“How’s your wife?” the other Yank asked with a leer.
Chaim shrugged. “She’s back in the city, doing what she’s doing. And I’m here, doing what I’m doing.” That he’d made it with La Martellita struck him as a marvel. That she’d been willing to tie the knot for the sake of giving their accidental kid a last name was whatever came one step up from a marvel.
Mike tried to pinch off a hangnail with the other hand’s thumb and forefinger. “Doesn’t sound like the recipe for living happily ever after, y’know?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Chaim would rather have talked about birds. He hadn’t even started in on the hoopoe’s aerial ballet.
“What’ll you do when she dumps you after Junior comes out?” Mike found the sixty-four dollar question, all right.
All Chaim could do was shrug again. “Get drunk, I guess. Shoot some Fascists. What else is there to do?” Like Mike, he assumed she’d dump him once the baby was born. He also assumed the war in Spain would still be going on this fall. The way things looked right now, the war in Spain was liable to go on forever.
“Aren’t you tired of going hungry over there?” The enormous voice came from a microphone and speaker in Marshal Sanjurjo’s lines. “Come over to our side. We’ll give you a big bowl of mutton stew!”
Before, the Fascists had tempted Republican soldiers with chicken stew. Maybe they’d hired a new chef. More likely, they’d just put a new liar on the payroll. Chaim had captured Nationalist troops. They were every bit as skinny and miserable as the guys on his own side.
“Baa!” he bleated at the propaganda message. “Baa!”
Mike Carroll joined in. “Baa!” he yelled, even louder than Chaim. “Baa! Baa!”
“Mutton stew! Delicious mutton stew!” blared from the speaker.
“Baa!” This time, half a dozen Abe Lincolns bleated back. Before long, the whole stretch of Republican line northwest of Madrid was going “Baa! Baa! Baa!” in ragged chorus.
“Now look what you went and started,” Mike said. Chaim grinned. He was proud of himself.
Marshal Sanjurjo’s men didn’t think it was funny. Fascists, in Chaim’s experience, had all had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were very small. They had nasty ways of making their unhappiness known, too. Machine guns rattled. Mortar bombs whispered down. Even a battery of old German 77s well behind the line started up.
Naturally, the Internationals and the Czechs and the Spanish Republican soldiers in that stretch of the line fired back. “Now look what you went and started,” Mike Carroll repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.
A bullet cracked not far enough above Chaim’s head. He ducked automatically. “The fucking Battle of the Mutton Stew,” he said.
It was a joke, and then again it wasn’t. Bleating at the silly propaganda set off the shooting, sure. No matter what set it off, though, men on both sides were getting killed and maimed. He could hear wounded men screaming, all because he’d decided to make a noise like a sheep.
He didn’t want anything like that on his conscience. He told himself they would have got hit anyway. Himself told him he was full of it. Himself had a point, too. He’d been in Spain a long time. He’d seen how random war was. This guy bought a plot the day after he came into the line. That guy went without a scratch for years. Why? If it was anything more than God’s crapshoot, Chaim couldn’t imagine what. And, when he remembered not to, he didn’t even believe in God.
After both sides hauled their wounded away for whatever help the docs could give them, the Fascist announcer started going on about mutton stew again. He had a script, and he had his orders. This stretch of line was going to get so many repetitions. Then he’d go inflict himself somewhere else.
“Fuck you!” Chaim screamed, almost as loud without the loudspeaker as the announcer was with it. If he heard about mutton stew one more time, he’d snap. Or maybe he already had. “Fuck you up the ass! Fuck your mother! And fuck the sheep your fucking mutton stew comes from, too!”
That produced scattered cheers from the Internationals. He thought the only reason it just produced scattered cheers was that they didn’t want to risk starting up the firefight again. And, to his amazement and delight, it also produced a few scattered cheers from the Nationalist trenches. Those had to come from men sure they were off by themselves so nobody could rat on them.
Mike heard the cheers from Sanjurjo’s side, too. “Wow, man,” he said. “You really struck a nerve there.”
“Bet your ass I did,” Chaim replied. “When’s the last time you figure one of those poor sorry dingleberries even smelled mutton stew, let alone tasted any? That clown with the mike probably drives them even crazier than he drives me.”
Carroll sent him a speculative stare. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
The next day, Brigadier Kossuth summoned Chaim to his headquarters behind the lines. Like La Martellita, the Internationals’ CO used a nom de guerre, though he was a Magyar like his namesake. “I hear you’ve been running your mouth again,” he said in German. He was old enough to have learned it in the dead Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Thanks to Yiddish, Chaim could follow German. “Afraid so,” he admitted cheerfully.
Yiddish didn’t faze the brigadier. “Why?” he asked with a glower that would have turned a basilisk to stone.
But nobody’s glower was going to make Chaim quake in his drafty boots. He’d been through way too much for that. “Because I got sick and tired of all that crap about mutton stew,” he said.
Kossuth eyed him the way a chameleon eyes a fly just before its tongue flicks out. “Are all Americans as deranged as you?” he asked with what sounded like clinical detachment and probably masked fury.
“Some of us are even worse,” Chaim said: he wouldn’t let the country down.
“Oh, I doubt that.” Kossuth knew what he was up against, all right. “And you managed to knock up that human hand grenade, too.… Tell me, if you would: how does one man find so much trouble?”
“I volunteered for it,” Chaim answered. “I could have stayed back in the States.”
“Everyone might have been better off if you had. Including you,” Kossuth said.
“Spain wouldn’t.” Pride rang in Chaim’s voice.
That basilisk-petrifying glower again. When Chaim refused to wilt under it, the Magyar brigadier sighed. “Anything is possible—but nothing is likely.” He jerked a thumb toward the tent flap. “Now get out.” Whistling, Chaim got.
PEGGY DRUCE WAS getting the urge to travel again. After her adventures and misadventures in war-torn Europe, she would have bet she’d be content—hell, be overjoyed—to stay in Philadelphia the rest of her days. But things didn’t work out like that. After so long living by her wits and by what she could browbeat out of unhappy officials, ordinary life seemed Boring with a capital B.
She didn’t put it that way to her husband. It would have hurt Herb’s feelings, which was the last thing she wanted to do. Then again, she didn’t need to say much to him. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how she ticked. One morning at breakfast, he set down his coffee cup and said, “You ought to do something for the war effort, you know?”
“Like what?” she said. It wasn’t as if the suggestion came out of the blue. She’d been thinking along those lines herself.
Herb was a jump ahead of her, though. “Well, you’ve seen a lot of stuff other people haven’t,” he answered. “You ought to go around and tell them what a mess Europe is. Some of these chowderheads are still mad ’cause FDR won’t let ’em sell stuff over there any more.”
“Too bad for them,” she said. She’d been all for sending England and France everything but the kitchen sink when they were fighting the Nazis. Now that they were fighting on the Nazis’ side, she was as ready to say to hell with them as FDR seemed to be. But swarms of people who’d made big stacks of cash by shipping them this, that, and the other thing were jumping up and down and bawling like a three-year-old throwing
a tantrum.
Herb chuckled. “You know how to win friends and influence people, you do.”
“I looked at that stupid book when it was new,” Peggy said. “I wouldn’t waste my money on it. It was a bunch of hooey, nothing else but.”
“Maybe so, but the guy who wrote it’s laughing all the way to the bank,” her husband answered. “I’d like to have a quarter of what he raked in from the son of a gun.”
That was bound to be true, no matter how unfortunate Peggy thought it was. She’d never been one to stay gloomy long, though. If she were, her time in Europe would have driven her nuts. She brightened as a new thought came. “A lot of the big shots who want to go on doing business with Europe will be making even more money pretty soon by selling the government what it needs to fight the Japs.”
“There you go.” Herb made silent clapping motions. “Now you’ve got your text. You can go and preach it all over the place, like St. Paul.”
“I don’t want to preach in St. Paul,” Peggy said with malice aforethought. “If there’s a duller town anywhere in the world, I don’t know where.”
Herb eyed her through a veil of cigarette smoke. “When you start making cracks like that, you need to get out of the house, all right, and PDQ, too.”
But getting out of the house wasn’t so simple. The government had clamped down on travel. Tires and gasoline were rationed. That made sense, since you couldn’t win a modern war without rubber and petroleum. It was still a pain. And, if she was going to head out on what amounted to the campaign trail, she was damned if she wanted to spend her own money—or even Herb’s—to do it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford to; it was the principle of the thing. So she told herself, anyhow.
She rapidly discovered she didn’t have to. To most Philadelphia Main Line families, Roosevelt was and always would be That Man in the White House. Philadelphia Democrats fell all over themselves to get help from someone in that group who didn’t see him that way. Train fare? Yes, ma’am! Hotel bills? Expenses? Yes, ma’am!
They asked her if she wanted a speech writer. She looked at them as if they’d asked if she wanted a positive Wassermann. “I can talk for myself, thanks,” she said coolly. “If you don’t believe me, ask my husband. Or ask Hitler. I got him to do what I wanted, and I was speaking German then. I’m better in English.”
She’d never heard so many stammered apologies in her life. They were just suggesting … They didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.… To show they didn’t, they upped her expenses.
When she told Herb that, he guffawed. “Squeeze ’em for all they’re worth,” he said. “They’ve got more moolah than they know what to do with, and most of it doesn’t exactly belong to anybody, so they can throw it around.”
No matter how much money the Philadelphia Democrats had, they didn’t send her very far on her first run—only to York, on the west side of the Susquehanna. She didn’t blame them for that. If she turned out to be a dud, they’d want to know at minimum expense.
York sat in the valley formed by Codorus Creek. It was a medium-sized town: 50,000 people, or maybe a few more. It had been a brick-making center, and many of the older neighborhoods were one brick home or apartment house after another. The public buildings and the many Gothic churches were of red brick with white trim, as if they’d come from early nineteenth-century England.
The local women’s club had arranged for her to speak at the First Presbyterian Church, a few blocks east of Continental Square. It was another Gothic brick building, built in 1789 and rebuilt in 1860. For variety’s sake, perhaps, its brickwork was painted gray; the renovation added brownstone and wood trim. Loretta Conway, the woman who picked her up at the station, told her the graveyard next to the church held the remains of James Smith, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
“That’s nice,” Peggy said.
Her nonchalance flustered the woman from York, but only for a moment. Then Mrs. Conway turned pink. “I forgot you’re from Philly,” she said. “You’ve got more Revolutionary War stuff there than you know what to do with, don’t you?”
“Pretty much,” Peggy answered. She knew York had some, too, and she was ready to be a good sport if Loretta wanted to show it off, but the other woman didn’t. Instead, she talked—very sensibly (which meant her views matched Peggy’s)—about the need to knock the snot out of the Japs and to keep Hitler from getting too big for his britches. She had a twenty-year-old son who’d just volunteered for the Marines. That brought the war home for her in a way Peggy hadn’t felt since Herb got back from Over There in 1919.
“Maybe you should give the speech,” Peggy said.
“Forget it,” Loretta answered. “I go up in front of more than four or five people, I freeze up like a block of ice.”
Peggy laughed. “Okay. You aren’t the only one, heaven knows. But whatever else they say about me, I’m not shy.”
She got her chance to prove it a little later. The church wasn’t packed, but it came close. The minister, a white-haired man named Ruppelt, introduced her. “Here is a lady who can talk about the world situation because she’s seen more of it than most people, Mrs. Peggy Druce.”
She got polite applause as she stepped up to the lectern. “Thank you, Reverend Ruppelt,” she said. “A lot of what I saw, I wish I never did. But that’s the point about war, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening to our boys in the Philippines right now. If the Japs had been a little luckier, it might be happening in Hawaii, too. So we’ve got some work we need to take care of. If Hirohito thinks Japan can do whatever it wants in the Pacific, FDR’s going to show him things don’t work that way.”
More applause, and more enthusiastic. Peggy warmed to her task: “When I finally did get to England, a customs man there said, ‘Welcome to freedom.’ I was glad to hear it, too. But what’s freedom worth if you use yours to take away somebody else’s? Isn’t that what England’s doing in Russia right now? Didn’t she learn better right here in Pennsylvania in 1776? And how can you expect to stay friends with us if you’re friends with Hitler, too?”
If she’d been talking with Herb, she would have said in bed with Hitler. She almost did here. She thought her husband would have been proud of her because she showed restraint. You didn’t talk about sex in church.
And she didn’t need to. The raucous clapping that followed showed people got the message even when she kept it clean. The ones with minds that ran in the same gutter as hers could gloss in bed with Hitler for themselves. The others … were dull, but they were here, too.
They cheered—some of them stood up—when Peggy got done. They bought bonds. They contributed to the Democrats. And they made sure she’d be on the road a lot from now on.
Chapter 8
Before coming to Pingfan, Hideki Fujita had never had anything to do with Americans. The only white men he’d dealt with were the Russians who’d tried to kill him in Mongolia and Siberia, and the Russian prisoners on whom the Japanese microbiologists and biochemists experimented here.
You had to watch yourself with Russians. They were tough, and they were sneaky. If they saw an opening, they would grab it in a heartbeat. But as long as you made sure they recognized they couldn’t get away with anything, they grew docile enough.
Pingfan held tens of thousands of Russians. Most of the men who’d surrendered around Vladivostok were marched here afterwards. Not all of them made it here—nowhere close. Fujita had been one of the soldiers herding them along. He knew how many fell by the wayside. He also knew how fast the Japanese scientists were using them up. Still, the experimental station had plenty left.
Americans … Americans were different. They were different all kinds of ways. There weren’t very many of them. The U.S. Marines had had only small garrisons in Peking and Shanghai. A lot of the Marines in both places had made the Japanese kill them after war broke out between the two countries. Despite being insanely outnumbered, they’d killed a lot of Japanese, too. You had to respect men like that.
&nbs
p; In the end, though, some of the Marines did surrender. Perhaps to pay them back for the fight their comrades put up, they got shipped straight to Pingfan. The Japanese scientists were excited to have them. American POWs let them try to tailor germ-warfare weapons against Anglo-Saxons in particular.
Which was fine—for the scientists. Fujita and his soldiers had to ride herd on the Americans in the meantime. They had to keep them from making trouble, and they had to keep them from escaping. And Fujita didn’t need long to figure out that Americans were born troublemakers.
Russians would escape if you gave them half a chance, too. And Chinese! No one in his right mind would trust Chinese to stay where they belonged unless you kept your eye on them every second—and they knew you were keeping your eye on them every second. Then they couldn’t behave better.
But the Americans played games with the system that Fujita wouldn’t have believed if they hadn’t been messing around with him. The essential feature in controlling them was the count. They stood in ranks of ten, which made it easy for the guards to know exactly how many of them there were on any given morning or evening.
Or it should have made things easy. Somehow the Marines managed to convince the Japanese that there were three more of them than there were supposed to be. How? Fujita didn’t know. Obviously, they were moving around in the ranks, but not where anybody could catch them at it.
He’d already worked out that one of the chief nuisances was a big, burly fellow named Szulc. The American didn’t understand Japanese, of course. He didn’t understand Chinese, either—Senior Private Hayashi was a smart fellow, and knew quite a bit.
“I am very sorry, Sergeant-san, but I think he really is ignorant and not faking,” Hayashi reported to Fujita.
“How could he be?” Fujita asked irritably—everything about Szulc irritated him. “These Marines serve in China for years. They must learn some of the language while they’re there.”
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 13
