Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ repeated Anna-Luisa. ‘What lies are being spread?’

      ‘I never listen to scandal,’ said the old woman haughtily. ‘It’s all stupid nonsense. I have told you that.’

      ‘With whom?’

      ‘With everyone, child; you would have to be the most energetic courtesan since Pompadour.’ She patted her arm again and the bejewelled rings flashed in the sunlight.

      Fischer was a young man – twenty-four last birthday – but his bloodshot eyes and the black rings of tiredness around them made his appearance deceptive. Now that he had had a steaming hot bath and washed the Russian dust out of his hair he shook away some of his fatigue. He found a last clean set of underclothes and a reasonably clean shirt in his baggage. An orderly had just returned his boots to him brightly shining, although there were deep scratches that went right through the leather in places. His long leather overcoat hanging on the door was also beyond salvage. Its lapels were scuffed white and the sleeve seams had been ripped and resewn so many times that it was crookbacked. He put the Knight’s Cross over his head and tucked the lady’s garter to which it was attached under his collar out of sight.

      In the front line no one any longer wore their conspicuous Leibstandarte cuffband but now Fischer put it on his sleeve. The words ‘Adolf Hitler’ shone bright and new compared with the faded fabric of his jacket. Fischer stroked the armband. The number one SS division, and he was to join number twelve. Ugh! He feared it might be like this rundown SS training depot where even the sentries were improperly dressed and the slow-witted young officers only half trained. It depressed him to think about it.

      He looked at himself in the mirror. A tall slim man with a yellowish complexion that never altered no matter how long he spent in the sunshine. His eyes were black, intelligent and attractive. His brows were bushy, meeting above his large hooked nose to make a straight line across his face. At school he had been chosen to play Julius Caesar when his teacher said that he looked exactly like a Roman emperor. Adolf Fischer liked that idea and even now he would sometimes have too many drinks and surprise the other officers, who knew him only as a zealous and consistently savage warrior, by long quotations from Shakespeare’s play.

      These rooms on the first floor with balconies overlooking the lake had once been the finest rooms in the hotel. The bridal suite, perhaps. Now they were used for officers in transit and they had been left unaltered even to the china jug and basin on the marble washstand with an enamel jug of boiling water delivered each morning to the rooms without baths. The pictures too remained: stag hunt, dawn in the mountains and Napoleon after Waterloo. There was a knock at the door.

      ‘Come in,’ bawled Fischer. He was surprised to find that his visitor was an old man who outranked him considerably. Embarrassed by the manner in which he had shouted, Fischer came to a stiff position of attention and waited with unseeing eyes until his visitor bid him relax.

      ‘Standartenführer Wörth,’ the old man introduced himself. His voice was quiet and his manner hesitant. Fischer had to watch his lips to understand his words. ‘I’m the commanding officer. Please continue with whatever you were doing. I only wished to offer you my greetings as I shall not be dining in the Mess this evening. The Burgomaster here in Altgarten is an old Allgemeine SS officer and he’s having a rather formal dinner party.’

      It was frightening, thought Fischer. The German Cross medal on the old man’s pocket showed that he had been a fighting soldier in this war and yet now he’d become a mere vegetable, wrinkled and bent like an old turnip and so pale that Fischer felt positively tanned beside him.

      ‘I have acquaintances nearby, sir. It was my intention to call upon them this evening.’

      ‘Splendid,’ said the old man. ‘You’re going to this new “Hitler Jugend” Division.’

      ‘The Division commander was with me in the Leibstandarte. He’s asked for me.’

      ‘Reich Germans?’

      ‘Yes. All of them born in 1926, volunteers from the Hitler Jugend.’

      ‘It will be an élite division.’

      ‘Yes, my tame Untermensch will look out of place.’

      ‘So I hear.’

      Fischer felt obliged to answer the unspoken question. ‘He’s a first-class gunner and mechanic. I had him assigned as a personal servant only in order to keep him.’

      ‘You’re a tank man?’

      ‘Tigers; I volunteered for the first tank company the LAH got.’

      ‘Cavalry man myself.’ He flinched from some secret pain. ‘Left a hand behind in Rzhev, can’t hold a rein and fight with one hand.’ Fischer noticed the stiff glove. Cavalry; that explained everything. These old fogeys are from another world.

      ‘Cavalry Brigade Fegelein?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It’s largely Volksdeutsche now.’

      ‘In my time it was just Reich Germans. It was an élite unit then.’

      ‘I know that, sir.’

      Wörth looked at Fischer’s cuffband and then again at the young man’s face. He saw his own youth there. Wörth was with the Leibstandarte in 1937. What fine fellows we were! Our average age was eighteen years one month. Liebchen aller Herzen they called LAH in those days. Heart-breakers we were too. Handsome fellows. The volunteer ahead of Wörth at the medical was failed for having one filled tooth. He could scarcely believe it now, when he looked at some of the odds and ends they had sent him. Dutchmen some of them and Flemings too. Keen of course, but he couldn’t understand a word they said. Somewhere nearby a guard dog barked and then another one. There were shouts and a yelp of pain before the dogs became quiet. ‘Those damned dogs will drive me mad,’ muttered Wörth.

      ‘I can well believe it, sir,’ said Fischer. ‘Why don’t you get rid of them?’

      ‘Why indeed,’ said Wörth and smiled as though Fischer had made a rather good joke.

      Leibstandarte, this old man, was it possible? ‘Rzhev?’

      ‘January ’forty-two, the Rzhev pocket.’ It was months since he’d last spoken of it. ‘My company of cavalry were trying to find Ivan. Our artillery found us.’ In the snow, horses and riders moved like ghosts, silent and invisible in their newly issued white smocks. Wörth was riding Rosenknospe, a lightfooted horse as fast as any other in the company and with a gentle disposition.

      They were in the Valdai hills where the Volga rises, north of Rzhev. They had come over the rise cautiously; Hentschel first on the black mare that he’d had all the way from the training school in Warsaw. At the bottom of the rise there was a T34, its turret askew and a black circle round it. Hentschel waved them on and then went close to the sooty burned-out tank, but there was no sign of life there. It was snowing slightly and the horses were fidgety, tossing their heads and missing their footing as they encountered debris, bodies and goodness knows what under the snow. ‘It was our artillery.’ They must have had the old T34 zeroed in; by getting close to that we were asking for it really. ‘A T34 might be very different from a Tiger tank but Russian cavalry looks just like us, eh?’ Then there was the noise: deafening thuds and the screams of horses and men. Instead of a black and white silent film it became a noisy colour film. The black mare racing across the snow, СКАЧАТЬ