Читать книгу Hoodwinked - the spy who didn't die - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 19

NATURALLY, I AM THE PERFECT PARTISAN for the job. I speak German very well, I’m tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed—Hitler’s perfect Aryan!

Not being the perfect person for the job if dead or wounded, I have been quarantined away from battle in recent weeks, during which they’ve “requisitioned” an almost perfect German officer’s uniform. Only lacking in complete perfection by a fair-sized bullet hole and a neat little patch of blood where someone’s chest used to be. One of the older women fixes that little problem so well with a needle and thread you’d be hard pressed to spot the defect with a microscope.

I’m not sure if they measured Fritz before they shot him, but the uniform fits me very well, although the officer’s cap is a couple of sizes too large, remedied with a bit of wool stuffing under the lining.

A motorcycle arrives on the instalment plan, one piece at a time. Wrecked vehicles of every kind litter the roadsides, so gradually, a steering wheel here, a tire there, a few sparkplugs; my comrades acquire sufficient operational parts to cobble together a motorcycle with a sidecar that runs amazingly well. Rather reluctantly, it seems to me, they remove the sidecar so that I can take a few practice runs along forest trails and into vacant clearings until, as you would say in the West, I get the hang of it.

As I tell you all of this, you may think I am being rather flippant, but to tell you the truth, I was very frightened. Scared out of my wits! My Waffen SS officer’s uniform includes a loaded Luger pistol that I try to convince myself is an appropriate substitute for a thorn of stone, but the thought of going back into the heart of the horror from which I have so recently escaped is terrifying.

Nightmares of buried children and mangled corpses fill my nights. I find that resorting to prayer again helps to calm me. God, I desperately want to believe, is still watching over me. What I seek most is courage.