Last Orders: The War That Came Early (50 page)

Lothar Eckhart got Witt bandaged and injected. Then the panzer’s big gun started pouring HE shells into the
Rathaus
. Each burst turned more of the fine old building into fine modern junk. Several of the bursts started fresh fires, too. With hot metal fragments tearing through what probably amounted to cubic kilometers of paper, that was anything but surprising.

As the fires grew and spread, men in
Feldgrau
and others in black started scrambling out of the
Rathaus
. The panzer crew fired more HE rounds at the doorways: the range was too long for canister. Theo added bursts from the bow gun every now and again. Eckhardt chimed in with some from the coaxial machine gun in the turret, too. Neither one of them felt any great warmth for the diehard National Socialists.

Diehards they might be, but they did die. Some of them lay very still after they got shot. Others thrashed like a cat hit by a car. Theo concentrated on turning thrashers into still ones. He was putting them out of their misery—and he was making sure they wouldn’t get up and start shooting at the panzer again.

Some of the Nazis made it to piles of brick and stone and God knew what in front of the
Rathaus
or off to the side. They did shoot back. Every once in a while, a rifle round would ring off the hardened steel of the Panzer IV’s front plates. If no one was standing up in the cupola, though, you could fire rifles at a panzer from now till doomsday without doing worse than chipping the paint.

Theo glanced back at Hermann Witt again. “How are you, Sergeant?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve been better, but the morphine’s working, so I’ve been worse, too—a few minutes ago, say.” Witt’s voice seemed to come from far away, but he didn’t just close his eyes and go to sleep, the way a lot of people who got stuck did. He might not be thinking any too fast, but he was still thinking straight. After a longish pause to work things through, he went on, “I’ll be laid up for a while. Till you clowns get a new commander, Adi, I’m putting you in charge.”

“Me? That’s got to be the dope talking, Sergeant.” Adi sounded amazed and horrified at the same time.

Witt shook his head as if in slow motion or underwater. But he sounded very sure as he answered, “Nah. Theo doesn’t want it”—which was an understatement, as he had to know—“and you’re both senior to Lothar and Kurt. So tag—you’re it.”

“But—” Adi protested helplessly.

“I know what you mean. That won’t matter, either, not under the Salvation Committee. Or it better not. So do what he tells you, you lugs,” Witt said. Theo nodded. He didn’t think the Salvation Committee would act stupid in the same ways the Nazis had. If it did, well, the country would need a revolution against the revolution.

When you were a civilian in a town where they were fighting a civil war, what could you do but hunker down and hope you didn’t get killed? Sarah Bruck and her parents did exactly that. They got hungry. The power didn’t always stay on. But they lived far enough away from the
Rathaus
and the cathedral that only a few stray artillery shells came down anywhere close by.

Sarah looked at the hole one of them made in the street with amazement. Her father eyed it with something more like amusement. “Believe me, dear, you put that next to the crater a five hundred-kilo bomb makes and you’d never even notice it,” Samuel Goldman said.

“I believe you. I’ve seen those, too,” Sarah answered. “But this isn’t a little hole in the ground even if it doesn’t have a bigger one next to it.”

He considered that with professional deliberation before nodding. “Mm, you’re not wrong,” he said, as if giving her the accolade.

He went out later that afternoon. He wouldn’t say where he was going. He came back carrying a cloth sack. When he opened it, he took out tinned meat, tinned cabbage, tinned potatoes, even tinned bread. “Where did you get this stuff?” Sarah gasped.

Father shrugged. “I have a few things saved for a rainy day. This looked rainy enough to use one or two.”

“But—” Sarah said.

“But—” her mother echoed. Hanna Goldman found words to add
to that: “How could you have kept them, Samuel? How many times did the
Gestapo
search the house? Four or five, at least.”

Samuel Goldman looked professorial again: professorially scornful. “What do blackshirts know about black-figure potsherds? Not much! Not even enough to steal them. But there are still a few people here in town who know a little more.”

Sarah thought she remembered that black-figure pots were older than their red-figure counterparts. She wasn’t even sure of that; it might have been the other away around. So she knew very little, if at all, more than the
Gestapo
men did. What looked like a broken chunk of a vase hadn’t even seemed worth lifting to them. Evidently, that was their mistake.

“Did you get anything close to what they’re really worth?” Mother asked.

He shrugged. “I got enough to keep us eating for a few days—maybe till the fighting dies down and we can spend money instead. The way things are right now, that’s good value for what they’re worth, especially when the other choices are nothing, nettle soup, and dandelion salad.”

Hanna Goldman had no answer for that. Neither did Sarah. Her clothes hung looser on her every day. Her belly growled all the time. At bottom, you were an animal. When the animal started starving, it wanted to eat, and it didn’t care how it got fed.

The animal inside Sarah was much happier after they opened some of those tins. Her father still seemed discontented. “I should have got some tobacco, too,” he muttered. His pouch was empty, and he couldn’t go hunting cigarette butts unless he wanted someone to shoot him.

Not long after dark came a sharp knock on the door. Sarah and her mother and father stared at one another in horror.
Not now!
she thought.
Not when they’re throwing the Nazis out! It isn’t fair!

The knock came again, and a deep voice with it: “Open up! I know you’re in there!”

What would he do if they didn’t? Start shooting through the door? That seemed most likely to Sarah. It must have to her father, too, because he gestured helplessly toward the doorway. All at once, he seemed very old.

Legs numb with fear and despair, Sarah walked to the door and opened it. A tall man dressed all in black strode in. He carried a Schmeisser. A metal death’s-head badge gleamed on his cap. He quickly closed the door behind him to keep light from leaking out.

He looked Sarah up and down. That arrogant stare made her want to hit him. So did the grin that stretched across his strong-cheekboned face. Then he said, “Hi, Sis. Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time.”

Those numb legs didn’t want to hold Sarah up. She had to lock her knees to keep from falling on the floor. More slowly than she might have, she realized he was wearing black coveralls, not a tunic and trousers. The glittering death’s head was a panzer crewman’s insigne, not the SS’s.

“Saul?” she whispered.

“Guilty,” he said. “Guilty of all kinds of things these past few years, I’m afraid.” He nodded to Samuel Goldman. “Hey, Pop. Well, now I’ve been through the mill, too. Some fun, huh?” Only after that did he tack on, “Hi, Mom. Made it this far, anyhow.”

Little by little, they all began to believe the prodigal son had returned. The story came from the wrong Testament, but none of them was inclined to be fussy. They crowded round Saul and hugged him and kissed him and pounded him on the back. The one thing they didn’t do was make a whole lot of noise. They didn’t want the neighbors to know they had anything to celebrate.

“What are you
doing
here?” Sarah asked after they dragged her older brother to the sofa.

“Well, we got pulled out of Russia to help sit on all the wicked rebels in Münster,” he answered. “I thought that was pretty damn funny all by itself. Then when the generals staged the
Putsch
against the
Führer
, most of the crews in the regiment sided with the Salvation Committee.” His face clouded. “I don’t think my panzer gang killed anybody I was friends with. I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

Quietly, Samuel Goldman said, “I never had to wonder about that, thank God. The last time around, the civil war didn’t start till after the regular fighting ended, and I managed to stay out of it.”

“We got your letter,” Sarah said. “We knew you got into the
Wehrmacht
. After that, all we could do was hope.”

“And pray,” her mother added. People were rarely as secular as they thought they were before hard times hit.

“You got it? That’s good. I figured writing the Breisachs across the street was a better bet than sending it straight to you—as long as they didn’t turn me in,” Saul said. “And a lot of Aryans just went with the Jew-baiting because the Nazis told ’em to. They didn’t all enjoy it.”

“We’ve seen the same thing,” Sarah agreed.

“How did you get to be Adalbert the panzer man?” Father asked. “How did you get papers that said you were?”

“I owe one of the guys I played football with for that—owe him more than I can ever pay back, I guess. He knew people who took care of it for me,” Saul said. “These days, I think of myself as Adi more than I do by my real name. Unless you called me Moses, you couldn’t have stuck me with a more Jewish handle.”

“It wasn’t a problem at the time,” Father said stiffly.

“I suppose not,” Saul allowed. “And it may not be a problem any more. The
Rathaus
and all the paperwork in it are up in smoke. I ought to know—my panzer helped blast it.”

“My marriage certificate.” Sarah sounded sadder than she’d dreamt she would.

Her brother stared at her. “Your what?” He shook his head. “I guess I’m not the only one who had a life while I was in the
Wehrmacht
. Who is he? Where is he? What’s he do?”

“He’s dead.” Even now, Sarah started to puddle up when she said that. “He was Isidor Bruck, from the baking family.”

“I know him. Uh, I knew him. I played football against him. Uh, I’m sorry,” Saul said. “Too much, too quick. And now I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not supposed to be here at all, which is putting it mildly.” He hugged and kissed Sarah and her mother and father once more in turn. Then he slipped out the door and vanished into blacked-out night. Sarah stared after him. Only the remembered feel of his arms around her made her doubt she’d dreamt the whole thing.

Vaclav Jezek had fought in the slag piles of France’s industrial northeast before. Crossing over the border into Belgium didn’t change the way the landscape looked by one iota. But now the forces of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile weren’t fighting, even if they had come up to the front.

Not fighting ate at Vaclav. “What are we doing here?” he demanded of, inevitably, Benjamin Halévy.

“That’s a big question, isn’t it?” Halévy said. “Wouldn’t you do better talking about it with a priest?”

“Oh, fuck yourself!” Vaclav exploded. “God damn it to hell, I want to kill Nazis. I feel like an atheist in a coffin, all dressed up with no place to go.”

“Cute. Definitely cute.” The Jew mimed applause. “They should put you on the radio. You’d have people in stitches.”

“If you don’t quit acting like a wise guy, you’ll need stitches,” Jezek said. “What are we supposed to do when they won’t let us fire at the Germans? I can see the bastards over there, going about their business.” He pointed to the Nazis’ field fortifications. Sure as hell, the Germans
in them didn’t bother keeping their heads down. The ceasefire was holding as what they called the Salvation Committee slowly gained the upper hand on the loyalists or diehards or whatever name you wanted to stick on them.

“It was like this on the Western Front for a while right after the war started, too,” Halévy said.

“When England and France stuck their thumbs up their asses while Hitler raped my country, you mean,” Vaclav glossed bitterly.

“That’s right.” Benjamin Halévy admitted what no one could possibly deny. The Jew went on, “Next thing we knew, we were trying to keep the
Feldgrau
bastards from sticking a swastika flag on top of the Eiffel Tower.”

“Served you right, too.”

“I guess it did.” Again, Halévy seemed to hope a soft answer would turn away wrath. “But I don’t think that’ll happen this time around. The Germans have seen they can’t conquer the world. Now they’re hoping like hell the world can’t conquer them.”

“Everybody’s crazy to let ’em get away with a peace that doesn’t knock the snot out of them,” Vaclav said. “I mean, crazy. You think they won’t try this shit again as soon as they patch things up at home? Third time lucky, some general will think, and maybe he’ll be right.”

“Maybe he will,” Benjamin Halévy said with a somber nod. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s going to make Germany spit out Austria, does it? She’s the biggest, richest country in Europe even without it. With it, she’s the same thing only more so. But it seems as though most Austrians would just as soon be Germans, so there you are.”

“Austria? Fuck Austria! Fuck Austria in the neck!” Vaclav said. “It looks like those shitheeled Slovak bumpkins will get to keep their own country, too, and the Fritzes will get to keep mine.”