The telephone chose that moment to ring. Peggy jumped, then sprawled across the bed to pick it up. “Bitte?” she said.
“Hello, Peggy.” Of course it was Constantine Jenkins. Who else would it be? Just to drive me crazy, she thought. Um, crazier. He went on, “I know you speak German pretty well.”
“Fair,” she said. “Better than when I got here. I know a lot more French-and much good that does me.”
“As a matter of fact, so do I,” he said. And he really was fluent auf Deutsch, while Peggy struggled to make herself understood and to follow what other people said to her. If he did speak French better… But he was after something else, because he asked her, “How well do you write German?”
“Write it?” Peggy could hear herself squeak in surprise. “I don’t think I’ve tried since I was in high school. I’d make a horrible mess of the grammar-I’m sure of that. How come?”
“Because I want you to write a letter to Adolf Hitler,” Jenkins answered. Whatever he thought of the Fuhrer, it didn’t show in his voice. Peggy had a good idea of his opinion. No Gestapo man tapping the phone line would, though. The blackshirt might wonder if he’d gone round the bend, of course.
And who could blame a hard-working blackshirt for that? Peggy wondered the same thing. She also wondered whether her own hearing had gone south. “You want… me… to write a letter… to Hitler? In German?”
“He doesn’t read English, and I don’t want his secretaries to sidetrack this. They may anyhow, but if it comes by way of the American embassy you have a chance of getting him to look at it,” Constantine Jenkins said. “Sometimes you have to go straight to the top here, if you can do it.”
“What should I say?” By now, Peggy was beyond flabbergasted.
“Tell him what you’ve been telling all the other Germans. You’re a neutral, you’re stuck here, and you’d appreciate it if he’d make it possible for you to go back to the USA and to your family. A couple of paragraphs should do it.”
“You really think that will work?”
“I don’t know. It may. Lots of leaders will do favors for little people because it makes them look good and doesn’t cost anything much. And if he says no, how are you worse off?”
Peggy had no answer for that. Even though he couldn’t see her, she nodded. “Okay, Con-I’ll take a shot at it. I’ll bring it by the embassy this afternoon.”
She thought for a moment, then called the front desk. “A German-English dictionary?” said the clerk who answered. “Ja, we can supply one. Please wait. A bellboy will deliver it sofort.” As Jenkins had before him, he hung up.
It didn’t come immediately, but it didn’t take long enough to annoy her. The bellboy was at least sixty-five, with a bushy white mustache and a limp. What had he stopped in the last war? She tipped him more than she would have if he were some kid. “Danke,” he said gravely, and brushed a forefinger against the brim of his cap.
She felt like cheering when she found the dictionary included a table of declensions, and another one for conjugations. She’d still write bad German, but it wouldn’t be quite so bad.
Fuhrer, she began-he wasn’t Mein Fuhrer, not to her. She set out her problem and what she wanted as simply as she could. As Jenkins had predicted, it didn’t take much more than half a page. I thank you very much for your help, she finished, and signed her name.
She put the letter in an envelope but didn’t seal it: Con Jenkins would want to look it over before it went out. Before it went to the Fuhrer. She laughed again. Would Hitler see it? What were the odds? But, as Jenkins had also asked, if he didn’t see it, or if he said no or just ignored it, how was she worse off?
She set the dictionary on the check-in counter as she left for the embassy. “I hope it was useful to you,” the desk clerk said.
“It was. Danke schon,” Peggy answered.
Jenkins certainly didn’t treat her like a lover when she got there. She had to cool her heels for half an hour before she could see him. Again, he was closeted with the gray-haired naval attache. Well, that fellow probably had enough on his mind and then some. The whole business with the Admiral Scheer and the Royal Navy had played out right on the USA’s front porch, so to speak.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” the undersecretary said briskly when she made it into his office at last. She was just as happy to stay businesslike. She handed him the letter. He read it, then grinned at her. “Oh, this is fine, Peggy. Much better than I expected. You didn’t give your German enough credit.” She told him how she’d borrowed the dictionary. He clapped his hands. “Good for you, sweetheart!”
He didn’t sound like a fairy being arch. He sounded like a lover praising his lover. Peggy wished he would have seemed more faggoty. At least he didn’t say something like I’ll show up at your hotel tonight so you can thank me the right way. Peggy asked, “How long do you think it will take before I know?”
“Hitler’s staff will have the letter tonight,” Jenkins said. “What they do with it, what he does with it-that’s out of my hands.”
“Okay,” Peggy said. “Thanks again.” She got out of there as fast as she could without being rude.
Three days later, the telephone in her room rang at a quarter to five in the morning. At first, muzzy with sleep, she thought it was the air-raid siren going off. When she realized it was the phone, she got good and pissed off. What asshole would call at this ungodly hour? It was getting light, but even so-! “Bitte?” she snarled.
“Sind Sie Frau Druce?” A man’s voice.
“Yes, I’m Peggy Druce. Who the devil are you?”
“Adolf Hitler here,” the voice answered. And it was. As soon as he said it, she knew it was. She’d heard him on the radio too often to have any doubt. “You are having trouble leaving my country?”
When Hitler said it was his country, he damn well meant it. “Uh, yes, sir,” she managed.
“The trouble will end. Whatever neutral nation you wish to visit, you may. Never let it be said we keep anyone who does not wish to stay,” the Fuhrer told her.
“Uh-” Peggy kept saying that. She’d never expected a call from one of the two or three most powerful men in the world. She’d never expected anything to come of her letter, truth to tell. “Thank you very much, sir!”
“You are welcome. Have you any questions?” He spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure she could follow. Even over the telephone, the weight of his personality made her sag.
“Uh-” There it was again! “Why are you up so early?” she blurted.
He actually chuckled. How many people could say they’d made Hitler laugh? “I am not up early. I am up late. The enemies of the Reich do not sleep, and neither do I. Good-bye, Mrs. Druce. Finding a problem so easy to solve is a pleasure, believe me.”
“Thank you.” Peggy finally managed not to say Uh, but she was talking to a dead line.
Chapter 11
Down screamed the Stuka. Vaclav Jezek had never yet met a man who’d lived through a dive-bomber attack and didn’t hate the German warplane with a fierce and deadly passion. Outside of a few luckless people down in Spain, no one had hated the Stuka like that longer than he had. He’d been dive-bombed on the very day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, and more often than he cared to remember since.
“Get down!” he yelled to Benjamin Halevy, who was working his way across the field with him.
“I am down,” the Jewish sergeant answered. So was Jezek. He lay flat as a flapjack. The smells of grass and dirt filled his nostrils.
That Stuka screeched like a soul tormented in hell. The sirens built into the landing gear were one more piece of German Schrechlichkeit. Vaclav sneaked a glance at it. It looked funny. What were those pods under its wings? Not bombs, surely.
The dive bomber couldn’t have been more than fifty meters off the ground when fire blasted from the ends of the gun barrels projecting from the pods. That was when Vaclav realized they were gun barrels. Till then, he’d hardly noticed them-no great surprise, n
ot when the Stuka was hurtling down at several hundred kilometers an hour.
As it pulled out of the dive and roared away, answering fire spurted from the rear decking of a French tank. The tank started to burn. The crew bailed out and ran for cover.
“Bastard’s got big guns under there!” Halevy exclaimed.
“Tell me about it!” Vaclav answered. “What can we do to stop him?”
“Shoot him down,” Benjamin Halevy said. “If you’ve got any other bright ideas, I’d love to hear them.”
Vaclav didn’t, however much he wished he did. He watched the Stuka climb high into the sky again, then dive at another French tank. He and Halevy both fired at the ugly, predatory warplane. If they hit it, they didn’t harm it. At least one of the rounds it fired at the tank struck home-the motorized fort slewed to a stop, flame and smoke rising from the engine compartment. Again, the Stuka flew off at treetop height, then started to climb once more.
Another screaming dive. Another stricken French tank. “Jesus Christ!” Jezek said. “He can do that all day long!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Halevy said. “Sooner or later, he’s bound to run out of gas or ammo-unless we run out of tanks first.”
“Happy day!” Vaclav sent him a reproachful look. “You really know how to cheer me up, don’t you?”
“It could be worse,” the Jew said.
“Oh, yeah? How?” Vaclav demanded.
“The Nazis could have a dozen Stukas armed like that, not just one,” Halevy answered. “Looks like they’re trying this out to see if it works. If it does, they’ll put guns on more planes.”
“Well, they will, on account of it damn well does,” Jezek said. “Does it ever!” Three smashed tanks-three tanks smashed from an unexpected direction-had shot the Allied advance in this sector right behind the ear. Everyone was staring wildly into the sky, wondering if that Stuka would come back again.
And it did. This time, it had to dive through a storm of small-arms fire. But a dive-bomber was armored against nuisance bullets. The designers must have realized it would run into some. Letting them disable it didn’t seem such a good idea, so the engineers made sure they wouldn’t. Germans, Vaclav thought glumly. They take care of those things.
“Sure they do,” Benjamin Halevy agreed when he said that out loud. “They wouldn’t be so dangerous if they fucked up all the time, like a bunch of Magyars or Romanians.”
“Well, you didn’t say ‘like a bunch of Slovaks,’ anyway,” Vaclav said.
“Or them,” Halevy replied. “They’re so fucked up, they jumped into bed with the Nazis, right?”
“Afraid so. When the Germans invaded us, I had this one Slovak in my squad, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d shoot at them or try to shoot me.” Vaclav grimaced and spat, remembering.
“So what did he end up doing?” the Jew asked in tones of clinical interest.
“Well, he didn’t try and plug me straight off-I will say that for him,” Jezek answered. “After that, fuck me if I know. We were right at the point of the bayonet, if you know what I mean, and things fell apart pretty fast. Maybe a Stuka blew him to kingdom come. Or maybe he surrendered to the Nazis. If he did, he’s likely a sergeant in the Slovak army by now.”
“In the Slovak army.” By the way Halevy said it, it tasted bad in his mouth. Well, it tasted bad in Vaclav’s mouth, too. Czechs no more believed Slovaks had a right to their own country than Germans believed Czechs had a right to theirs. Slovaks were bumpkins, country cousins, hillbillies who talked funny and drank too much and beat their wives. Only country cousins could take the Hlinka Guard and a fat windbag like Father Tiso seriously.
And now Slovakia was a country, with Father Tiso as its tinpot Fuhrer, or whatever the devil they called him. The Hlinka Guard did its best half-assed imitation of the SS. And Bohemia and Moravia, the cradle of the Czech nation since time out of mind, had been bombed and shelled to kingdom come, and the German occupiers treated them exactly the way locusts treated a ripe wheatfield. Life could be a real son of a bitch sometimes.
Sometimes it could be a lot worse than that.
“You know what we ought to do?” Halevy’s question derailed Vaclav’s gloomy train of thought, which might have been just as well.
“What’s that?” Vaclav asked. No, he wasn’t sorry to think about something else.
“We ought to let our brass know the Germans have themselves a new toy,” the sergeant said. “If those assholes can pull a stunt like that, we should be able to do the same thing, right?”
“Right,” Jezek said, but his voice lacked conviction. The Germans were good at pulling new stuff out of the hat. That was part of what made them Germans, at least in a Czech’s eyes. How good the French and English were at the same game… The war was a long way from new, but the French were just now figuring out that German tank tactics beat the snot out of their own half-bright ideas.
Benjamin Halevy gave him a crooked grin. “C’mon, man. We’ve got to try,” the Jew said. “We keep our mouths shut, nobody with the clout to do anything about it will find out what’s going on for another month and a half. You think the tankers’ll tell?”
Vaclav considered that, but not for long. Tankers thought their big, clattering mounts were perfect. They wouldn’t want to admit that the enemy had come up with a big new flyswatter. Sighing, Jezek said, “Let’s go.”
The next problem, of course, was getting an officer to listen to them. Two noncoms, one a Czech, the other a Czech and a Jew (naturally, the French thought of Halevy as a Czech, even if he’d been born in France-he spoke Czech, didn’t he?), didn’t have an easy time getting through to the fellows with fancy kepis. At last, though, a captain said, “Yes, I’ve already heard about this from other soldiers.”
“And?” Halevy said. The captain looked at him. He turned red. “And… sir?” Even Vaclav, with his fractured French, followed that bit of byplay.
“I will do what I can,” the captain said. “I don’t know how much I can do. I am not in the air force, after all.”
Sergeant Halevy translated that for Vaclav. Then he went back to French to inquire, “Sir, if no one says anything at all to the air force, what will happen then?” He also turned the question into Czech.
“Rien,” the officer replied. Nothing was a word Jezek followed with no trouble. The Frenchman went on, “But it could also be that the air force will do nothing just because the army is screaming at it to move.”
“Those pilots don’t want everybody in the army spitting at them, they’d better start treating German tanks the way the Nazis treated ours,” Vaclav said. Sergeant Halevy did the honors with the translation. Vaclav thought it sounded better in Czech than it did in French.
“Yes, yes,” the captain said impatiently. He looked from one grubby front-line soldier to the other. “Now, men, you have done your duty. You have done what you thought you had to do, and you have done it well. You can do no more in this regard-it is up to me to take it from here. I will do so. You had best return to your own positions, before the officers set over you start wondering where you are, and why.”
Go away. Get lost. The message, once Halevy translated it, was unmistakable. And the Jew and Vaclav went. What else could they do? Maybe the officer would make some progress with his superiors and the air force; maybe not. But two foreign or half-foreign noncoms couldn’t. Back to the war, Vaclav thought gloomily, and back to the war it was.
* * *
The Spanish nationalists had always had more artillery, and better artillery, than the Republicans. Up on the Ebro front, Chaim Weinberg had got resigned to that. It was part of the war and something you had to deal with, like the endless factional strife between Communists and anarchists on the Republican side. Since the Soviet Union supplied Communist forces in Spain while the anarchists had to scrounge whatever they could wherever they could, the red flags had had a big advantage over the red and black.
Now nobody supplied anybody in Spain, not in any reliable way. Everyone wa
s too busy with the bigger war off to the northeast. Both sides had forgotten about this particular brawl between progressive and reactionary forces-except for the people still doing the fighting and dying here.
The Nationalists still had the guns Hitler and Mussolini had lavished on Marshal Sanjurjo. What they didn’t have any more were the endless crates of high-quality Italian and German ammunition. They’d already fired it off. So if they wanted to shoot at the Republicans defending Madrid, they had to use shells they made themselves.
Spanish factories didn’t turn out nearly so much ammo as the ones in Germany and Italy. Not only that, Spanish artillery rounds, like Spanish small-arms ammunition, were junk.
Chaim didn’t know why that should be so, but it was. At least half the shells the Nationalists threw at the Republicans lines just north of University City were duds. He would have liked to think the workers in the munitions plants were sabotaging their Fascist masters. He would have liked to, but he couldn’t. The ammo that reached the Republicans from factories in Madrid and Barcelona was every bit as crappy. The workers on the Republican side should have had every incentive to do the best work they could. They did have every incentive, in fact, but the best work they could do wasn’t very good.
“And what do you expect?” Mike Carroll asked when Chaim complained about that. “They’re Spaniards, for Chrissake. They’re brave. They’d give you their last bullet or their last cigarette or the shirt off their back. But they haven’t heard about the twentieth century. Hell, they haven’t heard much about the eighteenth century-and what they have heard, they don’t like. As far as they’re concerned, it’s still 1492. They’ve cleaned out the Moors, and they’re waiting to see what happens when that Columbus guy gets back.”
As if to punctuate his words, another dud thudded in fifty meters away and buried itself in the hard brown dirt. That was too close for comfort; it would have been dangerous had it gone off. Chaim nodded-what Mike said held some truth. But only some, as he pointed out: “So how come the Republic won the election, then? The kind of progressive government Spain had-the kind our chunk’s still got-doesn’t come out of 1492. Not out of 1776, either.”
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