Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

Bill smiled to himself as he hung up the phone. He checked his calendar and called out to the outer office. “Cheryl, can I have the summary for my eleven o’clock?”

Cheryl came in with the summary and said, “I have a Mr. Remo on the phone?”

“Remo? From where?”

“He says he’s an old friend.”

Bill’s mind whirled. “Peter Remo? Yeah, I’d say so. Okay, put him through.”

Cheryl went outside and a few seconds later Bill picked up. “Peter, how the hell are you, man?”

“Hey, Bill; thanks for taking my call.”

“Don’t be silly. How ya been, buddy?”

“I’ve been okay, but something’s come up and I need to sit down with you.”

“This doesn’t sound too good.”

“I wish it were good, but Bill, I’m scared, and I need help.”

“You got it. Where and when?”

“Not in your office. Can you meet me in twenty minutes, at the Lincoln Memorial?”

“Little dramatic, Pete, ain’t it?”

“Bill, please.”

“Okay, twenty minutes.”

Bill hung up the phone and called to Cheryl. She wasn’t fond of the “scream intercom,” and her expression showed it.

“Cancel the rest of my morning and my two o’clock.”

“Huh?”

“There’s nothing cabinet level and you can cover the eleven and two o’clock for me if you want.”

“Oh, okay. Where will you be?”

“On my cell.”

“No, where? The Secret Service is going to want to know.”

“The Lincoln Memorial.”

“Why?”

“Dramatic interlude.”

Cheryl shrugged. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

It was the best knockwurst in the neighborhood. In fact, his little stand was a six-sided, umbrella faceted jewel in the gastronomic crown of Hungary. Claude’s traditional preparation in his humble kitchen in Kivorst held the secret. He stewed the meat in three kinds of sauerkraut from earlier the previous afternoon. Each of the krauts brought out the individual flavor of the beef, pork, and veal that was knockwurst. He also added a dash of molasses, apple vinegar, and wine to the pot to compliment each. As was happening more and more, a businessman from the area was proudly buying lunch for a visiting client. He was spouting praise for Claude claiming, as many others had, that the knockwurst was just like his mother’s. The anticipation on the faces of those who knew what awaited them, with many actually rubbing their hands together like children expecting a treat, made Claude proud. And he had little to be proud of since the war.

There was a time when he owned one of the best restaurants in Budapest. It involved thirty-three years of toiling everyday, getting up before the chickens, and going to sleep after the cows, but he loved it. Those were truly the good old days. His whole family worked in the restaurant, which kept them close and caring for each other. It provided a good life for all, obviously there was always enough to eat, and his sister, Mary, even met a doctor. It wasn’t too bad a life.

Then the Nazis came, the dream ended, the nightmare began. Now, he was the only one left. His wife, mother, father, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, all shipped off to the camps, never to be seen or heard from again. He had a different fate because of his cooking skills. The Germans found Claude, emaciated and near death, when hunger forced him to leave his hiding spot in the root cellar of the restaurant. The Nazis had taken over the place to be an officer’s mess. He didn’t get as far as the front door when they caught him. A sniveling coward of a Nazi captain, left behind to secure the phone system of Budapest, ordered him carried off to the street to be shot. However, when the captain overheard Claude protesting that this was his restaurant, he ordered his men to halt.

“Can you cook?” the captain asked.

“Yes… I was… the… chef,” Claude said, coughing.

The Nazi turned his head as he ordered, “Take him to my house, clean him up, and see if he can boil water.”

Claude became the captain’s personal cook. It was barely survival, but again where there was food there was life. Claude stayed alive by feeding the fat Nazi officer like he was the Archduke. While the Hungarian people starved under Nazi occupation, “the Pig” always had fine butchered meats and fresh vegetables for Claude to prepare every day. Many times Claude thought of adding a dash of lye to the soup or iodine to the sauce, but that would only kill Hans, the lowly private who served as the pig’s credenza, tasting everything before the swine ate.

During one of the final days of the war, when the battles outside the city were looming closer and closer, Claude and all the servants and workers who had evaded death by becoming slaves to these “Aryan Supermen” were rounded up and hastily put up against a wall to be killed. Claude heard the bolt action from the rifles of the SS troops as they aimed their weapons. A once proud people were about to be robbed of the only thing they had left, their lives.

Claude flinched as the shooting started. He waited a seeming eternity for what would surely be the searing pain of hot bullets puncturing his body, but it never came. He crouched low covering his head. From somewhere deep inside him he drummed up the courage to look behind him. All the SS men were sprawled over the ground, steam vapor emanating from the bullet holes in their crisp, black uniforms as the heat of their blood hit the cold winter’s air. Beyond them were the mud-stained, olive drab uniforms of American soldiers, their guns smoldering as a few of them continued firing sporadic bursts and single shots at SS men still alive or trying to escape. At that moment, Claude started to believe in God once again, a belief he had abandoned in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the Nazis brought with them into Hungary.

At war’s end, he set up the street cart and reasoned that if he just made enough money to survive the winters, then he was living the life of a king. Accordingly, he only prepared so much meat every day and, when it was gone, he was off. He’d go home, simmer tomorrow’s pot, then read, walk, or watch the children play.

So it was, that on this fine autumn day, the two businessmen were dabbing sauerkraut juice from their smiling mouths when he heard it. Although his mind didn’t recognize it at first, his body reacted. He slammed down the lids on his cart, dropped the serving fork, and started running, as fast as his old legs could carry him.

“Claude! Where are you going? My friend wants more of your fine knockwurst! What is that noise?”

Like a low hanging fog, rolling in from around the corner, a rumbling growl swept over the cobblestones. Then came a metallic clanking sound, then the barrel and finally the tracks of a Soviet TU-24 attack tank. Hundreds of Soviet infantry troops swarmed behind the tank. The two businessmen, who were only thirteen when the Germans left Budapest, started running as well.

It was the beginning of the Communist siege of Hungary in 1956.

?§?

“Tony, enough with the clanging, it’s no use. You’re just waking everybody up.”

“That cheap, tightwad, son-of-a-bitch of a landlord, I’ll clang him with a wrench!” Clank, clank, clank was the sound Tony’s crescent wrench made as he rapped the radiator in his fifth floor walk-up tenement apartment. “Send up more steam fer Christ sakes, ya bastard!” Tony, the burly truck driver, yelled at the pipes as if the landlord was nestled warm in his apartment on the first floor, with his ear frying on a steam pipe listening in delight to the freezing cold agony of his tenants on this bone-chilling winter night.