“May I ask, Sir, what my sentence is?” Eric had asked very carefully.
“You have been sentenced by the Municipal Magistrate to three months’ confinement at hard labor for unauthorized travel to Pecs,” the prison guard had said.
“Yes, Sir,” Fulmar said.
“Thank you. Sir.”
“Three months in the mines,” the Black Guard had said, in barely understandable German, “will be good for you. And maybe it will even teach you that you can’t slip things past the river patrol.”
There was a suggestion there that if he had offered the Black Guard on the boat a little money, he would not have been arrested at all.
There was a terrible temptation to press his luck, to offer them more money to let them go. But he realized in time that he was so overexcited by fear that he couldn’t trust his own judgment. He was deeply aware that a vein on his temple was pulsing in time with his heart. And his ears rang.
“I will remember that, Sir,” Fulmar said, managing a weak smile.
Smiling, the prison guard waved him out of the little office.
As quickly as the first scenario had come to him, others followed, and they were not nearly as pleasant. A hundred things could go wrong: Professor Dyer might paniG. He might decide to try to save his own skin by turning on Fulmar. And Gisella had not been arrested. So he might decide that turning himself and/or Fulmar in would somehow help her.
But above all, there was the alarm sounded for all of them by the Gestapo and the SS-SD. It was wishful thinking gone mad to hope that no connection would be made between the two men the entire German security services were looking for and the two “persons traveling to Pecs without authorization.”
But there had been nothing to do about that possibility but pray.
On his second day in the mines, Professor Dyer had crushed his fingers under the wheels of one of the coal cars. He had been taken from the mine, howling in pain. It had been easy then to imagine that the accident would attract the authorities to him, but that hadn’t happened, either.
Dyer’s hand had been treated and bandaged. And he now spent his days one-handedly sweeping out the cells in St. Gertrud’s and replacing the straw in the mattresses.
Every night, when he got back, Fulmar had to display a confidence that he did not feel at all. He had to reassure Dyer they had nothing to worry about, that all they had to do was avoid attracting attention to themselves, and they would be turned free.
And every morning, he gave the professor what he hoped was an encouraging wink as he filed out of the cell block to get on the truck.
The donkeys in their stalls stood waiting stoically to be led out and hitched to the coal cars. They didn’t seem to mind, obviously, doing what was expected of them. Being in the mines, for them, was the way things were.
The mine corridor where the donkeys had their stalls was several hundred feet long; the donkey stalls occupied the center portion. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of donkey manure. There was a sharp odor on top of that, ammonia like from donkey urine.
Three-quarters of the way down the line of stalls the donkey-shit car sat waiting for attention. As they approached it, Fulmar understood why he and another muscular young prisoner had been selected from the line of incoming miners. There was more than donkey shit to be loaded aboard the donkey-shit car today. There was a dead donkey.
“Tot [dead],”the foreman said, quite unnecessarily.
Then he showed them how one of the sides of the donkey-shit car could
be removed, and how, with the aid of a block and tackle, they were to load the carcass onto the car. The donkey’s eyes were open, a curious white. And he was already starting to decompose, and to smell. When they got the block and tackle in place and hauled him out of the stall onto the tracks, the movement caused the contents of his lower bowel, not ordinary donkey shit, but a foul smelling bluish semiliquid, to pass from his anus.