The Commissar (46 page)

‘Don’t you want
any
of the gold?’ asks Tiny, practically. ‘Thought ’ow much of it there’ll be apiece when we get it sold?’

‘No!’ replies the Old Man decisively. ‘In any case I don’t believe any of you are going to get much fun out of that shit!’

‘Shit?’ Barcelona gives a forced laugh. ‘You’re off your head! We’re rich men! A week from now we can demob ourselves, and if you want the biggest carpenter shop in the world you can buy it for yourself. That is if you want to go on planin’ planks for fun!’

Porta sweeps up the gold-dust from the battered ingots and puts it in his pocket.

‘What’re you doin’ that for?’ asks Gregor blankly.

‘Berlin intuition,’ smiles Porta, foxily. ‘Who knows, somebody might manage to take our arses at quarter to midnight, and then it’d be nice to have a bit in reserve in your pockets!’

‘Stop!’ comes a warning shout from Barcelona. ‘The waggon can’t take any more!’

‘’Ow bleedin’ annoyin’,’ says Tiny, vexedly. ‘There’s a load of bars left yet! We can’t leave them for Ivan Stinkano-vitch! It makes me bleedin’ ill to think of it!’

‘Share ’em out between the tanks,’ shouts the Commissar nervously. ‘Time’s run out! The gas has stopped working! They’ll all be here soon, and they won’t like what we’ve been up to one bit!’

From the parade ground two shots sound in quick succession.

Igor comes down the stairs, grinning.

‘Couple of ’em woke up too soon,’ he says, pushing his
Nagan
back in its holster.

‘Get ready to blow up the communications centre,’ the Commissar orders Igor. ‘They must, above all, have no
possibility of communicating with anybody outside for the next twelve hours! Set the primers for thirty minutes, and surround the lot with phosphorus cans! They’ll burn like hell, and give them more than enough to think about!’

‘Nothing more’s going to be blown up here,’ says the Old Man harshly, ‘and there’ll be no more killing either!’

‘I’m in command here!’ roars the Commissar, in a rage, ‘and what I say is to be blown up
will
be blown up! Get going, Igor! What naïve fools you Germans are when it comes to it!’ he jeers, his lips curled in contempt.

‘Shut it! You stinking Soviet Jew shit! Shut it!’ Heide swings round with his mpi at the ready.

Like lightning the Commissar has the weapon out of his hands, and slings Heide over against the wall.

‘Don’t call me a Jew shit, you stinking little Nazi creep!’

White with rage, Heide tears the
Nagan
from its leather holster, and aims it at the Commissar.

‘Be a good boy now, little Moses, or Daddy smack,’ grins Tiny, kicking the gun from Heide’s hand.

Heide jumps forward as if on steel springs, and his right fist crashes into Tiny’s face. There is such speed and power in the punch that Tiny goes over on his back and gasps for air.

‘You ’it me, Moses!’ he howls. ‘I’m goin’ to
kill
you!’

Battle is on. Heide rushes forward with a mad scream. Tiny is too slow in getting away from the rain of blows which come at him. A murderous punch lands on his temple, and he staggers and shakes his head like a pole-axed bull. The edge of Heide’s hand catches him across the larynx and sends him to the ground. It would have killed another man.

‘This time I’m going to
kill
you,’ hisses Heide furiously, aiming a kick at the big man’s kidneys.

Now Tiny is really angry and in that condition he is more dangerous than a whole case of dynamite. He gets back on his feet, wipes the blood from his face, and spits out a couple of broken teeth. With a noise like the splitting of skulls he crashes his forehead into Heide’s face.

‘Uh!’ he grunts, and spits blood, as Heide’s fist buries itself
in his middle, pumping the air from his lungs. ‘Uh!’ he grunts again. He turns half round and smashes a karate kick at Heide’s stomach.

Heide tries desperately to jump to one side, but Tiny’s size 14 boot gets home on his hip with the force of a diving Stuka. He bends forward, and Tiny brings up his giant fist, with a happy grin, into his pain-distorted face. The left fist follows the right, and lands with a sound like a ton of dough falling from a skyscraper.

‘
Mama mia
! What a punch!’ cries Porta, who is sitting on a pile of gold ingots enjoying the fight.

We are all taken up by the battle. We shout and encourage them, and give good advice.

His face pouring with blood, Heide tries an attack, which, by all the tenets of boxing, is suicidal. One hard blow after another crashes into Tiny’s twisted face. It resembles a bowl of minced meat, blood oozing from it. Tiny takes it all with the indifference of a rock, not even guarding against the merciless punches. You can no longer see from where the blood is coming. It is pouring from the whole of his face.

‘Kick him in the balls,’ shouts Porta kindly, banging his fist into his other hand to show how.

‘Butt him! That rotten swastika rat,’ roars Igor, furiously boxing holes in the air.

‘Tear his head off!’ screams the Commissar. ‘Kill the stinking Nazi pig!’

There is no doubt where the Russian/German audience has its sympathy.

Tiny steps backwards towards the cellar door. Kostia. the little slant-eyed Siberian with the big Cossack fur hat, opens the door. The whole prison seems to shake as Tiny falls backwards down the stairs and through the trapdoor which leads to the heating system. All we can see of him are his size 14 boots caught on the edge of the trapdoor. The rest of him is dangling over the hissing hot-water pipes which have been smashed by the explosions.

Heide gives out a victorious yell, and throws himself murderously at Tiny, who is desperately attempting to
release himself from the trapdoor. Kostia and Porta help him by pulling off his boots. He somersaults up onto his feet.

For a moment the two bloodthirsty berserkers stand watching one another. Heide, the boxer, is continually on the move, and using his left. It is no secret that he has a left hand everyone is afraid of. He has learnt to use it in the same way as the Britishers. Every punch is hard and deadly accurate. He is a feared regimental boxer, and has won countless matches. Anyone but Tiny would long since have been dead. Heide is grimly determined to kill him. Years of hatred are culminating in the battle between these two.

Tiny gives a scream like a bull elk at mating time, and flails away, but without any of his punches landing. He has no thought of defending himself. A hail of hard blows makes him stagger for a moment. He spits out a couple more broken teeth. His mouth looks like a crushed tomato.

Heide gets home two karate kicks on Tiny’s body. The spectators howl in disgusted protest. When Tiny manages to do the same, they cheer and clap excitedly, and all seem to feel that everything is as it should be.

Shortly after, Tiny goes down on one knee. Heide immediately kicks him in the face, with a cracking sound like eggs breaking.

Tiny is now literally mad with rage. Roaring furiously he gets back up on his feet and lands a right on the side of Heide’s head which sends him spinning round like a top. He gets a few more punches home, but this time on Heide’s ribs. With blood running down over his face and both eyes closed he goes in like a mad bull to crush the Nazi’s face.

But Heide ducks like lightning and feints a left towards Tiny’s bloody face. Lithely he springs to one side and avoids a murderous kick at his crotch which would have crushed not only his testicles but his entire pelvis if it had landed.

Heide grins satanically, and begins to hammer away at Tiny’s smashed face with his ramrod of a left.

‘We’ve got to stop this,’ says the Old Man, worriedly. ‘Hell, that Hamburg crook’s no more than a gutter fighter. He hasn’t the faintest idea of how to box. The Nazi pig’ll
murder him. It’s like a cat playing with a mouse!’

‘The big dope don’t even know how to defend himself,’ says Gregor, shaking his head in commiseration.

‘Stop ’em!’ repeats the Old Man. ‘It’s cold-blooded murder!’

‘Have to shoot Heide to do that,’ says Porta, accepting one of the Legionnaire’s
Caporals
.

Heide’s fists are going like drumsticks, and every time they land on Tiny’s face it sounds like a butcher slapping a parcel of minced meat.

Tiny keeps hitting out, but without his punches landing.

Heide is dancing round merely flicking his left into his face, certain he has won.

Tiny gives out a ringing scream, and rushes forward like a mad bull in the arena.

The attack makes Heide step to one side professionally, and accept a couple of light blows. He bobs and feints, cool as a cucumber, takes a step forward and lands a straight left which stops Tiny as if he had run into a wall. His animal roar turns to a strangled gulp, as the air is knocked out of his lungs. He stops, in confusion, and wipes the blood from his eyes, trying to find Heide, who is dancing lightly around him on his toes. Every time Tiny throws his club of a fist at him he is out of reach. Cut to bloody doll-rags, Tiny shakes his head in an attempt to clear it. His left ear hangs down on his neck, half torn away.

‘Yellow Nazi swine!’ he growls furiously, and kicks out backwards like a horse.

Heide sees his chance. Two murderous blows and a kick and Tiny is staggering across the concrete floor like a dying man, with blood streaming from his nose and mouth.

Heide struts over towards the wall, brushing his hands together contemptuously, as if he had been handling something filthy.

‘Butcher’s offal!’ he snarls, and goes to a water-tap to swill the blood from his face.

Tiny, who is lying on the floor struggling desperately to regain his breath, lifts his bloody head, and peers around. He
looks like a grizzly bear awakened too early from hibernation, and he is just as vicious as one.

The babble of conversation amongst the spectators dies away. The sudden silence warns Heide, who has begun to comb his hair. He whirls and barely manages to duck under Tiny’s giant fist as it comes hurtling at him in a hook which would have taken off his head if it had landed.

Heide goes to work with a whole series of professional body blows.

Tiny’s lungs whistle for air, but Heide is in close, hammering at his middle. It feels as if his stomach is being smashed in, and his lungs dilate emptily in his chest.

Murder and hatred glitter in Heide’s eyes. None of us doubt that he is not going to stop now until Tiny is dead.

‘Adolfs little Moses,’ gasps Tiny, with a horrible grin, swinging his arms in circles. He hits Heide on the chin with a punch which lifts him from the floor and throws him against a row of shelves. Machine-pistols clatter down over him. Tiny thunders forward and runs straight into the barrel of an mpi in Heide’s outstretched arms. He is moving so fast it is a wonder the barrel of the weapon does not go straight through his body. He gives out a shrill scream and goes down on his knees with both hands pressed to his stomach.

With a crazy grin Heide swings the machine-pistol at him, but Tiny manages to duck away from it and the butt only grazes his head. He rolls across the floor and gets back up on his feet. On his way he too has got hold of a machine-pistol, and now the two men go at one another with the butts. Heide is the faster at this, too. Tiny remains the slow-thinking gutter fighter with no idea whatever of finesse. What takes Heide a fraction of a second to work out, takes Tiny an hour. Every time Tiny thinks he has Heide set up and swings at him, the mpi butt hits something else. Igor goes down without a sound, blood streaming over his red-painted face.

Heide has got round behind Tiny, who is standing staring blankly at the unconscious Igor whom he thinks of as a friend.

‘Sorry!’ he mumbles, sniffing sorrowfully. Behind him
Heide takes careful aim, and brings the butt of the mpi down on the back of his neck. He goes down on his face like a felled tree, his arms spread out like a man crucified.

The Old Man bends over him, worriedly, feeling for his pulse.

‘Get a doctor!’ he orders, harshly.

‘Doctor?’ the Commissar screams with laughter. ‘Where the hell d’you think you are? You’re in Vladimir isolation prison, man! They only use doctors here to certify death, and if there was one he’d be crazy from gas for the next 48 hours! Now it’s
off
! And it can’t be too soon!’ He turns to Igor and coughs an order in some strange Russian dialect.

When we are a few miles from the prison, a blinding flash of light illumines the sky, and we hear the long, thundering roll of an explosion.

‘Those villains blew up the prison anyway!’ snarls the Old Man furiously.

‘What the devil! At war aren’t we?’ remarks Porta, cheerily. ‘And it’s not only legal, it’s also our
duty
to knock off the lads from the other FPO. It’s only the communications centre Igor’s blown up! If the commandant went with it, nobody’s going to cry for him, either!’

The Old Man growls and looks angry.

A little later the differential goes on one of the trucks. We blame one another for it, and World War III nearly breaks out on the spot.

In the end Porta downs tools and refuses to do any more to repair the damage.

‘I’m a bloody tank-driver,’ he shouts furiously. ‘Accordin’ to regulations I’m not allowed to repair anything! The mechanical engineers are supposed to look after all that! Dial three zeroes and get ADAD
^*
.’