The Commissar

  ‘Are you really telling me,’ he asks, bending absorbedly forward across the table,’ that you Vice cops can find out if I’ve been having a bit of illegal crumpet off with some bint or other? Sounds like a bleedin’ fairy tale, to me!’

  ‘Well, it’s still a fact,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’, putting a king in place. ‘And the sentence is thirty years. After twenty years you’ve got a chance of transfer to a labour camp. Oh, and don’t forget, if you like a bit o’ rape, that most of those chaps get sent to the Pjopre prison on the Tomsk river. I was there once on an escort job for two blokes who hadn’t committed rape, but who’d had a couple of “frigates” cruising the Nevski Prospekt for ’em. They’d got twenty-five years for it. They were both of ’em in good humour all the way, making plans for the future and such, but you should’ve seen their faces when we come up over the hills and got a sight of the place they were headed for on the other side of the river. It was still a good way off. but it felt just like a wicked, cold fist being smashed into your face. We three that was escorting them, we took a good firm grip on their leading chains. We knew they only had one thought in their heads: to get away from us in any way they could. Those “ship-owners” had just realized what a long time twenty-five years really is.’

  ‘Holy Mother of Kazan, but it is a long time, ‘Porta comes in thoughtfully. He strokes his chin, consideringly. ‘A whole Porta lifetime. Lord save us. It’s a long bloody time!’

  ‘Shut up for Christ’s sake,’ mumbles Tiny. ‘It’d knock over the wickedest black monkey as ever lived. Twenty-five years! Just for’avin’ a couple of biddies out workin’ to put a bit more butter on your bleedin’ bread. And I suppose there could be twenty-five years more’angin’ fire in the re’abilitation camp?’

  ‘You can count on it,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘I never heard of nobody who came straight home when he was finished with a stretch. Whether it was prison or punishment camp. There’s always a “surprise” for dessert. They call it expulsion to Siberia anyway.’

  ‘Jesus,’ groans Tony, putting his hand to his head, so that ‘Frostlips’ can see all his cards again. ‘Be better to pay for it, and get a receipt too. Fifty years, just for a shag! Bleedin’’ell no! I’m going into a monastery!’

  ‘Bet there’s a lot of those cunt-crazy sods in gaol on the Tomsk who wish they’d been born without goolies,’ remarks Porta, bidding twenty-one triumphantly for the twelfth time.

  You don’t have to be in a war for more than five minutes to find out how stupid it all is. There must really be a better way of doing things!

  Porta to Tiny on the outskirts of a burning Russian town

  The great, cool church hummed with the voices of people in prayer. They prayed aloud for the things they were allowed to pray for, but in the silence of their thoughts they prayed for peace. For an end to the hellishness of war; never to see soldiers or tanks any more; never to experience bombs and incendiaries again. They prayed that the man in the grey party uniform might be amongst the dead in the next bombing raid. They begged in their prayers that they might soon be granted the sight of British and American soldiers.

  Suddenly the mumble of prayer stopped. Panic grew in the eyes of the congregation.

  The priest rose from his knees and stared fearfully towards the closed door, heard the hard tramp of jackboots and the hoarse, brutal song:

  Wir werden weiter marschieren*

  wenn alles in Scherben fällt,

  denn heute gehört uns Deutschland

  und morgen die game Welt!

  ‘SS,’ mumbled the priest and let his folded hands fall down to his sides.

  Everything was in ruins already. Berlin was a pile of rubble. Stuttgart burnt. Hamburg pockmarked like a lunar landscape. Leipzig a hell of fire. Breslau fighting to the last man and the last bullet. In Cologne the ruins of the cathedral loomed above wrecked houses; but the Führer’s guard marched on, crunching the ruins under their heavy boots.

  * Russian collective farm

  * Heim ins Reich!: Back to the Reich

  * GEFEPO: The Secret Field Security Police

  * Gauno: Russian for shil

  * We will march on

  When all is in ruins.

  Today Germany is ours

  Tomorrow the whole world!

  THE PARITIP

  The Commissar’s armoured sledge leads the column. But then, he is the only one who knows the way to the hiding-place of the gold.

  The narrow, winding path grows steeper and steeper. The higher we go the more our spirits sink.

  Time and again the tanks slide backwards, and risk going over the edge and down into the depths below us. Looking down, it reminds one of a cauldron of water at the boil. Driving snow spouts up from it in jets like those of a fountain. Only the drivers remain in the vehicles. The rest of us put on Siberian snow-shoes and run along the inner side of the path, close in to the rock wall where there is less risk of being blown over the edge by a sudden violent puff of wind. Close to the tree level, where the eternal winds have hardened the snow, we change to short skis.

  The tanks and motor sledges can now increase speed and we have difficulty in keeping up.

  At breakneck speed Porta’s Panther goes into a hairpin bend, slides sideways and hits the mountainside with a crash. It spins completely round on the icy path, slides backwards and comes rushing down towards us, with ice and frozen snow showering up around it. We throw ourselves headlong to one side to save ourselves from being crushed by the 45-ton monster.

  The rear T-34 is in the middle of the first hairpin when the Panther comes rushing down on it in a giant cloud of snow.

  ‘Holy Christ!’ screams Albert, grey-faced with terror.

  ‘Turn the waggon, you bloody black fool,’ shouts Barcelona, desperately, but Albert is completely paralysed. He glares, wild-eyed, at the death coming roaring down at him.

  The Old Man is up on the T-34 in one long jump, but before he has got down through the turret the Panther has arrived. Steel clangs against steel, and both tanks rush on down the slippery path.

  Somehow Albert gets the tracks to go the opposite way, so that the T-34 slides into the wall of the cliffand stops the wild race. How, is a mystery. The Panther rears up, mounting halfway up on the T-34. Through the clashing of steel we can hear Albert calling wildly on God. The Old Man brings his hand across the black man’s face twice, hard. Albert stops shouting, and begins to grin foolishly.

  ‘No man can stand up to this sort of thing,’ he whines miserably. He is standing out in the snow, a little later, staring down into the abyss below.

  ‘Shut your black trap!’ shouts the Old Man furiously. ‘Get back up in that tea-waggon of yours, so’s we can start up again.’

  ‘I bloody won’t,’ protests Albert, grey-faced. ‘I don’t want anything to do with that gold! I’m satisfied with bein’ a poor, black Obergefreiter in the German Army, I am. What good’s a load of gold to me, man, if I’m lyin’ smashed up in my tea-waggon at the bottom of a rotten cliff?’

  ‘I ordered you to shut it,’ rages the Old Man. He turns his mpi on Albert. ‘Up with you!’

  Whining softly to himself Albert shrugs his way down through the hatch and bangs it to behind him.

  There is wild discussion as to which of us are to go with the drivers in the vehicles. We all refuse, and then Porta arranges a driver strike. They won’t drive without an observer in each waggon.

  It is hard to tell whether it is the Old Man or the Commissar who shouts the loudest. But it all ends as it usually does, with the weakest going to the wall. Resignedly, swearing in an undertone, I climb up to Porta and edge my way down behind the instruments.

  ‘You look like my pal Rodeck the day they picked him up on a 30-year rap!’ he grins.

  ‘I don’t know your bloody friend Rodeck, ‘I answer him, sourly.

  ‘He was a nice, pleasant chap, ‘Porta goes on happily.’ They called him a car-thief, and it was cars he stole. But he was really a painter, and he was th
at good at it he could repaint any size of car you liked to come with, in 1 hour and 11 minutes flat. There was usually some paint left over, too, so the owner of the car and his family could sniff themselves silly for a week after. He lived, free and happy, in the company of his paints and his sprayers, until one Wednesday mornin’ between 3 and 5 o’clock. Then the door-bell rang so long and loud you’d have thought it was the Devil arrived to pick up a lost soul.’

  ‘“Who the hell’s that?” shouted Rodeck from his side of the door. He was naturally a bit narked at being woke up at that un-Christian time of the day.

  ‘“Give you three guesses,” creaked a voice out from the landin’, and then the door gets smashed in on him, and two snap-brims are asking for a view of his wrists. “Click” go the cuffs and there he is with his pyjama jacket fitted with steel extensions.

  ‘So off he went with all his paint-pots, and nobody outside the “Alex” tec-shop has seen him since.’

  The road has begun to improve, and everybody gets back up into the vehicles. Before we cross the pass, the Commissar orders us to rope the waggons together with double towing-wires. The path will become so steep that there is danger of the vehicles toppling over backwards. Their theoretical angle of climb we have long ago exceeded. The new T-34 is in the lead with Albert driving. It is a tank which has everything the others ought to have but haven’t. It can climb like a chamois on its incredibly wide tracks, and Albert knows how to drive it; but we have to fill him up with plenty of liquor to make him forget his constant fear of death. When he has got half a bottle of vodka inside him he is on top of the world. Only Porta is a better driver.

  ‘Take it easy now, black-arse! No further’n the edges,’ Porta warns him from the Panther’s turret. ‘Don’t get to thinkin’ that Russian thunder-box can scramble down sheer rock faces!’

  Albert gives him the international ‘Up you’ sign, with a slap of his hand on the inside of his bent elbow.

  The tow-wires break twice, as if they were cotton, and the Panther slides back down towards the dizzying abyss.

  ‘Don’t we soon get a break?’ says Barcelona, dog-tired. ‘Hell, it’s black as the inside of your hat!’

  ‘A break? Here? At three in the afternoon?’ shouts the Old Man angrily. ‘You must be off your rocker!’

  The Commissar orders us to tie outselves to one another with our climbing-ropes, in order that nobody get lost in the roaring hell of snow.

  ‘I just can’t go on any more,’ moans Gregor. ‘You can have my share of the gold! If this had been a legal job, they’d have had to strike a new medal for it. We deserve one!’

  ‘An’ if it goes wrong,’ laughs Tiny, raucously, shaking chunks of ice from his shoulders,’ they’ll tie 120 years on our back, with a little bit of a chance of gettin’ out on parole when we’ve done 80 of ’em an’ ’ave forgot entirely what cunt’s all about!’

  ‘Save your breath!’ snarls the Old Man sourly. ‘Stay here,’ he orders, shortly, releasing himself from the safety-rope. ‘I’m going forward a bit to have a look. Don’t blow me away when I come back!’

  With his binoculars bumping against his chest, he climbs on up, and is hidden, in a few seconds, by the driving snow.

  ‘He’s that bloody careful, he wipes his arse an hour before he goes to the shithouse,’ snarls Porta irritably, taking a big bite of frozen brawn, and washing it down with a swallow of vodka.

  ‘There isn’t a chance of Ivan Baggytrousers laying an ambush for us. It’s overcareful sods like that who slow down the war effort. If it was up to me it’d be off we go for Uncle Joe’s gold as fast as the tracks’d let us! That’d soon make the neighbours take off, if they really were crazy enough to be sitting nursing their frost-bitten pricks and waitin’ for us.’

  ‘How cold is it?’ asks Gregor, shivering.

  ‘Je ne sais pas, mon ami,’ answers the Legionnaire despondently, beating his body with his arms. ‘But I have never been through anything like it!’

  ‘48 below,’ reports Heide, arrogantly.

  ‘You’re barmy,’ protests Tiny, hopping on the spot and swinging his arms. ‘You mean 148 below at least! My toes’ve turned to icicles inside these felt boots, and my blood thinks it’s become part of the bleedin’ Arctic Ocean!’

  ‘Oh, no!’ groans Barcelona, brushing icicles from his face. ‘It’s not worth it. Who the hell’d ever believe it could get this cold?’

  ‘Pack yourselves out with paper,’ orders the Commissar, throwing down some bundles of old newspapers which he and ‘Frostlips’ come up with. ‘Rub yourselves down with snow all over first, then pack yourselves in a layer of newspaper!’

  ‘You must be round the bleedin’ bend,’ screams Tiny. ‘Take our clothes off at 148 below? We’ll go off bleedin’ bang like the soddin’ trees!’

  ‘Wait till it gets really cold,’ laughs the Commissar. ‘This is only the beginning!’

  ‘If it’s goin’ to get colder’n this then my share of the gold’s goin’ cheap,’ declares Tiny, through chattering teeth, while he packs a few copies of Pravda round his stomach.

  ‘No, not like that,’ ‘Whorecatcher’ warns him. ‘First you’ve got to rub yourself down with snow. It’s not near as bad as you think. Feet most of all’. Rub ’em till you feel they’re glowin’!’

  ‘Oh Jesus!’ sobs Gregor, rubbing snow all over his naked body. ‘Some ski tour this is. And we’re doing it as volunteers!’

  ‘Yes, you don’t ’ave to go to the soddin’ psychopaths to be certified as a bleedin’ super-idiot,’ rages Tiny, struggling with his frozen fur jumpsuit.

  ‘Who the hell would’ve thought it could get this cold any place on earth,’ pants Porta, pushing an extra copy of Izvestia down round his chest. ‘I’m cured of winter sports for the rest of my life!’

  ‘I can’t help wondering, man, whether that fuckin’ gold’s really worth all this trouble?’ chatters Albert. ‘You want to hear what I think, we’d turn back now, before the new Ice Age overtakes us!’

  ‘I’m not givin’up my gold,’ shouts Porta. ‘If I have to roll on my bollocks through ice an’ snow all the way to where it’s hidden, an’ do it on my own, I’ll still do it! But if you want to go on living your little lives out in lousy, stinkin’ poverty, then step off now before you’ve got too far into the Ice Age!’

  The Old Man comes back, blue in the face with cold.

  ‘Why the devil didn’t you take me with you?’ asks the Commissar, smearing frost salve on his face. ‘Never do that again! You don’t know how easy it is to get lost. You can’t count on the compass. The mountains make the readings go wild!’

  ‘Give me a drink,’ says the Old Man, brusquely, reaching for Porta’s water-bottle.

  ‘D’you know this area?’ he turns to the Commissar.

  ‘No, I’ve never been here. But we save about 400 kilometres by going over the pass. Everybody says it’s impossible from October to the end of May. I chose it for safety. Nobody would dream that anybody would try it in winter-time.’

  ‘The devil,’ curses the Old Man. ‘Let’s get out of here. We’ve got to get through that pass quick as possible. There’s a storm on the way. Just on the far side of the pass, there’s an old fort, or a monastery or something, where we can tank up and get a breather for the night.’

  When we are halfway up the pass, one of the half-tracks skids off the path and we have to dig it out of the snowdrifts.

  Porta wants to push it over the edge, and is on his way with the Panther, but the Commissar protests violently. The truck cannot be done without, if we are to bring back the gold.

  Then the older T-34 gets stuck. We weep with rage and despair and are ready to give up completely. Finally we get the new T-34 backed into a position from which it can pull its elder brother out of the snow. The tow-wires stretch and hum.

  ‘Back!’ shouts ‘Frostlips’ warningly, jumping behind a snowdrift.

  ‘Somebody comin’?’ asks Tiny, confusedly, staring from behind a large tree.
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  The wire snaps with a whining crack and the pieces fly close by Tiny’s head. A fraction of an inch to one side or the other and he would have been beheaded. A madness of rage grips him. With a shovel in his hands he rushes towards the T-34, where Albert’s black face is just visible above the turret coaming.

  Like lightning Albert has the hatch slammed to and dogged fast from the inside. Tiny smashes the shovel down on the closed hatch cover in a mad rage.

  ‘Come outside, you black cannibal, so’s I can kill you!’ he roars madly.

  ‘Knock him out!’ shouts the Old Man. But none of us dare go near him when he is like this. A mad grizzly is a lapdog compared to him.

  ‘Come out, you black ape,’ he screams, pulling the cord of a grenade and swinging it round his head.

  ‘Hell! Get rid of it,’ warns Porta from the Panther’s hatch.

  ‘’Ere then!’ shouts Tiny, throwing the grenade at Porta, who is down under cover inside the tank with the speed of a ferret.

  The grenade strikes the top edge of the hatch coaming, but the antenna causes it to change direction and it goes off with a sharp crack.

  ‘The devil take me if I’m going to stand for this any longer.’ rages the Old Man. He grabs his Kalashnikov by the barrel and swings it round his head. The butt comes down with a hollow thud on the back of Tiny’s neck. With a long, hoarse exhalation of breath he goes down in the snow. His arms and legs jerk a few times, then he lies still.

  ‘Shoot him,’ foams Albert from inside the T-34, ‘shoot that mad bastard.’

  ‘Where did you catch him?’ asks the Commissar, shaking his head wonderingly. ‘He ought to be kept in a strait-jacket for the rest of his life!’

  ‘Tie him up,’ orders the Old Man, grinding his teeth together. ‘Tie him up like a Christmas tree! When he wakes up he’ll be worse than a ton’of HE. Tie him to the gun. Even he can’t shift that!’