The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (14 page)

“Do we?” another sailor said. “The government shouldn’t tell us how to be religious. They fought wars about that back in the old days.”

“A bishop’s got no business telling government what
to do, either,” the first man retorted. “They fought wars about that in the old days, too.” By the way the two ratings glared at each other, they were both ready to square off on the spot. By the way their friends shifted toward one or the other, everybody knew which side of the fence he stood on.

“That will be enough of that,” Lemp said sternly. “As you were, all of you.” For a bad couple of
seconds, he didn’t think they’d listen to him. That was the worst feeling an officer could get. Obedience sprang from consent, no matter how much the military tried to conceal that. When men stopped listening to their leaders … You got the end of 1918 all over again. No German in his right mind wanted to repeat that long fall into chaos.

But then one of the ratings said, “Ah, fuck it. It’s got
nothing to do
with crewmates.” After a moment, the other man nodded. Tension left the barracks hall like water leaving a dive chamber when a U-boat surfaced. The rating went on, “If we can’t go into town, the least they could do would be to bring some broads onto the base and set up a brothel here.” All the sailors nodded in unison to that.

It seemed like a good idea to Julius Lemp, too. “I’ll
see what I can do,” he promised, and headed back toward the
Kapitän zur See
’s office. A few girls, even homely ones who smelled of onions, would go a long way toward making sure the men remembered what they were supposed to be doing and why. They’d also go a long way toward making sure the men remembered their superiors cared about them. And that would help them remember what they should be doing
and why, too.

SOME OF THE STREETS
in Bialystok had trees growing alongside them. The locals bragged about their tree-lined boulevards, and said they made Bialystok just like Paris. Only a bunch of provincial Poles and Jews could imagine that a Polish provincial town was anything like Paris, but try and tell them that.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel didn’t. For one thing, life was too short. For another,
he’d never been to Paris himself. He’d bombed the place when the
Wehrmacht
fought its way to the suburbs, but that wasn’t the same thing. He’d promised himself leave in the French capital after it fell, but it didn’t.

So here he was two years later, on leave in Bialystok instead. At the moment, the trees were bare-branched, even skeletal. But the leaf buds were starting to swell. Spring was on
the way. Before long, Bialystok would be green again, even if not Parisian.

Signs on shops and eateries were in incomprehensible Polish and just as incomprehensible Yiddish. The one had the right alphabet but alien words, the other pretty much familiar words in an alien script. Both added up to gibberish for him.

But he’d come here before, often enough to know where he was going from the train
station. If he had got lost, spoken Yiddish made far more sense to him than the written kind, and Bialystok was full of Jews. He could have asked one of them. These days, the town also had its
share of chain dogs—German
Feldgendarmerie
, their gorgets of office hung around their necks from chains. He was glad he didn’t need to talk to them. The less he had to do with them, the better.

A drunk
Pole reeled out of a tavern. That would have been a cliché, except the Pole, in a uniform of dark, greenish khaki, was arm in arm with an equally plastered German in
Feldgrau
. They were both murdering the same tune, each in his own language. Drunken Germans weren’t such a cliché, which didn’t mean Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen his share of them and then some.

As a matter of fact, he was heading for
a tavern himself, though not this one. Another block up from the station, half a block over … He nodded to himself. He recognized the Polish sign out front, even if it made no sense to him. He walked in. The place smelled of tobacco and sweat and beer and fried food—and stale piss from the jakes out back.

Poles and Germans drank together here, too. So did Jews and Germans, which would have been
unimaginable back in the
Reich
. The Poles didn’t like their Jews, but they didn’t hit them with the same legal restrictions the Germans did. Maybe they couldn’t; one person in ten in Poland was a Jew, only one in a hundred in Germany.
Wehrmacht
personnel here had orders to conform to local customs and laws.

A short, swarthy barmaid sidled up to Hans-Ulrich. She spoke in throaty Yiddish: “You
may as well sit down, not that the boss’ll make a zloty off you if you keep on drinking tea.”

“Hello, Sofia. Won’t you at least tell me you’re glad to see me?” Rudel didn’t grab her or kiss her in public. She didn’t like that. Did she go with other men while he was in the East fighting the war? If she did, he’d never heard about it. The way things were these days, that would do.

“I’m at least
glad to see you,” she answered, deadpan. She wasn’t exactly a Jew; she had a Polish father, which in the
Reich
’s classification scheme made her a
Mischling
first class. But she thought of herself as Jewish, and she was snippy like a Jew. Back in Germany, Hans-Ulrich would have endangered his career by having anything to do with her. He could get away with it here—could, and did.

She took him
to a corner and brought him a glass of tea. She found his teetotaling as funny as most of his service comrades did. She was also as nervous about seeing a German—and a Nazi Party member at
that—as he was about going with a Jewess. In bed, everything was fine. The rest of the time … Hans-Ulrich sometimes thought they came from different planets, not just different countries.

Sofia was well informed
about his planet, though. Along with the sweet, milkless tea, she gave him a mocking grin. “So even the Catholics in Germany say Hitler can’t get away with some of the stuff he’s trying to pull?” she said.

As a Lutheran minister’s son, his opinion of Catholics had never been high. “A lot of that is just enemy propaganda,” he said. None of it had come over the German radio or appeared in any army
or
Luftwaffe
newspaper. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard a few things, or more than a few. It did mean he wasn’t obliged to believe them—not officially, and not when Sofia tried to rub his nose in them.

She quirked a dark eyebrow. “Well, if you say so,” she answered, which meant she wasn’t obliged to believe him, either. She went on, “The big switch was good for something, anyhow. I got a card
from my mother the other day, from Palestine.”

While England and Germany were at war, mail from Palestine—a British League of Nations mandate—didn’t travel to Poland because it was friendly to Germany. Now that England had joined the crusade against Bolshevism, things moved more freely. “There’s rather more to it than that, you know,” he said stiffly. He often was more literal-minded than might
have been good for him. Sofia enjoyed getting under his skin. As if having a mother who felt strongly enough about being Jewish to go to Palestine after the Pole she’d married (a drunkard, if you listened to Sofia) walked out weren’t enough!

“If you say so,” Sofia repeated. Big things—like who would win the war—meant little to her. Or, if they did, she wouldn’t let on. A small thing—like getting
a card from her mother after a long silence—counted for more.

“I think you’re trying to drive me crazy,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“It would be a short drive,” she retorted, which made him regret—not for the first time—getting into a battle of words with her. He was a good flyer, not such a great talker. But everybody knew Jews were born talking, and in that Sofia took after her mother. Rudel assumed
as much, anyhow, without even thinking about it.

He tried to change the subject: “What time do you get off today?”

“Why? What have you got in mind?” She didn’t just answer a question with another question. She answered one with two.

“Whatever you want, of course,” Hans-Ulrich said. Bialystok’s nightlife consisted of a few movie houses, a dance hall or two, and a Yiddish theater. Even with trees
lining the streets, Paris it was not.

Sofia laughed raucously. “Whatever
you
want, you mean. And what else does a man ever want?”

Rudel’s ears heated. “Well, what if I do? If I didn’t, you’d think I was sleeping with somebody else, and you’d give me trouble on account of that.”

“I wouldn’t give you trouble. I’d drop you like a grenade. No—I’d throw you like a grenade.” She cocked her head to
one side. “You mean you don’t visit the officers’ whorehouse? I’m sure they’ve set one up somewhere not far from you. They always do things like that, don’t they?”

As a matter of fact, they did. An officers’ brothel—and one for other ranks—operated in a village a couple of kilometers from the airstrip. Hans-Ulrich knew Sergeant Dieselhorst had visited the one for enlisted men. He hadn’t called
at the officers’ establishment. That gave his fellow flyers one more reason to think he was strange, though they knew about Sofia and didn’t think he was a fairy.

“The girls there would just be doing it because they were doing it,” he said slowly, trying to put what he thought into words. “They wouldn’t be doing it because they wanted to do it with me.”

And I do?
He waited for the barmaid’s
jeers. Rather to his surprise, it didn’t come. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “That matters to you?”

“Yes, it matters to me.” He was in his midtwenties. He often risked his life several times a day. He gave Sofia a crooked grin. “Well, most of the time, anyhow.”

He wondered if she’d get mad. Instead, he startled a laugh out of her. “You’d better watch yourself. If
you aren’t careful, you’ll make me think you’re honest.”

Hans-Ulrich prided himself on his honesty—he
was
a pastor’s son.
He started to get angry, then realized she was teasing him. “You …” he said, more or less fondly.

She grinned at him, altogether unrepentant. “Did you expect anything different?” Before he could answer, the soldiers at another table yelled for her to fetch them another round
of drinks. She fluttered her fingers at him and hurried away. Hans-Ulrich realized she never had told him when she got off. How much tea would he soak up before she finally did? He wasn’t even that fond of tea. But he was fond of Sofia, and so he waited and ordered glass after glass.

ALISTAIR WALSH’S PRINCIPAL USE
to the Conservative conspirators against Sir Horace Wilson’s alliance with the
Reich
was that he knew soldiers. Some of them had put on the uniform after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, but he’d worn it for more than twenty years—for his whole adult life, till his political unreliability led him to resign from the service and led the army to accept his resignation.

So he knew soldiers in ways the toffs didn’t. And he also knew soldiers—literally. At one time or another
between the wars, he’d served under most of England’s prominent and high-ranking officers. Senior officers tended to remember senior noncoms. Those long-serving veterans were the army’s backbone. They counted for more in the scheme of things than lieutenants and captains and sometimes even majors because they knew all the things the junior officers were just learning—and more besides, especially
if you listened to them.

And Walsh could do things in an unofficial capacity that would have raised eyebrows—to say nothing of hackles—had an MP gone about them. If the conspirators talked to a general, for instance, Sir Horace and his none too merry men would naturally suspect them of skullduggery. The Prime Minister and his henchmen would be right, too.

But if Alistair Walsh called on General
Archibald Wavell—well, so what? He was only an out-to-pasture underofficer. For all Scotland Yard could prove, he was asking for a job, or maybe a loan.

That was also true for all General Wavell knew. He might not have had any idea of the company Walsh was keeping these days. He did
know who Walsh was, though, and did agree to meet him at General Staff headquarters. In baggy civilian tweeds,
Walsh felt dreadfully out of place in that sanctum of creased khaki, gleaming brass tunic buttons, shoulder straps, and swarms of the red collar tabs that showed officers of colonel’s rank and above. In uniform himself, he would have had to salute till his shoulder ached. As things were, his arm kept twitching as he fought down the conditioned reflex again and again.

Wavell was an erect, thin-faced
man in his early fifties. “I can give you fifteen minutes, Walsh,” he said as he closed his office door to let them talk privately. Scotland Yard might be able to plant microphones in many different places, Walsh judged, but not here.

“Thank you, sir,” the ex-serviceman said. “I appreciate it, and so do my friends.”

One of Wavell’s bushy eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch. “Your … friends?”
He let the word hang in the air. By the look on his face, he might have taken a bite of fish that was slightly off.

“Yes, sir,” Walsh said stolidly. “You may or may not have heard I was the bloke who had the bad luck to bring in Rudolf Hess after he parachuted from his Messerschmitt 110.”

“Were you, now?” The general’s gaze sharpened. “Yes, that’s right. You were. I remember seeing the report,
now you remind me of it.

And so?”

“And so I wish I’d had a pistol with me and plugged him instead,” Walsh answered. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be in bed with Hitler now. My friends”—he deliberately reused the word—“still wish we weren’t.”

Wavell snorted. “They aren’t the only ones, I’m sure.” But he checked himself. “It’s up to the politicians to set policy, of course. The military’s here to back
their play when the usual peacetime methods fail.”

“Invading Russia, sir?” Walsh said. “Isn’t that going a bit far?”

“If your friends are of the pink persuasion, Walsh, I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.” Twenty degrees of frost crisped up Wavell’s voice.

“They’re Tories almost to a man. Churchill was one of them, till he met that Bentley,” Walsh replied. Winston Churchill
hated the idea of helping Hitler, not that Neville Chamberlain cared a farthing what Churchill thought. People still wondered whether the rich young man
behind the wheel of the auto that ran Churchill down was truly as drunk as the bobbies claimed.