Last Orders: The War That Came Early (53 page)

“An assault rifle?” Lemp echoed. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

Aristide Demange sourly eyed the Germans going on about their business in southern Belgium. The truce between the new government in Germany and the Allies was holding. The business the
Boches
were going about was packing up and getting ready to go home. The matter-of-fact way they went at it suggested they’d been tourists here for the past few years, or possibly men who’d been assigned to work in a foreign land.

That might have been how they felt about it. Demange knew goddamn well how he felt about it. His trigger finger itched, that was how. There they were, figures in
Feldgrau
, some of them only a couple of hundred meters away. They weren’t even trying to stay under cover. Of course he wanted to kill them!

Not all the French soldiers felt the same way, but some of them did. “Doesn’t seem natural,” one said, pointing toward the Germans. “Whenever I spot one of those
cons
, I know I’m supposed to shoot him. I know he’ll shoot me if I don’t, too.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Demange nodded. “Only now we can’t.”

“Now we can’t.” The
poilu
nodded. “Seems a shame to let ’em go
back to Bocheland without putting some holes in ’em,
n’est-ce pas
? In a few years, we’ll have to kick ’em out of here again, chances are.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Demange said. “But knocking ’em flat so they’d know better than to try that kind of crap, the politicians have no stomach for it. It would cost a lot of lives, which they care about a little, and it would cost of lot of money, which they care about a lot. Keep taxes high and you might lose the next election, God forbid.”

A truck rolled up, over on the other side of the wire. Some of the Germans piled into it. A couple of them kissed Belgian women good-bye before they did. One Fritz—an officer, by his cap—shook hands with a Belgian in a top hat. They exchanged bows. They didn’t brush cheeks, but it was plainly a near-run thing. The officer got into the truck, too. Smoke belching from its exhaust, it headed off to the east.

Louis Mirouze came up in time to see the truck disappear behind a grove of beat-up apple trees. “Some more of them gone,” the second lieutenant said.

“They aren’t gone,” Demange said. “If they were gone, they’d be under those fat black crosses they use on their military graveyards. They’re just going back to get ready for the next round.”

“It could be. I think it’s all too likely, in fact,” Mirouze said. “But I also think that won’t happen tomorrow or next week or next year. What will you do in the meanwhile?”

“Whatever the fat
cochons
set over me tell me to do. What else?” Demange answered. “They’d have to cut me out of this goddamn uniform. I don’t know how to take it off any more. How about you, kid?”

Mirouze’s sallow cheeks turned pink. “You will laugh.”

“Try me.”

“At the university, I was a student of American literature. Well, no—of American writing. I am particularly interested in the popular magazines: the stories of the Old West, the crime stories, the love stories, the prize-fighting stories, the stories about rocket ships and Martians with eyes on stalks.”

He was right—Demange did laugh. Then the older man asked, “Can you get a job teaching about that kind of stuff?”

“You are a practical type,” Mirouze said with respect. “I read these things because I enjoy them. They fascinate me. America must be a
very strange place. I have no idea whether I can get that kind of position. I won’t starve if it turns out not to be possible. There is always work for someone who can translate between English and French.”

“You aren’t wrong about that,” Demange agreed. “You would’ve come in handy if there were ever any limeys or Yanks within fifty kilometers of where we’re at. How come you didn’t say anything before about how you get a bulge in your trousers about this American
merde
?”

The younger man blushed once more. “I told you—you would have laughed. I found out very soon that you—please excuse me—did not always take me seriously.”

If anything, that was an understatement. Demange had hardly ever taken Second Lieutenant Mirouze seriously. The rule, however, did have its exceptions. “I took you seriously whenever we messed with the
Boches
. You need a wheelbarrow to carry your balls, and that makes up for a lot of other crap.”

“For which I thank you very much, sir,” Mirouze said gravely. “If you could have seen how frightened I always was inside—”

“That doesn’t mean anything.
Rien
, you hear?” Demange broke in. “The only people who aren’t scared are the ones who’re too dumb to know what can happen to ’em, and you aren’t like that.”

“There are some others,” Mirouze said. “Hitler had many things wrong with him, but stupid he was not. He enjoyed the soldier’s life in the last war, though, the fighting along with the rest.”

“A few like that, yes,” Demange allowed. “Not many. A lot of them get killed in a hurry. Some of the others grow up to be generals or politicians. They send out the next batch to get killed for them.”

Louis Mirouze sent him a quizzical look. “If you feel that way about it, why do you stay a soldier?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m fucking good at it, that’s why. Our
con
of a colonel wanted to get me shot last Christmas, and he didn’t give a shit if he threw away the whole company as long as I stopped one. But we took that village without losing a man, and we all slept warm in it, too.”

“If you had a higher rank, you could accomplish more.”

“If I had a higher rank, I’d be a
con
myself,” Demange retorted. Something in Mirouze’s face made him chuckle and shift his Gitane
from one side of his mouth to the other. “All right, all right. If I had a higher rank, I’d be a bigger
con
. There. You happy now?”

“
Mais certainement
, Lieutenant.” Mirouze sounded almost as dry as Demange could manage.

A couple of more German trucks rattled up to take away more troops. Each one also towed a 105mm howitzer. Demange knew he wouldn’t be sorry to see those snub-nosed murderers disappear back into Germany. The trucks, though, sounded as arthritic as they looked. The Americans, now, the Americans by God knew how to build trucks. Demange knew little and cared less about American boxing stories. Trucks mattered, though.

American trucks, he thought, could even stand up to Russia’s ruts and bogs. German models hadn’t been able to; they started falling to pieces in short order. Demange couldn’t get too scornfully amused about that—French trucks went to bits just about as fast.

More
Boches
climbed into the trucks. On Belgian roads, they’d do all right. Pretty soon, the
Wehrmacht
would leave the Low Countries. Everything would get back to normal. Or everything would except the endless kilometers of barbed wire, the minefields that would go on maiming people and farm animals for years to come, the trenches, the bomb craters, the reinforced-concrete fortifications that would take dynamite to remove …

Demange remarked on those. Mirouze looked back at him. “Well, sir, if you’re going to worry about every little detail …”

“Ha!” Demange barked sour laughter. “You’d better watch yourself there, sonny. Bits of me are rubbing off on you. That’s fine when you’re in the trenches like this. Maybe not so good at the university, eh?”

“Maybe—but then you never know for sure,” Mirouze answered. “If I booby-trap a professor’s office, mm, that’s one way to get ahead.”

This time, Demange laughed for real. “There you go! And if the Germans get frisky again and the Army calls you back, you might get stuck with me again.” He’d had plenty of worse men under him, but he was damned if he’d say so. If Mirouze couldn’t figure it out, the hell with him. Demange grubbed in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes.

.  .  .

Chaim Weinberg stared at the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers stabbing the heavens as the
Ciudad de Santander
chugged into New York harbor. He’d grown up with all this stuff, but it still felt dreamlike to him. He hadn’t set eyes on any of it since 1936.

Just about eight years
, he thought in wonder. He’d been a kid when he set off to fight for the Spanish Republic. He wasn’t a kid any more. A lot of things, yeah, but not a kid. He looked down at the wreckage of his left hand. He had the scars to prove he was no kid, all right. He had a son to prove he was no kid, too, a son he’d probably never set eyes on again.

Tugboats shoved the freighter against a pier. The
Santander
had only a few cabins. They said Chaim’s was the best one. The good news was that he believed them. The bad news, unfortunately, was also that he believed them.

No—the good news was that he hadn’t had to worry about U-boats on the Atlantic crossing. They’d all gone home to Germany. The coalition of generals and fat cats heading the new government didn’t look to be any bargain. Compared to what the generals and fat cats had overthrown, though, they also didn’t seem so bad.

The scene on the pier wasn’t like the ones you saw in the movies when the big ocean liner came into port. No crowds in evening clothes out there, no band playing, no confetti. Next to no nothing. A short, broad-shouldered man in a dark brown fedora, a tweed jacket, and work pants stood there, along with a gray-haired woman wearing a flowered housedress.

Chaim waved. Moishe and Ruth Weinberg—his mother and father—waved back. “I gotta clear customs before I can see you,” he shouted. A moment later, he yelled the same thing in Yiddish. His father waved to show he got that.

Sure enough, when the gangplank came down, it came down on the far side of a chicken-wire fence on wheels that they rolled out to keep people from just strolling on into New York City. Chaim shouldered his duffel bag and went into the customs shed. It wasn’t as if he had a lot of treasures from Spain. A few old clothes, a big bottle of Spanish brandy for his folks, another one that he’d mostly emptied on
the way over, some newspapers with photos of the Nationalist surrender—that was about it.

He pulled his passport out of his pocket to show it to the customs clerk. The green cover was bent and crinkled and stained with sweat and mud and blood. Some of the inside pages carried those stains, too.

As soon as the clerk opened the passport, he frowned. It wasn’t because of the stains. As far as Chaim could tell, he didn’t even notice those. He was looking for other things. “Don’t you have any current identification?” he asked in annoyance. “This passport expired years ago.”

“Well, I’ve got this.” Chaim produced his discharge papers from the Army of the Spanish Republic. The document was full of seals and stamps and rococo typography.

But it cut no ice with the customs clerk. “Have anything in a language a man can read? English? French? German?”

“Nope. My mom and pop are waiting for me on the pier, though. They’ll tell you I’m still the same
meshuggeneh
who got the passport.”

“What have you been doing in Europe, in, ah, Spain”—the clerk went through the endorsements on the passport’s back pages—“after this document became invalid?”

“Fighting Fascism,” Chaim answered proudly. “I can show you my picture in the paper when the Nationalists finally gave up. It’s pretty little, but you can still spot my smiling
punim
.”

He started to pull the newspaper out of the duffel. The clerk waved for him to stop. “Mr. Simmons!” the fellow called. “We have a difficult case here, I’m afraid.”

Chaim’s heart sank when he saw Mr. Simmons. From pale, bald head to gold-rimmed round glasses to respectable suit, the man was the spitting image of mid-level bureaucrats all over the world. What would he make of a rough-talking Marxist-Leninist Jew with out-of-date travel documents?

“What’s going on?” he asked, and his voice was as gray as his jacket.

The younger clerk and Chaim took turns explaining. Each talked over the other. Pretty soon, each was making a point of talking over the other. Mr. Simmons listened. He asked a few questions. He looked
at Chaim’s passport, and at his smashed left hand, and at his discharge papers. Then he asked, “When you were in Spain, Mr. Weinberg, did you know an Abraham Lincoln named Wilmer Christiansen?”

“A long time ago,” Chaim answered. “Redhead, wasn’t he? Poor guy got killed on the Ebro in ’38, if I remember straight. He was all right, Will was. How come?”

“He was my nephew,” Simmons said. “Now let’s get this straightened out, shall we?”

And they did. With a few thumps from a rubber stamp, the irregularities in Chaim’s paperwork disappeared. The clerk who’d called Simmons over looked discontented, but he kept his mouth shut. When you called your superior over and he did something you didn’t expect, you were stuck with it.

Duffel bag over his shoulder again, Chaim walked out of the customs shed. He put the duffel down to thump his father on the back and hug his mother. “Your poor hand!
Vey iz mir!
” Ruth Weinberg exclaimed.

“It’s okay,” Chaim said. English felt funny in his mouth. He’d used it less and less as time in Spain went by. Americans in the Abe Lincolns kept getting hurt or killed, and Spaniards took their places. German-speaking Internationals could handle his Yiddish. He’d spoken Spanish whenever he went behind the lines, too, except when he was talking with Dr. Alvarez.