Free Pavel & I by Dan Vyleta

portion to Schlo’ who looked like he had not been sleeping well recently. Anders only got a single, mangled peach – Paulchen speared it with a knife and slipped it straight into his hand. The sugar water clung to his skin long after it was gone. Anders did not complain about the unequal distribution. He had not been around much lately, and Paulchen rewarded loyalty as much as earning potential. In order to signal his good will, Anders volunteered to do the dishes. It involved fetching water from a pump two blocks over. Even so the water was half-frozen by the time he got back. Once he was done he joined the other boys in Paulchen’s bedroom. Under the magazine picture of an American pin-up in black underpants and bra, they lit up smokes and talked about the day’s pickings, and what they had planned for the week ahead. Word had it that another train full of refugees from the east would be rolling into the station later that day, or early the next. Paulchen commandeered a few of the boys to go and wait for its arrival. Refugees meant business: they would get off the train and require food, shelter, a kilo of firewood. Most of them were too poor to be worth much, but there would be a few valuables amongst the family possessions they carried.
    â€˜Don’t rip them off too bad,’ Paulchen warned them. ‘They are good people who got screwed by the Russians.’ Paulchen made much of the point that he was a patriot.
    As casually as possible, Anders steered the conversation onto the topic of the Colonel. He told them that he had seen him come out of a building wearing a mink coat. ‘A fat man in woman’s furs. Man, we should rip the bastard off. That coat’s worth a crapload.’
    Paulchen cut in and told him the man was off-limits: ‘He’s a Tommy. A general or something. Besides, word has it that he’s a fairy.’
    â€˜A what?’
    â€˜A fairy.’
    â€˜What’s that?’
    â€˜Somebody who fucks little boys like you.’
    â€˜Fucks boys? How?’
    â€˜What do you mean,
how
? He fucks them.’
    They all sat in silence, contemplating the point.
    â€˜It can’t be,’ Anders objected after some thought. ‘He fucks this woman. I heard him do it. I swear.’
    Paulchen was unimpressed.
    â€˜These
ped-i-rasts,
’ he said knowledgeably, ‘they fuck anything that moves.
    â€˜They should be gassed,’ he told them. ‘Rounded up and gassed.’
    At the edge of their circle, silent young Schlo’ started to cry. He was ever so much of a girl.
    Anders lit another smoke and decided to stick around for the day.

    In those days there were many such rumours about the Colonel. I heard them drinking in bars, always mindful, of course, to keep secret the precise nature of my association with him. The Colonel, I wouldhear, was a queer, a Soviet spy, a Nazi operative who had infiltrated British Intelligence back in ’33 and had stayed under cover when the Reich went belly up. I was told that he was Italian royalty, part of the ‘di Fosco’ family who’d been expatriated by Mussolini; that he made his money in banking, in real estate, at the horses. Once, an old French journalist swore to me that he had shared a roulette table with him – along with a woman – in pre-war Monte Carlo. ‘He was just back from Spain, fighting for Franco,’ he confided, and would not be dissuaded otherwise. A German brothel madam told me the story of how she had had to pay the Colonel’s money back, because none of her girls could satisfy his appetites, and an Irish sailor – God only knows what he was doing there – enacted for me their five dramatic rounds in the ring. ‘Bare-knuckle bout, my lad,’ he sang with his liquor-oiled brogue. ‘That bastard’s so fat, he hits the deck he bounces right back up again, like a fecking rubber ball.’
    â€˜Did you win?’ I asked him, but