The Big Switch twtce-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s what you say.” But even La Martellita couldn’t make herself sound too angry at him.

  He nodded. “Yes. That is what I say. What can you do after you get killed?”

  She considered his foolishness with drunken gravity. Then she thrust out an accusing forefinger at him. “You were very silly there, outside the Party offices. You looked like a boy who couldn’t get the candy he wanted.”

  “Asi es la vida.” Chaim used that one a lot. When you spoke a language badly, cliches came in handy. And So it goes was better than bursting into tears the way she had. He thought it was, anyhow.

  La Martellita wagged the finger his way. “You still want the candy.”

  “Well, so what?” He hadn’t drunk a lot of beer, but he could feel his temper fraying. She’d drive a saint to armed robbery. Not without bitterness, he added, “Who wouldn’t? You’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re-” He stopped. Dammit, he didn’t know how to say sexy in Spanish. What the hell? He said it in English instead.

  She understood it. He saw that right away. He wondered if he’d get a faceful of brandy with a glass chaser, the way she’d baptized luckless Claudio with beer. “But you don’t try groping me,” she said, and drank some of the vicious stuff instead of flinging it.

  Yet another shrug. “Not American style. Not my style. Just coming to see you took all the nerve I had.”

  La Martellita got to her feet. Chaim was amazed she could. “I am going home,” she announced, as if challenging him to doubt her.

  He scrambled out of his chair. “I’ll help you get there.”

  “I don’t need nobody’s-anybody’s help!” She swayed, caught herself, and giggled. “Well, maybe I do.”

  Out into the blacked-out night. There was a moon, which helped… some. He hoped like hell she remembered where she lived. He also hoped it wasn’t far. She lurched like a schooner in contrary winds. Once all that brandy kicked in, she was going to keel over.

  He didn’t grope her, except incidentally, but by the time they got to her block of flats he was pretty much holding her upright. He didn’t quite carry her up the stairs to the third floor, but close. Then along the hallway. “This one,” she said. He hoped she was right. Otherwise, whoever lived in there would think he was getting burgled.

  The key worked. They went in. Nobody screamed or opened fire. La Martellita swiped at a wall switch. By some miracle, she hit it. A blackout curtain kept the light inside. The flat was tiny: a bed, a chair, a chest, a small bookshelf with a radio on top, a sink, a hot plate. The toilet and bathtub had to be down the hall. Chaim had lived in places like that.

  She made it to the bed, fell onto it, and smiled at him, or maybe at the low ceiling. She was gassed. Lord, was she ever! A gentleman would have left, and hated himself ever afterwards. As Chaim had told more than one Spaniard, he was no gentleman. And, no matter how drunk she was, she wouldn’t have brought him here if she didn’t think he would try something… would she?

  Only one way to find out. He turned off the light and advanced on the bed. She might hate him in the morning. In the morning, though, she’d hate the whole goddamn world. Whatever happened in the morning, he’d worry about it then.

  Along with the rest of the forces of the Czech government-in-exile, Vaclav Jezek stood at attention a couple of kilometers behind the now-quiet line. A French major was going to address them. It wasn’t as if the son of a bitch spoke Czech. That would have been too much to hope for. Sergeant Benjamin Halevy stood at his elbow to translate.

  The major had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. He coughed into his hand a couple of times before beginning. “Gentlemen, the Republic of France owes you a debt of gratitude. When times were hard, you came to our aid.”

  “And now you’re going to sell us down the river, you piece of shit!” a man not far behind Vaclav shouted.

  Sergeant Halevy translated that for the major, though probably not all of it. The Frenchman coughed again. “Well, you see, gentlemen, the situation has changed recently,” he said.

  More jeers from the Czechs: “You’re fucking Hitler now-he’s not fucking you!” “The Russians really helped us! That’s more than you ever did!” And a rising chorus that drowned out all the individual insults: “Shame!” Vaclav joined in, baying the word at the top of his lungs.

  “We do not abandon men who have helped us,” the French major said stiffly. “Under no circumstances will we allow the Germans to take control of you. We understand that your authorities are still at war with them, even if that, ah, no longer obtains for us.”

  Halevy was a good translator. He even put in the officer’s hems and haws, and imitated his tone very well. But so what? The bottom line was, even if the Nazis didn’t get hold of this battered detachment, France would screw the Czechs for them.

  The major proceeded to explain just how France would screw them: “If you wish to remain in France as civilians, you may do that. If you wish to be interned in Switzerland, which remains neutral, you may also do that.”

  He didn’t say France would do anything for the Czechs. Stay here? Vaclav didn’t know the language, and didn’t much want to learn. More likely than not, he’d starve before he could. Switzerland? He’d already been interned in Poland. The Swiss would probably be friendlier about it-like most Czechs, he didn’t think Poles were nice people-but even so…

  “Or there is another possibility,” the French major went on. “This would have to be done unofficially, you understand. Despite altered circumstances, we still maintain diplomatic relations with the Spanish Republic. You would need to enter on tourist visas issued by your government-in-exile, and we would have no formal knowledge of your doing so. But if, once you were there, you continued to uphold your cause, we would be able to say with a clear conscience that it was none of our doing.”

  Now that they were licking the Germans’ boots, they didn’t want to piss off the people wearing said boots. That was what it came down to. Even a corporal like Vaclav Jezek didn’t need field glasses to see it.

  “Suppose we go after you traitors instead?” another Czech yelled.

  Vaclav wondered if Sergeant Halevy would translate that. He evidently did, because the major performed a classic Gallic shrug. He spoke briefly. Halevy put it into Czech, also briefly: “That would be unfortunate-for you.”

  Vaclav found himself nodding. He didn’t want to, but he also didn’t see that he had much choice. The Czechs had numbered about a regiment’s worth of men when they went into action in France. They’d taken more casualties than replacements since. They had no tanks, or even armored cars. They could annoy the French if they rebelled, but that was about all.

  Spain. He spat in disgust. It would be another losing war. The Republic was fucked the same way the Czechs were. Politics had got ahead of it, and now it was going under in the backwash.

  What were the Nazis doing to Prague? What were they doing to the rest of Bohemia and Moravia? Next to no news came out of Czechoslovakia these days, but the answer had to be nothing good.

  “God will punish you for selling out freedom!” another Czech shouted, shaking his fist at the major.

  It had nothing to do with God. Vaclav understood that very well. France had decided that getting out of the war with Germany would work to her advantage. England had reached the same conclusion. And so they’d gone ahead and done it. The Czechs were just a minor problem to be cleaned up. By their standards, the French were being generous. They could have put their now-useless allies behind barbed wire. Or they could have handed them to their new friends, the Nazis. That would have been sweet, wouldn’t it?

  Calmly, the French major answered, “I am prepared to take my chances. Any man who claims he knows what God will do only proves he has no idea what he is talking about.”

  Sergeant Halevy went back and forth with the major in French. The officer shrugged once more, but nodded. Halevy turned back to the gloomy French soldiers standing before him. “For whatever it’s worth to you ba
stards, I’m coming with you. The French Army has let me resign, and the Czech government-in-exile has let me enlist. It needs people-even Jews-and the French authorities can see I won’t make a good little cog in the machine now that Hitler’s at the controls.”

  What would the major have said had he understood Halevy’s claim that Hitler was running the French war machine? Something interesting and memorable, without a doubt. But Czech was only noise to him. Being a small nation, Czechs realized they needed to learn other people’s languages. Being a large and proud one, the French expected other people to learn theirs.

  Vaclav didn’t know about the other Czechs, but he was glad to have Halevy along. He didn’t know that the Jew spoke Spanish, but he also didn’t know Halevy didn’t. He did know he wouldn’t have been surprised. And he knew Halevy made a damn good soldier. He wouldn’t have figured that when they first met. Everybody knew Jews weren’t fighters. Here as so often, what everybody knew proved nothing but bullshit.

  The officer brayed out some more French. Again, Halevy did the honors: “He says we’re supposed to march to the nearest train station. They’ll take us over the Pyrenees, so they don’t have to think about us any more. That isn’t what he says-it’s me. But it’s what he means.”

  March Vaclav did. He hadn’t done a route march in quite a while. Picking them up and laying them down was no more fun than it had been the last time. If anything, it was worse, because his antitank rifle weighed at least twice as much as an ordinary piece.

  He wondered what the Spanish Republicans would make of a sniper with an elephant gun. From what he’d heard, neither side down there had much in the way of armor. Well, there’d be plenty of-what did they call the assholes on the other side? Nationalists, that was it-plenty of Nationalists who needed killing.

  There’d probably be plenty of Republicans who needed killing, too. He hoped not too many of them tried giving him orders. The enemy… You could deal with the enemy. You knew what he was, and you knew where he was. But you were stuck with your so-called friends.

  Benjamin Halevy fell in beside him. “I wish this turned out better,” the Jew said.

  “Fuck it. What can you do?” Vaclav said. “Spain’ll be another balls-up, won’t it?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure,” Halevy answered. “But whenever the brass are willing to send you somewhere, you’ve got to guess they aren’t doing you a favor.”

  “If they want to do me a favor, they can all drop dead.”

  “There you go.” They marched on, away from one stalemated war that had suddenly flipped upside down and towards another.

  As far as Theo Hossbach could see, Byelorussia looked a hell of a lot like Poland. Maybe it was a little shabbier, or maybe that was his imagination. He understood little bits and pieces of Polish, as a lot of Germans from Breslau did. Byelorussian sounded different, but not all that different. And a lot of villages had Jews in them. They could manage with German, and he could do the same with Yiddish.

  The biggest change was in the signs. Polish and German used the same alphabet. Sometimes he could guess written words he didn’t know. But the Soviet Union’s Cyrillic script was almost as incomprehensible as Chinese would have been.

  Adalbert Stoss said very much the same thing. When he did, Hermann Witt gave him a wry grin and answered, “We didn’t come here to read, Adi.”

  “Ah, stuff it,” Adi said. They both laughed.

  So did Theo. If Heinz Naumann had said something like that to Stoss, the driver probably would have come back with the same response. But Heinz wouldn’t have been grinning, and Adi would have meant what he said. That the other panzer commander and Stoss hadn’t got along was an understatement. Naumann was dead now, though, and the feud buried with him in a badly marked grave back in Poland.

  Witt attacked the engine with screwdriver and wrench. After liberating the carburetor, he held it up in triumph… of sorts. He delivered his verdict like a judge pronouncing sentence: “This thing sucks, you know?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes,” Adi said. “We clean out the valves, it’ll do all right for a while-till it decides not to, anyway.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Witt agreed. “I wonder if the carb on the Panzer III’s any better.”

  “I’d sure like to find out,” Stoss said.

  Theo nodded. No matter what the carburetor was like, everything that counted was better on a Panzer III. Thicker armor, a cannon that could fire both high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds, a machine gun in the turret and another one in the hull… What was there not to like?

  He could think of two things. The turret cannon and machine gun took a loader and gunner, which meant there would be a couple of new people to get used to-never his favorite pastime. And, more to the point, the Reich still didn’t have enough Panzer IIIs to go around, so he was worrying about getting used to a pair of imaginary soldiers.

  Back when Naumann commanded the Panzer II, the carb also misbehaved. He and Adi had quarreled about it. Witt didn’t seem to want to quarrel with anybody except the Ivans. Theo approved of that.

  The next morning, the promotion fairy sprinkled magic dust on the panzer’s crew. Adi became a Gefreiter, and Theo himself an Obergefreiter. Witt slapped him on the back and said, “They’ll pull you out and turn you into a real noncom pretty soon.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” Theo answered. The Wehrmacht had one more grade below Unteroffizier or corporal. After that, you had to go to training classes to get rid of the emblem on your sleeve and acquire an Unteroffizier’s shoulder-strap pip. Theo had had enough of training classes in basic to last him the rest of his life and twenty minutes longer.

  Witt laughed. “Might do you good. It’d make you come out of your shell a little bit, maybe.”

  “Maybe.” Theo didn’t believe it for a minute. He could no more come out of his shell than a turtle could escape from its. It was part of him. If anything, he wished he came equipped with a Panzer III’s armor, not a Panzer II’s.

  Heinz Naumann would have gone on giving him grief about it. Witt didn’t. All he said was “You keep living through fights, they’ll make you an Unteroffizier whether you like it or not.”

  “Oh, boy,” Theo said. The panzer commander laughed again. Had Theo been the kind to come out with what he was thinking, he might have added that he’d never run into a better reason to get killed. He hated the idea of giving other people orders. He didn’t like getting told what to do himself, either. He was, perhaps, not ideally suited to the Wehrmacht.

  That, of course, bothered the Wehrmacht not a bit. Round peg? Square hole? Drive the damn thing in anyway. Hit it hard enough and it’ll stay in place. Then we can hang some more stuff from it and get on with the war.

  Adi Stoss was thinking of other things. “You know what?” he said. “Winter in Russia’s liable to make winter in Poland look like a Riviera holiday.”

  “Try not to sound so cheerful about it, all right?” Witt said. “Besides, we’ll have the Poles and the French and the Tommies shivering right beside us. Oh-and the Ivans, too, of course.”

  “Aber naturlich,” Adi agreed with more sardonic good cheer. “But the Ivans do this every year. They’re used to it, poor devils. The rest of us aren’t, except maybe the Poles.”

  “You’re jam-packed with happy thoughts today, aren’t you?” Witt said. “Why don’t you gather up some firewood?”

  “I thought Gefreiters didn’t have to do shit like that,” Stoss said. “Isn’t the whole point of getting promoted not needing to do shit like that any more?”

  “Like I told Theo, getting promoted means you didn’t get blown up,” the panzer commander answered. “If you figure out how to pack a servant into the panzer, he can gather firewood for us. Till then, somebody’s got to do it, and right now that’s you.”

  “Come the revolution, you won’t be able to abuse the proletariat like this.” Adi went off to collect sticks and boards.

  Witt looked after him, shaki
ng his head. “He sails close to the wind, doesn’t he?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to Theo. “If somebody who takes the political lectures seriously heard him, he’d go on the rocks faster than a guy with the shits runs for the latrine.”

  Theo shrugged to show he’d heard. He did his share of fatigues, even though he was now an exalted Obergefreiter. For that matter, so did the sergeant. Adi knew as much, too; he was just making trouble for the fun of it. A panzer wasn’t like an infantry platoon, with plenty of ordinary privates to do the dirty work for everyone else.

  They rolled forward again the next morning-but not very far forward. The Russians had laid an ambush, with panzers hidden in a village and antipanzer cannon hiding among the fruit trees off to one side. The Germans pulled back after a couple of Panzer IIs brewed up and another lost a track.

  Maybe the Ivans thought they’d halted their enemies. If they did, they soon learned better. Stukas plastered the orchard with high explosive. One of them, with cannon under the wings in place of bombs, dove on the village again and again. The columns of greasy black smoke rising into the sky spoke of hits.

  Adi and Hermann Witt watched him swoop in the distance. They whooped and cheered and carried on. Theo watched the dials on the panzer’s radio set. He could see the machine pistol on its brackets near the set and, if he turned his head, the back of the chair in which the panzer commander sat. Since Witt wasn’t sitting now, Theo could also see his legs. It wasn’t an exciting view. Theo didn’t care. He wanted excitement the way he wanted a second head.

  And, while the Stukas kept the Russians who’d set the trap hopping, more German panzers raced around their flank. The Ivans skedaddled; they were always nervous about their flanks. Theo’s panzer company, or the survivors thereof, rolled past the village where they’d been held up. They didn’t roll through it, a plan Theo liked. Nobody knew for sure whether all the Red Army men had abandoned the place. They might be waiting in there with Molotov cocktails and antipanzer rifles and whatever other unpleasantnesses they could come up with.