Last Orders: The War That Came Early (55 page)

He wondered what had happened to Hess since Hitler’s untimely demise. He didn’t recall hearing anything about Hess since then, not that the man with the bushy eyebrows died a brave Nazi death, not that he was still alive and fighting, not that he’d been captured, not … anything.

His high-placed friends would know. Once he got back to England, he could find out. If he remembered. If he didn’t, that wasn’t the biggest thing in the world, either.

After a while, the lorry pulled off onto the shoulder. “Break time,” the driver announced. “Grab some grub, brew some char, go off into the bushes and set your minds at ease.”

“I don’t keep my mind there,” Walsh said.

“You’ve got to remember, Staff—you’re gettin’ old,” Jack Scholes said. The other Tommies in the back of the truck chuckled. The driver whooped—Walsh couldn’t give him trouble once this ride ended.

They washed down whatever they happened to have on them with tea brewed over smokeless cookers. Then they climbed back into the lorry. Before long, they crossed from Belgium into France. Walsh never would have known it, except that they passed two flagpoles, one
flying a tricolor of black, yellow, and red, the other a red, white, and blue three-striper.

As night was falling, the lorry pulled into a tent city on the outskirts of Calais. “This is where I came in,” Walsh said. “Where I came in three different times, as a matter of fact.”

“Next time you get over ’ere, you can pay your own way,” Scholes said with a sly grin.

“I’ve seen all kinds of funny places on His Majesty’s shilling,” Walsh said in musing tones. “France and Belgium and Norway and Egypt … I never would have set eyes on the Pyramids and the Sphinx if I hadn’t gone there on duty. That’s something I’ll remember the rest of my days. Christ, chances are I’d never even have seen Scotland if I’d stayed a miner.”

“No loss.” Private McAllister was as glad to be away from his homeland as Walsh was to have escaped Wales.

“ ’E’s right, Oi reckon,” Scholes said, grinning still. “ ’Ow much would you ’ave missed it?”

“Not bloody much—for all kinds of reasons.” Again, Walsh saw Hess’ parachute coming down in that field. That had turned his life inside out and upside down, sure as hell. He went on, “I got shot in France, and I got shot in Africa, too. Wherever you do it, it’s not something I recommend. I didn’t get shot in Norway, but God only knows why. The Fritzes up there gave it their best try, no doubt about that.”

“An’ now they’re leaving, an’ that Quisling sod ’oo ’elped run the place for ’em, ’e’s got to find ’imself somewhere to ’ide,” Scholes said.

“Him and Mussert the Dutchman and Degrelle the Belgian and more besides,” Walsh agreed. “They’re all homegrown Nazis, so I don’t know if the Salvation Committee will even let them hole up in Germany. If their own people catch ’em, they’ll win a noose or a bullet.”

“Tell me they don’t deserve it, Staff,” the younger man said.

Walsh shook his head. “I can’t. I think they do. Then maybe we’ll have a little peace and quiet—till the next crop of gangsters and traitors gets taller and starts to need cutting down, anyhow.”

Peggy Druce scooped bacon out of the frying pan with a slotted spatula and set the rashers on paper napkins that would soak up the grease. After cracking eggs into a bowl that already held some heavy cream and stirring the mix, she started scrambling them in the pan.

Watching from the kitchen table, Dave Hartman blew a stream of cigarette smoke up toward the ceiling. “You’re so smooth when you do that,” he said admiringly.

“Practice,” Peggy answered. “Not like it’s the first time I ever fixed bacon and eggs.” At her age, there weren’t many things left to do for the first time. Too many of the ones that were left had to do with getting old and getting feeble and dying. The longer she didn’t find out about those, the happier she would stay.

But Dave took her words in a different sense. “That’s it!” he said, and nodded in complete concord. “That’s just it! You remind me of a guy who’s been working a drill press so long, he knows in his sleep all the things it can do and all the things he can do with it. When I mess around in the kitchen, I’m more like somebody who’s maybe heard of a drill press but hasn’t hardly seen one.”

“I’ll bet you do fine.” Peggy had trouble imagining Dave as less than competent at anything to which he set his hand. She served up breakfast. “Do you want another cup of coffee with this?”

“Sure. Thanks, sweetie.”

After she poured for him and for her, she put the frying pan in the sink and filled it with soapy water. That would save on elbow grease when she did the dishes. Things wouldn’t dry out and stick to the inside of the pan like cement. “Why can’t they make a frying pan where it’s enamel or something else smooth in there, so you could wash it easier?” she said.

“You could …” Dave stretched out the word, and the silence after it, while he thought things over. Then he went on, “I bet it’d be swell to begin with. After a while, though, you’d bang on the enamel with your spatula and your big fork and your serving spoon, and the surface would get as scratched up as steel does, or maybe worse. Same with the grit from cleanser, and you couldn’t use steel wool. If you had nothing but wooden kitchen tools and you washed your frying pan with a sponge and soap all the time, it might stay okay long enough to be worthwhile.”

“I guess.” Peggy was glad he didn’t make her sound like a jerk even while he picked to pieces what she’d thought was her good idea. She continued, “There ought to be something like enamel that food wouldn’t stick to but that you wouldn’t need to baby.”

“Yeah, there ought to. Only trouble is, I have no idea what that’d be,” Dave said. “I wish I did—I bet I could get rich off it.” He shrugged. “I’m not a metallurgist, or a chemist, either. Working with metal and stuff, you pick up bits and pieces, but bits and pieces are all I’ll ever have. For a guy who quit school halfway through the tenth grade, I’ve done okay for myself.”

“You sure have. Your hands know just what they’re doing.” Peggy winked at him. “They probably do when you’re at work, too.”

He blushed like a kid still wet behind the ears, though her language hadn’t been even slightly blue. He was more straitlaced about those things than Herb. Talking dirty had made Herb laugh and got him excited. It shocked Dave, all the more so since he thought of her as a
high-class lady. That didn’t stop him from enjoying her company when they were together in bed, or why would she have just cooked him breakfast? It did mean she behaved differently with him from the way she would have with her ex-husband.

Herb hadn’t been Peggy’s first man, though she didn’t know if he knew that. He had been the first whose likes and dislikes she’d paid close attention to. Now she was learning somebody else.

And somebody else was learning her, too. They’d fumbled some to begin with, each finding out what worked with the other and what didn’t work so well. That seemed strange and interesting. She and Herb had known the right answers without thinking, which might have been part of the problem. The other part was that, after she got back from Europe, they’d known without caring.

Care Dave did. If he was as precise with his lathes and presses and punches as he was with her, he had to be the best machinist in Pennsylvania, if not in the whole country. And he still seemed surprised she wanted to fool around with him. She found that flattering and funny at the same time.

He glanced over at the clock above the stove. Her eyes followed his. It was a few minutes before eight. “Want I should turn on the radio, see what’s gone wrong since last night?” he said.

“Sure. Just because it’s Sunday, that doesn’t mean everything’s perfect,” Peggy said.

She’d never had trouble living without much in the way of religion. Neither had Herb, who was too cynical to believe in things he couldn’t see for himself. Dave wasn’t somebody who sang hymns in church, but he took for granted the beliefs he’d soaked up as a kid. Peggy hadn’t exactly shocked him, but she had made him blink a few times.

He clicked the knob on the little kitchen set. When the sound came up, a smooth-voiced announcer was flogging Bon Ami cleanser. He claimed it didn’t scratch. Dave’s raised eyebrow called him a liar.

“This is Lowell Thomas with the news,” came next. “The Soviet Union has declared martial law in newly annexed Lithuania after two assassins, one armed with a bomb, the other with a submachine gun, murdered Field Marshal Ivan Koniev, Stalin’s military governor, as he
traveled by car from his residence to his office in Kaunas. Kaunas is currently the capital of Lithuania, though the recently incorporated Vilno may take the other city’s place.

“Speaking from Finland, Lithuanian exile groups call Koniev’s assassination a powerful blow for liberty. Russian reprisals in occupied Lithuania are said to be very harsh, although not much news has come out of the USSR following the announcement of the killing.”

“God help the Lithuanians,” Peggy said. “Stalin will jump on them with both feet, and he’ll put on hobnailed boots before he does it, too. He’s not quite Hitler, but the choice between them was always the choice between worster and worstest.”

Dave hoisted an eyebrow again. “You talk funny sometimes, know that?”

“No comment has come from the White House yet,” Lowell Thomas went on. “The United States has not officially recognized the Russian occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, any more than we have officially recognized the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.”

“But we ain’t gonna fight about any of them,” Dave put in. Peggy nodded; it looked the same way to her.

“American freighters continue to carry trucks, tanks, planes, and other military supplies to Murmansk and Archangel,” the radio said. “No one expects anything the USSR does in Lithuania to hurt the Russian-American alliance against Tojo’s Japan.”

Peggy nodded again. Sure as hell, that sounded like the way the world worked. The little peoples, the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians and Czechs, got the shitty end of the stick while the big countries did as they pleased. The Iroquois and Cherokees and Apaches might sympathize with the minnows on the other side of the Atlantic. They sat on reservations; their European counterparts were under martial law. And the sympathy wouldn’t do anybody any good.

“American bombers pounded Wake Island again,” Lowell Thomas said. “And fast American patrol and torpedo boats—PT boats, the Navy calls them—have raided the fringes of the Japanese Empire and inflicted damage all out of proportion to their size. Our submarine war against Japanese shipping also is producing important results.”

He could say it. People here would mostly believe it. Why not?
They couldn’t very well hop aboard one of those PT boats to check for themselves. German and Russian propaganda worked the same way. Did truth lie behind the words?

When she put that question to Dave Hartman, he just said, “We’ll all find out, won’t we?” And that was about the size of that.

Kurt Poske nudged Saul Goldman. “How’d it feel to see your folks at last, Adi?” the loader asked.

“Weird. That’s the only word I can think of,” Saul answered. “I mean, I’m glad they made it through the bombings. I’m glad they’re safe. But I don’t belong there any more.”

“Huh,” Poske said, chewing on that.

Saul wished he were talking to Theo instead. Theo would understand what he was talking about: Theo didn’t fit in anywhere, either. No wonder he played goalkeeper. Kurt was too sane, too normal, to get it.

Or Saul thought so, till Poske said, “You’ve been at the front too long, is what it is.”

“That sure may be some of it,” Saul said. “Although my old man was in the trenches the last round, so he knows about that. Now he knows I know about it, too. But the big thing is, I like being a panzer man better than I liked anything I was doing when I used to live here. Even if I weren’t, ah, what I am”—even now, he had trouble saying he was a Jew—“I wouldn’t have anything going for me except this.”

“You’re not the only guy I know who talks that way,” Poske said. “Me, I want to get home. My old man’s a cabinetmaker. Well, he’s in an aircraft plant now, but that’s what he does. It’s a good trade. I did some before I got called up. I’ll be able to handle more now, maybe take over the business when my dad decides to pack it in.”

“I don’t have anything like that to go back to,” Saul said. And wasn’t that the truth! No matter how much his father wished he would, he cared nothing for ancient history. He’d learned some in spite of himself, but it didn’t do anything for him.

“You could play football,” Kurt said. “You’re good enough. You might make some real money doing that, not
Wehrmacht
pigeon feed.”

“For a little while, I might. Not for long. I’m already twenty-seven, so I’ve got maybe six years, tops,” Saul said. “If I tear up a knee or break an ankle, it’s all over right there. I love to play—you know that. But I can’t count on football.”

Poske’s gray eyes met Saul’s brown ones. You always thought of the loader as the dummy in a panzer crew because he had the simplest job. But Kurt, Saul realized, wasn’t such a dope after all. He said, “Can you count on the
Wehrmacht
? Do you still want to be a
Stabsobergefreiter
when you’re forty-five? Will the big shots want you in that slot then?”