The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (40 page)

Chapter 17

S
omething was wrong. Peggy Druce knew that. She also knew she was afraid she knew what it was. The complicated, inside-out reasoning should have made her laugh. Instead, it left her more afraid than ever.

Most of the time, she would have taken the bull by the horns. She had a low tolerance for bull generally,
as even the Nazis came to understand. Without that low tolerance, she knew she would still be stuck in Europe. But going nose to nose with somebody you couldn’t stand was one thing. Going nose to nose with the man you loved more than anyone else in the world was something else again. Boy, was it ever!

Most of the time, Herb also spoke freely, at least when he was talking with her. He might be
(might be, hell!—he was) more circumspect than she was in public, but she always got to find out what was on his mind. Or she had, till she got back from England.

Of course, if this went wrong it would blow up in her face. She knew that, too. Did she ever! And what was liable to happen if it did … What was liable to happen if it did was plenty to make her keep her big trap shut for months.
Not
talking about something, though, could prove as
toxic as talking about it obviously was. That silent poison might be slower-acting, which didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

And so, one Thursday evening after dinner and a couple of highballs, Peggy said, “Herb, I think we need to talk.”

Her husband neatly folded his copy of the
Daily News
(the evening paper, so he and Peggy wouldn’t have to depend
on the radio or wait for tomorrow morning’s
Inquirer
to keep up with what was going on), stubbed out his cigarette in the pocket of a bronze ashtray shaped like a baseball glove, and said, “What’s cookin’?”

Even though Peggy was sitting down, her knees wanted to knock. All the same, she said, “I think you know. About us.”

Herb made a small production out of firing up another Pall Mall. He held
out the pack to her. She got up, took one, let him light it for her, and retreated to her chair. He dragged deeply, then blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. He looked up at the smooth plaster as if watching for enemy bombers, but all there was to see was the smoke disappearing little by little.

His sigh might have come straight from
Camille
. “Damn,” he said without heat. “Who told
you?”

“Who told me what?” Peggy echoed foolishly.

“I figured you were bound to hear sooner or later. I thought you must have already. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said ‘We need to talk’ like that.” Herb sounded resigned, and a bit mad at himself. “Or maybe you would. Who the … Who knows? But people do gossip.”

“And what do people gossip about?” Peggy chose to rephrase that: “Why would people
gossip about you?” Listening to herself, she thought she sounded resigned, too. She didn’t think she sounded mad at Herb, which was good.

He sighed again, even more deeply. He knocked ash into the bronze glove and set the cigarette down. Then, staring down at the comfortably shabby Persian rug under his slippers, he said, “You know, you were away from home a lot longer than we thought you would
be when you headed for Europe.”

“I sure was,” she agreed. “What about it?”

He kept looking at the rug, which wasn’t like him. “Even then, I told
myself I’d tell you if you ever asked me. Dammit, I messed around with one of the girls from the typing pool for a month or so. It didn’t mean anything, and I’m sorry I did it, but it happened.”

“You’re sorry now,” Peggy said. “What about then?”

“Then …” He looked up—he seemed to make himself look up—with a familiar crooked smile on his face. “Then I got so sick of playing with myself, I might’ve ended up in bed with somebody a lot homelier than Gladys.”

Peggy knew she couldn’t have picked Gladys out of a police lineup of clerk-typists, assuming there was such a thing. That was probably just as well. She also knew Herb had just handed
her the moral advantage. If she wanted to hang on to it, she could. But she realized that was another kind of slow-acting poison. The idea was to air things out on both sides … wasn’t it? That seemed to be their only chance of getting back to where they had been.

And so she let out a sigh of her own. “Well …” she said, and then bogged down. This was even harder than she’d expected. Herb was a
man
, dammit. How would he take what she was about to come out with? She hadn’t got up on her high horse, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t. If he did … she’d deal with it as best she could, that was all. “Well,” she repeated, and then made herself go on: “Well, it’s not like you were the only one.”

There. It was out. Now—would the sky fall? Herb’s eyes widened. He started to say something,
then shook his head and visibly swallowed it. As she had, he tried again a moment later. He managed one word: “You?”

“ ’Fraid so, hon.” Peggy didn’t want to look at him now.

“I’ll be—” Whatever Herb would be, he didn’t want to finish it. Peggy didn’t suppose she could blame him. “How’d that happen?” he asked after a long, long pause.

“It was after the opera in Berlin. I got smashed. I thought
the guy who took me was a fairy, but he turned out not to be. Not all the time, anyway.” Peggy still felt like a jerk about Constantine Jenkins, which did her no good whatsoever.

“Only the once?” Herb asked.

“Yeah,” Peggy said, and left it right there. It was true. She would gladly have told him she’d swear on a stack of Bibles, but she knew her man. That would have left him more inclined to
doubt her, not less.

“How about that?” he said, more to himself than to her. He looked at his cigarette. Most of it had burned away while they were talking. So had most of Peggy’s. Herb put his out. She did the same. He started to take another one, then stuck the pack back in his pocket instead. He gathered himself. “I guess you’ve got the edge on me, ’cause I did it more than once. Not a whole
lot more than once, but I did, dammit.”

“You don’t sound exactly proud of it,” Peggy said.

“Nope.” Herb eyed her. “Neither do you.”

“I was snockered,” Peggy said. “And I was dumb. I don’t
want
to mess around. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Amen!” Herb said, as if responding to a sermon from Father Divine. He might have had the same thought, for he added, “You can sing that in church.”

Peggy said, “Maybe now we can quit looking at each other out of the corners of our eyes, the way we have been.”

“That’d be good.” Herb lit another Pall Mall after all. Peggy made a small pleading noise, so he gave her one, too. He went on, “I wondered if you’d noticed we were doing it.”

“Uh-huh.” Peggy nodded. This felt like going to the dentist. Any minute now, the novocaine would wear off.
And how much would things hurt then?

“It ought to get better now that it’s out in the sun and air,” her husband said. “As long as it stayed covered up, it was going to go bad. And there isn’t much worse than gas gangrene.” Such glancing references were as close as Herb came to talking about things he’d seen Over There.

The only thing Peggy knew about gas gangrene was that it sounded horrible.
No. She knew something else: she didn’t want to think about it, not right this minute. She had something else in mind. “We ought to celebrate getting it out in the open,” she declared.

“Celebrate, huh?” Herb gave her another crooked smile. She nodded back. The smile straightened—some. “The wench grows bold,” he said.

“Damn right,” Peggy answered.

Up the stairs they went. Peggy didn’t know if
it was a celebration, but it was pretty good. Better than it had been while they both kept secrets? She thought so. She hoped so. She also hoped it would keep getting better again. That was the point to all this, wasn’t it?

She also wondered if she could find some way to do Gladys a quiet bad turn, whoever the round-heeled little chippy was. And there was one more thought Herb didn’t need to
know anything about.

ALISTAIR WALSH WANTED
to fight the Germans. That was the point of putting on the uniform again, wasn’t it? The only trouble was, he—and the rest of the British Army—had no convenient place to do so. Land in the Low Countries or France and they’d get slaughtered. Land in France they couldn’t. England and France weren’t at war with each other—and a good thing, too, as far as
Walsh was concerned. Even RAF planes avoided French airspace when they flew off to bomb Hitler’s towns.

Would French fighters really rise to try to help the
Luftwaffe
shoot down English bombers? If they did rise, how hard would the French pilots fight? Nobody seemed to want to find out, or to have the nerve.

“By God, your Excellency, I wish Churchill were still alive,” Walsh told Ronald Cartland
in the pub near Parliament. “He’d make the froggies show whether they meant it or not.”

“Nothing halfhearted about Winston,” the MP agreed, draining his whiskey and waving to the barmaid for a reload. He was catnip to the female of the species, no two ways about it. Walsh knew she wouldn’t have come over half so fast for
him
. He drank whiskey or brandy or anything else he could find on the Continent.
When he could get a pint of decent bitter, he liked that better.

Sooner or later, Parliament would start working again. The provisional government kept promising elections soon, and also kept pushing back the day. People were starting to grumble. Walsh worried lest creeping Chamberlainism reassert itself when the votes were finally cast. If that happened, then what? Another
coup d’état
? He wouldn’t
have been a bit surprised.

Cartland asked, “Did you catch Musso’s speech on the shortwave last night?”

“Afraid I didn’t,” Walsh admitted. “Wouldn’t have done me much good if I had, either. When I go to one of those restaurants with the red-and-white checked tablecloths, I can tell the dago with the pencil behind
his ear I want a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. My Italian starts and stops right
there.”

“Ah,” Cartland said politely. “I should have thought of that. Can’t say I ever studied it myself, not in any formal way. But I speak French and I did endless Latin, so I can muddle along after a fashion.”

I’ll bet you can
, Walsh thought, without either rancor or envy. The MP would have picked up his education at some posh public school, and then at Cambridge or Oxford. Walsh often thought
he’d got his own, such as it was, at a jumble sale. Considering how easily he might have spent his whole life grubbing coal out of a seam, he hadn’t done too badly for himself.

And … “So what did the bugger with the big chin say, then?”

“Called us traitors to the cause of Europe, if you can imagine the cheek.” As any aristocrat might have, Cartland seemed more affronted than anything else. “He
said that, since Hitler was busy giving Stalin what-for and didn’t have time for puppies like us—”

“Puppies?” Walsh broke in. “Musso has the gall to call us puppies?” He wanted to laugh and to haul off and punch somebody, both at once. He would have felt that way if a waiter in one of those checked-tablecloth eateries had called him the same thing, too.

“He did indeed,” the MP replied, sipping
from his fresh drink. “He said he’d have to go on and let us have a proper hiding himself, since Adolf was busy.”

“And then you wake up!” Alistair Walsh exclaimed. “The Fritzes, now, they’re proper soldiers, say what you will about the bleeding
Führer
. But the Italians?” It came out of his mouth as
Eye-talians
, which only made his pique plainer.

“Quite.” Cartland spoke with the same frozen disgust
a society matron might have used in carrying a dead rat from the drawing room by the tail.

In his mind’s eye, Walsh studied a map. The clearer the mental picture got, the more it enraged him. “He’s mad as a balloon, he is,” the Welshman said, with the air of a judge sentencing a bungling burglar. “Barking mad! How does he propose hiding us when we hardly even touch?”

“He could cause trouble
for Egypt from Libya, I suppose, and for
Malta from Sicily. He might even use Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland to go after British Somaliland—assuming he’s balmy enough to want British Somaliland, I should say.” Ronald Cartland, plainly, had been eyeing mental maps longer than Walsh and spreading them wider.

Walsh had never been stationed in British Somaliland. He knew several regulars who had,
though. From everything he’d heard, Cartland was spot-on. Chances were not even the Somalis wanted to drive their sheep and camels through land so miserable—not that Italian Somaliland was any improvement.

He wasted no more time worrying about the Horn of Africa. Even if Mussolini’s legions there carried all before them, all they would have was the goddamn Horn of Africa. Egypt, on the other
hand … “Wouldn’t be so good if the bloody Italians”—he pronounced it the same way he had before—“paraded through Alexandria or took the canal away.”

“No. It wouldn’t.” If Cartland’s laconic agreement wasn’t British understatement at its best, Walsh didn’t know what would be.