Daisy, on the other hand, looked like hell and knew it. She got a desultory sponge bath every other day. She hadn’t had her hair, what there was of it, washed in much too long.
But all the other women in their cots, and even the much cleaner and healthier sister, stared as McNulty came over to stand by her. He took off his officer’s cap and held it in both hands. “How are you, sweetie?” he asked.
“I feel better now you’re here,” she said, which was sappy but true.
“Yeah, well—” He left it there. Had he been at Sculthorpe when the Russian bomb fell, he would have been blasted to vapor. He had to know it, and to know she knew it, too. Instead, he was fine.
And why was he fine? Because he’d been up in his B-29, visiting the same hell that had fallen on her on untold thousands of people on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was everything she admired in a man—and he was also a killer with more deaths on his shoulders than all but a few of the most heinous Nazi murderers.
Did the Russian who’d bombed Sculthorpe wonder about such things, assuming the fighters hadn’t shot him down? How could he not? He was a man, wasn’t he?
“I just came to see how you were doing,” Bruce said.
“They think I’ll get better,” she answered. “I haven’t the faintest notion what I’ll do once that happens. Not much left of Fakenham, is there?”
“I drove past it on my way here. It got knocked around pretty good, yeah,” McNulty said. “Anything you need that I can take care of, though, you just have to ask. Anything at all. You know that, right?”
“It’s good to hear,” Daisy said quietly. That was also true. She had no claim on him, none he was obliged to honor. “Thank you.”
“Sure. Look, babe, I gotta go. But I’ll come see you first chance I get, promise.” He bent to kiss her cheek. Then he left. Daisy noticed the sunshine this time.
“FIRE AND FALL BACK!” Sergeant Gergely shouted.
Istvan Szolovits popped up out of his foxhole like a malevolent jack-in-the-box. He fired a couple of rounds at the advancing Americans—or maybe they were Englishmen or Germans—and then, satisfied he’d made them put their heads down, trotted east through the war-shattered Ruhr.
War-shattered or not, this town (whichever town it happened to be) still had people living in it. “Look at the Russian pigdogs run!” one of them said to her equally elderly friend.
I’m not a Russian, you ugly German twat, Istvan thought. He laughed. Anger, under the circumstances, seemed absurd. Well, war was nothing if not absurd. He’d already found that out, over and over again.
The other old lady scrounging with a stringbag clucked like a laying hen. She pointed right at Istvan as he loped by. “Look at that one, Ilse!” she shrilled. “His whole face is peeling. How did he get a sunburn this late in the year?” He counted himself lucky. That was the burn scar healing, not radiation sickness. His unit hadn’t got it nearly so bad as others closer to the bomb.
Bullets were still cracking along the street, some from the Hungarians, others from the soldiers pushing forward against them. They bothered the two German crones no more than they did the men in uniform. Then again, it wasn’t as if the old ladies weren’t veterans at this kind of thing, too.
As for Istvan, he trotted around a corner and ducked into a recessed doorway. From there, he could shoot at anybody coming after him.
Some of the real Russians who’d come back from nearer to where the bomb went off had their noses and ears melted into their faces and the sides of their necks. He’d seen some things that gave him new nightmares. Just when you started to think you were hardened to horror, horror went and showed you you didn’t know so much after all.
More boots thumped on the shattered pavement. Istvan leaned forward. He still didn’t like shooting at Americans, but he’d seen they didn’t mind shooting at him one bit. You did what you had to do to stay alive. Everything else, you could worry about later.
But these weren’t Americans. They were comrades from the Hungarian People’s Army. My countrymen, Istvan thought, not without bitterness. It was less than even money that they would think of him that way. They were Magyars. He was just a damned Jew who chanced to live in Hungary and to speak Magyar as if he’d learned it while he was a baby—which, of course, he had.
One of them trotted past the doorway without even noticing Istvan in its shadow. The other, more alert, started to swing his PPD that way. Then he recognized the uniform, if not the Jew wearing it. He lowered the machine pistol, waved, and ran on.
Istvan waved back. He didn’t want the other man having doubts about what he was and which side he belonged to. From short range like this, there wasn’t much that was deadlier than a PPD.
Then the door opened behind him. He whirled, sure he was dead. There stood Sergeant Gergely, a cigarette in his mouth, his own submachine gun cradled in his arms, a wicked grin on his face. “Hi, there,” he said.
“Fuck you!” Istvan blurted, his heart still pounding like a runaway hippo.
“That’s ‘Fuck you, Sergeant!’ ” Gergely clucked in mock reproof. “You have to respect the rank.”
“Fuck you, Sergeant! All right? Happy now?” After a ragged breath, Istvan managed to go on, “How the devil did you get there?”
“I was on the landing, one floor up, and I saw you coming. So I thought I’d bake you a cake.” The sergeant was still grinning. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
It didn’t seem that way to Istvan. Saying so, though, would only make Gergely laugh at him. What he did say was, “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Keep fighting. Slow the enemy down as much as we can. Make him pay for everything he gets.” Gergely would have listened to German officers talking that way in 1944 and 1945—talking that way about the Red Army, the army now on the same side he was. He went on, “And hope Stalin pulls some wonder weapons out of his back pocket, or maybe out of his asshole.”
He spoke the key word in German: Wunderwaffen. There was irony, if you chanced to be looking for some. The Germans had talked about wonder weapons in the last war. They’d talked about them more than they’d produced them, as a matter of fact. The ones they did produce—the long-range rocket, the jet fighter—were too little and came too late.
Now the Americans and the Russians had the wonder weapons, with the atom bomb topping the list. And where did they trot out their fancy new toys? Why, on what was left of Germany. If Hitler had a grave, wasn’t he bound to be spinning in it?
“Bet your balls he is, Jewboy,” Gergely said when Istvan brought out that conceit. Somehow, the insulting name seemed like an endearment from him. He went on, “The guys who invented the fucking gyroscope got the idea by watching the way old Adolf spun.”
Istvan gaped at him. “Bugger me blind if you aren’t crazier than I am, Sergeant.”
“I’ve seen way more shit than you have, kid,” Gergely answered. “If that doesn’t drive you round the bend, well, Christ, you ain’t half trying.” His eyes narrowed. In less than a heartbeat, he went from storyteller to wary soldier. No, he hadn’t stayed alive to see all that shit by accident. “Something’s coming,” he said. “Sounds like trouble.”
“Uh-huh.” Istvan heard it, too: the rumbling clatter of a tracked vehicle. It was moving from west to east, which meant the people inside wouldn’t be friendly. He ducked into the doorway Gergely’d come out of. The sergeant followed, closing the door after him. If those unfriendly people didn’t see them, they wouldn’t start shooting at them. Or Istvan hoped they wouldn’t.
He and Gergely hotfooted it up to that landing and peered out through a glassless square that had been a window. An American self-propelled gun clanked around the corner. It carried a 105mm gun and a couple of machine guns. It didn’t have as much armor as a tank, but it was fine for knocking down buildings or shooting up soldiers and trucks it caught in the open.
Or it would have been. It never got the chance. Istvan had seen less than Sergeant
Gergely, but he knew armor inside a built-up area was hideously vulnerable. Somebody in a block of flats across the street had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. A roar, a blast of fire, and that self-propelled gun turned into a blazing oven to cook its crew. It burned with savage ferocity. Flames and black, greasy smoke rose from the murdered machine.
“Stupid cocksuckers,” Gergely said. “You send one of those babies up a street without an infantry screen, you’re asking for something like that. It’s blocked the road so nothing else can get through, too.”
“They must have thought we’d thrown in the sponge,” Istvan said. “After all, we’re only Hungarians, right?”
The Americans would think he was a Hungarian. They’d kill him if they could because they thought he was a Hungarian. But how about Sergeant Gergely? What did he think? Somehow, the answer mattered very much to Istvan.
If Gergely had laughed and said something like You, a Hungarian? You’re a Hungarian like I shit angels, Istvan might have shot him right there. But the sergeant just grunted and replied, “Yeah, well, in the last war the Russians got that kind of surprise a time or three, too. You have any smokes?” Istvan gave him a cigarette and lit one himself, feeling better about his small piece of the world.
—
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. A captain Ihor Shevchenko’d served under during the Great Patriotic War used to say that all the time. He’d said it all the time till a German bouncing mine blew off his balls, anyhow. If he still said it, he said it soprano.
Which might not have kept the Chekists from sucking him back into the Red Army. They might figure a guy who’d had balls once upon a time still did whether that was literally true or not. Or, if he helped them make their quota, they might not even care.
What brought the thought back to Ihor’s mind now was the AK-47 he carried through northwestern Germany. As long as he had it, he could use it to get whatever he wanted. The front seemed to have broken down. No one gave him any orders after he got kicked out of the aid station. The docs there expected him to hook up with his old regiment again.
And so he would have, had he thought anything was left of it. But it had been in the trenches the Americans atom-bombed. He was one of the few people who’d watched two A-bombs delivered in anger go off and was still around to talk about it. A dubious distinction, yeah, but his own.
Only he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to rejoin the war, either. He went where he pleased. The A-bomb seemed to have blown up the MGB pukes behind the line, one of the few good things he could say about it. Nobody Soviet tried to dragoon him into the trenches.
And nobody German wanted to argue with him, not when he had Sergeant Kalashnikov’s finest creation as a persuader. Using it and the bits of Deutsch he remembered from the last war, he had no trouble getting all the food and booze he wanted. Who would argue with an assault rifle?
He and the men he’d joined up with weren’t the only Red Army soldiers roaming the countryside on their own. Soviet military discipline was stern, but not always stern enough to stand up to a good dose of radiation. Plenty of men who hadn’t wanted to be in Germany to begin with had had all the war they wanted, thank you very much.
Loosely banded together as they were, they could pull off bigger heists than one man could on his own. Then they’d drink themselves into a stupor. Schnapps worked as well as vodka for that.
A corporal named Feofan hoisted a bottle and said, “Pretty soon the Americans will push forward and butcher all of us like hogs.” He laughed till tears ran down his dirty face. He was very drunk.
Well, so was Ihor. So were all of them. And they all laughed. Ihor said, “We lived through the atom bomb. You think ordinary soldiers can do for the likes of us?”
“No fucking way!” Three Russians said the same thing at the same time. Or Ihor thought so. He was already drunk enough to be seeing double. Why shouldn’t he be drunk enough to be hearing triple? That was the last thing he remembered before passing out.
He woke up the next morning feeling exactly like death. He lay under a blanket out in the open under chilly drizzle. And one thing about schnapps: it hurt you worse than vodka did. The only medicine Ihor could think of that might dent his jimjams was the hair of the wolfpack that had its teeth in him. Not all the bottles lying around the sodden soldiers could be empty…could they? Fate wouldn’t be so cruel!
He found one with some life in it and swigged like a man in the desert who’d stumbled across an oasis. His stomach didn’t like the dose, but the rest of him did.
The others were no happier as they came back to consciousness. They ran out of restorative before they ran out of men who needed it. Then, weapons at the ready, they descended on the nearest village to take more. Ihor feared his head would fall off if he had to fire his AK-47, but the Germans didn’t know that.
What the Germans hereabouts did know was that Russians had done horrible things to their countrymen farther east. (Some were bound to know those horrible things were in revenge for what the Germans had done in the USSR, but that made them more nervous, not less.) When grimy, nasty Red Army men with assault rifles and machine pistols descended on them, they didn’t do anything to try to provoke the invaders.
Schnapps? Food? Cigarettes? They were happy to cough those up, as long as the Russians didn’t start shooting their men and gang-raping their women. Nothing could have stopped the Red Army soldiers from doing that, but they didn’t. They’d get in trouble for it, either from their own officers if the USSR pulled itself together or from the enemy if their own country couldn’t. However much he wanted to, Ihor couldn’t get drunk enough to forget about the enemy.
Artillery fire said the Americans were moving forward not far south. The only reason Ihor could find that they weren’t moving forward here, too, was that this wasn’t the main axis of their advance. They’d push hard where they wanted to, and clean up backwaters later.
Backwaters like this one.
It wasn’t till two days later that an American jeep nosed down the road to see what was going on. Like many jeeps, this one carried a pintle-mounted heavy machine gun: a lot of firepower for such a little vehicle.
The powerful machine gun did the Yankees in the jeep no good at all. They were gum-chewing teenagers, conscripts who had no idea what war was about. Since their very first lesson was the cruelest one possible, they never got the chance to learn.
They had no idea any Russians were within five kilometers of them, either, when they drove into the village. Like Ihor, most of his pals had picked up their warcraft against the Fritzes the last time around. Setting ambushes was second nature to them. Guys who couldn’t learn that stuff lay in unmarked graves all up and down the western USSR, when they weren’t just bones under bushes somewhere.
Because he had the Kalashnikov, Ihor took out the man behind the machine gun with a single head shot. The range wasn’t long for him, but it would have been for somebody with a submachine gun. The driver just had time to turn in alarm toward his stricken comrade when a burst from a PPD cut him down. He didn’t die right away, so another burst finished him. The jeep rolled on till it hit a telephone pole. Then it stopped.
“Too easy!” Feofan said scornfully.
“They won’t always be that blind,” Ihor said. “We should grab the machine gun. That’s one hell of a weapon for as long as we can keep it fed.”
“Go ahead, if you’ve got a hard-on for it,” Feofan told him.
So he did. It came off the pintle easily enough. But it weighed close to twenty kilos, not counting the box of bulky cartridges it fired. Using it without a tripod wouldn’t be easy.
A sentry—Ihor had said he’d kick the man’s ass if he didn’t get over to the western edge of the village—sang out: “More Americans on the way!”
And there were, too many for the Red Army men to dispose of them all so easily. After an exchange of fire, the Yanks pulled back. Then they started lobbing mortar bombs into the village.
That was no fun at all. By the local Germans’ shrieks, they enjoyed it no more than Ihor did.
Before long, he and his friends had only two choices: stay where they were and get cut off and killed or pull out. Before he left, Ihor fired a belt of ammo from the heavy machine gun. He didn’t aim, or need to. Not only was it loud fun, it made the Americans move up slower than they would have otherwise.
Three or four kilometers east of the village, the Red Army men ran into their own side’s military police. “What are you slackers doing running around without orders?” a sergeant asked ominously.
“Slackers, my dick,” Ihor retorted. “Didn’t you hear the firefight? We were defending that village from the capitalist imperialists.”
“Huh.” The sergeant wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t try to arrest them all. Back under military control they went. Freedom had been fun while it lasted, but nothing lasted forever. Most things didn’t even last very long.
—
Aaron Finch scowled at the 1946 Chevy that had replaced his stolen Nash. The car was okay. Whoever’d owned it before had taken decent care of it. The payments…He scowled again. He hated paying on time; interest sucked money the way leeches sucked blood. But if you couldn’t afford to write a check, you did what you had to do.
He’d made the best deal he could. Almost the best deal—a pretty nice Ford a year newer had cost about the same. But Aaron was damned if he’d buy a Ford, even a secondhand one. Old Henry hated Jews and he hated union men. With two strikes like those, he didn’t need a third one to be out in Aaron’s book.
He unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel. He thought he’d locked the Nash the night before it disappeared, but he wasn’t sure. He made sure all the time now. Locking the barn door after the horse is gone, he thought as he turned the key and pulled out the choke.
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