Coup d'Etat

Chapter 19

The farther south and east into the Ukraine the Germans and Romanians drove the Red Army, the more familiar things became for Ivan Kuchkov. More of the people spoke Russian, for instance. It was Ukrainian-accented Russian, with guttural h’s replacing proper g’s, but he could more or less make sense of it. Real Ukrainian hovered right at the edge of comprehensibility for him, which pissed him off.

People farther south and east here didn’t seem so ready to prick up their ears and whinny at the sound of a crappy German oompah band, either. They remembered they were Soviet citizens. Maybe the NKVD had left them too scared to forget. Kuchkov wasn’t inclined to be picky. As long as they didn’t give the Hitlerite swine a helping hand, he didn’t care why.

He wished more T-34s would come into the fight. “The Fritzes shit their drawers every time they see one of those fuckers,” he said as his section cooked this and that around a fire built from the planks of a blown-up barn. “The pussies’d all run for home if we had enough.”

His men nodded. For one thing, he was obviously right. For another, arguing with him was a losing proposition. He backed up his words with fists, knees, teeth, a knife he carried in his boot, and anything else that might come in handy. Even the politruk had quit agitating that he should join the Party. In the middle of a war, a political officer could meet an untimely end just like anybody else. And chances were the authorities would be too busy with bigger stuff to ask a whole lot of questions.

Off to the north, a Soviet machine gun fired a couple of short bursts. No German machine gun answered, so maybe the guy at the trigger was shooting at shadows. Or maybe he’d scragged a Nazi. Kuchkov hoped so.

All of his men had cocked their heads in the direction of the gunfire. When it petered out, they nodded or smiled and went back to whatever they’d been doing. So did he. That wasn’t trouble. It wasn’t trouble for his section, anyhow, which was the only kind of trouble he worried about. The smart fuckers with the fancy rank badges on their uniforms cared about how the whole front was going. This tiny piece of it was plenty for him.

One of the soldiers turned coarse tobacco from a pouch and a strip of old newspaper into a cigarette. He lit it with the tip of a burning twig. After blowing out a long, gray smoke stream, he said, “Maybe we’ll get to stay here awhile.”

“Watch your dumb cunt of a mouth, Vanya,” Kuchkov said without heat.

“Huh?” Vanya wasn’t the brightest star in the sky. But even he got it after a couple of seconds. “Oh. Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.”

“ Sorry ’s all right for me. There’s plenty of pricks who’d stick sorry right up your sorry ass, though,” Kuchkov growled, more to make the soldier remember than because he was really angry. Officers went on and on about squashing defeatism wherever it stuck up its ugly head. The NKVD squashed people it imagined to be defeatists, usually for good. If somebody here ratted on poor, slow Vanya… Kuchkov didn’t know there was an informer in his section, but he would have been surprised if there weren’t. Unlike the poor jerk with the roll-your-own, he understood instinctively how the system worked.

He had his own reasons for hoping the Red Army could hold the line in these parts, even if he wasn’t dumb enough to come out with them. There was a village maybe a kilometer and a half behind this campfire, and his eye had fallen on one of the girls there, a cute little blonde named Nina.

She’d smiled back at him, too, damned if she hadn’t. Some women liked handsome. Kuchkov didn’t have a prayer with them. He knew it. He didn’t like it, but what can a guy do about his own mug? Some women, though, some women liked strong. And with those broads he had a fighting chance. He wasn’t pretty and he wasn’t smart, but he could break any two ordinary jerks over his knee like skinny sticks.

A smile, the right kind of smile, was all it took. If he could get Nina alone, especially if he had some vodka along, he knew damn well he’d be able to slide his hand under her skirt. The war was won as soon as you did that.

But if the Germans drove the Red Army back before he got the chance, some Nazi son of a bitch with broad shoulders would end up balling her instead. That would be a waste, nothing else but.

Kuchkov tore off his own strip of Pravda. Or maybe it was Izvestia or Red Star, the Army paper. Since he couldn’t read, he didn’t care. He wiped his ass with newsprint. And he rolled smokes with it. “Let me have some of that makhorka, Vanya,” he said.

“Sure, Comrade Sergeant.” The soldier passed him the pouch. Vanya might be dim, but he was as eager to please as a dog. With deft fingers, Kuchkov formed a cigarette. He lit it the same way the other man had. He had food, he had smoke in his lungs, he might get laid before too long, the Germans seemed pretty quiet… Life could have been worse.

Since the Germans stayed quiet through the night, at sunrise the next morning he made up an excuse to go back to the village. No one asked him any questions. An ugly mug and a strong, hairy back made other people mind their own business. He knew what they called him when that back was turned. When he overheard it, he broke some heads. That worked. Let them mock, as long as they feared.

He reached the place just as the peasants were going out to their chores. Waving, he called, “Nina! Come here!” He didn’t go Come here, you bitch! For him, it was the height of suavity.

She waved back, which made his hopes-among other things-rise. “What do you need, Sergeant?”

You. But that would be for later. He pointed to a nearby stand of brushy woods he’d noticed-the best privacy you could find around here. “Let’s talk about you whipping up a big tub of stew for my guys, hey?”

“Where do I get the stuff to put in it?” she asked. The obvious answer was from your village. That would leave the people there hungry.

But he just said, “Well, we can talk about that.” He hopped over a bush and walked into the woods. Nina followed. He offered her his water bottle. “Here. Have a knock of this first, sweetie.”

Calling it a knock warned her. Her eyes didn’t cross when she swigged Red Army vodka. Calling her sweetie probably warned her, too. But she was smiling when she handed back the water bottle. “You should drink some.”

“Fucking right I should.” He titled his head back. Fire slid down his throat and exploded in his stomach like a 105. He held out the vodka. “Have some more.”

“Sure. Best way to start the day.” Nina was a Russian, all right.

“Almost the best way.” Kuchkov grabbed her. She squealed and she giggled and she made a token try at pushing him away, but then they were rolling on the ground together and kissing. When he did reach under her skirt, she laughed again and then she purred. Who ended up on top was a matter of luck. She undid his fly, sucked him for a minute to make him even harder than he was already, and impaled herself on him. His hands clutched her meaty backside while they thrashed. She had plenty to hold on to.

She threw her head back and mewled. A moment later, he grunted as joy shot through him. A moment after that, before he could decide whether to slide out or start again, German shells started landing on the Russian line and reaching back toward the village.

That made up his mind, and in a hurry. He threw Nina off him, even his rude chivalry forgotten. She let out an indignant squawk. He didn’t care. He scrambled to his feet, shoving his cock back into his pants and doing up the buttons. Then he took off on the dead run, back toward his section. Fun was fun, but killing the fucking Fascists really mattered.

He ignored the shell bursts. If one got him, it got him. None did. He wasn’t as fast as an Olympic track man getting back, but an Olympic track man didn’t run in boots and carry a submachine gun. He reached his men before the barrage stopped and the ground attack came in.

“Hold on to your dicks, boys,” he called when the artillery let up. Nina’d sure had hold of his. “We’ll slaughter the clapped-out cunts.”

They didn’t. The Germans were veterans, and didn’t assume the shelling would make their advance easy. They came cautiously, by small groups, firing and moving. Where they met strong defensive fire, they held up and started digging themselves foxholes. They weren’t going to let their officers get them killed if they could help it. If they hadn’t been Nazis, they would have been sensible men.

For a wonder, Russian tanks showed up before the Germans brought up any armor. The Fritzes retreated sullenly. Maybe I can fuck Nina again tomorrow, Kuchkov thought. You never knew till you tried.

Pete McGill passed five-inch shells as fast as he could. The Japs had more dive-bombers than Carter had little liver pills. Sweat poured down his bare back. He’d be sunburned like nobody’s business if he lived, but that was the least of his worries. He’d got way too hot and sticky to stay in his shirt.

Most of the guys at the gun wore nothing but a helmet above the waist. You needed a helmet. You needed one bad. What went up eventually came down, and lots and lots was going up. Fragments rained down all over the Pacific. You’d feel like a jerk if one of them smashed your unprotected skull-but not for long, worse luck for you.

The five-incher bellowed again. Pete heard it as if from very far away. If he had any ears at all left by the time this got done, he’d count his blessings. A shell casing clanged on the deck. Somebody kicked it out of the way to keep from tripping over it. It didn’t roll far. Too much other brass had already been kicked. Pete grabbed the next round and passed it to the loader. Into the breech it went. The gun lowered a little to bear on the dive-bomber. Blam! The cycle began anew.

The Jap plane didn’t give a damn about the Boise. It was swooping down on a heavy cruiser. Shells burst all around it, black smoke puffs soiling the clean, moist Pacific air. The pilot ignored everything but his target. He released the bomb and zoomed away bare yards above the ocean. A shell clipped his wing then. His plane broke up as it went into the drink. Fire floating on the sea was the only grave marker he’d ever get.

Too late came the hit. The bomb burst right alongside the American ship. It wasn’t a killing blow. But blast and fragments would do their worst, and their worst was no damn good. The Boise had taken blows like that, and suffered from them yet.

“One fucker won’t be back!” Joe Orsatti shouted. Everybody at the five-inch mount yelled as loud as he could. It was the only way the Marines had a prayer of making themselves heard. Even as things were, Pete might not have understood if he hadn’t read the gun chief’s lips.

“How many more have they got?” he yelled back. Orsatti didn’t answer. By the nature of things, he couldn’t know. Neither could Pete. But that was the question.

All the guys with the fat gold stripes on their sleeves who’d made up the American attack plan seemed to have missed something: the Japs had turned their mid-Pacific islands into unsinkable aircraft carriers. They had sinkable carriers, too; the Americans had sunk one. But no American carriers remained afloat, and the U.S. fleet had yet to see any Japanese naval craft at gun range. (No, that wasn’t quite true. One Jap sub incautiously surfaced near a battleship whose big guns happened to be trained its way. A few seconds later, nothing was left of that sub but paper clips.)

No twilight-of-the-gods super-Jutland here, no matter what the planners-and Pete McGill-had figured this fight would look like. No Joe Louis-Max Schmeling. Instead, the Japs were making like some superfast lightweight. Hank Armstrong on benzedrine, maybe. They jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and when you tried to hit back they weren’t there. And they wore you down, one punch at a time.

Pete had guessed the big free-for-all would happen somewhere near the Philippines. And it might have, if the U.S. fleet had been able to get that far. But even Guam still lay far to the west. And reaching Guam would be no cure-all; the Stars and Stripes didn’t fly there any more. How many Japanese planes would come up from all their islands and attack the remains of the American force? How long before they’d be more than all the antiaircraft guns aboard the surviving ships could hope to knock down? If the admirals went on being stubborn, that day might come soon.

If it did, Pete probably wouldn’t even get a brief patch of fire on the Pacific to mark where he’d gone down. An oil slick would be about it.

He didn’t want to die. Not yet. He didn’t have nearly enough revenge for Vera. Four red rings circled his five-inch gun’s barrel, each one signifying a plane Orsatti was sure they’d killed. The rings, and the rest of the paint on the barrel, were blistered and scorched from the heat of all the shells that had gone through. It took a hell of a lot of firing to knock a plane out of the sky: way more than anybody’d figured before the war got rolling.

The Boise ’s engines picked up. Pete felt the new vibration through the soles of his shoes. The light cruiser swung into a long turn, carving a white wake into blue water. When the turn ended, she was heading east.

“Now hear this!” blared from the loudspeakers. “At the orders of the fleet’s commanding officer, we are withdrawing toward Hawaii. I say again-at the orders of the CO, the fleet is withdrawing from these waters.”

So it wasn’t just the Boise. It was everybody. Everybody who was left, anyway. Pete wasn’t even sure of the current CO’s name; Admiral Kimmel went down with the Arizona when she sank, probably figuring that was easier than having to explain failure back home.

Well, if the new guy was throwing up his hands and hightailing it back toward Pearl, his name was also likely to be mud whoever the hell he was. The Secretary of the Navy and the President would blame him for not blowing the Japs out of the water. After all, if another admiral fell on-or was pushed onto-his sword, less blame would stick to his superiors.

Then again, if the Americans kept pushing forward no matter what, it wouldn’t be long before they had nothing left to push with. Going into this war, everybody’d wondered how sea power stacked up against air power. Now that the returns were in, they didn’t look encouraging for the poor bastards in ships. It had been a running fight between airplanes all the way west across the Pacific. Now that the U.S. Navy was out of carriers, the fleet went on taking it on the chin no matter how much antiaircraft fire the ships threw up.

Pete nervously scanned the sky. Just because the fleet was on the lam, that didn’t mean the Japs would leave it alone. Kick ’em while they’re down was good advice in bar brawls and in war. If the other guy didn’t think he’d almost licked you, he wouldn’t jump on you again any time soon. Now the U.S. Navy was trying to get up off the floor and brush away the sawdust and the spilled beer.

Some of the other ships were still firing-maybe at Japanese planes, maybe at nothing. Around the Boise, it was quiet for the moment. Pete suddenly realized how very stiff and sore and weary he was. “Fuck,” he said.

Orsatti must have read his lips, because he didn’t say it very loud. The gun chief nodded. He looked like hell: unshaven, bags under his eyes, his face thin and drawn. Pete probably looked the same way, but he hadn’t seen himself any time lately. He’d been living on coffee and sandwiches and snatching sleep curled up on the deck next to the gun like a dog since… He couldn’t work out since when. It had been a while now. He knew that.

One of the other guys pulled a crumpled pack of Luckies from his dungarees and gave everybody a cigarette. Pete took his gratefully. The nicotine seemed to help a little with the haze of fatigue that dogged him. “Fuck,” he said again. This time, the rest of the crew nodded in mournful agreement.

“Didn’t never figure we’d get licked,” Orsatti said, speaking slowly and loudly. “Not by the Japs.”

Pete could have said I told you so. He’d known the Emperor’s finest were tougher than most Americans wanted to believe. He kept quiet. Sometimes being right cost more than it was worth.

But then he did say “Fuck” one more time. After another drag on the Lucky-some luck! — he amplified it: “What’s gonna happen to the poor sorry assholes stuck on the islands we took away from the slanties?”

“Maybe we’ll make pickup while we go,” Orsatti said. But he didn’t sound as if his heart was in the words. Pete could see why. If the fleet was doing its goddamnedest to get away from the Japs, would it want to stop for anything? That was asking to get worked over again.

But to leave leathernecks behind to try to hold off Hirohito’s bastards with whatever they happened to have… That was the worst kind of losing proposition. Sweet Jesus, was it ever!

Or was it, really? Wasn’t getting killed trying to take them off and then leaving them stuck for the Japs anyway worse still? An admiral was bound to think so. The admiral in charge of the fleet did think so. Pete was a Marine. For two cents’ change, he would have torn the goddamn admiral’s head off and pissed in the hole.

Married. When Sarah Goldman (no, she was Sarah Bruck now; she had to keep reminding herself she was Sarah Bruck) had thought about being married before she actually was, she hadn’t thought much about what came after she went through the ceremony. Oh, she’d thought about some of it, but you couldn’t do that all the time even when you were newlyweds and very young. She hadn’t thought about what her life would be like after the wedding.

She had expected she would eat better, and she did. The Brucks were bakers, after all. Even if they were Jews, even if the Nazis watched them three times as hard as the Aryan bakers in Munster, they found ways of making flour silently vanish from the official allocation. Some they baked into stuff they ate themselves. They traded the rest with other people who dealt in food. Nobody-nobody below the rank of General-major, anyhow-ate well in the Third Reich. But the Brucks did very well for Jews, and better than some Aryans.

Sarah hadn’t expected she would work so much harder. Isidor might have got himself a wife. His mother and father had got themselves a brand-new employee they didn’t have to pay. They made the most of it. She knew next to nothing about baking when she started sharing Isidor’s little room. They set about giving her a crash course.

To be fair, they started her on simple things, as if she were a child. She could tell time, obviously. They could trust her to open the ovens and take out the loaves after half an hour (they could also smear ointment on her hands when she burned herself doing it-it wasn’t as if they’d never got burned).

They could let her mix the various flours that went into war bread. “No, none of them is sawdust,” David Bruck assured her, amusement in his voice.

“Was there any in the last war?” she asked. “People always say there was.”

“There were things nobody talked about. The government issued them to us, and we used them. It was use them or not bake anything.” Isidor’s father no longer sounded or looked amused. “That was… a very hard time.”

“This isn’t?” Sarah’s flour-covered hand reached for but didn’t touch the six-pointed yellow star on her blouse.

David Bruck wore a star, too. He considered. “We were hungrier then, but we were happier, too. People weren’t banging on the tea kettle at us all the time because we were Jews.”

Sarah smiled. Her mother would use that homely phrase for raising a ruckus every now and then. Her father always looked pained when Mother did. It wasn’t the kind of thing Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was used to hearing, his expression said. Herr Doktor Professor Goldman was doing all kinds of things these days that he hadn’t been used to.

And so was Sarah. Besides the burns, unfamiliar work made her arms and shoulders ache. Her feet hurt because she was on them so much. She was tired all the time. She sometimes wondered if this was what she’d signed up for.

It would have been worse if she hadn’t seen that all the Brucks, Isidor included, drove themselves harder than they drove her. That made her feel silly about complaining. But she slept as if someone hit her over the head with a boulder as soon as she lay down.

When she slept. As the hours of darkness got longer, RAF bombers started showing up over Munster more often. There weren’t many of them, and they didn’t drop a lot of bombs, but they wrecked the nights when they appeared.

She and Isidor and his parents would go downstairs and huddle under the counters. It was no better than hiding under the dining-room table had been at her parents’. If a bomb knocked the building down on top of you, you’d get squashed. If one blew out a side wall, it would blow you up, too. The Aryans in the neighborhood, like the Aryans in her old neighborhood, had proper bomb shelters. Verboten for Jews, of course. Jews took their chances.

Isidor took his chances in the blackout darkness. She’d never got felt up during an air raid before. She wanted to laugh and she wanted to belt him, both at the same time. She couldn’t do either, not without giving away what he was up to.

Every couple of weeks, she and Isidor would walk over and see her folks. She enjoyed that more than she wanted to show. The Brucks talked about bakery business and neighborhood gossip and the music on the radio, and that was about it. At her own house, talk ranged all over the world and across thousands of years. She’d thought it would be the same for everybody-till she discovered it wasn’t.

Coming back to such talk felt wonderful. She said so once, while Isidor was using the toilet. Her father’s smile twisted a little. “The Brucks are nice people. They are-don’t get me wrong. But they’re not very curious, so they might not seem very exciting, either.”

“Not very curious!” she echoed, nodding. That was it, all right. That was exactly it. The Brucks knew what they knew, and they didn’t worry about anything else.

Socrates talked about people like that in the Apology. If she tried to tell Isidor so, he would look at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking ancient Greek herself. It wasn’t that knowing all the strange things she knew ever did her much practical good. But it gave her things to think about she wouldn’t have had otherwise. When she was with other people who had the same strange set of mental baggage, it also gave her things to talk about that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.

When she was with the Brucks… A flush from the bathroom said Isidor would be coming out. She put that one on the back burner.

Was this what marriage was about? Giving up part of yourself you hadn’t even been aware you had in exchange for love? She had no doubt that Isidor loved her. She loved him, too. It wasn’t that he made her abandon that part. But he didn’t have its match, so showing it to him seemed pointless.

But he had points of his own. As he sat down beside her, he said, “I heard this one from an Aryan the other day, if you can believe it. Hitler, Goebbels, and Goring are on a plane that crashes. Everybody aboard gets killed. Who is saved?”

Something in the way her father’s mouth twitched told her he already knew the joke. But all he said was, “ Nu? Who?” She was glad, because she hadn’t heard it, and she didn’t think her mother had, either.

“The German people,” Isidor answered, and exploded into laughter.

If there were microphones in the house, they were all in trouble. Sarah knew as much. She laughed anyway. So did Mother. “An Aryan told you that?” Father asked Isidor. He was also laughing, even as he went on, “Was he an SS man, seeing if he could land you in trouble because you thought it was funny?”

“No, no.” Isidor shook his head. “Not like that. It was one old guy talking to another one on the street. I heard it walking by.”

“Ach, so.” Samuel Goldman relaxed. “That should be all right, then. Nobody seems happy with the way things are going.”

“ ‘We continue the advance on the important Soviet citadel of Smolensk.’ ” Isidor amazed Sarah. She hadn’t dreamt he could imitate a self-important newsreader so well.

He surprised Sarah’s father, too. Samuel Goldman let out a sudden bray of laughter, then looked at Isidor as if he’d never really seen him before. Maybe he hadn’t. And maybe now he saw some little piece of what Sarah saw in the baker’s son.

Walking back to their little room after the visit, Isidor said, “I like talking with your mother and father. They’re… interesting.”

“Peculiar but fun?” Sarah’s voice was dry.

Isidor kicked a pebble down the sidewalk. “You said that. I didn’t.”

You sure meant it, though, Sarah thought. She cocked her head to one side-a gesture her father might have used-and asked, “Do you think I’m… interesting, too?”

This time, Isidor didn’t hesitate for a second. “Darn right I do!” He was undressing her with his eyes.

“Not like that, Dummkopf,” she said, though the eager stare warmed her. “Like my folks, I mean.”

“Oh.” To him, that seemed less important. But he nodded after a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. You… kind of think lefthanded, if you know what I mean.”

If Sarah hadn’t thought that way, she wouldn’t have. As things were, she batted her eyes at him and murmured, “You say the sweetest things.” If you couldn’t always leave them happy, sometimes confused worked almost as well.

The Ivan struggled out of his hole. Blood from a small wound to his ear dripped onto his baggy khaki tunic. He left his rifle behind and kept his hands over his head. “Freund!” he said hopefully. “Kamerad!”

Luc Harcourt’s lip curled in scorn. “You stupid sack of shit, I’m no fucking German,” he answered in his own language.

“Mon Dieu! C’est vrai! Vous-etes francais!” To Luc’s amazement, the Russian-corporal, if he was reading the rank badges the right way-spoke a French as near perfect as made no difference. The fellow went on, “The Boches were in this sector yesterday, and I did not even think to look at your uniform. A thousand apologies, Monsieur. Ten thousand!”

Sure as hell, German tanks had passed through here the day before. The French infantry was helping to clean up the pocket the armor had carved out. “If I was a Boche, odds are you’d be dead right now,” Luc said.

“Vous-avez raison,” the Russian agreed. “Once more, I thank you for your mercy.”

Luc didn’t know how long he’d stay merciful. Prisoners were a pain in the ass. But a prisoner who spoke French as if he were educated at the Sorbonne might be worth something. Intelligence sure wouldn’t have any trouble interrogating him. Luc gestured with his rifle. “Well, c’mon. Get moving.”

“But of course.” The Russian put a hand to the side of his head. Naturally, it came away bloody. “How badly am I hurt?”

“Just an ear. Those always bleed like mad bastards, but it’s only a little wound,” Luc answered with rough sympathy. Then he said, “Hang on. Take off your belt-nice and slow. Don’t do anything stupid. You can hold up your pants with one hand afterwards.”

“Oui, Monsieur.” The Ivan obeyed. The belt had several grenades on it. Only after it lay on the ground and the prisoner had straightened up again did Luc relax-a few millimeters’ worth, anyhow.

“ Now get moving,” he told the guy, and the Russian did. After a few steps, he asked, “How come you speak such good French?”

“It is the language of culture-and I am, or I was, a student of French history. Yevgeni Borisovich Novikov, at your service.” The POW made as if to bow, but didn’t follow through.

Culture. Right, Luc thought. The so-called student of French history looked like any other captured Russian: dirty, whiskery, in a baggy tunic and breeches. The splatters of blood from his ear were just accents. (But for the blood and the cut of his uniform, Luc didn’t look much different himself.)

After a few steps, he did ask what was on his mind: “If you’re so educated and everything, how come you’re only a crappy corporal and not an officer?” Why should he worry about offending a prisoner he’d never see again?

“Only a corporal?” Novikov barked bitter laughter. “For me, getting promoted was a miracle. I come from a kulak family. Do you know what kulaks are? Were, I should say-not many of us are left alive.”

“Kulaks are rich farmers, right?” Luc hoped he wasn’t confusing the Russian word with something else altogether.

But the captured, cultured corporal nodded. “Rich enough to have a few cows, anyhow. Richer than the ordinary muzhik. Richer because they worked harder than the ordinary muzhik and didn’t drink as much. Rich enough that they didn’t want to get herded into collective farms and give up more than they got. Rich enough to get called enemies of the state and go to the wall.” He grimaced. “I’m lucky to be alive, let alone a corporal.”

He might have thought that would impress Luc. And it did-but only up to a point. “Happy day, buddy,” Luc said. “Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t’ve shot me if you got the chance. I’ve been in this shit since ’38. Tell me about lucky to be alive.”

“It could be, though, that you were allowed to be a human being before the war began,” Novikov replied.

Allowed to be a human being. Luc chewed on that till he spotted Lieutenant Demange. If anyone ever stood foursquare against the notion of letting people be human beings, Demange was the man. He waved to Luc. “What the hell you got there?” he called, as if Luc had brought in some exotic animal instead of an ever so mundane POW.

“Russian who speaks French better’n you do, Lieutenant,” Luc answered sweetly.

Demange said something about Luc’s mother that he was unlikely to know from personal experience. Luc grinned; he’d got under Demange’s skin, which he didn’t manage to do every day. The lieutenant glowered at Yevgeni Novikov. “So what the fuck you got to say for yourself, prickface?”

“I am glad your sergeant here did not kill me when he could have,” Novikov told him. “I hope you will not, either.”

He knew what could happen to captured soldiers, then. Well, who didn’t? And Demange looked comically amazed. “You con!” he said to Luc. “The asshole does speak better French’n me. Better than you, too.”

“I’m not arguing,” Luc said. “The guys who question him won’t have to fuck around with German.” There were French interrogators who spoke Russian, but only a very few. But lots of Frenchmen could get along in German, and so could lots of Russians. Conducting an interrogation in French would be a luxury.

Lieutenant Demange nodded. “You’re right. I bet he speaks better French than the clowns who squeeze him, too.” He chuckled unpleasantly. “And a whole bunch of good that’ll do him. Go on and take him back, Harcourt.”

“Will do.” Luc would have taken Novikov back any which way. Any excuse to move away from the front line where people were liable to shoot at you was a good one. Now I only have to worry about shells and bombs, Luc thought with perfectly genuine relief. Had he tried to imagine that before the war, he would have decided he was nuts.

He had to give Novikov up at regimental headquarters: a scattered handful of tents any self-respecting Boy Scouts would have laughed at. They would, at least, unless a French picket plugged them before they could get close enough to laugh. The picket was invisible till he called a challenge. He’d definitely earned his merit badge in foxhole digging.

Luc didn’t know the headquarters password. A rigid Russian or German might have shot him for that. The sentry laughed at him and then passed him through. The guy could see and hear he was a Frenchman.

The officers at the HQ weren’t thrilled to see Yevgeni Novikov. One more POW-just what we don’t need, their attitude declared. Then he opened his mouth. They fell on him with glad cries after that, especially when they discovered he would sing like a skylark. They even gave Luc a cup of good burgundy-not pinard, heaven forbid; they were, after all, officers-and a pack of Gauloises as the bringer of good news.

Thus fortified, he started up to the front again. He took his own sweet time getting there. If Lieutenant Demange didn’t like it, too damn bad. But Demange wouldn’t care, not about something like this. Back when he was a sergeant, he would have taken his time returning, too. Anybody would. Who in blazes wanted to come straight to the killing zone?

That thought made Luc stop again. When you were heading to the front, any excuse was a good one. So it looked to him, at any rate. But there were a few white crows who were never happier than when they were mixing it up with the Nazis or Reds or whoever the enemy happened to be.

Most of the time, dumb cons like that didn’t last long. They got too eager, and somebody on the other side-probably some scared fuck who would rather have been in an estaminet somewhere with a barmaid in his lap-took them out. Not many people missed them once they were gone, either. They tended to get their comrades killed, too.

Every once in a while, though… By all accounts, Hitler had been that kind of ferocious loner. He’d spent just about all the last war as a runner at the front, and he’d come through with hardly a scratch. You couldn’t begin to figure the odds on that. The way it looked to Luc, God had dropped the ball there.

He laughed at himself. “Fat lot anybody can do about it now,” he said, and lit one of his new Gauloises.