Free Monte Cassino by Sven Hassel

furious, you could hear him cursing and swearing half a mile away. He all but shot Tiny, when he staggered up later with a gigantic mirror that he had brought from the nearby big house, so that Heide would enjoy the sight of himself. But Heide was careful not to break the mirror. That would have meant seven years bad luck. We cursed that mirror. It became a real problem. We tried to get rid of it by giving it away, but nobody would have it, and, in the end, we took it to Palid Ida's whorehouse and with considerable difficulty got it fixed to the ceiling in one of the bogs there. Once it was up, we felt that a curse had been lifted from us.
    Porta had found a house, standing all by itself among some pines, well hidden from the gaze of the curious. There he had opened a gambling den. Stalin, the cat, sat on a red silken cushion in a parrot cage above Porta's head. The cushion had originally been used under the bottom of one of Ida's girls, and Tiny had removed it one evening, when we had a fight with some Bersaglieri of the 7th Alpino, a regiment we heartily disliked, though nobody knew why.
    Porta had "organised" an elegant table. Tiny had taken up position on a bucket placed upside down on another table, from where he had a good view of the players, in case there should be trouble, which there always was. Naturally, the play was not fair, but it was good honest cheating. You were at liberty to examine the dice, if you liked, but people seldom did when they saw the look on Tiny's face, sitting there with a machine pistol on his lap and an American police truncheon nonchalantly swinging from his wrist.
    Oberfeldwebel Wolf had been having a run of luck and the pile of money in front of him was growing. He was humming Three Lilies out of sheer delight and self-confidence.
    "Herr Oberfeldwebebels in luck," Porta said with a crafty smile.
    "I'll break the bank," smiled Wolf. He did not hear Tiny's confidential whisper to Porta: "Shall I go after the shit when he leaves and land him one on the napper?"
    Porta shook his head. Tiny just didn't have a clue. To his mind it was the simplest thing just to let his truncheon descend on Wolf's head when he was outside and to relieve him of his winnings, but Porta had his own plan on this occasion.
    Wolf got to his feet, raked his winnings together and filled his bulging pockets. Then he pulled a pistol from the leg of his boot and spun it round his finger like a wheel.
    "You bandits will notice that this is a Colt II, and I should like you to realise that I know how to use it. Anyone who opens the door before I have been gone five minutes will find himself with a hole in his head as well as his arse, and that goes especially for you, Creutzfeldt." Then with a broad grin, he walked backwards to the door, holding the Colt, its safety catch off, in his hand. Outside, he loosed his two big wolf hounds he had tied to a tree. These ferocious brutes were to be found wherever Wolf was. Once they all but killed Tiny, when he had tried to steal a jeep Wolf was intending to flog privately. As he disappeared down the path through the pines, we heard Wolf laughing and his dogs barking.
    Tiny leaped down from his table and dashed towards the door. He flung it open and found himself gazing into Wong's yellow face. Wong was one of the two Vlassov soldiers Wolf had as a bodyguard.
    "You no out of door go. Wolf say no. Njet. Njet."
    Tiny withdrew before the muzzle of a Russian machine pistol that pointed straight at his midriff. A little further off he could see the figure of Thung, the other guard, among the trees.
    Tiny slammed the door shut and clambered back on to his pail.
    "That Wolf's not nice," he said indignantly. "Setting murderers on to peaceable people! If only he would go up to the front for a few minutes."
    "He certainly won't do that," Porta said in a tone of conviction, "not even Adolf could lure him there."
    We took our places again round the gaming table.
    "He'll come back," Porta prophesied