The Informer (Sabotage Group BB) (10 page)

He can’t spell his own name. Though he loves the name Smith. ‘I was named Smith, and a smith is what I am!’ he often shouts when he’s drunk. And a smith he is. If he catches you not listening when he is talking, he will swing his four-finger hand at you.

You can’t reason with him. You can’t explain to him that he is making a mistake. His only answer is more beatings. If you don’t nod your head and say, ‘yes, Dad,‘ in all the right places, you will have to feel some pain. There are no rules to go by, no refuge anywhere. You can get beatings for doing something he told you to do himself, if he has forgotten it, or if it turned out to be a bad idea after all.

Even mom used to get her share until she developed a habit of making herself disappear when trouble was brewing. She goes to the privy or something—she just disappears, only to return later and continue whatever she was doing as if nothing had ever happened.

When Father is not home, she is the boss. And that is better. She only hits the little ones, and only if she gets really mad; but then she will use the coat hanger until her arm tires. She has ruined a few brackets that way. However, none of the children hate their mother. Maybe it is too tough to accept both your parents being mean brutes. Maybe it is the fact that she is not as bad as their father. Most of the time it is possible to understand what made her angry. There is some sense in her madness. She is no angel; there are very few angles in the slum. To be an angel requires some kind of surplus which most people in need do not have. But, place her next to Dad, and she will get the looks of an angel. Gray can seem very white next to black.

Besides, she understands how to benefit from the situation. She is a victim of Karl’s whims herself. The children often get to feel more pity for her then for themselves or each other, even if she is really the only person who could save them from his terror. Her life is martyrdom. And as long as she stays put, she can hide inside the role of the martyr. A victim can get away with anything. It would be so much harder to get by on your own account.

The best thing Poul-Erik’s dad ever did for him was losing his job. A resistance group blew up the smithy, and that was the end of that job. The next four weeks was a living hell for everyone in the family, but if he had not lost his job, he wouldn’t have been forced to take a job in Germany.

It has been almost six months by now. He has only been back home for one weekend in all that time. The only person in the whole family who misses him is their mother. It is hard to stay a martyr without the abuse.

Nobody seems to know exactly what kind of work Poul-Erik’s father is doing down in Germany. Poul-Erik was told something about a smithy in Berlin, but his dad was shouting something about Hamburg during the time he was back home for the weekend. He didn’t speak of any kind of forging whatsoever. Of course, he never writes any letters. He just sends an envelope with some money every other week.

There will be a big surprise waiting for him when he eventually comes back home. The sissy he calls his son has been transformed into the saboteur, Willy. A hero who has killed two Hipo in close battle. Nobody is ever going to violate Willy again. The times have changed. Poul-Erik can feel it deep within, as he stands there holding the pistol. He is no longer the same boy.

He puts the pistol inside his coat pocket and instantly feels so much better. He steps out of the outhouse, into the rain, and hurries over to the gateway where an ally cat hisses at him. He kicks the air near the cat’s head and it rushes out of the gateway.

He pulls his cap down his forehead, turns up the collar, and moves out into the dark city. Running inside the shadows, making himself disappear in the darkness. Through backyards, over fences.

Several hours pass by before he returns.

21

Rolling on to her stomach, the widow Mrs Skrab takes a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand, next to the framed photograph of her late husband. Johannes lights up his pipe, his glance lingering on the widow’s nice and round backside.

“What are you looking at?” She smiles back over her shoulder, confident about the beauty of her ass—and she should be.

“I am just enjoying the pleasant view,” Johannes says, taking a long pull on his pipe.

She strikes a match and lights the cigarette. She stays that way, looking at the picture on the nightstand. Letting her fingers slide over the glass in the frame.

“Do you miss him?”

“Not really.” She takes the photograph and rolls back in the bed. Her breasts are firm and have the funniest little pink nipples. They are something special, not at all like other women’s breasts. “Well, sometimes I do miss him. The children miss him a lot, that’s for sure. He was a good father.”

“He sure was.”

“And a good husband. He never cheated on me. That’s just the way he was.”

“Oh, well,” Johannes mumbles, looking at the silly display of porcelain figurines on the dresser. In his private theory, if a man can brag about being faithful to his wife, the odds are that the wife’s been cheating on him. He keeps this to himself for the moment.

“But he was boring,” she says, throwing the picture back on the nightstand. “He was so fucking boring.” She rests her head on Johannes’s stomach. Stroking his chest. “Am I going to hell for my sins?”

“Yes.”

“Asshole.”

They lie in silence, smoking for a while. She’s been his mistress for some years now. They met at the baptism preparations for her youngest child. Johannes knew right away that he needed to have this woman. And he got her. Frederiksberg is populated by respectable women; neglected and bored. Johannes can choose as he pleases. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, and a bag of chips. Frederiksberg has it all. Many women feel delighted by a visit from the reverend.

Mrs Skrab’s late husband never suspected anything fishy about the reverend stopping by when he wasn’t around. He seemed to regard it as a special honor. He was the owner of a hotel in the heart of Copenhagen and regarded himself a significant and highly respected man. He had a strong faith in the Lord, always there in Johannes’s church for the Sunday service with his beautiful wife at his side, like he wanted to show off his success—like the walking stick, the shining polished shoes, and the tailor-made suit. It was all so perfect and neat. Who would have guessed that the doll at his side loved when the reverend came inside her mouth, making the semen drip from her lips?

The hotel proprietor Skrab died in the first year of the war from a heart attack. The funeral was held five days later by Johannes. There he was shoveling dirt on the man he made a cuckold.

From dust to dust…

“Do you believe in God?” The widow kills her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Sure.” He lets his hand slide down her back. “Who else could have created something as beautiful as you?”

She chuckles. Caressing his balls. “No, I mean it. Do you believe that he’s sitting somewhere up in the sky, judging our actions?”

“You are asking your reverend about that, Iris?”

“You’re not like any other reverend, Johannes.”

He places the pipe in the ashtray. “Maybe not.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Why’s that so important to you?”

“Just answer my question.”

He rubs his face. Looks at his watch. “I think it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that there is a God in control of everything, and at the same time believe this God to be good.”

“Maybe we just don’t get the big picture?”

“Maybe.”

“I loved my husband. Isn’t that the strangest thing? I mean, it wouldn’t have been the same sin if he’d been an evil man, and I’d hated him, would it?”

“I love my wife.”

“Would you forgive her if she saw someone else?”

Johannes blinks his eyes. “No, I do not think so.”

“What’d you do if you came home one day and found her in bed with another man?”

“I don’t know … I might do all kind of things.” He frowns. “What are you getting at?”

“Just wondering. There’s so much deceit in this world. I’m trying to understand.”

“Don’t.”

“Did I upset you?” She takes his soft penis in her hand. Smiling. “Don’t be mad.” Her tongue feels good. He closes his eyes and gently holds her head. But he’s got a special reason for being here today, and he needs to be back at the church before long to teach a class of confirmation candidates.

“Iris, stop,” he gasps, pushing her away.

She looks at him all confused. Hurt too. “But you love that?”

“I do. I love it. But we need to talk. It’s important.”

“Talk?”

“The third floor.”

“The third floor?”

“At the hotel. You know.”

“I might start to wonder, Johannes. You ask a lot of questions about the third floor.”

“I have a friend who is…afraid.”

Less than a year ago, the Gestapo in all secrecy rented the whole third floor of the Daisy Hotel which Iris Skrab had inherited from her late husband. The place was used to house German and Danish agents who specialized in infiltrating the resistance, and controlling a spider web of informers in every corner of Denmark.

“I don’t get to hear that much,” Iris says sulkily. “The maids have been told that they’ll execute them all if anything gets out.”

“And you?”

“I hardly ever visit the third floor. I let my employees handle that.”

“So, you know nothing at all?”

“Well, I might. I had to go in to fix some stupid incident regarding a German agent who’d taken certain liberties with one of the maids. We can’t accept something like that. It’s a respectable hotel. I had to lay off the maid.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I had to talk to all my employees to find out what’s up and down in that whole mess. The agent might have been after some of the other girls as well. I even got a few words with some of the agents. I was offered coffee,
real
coffee, by one of the superiors, an Obersturmbannführer, I think.”

“I see.”

“The poor man seemed to miss having someone to talk to. He’d hardly seen his family since the beginning of the war. Had a wife and two sons in some village down there. Stalzbürgerswingerwalsen or something like that. This is his fifth deployment. He’d been to Latvia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Holland, and now Copenhagen. He was a lonely man a long way from home.”

Johannes smiles. The sad and lonely soldier far away from home. Women are so easy. “Poor fellow.”

“He also told me a little about his assignment here in Copenhagen.”

“Oh, he did?” Now it might get interesting. Iris was a little beauty, and if only she got to unfold a bit of her oral potential, any man could end up in trouble. “What did he say?”

“I don’t really understand these things, you know. He did mention some group of saboteurs called BB. They were more like criminals than resistance, I guess. If your scared friend is a member of that group, he might want to get away. They have an informer inside the group telling the Germans everything the group plans to do.”

“Did he mention the name of the informer?”

“No.” She looks at him from the corner of her eye. “Are you a saboteur, Johannes?”

He laughs. “Me? Could you imagine me running around in the middle of the night blowing up factories? Iris, you got to…”

She just keeps looking at him.

22

“Do you have the money?” Jens looks at the man leaning against the wall with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The shine from the full moon gives a cold and blue sense to the whole area. In the distance, on the other side of the sound between Denmark and neutral Sweden, the lights twinkle.

“Is that really all you care about, copper?” He flicks the cigarette out into the water. “You’re a fucking capitalist.”

“You got the money?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe’s not good enough.”

“Oh, well,” he says, scratching his neck. “That’s all you get.”

Jens stares at the man he only knows by his codename, Knud. Knud is the leader of a minor fraction of the major Communist sabotage and resistance organization called
Bopa
.

“What are you saying?”

“We can’t pay you at this point. We have a major sabotage operation in the making, and we need all our resources.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“You’re a saboteur yourself. The common cause. The common enemy.”

“I still have my expenses. I delivered the goods almost a month ago. My suppliers do not give a shit about any common causes. If I don’t pay, I end up at the bottom of this harbor. Do I make myself clear?”

“You are a real asshole, pig.”

“If you say so.”

“Listen, we’re planning a major act. More than fifty men. We could use your little group as well.”

“What’s the target?”

“The Torotor factory out in Ordrup.”

“No kidding? Torotor produces components for the German V2 rockets. It might be the best guarded factory in all of Denmark. You don’t have a chance. It’ll be a suicide mission.”