Otto's Phoney War Read online

  There, peasant farmers awaited them, bean coffee already bundled up in anticipation, eager to receive their consignment of manure, the like of which their worn-out hill farms had not seen these many years.

  Any profits were split, it went without saying. After all Emil arranged the contracts and supplied the horse. All the same, within a week he had collected some thirty kilograms of bean coffee, hidden in the old nag’s feed box, a small fortune at the day’s black-market prices. By the end of the second week, the feed bin bulged with over seventy kilos of the precious beans and Otto realised that he needed a business agent to get rid of the stuff for him.

  He couldn’t keep accumulating it in this manner. Someone would surely stumble across it sooner or later. Besides it would be too dangerous to unload the coffee in the local area. The locals hadn't much money anyway. As Sergeant Forz often proclaimed contemptuously: ‘This lot of half-frogs ain’t even got a pot to piss in – they’re so poor!’

  It was a hazy Wednesday afternoon and Otto was quietly enjoying one of the perks of his new-found income. The door of his shed looked out over the cleared land with billets falling away below him and the sun crowning the countryside in gold. He had swapped a half kilo of coffee for a lighter two days previously. It was dulled with good use, and now he was using it to dig into his collection of Belgie cigarrettes, disguised in German packets. A hunchbacked form was making his way through the camp, easily noticeable amongst the general post-meal inactivity. It was Wurm, the clerk. Here we go again, thought Otto. Wurm would make this pilgrimage regularly, promising to alleviate the young Herr Stahl's present predicament, and borrowing a cigarette or two as well. Otto would never get them back. Suddenly an idea came to him, and he was on his feet, waving Wurm over.

  ‘You go to Aachen every Thursday to collect the men’s weekly wages for the Friday pay-day, don’t you, Wurm?’ he asked casually as the two of them sat there smoking reflectively, while across in the billets a triumphant radio announcer was shrilling the great news that Warsaw, the Polish capital, had finally surrendered to the Greater German Army.

  ‘Yes,’ Wurm answered, puffing at his little clay-pipe in an attempt to ward off the worst of the stench that came from Otto’s direction. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Otto replied to this question with one of his own. ‘How do you get to Aachen – by the local train?’

  ‘No, the Fart-Cannon is magnanimous enough to allow me to take the company truck. After all, I do bring back with me on average five hundred marks or more a week, you know.’

  ‘Little Fish!’ Otto said, taking the plunge.

  Wurm’s curiosity was aroused. ‘What do you mean – little fish?’

  ‘What I said. I’ve got a little project, if you’re interested.’ He lowered his voice. ‘There’ll be money in it for you, a lot of money. Surely you’re not happy with the kind of peanuts they pay us in this place? You can’t get fat on that, Wurm.’

  Slowly, his bespectacled face thoughtful, Wurm nodded his agreement. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right,’ Otto urged.

  ‘You know,’ Wurm said, lowering his eyes as if he were a little afraid to look the other man in the face, ‘that I have certain physical disadvantages. I’m not handsome like you – and I’ve got this damn hump on my back.’

  Now it was Otto’s turn to lower his eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘I never had anyone who … loved me,’ Wurm continued. ‘You see my parents died when I was a baby and I was brought up by the nuns in a church orphanage in Aachen. That is until I met Gerda.’

  ‘Gerda?’ Otto echoed, a little worried at the unexpected turn his carefully planned conversation was taking. He didn't want to hear any more confessions from the little cripple.

  ‘Yes, my girl,’ the hunchback smiled at him. ‘I mean, I know she isn’t pretty with her cross-eyes and her withered arm.’ Otto heard himself muttering that beauty wasn’t just skin-deep and feeling a hypocrite for doing so.

  ‘But she loves me and I love her. So we’re trying to save a little money to buy a cottage if they’ll let us get married. The laws of hereditary diseases you know? My back and her arm.’

  Otto nodded his understanding. ‘Could be just an accident at birth. Just because you’ve got a little – err – physical defect, it doesn’t mean that your kids will inherit the same thing.’

  ‘That’s what we always say,’ the hunchback clutched the pathetic straw almost greedily.

  ‘Well, then,’ Otto said swiftly, not wanting to hear any more of his cross-eyed Gerda with her withered arm, ‘here’s your chance to earn the money you need for a down-payment.’

  ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ Wurm said with new determination. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, you see, I’ve come into possession of a lot of real, genuine coffee beans from a source that I am not allowed to divulge to you. Now I want someone to act as my agent on the Aachen black-market, and Wurm, I think you are that man. What do you say?’

  Wurm stretched out his skinny little clerk’s paw, jaw hardening like some heroic character in an UFA adventure movie. ‘Stahl, I am your man!’

  If he hadn’t been so pathetic, Otto could have laughed in his ugly bespectacled face.

  ‘You’re getting a gut, Wurm,’ Sergeant Forz grunted, as the little clerk came through the door carrying a steaming cup of coffee.

  The Sergeant sat at his desk, booted feet resting in the ‘in’ tray, cheap cigar in his mouth, the coffee pot steaming on the pot-bellied stove behind him. He was reading the front page of the Nazi Wesideutsche Allgemeine, with its account of the final dismemberment of a defeated Poland by the two new allies Russia and Germany. ‘Don’t you know that a good cock never gets fat,’ he added. When the clerk didn’t answer, he chuckled. ‘But then no woman in her right mind would want a little cripple like you, would she?’

  ‘I suppose so, sergeant,’ Wurm said, lowering his gaze so that the big NCO would not see the look of hate and triumph in his eyes. What did the ugly fart-cannon know, he asked himself. Hadn’t Gerda allowed him to make love to her in the back of the truck last Thursday after he had given her four hundred Reichsmarks, his share of the money he had made on Aachen’s black-market selling Otto’s coffee?

  ‘What time are you off?’ Forz asked.

  ‘As soon as I finish my coffee, sergeant.’

  ‘No time for that. I want the truck back here by four so that you can get straight on filling the wage packets for tomorrow.’

  Wurm put down his coffee. ‘As you wish.’

  ‘And don’t forget my cigars, Wurm, or I’ll have your arse.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Wurm replied dutifully. ‘Twenty, wasn’t it?’

  Forz nodded, his gaze fixed on his newspaper once more.

  ‘Right, Sergeant, that’ll be two marks.’ Wurm held out his little hand for the money.

  Forz pretended to be engrossed in his newspaper.

  Wurm gave a little shrug and slinging his pack containing the precious coffee beans went out, trying not to hear Forz’s low laugh of contempt as he did so.

  ‘Stupid little crippled bastard,’ Forz said to himself as the truck started up outside. ‘Still wet behind the spoons. Falls for the same old trick every Thursday, he does.’ He sighed and made himself more comfortable at his desk. It was going to be a nice easy day and at dinnertime there might be more than a good strong pea soup waiting for him back home.

  For a few minutes he savoured the memories of that delightful, if surprising incident on the couch three weeks previously before he gradually became aware of a strange, exotic odour.

  He sat up and sniffed hard. What was it? He looked at his cheap cigar. It had gone out. The smell didn’t come from that source. He frowned and, a little intrigued, rose to his feet to stare around the office.

  There seemed nothing out of the ordinary. His narrow animal brow wrinkled in bewilderment. Like a bloodhound sniffing out its prey, he stamped around the office, his flared, hairy nostrils twitc
hing as he tried to locate the source of the strange odour. And then he had it. It came from the little cripple’s still steaming coffee cup!

  He lifted up the chipped, cheap cup and sniffed hesitantly. By God, he told himself, it did smell like the real thing. He wiped his lips with one sweep of his hairy paw and took a tentative sip, and then another, and another. Suddenly his bushy eyebrows slid up his forehead like twin lifts with astonishment. It was the real thing! In one gulp he drained the rest of the brown liquid. There was no denying it. The little cripple Wurm had been drinking real bean coffee! Suddenly, as if overcome by the discovery, Forz slumped down into his chair, his mind racing, his newspaper forgotten.

  What was Wurm up to? he asked himself. Wurm, whose weekly wage was all of forty marks, was drinking real bean coffee. Even if one could find a black marketeer selling the precious stuff, it still cost at least thirty Reichsmark a kilo, a sum impossible for that little crippled shit to raise.

  He was getting fat too, in spite of the fact that he, Forz, kept him on the move six days a week. It couldn’t be the camp grub. Those greedy bastards of kitchen bulls wouldn’t give you the dirt from beneath their nails, and nobody could grow a gut on the watery horse-meat soups and greasy soya-bean hashes they dished out.

  Forz rubbed his big black chin, only half-hearing the rasp of the stubble. Wurm was getting money from somewhere, lots of it! But from where?

  Forz pondered that question for a very long time, his slow mind coming up with answer after answer which he dismissed almost as soon as it came to him. And then he had it with the startling clarity of a sudden vision.

  ‘Of course,’ he cried out loud. ‘Of course it has to be that!’ Abruptly he experienced the delightful mental picture of the promotion this discovery would bring him, perhaps even a medal. Walburga would be as proud of him again as she had been the day they had married and in spite of the fact that four comrades had been necessary to carry his drunken body into the bridal chamber, she had been very willing and appreciative once he had come to again.

  He hesitated no longer. With a sausage-like forefinger that trembled slightly with barely controlled excitement he dialled the secret Aachen number. It had been given to him specifically for just such cases as this, though he never expected he would have occasion to use it.

  Impatiently he waited for the other party to come through.

  Finally a gruff, bored, masculine voice rasped, ‘Geheime Staatspolizei, Dienststelle Aachen.’

  ‘Gestapo?’ he said somewhat stupidly.

  ‘No, we’re the home for fallen mothers,’ the gruff voice snarled. ‘I’ve just said we are, you idiot!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Forz said hastily. ‘Sergeant Forz here, West wall, Sector Four … I’m afraid I’m a bit excited.’

  ‘Well, don’t give yourself a hernia, Sergeant,’ the Gestapo man replied without any particular interest. ‘Where’s the fire? What is it? Cough it up!’

  Sergeant Forz drew a deep breath, his mind full of medals and naked women. ‘Sir,’ he said firmly, ‘I would like to report a case … a case of espionage … ’

  CHAPTER 6

  Cautiously the little hunchback parked the battered old engineers’ truck behind the huge, domed cathedral that housed the throne of the great Charlemagne himself, the emperor who had made this his imperial city over a thousand years before. Not that such things interested Wurm, who had been brought up in Aachen. Hunchbacked orphans with weak eyes usually have little time for glory and history; Wurm thought them much too humble and concerned with simple survival.

  He pulled the handbrake, turned off the engine, and looked to Gerda, sitting in the cab next to him. Patting her skinny knee, encased in the thick woollen stockings she knitted herself in her sparse off-duty time as a scullery-maid, he said, ‘Now, Gerda, I don’t want you to move away from the truck. You just watch the wages under the seat. Don’t open the door to anyone but me. Do you understand?’

  ‘No I won’t open the door, Klaus. And I won’t leave the truck either,’ she said in that slow illogical manner of hers and gave him a loving, cross-eyed look.

  He smiled back at her and wished again she would not always let her tongue hang out of the corner of her slack mouth as though she were an idiot. These days the Nazi authorities were quick enough to whip anyone who looked slightly mental into one of those discreet secluded country ‘sanatoria’, from which they mostly returned to their loved ones inside an urn with the polite noncommittal statement that ‘Patient X or Y’ had died unexpectedly of an infectious disease which had ‘necessitated immediate cremation’.

  Still, he could never be angry with Gerda in spite of her defects. She was always so loving, humble and grateful – and she had let him make love to her thirty minutes ago in the back of the truck in Aachen’s well-wooded Staatsforst. So he slung his pack, containing the precious coffee beans, flashed her another smile and with a soft ‘bis bald’ was gone.

  The Aachen black-market, centred in the narrow cobbled medieval streets around the great Romanesque cathedral, was in 1939 only a shadow of the booming business centre it would become in 1944-5 when Otto Stahl had become the uncrowned king of the illegal border trade. Yet still the illicit market-place was thriving due to the fact that it was still only a tram-ride to those lands of plenty, Belgium and Holland. They weren't affected by the severe restrictions placed on luxuries by a National Socialist Germany whose motto was ‘guns before butter’.

  There were Jews, for once wearing the yellow Star of David willingly as a signal to the dealers that they were there to do business, wanting to trade their gold and jewels for foreign currency to take with them for the long illegal journey to Palestine. By now most of them knew that the border police would give them a large dose of castor oil to ensure that they did not smuggle out any such valuables in their stomachs. Foreign currency could be taken to Holland or Belgium by means of sending a letter to oneself Poste Restante in Liege or Maastricht.

  There were hard-pressed housewives, eager to find good Dutch butter without which no confirmation, birthday, or wedding celebration could be a success; who had ever heard of a German party without a belly filling selection of puffers and torture?

  There were shabby men in blue overalls, taking precious time off work, in order to find an inner-tube or even a tyre to replace yet another torn synthetic product from Buna so that they could get to the factory the next morning on their bikes or motorbikes.

  And then there were the dealers, those flashy creatures from both sides of the border with their ringed fingers and greased hair who dominated the market, making it all possible by their liberal backhanders to the fat-bellied green-uniformed Schupos who never seemed to interfere with the illegal trade right in the heart of the ancient imperial city. Dealer donations didn't end there: they also gave to the uniformed ‘Winter Help’ collectors, who were everywhere in that tight mass of eager, desperate, hopeful, pessimistic people.

  Slowly the little hunchback, not minding the buffeting he was receiving from the throng, made his way around the cathedral for the third time, eyeing the dealers and making his assessment of the one who might be financially capable of taking his coffee in one go and still paying him a suitable price.

  So, thus occupied, fully immersed in his task, he did not realise he was being followed until it was too late and the two heavy-set men in the long green leather-coats and with their dark felt hats pulled low over their brows were right behind him.

  ‘Herr Wurm?’ a deep polite voice asked.

  He turned round startled, and his heart sank as he recognised them for what they were, even before the older of the two pulled the medal badge from inside his pocket and whispered softly so the people nearby could not hear, ‘Geheime Staatspolizei.’

  Gestapo! The frightening thought flashed through Wurm’s mind. They knew all about the smuggled coffee. Panicked beyond all reason, Wurm thrust out his puny clerk’s hand. The older Gestapo man was caught completely by surprise. He staggered against the railings
, dragging his assistant with him. Next moment Wurm was off at a crazy gallop, pelting down the narrow lane which led to the cathedral, the rucksack bouncing up and down on his crooked shoulders, while the older official fought to tug his pistol out of his pocket.

  His assistant was quicker off the mark. In an instant he whipped out his Walther and standing as if on a police training range, while the scared civilians scattered wildly on both sides, he called as Gestapo Regulations prescribed, ‘Stehenblieben, oder ich schiesse!’

  Wurm heard the words, but they meant nothing to him in his unreasoning fear. He kept on running.

  The assistant’s jaw hardened.

  ‘Warning shot in the air first,’ the older man, still struggling to free his pistol, cried in red-faced anger. ‘In the air!’

  But the other man was not listening. His whole being was concentrated on the spot just below the running man’s rucksack. He gave a little grunt, and pressed the trigger.

  The Walther erupted in his fist. A woman screamed and the dealers started to bolt for cover, wondering what had gone wrong. Had they not been generous enough with the bribes to the Gestapo?

  Wurm staggered. A great wave of almost unbearable pain swept through his body. For one long moment he stood there, too shocked to move, all breath knocked from his lungs by that tremendous impact. Then he remembered poor Gerda waiting for him in the truck. He started to stagger forward again, reeling from side to side of the dark alley like a drunken man, mumbling her name again and again.

  The assistant didn’t hesitate. He pressed the trigger once more. The second bullet struck the rucksack in the very same instant that his superior knocked the pistol out of his hand with an angry, ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, man? This is not the Wild West. This is Aachen … Come on, after him!’