The Demi-Monde: Winter (39 page)

Every eye in the square turned towards Dabrowski, who flinched back as though physically struck. He looked awful: pale and weak, he had to lean on a stick to stay upright.

Dabrowski seemed to crumble into uncertainty. He looked a different man from the rakish and confident soldier Trixie had known only a day or so ago. Could it be, she wondered, that the injuries he had suffered in the raid on the barges had broken him both physically and mentally? Maybe he was ill? Maybe all his training, all his conditioning as an officer to obey orders given by a superior was confusing him?

At Dabrowski’s silence, the Chief Delegate smiled an obnoxious little smile. ‘I think that is all the answer we need.’

Around her Trixie felt the volunteers begin to shuffle and to murmur. She was aghast at how a crowd could be so easily manipulated, how easily an army that only a few moments ago had been full of patriotic ardour could be cowed by bluster and braggadocio. She could not – would not – stand by and watch this foul man take control of the situation.

A determined set to her mouth, Trixie turned towards her army and addressed them directly. ‘The Warsaw Free Army is not prepared to surrender.’ She paused, unnerved by how the large crowd was listening so attentively. ‘Yesterday my father was murdered, laying down his life for mine. Today, it is my turn to make a stand for those who have the audacity to be different from the Aryan ideal of Heydrich. I am not a soldier, but I will fight. I am not a man, but I will fight. I am not a Varsovian, but I will fight.’ She paused for a moment to calm the tremor of
emotion that had infected her voice. ‘And if none choose to follow me … then, as ABBA is my witness, I will fight alone.’

The square was totally hushed, those gathered in it silenced by their uncertainty.

Trixie was aware of movement to her left as Sergeant Wysochi came to stand next to her. ‘While I breathe,’ he announced, in a stentorian voice that echoed around the square, ‘I swear by ABBA that you will never stand alone.’ He stabbed his fist into the air. ‘Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!’

Even as the last word left his lips, the Warsaw Free Army erupted in a storm of cheering.

‘What did you make of that?’ asked Ella, as she sat by the window of her hotel room looking down at the scene unfolding in the square below her.

‘They’re all mad,’ was Vanka’s conclusion.

‘They seem determined enough and that Trixiebell Dashwood has been a revelation. I never took her for a revolutionary.’

‘War does strange things to people and it’s often the unlike-liest of individuals who prove themselves the most capable.’ He sighed and pulled the curtain back over the window. ‘Trixie Dashwood is a natural leader but that’s not enough. The Poles haven’t got a prayer.’

‘Why? There’s an awful lot of them.’

As he patted the room’s scabrous couch – raising a cloud of dust as he did so – and sat down, Vanka shook his head. ‘I don’t think the Poles realise what’s coming at them. Clement’s SS are the best, the most ruthless and the most formidably equipped troops in the whole of the Demi-Monde. It’s going to take more than some stirring words, a mob of ill-armed irregulars and a few jerry-built barricades to keep them out. The SS will crush them before the end of the week.’

‘They’ve got weapons now.’

‘They’ve got a few out-of-date rifles. The SS have got superior weaponry, they’ve got discipline, and they’ve got armoured steamers and artillery. This rabble hasn’t a prayer.’

‘I understand that in street-fighting the advantage is always with the defenders.’

Vanka shrugged and took a moment to light a cigarette. ‘We’ll see. If they’re brave enough and they’ve got enough of these firebombs I hear their womenfolk have been cooking up, then they could give the SS a headache, but the key problem the Varsovians have is that there is no way for them to win. They can’t defeat the SS. They can’t defeat the ForthRight. And if you can’t win, the only alternative is to lose.’

Ella nodded towards the crudely painted banner that was being paraded around the square by a band of dancing WFA fighters. It read, ‘Our Victory Is Never to Surrender’. ‘They seem to think that they can fight the SS to a standstill.’

‘Humbug,’ snorted Vanka. ‘Heydrich will never allow himself to be defeated by a bunch of street-fighters; he’ll put as many troops into the Ghetto as is necessary to get the job done. That’s the problem with people like Trixie Dashwood, she’s a romantic. That escapade with the barges has gone to her head: she’s stopped thinking about the consequences of what she’s doing. Romantics are the most dangerous of all soldiers, they’re the ones who want to die.’

‘But, as Sergeant Wysochi said, maybe it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’

‘Heroic tosh,’ snapped Vanka. ‘Once you’re dead you have no chance of victory. Better to be a live coward than a dead hero.’

‘That’s a very cynical attitude, Vanka.’

‘Pragmatic rather than cynical, I think. And believe me, Ella, I have absolutely no intention of dying. I think it a better
philosophy to let other people do the dying for me. Anyway, these kids seem so enthusiastic to journey to the Spirit World that it would be churlish to deny them my place in the queue.’ He took a thoughtful puff on his cigarette. ‘No, our objective is to stay comfortably hidden away here for the time being, to keep out of that bastard Olbracht’s way – he’s too loyal to the Party for my liking – and wait until they forget what a good idea it would be to give up your pal Miss Norma Williams to Heydrich. Then when the time is right we’ll make a run for it. Maybe we’ll head for the Coven and board a barge to take you and Little Miss Misery’ – he nodded towards the adjoining room where Norma was sleeping – ‘to NoirVille. Once we’re there you can pay me the million guineas you promised me.’

‘And then?’ prompted Ella, somewhat hurt by the rather mercenary way Vanka was discussing their escaping to NoirVille. She had hoped he might be motivated to help her by something other than money. She had come to think – to hope – that Vanka Maykov might actually have some feelings for her.

‘And then you go back to your world and I’ll have a good time spending my million in this one.’

Apparently not. Maybe now she was seeing his true side; the man was, after all, a conman. A conman who obviously didn’t like the idea of having a Daemon as a lover.

She just wished she didn’t care for him so much.

Barely able to hide a smile of smug satisfaction, Archie Clement scanned the map of the Ghetto one more time and checked his watch. It was five minutes to noon: the Leader had ordered him to begin his assault on the Ghetto by midday on the 59th day of Winter and by dint of a Herculean effort the destruction of Warsaw would begin one full day ahead of schedule. He had been set an impossible task but he had done it. Today the Ghetto
would be punished for Dabrowski’s abduction of the Daemon and his taking of the barges.

‘You got all them steamers fired up, Comrade Major Hartley?’ he asked the officer beside him. ‘Won’t do for them to miss the big parade, now will it?’

‘We have four steamers in position to lead the assault along Uyazhdov Boulevard, Comrade Colonel.’

‘Only four?’ Clement turned and spat out a wad of tobacco which missed the Major’s brightly shone boots only by inches. ‘Just four steamers ain’t gonna get them Rebs fouling their breeches, now is it?’

‘Unfortunately, Comrade Colonel, such was the speed of the mobilisation that we had no time to bring up more. But even so, we anticipate only limited opposition. We will conduct an artillery barrage to eliminate the barricades the rebels have thrown up across the avenue then deploy our very finest shock troops.’

‘Don’t do to count your chickens, Hartley. Them damned Polaks showed a lotta grit during the Troubles, so don’t you go thinking they’re gonna skedaddle just ‘cos we fart in their direction. And make certain sure you’ve told your commanders that them Rebs is heeled. There was ten thousand rifles on them barges they hijacked.’

Now that had come as a surprise. According to Beria’s assessment, Dabrowski was the archetypal staff officer: a man built for thinking rather than action. That, after all, was why they had selected him. But the attack on the barges had demonstrated an unexpected determination and ruthlessness. Perhaps he would make a more resolute and effective commander of the WFA than they had anticipated.

‘With all due respect, Comrade Colonel, they were only Martini-Henrys, obsolete models that are no match for the M4s our own men carry.’ The Major gave his commander a reassuring
smile. ‘I am confident that we will sweep this rabble before us. By nightfall we will be in the Old Town and have control of the Warsaw Blood Bank and once we have achieved that objective it is only a matter of time before Warsaw surrenders.’

Clement nodded. What the Major said made perfect sense, but somehow Clement couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling of foreboding. Taking Warsaw might, he decided, be a little more difficult than his Major believed.

You could never trust a fucking Reb.

Major Dabrowski …

Trixie stopped herself, remembering that now, as official Commander of the Warsaw Free Army, Dabrowski was Colonel Dabrowski. And Colonel Dabrowski, Trixie decided, was a jealous man.

There was no other explanation for his shoddy treatment of her during the first meeting of the WFA Emergency Executive. He had barely been able to be courteous, never mind thank her for saving him from Olbracht. During the meeting he had strenuously refused to acknowledge her role in the taking of the barges, in the arming of the WFA, in the overthrowing of the delegates, or in his elevation to head of the Emergency Executive. All he had seemed intent on doing was stripping her of any role or influence she might have in the WFA.

Indeed, his first act – browbeaten into it, Trixie had to admit, by the regular army officers – was to decree that women could only hold non-combatant positions in the WFA. For Trixie it had been a slap in the face which, almost a day later, she was still fuming about. There seemed little point in having a revolution if all the old prejudices and hatreds remained intact.

Trixie felt a tug on her sleeve. Turning, she found Sergeant Wysochi holding a large enamelled mug of soup out towards
her. ‘Drink this,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s going to be a long hard day and I don’t think Clement will be inclined to allow us a pause in the fighting to take luncheon.’ Trixie nodded her appreciation of the Sergeant’s thoughtfulness and sipped the scaldingly hot potato soup. ‘Put this in your bag too.’ He passed her a parcel wrapped in newspaper. ‘It’s a black bread and cheese kanapka.’ He noted the look of bemusement on Trixie’s face. ‘It’s a sandwich. It’ll keep you going if things turn difficult.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Sergeant.’

‘Just protecting my officers … some of ‘em anyway. The ones worth protecting.’

‘I’m not an officer: Colonel Dabrowski made that very clear. My role is simply to provide help and sustenance to our brave, male soldiers.’

Wysochi chuckled. ‘Well, you should be. After that little speech of yours in Pilsudski Square they should have made you a general. But then the Colonel is a little old-fashioned that way: he doesn’t much like the idea of women bossing men about.’ Wysochi gave Trixie an evil little grin. ‘Me, on the other hand, I quite like the idea of powerful women.’

Trixie decided to ignore the rather tasteless innuendo. It was a sign of the remarkable transformation in her life and attitudes that she could even bring herself to chat with someone of such a low rank in society as Wysochi. War jumbled everything up, made all the old certainties … uncertain.

‘You don’t seem to like officers, Sergeant Wysochi.’

‘Nah. Most of them are tossers, even the regular army ones. But you … you might make a fighter. Not a good fighter,’ Wysochi added impishly, ‘what with you being a girl, but not a bad one.’ He pushed at the barricade that stretched across the street with his boot. The barricade was a higgledy-piggledy structure that had been erected in a madcap couple of hours
from a mishmash of paving slabs, doors, old bits of furniture, wrought-iron fencing, barrels and several trees that had been chopped down and dragged in from some neighbouring gardens. ‘Solid enough,’ he decided, ‘but whether it’ll be strong enough to stop an armoured steamer is another matter.’

‘It better be,’ observed Trixie. ‘This street leads directly to the Blood Bank, so this is where the main SS assault will come. Apparently the Captain’ – now it was her turn to nod in the direction of Captain Gorski, who was sitting on top of the barricade gnawing at a fingernail – ‘has been ordered to hold this street to the last man.’

‘The Spirits help us then. I don’t think Gorski could hold his dick with both hands, never mind a barricade with only two hundred fighters. And without good leadership, once it gets hot this lot are going to cut and run.’

‘They’ve got you.’

‘Yeah, they have, haven’t they?’ Wysochi lit a cigarette, took a deep suck of smoke and gave Trixie a smile. ‘And they’ve got you too, and from that look in your eye, non-combatant or not, I think you’re intent on doing more than just offering words of encouragement.’

They were interrupted by a shout from a lookout stationed on one of the rooftops along the street.

‘Balloon!’

Trixie looked up to where the sentry was pointing. There, hovering a quarter of a mile away and perhaps two hundred feet in the air was one of the ForthRight’s new Speke-class hydrogen balloons, its huge red canopy bright in the afternoon sunshine. It seemed so peaceful, so harmless floating there. She could see two men in the wicker basket studying the barricade through a telescope, the lens glinting in the sun.

Wysochi tossed his cigarette aside. ‘C’mon, the balloon’s gone
up. Time to make ourselves scarce.’ He cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Take cover,’ he bellowed to the WFA soldiers standing around their braziers trying to keep warm, then he grabbed Trixie’s arm and hauled her towards one of the cellars that had been commandeered into service as bunkers.

‘Ignore that,’ yelled Captain Gorski. ‘It’s only a balloon.’

‘They’re spotting for the artillery,’ shouted Wysochi over his shoulder as he hurled Trixie down the steps to the cellar.