Last Orders

CHAPTER 24

Aristide Demange sourly eyed the Germans going on about their business in southern Belgium. The truce between the new government in Germany and the Allies was holding. The business the Boches were going about was packing up and getting ready to go home. The matter-of-fact way they went at it suggested they’d been tourists here for the past few years, or possibly men who’d been assigned to work in a foreign land.

That might have been how they felt about it. Demange knew goddamn well how he felt about it. His trigger finger itched, that was how. There they were, figures in Feldgrau, some of them only a couple of hundred meters away. They weren’t even trying to stay under cover. Of course he wanted to kill them!

Not all the French soldiers felt the same way, but some of them did. “Doesn’t seem natural,” one said, pointing toward the Germans. “Whenever I spot one of those cons, I know I’m supposed to shoot him. I know he’ll shoot me if I don’t, too.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Demange nodded. “Only now we can’t.”

“Now we can’t.” The poilu nodded. “Seems a shame to let ’em go back to Bocheland without putting some holes in ’em, n’est-ce pas? In a few years, we’ll have to kick ’em out of here again, chances are.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Demange said. “But knocking ’em flat so they’d know better than to try that kind of crap, the politicians have no stomach for it. It would cost a lot of lives, which they care about a little, and it would cost of lot of money, which they care about a lot. Keep taxes high and you might lose the next election, God forbid.”

A truck rolled up, over on the other side of the wire. Some of the Germans piled into it. A couple of them kissed Belgian women good-bye before they did. One Fritz-an officer, by his cap-shook hands with a Belgian in a top hat. They exchanged bows. They didn’t brush cheeks, but it was plainly a near-run thing. The officer got into the truck, too. Smoke belching from its exhaust, it headed off to the east.

Louis Mirouze came up in time to see the truck disappear behind a grove of beat-up apple trees. “Some more of them gone,” the second lieutenant said.

“They aren’t gone,” Demange said. “If they were gone, they’d be under those fat black crosses they use on their military graveyards. They’re just going back to get ready for the next round.”

“It could be. I think it’s all too likely, in fact,” Mirouze said. “But I also think that won’t happen tomorrow or next week or next year. What will you do in the meanwhile?”

“Whatever the fat cochons set over me tell me to do. What else?” Demange answered. “They’d have to cut me out of this goddamn uniform. I don’t know how to take it off any more. How about you, kid?”

Mirouze’s sallow cheeks turned pink. “You will laugh.”

“Try me.”

“At the university, I was a student of American literature. Well, no-of American writing. I am particularly interested in the popular magazines: the stories of the Old West, the crime stories, the love stories, the prize-fighting stories, the stories about rocket ships and Martians with eyes on stalks.”

He was right-Demange did laugh. Then the older man asked, “Can you get a job teaching about that kind of stuff?”

“You are a practical type,” Mirouze said with respect. “I read these things because I enjoy them. They fascinate me. America must be a very strange place. I have no idea whether I can get that kind of position. I won’t starve if it turns out not to be possible. There is always work for someone who can translate between English and French.”

“You aren’t wrong about that,” Demange agreed. “You would’ve come in handy if there were ever any limeys or Yanks within fifty kilometers of where we’re at. How come you didn’t say anything before about how you get a bulge in your trousers about this American merde?”

The younger man blushed once more. “I told you-you would have laughed. I found out very soon that you-please excuse me-did not always take me seriously.”

If anything, that was an understatement. Demange had hardly ever taken Second Lieutenant Mirouze seriously. The rule, however, did have its exceptions. “I took you seriously whenever we messed with the Boches. You need a wheelbarrow to carry your balls, and that makes up for a lot of other crap.”

“For which I thank you very much, sir,” Mirouze said gravely. “If you could have seen how frightened I always was inside-”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Rien, you hear?” Demange broke in. “The only people who aren’t scared are the ones who’re too dumb to know what can happen to ’em, and you aren’t like that.”

“There are some others,” Mirouze said. “Hitler had many things wrong with him, but stupid he was not. He enjoyed the soldier’s life in the last war, though, the fighting along with the rest.”

“A few like that, yes,” Demange allowed. “Not many. A lot of them get killed in a hurry. Some of the others grow up to be generals or politicians. They send out the next batch to get killed for them.”

Louis Mirouze sent him a quizzical look. “If you feel that way about it, why do you stay a soldier?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I’m fucking good at it, that’s why. Our con of a colonel wanted to get me shot last Christmas, and he didn’t give a shit if he threw away the whole company as long as I stopped one. But we took that village without losing a man, and we all slept warm in it, too.”

“If you had a higher rank, you could accomplish more.”

“If I had a higher rank, I’d be a con myself,” Demange retorted. Something in Mirouze’s face made him chuckle and shift his Gitane from one side of his mouth to the other. “All right, all right. If I had a higher rank, I’d be a bigger con. There. You happy now?”

“Mais certainement, Lieutenant.” Mirouze sounded almost as dry as Demange could manage.

A couple of more German trucks rattled up to take away more troops. Each one also towed a 105mm howitzer. Demange knew he wouldn’t be sorry to see those snub-nosed murderers disappear back into Germany. The trucks, though, sounded as arthritic as they looked. The Americans, now, the Americans by God knew how to build trucks. Demange knew little and cared less about American boxing stories. Trucks mattered, though.

American trucks, he thought, could even stand up to Russia’s ruts and bogs. German models hadn’t been able to; they started falling to pieces in short order. Demange couldn’t get too scornfully amused about that-French trucks went to bits just about as fast.

More Boches climbed into the trucks. On Belgian roads, they’d do all right. Pretty soon, the Wehrmacht would leave the Low Countries. Everything would get back to normal. Or everything would except the endless kilometers of barbed wire, the minefields that would go on maiming people and farm animals for years to come, the trenches, the bomb craters, the reinforced-concrete fortifications that would take dynamite to remove …

Demange remarked on those. Mirouze looked back at him. “Well, sir, if you’re going to worry about every little detail …”

“Ha!” Demange barked sour laughter. “You’d better watch yourself there, sonny. Bits of me are rubbing off on you. That’s fine when you’re in the trenches like this. Maybe not so good at the university, eh?”

“Maybe-but then you never know for sure,” Mirouze answered. “If I booby-trap a professor’s office, mm, that’s one way to get ahead.”

This time, Demange laughed for real. “There you go! And if the Germans get frisky again and the Army calls you back, you might get stuck with me again.” He’d had plenty of worse men under him, but he was damned if he’d say so. If Mirouze couldn’t figure it out, the hell with him. Demange grubbed in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes.

. .

Chaim Weinberg stared at the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers stabbing the heavens as the Ciudad de Santander chugged into New York harbor. He’d grown up with all this stuff, but it still felt dreamlike to him. He hadn’t set eyes on any of it since 1936.

Just about eight years, he thought in wonder. He’d been a kid when he set off to fight for the Spanish Republic. He wasn’t a kid any more. A lot of things, yeah, but not a kid. He looked down at the wreckage of his left hand. He had the scars to prove he was no kid, all right. He had a son to prove he was no kid, too, a son he’d probably never set eyes on again.

Tugboats shoved the freighter against a pier. The Santander had only a few cabins. They said Chaim’s was the best one. The good news was that he believed them. The bad news, unfortunately, was also that he believed them.

No-the good news was that he hadn’t had to worry about U-boats on the Atlantic crossing. They’d all gone home to Germany. The coalition of generals and fat cats heading the new government didn’t look to be any bargain. Compared to what the generals and fat cats had overthrown, though, they also didn’t seem so bad.

The scene on the pier wasn’t like the ones you saw in the movies when the big ocean liner came into port. No crowds in evening clothes out there, no band playing, no confetti. Next to no nothing. A short, broad-shouldered man in a dark brown fedora, a tweed jacket, and work pants stood there, along with a gray-haired woman wearing a flowered housedress.

Chaim waved. Moishe and Ruth Weinberg-his mother and father-waved back. “I gotta clear customs before I can see you,” he shouted. A moment later, he yelled the same thing in Yiddish. His father waved to show he got that.

Sure enough, when the gangplank came down, it came down on the far side of a chicken-wire fence on wheels that they rolled out to keep people from just strolling on into New York City. Chaim shouldered his duffel bag and went into the customs shed. It wasn’t as if he had a lot of treasures from Spain. A few old clothes, a big bottle of Spanish brandy for his folks, another one that he’d mostly emptied on the way over, some newspapers with photos of the Nationalist surrender-that was about it.

He pulled his passport out of his pocket to show it to the customs clerk. The green cover was bent and crinkled and stained with sweat and mud and blood. Some of the inside pages carried those stains, too.

As soon as the clerk opened the passport, he frowned. It wasn’t because of the stains. As far as Chaim could tell, he didn’t even notice those. He was looking for other things. “Don’t you have any current identification?” he asked in annoyance. “This passport expired years ago.”

“Well, I’ve got this.” Chaim produced his discharge papers from the Army of the Spanish Republic. The document was full of seals and stamps and rococo typography.

But it cut no ice with the customs clerk. “Have anything in a language a man can read? English? French? German?”

“Nope. My mom and pop are waiting for me on the pier, though. They’ll tell you I’m still the same meshuggeneh who got the passport.”

“What have you been doing in Europe, in, ah, Spain”-the clerk went through the endorsements on the passport’s back pages-“after this document became invalid?”

“Fighting Fascism,” Chaim answered proudly. “I can show you my picture in the paper when the Nationalists finally gave up. It’s pretty little, but you can still spot my smiling punim.”

He started to pull the newspaper out of the duffel. The clerk waved for him to stop. “Mr. Simmons!” the fellow called. “We have a difficult case here, I’m afraid.”

Chaim’s heart sank when he saw Mr. Simmons. From pale, bald head to gold-rimmed round glasses to respectable suit, the man was the spitting image of mid-level bureaucrats all over the world. What would he make of a rough-talking Marxist-Leninist Jew with out-of-date travel documents?

“What’s going on?” he asked, and his voice was as gray as his jacket.

The younger clerk and Chaim took turns explaining. Each talked over the other. Pretty soon, each was making a point of talking over the other. Mr. Simmons listened. He asked a few questions. He looked at Chaim’s passport, and at his smashed left hand, and at his discharge papers. Then he asked, “When you were in Spain, Mr. Weinberg, did you know an Abraham Lincoln named Wilmer Christiansen?”

“A long time ago,” Chaim answered. “Redhead, wasn’t he? Poor guy got killed on the Ebro in ’38, if I remember straight. He was all right, Will was. How come?”

“He was my nephew,” Simmons said. “Now let’s get this straightened out, shall we?”

And they did. With a few thumps from a rubber stamp, the irregularities in Chaim’s paperwork disappeared. The clerk who’d called Simmons over looked discontented, but he kept his mouth shut. When you called your superior over and he did something you didn’t expect, you were stuck with it.

Duffel bag over his shoulder again, Chaim walked out of the customs shed. He put the duffel down to thump his father on the back and hug his mother. “Your poor hand! Vey iz mir!” Ruth Weinberg exclaimed.

“It’s okay,” Chaim said. English felt funny in his mouth. He’d used it less and less as time in Spain went by. Americans in the Abe Lincolns kept getting hurt or killed, and Spaniards took their places. German-speaking Internationals could handle his Yiddish. He’d spoken Spanish whenever he went behind the lines, too, except when he was talking with Dr. Alvarez.

“You want I should carry the sack?” his father asked when they headed for the closest subway stop.

“Thanks, Pop. I can do it,” Chaim said. His head might have been on a swivel. None of the buildings here had been hit by bombs or artillery. Out of all the windows he saw, only one or two were boarded up. No bullet holes scarred concrete or pocked wooden doors. Cars and trucks and buses all seemed new and freshly painted. People didn’t have the pale, scrawny, wary look that went with hunger and fear. To someone newly come from Spain, everybody looked rich.

His mother saw the amazement on his face, but didn’t understand why it was there. “It’s the war,” she said apologetically. “Nothing’s been the way it ought to be since those filthy Japs jumped us.”

Chaim wondered if she’d ever seen a Japanese man in her life. There were some in New York City, but not many. But that wasn’t why he dropped the duffel on the sidewalk (butts everywhere-not many folks here needed to scrounge them) and laughed till he had to hold his sides. It was either laugh or cry. Laughing felt better.

It did to him, anyhow. Ruth Weinberg looked mad. “I said maybe something funny?” she asked, her voice sharp.

“Yeah, you did, Ma. Sorry, but you did,” Chaim answered. “If this looks bad to you … This is so much better than anything I saw in Spain, I don’t know how to tell you. Now I believe all the stories you guys tell about the shtetls, on account of I’ve seen that kind of stuff myself.”

“So why did you go over there, then?” his mother said.

“Because the Republic was fighting the kind of mamzrim who start pogroms, that’s why,” Chaim said. “Because now Spain is free.” That was the simplest way to put it. He didn’t talk about reeducation camps, or about his suspicion that he would have wound up in one if he’d stayed in the Republic much longer.

“What will you do now that you’re back?” his father asked as they went down the steps to the trains.

“I dunno. Whatever I can find.” Chaim worried about it not in the least. In a land like this, dripping with milk and money, he was sure he’d manage something.

When word of the peace with Germany reached the Ukraine, Ivan Kuchkov figured they would do one of two things with him. Either they’d toss him him out of the Red Army and ship him back to his collective farm or they’d put him on the Trans-Siberian Railway and turn him loose against the Japanese. Now that the Fritzes were old news, the fight against the little yellow monkeys was warming up again.

But no. They had something else in mind. His regiment had gone east, all right, but not very far east. They were still this side of Kiev, combing the countryside for Ukrainian nationalist bandits. The Ukrainian rats had jumped straight into bed with the Nazis, hoping to use them to pay back the Soviet government for starving their country into collectivization.

Now the Nazis were gone. Even the stupid Germans couldn’t stomach them any more. But the bandits, or some of them, kept fighting. They had their reasons for hating the Red Army. And they knew they’d get forever in the gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck if they gave up, so what did they have to lose by going down rifle in hand?

“Fuck me if I wouldn’t sooner take on those Hitlerite pricks,” Kuchkov complained after a nasty skirmish with the Banderists. “When they got in trouble, they retreated. These pussies, you’ve got to kill ’em.”

“And they’re trying to kill you till you do,” Sasha Davidov agreed mournfully. He had a bandage on his right forearm. It was only a graze, but you didn’t want to make even a nodding acquaintance with somebody else’s bullet.

“Too goddamn right, they are.” Ivan muttered more obscenities under his breath. He had the bad feeling he knew why his regiment had drawn this stinking, dangerous duty. Someone who could give orders that moved units around was still working on paying them back for plugging that political officer.

He glanced over at Davidov. The little Jew looked back. His shoulders went up and down in a small shrug, as if to say What can you do? Ivan already knew what he could do: not a goddamn thing. He couldn’t even complain to Lieutenant Obolensky. If he did, the company commander would tell him They’re screwing me the same way they’re screwing you. And he’d be right.

Go over the lieutenant’s head? What a joke! Anyone with fancier shoulder boards would tell him Shut up and soldier, soldier! That had only one answer: I serve the Soviet Union!

If I serve the Soviet Union! was all you could say, no point to complaining in the first place. Besides, if he talked to anybody of higher rank than Obolensky, the Chekists would hear about it. Yes, this was a nasty duty. Yes, no one in the blue that was the NKVD’s arm-of-service color would shed a tear if a bandit put one through his brisket.

But they could find worse things to do with him-and to him-if he kicked up a fuss. Right now, they figured he wasn’t worth the trouble. If he made them change their minds … He didn’t want to find out what would happen then.

And so, the next morning, his section combed through the riverside woods again, flushing out Banderists. The bandits were in the woods, all right, in them and well dug in there. Had they been Germans, the Red Army would have pasted the woods with a few dozen Katyushas and then sent in troops to scrape up the stunned survivors.

They were only Banderists, though. Nobody who could order up the rockets wanted to waste them on worthless Ukrainians. The regiment got to clean them out the hard way, the old-fashioned way, then. If some soldiers got killed taking care of it, well, you could always find more soldiers.

The bandits fought with a motley mix of Nazi and Soviet weapons. They had an MG-34, but fired it only in short bursts. Ivan guessed they were low on 7.92mm cartridges. They wouldn’t get any more from the Fritzes. Once what they had was gone, it was gone for good.

They had to know they were licked. Without the Nazis to help them out and to distract the Red Army, they hadn’t a prayer of winning. They stayed in their foxholes and fought it out anyway. Some of them stayed quiet till the Red Army men went past them, then shot their enemies in the back. The Russians had used that trick against the Hitlerites whenever they could. Seeing it turned against them wasn’t so much fun.

“Give it up, you fools!” Sasha Davidov shouted to the Ukrainians. “All you’ll do is die here.”

“Suck my dick, you Communist whore!” a Banderist yelled back. Yes, they knew what they were doing. They knew why they were doing it. They were bound to know it was hopeless, too. They went ahead and did it anyhow. That made them very brave or very stupid, depending on how you looked at things.

The Red Army men took only a couple of prisoners. One of the Banderists actually gave up-he decided he would rather die slowly than all at once. Kuchkov’s men found the other guy behind a tree with a wound in the shoulder and another in the side.

“If you feel like doing me a favor, you’ll finish me off and not let the Chekists get their claws in me,” the Ukrainian said in his accented Russian.

“I will if you want,” Kuchkov said-he had no more use for the NKVD than he did for the Banderists. “Fuck your mother, are you sure?”

“Fuck you in the mouth, I sure am, Red,” the injured man replied. “I hurt like a son of a bitch. Might as well get it over with.”

A short burst from the PPD gave him what he wanted. One of the men in Ivan’s section must have said something about it to Lieutenant Obolensky, because the company commander took Ivan aside and said, “Are you sure you should have killed that bandit?”

“You mean the wounded prick? Fuck yes, Comrade Lieutenant! He was shot a couple of times. I hope some whore would do that for me if I asked him to. Even the Hitlerites’d put a sorry bastard out of his misery sometimes.”

Speaking carefully, Obolensky replied, “I hope it doesn’t get back to State Security that you killed the Banderist to keep him from telling them whatever he knew.”

“Oh.” Ivan considered that, but not for long. Then he laughed. “Fuck ’em all, you know? They can already drop on me because of Vitya and the politruk. If the cunts do, they do. Nichevo, right?”

“Nichevo-right,” Obolensky said. “But there’s a difference between not being able to do anything about it and swimming around in gravy before you jump into the wolf’s mouth.”

“I guess so, Comrade Lieutenant. You’re a goddamn good guy, you know?”

“Spasibo,” Obolensky said gravely.

“You’re a goddamn good guy,” Ivan repeated, “but fuck ’em all anyway. I’ve been doing this shit too cocksucking long. I’m not scared any more. I don’t want ’em to jug me, but I’m fucking sick of worrying about it. They shoot me? So, fine-they shoot me. They send me to Kolyma? Kolyma can’t be too much worse than some of the fuck-storms I’ve already been through.”

“I believe you,” Obolensky said slowly. “The NKVD would have a much harder time keeping the country in line if everybody felt that way.”

Ivan only shrugged. What he really wanted to do was ask the lieutenant who’d blabbed about him. He didn’t waste his time, though. Obolensky wouldn’t tell him. He knew as much without asking. In the lieutenant’s footwraps, he wouldn’t have answered a question like that, either. Obolensky needed people to tell him things. And if Ivan found out who the rat was, that bitch would be a fatal accident that hadn’t happened yet.

So Kuchkov shrugged one more time. He might be able to find out without asking anybody, at least in so many words. He might not read or write, but he sure as hell could add two and two.

Then he could fix things so the Banderists did his dirty work for him. Or if not them, the Japs. Sooner or later, the regiment would head for the Far East. The Japs were supposed to be just as much fun as the Germans, only in a different way. Yeah, they’d give plenty of chances for payback. You bet they would!

The big, snorting American lorry rolled away from the front. “And so we bid farewell to beautiful, romantic Belgium,” Alistair Walsh said grandly as he sat in the back with a squad’s worth of men. “We say good-bye to the exotic natives and their quaint and curious customs, and to our fellow holidaymakers from the strange and distant land of Deutsch.”

“Blimey,” Jack Scholes said. “Staff’s gone clean barmy, ’e ’as.” By the way the rest of the Tommies nodded and rolled their eyes, they sided with the gritty little private. No, Scholes had a new lance-corporal’s single chevron on his left sleeve: a parting gift, as it were. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the stripe the hard way.

“Not me,” Walsh said. “You blokes have no poetry in your souls-that’s what the trouble is.”

“Or m’ybe you’ve got rocks in your ’ead,” Scholes said. Again, by all the signs a vote would have gone his way.

Walsh pulled a new packet of Navy Cuts out of his breast pocket. After lighting his own, he passed the cigarettes around. “He may be balmy, but he’s not a bad old bugger,” one of the soldiers said, as if he weren’t there. Most of the others nodded one more time. They were, after all, enjoying his bounty. He was about as much a politician as any other staff sergeant, and not shy about buying popularity.

The canvas top was spread over its steel hoops to keep sun and rain off the passengers in the truck. Walsh could see out the back, but that wasn’t much of a view: the road the truck had just traveled over, and a little off to one side of it. The farther from the front they got, the fewer the smashed trees and flattened houses he spotted.

“Bloody fucking hell,” said Gordon McAllister, who sat next to him. The big Scot’s burr only added to the sincerity of the sentiment. “We lived through it.” He didn’t talk much. When he did, it was to the point.

Unless we run over a mine or something ran through Walsh’s head. He left it there. You didn’t want to say some things, for fear of making them come true. Any educated toff would tell you such magical thinking was superstitious nonsense. Walsh didn’t care. Not mentioning such things couldn’t make matters worse.

On they went. They met no mines, for which the staff sergeant was duly grateful. They did have to get off the road once, to jounce along on a corduroyed track through a field. When they came back to the paving, Walsh saw why they’d left: a repair crew was filling in an enormous crater.

“Fritzes must’ve dropped that one about an hour before the shooting stopped,” Scholes said.

“Why’d they send us down this stinking road, then?” somebody else asked. “Couldn’t they find one without a big fucking hole in it?”

That was one of those questions without any answer, of course. Maybe the fellow who’d planned the withdrawal had no idea about the bomb crater. Maybe he’d figured the corduroyed stretch would handle the traffic. Maybe he hadn’t given a damn one way or the other. Maybe the driver was lost.

Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, nobody’d given a damn one way or the other. The British Expeditionary Force was leaving Belgium. By lorry, by train, by bus, and, for all Walsh knew, by stagecoach, the Tommies were pulling out and heading for Calais and the other Channel Ports. Pretty soon, they’ll all be off the Continent and back in Blighty again.

Most of their German counterparts were already out of Belgium and Holland and even Luxembourg and back in the Vaterland. Walsh wondered what the Salvation Committee would do with all the young men they’d have to demobilize, and how unhappy those young men would prove when they had trouble finding work.

For that matter, he wondered how his own country would cope with swarms of demobilized soldiers looking for jobs. That hadn’t been easy the last time around. This go looked no easier.

It wasn’t his problem, though. The people who would have to worry about it were the bright young men in the government: the bright young men who were his friends and acquaintances, thanks to an accident of fate.

If Rudolf Hess had chosen to parachute into some other field … Walsh shook his head. In that case, someone else would have fetched the deputy Führer to the authorities, and one Alistair Walsh never would have found his affairs commingled with those of the great, the famous, and the powerful. But Hess had come down in that field outside of Dundee, and Walsh had taken him back into the town, and nothing was the same as it would have been otherwise. Better? Worse? How could he know? But surely different.

He wondered what had happened to Hess since Hitler’s untimely demise. He didn’t recall hearing anything about Hess since then, not that the man with the bushy eyebrows died a brave Nazi death, not that he was still alive and fighting, not that he’d been captured, not … anything.

His high-placed friends would know. Once he got back to England, he could find out. If he remembered. If he didn’t, that wasn’t the biggest thing in the world, either.

After a while, the lorry pulled off onto the shoulder. “Break time,” the driver announced. “Grab some grub, brew some char, go off into the bushes and set your minds at ease.”

“I don’t keep my mind there,” Walsh said.

“You’ve got to remember, Staff-you’re gettin’ old,” Jack Scholes said. The other Tommies in the back of the truck chuckled. The driver whooped-Walsh couldn’t give him trouble once this ride ended.

They washed down whatever they happened to have on them with tea brewed over smokeless cookers. Then they climbed back into the lorry. Before long, they crossed from Belgium into France. Walsh never would have known it, except that they passed two flagpoles, one flying a tricolor of black, yellow, and red, the other a red, white, and blue three-striper.

As night was falling, the lorry pulled into a tent city on the outskirts of Calais. “This is where I came in,” Walsh said. “Where I came in three different times, as a matter of fact.”

“Next time you get over ’ere, you can pay your own way,” Scholes said with a sly grin.

“I’ve seen all kinds of funny places on His Majesty’s shilling,” Walsh said in musing tones. “France and Belgium and Norway and Egypt … I never would have set eyes on the Pyramids and the Sphinx if I hadn’t gone there on duty. That’s something I’ll remember the rest of my days. Christ, chances are I’d never even have seen Scotland if I’d stayed a miner.”

“No loss.” Private McAllister was as glad to be away from his homeland as Walsh was to have escaped Wales.

“ ’E’s right, Oi reckon,” Scholes said, grinning still. “ ’Ow much would you ’ave missed it?”

“Not bloody much-for all kinds of reasons.” Again, Walsh saw Hess’ parachute coming down in that field. That had turned his life inside out and upside down, sure as hell. He went on, “I got shot in France, and I got shot in Africa, too. Wherever you do it, it’s not something I recommend. I didn’t get shot in Norway, but God only knows why. The Fritzes up there gave it their best try, no doubt about that.”

“An’ now they’re leaving, an’ that Quisling sod ’oo ’elped run the place for ’em, ’e’s got to find ’imself somewhere to ’ide,” Scholes said.

“Him and Mussert the Dutchman and Degrelle the Belgian and more besides,” Walsh agreed. “They’re all homegrown Nazis, so I don’t know if the Salvation Committee will even let them hole up in Germany. If their own people catch ’em, they’ll win a noose or a bullet.”

“Tell me they don’t deserve it, Staff,” the younger man said.

Walsh shook his head. “I can’t. I think they do. Then maybe we’ll have a little peace and quiet-till the next crop of gangsters and traitors gets taller and starts to need cutting down, anyhow.”