The Commissar (35 page)

‘Sent ’em to Kolyma,’ the former Vice man says, making a clumsy attempt at palming the ace of spades under cover of the talk.

‘Better have that one, too,’ says Porta, sweetly, holding out his hand.

‘That’s funny,’ answers ‘Whorecatcher’, looking innocent.

‘Yes
very
, bleedin’ funny,’ rumbles Tiny, angrily. He draws his
Nagan
from its place in his boot-top. ‘You just watch somethin’ funny don’t ’appen to you, mate. Like you suddenly growin’ a couple extra ‘oles in you somewhere or other!’

‘I can’t see there’s any risk grabbin’ a bit o’ free cunt now an’ again!’ Tiny laughs noisily and scratches his crutch. ‘If you get picked up for it all you got to say’s the bag’s a bleedin’ liar!’

‘You don’t get away with it that easy, lad,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’ sadly. ‘The Vice Squad knows all those games. Keep off rape! Any caveman of a copper can prove it’s you that’s been inside it easy as winking. Cunts’re like guns. The rifling tells you what’s been through ’em. and even the most corrupt judge’ll take that kind of thing seriously. I can only remember two cases where the sod got away with it. There was this Anna Petrovna who’d accused some limp prick of having raped her. Well, the report revealed that she’d let 946 high-born gents get across her. They used to contact her by telephone. Not too clever of her that, ’cos our telephone bugging service
checks all telephones. We had a serious talk with her, and she told all. Rape, that was just a bit of fun she was having. The real reason was he wouldn’t share his black money with her. They both wound up in Kolyma!’

‘But you said he got away with it,’ protests ‘Frostlips’, disappointedly.

‘I said he got away with the rape charge,’ answered ‘Whorecatcher’. ‘He went to the mines for having black money. Three years later he committed suicide with an ice block.’

‘What was the other case?’ asks Porta, interestedly, raking in the pool. It is the fourth time he has had twenty-one!

‘It was a Chinese bint,’ smiles ‘Whorecatcher’, lifting up the corners of his eyes with his fingers to show us what she’d looked like. ‘She found out one day that her belly was growing at a surprisingly rapid rate. So she stepped off up to the social worker, who was one of them that was born in the bottom of a laid-up barge, an’ believed every word the slit-eyed bint told her about rape and being misused and that. So if the yellow bitch could get a prick tacked on to her coming nipper then she was certain of getting a bag full of roubles from the social lot. We had a bit of a talk with her and read what she’d said to the bull she’d got on the board as being pappy. Luckily for him our sex experts were able to prove that what this Pekin duck was saying was not on. They sent her to Kolyma, together with what she was carrying around in her.’

‘What about the feller?’ asks Porta. ‘He go to Kolyma, too?’

‘No, not for that,’ answers ‘Whorecatcher’, sorrowfully. ‘He went up for a different job, couple of years later. He’d been celebrating the first of May, and got drunk. While drunk he’d talked a lot to a bloke who didn’t agree with him. You know what I mean, I reckon? He was picked up before he’d even got rid of his hangover!’

‘Jesus,’ cries Tiny, impressed. ‘You reckon the German
Vice bleeders are as good as your lot?’

‘
I
dunno,’ says ‘Whorecatcher’, playing a jack, on which Porta promptly drops an ace for another 21,’ but I can guarantee not much gets past ’em, and I know that when there ain’t a war on they visit one another and pass on the news!’

‘What a bleedin’ world we do live in!’ sighs Tiny, letting his cards down, thoughtlessly, so that ‘Frostlips’ gets a look at them.

‘Twenty-one,’ chuckles Porta. He has immediately picked up the signal from ‘Frostlips’, who is his partner.

Tiny is speechless. With a silly look on his face he stares at the ace and two queens lying in front of Porta. He has two jacks, and a king on the side. If it hadn’t been for all that talk about the Moscow Vice Squad he could have bid ‘Twenty-one’ long ago. But he is still so shocked at what he has heard that he does not even get annoyed.

‘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 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 that 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.’