“I—I’m sorry,” Storch stammered.
“Tell me another one,” Halévy answered. If he’d plugged the German for holding out, Vaclav wouldn’t have said boo. But he only gestured with his rifle. “Get it in gear. If your little friends don’t shell us on the way back, you’re a POW.”
Vaclav slung the antitank rifle as they headed away from the front. That was easier than lugging it in his arms—not easy, but easier. The gun could do all kinds of things an ordinary rifle couldn’t, but it weighed a tonne.
A couple of poilus eyed the procession as they zigzagged along a communications trench. One of them called a question in French. Halévy answered in the same language. The poilu snorted. Halévy switched to German: “He asked where we got you, Storch. I said we won you in a poker game.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have got fifty pfennigs?” the Landser asked. He took Vaclav completely by surprise. The Czech broke up. Damned if a human being didn’t lurk under the beetling brow of the German Stahlhelm.
They eventually found a couple of military policemen who were happy enough to take charge of Wolfgang Storch. They’d be less happy when they found out Vaclav and Halévy had already picked the German clean, but that was their hard luck—and maybe Storch’s as well.
“Now—we just have to do that another million times, and we’ve won the fucking war,” the Jew said as he and Vaclav started up toward the front-line trenches again.
“Should be easy,” Jezek answered. He was damned if he’d let anybody outtry him.
Chapter 8
Airplane engines droned overhead. Chaim Weinberg looked up warily, ready to dive for cover if bombs started falling. The Condor Legion, the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo’s Spanish pilots had already given Madrid a big dose of what Paris was catching now, and what Hitler no doubt wanted to visit on London as well.
But these were Republican planes: obsolescent bombers the French could pass on for use on a less challenging front. Chaim recognized the Fascists’ Junkers and Capronis at a glance. The French planes were even uglier. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there you were.
The Spaniards on the streets knew the bombers belonged to the Republic, too. They waved and blew kisses up toward the sky, though the pilots were too high up to see them. “Kill the traitors!” someone called, and several people clapped their hands.
Mike Carroll’s smile had a sour twist. “Hell of a thing to say, isn’t it?” he remarked in English. “In a civil war, everybody’s a traitor to somebody.”
Chaim hadn’t thought of it like that. He nodded, but he said, “We aren’t traitors. We’re just lousy mercenaries—if you believe the Nationalists.”
Mike mimed scratching his head and his armpits and the seams of his trousers. “I’m not lousy right now. Don’t think I am, anyway.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Chaim said. Fighting in and around a big city had its advantages. When you weren’t actually up there trying to murder the other bastards and to keep them from murdering you, you could come back and clean up and get your clothes baked and sprayed so you wouldn’t be verminous … for a while.
Bomb blasts thudded off to the northwest. Chaim and the Madrileños on the street grinned at one another. Knowing the other guys were catching it for a change felt mighty good. Do unto others as they’ve been doing unto you, only more so. That might not make it into the Bible any time soon, but it was the Golden Rule of war.
“I’m gonna buy me a beer and celebrate,” Mike declared, as if he thought Chaim would try to stop him.
If he did, he was out of his tree. “Sounds good,” Chaim said. They didn’t have to go more than half a block before they found a bar. About one business in three in Madrid seemed to sell something to help people forget their troubles. Well, people around here had a lot of troubles that needed forgetting.
No one in the dark little dive even blinked when two foreigners in ragged uniforms with rifles on their backs walked in. The skinny little guy behind the bar looked like a wall lizard with a Salvador Dali mustache. He raised one eyebrow a couple of millimeters by way of inquiring what the new patrons wanted.
“Cerveza,” Carroll said, doing his damnedest to give it a proper Castilian lisp: ther-VAY-tha.
“Dos,” Chaim added. His Spanish was bad, but not so bad that he couldn’t get himself a beer with it.
Then the bartender said, “Okay, boys,” in clear, American-accented English. As he poured, he went on, “I worked in Chicago for five years. I came back when the war started.”
Chaim set coins on the bar. Mike nodded thanks. Chaim bought more often than not. The last thing he wanted was a reputation for being a cheap Jew. When the bartender started to make change, Chaim waved for him not to bother. Earlier in the war, the fellow probably would have given him his money, and a lecture to go with it. Tipping was seen as a leftover of class differences, and beneath a proper proletarian’s dignity. That stern puritanism—always stronger in Barcelona than Madrid—had eased off now. The bartender nodded his thanks. He gave them the beers.
The glasses were none too clean. That would have bothered Chaim back in New York City. Not any more. Considering what all he’d eaten and drunk in the field, this was the least of his worries. He did note they were etched with the name of a German lager. That wasn’t what they held now: nobody wanted to buy, or could buy, Fascist beer inside Republican territory. Fascists or not, the Germans brewed better than locals dreamt of doing. This tasted like horse piss.
But it was beer. Chaim raised his eye to the barman. “¡Salud!”
“Mud in your eye,” the Spaniard said gravely. “If I didn’t have to eat, I’d give ’em to you on the house. You’re doing my job for me now.”
Something in the way he said the last word made Chaim look at him in a different way. “Spent some time at the front, did you?”
“Uh-huh. I’d still be there, only I’m standing on a peg.” The bartender shrugged microscopically. “I should count my blessings. I’m still here. Plenty of guys who caught ones that didn’t look so bad, they’re pushing daisies now.”
Mike Carroll put down a couple of pesetas. “Buy yourself one, buddy.”
“Thanks.” The bartender could smile, most cynically. “I’d be on my ass if I poured down all the ones people buy me. I will this time, though.” He poured his own beer. “¡Viva la República!”
“¡Viva!” Chaim and Carroll echoed. Chaim drained his glass. He dug in his pocket for more coins. “Let me have another one.”
“Me, too,” Mike said. He grabbed Chaim’s money before the bartender could and gave it back to him. “I’ll buy this time.”
“Thanks.” Chaim nodded. Fair was fair.
Along with the beers, the barman set out olives and crackers and pork sausage the color of a new copper penny. Chaim eyed the sausage warily. He liked the stuff: what wasn’t pork was garlic and peppers. But it didn’t like him. Every time he ate it, it gave him the runs. He stuck to the crackers and olives.
Mike started in on the sausage as if he thought they’d outlaw it tomorrow. Maybe his guts were made of stronger stuff than Chaim’s. Or maybe he’d spend the next week being sorry. You never could tell.
Two more men walked into the bar. It got quieter than it had when the Americans came in. That made Chaim look around. They weren’t Spaniards or even fellow Internationals—they were a pair of genuine Soviet officers, squat and hard-faced. You didn’t see them very often any more. The Russian mission in the Republic was smaller than it had been before the bigger European war broke out. Some of the men had gone home to the motherland, while hardly anyone came out to replace them. Maybe getting from Russia to Spain was harder than getting back to Russia from Spain. Or, more likely, the Soviet government just had things to worry about in its own back yard.
These fellows might have been movie actors overplaying their roles. They stomped up to the bar, barely favoring Chaim and Mike with a glance. “You give us whiskey,” one of them told the bartender, as if ordering him
to assault Nationalist trenches.
“And something to eat,” the other one added. Spanish with a Russian accent sounded as weird as German with a Spanish accent, which Chaim had also heard.
He eyed the Soviets. One was an obvious Russian. The other … Chaim would have bet they had more than accented Spanish in common. “Nu, friend, you understand me when I talk like this?” he asked in Yiddish.
“Nu, why shouldn’t I?” the Soviet said. Like a lot of Jews Chaim knew, he looked clever—maybe too clever for his own good. “Where are you from?”
“New York. You?”
“Minsk.”
“One of my grandmothers came from there. Maybe we’re cousins.”
“Maybe.” The Soviet officer didn’t seem impressed. Blood might be thicker than water, but ideology was thicker than blood. Jew or not, the officer knew what mattered to him: “How long have you been here? Where have you fought?”
Mike Carroll, the barman, and the Russian were all watching the two Yehudim. Chances were none of them could follow the Yiddish. Hell, they were liable to think it was German. Well, too goddamn bad if they did. “Almost two years,” Chaim said, not without pride. “I’ve been on the Ebro front, and lately down here.” He looked a challenge to the Soviet officer. “How about you?”
“Since 1936,” the other Jew answered. That trumped Chaim’s claim. It also meant the fellow had been here through the purges back home. Maybe that had saved him. Then again, who could say? Some of the Russians had gone back to almost certain arrest—but they’d gone. Soviet discipline, in its own way, was as formidable as the Prussian variety. The Jew went on, “I have fought here, and in the south, and on the Ebro, and now here again.”
“And what do you think of it all?” Chaim asked.
“We are still fighting,” the other man replied. He raised his glass. “Let us keep fighting!” He said it in Yiddish, and then in his strange Spanish. Everybody drank.
ONE OF THE SS MEN who’d come to grab Wolfgang Storch had taken an ugly leg wound. He was in a military hospital somewhere well behind the line. When he got out, he’d be able to wear a wound badge that would make him the envy of his deskbound friends. Willi Dernen wondered how much he’d care. Sometimes you paid more for things than they were really worth.
The one who was left was named Waldemar Zober. He thought Willi had something to do with Wolfgang’s disappearance. He thought so, yes, but he couldn’t prove a goddamn thing as long as Willi played dumb.
And Willi did. His old man had called him a goddamn dummy plenty of times. Back in the day, that had pissed Willi off. Now, for the first time, in came in handy. “No, I don’t know what happened to him,” he told Zober. “For all I know, he took a direct hit, and there wasn’t enough of him left to bury. The Frenchies got kind of busy that day, you know.”
Zober had the grace to look away. He knew how busy the French had been, all right. But he still suspected Willi. “You went running off to the trenches. Storch was already up there.” It made perfect sense to the SS man. Well it might have, too. He only had to connect the dots.
But he didn’t know for sure he had connected them. Willi had no intention of telling him. “I ran to the trenches to shoot at the enemy in case he followed up the shelling with an attack. That’s what I get paid for, you know—and I don’t get paid real well, either.”
Waldemar Zober not only had rank—he had those SS runes on his collar tab. They made him Heinrich Himmler’s fair-haired boy. They also meant he got more money than a Wehrmacht soldier of equivalent rank would have. And, most of the time, he never came unpleasantly close to shells or bullets. Life wasn’t fair—not even close.
His lips were uncommonly red. He pushed out the lower one now, like a four-year-old about to throw a tantrum. You could spank a spoiled little brat. Nobody could wallop an SS man, no matter how much he deserved it.
“Interfering with an SS investigation is a crime with severe punishment attached,” he growled.
“Der Herr Jesus!” Willi burst out. “I’ve been at the front ever since the fight in the West started. The Frenchies could blow my foot off any old time, same as they did with your buddy. They could blow my balls off, for Christ’s sake! And you’re going on about severe punishment? Give it a rest, why don’t you?”
Zober’s eyes might have been cut from blue and white glass, like the ones on an expensive mannequin. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and absolute assurance filled his voice. “You don’t have the faintest idea. A week in our hands, and you’d beg to fight at the front, even in a punishment company.”
Willi licked his lips. He knew about those. Officers and men who’d disgraced themselves by running away or otherwise fucking up got handed rifles and thrown in where the fighting was hottest. If they tried to run again, they got shot from behind. If they lived, they redeemed themselves … or maybe they just won the chance to put out another fire by smothering it with their bodies.
You’re a tough guy when you’re working over poor bastards who can’t hit back, Willi thought. How long would you last up here, though? Not long, I bet. If the bad guys didn’t get you, somebody on your own side would arrange an “accident.” No one talked about that kind of thing, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen every once in a while.
You couldn’t show thoughts like that, not unless you wanted to find out what camps were like from the inside out. Even if his father had called him a dummy, Willi wasn’t that stupid. Wearily, he said, “Look, give it a rest, why don’t you? I don’t know what happened to Wolfgang, and I wish I did. We were friends. I miss him.”
By the glint in Zober’s glassy orbs, that was almost a ticket to Dachau all by itself. “He was a criminal. He was an enemy of the Reich, and of the Führer.”
“He fucking shot enemies of the Reich,” Willi answered. “He was a damn good soldier, and one of the best scroungers I’ve ever known. I’m still here answering your questions on account of him. The only good thing I can say about what happened to him is, he never knew what got him. I should be so lucky.”
“If he did not desert to the enemy,” Zober said implacably.
Willi stood up. “I know you’re in the SS, sir. But if you say that to the soldiers who know Wolfgang, somebody’s gonna punch you in the snoot.” He walked out without waiting for leave from the blackshirt.
The funny thing was, he was dead right. Yes, Wolfgang had deserted. As far as Willi knew, though, he was the only guy on this side of the line who knew it. Anybody who didn’t know wouldn’t believe it. And anybody who heard it from a prick like Waldemar Zober would want to flatten his nose for him.
Only one thing was wrong with walking out on Zober: it didn’t get Willi away from his problem. Arno Baatz was also convinced he had something to do with Wolfgang’s going missing. Willi couldn’t make Awful Arno feel inferior for not being a Landser. Baatz was one—maybe not a good soldier, but a soldier even so.
“You two clowns were asshole buddies,” the corporal said. “Don’t waste my time telling me you weren’t, ’cause I know better. When the SS men told you they were looking for him, what would you do but squeal like a little pink piggy?”
“I didn’t do anything like that, goddammit.” Willi had told the same lie so many times by now, he was starting to believe it himself. He could feel himself getting angry, which was pretty funny when you thought about it. The anger might be ersatz, but it felt the same as the real thing. “All I did was go to the front line when the shelling started.” He looked Awful Arno up and down. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Well, I was,” Baatz said, which might have been true and might have been as big a whopper as any of the ones Willi had come out with. The noncom went on, “And sooner or later you’ll tell me one I believe.”
“Let’s go talk to Captain Lammers,” Willi said. “Either he’ll jug me or he’ll tell you to leave me the fuck alone. Either way, I’ll be better off than I am listening to your bullshit all the time.”
&nbs
p; Baatz blinked. His eyes were dark, and reminded Willi of a mean dog’s. Sometimes you could make a mean dog turn tail if you yelled at it and moved towards it instead of running. Sometimes you’d get bitten, though. Willi waited to see what would happen here. “You … want to talk to the captain?” Awful Arno said slowly.
“Bet your ass I do. If it’d get you and that blackshirt out of my hair, I’d talk to the general commanding the division.” Willi wondered if he really meant that. Officers with fancy shoulder straps needed to listen to privates’ troubles the way they needed getting their headquarters bombed.
But Arno Baatz was also imagining coming face-to-face with a general. By the look plastered across his ugly mug, he wasn’t liking it much. He tried to hide that by jeering: “You think the division CO has time for piss-ants like you? Don’t make me laugh!”
“The captain will,” Willi said. “Let’s go find him.”
And Captain Lammers would. Awful Arno knew that as well as Willi did. He said something about Willi’s mother. Had Willi popped him, they would have visited the captain on the corporal’s terms. Willi just stood there. Baatz glowered as fearsomely as he knew how. Willi didn’t blink “I’ve got my eye on you, Dernen,” Awful Arno snarled, and he stomped away.
Five minutes later, Willi heard him screaming at some other private for having a dirty rifle. Willi smiled. If you beat up a little kid, he’d turn around and pound on some kid who was smaller yet to make himself feel better. Arno Baatz worked the same way.
Waldemar Zober summoned him one more time. “You’d better watch yourself, Dernen,” the blackshirt said. If he’d worn a mustache, he would have twirled it like a villain in an old-time melodrama. “We’ve got our eye on you.”
“Yes, sir,” Willi said, in lieu of We? You and your tapeworm? But right after that, Zober went off to inflict himself on some other Wehrmacht men who were just doing their damnedest to win the war for their country.
The War That Came Early: West and East Page 14