Coup d'Etat

Chapter 26

Like the Goldmans, the Brucks had a radio set. If anything, they listened to it more than Sarah’s mother and father did. Books meant less to them than they did to the Goldmans. Isidor and his folks used the radio to fill in the spaces where the Goldmans would have been reading.

Which would have been all right, if Dr. Goebbels weren’t the fellow giving the orders about what went out over the airwaves. Oh, not even Hitler’s club-footed propaganda boss could screw up everything. Sarah had no problems with Handel and Bach and Beethoven. They didn’t belong to the Nazis alone. They were part of every halfway cultured person’s baggage.

Wagner… Wagner was more complicated. Sarah had been a girl in the days back before the Fuhrer came to power. She remembered her father playing records of Wagner’s operas then. And, after the direction in which the Nazis were taking Germany grew unmistakably clear, she remembered him smashing those records one by one and throwing the pieces in the trash.

That didn’t mean he, or anyone else in the Third Reich, could escape Wagner altogether. Naturally, Hitler’s favorite composer was on the radio all the time. Samuel Goldman had usually turned it off or found another station when that happened. Sometimes, though, Sarah had caught him listening, hardly seeming to realize he was doing it. The Germans made it plain that liking Wagner was a big part of being one of them, and her father’d always wanted nothing more than to be, and to be seen to be, a good German himself.

Besides, some of what Wagner wrote-not all, not to Sarah’s ear, but yes, some-was ravishingly beautiful.

These days, more French treason and French betrayal were on the radio than Wagner. German commentators screamed that France had broken her commitments as an ally and a friend.

David Bruck was nowhere near so sophisticated a man as Samuel Goldman, but did you need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing? “It’ll be two fronts going full blast, same as it was in the Great War,” he predicted. “It didn’t work then. What are the odds it will this time?”

“Do you want it to?” Sarah asked him. “If this regime goes down the drain, maybe whatever comes along next won’t blame everything on the Jews.”

The baker looked startled. “I hadn’t even though of it like that,” he confessed. Turning to his son, he went on, “See what a smart girl you married, Isidor?”

“Oh, yeah?” Isidor said. Sarah was about to throw something at him when he added, “If she’s so smart, how come she married me?” That self-mockery was very much his style. This time, he dragged her into it, too.

“Must be your good looks,” David Bruck said. They all laughed. Isidor looked a lot like his father. The older Bruck gave his attention back to Sarah. “I hadn’t even thought about no more Nazis. I just remember how hard things were during the last war, and what a horrible mess everything was afterwards.”

The Nazis had sprung from that horrible mess. What might spring from the next one, if there was a next one? Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Hitler’s party. Sarah was sure of that.

She wondered if her father would be so sure. The Nazis had surprised him with their virulence. Had they gone as low as people could go? Sarah thought so. If she was wrong, she didn’t want to find out about it.

“Well,” Isidor said, “let’s get these into the ovens.” And into the ovens the dark loaves went. He and his father complained all the time about the horrible brown coal with the lumps and chunks of worthless shale they had to use for baking these days.

Sarah understood why they complained: they were used to better. Jews all over Germany were used to better all kinds of ways. Here, though, Sarah wasn’t inclined to kvetch along with them. Before long, the baking bread would smell wonderful. And the ovens, even if they burned the cheapest, most adulterated coal around-and what else would a Jewish bakery get? — kept the place warm. In earlier war winters, she’d shivered till spring finally came. No more.

The war bread came out of the ovens right at the top of the hour. David Bruck turned on the radio to catch the news. “It’ll all be lies,” Sarah said.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “Not all. Just most of it.” She nodded; he was right. If you listened carefully and knew how to read between the lines, you could sometimes glimpse the real moving figures that cast the enormous, blurry shadows the newsreaders talked about.

The latest broadcast started out with a bang: “The Jews are our misfortune!” the announcer shouted, slamming his fist down on a tabletop. “So our beloved Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, said twenty years ago, and, as usual, history has proved him right.”

At that point, Sarah’s father would have given forth with a derisive snort. Since he wasn’t there, she did it for him. Her husband and father-in-law made identical shushing noises.

“Now the Bolshevik Jews of Moscow conspire with the plutocratic Jews of Paris to try to smash the German Reich between them,” the newsreader went on. “For a little while, it seemed the degenerate French would have will enough to resist the poisoned honey the Jews poured down their throats. Sadly, though, this was not to be. As a result of base French treachery and deceit, we are punishing the enemy soldiers who seek to desert to the Bolsheviks.”

They’d said the same thing after England decided she’d had enough of the fight in Russia. Maybe it was true. Maybe it was sweet syrup designed to make the radio audience feel better about what was going on. Here, Sarah couldn’t know for sure without going to Russia herself. There weren’t many places she wanted to be less than in Munster, but the Russian front was one of them.

“Fighting has resumed in France,” the announcer said in portentous tones. “Displaying their usual cowardice, the French were pushed back several kilometers in the skirmishes. No sign of English troops on the Western Front has yet been detected. As always, England talks a better game than she plays.”

Sarah would have looked across the street at the bombed-out grocery there, only she couldn’t. The bakery’s front window was repaired-after a fashion-with scraps of plywood and cardboard. The RAF played all too good a game.

“In other news relating to the changed war situation, unlimited U-boat warfare in the North Atlantic has resumed,” the announcer said. “If America’s Jew capitalists think they can get rich shipping arms to increase Europe’s woe, we will hurt them in their pocketbooks. Wait and see how loud they scream!” He laughed a most unpleasant laugh.

After that, home-front reports took over. Then the radio started playing Tristan und Isolde. David Bruck smiled. He liked Wagner. He hadn’t quit liking the composer because the Nazis liked him, too, the way Sarah’s father had. She wondered what that said. Most likely, no more than that he liked Wagner even better than Samuel Goldman did.

Isidor said, “I bet the Wehrmacht is jumping up and down with joy because they get to fight a two-front war again.”

“Bet you’re right,” his father agreed. “They’ve already tried to toss out our beloved Fuhrer ”-he laced that with sarcasm, not the newsreader’s schmaltz — “a couple of times. How long before they take another shot at it?”

Sarah looked from one of them to the other. No, they weren’t sophisticates like her father. But, as she was coming to realize, that didn’t make them dummies, either. They could see what was going on in the world.

Hitler would be able to see it, too. How far could he trust the Wehrmacht? If he didn’t trust it, what would keep the French and English out of Germany? For that matter, what would keep the Russians out of the Reich? There was a thought to make any good National Socialist’s blood run cold!

Sooner or later-probably sooner, the way Isidor grabbed her every chance he could steal-she was going to have a baby. What kind of world would it grow up in? In a world that didn’t look a whole lot like this one? In a world without Nazis? A few weeks earlier, that would have looked impossible. Now? Now she could hope, anyhow.

“ You can go home again, ” Vaclav Jezek said, contradicting the title of a new novel he’d never heard of.

Benjamin Halevy shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. But unless we all go back to France to fight the Germans, I’m staying right here with you guys.”

“You’re a French citizen. You’re a French soldier,” Vaclav said. “What if your government orders you back?”

Halevy told him what the French government could do about it. Vaclav didn’t think governments were equipped to do such things, especially not sideways. He laughed all the same.

“One thing,” he said when he got done laughing. “Now that France and Germany are on the outs again, they’ll open up the supply spigot here.”

“There you go. That is something.” Halevy sounded enthusiastic all at once. “Let the fucking Fascists get thirsty for goodies for a change. With France and England back in the war, I’d like to see Hitler and Mussolini ship Sanjurjo any toys.”

“It’s funny. The Nationalists are Fascists, and I can’t stand them on account of they’re dumb enough to be Fascists, but I don’t hate them the way I hate Germans,” Vaclav said. “I wonder why.”

“All the Spaniards have done is try to kill you,” Halevy said. “They haven’t raped your country and stolen it from you. Besides, I bet you didn’t have much use for Germans even before the war. What Czech does?”

“You are a smart Hebe,” Vaclav said, less ironically than he’d intended. Every word of that rang true.

“Hey, I love you, too.” Halevy made as if to kiss him.

Laughing some more, Jezek pushed him away. “Leave me alone, you fairy!” he said, and laughed again.

“Not guilty.” Halevy shook his head. “I’m a French Jew fighting for the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile in Spain. I’ve got to be normal some kind of way. I like girls. They don’t always like me, but I like girls.”

“Girls don’t always like anybody,” Vaclav said. He and Halevy went on from there. When everything else failed, you could always talk about women.

Vaclav slipped out through the wire before dawn the next morning. If you were in place by the time the sun rose, the bastards on the other side wouldn’t notice you moving. The Nationalists’ would-be sniper had discovered the error of his ways about that, but he’d never get the chance to do it over and do it right, not now he wouldn’t.

The Czech crawled into a shell hole whose forward lip helped shield him from the prying eyes of Sanjurjo’s men. They wouldn’t find him easy to spot any which way. Twigs and branches torn off bushes broke up his helmet’s outline. More camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel. His greatcoat was dun-colored to begin with, and muddy on top of that. He’d smeared streaks of mud on his face, too. They had chameleons in the far south of Spain. He did his best to impersonate one of the goggle-eyed lizards.

Since he lacked goggle eyes of his own, he peered through the scope on his rifle instead. The Nationalists behind the lines seemed busier than usual, hustling here and bustling there. He wondered if they were getting ready to attack in this sector. That wouldn’t be so good, neither for the Republic nor, more relevantly, for his life expectancy.

After a while, though, he decided it wasn’t that kind of hustle and bustle. It seemed more as if they were getting ready to receive a VIP. In spite of himself, excitement coursed through him. People had been telling him to blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off ever since he crossed the Pyrenees. What if he really got the chance?

Don’t blow it, that’s what, he thought. One shot, probably out close to 2,000 meters. He could hit at that range. He’d done it before. He’d missed, too, but he refused to dwell on that. Footballers missed all the time, but they kept playing even so. And strikers shrugged off misses and put the ball in the net the next time. Without false modesty, Vaclav knew he was one of the best strikers in this game. He was still here, wasn’t he?

He’d smoked a cigarette just before he emerged from the Republican trenches. The next one would have to wait. As usual when he was out between the lines, he didn’t want to do anything that might give him away.

Time dragged on. If you didn’t know how to wait, you had no business sniping. He ate some sausage. He took a leak. He’d improved the bottom of the shell hole by digging a little trench so he could deal with such things without needing to lie in a puddle of piss afterward.

A Nationalist officer in one of those almost-German helmets surveyed no-man’s-land through field glasses. The nerve of the son of a bitch! Vaclav almost killed him to discourage the Fascists from doing that kind of thing again. They knew that he was out here, or that he was liable to be, anyhow.

He would have disposed of the officer had those binoculars paused while they were pointed his way. He might have done it on general principles if he weren’t after bigger game. He’d never known the Nationalists to do that kind of thing before. Maybe they were trying to make sure their precious big shot would be safe.

Vaclav ducked down before he shook his head. Sorry, boys, he thought. I’m here, whether you see me or not.

He waited some more. Clouds rolled in and turned the day gloomy. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. That would screw up everything. He needed a clear shot if he ever got a target.

A few drops fell. “Come on, God! Quit screwing around!” Vaclav grumbled. “Whose side are you on, dammit?” The rain stopped. Either God was on his side or the rain just stopped. He remembered a day when he would have figured it was God. Now he would have bet it just happened.

Any which way, after a while he spotted a Nationalist general haranguing a bunch of assembled officers. It wasn’t Marshal Sanjurjo. Vaclav knew what he looked like; the Fascists slapped posters of his jowly mug on anything that didn’t move. This guy was younger and skinnier. A good thing, too: if you were fatter than Marshal Sanjurjo, you were too fat to be a general, and probably too fat to live.

Well, this shithead was too Fascist to live. He had an oval, rather disapproving face and a neatly trimmed dark mustache. By the way he gestured, he wasn’t the most exciting speechifier God ever made, no matter on whose side God turned out to be.

He wasn’t quite so far away as Vaclav had thought he might be: no more than 1,500 meters. The Czech aimed with his usual meticulous care. He took a couple of deep breaths. As he let out the second one, he fired.

Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, the antitank rifle always tried to break his shoulder. He’d have a fresh purple bruise tonight, to go with the ones that were fading to yellow. But the Nationalist general stopped in the middle of one of his jerky gestures and fell over. As far as Vaclav was concerned, that counted for more than the bruises.

The Fascists started running around like chickens suddenly minus their heads. The guy with the field glasses popped up again. Except for Vaclav’s rule against shooting twice from the same place, he would have nailed him for his presumption. Sitting tight wasn’t easy, but he did it.

His pals back in the Republican trenches were on the ball. They started shooting rifles and machine guns at the Nationalist lines. That made Sanjurjo’s men decide against going out to hunt for him. He appreciated the gesture. Any heirs he might eventually have would, too.

More waiting, then. Once darkness fell, Vaclav crept back to the little stretch of trench the Czechs held. They pounded him on the back and plied him with harsh Spanish brandy and even harsher Spanish cigarettes. “Do you know who you got?” they yelled. “Do you?”

Since Vaclav didn’t, he answered, “Tell me, for Christ’s sake. All I know is, it wasn’t the big cheese.”

“Next best thing, by Jesus,” one of them said. “It was that Franco asshole who’s given us so much grief.”

“Hey! That was worth doing!” Jezek said. Francisco Franco was-no, had been-one of the Nationalists’ better generals. He had balls even if he was a Fascist, and he had a tenacity few on either side showed. What he grabbed, he held on to.

Well, all he’d grab from here on out was a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep. In the end, that was all anybody ever grabbed, but when you got it mattered.

The Republicans hadn’t put an enormous price on his head, the way they had with Sanjurjo. All the same, Vaclav bet they’d give him some leave and some cash to have a good time in Madrid for potting Franco. And if you couldn’t have a good time in Madrid, you weren’t half trying.

Battle damage repaired, the Boise steamed out of Pearl Harbor and headed west, looking for trouble. Pete McGill was happy about that. Any chance to give the Japs one in the slats-or, better, one in the nuts-looked good to him.

He wished he were on the six-inch guns instead of the secondary armament. Then he could have fired at enemy ships, not planes. If you sank a destroyer or another light cruiser, you could give yourself credit for hundreds of Japs instead of the lousy one or two you got for hitting a fighter or a bomber. Vera still needed more revenge. No matter how much he tried to take, it could never be enough. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to up his score, though.

Along with the Boise came three destroyers, a heavy cruiser, and the Ranger. All the other ships were along to protect the carrier. The Ranger wasn’t the ideal carrier to go after the Japs. She was just arrived from the Atlantic, and she’d been more a training ship than a combat vessel. But the fleet carriers that had been in the Pacific now lay on the bottom. If the USA was going to hit back at all, it needed to grab whatever it could get its hands on.

“Two years from now, none of this shit’ll matter,” Joe Orsatti said as the gun crew stood by their piece looking out over the wide, empty ocean. “Two years from now, we’ll have so fuckin’ many carriers, they’ll fly out our nose when we sneeze. Tojo’ll see ’em in his bathtub, for Chrissake. Little tiny Wildcats’ll strafe his fuckin’ mustache.”

Everybody laughed. “You’re outa your goddamn tree, you know that?” Pete said, not without admiration.

“Yeah, well, I have fun.” Orsatti looked around some more. “Except when I gotta put up with youse guys, I mean.”

“Boy, you talk even more New York than I do,” Pete said, again more admiringly than not. “I didn’t figure anybody could.”

“Comes of bein’ a dago,” Orsatti said with pride of his own. If the wrong guy had tried to slap that label on him, he would have decked the bastard, but he could stick it on himself. He pointed at McGill. “Now you, you’re just a regular paddy. If you came from Minnesota, you’d sound like a fuckin’ squarehead. But a guinea like me, don’t matter where he’s from. He still sounds like Hell’s Kitchen-or Jersey at the most.” Inevitably, that came out Joisey.

“Talking about Jersey”-Pete pronounced it much the same way-“who’s that kid who’s been singing with Goodman and now with Dorsey?”

“Sinatra.” Orsatti spoke with assurance. “Yeah, he’s from Hoboken. My folks know his folks some kinda way. I think one of my cousins went out with a gal who’s kin to him-like second cousin or something-but it didn’t stick.”

“Too bad for your cousin,” Pete said. “The way the dames scream for that guy, he’s gonna end up with more money than Henry fuckin’ Ford. Probably enough so some even sticks to a second cousin.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Orsatti agreed. “But it’s water under the bridge now. And Vito’s in the Army, poor sap, so he’s got more to worry about than trying to make it with Sinatra’s cousin.”

“My ass, he does. The Army’s safe as houses.” Like any halfway decent Marine, McGill looked down his nose at the larger service. He had his reasons, too: “What’s he gonna do besides train and look cute? Army can’t fight the Japs, not till it gets delivered, and that won’t happen any time soon. If we were fighting the Germans, too, he might have to work for a living. Way things are, though? Forget about it.”

“It’s coming. You gotta think so, anyway,” Orsatti said. “Now that France and England are over their fling with the Nazis, we’re shipping ’em stuff again. That’ll piss Hitler off-hell, it’d piss me off. So he’ll start torpedoing freighters, and we’ll jump in, same as we did against the Kaiser.”

“Could be,” Pete allowed. “He’s turned his subs loose again over in the Atlantic.”

Idly, he wondered what it would be like to be a kid from Hoboken with girls screaming for you wherever you went. There sure had to be worse ways to make a living. Back when he had Vera, he wouldn’t have cared if all the other girls in the world were screaming for him. (And if that didn’t prove he’d been head over heels, what would have?) Since he couldn’t have the one he’d wanted most, being able to pick and choose from all the rest didn’t seem half bad.

The Ranger and her shepherds steamed south and west. Nobody’d said where they were going: not to the likes of Pete McGill, anyhow. He didn’t care. As long as it was toward the enemy, that suited him fine.

Wildcats from the carrier flew a combat air patrol over the task force. Floatplanes from the heavy cruiser buzzed ahead of the American ships to make sure they weren’t running into trouble facefirst. Little by little, the USA was learning to fight a mid-twentieth-century war. No matter what kind of super-Jutland the admirals had imagined, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Admirals’ imaginations hadn’t encompassed airplanes and submarines. Battleships turned out to be dinosaurs: huge and ferocious and armored, with mouths full of big, sharp teeth, but doomed to extinction all the same.

Klaxons hooted almost every day. Swabbies and leathernecks dashed to battle stations. It always turned out to be a drill. Men swore when the all-clear sounded. But they didn’t swear too loud or too hard. Most of them had been aboard the Boise when the big American fleet tried to run the Japanese gantlet. Only now was Pete coming to realize how dumb the admirals had really been.

Joe Orsatti laughed at him when he said so. “I bet you still believe in the tooth fairy and the fuckin’ Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, too,” Orsatti said. “But don’t sweat it. Sure, our big guys are dumb. But you bet your ass the Japs are, too.”

Pete was betting his ass. Everybody in this flotilla was. If he’d had any doubts, they were erased when one alert was followed by an iron-throated shout of “This is no drill!” from the intercom speakers. The officer at the mike went on, “Japanese planes incoming from bearing 240. I say again, this is no drill!”

Grunting, Pete grabbed a shell and handed it to the loader, who slammed it into the five-inch gun’s breech. Joe Orsatti trained the gun to bear on the enemy planes’ expected track toward the Ranger. Pete stood ready to pass as many fifty-pound shells as might be needed. His shoulder complained every time he did it, but he’d long since quit listening.

Overhead, the Wildcats tangled with a swarm of Japanese Zeroes. Wildcats had a chance against Zeroes, but not usually a great chance. One of the American planes splashed into the ocean as Pete watched. “Shit!” he said.

And the Zeroes kept the Wildcats too busy to do what they should have been doing: going after the dive-bombers that followed the fighters in. Japanese naval dive bombers-Vals was the U.S. code name for them-were ugly and old-fashioned. Like German Stukas, they had fixed landing gear. Also like Stukas, they could put a bomb down on a silver dollar if you gave them the chance.

Four of them pulled away from the main bunch and buzzed toward the Boise. A Wildcat that broke off from the big melee shot one of them down. A moment later, a Zero shot down the Wildcat. The rest of the Vals droned on.

All the light cruiser’s antiaircraft guns, large and small, started going off at once. Pete jerked shells like a man possessed. Bursts blackened the air all around the enemy planes. One took a direct hit and turned into a fireball. The other two dove.

Joe Orsatti frantically swiveled the five-inch gun. “Aw, fuck!” he said, again and again. “Aw, fuck!”

Bombs fell free. One of them hit fifty feet to starboard of the Boise. The other caught the cruiser just abaft the bridge.

Pete flew through the air with the greatest of ease. Next thing he knew, he was in the blood-warm Pacific. He was amazed how far from the ship he’d been thrown. A good thing, too, because the Boise was already starting to settle in the water. Pete looked around for a life ring. He could dog-paddle for a while, but… Off to his left, a dark gray dorsal fin sliced the sea. It was the oldest shipwreck cliche in the world-except when it happened to you. And it was happening to Pete.

Theo Hossbach huddled with the rest of the panzer crew around a little fire in a peasant’s hut in a tiny village whose name, if it had a name, was written in an alphabet he couldn’t read. He wished for hot coffee thick with sweet cream. Yes, he was from Breslau, but Viennese-style would have suited him fine.

They’d found some tea in the hut. Water was boiling in a dented pot over the fire. No sugar. No milk. An Englishman probably would have killed himself before he drank such Scheisse. Theo looked forward to getting outside of anything warm. He would have drunk plain old hot water just then, and been glad to have it.

Hermann Witt took the pot and filled everybody’s tin cup. The loose tea in the bottom of Theo’s cup smelled great when the water hit it. He had to make himself wait before he drank so it would brew some in there.

“The Tommies would laugh at us.” Not for the first time, Adi Stoss’ way of thinking paralleled his.

Everybody swore at the Tommies-everybody except Theo, who as usual kept his ideas to himself. “Lousy bastards ran out on us, same as the French fuckers,” Lothar Eckhardt growled. The gunner scratched without seeming to notice he was doing it. Odds were he was lousy himself. Theo was pretty sure he was, too. You came into one of these places, you’d pick up company whether you liked it or not.

“Next time we see Englishmen, it’ll be through our sights,” Kurt Poske agreed.

Adi said, “Well, the good news there would be, we’d be seeing Tommies instead of Ivans. That’d mean we’d got out of Russia in one piece.”

Theo sipped his tea. By now, it was plenty strong. The caffeine made his heart beat faster. It sure held more than the ersatz coffee that came with German rations. He wondered if that crap had any at all. You could get benzedrine tablets. He’d used them once in a while-who didn’t, when you needed to keep going? — but he didn’t like them. They were too much like squashing a cockroach by dropping a building on it. Caffeine, now, caffeine was just right.

“Two-front war,” Witt said, and not another word. With just Theo and Adi there, he probably would have talked some more. Neither Kurt nor Lothar had ever given the slightest hint they would bring anything to the National Socialist Loyalty Officer, but the panzer commander didn’t take needless chances in combat with the enemy or with his own side.

“That’s what screwed us the last time. I just hope it doesn’t screw us again,” Adi said. Maybe he trusted the two new guys further than Witt did. Maybe he had his reasons, too. If Eckhardt or Poske ever reported him to the powers that be, odds were they wouldn’t do it for anything so trivial as a few ill-chosen words. He had bigger things than that to worry about.

“I wouldn’t mind getting the hell out of Russia. I mean, who in his right mind would?” Eckhardt said, a sentiment that certainly had its points. He went on, “I don’t want to get my sorry ass run out of Russia, though, know what I mean? We get run out of Russia, things aren’t going so good.”

Adi nodded. So did Theo; that was plainly true. But Adi said, “You know what this miserable country is? It’s a swamp with no bottom, that’s what. We throw in panzers and planes and people, and then we throw in some more and some more and some more after that, and the swamp just kind of goes glup! and it’s like we never did anything to begin with.”

“Glup!” Theo echoed. He liked that.

“There’s got to be a bottom somewhere,” Hermann Witt said slowly. “The Ivans have to run out of land and soldiers and machines sooner or later.” He grimaced. “Only thing I wonder is whether the Reich ’s pole is long enough to reach that bottom.”

Sooner or later. People had been saying the Russians were bound to run out of people and stuff ever since the Germans started fighting them in northeastern Poland. Now the Germans (and the Poles and Romanians and Magyars and Slovaks, but-dammit! — not the English or French any more) were halfway to Moscow. All the same, sooner or later was looking more and more like later.

The fire dwindled down toward extinction. Like the other guys in the crew, Theo glanced around for more wood to throw on it. He didn’t see any. There wasn’t any to see; they’d burnt the last of it. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, go on out to the woodpile in the square and bring back some more fuel.”

Eckhardt picked up his Schmeisser. Everybody kept a weapon handy all the time. You never could tell when some Reds would sneak past the German pickets and raise hell. But the gunner couldn’t go out without pissing and moaning first: “I just fetched firewood like two days ago. Why don’t you send the Hebe instead?”

It hadn’t been noisy inside the hut before. Now silence seemed sudden and absolute. The wind still howled and whined, but that might have been a million kilometers away. “What did you call me?” Adi asked softly. His machine pistol lay beside him. He wasn’t holding it, the way Lothar held his. All the same, Theo would have bet on Adi if shooting started. And shooting didn’t seem very far off at all. Theo glanced down at his own Schmeisser- just in case, he told himself. In case of what, he didn’t want to think about.

For a wonder, Lothar actually got how far he’d stuck his foot into it. “Hey, take an even strain,” he said, making no quick or herky-jerky moves. “I didn’t mean anything nasty by it. Honest to God, Adi, I didn’t. But, so you know, everybody in the company calls you that when you aren’t around to hear it.”

Theo hadn’t heard anyone call Adi that. Which proved… what? Not much, probably. If self-sufficient Adi had a best buddy, it couldn’t be anybody but Theo. People wouldn’t say anything Adi didn’t fancy where Theo was around to overhear it. If it got back to Adi… Theo wouldn’t have wanted him for an enemy. Nobody with a pfennig’s worth of sense would.

“Lothar, first things first. You’ll get the wood ’cause I told you to,” Witt said. “If I wanted Adi to fetch it, I would have sent him. Hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Eckhardt said, his voice uncommonly solemn.

Witt nodded, recognizing that. “ Wunderbar. Now, about the other thing… If people do call Adi that, tell ’em for Christ’s sake to cut it out. We need the SS sniffing around us like we need an asshole where our mouth ought to be. You hear me there?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” the gunner repeated, more formally yet.

“All right. Now get the hell out of here and bring back that wood before we freeze to death. Go on-scram!”

Eckhardt went. “You didn’t need to make a big deal out of it, Sergeant,” Adi said after a moment. “I shouldn’t’ve got pissed off.”

“People talk too goddamn much,” Witt said, a sentiment Theo heartily agreed with. The panzer commander went on, “That’s a dangerous nickname to have. It’d be dangerous for a fat blond Bavarian.”

He left it there. He didn’t say It’s really dangerous for somebody who kind of looks like a Jew, and who just happens to be missing his foreskin. Adi was no dummy. He could work that out for himself. After another pause, he said, “A while ago, Theo told me the guys knew. I’d kind of got used to that.”

“Knowing is one thing. Blabbing’s something else,” Witt said. “If things were different, you’d probably be a major by now, and ordering all of us around.”

“I don’t want to tell anybody what to do,” Adi said. “I just want people to leave me the fuck alone.”

Words burst from Theo: “No wonder I like you!”

The other crewmen laughed like loons. “No wonder at all,” Adi agreed.

“Enough, you lovebirds,” Witt said, and the panzer men laughed some more. “Getting through the war in one piece-like you said before, Adi, that’s the only thing that counts. The rest is just bullshit. So let’s get through, and if the other stuff needs sorting out we can always do it later.”

Lothar came back with an armload of wood to build up the fire. Theo fed in a few little skinny chunks. When they were burning well, he added some bigger ones. After a while, they caught, too. Like wall lizards basking in the sun, all five panzer men leaned toward the flames, soaking up the wonderful warmth.