Metzger’s grey-steel eyes twinkled as he completed his review. ‘If this goes wrong, Reichsfuhrer …. ’
Himmler’s eyes narrowed behind his wire frame glasses, a faint smile danced around his lips, making his moustache twitch.
‘This is why we selected you, General. It won’t go wrong,’
Schenker’s head snapped up. It reminded Himmler of an obedient Doberman. He found he was unable to look away from this Adonis. Hitler was right; this boy was a prime specimen.
‘I can’t foresee any problems.’ His cultured accent and his refined sense of dress confirmed he was born to wear the uniform. Himmler felt himself dumpy in this beautiful boy’s presence. He tried to concentrate on the dossier. He tried not to blush.
Metzger lit a cigarette. Himmler tried to wave the smoke away with a tailored leather glove.
'My concern is that we get a local policeman who just happens to be thorough.'
Himmler afforded himself a small smile as the limousine turned off Prince Albrecht Strasse down into a cavernous parking lot below the SS Hauptamt building.
‘The nature of this will be so heinous that the Gestapo, Waffen SS and Diplomatic corps will want it. It is imperative that we execute this plan efficiently to forward the Fuhrer’s plan.’
The limousine pulled up alongside an army truck painted in a gun-metal grey, the number plates and registration erased. Metzger and Schenker alighted and, with Himmler, strode to the rear of the truck. Pulling the tarpaulin window aside, a group of soldiers acknowledged the three of them with the briefest of nods. All looked like hardened street fighters, Metzger’s personal detail.
‘Excellent,’ said Metzger.
Himmler touched his elbow and whispered into his ear, ‘If you pull this off, General, I can promise you a most excellent theatre of operations,’
Schenker whistled slowly, and began to follow the General’s lead. His smile almost stretched his jaw.
It was the dogs barking in the yard that woke farmer Rupert Lowe. He reached for his glasses and sat upright in the bed. The vast bulk of his wife Gertrude shifted and groaned as she tried to settle into a more comfortable position. He stared into the darkness, the window shutters rattling slightly again, the barking, then a shrill cry from one of the hounds. A quick succession of whinnies, shrill barks and cries rang out, then silence.
Lowe slipped out of the bed, his feet dancing on the cold floor. His stomach churned in fear. He could hear movement outside. The farm was two miles away from the Polish border and there had been reports of strange occurrences over the past few days. In two nearby farms, machinery had been vandalised in the night, some buildings had also been subjected to arson. The tension between the two countries was beginning to spill into the countryside. At the market last weekend a row had broken out between two German and Polish families who for years had traded amicably. The Gestapo had appeared out of nowhere, broken it up, and forcibly beaten the Polish family across the border.
Lowe loaded his shotgun quietly. His daughters Lottie, Dorothy and Anna peeked out at their father from their loft bed. Lowe raised his finger to shush them and went down the staircase he had built and installed a month after his wedding, fifty years ago. He opened the front door and spread his still broad form across the threshold, gun raised. He kept all the lights off, allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom quickly.
Two figures scampered across between the barn and his tool shed.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted out into the darkness. He was met with silence.
Then a sudden movement in his peripheral vision made him turn. He fired the shotgun’s double-barrels into the night, the report booming. His dogs should have been raising hell by now.
Then he heard automatic machine gun fire. His legs buckled beneath him, white hot light flashed, consuming his vision, and a sweat drenched his nightshirt, mingling with his blood. He tried to rise up but was kicked back by a man in army fatigues whose design he didn’t recognise. The man looked mature, grey haired with cold grey eyes. He pointed a pistol into Lowe's forehead. The last thing Lowe saw was the man smiling. It was a warm smile as he pulled the trigger. Faintly in the distance, Lowe could hear his daughters screaming.
Metzger made his way up into the loft where the three women huddled. Wiping his brow, he smiled at his incredible good fortune. How did the saying go? ‘Country girls, country appetites’. He vaulted into the bed, brandishing a bayonet. ‘Now ladies, who’s first?’
Schenker moved through the house while Metzger and the other ten SS entertained themselves up in the girls' loft. His heart was racing with the excitement; the hapless farmer having been his second ever kill. He moved through the kitchen and came suddenly upon the crouching form of the dead farmer’s wife. Gertrude launched herself at him, a vast nightgown swooping toward him with a banshee howl. She flattened him onto the cold floor, his head striking the stone tiles making him see stars. She straddled him, he couldn’t breathe, she produced a huge carving knife from her sleeve and, deftly changing hands, flipped the blade toward him.
He wrestled his Luger free from its holster and fired point blank. Gertrude’s head flipped back, spraying blood all over him, the walls and the ceiling before she collapsed forward, her dead weight pressing like a vice on his lungs.
He lay there for minutes, his breath coming in short gasps. He thought about his strict catholic upbringing in Bavaria, the nuns, the mystery of the sacraments and his gift, his trick. As a child he liked to maim little animals. Starting with insects, he quickly moved onto feral kittens, birds and mice in the privacy of his room. He’d derived exquisite pleasure in baiting and torturing the neighbour’s dachshund that had annoyed him. He had tricked the noisy little bastard into his family’s barn and fixed a leash to its neck, the other end wrapped around the steel leg of his father’s work bench. He set to work on it with the knives from the cook’s pantry. He found it hard not to rush to the finale and learned over the years how to drag out the exquisite torture.
After each of these animals had been slain, little Thor would extend out his arms like the saviour and pray for these poor animals' souls and he would bury them guiltily under his mother’s rose bushes when left alone with his aged nanny.
This gift he brought to the SA, then the SS. His rigorous attention to detail during the Kristallnacht brought him to Himmler’s attention. He believed from an early age he had the power to grant life or death, that he was in effect the hand of God.
This gift he had bestowed on the elderly shopkeeper who had come out protecting his shop front from Schenker’s charges. Schenker had shot him in the head, citing self-defence. The man was armed only with a sweeping brush hurling insults in Yiddish. That night Schenker had found his calling, inspired by the words of Hitler, taking Goebbels propaganda as Gospel, an avenging angel of death for the Reich. The people rounded up that night were handed over for him and his cohorts to interrogate. In the police cells in the wee hours of the morning, Schenker’s skills were honed. These thoughts floated around as the vast expanse of Gertrude expired, slumping and pushing him harder against the floor.
Her blood was flowing in thick bursts onto him. He was going to be found dead under this woman. He started to scream for help. His voice was lost in the screams of the girls above. Eventually Metzger’s head appeared amid the woman’s blood-matted hair. Looking at Schenker he called back to the troop behind him, ‘Looks like he’s finally popped his cherry.’ Amid the laughter, Gertrude was hauled off him and he gasped the air around him.
An army radio barked into life on the kitchen table. For a radius of two miles, Metzger’s forces were attacking local German farms. Somewhere in the distance a farm was being torched, the horizon beginning to glow from the blaze. Schenker rose unsteadily to his feet, smelling like a butcher’s block.
Metzger was covered in blood, his men also. They had a sweaty high coming off them; they were all panting like hounds. Schenker retched onto the floor and onto his highly polished boots.
Metzger looked at him in disdain. ‘Christ, Schenker, pull yourself together.’
He picked up Schenker’s Luger and handed it to one of the younger men. The soldier looked at it in puzzlement until Metzger, reaching down, picked up the carving knife on the floor and plunged it to the hilt into the soldier’s chest. Pulling the stunned man closer onto the blade, he twisted it repeatedly, then threw the soldier onto the floor. The rest of the men stood stunned.
Metzger turned to them. ‘He will receive a funeral you could only dream of. He will join the great fallen German soldiers who are about the shed their life’s blood for the Reich. Remember him well, gentlemen. He is a hero.’
He then pulled documentation from his tunic, drenched in blood, and checked the photograph on it. Satisfied
