Assignment Gestapo (14 page)

Steiner promptly forgot his quarrel with Porta. Howling with pain and indignation, he turned upon Gerda, who took to her heels and fled for the comparative safety of the counter. Steiner plunged after her, turning over tables and chairs as he galloped after her across the room. He caught up with her just before she reached the counter, and pushing her hard against the wall he began thumping her head backwards and forwards against it. Gerda fought like a tigress, biting, scratching and kicking, using her teeth, her nails, her knees, anything that was handy, and all the while howling at the top of her voice.

Suddenly, the door behind the counter opened and Big Helga appeared. She took in the situation at a glance, calmly picked up a champagne bottle and sallied forth to join in the action.

Steiner was far too preoccupied to notice this new and highly dangerous attack on his right flank. Helga took careful aim and the champagne bottle caught Steiner neatly in the nape of the neck. He crumpled instantly into a sawdust heap, blood and champagne mingling together.

‘Murderer!’ screamed Helga, kicking him ruthlessly where he lay.

‘Sex maniac!’ screeched Gerda, snatching up the broken neck of the champagne bottle and attempting to carve open Steiner’s face.

With surprising agility for one so enormous, Big Helga prised the broken glass away from her – not that she had any sympathy with Steiner, only that a murder on the premises might not go down too well with the authorities. Gerda had to content herself with a stream of obscenities, the like of which I swear I had never heard before, accompanied by a furious kicking of Steiner’s bloody and unconscious body.

The girl named Gertrude, who had a boyfriend in the SD, came staggering up the stairs with a crate of beer in her muscular arms. She had long, lank, tarnished fair hair and a perpetual pus-filled spot on the side of her nose.

Gerda fell eagerly upon her, pointing excitedly to Steiner and shouting something about revenge. Gertrude dumped her case of beer and looked down upon Steiner without much interest.

‘What am I supposed to do about it?’

‘Tell your boyfriend in the SD! ‘urged Gerda, aiming another vindictive kick into the small of Steiner’s back.

‘A la bonne heure
⁸
,’ replied Gertrude, in French.

She had no idea what the expression meant, but it sounded good and she used it frequently. She had picked it up from a French sailor to whom she had once been engaged for eight days, which was the length of time his boat had been in Hamburg. She had been engaged to many other sailors since then, but she had never forgotten ‘à la bonne heure’. If you wanted any special favour from Gerda, you had only to remark, in tones of admiration and wonderment, ‘Oh, you speak French, do you?’ and she would rise immediately to the bait. Unfortunately, the favour was almost always accompanied by a recital of her favourite fairy tale, of how she had been born into a rich French family and of how they had abandoned her at an early age and left her in a fashionable boarding school, the location of which was vague and could never quite be pinned down; but if you were prepared to hear her out, then she in return was willing to grant you all manner of small favours.

Porta and Tiny had once strung her along very successfully for a whole evening, when they had eaten half the food in the canteen and drunk themselves into a near paralytic stupor – and all at Gerda’s expense. Mind you, Tiny had paid for it afterwards. On returning to barracks he had suddenly taken a notion into his head to demonstrate to Porta the regulation manner in which an infantryman – and in particular an infantryman belonging to the regiment in which he had himself begun his military career – should fall to the ground on all fours and crawl along on his stomach. As Porta stood watching him, he saw Tiny disappear from view, hurtling groundwards, flat on his stomach, and crashed his head straight into a piece of sharp stone. The stone made a hole the size of a pigeon’s egg in Tiny’s forehead, and the blood ran in rivers down his face, but he picked himself up and linked arms with Porta, and they rolled back to barracks singing at the tops of their voices:

‘Soldaten sind keine Akrobaten!’
(Soldiers are not acrobats.)

The idea seemed to amuse them, and they were still trying unsuccessfully to turn cartwheels when they landed up outside the door of the infirmary and Tiny passed out.

He now, however, was very much alive, and he leaned forward over the beer-slopped table and shouted across to Gerda.

‘Hey, Beanstick! You want someone to come and kick his face in for you? Stand me a couple of pints and I’ll do it like a shot!’

‘Watch it,’ growled the Old Man, from the far end of the table.

The Legionnaire stretched out a steely hand and closed it round Tiny’s wrist. He shook his head, disapprovingly.

‘A joke’s a joke, but we don’t want a corpse on our hands, do we?’

‘Don’t we?’ Tiny considered the matter. ‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re bloody difficult things to get rid of?’ I suggested.

‘Why? Why not take ’em down and dump ’em in the water?’

Barcelona gave a short crack of laughter.

‘You ever tried marching down to the harbour with a corpse tucked under your arm? You’d have the coppers down on you like a ton of bricks before you were even half-way there.’

While Tiny was digesting this piece of information, Heide suddenly took his nose out of his beer mug to inform us that he was in no mood to stand guard. duty that night and had half a mind to go down the road to the ‘Matou’ to see their renowned whore in the green dress. We had all heard of the lady in question, though speaking for myself I had never seen her in the flesh.

‘Mark you, she’s expensive,’ said Barcelona, gravely.

‘But worth it,’ said Heide.

‘You know old Bernie the Boozer?’ Porta leaned forward towards us, his eyes gleaming. ‘He told me that for 5,000 he’d spent a whole night and half the next day with her. According to him, he was on the job non-stop and did it sixty-seven times.’

‘Like hell!’

‘It’s true,’ insisted Heide. ‘I saw him the day after, he hardly had the strength to get out of bed.’

‘Ridiculous bloody way to spend your money,’ said the Legionnaire.

‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’

With an obscene smile on his lips and his thoughts obviously far away, Porta pulled out a seagull’s egg and cracked it into his beer. With the point of his bayonet, he stirred the mixture dreamily round and round.

I watched him, fascinated.

‘Is it good?’ I asked.

‘Sodding awful,’ replied Porta, licking his bayonet clean.

‘Tell us that story of the girl you asked to marry you,’ suggested the Old Man, leaning back in his chair and filling his pipe. He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve just got time before we go on duty.’

And he hauled his feet up on the table, settling comfortably in his chair and preparing himself to listen to one of Porta’s rambling excursions into story telling – part truth, part invention, and, knowing Porta, I should say the more unlikely passages being the ones that actually did take place.

The rest of us followed the Old Man’s example and put our feet up on the table. Steiner was lying on the floor groaning, and we left him to it.

‘Well, it was right back at the beginning of the war,’ said Porta, coaxing the remains of his egg yolk up the side of the glass with one finger and sliding it into his mouth. ‘Before all the fighting broke out. I was with the 11th Regiment at Paderborn . . . Don’t know if you’ve ever been to Paderborn? Flaming horrible, it was. Dead as a bleeding doornail, nothing to do from one day to the next except stand and stare at all the po-faced gits that lived there running off to church every five minutes . . . Not only that, but to tell you the honest truth I wasn’t all that struck on the idea of fighting this bleeding war from the word go. Seemed proper daft to me. Shells and bombs and Christ knows what . . . nothing to eat, nothing to drink—’He drew in a breath and shook his head. ‘Didn’t do nothing for me at all. It’s not your scene, I says to myself. It’s not your scene, Porta my lad . . . you got to get out of this as quick as you can. . . Well, as you know, I’m not one to sit around on my arse doing nothing. No sooner said than done, that’s me . . . So the minute I’d made my mind up, I got this rather serious malady what threatened to do me in.’

The Old Man laughed.

‘I’ll never forget it . . . God knows what he didn’t do to himself to try and get sick. The stuff he ate . . . Christ, it would have felled an elephant! But not this lad. Oh, no! The more he tried, the healthier he got.’

‘Yeah, I reckon I got so toughened up you could’ve bounced me all over a perishing minefield and I’d’ve come out in one piece.’ Porta sucked the egg off his fingers, picked up a leg and farted, then settled back to his story. He grinned at us, knowingly. ‘I did it all right in the end, though. I was a bit green in them days, but I wangled my way into the infirmary all right.’

‘I remember the infirmary!’ cried Tiny, in excitement. ‘Stuck away round the back of the Cathedral. They shoved me in there when my big toe swelled up. Enormous, it was. Almost had to take it off.’ He turned to Porta. ‘Here, you remember that sawbones they had in there? Him with the wooden leg? What was his name?’

‘Brettschneider,’ said Porta.

‘Yeah, Brettschneider, that was the bastard! I remember when I was in there—’

‘What about my story?’ said Porta, coldly.

Tiny looked at him a moment, then blinked.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m not bothered.’

‘Thank you . . . Well, like I was saying, I got took off to the infirmary, where I saw this bastard doctor you just mentioned. And he was a bastard, I’ll grant you that . . . First day I was in there, he comes marching up to me with half the bleeding hospital trailing behind him. They screech to a halt at my bed, and he stands there, coughing in my face and asking me what I’m playing at and what I think’s wrong with me. So I explains about how I’m paralysed practically all over and can’t feel a thing, and how unfortunate it is, on account of the war starting up, and how I wanted to do my bit, and all that, and all the time he just goes on standing there and coughing – and me paralysed all over,’ said Porta, indignantly. ‘Paralysed all over and couldn’t even move out of the way. Might have had TB or the galloping clap for all I knew . . . So anyway, after a bit I gives a sort of groan, like—’ Porta gurgled hideously in the back of his throat – ‘and he agrees with me about it being unfortunate, and then quite sudden, like, he whips off all the bedclothes and leaves me lying there exposed with all these strangers looking on like I was some sort of specimen been tipped out of its bottle. So then he starts kind of prodding and poking and saying can I feel it and does it hurt, and me just lying there and making like I can’t feel a damn thing, and all the time I’m thinking, You’re not going to catch me, you bastard, you scum, you lousy stinking medico . . . Anyway, after a bit he straightens up and tells everyone how sad it is, this poor soldier going and getting paralysed right at the start of the war . . . But never mind, he says to me. I reckon we can put you right again. How did you say it come on? he asks. Sort of sudden, like? Just about the time when war was declared? Like a sort of shock?’ Porta looked round at us and closed one eye. ‘Stringing me along, see? Making like he was easy to con . . . So I thought I’d pile it on a bit, give it a few details . . . You’re right, I says. That was just how it come on, like a sort of shock, all through the body, like you said . . . I was standing in line with the others – we was being kitted out, see – and all of a sudden I come over bad. Real bad. Cold sweat and stars and everything turning round and this horrible kind of ringing in the ears . . . I managed to go another few yards and then I got this paralysis, like, and I just blacked out . . . Oh, I tell you,’ said Porta, ‘I really laid it on thick. Like I said, I was green in them days . . . I even forced a few tears out and carried on about how bad I felt, not being able to fight and earn medals and how chuffed my poor old mum and dad would’ve been if their son had been a hero . . . Tell me! I cries, all ardent like, Surely there’s some way a man what’s paralysed can serve his country and his people and his Führer? . . . You know what the bastard said?’

We shook our heads, obligingly, though some of us had obviously heard it all before in one version or another. Porta spat.

‘Oh, yes, he says, you can get up and start walking again just like everyone else has to . . . and with that, he bashes me real hard on the knee cap when I’m not ready for it, and my bleeding leg shoots out and knocks his glasses off . . . Jesus, I don’t know who was more mad, him or me . . . So anyway, when he’s recovered a bit and they’ve picked his glasses up for him and stopped sniggering behind their hands, he takes some bloody great long thing off a tray and begins shovelling it down my lughole until I think it’s going to come out the other side of my head . . . and when he’s finished playing with that, he yanks my eyelids somewhere over the top of my head and has a good long look at my flaming eyeballs, till after a bit – thinking maybe he’s colour blind, like -I says, they’re blue, and he says, what, and I says blue, fancy having a doctor what’s colour blind, and he just curses me all over the bed and starts fishing down my throat looking for my tonsils. God, that bastard had a field day! He was in my mouth, down my ears, up my bum, everywhere he could possibly poke something he bloody poked it’

‘So what happened, in the end?’ asked Stege, who was new to the story.

‘Hang on a minute, I’m getting there!’ said Porta, irritably. He couldn’t bear to be interrupted, or urged on to the conclusion before he was ready for it. ‘Next thing the bastard does, he stands back and says how sorry he feels for me . . . It’s enough to break your heart, he says, seeing this young man what’s so gravely ill and asks nothing more but being able to serve his people and his country and his Führer . . . It might be better, he says, to put you in an isolation ward – like maybe a military prison? But we’ll see how you go, he says. It wouldn’t surprise me if you was to get better quite sudden. It’s the way with these maladies like what you’ve got. They attack people sudden and they go sudden, especially at times like now, when the country’s at war. You’d be surprised, he says, how many other brave boys like you have been struck down in the prime of life this past week or so . . . and most of ’em, he says, grinning, like, with his dirty great choppers, most of ’em’s already up and about and back with their units . . . just like you’re going to be.’ Porta shook his head. ‘What a bastard! Next thing I know, he’s trying to get me out of bed – trying to get me to walk, like some bleeding miracle in the bleeding Bible. He has four of ’em haul me out and set me upright, and of course as soon as they lets me go I just collapses on the floor and they has to put me back again. He doesn’t like that. You can tell he doesn’t. For two pins I reckon he’d have put the boot in and walked off and left me to it. Only he couldn’t do that, on account of he was supposed to be curing me, so he sort of pulls his face together and starts telling the sister what sort of treatment she’s got to give me . . . We’ll start off gentle, he says. Nothing too drastic . . . Put him on a fluid diet, he says, for a start. No solids. No meat. Right? And of course, no alcohol . . . Give him emetics every day, he says, to make him vomit . . . Purge him every other day, clean his bowels out . . . If that doesn’t work, try him on quinine . . . but nothing harsh, not just at the moment. We’ll see if we can’t cure him the easy way first . . . And then he grins at me, the bastard, and he leans over the bed and he says, we’ll have you out of here and serving at the front in record time, you see if we don’t . . . we’ll have you winning medals yet, he says. You’ll have your chance to be a hero, lad . . . Honest,’ said Porta, ‘it was more like a threat than a bleeding promise. So I thanks him very kindly with tears in my eyes, and all the time I’m swearing to God he’s not going to get the better of me . . .’