The Commissar (22 page)

‘“Why are these prisoners not chained by the neck, so that they could have been dragged in here like the dogs they are?” she snarled, wickedly. She bent over the indictment on the bench in front of her, and rattled through it at such a pace that nobody could understand a word she said. She raised her head and stretched her neck like a hungry vulture, staring the three estate agents down.

‘“According to paragraph 900, section 3, part 4B. the punishment for the crime which you have committed, i.e. grand fraud and illegal sale of the property of third person, is imprisonment for a period of from two to ten years. In aggravated circumstances the sentence may be increased to hard labour for up to fourteen years.” She banged three times with her gavel, covered up her permanent-waved hair, and announced the sentence: “In the name of the Führer and the German people I sentence you to fourteen years hard labour! I only regret that I cannot sentence you to life imprisonment.” she added with a smile which resembled that of a shark turning on its back to strike.

‘The three former geniuses of finance rattled their chains out of the court, taking their dead cert with them. Nobody
outside
Bautzen
*
has seen them, since they jingled off through the courthouse gates in the Black Maria!’

‘Yes,’ sighs Wolf, ‘money can be a source of wisdom. But what were you trying to tell us?’

‘Well, you see,’ smiles Porta, pleasantly, ‘I wanted you to understand that you must never undervalue anybody! Even though there’s only a few around with more’n sand in their heads, most’ve ’em have still got enough up there to take you for a sucker, if you don’t keep on your toes all the time.’

‘Yes. anybody can buy a Jew’s gun an’ a piece o’ paper, but usin’ it right’s a different kettle of fish,’ mumbles Wolf, writing down a figure on the tablecloth.

‘What’s the Old Man going to say to this trip?’ asks Sally, practically, pursing his lips. ‘Won’t we have trouble with him?’

‘Yes, he’ll be our big problem,’ admits Wolf, showing all his gold fillings in a ghastly, hyena grin. ‘He’ll call it bank robbery, and won’t like us havin’ planned to leave most of the mob in the lurch.’

‘Oh, come
on
,’ protests Porta, shovelling the remains of the blackcurrant jam into his mouth. ‘You’re making it into something ugly and criminal. To my way of thinking it’s completely legal. Commie theory says everything belongs to the people, and aren’t we the people? So all we’re doin’ is going off to pick up our own gold!’

‘It limps,’ hisses Sally, contrarily. ‘The gold belongs to the Soviet people, and that’s not us!’

‘In a way you’re right,’ Porta says, triumphantly,’ but my bint an ‘her commissar husband
are
Russian Commie people, and they are going to share their gold with us! And very Social Democratic of them too, I say.’

‘Know what,’ Wolf suddenly begins to laugh noisily and wriggles happily in his generals-only swivel-chair. ‘I’d love it if we could just leave Tiny behind on the quay at Liban. I
still owe him for that time he wanted to blow me to bits with this radio.’

‘You must be out of your mind,’ cries Porta. ‘Don’t make any mistakes about Tiny. Maybe he does call the letter H a rugby goal and Y a catapult, but he’s still the cunningest sod that ever slunk down the Reeperbahn. If we were stupid enough to leave him at Libau, and do him out of fulfilling his dearest wish: black silk underclothes and alligator-skin shoes with pin-holes in ’em, he’d be mad enough to drink the bloody Baltic dry, an’ then we’d never get to sail to Sweden.

‘I remember once when he was batman to the Commander of 9th Army at Hamburg, General of Cavalry von Knochenhauer. One of the wicked sods from Sankt Pauli put the word in about Tiny having done something Herr General von Knochenhauer didn’t like one little bit. In went Tiny for interrogation, and they knocked him about something dreadful, but didn’t get anything out of him. Still, when he got out on the Reeperbahn again, he was limpin’, reduced to the ranks and a lot thinner than when he went inside.

‘“That Kurt’s a wrong un,” he explained to the Jew furrier’s son David, when they were sitting down in “The Headless Nag” drinking beer. “A louse’s what ’e is, a filthy rat.
donkey
shit! Let’s me’n you go an’ talk to Mm a bit an’ persuade ’im to stop shoppin’ people!”

‘“He’s a dirty, rotten, bastarding lump of afterbirth,” shouted David, angry on Tiny’s behalf. He’d never met Kurt really. “He’s nothin’ but a chopped-offpair of Kaffir bollocks!” he wound up, wrathfully.

‘When they’d finished gettin’ one another all worked up. they got “Pickpocket Petra” to ring over to “The Cow With Three Udders”, where Kurt was sittin’ drinking raspberry juire’n rum.

‘“Who’m I talkin’ to?” asked Kurt.

‘“Me o’ course.” said Petra, which was true enough.

‘“Who’s me, then?” squealed Kurt suspiciously. “Got a
name, haven’t you love?”

‘“Fräulein Müller, Petra Müller.”

‘“Go
on
! Now ain’t that nice of you to ring, Petra? How’s it goin’ then? ’Ad it off lately, ’ave you?”

‘“Hello Kurt! Listen to me now, I got a hot one for you! Can you be at
Zirkusweg
in a half-hour’s time? It’s your lucky day, dear! You’ll be jumpin’ for joy, you will!”

‘“Go on with you. You don’t say so? I’m on my way already!”

‘A quarter of an hour before the agreed time there was “Kurt the Nark” standing on the corner of
Zirkusweg
an’
Bemhard Nocht Strasse
, steppin’ around like a black Yankee as had something hot to dispose of.

‘“Pickpocket Petra” popped up out of a watchman’s shelter, and whispered something into Kurt’s ear. While she was talkin’ she slipped one hand into his fly-opening and tickled him up, at the same time helping herself to the wallet in his arse-pocket with the other. Second nature to her it was. It was the way she made her livin’, anyway.

‘Out from
Kastanie-Allée
, where the street lamps wasout, come Tiny, the Jew’s David an’ “Ready Money Paul”, in a beer-waggon they’d borrowed for the occasion.

‘“We’re pickin’ up a ’ot load. Wanna come along?” rumbled Tiny’s bass voice from the dark of the driver’s cabin.

‘Soon as “Kurt the Nark’s” up in the waggon, which was one o’ them with a canvas back. Tiny an’ “Ready Money” are up there with him. “Ready Money’s” twistin’ his balls up to nearly round his neck, an’ Tiny’s got him by the throat, an’ is bendin’ him over backwards so his backbone’s making crackin’ noises. He was soon making the kind o’ sounds people do when they’re gettin’ close to being strangled to death.

‘The Yid furrier’s boy David was tryin’ to aim a Baretta at him. He wanted to plug him between the eyes, but every time he was ready to pull the trigger Kurt’s head was somewhere else. So when the first shot went off it only creased the
top of his ear, and went out through the truck’s canvas and through a third-floor window. There it nearly frightened the life out a farmhand from Soltau who was gettin’ ready to have a go with “Gallopin’ Gerda”. The next shot ended in the same place an’ Gerda’s visitor was that frightened he broke an arm tryin’ to run down stairs an’ put his trousers on at the same time.

‘By this time the “Nark’d” found out he was starring in a real live liquidation scene, which you otherwise only experience in a horror film!

‘“Jesus Christ!” he screamed, and God must have given him the strength of ten at least, ’cos he managed to butt “Ready Money” in the face, an’ bring his American-made boot up in Tiny’s tingle-tangle with full force, at one an’ the same time. Then he burst through the canvas o’ the waggon head-first like a delayed-action shell, knocked Petra arse-over-tip, and found himself standing on the pavement, shaking like a leaf from the nervous tension of it all. Petra was screaming for dear life, and Kurt was spinnin’ round on his own axis tryin’ to find out whether he was still alive or if he’d been killed.

‘“
Get
’im!” howled “Ready Money Paul”, and crawled across Tiny, who was sitting, nursing his maltreated privates.

‘“Holy Synagogue,” moaned the Jew furrier’s David, “that shit’s makin’ that much noise, you’d think somebody was trying to kill ’im!”

‘“Choke ’im off, then,” roared Tiny. “’E’s already stayed breathin’ too long!”

‘Kurt had found out by now that he wasn’t dead after all, but would be soon if he stayed where he was. So off he goes, fast as his legs can carry him, down towards
Davidsstrasse
so he can get into
Herberlsstrasse
where he’d be safe. He was king down there. God help those three if they were mad enough to go in there after him.

‘“The yellow swine’s runnin’ for it!” roared Paul. “
Get
’im!

‘The beer-truck roared down through
Hopfenstrasse
right on Kurt’s arse. He was running like a hare with the sparks flyin’ up from his American boots. He was just about to slip into safety behind the iron fence at
Herberlsstrasse
when the truck caught up with him, and crushed him flat against it. He looked like a great splash of beer-mash some crazy sod had chucked up against the fence. The beer-truck backed off to get away before the coppers arrived. You could usually count on them getting hung up by their truncheons and pistols in the swing-doors leading from
Davidsslrasse
Station.

‘They left their bumper behind, mixed up with the remains of Kurt, and disappeared down the
Landesbrücke
, fast as a Rabbi with the SS breathin’ down his neck. Next day everybody in Sankt Pauli was talkin’ about how “Kurt the Nark” had been taken out by a hit-and-run driver. All the coppers from
Davids Wacht
were out looking for a beer-truck, but it had been lyin’ on the bottom of the Elbe, the stink of beer washed out of it a long time since.

‘“Mulatto Louis”, so-called because he wasn’t a real, pure German, was a kind of a viceroy on the Reeperbahn at that time, and decided who it was did what! But he kicked the bucket about a year after, from natural causes. They found him hangin’ by the neck in the bus terminus. Hed got worried when he heard about Kurt’s sudden departure, and got some people to find out what had really happened. It soon got around who was the hit-and-run driver, an’ all the bosses on the Reeperbahn were goin’ round whisperin’ to one another:

‘“Him there. Tiny.
you
know. Him an’ his mate David, the feller with the astrakhan collar. They’re a coupla hot numbers, they are.
They
know how to fix things!”

‘The easy removal of “Kurt the Nark” from the asphalt of Sankt Pauli made Tiny an’ David, the Jew’s boy very famous. They were well on the way to becoming wealthy specialists in the removal of unwanted citizens of Hamburg. But this lucrative business they were buildin’ up came to a
stop, unfortunately, when Tiny got posted to the bicycle dragoons at Breslau, an’ the Jew’s kid David took a single to England in the bilge of a collier, ’cos he didn’t get on all that well with Adolf.’

‘How you do go
on
!’ says Sally, irritably. ‘Why waste our time with all that shit? Who the hell cares what Tiny’s done on the Reeperbahn?’

‘You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?’ asks Porta, throwing his arms wide. ‘It’s because I want to get it into your thick skulls that it’d be very unhealthy to leave Tiny gapin’ after us on the docks at Libau,
and
it might also shorten our lives considerably!’

The sun is rising over the melancholy Russian landscape when they take leave of Sally at the airstrip.

‘Hope he don’t fuck it all up,’ says Wolf, pessimistically, as the JU-52 disappears into the clouds carrying the ‘War Minister’ with it.

‘He’s no stupider than he was on his birthday,’ Porta comforts him. ‘He knows where the pickings are, and he’ll stay on his toes!’

The Old Man turns the plan down immediately. He does not want to spend the rest of his life in Germersheim, or somewhere in Siberia. But Porta will not give up. He chatters on and on about ownership by the people, and in a couple of days time he has the Old Man convinced that the gold is really ours, and that there is nothing criminal in our going to fetch it. The plan begins to take shape.

Sally’s two specialists in alterations and signatures arrive with the mail-plane from Berlin. They are each carrying two large briefcases, decorated with the German eagle. In the following days, Chief Mechanic Wolfs sanctum sanctorum is in a state of white-hot alert. TOP SECRET documents are all over the place.

After the Old Man has examined the TOP SECRET orders for a while, he gives in, with a bark of laughter.

‘Never in my life have I seen anything like this! It
can’t
go wrong. There’s even an Order of the Day from the Führer!’

Porta is sitting beside Vera, telling her about their progress since Sally’s visit. Proudly he shows her the Führer’s Order of the Day, signed with his own hand. It’s all there. The special eagle and everything.

‘Let’s get moving,’ he says. ‘The orders for a special partisan-type action are already on the desk of the divisional commander, General “Arse-an’-pockets”.’

‘What if some weak-minded, walnut-brained person was to check this with the Führer’s HQ?’ asks Vera, with healthy suspicion.

‘Don’t be silly, girl,’ laughs Porta. ‘No German dope in uniform’d dare ring Adolfn ask if his orders were really what he meant! Think your hubby’d ring up Joe’n ask
him
if he knew what he was up to, liquidatin’ a load o’ fellers who’d poked their noses in too far?’

‘No, you may be right,’ Vera gives in, thoughtfully.