The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (17 page)

That also brought them down closer to the flak gunners on the ground. Stas tried not to dwell on such things as the slotted flaps lowered and grabbed air. “Be ready,” he called to Fyodor Mechnikov back in the narrow bomb bay.

“What the hell else am I gonna be—sir?” the bombardier
answered through the speaking tube. Behind goggles and oxygen mask, Mouradian grinned. Sure as the devil, it was almost like flying with Ivan Kuchkov again.

The Germans did have guns waiting for the Soviet bombers. Stas wished he were more astonished. Yes, they’d protect the railroad yards. And yes, they’d probably got a few minutes’ warning. Unlike Russians, Germans knew what to do with a few
minutes’ warning, too.

Had he flown through heavier flak? He supposed he must have, but he couldn’t remember offhand just when. Something tore half the left wing off the Pe-2 diving next to his. The stricken bomber spun out of control. The crew had no chance to bail out.

“Now!” Stas yelled through the speaking tube. As soon as the bombs fell free, he leveled out and scooted away at full throttle
and low altitude. Any Messerschmitt pilot who wanted to run him down was welcome to try. He turned back toward Soviet-held territory. The railroad yard, or something in its neighborhood, had taken one mighty thorough pounding.

Of course, the bombs also came down on the heads of the people who still lived in Mogilev. Stas’ superiors thought they’d do more harm to the enemy than to Soviet citizens.
He had to hope they were right.

SPRING WAS IN THE AIR
outside Madrid … spring and the stink of shit and garbage and unburied bodies, and the occasional bullet or shell fragment. But when things started turning green, when the birds came back from the south, Chaim Weinberg was less inclined to be critical.

Mike Carroll gave him a peculiar look when he started going on about birdsong. “Chirp,
chirp,” the other Abe Lincoln said. “Hot diggety dog.”

“It’s pretty,” Chaim insisted. “And it doesn’t sound the same here as it does in the States.”

“What? The fuckin’ birdth thpeak Thpanish?” Mike put on a sarcastic Castilian lisp.

“No, but there’s different ones here,” Chaim said. He was going to get pissed off if his buddy couldn’t see what he saw, couldn’t hear what he heard. He could feel
it coming like a rash.

“Sparrows. Pigeons. Starlings. Crows. Stop the fucking presses. Call Walter fucking Winchell.” Mike was tall and slim and blond and handsome, none of which adjectives applied to Chaim. At the moment, the other American was also a royal pain in the ass.

“Only reason there’s pigeons and sparrows—these kindsa sparrows—and cocksucking starlings in the USA is that they’re imports,”
Chaim said. “And the crows here aren’t the same as crows on the other side of the ocean. They’ve got bigger beaks, and they make different noises.”

“
You’d
notice the stupid beaks,” Mike said.

“Your mother,” Chaim said without heat. Had somebody who wasn’t
his friend made even an indirect crack about his own very Jewish beak, he would have rearranged the guy’s face for him. From Mike, though,
he’d take it.

“How’s your wife?” the other Yank asked with a leer.

Chaim shrugged. “She’s back in the city, doing what she’s doing. And I’m here, doing what I’m doing.” That he’d made it with La Martellita struck him as a marvel. That she’d been willing to tie the knot for the sake of giving their accidental kid a last name was whatever came one step up from a marvel.

Mike tried to pinch off
a hangnail with the other hand’s thumb and forefinger. “Doesn’t sound like the recipe for living happily ever after, y’know?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Chaim would rather have talked about birds. He hadn’t even started in on the hoopoe’s aerial ballet.

“What’ll you do when she dumps you after Junior comes out?” Mike found the sixty-four dollar question, all right.

All Chaim could do was shrug again. “Get
drunk, I guess. Shoot some Fascists. What else is there to do?” Like Mike, he assumed she’d dump him once the baby was born. He also assumed the war in Spain would still be going on this fall. The way things looked right now, the war in Spain was liable to go on forever.

“Aren’t you tired of going hungry over there?” The enormous voice came from a microphone and speaker in Marshal Sanjurjo’s
lines. “Come over to our side. We’ll give you a big bowl of mutton stew!”

Before, the Fascists had tempted Republican soldiers with chicken stew. Maybe they’d hired a new chef. More likely, they’d just put a new liar on the payroll. Chaim had captured Nationalist troops. They were every bit as skinny and miserable as the guys on his own side.

“Baa!” he bleated at the propaganda message. “Baa!”

Mike Carroll joined in. “Baa!” he yelled, even louder than Chaim. “Baa! Baa!”

“Mutton stew! Delicious mutton stew!” blared from the speaker.

“Baa!” This time, half a dozen Abe Lincolns bleated back. Before long, the whole stretch of Republican line northwest of Madrid was going “Baa! Baa! Baa!” in ragged chorus.

“Now look what you went and started,” Mike said. Chaim grinned. He was proud of
himself.

Marshal Sanjurjo’s men didn’t think it was funny. Fascists, in Chaim’s experience, had all had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were very small. They had nasty ways of making their unhappiness known, too. Machine guns rattled. Mortar bombs whispered down. Even a battery of old German 77s well behind the line started up.

Naturally, the Internationals and the Czechs and
the Spanish Republican soldiers in that stretch of the line fired back. “
Now
look what you went and started,” Mike Carroll repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.

A bullet cracked not far enough above Chaim’s head. He ducked automatically. “The fucking Battle of the Mutton Stew,” he said.

It was a joke, and then again it wasn’t. Bleating at the silly propaganda set off
the shooting, sure. No matter what set it off, though, men on both sides were getting killed and maimed. He could hear wounded men screaming, all because he’d decided to make a noise like a sheep.

He didn’t want anything like that on his conscience. He told himself they would have got hit anyway. Himself told him he was full of it. Himself had a point, too. He’d been in Spain a long time. He’d
seen how random war was. This guy bought a plot the day after he came into the line. That guy went without a scratch for years. Why? If it was anything more than God’s crapshoot, Chaim couldn’t imagine what. And, when he remembered not to, he didn’t even believe in God.

After both sides hauled their wounded away for whatever help the docs could give them, the Fascist announcer started going on
about mutton stew again. He had a script, and he had his orders. This stretch of line was going to get so many repetitions. Then he’d go inflict himself somewhere else.

“Fuck you!” Chaim screamed, almost as loud without the loudspeaker as the announcer was with it. If he heard about mutton stew one more time, he’d snap. Or maybe he already had. “Fuck you up the ass! Fuck your mother! And fuck
the sheep your fucking mutton stew comes from, too!”

That produced scattered cheers from the Internationals. He thought
the only reason it just produced scattered cheers was that they didn’t want to risk starting up the firefight again. And, to his amazement and delight, it also produced a few scattered cheers from the Nationalist trenches. Those had to come from men sure they were off by themselves
so nobody could rat on them.

Mike heard the cheers from Sanjurjo’s side, too. “Wow, man,” he said. “You really struck a nerve there.”

“Bet your ass I did,” Chaim replied. “When’s the last time you figure one of those poor sorry dingleberries even smelled mutton stew, let alone tasted any? That clown with the mike probably drives them even crazier than he drives me.”

Carroll sent him a speculative
stare. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

The next day, Brigadier Kossuth summoned Chaim to his headquarters behind the lines. Like La Martellita, the Internationals’ CO used a
nom de guerre
, though he was a Magyar like his namesake. “I hear you’ve been running your mouth again,” he said in German. He was old enough to have learned it in the dead Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Thanks to Yiddish, Chaim could
follow German. “Afraid so,” he admitted cheerfully.

Yiddish didn’t faze the brigadier. “Why?” he asked with a glower that would have turned a basilisk to stone.

But nobody’s glower was going to make Chaim quake in his drafty boots. He’d been through way too much for that. “Because I got sick and tired of all that crap about mutton stew,” he said.

Kossuth eyed him the way a chameleon eyes a
fly just before its tongue flicks out. “Are all Americans as deranged as you?” he asked with what sounded like clinical detachment and probably masked fury.

“Some of us are even worse,” Chaim said: he wouldn’t let the country down.

“Oh, I doubt that.” Kossuth knew what he was up against, all right. “And you managed to knock up that human hand grenade, too.… Tell me, if you would: how does one
man find so much trouble?”

“I volunteered for it,” Chaim answered. “I could have stayed back in the States.”

“Everyone might have been better off if you had. Including you,” Kossuth said.

“Spain wouldn’t.” Pride rang in Chaim’s voice.

That basilisk-petrifying glower again. When Chaim refused to wilt under it, the Magyar brigadier sighed. “Anything is possible—but nothing is likely.” He jerked
a thumb toward the tent flap. “Now get out.” Whistling, Chaim got.

PEGGY DRUCE WAS
getting the urge to travel again. After her adventures and misadventures in war-torn Europe, she would have bet she’d be content—hell, be overjoyed—to stay in Philadelphia the rest of her days. But things didn’t work out like that. After so long living by her wits and by what she could browbeat out of unhappy officials,
ordinary life seemed Boring with a capital B.

She didn’t put it that way to her husband. It would have hurt Herb’s feelings, which was the last thing she wanted to do. Then again, she didn’t need to say much to him. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how she ticked. One morning at breakfast, he set down his coffee cup and said, “You ought to do something for the war effort, you know?”

“Like what?”
she said. It wasn’t as if the suggestion came out of the blue. She’d been thinking along those lines herself.

Herb was a jump ahead of her, though. “Well, you’ve seen a lot of stuff other people haven’t,” he answered. “You ought to go around and tell them what a mess Europe is. Some of these chowderheads are still mad ’cause FDR won’t let ’em sell stuff over there any more.”

“Too bad for them,”
she said. She’d been all for sending England and France everything but the kitchen sink when they were fighting the Nazis. Now that they were fighting on the Nazis’ side, she was as ready to say to hell with them as FDR seemed to be. But swarms of people who’d made big stacks of cash by shipping them this, that, and the other thing were jumping up and down and bawling like a three-year-old throwing
a tantrum.

Herb chuckled. “You know how to win friends and influence people, you do.”

“I looked at that stupid book when it was new,” Peggy said. “I wouldn’t waste my money on it. It was a bunch of hooey, nothing else but.”

“Maybe so, but the guy who wrote it’s laughing all the way to the bank,” her husband answered. “I’d like to have a quarter of what he raked in from the son of a gun.”

That was bound to be true, no matter how unfortunate Peggy thought it was. She’d never been one to stay gloomy long, though. If she were, her time in Europe would have driven her nuts. She brightened as a new thought came. “A lot of the big shots who want to go on doing business with Europe will be making even more money pretty soon by selling the government what it needs to fight the Japs.”

“There you go.” Herb made silent clapping motions. “Now you’ve got your text. You can go and preach it all over the place, like St. Paul.”

“I don’t want to preach in St. Paul,” Peggy said with malice aforethought. “If there’s a duller town anywhere in the world, I don’t know where.”

Herb eyed her through a veil of cigarette smoke. “When you start making cracks like that, you need to get out of
the house, all right, and PDQ, too.”

But getting out of the house wasn’t so simple. The government had clamped down on travel. Tires and gasoline were rationed. That made sense, since you couldn’t win a modern war without rubber and petroleum. It was still a pain. And, if she was going to head out on what amounted to the campaign trail, she was damned if she wanted to spend her own money—or even
Herb’s—to do it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford to; it was the principle of the thing. So she told herself, anyhow.

She rapidly discovered she didn’t have to. To most Philadelphia Main Line families, Roosevelt was and always would be That Man in the White House. Philadelphia Democrats fell all over themselves to get help from someone in that group who didn’t see him that way. Train fare?
Yes, ma’am! Hotel bills? Expenses? Yes, ma’am!

They asked her if she wanted a speech writer. She looked at them as if they’d asked if she wanted a positive Wassermann. “I can talk for myself, thanks,” she said coolly. “If you don’t believe me, ask my husband. Or ask Hitler. I got him to do what I wanted, and I was speaking German then. I’m better in English.”

She’d never heard so many stammered
apologies in her life. They
were just suggesting … They didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.… To show they didn’t, they upped her expenses.

When she told Herb that, he guffawed. “Squeeze ’em for all they’re worth,” he said. “They’ve got more moolah than they know what to do with, and most of it doesn’t exactly belong to anybody, so they can throw it around.”

No matter how much money the Philadelphia
Democrats had, they didn’t send her very far on her first run—only to York, on the west side of the Susquehanna. She didn’t blame them for that. If she turned out to be a dud, they’d want to know at minimum expense.