Richard Le Normand

Once Upon a Bridge Richard Le Normand

Would it ever occur to you that the person sitting next to you on the ten-thirty train from Brisbane to the Gold Coast could be a cold-blooded killer? No? Well think again. The cheerful-looking ageing gentleman in the seat next to you may be just that... I smiled when I looked around the carriage at the four badly behaved teenage boys and wondered, if given the same circumstances, they would have over a period of three years, quietly and efficiently slit the throats of eight men. Could they grip and hold back a man's head while sliding a knife across his throat, listen to the gasp and then watch him die. Could anything arouse in them the cold and deadly anger that had given me the power to kill? I pondered over the many horrific incidents in Northern France during those last two years of Word War Two when so many lives, both German and Resistance fighters, were lost. I remembered the Death Run we organised after the war, when we promised the German concentration camp prison guards a safe trip to South America, only to lock them in the cabin of our cruiser, where we gassed them to death, after which we recovered all their stolen gold, mostly teeth! That gold later helped many war refugees. I realized it was time to tell my story, the exploitation of sex coupled with violent death. It was sixty years since it all began; now it was time to relive the experience that I had so successfully put out of my mind for so long. Little did I know that I was about to be called upon to help my old Portuguese friend, to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren from the clutches of my Nazi arch-enemies from South America.