Chewing his gum like a cow, his legs thrown impudently onto the redwood desk.
Her father’s desk.
Under her marble-like, arrogant mask, invisible ire was seething.
“Still nothing, eh?” Her interrogator stubbed the unfinished cigarette in her father’s ashtray. Black marble with gilded sides, a rare stone perfection, of which Gruppenführer Neumann was so very proud. In Gerlinde’s lap, her hands closed into fists. How she wished to grab this ashtray and bash the Ami’s head in with it. “You’re just going to sit there, mute as a mule and hope for your daddy to come back on a white stallion and save you?”
As was her habit, Gerlinde didn’t deem the jab worthy of a reply, just regarded the ashtray more closely. What would they do to her if she indeed cracked one of their men’s skulls with it? Hardly they would execute her. She still was the only person who could give them Gruppenführer Neumann.
Noticing the dark gleam in the girl’s eyes, the American pulled the ashtray closer to himself, away from her reach. One of the mayors, newly appointed by the American Military Government in the liberated territory, had been killed just a few months ago by a hit-squad, consisting of two Hitlerjugend members and a BDM girl. With all of these brainwashed children of the Reich with their Werwolf movement, testing one’s luck in their presence wasn’t a wise thing to do.
“Don’t get any ideas. You’ll find yourself in the welcoming presence of the Russkies before you know what hit you.”
This got at least a smirk out of her.
“You think it to be funny?” He pulled forward. “Have you forgotten what they did with your kind here just a month ago and still do, for that matter?”
“You ought to be more original with your threats, Herr Turner.” Gerlinde knew that her interrogator loathed being addressed in the German way and made a point of doing just that. “Trying to frighten me with raping hordes of Asian barbarians is so… passé. Besides, we both know that you will never hand me over to your Russki friends. You want to be the ones to find my father. They already stole far too many men from under your noses. You want to get at least him, don’t you?” She smiled sweetly and all of a sudden looked like an innocent, sixteen-year-old girl with pure, striking features and bright fearless eyes. She lowered her long lashes and the illusion was complete. “That’s why, Herr Turner, you’ll never hand me over to your allies. Are they even still your allies? I’m surprised it lasted so long, to be truthful. You know, my brothers, when they were still alive, had a bet going on how fast you all will tear into each other’s throats after the end of the war.”
“We’re not here to discuss our relationship with the Russians. We’re here to find Otto Neumann and you’re wearing our patience thin, Fräulein. Maybe we will, after all, hand you over to the Russians. Their SMERSH is infamous for untying the tongues whereas we’re being much too lenient with you people. Perhaps, we’ll just invite them here and see if they can help us out.”
Gerlinde yawned, purposely not covering her mouth. Her mother would have slapped her for such a thing but her mother had decided to take the coward’s way out and Gerlinde had lost all respect for her when she’d found her lifeless body and a second cyanide capsule, she had left for her daughter to use. Gerlinde crushed it under her heel.
Now, it was just her left. Just her, her father’s daughter and she would see to it that no harm would come to him, as long as she was alive.
The villa was tremendous; obviously built in the past decade or so in the typical fashion of neo-German austerity combined with just-as-apparent neo-Roman grandiosity. It was standing, wreathed in bloom, in the same affluent area which even the bombs and the street-to-street fighting had miraculously spared.
Lt. Morris parked his jeep in a driveway and regarded the six colossal columns of white marble, positioned in a semicircle around the grand entrance. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Gruppenführer Neumann sure had good taste.”
Tadek shifted in a seat next to him but made no reply. He had long lost the habit of seeing beautiful things, beautiful houses, beautiful people. He had grown much too used to death and devastation all around him and soon he could no longer remember what the word “beautiful” even stood for. In the crematorium, to their SS supervisor Voss, “beautiful” stood for the neat manner in which the Sonderkommando men positioned the corpses on the gurney – one normal one, to supply the fat to the two emaciated ones next to him and two little children, on top, to fill in the space. Burning corpses was an art form in Auschwitz. The new crematorium, with six industrial ovens, was “beautiful” too, in the same Voss’s terms. In the Red Army, the manner in which Katyushas obliterated enemy positions was “beautiful.” Tadek didn’t know what to do with this long-forgotten “beautiful” now.
“Your new lodgings, my good fellow.” Morris’s amicable clap on his shoulder brought Tadek out of his reverie. He turned to the American, suddenly alarmed but Morris only grinned in response. “I personally think you deserve some luxury after everything those bastards have put you through. What do you say to that?”
Tadek had nothing to say to that. Others would only dream of crashing their tired bones in grand lodgings like this mansion but Tadek found it too overpowering. He climbed out of the military jeep and stood, somber and somewhat intimidated, in front of the stone stairs; observed the bronze eagles, with their spread wings, guarding the entrance as though some medieval gargoyles. As though sensing
