Again, Sarah kept her mouth shut. She had to bite down hard on the inside of her lower lip to manage it, but she did. The Reich hadn’t been able to beat England and France and torment their Jews, though horrible things were supposed to have happened to the ones they’d caught in Russia. The SS man must have pulled his vision of triumph over the United States out of an opium pipe. Or maybe you needed to smoke something stronger than opium to get that kind of hallucination.
She managed to escape. No one was shooting around here right this minute. But a rifle or machine-gun bullet could fly a couple of kilometers and kill somebody who chanced to be in the wrong place at the wrong instant. There hadn’t been any funerals like that on the block where her parents’ house stood, but the next block over had seen one, and a little girl in the hospital with a hole in her leg. Bad luck? God’s will? Sarah had no idea. She wasn’t even sure there was a difference.
A cigar butt lay on the sidewalk: three centimeters or so of stepped-on tobacco, soggy at one end. As casually as if she’d been doing it all her life, she bent and picked it up. She had no use for it herself—she’d never got the smoking habit. But her father would mix it in with his own scroungings. Jews got no tobacco rations. If Father was going to smoke, he had to make do with other people’s leavings.
Or, sometimes, he managed to steal unsmoked cigarettes he found in bombed-out houses—another kind of scrounging. He’d even got American cigarettes that way, from the home of a Party Bonz whose connections let him latch on to things ordinary people couldn’t even dream of. Those connections, though, hadn’t kept his fancy place from getting blown to smithereens … or a Jew from enjoying things for which he had no further use.
When Sarah came home at last, her mother asked, “How did it go?”
“Could have been worse.” Sarah displayed the produce in her stringbag. “And I found part of a cigar for Father.”
“That’s good. He’ll be happy,” Hanna Goldman said. “What have you got there? Mustard? When was the last time they had any?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while. If only we had some meat to put it on,” Sarah said.
“Well, it won’t go bad,” her mother said—they didn’t. All you could do was try to get by and hope the war ended before you did. Did America’s entry into the European fight make that more likely or less? Sarah didn’t know. Like everyone else, she could only wait and find out.
Arno Baatz puffed out his chest. The Unteroffizier knew something most people didn’t. He’d heard it from a Gestapo officer. The secret policeman hadn’t been talking to him, and might not have talked at all had he known Arno was eavesdropping. But that had nothing to do with anything. Arno had heard. He knew. He felt proud. He felt important. He liked feeling important.
Part of the fun of knowing something other people didn’t was getting the chance to tell them. Then they knew, too, of course, but they also knew you’d known before they did. That was how you scored points with your fellow men.
And so Baatz gathered his squad together and said, “Listen, you clowns, you’d better behave yourselves and keep all your gear better than new for the next few days, or else you’ll catch hell.”
“Since when did they appoint you God?” Adam Pfaff inquired.
“Might’ve known you’d be the one to piss and moan. But it won’t have anything to do with me. You’ll catch hell from everybody,” Arno said loftily.
“Oh, yeah? How come?” the Obergefreiter asked.
“How come? I’ll tell you how come. Because the Führer’s coming to Münster to make a big speech, that’s how come.” There. It was out. What Arno knew, he’d spread. Whether it was something he was supposed to spread, he simply didn’t worry about. He could no more keep it quiet than he could do without eating or drinking or breathing.
Some of the soldiers gaped at him. He hadn’t convinced all of them, though. Speaking for the unconvinced, Pfaff said, “Sure he is. And when he decided he would, the very first person he phoned up to tell him was Unteroffizier Arno Baatz. In your dreams!”
“No, of course the Führer didn’t phone me,” Baatz snapped. “Don’t be a bigger Dummkopf than you can help.”
“So how do you know, then?” Pfaff said. “Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk—again?”
“Doubt all you want. You’ll find out,” Baatz answered. “And when you get your ass in a sling, don’t come crying to me and say I didn’t warn you. Us and the SS guys, we’ve got to make sure the Führer stays safe while he’s in town and the rebels don’t kick up any fuss.” By the way he said it, the forces protecting Adolf Hitler would include Himmler’s police and prison guards and praetorians … and this one squad of Landsers.
“You really believe this shit, don’t you?” Pfaff sounded less skeptical himself now.
“I believe it because it’s true,” Arno said. “And I want to see you clean yourself up—all of you, in fact! You look like pig sties in marching boots. Oh, and Pfaff, when we line up for the Führer’s inspection, you’d damn well better be toting a rifle with a varnished stock, you hear me?”
The Obergefreiter unslung his gray-painted Mauser. Arno Baatz had hated that nonregulation piece since the second he set eyes on it. Pfaff started to say something, then had second thoughts. At last, he answered, “If the Führer inspects us, I’ll do it. But he was a Frontschwein himself. I bet he’d understand.”
“He’d understand what a square peg you are, that’s what he’d understand,” Baatz retorted. Adam Pfaff clung to a wounded, dignified silence.
For the next couple of days, nothing out of the ordinary happened. The soldiers began to give Arno funny looks when they didn’t think he could catch them doing it. But he had what might as well have been a radio antenna to pick up such things. He noticed, all right.
He noticed, and he worried. What if he’d heard wrong? What if the Gestapo officer had been talking through his high-crowned cap? Arno knew he would never live it down if he’d made a mistake. The men didn’t respect him enough as it was (they would have had to treat him like a field marshal to give him the respect he felt he deserved). They wouldn’t respect him at all if the Führer didn’t show.
But then things started tightening up. Parties of soldiers and labor gangs full of convicts and Jews went to work cleaning up Münster. The city hadn’t taken as much of a beating as some Russian town that went back and forth between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army three or four times, but it wasn’t in what anybody would call great shape.
Grudgingly, Adam Pfaff said, “Well, maybe you were right, Corporal. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be putting mascara and rouge on this corpse.”
“Bet your ass we wouldn’t,” Baatz agreed, also grudgingly. Neither Pfaff’s rank nor his own, which shielded them from most fatigue duties, kept them from shoveling and hauling as if they were kikes or jailbirds. His hands were getting blisters in places where they didn’t already have calluses.
Even more galling was the ironic glint that sparked in the dark eyes of the big-nosed bastards with the yellow stars on their clothes. See? they might have been saying. You like Hitler, and what has it got you? You’re doing the same kind of shit we are.
If one of them had said anything like that to Arno, he would have knocked the pigdog’s teeth down his throat with an entrenching tool. The Jews knew better than to open their big yaps. Whether or not they said anything, though, their eyes spoke for them.
The SS began moving in in droves: Gestapo men, SD men, hard-faced troopers from the Waffen-SS. The looks they gave ordinary German soldiers were even more scornful than the ones the Landsers got from Jews. To the SS functionaries, soldiers were only cowflops under their boots. Medieval barons must have looked at peasants the same way.
Every so often, the peasants had risen up against their noble overlords. They’d killed all the barons and counts and princes they could catch. Arno had never sympathized with the peasants till now. He finally understood.
He still got angry when he saw Jews eyei
ng him in their sneaky, snotty way. His understanding wasn’t all that flexible. It stretched only so far.
SD men—faggots if he’d ever seen any—started hanging red-white-and-black bunting and swastika banners all over town. They wanted to give the impression that Münster loved the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the Führer. Even Arno knew better than that. Why were soldiers and panzers holding the place down under martial law if everybody in it was such a contented citizen of the Grossdeutsches Reich?
Well, everybody in it except the Jews. They weren’t citizens of the Reich. They were only residents. Most Germans—most good, moral, upright Germans—wished they weren’t even that.
A few RAF bombers came over by night. In the confusion of the air raid, someone with matches and a can of kerosene torched a lot of banners and bunting. The soldiers had more important things to worry about. For Arno and his men, staying alive stood pretty high on the list.
By contrast, the blackshirted fairies pitched conniption fits when the sun came up and they discovered how their artistic handiwork had been vandalized. They started screaming and wailing and demanding house-to-house searches to smoke out the culprit. Some of the things they wanted to do to him once they caught him made Arno’s blood run cold. For somebody who’d spent so long on the Eastern Front, that was saying something.
“Boy, they’re sweethearts, aren’t they?” Adam Pfaff said.
“At least,” Arno answered. He wasn’t used to agreeing with the miserable Obergefreiter, but they saw eye-to-eye on this one.
The artistic SS men raised such a hue and cry that it finally took a Wehrmacht colonel general to tell them to shut up and to make it stick. Along with Himmler’s elite, high-ranking Army, Navy, and Luftwaffe officers were coming into Münster to hear what their chief of state had to say. Some of them eyed the SS paladins the way the blackshirts looked at Landsers. An interesting time was had by all.
Pete McGill handed the Marine Corps quartermaster sergeant his helmet. He’d worn one like it ever since he became a leatherneck. So had a zillion other Marines, and even more doughboys and dogfaces. Any English soldier who’d gone over the top at the Somme in 1916 would have recognized them: they were nearly exact copies of the limeys’ tin hats. Tommies wore them to this day.
Marines and soldiers had worn them to this day, or something close to it. But Progress with a capital P was now reaching even the garrison on Midway. In exchange for Pete’s steel derby with its broad brim, the quartermaster sergeant handed him a pot-shaped plastic helmet liner and a helmet that fit tightly over it. You could adjust the straps and padding inside the liner so it gave a good fit to your particular noggin.
When Pete started to do that, the quartermaster said, “One thing at a time, if you don’t mind. You’ve got to sign for this baby first.”
As a matter of fact, Pete had to sign twice: once for the helmet and once for the liner. He said, “You sure there’s not an extra form for the goddamn chin strap?”
“No, that’s included on the form for the helmet proper, to which it attaches,” the quartermaster sergeant answered automatically. Then, a beat slower than he should have, he realized Pete was being sarcastic. He jerked his thumb at the tent flap. “Funny guy, huh? Get the hell outa here, funny guy.”
Grinning, Pete got. He looked out at sand and at the Pacific, which from Midway seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. The island still stank faintly of dead Japs. The Marines hadn’t taken more than a handful of prisoners, most of them captured too badly wounded to die fighting or kill themselves. As far as Pete was concerned, if Hirohito’s boys hadn’t caused so much trouble from this place, they would have been welcome to it.
Come to that, if Midway hadn’t been a place from which you could either cause trouble or try to stop it, no one in his right mind would have wanted to set foot on it. It could have stayed as it was in the beginning, all sand and thin grasses and crash-landing gooney birds.
But on the Pacific’s vast, watery chessboard, islands were important squares. You could put garrisons on them. Even more crucially, you could fly planes off them.
They still hadn’t told him when they were going to let him and the rest of the Marines who’d recaptured Midway get off the island and go somewhere with more civilized comforts. They also still hadn’t imported any vaccinated hookers. As far as Pete was concerned, that was really a goddamn shame.
He barked sudden laughter. The quartermaster sergeant who thought he was God’s anointed because he doled out the spiffy new helmets … They wouldn’t let that sorry son of a bitch off Midway any time soon, either. Pete wondered if they’d told the guy yet. He would have bet against it. The quartermaster was too full of himself to have got that kind of bad news.
An American flag fluttered near the chugging desalinization plant. And, Pete saw, a new banner had gone up alongside: a smaller, plainly homemade one. MIDWAY—HOME OF THE TYPHOID MARY PARACHUTE BRIGADE, the flag declared.
Pete laughed again. You could laugh or you could cuss or you could go Asiatic: grab a rifle or a Tommy gun and do as much shooting as you could till they got you. Nobody here had actually done that. More than one Marine had talked about it, though. Some were just blueskying. Others sounded honest-to-God tempted.
They said that when you talked about crap like that you never actually went and did it. Pete never had worked out who they were supposed to be. He had seen that a lot of what they said was pure bullshit. This once, he hoped the mysterious they knew what they were talking about.
One way to keep from going Asiatic was to take your mind off your troubles. As soon as things like prunes and canned apple juice started getting to the island, a couple of enterprising Marines rigged up a still and started turning out joy juice. It wasn’t what you’d call good hooch—it wasn’t within miles of what you’d call good hooch—but hooch it was. With no good hooch closer than Kauai, the customers weren’t inclined to be fussy.
Navy ships were supposed to be dry, but Pete had never served on one that didn’t have some unofficial alcohol available. As long as the producers didn’t get greedy, didn’t get blatant, and did grease the proper palms, they could go about their business without much trouble.
So things went here. Nobody got too curious about the tent way off by itself. Nobody got too curious about the steady trickle of men who visited it, either.
Pete came back with a couple of canteens’ worth of the enterprising corporals’ firewater. They claimed the stuff was cognac. Pete thought any Frenchman who brewed up such nasty stuff would kill himself for shame—which, of course, didn’t keep him from drinking it. A leatherneck from Mississippi called it stump-likker. That came closer to truth in advertising.
After he’d drunk enough to take the edge off his own gloom, he wondered what would happen if you got an albatross toasted. Would a cop pull the bird over for reckless flying? Would a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one? Could a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one?
The only problem with finding out was, he had no idea how to inebriate a gooney bird. The sole fresh water on Midway was the stuff the desalinization plant turned out. He’d never seen albatrosses drink. Maybe they got everything they needed from the fish they ate. Or maybe they drank from the Pacific. Pete had no idea. Someone who studied the birds might know, but he didn’t.
Another way to assassinate some hours was with a deck of cards. Yes, the poker games on Midway had started before the last Japs got hunted down. They hadn’t stopped since. Back in Peking, Pete had learned the expensive way not to mix booze and poker. Booze turned you into an optimist. It also turned you into a sucker. Better, or at least smarter, to wait till you had a clear head and to fleece the fools who didn’t know enough to do that.
Games here got insanely expensive. Guys had nothing else to spend their money on. They didn’t know when, or even if, they’d ever escape Midway. And so they bet as if there were no tomorrow.
For one poor leatherneck, there was no tom
orrow. He’d won for a while. Then he started losing, and losing, and losing some more. He went through all the money he had. He went through a year and a half’s pay he hadn’t earned yet. He wrote IOU after IOU, figuring he’d start winning again pretty soon.
Only he didn’t. And, one dark, moonless night, he walked down to the edge of the ocean and blew his brains out. The note by his body read Well, I guess I’m square now, and my folks will get my insurance.
That was sobering. It didn’t stop the games, but it did make people cut back on the stakes and not allow gamblers down on their luck to pledge money they hadn’t made yet. Pete liked the changes. Gambling was all very well, but the only way anyone needed to risk his life was in action against the Japs.
Or, now, against the Germans. Pete still held his grudge against the slanties, but he wouldn’t have said no if someone sent him storming ashore on some Belgian beach. Hitler’s would-be supermen thought they were hot shit. Their daddies had, too, till U.S. Marines taught them better in France. Some of those old Marines were still in the service. Lots of them had taught Pete the soldiering trade. Giving the Nazis what-for would be a way to show them how well he’d learned his lessons.
Would be. He was about as far from the Wehrmacht as a human being could get. He had no idea when the brass would decide Midway was decontaminated enough to make shipping people off it safe. In the meantime, he had stump-likker and poker games. Oh, it was one hell of a life, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just?
Spring was in the air. Aristide Demange surveyed it with the same jaundiced gaze he turned on summer, fall, and winter. So birds were singing? So flowers were blooming?—at least till artillery fragments cut them down to size. So bright green grass sprouted in shell holes and on the parapets of entrenchments?
So what?
Demange scowled at his men, too. “You think the Boches can’t kill you because the sky is blue and you’ve got a stiff bulge in your pants? The Germans don’t care. They’re just waiting for you to do something stupid so they can blow your balls off. Then you won’t have to worry about hard-ons any more.” His voice rose to a shrill, mocking falsetto.
Last Orders: The War That Came Early Page 31
