One. Three. Two. Double four.
All he had to do was get a squad together and follow that strange skinny boy to the shelter. A few shots, and the Bogeyman was dead. Eyes rolled back, mouth wide open, frizzy hair smeared with blood.
The Standartenführer put his gun back in its holster and looked at the boy, who stood beside him, unfazed by the slaughter.
“Chocolate is for children. You’re not a child.” He gestured, and one of the soldiers started pulling the boots off the corpse of the American with the rabbit teeth.
“You’re as strong as Siegfried and as cunning as . . .” The Standartenführer lifted his index finger to his chin, searching for inspiration. “. . . as an elf? No.” He shook his head, annoyed with himself. “No, not an elf. What do you call those . . . ?”
“Sir?”
The soldier handed him the boots. The Standartenführer tested the soles. They were soft and sturdy. He handed them to the boy.
A gift.
13 February 1944: the boy accepted it. It cost him no effort.
“These will be much more useful to you than a piece of chocolate, don’t you think, my little . . .” Inspiration came at last. The Standartenführer smiled, delighted with his own wit. “My little Kobold?”
That was it: Kobold.
Just like in the fairy tales, Marlene had said when Wegener (in love? Yes, in love) had told her the story. Kobold. Like the cruel creatures who lived in metal and in the ground. With blue eyes that turned the light into the essence of hatred and terror. Marlene knew about the Standartenführer, she knew about Kobold. But she did not know everything. She did not know about the Standartenführer’s gift.
The boots.
Boots so warm that Robert could barely hold back his tears.
“Who’s Siegfried?”
“Don’t you know?”
Robert shook his head.
The Standartenführer took him outside. Night had fallen by now, but the boy’s feet were warm. The officer took off the gold watch he wore on his wrist and showed him the engraving on the case: a knight holding a spear.
“This is Siegfried. A true Aryan. The greatest hero of them all. He climbed a mountain and killed a dragon.”
“There’s no such thing as dragons.”
The Standartenführer smiled. “Not anymore. But in the past? Who knows? The Bogeyman was real enough, you showed him to me. He ended up just like the dragon. And kobolds? I thought they were a legend, but now I’ve got one right in front of me.”
He touched the boy’s forehead with his index finger and smiled, then went back to barking orders at his men.
The nickname stuck.
“Informer Kobold” was what it said on the Standartenführer’s dispatches. Not “Robert Weg-e-ner,” just “Informer Kobold.” Robert Wegener could be tracked down and killed. But Kobold? It was impossible to kill a Kobold.
The boy had been a great discovery of the Standartenführer’s. Kobold had talent. He was clever. He knew the most hidden paths and mountain passes. He was a skinny boy with strange boots and nobody paid any attention to him. And so he would listen and take note. Who sold bread on the black market, who was trying to evade conscription, who was hiding weapons or tuning in to forbidden radio stations.
Shortly before Christmas 1944, Kobold changed sides. The Americans, the British and the partisans had broken through; and the Reich was on the verge of surrender.
In 1945, the war came to an end, but hunger didn’t. Kobold learned that, for those who are born barefoot, war never ends. So he carried on with his activities.
Men fleeing south and goods going north.
After a while, there were no more fleeing men, but there was still hunger. By now, Kobold had grown stronger. He was barefoot no longer, he carried a gun concealed in his jacket and could eat with no risk of running into debt, but he was under no illusions.
There was still a war on.
Over a new word now: respect.
Kobold wanted people to take off their hats to him as he walked past, the way they used to do with the Standartenführer. He wanted men like his father to whisper warnings to their children and cross the street. He hated these men. They weren’t heroes. They were wretched cowards. In a word: idiots.
Kobold realised he needed to enlist help, but knew that fully grown men would never agree to be ordered about by a teenager. So he roped in barefoot boys whose eyes were shiny with hunger. He taught them discipline, obedience and perseverance. Not violence, because these callow youths had learned that a long time ago.
It worked. It worked really well. The volume of business increased, and Kobold decided it was time to use more reliable methods of transport than strong backs or bicycles. He acquired a van, then a couple of lorries, which grew to five, six, ten. It was never enough.
Kobold wanted more.
He realised that if he wanted to expand his business, he would have to study, and he did. Mathematics, economics. But not only that. He discovered that he enjoyed reading. Especially history books and biographies of famous people. He found them enthralling.
He read a lot and learned a lot.
About the same year his future wife was born, 1952, Kobold, nineteen now and already with quite a reputation in some quarters, was approached by an accountant looking for easy money.
He didn’t beat about the bush. Now was a good time, he said. Italy needed to get back on its feet, and the State turned a blind eye to anyone who helped money circulate. But soon this fun would come to an end, and the State would revert to its old role as a damned watchdog.
And when that happened, the dog would bite him.
In order to avoid this, you had to learn to stroke it. That’s where he came in, he said. In exchange for a small slice of the proceeds, he would set up dummy companies (for which he would have to pay his taxes like an upright citizen, which amused Kobold greatly), put figureheads in charge of them and make sure the accounts were open and aboveboard.
Kobold approved of this plan.
His activities prospered.
When the wave of terrorism came, job offers increased to astonishing levels, but Kobold turned them all down. No TNT. No weapons. He had learned that the watchdog could be tamed in just about every way, except one.
Violence. The State was jealous of its own power.
It was alright to get rid of someone by tossing him into the Passer or the Adige. Fights were fine, so was knifing somebody in the dark. Even setting competitors’ warehouses on fire was tolerated, as was the occasional shoot-out – but terrorism? That was going too far.
Kobold also refused proposals to move men from one side of the border to the other. That was something he had not done for a long time, for decades, and he had never told anyone the real reason. Not even Marlene. Some secrets had to remain secret. For his good and for hers. It all went way back.
To September 1945.
The last fugitive Kobold had agreed to help was the Standartenführer. He had a long beard and was emaciated, unrecognisable without his uniform, a shadow of the man who had offered him Belgian chocolate. The best in the world.
“Kobold,” he’d said to him in a trembling voice, “you have to get me out of here.”
There was no need to ask him why. The newspapers were full of pictures of what the Jews, the Americans, the British and the Russians were doing to former S.S. officers.
Kobold had led him to the woods of the Ulten Valley, telling him they would meet up with “patriots” there who would get him out of Italy and then put him on a ship to Argentina, where he would be able to make a new life for himself, or else plot to revive the defunct Reich.
It was a lie.
Once they had reached the middle of the forest, Kobold had taken out his revolver, made the Standartenführer kneel amid the roots of a yew tree, pinned his father’s Iron Cross to his chest and shot him in the forehead.
He had turned the body over with his foot, slipped off the gold watch and put it on his own wrist. He had returned to Merano before dawn and, that same morning, had made his mother change his surname from Wegner to Wegener.
He still wore the gold watch.
It had never missed a second.