“I know where it is, boss,” Aaron Finch answered quietly.
“Sure you do.” The man who’d founded and still ran Blue Front Appliances nodded. “The trouble is, Jim will, too. Don’t let him give you any tsuris, you hear?” That he let a Yiddish word creep into a conversation other people might overhear showed how important he thought the point was.
Aaron nodded. He was a lean, weathered, medium-sized man five months away from his fiftieth birthday. Ridiculously thick glasses perched on his formidable nose. His eyes were so bad, they’d kept him out of the Army in World War II.
He’d joined the merchant marine instead. The only thing the guys who put together freighter crews cared about was a pulse. They couldn’t afford to be fussy, and weren’t. On the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific, he’d seen as much danger as most Army or Navy men. After the war, it got him exactly no benefits. That disgusted him, but what could you do?
“I’ll deal with Jim,” he promised. “I’m not jumping up and down about going to that part of town myself, you know. I’ll do it, but I’m not jumping up and down.”
One of the two atom bombs that hit Los Angeles landed downtown. The other tore up the harbors at San Pedro and Long Beach. The delivery address was closer to the first of those. It was out of the zone that had seen a lot of damage, but not very far out. From the Glendale warehouse, the truck would have to go through or around that zone to get there.
Herschel Weissman clicked his tongue between his teeth. It wasn’t quite Et tu, Brute?, but it might as well have been. “Aaron, we really need any sale we can get, wherever it is,” he said. “Those goddamn bombs blew up our business along with everything else.”
“Sure, sure.” Aaron nodded again. He understood that at least as well as his boss did. He’d seen his hours cut because Blue Front was hurting. When you had a wife and a two-year-old back home, that pinched hard. He would have felt only half a man if Ruth had to go out looking for work because he couldn’t make ends meet on his own.
“Tell you what,” Weissman said. “I’ll give you double time for the run. You don’t have to tell Jim about that.”
Aaron paused to light a Chesterfield. He went through two or three packs a day, and the little ritual gave him a moment to think. “Give him what you give me, or else don’t bother giving me anything,” he said after his first drag. “I won’t be doing anything he isn’t.”
Weissman didn’t call him a shlemiel, but his face did the talking for him. That was bound to be one reason he headed the company and Aaron drove a truck and lugged heavy appliances around. But Aaron didn’t care. He had his own stubborn notions about what was fair and what wasn’t. Herschel Weissman must have seen as much. He lit his own cigarette and sighed out smoke. “All right. Double time for both of you. Now get lost.”
Even with double time, Jim Summers wasn’t thrilled. “Them atoms’ll cook you from the inside out,” he said. He had a Deep-South drawl and maybe a sixth-grade education. Whatever he knew about atoms, he’d got it from comic books.
Which didn’t mean he was wrong. “We’ll take the long way around, like we did when we went to Torrance,” Aaron told him. “We won’t go through downtown.” You could do that again; some of the roads were open, and they were working hard on rebuilding the freeways. But even Aaron’s lively curiosity didn’t make him want to try it.
Jim raised an eyebrow. His weren’t as bushy as Andy Devine’s, but they were in that ballpark. “If you don’t want to try it, anybody who does has got to be nuts,” he said.
“I’ll try not to dance on the lawns and swing from the telephone poles,” Aaron said dryly.
“You better not. They’ll come after you with a butterfly net if’n you do.” To Jim Summers, irony was what his wife used to put the creases in his gabardine work pants.
Aaron drove the big blue truck west to Sepulveda before swinging south. That took him past the veterans’ cemetery and UCLA to the east and an enormous refugee camp to the west. Things in the camp were supposed to be getting better, but he could still smell it as he piloted the truck past it. Too many people hadn’t bathed or flushed often enough for too long.
He wanted to turn east at Wilshire so he could see more of what the bomb had done. They were almost through tearing down the shattered Coliseum. They hadn’t got around to Wrigley Field yet, a mile or so farther south. The PCL Angels were sharing Gilmore Field with the Hollywood Stars. No one seemed to have any idea where the Rams and Trojans and Bruins would play come fall. The look Jim sent him, though, persuaded him not to go east till he had to.
That was at Manchester, most of an hour south of Wilshire. Even then, Jim pulled a bandanna from his trouser pocket and tied it over his nose and mouth. “You look like a bank robber in a bad horse opera,” Aaron said. His younger brother, Marvin, had worked in the movies for a while—till people noticed how annoying he could get, Aaron had always thought. Some of the Hollywood slang he’d brought home rubbed off.
“I don’t give a shit if I look like a camel in the zoo,” Jim said. “I don’t want to breathe none o’ that radio-action crap.”
Aaron thought about correcting him, but decided that was more trouble than it was worth. So was asking how good a screen that none too clean, cheaply woven bandanna made.
The house taking delivery of the washer and refrigerator hadn’t got any damage. A colored family was moving in down the block. Jim Summers sighed. “I reckoned the bomb took out most o’ the niggers here,” he said mournfully. “Guess I was wrong. Oh, well.” He didn’t like Jews, either. Because Aaron carried an ordinary-sounding last name (it had been Fink till his father anglicized it), he’d never realized his partner was one. No one had ever claimed he was long on brains.
Wrestling the appliances down the ramp from the truck to the street and then into the house was part of what made the job so much fun. Aaron knew he’d feel it in his back and shoulders when he got home tonight. He was sure he wouldn’t have ten years earlier. This getting old business was for the birds.
“Thank you very much,” said Mrs. Helen McAllister, who’d ordered the icebox and washer. She gave them lemonade made from lemons off a tree in her back yard. After she signed all the paperwork and wrote Aaron a check, she added, “Did you see the coons buying Joe Sanders’ place? My God! This is the other side of Manchester! Who ever thought they’d come this far?”
Since Aaron had nothing to say to that, he kept his mouth shut. Getting into political arguments with customers wasn’t smart. Jim Summers didn’t argue with Mrs. McAllister. He agreed with her. He sympathized with her. Aaron practically had to drag him out of the house and back to the truck.
“Couple more spooks buy around here, poor gal’s house ain’t gonna be worth the paper it’s printed on,” Jim said.
“It’s not our business any which way,” Aaron said.
“It’s a damn shame, is what it is.” Jim redid his mask, which he’d taken off to bring in the appliances. “ ’Sides, she was purty.”
“She wasn’t bad.” Aaron could agree about that. He noticed nice-looking women, too. What man didn’t? Since finding Ruth, though, he hadn’t done any more than notice. If he was happy where he was, why risk messing that up? He made a Y-turn on the narrow street and started the long, roundabout trip back to Glendale.
—
Along with the rest of his crew, Konstantin Morozov had slept under their T-54. The tank was stopped on hard ground. Morozov and the other three men did some digging under the chassis to make sure it wouldn’t settle and squash them. Then they rolled themselves in their blankets and sacked out. The hardened steel above them and to their right and left would keep them safe against anything this side of an atom bomb. In case somebody dropped one of those on him, Konstantin figured he’d die before he had time to worry about it. So he didn’t.
He had enough to worry about without the great destroyer, the ender of worlds. First and foremost came enemy tanks. The American Pershing and Patton and Engl
ish Centurion were at least as good as his T-54. They were slower, but had thicker armor. Their guns were smaller than his 100mm monster, but carried better fire-control systems. They could kill him and he could kill them. That was what it boiled down to. Who saw whom first, who shot first, who shot straightest—those were the things that counted.
He worried about enemy foot soldiers with bazookas, too. The Hitlerites had had some of those in the last year of the Great Patriotic War. The Americans had more, as they had more of everything. The T-54 carried better protection than the T-34/85 had, but a bazooka round could still torch everything and everybody in the fighting compartment if it burned through.
And he worried about his new crew. The old guys had been fine. He’d been able to count on them. But they were all dead. He’d been blown out of the open cupola with his legs on fire when his last tank got killed. They hadn’t made it, poor luckless bastards.
This new tank…These new guys…Vladislav Kalyakin, the driver, was a kid, but he was all right. He was a Byelorussian, a fellow Slav. The loader, Vazgen Sarkisyan, was an Armenian without much Russian. But a loader didn’t need to know much. Like most tank crewmen, Morozov had started there himself. And, as blackasses went, Armenians were pretty much okay. Plenty of other swarthy types from the Caucasus were worse, anyway.
But Juris Eigims, the gunner, he was trouble with a capital T. He was either Latvian or Lithuanian; Konstantin wasn’t sure which. Either way, he didn’t like Russians. He didn’t like it that his little pissant land was part of the USSR, the way it had been part of the Russian Empire before World War I. When he was a kid, it had been its own two-kopek country. Nationalist bandits still prowled the Baltics, the way they did in the Ukraine.
And Juris Eigims really didn’t like Konstantin. That was personal, not political. As Konstantin had lost his crew, so these guys had lost their commander. Eigims must have thought he would take charge of this tank. Instead, he got a Russian sergeant dropped on him. By his attitude, he would have preferred an atom bomb.
Morozov would have preferred a puff adder in the gunner’s seat. One of those would have been less dangerous. But he had what he had, not what he would have preferred. Somehow, he had to get the best out of Eigims—and keep him from going over the hill first chance he saw.
For now, he wriggled out from under the tank. Half a dozen other armored behemoths had stopped nearby, some with camouflage nets over them, the rest under trees. The Red Army always remembered maskirovka. Here in the Ruhr, there weren’t that many trees to hide under. Konstantin had never seen so many towns packed so close together. Russia had nothing like this.
Sarkisyan crawled out, too. He’d been sleeping next to Morozov. “I must have woke you up,” Konstantin said. “Sorry about that.”
“Is of nothings, Comrade Sergeant.” The Armenian shrugged broad shoulders. He was built like a brick, a good shape for a shell-jerker. Stubble darkened his cheeks and chin; he really needed to shave twice a day. His hairline came down almost to his tangled eyebrows. He would have made a tolerable werewolf.
Juris Eigims, by contrast, was slim, blond, and blue-eyed. He looked as if he’d come straight from the Waffen-SS: one more reason he and Konstantin hit it off so well.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He spoke much better Russian than Vazgen Sarkisyan, but it was plainly a foreign language for him. His native tongue left him with an odd, singsong accent that set Morozov’s teeth on edge.
“Not much, or it doesn’t seem like it,” the tank commander answered. And it was pretty quiet. It was getting light, but the sun hadn’t risen yet. The air smelled of smoke, but of old, sour smoke—nothing new or close. A battery of Soviet 105s boomed, one gun after another, as if going through limbering-up exercises. They too, though, were off in the distance. Up ahead of the tanks only spatters of rifle fire cut the silence—hardly anything.
Corporal Eigims cocked his head to one side, studying the sounds as gravely as if he were a Marshal of the Soviet Union, not a Latvian punk. “Think we’ll break into Bocholt today?” he asked.
Konstantin shrugged, as Sarkisyan had earlier. “Depends on what they’ve moved up to stop us. One way or the other, we’ll find out.” He scratched himself. “What I think is, I want some breakfast.”
Eigims’ grin made him almost human, though he still looked too much like a German for Konstantin’s comfort. “Breakfast—yeah!”
“Breakfast?” Vladislav Kalyakin emerged from under the T-54 just in time to hear the magic word.
“Breakfast,” Konstantin agreed. They ate sausage and stale bread stolen from the last village they’d rolled through, and washed it down with hot tea. Kalyakin had a little aluminum stove he’d taken from a dead Englishman, and enough of the tablets that fueled it to let them brew some without making a fire.
When they were fueled, they checked out the tank. As Morozov went over the engine, he eyed Juris Eigims. The Balt had tried to show him up when he took over the T-54, but ended up with egg on his face instead. He wasn’t pulling anything cute today, though.
They had half a load of ammo and half a tank of diesel fuel: enough to go on for a while, anyhow. Both sides were doing everything they could to foul up their foes’ supply chains. The bomb that smashed Paris was supposed to make things hard on the Americans that way.
No sooner had Konstantin got into the commander’s seat in the turret than Captain Lapshin’s voice sounded in his earphones: “Ready to move out?”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Morozov answered.
Away they went, and straight into trouble. The morning quiet popped like a soap bubble. One of the T-54s in the company took a hit from a 155 that had to be firing over open sights. What the heavy gun was doing so far forward, Konstantin had no idea. But it would have smashed a destroyer, not just a tank. The only hope was, the crew never knew what hit them.
Machine-gun bullets clattered off his own tank’s glacis plate and turret. The infantrymen moving up with the T-54s puckered their assholes on account of machine guns. Those rounds would chip his machine’s paint, but that was about it. But he needed the foot soldiers, too, to keep the sons of bitches with bazookas at a distance.
Il-10s roared by at rooftop height, gunning and rocketing the enemy. Morozov loved Shturmoviks. They were heavily armored—almost flying tanks themselves. They could take a lot of punishment, and they dealt out even more. They looked old-fashioned in the new jet age, but they could hang around a battlefield better than any jet.
Another T-54 stopped short, spewing smoke from the turret. Hatches flew open. Men bailed out. One of them was burning, the way Konstantin had been when he got blasted out of his tank. He hoped the luckless tanker lived. He hoped this machine didn’t get hit the same way.
The Soviet drive stalled. The enemy had too many men, too many guns, and too many tanks in front of Bocholt. This wasn’t like the war on the Eastern Front. You couldn’t get around the foe and in behind him. He had something nasty waiting for you everywhere. You had to push through him, push him back. But not today.
—
Daisy Baxter tried to run the Owl and Unicorn the way her dead husband’s family had run it for generations. Changes did come to the pub in Fakenham every so often. Flush toilets got added during Queen Victoria’s reign, electric lights between the old queen’s passing and the start of the First World War. These days, a wireless set—the Yanks from the Sculthorpe air base called it a radio, and so did more and more locals—sat on a shelf behind the bar. Sometimes people listened to it. More often, they ignored it.
But those were cosmetic changes. The smoky air, the potato crisps and meat pies and other salty pub grub, and, most important, the best bitter in wooden barrels in the cellar—those hadn’t changed in a long time. Daisy saw no reason they should.
All of Fakenham had flush toilets these days, and electricity, and wireless sets, and automobiles. A couple of prosperous gents even boasted a telly in their homes. People who fancied banging the little East Anglian tow
n’s drum said it was modern as next week.
Daisy didn’t call them a pack of stupid windbags when they went on like that. She might have thought it—she did think it—but she didn’t say it. The way Fakenham looked to her, the externals might change, but the internals never did. Motorcars and televisions be damned. People in a mid-twentieth-century English small town still thought the way they had in a mid-eighteenth-century English small town, and all too likely in a mid-fourteenth-century English small town as well.
She knew they talked about her behind her back. Running the pub by herself didn’t quite turn her into a scarlet woman, but it came close. The funny thing was, the USAF and RAF flyers who came to the Owl and Unicorn from Sculthorpe knew bloody well she was no such thing. They would have liked her ever so much better if she were.
They drank her beer and whiskey. They ate her snacks. They played darts in the snug—the locals, better practiced, commonly took their money without the least remorse. And they chatted her up and trotted out all their patented ladykiller routines. And, to a man, they struck out—an American turn of phrase she rather liked.
She knew they talked about her behind her back, too. They called her frigid. They called her a carpet-muncher. She was neither. She liked men fine, thank you very much. When she went to bed not too exhausted, she missed Tom’s arms around her almost more than she could bear. He’d been part of a Cromwell crew in northwestern Germany during the last days of the war. A diehard with a Panzerschreck made sure he never saw Fakenham again.
But she knew that, if she slept with the customers, they wouldn’t come to the Owl and Unicorn for the beer or the pub grub or the darts. They’d come for a go with her. Then she really would be the scarlet woman the Fakenham gossips made her out to be.
She didn’t want that. So she always smiled. She was always friendly, but never too friendly. She was always polite. And she was always unavailable for anything more than a smile.
RAF men wore a slaty blue, Yanks in the USAF a darker shade. She wasn’t sure which uniform annoyed her more. Some of the RAF officers really were bluebloods, and thought women fell at their feet by divine right. Some of the Americans thought all foreign women were tramps.
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