‘What was up with him?’ asks Porta, putting his head up again cautiously through the hatchway.
‘He nearly got his napper chopped off when the wire went,’ explains Gregor, with a laugh. ‘Now he thinks Albert did it on purpose. They had a bit of an argument over some black puddin’ earlier on.’
‘It’s what I always say,’ laughs Porta. ‘He’s too touchy, that boy!’
It is well into the night before we are through the pass and go slipping and sliding down the far side. The huge fort rises before us, dark and threatening. It is built of great, shaped blocks of stone, piled upon one another without any kind of mortar. If mortar had been used it would have crumbled away long ago. Frost has bitten deeply into the corners of the blocks.
‘That’s what I call building blocks,’ cries Heide, for once really impressed. ‘How on earth did they manage to get them up on top of one another?’
‘Slaves,’ replies ‘Whorecatcher’, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Never been a shortage of them, here in Russia. They’re willin’ and effective, and there’s plenty of ’em. People can be made to do most anything, if you know how to apply a knout to ’em, or cut ’em a bit with a Cossack knife!’
‘I’ve always been a great admirer of your humanitarian principles,’ says Porta, sarcastically.
The Old Man wants us to tank up before resting, but he has to give in to our wild protests.
‘Frostlips’ and Gregor get a huge fire going inside the great hall.
‘Stinks o’ dead men in here,’ says Barcelona, sniffing the air.
‘To hell with that,’ hisses the Commissar. ‘Dead men aren’t dangerous!’
‘You’re that ugly a feller could spew up just lookin’ at you,’ shouts Tiny angrily. He hits out at Heide with his machine-pistol.
‘Stop that everlastin’ squabbling,’ shouts the Old Man. ‘Now I want quiet! One word more and you get guard duty!’
‘That Nazi shit looks like ’e’s on ’is way to a funeral,’ roars Tiny, pointing at Heide with his mpi. ‘’Is own funeral, too!’
‘Shut up and come over here. Let’s have a game of idiot bank,’ suggests Porta, shuffling the cards. ‘How many’s in?’ he asks, looking around him.
‘I’m too bloody tired,’ moans Barcelona, dropping down heavily on the packed earth on the floor.
‘There’s two things a man’s never too tired for,’ says Porta, cutting the cards into talons. ‘Gambling and shagging! I can tell you a story about what can happen to people who think they’re too tired to fuck!’
‘The very widely-known Wachtmeister, Alois Fresa from the “Alex” station, got temporarily posted, one Palm Sunday it was. to the plain-clothes branch. He put on his good pin-striper, and then got himself an Afro hair-do -that’s a typical symptom of paranoia. When he found it not so easy to pick up a bit o’ the other, he got hold of a roupie of yellow leather shoulder-holsters an’ stuck a roupie of P-38s into ’em. He’d seen that was how the tough rops on the films did it. Of course, this made a hell of an impression on the shield-struck floozies. He let the word go round he was Gestapo, but that was a lot of balls. He was on the bicycle-theft flying squad, really. Then his lucky day rolled round. He met three villains’comin’ out of the Commerzbank in Hohenzollem Damm, each with a bagful of shekels in his hand, and he blew ’em away with his hand-artillery. This blood-bath got itself talked about all over Berlin, and the women were soon standin’ ten-deep round Alois. After a bit of this, though, he found it was more’n he could manage and wished they’d all get to hell out of it and leave him be. So there he was, late one night, sitting in “The Crooked Cop”, head down, an’ fucked all to pieces. Up came a little made-up doll from the Wedding district, totterin’ along in heels like stilts, an’ began touching him up for starters.
‘“How’d you like to show me your other gun?” she whispered, passionate as all hell. “I’ve heard a lot about you! You know you look the way Clark Gable always wanted to look!” She touched him upa bit more then, and got one of her long, painted nails inside, and started working direct on John Thomas with the roll-collar. But Johnny T. wasn’t havin’ any. He was limp an’ wrinkled as a 90-year-old eunuch.
‘“Sod off!” snarled Alois, giving her a push. “If I was to really get hot for you, you’d have to look a lot different!”
‘This Wedding bint started givin’ him mouth then, which Wedding bints have a way of doin’!
‘“An’ you’re the feller they’re all talking so much about,” she yelled. “You ain’t even got hair on your balls. You don’t get away with turnin’ me down!” And before anybody knew what she was up to, there she stood with his two P-38s in her hands. She’d flipped ’em neatly out of his shoulder-holsters. Then she cocked ’em with her thumbs the way the cowboys used to do when they walked into Prairie Town bank to arrange a loan.
‘“God! No!” he screamed, holding out his hands in front of him. As if that was goin’ to help!
‘The one-legged bartender choked on his drink. He was tryin’ to shout “Heil Hitler!” an’ swallow at the same time.
‘“Understand me! Please! Darlin’! I’m tootired!” babbled Fresa. But he’d gone off the bar-stool on to the floor before he even knew he was dead.
‘The bartender tried to scream, but all he got out was a sound like a sea-lion with asthma.
‘So there you see what can happen to a feller who’s too tired to fuck! Anybody else want in?’ asks Porta, looking around again.
‘Twenty!’ shouts Gregor, slapping twenty marks on the nearest talon.
But the game soon peters out. We are far too exhausted, and hardly care whether we win or lose. The two last players are Porta and ‘Frostbite’. Then they, too, give up.
Tiny has hardly got his head down before he breaks into a roar of laughter. He is one of those lucky people who can laugh for hours at their own jokes. His unbridled laughter takes the rest of us with. him. Soon laughter shakes the whole room.
The Commissar whinnies, tears running down his cheeks. Every time we look over at Tiny, sitting with his pale-grey bowler cocked at an angle on his head, we explode into laughter again. We simply cannot stop. The only serious face is that of Heide. Each of our roars of laughter seems to tighten his face into an even stiffer mask of severity.
Finally we fall into a sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly Tiny is there again. He stands over the Old Man with legs apart, jabbing at him with a machine-pistol.
‘What the hell now?’ curses the Old Man.
‘You’re under arrest!’ says Tiny with an MP look on his face.
‘Arrest? Are you mad?’ hisses the Old Man, angry at being pulled back out of dreamland. ‘What the hell’re you talking about? Don’t you know I’m your Section Leader?’
‘That’s why,’ growls Tiny, darkly. ‘In mine, Adolf’s an’ the German people’s name you are under arrest. You have illegally laid hands on a subordinate!’
‘Now I’ve heard that one too?’ protests the Old Man, blankly.
‘It won’t ’elp you to deny it, Oberfeldwebel Beier,’ says Tiny, with the strict air of an interrogator. ‘Did you, or did you not, crack me on the bonce with an mpi butt? You see? Now I’m going to shoot you for it! I will not stand any more of it!’
‘He’s mad as a hatter,’ whispers ‘Frostlips’. He edges over towards Tiny, who has released the safety on his weapon and whose finger is already curling dangerously on the trigger.
The Old Man sits there paralysed, staring at him.
‘Frostlips’ jumps forward and bores three stiff fingers into Tiny’s diaphragm. Air leaves the big man’s lungs with explosive force. He bends over forward.
The Legionnaire lifts his arm and brings the edge of his hand down with all his strength on Tiny’s neck. He falls unconscious.
‘What the devil’s wrong with him?’ gasps the Old Man, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve knocked him cold with a butt-stroke. I’m getting fed up with the bloody idio
t!’
‘Bien sûr, he is dead drunk,’ says the Legionnaire. ‘That is the trouble! You can see it on him!’
The Commissar begins frantically to rummage in his pack. He pulls out two empty Stolichnaja bottles.
‘I’ll say he’s drunk,’ he says, throwing the bottles disgustedly from him. ‘The swine’s drunk two litres of vodka!’
‘Let’s kill him,’ suggests ‘Whorecatcher’, as soon as he discovers there is not a drop left in the two bottles.
‘A beating is what he needs,’ says the Legionnaire. ‘A good whipping with our belts would make him think twice!’
‘No good,’ answers Porta, shaking his head. ‘He’s a double-nature. One of ’em, when he’s drunk, is completely unaccountable for his actions; then there’s the sober feller, who can’t remember a single thing the drunk did while under the influence. When he’s not drunk he’s right enough.’
‘Then we’ll have to see to it he don’t get drunk, won’t we,’ says ‘Frostlips’. ‘He’s a danger to all around him!’
‘That’s nothing to what he’s like if you refuse to give him anything,’ laughs Porta, heartily.
I don’t know how long I have been asleep when the others awaken me. Soundlessly I grasp my machine-pistol, and strain my ears in the darkness.
Porta sits up alongside me and is about to give a shout. I put my hand on him to indicate silence. Instinctively he covers the glowing embers of the fire with a tin bath. The room is in total darkness.
‘What is it?’ whispers the Old Man, nervously.
‘I don’t know, ‘I whisper back, my hands tightly around the mpi. ‘Something woke me up!’
‘Skis,’ mumbles Tiny, who has ears like a weasel. He claims he can hear a fly rubbing its legs together five miles away. Against the wind, too!
‘Are you sure?’ asks the Commissar, in a voice which shakes a little. ‘It’s not the wind, fooling you?’
‘Don’t you believe it!’ answers Tiny. ‘Me an’ my flappers don’t make mistakes! When you been a slave in Torgau, you can’ear the lice dancin’ a tango on the belly of a Chinese whore in Shanghai!’
‘Skis!’ mumbles the Commissar, thoughtfully. ‘Then they’re after us! But how the hell can they have found us here?’
‘Impossible!’ whispers ‘Frostlips’. ‘Can’t be us they’re after. Must be somebody else. There’s manhunts on in Russia all year round!’
‘Well, they ain’t come out here in this hellish snow for the fun of it, you can bet your boots,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’.
‘Let’s get outside!’ orders the Old Man, nervously. ‘We’re like rats in a trap in here!’
Unfortunately, it has stopped snowing. A full moon has come out from behind the hurrying clouds, and the snow glitters in its pale beams.
We huddle together, freezingly cold, behind the frost-weathered stones, and stare out over the snowy distances. We can see nothing, only hear the wind, howling.
‘Jesus’n Mary!’ cries Tiny suddenly. ‘The ’ole Red bleedin’ Army’s on its way up’ere after us!’
The Old Man turns his glasses in the direction Tiny is indicating, but can see nothing.
‘You’re still bloody drunk, and seein’ things,’ he snarls angrily.
‘Job tvojemadj,’ cries the Commissar. ‘Siberians! A whole company of ’em, and they’re coming this way!’
Soon after, the rest of us can see them too. They come racing down the mountains on skis in one long line.
The Legionnaire slides down behind the MG-34, inserts a belt, loads, and closes the cover with a tiny click.
I draw my pistol from its shoulder-holster, cock it and let the hammer down carefully on the round. It’s the best way with a Nagan.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re goin’ to get up to with that popgun?’ asks ‘Whorecatcher’, with a gesture of resignation. ‘Do you realize what those fellers’ll do to us when they get hold of us? I hurt just thinking about it. We’ll never see the light o’ day again! And when they’ve finished with us we’ll only be able to crawl!’
‘Shut up,’ I snarl, holstering the pjstol again. ‘They won’t take me alive!’
‘You’re wrong! If they want us they’ll take us, however much you bang away with that pistol of yours. The sun’s gone down for us. We’re dead men. Think I’ll just stroll down there and get it over quick!’
‘You stay here,’ commands the Commissar, in a voice sharp as a knife. ‘Damned if we’re going to give up just because a couple of slit-eyed NKVD coppers come sliding down on boards!’
‘I’m not givin’ up either,’ swears ‘Frostlips’, readying his Kalashnikov.
Gregor cracks a magazine in the LMG. He too is ready to fight things out.
The Legionnaire puts a. Nagan in his boot-top, and draws his Moorish combat-knife.
‘What the hell good’ll it do, bangin’ away now, man?’ sighs Albert despairingly. Still he loads himself up with hand-grenades.
‘You look like a lump of black pudding left behind in a shithouse,’ grins Porta.
‘That’s what I feel like,’ admits Albert sadly.
‘Shall we give ’em a dose up the arse with stovepipe Lizzie here?’ asks Tiny, battle-hungry. He handles the heavy mortar as if it were made of cardboard. ‘We can blow them shits away like confetti, when they come on to that long flat bit.’
‘You must have been reading our propaganda leaflets again, ‘Porta scolds him irritably. ‘They’d hear it a million miles off in these shitty mountains. Then we’d have the whole rotten OGPU on our necks!’
‘Njet mortira*,’ warns sledge-driver Ermolov, hugging his Kalashnikov closer to him. He has loaded with explosive bullets which smash anything they hit.
‘Is it the OGPU?’ asks Albert with wide-open eyes. Even the thought of the OGPU or the Gestapo makes him shiver like a blancmange.
‘Yes! Who’d the hell you think it was?’ asks Porta, with a short laugh. ‘Think it was a load of Salvation Army blackbirds, out picking up loose souls?’
‘Ssatana,’ curses the Commissar. ‘Of all the fucking patrols to run into! Siberian bloody OGPU. Ssatana!’ he repeats, banging his fist down viciously on the Kalashnikov’s round magazine.
‘What the hell difference does it make if they’re Siberians or whatever?’ asks the Old Man, blankly. He keeps his eyes on the long line of snow-camouflaged skiers on the farside of the mountain slope, as he speaks.
‘Hell of a difference,’ growls the Commissar. ‘Siberians are the best manhunters in the world. They’re on their feet night and day all year round, in peace or war. They range the country from the Polar Sea to the Black Sea, from the mountains of China to the forests of Finland and Poland, and they get a bounty for every single body they bring in.’
Staff-corporal Dalin comes rushing down the ice-clad path, completely out of breath, throws himself down alongside the Commissar and fishes a crumpled cigarette from his pocket. Hungrily he sucks smoke into his lungs, and lets it come slowly out through his nostrils.
‘Igor’s still up there,’ he explains, pointing to the mountain top. ‘There’s a whole company of OGPU special service troops on the way up and they’ve got a short-barrelled mountain gun with ’em. Igor thinks they’ve picked up our trail.’
The cigarette burns down one side. He looks at it, sadly.’ ‘Tovaritsch!’ he says, giving the Commissar a pleading look, and scratching his head under his fur cap. ‘Let us go home, and leave the gold where it is! A man who has never been rich will never miss it!’
‘Shut up, you mangy cur,’ says the Commissar angrily. ‘There is no way back. Take a swig of vodka, maybe it’ll swill the cowardice out of you!’
‘Get your pecker up, mate.’ Tiny puts his arm, comfortingly, round Dalin. The man looks like a sick hen, whose eggs have been taken from her. ‘Buck up, now! You’re gonna be rich, an’ can pick out your own wallpaper.’
‘Have we got any chance at all of getting out of this?’ asks Gregor desperately, looking up at the snow-
capped mountains.
‘I’m no prophet,’ growls the Commissar impatiently. ‘But first of all we’ve got to get up through that gulch before they start cackling on that bloody radio of theirs!’
‘We can soon blow that lot away,’ cries Porta, optimistic as always. ‘We’ve got two tea-waggons, the PIV and the Panther and that armoured sledge. We’re a whole bloody army. They’ve only got a pissy little mountain gun, and for sure not a single armour-piercing shell for it. They can’t do more’n scratch our paintwork a bit!’
‘The radio dammit, the radio! shouts the Commissar furiously. ‘Before the noise of our first explosive shell has died away they’ll have alarmed their base and we’ll have a whole division on top of us – supported by Jabos! There’ll be headhunters swarming all over these mountains like flies on a hot midden!’
‘Who says we use guns?’ asks Porta. ‘We just go quietly up to ’em with open hatches so they think we’re on their side. Then when we get close enough to start up on ’em with balalaikas an’ guitars. Goodbye the slit-eyed shits!’
‘Njet!’ answers the Commissar, shaking his head negatively. ‘Anybody can tell you don’t know the headhunters. Immediately they sight us a radio report goes off, and somewhere or other somebody starts finding out who we can be. Nobody can move in Russia without the OGPU having been informed, and what d’you think’ll happen when they can’t obtain radio contact with the company we’ve liquidated? I promise you. Everything comes to the boil!’
‘You don’t think, then, that it’s us they’re looking for?’ asks the Old Man, doubtfully. ‘Who the hell else can it be?’
‘It’s certainly not us,’ answers the Commissar, decisively. ‘They’re one of those blasted tracking patrols who’re not looking for anything in particular. Patrols like that are permanently on the hunt for anybody wandering round without a propusk*.’ He pushes his fur cap thoughtfully back on his head.
His grey eyes suddenly begin to glitter cunningly. ‘I think I’ve got it,’ he says after a long pause. ‘A natural disaster! Their base could accept that!