The Commissar (18 page)

They lie naked on the bed for a while, drinking rum laced with cognac, while they convince one another how grey and melancholy the world is when you haven’t enough money.

‘I was born to be rich,’ breathes Vera, a deep, thoughtful wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows,’ so that you must understand the Soviet Union is not altogether suiting me.’

‘Only fools choose a life without money, ‘Porta agrees, filling up their glasses again. This time he chooses
Slivovilz
to get rid of the cheap cognac taste.

‘My father was Imperial officer, a general.’ she sighs proudly, looking sideways at Porta. ‘If Lenin stay in your damned Germany I would be at the Imperial court now.
Why you do not shoot him for the devil’s sake?’

‘May I just touch Your Grace?’ asks Porta, rolling over on top of her.

‘My mama was from the best circles.’ she goes on, swinging her legs up around his skinny thighs. ‘Her family was much at the palace. We all believed in God.’

‘God didn’t help you much though, when Lenin’s boys got there an’ shot your blue-blooded arses off,’ says Porta, biting her nose gently.

‘Everyone know my father. His division was the best. He won the St George Cross. You Germans fled from him as fast as your legs could go . . .’

‘Hold it, ‘Porta puts in, holding up his hand. ‘I wasn’t in that fight!’

‘My father was a wealthy man! He gave his’life for the state. He sign death penalties, send criminals to Siberia, was lover of fine horses and women, the Tsar and God.’

‘I’ve met one or two generals like that,’ says Porta, laughing shortly. ‘They think they were born to the job. They never get round to understanding that that’s something we made ’em into!’

‘You talk like a filthy
Bolshevik
,’ she spits, angrily.

‘You’re wrong there, girl,’ he laughs, emptying his tumbler. ‘Don’t forget you’re the wife of a commissar with gilt-edged red stars all over you. The Tsar’s generals are all gone upstairs an’ are kissin’ Ivan the Terrible’s arsepart now. Stalin’s commissars are the boys that’re steppin’ light an’ easy around on the stage these days.’

‘What would you say to making 30 millions? Maybe more!’ she asks him, sipping thoughtfully from her glass.

Porta picks up the cognac bottle, and takes a long swallow. Then he takes up the rum and washes the cognac down with a still longer swallow. He looks at her for a long time. Then he asks, in a quiet voice:

‘Did you say millions? You’re not kidding me?’

‘Yes. 30
millions
!’ She smiles mysteriously. ‘But I think more. Much more. We have worked all out, so there is
nothing to get worried about. It is what you call a sure thing. We are already rich!’

‘You’ve no idea,’ he says, in a knowing voice, ‘just how many clever chaps I’ve met who’ve told me just exactly what you’re telling me. And what they were talking about was small potatoes compared to your millions. But they’re all tucked away behind bars now, and wondering what it was went wrong with their sure thing!’

‘You are frighten, then?’ she jeers at him. ‘I am wrong about you? Take your rags and get out of here. I don’t know you any more!’

‘No my dear, it ain’t that easy,’ he grins fiendishly, shaking the empty rum bottle. ‘When Joseph Porta, Oberge-freiter by the grace o’ God, gets on the trail of a job with 30 million iron men, he wants to hear ’em chinking! I’ve dreamt about something like this all my stinkin’ German life. You realize how long it’d take just to
count
30 millions? A hell of a long time I can tell you. It’d make even the Yids in the state bank sweat just to think of it.’

‘You go with us in sledge, and are ready to run a lit tie risk to be rich and independent of politicians and other foolish people?’ she asks, taking a deep pull on her cigarette.

‘You can bloody well believe it I’m ready.’ He roars with laughter. ‘An’ if your sure thing
is
a sure thing, then I swear by the Holy God above I’ll burn seven candles for you forever in the synagogue of my heart!’

‘Light them now, then,’ she smiles, offering him her cigarette-lighter. ‘You can get helpers? Good men? Not stumbling bums?’

‘Too true I can,’ he nods with assurance, lighting one of her cigarettes. ‘I have a kind of friend in Berlin who can open any kind of safe or strong-box, from the most advanced model to the primitive ones the municipalities buy in bundles of twelve. We called him “Plastic Man”, because he usually worked with plastic explosives. I once saw him open a safe that belonged to some people who didn’t trust the banks after Adolf moved in to Berlin. He stuck a coupla
little balls of plastic explosive on the door of it by the hinges. We stepped into the next room, where he set it off with a natty little radio an’ “BOOM!” it said. When we went back inside there’s this impenetrable armoured door lyin’ on the floor inside out. All we had to do was empty the box. That door couldn’t have been opened quicker with the proper key.’

‘This has nothing to do with safes,’ she corrected him. ‘It is much bigger than such things!’

‘Do we have to send somebody off in a natural manner, then?’ he asks, with a pleased expression. ‘I can fix that, too. My adjutant, Tiny, is a very handy fellow with a garrottin’ wire. People drop dead from it. An’ if there are any really
big
problems attached to removing somebody from this world in a hell of hurry, then I’ve got a mate we call “Sudden Death”. When I was last in Berlin, I took him with me to “talk” to a feller who thought he could put one over on me. We arrived, just when they’d got to the dessert, with a couple of Stens. It went off that quick, we hadn’t even said hello before the chap had fell over from the weight of the lead in his body. The landlord of “The Half Donkey”, who was standin’ there waiting with pancakes on a plate, got his tie shot off by a bullet. He was that shocked he was still standing there in the same spot, with his bloody pancakes and the shot-off bit o’ tie in his hand, when Inspector August an’ his posse arrived to discover who it was’d got shot.

‘“Shot?” he whined, dropping his pancakes. “Nobody’s been
shot
!” He didn’t know a thing about the body under the table. He swore to it. Said it must have got left there, somehow!

‘They closed the case as bein’ disorderly conduct, when they found out where the bullets in the body came from. They were from
Prinz Albrecht Strasse 3
.’

They sit back together on the bed, propped up on pillows, and drinking steaming-hot coffee.

A large map is spread out in front of them.

‘Here,’ she says, ‘are our millions. They lie there waiting for us.’

‘Prikumsk,’ he mumbles, bending closely over the chart, as if he were nearsighted. ‘Prikumsk! Sounds like some kind of a drink. You sure all that glitterin’ Commie gold is really hidden away there? I don’t like that river. There’s another town over there on the other bank. Reminds me of a beartrap ready to snap shut and hold you fast while you shit yourself waiting there to get shot!’

‘You can be easy,’ she says. ‘My husband lead the convoy, and nobody put wool on his eyes!’

‘And now your reliable husband has decided to go fetch the 30 million again?’ grins Porta, sceptically. ‘And
you
can trust him, of course. But can
I
? Good an’ faithful servants of the state who steal with both their fingers an’ their toes I do not feel happy about!’

‘He is a good friend to his friends, true as steel,’ she declares grandly. ‘He
never
cheat!’

‘No! I don’t suppose so, ‘Porta laughs, heartily. ‘What kinda feller’s this commissar husband of yours, anyway? Is he from Moscow?’

‘Are you mad? You believe I trust a man from Moscow?’ she screams, insultedly. ‘He is Georgian. His mother was Jewish from Crimea. The grandfather on mother’s side from Salonica. The family was Italian.’

‘If you tell me now there’s Irish on his dad’s side,’ he says jokingly, ‘then I’m sorry to say your commissar ol’ man’s goin’ to have to go through the process of natural death. A knife in his back, or somethin’ like that. A cocktail like him ran be a dangerous mixture.’

‘What in hell you mean by that?’ she asks, her eyes narrowing to slits. ‘You are some kind of racist pig?’

‘No, I can’t afford to be,’ answers Porta. ‘But let me tell you I know just what goes to making a good Mafia boss. 90% spaghetti blood, preferably Sicilian. That’s the beginning of the dodgiest of the dodgiest. 2% Irish, to make him a good fighter. 5% Jew juice, so he understands figures an’ knows
how to alter ’em to his own advantage. Spot o’ Greek on top of that lot an’ he’ll be one o’ the worst villains on earth, with the big advantage of trustin’ his fellow human beings as far as politicians trust one another. D’you understand now why I have doubts about your husband’s reliability?’

‘You think the gold bars are perhaps not there?’ she asks suspiciously.

‘I believe it’s there all right, and I’m in no doubt that your good husband, with all the advantages of blood the Lord has granted him, will be able to pinch it off of his mates in the Kremlin. But I’m also in no doubt of his also having found out how he can also take a silly sod of a German. It’d be nice not to have to share with
anybody
, wouldn’t it now?’

‘He never do that,’ she shouts, insultedly. ‘You must not forget that he is a Russian officer!’

‘Yes, I realize that,’ he laughs, heartily. ‘But just you watch out you don’t find yourself sitting on your bare butt in a very cold snowdrift, watchin’ honest hubby making off as fast as his legs can carry him with the shekels. Why in the world would he want to share ’em with anybody, when he could hang on to the lot with no bother?’

‘He would not dare to do that with me.’ she shouts, furiously. ‘I would kill him completely! Step on him like a piece of shit!’

‘D’you really believe all that?’ he asks, staring at her. ‘You couldn’t do a thing to him. You weren’t thinkin’ now of going to the OGPU, were you? And I’d recommend you to keep far, far away from the Gestapo.
They’re
not a very tender-hearted lot. If he does you out of it, you’ll have to swallow the pill no matter how bitter it is. He’s got the laugh on you all ways. He’s
rich
! You don’t get back on rich people. Not often. The best weapon in the world’s money!’

‘You think he would do that,’ she asks, with growing suspicion.

‘No trouble,’ he answers, laughing shortly. ‘Can’t see why he shouldn’t. Money can change the best of us.’

‘I am his wife, whom he loves.’ she protests, shaken,
looking at Porta in shocked fashion.

‘When you’ve got a big bag of money, it’s easy to get yourself a new wife. He says he loves you, does he? A man says a lot of things on his way down the thorny road of life.’

‘You have evil in your mind,’ she snarls, bitterly. ‘I should never have told you about this thing!’

‘Maybe it would’ve been cleverer not to,’ admits Porta. ‘The more people who know about the gold, the bigger’s the risk of losing it. But I don’t think you’d have told me your little secret either if you an’ hubby weren’t in need of some good old German know-how! If God won’t take you the Devil must. But we’d do best to think it over carefully before we decide who else to tell where the Jew fly-paper is, or, before we can turn round, there’ll be more souls outside its hidey-hole than there are waitin’ at the gates of Hell. Thirty million bucks! Good Lord preserve us! Thought about the effect it’ll have on the market when you let that Commie load loose on it?’

‘As I have told you, there is thirty millions and probably some little more,’ she assures him, tracing dollar signs with her fingernail on the sheet. ‘I have calculated on it is hot money.’

‘Hot, you say?’ he laughs, noisily. ‘If you’d said it was glowin’ you’d have been a lot closer to the truth. Thirty millions! I’ve never set eyes on that much loot even in my dreams.’ Suddenly his Slivovitz goes down the wrong way, and he begins to cough and splutter violently.

‘You keep saying thirty millions all the time,’ he gasps, between spasms of coughing. ‘But you don’t say thirty million
what
? Don’t say it’s Eyetie money!
Don’t
! Thirty millions of them wouldn’t get a German bailiff out of his warm bed!’

‘It is Yankee, capitalist dollars,’ she breathes, looking at him with an expression of triumph. You would think she had printed them herself.

‘Dollars,’ he mumbles radiantly, working out rapidly in his head what that would be. in marks. ‘Holy Mother of
Kazan, that’s a lot of reinforcements!’ Enthusiastically he grabs his piccolo, jumps high in the air, rushes round the room, like a happy fawn and hops up on top of a table. From this new eminence he begins to sing, in a ringing voice:

There was a rich man, and he lived in Jerusalem,
Glory hallelujah, hirojerum,

He wore a silk hat, and his coat was very sprucium,
Glory hallelujah, hirojerum.

At his gate, there sat a human wreckium,
He wore a bowler hat and the rim was round his neckium,

The poor man asked for a piece of bread and cheesium.
The rich man cried: ‘I’ll call for a policium,’

The poor man died and his soul went to heavium,
He danced with the angels, till a quarter past elevium,

The rich man died, but he didn’t fare so wellium,
He couldn’t go to heaven, so he had to go to hellium,