Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(82)
Romy’s twin eyed him with both terror and disbelief. Everyone knew the guards taunted the prisoners to attempt escape. Rewards such as extra leave were offered to guards who successfully shot and killed any prisoner who foolishly tried.
“You have to trust me,” Gideon hissed. “When I fire at you, fall – as though dead.”
Another SS guard was eyeing Gideon, surely curious about the interaction between the prisoner and guard.
Gideon nodded up and told the guard, “The guy’s one of the fucking gays. Made a pass at me, would you believe? I say I pump his fucking ass full of lead.” And beneath his breath, “Run, Luca!”
So much hinged on this one pivotal moment. Would Luca run? And could Gideon forestall the guards in the immediate vicinity from taking a pot shot at the escaping prisoner?
Autumn’s rising sun suddenly crested the gray ghostly barracks and momentarily blinded all with its renewing beauty of hope.
Apparently, the sound of his given name again compelled Romy’s brother. He took off, although a senior citizen could have beaten him to a finish line.
But Gideon was not going to give him the chance to reach it. At once, he jerked his semi-automatic to his shoulder – “The gay’s mine!” – and fired.
Twenty yards away, Luca’s body was flung forward.
Fervently hoping no other karabiner cartridge had hit its intended mark, Gideon loped over to the body. Hailing the waiting mortuary van, he cuffed the uniform’s coarse collar and began to drag the body’s dead weight to meet the approaching vehicle.
Behind him, he could hear the guards’ hoots and cheers. He shoved Luca’s body into the back and, before his actions could be questioned, hastily boarded the passenger seat.
Even as Romy shifted rapidly, and grindingly, through second into third gear, she was glancing over her shoulder into the darkened rear. “Luca?!” Her voice was a battered heart’s scream.
As she began to drive along the road at a lung-stopping sedate pace, toward the main guard gate, a spectral voice from the back said dryly, “Aye, Sis. Tis one hell of a family reunion ye just pulled off.” Another deeply drawn breath, and, “Pick up Pfister at the lab, and t’will be like old times.”
Her head whirled toward the back and her brother, and with alarm Gideon watched as she overcorrected from steering off the asphalt, the van whipping dangerously from one side to the other. “Pfister’s here?!”
“Still performing his gory work from what I am told.” Her brother drew another rasping breath. “Though I have managed to stay out of the way of . . . of his more recent medical experim – ”
Abruptly, she whirled the steering wheel like a roulette wheel, like the wheel of fortune. The truck skidded to an about-face, then shot like a bullet, hurtling back toward the lab’s dock.
“Romy!” Gideon hissed, realizing what she was about. “We don’t have time!” A panicky glance at his pocket watch revealed, at the most, three minutes ticking down to disaster in the form of the SS Death Squad.
Without pausing to back up, she screeched the truck to a halt before the infirmary bay and slung open her door. He thought he was fast, but she was quicker. She sprinted up the nearby concrete steps with him on her heels and flung opening the lab door.
Startled, Doktor Pfister looked over his shoulder from the second of five, white tile-covered tables, where he was now performing an autopsy on a fresh corpse. ”What the fu – ”
Things next seemed to happen in slow motion to Gideon. Romy leveled the double-barreled derringer on Pfister. “G?tterd?mmerung,” she said, smiling grimly.
Now was not the time to bring up a conversational review of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods”, supposedly played at some of Germany’s concentration camps.
She must have thought likewise. She fired a single bullet between those Aryan-blue eyes of the Angel of Death. Pfister lurched sidewise then forward. Immediately blood began to pool with that of the cadaver’s in the table’s white tiled tray edge.
She wheeled toward the door. “Let’s go, Gideon!”
Less than two minutes later, she pulled once more alongside the guardhouse.
His heart was still beating a rapid tattoo – and there still remained the Guard Tower A’s 8 mm machine gun to evade.
She rolled down the window. A guard stepped up to the truck, not the same one as earlier, who must have gone off duty with the daybreak shift change.
Verdammt! Going on-duty, this bastard would likely be more alert and vigilant – and his bull-dog looking face was not reassuring.
“Oranienburg Mortuary,” she brightly bluffed, but Gideon detected her shaky voice, “Picking up a body from the lab.”
Suspicious of her discomposure, the mongrel’s mouth grilled downward. His unblinking eyes scanned both her and Gideon. Then he stalked around to the rear of the truck.
In horror, Gideon looked over the back of his seat. Luca might be playing possum, but dressed as he was in black-and-white stripes, he was certainly not a naked corpse upon which experiments had been recently performed.
“What is this?” the guard barked, prodding viciously with his rifle barrel the deadweight Luca.
How Romy’s brother refrained from groaning in pain Gideon could not imagine, but he quickly responded, “A suicide. When the prisoner learned the doc planned to implant dirt into a leg they were going to amputate, he hanged himself. What a Feigling!”