Derek Lambert - Vendetta

A gust of wind blew an eddy of snow into the pickling plant. Meister, wearing a camouflage jacket – Ordnance didn’t seem to have grasped that in the Russian winter white made you a chameleon – shivered. The snow made a tiny drift in one corner of the store room under a row of glass jars containing cucumbers in frozen brine. They had broken a few jars and hammered the cucumbers from the ice but they had tasted of ammonia and Lanz had speculated that, before abandoning the village, the Russians had pissed in them.

Lanz had lit another of his fires. It was a poor thing, made from charred wood, but it glowed resolutely holding the frost at bay and it was a cheerful companion in adversity.

‘Mind you,’ Lanz said, holding mittened hands to the fire, ‘there wasn’t all that much to eat in Berlin even in those days. You know, we had ration cards – blue for meat, yellow for fat, white for sugar… But I suppose you didn’t know much about ration cards.’

‘I knew about them. But you’re right, we had more than our fair share.’

‘And a car, of course.’

Two, Meister remembered. He nodded. No need to elaborate.

‘No problems with gasoline rationing?’

‘I wouldn’t have known about that.’

‘My God, I wish I’d known about you Meisters – I would have robbed you blind.’

Lanz blinked at the fire. His face was protected by a wool face mask fashioned from a scarf and all his thoughts were in his eyes. He wore a stolen fur hat and a field-grey great-coat that was too big for him. He was comical or sinister according to his eyes.

Meister stared across the steppe. It would soon be dark. The hollows in the snow were filling with night and the sky to the west was a chilled pink. The wind, making stringed instruments of barbed wire and bent girders, played a dirge.

‘Do you know when the best time to rob a house was?’ Lanz asked.

‘When the occupants were on holiday?’

‘Wrong. That was when they removed the valuables. No, the best time was during a Party rally. Find a house owned by a Nazi big-shot and it was like picking your own pockets. While the family were listening to Hitler spouting and watching the storm troopers goose stepping, while the staff were drinking their master’s booze… I broke into Ley’s place once but I hadn’t done my homework. I was disturbed by a valet who didn’t drink and he chased me along a street lined with brownshirts and police. I only had a tiny car that ran on gas from a wood-burning stove and it was so slow I had to run for it. Luckily Hitler came along just then and instead of shouting, ‘Stop thief,’ the valet stopped and shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ and I got away. So you see I’ve got a lot to thank the Führer for.’

‘I would have caught you,’ Meister said, ‘and handed you over to my father.’

‘Would you now?’

‘Not now. My values have changed. They have to, don’t they?’ Meister gestured across the hibernating land that war wouldn’t allow to sleep. ‘I’ve got a lot to thank the Führer for as well.’

‘Don’t become a thief for God’s sake.’

‘There are worse occupations. It depends what you steal.’

‘So when is it bad to be a thief?’

‘When you’re stealing young minds,’ Meister said.

Distant gunfire made a summer storm on the winter horizon. Glimmers of light followed by grumbling explosions.

Lanz said: ‘You’re right of course. About values. About war. It legalises crime. For murder, read heroism. For theft, the fortunes of war. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, which values are the correct ones.’

‘None of them, perhaps,’ Antonov said.

‘Come now.’ Lanz threw a charred stick onto his puny fire. ‘Rape, child abuse, cruelty… No justification for any of those.’

Meister, staring across the darkening void said: ‘Those are crimes against people. Against ourselves if you like. The other crimes – murder, theft, fraud – they’re offences against a code which we’ve compiled.’

‘You should become a judge,’ Lanz observed. ‘Especially when I’m in the dock.’

‘I couldn’t be a judge. I don’t even know whether we or the Russians are in the right any longer.’

‘Neither,’ Lanz said.

‘Not even Misha knows.’

‘Don’t bet on it. A very demanding parent, Mother Russia. Just as demanding as a Jewish mother. If it really came to it, you versus Antonov, Germany versus Russia, he wouldn’t hesitate.’

‘He saved us,’ Meister said.

‘But where is he now?’

‘With his own people,’ Meister said. ‘Where else?’ and wished it were not so.

The dawn was dove-grey and pink-breasted, deceptively soft, as Lanz, riding a bicycle with a buckled front wheel, left the pickling plant to find breakfast. Before Meister returned to normal sniping duties such a foray wouldn’t have been necessary because the cooks had been ordered to make sure he didn’t go short of food. Now he had to make out as best he could and he was grateful that his bodyguard was a thief.

Lanz returned as the guns thirty miles away began their overture. His eyes glittered through his mask and his breath smoked and crystallised ahead of him.

Inside the pickling plant Lanz the Magician began his act. He placed his canvas bag on the table and with a flourish began to extract his ‘rabbits’. A packet of salted biscuits, fragmented and speckled with mould; two shrivelled potatoes that had begun to sprout before the frost pruned them; a paper bag containing a spoonful of tea; and the finale, a can bearing the word SPAM.

‘By courtesy of the Yanks,’ Lanz said plunging a bayonet into the can. ‘We should be grateful they’re helping to feed the Ivans.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘In the remains of the police-station,’ Lanz said. ‘Where else?’

He prised back a flap of metal skin. The flesh beneath was pink, glistening ambrosia, and its aroma made their stomachs whine.

Lanz held up one hand. ‘Wait, let’s be civilised. A proper meal, food and drink.’ He filled a blackened saucepan with snow and perched it on the fire and emptied the tea into a jar. Then he eased the Spam out of the can onto a wooden plate.

‘Do you think Gruppe Hoth will make it?’ Meister asked. He talked to distract his attention from the tinned meat.

‘If he’s going to he’ll have to hurry: there are only ten more shopping days till Christmas.’

The last Christmas Meister had spent in Hamburg had been in 1940. Special rations had been issued. Three eight-ounce rations per person of peas, beans and lentils; extra marmalade and sugar. It had also been announced in the Press that troops at the front were to receive 100 million cigarettes, 25 million cigars and an ocean of booze.

Goering stated that a thousand Deutschmarks would be given to the child of every pilot killed in action, the money to be paid when he or she came of age, and the newspapers contained recipes for eggless and almost fatless Christmas cakes.

The Meister family, barely affected by shortages, were mightily impressed by Nazi beneficence and when, on Christmas Day, the High Command announced: ‘The German air force refrained from attacks yesterday and last night and no enemy planes entered German territory,’ Karl recalled reading about the Christmas Day truce in the trenches in the previous war and wondering why the soldiers who had shaken hands had returned to the business of killing each other.

But the talk among Hamburg’s leading Nazis gathered around the Meister’s log fire on Christmas Eve was about victory not truces. The conquest of the British, out-of-touch with reality on their offshore island, the establishment of a Thousand Year Reich.

Words shone like medals. Coloured candles spluttered on a tall tree, presents sprawled beneath it. The chiming night was a pre-victory celebration.