I felt fear crawl across my skin as I walked quickly in the direction of the sound. A high bank of rubble was piled against the building's curved wall and, having climbed to the top of it, I stared through an empty arched window into a semi-circular room that was of the proportions of a small-sized theatre.
There were three of them struggling in a little spot of moonlight against a straight wall that faced the windows. Two were Russian soldiers, filthy and ragged and laughing uproariously as they attempted forcibly to strip the clothes from the third figure, which was a woman. I knew it was Veronika even before she lifted her face to the light. She screamed and was slapped hard by the Russian who held her arms and the two flap sides of her dress that his comrade, kneeling on her toes, had torn open.
'Pakazhitye, dushka (show me, darling),' he guffawed, wrenching Veronika's underwear down over her knocking knees. He sat back on his haunches to admire her nakedness. 'Pryekrasnaya (beautiful),' he said, as if he had been looking at a painting, and then pushed his face into her pubic hair. 'Vkoosnaya, tozhe (tasty, too),' he growled.
The Russian looked round from between her legs as he heard my footfall on the debris that littered the floor, and seeing the length of lead pipe in my hand he stood up beside his friend, who now pushed Veronika aside.
'Get out of here, Veronika,' I shouted.
Needing little encouragement, she grabbed her coat and ran towards one of the windows. But the Russian who had licked her seemed to have other ideas, and snatched at her mane of hair. In the same moment I swung the pipe, which hit the side of his lousy-looking head with an audible clang, numbing my hand with the vibration from the blow. The thought was just crossing my mind that I had hit him much too hard when I felt a sharp kick in the ribs, and then a knee thudded into my groin. The pipe fell on to the brick-strewn floor and there was a taste of blood in my mouth as I slowly followed it. I drew my legs up to my chest and tensed myself as I waited for the man's great boot to smash into my body again and finish me. Instead I heard a short, mechanical punch of a sound, like the sound of a rivet-gun, and when the boot swung again it was well over my head.
With one leg still in the air, the man staggered for a second like a drunken ballet-dancer and then fell dead beside me, his forehead neatly trepanned with a well-aimed bullet. I groaned and for a moment shut my eyes. When I opened them again and raised myself on to my forearm, there was a third man squatting in front of me, and for a chilling moment he pointed the silenced barrel of his Luger at the centre of my face.
'Fuck you, kraut,' he said, and then, grinning broadly, helped me to my feet. 'I was going to belt you myself, but it looks like those two Ivans have saved me the trouble.'
'Belinsky,' I wheezed, holding my ribs. 'What are you, my guardian angel?'
'Yeah. It's a wonderful life. You all right, kraut?
'Maybe my chest would feel better if I quit smoking. Yes, I'm all right. Where the hell did you come from?'
'You didn't see me? Great. After what you said about tailing someone I read a book about it. I disguised myself as a Nazi so as you wouldn't notice me.'
I looked around. 'Did you see where Veronika went?'
'You mean you know that lady?' He meandered over to the soldier I had felled with the pipe, and who lay senseless on the floor. 'I thought you were just the Don Quixote type.'
'I only met her last night.'
'Before you met me, I guess. Belinsky stared down at the soldier for a moment, then levelled the Luger at the back of the man's head and pulled the trigger.
'She's outside,' he said with no more emotion than if he had shot at a beer-bottle.
'Shit,' I breathed, appalled at this display of callousness. 'They could certainly have used you in an Action Group.'
'What?'
'I said I hope I didn't make you miss your tram last night. Did you have to kill him?'
He shrugged and started to unscrew the Luger's silencer. 'Two dead is better than one left alive to testify in court. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.' He kicked the man's head with the toe of his shoe. 'Anyway, these Ivans won't be missed. They're deserters.'
'How do you know?'
Belinsky pointed out two bundles of clothes and equipment that lay near the doorway, and next to them the remains of a fire and a meal.
'It looks like they've been hiding here for a couple of days. I guess they got bored and fancied some ' he searched for the right word in German and then, shaking his head, completed the sentence in English '- cunt.' He bolstered the Luger and dropped the silencer into his coat pocket. 'If they're found before the rats eat them up, the local boys will just figure that the MVD did it. But my bet is on the rats. Vienna's got the biggest rats you ever saw. They come straight up out of the sewers. Come to think of it, from the smell of these two, I'd say they'd been down there themselves. The main sewer comes out in the Stadt Park, just by the Soviet Kommendatura and the Russian sector.' He started towards the window, 'Come on, kraut, let's find this girl of yours.'
Veronika was standing a short way back down WShringer Strasse and looked ready to make a run for it if it had been the two Russians who came out of the building. 'When I saw your friend go in,' she explained, 'I waited to see what would happen.' She had buttoned her coat to the neck, and, but for a slight bruise on her cheek and the tears in her eyes, I wouldn't have said she looked like a girl who had narrowly missed being raped. She glanced nervously back at the building with a question in her eyes.
'It's all right,' said Belinsky. 'They won't bother us no more.' When Veronika had finished thanking me for saving her, and Belinsky for saving me, he and I walked her home to the half-ruin in Rotenturmstrasse where she had her room.
There she thanked us some more and invited us both to come up, an offer which we declined, and only after I had promised to visit her in the morning could she be persuaded to close the door and go to bed.
'From the look of you I'd say that you could use a drink,' Belinsky said. 'Let me buy you one. The Renaissance Bar is just around the corner. It's quiet there, and we can talk.'
Close by St Stephen's Cathedral, which was now being restored, the Renaissance in Singerstrasse was an imitation Hungarian tavern with gypsy music. The kind of place you see depicted on a jigsaw-puzzle, it was no doubt popular with the tourists, but just a concertina-squeeze too premeditated for my simple, gloomy taste. There was one significant compensation, as Belinsky explained. They served Csereszne, a clear Hungarian spirit made from cherries. And for one who had recently been subjected to a kicking, it tasted even better than Belinsky had promised.
'That's a nice girl,' he said, 'but she ought to be a bit more careful in Vienna. So should you for that matter. If you're going to go around playing Errol-fucking-Flynn you should have more than just a bit of hair under your arm.'
'I guess you're right.' I sipped at my second glass. 'But it seems strange you telling me that, you being a bull and all. Carrying a gun's not strictly legal for anyone but Allied personnel.'
'Who said I was a bull?' He shook his head. 'I'm CIC. The Counter-intelligence Corps. The MPs don't know shit about what we get up to.'
'You're a spy?'
'No, we're more like Uncle Sam's hotel detectives. We don't run spies, we catch them. Spies and war-criminals.' He poured some more of the Csereszne.
'So why are you following me?'
'It's hard to say, really.'
'I'm sure I could find you a German dictionary.'
Belinsky withdrew a ready-filled pipe from his pocket and while he explained what he meant he suck-started the thing into yielding a steady smoke.