Officer Factory. Hans Hellmut Kirst

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СКАЧАТЬ Elfrida Rademacher, smiling with genuine pleasure.

      “I’m always hearing about this Corporal Krottenkopf!" cried Kater desperately. “But really it's absurd! It's just not possible."

      “It’s the truth," said Elfrida. She was obviously thoroughly enjoying herself. “The rape of Corporal Krottenkopf took place sometime in the early hours of this morning between one and three a.m. In the basement of the headquarters building too, in the communications center, by three of the signal girls on duty there."

      “But it simply can't be true!" cried Captain Kater. “What do you say, Lieutenant Krafft?"

      “I’m trying to envisage it from a practical point of view, Sir," declared Krafft, shaking his large bucolic head in amazement. “But I'm afraid my imagination doesn't seem to run to it."

      “Disgusting!" cried Kater, meaning not so much the incident itself as its possible consequences. “What was this Krottenkopf fellow doing at night in the communications center anyway, even though he is the signals corporal? And how is it that three of these women were all in the communications center at the same time? There are never more than two on duty at once at night. And why did they have to pick on Krottenkopf? Aren't there enough cadets in the barracks who would be only too glad to satisfy their demands? Quite apart from which, why did it have to happen in duty hours!"

      Captain Kater refilled his glass to the brim, and his hands were trembling so much that the cognac spilled on to a document on his desk, forming a tiny aromatic lake there. But Kater couldn't have cared less about the document or the lake of cognac. All he could think of was this appalling affair of the rape and the complications it was likely to lead to. He knocked back his glass, but its contents might have been water. There was nothing he would have liked better than to get drunk on the spot. But he had to take a decision first, and it had to be the best possible one in the circumstances. In other words it had to be a decision which would save him work and worry, and enable him to shift the responsibility from himself on to someone else's shoulders.

      “Krafft," he said, “I hand the investigation of this affair over to you. The whole thing seems to me utterly incredible, but we've got to try and get to the bottom of it. I hope you follow me. I simply cannot believe that anything like this could possibly take place in my headquarters company. Biologically speaking its improbable enough, but militarily it's unthinkable. It must be a mistake."

      Having said which, Kater prepared to leave, confident that officially he hadn't put a foot wrong so far. He had taken the requisite steps for an occasion of this sort, handing the matter on to someone else and seeing that it was properly investigated. If mistakes were made now, the responsibility would no longer be his. And if Krafft were by any chance to come a cropper in the process, so much the better.

      Yet before Kater finally left he turned to Krafft and said: “There’s one point you oughtn't to overlook, my dear fellow—and that's this: why does Krottenkopf wait until this afternoon, before reporting this filthy business? Regulations say he should have done so first thing this morning at the latest. What does the fellow think he's doing? Who does he think he's dealing with? See that he's severely reprimanded! A man who breaks regulations like this is always a suspect."

      Krafft felt a certain respect for Kater as he watched him go. He was certainly a cunning creature—though there was really nothing so surprising about this, for how otherwise would he have managed to hold his job at the training school?

      Kater's suggestion that Corporal Krottenkopf, the plaintiff, had broken the regulations was as low as it was cunning, for it put Krottenkopf at a disadvantage from the start.

      “I really feel like throwing the whole thing back in Kater's face!" said Lieutenant Krafft.

      “Is that all you feel like doing?" said Elfrida, sidling up to him.

      “Perhaps we ought to close the door!" suggested Lieutenant Krafft. He was standing very close to Elfrida.

      “What’s the use?" she said with a slight huskiness in her voice. “It hasn't a lock."

      “How do you know?" he asked quickly. “Have you tried it before?"

      She laughed softly and snuggled up close to him as if to stop him from asking any more questions.

      He put his strong arms around her and her body yielded willingly. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the C.O.'s desk, at the same time pushing the coffee cups to one side with an unfaltering hand to prevent them falling to the floor.

      “No one will come in without knocking," she said. “And Kater's in the officers' mess by now."

      Lieutenant Krafft looked down past her to the desk, where there was a writing-pad with a note scrawled on it: “Call RO 25/33." Presumably this meant: Call Rotunda, the land-lord of The Gay God, and get him to deliver twenty-five bottles of the '33 vintage. But Krafft closed his eyes as if to forget the letters and figures, as if to forget everything except the strength of the life within him.

      They were soon panting desperately, while outside a group of cadets could be heard singing: “There is no finer country in the world." With its sturdy ground bass of tramping boots, this song made a good deal of noise, and this was helpful, for barrack walls, not being built for eternity, are usually pretty thin.

      "I can't wait for to-night!" said Elfrida.

      But all Karl Krafft could do was nod.

      Corporal Krottenkopf, the alleged victim of the rape, was waiting for Lieutenant Krafft in the corridor. He gazed up at his superior officer with a tortured expression, and then, stooping slightly, bowed his head in shame.

      Yet this Corporal Krottenkopf was no sensitive plant, no delicate youth or mother's darling. He was a man with a protuberant nose, full fleshy lips, apelike hands, and the powerful hindquarters of a stag.

      “They called me up in the middle of the night," he related mournfully and with a great show of indignation. “They called me up and told me that the external exchange was out of order. I told them they could go and get—well, you know. . . . They said: Well, not down the telephone. That should have put me on my guard. But I was thinking solely of my duty, of the fact that the exchange was out of order, and of what the General might say if he wanted to telephone. It just didn't bear thinking of. It's the sort of thing that can get a man sent to the front. Well, anyway, along I went, for duty is duty, after all. No sooner had I reached the basement, though, than they set upon me. All three of them, like wild animals. They simply tore the clothes off me, boots and all. And that had them panting a bit, because my boots are damned tight—anyone who hasn't the knack has to pull like hell to get them off. But these women stopped at nothing!"

      “All right, all right," said Krafft, who had no wish to go into any further details. “But why are you only coming to me now? It must have occurred to you first thing this morning that you'd been the victim of a brutal rape?"

      “Yes, well," said Krottenkopf, grinning to show that he was speaking as man to man, “I’m not inhuman. I'm not a petty-minded sort of fellow, you know; never have been. I enjoy a visit to a decent brothel like the next man, and when these women set upon me like this I thought to myself: Now then you're not going to have any hard feelings about this. When someone's had more to drink than is good for them, it works on the brain and makes them randy as a rattlesnake. Right, then, I said to myself, forget all about it. It's a hard СКАЧАТЬ