The baker looked startled. “I hadn’t even though of it like that,” he confessed. Turning to his son, he went on, “See what a smart girl you married, Isidor?”
“Oh, yeah?” Isidor said. Sarah was about to throw something at him when he added, “If she’s so smart, how come she married me?” That self-mockery was very much his style. This time, he dragged her into it, too.
“Must be your good looks,” David Bruck said. They all laughed. Isidor looked a lot like his father. The older Bruck gave his attention back to Sarah. “I hadn’t even thought about no more Nazis. I just remember how hard things were during the last war, and what a horrible mess everything was afterwards.”
The Nazis had sprung from that horrible mess. What might spring from the next one, if there was a next one? Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Hitler’s party. Sarah was sure of that.
She wondered if her father would be so sure. The Nazis had surprised him with their virulence. Had they gone as low as people could go? Sarah thought so. If she was wrong, she didn’t want to find out about it.
“Well,” Isidor said, “let’s get these into the ovens.” And into the ovens the dark loaves went. He and his father complained all the time about the horrible brown coal with the lumps and chunks of worthless shale they had to use for baking these days.
Sarah understood why they complained: they were used to better. Jews all over Germany were used to better all kinds of ways. Here, though, Sarah wasn’t inclined to kvetch along with them. Before long, the baking bread would smell wonderful. And the ovens, even if they burned the cheapest, most adulterated coal around—and what else would a Jewish bakery get?—kept the place warm. In earlier war winters, she’d shivered till spring finally came. No more.
The war bread came out of the ovens right at the top of the hour. David Bruck turned on the radio to catch the news. “It’ll all be lies,” Sarah said.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “Not all. Just most of it.” She nodded; he was right. If you listened carefully and knew how to read between the lines, you could sometimes glimpse the real moving figures that cast the enormous, blurry shadows the newsreaders talked about.
The latest broadcast started out with a bang: “The Jews are our misfortune!” the announcer shouted, slamming his fist down on a tabletop. “So our beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, said twenty years ago, and, as usual, history has proved him right.”
At that point, Sarah’s father would have given forth with a derisive snort. Since he wasn’t there, she did it for him. Her husband and father-in-law made identical shushing noises.
“Now the Bolshevik Jews of Moscow conspire with the plutocratic Jews of Paris to try to smash the German Reich between them,” the newsreader went on. “For a little while, it seemed the degenerate French would have will enough to resist the poisoned honey the Jews poured down their throats. Sadly, though, this was not to be. As a result of base French treachery and deceit, we are punishing the enemy soldiers who seek to desert to the Bolsheviks.”
They’d said the same thing after England decided she’d had enough of the fight in Russia. Maybe it was true. Maybe it was sweet syrup designed to make the radio audience feel better about what was going on. Here, Sarah couldn’t know for sure without going to Russia herself. There weren’t many places she wanted to be less than in Münster, but the Russian front was one of them.
“Fighting has resumed in France,” the announcer said in portentous tones. “Displaying their usual cowardice, the French were pushed back several kilometers in the skirmishes. No sign of English troops on the Western Front has yet been detected. As always, England talks a better game than she plays.”
Sarah would have looked across the street at the bombed-out grocery there, only she couldn’t. The bakery’s front window was repaired—after a fashion—with scraps of plywood and cardboard. The RAF played all too good a game.
“In other news relating to the changed war situation, unlimited U-boat warfare in the North Atlantic has resumed,” the announcer said. “If America’s Jew capitalists think they can get rich shipping arms to increase Europe’s woe, we will hurt them in their pocketbooks. Wait and see how loud they scream!” He laughed a most unpleasant laugh.
After that, home-front reports took over. Then the radio started playing Tristan und Isolde. David Bruck smiled. He liked Wagner. He hadn’t quit liking the composer because the Nazis liked him, too, the way Sarah’s father had. She wondered what that said. Most likely, no more than that he liked Wagner even better than Samuel Goldman did.
Isidor said, “I bet the Wehrmacht is jumping up and down with joy because they get to fight a two-front war again.”
“Bet you’re right,” his father agreed. “They’ve already tried to toss out our beloved Führer”—he laced that with sarcasm, not the newsreader’s schmaltz—“a couple of times. How long before they take another shot at it?”
Sarah looked from one of them to the other. No, they weren’t sophisticates like her father. But, as she was coming to realize, that didn’t make them dummies, either. They could see what was going on in the world.
Hitler would be able to see it, too. How far could he trust the Wehrmacht? If he didn’t trust it, what would keep the French and English out of Germany? For that matter, what would keep the Russians out of the Reich? There was a thought to make any good National Socialist’s blood run cold!
Sooner or later—probably sooner, the way Isidor grabbed her every chance he could steal—she was going to have a baby. What kind of world would it grow up in? In a world that didn’t look a whole lot like this one? In a world without Nazis? A few weeks earlier, that would have looked impossible. Now? Now she could hope, anyhow.
“YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN,” Vaclav Jezek said, contradicting the title of a new novel he’d never heard of.
Benjamin Halévy shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. But unless we all go back to France to fight the Germans, I’m staying right here with you guys.”
“You’re a French citizen. You’re a French soldier,” Vaclav said. “What if your government orders you back?”
Halévy told him what the French government could do about it. Vaclav didn’t think governments were equipped to do such things, especially not sideways. He laughed all the same.
“One thing,” he said when he got done laughing. “Now that France and Germany are on the outs again, they’ll open up the supply spigot here.”
“There you go. That is something.” Halévy sounded enthusiastic all at once. “Let the fucking Fascists get thirsty for goodies for a change. With France and England back in the war, I’d like to see Hitler and Mussolini ship Sanjurjo any toys.”
“It’s funny. The Nationalists are Fascists, and I can’t stand them on account of they’re dumb enough to be Fascists, but I don’t hate them the way I hate Germans,” Vaclav said. “I wonder why.”
“All the Spaniards have done is try to kill you,” Halévy said. “They haven’t raped your country and stolen it from you. Besides, I bet you didn’t have much use for Germans even before the war. What Czech does?”
“You are a smart Hebe,” Vaclav said, less ironically than he’d intended. Every word of that rang true.
“Hey, I love you, too.” Halévy made as if to kiss him.
Laughing some more, Jezek pushed him away. “Leave me alone, you fairy!” he said, and laughed again.
“Not guilty.” Halévy shook his head. “I’m a French Jew fighting for the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile in Spain. I’ve got to be normal some kind of way. I like girls. They don’t always like me, but I like girls.”
“Girls don’t always like anybody,” Vaclav said. He and Halévy went on from there. When everything else failed, you could always talk about women.
Vaclav slipped out through the wire before dawn the next morning. If you were in place by the time the sun rose, the bastards on the other side wouldn’t notice you moving. The Nationalists’ would-be sniper had discovered the error of his ways about
that, but he’d never get the chance to do it over and do it right, not now he wouldn’t.
The Czech crawled into a shell hole whose forward lip helped shield him from the prying eyes of Sanjurjo’s men. They wouldn’t find him easy to spot any which way. Twigs and branches torn off bushes broke up his helmet’s outline. More camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel. His greatcoat was dun-colored to begin with, and muddy on top of that. He’d smeared streaks of mud on his face, too. They had chameleons in the far south of Spain. He did his best to impersonate one of the goggle-eyed lizards.
Since he lacked goggle eyes of his own, he peered through the scope on his rifle instead. The Nationalists behind the lines seemed busier than usual, hustling here and bustling there. He wondered if they were getting ready to attack in this sector. That wouldn’t be so good, neither for the Republic nor, more relevantly, for his life expectancy.
After a while, though, he decided it wasn’t that kind of hustle and bustle. It seemed more as if they were getting ready to receive a VIP. In spite of himself, excitement coursed through him. People had been telling him to blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off ever since he crossed the Pyrenees. What if he really got the chance?
Don’t blow it, that’s what, he thought. One shot, probably out close to 2,000 meters. He could hit at that range. He’d done it before. He’d missed, too, but he refused to dwell on that. Footballers missed all the time, but they kept playing even so. And strikers shrugged off misses and put the ball in the net the next time. Without false modesty, Vaclav knew he was one of the best strikers in this game. He was still here, wasn’t he?
He’d smoked a cigarette just before he emerged from the Republican trenches. The next one would have to wait. As usual when he was out between the lines, he didn’t want to do anything that might give him away.
Time dragged on. If you didn’t know how to wait, you had no business sniping. He ate some sausage. He took a leak. He’d improved the bottom of the shell hole by digging a little trench so he could deal with such things without needing to lie in a puddle of piss afterward.
A Nationalist officer in one of those almost-German helmets surveyed no-man’s-land through field glasses. The nerve of the son of a bitch! Vaclav almost killed him to discourage the Fascists from doing that kind of thing again. They knew that he was out here, or that he was liable to be, anyhow.
He would have disposed of the officer had those binoculars paused while they were pointed his way. He might have done it on general principles if he weren’t after bigger game. He’d never known the Nationalists to do that kind of thing before. Maybe they were trying to make sure their precious big shot would be safe.
Vaclav ducked down before he shook his head. Sorry, boys, he thought. I’m here, whether you see me or not.
He waited some more. Clouds rolled in and turned the day gloomy. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. That would screw up everything. He needed a clear shot if he ever got a target.
A few drops fell. “Come on, God! Quit screwing around!” Vaclav grumbled. “Whose side are you on, dammit?” The rain stopped. Either God was on his side or the rain just stopped. He remembered a day when he would have figured it was God. Now he would have bet it just happened.
Any which way, after a while he spotted a Nationalist general haranguing a bunch of assembled officers. It wasn’t Marshal Sanjurjo. Vaclav knew what he looked like; the Fascists slapped posters of his jowly mug on anything that didn’t move. This guy was younger and skinnier. A good thing, too: if you were fatter than Marshal Sanjurjo, you were too fat to be a general, and probably too fat to live.
Well, this shithead was too Fascist to live. He had an oval, rather disapproving face and a neatly trimmed dark mustache. By the way he gestured, he wasn’t the most exciting speechifier God ever made, no matter on whose side God turned out to be.
He wasn’t quite so far away as Vaclav had thought he might be: no more than 1,500 meters. The Czech aimed with his usual meticulous care. He took a couple of deep breaths. As he let out the second one, he fired.
Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, the antitank rifle always tried to break his shoulder. He’d have a fresh purple bruise tonight, to go with the ones that were fading to yellow. But the Nationalist general stopped in the middle of one of his jerky gestures and fell over. As far as Vaclav was concerned, that counted for more than the bruises.
The Fascists started running around like chickens suddenly minus their heads. The guy with the field glasses popped up again. Except for Vaclav’s rule against shooting twice from the same place, he would have nailed him for his presumption. Sitting tight wasn’t easy, but he did it.
His pals back in the Republican trenches were on the ball. They started shooting rifles and machine guns at the Nationalist lines. That made Sanjurjo’s men decide against going out to hunt for him. He appreciated the gesture. Any heirs he might eventually have would, too.
More waiting, then. Once darkness fell, Vaclav crept back to the little stretch of trench the Czechs held. They pounded him on the back and plied him with harsh Spanish brandy and even harsher Spanish cigarettes. “Do you know who you got?” they yelled. “Do you?”
Since Vaclav didn’t, he answered, “Tell me, for Christ’s sake. All I know is, it wasn’t the big cheese.”
“Next best thing, by Jesus,” one of them said. “It was that Franco asshole who’s given us so much grief.”
“Hey! That was worth doing!” Jezek said. Francisco Franco was—no, had been—one of the Nationalists’ better generals. He had balls even if he was a Fascist, and he had a tenacity few on either side showed. What he grabbed, he held on to.
Well, all he’d grab from here on out was a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep. In the end, that was all anybody ever grabbed, but when you got it mattered.
The Republicans hadn’t put an enormous price on his head, the way they had with Sanjurjo. All the same, Vaclav bet they’d give him some leave and some cash to have a good time in Madrid for potting Franco. And if you couldn’t have a good time in Madrid, you weren’t half trying.
BATTLE DAMAGE REPAIRED, the Boise steamed out of Pearl Harbor and headed west, looking for trouble. Pete McGill was happy about that. Any chance to give the Japs one in the slats—or, better, one in the nuts—looked good to him.
He wished he were on the six-inch guns instead of the secondary armament. Then he could have fired at enemy ships, not planes. If you sank a destroyer or another light cruiser, you could give yourself credit for hundreds of Japs instead of the lousy one or two you got for hitting a fighter or a bomber. Vera still needed more revenge. No matter how much he tried to take, it could never be enough. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to up his score, though.
Along with the Boise came three destroyers, a heavy cruiser, and the Ranger. All the other ships were along to protect the carrier. The Ranger wasn’t the ideal carrier to go after the Japs. She was just arrived from the Atlantic, and she’d been more a training ship than a combat vessel. But the fleet carriers that had been in the Pacific now lay on the bottom. If the USA was going to hit back at all, it needed to grab whatever it could get its hands on.
“Two years from now, none of this shit’ll matter,” Joe Orsatti said as the gun crew stood by their piece looking out over the wide, empty ocean. “Two years from now, we’ll have so fuckin’ many carriers, they’ll fly out our nose when we sneeze. Tojo’ll see ’em in his bathtub, for Chrissake. Little tiny Wildcats’ll strafe his fuckin’ mustache.”
Everybody laughed. “You’re outa your goddamn tree, you know that?” Pete said, not without admiration.
“Yeah, well, I have fun.” Orsatti looked around some more. “Except when I gotta put up with youse guys, I mean.”
“Boy, you talk even more New York than I do,” Pete said, again more admiringly than not. “I didn’t figure anybody could.”
“Comes of bein’ a dago,” Orsatti said with pride of his own. If the wrong guy had tried to slap that
label on him, he would have decked the bastard, but he could stick it on himself. He pointed at McGill. “Now you, you’re just a regular paddy. If you came from Minnesota, you’d sound like a fuckin’ squarehead. But a guinea like me, don’t matter where he’s from. He still sounds like Hell’s Kitchen—or Jersey at the most.” Inevitably, that came out Joisey.
“Talking about Jersey”—Pete pronounced it much the same way—“who’s that kid who’s been singing with Goodman and now with Dorsey?”
“Sinatra.” Orsatti spoke with assurance. “Yeah, he’s from Hoboken. My folks know his folks some kinda way. I think one of my cousins went out with a gal who’s kin to him—like second cousin or something—but it didn’t stick.”
“Too bad for your cousin,” Pete said. “The way the dames scream for that guy, he’s gonna end up with more money than Henry fuckin’ Ford. Probably enough so some even sticks to a second cousin.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Orsatti agreed. “But it’s water under the bridge now. And Vito’s in the Army, poor sap, so he’s got more to worry about than trying to make it with Sinatra’s cousin.”
“My ass, he does. The Army’s safe as houses.” Like any halfway decent Marine, McGill looked down his nose at the larger service. He had his reasons, too: “What’s he gonna do besides train and look cute? Army can’t fight the Japs, not till it gets delivered, and that won’t happen any time soon. If we were fighting the Germans, too, he might have to work for a living. Way things are, though? Forget about it.”
“It’s coming. You gotta think so, anyway,” Orsatti said. “Now that France and England are over their fling with the Nazis, we’re shipping ’em stuff again. That’ll piss Hitler off—hell, it’d piss me off. So he’ll start torpedoing freighters, and we’ll jump in, same as we did against the Kaiser.”
“Could be,” Pete allowed. “He’s turned his subs loose again over in the Atlantic.”
Idly, he wondered what it would be like to be a kid from Hoboken with girls screaming for you wherever you went. There sure had to be worse ways to make a living. Back when he had Vera, he wouldn’t have cared if all the other girls in the world were screaming for him. (And if that didn’t prove he’d been head over heels, what would have?) Since he couldn’t have the one he’d wanted most, being able to pick and choose from all the rest didn’t seem half bad.
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