Up For Grabs

by Max Hennessy

  Erwin was flattered. ‘Wunderbar! Splendid. Do that. I’ll be pleased to show you.’ He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. ‘What a pity it’s so hot. The washes don’t run as they should. The paper’s brittle and tinder dry. It soaks up the colour. And the sand—’ He gestured vaguely.

  Easels and drawing boards and boxes of paints were transferred to the second car and Erwin and Stracka climbed in with them. As Erwin settled in his seat, he gestured to the tent where Jones’s voice was suddenly ominously silent.

  ‘You should never stop your men singing, tenente,’ he said reproachfully. ‘That man has a splendid voice.’

  ‘He should be giving his attention to his work, excellency.’

  Erwin smiled. ‘He should sing, too, tenente. Let him have the pleasure of his voice. I’d like to hear more of him. Italians are so lucky. Their climate makes for clear chests and splendid vocal cords.’

  As Erwin jabbed the driver in the back and the car moved off, Rafferty and Dampier appeared warily from the tent.

  ‘What did he want?’

  Morton grinned. ‘He wanted to listen to Taffy Jones singing,’ he said.

  * * *

  When they had repaired the punctured tyre and the indignant Jones had been bullied into blowing it up, Morton climbed into the car and, followed by Caccia in Dampier’s Humber to bring him back, drove it into the desert. The scene that greeted them was bucolic and peaceful. Erwin and Stracka were seated on camp stools with easels erected in front of them, a large striped sun umbrella leaning over their heads. Alongside them a portable gramophone – once British – was playing. Erwin had discarded his peaked cap and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat tilted over his eyes and was busy sloshing colour on to the paper in front of him. In ochres and blues, a passable reproduction of the desert with the roofs and palms of Zuq just appearing over the horizon was emerging. Stracka was sitting alongside doing the same, though his painting was considerably less skilful than Erwin’s. Both men were utterly absorbed and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

  As the car came to a stop, Erwin went on painting for a moment. The gramophone finished playing and Bomberg, the driver, replaced the record with another and rewound it. Morton recognized the music as Mendelssohn.

  ‘A Jew, excellency?’ He couldn’t resist it.

  Erwin grinned, an honest mischievous grin. ‘We keep that one for Italian generals,’ he said. ‘They worry about what to do, what to say, where to look, because they’re puzzled yet they’re afraid of offending. Are you afraid, tenente?’

  ‘I like Mendelssohn, excellency. His music is kind. But, then, I like Mozart and Puccini and St Saëns and Elgar.’

  Erwin smiled. ‘All preferable to “Deutschland Über Alles” which sounds like ten thousand Lutheran choirs trumpeting a protest. Or the “Horstwessellied”, which only reminds us of a thug killed in a street brawl.’

  ‘You’re not a Nazi, general?’

  Erwin’s smile came again. ‘I shouldn’t be painting deserts if I were,’ he smiled. ‘I should be painting good Nazi supermen with strong faces and bronzed arms. Perhaps even good Nazi superwomen with full breasts and buttocks and a fanatic look of hope in their eyes that they’ll produce good Nazi superchildren.’

  Morton’s face was blank. This was one for the book, he was thinking. A German sergeant who didn’t think much of fascism and a German general who enjoyed Mendelssohn.

  ‘We Germans are a strange race,’ Erwin continued. ‘We have all the virtues except the arts. Our arts are leaden. The British produced Shakespeare. The Italians Puccini. What did we produce? Our beloved Führer.’

  He looked at Stracka and laughed. ‘Art’s so important,’ he went on, bending over his easel. ‘Especially here. The desert saturates the mind and makes it as sterile as itself. Which is why we must keep up with the things that make us use our intelligence.’ He frowned at his work. ‘I could do better in oils. Perhaps you’ll take a drink, tenente, with my thanks for the repair work.’

  Clicking his fingers, Erwin directed Obergefreiter Bomberg forward. He held a bottle of German wine, frosted with cold.

  ‘We managed to get ice,’ Erwin smiled. ‘It’s our day off and we like to get away from time to time.’ He passed the glass to Morton and gestured at Caccia. ‘See the sergeant gets a beer, Stracka.’

  He was studying Dampier’s car. ‘An English car?’ he said. ‘A Humber?’

  ‘Captured, excellency,’ Morton agreed. ‘Everybody uses what they can get.’

  ‘Soon it’ll be impossible to identify each other,’ Erwin admitted. ‘We shall all look alike. As it is, we all wear khaki drill shirts and khaki drill shorts or trousers. The only difference is in the caps we wear.’

  ‘Even our boots are British, excellency.’

  ‘You’re wise, tenente. The British have splendid equipment even if their weapons are inferior. They still have nothing to touch our 88 which, as you’ll know, is anti-aircraft, anti-tank and, for the British, anti-social.’ He laughed, then his smile died as he went on in the same vein as Schwartzheiss. ‘But otherwise we’re sadly lacking in many things. Our German corps here was a child of chance so that our food leaves a lot to be desired.’

  He gestured with his glass. ‘At Mechili there were stacks of canned beer, huts bursting with white flour, cigarettes, tobacco, jam, gallons of Scotch whisky, Indian tea, Bohnkaffee – bean coffee, not ersatz – tinned food of all kinds.’

  It seemed that, as with the Italians, food was a favourite topic of conversation.

  ‘And the clothing,’ Erwin went on. ‘So tough, but so cool to wear. I was terrified my men would be seduced into indiscipline. A distinctive trait of the German is his capacity for envy, and British clothing is enough to make a saint break the Tenth Commandment. And when a German soldier loses faith in his army he finds it hard to face reality.’

  The smile grew wider. ‘We’re taking advantage of the quiet spell. Stracka and I thought we’d spend a few days enjoying ourselves. We expect to be on the move again soon but unfortunately your general doesn’t move very swiftly.’

  Morton smiled, confident of Erwin’s friendliness. ‘I’ve heard it said that the only thing that stops the Germans getting to Cairo is the Italian general staff.’

  Erwin gave a bark of laughter. ‘And loose bowels,’ he agreed.

  They laughed together and Morton bent over Erwin’s painting to admire it.

  ‘It’s not very good,’ Erwin said modestly. ‘I think it is another German atrocity. Every nation has them. With the British it’s bagpipes.’

  They laughed once more, then Erwin became serious. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘we must count ourselves lucky here in the desert. We have none of the hard-eyed zealots of the Gestapo in this theatre. War brutalizes and battle has many bestial by-products, but out here, thank God, it’s a war without rancour and there’s not the sad destruction of beautiful things that war normally brings.’ He smiled. ‘There aren’t even too many bad frights – only about one every week or two. And still human virtues and good manners and a little of what’s been lost lately in Europe: Ritterlichkeit und Kameradschaft – chivalry and comradeship. It’s the only thing that makes war endurable.’

  Morton found himself actually liking the German. He was a sophisticated, urbane military man of the type he thought only the British army with its amateur attitudes could produce. Despite an inclination to talk too much, he had a sense of humour and clearly saw through the sham of dictatorships. And, though it was clear he despised the Italian High Command, he was treating Morton, whom he believed to be Italian, with considerable courtesy.

  He was gesturing with his glass again in a sweeping movement. ‘This spot is full of pictures, tenente. The light and shade in the afternoon are splendid. The desert itself – pink, purple, grey, yellow, blue – and just to the east there, the dunes catching the light. One day I shall hold an exhibition of my desert paintings.’

  Morton tested the water. ‘When the British are driven out of Africa,’ he said.<
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  Erwin gave him a sidelong glance and in it there was doubt. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘When the British are driven out of Africa.’

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries, then Morton drove away with Caccia. As they disappeared, Erwin stared after them.

  ‘A good young man that, Stracka,’ he said. ‘But strange.’ He glanced again at the disappearing cloud of dust. ‘I wonder who he is.’

  Chapter 8

  Though no one was keen to see General Erwin again – ‘Generals know too much about the army,’ Rafferty said – Scarlatti seemed too concerned with his own affairs to worry anybody much.

  Despite his bounce, he was an anxious little man whose thoughts were always with his family back in Italy, and it was easy to draw him out. By talking about his children, it wasn’t hard to get him worrying about the outcome of the war and from there to his hopes for the new push. By discovering what he was issuing, in what quantities and to where, it then wasn’t hard to build up the sort of picture Dampier was seeking. As Morton reported what he learned, Dampier, still confined to his tent with a back that stubbornly refused to improve, put it all down on paper. And while Dampier occupied himself with gathering information, it became Rafferty’s job to preserve their anonymity.

  They had already effected simple repairs to one or two vehicles, but since they had had to turn away others more seriously damaged, the wary Rafferty thought that Clutterbuck should put his skills to use once more.

  ‘The notice out there says 64 LIGHT VEHICLE REPAIR UNIT,’ he pointed out. ‘So, unless we want somebody to surround the place with storm troopers we’ve got to look as if we really are a light vehicle repair depot.’

  Clutterbuck saw his point at once. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said.

  The following morning, Clutterbuck, Clegg and Micklethwaite, dressed in galabiyahs from the Ratbags’ property basket and wearing a lot of brown No. 7 from the make-up box, set off for Zuq in Dampier’s car with Morton and Caccia. Morton was done up to the nines in his Italian officer’s jacket and cap. Caccia, wearing his sergeant’s stripes, was armed – just in case – with a bundle of the requisition forms they had found on the night they arrived, filled in by Rafferty and completed by Clutterbuck – who, it seemed, could add forgery to his other skills – with a fair facsimile of the signature of Brigadier Olivaro.

  Morton dropped them near the dump and Micklethwaite was left outside the wire fence, squatting by a ditch clutching a sack.

  ‘You just sit there, old mate,’ Clutterbuck said. ‘When Cleggy ’ere appears, you pick up what ’e drops and shove it into your sack. Got it?’

  ‘Won’t anybody want to know what I’m doing?’ Micklethwaite’s plump face was worried under its make-up.

  ‘You’re just sittin’ in the sun thinkin’,’ Clutterbuck explained patiently. ‘Nobody’ll take any notice. If anybody comes along ’oo looks suspicious, just ’old out your ’and an’ say, “Backsheesh.” That’s beer money. If they start gettin’ stroppy, pretend you don’t understand. You wouldn’t, o’ course, them bein’ Italian. If they try to kick your arse, beat it. It’s safer. You can always come back when they’ve gone.’

  ‘Suppose they find out I’m not an Arab. Won’t they think I’m a spy and shoot me?’

  Clutterbuck considered the possibility. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘they might.’

  Leaving a distinctly worried Micklethwaite sitting by the wire, his sack stuffed up a culvert under the road, the other three strolled into the dump, Clegg and Clutterbuck in their dusty robes, Caccia carrying the Italian forms they’d acquired. As they passed the gate, Caccia gestured at the other two, and the private sitting at a desk checking in the native workers nodded.

  Five minutes later Clutterbuck was carrying a brush and Clegg a bucketful of dirty water, both neatly removed by Clutterbuck from alongside a hut where an Arab labourer, who had disappeared round a corner for a smoke, had left them.

  ‘Tools of the trade,’ Clutterbuck explained. ‘I expect ’e’s usin’ ’em for the same thing we’re goin’ to use ’em for.’

  Nobody looked twice at them as they moved about the dump because they looked exactly like an Italian soldier with his two Arab helpers making sure the drains were working.

  ‘It’s a well-known fact,’ Clutterbuck reassured the nervous Caccia, ‘that if you’re carrying a piece of paper you’re on office business. You’ve got a ’ole sheaf of ’em there.’

  Under Scarlatti the dump had become an extensive one and they remained there the whole day. Every hour or so, Clegg carried his bucket to the perimeter and emptied it over the wire, at which point Micklethwaite rose from the ditch where he was squatting and shovelled into his sack the assorted spanners, wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, wire, screws, nuts and bolts which the dirty grey water had hidden.

  ‘It’s an old dodge,’ Clutterbuck said cheerfully. ‘Them Arabs what work in the camps round the Delta are at it the ’ole time. They caught one old bastard with a sack containing a ’undred and sixty spanners, twelve pressure gauges and fifty spark plugs.’

  As they left late in the afternoon, the Italian private on the gate eyed them but said nothing, and they strolled down the road towards the town. They were well pleased with the day’s work, especially Clutterbuck, who had also done the rounds of any unattended petrol tanks he had seen. Micklethwaite was waiting for them by the wire, obviously encouraged by their success.

  ‘What I tell you?’ Clutterbuck said. ‘They didn’t shoot you arter all, did they?’

  ‘One Italian tried to kick me.’ Micklethwaite seemed quite pleased that the Italian had thought him worth kicking. ‘An Arab spoke to me too.’

  ‘What you do?’

  ‘What you told me. Acted daft. Morton came past,’ he went on. ‘He said he’d pick us up near the mosque.’

  They waited close to the Arabs drowsing with their animals near the white dome among the trees. It was impossible for Caccia in his Italian uniform to squat down with them, so he wandered down the street, keeping one eye on the others so he could pick up the car when it appeared.

  As he reached the corner, he recognized the standpipe in the road and the Arab women carrying chattis and gossiping in a group round a muddy pool. They reminded him of the Bar Barbieri and he found it only fifty yards further on. As he approached, he was presented with the same performance he’d seen a few days before – Rosalba Coccioli swiping with a cloth which looked as though it was normally used to wipe the floor at Schwartzheiss, the German sergeant he’d seen with her on his last visit to the bar.

  The sergeant was hooting with laughter as the girl began to pick up empty bottles and hurl them futilely at him. As he climbed into his kübelwagen, she turned away and savagely began to wipe the tables. As she saw Caccia, however, her expression changed and she waved enthusiastically, pleased to see him.

  ‘Eh, soldato,’ she said. ‘So you came back after all!’

  ‘I said I would.’

  ‘And your friends?’

  Caccia waved a hand vaguely.

  ‘Is our army staying in Zuq this time? I’m tired of going out into the desert every time the place changes hands. So is everybody else.’ She gestured after the German. ‘That Sergeant Schwartzheiss,’ she snapped. ‘He’s always here. He wants to get into my bed.’

  Caccia eyed the girl. She had a good figure, long legs, a good behind and, as he could see down the front of her blouse when she bent forward to wipe the tables, a good before too.

  ‘I would, too,’ he said. ‘If I could.’

  She swung at him with the grey cloth but there wasn’t the anger in it with which she had swung at the German.

  ‘Eh, soldato,’ she said. ‘You have a large mouth.’

  ‘Noted for it,’ Caccia agreed.

  ‘You going to Cairo? After the English?’

  Caccia shrugged. ‘Mussolini’ll never get to Cairo,’ he said. Nobody had ever explained the strategic or tactical situation to him. It was just a feeling he had.

&nbs
p; The girl pulled a face. ‘Mamma mia,’ she said. ‘It’s certain you won’t if that’s how you feel. You might as well pack up and go home to Italy. I expect you’d like that, eh, soldato?’

  Caccia shrugged again and she went on in a bitter voice. ‘I’d go back,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow. There’s nothing to keep me in Libya – only a bar with nothing in it except Sicilian wine, vermouth and anisette.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘My mother died. And then my father died. That frog-faced clown Mussolini put him in prison for speaking his mind and he never came out. I couldn’t stay in Rome. I’d have ended up on the streets. There are plenty of dirty old men who’d have helped me to. So I came here to join my uncle. My aunt had run off with a sergeant in the army and he needed a woman about the house.’

  ‘Why did he come here?’

  She gestured. ‘The government had schemes to help people. Surely you’ve read about them in the papers. He fancied himself as a farmer. Only he didn’t know anything about farming so he ended up doing what he did in Rome. Running a bar. He’s out looking for petrol. We need wine. We need beer. But to get wine and beer you have to go to Derna or Tripoli, and to go to Derna or Tripoli you have to have petrol for the car. But there is no petrol. It’s needed for the Duce’s war machine, they tell us. Also, I suppose, for the Duce to drive round in a big car with his generals to impress Hitler. Hitler?’ She spat. ‘He looks like a plumber come to fix the drains.’ She shrugged again. ‘All the same, perhaps we’re better off here than back home in Italy. Italy will come out of this war worse than she went in. If the English win, they’ll be all over Italy. If the Germans win, it’ll be the Germans.’