Coup d'Etat

Chapter 5

Benjamin Halevy had all the answers. He was a Frenchman and a Jew, so he sure thought he did, anyhow. “Marshal Sanjurjo inspects the Madrid front every so often,” he said. “The Nationalists still don’t realize everything your elephant gun can do. Put a round through his giblets at a kilometer and a half and watch the assholes on the other side thrash like a chicken after it gets one in the neck from the farmer’s wife.”

“You make it sound so easy.” Vaclav Jezek eyed his cigarette with distaste. Spanish tobacco was even harsher than French. Every drag sandpapered his throat. The only thing worse would be no tobacco at all. This was a misfortune. That would be a catastrophe.

“You’ve done it before,” Halevy said. “You just have to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Jezek repeated, even more dryly than before. Like so many things, sniping had to look simple to people who didn’t do it. The positioning, the concealment, the waiting, the shot… Everything had to go perfectly, or you wasted a bullet. More likely, you never got your shot off. Or else some canny bastard on the other side, somebody who was better or luckier than you were at that particular moment, blew out the side of your head.

“Well, think about it,” the Jew told him. “I’m starting to get connections, and sometimes they hear things from the other side. If you punch Sanjurjo’s ticket, the Republic will pin so many medals on you, you’ll look like a Fascist general.”

“I think I’d rather get laid,” Vaclav said. Halevy laughed. Vaclav sent him a sour stare. “And how are you getting connections? You don’t speak Spanish.”

“No, but if people here speak any foreign language, they speak French.” Halevy made it sound natural and easy.

It probably was, for him. Vaclav grunted, pinched out the cigarette’s coal, and stowed the little butt in a tobacco pouch. Waste not, want not. A Jew would land on his feet anywhere-even in Spain, evidently.

Somebody on the other side fired a rifle. The bullet whined high over the Republican line. It would come down somewhere, but long odds it would hurt anybody when it did. A lot of shots fired in war were like that. You wanted to get the other guys, but you didn’t want them to get you. So you fired without sticking your head up to see what you were doing. You made them keep their heads down, anyway.

More often than not, the Czechs and Internationals holding this stretch of the line would have ignored such a wild round. But guys here must have been jumpy, because two rifles in quick succession answered the Fascist shot.

That spooked Sanjurjo’s men. Vaclav couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. That the veterans on the other side would swarm out of the trenches and charge them? They had to be nuts to believe anything like that.

Nuts or not, more of them fired back. Bullets started snapping past, much closer to the trenches. You didn’t want to stick your head up over the parapet, or you’d stop one with your nose. Halevy chambered a round in his rifle. “I didn’t much want a firefight, but…” He shrugged. War wasn’t about what you wanted. It was about what you got stuck with.

Along with the antitank rifle, Vaclav carried a pistol to defend himself at close range. The big piece was no good for work like that. Neither weapon was much use in a fight like this. Machine guns on both sides started yammering. Vaclav realized what a long way from home he was. But he didn’t want to be back in Prague, not with the Nazis’ swastika flying over it.

Mortar bombs whispered when they came down. The first couple burst a few bays over from the sniper and the Jewish sergeant. Vaclav had dug a bombproof into the forward edge of the trench, with some help from Halevy. They’d reinforced it with bits and pieces of wood scavenged here, there, and everywhere. Both men dove into it now.

If a mortar round burst right behind them, even the bombproof wouldn’t help. Vaclav wished such thoughts wouldn’t cross his mind. They just made this business even more horrible than it would be otherwise.

“What if they try to rush us?” Halevy yelled through the din.

“What if they do?” Vaclav returned. “The machine guns will slaughter them, that’s what.” The machine guns had heavily protected nests. Even a direct hit from a mortar bomb might not take one out. An ordinary soldier who got up on the firing step, though, was asking to get murdered.

Before the war started, Jezek had figured Jews for cowards. He’d got over that. The ones in the Czechoslovakian army hated Hitler even more than Czechs did, which was saying something. They made up a disproportionate number of the men who served under the government-in-exile. And Benjamin Halevy held up his end of the bargain as well as anyone could want.

Vaclav still didn’t like Jews. He saw no reason why he should. But he wasn’t dumb enough to disbelieve what he saw with his own eyes. Jews weren’t yellow, or no more yellow than anybody else.

Little by little, the firefight ebbed. There was no particular reason for that, any more than there had been for its start. Combat wasn’t always rational. Not even a goddamn German General Staff officer with a volume of Clausewitz under his arm could deny that.

Wounded men moaned or shrieked, depending on how badly they were hurt. Off in the distance, the same sounds rose from the Nationalists’ positions. Suffering had a universal language.

Stretcher-bearers hustled wounded Republican fighters to aid stations behind the lines. If the men got there alive, they had a pretty good chance to stay that way. To his surprise, Vaclav had discovered that they knew far more about giving blood transfusions in the field here than they had in either Czechoslovakia or France.

He crawled out of the bombproof and dusted himself off. The stink of shit hung in the air. Maybe it came from men killed on the spot, maybe from men scared past endurance. He’d fouled himself a time or two. He wasn’t proud of it-who would be? But he wasn’t anywhere near so ashamed as he had been when it happened. He wasn’t the only one it had happened to-nowhere near, in fact. It was just one of those things.

Sergeant Halevy came out, too. “Such fun,” he said.

“Fun,” Vaclav echoed in a hollow voice. “Right.”

“If Sanjurjo were watching the football game right now-” Halevy said.

“Then what?” Vaclav broke in. “I’d have to spot him. I’d have to know he was there to spot in the first place. He’d have to be somewhere the rifle could reach. I’d have to be somewhere I could shoot from. And I’d have to hit him when I did. Snipers never talk about all the times they miss, you know. So why don’t you give it a rest, huh?”

“All right,” Halevy said. “But Sanjurjo does come right up to the front line to see what’s going on. Whatever else you can say about the miserable fat turd, he’s no coward.”

“Oh, joy,” Jezek answered. Men who hadn’t seen action always figured the miserable turds on the other side wouldn’t show courage. But he’d seen that the Nazis were as brave as Czechs or Frenchmen or Tommies. No one here in Spain had ever accused the Nationalists of lacking balls. Brains, yes, but brains weren’t the same thing. Not even close.

“I’m just telling you it’s not impossible you’ll get a shot at him, that’s all.” Halevy wouldn’t leave it alone.

“And I’m just telling you it’s not impossible monkeys’ll fly out my ass next time I fart, but I’m not gonna wait around till they do,” Jezek retorted irritably.

He couldn’t faze the Jew. “With all the singe we’ve both eaten, it wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” Halevy said. Singe was what the French called the tinned beef they got from Argentina. It meant monkey meat. Vaclav had never eaten real monkey, so he couldn’t say how much singe tasted like it. He was sure nobody in his right mind would eat the stuff if he didn’t have to.

He did say, “That Spam the Americans ship over is a hell of a lot better.”

“You’re right.” Halevy grinned and made as if to lick his chops. “It sure is.”

“It’s pork,” Vaclav reminded him, not without malice.

“You’re right,” Halevy agreed once more. “It sure is.” Vaclav thought that over, then shrugged. He wasn’t a perfect Christian. Why should he expect the French sergeant to make a perfect Jew?

Surabaya, on the north coast of Java, was even hotter and muggier than Manila. Pete McGill hadn’t dreamt any place could be, hell included, but there you were. And here he was, with the Boise, thanking the Lord the Japs hadn’t sunk the light cruiser before she got here.

Joe Orsatti had an answer for the weather. Joe Orsatti, Pete was discovering, had an answer for everything. Sometimes he had a good one; sometimes he was full of crap. But the other Marine always liked to hear himself talk.

“We’re on the other side of the Equator now,” he said. “So it’s summer here, not winter. No wonder it’s so fucking sticky.”

“We aren’t more than a long piss on the other side of the Equator,” Pete pointed out. “Looks to me like it’d be this way all the fuckin’ time here.”

“Maybe that’s what makes the local wogs so jumpy,” Orsatti said. “Shit, if I had to live in a steam bath the goddamn year around, you can bet your sorry ass I’d be mean, too.”

“Who says you aren’t?” Pete thought that was one of Joe’s crappy answers.

The Javanese didn’t look a whole lot different from Filipinos, at least to American eyes. They were small and slight and brown. When they talked among themselves, their jibber-jabber sounded pretty much the same as the Filipinos’, too.

But a lot of Filipinos knew English, and some of the ones who didn’t knew Spanish instead. If a Javanese spoke any European language, he spoke Dutch. And, to Pete’s way of thinking, that was a big part of the problem right there.

When the United States took the Philippines from Spain, it was with the notion that eventually the islands would turn into a country of their own. (That was how Pete had heard it, anyway. Americans tended to forget they’d fought a nasty little war against Filipinos who wanted a country of their own right away.)

Holland, by contrast, didn’t want to turn the Dutch East Indies loose. As long as Dutch forces in the Indies were strong enough to squash revolts, the locals put up with being ruled by a little country halfway around the world. They might not like it, but they put up with it.

Now, suddenly, all that was tottering. The Japs were on the way. They weren’t white men. They were little and kind of brown themselves. They’d made the Boise bail out of Manila Bay like a cat running from a big, mean dog. They had troops on the ground in the Philippines now. And they were heading this way, because they were desperately hungry for the oil and tin and rubber the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya had in such abundance.

And it didn’t look as if the Dutch-or the Americans, or the British, or the Australians-would be able to stop them. Against what Japan could throw into the fight, the white powers didn’t have enough troops or ships or planes, and what they did have wasn’t good enough.

Pete could see that. He wouldn’t have been in Surabaya if the Americans could have hung on in Manila. If he could see it, didn’t it stand to reason the Javanese could, too? If they figured the Japs were going to set them free or take them over, why did they have to kowtow to white men any more?

How many of them listened to Japanese propaganda on the radio every chance they got? How many were quietly helping the invaders? Pete had no way to know stuff like that. He did know the Boise ’s skipper had put even the harborside dives off limits for the ship’s crew. They were officially judged unsafe, and not just because the local joy girls would give you the clap. The Dutch, who were supposed to run this town, wouldn’t go through the streets in groups smaller than squadsized. If they did, they were much too likely to get their heads smashed with a brick or their throats slit.

A plane buzzed over the Boise: a Dutch fighter with fixed landing gear. Everybody said the Japs built junk. Everybody said that, yeah, but they’d sure done a number on the U.S. Army Air Force in the Philippines. The Dutch plane looked hotter than an Army Peashooter, but not by one whole hell of a lot.

Joe Orsatti eyed the Dutch plane, too, and the orange triangles under the wings. “A Fokker,” he remarked.

“A mother-Fokker,” Pete agreed.

Orsatti sent him a pained look. “Har-de-har-har. Y’oughta take it on the road.”

“I did,” McGill answered. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

“Funny again-like a truss.”

“I know,” Pete said. “But I’d sure rather see those triangles than the big old Jap meatballs.”

“Better get used to it,” Orsatti said. “Five wins you ten we ain’t gonna stick around here real long. We’re useless here. We gotta get up farther north if we’re gonna keep the Japs from landing, y’know what I’m saying?”

“Uh-huh,” Pete replied, not altogether happily. “Talk about sticking your head in the tiger’s mouth…”

“Gonna be a shitass excuse for a fleet, all right,” the other Marine said. “Us, a coupla our destroyers, some Dutch tin cans, that limey light cruiser… Should be fun, getting all of us dancing to the same tune.”

Pete hadn’t thought about that. He’d been away from ships too long before he found himself back aboard the Boise. Trying to get skippers from three countries to act in concert? “Fun. Right.” One thing for sure: the Japs wouldn’t have that problem.

They might have others. Pete could hope so. If they didn’t, the allies here were in a lot of trouble. Pete had seen enough of the Japanese in China to have more respect for them than a lot of higher-ranking Americans did. They might not be white men, but they were sturdy and tough. And they were proud of not being white, the same way a lot of Americans and Englishmen-and, evidently, Dutchmen-were proud because they were.

Perhaps because Orsatti had had a lot of shipboard duty, his feel for what the fleet at Surabaya would do next was pretty good. They headed north two days later. Pete wondered if word had come in that Japanese landing forces were on the way. No one said so-but then, nobody ever told the guys who would do the fighting and dying any more than they absolutely had to know. Sometimes not even that.

Then the destroyers steamed away and left the light cruisers behind. “Something’s goin’ on,” Orsatti opined.

“You oughta be a detective-a private dick, like,” Pete told him, which won another dirty look. They were practicing at the five-inch gun, uneasily aware that the practice could turn real any second. Lookouts constantly eyed the skies. Planes that appeared out in the middle of the ocean would be Japanese. Did the enemy fleet have carriers along? They’d struck at Hawaii, but that hadn’t gone so well as they would have liked. Manila, unfortunately, proved a different story.

Night fell. The gun crews were on watch and watch, so Pete’s sleep got ruined. He gulped hot coffee to keep his eyes open. He wasn’t the only one. Drinking java near Java was… almost funny.

The Boise sliced through the Java Sea, kicking up a phosphorescent bow wave and wake. If any Japanese subs were in the neighborhood… With any luck at all, we’re going too fast for ’em, Pete thought, yawning. He wasn’t used to sack time chopped into little bits. Yeah, it had been too long.

“Our destroyers are in contact with enemy warships and transports off Borneo,” the intercom blared in harsh, metallic tones. “They are making torpedo runs at the transports.”

Pete waited to hear reports of Jap freighters blown to smithereens, and he wasn’t the only one. But the intercom stayed quiet after that. Little by little, he realized the silence wasn’t a good sign. So did the other leathernecks on the gun crew. Their high spirits faded.

The sun came up within a few minutes of 0600, as it always did in these waters. A plane buzzed down out of the north to look over the allied fleet. Orders came to fire at it. All the antiaircraft guns on the Boise roared together. The bursts didn’t come close to reaching the plane. It saw what it wanted to see and flew away. And nobody said another word about the destroyers and what they might be doing-or what might have been done to them. Pete kept his mouth shut along with everyone else. But he knew damn well that wasn’t a good sign.

A horse slogged up a road pulling a panje wagon after it. The wagon had tall wheels and an almost boat-shaped bottom. Russian peasants had-and needed-plenty of experience building wagons that could plow through even the thickest mud.

Thaw’s early this year, Ivan Kuchkov thought. More freezes would probably come, but little by little the winter snowfall would melt and soak into the ground. For the next four to six weeks, nobody would go anywhere very fast. No one in his right mind would order any major actions during the rasputitsa, because action just bogged down in the mud.

The Poles knew as much about the rasputitsa, the mud time, as their Russian neighbors. The Germans had fought in the East last year and during the last war, so they knew something. Ivan had heard they knew enough to steal as many panje wagons as they could, anyhow. Their trucks got stuck in the muck just like everybody else’s.

What the Germans’ French and English lackeys knew… Kuchkov’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a nasty grin. He suspected the Red Army would teach them a few lessons. He also suspected they wouldn’t enjoy the instruction. The few schoolmasters Kuchkov had known used a switch to make sure their teaching sank in. The Red Army had a bigger switch than even the meanest, most brutal village schoolmaster, and could swing it harder.

Lieutenant Obolensky squelched up. Kuchkov pretended not to see him. It was at least possible that Obolensky needed to talk to somebody else in the squad. Avram, maybe; the nervous little Jew had his fingers in a million different pies. Ivan wouldn’t have been surprised if he was NKVD.

But no. Obolensky looked around till he spotted Kuchkov. “Come here a moment, Sergeant,” he said.

“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Lieutenant!” That was never the wrong answer. Kuchkov added a salute. The mud tried to suck off his boots as he made his way over to the junior officer. When he got there, he stood and waited. Let Obolensky show his cards.

The lieutenant also waited, but he was the one who spoke first: “What shape is your squad in, Sergeant?” Ivan smiled to himself. Obolensky was an educated guy, a city guy-his attitude, his accent, his very way of standing all said as much. No way in hell he could outstubborn or outwait a man from a village where the creek was the only running water… when it wasn’t frozen, anyhow.

“Well, sir, we’re kinda fucked. We lost three guys taking that last village from those Nazi dicks.” No, Ivan neither knew nor cared what was regular Russian and what was mat. “We got one back-cocksucking bullet only grazed the bitch, y’know? And we got a replacement, but the pussy’s so green we’d be better off without him. So yeah, we’re fucked.”

To his surprise, Lieutenant Obolensky smiled. “You sound just like every other sergeant in charge of a squad. Maybe the Red Air Force isn’t so different from the Red Army after all.”

Kuchkov was convinced the Red Air Force was a damn sight better than the Red Army. No one would ever have accused him of being bright, but he had enough animal cunning to know saying so would only get him in deeper. Deeper in what? He didn’t know that, either, and he wasn’t interested in finding out. He waited some more. Maybe Obolensky would go away and pick some other squad for whatever shitty job he had in mind.

Maybe pigs had wings. Not around here, though. The lieutenant pointed west, toward-no past-the birch and pine woods over there. “You know the Fascists are set up in the fields beyond the trees.”

“Uh-huh.” Kuchkov only nodded. The Germans had dug in as well as they could while the ground was frozen. Now they had to be shoring up their trenches with boards and sticks and twigs and straw and anything else they could grab. The mud would ooze through anyway. It sure did here.

“Our battalion has orders to shift them,” Obolensky said.

“Happy fucking day, sir!” Kuchkov said. “The whoremongers’ll have machine guns set up and waiting for us.” German machine guns scared the piss out of him, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

“We have orders,” Obolensky repeated in a voice like doom. “This company is on the right wing. I am going to place your squad as the last feather on the wing. You will try to outflank the Nazi position and roll it up.”

“What? With one little piss-dribble of a squad?” Ivan burst out. Obolensky just looked at him. He made himself nod and salute. Sometimes you got stuck with it. And things could have been worse. He’d feared the lieutenant would send his squad in ahead of everybody else. If that wasn’t suicide… then this might be.

He gave his men the news. “Oh, boy,” Avram said, and then, “Gevalt.” Talking like a German was liable to get him killed, but sometimes he did it anyway. He took off his submachine gun’s drum magazine and started cleaning the works. Anything he could keep from going wrong, he would. The trouble was, you couldn’t keep everything from going wrong.

They sneaked through the woods during the night. As black began to yield to gray, Ivan and everybody else gulped a hundred grams of vodka. It made him fierce. It also made him even more what-the-fuck than he had been before.

There was supposed to be an artillery barrage before the attack went in. Red Army artillery was usually reliable. Not today. A few mortar rounds woke up the Fritzes without hurting them much. They started yelling. A machine gun and a few rifles fired at nothing.

“Gevalt,” Avram said again. Kuchkov’s mouth was dry. The Nazis would be waiting now. No chance in hell to catch them by surprise. Kilometers back of the line, some fat Russian colonel was probably eating out his secretary’s twat instead of telling the 105s to get busy.

No help for it. Yelling “Urra!”, the battalion burst out of the woods and rushed the German trenches. Some men wore snow smocks; some didn’t. Some smocks were clean and white; some weren’t. With slushy snow dappling the mud, the mixture camouflaged the Russians as well as any more rigid scheme would have.

The Germans opened up on them, of course. Facing machine-gun fire, camouflage hardly mattered. Either a bullet got you or it didn’t. All luck, either way. Something tugged at Kuchkov’s left sleeve. When he looked down, he found the leather of his flying suit had a new rip. But he didn’t hurt and he wasn’t bleeding, so he ran on.

A potato-masher grenade flew out of the forwardmost German trench, and then another one. Ivan dove for the mud. His tunic would never camouflage him against snow again, but all the fragments went over him and none into him. He yanked the pin from his own egg grenade and chucked it at the Germans from his knees. Then he scrambled up and dashed forward again.

Despite the grenade, a German in a whitewashed helmet popped up and fired a Mauser at him from point-blank range. As often happened in the rage and terror of combat, the Fritz missed. Kuchkov gave him a burst from the PPD before he could work the bolt for his next shot. It was like spraying a hose-you didn’t have to be a sniper to get two or three hits. The German toppled with a groan, his tunic front all over blood.

“Come on!” Ivan yelled to his men still on their feet. “Let’s clean out these motherfucking cunts!” He jumped down into the zigzagging Nazi trench. Grenades and submachine guns were the right tools for the job.

A German dropped his rifle and threw up his hands. “Kamerad!” he squealed, terror on his face. Kuchkov gave him a burst, too. Considering what happened to prisoners, he might have done the fellow a favor. Chances were he would have shot him anyway, though.

The Fritzes had been thinner on the ground than he expected. They pulled back in good order. What was left of the Red Army battalion began looting the corpses left behind in their trenches. The Russians had taken a devil of a lot of casualties themselves to win this hectare of blood and mud. Was it worth them? Kuchkov had no idea. He was busy spreading meat paste from a dead German’s tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. If the bastards eat like this all the time, no wonder they’re so fucking tough, he thought, and squeezed the tube for more.

When Samuel Goldman came home from his laborer’s job, unusual excitement lit his gray-stubbled face. (No one in Germany had enough soap, and Jews’ rations were smaller than Aryans’. He didn’t shave very often.) “What’s up, Father?” Sarah asked. “Something is-I can see it in your eyes.”

“You’re right,” he said. “They’ve finally gone and arrested the Bishop of Munster. The Gestapo took him away in an armored car.”

“Oh. Oh, my,” Sarah said. “He’s been asking for it, hasn’t he?”

“Just a little bit,” Father answered. “I knew him-not well, but I knew him-back in the days when knowing a Jew didn’t destroy someone’s reputation. Clemens August von Galen is a proud, stiff-necked man.”

“With a name like that, he’s an aristocrat, too,” Sarah said.

“Right again,” her father agreed. “He’s not the kind to be happy when a jumped-up shoe salesman or whatever tells him what to do. You can hear that in every sermon he preaches-well, every sermon that doesn’t have to do with foreign policy, I mean.”

Sarah nodded. Hardly a German had ever had a good word to say for the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. She hadn’t herself, back when she was a kid before the Nazis took over. Yes, she’d partly been parroting her parents, but even so…

Maybe Bishop von Galen could forgive the war, which was designed not least to give Germany her proper place once more. But he couldn’t forgive the Nazis for confiscating church buildings, for expelling members of religious orders from the Reich, or for their program of what they called mercy killings. He said so, loudly, from the pulpit. After RAF planes bombed Munster, he delivered a sermon on loving one’s enemies.

Not a word of that, of course, got into the local newspapers. Radio broadcasts kept quiet about it, too. The regime controlled every official news source. It got around all the same. People who heard Bishop von Galen speak spread word of what he said. People who heard them spread it wider. Everyone in town knew the bishop and the Nazis were on a collision course.

“What will happen now?” Sarah asked.

“They’ll keep him in jail, or else they’ll kill him,” Father said. “I don’t think they’ll kill him right away. They have other ways to put the screws to him. He has a brother-Franz, I think his name is. The Gestapo ’s already grabbed other priests from the diocese.”

“Did they hope Bishop von Galen would take a hint?” Sarah inquired.

Samuel Goldman beamed at her. He might be tired, but he was also proud. “How did you get so grown-up when I wasn’t looking?” he said. Sarah made a rude noise. Her father laughed but went on, “Yes, I’m sure they did hope he’d do that. But if he were the kind of man who took those hints, he wouldn’t be the kind of man who preached those sermons.”

That made sense to Sarah. Father usually made sense to her, except for his hopeless, unrequited love affair with being a real German. She found the only question she could think of that really mattered: “What happens next? Do people let the Nazis get away with it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either,” he said slowly. “But I’ll tell you this: we heard they’d arrested von Galen about an hour before quitting time, and the whole labor gang was furious. Not just Catholics. Everyone. The men were cussing out the Gestapo like you wouldn’t believe. When I was walking home”-Jews couldn’t use buses or trams-“I heard more people up in arms about it, too.”

“What will they do? Rally in front of the Rathaus?” Sarah laughed at the idea. “That would just give the blackshirts the chance to arrest all of them at once.”

“You might be surprised,” her father said. “The Catholic Church still has some clout, and it’s always been more leery of the Nazis than most Protestant churches were. No ‘German Christians’ among the Catholics, or not many, anyhow.” He screwed up his face.

So did Sarah. So-called German Christians believed Nazi ideals were compatible with those of Jesus. As far as she could see, that was well on the way toward being like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who made a habit of believing two impossible things every day before breakfast. But German Christians dominated most Protestant denominations these days. Didn’t you also believe in impossibilities if you thought you could tell the Nazis no and get away with it?

“Where’s your mother?” Samuel Goldman asked. “Now I’ll have to tell the story twice.”

“She’s out shopping.” Sarah’s voice was sour. Jews could only do it at the very end of the day, when everyone else had already had the chance to pick over the little in the stores. Sarah added, “I was peeling potatoes when I heard you come in.”

Her father sighed. “Bad food, and not enough of it.” He flipped his hand up and down. “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not. You and mother do everything anyone could with what the Reich lets us have.”

“That’s not enough, either.”

“If it were, the Reich wouldn’t let us have it,” Father said.

He paused then. Sarah could read his mind. He was looking for the best-or worst-way to make a pun about how the Reich really wanted to let them have it. He did things like that. But before he could this time, the front door opened behind him. He looked absurdly affronted as he half turned on his good leg, as if Mother had squashed his line on purpose.

Hanna Goldman hadn’t, of course. Her little two-wheeled collapsible wire shopping cart was almost as empty as it had been when she set out. Some sorry turnips, some insect-nibbled greens… That kind of stuff might have done for fattening hogs. People just got thinner on it, as Sarah had sad reason to know.

But Mother’s jade-green eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve arrested Bishop von Galen!” she exclaimed.

“We knew that.” By the deflationary way Father said it, he was miffed he hadn’t got to make his horrible pun.

Mother refused to be deflated. “Did you know there’s a great big crowd out in front of the cathedral? Did you know they’re yelling at the police and the blackshirts, and throwing things at them, too?”

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Father burst out. Sarah felt the same way. Germans mostly didn’t do such things. She’d heard that, when machine guns opened up on demonstrators in the mad Berlin of 1919, the crowd fled across a park to escape the deadly fire-but people obeyed the KEEP OFF THE GRASS! signs while they ran for their lives.

“It’s true. I saw the edges of it. I got away from there as fast as I could afterward,” Mother said. “I didn’t want to wait till the blackshirts started shooting-and I didn’t want to give them any reason to arrest a Jew, either.”

“If each of us would have tried to take one of those pigdogs with him when they came for him…” For a moment, Father looked and sounded young and ferocious, the way he would have in the trenches in the last war. But then he sighed and shook his head and went back to his familiar self. “The Nazis wouldn’t care. They’d thank us for handing them an excuse to murder us all.”

“They can’t murder everyone out by the cathedral,” Mother said.

Distant gunfire seemed to give her the lie. Even more faintly, Sarah heard screams and shrieks and shouts. She supposed they’d been going on before, but she hadn’t been able to make them out. She could now. People made more noise when bullets snarled past-or when they struck home.

“They’ll blame the Communists for this,” Father predicted.

“There aren’t many Catholic Communists,” Sarah pointed out.

“They won’t care,” Samuel Goldman said. “Outside agitators, they’ll call them, and they’ll say von Galen was working with them.” He spread his callused hands. “I mean, otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what are the odds of that?”