Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [108]
‘They want your watches,” Dr. Hahn said. “Give them up.”
Hildegaard and Herta Falkenstein nervously took them off and put them on the center table. The leader snatched them, listened to the movements, and attached them to his left arm, where he already wore a dozen watches.
He jabbered an order to the one with the submachine gun, who smiled through brown and yellow decaying teeth as he separated Dr. Hahn and Falkenstein from the women, leveling a gun barrel at their chests and motioning them to turn their faces to the wall.
“Kurmm frau,” the leader said, advancing toward Hildegaard Falkenstein.
“Listen,” Dr. Hahn said rapidly, “it is useless to struggle. They might kill you. Do as they say ... don’t resist.”
“Mother!” Hildegaard shrieked, and clung inside Herta’s inept protective grasp. “Mother! Tell them I’m sick! Tell them not to make me do it!”
Herta Falkenstein held her daughter tightly for an instant, and then they pried her loose and flung her onto the cot under which Ernestine was hidden.
“Animals! Bastards!” Bruno screamed as he turned and lunged. He caught the barrel of the guard’s gun over the bridge of his nose, sending his glasses to the floor, smashed. Another crack on his jaw with the gun butt sent him sliding in slow motion to the ground, now on his hands and knees, pawing around senselessly. One last blow flattened him and a pool of blood began to form under his face.
The leader tore the clothes from Hildegaard’s body. This sent the other three soldiers into spasms of laughter as the girl screamed, tried to shield herself, prayed, and cried. He knocked her flat, and mounted her. Another of the soldiers shoved Herta Falkenstein onto another cot. Her fat, flabby body and immense hanging breasts delighted the Mongols. They chortled and whooped as they forced themselves on her.
The two women lay rigid and unprotesting. When the first two assailants were done, they traded women. The other two became angry and pushed their comrades off and took their own turns. All of this went on as the leader began vomiting from liquor and the others urinated and moved their bowels on the floor. Each new disgusting act was considered terribly humorous, causing them to scream with laughter.
Two hours after they arrived, they shot up the shelves in the cellar in a last burst of vandalism and left.
As Dr. Hahn went to the women, Bruno Falkenstein crawled toward his cot, took his pistol from under the mattress, and stuck the barrel in his mouth. The doctor leaped on him and kicked the pistol from his hands. He writhed on the floor weeping.
“You idiot! Help me with your women!”
“Why did you stop me? What is there to live for? We are all ruined!”
Old Dr. Hahn stood in this chamber of horrors with the fetid smell reaching deeply into his nostrils. He saw the agonized man beating the floor with his fists, and he saw the shambles and heard the three women groan.
Frau Herta Falkenstein crawled from her cot and knelt beside her prostrate husband and touched his head. He pulled away from her. “Bruno,” she moaned, “go to Hilde. Tell her you love her. Please go to Hilde and tell her you love her.”
“Ruined,” he wept. “We are ruined.”
Chapter Four
HEINRICH HIRSCH WALKED ALONE and unarmed in the middle of a street still smoldering from battle in the Neukölln District of Berlin. He stopped before a three-story building on Geyer Strasse 2. A bullet-pocked sign, “Backerei,” groaned back and forth. The window was smashed and boarded. He looked up to the second floor. A window box held petunias that drooped wearily.
The young man was tall and slender. He had thin Semitic features revealing he was half Jewish, from his mother’s side of the family. He wore shiny new boots, semimilitary garb, and a red star on his arm band.
He walked the creaking steps to apartment four at the front of the building, second floor, and knocked. The door was opened slowly by a frightened old woman. Upon seeing his Russian attire, she paled.
Heinrich shoved the door wide and entered the room.