The Bells of Hell

by Michael Kurland

  The officer stamped his foot – Geoffrey had never seen anyone actually stamp his foot before except in a stage production of Macbeth, and then he thought it was overacting. But the officer seemed to be working himself into a frenzy over what the poor man in front of him either had or didn’t have. He unholstered his automatic pistol and waved it about, while continuing to yell commands at his prisoner. Then, perhaps realizing that this was accomplishing nothing, he paused, pointed the automatic at the man, and barked an order. The man backed up two steps. The officer repeated his order. The man knelt down and began taking off his clothes; unbuttoning the four buttons of his jacket and removing it, following with vest, tie, shirt, shoes, pants … As each item was removed the officer grabbed it and felt it, squeezing it all over as though he were wringing it out after a wash. He wrenched the heels off the shoes, and then threw heels and shoes aside in disgust. The man stopped at his underwear, but at a barked command from the officer pulled it off with the rest. He stood there clad only in his socks while the officer continued his examination of the clothes. Then, with an excess of poking and prodding with the officer’s stick, he forced the man to turn around and bend over and hold his ankles.

  ‘That’s a bit much, don’t you think?’ said HRH, peering through a corner of the window.

  ‘This whole episode is a bit much,’ Geoffrey agreed from his corner. There was a hypnotic quality to the scene that stopped him from looking away, although he really didn’t – really and truly did not – want to see what was happening. He noticed that the stewardess was no longer setting the table, but had dropped the tablecloth and a cluster of napkins and was staring out the window across from her, her hand to her mouth and her eyes fixed in horror. He thought of going to her, but realized that anything he might do to reassure her might have the opposite effect, so he stayed where he was.

  The officer called one of his men over and gave him instructions accompanied by some odd gesticulations. The trooper considered the situation and then wrapped a handkerchief around his middle finger and thrust it up the prisoner’s rectum, an action that pleased neither of them. After a few seconds the trooper withdrew the finger and carefully pulled the handkerchief off his finger and cast it on the ground by the side of the road. He shrugged and stepped aside.

  The officer appeared deep in thought for some moments, and then he gesticulated some more and barked a few commands, and the little man began to put his clothes back on, underwear, pants, shirt … He attempted to fasten the heels back on the shoes with no success, but he put the shoes on anyway. The SS troops were returning to their trucks while this was going on, leaving only the officer and his prisoner standing by the side of the train. As the little man was doing the top button of his jacket the officer said something, but the man just stared at him blankly. The officer repeated whatever he had said, and gestured with his gun.

  The man backed away several steps, still staring at the officer.

  The officer gestured with both hands this time – a go away, get out of here gesture – and holstered his pistol.

  The man took two tentative steps away, made a tentative gesture toward his suitcase and then just turned and started walking away slowly, and then more rapidly, to the right, away from the train and the trucks. After a few seconds he began running.

  The officer drew his pistol. ‘Halt!’ he yelled. ‘Halt!’ And then he took careful aim and fired, once, twice, three times, at the running man. The man threw his arms in the air, and crumpled to the ground.

  The officer holstered his gun and walked calmly to the staff car. The searchlights on the trucks blinked out.

  The two Englishmen looked at each other. Neither of them spoke.

  FOURTEEN

  With pride we see that one man remains beyond all criticism, that is the Führer. This is because everyone feels and knows: he is always right, and he will always be right.

  – Rudolf Hess, 1934

  Lord Geoffrey and HRH stood, a motionless tableau of disbelief, and watched through the window as two troopers grabbed the fallen man by the arms, hauled him over to their truck, heaved him into the back, and climbed up after him. Two other troopers came for the frightened and bewildered boy they had pulled off the train, who was staring at the Nazi officer, his mouth open, his face frozen in shock. They yanked him to his feet and prodded him forward, pushing him onto another truck. At a barked command the other troopers stiffened to attention, did a sharp right turn, and fell out to climb aboard their trucks, which promptly coughed their engines into life and commenced pulling away. The officer stood for a minute, his hands on his hips, surveying the scene before kicking the broken suitcase twice and then clambering in to his staff car, which followed after the departing trucks.

  ‘The new Germany,’ Geoffrey said softly.

  ‘Surely Herr Hitler—’ the Duke began.

  ‘Surely,’ Geoffrey agreed, ‘Herr Hitler.’

  The young stewardess had folded to the floor of the car by the table and was sitting there, her hands covering her face, her body shaking with silent sobs. Geoffrey went over and squatted beside her. ‘That was a horrible thing to watch,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Who is that man? How do you know him?’

  She looked up at him between her fingers. ‘What?’ She said. ‘How did you … What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m a friend, if you’ll let me,’ he told her. ‘Is he your husband?’

  She took a deep breath and then another. ‘My father,’ she said. ‘I am only sixteen.’

  ‘What?’ HRH stalked over and peered down at her. ‘Look here … Only sixteen … And you’re not … You don’t …’ He turned to Geoffrey. ‘You mean she’s not …’

  Geoffrey looked up. ‘That’s right, your royal highness. She doesn’t work for the railroad. She came in here to hide. The conductor, obviously, is in on it.’

  ‘Ah!’ said HRH. ‘But that could have caused trouble – I mean, for us, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I doubt it, your royal highness,’ Geoffrey told him. ‘After all, you are a Royal Personage and a Friend of the Führer. The worst that would happen is that they would pull her out of here while we protested that she hadn’t served us our dinner yet.’

  HRH thought that over for a minute and then asked, ‘How did you know? That this girl was not, ah, what she seemed, I mean?’

  ‘Observation,’ Geoffrey told him. ‘It’s a curse, I can’t help it. I knew the moment she came into the car, but I wasn’t going to say anything. And then … this.’

  The trained jerked to a start and slowly began pulling away from the scene.

  The girl lowered her hands and lifted her face and turned to examine HRH and then Geoffrey. ‘Are you going to turn me over to the Gestapo?’ she asked.

  ‘Is that who they were?’ Geoffrey asked. ‘They’re gone, so you’re safe for the moment.’

  ‘The special border police,’ the girl explained. ‘A branch of the Gestapo. And they’ve certainly left someone on the train to go through the cars, one by one, until they find me.’

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘This handsome gentleman,’ he added waving a hand toward HRH, ‘is a Very Important Personage, and quite brave if it comes to that. And between us I believe we’re capable of bamboozling any number of border guards.’

  ‘Just what was it that you observed about this young lady?’ the Duke asked Geoffrey. ‘Honestly, how did you know?’

  ‘To start with,’ Geoffrey told him, ‘the Chemins de fer de l’Est does not employ lady stewards.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘And,’ he added, waving a hand at the stewardess, ‘the young lady’s uniform is a creation. The jacket is several sizes too big for her, and the skirt is almost but not quite the right color blue.’ He turned back to the girl. ‘Just why were they so interested in your father? And why are they looking for you?’

  ‘We are Jews,’ she said. ‘That is enough.’

  Geoffrey took the girl’s hand and raised her from the floor, reset
tling her in a nearby chair. She did not resist. Indeed, she did not seem to notice the change. ‘I know things are bad for Jews in Germany right now,’ he said, ‘closing businesses, firing teachers, doctors, lawyers, setting up work camps. But just shooting someone?’

  ‘They come to your house and give orders,’ she said simply. ‘Wear a Magen David on your coat. Take one suitcase of only clothing and leave; we are giving your flat to an Aryan family. We are giving your shop to a party member. If you resist you will be shot. If you don’t resist, they will take all your belongings, valuable or not, and send you to a camp. Where you will be treated like excrement and worked to death. Or shot.’

  ‘Just for being a Jew?’ HRH asked.

  She nodded. ‘Or a Roma – a Gypsy – or a priest, or a Communist, or a Jehovah’s Witness, I think they’re called, or an Unfit Person. They also do not like black persons, but there are not so many of them here. But mostly if you’re a Jew.’

  ‘An unfit person?’ asked Geoffrey.

  She nodded. ‘Feeble-minded, deformed from birth, incurably ill. I understand it’s also used to eliminate the – what would you say? – politically undesirable.’

  ‘Well!’ said HRH.

  ‘Who was that boy they took off the train with your father?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ the girl said. Then her lips formed a thoughtful O, and her eyes got wide and she stifled a gasp or a sob. ‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘Poor boy. They think he’s me.’

  ‘Why would they …?’

  ‘Because I was dressed like a boy when I got on the train. Then Anton told us that they were looking for a father and son, so I changed into my skirt and he loaned me a jacket and I came in here.’

  ‘Anton?’

  ‘The conductor.’

  ‘Ah! How do you suppose they knew – to look for a boy, I mean?’

  She took a white linen napkin from the table and dried her eyes. She waited a few seconds and then dried them again, and crumpled the napkin in her lap. ‘Someone must have informed on us,’ she told them. ‘The Gestapo pays a reward for turning in hiding Jews or escaping Jews or, I suppose, any other sort of Jews.’

  She turned to the table and put her head down. ‘He was such a kind man, my father,’ she said. ‘A thoughtful man, an intelligent man. He read – everything. He talked about everything. He was wise. He was a conductor.’

  ‘For the railroad?’ HRH asked.

  She raised her head. ‘For the Munich Symphony Orchestra. The musicians loved him. This is a rare thing, for a conductor to be loved by his musicians. Respected, yes perhaps. But loved? I am given to understand that this is very rare. But they—’ She put her head back down, cradling it in her arms, and said nothing. She did not even appear to be crying any longer.

  Geoffrey and HRH hovered over her in silence.

  ‘What am I to do?’ she asked whatever gods there be, her head still buried in her arms. ‘Where am I to go?’ And then, a few seconds later she began softly sobbing.

  HRH retreated a few steps and sat down on one of the overstuffed leather chairs that the railroad believed suitable for royalty. He had encountered crying women before, but not in similar circumstances, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘You have no one?’ Geoffrey asked.

  She raised her head and stared at – something. ‘I have an uncle in the United States of America,’ she said. ‘In Brooklyn, New York. Flatbush? My father and he had an argument when he left four years ago. Uncle Moishe tried to talk my father into going with him. “There are symphony orchestras in America,” he said. “Fine ones,” but my father said no, we are Germans and we will stay. And so … But I’m sure my uncle would take me in.’

  ‘Well then—’

  ‘But I have no money and no papers. I was on my father’s passport and he … he …’ She finally broke down completely, cradled her head in her hands, and began sobbing uncontrollably.

  HRH looked alarmed, but Geoffrey told him, ‘Let her cry for now. It is what we would do in the same circumstances.’ He smiled after a few seconds and added, ‘If we weren’t raised British.’

  ‘Look here, girl,’ HRH said after a minute. ‘We can lend you – give you some money. Enough to get you to America.’

  ‘You would do that? I cannot – I would not—’

  ‘Of course you would,’ Geoffrey told her. ‘And you shall.’

  ‘But I have no papers. If I am not caught at the border, I will be held in France in a camp or sent back. They do not welcome refugees in France. They have their own troubles.’

  Geoffrey looked her over critically for a minute, and then asked, ‘If you don’t mind, what is your name?’

  ‘Sophie,’ she told him. ‘Sophie Hertzel.’

  ‘And a lovely name it is,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Well, Miss Hertzel, it would seem that you have come to the only railroad car in Europe that can help you with this, and I think we will. You’ll do.’

  ‘Do what?’ she asked.

  ‘Come to England with me,’ he told her. ‘And thence, probably to the United States of Brooklyn.’

  ‘I will?’

  ‘As my wife,’ he explained. ‘Patricia is on my passport, and we have diplomatic whosis and are here on a secret, sort of, diplomatic mission. The various governmental busybodies will not look at us closely, if at all. They didn’t as we came in and they won’t as we leave.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘We will have to get you made up to look more like an elegant lady. My wife is an elegant lady. And perhaps add a few years to your apparent age. I fancy that Anton can help us with that. Procuring makeup and garments and the like from some of the other passengers.’

  The Duke began pacing back and forth down the narrow aisle. ‘I’m not sure I like this,’ he said.

  ‘You know nothing about it,’ Geoffrey told him.

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right then.’

  FIFTEEN

  Who is in charge of the clattering train?

  The axles creak and the couplings strain,

  and the pace is hot and the points are near,

  and sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear,

  and the signals flash through the night in vain,

  for death is in charge of the clattering train

  – Edwin J. Milliken, ‘The Clattering Train’

  (as abbreviated by Winston Churchill)

  ‘America first,’ Gauleiter Gerard bellowed from the tiny stage, fist raised, the holy fire of his Mission burning in his eyes, ‘America last, and America always!’

  ‘America first, America last, and America always!’ came back the ragged return echo from the six hundred or so people in the phalanx of chairs facing the speaker.

  They were gathered in the large meeting room on the ground floor of the Hotel Vandamm on 85th and Third and had spent most of the past hour listening to the rebroadcast of a rousing radio program on ‘Social Justice’ from Father Coughlin, the ‘Little Flower Radio Priest’, transcribed from his Royal Oak, Michigan studio. As always Coughlin had not been shy in blaming the rise of Communism, the global economic crisis, and the loose morals of today’s youth on ‘Jewish bankers’.

  A skinny man with oversized glasses came up to the edge of the small stage and signaled something to Gerard by balling his right hand into a fist and beating it with his left. Gerard nodded and turned to face his audience. ‘And now the moment we’ve been waiting for,’ he told them. ‘I’ve just been informed that Bundesführer Kuhn has arrived and will be with us shortly.’

  Blake, who was sitting as far back in the room as he could manage without being out the door, wondered idly why an organization whose motto was ‘America First’ would give its leader the title of Bundesführer. Or, for that matter, why Gerard was a Gauleiter. Weren’t there enough American titles to go around?

  After a couple of minutes of restless murmuring among the audience, Fritz Kuhn, a short, bow
legged man with a massive rump and a thick neck, appeared at the rear door in a brown stormtrooper’s uniform with a black Sam Browne belt, unadorned with any insignia. He swaggered up the aisle flanked by four stormtrooper guards, and pushed himself up onto the stage. To Blake he looked like a parody cartoon of a fat Nazi, but the audience went wild, stomping and cheering as he reached for the microphone.

  ‘Today I vas accosted by a Joo, right out on the street,’ Kuhn began without preamble, his heavy German accent making the America First banner behind him look like a bad joke. ‘But my boys knew what to do mit him! Und that they did! Dis Joo vill not be accosting nobody no more.’

  The crowd cheered and stamped its collective feet. ‘Send them back where they came from!’ someone yelled. ‘On a leaky boat!’ added a high-pitched voice.

  Kuhn looked around and nodded his satisfaction at the audience’s reaction. ‘We must reclaim our birthright,’ he yelled down at them. ‘Save America from the mongrel races.’ He paused for thought. ‘Our goal,’ he went on, raising one bologna-like fist above his head and shaking it back and forth, ‘is a free America – an America what stays on its own shores und takes care of its own people. Right here, right now. America – America First!’

  The crowd went wild.

  ‘De troubles in Europe, dey are for the Europeans und we …’