The Commissar (10 page)

‘What’d it cost you?’ asks a Wachtmeister of artillery, interestedly. He is wondering if the 25 marks he has saved up is enough.

‘She did it for love!’ Porta brags. ‘But
you
, you can count on slipping a grand at least for the pleasure.’

‘Fuck her then. She ain’t my type,’ snarls the Wachtmeister disappointedly. He goes over to chat up one of the short-skirted waitresses.

‘Take cover!’ shouts Tiny, swaying drunkenly to his feet. ‘I’ll shoot the bleeding cocks off the lot of you, else!’

The machine-pistol seems to go on chattering forever. A huge mirror carrying the old Czarist eagle shatters to pieces. Bottles fall from behind the bar. Ricochets leave splintered
tracks in the floor. When the magazine is finally empty he stands for a moment swaying uncertainly on widespread legs.

‘Are you dead?’ he asks the empty bar-room, changing magazines. ‘Maybe you know now ’oo it is as ’as invaded this bleedin’ country?’ With another long burst he blows all the windows out, shoots a cow in a landscape painting hanging on the wall, and makes a colander of the plank wall screening the bar from the kitchen. Then he falls to the floor, clutching the machine-pistol lovingly in his arms.

A quartermaster with only one boot on exits rapidly through the door. He thinks the Russians have come back.

Tanya helps Tiny to his feet, embraces him and tells him with false friendliness that she has always loved Germans.

‘A world war’s not all wickedness,’ says Porta to Vera, straightening her garter. ‘Does that commissar feller of yours know you dish out his private crumpet to the German liberators while he’s away? He might send you to
Kolyma
for unRussian behaviour if he found out. But p’raps you’d like the work, down in the state mines?’

‘We’ve got visitors,’ yells Gregor, happily, as a Kübel comes skidding sideways through the slush of the square with tyres whining.

Five military policemen spring eagerly from the Kübel. Carefully as ballet dancers they pick their way through the melting snow, to avoid marring their mirror-bright jackboots. Their helmets sparkle, throwing flashes of light to all sides. As they cross the square they draw Walther pistols from their new, yellow holsters. They tramp heavily and with assurance across the planks of the floor, chests well out to display their brightly-polished headhunter insignia for all to see. They are big, well-nourished men, who enjoy the fear they are accustomed to engendering.

The guard commander, a brutal-looking, beery Saxon
with the Blood Order
*
over his right breast pocket, marches round in a circle and sends field court-martial looks at us.

‘You don’t know
me
, you sons of pigs,’ he roars, with a self-satisfied air, spitting on the floor. ‘But God help you when you do!’ He draws a long police truncheon from its special pocket in his trouser-leg, flexes it like a rapier with both hands, and swishes it menacingly through the air. ‘Let’s see the bastard who was shootin’ in here without orders!’

‘I’m the bloke you’re lookin’ for, Herr Wachtmeister, sir,’ grins Tiny, round a fat cigar. As he answers he presses the muzzle of a heavy
Tokarew
pistol hard up under the MP’s fat jowl. ‘Look, you stinkin’ excuse for a ’uman bein’, you sod off, an’ take your bleedin’ shower of coppers with you!’Cos in just one minute I’m goin’ to start shootin’ again.’

‘You’re bloody
mad
!’ stammers the Wachtmeister, nervously, falling slowly back toward the door.

‘No I ain’t,’ grins Tiny, sending a bullet into the floor between the man’s feet. ‘I’m Frankenstein’s bastard, bleedin’ son, I am, an’ I drink blood every mornin’ for breakfast!’

‘Arrest that man!’ gabbles the Wachtmeister, chalk-white in the face. There is no reaction to his order. His four MPs have fled out of the door. He gives out a shrill scream, as Tiny closes in on him with a deep snarl, and hammers his helmet down over his nose with a closed fist. He gets out of the door so quickly that he falls over his own feet and slides a long way on his face in the slush.

‘There’ll be trouble
now
,’ predicts Barcelona, darkly. ‘They’ll
kill
us, when they come back with reinforcements.’

‘Pick up your gear, and let’s get out of here,’ orders the Old Man, squaring his cap on his head.

‘We are closing now,’ says Tanya, decisively. ‘Get off
with you. We see you again tomorrow. This is a
nice
place, I must tell you arse-licking Germans!’

She rattles the iron Venetian blinds shut, and turns off the stuffed bear’s wicked red eyes.

On the way out Tiny smashes his fist through one of the remaining window-panes. He shakes his hand, which is covered with blood, and licks at it like a cat lapping up cream.

‘What the hell did you do
that
for?’ the Old Man scolds him, angrily.

‘It was a Commie bleedin’ window, that’s why,’ yells Tiny. He kicks out at an empty bucket, which rolls noisily over into the opposite gutter. ‘You’re always grumblin’, Old Un’. You don’t want us poor, lonely soldiers to ’ave any fun. I
love
smashin’ windows. ’Ave done since I was a nipper. If I’ad to pay for all the windows I’ve busted, I’d need a big, bleedin’ loan in the National bleedin’ Bank to do it. You ought to ’ave been there the night me an’ the Jew furrier’s son David from ’
Eyn
’
Oyerstrasse
busted all the windows in the David Station, an’ showered the bleedin’ coppers all over with busted glass. It was their own fault, really. They was ’avin’ a gaspipe repaired, an’ the silly bleeders ’ad piled up all the cobblestones just ready to ’and for us when we come out o’ the “’Appy Pig”!

‘“’Ere we go, then!” shouted the Yid’s kid, an’ ’e threw the first stone. It landed smack bang on Superintendent Willy Nass’s bleedin’ desk, knockin’ over ’is personal coffeepot an’ smashin’ ’is inkwell, so a’ole lot of documents important to the soddin’ state gets covered with coffee an’ ink. Nass went bleedin’ barmy, an’ went off’Amburg-style so all the Schupo coppers started puttin’ on their armour an’ artillery. On their way out o’ the door leadin’ to the
Reeperbahn
they got stuck, there was that many of ’em. David an’ me borrowed a couple o’ bikes, as was leanin’ waitin’ for us, up against the wall of the variety theatre, an’ spurted off down the road with a posse o’ blue-lights chasin’ our arses. Jesus, but they was narked when they copped us. Me that is,
’cos I was the only one they copped. The Yid’s David ’e’d gone off to Buxtehude. Said ’e ’ad to ’elp ’is auntie with’er tomatoes. Nass, ’e threatened me with ’eavy punishments for pinchin’ bikes an’ wanton destruction of property while escapin’. There was somethin’ too about old women an’ a paperstand. I tried to explain to ’im, best I could, as it couldn’t ’ave been me ’cos I couldn’t ride a bike.

‘“It’s a
lie
”’e screamed, an’ smashed the top of ’is desk in two with ’is truncheon. But we’ll soon find out what’s what, ’e promised me, an’ pushed me out the door an’ down the bleedin’ stairs. Out in the street they give me a national police force bike, which Nass ’ad to give a receipt for. We started off from
Davidstrasse
, as goes down on the slope into the Elbe.

‘“Get on!” said an Oberwachtmeister with a moustache the spittin’ image of Adolf’s.

‘I pretended to fall off a couple o’ times, an’ they beat me up a bit to make me understand as ’ow this bike trip was important to ’em. They set me up on the saddle then an’ give this national bleedin’ bike an ’ell of a push.

‘“Ride, you stinkin’ cycle thief,” Nass ordered me, out from under ’is ’at-brim.

‘“Very good, sir,” I yelled and ’eld me feet out to the sides. The bleedin’ bike did the rest. It went like a bat out o’ bleedin’ ’ell down
Davidstrasse
, an’, ’angin’ over on one side, round the corner o’
Bernhard Nocht Strasse
, as is pretty steep. I nearly kissed a number 2 tram on the way, as it come pissin’ up the ’ill there where all them 5 mark ’ores from
Fischermarkt
does their business.

‘Down by
Landingsbrücke
, I’ad to leave the police bike, which carried on on its own down into the bleedin’ Elbe. You should’ve ’eard im, Nass, go on when ’e found out ’is bike was drowned. I ’eard later as ’e ’ad to pay for it. It was ’im as ’ad ’is name on the receipt.’

‘Stop all that shit about
Davidswacht
and Nass,’ sniffles Porta, who has caught a cold. ‘We’ll be shot before we know where we are. That commissar bint I had social
relations with, told me there was a mob of NKVD who’d gone underground here when the Red Army lighted out.’

‘Latrine rumours,’ says Gregor Martin, off-handedly. ‘Our friends have lost their courage. We have won the war. All we’ve got to do is make our way straight across Russia, and meet up with the rice-eaters on the other side o’ the earth.’

‘I want to see the MO first,’ sneezes Porta. ‘My feet are killing me
now
, an’ what a walk
that’ll
be! Have you any idea just how big Mother Russia
is
?’

‘Know what I think,’ trumpets Tiny, banging himself on the chest. ‘We ought to burn the arses out from under them NKVD bastards, so’s we could get a bit of bleedin’ peace for once in a while!’

‘
Up
you,’ groans Porta hoarsely, clearing his nose between his fingers, noisily. ‘I’m about tired of fucking about on the crust of this sodding earth at everybody’s beck an’ call. Think of all the things that’re going on in Berlin while I’m wastin’ my time out here playing soldiers!’

He blows his nose again, and takes a big swig of vodka. ‘Our German God ain’t all that smart. If He’d been clever He’d of took out a Bohemian Gefreiter named Adolf Hitler in the First World War!’

‘Watch your mouth, Obergefreiter Porta,’ Heide warns him, sharply. ‘It is my duty to report you to the NSFO. I have no doubt of what the result of that will be.’

‘See into the future, can you?’ asks Porta, ironically, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

A revealing click sounds in the quiet night, and we go to cover alongside the wall.

‘An mpi, a bleedin’ mpi,’ whispers Tiny, as he goes down.

Like a wise old tomcat Porta moves straight across the street and forces his way down some wrecked cellar stairs, where half a door hangs swinging.

As he moves, explosions erupt from another cellar opening.

‘A
Balalaika
! God rot me, a
Balalaika
!’ howls Gregor excitedly, and fires reflexively at the flash.

Just as reflexively I tear the ring from an egg-grenade, and sling it towards the cellar. There is a hollow thump, and a yellow-red flame blooms in the darkness. Its reflection comes back at us from wet steel helmets.

Tiny rushes straight through a glass door, with a deafening crash. Glass splinters fly around his ears. His
Schmeisser
explodes, chatteringly. It takes only a few minutes. He comes back out through the door-frame, kicking glass out of his way. He sneezes twice, violently.

‘’Ere’s the bleedin
Balalaika
,’ he shouts, holding a
Kalashnikov
up above his head. ‘’Im as played it’s dead!’

‘The bloody neighbours are that fucked up by this war, they ain’t able to do much more’n get in the way,’ coughs Barcelona. He has a cold, like the rest of us. He coughs up phlegm, and spits on a dead horse, which is lying in a pool of frozen blood.

‘Don’t you be too sure of that,’ sniffles Porta, taking another swig from his vodka bottle. He regards vodka as an alternative to vitamin C, and thinks it will help his cold. ‘Never trust the neighbours. Before we know where we are those rotten lice’ll have started up all over again, and we’ll be back where we kicked off!’

‘Know what I think?’ shouts Tiny, from inside the remains of a delicatessen. ‘This war is a new Thirty Years War, like the time Jesus landed ’Is army in the Red bleedin’ Sea to give the Turks a beatin’ up.’ His biblical knowledge is, as usual, slightly off-centre.

Heavy infantry fire sounds from the far end of the town.

‘They’ve got shit between the ears,’ sneezes Gregor. ‘War-mad bastards. Why they got to always be shootin’? I wish I was back with my general. With him, war was
fun
!’

‘Not allowed to shoot MPs, is it?’ says Porta, mysteriously, and scrapes frozen snow from his boots.

‘Too true it ain’t,’ laughs Barcelona, swallowing a whole
handful of throat pastilles. He has ‘found’ them on a body.

‘There’s a lot o’ things as ain’t allowed,’ shouts Tiny. Angrily, he picks up an unexploded hand-grenade and throws it through a window. ‘Fuck ’em all!’

Jesus, Jesus, why is everybody always sneezin’ and freezin’ in this God-awful country,’ sniffles Porta. ‘Anybody know a cure for it? I feel as if hair’s growin’ out of the sides of my head, an’ the germs’ve built a barbed-wire entanglement in my throat!’

‘A Russian grenade up your backside, or perhaps a
Kalashnikov
burst straight into your napper’d clear that cold away in a second,’ says Gregor, with a less than humorous laugh.

‘They’re a certain cure, at least,’ the Old Man admits, scraping at his silver-lidded pipe with his combat-knife. ‘Colds are hell, and worst of all they’re not enough to put you in sick-bay.’

‘You’re right there,’ puffs Tiny. ‘I saw the MO yesterday. Threw me out ’e did, an’ threatened to ’ave me jailed for bleedin’ sabotage o’ the war effort.

‘“I got a fever sir,” I said. “52 degrees at least.”