The salon was in absolute chaos.
A drunken crowd made up of officers, stewards and prisoners had gathered outside the brothel’s entrance. Stahl, being the most senior officer present, took it upon himself to push his way through the swaying throng and into the room beyond.
Naked bodies screamed and shouted; their volume unbearable in the confines of the mirrored room. The walls multiplied the screaming faces ten-fold and for a moment Stahl was disorientated as he saw his own reflections in the wall. The reflections showed a man disgusted, not only with the scene in front of him, but also with himself. He approached the epicentre of all this turmoil, his boots crunching the remains of a smashed schnapps bottle along the way. As Stahl closed in, he ominously saw great streaks of blood on the walls and ceiling. Against the far wall, three officers struggled with a screeching shape. It was Ruby, the girl that only moments before had been shown off so proudly by Huber at the bar.
The girl gritted her teeth and shouted. ‘I hope you fucking die, you dirty bastard! I told him if he touched me again I’d kill him!’
Stahl turned and looked at a circular bed in the middle of the room. Its sheets were saturated by a sea of blood and amongst this gore lay Huber’s body. His throat had been slashed wide open, the broken neck of a bottle still imbedded in the wound. It was obvious he was dead, but such was the power of Huber’s sex-drive that his penis still stood erect, oblivious to the rest of the body’s demise.
Doctor Blomberg then appeared and pushed his way into the room; his multiple reflections joining the other shocked faces. He lifted Huber’s limp arm up and felt for a pulse.
‘Are you going to confirm what we all know, Blomberg,’ Stahl simply said.
He slowly nodded and forlornly dropped the dead arm back onto the blood-spattered body. He then yanked the shard of glass from the ugly wound and pulled a clean blanket from an adorning bed to carefully drape over the corpse, giving Huber some dignity, at last.
Upon the conformation of Huber’s demise, his murderer triumphantly laughed.
Stahl’s blood boiled at the sound. He balled his fists, his knuckles cracking as they turned white under the pressure. Then, quick as a flash, he swung his fist and hit the cackling prisoner full force in the face. She groaned pitifully as she slumped to the floor, helpless and now at the mercy of Stahl. Raising his jackboot, Stahl was poised above the girl’s head, ready to crack her skull wide open. Nothing could stop him. But at that split second, Stahl caught sight of Elsa reflected in the mirrored wall, and at that moment, his desire to be with her took hold of him again and it stayed the fatal stamp. He slowly lowered his jackboot to the floor and turned to the officers.
‘Take that bitch away before I change my mind,’ he said.
Guards from the camp rushed into the salon now. They ushered the shocked partygoers away and pushed the female inmates back into their cells. As the crewmen left it appeared that the death had suddenly focussed their minds on the mission ahead and the risks that were involved. Doubts, even thoughts of backing out, crossed the minds of many. It would have been understandable if you sat down and analysed all the problems that could, and would, arise during their journey and after they arrived at their far off destination. A single short-circuit or an incorrect computer code could cause the life support systems to fail; a single loose nut could compromise the fusion reactors or rattle its way through the massive engines, tearing open fuel-lines, exhausts and coolant pipes. But the more rational officers, in fact, the majority of the men selected for the mission, knew that their own bodies were as vulnerable as the great ship. A single faulty cell could trigger cancer or even a lone microbe could spread and infect their biological vessels. However, the shock of seeing one of their own been killed so swiftly by a prisoner as he lay helpless made them all feel even more fragile. Therefore, the Nazis shuffled out the salon and left the female inmates to return to the refuge of their cells. The barred environment felt strangely safe and familiar following the night’s bloody events, and naturally, Elsa followed her sisters.
Elsa had little sympathy for the victim or his, now, nervous comrades. She feared for herself and her sisters. Would a drunken colleague of the man return and take his revenge on them all? Perhaps the SS officer who had so wantonly pursued her and who had the chance to kill Ruby then and there would be the one who would have vengeance upon them. If that was the case would she too, like Ruby, protect herself. The thoughts filled Elsa’s mind to such an extent that she failed to foresee what happened next. Before she could make it back through the threshold of the satin curtains, Stahl appeared before her, his body barring her path to the cell-block. Her visions of him exploding violently flashed before her eyes. But instead, he slipped his fingers into her waist-band and once again reeled her in, her skin bristling as she felt the lust radiate from his body.
‘You didn’t really think that I’d forgotten about you.’ Stahl said quietly. ‘I have unfinished business with you, Elsa.’
He pushed her out of the fraüenblock in the direction of his own room. But as they passed the brothel, Elsa caught sight of Doctor Huber’s dead body. It still lay on the bed with the blood-soaked shroud and a host of multiple reflections as its only companions. At the sight of this macabre scene, Elsa imagined that body was not that of the unfortunate Huber, but that of Stahl.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the darkness Konrad stared at his crude etching of the nightmarish spire. During the hours that had passed after his work in the shuttle and while the barrack life of washing, eating and sleeping had continued around him, his thoughts had been dominated by that Nazi voice that had so gripped him in the shuttle’s hold. What was the connection between that brutish SS officer he encountered and his own dream? Why did the tower’s god-like tone match the Nazi’s? Was it simply coincidence? Or, as Konrad feared, was it something else; something more deliberate, more prophetic. Before this latest turn of events, his normally sceptical nature would have dismissed the dream as an unusual story if someone like Gigolo had confessed it to him. His scepticism would have grown even more once he learnt about voices and Nazis, but scepticism was far from Konrad’s mind now. Once again the feeling of being under the control of someone else, a force that he couldn’t control or alter held sway over him. The last time such feelings gripped Konrad was after his arrest. Then, the forces that assailed him were obvious, but no less brutal. However, his sense of helplessness was now even more frightening because whoever, or to be more accurate, whatever stood behind the events, they remained hidden.
But thoughts of the dream also brought back memories of the woman. Her features remained dim, but he knew that she wasn’t a representation of the colonist he has seen in the shuttle’s hold. There was gentleness to the dream figure’s face and demeanour when compared to the harsh, even arrogant, presence which shone from the German colonist. Even in her state of hibernation, the colonist, just like Stahl, looked down upon Konrad. He concentrated as he tried to remove the clouds that obscured his memories, but again the female colonist remained foremost in his mind’s eye, however, there was something different about this vision. The naked colonist still floated in the amniotic fluid, but now, the austere face had changed. It had been replaced by the face of the girl from the alpine meadow.
Unfortunately for Konrad the image was swept away from him as absolute chaos erupted all around him.
Led by the Kapos, the guards poured into the dormitory and dragged the bewildered prisoners from their bunks. As this force of nature made its way between the bunks, Stahl and the other Nazis waited at the open doorway with an apparent air of disinterest, but Stahl, unlike his colleague, watched the operation with a keen eye. Despite not displaying it or making it obvious, the SS officer took sweet sadistic pleasure in the overt hostility on display before him. His heart skipped with each swing of a Kapo’s truncheon and with every kick and punch. This in-bred attraction to violence was engrained deep within his soul.