Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! (57 page)

The door violently flew back into the wall, a jackboot appearing in its place, oddly disjointed until the body it was attached to followed it into the room. Six others joined him, and a swarm of SS uniforms poured through the naked opening. Naomi screamed.

“Shut up!” The first man sternly told her. He was quite calm, but the menacing tone silenced her.

Naomi was crouched in the tub, having been interrupted in the process of taking a standing bath with heated water upstairs. Now she cowered in the brackish water, terrified out of her wits. The security police laughed at her discomfort.

The first officer again took charge. Clad in a grey SS uniform – she assumed, at least, as the collar tab where the dreaded lightning runes supposedly were was in fact jet black, and entirely blank – he nonetheless otherwise resembled the part to a horrifying degree. The officer wore the high peaked cap with its Death’s Head symbol; a pirate’s hat, skull and crossbones, a logo of death. She quickly took in his full appearance; there was a small ‘SD’ diamond tag on his sleeve, and she noticed three diamond pips on his other collar patch. Tall, slim, jackbooted to the knee; there was no mercy for her in those pitiless eyes, she realised, as she gazed in vain to try to coax some compassion out of the awful young breed of German Supermen.

She took him in, whole, for what felt like minutes. They had stopped laughing, and were stood staring at her with barely concealed loathing.

Finally, the officer cleared his throat. “Naomi Rosenberg?”

Naomi was too frightened to answer the calm German-accented voice, while being utterly unable to formulate a better response. Her usual quick wit deserted her.

“Naomi Rosenberg?” he said louder, his jaw bunching.

“Yes,” she quavered.

“Get out, get dressed.”

“Leave the room,” she tried snapping, but the commanding tone was lost to fright.

As though a spell had been broken, the SD men began laughing. It was a frightening, controlled laughter, and scared her more because of it. There was no frenzied attack, no abuse, no recrimination. Their composure, their total
control
was terrifying.

“What do you think, Beckenbaur?” the officer smirked to the hard-faced man beside him, speaking in German. “Can you control yourself with a naked yid?”

“
Jawohl
, Untersturmführer,” Beckenbaur replied sourly.

“We could give you twenty seconds? What do you think; that should be enough for you, village boy?”

The others laughed with a harsh intensity, wired as they were on the rationed amphetamines, and thrilled in the moment of action.

Naomi could not understand the words, but the officer’s cold amusement was plain to see. Yet so controlled… it was barely human. They seemed joyless, manically intense, taking no real pleasure in their work or betraying any normal human feeling.

“
Please
leave the room,” she implored, trying a different tack. It made no change to the stony-faced SD lieutenant.

“We are not interested in your body, you Jewish rat.”

The officer’s words cut her to the core. A potent mix of fear and anguish threatened to rise up in her, then. His revealing words showed the absolute indifference that they had to her; she was not human. Naomi knew that men desired her. She registered their lust. But here she was, sat naked in a tub and the SS officer barely even acknowledged her nakedness, her physicality, the womanhood of her flesh. Her shame, or sexuality, did not so much as cross their minds.

She tried, one last time, a futile effort at reasoning.

“Look, please listen to–”

Quick as a flash, the SD Untersturmführer leapt forwards to grab her neck with a terrible grip, like a demented rat-catcher, and hurled her sideways. Naomi flew head-first over the top of the metal tub, her wet body hitting the linoleum floor with a sickening slap like raw meat on a slab, before sliding into the wooden counter with a dull thud.

Screamed curses in an unfamiliar tongue began to rain down on her, along with heavy blows. Screaming, Naomi covered her head as she yelled a mixture of pleas, and then apologies, but the strikes of fists and feet rained down, with spittle and phlegm, and lastly, a low, intense haiku of hatred.

“Aye man… you German boys wouldn’t be able to handle our Newcastle women. I’m telling you, you’d have never invaded if we’d put them along the coast!”

Sebastian screamed with hysterical laughter, slapping the table in front of him hard enough for beer to spill over the rim of his pint glass. The table was littered with empty glasses. Helmut snorted loudly, and some small fragments of phlegm attempted to liberate themselves from the insides of his nostrils, settled in the minute black hairs that lay inside.

Sebastian made a sort of whooping wheeze, controlling his laughter.

“Oh ho… Alan, I tell you, when we first sat down I couldn’t understand a word you were saying. Your accent is so, so difficult! But I understand you now. I would love to meet one of your women.”

“Aye… but ah, I think they’d beat you up if you did!” Alan cried back, banging his pint down on the table to more general hysterics.

The laughter did not quite reach his eyes. To William he looked like some sort of deranged comedian, the manic humour an expression of deep depression or mental imbalance. His admiration for Alan was limitless.

William and Mary woodenly played along, though it came easier for Jack.

“Ah… you English,” Helmut slurred. “Herr Oberleutnant, is it not time we were heading back now?

Sebastian’s laughter petered out to irregular chuckles. Checking his watch, he sorrowfully agreed.

“Yes, I suppose you are right, Helmut.”

They stood in unison. Sebastian gave a mock salute.

“Gentlemen… Lady… it has been a pleasure and a privilege to meet you. We will be drinking in this public house for the foreseeable future while we are stationed nearby, so I am sure we will see you soon.”

Without further ado, they turned on their heel and with no trace of a stumble, marched out of the saloon bar. All hilarity abandoned, four silent Brits were left stunned in their wake.

“Fucking
hell
, man…” breathed Alan.

“
Fucking
hell…” William agreed almost simultaneously

“My heart was going there.”

“I thought we’d had it then.

“Déu meu…” Mary whispered. “I thought the pigs had us.”

In the public bar, populated by only six regular drinkers, Sebastian held his arm out at the door, and stopped Helmut in his tracks.

“Actually, private…” he considered in German. “I suppose one more drink will not hurt. We are off duty, after all.”

“I agree, Oberleutnant,” Helmut replied in English.

They approached the bar, and Arthur, smiling genially, started to pour a brace of pints, the same Westerham pale ale that they’d drank solidly for the past hour or so with the furtive group in the saloon room.

“Two of the same, there you are gentlemen,” Arthur smiled.

The oberleutnant took it, carelessly throwing down a mass of food and clothing coupons instead of ¾ ’a shilling, or ninepence, with two Reichsmarks. The value added up to more than the beer’s price, but the arrogance of such a gesture was incalculable. The German currency would be a hassle to exchange, too; the process was not far from police interrogation. Arthur’s face fell, though he masked his dislike.

“Thank you so much,” Sebastian smiled amiably. “One pint of British
bitter
.”

The pub’s patrons stared at him. He revelled in the attention, an obvious effect of the uniform. While respected in Germany, Sebastian keenly appreciated just how much further his status as a Wehrmacht lieutenant could take him. He intended to see just how far.

Paul hesitated, three doors down from his house. Though there was nothing openly untoward, he knew, with a sudden cold sense of dread that sent chills through his body, that something was very wrong.

The blood ran cold in his veins.

He dropped the bag filled with his meagre remaining coupons’ worth of food at the gate. Sensing eyes at his back, Paul turned, his senses tingling, to see Old Doris staring straight at him through the window of the house opposite where she knitted. Unusually, the old gossip made no attempt to look away, and Paul queasily noticed that she was flushed. Not excitement, exactly, nor was there triumph or joy in her face. But she was flushed, as though filled with some recently expressed, or suppressed, emotion.

He turned back and approached his own door. There was woodchip at his feet.

“Oh, no,” he closed his eyes, groaning, his head leaning on the door.

Slowly, he opened it, to find the metal bathtub empty. He stepped in, tested it. The water was cold.

“Naomi?” he called, without hope.

He checked the two rooms at ground level, then descended the wooden stairs. One lightbulb was out; the result was the room was dingy. Naomi was not there, and nor were the clothes that she had been wearing, including her green coat.

“Oh, no…” he moaned.

As though in a daze, he walked over to the bed, as unmade as it had been every day since she moved in, and leaned in to the fabric, deeply inhaling her scent.

“My poor girl…”

He broke down, and the sorrow engulfed him; choking on tears and impotence, he wept for the girl who had vanished as though her existence had merely been a dream.

All that we see, and seem, is but a dream within a dream.
Had Naomi ever existed outside his imagination? What cruel injustice of fate could possibly see her as a social threat, whose removal was necessary for the continued prosperity of a German-dominated Europe? What threat did the might of Berlin face from his beautiful, harmless leodensian Jew?

After languishing for some minutes, Paul dried his eyes on a woollen sleeve, and looked around the detritus of his room. It had obviously been searched, with no regard to care. Torn paper, clothes and books lay strewn amongst the wreckage of his living space. And it was only then that Paul remembered his novel; some of the pages of which were scattered in pieces around the floor.

Barely able to comprehend Naomi’s seizure, he realised that he, too, was in serious peril. Drying his eyes, Paul’s mouth opened in sudden horror. Stifling his fear, he collected some of the pages together, and then tottered over to the door that led to his flat’s great 1930s luxury; inside facilities, a rarity amongst all but the most modern of houses in England.

The wooden door swung open to reveal the icy blue eyes of an SS man fixed on his. Fear jolted the beating of his hammering heart.

Supreme was the confidence with which the SS officer stepped forwards, and Paul edged back, his eyes wide, body tensed, barely breathing.

“Paul Heggerty,” the voice said, quietly. It was not a question.

Almost paralysed by fear, the young Yorkshireman answered anyway.

“Yes?”

“I am Goeth, SS-Untersturmführer.”

The man held his hand out, revelling in the cruel parody of the situation. Tremulously, Paul took it with a shaking hand, and felt his knuckles crushed in a powerful, pitiless grip. Goeth held his eyes, grinning malevolently, and after an extended period of silence released the loiner’s pained fingers. The Austrian cleared his throat, theatrically, before continuing in a more commanding tone.

“The relationship you have been illicitly conducting is a breach of the German race laws. This is a matter of great concern to the Security Service of the SS, which I represent. But first, I would like to ask you a question. Your answer must be honest, or you will be punished quite severely. You are a creative man, yes?”

A bead of sweat ran down his neck, and Paul felt it slide down his shirt and continue its slippery course down a back that perspiring from fright. He couldn’t answer, and his lip shook, along with the rest of him. Paul was paralysed with fear.

“Well?” the soft, terrible voice purred.

“Yes.”

“You are writing a book?”

“Yes.”

“It is not finished?”

“No.”

“There are no other copies of the material found here today?”

“No.”

“Do you intend to continue writing…
material
to incite tensions and slander the Führer and Reich?”

“No.”

“There will be consequences if you persist.”

“I understand,” Paul stammered his agreement, trying to control his breathing with considerable effort, and failing.

The officer smiled. “I may not seek to punish you for the offensive materials found here, although the matter will be archived in the files of ‘SiPo and SD’ – the Security Police and Security Service. The Reichsprotektor of Britain – also the Chief of the
Sicherheitsdienst,
founder of SiPo and SD – bears only
goodwill
towards the Anglo-Saxon people. But regarding the Jew, Naomi Rosenberg, you understand that it is a matter of racial defilement? The legislature enacted in 1935 has been
de jure
British policy for some time. Not to mention her own criminal recklessness in remaining at large as an unregistered, hostile partisan.”

Paul could not respond. And now, a definite, malevolent grin spread across the SS officer’s face. His tone had remained slow and measured throughout.

“We have taken the Jewess into Protective Custody. There is no chance of properly
redeeming
a Jew, particularly an unruly, insidious partisan and a criminal, but we still remove the more disobedient elements from society into our rehabilitation camps. What I must ask you, regarding this matter of racial defilement is…” and the officer slowly circled the paralysed Paul. “Do you have any objection to the
Sicherheitsdienst’s
removal of the unregistered Jew?”

Paul was mortified. Could this be what it seemed?

“Do you object to the SD’s removal of the criminal Jewess?” he pressed.

Naomi, I’m so, so sorry my lass
…

“No,” Paul croaked, his voice breaking.

The SS man nodded slowly.

“Excellent. Then you must sign the following form immediately, stipulating as such.” He produced a sheet of white paper. “This should guarantee your future agreeability to the Reich.”