The Prisoner (6 page)

He got more worried when Vogel stood up from his desk and circled behind, like an interrogator.

‘Blond hair, blue eyes, strong body, upright posture,’ Vogel said mysteriously, as his hand rested on Marc’s shoulder. ‘You have what my boss, Reichsfuhrer Himmler
⁴
, would call
desirable racial characteristics
. There’s even a program where boys like you get Germanised.’

Marc looked baffled, which made Vogel laugh.

‘Germanised: it’s all part of our racial policies. Jews get booted off to some mud patch in Poland. Foreign boys and girls who fit the image of tough, blond-haired Germans get rebadged and adopted by German families, or sent for training in Hitler Youth Camps.’

Marc thought the idea that kids could become German based solely on the way they looked was barking, but was too diplomatic to say so.

‘I can look into it if you’d like me to,’ Vogel said. ‘No bugs and I’m sure the food’s better.’

As one door closes, another opens
, Marc thought. But an obvious downside was that healthy German boys not much older than himself got handed uniforms, guns and one-way tickets to the Russian Front.

‘Well?’ Vogel asked. ‘It’s not like you to stand there gawping.’

‘I’m …’ Marc said, before tailing off. ‘It’s just the last thing I expected you to say, sir. I thought you were keen to keep me here, working for you.’

‘I’m sure I can find another messenger boy,’ Vogel said, as he handed Marc the telegrams. ‘Promise me you’ll have a serious think about it and let me know within the next couple of days.’

‘Yes,’ Marc said. ‘I will … Of course I will.’

Marc’s head was all over the place as he put on his prisoner coat and jogged across town. The Germanisation idea was weird, but better food and a lice-free existence had undeniable appeal, even if he couldn’t exactly see himself in dinky little Hitler Youth shorts and a swastika armband.

The post office queue was huge and Marc watched the clock as the line crept forward. All being well, Laurent, Marcel and Louis would be at Bonn Station by now, with half an hour until their connecting train to Paris.

Either that or they were in a cell, looking at a whole heap of trouble that would lead back to him.

*

Marc had to work late with one of the secretaries, translating German instructions to a new piece of machinery for French workers. His appearance in his cabin on the
Oper
just after eight gave Richard and Vincent a jolt.

‘That explains why I got served three portions in the food line,’ Richard said.

‘There’s bread left, but we ate your share of the soup,’ Vincent added. ‘How far’d you get? Are the others coming back?’

‘I got to the end of the gangplank,’ Marc said peevishly, as he peered into the empty soup bowl. ‘I’ve not heard anything about the other three, but if it’s gone to plan, they’ll be on home turf by now.’

Marc pushed a ball of bread into his mouth, but as he stepped up to his bunk he noticed his mattress had been switched for a ripped one with a strong whiff of urine.

‘Who took it?’ Marc gasped. ‘Why’d you let them in here?’

‘Alain heard you guys got transferred,’ Richard said. ‘Some of his boys came in.’

‘Can’t fight thirteen of ’em,’ Vincent said. ‘And you’d better watch your back now Laurent’s not covering it.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know already,’ Marc said, then flew back in shock, making a gagging noise.

As Marc straightened the mattress, he’d revealed a hole. Inside hundreds of maggots wriggled within the rotting corpse of a mouse.

‘Christ,’ Marc said, as he threw the straw mattress on to the floor. ‘I’d rather sleep on bare slats.’

‘Alain’s gonna talk to Fischer,’ Vincent said. ‘Their cabin’s crowded, some of his boys want to move in here.’

‘Us six made a good set-up,’ Richard said forlornly. ‘Laurent kept us safe. Now …’

Vincent gave Marc an accusing look and finished Richard’s thought. ‘Now it’s all screwed, thanks to
you
.’

Marc felt guilty, but also pissed off because real mates don’t kick you when you’re down. The swastika and shorts looked more attractive by the minute.

As Marc tried to work out whether it was better to sleep on bare boards, or if he had to find some way to clean the worst filth and stink off his new mattress, two boys from Alain’s cabin swaggered in with their stuff.

‘Fischer gave us the all clear,’ the bigger of the two announced as he threw his mattress up on to Laurent’s old bunk. ‘Hope that’s OK. Tough if it’s not, ’cos it’s happening.’

The other lad got all excited when he saw Marc. ‘Thought you were transferred?’

Before Marc could answer, the bigger lad shoved Marc back against the porthole and shouted. ‘Alain, get in here!’

Marc caught his captor with a palm to the face and broke free, but ran straight into Alain as he ducked through the doorway.

‘Hello, old pal!’ Alain said cheerfully, as he grabbed Marc by his collar and bashed his head against the side of a bunk. ‘I thought I’d missed you.’

Marc broke Alain’s grip and landed a good punch in his kidney, but the space between bunks was barely a metre wide. With three older lads boxing Marc in, he was quickly overwhelmed with the one lad twisting his arm up behind his back and Alain doubling him up with a brutal kick in the stomach.

‘Remember kicking me in the face?’ Alain shouted, as he kneed Marc again.

Marc groaned as Alain grabbed his legs, leaving him suspended agonisingly by his twisted arm. His head got thrown against both sides of the passageway as more of Alain’s crew poured out of their cabin.

‘Mess that little punk up!’ someone shouted eagerly.

Marc ended up thrown against the wall under the stairs, with the taste of blood in his mouth and boots flying in from all sides.

‘You’ll kill him,’ Richard shouted, earning himself a slap and a firm warning to butt out.

Marc lay in a shaking ball when the kicking stopped, but it wasn’t over. Alain knelt across Marc’s chest with a home-made knuckleduster wrapped around his fist. Marc felt sure he’d die as a powerful blow smashed into his mouth.

Savage cheers and whoops came from the lads around Marc as Alain pulled back for another shot.

‘Finish the little queer off,’ someone shouted, as Marc gagged on his own blood.

Alain struck Marc over the right eye, exactly where Fischer’s rifle had opened him up two nights earlier. Blood spurted as Marc’s head snapped to the right. He tried yelling, but the pain froze his whole body.

Then everything went black.

Note

  
⁴
 
Heinrich Himmler – German Interior Minister, head of the SS, Gestapo, Reich Labour Administration and many other departments. Himmler was regarded as the second most powerful Nazi after Hitler.

Time passed in a blur as Marc drifted in and out of consciousness

He felt Osterhagen’s fingers down his throat as he lay flat out on the wharf, choking on blood. Then he was on a prisoner ward, with mattresses on the floor and an insect tickling his wrist. Patients coughed and spewed in buckets.

Marc ached all over and passed out from the pain if he tried to move. His ribs were strapped. He could only see out of one eye and when he touched the blind side he felt a tennis ball where his eyelid should have been.

One time – it seemed like morning – a nurse told Marc that Commandant Vogel had been to visit while he was unconscious. Then Marc came round in paradise. A clean, light ward, and real beds with German children in them. A nurse spoon-fed him stewed apple, but the lump over his eye was even bigger.

Marc was only vaguely aware of an argument, a sense that he’d been sent somewhere he shouldn’t. All his dreams seemed to be nightmares of burning, drowning, being bombed or being kicked.

The next time he regained consciousness he’d gone from paradise to a straw mat in a filthy ward, full of cigarette smoke and men speaking Russian. A nurse swore when he wet the mattress and she left him laying in warm piss that gradually soaked through his hospital gown up to the back of his neck.

Stoypa, a Russian lad, started helping him sit up to use a bed pan. They spoke different languages, and Marc thought Stoypa was a nurse until he sat by himself and saw his helper squatting on the corner of the next mattress, hacking up snot.

Stoypa disappeared before Marc had a chance to thank him. He began hobbling around, and got his sense of time back: knowing when it was day or night, or when the food was due. Hungry men heal slowly, so the Germans gave hospitalised prisoners better rations than they got in the camps. After another week, Marc could breathe OK and most bruises had almost gone.

Marc had been deloused and all his body hair shaved to get rid of the bugs while he was unconscious, but instead of being itch free he’d picked up a rash from lying in his own urine. But the real problem remained the stubborn swelling covering his right eye. It distorted his face so that one side of his mouth twisted into a crooked sneer.

Each morning a nurse stabbed the swelling with a needle and drew out pus. But that only relieved the pressure under badly stretched skin. Finally, there was a showdown between a Polish doctor, who said the swelling above Marc’s eye needed time to heal, and a German hospital administrator with a strict quota for getting her patients back to work.

The German won the argument and Marc was sent for surgery. He’d imagined pain relief, bright lights and clean walls, but anaesthetic barely existed for non-Germans. Marc got told to sit on a chair in a gloomy basement room and tilt his head back.

With leather straps around hands and ankles, and two bear-like Russian prisoners holding him down, Marc watched a scalpel and screamed as the blade cut deep and twisted inside the swelling. Marc thought he’d pass out from the pain, but briefly got vision from both eyes.

It was a relief knowing that he wasn’t blind beneath the swelling, but soon both eyes were filled with blood as the surgeon cut away strips of skin, then used a sterilised tea-spoon to scoop out rancid-smelling pus and clotted blood.

When the straps were off, Marc sobbed with pain as the Russians lifted him into the world’s oldest wheelchair and took him back to his floor mat. The Polish doctor pushed a nurse aside and dressed the wound himself.

‘It’s not always a bad thing to open a wound up,’ the Pole explained, in immaculate French. ‘It can speed the healing process. But in a less than pristine environment, there’s great risk of secondary infection. So keep dry until a good scab forms, and however much it itches,
don’t
poke about under the dressing with your grubby fingers.’

*

Three days later, Marc was sent packing with a jar of antiseptic ointment and a roll of used but allegedly sterile bandage. He spent five hours in a hallway waiting for a transport official. The wound over his eye was still sore, but he had good vision in both eyes and his brain was back in order.

From a date on a newspaper in the waiting area, Marc worked out that it was thirty-five days since Alain had punched him out. He was scared of going back to the
Oper
, so it was a relief when the driver said they were taking him to Großmarkthalle first.

Marc hadn’t forgotten the whole Germanisation thing, and although he was disappointed that Commandant Vogel hadn’t been back for a second visit, he hoped the offer remained open, and that Vogel could protect him from Alain and his gang.

It might seem insane for a prisoner to spend a month in hospital only to be sent back where he’d almost been killed in the first place, but Marc knew he was nothing more than a card in a file cabinet to the Reich Labour Administration. He’d seen enough prisoner death reports to know that stuff like that happened all the time.

It was a warm day and Marc almost felt euphoric on the back of the cart, breathing outdoor air, seeing women in food queues and kids with black soles dangling fishing lines off the side of a bridge.

Marc realised that a month in bed had weakened his legs as he climbed the ten flights up to the RLA’s fifth-floor office. The transport official left him in the doorway, and the first person he saw was Ursula, the secretary.

‘You look different with your head shaved,’ she said, giving Marc a wary smile before tugging him into an alcove hidden by a wooden coat stand.

‘This cut’s all the rage at the hospital,’ Marc said.

But Ursula was anxious. ‘The new commandant went round asking questions about you,’ she began.

Marc felt like he’d been punched. ‘
New
commandant?’

‘It’s been Commandant Eiffel for two weeks now. You didn’t know?’

‘How would I know?’ Marc asked. ‘Although I did wonder, because I thought Vogel might visit me again.’

‘Herr Vogel put his neck on the line to get you a bed in the children’s hospital,’ Ursula said.

Marc’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Was that why he got the boot?’

Ursula shook her head. ‘He’d made enemies with the Gestapo. Complained to Berlin about moving out those skilled Jews. They’ve transferred him to take charge of a labour district in Poland. A promotion, allegedly, but he’s Frankfurt born and bred, so he wasn’t keen to leave.’

‘Hortefeux,’ a woman barked. It was one of the two battleaxe sisters who ran the office. An imperious stab of her pointing finger sent Ursula meekly back to her typewriter.

‘I hope it works out,’ Ursula whispered.

Marc waited for ages outside the commandant’s office. He’d developed a theory: the longer someone makes you wait, the more of a dick they are.

Vogel’s name on the door had been scratched off the frosted glass, but Eiffel’s had yet to replace it. Marc was surprised by the slim female figure moving about inside.

‘Hortefeux,’ she said, when she eventually asked Marc in.

Eiffel was stern, catlike and chain-smoked through a long ivory cigarette holder. She wore sombre civilian clothing, but with a swastika armband. A framed photo of Hitler had replaced the Mayor of Frankfurt on the wall behind the desk.

‘Sit,’ she said, before switching to decent French. ‘My predecessor spoke highly of you. Commandant Vogel even left me a letter, recommending that I keep you on.’