special. They get cake and we get black bread.”
“At least we’re soldiers,” Steiner said, eyeing Wolff speculatively. “Not policemen in fancy dress.”
But Wolff, accustomed like all SS to the jealousy of the Wehrmacht, refused to be drawn. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said equably, “that the policemen are always in action where the fighting is the toughest.”
Steiner and Wenck now appeared to be very drunk and Wolff was far from sober. Frosted air breathed through the gap in the roof but none of them felt it.
Wenck said: “And now for some brandy,” clapping his hands.
One of the girls produced a bottle of straw-coloured-liquor and poured coffee that tasted of cardboard.
Steiner drank some of the brandy, grimaced and leaned across the table. “Have you been to Berlin lately, Kurt?”
Wolff shook his head.
“Karl was there three weeks ago, weren’t you, Karl,” to Wenck.
“I was. A strange city these days.” His voice was slurred. “Full of rumours. And Plots …” He stood up and walked to the fire where he stood warming his back; Steiner and Wolff sat in two easy chairs, holed by cigarette burns, on either side. “Full of plots,” Wenck repeated.
“What sort of plots?” Wolff asked.
Wenck said to Steiner: “Should I tell him?”
“Why not?” Carelessly as though alcohol had dissipated all caution.
“I don’t know …”
“Out with it for God’s sake, man,” Wolff snapped. “We’re not schoolboys.”
“But an SS officer …”
Steiner interruped. “Wenck is talking of plots against the Führer.”
“I don’t believe it,” Wolff said immediately.
Wenck shrugged and drank some more brandy, “Some of the generals are not happy.”
“They never have been,” Wolff said.
“There has already been one attempt,” Steiner remarked.
“Attempt at what?”
“Attempt to finish off the Führer. At Borisov in 1941. There will be others.”
“And they will fail,” Wolff said, standing up and stretching. The girl with the thick legs looked at him expectantly. “I think I’ll turn in. I’ve heard enough idiot talk for one day.”
Wenck said: “It’s not only Wehrmacht officers who are involved.”
“If you’re implying that the SS is involved …” A cold hatred was beginning to replace Wolff’s indulgence. These two men were nothing more than traitors. “I think,” he said to Wenck, “that you’d better take that back.”
Wenck belched. “Not everyone is blind like you, Hauptsturmführer.” He turned and threw his glass into the flames. “I’ll wager that if you knew the end was near you’d change your tune. If you finally realised that a madman was sending men to their deaths when all was lost then you’d throw in your lot with the generals.”
Wolff drove his knee into Wenck’s crotch. And, as he bent forward with a thick cry of pain, raised the blade of his hand for the killer rabbit punch at the base of the neck.
Steiner intercepted the blow. “For Christ’s sake, Wolff, he’s drunk.”
Wolff turned and hit the taller man in the solar plexus, but his fist encountered hard muscle. In the background the two girls twittered anxiously.
While Wolff and Steiner struggled, Wenck painfully straightened up. “All right,” he shouted, “I apologise.”
Wolff relaxed, disengaged himself from Steiner. Then he took his pistol from its holster, pointed it at Wenck who was retching into the fire and said: “I want more than an apology.”
Steiner said: “For Christ’s sake put that thing away.”
Wolff turned the gun on Steiner. “Shut your filthy mouth.” And to Wenck: “Stand up straight or you’ll choke on your own vomit.”
Steiner said: “You’ll be court-martialled for this.”
“A dead man can’t give evidence.”
“But I will.”
“You’ll be dead as well.”
Wenck, his face white, sweat beading his forehead said: “What do you want?”
“I would like,” Wolff said, “to hear you repeat the Leibstandarte oath of allegiance to Hitler,” and turning to Steiner: “You too.”
Steiner shrugged. “Very well if it pleases you.”
“It does,” Wolff said. “Very much.”
Together the two officers intoned the oath after Wolff.
Wolff raised his arm in the Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” they said.
* * *
When he had gone up to the bedroom Steiner said the Wenck: “He did well.”
“Too well,” Wenck said, putting a hand to his aching crotch.
“He passed with flying colours,” the Captain said. “One more test now. The worst. Poor bastard.”
“What I want to know,” Wenck said, “is why I get a knee in the crotch and you only get a punch in the gut.”
“A matter of rank, Sturmbannführer,” Steiner told him. “A mere Captain is only worth a blow in the belly whereas a Major deserves a kick in the balls.”
* * *
Snow was falling when Wolff’s third and last test took place in the winter of ’43.
Winter was the Russians’ ally, the Germans’ enemy. The Russians revelled in it, their white-clad troops covering phenomenal distances on skis. And they were always on the attack, Cossack cavalry suddenly materialising from behind veils of falling snow, Stalin tanks splintering the ice beneath the snow, guns lighting the dusk as shadows filled shell-holes on the desolate steppe.
One morning in late November Wolff was fed with information about a minor counter-attack aimed at rescuing a pocket of German troops cut off by the Russians.
That night, while Wolff lay sleeping in a cottage, a three-man raiding party entered the village where the Germans were camped, took him prisoner — helpless in his sleeping bag — tied him to a sled, and took him through the snow-flying night to a deserted mill ten miles from the village.
The
