PREVIEW - Bicycle Through the Dark

Egon stared at the man.  The lined, but once-handsome face was vaguely familiar.  He let the man continue talking, trying to get a sense of who exactly he was.  “Du bist ein Deutscher, nicht wahr?  Ich kenne Sie.”  It was spoken in German, his native language.

“Yes,”  he nodded slowly, “I believe we have met.  Your name is ..?   I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it.”  The man sat down unbidden at his table, nodding.  Switching to English, he continued to nod as he spoke with what Egon thought might be a heavy Dutch accent, maybe German. 

“I remember you.” he said.  “You were unteroffizier en were attached brief to our …” he stumbled over a word and instead, spoke in German,  “Reichskommissariat.”  Egon knew what he meant.  The Order Police.  

The man started to laugh, “Ve call you der Geisteroffizier because you were dere, und zen you yust … dizappear!  Poof!  Gone!”  He flung his fingers up and out.  Egon laughed mirthlessly.  “Ghost officer”, yes, that was him.  

“But, I know vhy you come, zen go.”  The unexpected revelation made Egon’s blood suddenly run cold.  Nobody knew what he’d done during the war.  Nobody.  Unbidden, his mind took him back…

He sat in the train with his wife’s stricken face still before him.  He’d revealed what he knew of his fellow soldiers and their activities.  That was a big mistake.  He should have kept his big mouth shut.  But his own guilt at the knowledge of it, chewed him up on the inside.  ‘What the heart is full of, the mouth speaks’, he remembered the old adage.  His heart was full of rottenness, perhaps not his own, but certainly by association.  there had to be a way to make some of it right again.  He went over and over it in his head.

“Not the babies!” He still heard his wife’s anguished cry.  It still rang in his ears.  There was something he should be able to do, wasn’t there?  Something.  His new position as unteroffizier, and one so outside of the fighting units now, there should be something …. he thought hard.  His superiors had him going from one unit to another, asking him to report back on their activities, whether they were all doing their utmost, how their morale was.  Were they speaking ill of their leaders?  They’d turned him into a spy.  

Lately his orders had attached him to the Reichskommissariat, those Dutch Order Police that were rounding up Jews; whole families to be carted off to God knows where.  But, he had a good idea where they were being taken to.  He was no fool.  

And then he had an idea.  With careful planning, it might work.  He’d have to pay close attention, make sure nothing could expose him to discovery.  Maybe it would take away some of the blackness in his soul.

Strauss pulled himself back to the present, and looked at the man sitting across from him, sucking on a cigarette held between his forefinger and thumb.  The air was bluish above their heads. Yes, the man could very well know what he’d done during the war.  Would he say anything?  To whom?  No one knew he’d been a Nazi officer.  It was a part of himself he’d rather no one was privy to, and so far, he’d been able to keep it a secret in his new country.  They were still rounding up a few known Nazis here and there.  Some of them hadn’t fared too well, and he wasn’t sure whether what he’d done would offset his limited involvement.  Could he take the chance?

“What do you mean, what I did?” he asked now of his table companion.

The man started to laugh, “Oh ho ho, you naughty boy, you.  Yes, you were.” he said softly in German, as he stubbed out the cigarette butt. “But I won’t tell.”  

His German had a decided Dutch inflection, and Egan finally placed him as a Dutchman, one who’d collaborated with the Nazis during the war.  He remembered now the few conversations he’d had with the man during his time both in Rotterdam and Delft.  He didn’t like the man.  He reminded Strauss of a badger.

Strauss tried to fish for a little more information about his exact identity, and what the man knew, starting with what his name was.  

“Well, I still do not remember your name, but, I know we were both working for Hitler in the war, so we’re even on that score at least.  I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” Egon joked with a laugh, trying to act casual.  The man laughed with him, but still did not mention his name.  

“No, not  that bit I won’t." his visitor responded cryptically, “the rest of it…”  He waggled his hand back and forth sideways and left the statement hanging.  Strauss lifted his eyebrows in a question, raising his coffee to his lips as he stared at the man.  His heart drummed in his chest.

“The rest of it …?” he prodded.  

“Let’s face it, the interest in babies, the deliveries, it would all lead back to … what else you were back then.”  He laughed again, “Oh don’t worry, I probably won’t say anything.”

Probably.  There was no promise in the word.  Maybe he should disappear.  Again.  No.  He’d carved out a half-decent life here.  He didn’t feel like starting over again.  The first time had been hard enough.  There had to be another solution.

CHAPTER 2

1942 - Stabsfeldwebel, Gunther Zimmerman, stood by and watched dispassionately as the family was loaded into the van.  Father, mother, kid, and the brat-baby, squalling a bit.  Another four members of that filthy sort, die juden were cleaned off the streets.  Soon enough this entire section of Europe would feel clean and healthy again.

He watched the Order Police, with Herr Overbeek directing them, efficiently clearing the roadway as the entourage left.    Most of the volunteers were good Dutch citizens.  

He watched as the neighbourhood folk slowly drifted back into their houses.  Let them see how we clean up, he thought.  As he turned to go he noticed an  Unteroffizier riding off on his bicycle.  He’d been recently attached to his unit, but he couldn’t understand why.  What had he been doing here?  Probably spying on us, he thought.  

The man was always being assigned to different units, hanging around for a while and then leaving, without so much as a polite goodbye.  

He’d had the man attached to his unit briefly several times already, always with vague orders that had very little to do with anything pertinent to their mission, whatever it happened to be at the time.  Then he’d disappear without explanation.  Like they weren’t important.  It irked him a bit.  One day he would speak to someone about him.  There had been rumours.  But then, the German army was rife with rumours.  They weren’t always to be believed.

He expected the same thing to happen today. The officer would be at the rail depot, do a little crowd control and then just leave.  

Capless, the Unteroffizier struggled to get closer to the woman holding the baby.  All around him people clamoured, panicking, as the cattle car they were preparing to load the Jews into was slowly pulling up to the loading ramp.  He had to keep one eye on the other uniforms.   

The woman he was targeting was just ahead of him now, and he grabbed her arm with a quick one-handed tug to pull her down out of sight-line from any nearby uniform. He had a good handful of baby clothes with the other hand to get the child away from her.  

The crowd now was no longer paying attention to what he was doing, as they pushed and elbowed against each other, tightly packed together as they were.  

They were on the ground now, the feet and legs of people close.  Like the last time he did this, he promised the mother that her baby would be in safe hands.  Sometimes they’d only look at him, numb with shock already, and sometimes they’d start screaming.  It didn’t matter; the screams would be lost in the fracas of all the others as they were being shoved forcibly into the cattle cars.  Wearing his uniform, the Jews moved aside for him as he left the mother where she was.

A tightly rolled up sack was jammed into one of his overcoat’s patch pockets. Still obscured by the crowd, he reached for it now.  The baby looked at him with large, questioning brown eyes as he wrapped the sack around the infant, judging it to be about six months old or so.  Jamming his cap on his head again, he held the sack tightly against him, hoping the thing wouldn’t start bawling.  But, aside from the whimpering, it didn’t make a lot of noise.  

To the Order Police, his presence in the crowd now just looked like another officer doing crowd control, and he swatted a few people around him towards the cattle car, to look convincing, then worked his way to the far edge of the throng.  

The doctor he’d persuaded to take the baby was waiting for him.  His position as unteroffizier gave him just enough leeway to leave the rest of the Order Police to finish up.  As far as they were concerned he’d be needed somewhere else.

As he biked to the address, with the sack tied securely to the handlebars, he wondered how many more times he’d be able to get away with it.  He knew he was treading on thin ice, and had to choose his moments of defiance carefully.  

The Order Police, made of Dutch citizens cooperating with their German invaders, didn’t question his participation in their round-ups.  They knew better than to question higher authority.  With his connections it was easy enough to get fake orders drafted up for any operation he learned about during his regular duties, and had flexible enough schedules to pull it off.  So far.  

He was doing it for his wife, who had looked at him with horror in her eyes when he’d mentioned infants and toddlers as part of the Jewish “final solution”.   Early in the war he’d gone home to Cologne on a quick leave, and recounted for her the things he’d heard about in the occupied countries - whole families shunted off like cattle to concentration camps, to unimaginable horror.

“Not the babies!” she’d gasped at him.  The look of recrimination in her eyes was enough to send his guilt into overload.  That look was the last thing he remembered of her before leaving Germany.

“I’ll do what I can.” he’d promised her.  Eight months later she was dead.  The Allies had bombed Cologne.

Halfway to the address he stopped his bike, looking around him carefully, as he wheeled it out of sight into a narrow alleyway.  Parking it, he pulled a large bundled, nondescript overcoat from under the clamp on the back of his rear-wheel rack, took off his officer’s overcoat and cap, rolled them up, and replaced them under the clamp.  He pulled on the civilian coat and a fedora, then continued on.  By now the baby was beginning to whimper, and he was anxious to be rid of it.

At the address he rang the bell and, thrusting the bundle into the arms of whoever answered the door, said only, “Here is your expected parcel.”  Then he was gone, the less time spent at this door the better.  They already had enough information about the child from their previous encounter, to deal with it however they saw fit.  Adoption, or return to any surviving family member, he didn’t care what they did with the kid from this point on.  His conscience was once again clear.  Until the next time.

CHAPTER 3

1977 - “You bastard!  I’m gonna kill you!” He screamed at the cowering man.  “You messing with my wife?  My WIFE?”  A blow landed across the man’s jaw with a crack, then one more from the other direction.  

He turned to the woman, who crouched low and frozen, doubled over as though she wanted to cipher herself away to invisibility.  She was whimpering, “Don’t hurt him.  Don’t hurt him.”

“Go home, woman.  I’ll deal with you later!”  She scurried out the motel room door and disappeared.

He turned to the half-dressed man.  “So, ya think yer a gigolo or somethin’ huh?  Diddling my wife behind my back?  Gotta have a piece of someone else’s property, huh?”

His foot lashed out and caught the man squarely in the balls, and he went down, groaning in pain.  The sound seemed to infuriate the man even more and, in his rage he began to kick again.  The man made to crawl away, then tried to protect himself by curling up in a ball, but his tormentor was out of control, slamming with his fists and feet wherever he could.  

Without realizing it, the metal pipe he had jammed into his overcoat pocket was suddenly in his hand, and he swung down hard.  A purple rage took hold, and he swung, over and over across his victim’s body, finally slamming it hard across the side of his head.  The man stopped groaning and suddenly lay still.  Gasping for breath, and heaving, his wrath suddenly spent, he looked down at what he’d done.

“Fuck!”

He’d never meant to go that far, but his temper had betrayed him.  Again.  He stood over the man and nudged him with his foot.  There was no response.  He saw blood oozing from where he’d  struck, just above the ear.

“Hey, wake up cocksucker!”  Another nudge without an answering groan.  He bent down and checked for breathing, holding a couple of fingers under the nose.  Nothing.  Now he began to sweat in earnest.  Was the guy dead?  Had he killed the fool?  

He began to pace the room, thinking about his next steps, trying to get his rising panic under control.  He’d have to clean up the blood and wipe for fingerprints first, the thoughts crossed his mind as the prickles of hysteria started across his shoulders working their way down his torso.  It was suddenly hard to breathe.  

Clean up.  Gotta clean up.  Mop up the blood.  Get rid of the body, put him somewhere where nobody’d ever find him again.  

The man’s clothes lay scattered about.  He’d have to  get rid of those too.  He’d have to get rid of everything.  Nervous, he pulled a roll of Wint-O-Green Lifesavers out of his pocket, peeled one off and popped it in his mouth.  He began to chew.  It was a nervous habit, chewing hard peppermints when he was anxious. 

Absentmindedly, he choked, his jitters getting the best of him, and he coughed, scattering bits of candy out of his mouth.  Swallowing fitfully, he wiped candy crumbs and saliva off his lips and the front of his shirt.  

Still nervous, he reached into his pocket for another mint and found the packaged cookie he’s stashed earlier this morning.  Opening the cello bag, the smell of the freshly baked treat hit him, and, suddenly hungry, he jammed half of it into his mouth and chewed.  It’ll be a while ‘til another meal, he reasoned, looking at the time.  Three PM, another hour and it would start getting dark this time of year. 

He sat on the bed, after finishing whatever he could think to clean, and waited for night to fall.  There were so many hours until dark, and another Lifesaver went into his mouth.

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