Last Orders: The War That Came Early (17 page)

Hans-Ulrich took a few steps to get upwind of him. The Gauloise was so harsh, he didn’t want anything to do with it. In a low voice, he asked, “And what did you think of Major Keller today?”

For a few seconds, he thought he’d been too quiet and Dieselhorst hadn’t heard him. Then, without seeming to, the sergeant looked around to make sure no one else stood close by. As quietly, he answered, “In the time I needed to listen to that, I could’ve taken a good shit.
Quatsch mit Sosse
, nothing else but.”

Rubbish with sauce
. That was further than Rudel wanted to go—further than he might dare to go. “We do have to win the war, you know,” he said mildly.

“Aber natürlich.”
Dieselhorst did a good job of echoing Colonel Steinbrenner’s dry tones. “But you know, sir, I could figure that out all by myself. I don’t need some would-be Party
Bonz
to shove it up my asshole.”

“He does try,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“He’s trying, all right,” Dieselhorst answered, which sounded like agreement but wasn’t. “If the Party wants to tend to politics, fine. It can tend to politics. I’m a
Luftwaffe
sergeant, for God’s sake. What do I know about that crap, or care? But if the Party wants to run the goddamn war, it should do a better job.” He breathed out more smoke, either from the Gauloise or from his own ire. Then he paused and added one more word: “Sir.”

“Oh, yes.” Hans-Ulrich nodded. “As long as you tack that on the end, it makes everything that came before it
wunderbar
.”

They both laughed. They’d been flying together since before the war started. Not many crews from those days were still alive, much less still flying together. They’d saved each other’s bacon too many times. They didn’t always agree, but neither one would ever report the other.

You followed your superiors’ orders. You hoped the people set over you were there for a good reason and knew what they were doing when they gave them. Most of the time, they put their lives on the line along with you. You couldn’t ask for more than that. In the end, you had to hope it would prove enough.

Chaim Weinberg felt like a stranger in the one place in Spain where he should have been most at home. He’d been away from the Abe Lincolns for months while the fancy surgeon in Madrid put his left hand halfway back together again. The same mortar round that wounded him killed his best buddy. Too many faces in the trenches were Spanish-speaking strangers, not American idealists who’d come over here understanding that
somebody
had to stand first in line to give Fascism a good kick in the teeth.

Only one thing made coming back to the front worthwhile: the distant faces on the far side of the barbed wire and the hammered ground between the trench lines sill belonged to the bastards who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo. As far as Chaim was concerned, anybody stupid enough to fight for a dictator who was a fat, homely pig besides deserved to get his ticket punched.

The dumb
putos
over there probably thought that, if by some mischance their God was too busy watching a sparrow fall to keep them from catching a bullet in the ear, they’d head straight for a ghastly
Catholic heaven. Robes. Harps. Halos. Wings. No screwing. No drinking. Forever.

That vision of what lay beyond the Pearly Gates struck Chaim as more hellish than heavenly. He expected to die dead when he died, as if he went under ether without coming to again on the other side. He’d found out more about ether and going under these past few months than he’d ever wanted to know, too. But dying that way at least meant you were out of your pain, once and for all.

Nationalist loudspeakers still bragged about how good the food was on the other side of the line. Whenever a Nationalist soldier came over or got captured, he was always as scrawny as his Republican counterparts. So Chaim knew that was a load of crap.

Once, when the Nationalist with the microphone was wetting his pants about how good the mutton stew was, Chaim had mocked him so well, he’d touched off a big firefight. He’d learned his lesson. Mutton stew wasn’t worth dying for.

When he got a little money, he bought a bottle of Spanish rotgut brandy and took it down the line to the stretch the Czech army-in-exile held. The French Jew whose folks came from Prague told him Vaclav Jezek was out between the lines, lying in wait to murder some Fascist big shot more than a mile away.

“Good luck to him,” Chaim said. He held out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

“Sure. Thanks,” Benjamin Halévy answered. He and Chaim grinned at each other. Most of the Czechs spoke German—that was how Vaclav talked to Chaim. Halévy knew German, too. But, like Chaim, he spoke real Yiddish. Using the
mamaloshen
and knowing he’d be understood was a treat for the American.

Halévy seemed to enjoy it, too. “What language would you talk if you had your druthers?” Chaim asked him.

“My folks used Yiddish and Czech at home—sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both mixed together,” Halévy answered. “They knew French, too, of course, but they spoke it with an accent. Me, I learned from the other kids when I was a kid myself, so I lost my accent pretty quick if I ever had one. When I took regular
German in school, though, the guy who taught me said I sounded like a newspaper reporter from Prague. I used Czech vowels, see. Of course, my teacher was from Alsace. He had a hell of a funny accent himself.”

He didn’t exactly answer the question. From what Chaim had seen, Halévy was good at not exactly answering questions. Well, this one didn’t matter much. That they could talk to each other, that was what counted.

Chaim was about to say so when Vaclav Jezek’s monster rifle boomed, somewhere out there in no-man’s-land. You couldn’t mistake that report for anything else around here. Chaim wondered how the Czech kept that big, heavy brute from breaking his shoulder every time he pulled the trigger. Okay, it had a padded stock and a muzzle brake. Even so, anything that fired such a heavy slug so fat was bound to kick like a dinosaur.

Benjamin Halévy knew that boom for what it was. “Here’s hoping he nailed at least a colonel,” the French Jew said.

“Alevai, omayn!”
Chaim agreed. They grinned at each other again. You had to know Yiddish to get that.

But then Halévy’s handsome features soured into a frown. “If he did get a bigwig, Sanjurjo’s
mamzrim
”—another Yiddish word knowing German wouldn’t help you with—“will work us over for revenge.”

“Let’s have a look.” It had been quiet around here. Chaim didn’t think he was taking a horrible chance hopping up onto the firing step and peering toward the Nationalists’ lines. Right at the front, everything seemed normal enough. But off in the distance, he saw something that put him in mind of a commotion in an anthill.

As soon as he did, he ducked down. Just as well, too, because an enemy bullet cracked by no more than a couple of seconds later. He didn’t think it would have hit him—it sounded yards high—but that wasn’t the kind of thing where you wanted to find out the hard way you were wrong.

“He got somebody?” Halévy asked.

“They’re sure acting like it,” Chaim replied.

And they were. The Nationalists’ machine guns opened up in a minute or so. They lobbed mortars and some 77s at the Czechs’ position,
too.
Hate
was what the limeys called this kind of pounding. Chaim had picked up the word from an Englishman in the Internationals years ago—back before Hitler jumped Czechoslovakia, he thought.

As he crouched in the trench, he cradled his smashed-up hand under him. If it got hit again, they
would
cut it off. He knew that. There wouldn’t be enough left to save.

After about ten minutes, the bombardment eased off. “Well, it couldn’t have been a general,” Halévy said, cautiously getting to his feet. “They stay mad longer for generals.”

“They’d go
meshuggeh
—they’d fall on the floor and foam at the mouth like Holy Rollers—if our little Czech buddy really did blow Marshal Sanjurjo a new asshole,” Chaim said as he stood up, too.

“Foam at the mouth like what?” Halévy asked.

“Holy Rollers. You don’t have Holy Rollers over here?” Chaim said. When Halévy shook his head, the Jew from New York City explained: “Crazy Christians. Protestant Christians. They’re mostly in the South, but not all of ’em. They roll around on the ground and they speak in tongues and … and like that.” He realized he’d just told Halévy everything he thought he knew about them.

“Oh.” After a moment, Halévy shrugged a very French-looking shrug. “No wonder I never heard of them. Not a lot of Protestants in France or Spain.”

“No kidding!” Chaim said.

“Not a lot of Protestants in Czechoslovakia, either. Oh, I suppose maybe some of the Germans in the Sudetenland might have been Lutherans. But they didn’t do any of that rolling around in church.” Benjamin Halévy’s face clouded. “They saved that kind of shit for Hitler.”

“Yeah, I guess they would have.”

He hung around with the Czechs till after darkness fell. Night was coming earlier all the time now as summer ebbed. Vaclav sneaked in from no-man’s-land. No one challenged him till just before he reached the forward trenches. He was good at sneaking. He made his report in Czech, which meant nothing to Chaim. “He thinks it was a colonel he killed,” Halévy said in Yiddish. “The prick had two aides with him, so he probably wasn’t just a major.”

Chaim held out his bottle of rotgut. “Here’s to a dead Fascist colonel,” he said.

“Hey!” Vaclav slapped him on the back—considerately, on the right side. He took the brandy and cradled it like a baby. “Good to see you again. And where did you get this?”

“Stole it—where else?” Chaim said. “Let’s destroy the evidence.” So they did.

Stories in the paper admitted the
Wehrmacht
was falling back in Russia, though they called it things like “consolidating our lines” and “forming strengthened defensive positions.” What passed for news reports on Dr. Goebbels’ radio admitted the same thing. While admitting it, they tried to deny it at the same time. They boasted in bloodthirsty fashion about all the Russians Germany was killing and all the Soviet panzers it was destroying.

If you believed Dr. Goebbels’ radio, Stalin was scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to manpower and machinery. If you believed the radio, he’d scraped the bottom of the barrel so many times, he must have scraped clean through it by now.

Of course, if you believed the radio and the newspapers, you were a bigger
Dummkopf
than Sarah Bruck hoped she was. She knew lies when she heard them. The only thing that kept her from hoping for a total collapse in the East was the thought that Saul was probably there. He was if he hadn’t got killed by now, anyhow.

Sarah walked near the
Rathaus
. She carried a small cloth bag. The bag had woolen cloth inside it: some of a Jewish family’s pathetically small ration of woven goods. It was going to be used to patch the shabby clothes she and her mother and father were already wearing, not to make anything new. Unless you were going to turn out a cap for a pinheaded baby, you didn’t get enough to make anything new. Oh, that exaggerated, but not by a great deal.

She threw the Münster city hall a black look as she scurried by. The Party dignitaries who ran the town from there enjoyed making things as tough on Jews as they could. They were good at it, too.

An SS man strode past her, hobnailed boots clumping on the sidewalk.
He scowled at her, but didn’t ask—no, tell—her to stop and show her papers. She wore yellow stars in all the places Nazi regulations demanded.

“Stinking blackshirt!”

The cry made the SS man freeze for a moment with one foot off the ground, as if he were a frame in a newsreel. Then he whirled, amazement and fury warring on his hatchet face. “Who said that?” he shouted, an angry flush rising up from his collar, higher at every word.

He couldn’t blame Sarah: the yell had come from a man. Several Aryans in worn clothes were possibilities. A couple of them looked to be fighting smiles. They were all past conscription age, but seemed in better shape than what they had on.

Then the SS man did round on Sarah. “Who said that, Jew?” he growled. “You must have seen. Tell me!”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I wasn’t paying any attention,” she said.

“Leave her alone, you lousy pigdog!” a woman yelled. Now that the SS man had turned, he couldn’t tell for sure who she was, either.

He whirled again. He would have been a terror on a basketball court. “You are all under arrest! Every single one of you!” he bellowed. The back of his neck was even redder than his face. “Come with me to the
Rathaus
immediately—immediately, I say!”

“Lick my ass, peckerhead!” called one of the not-so-young men. The others laughed.

Sarah thought the laughter provoked the SS man more than the insult. He yanked a truncheon off his belt and walked purposefully toward the men.

One of them bent down and grabbed a beer bottle out of the gutter. With an economical motion that told of some practice, he broke the end on the edge of the curb. Sharp shards glittered there as he hung on to the handle. “Sure—come on,” he said with a wolfish smile. “See how you like it.”