? You probably think he’s a pimp on die Reeperbahn . . . well, he isn’t.’

Barcelona wagged a finger in the air and paused to look at it. That pause was the start of his undoing. It seemed to him that in some miraculous way he was wagging a dozen fingers all at once. Which was remarkable, when he was ready to swear that he only had five on either hand. And two hands made ten, and that was including thumbs . . . He watched for a while in fascination. He began speaking hypnotically of artists and heroes, passed on to a roof-raising speech about liberty, shouted angrily at us that we were all brothers and that he loved us, and ended up in the inevitable impasse of general obscenity and abuse, without ever realizing how he had arrived there.

He broke off in the midst of a string of curses and stared in amazement as the world rose up before his eyes and began slowly to close in upon him. He blinked and shook his head, and the world receded.

Barcelona was moved to thump vigorously on his chest, indicating his row of multi-coloured ribbons and decorations and declaring in passionate tones that none of them meant a damn thing to him and that he would be only too glad to get rid of them. He offered them all round as free gifts, attempted to claw them off his tunic and scatter them amongst us, but the effort was too much. He fell forward, headfirst on to the table, and lay with his head in a pool of beer singing a somewhat curious song about bird droppings.

After a while, someone sitting opposite, taking a sudden dislike either to the singer or the song, reached across and pushed him backwards on to the floor. Barcelona’s last words before he gave way to temporary oblivion were a fanatical, ‘Viva España!’

For a moment, Bernard the Boozer sat contemplating the inert figure of his art-loving friend. The sight seemed to move him very deeply. With the aid of Porta and the Legionnaire, he crawled walrus-like on to the table and prepared to make a speech, and there he stood, swaying in pendulum fashion from side to side, with the Legionnaire hanging on to both ankles and Porta waiting to catch him should he fall.

‘My friends!’ He held out both arms to embrace us. The electric light bulb went crashing to the floor. A paper chain came adrift and festooned itself round Bernard’s neck. ‘My friends, I trust you’ve all got enough to drink and there’s nobody going thirsty? Because I can tell you, here and now, that there’s enough liquor in my cellar—’ At this point he swayed backwards, into the waiting arms of Porta, and there was a pause while he was set back on an even keel. ‘There’s enough booze in my cellar to keep the whole German Navy afloat . . . and you’re welcome to it! You’re my friends and you’re welcome to it! Drink it all! Drink it until it’s coming out of your eyes and your ears and your arseholes . . . My friends!’ And now he swayed forward, and the Legionnaire held on to his ankles while Porta ran round to the front and caught him before he reached the table. He tilted him back again, towards the Legionnaire. ‘My friends, I hope you mink of this little place of mine as being a home from home . . . a real home from home, where you can piss and shit and fornicate just like you would by your own fireside . . . Being a publican, it’s not just a job, it’s a vocation . . . you know that? ’S a real vocation . . . Where do you lads go when you’re browned off and you want cheering up? Back to barracks? Back to the wife and kids? Like hell!’ With a joyous gesture, Bernard swooped round through an arc that brought turn dangerously close to scraping his nose on the table. By some miracle the force of his momentum was strong enough to carry him onwards, until he had again reached the perpendicular and the Legionnaire was able to reach up a hand and prevent his going off on another turn. ‘Like hell!’ roared Bernard, undaunted. ‘You don’t go anywhere near ’em . . . this is where you come! Round to good old Bernie’s place! Round to the boozer! Bernie the Boozer, that’s what you call me . . . and not for nothing, lads! I’m not called that for nothing! I been in the business a good long time and I know what it’s all about, and when you lads come here in search of a bit of comfort I make bloody sure you get it! Not one of my boys ever goes away from here without a gutful!’

‘That’s right,’ affirmed some wag from the far end of the table. ‘A full gut and an empty pocket!’

Bernard smiled benevolently, not catching the implications of this remark.

‘In my establishment,’ he declared, ‘the common soldier is king. Privates, corporals, sergeants . . . they’re all welcome! There’s only one class I won’t abide, and mat’s officers. Officers, my friends, are the most anti-social, arse-licking, yellow-bellied—’

The rest of his feelings on officers were lost in a general storm of cheers and catcalls. Bernard raised both arms above his head, clenching his fists and prancing about the table like a triumphant boxer. The Legionnaire and Porta hovered anxiously at his side.

‘Gentlemen!’ roared Bernard, his voice rising above the swelling hubbub, ‘we belong to Hamburg! Hamburg is our city! Hamburg is the last bastion of Europe!’

The cheers rang out again from all and sundry. Most of us had no affection whatsoever for Hamburg, but that did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm. We yelled and stamped and threw our arms round one another in a fervour of love and loyalty. Much encouraged, Bernard stamped energetically upon someone’s fingers and tramped down to the far end of the table, treading in plates and overturning glasses as he did so.

‘Sylvia!’ He lurched sideways, extended a hand and grabbed one of the passing serving girls. ‘Where are you going, wench? What do you think you’re doing? You’re on duty as long as the booze lasts . . . Bring on some more beer and let’s have a ball!’

Loud whistles filled the air. Feet stamped, hands clapped. Men opened their mouths and shouted wordlessly, for the pure delight of making a loud noise. Some of those who had temporarily withdrawn from the scene recovered their senses, vomited and returned to the fray. Bernard stumbled back down the table, waving his hands frantically towards the piano.

‘Let’s have a song! Ready for the song of Hamburg, lads! All together, now . . .’

The choir of voices filled the room. Harsh, unmelodious, out of time, out of tune, we bawled together Bernard’s song of Hamburg: