She gulped. “Never mind,” she said quickly. The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted was to draw the notice of the Office for Jewish Affairs. No matter how bad things were, they could always get worse.
“Very well,” the clerk said. “Goldmans, is everything on your cards now correct? At this time, there is no fee for adjusting them. If you find an error later and return to have it changed, the law requires a ten-Reichsmark charge.”
Did the law require the same thing for Aryans? It might. Governments were greedy whenever they found the chance. Sarah checked the card. Except for being ridiculous, it was accurate. So were her parents’. They all got out of there as fast as they could. Sarah, Sarah … When they were smaller, her brother would have turned it into a mocking chant. Even the Office for Jewish Affairs didn’t know what had happened to Saul. Sarah did, but she would never, ever tell.
PETE MCGILL WAS full of what a philosopher might have called existential despair. Pete was no philosopher. He was a hard-faced, raspy-voiced Marine corporal, one of the relatively small garrison charged with protecting the American consulate in Shanghai. Back in the days when the Marines, like similar forces from the European powers, protected their country’s interests against Chinese mobs, the arrangement had been reasonable enough. (The Chinese didn’t think so, but the next time any of the powers worried about what the Chinese thought would be the first.)
Things were different now, though. Like Peking (where Pete had served before coming closer to the coast, to a city where evacuation by sea was possible), Shanghai lay under Japanese occupation. The Japs had divisions’ worth of infantry near the two big cities. The Western powers’ companies of troops stayed on only because Japan didn’t feel like cleaning them out. Existing on Japanese sufferance rubbed Pete—and the rest of the leathernecks—the wrong way.
But that was only an insult, an accident of geopolitics. It was plenty to piss Pete off. Existential despair, though? No way in hell. What drove him there was falling head over heels for a White Russian taxi dancer named Vera. She was a blonde. She was built. She was, in his admittedly biased opinion, drop-dead gorgeous. She screwed like there was no tomorrow. She was even smart. And, in spite of that last, she gave every appearance of having fallen head over heels for Pete.
It was the kind of romance officers went out of their way to warn you against. Blah, blah, blah till they were as blue in the face as a USMC dress uniform. A lot of the time, of course, a guy fell for a girl simply because he was horny. Or a girl looked at a guy and saw a meal ticket, a sugar daddy, maybe even somebody who could get her to the States.
Vera wasn’t like that—Pete was sure of it. Oh, he’d bought her presents. But so what? In China, even a Marine corporal’s miserable pay stretched as if rubberized. And he had looked into what it would take for her to go back to America with him. That was because he loved her and wanted to stay with her forever, though, not because she’d pushed him into it. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name.
By what the Marine lieutenant with whom he’d spoken told him, he had two chances of getting Vera across the Pacific: slim and none. And that was what really left him floundering in the slough of despond.
Being sloppy drunk sure didn’t help. He sat in a bar not far from the consulate, one of a long procession of whiskey-and-sodas in front of him. The dive was called the Globe and Anchor. As its name implied, it catered to Marines. On the barstool next to him sat another leatherneck, a bruiser named Herman Szulc. He was a Polack with a Slavic spelling for his German name, which was pronounced Schultz.
Pete poured out his tale of woe. It wasn’t as if Szulc hadn’t heard it before. He had. But whiskey and loneliness made Pete talk—and talk and talk and talk. “I’ll never get her back to New York City,” he mourned, that being where he was born and raised and did such sketchy growing up as he’d done before the Corps got its hands on him. “Never!”
“Not if you play by the rules, anyway, sounds like.” Szulc paid no more attention to the rules than he had to. If he weren’t doing time in the Marines, he probably would be serving it in the state pen.
Pete was much more inclined to stay on the up-and-up. He had been, anyhow, till Vera discombobulated all his warning circuits. “How do you get somebody from China to New York if you don’t play straight?” he asked. Before Herman could answer, he drained his latest whiskey-and-soda and waved to the bartender for yet another refill.
“Coming right up, chief!” the barman said in excellent English. If he watered his drinks more as his customers got drunker, well, hey, it was a tough old world and he had a family to support. He also wanted to hear how to get from Shanghai to New York City—or anywhere else in the USA—without losing sleep over all the tiresome formalities of immigration.
“You gotta know who to pay off,” Szulc explained.
“Hey, this is China, man. Now tell me something I didn’t know,” Pete said. He supposed every country ran on cash and was lubed by the smooth slipperiness of greased palms. Chinamen were a lot more blatant about it than Americans, though. If you didn’t fork over here, you could forget about anything you wanted. But if you played ball the Chinese way, you rapidly discovered all things were possible.
“Yeah, it’s China. But you won’t just be paying off Chinks,” Szulc said. “You gotta find out which immigration people will look the other way when a gal without the right paperwork gets on a ship. Your girlfriend’s white, anyway. If you’d fallen for one of those slanty-eyed broads, you’d be shit outa luck. Nobody’d put himself out on a limb for you then.”
“Tell me about it,” McGill said. America wanted a square deal for Chinamen in China. But God forbid if any Chinamen—or slanty-eyed broads, as Szulc put it—or Japs wanted to sully the US of A. We sure didn’t want any more of them there. We didn’t like the ones we already had.
That wasn’t a problem with Vera, though. She was white enough to satisfy—hell, to thrill—a cross-burner in a sheet. So I caught a break for a change, Pete thought. Hot damn! That makes one.
“Do you know who the right guys to pay off are?” he asked.
“Couple of ’em,” Herman Szulc answered smugly. “An English colonel who drinks too fuckin’ much and this little old wizened-up Portugee who can maybe slide her out through Macao. You know what they say about that place—you can sneak anybody and anything through there, long as you know who to keep happy.”
“How much will it cost me?” Pete said. “I ain’t rich or nothing, you know.”
“Like I am,” Szulc said, rolling his eyes. He named a figure. Pete flinched. The guy behind the bar, who was listening avidly, too, didn’t. How many silver Mex dollars did he have socked away? That many and then some.
Pete did more than flinch. He said, “I’m not gonna rob a bank for you, Herman.”
“How much loot does your lady-love have?” Szulc returned.
“I’m not gonna take from her, neither,” Pete said. If Vera paid her own way to the States, how long would she remember a Marine who helped her make connections? No matter how head over heels Pete was, he wasn’t—quite—blind.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get your tits in a wringer,” Herman said. “I—”
“Wait a sec.” There were other ways in which Pete wasn’t blind, too. “How much would it be if you didn’t glom on to a big cut from the fee?”
The other Marine looked affronted. “Look, ace, I ain’t in this for my health. You don’t want to keep me sweet, you can goddamn well go find these other guys for yourself.”
An English colonel. An old, skinny, wrinkled Portuguese—assuming Szulc wasn’t lying about the details, which wasn’t what you’d call a lead-pipe cinch. “I didn’t say don’t take anything,” Pete replied, backtracking a little. “But you screw the guys you may have to go to war with, will you trust ’em at your back?” Shrewdly, he added, “I bet I’m not the only one who wants to know shit like this.”
“I already figured a discount into what I told you,” Szulc whined.
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“Swell. Now figure another one. I can go down to the waterfront, too,” Pete said.
Herman Szulc snorted. “You try it, you’ll end up wearing cement overshoes. You’re a nice guy, Pete. You know what the Shanghai waterfront does with nice guys? Trust me, you don’t want to find out.”
“I can take care of myself.” Pete believed it.
Szulc, by contrast, giggled. So did the bartender, though right away he tried to pretend he hadn’t. His reaction did more to persuade Pete he was talking nonsense than Szulc’s did. And Herman came down—some. They drank and haggled, haggled and drank. The guy behind the bar soaked in every word.
THEO HOSSBACH GATHERED with the rest of the panzer crewmen in his company to hear the word come down from on high. It came down through Captain Werner Schellenberg, the company CO. He read from a piece of paper that he must have got from regimental HQ: “To ensure continued loyalty amidst the pressures of our ruthless war against Bolshevism and international Jewry, we are going to introduce National Socialist Leadership Officers into the command structure. They will give the troops support in creating and maintaining a proper National Socialist worldview, and will see to it that all orders issued by the regular officer corps are in complete accord with National Socialist doctrines and ways of thought. This change in the command structure is to be implemented immediately.” He looked out at the men he led. “Questions?”
Several hands shot into the air. Had Theo been a man who asked out loud the questions that formed in his head, his would have been one of them. Since he wasn’t, he kept his hand down. So did Adalbert Stoss, though his expression was eloquent.
Captain Schellenberg pointed to one of the men. “Go ahead, Rudi.”
“Sir, how are these National Socialist Waddayacallems different from the Ivans’ political commissars?”
That would also have been the first question Theo asked. By the way the rest of the panzer crewmen nodded, it was uppermost in their minds, too. Everyone eyed the company commander. What would he say? What could he say?
“I’ll tell you how they’re different, boys. They’re ours, that’s how,” Schellenberg answered.
That was blunt enough and then some. But it raised as many questions as it answered—probably more. “What do we need ’em for?” Rudi demanded, which was certainly one of those questions. “Are people in Berlin saying we’ve gotta read Mein Kampf before we plan an ambush? Soldiering doesn’t work that way.”
There was an understatement. Theo had looked at Mein Kampf. He admired Hitler for making Germany a respected nation once more. Looking at the Führer’s book did nothing to increase his admiration. It struck him as rubbish—energetic, passionate, sometimes clever rubbish, but rubbish all the same.
Schellenberg chose his words with obvious care: “We need men who are loyal to the state and loyal to the government. If this is how we get them, I’m for it. Don’t forget, we had generals trying to overthrow the government in the middle of a war. How can we win when something like that happens?”
Maybe the government shouldn’t have started the war in the first place, Theo thought. But Schellenberg had a point. Nothing good would happen to the Reich if the government were toppled at a time like this. The war effort would surely have gone straight down the WC.
Then again, nothing good would happen to Germany if she lost the war Hitler had started, either.
“Other questions?” Captain Schellenberg asked.… “What is it, Bruno?”
“Sir, are these Leadership Officers”—Bruno spoke the name with obvious distaste—“going to squeal on us if we say anything they don’t happen to like? You know how soldiers go on. If we can’t blow off steam every once in a while, life’s hardly worth living.”
Several other men nodded, Theo and Adi and Hermann Witt among them. Bruno had it right. Soldiers would call their superiors and their civilian leaders a pack of idiots. Sensible officers paid no attention to most of that kind of talk. But what were the odds a National Socialist Leadership Officer would turn out to be sensible? Long, mighty long. The clumsy title seemed made to draw fanatics, people who know everything there was to know about Nazi doctrine but not a goddamn thing about panzers or rations or anything else that really mattered.
“They’re not here to be rats,” Schellenberg said firmly. “Honest to God, they’re not. The government wants the Wehrmacht to follow its lead, that’s all. So when we do have one of these fellows assigned to us, give him a chance, all right?”
Nobody said no, not out loud. Nobody in Theo’s crew complained where he could hear it. Were he a more outgoing sort, he might well have complained himself. But keeping his mouth shut was his natural style.
He wasn’t at all sure about Sergeant Witt’s politics. The panzer commander did his job. He did it well: he was smart and brave. But, if he hated Hitler and everything the Nazis stood for, he had the sense not to shout it from the turret on the Panzer II. By the same token, if he pawed the ground and whinnied every time he heard the Horst Wessel Lied, he didn’t advertise that, either.
Theo thought Adi Stoss had reason not to want a National Socialist Leadership Officer anywhere within a hundred kilometers of him. Then again, Adi also had reason not to discuss his reasons with anybody else.
Unless, of course, Theo was all wet. The radioman chuckled, very softly, to himself. Me, all wet? he thought. Impossible! Couldn’t happen! I’m much too shrewd to make dumb mistakes.
The Leadership Officer got to the company after a nasty skirmish with some Soviet officer. Bruno went back to an aid station swathed in bandages. Scuttlebutt was, he might not keep his arm. Neither of his crewmates was even that lucky. The panzer men weren’t in the mood to welcome Lieutenant Horst Ostrowski with open arms.
He didn’t look like a wild-eyed fanatic. He wore an Iron Cross Second Class and a wound badge—he hadn’t been commanding a desk in Dresden or something before he got this assignment. He talked about the need to beat the Russians so Central Asia didn’t grab a foothold in Central Europe.
Everything he said seemed harmless enough. All the same, Theo wished he were back at that desk in Dresden, or whatever his previous assignment had been. Again, the radioman didn’t think he was anywhere close to the only guy with the same wish.
BACK IN THE TRENCHES in front of Madrid, Chaim Weinberg didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He did know he ought to be pissed off, and he was. He had a good notion of who’d screwed him, and he hadn’t even got kissed. That pissed him off, too. La Martellita had a blowjob mouth if ever there was one—to look at, anyway. He’d never got to feel it on John Henry. Not against his lips, either, for that matter. She couldn’t stand him, so she’d put him back where he started.
Only a handful of old sweats from the States were left in the Abe Lincolns. Spaniards filled out the ranks, as they did in all the International Brigades these days. The surviving Americans thought his return was the funniest thing that had happened lately.
“Watsamatter wit’ you, boychik?” said another New Yorker, a Jew who went by the name of Izzy. “You had it soft in Madrid. How’d you manage to screw it up this time?”
Chaim didn’t like that this time, not even slightly. “Talent,” he said, and tried to let it go at that.
No such luck. Izzy was a born agitator. He was a New York Jew in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—of course he was a born agitator. “What did you go and do?” he asked, eyeing Chaim shrewdly. “Get somebody important mad at you? Can’t get away with that, boychik, not even in the classless society you can’t.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Chaim answered. Izzy laughed like a loon. Chaim almost hauled off and belted him. He would have, if that hadn’t been the same as admitting the other guy was right.
Izzy wasn’t the only veteran who thought he was the most comical—and the dumbest—thing on two legs. He couldn’t fight all of them, not if he wanted to live to do anything else. He didn’t know what all he wanted to do later on, but one thing seemed glaringly obvious. He wanted to get an
apology from La Martellita. If he couldn’t get an apology, a blowjob would do just as well. Maybe better.
First he had to live long enough to collect one or the other (even both, if he got really lucky). He hadn’t got sent to the trenches just because La Martellita put in a bad word somewhere. He hoped like hell he hadn’t, anyhow. The Republic was trying to push the Nationalists away from the capital. Whenever the Republic tried something that took hard fighting, in went the International Brigades. That had been true ever since the Internationals got to Spain.
And, though Spaniards filled out the Brigades’ ranks these days, it remained true even now. The Americans and Englishmen and Poles and Germans and Italians and Hungarians and God knew what all else who remained gave the International Brigades experience and esprit de corps no purely Spanish outfit could match. The foreign volunteers had and passed on experience the Spaniards couldn’t match, too. Germans who hated Adolf Hitler’s guts owned just as much professional expertise as the ones who fought in the Legion Kondor.
Naturally, Marshal Sanjurjo’s men understood all that as well as the Republicans. Naturally, the Nationalists kept their own élite troops opposite the Internationals’ positions. Naturally, any advance against those Fascist soldiers was a lot tougher than it would have been against the usual odds and sods who filled out the ranks on both sides.
You outflanked a bunch of odds and sods, they either ran away or surrendered. Raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as so many ticklish virgins. You outflanked a bunch of men who knew what they were doing and really meant it, and they hunkered down, dug their foxholes deeper, turned their machine gun your way if they had one, and defied you to winkle them out. Doing it wasn’t much fun.
“¡Chinga tu madre!” one of Sanjurjo’s finest shouted back when a man from the Abe Lincolns yelled that he should give up. A sharp burst of fire followed the obscenity: this gang of Nationalists did have a machine gun.
Some of the bullets snapped by overhead much too close for comfort. “Boy, I wish I was takin’ hot dogs outa boilin’ water back at Coney Island,” Izzy said.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 7
