“They’re the measles,” Peggy said firmly. “The Germans … The Germans are smallpox.” Shudders ran through the crowd. Plenty of people there, like Peggy herself, were old enough to remember when the horrible disease hadn’t been rare. Warming to her theme, she went on, “And the Republicans are a social disease.”
She smiled suggestively. People whooped and hollered. A couple of wolf whistles rang through the hall. “They are,” Peggy insisted. “They want to get rid of Social Security. They still want to do all the things they did that gave us the Depression. Want another dose?” She leered again. “Then vote for the grand old GOP!”
They gave her a big hand as she stepped away from the mike. She waved-she knew she’d earned it. The local politico who came up to introduce the next speaker wore an electric-green jacket with a big purple windowpane check. The hand-painted hula dancer on his scarlet tie was either voluptuous or built like a brick shithouse, depending on your attitude toward the language.
“It’s my great pleasure to present to you, ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed, as if announcing at a prize fight, “di-rect from Hollywood, California, that fine actor and good guy, Mis-ter George Raft!”
Raft didn’t especially look like a good guy. He looked more like the small-time hood he was supposed to have been before he got into acting. His shiny black silk shirt and knife-sharp lapels did nothing to lessen the impression.
He grinned out at the gathering. “I was gonna say I didn’t want to go on after Mrs. Druce, on account of she did such a great job there,” he began, and led a fresh round of applause for Peggy. Not surprisingly, she found herself liking him even if he did look like a hoodlum. When the clapping died down, Raft continued: “But I really don’t want to go on after Eddie Gryboski’s necktie. Ain’t that a beaut?”
Peggy laughed so hard, she almost wet her pants. She wasn’t the only one, and wondered how long it had been since the Masonic hall rocked with mirth like that. Gryboski stood up to show off the hula dancer again. The crowd cheered him. They cheered again when he sat down.
George Raft had a performer’s sense of timing, all right. He sensed just when to start his own speech. The audience was still happy after giving Eddie Gryboski a hand, but they were also ready to listen to whatever the marquee name had to say.
And Raft had plenty. Herb would have said that he tore the GOP a new one. He wouldn’t say what the new one was, not where Peggy could hear him, not unless he was extremely provoked and probably not then, either. It wasn’t that he thought she didn’t know or couldn’t figure it out. But he’d been taught not to cuss in front of women, a lesson no doubt driven home by a clout in the ear when he goofed.
The crowd ate it up. Well, no surprise there. They wouldn’t have come to this hall if they were America Firsters or other people with views like that. When Raft finished, he got a roar of applause. A big hand, yeah, but Peggy didn’t think it was much bigger than the one she’d earned for herself.
As things were breaking up, the actor came over to her and said, “I really meant what I said when I was working the crowd. You were great. You’ve done this a time or two before, I betcha.”
“Now that you mention it,” Peggy said, “yes.” They smiled at each other.
“Me, I haven’t done a whole lot of politicking. Never saw much point to it, not till the fighting started,” Raft said. “Maybe you could give me some pointers, like.”
Peggy blinked. “You’re kidding!” she blurted.
“Not me.” Raft shook his head and raised his right hand as if swearing an oath. “Nope, not me. How’s about you come up to my hotel room? We can talk about stuff there. I’ll call room service for a bottle of champagne on ice or somethin’. Help us relax while we talk, y’know?”
She laughed out loud. “Oh, I know all right, you wolf.” When he said talk, he meant screw. She spread the fingers of her left hand so the rock in her wedding ring flashed. “Thanks for asking, but no thanks.” How many women did he casually proposition? Quite a few, by his practiced ease. How many came across? Also quite a few, unless Peggy was all wet.
He laughed, too, also unabashed. “Can’t shoot a guy for trying.”
“Sure,” Peggy said. He’d been a gentleman about it, or as close to a gentleman as a guy who’d started out as a small-time hood could come. Getting asked never bothered Peggy. What bothered her were guys who didn’t understand when no meant no. George Raft plainly did. As he turned away-looking for someone else to try to charm-part of Peggy went Too bad.
Mail came to the Republican lines north and west of Madrid when it felt like coming. The Spaniards called that kind of thing manana. Vaclav Jezek looked down his blunt nose at such inefficiency. The Czech hated and feared his country’s German neighbors, but they’d rubbed off on him more than he realized.
Not that he ever got mail, anyway. The only people in the world who cared about him and weren’t in the Czech government-in-exile’s army lived in Nazi-occupied Prague. He hadn’t heard from family or friends since the war started. He had to hope they were all right.
The Spaniard who carried the burlap mail sack made a horrible hash of Benjamin Halevy’s name. But the Jew was used to Spaniards botching it. “Si, Senor. Estoy aqui,” he said. He’d learned a lot more Spanish than Vaclav had. Oh, he was a cunning linguist, all right.
“Here.” The Spaniard handed him an envelope with his name typed on it, and with a printed return address Vaclav couldn’t read upside down.
It wasn’t upside down for Halevy, of course. He whistled several tuneless notes. “Well, well. Isn’t that interesting?” he said. “I wonder what the Ministry of War wants with me.”
“The French Ministry of War?” Jezek asked in disbelief.
“No, of course not. The Paraguayan Ministry of War,” Benjamin Halevy answered tartly. Vaclav’s ears heated. Halevy pulled his bayonet off his belt and opened the letter with it. Letter opener, tin opener, candlestick … Those were all more common uses for the bayonet than sticking enemy soldiers. The Jew took out an official-looking-which is to say, typed on letterhead-letter.
“What’s it say?” Vaclav asked. If it was from the French military, it would be in French. Even if it weren’t upside down for him, he wouldn’t have been able to make much of it. German he could speak and read. He could swear in French, and order booze and food-and come on to the barmaid, too, if he was so inclined. But the written language was a closed book to him even if the book chanced to be open.
Instead of answering, or perhaps by way of answering, Halevy threw back his head and laughed as if he’d just heard the best dirty joke in the world. He laughed till tears cut clean tracks down his grimy cheeks. Speechless still, he held out the letter to Vaclav.
Vaclav pushed it back at him. “Just an asswipe to me,” he said impatiently. “You know I can’t make heads or tails of French.”
“Sorry. Oh, mon Dieu!” Halevy wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He started laughing again. Only half kidding, Vaclav made as if to slug him. Halevy took a deep breath, hiccuped, and made himself calm down by what seemed main force of will. He held out the letter once more. This time, though, he explained it, too: “The Ministry of War, in its infinite wisdom, desires to recall me for service in the Army of my patrie, the Republic of France.”
“You’re shitting me!”
“Could I make up such a thing?” Halevy shook his head, answering his own question. After a moment, Vaclav did the same thing. He didn’t believe it, either. The Jew went on, “I have a good imagination, sure, but not that good. It takes a government ministry to have an imagination that good.”
“But they waved bye-bye when you left,” Vaclav said. “They didn’t want you around after they cozied up to Hitler. You didn’t want to stick around after that, either.”
“You bet I didn’t,” Benjamin Halevy agreed. “But now I am recalled ‘to fight the Fascist foes of France.’ ” He waved the letter around. “That’s what it says here, anyway.”
“What are you
going to do about it?” Jezek asked. Halevy might be a Jew with parents from Prague, but he thought of himself as a Frenchman. He’d been proud to think of himself as a Frenchman till his government hopped into the sack with the Nazis.
That, though, must have been the last straw, because he answered, “What am I going to do? This.” He crumpled the letter into a ball. “And this.” He flipped it up and over the earthen parapet in front of the trench.
A split second later, a rifle shot rang out from the Nationalist lines. A bullet thudded into the dirt in front of them. “Hel-lo!” Vaclav said. “They’ve got a sniper over there keeping an eye on us, to hell with me if they don’t.” Sometimes you’d fire at any motion you saw and worry later about what it might be.
Halevy didn’t care about that. He knew better than to stick his head up where anybody on the other side might see it. And he managed to strike a silent-movie pose without putting himself in danger. “Here you see me, a man without a country!” he said in melodramatic tones.
“Big fucking deal.” Altogether undramatic, Vaclav fumbled in his tunic pocket for his cigarettes. As he lit one, he went on, “About a division’s worth of men without a country within mortar range of where we’re at.”
By some standards, he and the other Czechs in the line here were men without a country themselves. The Germans sat on two-thirds of what had been Czechoslovakia. Father Tiso ruled the Slovaks in the remaining third as a Fascist dictator-and as a Fascist puppet. The Czechoslovakian government-in-exile insisted that would all be put right one day. Jezek had to hope it was right. The Germans and Poles and Magyars and suchlike in the International Brigades had even less reason for optimism, and less of a chance of ever seeing their homelands again.
“I know, I know.” Halevy pointed to the pack. “Give me one of those?”
Vaclav did. “You’re a scrounge without a country, is what you are,” he said. “Plenty of those within mortar range of here, too.” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t bummed plenty of butts off the Jew.
After lighting up, Halevy said, “All of us guys without a country, we should get together and make our own new one. Hell, we could conquer a province somewhere-a lot of us carry guns, right?”
“Sounds great,” Vaclav said. “We could fight some big old wars against our neighbors, whoever our neighbors turn out to be. And if that ever gets boring, we can have civil wars about which language we should speak or whether we should raise taxes or not.”
“I like it.” Halevy clapped his hands together. “We’re not even a country yet, and already we’ve got big-time things to fight about.”
“Oh, hell, yes. Nothing but first class for us.” Vaclav sent him a sly look. “Good thing we’ll have some Jews to kick around.”
“Jews are the original people without a country,” Halevy said seriously. “Hard to be a number-one country without ’em. I mean, look at Germany. How much fun could the Nazis have if they just went and persecuted Gypsies and queers and Czechs and no-account folks like that?”
“Oh, I expect they’d manage.” Vaclav sounded as dry as his cosmopolitan comrade usually did.
Halevy grunted. “Mm, you’ve got something there. The Nazis are a cancer on humanity. They’ll eat up whatever they’re next to. Unless surgery works, they’ll eat up the whole world.”
Cancer. Surgery. Vaclav had heard a lot of nasty talk about the Nazis, but none that made more sense to him. “You’ve got a way with words, you know that?” he said, genuine admiration in his voice.
“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t think you cared,” Halevy lisped, and blew him a kiss. The Jew was as grimy and bestubbled and smelly as any other soldier who’d stayed in the front line too goddamn long. When he swished that way, he caught Vaclav by surprise and reduced him to helpless laughter.
“You son of a bitch!” the Czech wheezed when he could talk at all.
“Well, at least you smiled when you said it,” Halevy replied. The other Czechs were gaping at them as if they were both nuts. I guess we are, Vaclav thought, not without pride.
Chapter 11
Hideki Fujita rolled off the comfort woman, stood by the side of the bed, and pulled up his trousers. The rules at military brothels didn’t let him take them off, or even his boots. All that dressing and undressing wasted time. The comfort women wouldn’t have been able to service so many horny soldiers.
As he fastened his belt, he said, “Arigato.”
The comfort woman just stared at him. She stared through him, really: her eyes were a million kilometers away. She was Burmese-a couple of shades darker than a Japanese would have been, with less angular features. She looked as different to him as an Italian would have to an Englishman. That he looked as different to her as an Englishman would have to an Italian never crossed his mind.
Somebody banged on the door to the humid little room. “Hurry up in there!” the man outside yelled in Japanese.
Out went Fujita. As he’d hoped, the man standing in the hallway was only a corporal. “What was that?” he growled.
“Please excuse my bad manners, Sergeant-san.” The lower-ranking noncom quailed, as he had to. Fujita could have mashed him like a yam without getting into trouble. Superiors could always do what they wanted to inferiors-that was how the Japanese system worked.
Sated, though, Fujita didn’t feel like fighting now. He walked down the hall to the stairs. Behind him, the Burmese girl’s door slammed shut. The corporal would get his sloppy seconds, just as he’d got someone else’s a few minutes before. When you thought of things like that, wasn’t it something close to a miracle that the whole Japanese Army hadn’t come down with one venereal disease or another-or with one venereal disease and another?
Locals and Japanese soldiers led oxen up and down Myitkyina’s streets. Some of the oxen had sacks of grain strapped to their backs. Some pulled two-wheeled carts or four-wheeled wagons. None of them moved very fast. Trucks were few and far between in Burma. Nothing seemed urgent here, the way it had on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia, in Siberia, and in Unit 731 south of Harbin.
One of the fighting fronts was off in the west, by the border between Burma and India. The other was up north, in southern China. Myitkyina was a long way from either of them. If not for the bacteriological-warfare unit outside of town, this would have been a complete backwater.
Once upon a time, when he was younger and more eager, the way things went here would have bothered Fujita. No, it would have done worse than that-it would have driven him crazy. Not any more. Rushing toward an attack-what did that really mean? It meant rushing toward a chance to get killed: nothing else. Living was better, if they gave you even half a chance. You could do better than laying these resigned Burmese women, but you could also do an awful lot worse.
Not far from the brothel was the hotel the English Army had used for a headquarters till the Japanese chased out the white men and took over the place for themselves. It was the best Myitkyina boasted, which wasn’t saying much. A third-rate colonial copy of a third-rate English provincial hotel … Fujita didn’t know the details. All he knew was, the place was a dump.
But it was a dump with a bar, so he walked in anyhow. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the battered lobby. They stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The bar was all dark wood and brass. The kind of place it was modeled on might have felt cozy and inviting back in England. Here in Burma, the bar seemed out of place, to say nothing of bewildered.
They had beer. Fujita had never been in a bar anywhere that didn’t have beer. They had sake-a bad local imitation of what the Japanese made. And, no doubt because they’d started life as a bad copy of an English hotel, they had what they called whiskey. That was a worse local imitation of what the English made. It smelled and tasted like kerosene, and felt like burning kerosene on the way down. Once, Fujita had asked the native behind the bar what it was distilled from. The man had seemed fluent enough in Japanese, but he suddenly lost his ability to understand the language.
This was
a different bartender now. “Beer,” Fujita said, and set some occupation money on the bar. The native scooped up the bill and made it disappear. He filled a mug and handed it to the sergeant.
It wasn’t good beer, either. It was thin and sour. But beer was harder to screw up than sake or whiskey, even if the bar did serve it at room temperature. The barmen swore up and down that the English wanted it that way and complained if it was cold. Fujita had never known a barman who wouldn’t lie, but he couldn’t see why the Burmese would come up with such unlikely nonsense. Maybe they meant it-you never could tell. He hadn’t figured Englishmen were so stupid, though.
He carried the mug over to an empty table (he didn’t lack for choices) and sat down in one of the massive wooden chairs that were another holdover from England. In Japan, a chair like that would have marked a daimyo, a great lord. Ordinary people sat on mats or made do with stools. The English had different ideas about what was comfortable. Maybe they had more wood, too. They must have, if this paneled barroom gave any clues.
After he drank the first beer, he had another, and then a couple of more to weight down the earlier ones. By then, his head was buzzing nicely. It might not have been the best beer in the history of brewing, but it packed a punch, all right. He shambled over to the barman again. “Where do I piss?” he asked.
The Burmese jerked a thumb at a door he hadn’t noticed amidst all the fancy woodwork. As soon as he opened the door, the smell told him the water didn’t run any more. He got rid of his beer and escaped as fast as he could.
“Another, Sergeant-san?” the bartender asked.
“No, thanks.” Fujita walked out. He thought about going back to the brothel, but he wasn’t sure he could manage another round. Having a girl look through him was one thing. Having a girl sneer if he couldn’t keep it up was something else again, something much worse. Even if she had too much sense to show she was sneering, she would anyhow. He knew that.
Which left … what? He didn’t want to go back to his unit so soon. What was leave for but getting away from the people whose ugly faces you saw every day? Well, down the block stood the movie house. He could sit in the dark there and not think about anything. If the film turned out to be a stinker, he could fall asleep. Nobody’d care.
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