She looked through him. “And why not?”
“It didn’t seem necessary,” he answered feebly.
“That was very stupid,” La Martellita said.
“I thought every man was free to be anything he wanted, even stupid, under the Republic.” Chaim threw out the line like a chess player offering a poisoned pawn.
And she took it: “Every man may be stupid under the Republic, Comrade, but you abuse the privilege.”
“Didn’t Trotsky say something like that?” Chaim knew perfectly well Trotsky had. His voice was pure innocence all the same. If you accused somebody of quoting the Red Antichrist, you needed to sound innocent.
La Martellita’s eyes flashed again, terribly. She looked as if she hated him. No doubt she did. But now he had a hold on her. Even if they were dragging him off to the nearest wall, he had a chance of getting her stood up against it right after him. She took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and smoked in quick, furious puffs. She didn’t offer it to him.
She stubbed hers out while it was only half done—a rare thing in Spain these days. When she spoke again, she came straight to the point: “What do you want from me?” She knew what she’d done. Oh, yes.
“A little understanding would be nice,” Chaim said.
“What do you mean, ‘understanding’? If you think I’ll be your mattress or suck your stupid cock, I’d sooner cut my throat.” She sure as hell did come straight to the point.
“No, no, no,” Chaim said, thinking Yes, yes, yes! He went on, “I was talking about politics. I didn’t mean any harm when I said what I said, any more than you did just now. I don’t think I should get in trouble for it.”
“Oh. Politics.” The way La Martellita said the word, it sounded more obscene than cocksucking. She drummed her fingers on the rickety little table she used for a desk. “Can you try not to talk about your own so loudly when you’re not reeducating the Nationalists?”
It was like getting sent out of the confessional with a penance of three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. “I’ll try,” Chaim said. He didn’t even have to promise to do it.
“All right. Get the fuck out of here.” La Martellita wanted to pretend she’d never had anything to do with him.
“Tell me your name first.”
He would sooner have faced Nationalist artillery than her glare. “Magdalena,” she spat. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
“See you again, I hope,” Chaim said.
“That makes one of us,” she said, and for once he quit while he was ahead and got out.
PETE MCGILL STOOD SENTRY OUTSIDE the American consulate in Shanghai. Because he wore two stripes on his left sleeve, he commanded the two-man detachment out there. He could have done without the honor. Shanghai was a good bit south of Peking. You couldn’t have proved it by him, not this freezing early December morning.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” he muttered.
“Bet your ass,” Max Weinstein agreed. They both spoke with barely moving lips. No one more than a few feet away would have had any idea they were talking. They were there to look impressive, and they did that. Like convicts, they managed to go back and forth without letting the outside world notice.
There wasn’t much outside world to notice. Shanghai wasn’t used to this kind of godawful weather. Hardly anybody was on the streets. The people who had to go out bundled up in all the clothes they owned. A lot of them seemed to be wearing two or three people’s worth, and to be freezing even so. Inside his thick wool coat and tunic and trousers, Pete felt himself slowly turning into a block of ice.
“Liable to be fires in the Chinese part of town,” he said. That was something over ninety percent of Shanghai, but he didn’t think of it that way. “They’ll throw anything that burns onto the brazier.”
“Sure they will. And they live in those crappy little houses that go up like billy-be-damned, too,” Max answered. “They’re the exploited ones.”
Sighing out fog, Pete said, “Don’t get all Red on me, man. I was just saying it was something we need to be on the lookout for.”
“Yeah, yeah. I was saying why we needed to be on the lookout for it. Don’t you think why counts?” Weinstein said.
“What I think is, a Commie Marine’s as crazy as a fish with fur or a general with sense,” Pete said. “You take orders from guys like me, not from Stalin.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Max said again. “Don’t remind me.”
“Somebody better.” Talking out of the side of his mouth, Pete felt like a movie gangster. But if a sergeant or an officer came out to check on the sentries, he wouldn’t be seen moving his lips. “Why’d you join the Corps if you’re a fuckin’ Red?”
“On account of I like banging heads, an’ they’d jug me if I did it back in the States,” Max answered. “I thought about going to Spain instead. Sometimes it still looks like I shoulda done that. Wonder how many Fascists I woulda shot by now.”
“They shoot back,” Pete said dryly. “Besides, you’re liable to get your chance against the Japs.”
“Ain’t like they don’t deserve it, too. But I’d rather shoot Nazis any day,” Max said.
“Gee, how come?” Pete asked.
Weinstein gave him a sidelong dirty look. “Two guesses, asshole, and the first one don’t count.”
“That’s Corporal Asshole to you.” Pete had given Max grief first. If the other Marine came back with something snappy, he couldn’t very well resent it. Oh, he could, but then he’d really be an asshole.
“Funny guy. Funny like a truss,” Max said.
Before McGill could answer, something blew up a couple of blocks away. Pete was on the ground before he knew how he’d got there: not knocked over by the blast but automatically hitting the deck. He’d brought his Springfield to his shoulder and had a round in the chamber and his finger on the trigger, ready for … well, for anything. Marine training and drill were wondrous things.
Weinstein sprawled a few feet away, as ready as Pete was. “The fuck?” he said.
“Yeah, I—” Pete got interrupted again. Another blast went off, and then another and another. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “I think they’re trying to blow Shanghai up.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Max asked through several more booms, some almost as close as the first, others much farther off.
It was a good question. As far as Pete could see, it had only one possible answer: “Gotta be the Chinks. If this doesn’t drive the Japs squirrely, what’s going to?” More bombs went off as he spoke. No airplanes buzzed overhead; guerrillas inside the city must have planted the explosives. They’d get better results from bombs aimed right at the occupiers than they would have if the ordnance fell thousands of feet from a speeding plane.
They got the results they wanted, all right. Pete and Max had hardly climbed to their feet before Shanghai started bubbling like a pot with the lid on too tight. Chinese and Westerners came running out to see what the hell was going on. The American consul, a pink, double-chinned Rotarian named Bradley Worthington III, a worthy whom Pete had seen only two or three times before, came out for a look around. “Wow! That was something, wasn’t it?” he said in Midwestern accents.
“Yes, sir,” Pete said. He noticed Max’s trousers were out at the knee from his dive to the pavement. If the consul said anything about it, Pete would have to gig the other sentry. Then Max would find ways to make him sorry, even if the Red Jew was only a private.
But Worthington wasn’t going to get excited about pants with holes. He had bigger things to worry about. “The Japanese will turn this place inside out and upside down to catch the terrorists who just did that,” he predicted.
“Yes, sir,” McGill repeated, in a different tone of voice. He’d always assumed anyone plump, prosperous, and Midwestern was unlikely to have two brain cells to rub together. But Bradley Worthington III had just come up with the same conclusion he had himself. If that didn’t make the consul a clever fellow, what would?
Shooting broke o
ut a couple of minutes later. Max cocked his head to one side, listening. He was supposed to hold his stiff brace, but the times were irregular. “Arisakas—most of ’em, anyway,” he said.
“Yeah. They are,” Pete agreed.
“Not wasting any time, are they?” the consul said.
“No, sir,” Pete answered. Suddenly, painfully, he hoped Vera was okay. The Chinese shouldn’t have had much reason to target the joint where she danced and slept, but he knew he was going to worry any which way till he heard from her. How long till his relief came? He figured he’d go check on her as soon as he could.
Then a fire engine tore past, red lights blinking and bells clanging. More noise said ambulances were hauling casualties to hospitals. Please, God, went through Pete’s mind. Don’t let anything bad happen to her. Please.
A platoon of Japanese soldiers went by at a quick march. The lieutenant in charge of them shot the American consulate a look full of vitriol. Because it hadn’t been bombed? That was how it seemed to Pete. One of the ordinary Japs started to aim his rifle at Worthington. A noncom yelled at him, and he didn’t follow through. The platoon rounded the corner and disappeared.
Pete decided going to check on Vera might not be such a hot idea after all. If the Japs could think about firing at the consul on the steps of his own building, what would they do to a Marine they caught running around by his lonesome? Nothing good—Pete was sure of that.
Rifle fire crackled, almost close enough to make him dive for cover. Bradley Worthington III started to do the same thing, and checked himself at about the same time. That was interesting. Had the consul gone Over There in 1918? Pete wouldn’t have been surprised.
“This could get very bad,” Worthington said. As if to underscore the words, a machine gun went off in the distance: a long, somber stutter of death. McGill wondered whom the Japs were shooting at. He wondered if they knew—or if they cared.
“Bad? This could be another Nanking,” Max said.
“Christ! I hope not!” Pete said, and the U.S. consul nodded. When the Japs took Nanking, they went blue-goose loony. Most of the stories that came back from there were too outrageous to seem possible. Which proved exactly nothing, because some of the worst stories had photos to back them up. You wouldn’t think people could do such things to other people, let alone have fun while they were doing it, but that was what the photos seemed to show.
Another machine gun started up, this one closer. The gunner was an old pro, squeezing out one murderous burp after another. Pete could hear screams, too. Again, who were the targets? Some of the Chinese who’d planted bombs, or poor luckless devils who happened to have wound up in front of the gun?
A pause. Another short burst, and then one more. Pete didn’t know who the gunner’s targets were, but he knew too well what he guessed.
THEY GAVE JOAQUIN DELGADILLO his very own set of denim coveralls. His old uniform was so torn and tattered, it was almost falling off of him. Several Nationalist prisoners were already wearing the unofficial uniform of the Republic. He was glad of that; he wouldn’t have wanted to be the first one.
He got razzed even so. “Gone over to the other side, have you?” said a middle-aged POW still in the Nationalists’ yellowish khaki.
“I’m the same as I was yesterday,” Joaquin answered. “Only the clothes are different.”
“The same as you were yesterday?” the older man returned. “Well, how were you then, by God?”
“Why, the same as I am today, claro,” Delgadillo said. The other POW laughed and let him alone.
He was glad of that. He didn’t know himself how he’d been yesterday, not in the way the older man meant. Everything spun round and round inside his head, making him wonder which way was up—or if any way was. He had all the things he’d believed since he was a kid. And he had Chaim Weinberg; the Jew threw grenades at those old certainties every time he opened his mouth.
If what Weinberg said was true, the Republic had been right all along. If what he said was true, the future lay in its hands. Things would be richer, freer, better than anything Marshal Sanjurjo could deliver.
If. But it was a big if. Joaquin had been fighting the Republic for a long time before he got captured. He’d been in the Republican trenches. He’d taken prisoners before he became one. The bastards on the other side—on this side—were at least as skinny, at least as sorry, as the fellows he’d fought alongside. They could claim to be the wave of the future, but their present looked pretty sorry.
Of course, so did what he’d been fighting for. What did landlords do? Why, they took. Factory owners? The same thing, no doubt about it. Priests? Them, too. Them more than any of the others, because what did they give back? Nothing you could eat, nothing you could wear, nothing you could use.
They give you heaven, or a chance for it. Everything that got pounded into him while he was growing up was still there. It hadn’t gone away, even if the Jew—the Jew!—had done his best to exorcise it. But now it had company inside his head. New ideas and old warred in there like Republicans and Nationalists.
Yes, just like that, he thought unhappily.
Plainly, the Republic wasn’t the tool of Satan he’d thought it was before the trench raid that went south. As plainly, more things were wrong with the Nationalist regime than he’d imagined. But did that make the Republic the new earthly paradise? If it did, how come he was still lousy?
“Free love!” called another Nationalist still in decrepit khaki, pointing to his overalls.
“Oh, piss off,” Joaquin said, and his fellow prisoner chuckled. It was an article of faith among the Nationalists that all the women who favored the Republic would lie down for you if you snapped your fingers. Joaquin didn’t know of anybody who’d had the chance to find out whether that was true, but he did know everybody on his old side believed it.
Which meant … what? Weinberg went on and on about how stupid it was to take anything on faith. Unless you had a reason to think this, that, or the other thing, why do it? He would ask that over and over, and nobody had a good answer for him.
Joaquin had had a question that gave the Jew pause, though: “Why do you think Stalin is so wonderful? Have you met him? Have you gone to Russia?”
“No,” Weinberg said slowly. “But I have seen the bad things Hitler and Mussolini are doing. There’s a saying in English. It goes, The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Hitler and Mussolini are the enemies of the workers and peasants. Stalin has to be their friend, then.”
“We think Stalin is Spain’s enemy,” Joaquin said. “Where is Spain’s gold? In Moscow, that’s where. Stalin stole it.”
“No, he didn’t.” Weinberg shook his head. “The Republic bought weapons from Russia. Nobody else would sell to us, but Stalin did.”
Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. Joaquin realized he shouldn’t argue. He believed some of what the guy who’d captured him came out with. If he tried to convince Weinberg and the other Reds on the far side of the barbed wire that he believed all of it, maybe they’d turn him loose. Once he was on the far side of the wire himself …
Well, what then? Would they hand him a rifle and send him to a trench somewhere to fight against the men for whom he’d formerly fought? If they did that, he might be better off staying right where he was. Some people did switch sides. About half of them fought harder for the side they chose themselves than for the one where they’d started. The rest were spies or worthless for some other reason. Sorting out who was who got … interesting.
Then again, it was also possible that a distant trench was a better place than a POW camp in the middle of Madrid. Nationalist bombers still visited the capital. Joaquin had cheered them on when they flew over the lines. He’d wanted the Republicans to get what was coming to them. Now there was a chance that some of what was coming to them would land on him instead.
Before, they’d unloaded on Madrid in broad daylight. They mostly came at night these days. The more modern fighters the Republic had got from France
and England made day bombing too costly to try very often any more. Even coming by day, the bombers weren’t very accurate; the craters pocking the park proved as much. Flying by night did nothing to improve their aim.
Pounding guns and wailing sirens woke Joaquin from a fitful sleep. It was cold. It had been bitterly cold lately—this was going to be a winter to remember, and in no fond way. The drone of engines overhead penetrated the rest of the din.
“Fuck ’em all,” somebody in the big tent said, and promptly started snoring again.
Joaquin envied him without being able to imitate him. Too much racket, and too much in the way of nerves, too. Swearing under his breath, Joaquin went outside to watch the show.
The sky was black as a sergeant’s heart. The stars seemed even farther off than usual—grudging little flecks of light. The blue ones might have been cut from ice; the red ones didn’t feel warm, either.
Searchlights darted and probed. Antiaircraft tracers and bursts were beautiful, but they didn’t make Joaquin think of celebrations, the way they usually did. He knew too well that this was war, and all the bright lights intended nothing but death.
A searchlight speared a three-engined bomber—an Italian plane—in its glare. Antiaircraft fire from half a dozen guns converged on the machine the gunners could see. The bomber twisted and jinked, writhing like a stepped-on bug. The searchlight hung on to it. Others also found the bomber. Fire licked along its right wing. It tumbled toward the ground.
Bombs whistled down. Not all the sirens that screamed belonged to the warning system. Some came from ambulances and fire engines. Joaquin wondered if he should jump into a trench. The POWs had dug them to try to stay alive through air raids. But the show in the sky held a horrid fascination. He didn’t want to miss any of it.
He could have been smarter. He could have done a better job of gauging the screams of falling bombs. One went off close enough to knock him ass over teakettle. Fragments shouted and screamed past him. Once bitten, twice shy—he stayed flat as a run-over toad.
The War That Came Early: West and East Page 46