Bombs Away

21

Why am I here? Isztvan Szolovits wondered. The question was worth asking, on any number of levels. What kind of answer you got depended on how you asked it, which was true of most questions. A believing religious person (a dangerous thing to be in the Hungarian People’s Republic, but not quite illegal as long as you didn’t make a public fuss about it) would say he was here because God had placed him here as part of the divine plan. An existentialist would haughtily declare that such questions had no meaning.

Isztvan knew less than he would have liked about existentialism. The Horthy regime had frowned on such decadent fripperies. So did the Red regime that took its place a couple of years after the war ended. But for those couple of years, Hungary had been Russian-occupied but not yet officially Communist. The new notions from Paris got in and…They were exciting, till suddenly you couldn’t mention them any more if you knew what was good for you.

But for Isztvan right now, Why am I here? meant Why am I in a muddy trench in the middle of Germany with the Americans raining artillery down on my head? In a way, he knew the answer. His own country’s secret police would have tortured him or killed him if he hadn’t let himself be conscripted. Their Russian overlords would have tortured or killed them had they shirked.

A big one-probably a 155-slammed into the ground ten or twenty meters in front of the trenches. Everything shook. Blast made breathing hard for a moment. A little closer and it could have killed, sometimes without leaving a mark. Fragments screeched overhead. Mud flew into the air and thumped down in the trench.

He cowered in the dugout he’d scraped in the forward wall. He’d shored it up with wood the best way he knew how. If the best way he knew how wasn’t good enough, it would collapse on him, and that would be that. A little closer and it might have collapsed anyhow.

In the dugout next to his, a Pole told his rosary beads and gabbled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Isztvan recognized the Latin. He’d studied some. The Pole’s pronunciation seemed strange to him, but he wasn’t about to say so. He doubted the Polish soldier would have appreciated Latin lessons from a Christ-killing clipcock.

Any Jew who lived in Hungary heard such endearments. Any Jew who lived in Hungary while the Arrow Cross maniacs did Hitler’s bidding heard them screamed in his face. Very often, they were some of the last things he ever heard.

The Communists didn’t call Jews names like that. Several big shots of the Hungarian People’s Republic, including Matyas Rakosi, who ruled the country, were Jews-exiles returned from Russia or survivors like Isztvan. They were not, of course, observant Jews or even indifferent Jews like Isztvan. They were ready to go after their own kind, knowing Stalin would come after them if they didn’t. They didn’t talk about Christ-killers. They talked about rootless cosmopolites instead. It sounded much more scientific. In practice? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Along with the heavy stuff, the Americans were throwing mortars around. Isztvan had quickly learned to hate mortars. You hardly knew the bombs were coming in till they burst, and they could fall straight down into a foxhole or trench.

They could, and this one did. It burst right behind the Pole in the dugout next to Isztvan’s. The boom shook him. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the mud a few centimeters in front of his nose. Another one, smaller, drew a bleeding line across the back of his hand. And one more, smaller still, clinked off his helmet. Like most people who’d seen both, he liked the German model better than its Soviet counterpart. But the Red Army lid did what it was made to do. Nobody’s helmet would stop a bullet. Fragments? Yes.

He was so stunned-and so deafened by the near miss-he needed a couple of seconds to hear someone screaming, and a couple of seconds more to realize it was the Pole who’d sheltered in the dugout next to his. Though other bombs were still falling all around, Szolovits scrambled out of his shelter to do what he could for the foreigner who was here in a war no more his than the Hungarian soldier’s.

“Oh,” Isztvan said, and then, “Oh, God.” He’d already seen some things he’d be trying to forget for the rest of his life. This was worse than all of them put together.

He didn’t want to look. He wanted retroactively not to have looked. It was that bad. It was…he didn’t know what it was. He’d never dreamt even iron and explosives fired with bad intent could do-that-to a man.

Worst of all, despite mutilating the Pole as ingeniously as any torturer might have, the mortar bomb hadn’t killed him. He wailed and moaned and shrieked and clutched at himself, trying to put himself back together. He wouldn’t be in one piece again till the Christian Judgment Day at the earliest.

When the Pole wasn’t screaming, he was shouting and crying out in a language Isztvan didn’t speak. Some of that was prayer in Latin mixed with Polish. Some was-Isztvan didn’t know what it was. But if he’d been torn apart like that, he would have been howling for his mother.

If he’d been torn apart like that, he would have wanted something else, too. He would have given it to a tormented dog smashed by a tram. You could do it to a dog, though. With a man, you ought to make sure it was all right first.

Isztvan pulled the bayonet off his belt and held it in front of the Pole’s wild blue eyes. “Willst du?” he asked. Do you want me to? German was the only language the two of them might share.

He didn’t know the poor bastard spoke German. Even if the Pole did, he might be too far gone to follow now.

When his gashed mouth opened, more blood dribbled from the corner. But he choked out three clear words: “Ja. Bitte. Danke.” He tried to make the sign of the cross, but his right hand wasn’t attached any more.

“Ego te absolvo, filii,” Isztvan said. He wasn’t a priest, or even a Christian. He hoped the words would do the Pole a little good anyhow. In all the time since the beginning of the world, few men had been in unction this extreme. Not watching what he did, Isztvan cut the fellow’s throat.

The screaming stopped. Szolovits drew a deep breath. He plunged the bayonet into the dirt again and again to get the blood off it. It was a tool with all kinds of uses, though rarely as a spearpoint on the end of a rifle, its nominal purpose. He’d never thought he’d use it for that, though.

An unexpected hand on his shoulder made him jerk and start to use it as a fighting knife. No Americans in the trenches, though. It was Sergeant Gergely. “He shut up,” Gergely said. “You shut him up?”

“Uh-huh.” Isztvan nodded miserably.

“Way to go,” the noncom said. “Take care of it for me, too, if I get all ripped up like that.”

“Once was bad enough, and he was a stranger,” Szolovits said.

“You’d do it for a stranger but not for somebody you know? Lofasz a seggedbe!” The Magyar curse meant A horse’s cock up your ass! Hungarians had come into Europe off the steppe, and their language still showed it a thousand years later.

“Are you volunteering, Sergeant?” Isztvan asked. As soon as he spoke, he realized the joke might be too strong. But he was still feeling the horror of what he’d just done, and wanted to exorcise it any way he could. He’d also begun to suspect-though he wasn’t sure yet-a human being might lurk somewhere under Gergely’s thick, highly polished steel armor.

And the veteran noncom didn’t get angry. He let out a harsh chuckle. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. “If that day comes, you’ll know. I’ll be screaming the way that poor damned Pole was. Am I right? Did you try to shrive him before you put him out of his misery?”

“I didn’t think it would do any harm.” Isztvan sounded more sheepish, more embarrassed, than he’d thought he would.

“My guess is, you did him as much good as a priest would’ve,” the sergeant said. A good Marxist-Leninist was almost bound to say that. But you didn’t have to follow the Communist line to feel that way. Anyone who’d been through a couple of wars and listened to too many people die in ugly ways might come to think it was true. More and more, Isztvan was coming to think it was himself.

–

Boris Gribkov eyed the Tu-4 under camouflage netting at the field outside of Leningrad. “You know, we’re lucky no real Americans have looked us over in either one of our planes,” he remarked.

“Why?” Vladimir Zorin asked. “They look as much like B-29s as real B-29s do.”

“But a lot of the real B-29s have naked girls on the nose, to remind the crews what they’re fighting for. Not all of them, but a lot,” Gribkov said. “I bet our maskirovka guys would have enjoyed their work more if they’d given us one of those.”

“I would’ve enjoyed it more, too,” the copilot said with a grin. “But I can’t see the guys who give the orders telling them to slap one on.”

“Mm, no,” Boris said. The commissars who gave such orders were stiff-necked, strait-laced…. They were prudes, was what they were. They didn’t have much fun, and they didn’t believe anyone else should, either.

Leonid Tsederbaum said, “Our fighter pilots would sometimes paint a swastika on the nose for every Nazi plane they shot down.”

“That’s true,” Boris said. “And some bomber crews would paint a bomb there for each mission they flew.”

“Uh-huh.” Tsederbaum nodded. “So I was thinking-maybe we could paint two cities on the nose of our beast here.”

He owned a formidable deadpan. He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that the pilot started to nod before he really heard what Tsederbaum said. Then he made a horrible face and exclaimed, “Fuck your mother!”

“I love you, too, sir.” Tsederbaum blew him a kiss.

Two cities. The Jew had asked him if he wanted to bomb London or Paris or Rome. He hadn’t had to rip the heart out of a metropolis from which a great empire had been ruled for centuries. That was luck, if you liked. He had smaller places on his conscience. Seattle and Bordeaux didn’t matter nearly so much to the people who didn’t live in them. If you did happen to live in a city where an A-bomb went off, you wouldn’t be happy afterwards. The best, the only, defense was to be somewhere else when that happened.

And if you were on the other end of the bomb, the only defense was not thinking about what you did in service to your country and to the world proletariat in arms. Gribkov remembered that the Stalin hadn’t been able to land the crew at Petropavlovsk. He remembered the craters scarring the cityscapes of Moscow and Leningrad. He was defending his country.

The Americans who’d bombed Soviet cities were defending their country, too. A few of the Hitlerites who’d got hanged or shot for running death camps had killed more people than those Americans and their Soviet counterparts. A few, but not many.

That wasn’t such a good thought to have. Gribkov wished he hadn’t had it. Well, that was why they made vodka. One of the things vodka did was blot out thoughts you didn’t feel like having. They’d eventually come back, but with Russians and the way they drank eventually could take a while.

There were also other ways to blot out those ugly thoughts. Hearing the base air-raid siren could do the trick, for instance. Pilot, copilot, and navigator looked at one another. Then they all started to run.

Maybe from force of habit, the construction crew that ran up this field had dug trenches by the quarters and others alongside the runways. Gribkov, Zorin, and Tsederbaum dashed for a runwayside trench. Tsederbaum was taller and skinnier than his Russian crewmates. He might have broken the Olympic record for the hundred meters. In any race, though, they would have won silver and bronze.

Tsederbaum leaped down into the trench. Gribkov and Zorin followed. They all crouched in the mud, careless of their uniforms. The trenches were there to protect base personnel from bomb fragments and from strafing fighters’ machine guns. They’d done that well enough during the Great Patriotic War. They could again-if they were dealing with bomb fragments and bullets.

If, on the other hand, a B-29 was buzzing ten or eleven kilometers up in the air and dropped an A-bomb here, all this was nothing but a joke. Gribkov didn’t think the Americans would send a B-29 into Soviet airspace in broad daylight. He wouldn’t have wanted to fly a daylight mission against, say, England. But you did what they told you to do, not what you wanted to do.

And the fear remained. The fear, if anything, got worse. He’d dropped A-bombs. He’d seen the horrible gouges they tore in Soviet cities. So he knew what they did. If one did that here, he could only hope everything ended before he even knew the end had begun.

Jet engines screamed as fighters scrambled at some nearby airstrip. Looking up, Gribkov watched the MiG-15s climb almost vertically. That kind of flight was so different from the Tu-4’s, it was almost as if he were watching a flying saucer perform. In the Tu-4, you counted yourself lucky to get off the ground at all, however slowly you did it.

The MiGs could reach a B-29’s ceiling. They might even reach it fast enough to keep the Americans from doing whatever they wanted to do. They might, Boris thought. It wasn’t a prayer. It wasn’t that far from one, either.

Those jet banshee wails dopplered out as the MiG-15s rose against high-altitude invaders. No sooner had they begun to fade, though, than Gribkov also heard piston-engine growls.

He frowned. Before he could say anything, Leonid Tsederbaum exclaimed, “Those aren’t ours!”

And they weren’t. They were half a dozen American Mustangs. The plane had been developed as a long-range escort fighter. It had protected U.S. bombers all the way from England to Berlin. Mount a small bomb under each wing and it turned into a long-range fighter-bomber.

The Mustangs roared by low overhead. They dropped their bombs. They shot up the field. They zoomed away. They were gone.

“Bozehmoi!” Vladimir Zorin sounded shaken to the core. “I thought I was back in Lithuania in 1944, with Focke-Wulfs strafing my strip.”

“If the MiGs can spot the Americans, they’ll dive on them,” Tsederbaum said. “Mustangs are fast, but not that fast.”

“I wonder how many missions those Mustang pilots flew during the last war,” Boris said. By the way they carried out this one, they had plenty of experience. Soviet fighter pilots with that kind of expertise were up at the front, not defending an airfield far behind it.

Boris stood up. The Americans had left holes in some of the runways. The Tu-4s wouldn’t be taking off from here till people fixed them. Around the farmhouse that housed base personnel, everybody was running every which way. Well, everybody who could run. The Mustangs hadn’t left the farmhouse unscathed.

“You know something?” Zorin said. “We were lucky to be where we were when the Americans came. If we’d been over there, we might not’ve made it to the trenches.”

“It’s all luck,” Tsederbaum said. “Good luck, bad luck-what else is there?”

“The dialectic,” Boris Gribkov said. “There’s always the dialectic.”

“Well, yes, Comrade Pilot.” Tsederbaum smiled so charmingly, for a moment Boris thought he was watching a movie actor. “You’re right. Absolutely. There’s always the dialectic.”

Is he agreeing with me? Or is he mocking me, calling me an uncultured fool of a peasant? Gribkov wondered. He wasn’t sure. Leonid Tsederbaum left no room for anything so bourgeois as certainty. Then the pilot thought, Don’t you have more important things to worry about? Deciding he did, he figured the navigator could wait.

–

The Canal Zone was American territory. Harry Truman couldn’t imagine giving it back to Panama. The greasers down here could no more run or protect the Panama Canal than they could fly.

As the President stepped out of the Independence and into Panama’s steamy tropical heat, he scowled. It wasn’t as if the United States had done such a heads-up job of protecting the Canal. One bang, in fact, and there was no Panama Canal to protect any more.

“Welcome, Mr. President,” Arnulfo Arias said. The President of Panama was a stout man of about fifty. He spoke English almost as well as Truman did; he’d studied medicine at Harvard.

“Thank you very much, Mr. President.” Truman held out his hand. Arias took it. Holding the clasp, they turned toward the photographers and plastered political smiles on their faces. Flashbulbs popped. When the shutterbugs were happy, the two leaders let go of each other. As they did, Truman spoke in a low voice: “I’m sorry as hell about this.”

“Yes. So are we.” Arias shrugged. “Well, we can talk more about that after you’ve seen the disaster for yourself.”

It was as much a disaster for Panama as it was for the USA. If anything, it was a worse disaster for Panama than for the United States. Panama had no reason to exist except for the Panama Canal. Without the Canal, there would have been no Panama. Up till the turn of the century, it had been a province of Colombia-not always a perfectly contented province, but also not one with secession on its mind.

Then the Colombian government refused the excavation terms the American government offered. With amazing speed, the free nation of Panama sprang from Teddy Roosevelt’s forehead the way Minerva sprang from Jupiter’s. The United States recognized it almost before it declared its own independence. Colombia’s choice was accepting the inevitable or going to war with the USA.

Thus the Panama Canal was born. And now, not quite half a century later, the Panama Canal had died. If any young Colombian lieutenants then were old Colombian generals now, they had to be snickering behind their hands.

A Cadillac convertible drove out onto the runway. “I will take you to the Presidential Palace,” Arias said. “After the luncheon there, we will go the the Canal Zone so you can examine the damage for yourself.”

Truman didn’t want to go to the Presidential Palace. He didn’t want to have lunch with a bunch of Panamanian big shots. That was all a waste of time. He wanted to get up there and see what the damned Russians had done. But, like it or not, he had to be diplomatic. “Sounds fine, Mr. President,” he lied. “I’m at your service.”

Secret Service men who’d flown down with Truman and Panamanian soldiers climbed into other cars. They made a small motorcade that wound through the streets of Panama City. A few people stood on the sidewalks waving American and Panamanian flags. If Arias’ henchmen hadn’t got them out there, Truman would have been amazed. That was one of the oldest ward-heeler’s tricks in the world.

And one of the oldest assassin’s tricks in the world was to attack from a high place. The guards wouldn’t stop a rifleman or someone with a grenade if he popped out of a third-story window in one of the old Spanish-style buildings. Truman knew it but didn’t let it worry him.

The Presidential Palace lay northeast of Independence Square, and took up a whole block. They’d declared independence in the cathedral in the square. The USA was in the background when they did it, but not very far in the background.

Big white egrets swaggered across the marble-floored palace lobby. Smiling, President Arias said, “The nickname for the building is Palacio de las Garzas-the Palace of the Herons.”

Smiling back, President Truman replied, “None of those at the White House. We have lobbyists instead, lobbyists and other vultures.”

Like Arias himself, the dignitaries he’d invited to eat with Truman were educated men fluent in English. Some of them showed a better understanding of both sides’ strategy in the war than most of the Congressmen Truman had conferred with. The lunch was excellent: lobster chunks simmered in spiced coconut milk and served with rice and beans. Rum flowed freely.

Not too much later than he’d planned, Truman got back into the Cadillac with Arias for the trip to the blasted lock. The Canal’s geography was confusing; till you studied a map, you weren’t likely to realize that the Caribbean opening lay west of the one on the Pacific.

A good highway ran from Panama City to Colón. It had gone on to Gatún, but Gatún was no more. Neither was Lake Gatún, some of which had boiled to steam and more of which poured out into the Caribbean after the bomb hidden in the Panathenaikos went off. Every drop that poured through the crater became radioactive as it went. Eventually, the Caribbean would dilute the poison till it didn’t matter any more, but how eventually eventually was, Truman didn’t know. Every alleged expert he talked to gave him a different answer.

Making sure the Japs didn’t wreck the Panama Canal had been one of America’s worries during World War II. Making sure the Russians didn’t was a high priority this time around. High priority or not, the Russians had done it.

“My fault,” he told Arnulfo Arias. “We were supposed to defend against this kind of savagery. We were supposed to, but we dropped the ball. I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“I have heard that you are a man who says what is in his heart,” the President of Panama replied. “Now I find for myself that it is so.”

“And you find that it doesn’t do you one whole hell of a lot of good, hey?” Truman said. “I promise you this, Mr. President: after we’ve won the war, we will put the Panama Canal back together again. It’s too important to leave it like-this.”

“To the whole world, and to Panama,” Arias said.

“Yes, and to Panama,” Truman agreed. Without the Canal, Panama might as well go back to being part of Colombia. The only drawback to that was, Colombia probably wouldn’t want it.

President Arias had other things on his mind. “How long will the war go on before the United States wins it, Mr. President? How much of the world will be left in one piece by the time it ends?”

Those were both good questions. They were much better questions than Truman wished they were, in fact. “I’m not the only one who has something to say about that, you know, your Excellency,” he said. “Stalin does, too. If the Russians pull out of western Germany and Italy and if the Red Chinese pull out of South Korea, we have nothing left to fight about.”

“Yes, sir.” Arias studied him with wide, sad eyes. “And what do you think the chances of that are?”

“Pretty poor,” Truman said. “If he wanted to do that, he would’ve done it by now, and made Mao do it, too. But there is a way to get a man who doesn’t want to do something to do it anyhow. If you keep hitting him, after a while he’ll do what you tell him to do to get you to stop. That’s how we finally made the Nazis and the Japs give up. Sooner or later, we’ll make Stalin quit, too.”

“Sooner or later, yes.” Arias waved at the crater that marked the ruination of one of the greatest engineering feats mankind had ever brought off. “But in the meantime, Mr. President, Stalin keeps hitting back. He is still trying to make you quit.”

“Well, it won’t work,” Truman snapped. “Korea won’t go all Red, and if Joe Stalin doesn’t like that, he can stick it in his pipe and smoke it. Western Europe won’t be all Red, either.”

“He’s hurt you-not just here, but in your own country,” Arias said.

“We’ve hurt him worse. We’ll go on doing it as long as we have to,” Truman answered. He fanned himself with his Panama hat. It was muggier than even a Missouri man who’d done time in Washington was used to. As an old haberdasher, he knew perfectly well that Panama hats came from Ecuador. He wore one anyhow; names counted, too. He went on, “In the last war, Admiral Halsey said the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell. Japan surrendered before we had to arrange that. If the Soviet Union doesn’t, Satan will get himself a lot of new Russian customers.”

Arnulfo Arias smiled. The expression slipped as he realized Truman meant it.

–

Wilf Davies walked into the Owl and Unicorn and said, “I’ll take a pint of your best bitter, Daisy, if you’d be so kind.”

“Well, I might have enough left to spare you one,” she said, and winked at the mechanic with the hook where his left hand should have been.

“Here now, you watch that!” Wilf exclaimed as she worked the tap. “Anybody sees you and tells my missus, she’ll think you’re tryin’ to lure me away from her.”

The pub had just opened. They were the only ones in the snug. Wilf often stopped in for an early pint. Nobody but the two of them could have seen the wink. Daisy said, “Who knows? I could do worse.”

“Don’t go puttin’ ideas in my head, dear,” he said as he set money on the bar. They weren’t likely to be practical ideas, not when he was happily married and old enough to be her father. Maybe he got them anyhow.

The worst of it was, she’d only been half kidding. Some of the RAF and USAF men who came into the Owl and Unicorn reckoned themselves God’s gift to womankind. They acted as if she ought to fall into their arms right there in the snug-never mind wasting time going upstairs to bed.

You couldn’t even tell those blighters anything that would dent their splendid opinion of themselves. The nicer ones would call you stuck-up if you did. The others would call you things that started with frigid bitch and went downhill from there.

Davies took a pull at the pint and smacked his lips. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s mighty good.” He drank again. “I’ve got a question for you, dear.”

“What kind of question?” Daisy felt a certain small alarm. Was he going to get difficult, after so long being not just a customer but a friend?

But what he asked was, “Do you know how long a metal part stays radioactive and how dangerous that is?”

She stared at him. “Why in God’s name d’you think I’d know something like that?”

“Well…” He looked sheepish, and stared down at his half-empty mug. “You’ve got those Yank officers comin’ in here all the time. I wondered if maybe one of ’em talked about it, or somethin’.” Embarrassment thickened his accent.

“Not a word,” she said. “Not a single, solitary word. Why would you care about a crazy thing like that, anyhow?” She suddenly pointed a forefinger at him. It wasn’t quite Balzac’s J’accuse! but it came close. “You’re getting auto parts out of Norwich!”

“Hush!” He held his own forefinger up to his lips. “I’ve done no such illegal thing-not so they can prove it, any road. But I have me some friends who have some friends who can lay their hands on this, that, or the other thing-the kind of stuff what’s hard to come by these days. I ask ’em no questions, and they tell me no lies.”

Daisy wondered how outraged she should be, and whether she should be outraged at all. Of course scavengers would sneak into Norwich, never mind the Army and Scotland Yard. Autos at the edge of the blast area were more likely to have survived, or at least to be salvageable, than their owners were. You couldn’t put a dead man’s kidney or spleen on the market. A dead Bentley’s pistons or mudguards were a different story.

“You might get yourself one of those Geiger counters,” Daisy said. “If a part makes it click too much, don’t buy it or don’t use it.”

“There’s a good notion!” He looked at her admiringly. “I don’t much fancy putting some gears in the gear train and poisoning my customers with ’em. There’s the sort of thing that gives your business a bad name.”

“Poisoning yourself whilst you’re working on the repairs, too,” Daisy said.

Wilf blinked. “Hadn’t thought of that. Should have, shouldn’t I?”

“I daresay!” she answered. Am I killing myself on the job here? would have been the first thing she worried about. She hoped it would, at any rate. She lit a cigarette.

The mechanic pushed more silver at her. “Have a half on me,” he said. “You might just have saved my bacon there.”

Daisy didn’t care for beer so early in the day. But Wilf meant it kindly; she knew that. She filled one of the smaller mugs at the tap. Savoring the bitter, she said, “This is a nice barrel, isn’t it?”

“You’re the publican, sweetheart, so what else are you going to say?” Wilf returned. She made a face at him. He drank again. “I’m not pouring it down the sink myself, you see.”

“You’d better not,” Daisy said, and then, “Would you like another?”

He shook his head. “I’d like one fine, but I’ve got work back at the garage. I have a pint, it means naught. I have two pints, I’m liable to be clumsy and stupid and make a hash of what should be simple.”

“Do what you need to do,” Daisy said. That was her own motto; she could hardly resent it when someone else felt the same way.

Bruce McNulty came into the pub that evening. It was a noisier, busier, livelier place that it had been earlier in the day. Even so, Daisy asked him about how long metal parts stayed radioactive.

“That’s a funny question,” the American flyer said.

“A friend wondered,” she told him.

“A friend?” he echoed, a certain edge to his voice.

“From in town,” Daisy said, nodding. Then she realized the edge had to be jealousy. She felt like clomping the Yank over the head with a pint mug. Taking a deep breath instead, she went on, “For one thing, Mr. McNulty, Wilf was born before the turn of the century and came back from the First World War with a hook doing duty for one hand. And for another thing, Mr. McNulty, even if he were our age and handsome as a film star, that would be none of your bloody business.” One more deep breath. “Am I plain enough, or shall I draw you pictures?”

He turned sunset red. She’d hit him too hard. Naturally, she saw that only after she’d gone and done it. “You’re pretty plain, all right,” he mumbled.

“Good,” she said. Maybe briskness would help. “Do you know the answer to my friend’s question, then? He wants to be able to use auto parts from, ah, around Norwich, but he doesn’t want to hurt himself or any of the people whose cars they go into.”

“Black-market parts. Stuff the buzzards bring home in their claws,” McNulty said. To Daisy, a buzzard was a hawk; to the Yank, it seemed to mean vulture. She nodded again anyhow. That was what Wilf was dealing in, sure enough. Bruce McNulty shrugged and spread his hands. “Afraid I can’t tell you-or even your friend.” His mouth quirked. “I just deliver the junk. I don’t know what all it does after it goes kablooie. How radioactive stuff gets, how long it stays that way”-he shrugged once more-“it’s not my department.”

“Fair enough. Thanks.” After a beat, Daisy added, “I’m sorry I barked at you.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, let me have one for the road, will you?” McNulty set a couple of shillings on the bar. He waved away change and drained the pint at one long pull. Then he said, “See you around, kiddo. It was…interesting, anyway.” He tipped his cap and walked out into the night.

Only after he was gone did she understand that he wasn’t coming back. Wherever he did his drinking from now on, it wouldn’t be at the Owl and Unicorn. Well, damn, she thought as she drew another American a pint. She hadn’t meant to offend him. She’d just tried to get an answer for Wilf. Things spiraled out of control from there. He’d had no cause to get jealous. None. But why was she so sorry he was gone?