Coup d'Etat

Chapter 12

Something in the mail for you, dear.” Sarah Goldman’s mother handed her an envelope.

“For me?” Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she’d got a letter. It wasn’t as if Saul could write, after all. Not having any idea where her brother was, she had to hope he was all right.

This was no letter. The envelope bore an appallingly official eagle holding a circled swastika in its claws. The eagle’s tiny printed eye caught and held hers, as if commanding her to obedience. One of the things that made the Nazis so scary was the attention they gave even such picayune details: German thoroughness run mad and in power.

“You’d better open it,” Mother said.

“I suppose so,” Sarah agreed insincerely. Attention from the Reich was the last thing she or any Jew wanted. The best you could hope for, most times, was to be overlooked.

But the envelope in her hand wouldn’t go away if she didn’t open it. Whatever the Nazis were telling her they would do, they would do whether she read about it first or not. Better to know ahead of time. Well, it might be, anyhow.

A reluctant fingernail slid under the flap. The envelope opened easily-almost too easily. Even mucilage was of an inferior grade these days. She unfolded the notice inside and read it.

“Nu?” Hanna Goldman asked. “If you open your mouth any wider, a bug will fly in, or maybe a bird.”

Sarah hadn’t noticed her jaw drop. She wasn’t surprised it had, though. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so astonished. She held up the document as if it were a bream she’d just hauled out of a creek. “It’s-” She had to try twice to get the words out: “It’s my permission to get married. They’ve-they’ve approved it.”

She’d shivered in line more than once, waiting to duel with the Nazi bureaucrats at the Munster Rathaus. Back then, her breath had smoked. She’d worn her shabby old coat, which didn’t do nearly enough to hold out winter. Nevertheless, she’d wear it again when frost came back. A Jew’s meager clothing ration wouldn’t stretch to getting her another one.

No need for a coat now. Spring burgeoned outside. Birdsong sweetened the air. Grass was green. Flowers bloomed in perfumed rainbow profusion. Butterflies flitted from one to another to another. Bees buzzed. The sun blazed down from a blue, blue sky dotted with friendly little white clouds.

Mother rushed up and hugged her. “Oh, sweetheart, that’s wonderful! You see? Even they couldn’t say no in the end.” If she didn’t want to name the Nazis, who could blame her?

“Took them long enough to say yes,” Sarah answered tartly.

“They’re… what they are,” her mother said. Sarah couldn’t imagine a worse thing to say about Germany’s masters. Mother went on, “It doesn’t matter any more, though. You have their permission. They can’t take it away again.”

Of course they could, if they decided they wanted to. But even Sarah saw no reason that they should. She smiled a secret smile. It was a good thing permission had come when it did. She wasn’t in a family way, but not because of lack of effort. She and Isidor spun the roulette wheel every time they lay down together-rubber was a war material, too important for much to be allotted to prophylactics. They also made some of sheep’s gut, but so few that Jews had no chance of getting their hands on any.

You could do other things in bed besides that. You could, and they did. But the other things, however good they felt, also felt like substitutes. Ersatz filled life in Germany. How could anybody not want the original here? If you took a chance-well, fine, you took a chance.

Her mother’s smile, seen from a few centimeters away, seemed uncommonly soft and tender. “Grandchildren,” Hanna Goldman murmured. Did she know she might have had one sooner than she would have wished? If she did, she’d never said anything about it. That was as much discretion as a daughter could hope for.

Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted babies, not in this day and age. Hostages to fortune… Were truer words ever spoken? Was this world, and this particular part of the world, a fit place for bringing up little Jews? Not likely! But that coin had two sides. If you didn’t want children, if you decided to let things end with you, the Nazis won by default. They wouldn’t hate Jews any more if they had no Jews left to hate.

She hadn’t talked about any of that with Isidor. They’d worried about her getting pregnant before they could marry, not afterwards. All the same, she had a good notion of how she’d feel. He was more down-to-earth about such things than she was. Like her father, she pondered and worried before she acted. Isidor just went ahead. Chances were he’d go ahead with a family, too, and then see if he could get it through the war in one piece.

“We’ll have to see if we can knock a doorway between your room and the one that used to be Saul’s,” Mother said. “The two of you could almost have your own little flat then.”

Almost was the word, all right. They’d still have to share the kitchen and the bathroom with her parents. Even so, she quickly said, “We’ll manage, whether we can knock the door through or not.” Isidor already lived in a flat with his folks. There’d be no room for Sarah-which didn’t stop new in-laws from moving in when they had no other choice. Here, for once, they did.

Like any choice, this one had its downside, too. Mother said, “It’s a shame he’ll have to go across town every day to get to work.”

“He’s got a bicycle,” Sarah said. With all private cars vanished from the streets except those belonging to doctors, and with Jews banned from buses and trams, a bike was the best way to get around. Aside from shank’s mare and possibly roller skates, a bike was about the only way to get around.

Hanna Goldman rolled her eyes nonetheless. “If you want to call it that,” she said. Isidor’s bicycle had to be older than he was. It had been a cheap rattletrap when it was new, and neither he nor any of the people who’d used it before him had kept it up very well. In happier times, anyone in his right mind would have been ashamed to be seen riding such a rickety contraption.

Permission to wed still in her hand, Sarah made herself look on the bright side. “No one will want to steal it.”

Mother laughed, but answered, “You never can tell these days.” And that, sadly, was also true. Because so many people had so little, and because they could legitimately buy even less, a lot of them took what they needed or what they wanted-or whatever caught their eye-when they saw the chance. Anything not nailed down was liable to disappear… and anybody with a claw hammer was liable to draw out the nails and steal them, too.

Sarah knew all that perfectly well. She couldn’t even say she’d never pilfered; what else were Jews going to do when they got even less than Aryans? She could say, “I still think that bicycle’s pretty safe,” and mean it. Her mother didn’t try to tell her she was wrong, either.

Her father kissed her when he got home. Then he fell asleep in his chair before supper. He woke up enough to eat another meager, unexciting meal. After that, he fell asleep in the chair again. When Mother and Sarah went upstairs to bed, he staggered along with them like a man coming out from under the ether cone.

Sarah sank deeply into sleep herself. When you were hungry all the time, it was easy. And sleep’s anesthetic meant you didn’t feel how hungry you were. If only she could have slept all the time… till the wedding, anyhow.

She didn’t get to sleep all night tonight. Some time after midnight, Munster’s air-raid sirens began to wail. Sarah thought it was-thought it had to be-a drill, one more example of Nazi thoroughness run amok. Since Jews weren’t allowed to use public shelters, anyway, she stayed under the blankets till flat, harsh thuds outside and windows rattling in their frames told her the RAF had come back to Germany and was playing for keeps again.

Calling to one another, she and her parents (who’d also stayed in bed as long as they could) stumbled down the stairs and huddled under the dining-room table: the best protection they had. Engines droned overhead. Flak guns barked.

After an hour or so, the raiders went away. Nothing came down too close to the house. Sarah hoped the Brucks had come through all right, too. She’d have to get over there and see, if Isidor didn’t-maybe couldn’t-get over here first.

As Father creakily crawled out from under the table, he said, “Well, I won’t go short of work for a while. Happy day!” Filling in bomb craters was a long way from lecturing about the coming of the barbarians at the end of ancient history. Or maybe it wasn’t. Who but barbarians would set things up so a university professor could live only as a road-gang laborer? Sarah chewed on that while she went upstairs. Along with the raid, it kept her from getting any more rest till dawn.

Pearl Harbor. Honolulu. When Pete McGill got back to Hawaii-got back on American soil for the first time in much too long-he found he had a third stripe waiting for him. Making corporal wasn’t that hard. Sergeant… Sergeant meant you’d been a leatherneck for a while. Well, he damn well had.

Repair crews swarmed over Pearl like ants on sandwiches forgotten after a picnic. The Japs’ attack had done more damage than U.S. authorities were letting on to the folks back home. He was amazed their carriers could have got near the place, but they damn well had.

Two carriers and a couple of battlewagons had been badly damaged. And a heavy cruiser charging out of the channel to go after the enemy fleet had taken a torpedo amidships from a lurking Japanese submarine and gone down with almost all hands. That sure hadn’t made the evening news.

A couple of bombs had started fires in the vast fuel dumps alongside the harbor. One of those still sent greasy black smoke up into the sky. How many gazillions of barrels or gallons or whatever of fuel oil had burned? How badly would that screw up American operations in the Pacific? God surely knew, and maybe the brass here and back in D.C. Even as a newly minted sergeant, Pete McGill hadn’t the faintest idea.

He took the streetcar into Honolulu when he got a seventy-two-hour pass. Promotions didn’t happen every day. He’d blow a lot of the pay bump he hadn’t seen yet buying drinks for the other Marines from the Boise and getting his ashes hauled. He mourned Vera. He missed her, too, more than he’d ever missed anybody. He really had loved her, as well as an American Marine could love a White Russian taxi dancer. But she was dead, dammit, and he was here in Hawaii without having even seen a woman since Manila. It wouldn’t be the same as it had been with her; he wondered if anything would ever be that good again. But it was still pretty fine when you bought it from a hooker who would rather have been doing her nails than you.

Honolulu felt funny. It always did, whether you were coming from the U.S. mainland or the Orient. It was neither the one nor the other, and seemed pulled both ways at once. It was crawling with soldiers and sailors and Marines. Most of the signs were in English, and most of the English you heard on the street had one familiar American accent or another.

But most of the faces that didn’t belong to military personnel had narrow eyes, high cheekbones, low noses, and golden skin. Japs, Chinamen, Filipinos, Koreans… More Japs than any other group, white people included. A leatherneck on leave didn’t go into the neighborhoods where they lived. Japanese restaurants, Japanese movie houses, Buddhist temples, even Japanese Christian churches for converts and the children of converts…

Pete saw none of that, though he knew it was there. On the mainland, they were shoving Japs into internment camps in case they felt more loyalty to Tojo than to FDR. They couldn’t do that here, even if the authorities might want to. Too goddamn many Japs in Hawaii; the place would grind to a halt without them. And nobody’d actually proved they were giving Tokyo a hand.

So a Jap bartender poured Pete a scotch on the rocks and congratulated him on his promotion. It was crappy scotch, but hey, there was a war on. And it could still get you smashed. Next to that, everything else ran a distant second.

Before long, they headed off to another joint, one Joe Orsatti knew. The Hibiscus Blossom was closer to Hotel Street, Honolulu’s main drag for joy bought and sold. It was a rowdier place than the one they’d just left. Barmaids in short, tight skirts and halter tops fetched drinks. The one who took care of Pete and his pals was also a Jap. If only her eyes were blue, she would have looked like a Siamese cat.

Orsatti patted her on the ass after she brought the second round of drinks. She glared at him. “Don’t handle the merchandise, Mac,” she snapped in tones not far removed from Hoboken or Long Island.

The Marine leered back. “If it’s merchandise, sweetheart, how much are you peddling it for?”

“More moolah than you’ve got, Charlie, however much that is,” she retorted. Somebody at another table waved to her. Off she went. The way she moved, a football referee would have flagged her for backfield in motion.

Orsatti sighed as he watched. “If she’s playing Mata Hari for old Hirohito, I bet she hears all kinds of good shit.”

“Listen to her talk without looking at her and you’d bet she’s never even heard of fuckin’ Hirohito,” Pete answered. “For all we know, she hasn’t.”

“Fat chance,” Orsatti said. Pete didn’t argue with him; he was bound to be right. The other Marine went on, “ ’sides, I like looking at her. For a slanty-eyed gal, she’s pretty goddamn cute.”

Pete wouldn’t have bothered with the qualifier. But then, he’d had his long tour in China. Even though he’d ended up falling for a blue-eyed blonde, it wasn’t because he didn’t like the way Asian women looked. They took a little getting used to, but so did beer and scotch and cigarettes and other good stuff. Orsatti had never drawn duty in Peking or Shanghai. Oriental girls still seemed exotic to him.

When the barmaid came back with another round, he tried to pick her up again, this time a little more smoothly. He still wouldn’t have given Gregory Peck or Cary Grant anything to worry about. And he struck out like a high-school kid flailing against Bob Feller.

“Well, hell. Let’s get outa here,” he said after she wiggled off once more, as if it were the Hibiscus Blossom’s fault he had bad luck and worse technique.

They wound up on Hotel Street, as Pete had known they would. Bars, strip joints, whorehouses masquerading as hotels-anything the horny heart could desire was there for the taking-if you had the jack.

Naturally, military men packed the street. So did MPs and Shore Patrolmen. Pete had his pass checked three times inside of fifteen minutes. Since it was legit, he didn’t mind showing it. Somebody who was there without proper authorization swung on the Shore Patrolman who asked for his papers. That wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa. The SP and his buddies drastically revised the jerk’s phrenology with their billy clubs. Then they slung him into a paddy wagon. It hauled him off to the brig.

“Man, if you want to fight, don’t fight those assholes,” Pete said. “More expensive than it’s worth.”

“That sorry SOB was screwed any which way,” one of his friends said. “Soon as they found out he was AWOL, he was gonna catch it.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t have to bleed, too.” Pete was a practical man.

“Sometimes you just feel like brawling and you don’t care who,” the friend said.

“Well, sure.” It wasn’t that Pete had never walked into a bar looking for a fight. It wasn’t that he’d never found one, either. “But even so…” When you took on the SPs, your movie wouldn’t have a happy ending.

His night did, at one of the joyhouses along Hotel Street. If the blonde he chose looked a little like Vera, he didn’t consciously think about that till later on. Polly wasn’t from Russia by way of Harbin; she told him she came from Fargo, North Dakota.

“So why’d you end up in Hawaii, then?” Pete asked. They had time for a Chesterfield afterwards; having been away from women for so long, he’d come in a hurry. Maybe he’d rise again fast enough for another go. He hoped so. In the meantime…

She laughed. “You go where the customers are at, Jack. In my line of work, this here is the Promised Land. And besides, if you was ever in Fargo through the winter, you’d get the hell outa there like your pants was on fire.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed. Honolulu was bound to have better weather than some pissant burg in North Dakota. Honolulu had better weather than anywhere, possibly including heaven. He stubbed out his cigarette. “How’s about you go down on me for a little while? Then I think I can do it again.”

“How’s about you give me another fin first?” For somebody from Fargo, she imitated his Bronx accent pretty well. Of course, he wouldn’t be da foist guy she evah hoid who talked liked dat.

He pulled an engraved portrait of Abe Lincoln out of his billfold. She stashed it in the nightstand next to the bed in the bare little room. They went on from there.

Alistair Walsh felt like a new man with the uniform back on. He shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. It wasn’t quite right. He felt like his old self again, was what he felt like. He’d felt like a new man in civvies, and he hadn’t fancied the way the new man felt-not a farthing’s worth, he hadn’t.

But he’d left the army out of shame at Neville Chamberlain’s bargain with Hitler, and out of suspicion that the Bentley that ran down Winston Churchill after Churchill loudly and eloquently denounced the deal wasn’t driven by a drunk, but by someone who knew just what he was about.

England’s new government was still looking into that, as it was looking into a great many things its predecessor had done under Chamberlain’s lead, and then under Sir Horace Wilson’s. But one thing that didn’t need looking into was the bargain with Hitler. That went straight into the dustbin. The war was on again.

The former government had put a lot of soldiers out to pasture: men who, like Walsh, couldn’t stomach the big switch, and whom the civilians who’d made the switch couldn’t trust to stay loyal. That was funny, if you liked.

George VI had gone on the BBC, saying the change in government and the change in policy had his blessing. In a separate address of her own, his wife had done the same. Walsh had read somewhere that Hitler called Queen Elizabeth the most dangerous woman in Europe. Considering the source, there was a compliment to be proud of.

No matter what the King and Queen said, the putsch had horrified many, many Britons. The Army hadn’t shot Sir Horace, the way Walsh was convinced the collaborating polecat deserved. Instead, it put him into what some higher up with an unfortunately bureaucratic turn of phrase called “preventive detention.”

If only Walsh knew what the detention was supposed to prevent. It didn’t prevent Horace Wilson from getting endless complaints out and seeing them printed in the Times and the other papers that had fawned on him while he was PM. The Army didn’t come down on the papers for printing that self-serving drivel, either. The generals running the country bent over backward to show they didn’t intend to abridge free speech or any other fundamental rights.

“Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but it’s bloody ridiculous,” Walsh complained to Ronald Cartland. “The buggers we ousted were more tyrannical than we dare be.”

Cartland nodded and waved to a barmaid for another whiskey: they sat in the pub near the Houses of Parliament where they’d done so much conspiring. “No great surprise there,” the MP said-no, the captain, because he was back in uniform, too. “No matter how odious Sir Horace’s government was, it was constitutionally legitimate. That meant it could do all sorts of outrageous things and get away with them. Because we are extraconstitutional, we have to be much more scrupulous or everyone will start wailing that we’re worse than Hitler. Ironic, what?”

“Oh, perhaps a trifle,” Walsh allowed. He smiled at the barmaid. “Let me have another pint, too, would you, dear?” She was young enough to be his daughter, but he was old enough that a girl young enough to be his daughter could look delicious to him.

Which, sadly, wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to look delicious to her. “Another pint. Okey-doke,” she said in a pseudo-American accent she must have picked up at the cinema. For all the warmth in her voice, he might have been a post-a thirsty post, but a post nonetheless.

He sighed. He was getting to the age where, if he wanted a young, pretty girl to make him happy, he had to lay silver on the dresser beforehand. That was an even bigger shame than any of the troubles related to the change of government.

She brought the pint of bitter and went off without a second glance-at him, anyhow. Ronald Cartland, she noticed. Well, he was younger and of higher rank and therefore probably richer-and better-looking. If you were going to complain about every little thing…

“The real danger of our position is that we’ve damaged all the principles this country’s run on the past two hundred years and more,” Cartland said. “Anyone who tries to overthrow us will have as much right to do so as we did to throw out Sir Horace-which is to say, none.”

“We may not have had the right, but we had justice, by God,” Walsh said. “If we didn’t, what was I doing in a cell when I’d committed no crime?”

“You’d plotted treason, old man. And the people with whom you’d plotted it brought it off, too,” Cartland answered with justifiable pride, since he was one of those people.

“Next interesting question is, what does old Adolf do now that the RAF’s in the air again?” Walsh said.

“No. The question is, what can he do?” the officer replied. “He’s got the Luftwaffe heavily committed against the Russians. How much can he take away and turn against us?”

“He could have the Frenchmen do his dirty work for him. They’ve got plenty of planes left at home.” Alistair Walsh had crossed the Channel in two wars to help pull French chestnuts out of the fire. Familiarity with England’s nearest neighbor did not warm to liking or trust.

Cartland looked horrified. “Daladier would never do that!.. I don’t think. We aren’t at war with France. God willing, we never shall be.”

“We’re at war with the Fritzes. France is on their side in Russia. The froggies don’t look like giving up the fight there. If we’re at war with them and France is on their side…”

“We aren’t speaking about axioms of geometry. I hope like blazes we aren’t, any road.” Cartland still sounded worried. Maybe the nasty possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. Walsh hoped it had occurred to someone in charge of running England these days.

He thought of something else. “Is anybody listening to us? We were certain the PM’s people were before we threw out the rascals. Are they still?”

“No.” This time, Cartland sounded sure. He also sounded more than a little relieved he could sound sure. “We were certain-and we were damned well right. Some changes have been made at Scotland Yard. Yes, indeed, they have. In case it makes you feel any better, the blokes who jugged you and grilled you afterwards have got their walking papers.”

Draining his pint, Walsh considered that. “As a matter of fact, sir, it does make me feel better. I’d sooner see the buggers behind bars themselves, because they were playing fast and loose with the law, but we were, too, so what the deuce? If they’re scrounging dog-ends from the gutter and cadging pennies off their betters, I’m happy enough, by God.”

He knew he was stretching things. Bastards like that didn’t have to fall back on begging, no matter how much you wished they would. Not all of their friends in high places had fallen foul of the new regime. The ones who’d kept their noses clean would give the sacked coppers a hand. You never could tell-they might need their services again one day.

If the new military government looked like losing the war it had restarted, those quiet, powerful men might need the ex-coppers’ services again quite soon.

That thought came back to Alistair Walsh with painful force two nights later. London’s air-raid sirens began to scream. The blackout had been reimposed, but it was still spotty. Too many folks didn’t care to believe the war had picked up again. The Luftwaffe bombers wouldn’t have had much trouble finding the English capital.

Walsh stumbled to a Tube station in the more-or-less dark. It was packed with frightened people, and smelled as bad as some trenches he’d known. Up above ground, antiaircraft guns thundered. Searchlights would try to pin enemy planes in their beams for the guns. Tethered barrage balloons would make the Nazis fly high and, with luck, drop inaccurately.

Drop they did. Big explosions mingled with the guns’ shorter, sharper reports. Once or twice, the ground shook under Walsh as he lay on a straw pallet and tried without much luck to sleep. People around him-not all of them women-squealed. Those hits weren’t close, but he didn’t blame the Londoners for panic and inexperience.

He went back to his room after the all-clear sounded. Fire engines clanged toward blazes that scarred chunks of the horizon with orange and gold. None of the fires was close, or likely to trouble him. His room had no damage. He promptly fell asleep once more.

In the morning, the BBC claimed thirty-one German bombers shot down by guns and night fighters. That seemed like a lot to Walsh. But then, his own side wasn’t immune to the attractions of propaganda. Or maybe they were telling the truth. Stranger things had happened… hadn’t they?

Vaclav Jezek was gloomily certain he would never learn any Spanish. If a man had grown up speaking Czech, the sounds and vocabulary of this new language were too strange to stick on his tongue or in his memory. And finding a Spaniard who knew any Czech made the loaves and fishes seem a minor miracle.

When he got leave and went into Madrid, he did find some Spaniards who knew a bit of German. His own accent wasn’t perfect-nowhere close. The locals wanted to impose the staccato rhythms of their own speech on the alien tongue. They weren’t used to making noises in the back of the throat, either. Comprehension was always an adventure.

He could get drinks. The word for wine didn’t change much from one language to another. The Spaniards used some horrible lisping word for beer, though most barkeeps understood Bier. But Spanish beer wasn’t worth drinking, not if you had a Czech’s standards. So he mostly stuck to wine or hard stuff.

He could get laid, too. Brothels were easy to find and not too expensive. Unlike Czech whores, a lot of girls in the Republic seemed proud of what they did. They even had a union. So another soldier on leave told Vaclav, anyway. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but the International swore up and down it was true. So maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

“They going to strike for a raise in pay?” he asked the other guy.

“Better working hours, too. And maybe softer mattresses,” the International said. His German was better than Jezek’s. He was a Dutchman named Jan, though, and got pissed off if anybody took him for a German.

They went on to invent other demands striking prostitutes might make. Those got sillier and lewder the longer they went on. Of course, they drank more and more while they were at it, too. Vaclav wondered if he’d remember any of it when he sobered up.

The way his head felt the next morning, he wished he didn’t remember his name, let alone last night’s foolishness. Strong coffee-the Spaniards didn’t fool around when they brewed the stuff-and the hair of the dog that bit him helped bring him back to life. Aspirins were hard to come by here, but a bit of brandy took the edge off his headache.

Jan looked more bedraggled yet. He bore down harder on the brandy and went easy on coffee. After a while, he started reviving, too. “I hurt myself,” he said mournfully.

“Red wine will do it to you, all right,” Vaclav agreed.

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jan said.

Of course, bullets and bombs and shell fragments would also do it to you, and they wouldn’t give you any fun while they did. No wonder Vaclav and so many other soldiers drank and screwed as if there were no tomorrow whenever they got the chance. For too many of them, there would be no tomorrow, and they knew it, whether in the head or, more often, in the belly and the balls.

Vaclav was anything but thrilled about going back into the line when his leave ended. He was even less thrilled when he got there. Spanish spring packed the punch of Central European summer. The sun blazed down out of a sky a brighter, less washed-out blue than you ever saw in Prague. Dust was everywhere. It even smelled baked. And the stink of dead flesh seemed nastier than he’d ever known before. Meat spoiled in nothing flat in weather like this.

When Vaclav complained about the reek, Benjamin Halevy said, “You notice it more because you got away from it for a while, you lucky son of a bitch.”

“Ahh, your mother,” Jezek replied without rancor. “That’s part of it, but I don’t think that’s all. The heat really does make everything smell worse. And how much hotter will it get in the summertime?”

“We’ll find out,” the Jew said. “The Internationals talk about salt tablets and heatstroke.”

“Some of that’s probably just bullshit to make us turn green.” Vaclav wished he’d phrased it differently. The way he made it sound, some of what the Internationals said probably wasn’t bullshit. Well, they’d been here longer than he had. Chances were they knew what they were talking about, dammit.

Shouldering his antitank rifle convinced him the monster had got heavier while he was on leave. He couldn’t blame that on the warm Spanish spring. Pretty soon, though, he got used to listing to the right whenever he slung the rifle on his shoulder.

He started looking for targets well behind the Nationalists’ lines. He blew the head off some bigwig just getting out of a Mercedes. Remembering what Halevy had said a while earlier, he hoped it was Marshal Sanjurjo, but evidently not. The Republic didn’t claim Sanjurjo’s scalp, and the Nationalists didn’t go into mourning-or hysterics-because they’d lost him.

They did try to pay back the Czechs and the Internationals. Artillery and mortar fire rained down on their positions. The bastards might have been saying You want to play that way, we’ll make you sorry. In fact, that had to be exactly what they were saying.

A lot of the artillery rounds were duds, which saved some lives. Vaclav had noticed that a lot of the rounds the Republicans fired were duds, too. Which meant… what? That Spanish munitions factories weren’t everything they might have been? Evidently.

Vaclav was a careful, thorough sniper. He didn’t let himself fall into routines. He didn’t keep coming back to the same hideouts day after day. Snipers who made stupid mistakes like that didn’t last long. When deciding to go right or left along the line, he’d toss a coin and do what it told him. If he didn’t know what he’d do till he did it, the shitheads trying to slaughter him couldn’t outguess him.

He potted another Nationalist officer a few days later. It was a hell of a long shot, going on two kilometers. He was proud as hell when he watched the fellow grab at himself and slowly crumple. The Nationalist seemed much closer through the telescopic sight, but not that close.

Everybody on his own side congratulated him when he reported the kill. Only later, when he drank some Spanish peach brandy with Benjamin Halevy, did he think about what he’d actually done. “Mother of God!” he said. “Everyone thinks I’m the best thing since sausage because I can murder people farther away than the other guys can.”

The Jew looked at him. His eyes were bottle-green. “You just figured this out?”

“Nooo.” Vaclav let the word stretch. “But it kind of hit me more than it usually does.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, maybe that was the son of a bitch who ordered the artillery barrage after you nailed the last big shot,” Halevy said. “Even if he wasn’t, he was no friend of ours. You think he’d worry if he’d just shot you?”

“Who knows? Who knows anything these days?” Vaclav said. Maybe the brandy was hitting him harder than he’d thought it would. Or maybe he was looking at what he really did in the war, something few front-line soldiers could ever be comfortable trying. “This is a fuck of a way to decide who gets to do what.”

“What would you rather do? Roll the dice?” Halevy said. “Suppose the other guy doesn’t go along with losing? Then what? You bash the asshole over the head with a rock, that’s what.”

That was what, all right. Force had a brute simplicity nothing else could match. If the other guy was dead, he couldn’t stop you. If he feared you’d kill him, he wouldn’t have the nerve to try to stop you. “How does that make us any better than wildcats and wolverines?” Vaclav asked.

Halevy reached out and tapped the antitank rifle’s long barrel with the first two fingers of his right hand. “Wildcats and wolverines have to get close to do their dirty work,” he said. “We’re civilized. We can kill from a long way off.”

“Lucky us.” Vaclav’s voice sounded hollow, even to himself. He picked up the brandy bottle and tilted it back. Sometimes not thinking was better. Nice, civilized brandy took care of that, all right.