The Commissar (44 page)

‘Enemy of the people,’ he snarls, kicking irritably at the body.

The jailers give a Russian shrug of their shoulders, and go on without a word. It is best not to know, or see, too much in Vladimir prison. It is not unusual for people to be liquidated without explanation.

Our two lorries rumble into the prison yard, followed by one of the T-34s.

‘Get your gasmasks on,’ orders the Commissar nervously. ‘
Keep
them on no matter what happens! This whole prison’s full of gas already!’

‘Will they die?’ asks the Old Man, worriedly.

‘Not all,’ laughs Igor indifferently. ‘Only those who would have died in any case!’

‘Come on,’ says the Commissar, catching Porta by the shoulder. Porta’s head bangs into a door-post.

‘What the hell?’ he cries, yawning like a sleepy horse. ‘What’s goin’ on? Hell, where am I?’ He leans against the door, and tries to remember where he is.

‘Move it!’ says the Commissar, pushing him. ‘You’ve got a vault to open! You told us you’d been a locksmith’s apprentice, and could open any lock in existence!’

‘Right enough!’ mumbles Porta, and wobbles sleepily down the stairs.

‘Frostlips’ is behind him with two large bundles of keys. He swears one of them must be the key to the vault.

‘Are you sure the right key’s
there
? asks ‘Whorecatcher’ in a worried voice. ‘You’ve been wrong before!’

‘I’ll guarantee one of ’em fits,’ says ‘Frostlips’ in an insulted tone. He clashes the bundles of keys together.

‘One’s enough.’ says Porta, leaning tiredly against the heavy door of the vault. He looks through the big keyhole, but can see nothing. He begins trying keys in it. None of them fit.

‘Frostlips’ gets a funny look on his face, and stammers something about how maybe he has got hold of the wrong bunch of keys.

‘I should’ve known!’ says ‘Whorecatcher’. angrily, ‘the last time you were wrong you had a toothache, and this time you’re suffering from nervous stress!’

‘The whole bleedin’ prison’s asleep,’ reports Tiny. He comes clattering down the stairway with a pleased look on his face and swinging a gasmask in his hand.

‘I never in my life seen anybody go on their backs quick as the key-rattlers and the slaves in this cage! That bleedin’gas ought to be able to close down this world war quick as knife! I’d just love to see Adolf’s an’ Uncle. Joe’s coolies sleepin’ like
babes in one another’s arms!’

‘Unfortunately it only works in a closed room,’ says the Commissar. ‘Otherwise, I can assure you the whole German Army would have been put to sleep long ago!’

The Old Man comes down into the cellars. He is angry.

‘Don’t you think we’re going to get our arses singed on this one?’ he asks, standing with feet apart, in the middle of the room.

‘We’ll manage,’ says Porta, running his fingers over the armoured door. ‘All I’ve got to do is find out how this thing works, and then we’re rich!’

‘How long will it take?’ asks the Commissar, impatiently. ‘We haven’t got a lot of time! There’s enough gas to put ’em to sleep just once more and then we’ve had it!’

‘Why not liquidate them all now?’ Suggests Igor, his
Nagan
already in his hand.

‘Don’t you ever get tired of killing people?’ asks the Commissar, irritably. ‘You must soon be sick of yourself,
I
get sick just looking at you!’

Igor shrugs his shoulders indifferently, and slams his
Nagan
back into its holster with a jeering look on his face.

After half an hour’s work on the difficult lock. Porta sits down despondently.

‘I can do it,’ he says. ‘But that’s not the question!’

‘Then be so good as to inform us, please, of what the question
is
!’ says the Commissar, with heavy irony. ‘I’m just dying to know!’ Under stress conditions the Commissar’s right eye winks involuntarily. It opens and closes as if the eyelid were on a string. It has brought him into contact with a number of ladies in the course of his life, but it has also brought him a number of scoldings from ladies who did not approve of being contacted in that manner. His right eye is winking furiously now, but there are no pretty girls in sight.

‘It’s a question,’ explains Porta, with a dubious contortion of his features,’ of time!’

‘Time?’ whispers the Commissar, working his eyelid so hard it is wonderful the eye does not fall out of its socket.

‘Yes, time!’ Porta smiles with an effort. He sits down
cross-legged in front of the unapproachable vault door.

‘It’s going to take more time, then!’ nods the Commissar, falling resignedly into a chair. ‘How
much
more time?’

Porta counts on his fingers, and it seems for a moment as if he is about to begin on his toes as well.

‘This is a very intelligent vault we’ve to do with here! The bloke who gave birth to this was no pal of safe-crackers. It’s
different
! Different in every way!’ He knocks, thoughtfully, on the door towering above him. ‘The steel’s different! The lock’s an unknown make, and the bloody door itself’s different! It’s a real shit vault this one. Must’ve been a Jew that invented it!’

‘Thank you!’ smiles the Commissar, with a snarl in his voice.

‘I’ve not been let in on everything, I see,’ says the Old Man, pushing his fur cap back on his head. ‘That’s for sure! I’ve been done!’

‘Porta,’ says Gregor, bending over him. ‘tell us straight, now. How serious
is
it?’

Porta grunts, as if a bullet had sunk into his midriff.

‘Shitty!’ he answers.

‘How much shit?’ asks Gregor.

‘A great big bloody pile of shit!’ answers Porta, lighting a cigarette. ‘More shit than I’d ever have thought there could be!’

‘How long will it take you to open it?’ asks the Commissar, puffing nervously at his cigarette.

Porta counts on his fingers again.

‘All night an’ part of next day,’ he says sadly, holding out his hands like a fisherman showing the size of the one that got away.

‘That’s
great
! the Commissar explodes, jumping up from his chair. ‘We’ll have plenty of time for sightseeing, then?’

Porta gives him a long stare.

‘Let me just tell you I’m no happier about this than you are. But don’t forget it’s a Soviet bloody vault we’re dealing with, made in the USSR. No German vault would have been so mean!’

‘Listen here!’ says Barcelona, pushing forward. ‘The fact of the matter is, put short and sweet, that you reckon you can get this rotten box open some time before next Christmas, so we can get away with the gold?’

‘I’ve told you. There’s not a lock in the world I can’t get past, but it takes the time it has to take! When I was helping Egon, the best locksmith in Berlin, there wasn’t a lock didn’t give up when we arrived. We even used to open locks for the coppers, and we were highly respected, I can tell you. Look at those wheels there! They ain’t even round like normal wheels. They look like somethin’ out of a wrecked aeroplane!’

The Commissar tramps backwards and forwards impatiently, making figures of eight on the floor.

‘I do believe I’m dreaming,’ he says, knocking himself on the forehead. ‘Yes. I’m dreaming! I’m in hospital being anaesthetized, before they cut off both of my legs!’ He kicks the vault door viciously, and grimaces with pain. ‘And I hope it’s true, too, because this situation is much worse!’

‘We goin’ to live?’ asks the Old Man, puffing fatalistically on his silver-lidded pipe. ‘That’s all that interests me. Don’t tell me it’s a lot to ask!’

‘This job ain’t for us,’ shouts Tiny, resolutely. ‘If you lot’ll listen to me, we’ll get out of ’ere quick as we can, an’ find a proper bank. We go in there with mpis, scrape the beans together an’ sod off out of it! Any dope can fix a thing like that! I knew a kid o’ twelve as done it! He’d got to sixteen before they shot ’im!’

‘An’ where’d you get rid of all those roubles you’d knocked off?’ asks Porta, with a sneer.

‘Roubles? What roubles?’ asks Tiny blankly.

‘The roubles you and your chopper had picked up in the bank,’ answers Porta, ironically. ‘You don’t bloody well think Russian banks are stocked up with dollars, do you? Roubles you ran wipe your arse on, and they don’t even do much of a job of that!’

‘An hour from now the gas won’t be working any more,’ remarks the Commissar, with a hopeless look on his face.

‘Give me all the tools down here,’ Porta demands. ‘That
rotten, shitty lock’s going to get to know Obergefreiter, by the grace of God, Joseph Porta!’ He pulls the vodka bottle from his pocket, and reduces its contents by a third. Then he screws the cap back on and returns the bottle to his pocket.

‘You’re dead sure you can open that damned door?’ asks the Commissar, with the air of a Grand Inquisitor.

‘I said I could,’ answers Porta, annoyed.

‘And you can do it before the turn of the century?’ the Commissar goes on. ‘I only want to know, so that I can arrange my affairs accordingly!’

‘Don’t get me worked up. Come and give me a hand instead! I need light! Plenty of light. Then everything’ll go a lot quicker!’

‘Yes. I’m sure,’ says the Commissar, turning the hand-operated spotlight on to the lock.

Porta takes a few deep, long breaths to quieten his nerves. He squats down on his haunches, like an Inca warrior readying himself for breakfast.

‘Normally a lock like this ought to fly open when a feller blows on it!’ he says, thoughtfully.

‘Blow on it,’ suggests Gregor.

‘The rotten thing’s shaken my confidence!’ says Porta fiercely.

Igor rattles down the stairs with his
Nagan
ready for action in his hand.

‘Found a piece of cunt sergeant rattling off to the OGPU on the blower,’ he says, holstering his
Nagan
.‘I blew her away and smashed the phone. We hadn’t cut it off when we moved in.’

The Commissar presses his lips tightly together, and keeps back some remarks which he was otherwise prepared to spit out.

‘What’d she tell the OGPU?’ asks Barcelona practically.

‘Nothing much! I was right behind her when she made the connection. I blew her brains up the wall.’

‘Did anybody ever tell you what a stinking pig you are?’ asks the Old Man, staring contemptuously at him.

‘Only you,’ grins Igor, executing a highly complicated Russian shrug.

Porta leans down toward the door of the vault. His pointed nose touches the lock.

‘I can’t give you more light when you’re standing
there
’ protests the Commissar. He turns the spot on to Porta’s right eye, which is peering into the lock.

‘God dammit,’ shouts Porta, spitting angrily on the lock, ‘it’s
mean
to make anything so bloody complicated! If all locks were like that, think of all the unemployed there’d be!’

‘Unemployed?’ asks ‘Whorecatcher’ in amazement, kneeling down alongside him to relieve the Commissar with the spotlight.

‘Yes, of course! Bank robbers would have to give up altogether, and the police shut down their robbery sections! I need a drill with a diamond tip, that can get through that blasted metal!’

‘Here,’ says ‘Frostlips’, handing him a diamond drill.

‘I’ll fix that bloody thing now,’ says Porta grimly, and presses the drill against the lock. It whines like a runaway outboard motor. Then it slips. It has hardly scratched the metal.

‘You’ll do it all right. Take it easy,’ Igor comforts Porta, patting him on the shoulder.

Porta moves away like a dog which has been patted by a cat. He pushes a thin tool into the lock, but soon gives up again.

‘Dammit,’ he mumbles despondently. ‘I’m
good
at locks, but this bastard’s a real headache.’

‘If we get taken,’ grins Gregor, carelessly, ‘we can write a book about it. How about this for a title:
Gold-robbers in Siberia
!’

‘Oh. you
are
funny!’ snarls Porta wickedly. ‘You’re close to making me
die
laughin’!’

‘What about acid?’ suggests the Commissar. ‘We’ve got a bottle here, and a syringe!’

‘Why not?’ answers Porta. He empties the entire contents of the acid bottle into the lock.

It bubbles and hisses for about ten minutes. One or two drops splash on to the Commissar’s uniform, burning holes in
it immediately. Nothing happens to the lock.

‘Rat piss!’ says Porta, sending the empty acid bottle rattling across the floor with a kick.

‘What about a saw?’ suggests ‘Frostlips’.

‘If you’re in need of exercise,’ hisses Porta, ‘then saw as much as you like. But, if it’s opening the vault we’re talkin’ about, then sawin’ at it won’t do any good!’

‘I can’t get away from it,’ says Tiny, giving the door of the vault a kick. ‘It’s too much trouble breakin’ into a bleedin’ vault! Why don’t we go for a sausage factory. It’s a lot easier!’

‘A
sausage
factory?’ asks Porta, turning his head.

‘Yes,’ grins Tiny. ‘I know a couple of fellers who make a livin’ at it!’

‘Were they hungry?’ wonders Gregor.