West and East

Chapter 15

Pete McGill had never figured he would walk into a shop that sold carved jade and other jewels. Then again, he'd never figured he would fall in love with a White Russian taxi dancer. Life was full of surprises. He was enjoying this one a hell of a lot more than, say, getting stomped by half a dozen Japanese soldiers with hobnailed boots.

All the same, he'd come to the Jade Tree Maker out on Yates Road by himself. If he'd had any of his buddies along, they would have told him he was pussy-whipped. They might even have been right. But that would have made him more likely to try to punch them out, not less.

A Eurasian man in a sharp silk suit stood behind the counter. "Good day," he said in smooth English. The way he dipped his head was almost a bow. "How may I help you today, sir?"

"Right now I'm only looking," Pete said.

"Of course." The proprietor or clerk or whatever he was pretended the American Marine didn't exist. He was good at it. A white man would have kept sneaking glances Pete's way. This fellow didn't. He had the Oriental knack for not seeing what lay right under his nose. You needed that knack if you were going to live in the crowded warrens of Peking or Shanghai without going nuts.

If Pete tried to heist something, now… The man in the suit would turn out to have been watching all along. Understanding as much, Pete kept his hands to himself as he examined the merchandise.

Jade trees, sure enough. They came in all sizes from three inches to three feet tall, all qualities of jade-jadeite was a much more brilliant green than the cheaper nephrite-and all degrees of elaboration in the carving. Prices started at a few dollars Mex and went straight up like a mortar bomb.

He thought-he hoped-Vera would like a jade tree. He had cash in his pocket. A corporal's pay was nothing back in the States; in Shanghai, it made him well-off. He had nothing to spend his money on but cigarettes and booze-both cheap-and his lady love. Spend he would.

He picked up a jade tree: not a very big one, but full of detailwork in the carving of branches and leaves, and of peasants and cattle on the base. When he took it over to the counter, the Eurasian man dipped his head again. "You are a man of taste," he said.

Which meant the dicker would be harder. "How much do you want for it?" he asked.

"The price is on the tag here." The man in the silk suit tapped it with his forefinger. "One hundred twenty-five dollars Mex."

That was about forty bucks U.S.-a month's pay, more or less. The exchange rate went up and down, often wildly. Pete didn't get mad or storm out. He'd played these games before. "I know that's what the price tag says," he said patiently. "But how much do you really want for it?"

"You are an American," the Eurasian said. You've got lots of cash. Why do you care about getting gouged? Everybody in Shanghai thought that way, and with some reason. But only some. Even Vera thought that way. Pete might be head over heels, but he wasn't blind. He didn't think so, anyhow.

He stayed patient now. "I'm not an American general-I'm an American corporal. A hundred and a quarter Mex is too steep for me."

"What a pity," the man behind the counter murmured. For a moment, Pete thought there'd be no haggle after all. But then the fellow's narrow shoulders shifted as he sighed. "Perhaps, from an American corporal, I might take a hundred and ten."

Pete ended up getting it for seventy-five dollars Mex. He'd hoped to beat the Eurasian down to half the price on the tag, but this wasn't bad. The man swaddled the jade tree in cotton batting and wrapped it in newspapers full of incomprehensible Chinese hentracks. "Much obliged," Pete said. It wouldn't look like anything special as he carried it down the street. In a town where thievery was as much a sport as a crime, that mattered.

"Not at all, sir. A pleasure matching wits with such a good bargainer," the Eurasian replied. Of course he'd still made a profit at the price Pete paid-he wasn't in business for the fun of it. How much had he made? Was that a polite You sucker!? His face gave away nothing. Pete was glad not to have to face him across a poker table.

Bauble in hand, he walked down Yates Road. He knew where he was going next, and 332 was on the other side of the street from 343. Crossing meant risking his life, but he made it. KEN KEE-EMBROIDERY AND UNDERWEAR, the sign over the door said, with a picture of a lofty pagoda next to the words and some Chinese above them. Pete drew himself up straight before going in, as if advancing on an enemy trench. If you wanted something fancy in the way of lingerie, he'd heard, this was the place that had it.

The shopgirl who greeted him with a bright smile could have made a mint dancing in any of Shanghai's fancy clubs. She was tiny and gorgeous. "Yes, sir?" she said, her voice ringing like silver bells.

"Just looking," Pete mumbled again. This was harder than going up against a trench full of Japs. They just scared you; they didn't embarrass you.

He'd never bought lingerie before. He'd never dreamt he might want to buy lingerie. But when you found yourself with a gorgeous girlfriend, didn't you want to make her even gorgeouser? (The English teachers who'd rapped his knuckles at every mistake and helped encourage him to drop out of high school and join the Marines would have flinched, but not a goddamn one of them was within 5,000 miles of Shanghai.)

He nervously eyed a gown. He'd also never dreamt even silk could be so transparent. You could see the more substantial blue thing behind it right through the fabric. He wanted to touch it, but didn't dare. It looked as if it would tear if you breathed on it. When he thought about seeing Vera through that fabric, he had to turn away from the salesgirl till his hard-on went down.

When he swung toward her again, he coughed a couple of times and asked, "Um-how much for, uh, this one?" He pointed.

"Let me see, sir." She walked over and looked at the tag. "A hundred dollars Mex, even."

"Ouch!" Pete exclaimed. "That's more than I can afford."

"It's very fine quality." She didn't add And your girlfriend had better be, if she's going to put it on, but he could hear it in her chiming voice. She cocked her head to one said, studying him. "Well, what can you afford?"

No matter what the tags said, there weren't many fixed prices in Shanghai. "I was thinking, oh, fifty," Pete answered. Coming back with half the asking price was a standard opening move-a conservative one, but the place intimidated him too much to let him go any lower.

She nodded and came down a little. Pete moved up. He felt less confident than he had haggling with the Eurasian who sold jade trees. Thinking about jade trees didn't make him horny. Thinking about this gown… He almost had to turn away from the shopgirl again.

He ended up paying eighty dollars Mex, more than the carved tree had cost. So much cash, for something that was hardly there! Well, that was the point, wasn't it?

When the girl wrapped up the gown, it seemed to take up no space at all. It didn't weigh anything, either. Maybe it wasn't silk after all. Maybe some clever Chinaman had figured out how to curdle air, just a little.

Pete got out of Ken Kee's as if the place had caught fire behind him. The salesgirl didn't laugh at his retreat, but he could feel her amused eyes on his back. How many guys had she seen sneaking out of there? It wasn't as if he were buying dirty pictures, dammit. He paused out on the sidewalk on Yates Road. Dirty pictures only promised. This nightgown would deliver. Boy, would it ever!

But he wasn't completely stupid. The next time he saw Vera, he gave her the jade tree first. "Got something for you, babe," he said, as casually as he could.

"Chto?" That meant What? When you caught her by surprise, she still sometimes came out with Russian without thinking. He'd got some real wrapping paper from a clerk at the consulate, so the tree looked nicer now than it had when he took it out of the shop. Vera's quick, clever fingers stripped off the paper and the cotton wool. "Ahh," she said. "It is very pretty, Pete." Chances were she could guess to the penny what he'd paid for it, too. By the warmth of the kiss she gave him, she approved. "We go out now?"

They went out. He was throwing away money like a drunken sailor-like a drunken Marine-but he didn't care. Not while he was with Vera he didn't, anyhow.

They ate. They drank. They danced. They drank. By the time they went back to her little chamber, he was a drunken Marine. Not too drunk, though. He hoped.

With an air of suddenly remembering, he pulled the smaller package from an inside pocket. "This is for you, too," he said. If she didn't like it… Would dying on the spot or wishing he were dead be worse?

She wasn't quite so deft unwrapping this one; she'd also been knocking them back. "Ahh," she said once more, this time on a different note. She unfolded the gown and held it up. It still might as well have not been there. She gave him a slow sidelong smile. "For myself, darling, I would not buy this. I would not wear this. For you… Do you want me to?"

"Jesus, do I!" he said hoarsely. "Do you gotta ask?"

Asking was part of the game. Vera understood that, even if Pete didn't. She also understood enough to walk behind him and say, "Not to turn around until I am telling you." A pause. Faint rustlings. "Okay now."

He turned. She looked even better than he'd imagined, and he hadn't thought such a thing possible. He took her in his arms. Somehow, the silk also made her feel more like a woman than she ever had before, and she'd always felt about as much like a woman as a woman could feel.

And he wasn't too drunk. Oh, no. That turned out to be better than ever, too. One more time, he hadn't dreamt it could.

SERGEANT CARRASQUEL GLOWERED in the direction of downtown Madrid, only a few kilometers away but as unreachable as the bottom of the sea or the mountains of the moon. "Stupid bastards," he snarled at no one in particular. "They brought us here to take the capital away from the Republic, but we're farther away than we were right after we came up from Gibraltar."

"It's those damned Internationals, Sergeant." Joaquin Delgadillo knew he had to soften up the underofficer before Carrasquel started throwing around extra duty or dangerous assignments. "If they hadn't got between us and the city, we might be in there by now."

"That's what she said," Carrasquel retorted. "Just shows the brass has its head up its ass, that's all."

"You didn't say things like that when Marshal Sanjurjo came up to look things over," Joaquin said slyly.

"I said plenty. What good would more have done?" Carrasquel replied. "He is a marshal. He talked nice to me, but to the likes of him a sergeant isn't even a squashed turd on the sole of his boot." He looked around. "I won't go on about taking things up the ass where Major Uribe can hear me, either. He'd think it was a good idea."

Joaquin giggled, deliciously scandalized. "He's got cojones," he said in what might or might not have been reproof.

"Sure he does," the sergeant agreed. "And he'd like 'em to be slapping the backside of some pretty little boy-or he'd like some big manly fellow's cojones slapping his backside. Or maybe both?"

"Both?" The straitlaced private hadn't thought of that. Could you both do and be done by? He supposed you could, but… "?Madre de Dios!"

"She hasn't got any cojones. I'm sure of that. Hell, she didn't even get Joseph's," Carrasquel said.

This time, Delgadillo didn't answer right away. He was scandalized all over again, and not so deliciously this time. At last, stiffly, he said, "If you're going to make filthy jokes about the Virgin, you really should fight for the Republic." Everybody knew the people on the other side hated God-and He hated them, too.

"God understands me," Carrasquel said. "If a snot-nosed private doesn't, I won't lose sleep over it."

Major Uribe had said that God forgave his love life. Everybody seemed to think God would be soft on him in particular, even if all the other sinners running around loose would roast on Satan's grill forever, with demons sticking pitchforks into them every so often to turn them and make sure they cooked evenly on all sides. Joaquin didn't think God worked that way. It wasn't as if God had told him He didn't-God didn't waste time talking to a snot-nosed private. But that was how it looked to him.

"Go liberate some firewood." Sergeant Carrasquel talked to him, all right. "If you've got the time to jaw with me, you've got the time to do some real work." With a martyred sigh, Joaquin started scrounging. He'd tried to keep Carrasquel sweet-tempered, and look what he got for it! Nobody else would sympathize, either. The rest of the guys would just be glad he was busting his butt and they weren't.

To add injury to insult, Major Uribe chose him to join a raiding party that night. "We need some prisoners, sweethearts," Uribe lisped. "We always need prisoners. Have to keep track of what the dirty Reds are up to. They're going straight to hell, and you can count on it." He crossed himself.

So did Delgadillo. He also started working the beads on his rosary. How many prayers would he need to stay safe in a trench raid? The probable number struck him as unpleasantly large. He worked the beads harder. Hail, Mary, full of grace. Don't listen to the foul-mouthed sergeant. That wasn't your standard Ave Maria, but it came from the bottom of his heart.

After he got done with the rosary, Joaquin fixed the bayonet on his rifle-something he hardly ever did-and sharpened one edge of the blade on his entrenching tool. Trench raiding was close-quarters fighting at its nastiest. A couple of the men in the raiding party carried machine pistols, to fill the air around them with lead. Major Uribe had a sword-not an officer's ceremonial sword, but a shorter, fatter blade, almost a pirate's cutlass. Christ only knew where he'd found it. By the way he made it wheep! through the air as he limbered up in the Nationalist trenches, he knew what to do with it. And it went without saying that he would lead the party himself. No matter how queer he was, he never sent men where he wouldn't go himself.

No moon tonight. That was good. Light wouldn't betray the raiders as they crawled toward the Republican lines. A few hundred meters away, some of the other soldiers in the Nationalist trenches started shooting at the enemy. As Major Uribe had hoped, the Republicans fired back. With luck, the racket would cover any little noises the raiding party made.

With luck! What beautiful words those were! Joaquin had thought about that before, usually when artillery dropped too close. It crossed his mind again as he scrambled out of the trench and slithered forward.

Somewhere not far away, a cricket chirped. It fell silent as the Nationalist soldiers went by. "Mierda," Joaquin muttered under his breath. An alert Republican sentry might wonder why the bug suddenly shut up.

He couldn't do anything about that. All he could do was go on. The Republicans had barbed wire in front of their positions, damn them. Most wiring in Spain was halfhearted: a few strands, easy to cut through and to get through. Not here. The Internationals took war seriously. Damn them, too, in spades.

"No worries," Major Uribe said. He had wire cutters. The lengths twanged as they parted one by one. The noise seemed very loud to Joaquin, but the enemy didn't start shooting. Maybe the Mother of God was watching over him. The major hissed in the darkness. "Come along, lambs. All clear now."

On they went, mostly on their bellies. There was the parapet. In. Grab. Out. It would be easy. It could be easy.

"At my count of three, we rush," Uribe whispered. "Uno… Dos…"

He never got to tres. All hell broke loose. Internationals popped up along the parapet and started blasting away with everything they had. The Nationalists shrieked in despair. Major Uribe ran forward, sword drawn. Starlight glittered on the blade-for a moment. Then a bullet caught him. He groaned and fell. The sword flew from his hand.

Another bullet grazed Joaquin's shoulder. "Aii!" he howled, and then clapped both hands to his mouth. The more noise he made, the easier the target he gave the enemy. Well, a slug had found him anyhow. Blood dripped warm down his arm.

The firing eased for a moment. From the trench, someone called out in accented Spanish: "Surrender! Come in now! We'll take prisoners if you do. If you don't, you're dead. First chance, last chance, only chance. Now!"

How many meters back to his own lines? Too many. Joaquin was sure of that. Maybe they would take prisoners. His side had wanted some, after all. "I'm coming!" he said. Two or three other men also gave up. The others, he decided, would never move again, not in this life.

He slid down into the trench. An International frisked him in the dark. The fellow took everything that would have done him any good in a fight, and his wallet, too. That was a joke-he had all of seven pesetas in there. He didn't say anything. The foreigner would find out this wasn't even chicken feed.

"Get moving," the guy said in bad Spanish. "Not to do anything stupid, or I shoot you in the back.?Comprende?"

"Si," Joaquin said miserably, and then, "Where are you from?"

"Estados Unidos. Nueva Iorque," the International answered as they started toward Madrid.

"Why did you come here?" If Joaquin kept the guy talking, maybe he wouldn't shoot him for the fun of it. Maybe.

"For freedom," the American said. "Why do you want to fight for a puto like Marshal Sanjurjo?"

"For my country," Joaquin replied. The American-was he a Jew? wasn't everybody from New York a Jew? Joaquin had never talked with a Jew before-laughed at him. He would have laughed at the other fellow's so-called freedom, if only he were the one holding the rifle. But he wasn't. Head down, he shambled off into captivity. NIGHT IN THE SIBERIAN WOODS. Hideki Fujita sat in a foxhole, slapping at mosquitoes. Daytime, nighttime… The mosquitoes didn't care. They bit whenever they found bare skin. Fujita had itchy welts all over. The damn mosquitoes had bitten him right through his puttees. He wouldn't have believed they could do that till he got here, but he did now.

"Hayashi!" he called.

"What is it, Sergeant-san?" the superior private asked.

"What's the name of that bloodsucking demon in the American movie?"

"Ah! He's called Dracula, Sergeant-san," Shinjiro Hayashi answered. Fujita could hear the relief in his voice. He'd figured Fujita wanted something harder, something more dangerous. Whatever a sergeant wanted, a private had to give it to him.

"Hai! Dracula!" Fujita said, and slapped again. "The night tonight is full of Draculas. You hear them buzzing, neh?"

"That's right," Hayashi said. Not even a private with an education would ever tell a sergeant he was wrong. If he did, he'd get an education of a brand-new kind, but not one he'd want.

Fujita wanted a cigarette. He didn't light up. Who could guess where a Russian sniper might be lurking? Like any other hairy animals, the Russians were at home among the trees. A bullet might fly out of nowhere if he struck a match. Or even the smell of burning tobacco might guide a sniper toward him. Who could say how Russians knew what they knew?

They didn't know how to give up. Though the Kwantung Army had cut the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Red Army counterattacks showed that the enemy would keep trying to restore the lifeline to Vladivostok.

A buzz in the air… Fujita paused with his hand raised to swat at something. This was no mosquito: this was a deeper sound, almost a rumble. Japanese bombers flew by at night to pound Russian positions farther north. And sometimes the Russians returned the favor. These sounded like Russian machines, sure as hell. Their note was different from those of Japanese airplanes. To Fujita, it seemed more guttural, like the incomprehensible Russian language compared to his own.

"Bombers!" someone yelled in perfectly comprehensible Japanese.

Just before the bombs started whistling down, Fujita did stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it. Why not? It would make him feel a tiny bit better-and, if there were Russian snipers in the neighborhood, they'd be scared out of their wits, too. Those planes were dropping by dead reckoning, dropping blind. Bombers, as Fujita had found, were none too accurate even when they could see their targets. When they couldn't… Any Russian snipers faced at least as much danger as the Japanese on whom they preyed.

The first crashing explosions came from a couple of kilometers behind the trench line. Fujita breathed easier. Let the quartermasters and cooks and the rest of the useless people get a taste of what war was like for a change! How would they like it? Not very much, not if he was any judge.

Then he said, "Uh-oh." That didn't seem enough. "Zakennayo!" he added. The bombs were coming closer. He'd seen that happen before. After the lead plane dropped, the others would use his bursts as an aiming point. But they wouldn't want to stick around any longer than they had to. They'd drop too soon, and the ones behind them sooner still, and…

And Hideki Fujita cowered in his hole as the explosions crept nearer and nearer. "Mother!" someone wailed. "Oh, Mother!" That wasn't a wounded man's scream-it was just terror. Fujita had a hard time condemning the frightened soldier. He was about to shit himself, too.

He almost tore down his trousers so as not to foul them. Only one thing stopped him: the thought that the mosquitoes would feast on his bare backside if he did. He hadn't got bitten too badly there. He clamped down as hard as he could and hoped for the best.

Crump! That one was close. CRUMP! That one was closer-much closer. The ground shook, as if in a big earthquake. Fujita knew more about earthquakes than he'd ever wanted to learn. To their sorrow, most Japanese did.

But earthquakes didn't throw razor-sharp, red-hot shards of steel through the air. Several of them wheeped and snarled by above Fujita's head. Dirt kicked up by the explosions arced down on him. Blast tore at his ears and his lungs. He breathed out as hard as he could. It might not do much good, but he didn't think it could hurt.

Then the bombs started going off farther away. Some of them had to be landing on Red Army positions. Instead of exultation, Fujita felt a kind of exhausted pity for the Russians huddling in their trenches. It wasn't as if his own side hadn't also tried to kill him.

Did blasts murder mosquitoes? He hoped so, but was inclined to doubt it. Nothing else did much good against the droning pests.

He couldn't hear them now. Someone was shouting something. He had trouble making that out, too. Yes, the near miss had messed up his ears. It wasn't the first time. He wondered how long they would need to come back to normal. Time would tell.

The shout came again, more urgent but no more understandable. "Nan desu-ka?" Fujita shouted back. What is it? He heard a little something the next time, but not enough to make sense of what the yelling soldier was saying. "What about Lieutenant Hanafusa?" he demanded.

"He's dead." This time, the key word came through very clearly. The other man added something else. Fujita caught the last part of it: "-left but his boots."

The sergeant's stomach did a slow lurch. He knew what happened to men who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lieutenant Hanafusa's spirit would join the rest of Japan's heroic dead at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. His body… His body was probably splashed over half a square kilometer.

Somebody out there in the night said something else, something with Sergeant Fujita's name in it. "I'm here," Fujita called. "What was that? So sorry, but my ears are ringing like a bell."

Ringing or not, he got the answer very clearly: "You're in command of the platoon till we get a new officer. Sergeant Jojima got his hand blown off, and Sergeant Iwamura's hurt, too. So you're the senior noncom."

"What do we need to do now?" Fujita asked. But the other soldier couldn't tell him that. Only an officer could. And if any officers were left in the neighborhood, he wouldn't find himself in charge of the platoon. So he had to figure it out for himself. One thing looked blindingly obvious: if he ordered the men to retreat, somebody would hang him. "Hold tight!" he yelled as loud as he could. "If the Russians come, drive them back."

That sounded brave-braver than it was, probably. With any luck, the round-eyed barbarians would no more be able to attack than the Japanese were to defend.

So it proved. The rest of the night passed with hardly a shot fired by either side. When morning came, Fujita could see what a mess the bombs had made of the platoon's position and order his men to start setting things to rights. He didn't need to be an officer to see that that needed doing. How much did you need to be an officer to see? Not for the first time, he suspected it was less than officers claimed. IF COPENHAGEN WASN'T A MIRACLE, Peggy Druce couldn't imagine what one would look like. The lights were on. Cars ran through the streets amidst the swarms of Danes on bicycles. Somehow, nobody seemed to get clobbered. No one looked shabby. No one seemed to have even heard of rationing, let alone suffered under it. You could buy all the gas you wanted, and all the clothes you wanted, too.

And the food! My God, the food! Peggy gorged on white bread and butter, on fine Danish ham, on pickled herring-on everything she wanted. She poured down good Carlsberg beer. The only things with which she didn't stuff herself were potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. She'd had enough of those in Germany to last her about three lifetimes.

She did her best not to think of Constantine Jenkins. She was back in touch with Herb. All the cable lines between America and Europe passed through England, and the English allowed no traffic with the continental enemy. But Denmark was a neutral, just like the USA. She and her husband could catch up on what had happened since last October.

On most of it, anyhow. Of course Peggy wouldn't put anything about the embassy undersecretary in a wire, or even a letter. She didn't think she'd ever be able even to talk about what happened with him. I was drunk, she told herself, over and over. And she had been. But she'd been horny, too, or she wouldn't have gone to bed with him no matter how drunk she was.

That wasn't the worst of it, either. Would Herb have got horny, too, there across the Atlantic? Sure he would; Herb was one of the most reliably horny guys she'd ever known. What would he have done about it, with her away for so long? What wasn't he putting into his telegrams and letters? What wouldn't he want to talk about after she got home?

Every time that crossed her mind, she muttered to herself. It wasn't that she'd mind-too much-if he'd laid some round-heeled popsy. But not being able to talk about things with him… That wasn't good. That was about as bad as it could get, in fact. They'd always been able to talk about everything. If they had to put up walls against each other, something precious would have gone out of their marriage-part of the whole point of being married, in fact.

Before long, she'd have the chance to find out about all that. Travel between Denmark and the UK was more complicated than it had been before the war. Because of mines and U-boats, few ships cared to cross the North Sea. Airplanes flew between one country and the other, but they carried far fewer passengers. Peggy couldn't book a flight to London any sooner than three weeks after she got to Copenhagen.

In the meantime… In the meantime, she made like a tourist. She rented a bicycle herself, relying on the polite Danish drivers not to run her down. She shopped. You could buy things in Copenhagen! The shop windows weren't mocking lies, the way they were in Berlin. If you saw it on display, you could lay down your money, and the shopkeeper would hand it to you. He'd even gift-wrap it for you if you asked him to. Quite a few Danes knew enough English to get by. A lot of the ones who didn't could manage in German. Peggy wasn't fond of the language, but she could use it, too.

Danish radios picked up not only Dr. Goebbels' rants but also the BBC. The International Herald-Tribune reported both sides' war bulletins. After so long with only the German point of view dinning in her ears, that seemed almost unnatural to Peggy. She presumed Danish papers did the same thing, but she couldn't read those.

The Danes might publish both sides' war news, but they didn't seem the least bit military themselves. She saw very few soldiers. Like so many other things, that reminded her she wasn't in Berlin any more. At the heart of the Third Reich, more men wore uniforms than civilian clothes. And she had trouble imagining German soldiers pedaling along on bicycles, waving to pretty girls as they passed. German soldiers always looked as if they meant business. The Danes seemed more like play-acting kids in uniform.

At Amalienborg, off Bredgade, the royal guard changed every day at noon. The soldiers there looked a little more serious, but only a little. The cut of their tunics and trousers and the funny flare of their helmets still kept them from being as intimidating as their German counterparts. Or maybe that was because Peggy had seen Wehrmacht men in action, while only the oldest of old men remembered the last time Denmark fought a war.

Between two and half past five every afternoon, young people promenaded from Frederiksberggade past the best shops to Kongens Nytorv, near the palace. Peggy found the parade oddly charming. It was something she would have expected in Madrid (before Spain went to hell, anyhow) or Lisbon, not Scandinavia.

Days slid off the calendar, one by one. Getting her exit visa from Denmark and an entry visa cost some money, but not a speck of stomach lining. Examining the Czechoslovak and German stamps, the minor official at the British embassy who issued the entry visa remarked, "Seems as though you've had a bit of a lively time, what?"

If that wasn't a prime bit of British understatement, Peggy had never heard one. "Oh, you might say so," she answered-damned if she'd let the American side down.

She wondered if the functionary would ask her about what things were like in the enemy nation, but he didn't. He took her money, plied his rubber stamp with might and main, and used mucilage to affix the visa in her passport. "Safe journey," he told her.

"Much obliged," Peggy said. The phrase was a polite commonplace. Suddenly, though, she felt the words' true meaning. "I am much obliged to you-everybody who's finally helping me get home."

"I am here to assist travelers, ma'am," the official said, a trifle stiffly.

"Yes. I know. That's why I'm obliged to you," Peggy replied. He didn't get it. He was an Englishman, but maybe the war and all the accompanying madness seemed no more real to him than they did to the Danes. How long had he worked here?

Well, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she had the documents she needed. Nothing would keep her off that airplane. Nothing!

She sent a wire to Herb: EVERYTHING SET. FIRST ENGLAND, THEN USA. WHOOPEE! LOVE, PEGGY. The clerk at the telegraph office had to ask her how to spell Whoopee. She was happy to tell him.

Herb's answer was waiting at the hotel when she finished spending money for the day: WHOOPEE IS RIGHT, BABE. SEE YOU SOON! LOVE, ME. She smiled. He always signed telegrams to her like that. And, like her, he'd stayed under the ten-word minimum-rate limit. They were nowhere near poor. When you'd been through the Depression, though, you watched every penny from habit. When you weren't shopping, of course. Well, sometimes even then, but not always.

She ate another splendid Danish breakfast the next morning. One day to go. She was all packed. The only thing she'd have to do tomorrow would be to put the clothes she had on now into her suitcase. What she'd wear then was already draped over a chair in her room. She intended to go to the airport very, very early. She didn't care how bored she'd get waiting for the plane. As with the train out of Germany, she wasn't going to miss it. She wasn't, she wasn't, she WASN'T!

She had lunch at the Yacht Pavilion. A guidebook called it delightful, and she agreed. She could see the statue of the Little Mermaid staring out into the sound. The smorrebrod was good, the aquavit even better.

Men started getting off a couple of freighters in the harbor and forming up in long columns on the piers. Peggy's eye passed over them, then snapped back. "No," she whispered. But yes. She'd never mistake the color those men were wearing. She grabbed a passing waiter by the arm and pointed across the almost waveless water. "Those are German soldiers! You're being invaded!"

He looked at her, at the troops in Feldgrau and beetling Stahlhelms, back to her again. Laughing, he shook his head. "No. It cannot be. Someone is making a film, that's all."

Briskly, the German soldiers marched off the piers and into Copenhagen. They looked as if they were heading straight for the royal palace. Well, where else would they be going?

A few rifle shots rang out, then a sharp burst of machine-gun fire. Faint in the distance, Peggy heard screams. Blood drained from the waiter's face, leaving him pale as vanilla ice cream. All over the Yacht Pavilion, people started exclaiming. "But it cahn't be!" someone said in clear British English.

More gunfire. More screams. It could be, all right. And it damn well was. That plane wouldn't fly to England tomorrow, or anywhere else. Peggy burst into tears.