“I’m sure the RAF thinks so, too,” Peggy said sweetly.
The SS man was a fine, fair Aryan, which only made his flush more obvious. “Air pirates!” he said, proving he not only read but believed Goebbels’ newspapers. “They murder innocent civilians—women and children.”
“Sure,” Peggy said, and then, incautiously, “What do you think your own bombers are doing?”
“We strike only military targets,” the SS man insisted. The scary thing was, he plainly believed that, too.
Peggy wanted to yank off his high-crowned cap and beat him over the head with it, in the hope of knocking some sense into him. But she held back—it was bound to be a lost cause. If you were the kind of jerk who joined the SS, you had to be immune to sense. She contented herself with, “Can I go now?”
“‘May.’ It should be ‘may.’” Proud of winning a battle in her language, the SS man handed back her passport and waved her on.
She turned a corner—and walked straight into a police checkpoint. “Your papers—at once!” a beer-bellied cop shouted. Peggy produced the American passport. The policeman recoiled like Bela Lugosi not seeing his reflection in a mirror. As the SS man had before him, he barked, “What are you doing in Berlin?”
And, as she had before, Peggy answered truthfully: “Trying to get out.” Only later did she wonder about taking a big chance twice running. How many chances had she taken? Too damned many—she was sure of that. Hadn’t she been proud of acting more mature? She sure couldn’t prove it today.
But she got by with it one more time. “Pass,” the cop said, writing a note on a sheet clipped to a flat board. Any Gestapo official who examined all the reports various Berlin security officials compiled could figure out everywhere she went. For all she knew, some Gestapo goon did that every day. If she were a spy, it might have meant something. But she was only an interned tourist with a big mouth.
She couldn’t even have fun shopping. Window displays had nothing to do with what you could actually buy. And everything you could buy required ration coupons of one kind or another. She got enough for food to keep her going. For almost everything else, the Germans didn’t seem to feel obligated to take care of her.
And, after the Athenia went down, she couldn’t get out. She’d tried to arrange another train ticket to Copenhagen. She’d tried to arrange a plane ticket to Stockholm. Once she was in Scandinavia, she could get to England. Once she was in England, she could get to the States…if the Germans didn’t torpedo her on the way. And if they did, well, going down with her ship sometimes seemed more appealing than staying in Berlin.
But they wouldn’t let her out. She got “Your papers!” when she tried to buy her tickets, too. And when she flashed her passport then, it wasn’t magic. It was more like poison. They would frown. They would check a list. Then they would say, “I am very sorry, but this is verboten.” They liked saying verboten. Telling people no was much more fun than saying yes would have been. You got to watch your victims throw the most delightful tantrums.
Peggy refused to give them the satisfaction. She just walked away both times. After failing to get the plane ticket, she hied herself off to the U.S. embassy. If she couldn’t get help there, she figured, she couldn’t get help anywhere.
By all the signs, she couldn’t get help anywhere. The embassy personnel spoke English, not German, but they might as well have clicked their heels and intoned, “Verboten.” What they did say amounted to, “Sorry, but we can’t make the German government get off the dime.”
“Why not?” Peggy snarled at an undersecretary—she’d made herself obnoxious enough at the embassy that the clerks had booted her upstairs to get rid of her. “Denmark’s neutral. Sweden’s neutral. We’re neutral, for crying out loud. Why won’t the Nazis let me out of this loony bin?”
The undersecretary—Jenkins, his name was, Constantine Jenkins—had shiny fingernails—painted with clear polish?—and a soft, well-modulated voice. Peggy guessed he was a fairy, not that that should have had anything to do with the price of beer. “Well, Mrs. Druce, the long answer is that the Germans say they’re at war and they fear espionage,” he replied. “That weakens any arguments we might make, because it means they can tell us, ‘Sorry, emergency—we don’t have to listen to you.’”
“Espionage, my ass!” Peggy blurted, which made the faggy undersecretary blink. She went on, “The only thing I’ve seen is what a horrible, run-down dump this place is.”
“That is information the Germans would rather keep to themselves,” Jenkins said seriously. “And besides, the short answer is, the Germans are just being Germans—sometimes they enjoy being difficult. And when they do, you can shout till you’re blue in the face for all the good it does you.”
“Being pissy, you mean. Shit,” Peggy said. That made much more sense than she wished it did. She also made the American diplomat blink again, which was the most fun she’d had all day. She went on, “Can’t I just sneak over the border somewhere? All I want to do is go home.”
“I would not recommend it,” he said seriously. “We can be of no assistance to anyone caught violating the regulations of the country in which she happens to find herself, and whether those regulations are just or humane is, I’m afraid, beside the point.”
“Shit,” she said again, and walked out of the embassy. A man standing across the street wrote something down. Were the Nazis keeping tabs on her in particular or on everybody who went in and out? What difference did it make, really?
They wouldn’t let her go to Sweden. They wouldn’t let her go to Denmark. They wouldn’t let her go to Norway or Finland, either—she’d also found out that Oslo and Helsinki were off limits. The bastards wouldn’t let her go anywhere decent, damn them to hell.
She thought about Warsaw. Regretfully, she didn’t think about it long. Maybe she could get to Scandinavia or Romania from there, but she feared the odds weren’t good. The Russians had pushed Poland right into bed with Germany. The Poles probably didn’t want to land there, but what choice did they have when the Red Army jumped them? She wished Stalin such a horrible case of mange, it would make his soup-strainer mustache fall out. That’d teach him!
Then she had a brainstorm—or she hoped it was, anyway. She turned around and went back to the American embassy. The guy across the street scribbled some more. Maybe the Gestapo would have to issue him another pencil.
This time, Peggy didn’t have to be so difficult to get to see the queer undersecretary. Constantine Jenkins eyed her as if she had a case of the mange. “What can I do for you now, Mrs. Druce?” he asked warily.
“Can you help me get to Budapest?” Peggy asked. Hungary wasn’t exactly a nice place these days. Admiral Horthy’s government (and wasn’t that a kick in the ass? a landlocked country run by an admiral) was a hyena skulking along behind the German lion, feeding on scraps from the bigger beast’s kill. When the Hungarian army helped Hitler dismantle Czechoslovakia, England and France promptly broke relations. So did Russia. But she didn’t think any of them had gone and declared war on the Horthy regime. And if they hadn’t…something might be arranged.
“Well,” Jenkins said. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“I hope so.” Peggy sent him a reproachful stare. “Why didn’t you think of it yourself?”
For his part, he looked affronted. “Because chances are the Germans won’t let you go, even if Hungary is an ally. Because getting to Budapest doesn’t mean all your troubles are over, or even that any of them are.”
“If I can get into Hungary, I bet I can get out,” Peggy said. “Romania—”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” the undersecretary warned. “Romanians and Hungarians like each other about as much as Frenchmen and Germans, and for most of the same reasons. Romanians spite Hungarians for the fun of it, and vice versa. But if you’re trying to get out of Hungary, you need to worry about Marshal Antonescu’s goons, not Admiral Horthy’s.”
“Oh.” Peggy knew she sounded deflated
. Hell, she felt deflated. She paused to visualize a map of southeastern Europe. “Well, if I could get into Yugoslavia, that would do the trick, too. Anywhere but this Nazi snake pit would.”
“I don’t suppose you want to hear that the Hungarians have territorial claims against Yugoslavia, too,” Jenkins said.
“Jesus! Is there anybody the Hungarians don’t have territorial claims against?” Peggy exclaimed.
“Iceland, possibly.” Jenkins didn’t sound as if he was joking. He explained why: “If you think Hitler hates the Treaty of Versailles—”
“I’m right,” Peggy broke in.
“Yes. You are,” he agreed. “But Horthy and the Hungarians hate the Treaty of Trianon even more—and with some reason, because Trianon cost them more territory than Versailles cost Germany. A lot of it wasn’t territory where Hungarians lived, but some of it was…and they want the rest back, too. They aren’t fussy, not about that.”
“I’m sure.” Peggy sighed. “People couldn’t have screwed up the treaties at the end of the war much worse than they did, could they?”
“Never imagine things can’t be screwed up worse than they are already,” Constantine Jenkins replied. “But, that said, in this particular case I have trouble imagining how they could be.”
“Right.” Peggy sighed. She got to her feet. “Well, I’m going to give it a shot. What have I got to lose?”
“Good luck.” For a wonder, the American diplomat didn’t sound as if he meant And the horse you rode in on, lady.
So Peggy went off to the train station to try to get a ticket to Budapest. When she displayed her passport, the clerk said, “You will need an entry visa from the Hungarian embassy and an exit visa from the Foreign Ministry. I regret this, but it is strictly verboten”—that word again!—“to sell tickets without proper and complete documentation.”
“Crap,” she muttered in English, which made the clerk scratch his bald head. “It’s a technical term,” she explained helpfully, “meaning, well, crap.”
“I see,” he said. By his tone, he didn’t.
Peggy did, all too well. She went off to the Hungarian embassy at 8 Cornelius-Strasse. “Ah, yes—an interesting case,” said the minor official who dealt with her. His native language gave his German a musical accent. Had he spoken English, she supposed he would have sounded like a vampire. Maybe, for once, German was better. He relieved her of fifty Deutschmarks and stamped her passport. So she was almost good to go.
Last stop, the Foreign Ministry. Nobody wanted to come right out and tell her no, but nobody wanted to give her an exit visa, either. And nobody did. Finally, one of Ribbentrop’s flunkies sighed and squared his shoulders and said, “It is not practical at this time.”
“Why the devil not?” Peggy blazed. “I’d think you’d be glad to get rid of me.”
The man shrugged “My orders say this visa is not to be issued. I must, of course, follow them.”
By the way he talked, it wasn’t that something very bad would happen to him if he didn’t—though something probably would. But not following an order was as dreadful to him as desecrating the sacrament would have been to a devout Catholic.
“Aw, shit,” Peggy said, and that pretty much summed things up.
VACLAV JEZEK HAD NEVER LIKED quartermaster sergeants. As far as he was concerned, most of them were fat pricks. This miserable Frenchman was sure wide through the seat of his pants. And he was acting like a prick, all right. He thought he personally owned everything in the depot near the village of Hary.
Vaclav had been arguing with him through Benjamin Halévy, because he still hadn’t picked up much French himself. Since that wasn’t getting him anywhere, he fixed the French sergeant with a glare and asked him, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
He got exactly what he hoped for: indignant sputters. Then the Frenchman spoke to the Jewish noncom doing the translating: “He wants to know why you think he should speak the enemy’s language.”
“Does he?” Vaclav pounced: “Tell the son of a bitch I figured he would because he’s doing more to help the Nazis by sitting on his ammo till it hatches than he could any other way.”
“Are you sure you want me to say that?” Halévy asked. “He really won’t help you if I do.”
“Fuck him. He’s not helping me now. He’s got rounds for my antitank rifle, and he won’t turn them loose,” Jezek said.
“All right. I’ll try. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing.” In the Jew’s French, Vaclav’s insult sounded less nasty than it would have in Czech or German—French was better for kissing ass than for telling somebody off. No matter what it sounded like, the crack got home. The quartermaster went as hot—and as red—as iron in the forge. He said several things that sounded heartfelt.
“What’s all that mean?” Vaclav asked with clinical curiosity.
“You’d break your piece over his head if you knew,” Halévy said.
Vaclav laughed. “Not this goddamn thing.” Antitank rifles were huge, heavy brutes. The heavier the weapon was, the less it kicked when it spat one of its honking big bullets. Jezek approved of that. As things were, his shoulder was sore all the time. You could stop an elephant with an antitank rifle. Sometimes, you could even stop a tank. Elephants couldn’t grow more armor. Tanks, unfortunately, could. The rifle would be obsolete pretty soon, and you’d need a field gun to deal with enemy armor.
In the meantime, Vaclav wished he had a field gun to deal with this goddamn quartermaster sergeant. The Frenchman and the Jew went back and forth. Halévy chuckled. “He doesn’t like you, Jezek.”
“Suits me—in that case, we’re even,” Vaclav said. “I’m trying to defend his lousy country. It’s more than he’s doing, Christ knows. You can translate that, too.”
Halévy did. The French sergeant didn’t just sputter—he bleated. Then he sprang up from his folding chair. Vaclav thought the fellow was going to try and slug him. Monsieur le Français would get a dreadful surprise if he did; Jezek promised himself that.
But the quartermaster sergeant spun on his heel and stormed away. The view from the rear was no more appetizing than the one from the front. “If he’s going after military policemen to haul you off—” Halévy began.
“They’ll grab you, too, ‘cause you’re the one who said it in French,” Vaclav said happily. The Jew seemed less delighted. Too bad for him, Vaclav thought. Just to be helpful, he added, “It’s called shooting the messenger.”
In Yiddish, French, and Czech, Halévy told him what he could do with a messenger. To listen to him, shooting was the least of it. Vaclav listened in admiration. He didn’t understand everything Halévy said, but he wanted to remember some of what he did understand.
The quartermaster sergeant came back. A thunderstorm clouded his brow. He said several pungent things of his own. French might lack the guttural power of Czech or German when it came to swearing, but the sergeant did his damnedest. Vaclav hardly cared. At the same time as the Frenchman was cussing him out, he was also handing over half a dozen five-round clips of long, fat antitank-rifle cartridges.
“Tell him thanks,” Jezek said to Benjamin Halévy.
“Sure.” The Jew eyed him. “It won’t do you any good, you know.” He spoke in French. The quartermaster replied. Halévy translated for Vaclav: “He says you can shove a round up your ass and then hit yourself in the butt with a golf club to touch it off.”
“A golf club?” Vaclav had to laugh. “Well, that’s something different—fuck me if it’s not.”
“He’d say fuck you anyway,” Halévy replied. “Let’s get out of here before he decides he really does have to shaft us, just on general principles.”
That seemed like good advice. Vaclav took it. The quartermaster offered a couple of poignant parting shots. Vaclav glanced toward Halévy. The polyglot Jew declined to translate. That was bound to be just as well.
Civilians streamed away from the front. They didn’t want to get caught by bombs and shells and machine-gun bu
llets. Well, who in their right minds would have? Vaclav didn’t, either. But when you put on a uniform, that was the chance you took.
Some of the Frenchmen and-women eyed the Czechs suspiciously. They weren’t poilus. They weren’t Tommies, either. British soldiers were familiar sights in France. The damnfool locals probably thought they were Germans—it wasn’t as if that hadn’t happened before farther east. Vaclav would have thought German uniforms were plenty familiar here, too. Maybe he was wrong.
Soldiers came back with the civilians. The ones who clutched wounds, pale and tight-lipped, were simply part of what war did. The ones who didn’t seem hurt worried Vaclav more. He’d watched the Czech army fight till it couldn’t fight any more. Then, when the Nazis kept the pressure on, the Czechs went to pieces.
Would the same thing happen here? As far as Vaclav could see, France was in better shape than Czechoslovakia had been. The country seemed united in its fight against the Nazis. Czechoslovakia sure hadn’t been. Half the Slovaks—maybe more than half—wanted the state to come to pieces. Their precious Slovakia was supposed to be independent these days, but Hitler pulled the strings and made Father Tiso dance.
As for the Sudeten Germans, the miserable bastards who’d touched off the war…Vaclav muttered something foul. The Czechs had been pulling them out of the army because they were unreliable. He muttered something else. Too little, too late. Back right after the last war ended, Czechoslovakia should have shipped all those shitheads back to Germany. If they wanted to join the Reich so much, well, fine. So long.
It hadn’t happened. Too goddamn bad.
A French captain spotted the enormous rifle Vaclav had slung over his left shoulder. He said something in his own language. Vaclav only shrugged and looked blank. “Do you want me to understand him?” Halévy asked—in Czech.
Vaclav didn’t even have to think about it. “Nah,” he said. “He’ll pull me off to do something stupid that’ll probably get me killed. I’d rather go on back to camp.”
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