by Jon Cleary
The manoeuvres would start tomorrow. Six thousand men, a hundred tanks, guns, trucks, missile-carriers: he had the wild, mad idea that they should all be used to devastate the countryside, to bring the kidnappers out into the open. But he knew what could happen when an operation went too far. The wrong people could be killed.
Then, and the thought horrified him with its callous efficacy, he wondered if that would not solve his major problem.
X
Their captivity dragged on into the third day. They had slept together in the double bed without making love; or, as Cleo would have put it in her convent school days, without going all the way. They had slept in their underwear and despite the hopelessness of their situation (or because of it) the urge for sex had been strong in both of them.
Gerd had brought them a meal five hours after they had been locked up. In that time they had had plenty of opportunity to inspect their cell and to realize there was little or no chance of escape. The boards across the window were set into the outer frame, then screwed down and the heads of the screws filed flat. The door was a stout one, a real country door not a plywood one, and there were two locks to it. There was a small fireplace in the room, but the chimney was far too narrow for any escape that way.
“Why couldn’t you have been one of those skinny fashion models? I could have hoisted you up the chimney.”
The meal tray had been taken away by Kurt (Rosa was doing no woman’s work: she was downstairs cleaning the guns) and it was time for bed. Cleo was exhausted physically and emotionally; she knew she would sleep the sleep of the dead. She knew in her heart that she was dead anyway: the gang below were not going to allow her and Tom to go free. She took off her sweater and skirt and got into bed.
“I’ll sleep in the chair,” Tom said.
“No. I want some comfort.” That was all she was thinking of at the moment.
He undressed, all but his shorts, switched out the light and got in beside her. A thin ribbon of light from the light out on the landing lay under the door, but in their mental state the darkness seemed complete. Hesitantly he lifted his arm and was pleased when, without hesitation, she put her head in the crook of it. They lay like two people who had been going to bed together for years, for whom sex was only a Friday or Saturday night entertainment.
“Today’s Tuesday,” she said. “The manoeuvres start tomorrow. Maybe they’ll have the army out looking for us.”
“Maybe.” He wasn’t hopeful. He had had experience of the army’s interest in newsmen when he had been in Vietnam. “We could be miles from where the army is. I lost track of time when they put that sack over my head. I couldn’t tell whether we travelled twenty miles or a hundred.”
“It wasn’t far, not that far. I looked at my watch when they brought us up here. We couldn’t have been travelling for more than an hour. And they didn’t drive too fast.”
“Probably the same as when they had me driving the Merc. They didn’t want to attract attention. Maybe everything will work out okay.” He pressed her shoulder, felt the satin of her skin.
“Tom—” She could feel the muscles of his arm beneath her neck, felt their hard edge against her cheek. He was still bony, but he was also more muscular than she had remembered. Or perhaps all young men were. “When we get out of this, let’s be friends. Don’t let’s avoid each other.”
He said nothing for a moment, then he felt for her chin with his free hand and lifted her face. He kissed her on the lips, and was not surprised when they opened under his. He moved his body against hers, turning sideways so that she could feel what was happening to him. She felt him, all right: young men and old were all hard there, given these circumstances. She rolled over on her back, lifting her elbow to hold it against his ribs so that he would not think she was offering him an invitation.
“You’d better get up and let the night air get to the Old Feller.”
“To the what?”
“That . . . We can’t, Tom. Not with them down there in the room below. They’d come up to watch.”
It was some relief and pleasure to know that she might have let him make love to her had they not been where they were. He lay back and laughed softly. “You’re right. They’d hear us. There’s an old saying down where I come from. There’s no humpin’ without bumpin’.”
“Delicately put. Do you think you can sleep without trying to stick it into me?”
“Delicately put. I’ll try. Do you want to put a pillow between us? Bundling, they used to call it.”
“It might be better.” She pulled a pillow down between them. In the darkness she could not see him, but unerringly she found his lips when she raised herself and leaned over the pillow to kiss him. “Goodnight, Tom. Another time. I promise.”
But in the darkness she wondered if she was mistaking affection for love, confusing gratitude for his just being there with a feeling that she needed him permanently. Emotion was heightened by fear; and she was afraid. To declare, as much to herself as to him, that she was in love with him might not stand up to examination in other circumstances. Moreover, she didn’t want a repetition of what had happened in Saigon. Nonetheless, during the night, her hand found its way over the pillow and took his. In a way, even if in her sleep, it was a declaration. He was awake and took her hand, but he was cautious enough not to read too much into it. Women asleep are no more readable than women awake: not by a man afraid of commitment.
In the morning they looked at each other and smiled, as if they had been through some sort of test. “I slept like a log,” she said.
“Me, too.” But he hadn’t. He had slept fitfully and woken an hour before her with an erection, which hadn’t improved his state of mind. He had lain awhile, then got out of bed and dressed in the dark. When he heard her stir he had turned on the light.
“I want to go to the bathroom,” she said. “That’s the first thing I do in the morning.”
“Me, too.” They were married, if only in exchanging small early morning intimacies like honeymooners after the first night. “I’ll rouse the staff.”
He thumped on the door and a minute later Rosa, hooded and holding the Luger, opened it. She grunted good morning and, in turn, led Cleo and Tom to the small bathroom along the narrow hallway. Each of them did their usual morning business, washed themselves and cleaned their teeth with their fingers. Tom had a little trouble urinating; he had heard of men who suffered from shy penises in public lavatories and couldn’t pass water with someone standing beside them. Those guys were lucky: he had a hooded dame with a Luger standing three feet from him outside the open bathroom door. Finally his bladder won out.
The small routine in the bathroom, as ordinary as anything they did on any morning except that they were covered by a gun, set them on an even keel for the rest of what the day had to offer. Going back along the hallway Cleo looked for some identification, but even here the pictures had been removed from the walls. She did not know it but Gerd, of the military mind, had thought of everything.
Gerd brought them breakfast, then, with the Schmeisser in his lap, sat and watched them while they ate. Inside his hood his own face was as strained as the faces of his prisoners. But he sat so quietly, so anonymous in his mask, that he looked as unfeeling as a robot.
“What are you planning to do with us?” Tom was eating ham and cheese spread on rough bread.
“We are holding you for ransom. Well, Miss Spearfield . . . We know who she is. She should be worth a lot of money.”
“Not as much as the two generals you tried to kidnap,” said Cleo. “Or had you intended just to kill them?”
“If we’d intended to kill them, we could have done it without any trouble.” That was what he had advised originally: kill the American general, then threaten further assassinations if a ransom was not paid. That way there would not have been all the mess and inconvenience of having to keep prisoners. But Kurt and Rosa had been all for the big immediate action. “You are a substitute, Miss Spearfield. You’re not English, are you?”
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“No, Australian.”
“Why do you bother yourself with European affairs? Why did you leave Australia? It is a simple country, is it not?”
What would they say to that in Canberra, where they all took themselves so seriously? “Yes,” she said, “but I was ambitious. Just like you and your friends.”
Gerd’s ambitions were wilting, but the mask hid his pessimism.
“What are your aims?” asked Cleo. “I mean, what do you hope to achieve by what you’ve done?”
“What makes you think we are political?” Rosa stood in the doorway with her Luger. She had heard the voices and, suspicious as always, had come upstairs.
Cleo laid a piece of cheese on a round of bread. She was keeping control of herself, trying to ignore the guns, by being deliberately normal. “Then you’re just mercenaries? Ordinary kidnappers?”
The two hoods, eyes as blank as owls’, looked at each other.
“No,” said Rosa, “we have aims, but they are not political. Politicians have ruined the world.”
Dear Dad: listen to this . . . “If it wasn’t them, it would be someone else ruining it. You had Hitler.”
“A madman,” said Rosa, and spat. Her hood fluttered.
“Then you’re anarchists?” said Tom.
“Yes!” The hood fluttered again, as if a bird were caught in it. “All governments are a conspiracy!”
“Bakunin? I’ve read him. As I remember it, he retired disillusioned with everything, including his own connections.”
“Not true!” Rosa threatened to blow the hood off her head.
“They are baiting you,” Gerd told Rosa in German. “Let us be calm. We have to live together, with them as well as with each other. Who knows, perhaps we can convert them to be our propagandists?”
He was suffering from his own disillusionment. The operation was not going to succeed; he could feel it in his bones, the military bones of his father. Kurt, who had gone into Hamburg to phone the London Examiner from the central railway station to ask if the ransom would be paid, was already going to pieces over the death of Trudi. No matter how Rosa might rant about the stupidity and fallibility of love, it was a mortar that held people together. It had held Gerd to Kurt and he despaired now to see his loved one falling apart.
“People can run their own lives,” said Rosa, who still had to control her own. She ignored Gerd, and continued to speak in English to the representatives of the enemy: “Government and politicians are not necessary. A co-operation of labour, that’s all that is necessary. You worship all the wrong things—property, wealth, position. I can tell by the way you dress.”
“It’s that Harrods suit,” Cleo said to Tom, and the two anarchists wondered why their prisoners smiled at each other.
“Don’t laugh at us!” Rosa’s hood fluttered again; the Luger wavered in her furious hand. “We should kill you! You’re worth nothing—”
“That’s enough!” Gerd stood up, picked up the tray with the breakfast only half eaten. He was looking at Cleo and Tom, but he spoke to Rosa. “We’ll talk some other time.”
He backed out, pushing Rosa ahead of him with his elbow. He could feel the aggression in her, but she had the sense to wait until they were downstairs before she attacked him.
“You are too soft! You damned queers are all the same!”
He almost hit her then; but he had never hit a woman and he was not going to start now. She was like all women, and had the fixed idea that men like himself were afraid to fight; most men thought the same though there were some in Hamburg who knew different, having been bested by him in brawls. He sighed, suddenly feeling pity for her. She was like himself, defeated, and she was striking out in every direction in her frustration. All at once he yearned for Kurt to hurry back, wanted to be comforted just by his presence.
“Shut your stupid mouth,” he said quietly, turning his back on her. “You should grow up, Rosa.”
She raised the Luger, aimed it at the back of his head. Then reason came back, the blindness of rage disappeared. She lowered the pistol, spun round and went out into the kitchen. He heard her rattling dishes, doing the washing-up from last night’s supper. He smiled, but he knew enough not to go to the doorway of the kitchen and let her see the smile or make some comment.
Up in the bedroom Cleo and Tom had heard the muffled voices, through the thick rug on the floor, raised in fierce argument. The row was in German, but the sounds of disagreement do not need translation.
“They’re fighting between themselves,” said Tom. “That’s a good sign.”
“Is it?” said Cleo. “What if she shoots him and then comes up and kills us? She’s itching to use that gun.”
“The female of the species . . .” But it was just an idle remark, because he could think of nothing better to say.
The day dragged on. They heard the third kidnapper come back and the atmosphere downstairs seemed to improve: once they heard a laugh. They were given a meal in the middle of the day and again at seven o’clock, brought each time by Gerd. They recognized that he was the most sympathetic of the three kidnappers, though they hadn’t seen the leader since the first day they had been brought here.
They went to bed that night with the pillow between them again. They kissed goodnight and Tom kissed her breasts through the lace of her brassiere. For a moment she was tempted to remove the brassiere, but stopped herself. She was not going to have another disastrous attempt at love-making with him; she was an uninhibited lover, given to notions of delight when she felt like expressing them; she could not be mute if she tried. She remembered when she had lost her virginity at sixteen, on the living-room floor in the big house in Bellevue Hill in Sydney, with a pillow under her and the boy from Riverview, the Jesuit school, on top of her. Her ears had been as erect as the boy’s penis as she had listened, above his panting, for his parents to come downstairs from their bedroom and demand to know what was going on. Though your senses might desert you at the climax of passion, they were with you up till that moment. She was not going to make love to Tom with ears cocked.
“No further?” said Tom with male hopefulness.
They’re all the same, she thought: once they’re worked up, they’re deaf from the balls up. “It wouldn’t work, Tom. It would be even worse than—that other time.”
He turned over and eventually went to sleep. It wasn’t easy, not with a standard between his legs.
On the third day they were woken when the tanks clattered into the yard outside the farmhouse.
XI
Gerd was standing at the kitchen window putting water in the coffee pot when he saw the four tanks and the Jeep coming up the track from the neighbouring field. He had been looking out at the early morning with that idle curiosity of the half-awake, noting that a wind had risen during the night and the line of oak trees down the main track to the road were leaning slightly to one side, like a corps of arthritic ballet dancers. Birds and leaves were indistinguishable as they flew before the wind and over to the right he could see, beyond the rim of a hill, dust rising from what was probably a newly ploughed field. Then he saw the Jeep, followed by the tanks trailing their trains of dust, come over the skyline of the hill, dip down and begin to come up the track towards the farmhouse.
He shouted to Kurt and Rosa, not moving from the window, and in a few moments they came scrambling down the stairs, half-dressed but each of them carrying a Luger. His own Schmeisser lay on the draining board beside the sink, but he hadn’t picked it up and still held the coffee pot in his hand. A sub-machine-gun would be of no use against the firepower in those tanks.
“Jesus Christ!” Kurt was tucking his shirt into his trousers, pulling on a sweater. “What are they doing here?”
“How did they get on to us?” Rosa had pulled on her sweater and jeans but forgotten her shoes.
“Who said they know anything about us?” Gerd said. “Go outside, Kurt, and ask them what they want. Go on, you live here. Leave your gun.”
K
urt hesitated, then went to the kitchen door. There he paused, looked at the Luger in his hand as if wondering what he had intended doing with it, put it down on a chair and went out into the yard, closing the door behind him. Rosa moved to one side of the window, her pistol held ready. Gerd remained at the window, the coffee pot still in his hand, the Schmeisser still on the draining board like something left over from last night’s washing-up.
Out in the yard the American lieutenant, young and blond, more German-looking than Kurt, got out of the Jeep and smiled tentatively at the angry young man who had come out of the farmhouse. He said in German, “Good morning. You’re expecting us, I hope?”
Kurt was puzzled. Why should the army have been sent and not the police? He regretted leaving his Luger inside the house; they were going to take him without his being able to put up a fight. The wind whipped his long dark hair about his face as he stood with his feet braced apart: he looked wild enough to take them all on with bare hands.
“Did you need so many tanks? How many of us did you think there were?”
It was the American’s turn to look puzzled. “Are you Herr Hauser? Do you live here?”
“Yes.” Kurt began to see a little light, though it illuminated nothing.
“Did you not receive the letter telling you we should be using your farm as an observation post during our exercises? Only for today,” the American added apologetically. His parents were German, but he had been born in America and he was beginning to hate the idea of being the liaison officer between the NATO forces and the civilian population. He had always believed that his father’s countrymen were militaristic, but none of the farmers and villagers he had met so far had welcomed the intrusion of these military manoeuvres. “We shall be gone this evening.”
Kurt said, “When was the letter sent?”
“Oh, at least a month ago.”
“Then my father would have received it, but he forgot to tell me about it. He is away in England at present.” Kurt felt only a degree of relief. The army had not come to arrest him, Gerd and Rosa, but their presence was going to be dangerous. “Do you have to set up your observation post here near the house? My—my girl friend is not well.”
