“Now that you mention it, toots, yeah.” Bruce was still grinning. “But you know what else? I don’t give a darn.”
And that, she realized, had to be an understatement. Every time he climbed into a B-29, he walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Yes, he visited death and destruction on city dwellers luckless enough to live where Stalin’s whim was law.
But he visited death and destruction himself with each mission he flew. She didn’t know how many he’d flown, in this war and the last. All she knew was, the number wasn’t small, and kept getting bigger. No wonder he seemed to live as if each moment might be his last. He knew too well that it might in truth.
So they went out drinking and dancing, and afterwards the auto would stop on some pitch-black, secluded lane. If it was a hired car and not a jeep, the windows would steam up so no one could have seen what was going on inside even if it had been noon and not midnight.
“It’s warmer in an enclosed car than it is with a jeep,” Daisy said during one of those nocturnal encounters.
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed, his mouth no more than an inch from her ear. “But sometimes I can get a jeep from the motor pool without going through all the paperwork and stuff I need to rent a beast like this.”
Which was all well and good when it wasn’t pouring rain. In an English winter—or, for that matter, an English summer—the sky could turn on the tap whenever it decided to. Daisy didn’t worry about that. Right this minute, Daisy wasn’t worrying about anything at all.
A few minutes later, when the Vauxhall’s windows had got well and truly steamed, she heard a small ripping noise, as of paper being torn. “What’s that?” she asked.
“That, sweetie, is a rubber,” Bruce answered. “I know you don’t like taking chances, and I don’t blame you a bit, but sometimes the real McCoy is better than anything else you can do.”
“Oh, yes.” Daisy shifted to give him room. The Vauxhall was less roomy than a jeep would have been, even if it was enclosed. Her breath sighed out. “Oh, yes!”
As he drove her back to East Dereham, he said, “This would all be simpler if I could just come to your room.”
“It would, yes.” She nodded, though she wasn’t sure he could see her do it. “But you’ve met Mr. Perkins. He wouldn’t be happy, I’m afraid.”
“He’d be jealous, is what he’d be.” Bruce McNulty paused. “Or maybe not—who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a queer.”
“Neither would I,” Daisy said. Simon Perkins, the chemist above whose shop she lodged, was past fifty, and a lifelong bachelor. He was more precise than prissy, but she wondered whether any normal man could possibly have been so neat.
If he was a pansy, he was a discreet pansy. And well he might have been, when relations between men remained as illegal and scandalous as they had been in Oscar Wilde’s day, and when a good many sodomites who didn’t write nearly so well or so wittily as Wilde sat in prison for their crimes.
Since Bruce wasn’t going much above ten miles an hour, the hired car’s motor made next to no noise. When two jet fighters roared by overhead, Daisy wanted to clap her hands to her ears at the noise of their engines. “That will wake up everybody for miles around,” she said.
“It sure will,” Bruce agreed. “They don’t scramble like that unless they’re after something.”
“If they are, I hope to heaven they get it!” she said.
“Doesn’t have to be a Bull with an A-bomb in its belly,” Bruce said. “Those rotten twin-jet Beagles are a lot harder to catch.”
“Whatever it is, I want them to shoot it down before it can unload,” Daisy said. “This poor country’s been bombed too much already.”
“Honey, the way things are right now, there aren’t a whole lot of countries that haven’t been bombed too much already. Take it from somebody who knows,” Bruce said. “And the ones that haven’t, like Venezuela or Liberia or Pakistan, you wouldn’t want to live in ’em anyway.”
He was bound to be right. But those weren’t Daisy’s countries. England was. She went right on rooting for the fighters.
—
“Show me an A, Leon,” Aaron Finch said.
Without hesitation, Leon chose the A from his set of wooden letters. Aaron had made and painted them himself, using patterns he’d got from Popular Mechanics. He’d taken special care to sand them smooth so he wouldn’t give his son splinters.
“Good job!” he said. It was, too, considering that Leon was still more than two months shy of his third birthday. The kid was smart, no two ways about it. Now the real worry was whether he’d turn out too smart for his own good, the way Marvin had. Aaron shrugged. In a kid not quite three, that was a worry for another day. “Now can you show me a V?”
The A was easy. It was the first letter of the alphabet, and one of the most used. Ruth had bought a Scrabble set not too long before, which underlined that. V was at the back of the line and in narrower use. Leon didn’t hesitate, though. He grabbed it and said, “Vee!”
“That’s what that is,” Aaron said. “You are getting good at this stuff, kiddo.”
“Vee!” Leon squealed, and threw it as far as he could. He didn’t throw far or straight. Not only was he still a little guy, but his brain ran ahead of his body. He wasn’t what anybody would call graceful. Aaron wondered if he ever would be. Himself, he’d always had arms and legs that did just what he told them to. His son might not.
None of which had anything to do with anything. “Go pick that up and put it back with the rest of the letters,” Aaron said.
Leon pooched out his lower lip. “I don’t wanna!” he declared.
“You made the mess. You police it up,” Aaron told him. You couldn’t expect a kid his age to clean up after himself all the time. Little kids and messes went together like coffee and cream. But Leon had to understand he couldn’t get away with chucking his toys around for the fun of it.
“Don’t wanna!” he repeated. No, he didn’t get that yet.
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I told you what you needed to do.” Aaron waited. When Leon showed no signs of going after the red V, his father wheeled out the heavy artillery: “I guess you don’t feel like sleeping with Bounce tonight.”
That turned the trick. Aaron had thought it would. Leon was as attached to the Teddy bear as if it had grown out of his hip. As far as he was concerned, going to bed without it was a tragedy beside which the A-bomb that smashed downtown L.A. was as nothing. He talked to it while he was awake, and answered for it, too. He halfway made Aaron believe it was alive.
Now he scurried over to the wooden letter and made a small production of bringing it back to the rest of the set. “Okay?” he asked.
“You did it, so that’s good,” Aaron said. “But do you know why you did it?”
Leon looked at him as if he were an imbecile. “So Bounce will sleep with me.” He wasn’t good at lying yet. Whatever went through his head came out of his mouth.
“You did it because leaving it lying out there is sloppy,” Aaron said. “And you did it so nobody would step on the V. It might get broken, or it might hurt Daddy or Mommy’s foot.”
The summer before, crazy Bill Veeck had brought a midget to the plate to start a game for the St. Louis Browns against the Tigers. From what the papers said, the Tigers’ hurler tried to pitch to him, but was laughing so hard that all his offerings went way high. Aaron could see that his explanation flew over Leon’s head by at least as much.
He didn’t give up. Leon was growing every single day. An explanation that flew over his head today wouldn’t tomorrow, or maybe the day after. And he remembered things, even when he didn’t fully understand them. Aaron’s older brother Sam had a memory like that. He didn’t himself, but he’d seen how useful it could be.
Ruth walked in from the kitchen after finishing the dinner dishes. Leon picked up the letter he’d just retrieved. “Look, Mommy! It’s a V!”
“You’re right. It is a V,” his mother said
. “Can you show me an A?”
Leon’s face clouded. “I already did that one.”
“Mommy didn’t see you do it,” Aaron reminded him. “Find the A again, and then she’ll give you a new letter.”
“Oh, okay.” Leon might have reached a deal for the price of a secondhand car. He picked up the A and held it over his head, as if to show this was really too easy for someone of his talents.
“That’s the A, all right,” Ruth said. “Now show me the Q.”
“Ten points!” Leon sang out. Aaron and Ruth looked at each other. Yes, they played Scrabble, but Aaron had never expected Leon to pick that up. His son had no trouble finding the wooden letter. “It’s got a little tail, like a piggy,” he said. That was how Aaron had told him to know which was the Q and which the O.
Aaron had made the blocks only a couple of months earlier. He hadn’t thought Leon would be ready for them yet, but the kid kept surprising him. By now, Leon could reliably pick out almost all the letters. E and F sometimes confused him, and every so often he’d use an upside-down W for an M or vice versa. Other than that, he had them straight.
“One of these days before too long,” Aaron said, “I’m going to dig out my old reader.” He and Marvin had both learned to read from it. It was made, and made well, to show little kids how to put letters together to make words. Marvin had used it to help teach Olivia how to read. When Aaron had a son, he’d passed it along.
“He’s not ready to read yet,” Ruth said, but then she softened it by adding, “I don’t think.”
“Well, I don’t think he is, either, not yet,” Aaron admitted. “I said before not too long, not right this minute.”
“Okay.” His wife nodded, perhaps with relief.
Oblivious to them both, Leon built a tower out of the letters. They were also good for that. Then he finished reenacting Babel from the Bible by knocking the tower over like an angry Jehovah. “Kaboom!” he yelled as the letters flew and bounced and cartwheeled every which way.
Destruction complete, Leon started to head off to some new mayhem. “Hang on a second, sport,” Aaron said, holding up a hand like a traffic cop. “What do you do after you make a mess? We were just talking about that, remember?”
If Aaron hadn’t asked if he remembered, Leon would have been all the more tempted to forget. But he couldn’t resist showing off how much he knew. “You police it up.” He even got the word right.
“Why don’t you do that, then? Put the letters back in the box I made for them,” Aaron said.
That wasn’t Leon’s idea of fun. You always had a better time making your mess than cleaning it up afterwards—a great human truth not enough people thought about ahead of time. But Leon must also have remembered the dreadful prospect of a night without Bounce. He started retrieving letters and returned them to the ABC box.
“You still need to get the G and the N,” Ruth said when Leon looked as if he thought he was done. “They’re over there by the coffee table.”
“Hoo, boy,” Leon said.
Aaron laughed so hard, he started coughing. Words and intonation were a perfect imitation of Ruth when she had to do something else on top of everything she’d already done. The world might have been too much with Leon, but he went over and got the last two letters.
“Anybody would think he listens to us or something,” Ruth said.
“Little pitchers have big ears, yeah,” Aaron said. “Wait till he turns sixteen, though. See if he hears a word we tell him then.”
He’d be in his mid-sixties himself when Leon hit sixteen. He wondered whether he’d be able to keep up with a boy who imagined himself a man. That worry was still years away, though. For now, he lit another Chesterfield.
—
It was late in the year for snow. The stuff drifted down over north-central Germany, thick and wet. The sky was gray. The land was white. Color seemed to have washed out of the world.
“Christ, you’d hardly think this was Germany,” Gustav Hozzel said. “Reminds me of the Ukraine in 1943.”
“Me, I was thinking of Spring Awakening in Hungary in ’45,” Rolf said. “Except it was more rain and less snow then. When we got the move order, I watched the Tigers bog down in the mud and I thought, Shit, this won’t work the way they planned it.”
“Well, you were right about that.” Max Bachman said it before Gustav could. They looked at each other. Neither of them was in the habit of saying such a thing to Rolf.
“Hey, we drove the Ivans back in spite of the shitty weather,” Rolf said. “We pushed ’em for a solid week, made ’em retreat, thirty, forty, some places even fifty kilometers. Even in March of 1945, we were better soldiers than they ever dreamt of being.”
He was a Waffen-SS veteran, all right. He remained proud of everything the LAH and the other SS panzer divisions had accomplished. He ignored everything they’d done that made almost all the other countries in the world ally with Stalin against the Nazis. And he ignored the bitter crack from Sepp Dietrich, who’d commanded the Sixth SS Panzer Army during Operation Spring Awakening—They call us the Sixth Panzer Army because we’ve only got six panzers.
“Rolf…” Gustav put things as gently as he could: “How much good did driving the Russians back fifty kilometers do for the war? Didn’t we lose just as fast as if you’d stayed in the barracks and played skat? It was March of 1945, for God’s sake. The Reich was screwed coming, going, and sideways.”
“We fought hard anyway,” Rolf said. “We didn’t know how messed up things were all over.”
“You didn’t? You weren’t looking real hard, were you?” Max said. “Why did you think we were in Hungary instead of in Russia, the way we were a year earlier? Did we fall back so the Magyars could teach us to dance the fucking mazurka?”
“You know what you’ve got, Bachman? You’ve got a goddamn big mouth.” Rolf tapped a Lucky from an American ration pack against the back of his hand before he stuck it in his own mouth.
You know what you’ve got, Rolf? You’ve got a goddamn small brain. Gustav was tempted to come out with it, but he didn’t. There were things over which he and Max would never agree with Rolf. Agree with him or not, though, the ex-LAH man was somebody good to have on your side. Next to that, the arguments about what had been, what might have been, and what should have been were nothing serious.
The three Germans and their countrymen sat in the wreckage on the east side of Warberg, a small town ten or fifteen kilometers east of Marsberg. The front south of Paderborn hadn’t moved much lately. The Ivans weren’t giving ground the way they had right after the A-bombs smashed them farther west. They fought hard when the Germans came at them, and hit back hard whenever they saw a chance.
“Hello!” Rolf pointed east. “What the devil’s that about?” Hard suspicion filled his voice.
Flares flew into the low-ceilinged sky: red and green and white together. The Russians didn’t normally use that kind of signal. Here, Gustav found himself agreeing with Rolf once more. Any time the Ivans did something unfamiliar, you found yourself wondering and worrying about what was up.
Gustav didn’t have to wonder long. Drawn by those flares, a squadron of Shturmoviks zoomed in from the east to shoot up Warberg and pound it with bombs and rockets. The Germans on the ground fired at the Il-10s with rifles and submachine guns and machine guns.
Even as Gustav emptied his assault rifle into the air, he knew he was wasting ammo. Two of the nicknames Landsers had given the Shturmovik in the last war were Flying Tank and Iron Gustav. Engine and cockpit were both heavily armored, making the attack plane invulnerable to small arms.
But the Ivans got a nasty surprise of their own. Three American jet fighters swooped down on the Shturmoviks from above. They were straight-winged F-80s, planes hardly better than the Luftwaffe’s Me-262 (as Rolf would have been sure to point out had Gustav said anything about them). They far outclassed the prop-driven attack aircraft, though. In less than two minutes, three Shturmoviks were burning wrecks, their corp
ses sending pillars of greasy black smoke up to the clouds. The rest of the Il-10s raced east as fast as they could, hoping to find a country where such things didn’t happen.
When Russians had a plan, they stuck to it even if parts of it didn’t work the way they wanted. Even though the Shturmoviks hadn’t hit the Germans in Warberg as hard as they would have wanted, they followed up the air assault with a brief mortar barrage. Then the infantry came forward.
Some of the Red Army men had snow smocks and white trousers over their uniforms. Others wore khaki, and stood out against the background almost like running lumps of coal.
Regardless of whether he thought they had any chance of breaking through, Russian attacks always scared the whey out of Gustav. The Ivans advanced as if they didn’t care whether they lived or died. That probably meant they feared the secret policemen behind them more than the enemy soldiers ahead. They kept coming till they took their objective or till they all fell trying.
Sometimes they did that. Not always. They showed they were human after all at the oddest times. Anything they weren’t looking for could turn them from stoic heroes to fear-mad fugitives in seconds.
That was what happened this morning. The Germans had a well-hidden machine gun farther forward than the Ivans realized. And it wasn’t just any old machine gun. It was an MG-42, a Wehrmacht leftover that still outdid any other country’s murder mill.
The crew played it cool, too. They let the Russians hurry past them, then opened up from what was now a flank. The Red Army men started falling from bullets that seemed to come out of nowhere. And one MG-42 could put out as much fire as a company’s worth of riflemen.
Quite suddenly, the Russians weren’t running toward Warberg any more. They were running away as fast as they could, those still able to. Before he joined the Wehrmacht, Gustav had thought it wasn’t sporting to shoot a man in the back. That attitude didn’t last long on the Eastern Front. You did whatever you could to stay alive.
Dead men’s greatcoats were blots on the snow. Splashes and drizzles of scarlet seemed an artist’s embellishments…if the artist worked with pain and suffering. Gustav clicked a fresh magazine onto his AK-47. He had only a couple of more left, but he could scavenge plenty from the dead Russians.
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