Get Lenin by Robert Craven Page A

fire. His legs buckled beneath him, white hot light flashed, consuming his vision, and a sweat drenched his nightshirt, mingling with his blood. He tried to rise up but was kicked back by a man in army fatigues whose design he didn’t recognise. The man looked mature, grey haired with cold grey eyes. He pointed a pistol into Lowe's forehead. The last thing Lowe saw was the man smiling. It was a warm smile as he pulled the trigger. Faintly in the distance, Lowe could hear his daughters screaming.
    Metzger made his way up into the loft where the three women huddled. Wiping his brow, he smiled at his incredible good fortune. How did the saying go? ‘Country girls, country appetites’. He vaulted into the bed, brandishing a bayonet. ‘Now ladies, who’s first?’
    Schenker moved through the house while Metzger and the other ten SS entertained themselves up in the girls' loft. His heart was racing with the excitement; the hapless farmer having been his second ever kill. He moved through the kitchen and came suddenly upon the crouching form of the dead farmer’s wife. Gertrude launched herself at him, a vast nightgown swooping toward him with a banshee howl. She flattened him onto the cold floor, his head striking the stone tiles making him see stars. She straddled him, he couldn’t breathe, she produced a huge carving knife from her sleeve and, deftly changing hands, flipped the blade toward him.
    He wrestled his Luger free from its holster and fired point blank. Gertrude’s head flipped back, spraying blood all over him, the walls and the ceiling before she collapsed forward, her dead weight pressing like a vice on his lungs.
    He lay there for minutes, his breath coming in short gasps. He thought about his strict catholic upbringing in Bavaria, the nuns, the mystery of the sacraments and his gift, his trick. As a child he liked to maim little animals. Starting with insects, he quickly moved onto feral kittens, birds and mice in the privacy of his room. He’d derived exquisite pleasure in baiting and torturing the neighbour’s dachshund that had annoyed him. He had tricked the noisy little bastard into his family’s barn and fixed a leash to its neck, the other end wrapped around the steel leg of his father’s work bench. He set to work on it with the knives from the cook’s pantry. He found it hard not to rush to the finale and learned over the years how to drag out the exquisite torture.
    After each of these animals had been slain, little Thor would extend out his arms like the saviour and pray for these poor animals' souls and he would bury them guiltily under his mother’s rose bushes when left alone with his aged nanny.
    This gift he brought to the SA, then the SS. His rigorous attention to detail during the Kristallnacht brought him to Himmler’s attention. He believed from an early age he had the power to grant life or death, that he was in effect the hand of God.
    This gift he had bestowed on the elderly shopkeeper who had come out protecting his shop front from Schenker’s charges. Schenker had shot him in the head, citing self-defence. The man was armed only with a sweeping brush hurling insults in Yiddish. That night Schenker had found his calling, inspired by the words of Hitler, taking Goebbels propaganda as Gospel, an avenging angel of death for the Reich. The people rounded up that night were handed over for him and his cohorts to interrogate. In the police cells in the wee hours of the morning, Schenker’s skills were honed. These thoughts floated around as the vast expanse of Gertrude expired, slumping and pushing him harder against the floor.
    Her blood was flowing in thick bursts onto him. He was going to be found dead under this woman. He started to scream for help. His voice was lost in the screams of the girls above. Eventually Metzger’s head appeared amid the woman’s blood-matted hair. Looking at Schenker he called back to the troop behind him, ‘Looks like he’s finally popped his