They grinned at her, still hauling her through the crowd. They were much drunker now, and they had lost their Gretchen somewhere along the way. "Come on, sweetheart," one of the hussars panted. "We'll give you a much better time than he could!"
"Let me go!"
"Not until you've seen what a real man looks like!" the pirate leered.
"Susan!" Stefan shouted somewhere behind them. "Where are you?"
As she opened her mouth to call back, the other hussar grabbed her by the shoulders and sank his mouth on hers, spearing his tongue wetly in between her lips. Half crying, she struggled to break free, nauseated by the beery stench of his breath. But before she could yell for Stefan again, they whisked her around a corner and laughing, drunkenly dashed down a narrow alley running along one side of the Town Hall, carrying her screaming and protesting with them.
They clattered along the wet cobbles, ducked around a corner at the far end – and stopped dead. There were three youths in jeans and black leather jackets standing in the narrow, ill-lit street beyond the alley spaced out across the roadway, blocking their passage.
"Come on, fellows!" the first hussar said. "Make way, will you?"
"I don't think the lady's too keen to go with you," the youth in the middle said. There was an unlit cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth.
"Look, get out of our way," the pirate said truculently. "We're in a hurry!"
"If you don't want to get hurt, that is," the second hussar added.
"I think the lady wants to go the other way."
"She's coming with us," the pirate shouted. "Get out of the way!"
"She stays here," the boy with the cigarette said. "You can go on or go back, whichever you like. But she stays here. She's a student, and we're here to see no student gets hurt."
"For Christ's sake, who do you think you are? We saw the bitch first."
"Let's push them out of the way, Franz!"
"Give it to the bastards!"
The three youths barring the road stared at them and said nothing.
Susan stared from one group to the other, her heart thumping. She was still powerless to escape, her arms tightly held by the two hussars, and she was frightened. In the distance, she could hear Stefan shouting for her at the far end of the alley.
Abruptly the pirate lost his temper. Uttering a string of curses, he sprang at the boy with the cigarette and aimed a vicious right at his jaw.
The boy swayed back slightly on his heels so that the blow caught him on the collarbone, knocking him slightly off balance. Before he had regained his equilibrium, his two companions leaped at the aggressor. The boy on the left, a sulky youth with dark curling hair, crashed the sole of his boot sickeningly into the pirate's groin as the other punched him savagely on the side of the head. The pirate grunted and doubled up – to meet the bulky youth's knee, which jerked up sharply to smash with stunning force against the bridge of his nose. The pirate groaned and dropped to the cobbles with blood streaming from under his black mask.
Meanwhile the two hussars had released their grasp of the terrified girl to launch themselves at the boy with the cigarette. He braced himself and jolted his forearm stiffly against the Adam's apple of the first, then whirled to trade a fierce flurry of blows with the second.
As the first hussar staggered back, the bulky youth locked an arm around his neck, turning sideways to bend the struggling reveler backwards over his hip in a judo lock. At the same time the third youth – a handsome boy with dark hair – slammed three murderous right-handers low into the pit of his stomach. Released suddenly from the neck lock, the hussar reeled to the wall groaning, fell to his knees, and vomited noisily into the gutter.
All three of the strangers now fell on the remaining hussar. They battered him about the head and shoulders, kneed him in the groin, and finally beat him to the ground, where he lay face downwards in the mud, covering his head with his arms and moaning faintly. The boy with the cigarette drew back his foot, but the dark youth laid a hand on his arm and shook his head.
"That's enough, Heinz," he said quietly.
"Perhaps you're right," the other said. Producing a lighter, he held the flame to his cigarette, which had remained in his mouth throughout the encounter, and squinted over it at Susan as he dragged smoke into his lungs. "I think that's your friend coming now, isn't it?" he said to the frightened girl, jerking his head towards the alley as he exhaled through his nostrils.
She swung around. Stefan had just turned the corner and was running towards them.
"Y-y-you mean I can go? I'm free?" she stammered.
"Free? But of course!" the youth looked pained. "We don't like to see drunken hooligans running off with young girls, that's all." He looked contemptuously at the three groaning figures on the ground and added: "I don't think they'll trouble you again."
Stefan arrived breathless. "Thanks, that was real nice of you," he panted, linking his arm with Susan's and squeezing her hand.
The dark boy grinned. "Be our guest!" he said in English.
The three of them were still standing in the middle of the narrower street, watching, as the couple turned the corner and hurried back up the alleyway towards the square.
Stefan's "little place around the corner" turned out to be a pint-sized bar in a back street crammed with an older generation of villagers. The conversation was lively but low pitched, and there was little evidence here of the manic gaiety seizing the costumed crowds outside – though Gretchen, drunker than ever, was draped over one end of the counter with her arms twined round the neck of a red-faced farmer. In a corner, a group of Bavarians in narrow-brimmed, decorated tweed hats jested over their beer with much subdued laughter.
They found a place in an alcove at the far end of the beamed, low-ceilinged room, and the blond boy elbowed his way to the bar to return with two small glasses of clear, bright red liquid. Susan sniffed at it experimentally. "What is it?" she asked. "What I wanted you to try. This place is run by Bavarians. The owner comes from Obergunzburg, near Munich. It's a specialty of his part of the country. Try it."
She sipped cautiously, swallowed, and then smiled. "Why it's quite nice! Sweet, and sticky, and… and, yes, it's like that stuff they give babies!"
He nodded. "Rose Hip Syrup, yes. Hardly surprising, because that's what they distill it from! Every rose grower and Gasthof in the hills down there has a still in the backyard."
Susan took a larger swallow. "I like it," she said. "Is it… alcoholic?"
"Just a little," Stefan said.
They had a second, and then a third. Susan never knew whether it was the apparently innocuous drink itself, or the weakening effect on her mind of the shocking things she had witnessed, or the delayed action of cold and hunger or perhaps even a combination of all three but somewhere between the second and third, the evening shattered as it were into pieces… and she was never able to reassemble them again into a coherent whole!
The full effect of the deceptive liquor didn't hit her until they were out in the street again. Before that there was a period in which Stefan, his blue eyes blazing with earnestness, leaned confidentially across the table and told her how beautiful she was, how grown up for her age, how much he had been longing to see her. People were singing in the bar too, but that was at a different time. She remembered lying on the floor – had she fallen over? – looking up past a forest of legs to see the face of Gretchen bending down towards her, screaming with drunken laughter. An old woman in the powder room handed her a face cloth soaked in cold water to put on her forehead and then giggled as though she would never stop, but the giggle sounded exactly like Susan's own. Then there were voices, growing louder and louder, crashing in on her like waves as the Town Hall spun off to her left and the street lamps spiraled away and up behind her. But no… that must have been after they left the bar.