Free The Hammer of God by Tom Avitabile Page B

lowly private who served as the pig’s credenza, tasting everything before the swine ate.
    During one of the final days of the war, when the battles outside the city were looming closer and closer, Claude and all the servants and workers who had evaded death by becoming slaves to these “Aryan Supermen” were rounded up and hastily put up against a wall to be killed. Claude heard the bolt action from the rifles of the SS troops as they aimed their weapons. A once proud people were about to be robbed of the only thing they had left, their lives.
    Claude flinched as the shooting started. He waited a seeming eternity for what would surely be the searing pain of hot bullets puncturing his body, but it never came. He crouched low covering his head. From somewhere deep inside him he drummed up the courage to look behind him. All the SS men were sprawled over the ground, steam vapor emanating from the bullet holes in their crisp, black uniforms as the heat of their blood hit the cold winter’s air. Beyond them were the mud-stained, olive drab uniforms of American soldiers, their guns smoldering as a few of them continued firing sporadic bursts and single shots at SS men still alive or trying to escape. At that moment, Claude started to believe in God once again, a belief he had abandoned in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the Nazis brought with them into Hungary.
    At war’s end, he set up the street cart and reasoned that if he just made enough money to survive the winters, then he was living the life of a king. Accordingly, he only prepared so much meat every day and, when it was gone, he was off. He’d go home, simmer tomorrow’s pot, then read, walk, or watch the children play.
    So it was, that on this fine autumn day, the two businessmen were dabbing sauerkraut juice from their smiling mouths when he heard it. Although his mind didn’t recognize it at first, his body reacted. He slammed down the lids on his cart, dropped the serving fork, and started running, as fast as his old legs could carry him.
    â€œClaude! Where are you going? My friend wants more of your fine knockwurst! What is that noise?”
    Like a low hanging fog, rolling in from around the corner, a rumbling growl swept over the cobblestones. Then came a metallic clanking sound, then the barrel and finally the tracks of a Soviet TU-24 attack tank. Hundreds of Soviet infantry troops swarmed behind the tank. The two businessmen, who were only thirteen when the Germans left Budapest, started running as well.
    It was the beginning of the Communist siege of Hungary in 1956.
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    â€œTony, enough with the clanging, it’s no use. You’re just waking everybody up.”
    â€œThat cheap, tightwad, son-of-a-bitch of a landlord, I’ll clang him with a wrench!” Clank, clank, clank was the sound Tony’s crescent wrench made as he rapped the radiator in his fifth floor walk-up tenement apartment. “Send up more steam fer Christ sakes, ya bastard!” Tony, the burly truck driver, yelled at the pipes as if the landlord was nestled warm in his apartment on the first floor, with his ear frying on a steam pipe listening in delight to the freezing cold agony of his tenants on this bone-chilling winter night.
    â€œI’m going to check on Peter,” Anna Remo said as she went into the other room and found her little two-year-old son curled up and shivering in his brown snowsuit and mittens. She plucked the child from the crib and felt under the blanket for his bottle. It had been warm milk when she put him to bed, but it was now partially frozen. She brought the little boy into their bed and held him close to her body for warmth under the covers.
    Tony came back to bed swearing he was going to kill that wop of a landlord. Although he was Italian, Tony Remo selectively used the term whenever anybody, whose name ended in a vowel, acted like a criminal. As he lay there, a faint whistle