The Big Switch

Chapter 1

Vaclav Jezek slogged up a dirt track in eastern France. Crusted snow crunched under the Czech corporal’s boots. Like anyone from central Europe thinking of France, he’d always imagined Paris blazing with lights and beaches on the Riviera packed with girls in skimpy bathing suits. Freezing his ass off in the middle of a war had never been in the cards.

But here he was, freezing his ass off. This would have been a nasty winter by Czech standards. From everything he could pick up-he spoke only foul fragments of French-it was a bloody godawful winter by French standards. Which didn’t do anybody stuck in it one damn bit of good.

And here he was, in the middle of a war. And it was his own fault, too. When the Nazis jumped on Czechoslovakia in October 1938, he’d fought till he couldn’t fight any more. Then he’d gone over the Polish border and let himself be interned. And then he’d agreed to join the forces of the Czech government-in-exile still fighting the Germans from its base in Paris.

A good thing, too, he thought, lighting a Gitane without breaking stride. He didn’t breathe out much more fog with the cigarette than he had without it. Poland and Hitler were on the same side these days, both fighting the Russians. If he’d stayed in that internment camp, he’d probably be a German POW now.

Of course, he might yet end up a German POW. It wasn’t as if the Nazis had gone out of business. They were playing defense in the west for the time being, not pushing toward Paris with everything they had. That was something. Things looked a lot better now than they had when Vaclav got to Paris. He could still get killed or maimed or captured if his number came up.

As if to underscore the point, German artillery grumbled off to the east. Shells screamed through the air. Vaclav cocked his head to one side, gauging their flight. This lot wouldn’t come down anywhere close to him, so he kept marching.

The rest of the Czechs in his outfit made the same automatic calculation and did the same thing. They wore a motley mixture of Czech and French khaki uniforms. Most of them kept their domed Czech helmets in place of the crested French model. Vaclav did-he was convinced the Czech pot was made from thicker steel. The German Stahlhelm was better yet, but wearing one of those wouldn’t do, not if he wanted to keep on breathing, anyway.

Most of the Czechs carried French rifles. That made sense. French quartermasters didn’t want to have to worry about somebody else’s ammunition.

Jezek, by contrast, listed to the right as he marched. The piece slung on his shoulder was longer and heavier than an ordinary foot slogger’s rifle. It was made for wrecking tanks and armored cars. The 13mm armor-piercing slugs it fired would punch through twenty-five millimeters of hardened steel. It kicked like a jackass, too, despite padded stock and muzzle brake, but everything came with a price.

It also made one hell of a sniping rifle. Those big bullets flew fast and flat. And when one hit a mere human being, it commonly killed. Vaclav had picked off Germans out to a kilometer and a half. And he’d picked off a German sniper specially sent out to get rid of him: a compliment he could have done without.

Those 105s in the distance rumbled again. Again, Jezek cocked his head to one side. This time, he didn’t like what he heard. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled. He wasn’t the only one. The cry went up in Czech and French.

Even in his greatcoat, even with wool long johns, doing a belly flop into the snow wasn’t his idea of fun. And the goddamn antitank rifle thumped him when he landed. The stupid thing wasn’t content with bruising his shoulder every time he fired it. Oh, no. It wanted to leave black-and-blue marks all over him.

But snow and bruises weren’t so bad, not when you set them alongside of getting blasted into ground beef. Half a dozen shells came down not nearly far enough away from the Czech detachment. Fire at the heart of the burst, dirt and black smoke rising from it, fragments whining and screeching through the air… Vaclav had been through it more often than he cared to remember. It never got any easier.

Nobody was screaming his head off. That was good, to say nothing of lucky. They’d flattened out soon enough, and none of the shards of steel and brass decided to skim the ground and bite somebody regardless.

A couple of Czech soldiers started to get to their feet. “Stay down!” Sergeant Benjamin Halevy shouted from right behind Jezek. “They may not be done with us.”

Sure as hell, another volley came in half a minute later. One Czech swore and hissed like a viper, but only one. Bright red blood steamed in the snow under his leg. It didn’t look like a bad wound-but then, any wound you didn’t get yourself wasn’t so bad.

As the injured man bandaged around, Vaclav twisted around (trying his best to stay flat while he did it) and told the sergeant, “You may be a Jew, but at least you’re a smart Jew.”

“Fuck you, Jezek,” Halevy answered evenly. “If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?” He was redheaded and freckle-faced. He was a French noncom, not a Czech. His folks had brought him from Prague to Paris when he was little. Equally fluent in Czech and French, he served as a liaison between the government-in-exile’s troops and his host country’s army.

Before the war started, Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews. But, in Czechoslovakia and now here, he’d seen that you could count on them to fight the Nazis with everything they had. Anybody who’d do that was all right in his book. Plenty of Slovaks had thrown down their rifles and hugged the first German they saw. Slovakia was “independent” these days, though the next time Father Tiso did anything Germany didn’t like would be the first.

Since Halevy was a smart Jew, Vaclav asked him, “What d’you think? Can we get up now, or will those shitheads try to be really cute and throw some more shit at us?”

“What did I do to deserve getting asked to think like a German all the time?” The sergeant seemed to aim the question more at God than at Vaclav Jezek. That was good: God might have an answer, and Vaclav sure didn’t. After screwing up his features, Halevy went on, “I think maybe it’s all right. Maybe.”

“Yeah, me, too. C’mon. Let’s try it.” Vaclav scrambled to his feet. Snow clung to the front of his greatcoat. He didn’t try to brush it off. If it made him harder for the poor, shivering bastards in snow-spotted Feldgrau to spot, so much the better. Halevy followed his lead. So did the rest of the Czechs. They moved with no great enthusiasm, but they moved.

Stretcher-bearers carried the wounded man back towards a dressing station. Some of the other guys eyed them enviously: they were out of danger, or at least in less of it, for a while.

The German guns growled again. Jezek tensed, but these shells headed somewhere else. He nodded to himself. The artillerymen had a prescribed firing pattern, and by God they’d stick to it. Of course they would. They were Germans, weren’t they?

A stretch of snow-covered open ground several hundred meters wide lay ahead, with woods beyond. Vaclav eyed it sourly. He turned to Halevy. “What do you want to bet the Nazis have a machine-gun nest in amongst the trees?”

“I won’t touch that,” the Jew answered. “And there’ll be two more farther back covering it, so when we take it out it won’t do us much good.” He seemed no happier than Vaclav, and with reason. “Be expensive even getting close enough to take it out.”

Vaclav unslung the antitank rifle, which made his shoulder smile happily. “If we send a few guys forward to draw their fire, maybe I can do something about it at long range. Worth a try, anyhow.”

“Suits,” Halevy said at once. He told off half a squad of Czechs to serve as lures. They looked as miserable as Jezek would have in their boots. The rest of the men looked relieved. A well-sited MG-34 could have slaughtered half of them, maybe more.

Flopping down into the snow again, Vaclav steadied the monster on its bipod. He aimed where he would have put the gun if he were on the other side. Even with a telescopic sight, he couldn’t see anything funny. But nothing could hide a machine-gun muzzle when it started spitting fire. And maybe-he hoped-he’d spot motion when the crew served the gun.

Like sacrificial pawns, the handful of Czechs started crossing the field. They hadn’t gone far before the machine gun opened up on them. That was German arrogance. Letting them come farther might have drawn more after them. But the Nazis were saying, Thus far and no farther. This is our ground.

They could think so. Vaclav shifted the rifle a few millimeters-he’d guessed well. Blam! He winced even as he chambered a fresh round. Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, shooting that mother hurt every goddamn time. His right ear would never be the same again, either.

Blam! This time, the scope let him see a German reel away with his head nothing but a red ruin. Another one stepped up. They wouldn’t have caused so much trouble if they weren’t brave. Blam! He killed that one, too, and then another one a few seconds later. “Forward!” Halevy shouted. “Everybody forward!”

Forward the Czechs went. More Germans ran over to keep the machine gun firing. Vaclav methodically shot them. Before long, his side had a lodgement in the woods. The MG-34 fell silent. Maybe they’d captured it, or maybe the guys on the other side had pulled it back.

Either way, he could go forward himself now. Another few hundred meters reclaimed. Sooner or later, the rest of France. Later-how much later?-Czechoslovakia. It would take a while. Oh, yes. The antitank rifle seemed to weigh a tonne.

Theo Hossbach stood in front of the goal of what had to be the worst football pitch he’d ever seen. The Polish field was frozen and lumpy. The ball could have used more air, but nobody could find a valve that fit its air inlet. Nobody much cared, either. The German soldiers were back of the line for a while. The Ivans weren’t shooting at them, so they were letting off some steam.

The match was panzer black against infantry Feldgrau. Theo was the radio operator in a Panzer II. His black coverall wasn’t warm enough. His teammates heated themselves up running and falling and bumping into one another-and into the Landsers on the other side. A goalkeeper just stood there, waiting for something horrible to happen… and freezing while he waited. Theo didn’t complain. He never did. Come to that, he rarely said anything at all. He lived as much of his life as he could inside his own head.

If he had been moved to complain, he would have bitched about the quality of the match in front of him. Both sides would have been booed off the pitch if they’d had the gall to try to charge admission to an exhibition like this. He wasn’t the best ’keeper himself, but he liked to watch well-played football. This was more like a mob of little kids running and yelling and booting the ball any which way.

One of the guys in black missed a pass he should have been able to field blindfolded. A fellow in field-gray seized control of the ball. The mob thundered toward Theo. He tensed. A good defense would have stopped the attack before it got anywhere near him. Unfortunately, a good defense was nowhere to be found, not here.

He also tensed because there was liable to be an argument if one got past him. He hated arguments. And the makeshift goals were made for them. A couple of sticks pounded into the ground marked each one’s edges; a string ran from the top of one stick to the top of the other at more or less the right height. No net to stop the ball. Did somebody score or not? There’d already been two or three shouting matches.

But he didn’t have to worry, not this time. A tall man in black headed the ball away from danger before the incoming infantry could launch it at Theo. “Way to go, Adi!” one of the other panzer crewmen yelled. Theo couldn’t have put it better himself.

Adalbert Stoss took the praise in stride-literally. He ran the ball down, took it on the side of his foot, and expertly steered it up the field. Theo watched his back with proprietary admiration. Adi drove the panzer on which he himself ran the radio.

Smooth and precise as an English pro, Adi sent a pass to the right wing, then dashed into position in front of the other side’s goal. For a wonder, the guy to whom he sent the pass didn’t let it roll past the touchline. For a bigger wonder, he sent back a halfway decent centering pass. And Adi booted it past two defenders and the infantry’s ’keeper.

“Goal!” the panzer men yelled, pumping their fists in the air. The soldiers in Feldgrau couldn’t argue, not about that one.

Glumly, the infantrymen started from the halfway line. Before they’d done much, Adi Stoss swooped in and commandeered the ball. He charged up the pitch with it, sliding past Landsers as if they were nailed to the dirt. Only a wild, desperate lunge from the enemy ’keeper kept him from scoring again.

“No fair,” a panting foot soldier-right now a footsore foot soldier-complained. “You fuckers snuck a ringer in on us.”

“Like hell we did.” The closest panzer man pointed back toward Theo. “He’s in the same crew as our goalkeeper.”

“Scheisse,” the Landser said. “You ought to take him out anyway. He’s too damn good.”

“I didn’t know, that wasn’t in the rules,” the panzer man replied.

“Well, it ought to be,” the foot soldier said, bending over and setting his hands on his knees so he could catch his breath. “Playing against him is like going up against a machine gun with water pistols.” He looked up. “Christ, here he comes again.” Shaking his head, he clumped off.

Theo had known Adi Stoss was uncommonly fast and strong, even among the extraordinarily fit men of the Wehrmacht. He’d never seen him play football before. He was even more impressed than he’d thought he might be. If Adi wasn’t good enough to make his living in short pants, Theo couldn’t imagine anybody who would be.

Thanks largely to his efforts, the panzer side beat the infantrymen, 7-4. Soldiers in black passed bottles of the distilled lightning the Poles brewed from potatoes to soldiers in field-gray. Theo was glad to get outside some of the vodka. He wasn’t normally much of a drinking man, but in weather like this he figured he needed antifreeze as much as his panzer did.

Sergeant Hermann Witt, the commander of Adi and Theo’s machine, had run up and down the rutted field. He put an arm around Adi’s shoulder. “Man, I didn’t know you could play like that,” he said expansively-his other hand clutched a bottle.

“Fat lot of good it does me.” Adi sounded surprisingly bitter.

“You just made those ground pounders look like a bunch of jerks,” Witt said. “Nothing wrong with that. They think we’re out of shape because we don’t tramp like horses all day long. I guess you showed ’em different.”

“I like to play. That’s all there is to it.” Adi shook himself free of the sergeant.

Witt turned to Theo. “What’s eating him?”

“Beats me.” Theo had an opinion, which he kept to himself. As far as he was concerned, opinions were like assholes: necessary, but not meant for display.

The panzer commander frowned, lit a cigarette, and coughed. “I didn’t mean to piss him off-he was great. But the way he acts, I could have told him he stinks.”

Theo only shrugged. The less he said, the less he’d have to be sorry for later. At least Witt was interested in keeping Adi happy. That was more than Heinz Naumann, the previous panzer commander, had been. There would have been trouble between the two of them if Naumann hadn’t stopped a bullet. Theo didn’t like trouble, which meant he could have picked a better time to be born.

An infantryman came up to him. “You’re in the same crew as that maniac?” the fellow asked.

“That’s right,” Theo said. “What about it?”

“If he drives like he plays, you’re screwed,” the foot soldier said. He swiped his sleeve across his forehead. Despite the cold, sweat stained his tunic under the arms. “He’ll send you right into the Russian panzers, and they’ll blow you to hell and gone. He doesn’t know how to go backwards.”

“We’re still here so far.” Theo looked to the touchline. His greatcoat lay over there. As soon as this mouthy guy-Theo saw anyone who talked to him as a mouthy guy-went away, he could find it and put it on.

“Don’t get me wrong. He plays good,” the infantryman went on. After a moment, he added, “You weren’t bad yourself, dammit. I thought a couple of the shots you stopped’d go in for sure.”

“Thanks,” Theo said in surprise. He didn’t think he was anything out of the ordinary. You did your best to keep the ball from getting past you. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you couldn’t. Even if you couldn’t always, you tried not to look like too much of a buffoon out there.

“Well…” More slowly than he might have, the man in field-gray figured out Theo wasn’t the world’s hottest conversationalist. “See you. Try and stay in one piece,” he said, and walked off.

It was good advice. Theo hoped he could follow it. He was relieved when he found his greatcoat. Nobody who’d lost his own had walked off with it. If he found himself missing his, he might have done that. You didn’t screw your buddies when you were in the field. People you didn’t know could damn well look out for themselves.

There it was: the essence of war. You stuck with your friends and gave it to the swine on the other side as hard as you could. Theo knew who his friends were-the guys who helped him stay alive. He had nothing in particular against Russians, any more than he’d had before against Frenchmen or Englishmen or Czechs. But if they were trying to kill his pals and him, he’d do his best to do them in first.

The greatcoat fought winter not quite to a draw. The Wehrmacht needed better cold-weather gear. Boots, for instance: the Russians’ felt ones far outclassed anything Germany made. Well, there was more a ground pounder’s worry than a panzer man’s. Theo snorted. It wasn’t as if he had no worries of his own.

Out in the North Sea again. Lieutenant Julius Lemp felt the change in the U-30’s motion right away. The Baltic was pretty calm. As soon as you passed out of the Kiel Canal, you got reminded what real seas were like. And a U-boat would roll in a bathtub.

A rating up on the conning tower with the skipper said, “Somebody down below’s going to give it back-you wait and see.”

“Not like it’s never happened before,” Lemp answered resignedly. Once something got into the bilge water, it was part of a U-boat’s atmosphere for good. All the cleaning in the world couldn’t get rid of a stink. Overflowing heads, spilled honey buckets, puke, stale food, the fug of men who didn’t wash often enough, diesel fumes… Going below after the freshest of fresh air was always like a slap in the face from a filthy towel.

He went back to scanning horizon and sky with his Zeiss binoculars. Looking overhead was purely force of habit. Clouds scudded by not far above the gray-green sea. The RAF wasn’t likely to put in an appearance. But nobody who wanted to live through the war believed in taking dumb chances.

“Skipper…?” The rating let it hang there.

Lemp’s antennae that warned of danger were at least as sensitive as the metal ones on the boat that caught radio waves. Something was on the sailor’s mind, something he wasn’t easy talking about. The way things were these days, Lemp could make a good guess about what it was, too. All the same, the only thing he could do was ask, “What’s eating you, Ignaz?”

“Well…” Ignaz paused again. Then he seemed to find a way to say what he wanted: “It’s mighty good to be at sea again, isn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it,” Lemp answered dryly, “yes.”

Thus encouraged, Ignaz went on, “The only thing we’ve got to worry about out here is the goddamn enemy. That’s a good thing, nicht wahr ?”

“Oh, you’d best believe it is,” Lemp said, and nothing more. Somebody on the U-boat was probably reporting every word even vaguely political from him to the Sicherheitsdienst. Probably every even vaguely political word from the whole crew. That was how things worked right now.

The U-30 had been in port when some of the generals and admirals tried to overthrow the Fuhrer. There’d been gunfire at the naval base. Who was shooting at whom was something about which it was better not to enquire too closely. The Fuhrer remained atop the Reich. Two or three dozen high-ranking officers no longer remained among the living. The show trials were right out of the Soviet Union. Many more lower-ranking men had been cashiered.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that everybody in the military had to watch what he said and to whom he said it. If you couldn’t trust the comrades alongside whom you risked your life…

Then you couldn’t, that was all, and you took the precautions you needed to take. Out here, as Ignaz had said, it was only the enemy who was dangerous. Back in port, you had to worry about your friends. And how were you supposed to fight a war like that?

Carefully, Lemp thought. He had to fight carefully any which way. He’d had the misfortune to sink an American liner. History would not have been kind to the U-boat skipper who dragged the USA into its second war against Germany. Neither would that man’s superiors. Fortunately, it hadn’t happened. The Reich denied everything at the top of its lungs. The Americans couldn’t prove what they suspected. Lemp’s superiors still didn’t love him, but they hadn’t beached him, which was the only thing that counted.

He wasn’t likely to find an American liner in the North Sea. This was a war zone by anybody’s standards. British and French troops still hung on against the Germans in northern Norway. The only thing that could supply them or get them out of there was the Royal Navy. U-boats and Luftwaffe aircraft were making the Tommies pay. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though. They were both brave and professional, as Lemp had reason to know.

In weather like this, the Luftwaffe was no more likely to get planes off the ground than the RAF was. If anybody was going to keep enemy ships from slipping through, it was the U-boat force.

Down this far south, Lemp didn’t really expect to spy the foe. But he and the ratings on the conning tower braved awful weather and spray that froze in midair and stung cheeks like birdshot to keep binoculars moving up and down and from side to side. For one thing, the crew needed the routine. For another, as Lemp had thought not long before, you never could tell.

No planes in the sky now, though: neither English nor German. No smoke smudges darkening the horizon, not even when waves lifted the U-30 to their crests and let the lookouts see farther than they could otherwise. After a two-hour stint, Lemp and the crew went below, to be replaced by fresh watchers. You didn’t dare let concentration flag; the moment you weren’t paying close attention was bound to be the one when you most needed it.

This early in the patrol, the boat’s stench wasn’t so bad as it would get later on. Lemp wrinkled his nose all the same. But the reek inside the iron tube was familiar and comforting, no matter how nasty. And the dim orange light in there also made him feel at home, even if his eyes needed a few seconds to adjust to the gloom.

“ Alles gut, Peter?” he asked the helmsman.

“ Alles gut, skipper,” Peter answered. “Course 315, as you ordered. And the diesels are performing well-but you can hear that for yourself.”

“Ja,” Lemp agreed. It wasn’t just hearing, either; he could feel the engines’ throb through the soles of his feet. As Peter said, everything sounded and felt the way it should have. When it didn’t, you knew, even if you couldn’t always tell how you knew.

“You want the conn, sir?” Peter made as if to step away from the wheel. Discipline on U-boats was of a different and looser kind from what it was in the Kriegsmarine ’s surface ships. Most of the spit and polish went into the scuppers. No officer who was happy pulling the stiffening wire out of his cap missed it. Lemp sure didn’t. The men could fight the boat. As long as they could do that, who gave a rat’s ass if they clicked their heels and saluted all the time?

He shook his head. “No, you can keep it. I’m going to my cubbyhole and log the last two hours of-well, nothing.” Some of the rituals did have to be fulfilled.

Peter chuckled. “All right. Sometimes nothing is the best you can hope for, isn’t it? Damn sight better than a destroyer dropping ash cans on our head.”

“Amen!” Lemp said fervently. If a depth charge went off too close, the sea would crumple a U-boat like a trash bin under a panzer’s tracks. It would be over in a hurry if that ever happened-but probably not soon enough.

Only a curtain separated his bunk and desk and safe from the rest of the boat. Still, that gave him more room and more privacy than anyone else enjoyed. He spun the combination lock on the safe. When the door swung open, he took out the log book. A fountain pen sat in the desk drawer. Long habit meant he never left anything on a flat surface where it could-and would-roll away and get lost. He opened the log and began to write.

Walking in a winter wonderland. That was how Peggy Druce thought of Stockholm. It wasn’t that she didn’t know about winter. She’d grown up in a Philadelphia Main Line family, and married into another. She’d skied in Colorado, in Switzerland, and in Austria back in the days when there was an Austria. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what winter was all about.

But Philadelphia put up with winter. Ski resorts seemed intent on making money off it-which, when you looked at things from their point of view, was reasonable enough. Stockholm enjoyed winter.

Part of that, no doubt, was enjoying what you couldn’t escape. Scandinavia lay a long way north. If not for the Gulf Stream, it would have been as uninhabitable as Labrador. (She remembered a pulp story about what might happen if the Gulf Stream went away. She couldn’t recall who’d written it: only that he was a Jew. Now that she’d seen Hitler’s Berlin, that took on new weight in her mind.) But the Swedes did it with style. And the way they kept houses comfortable and streets clear of snow put Philadelphia-and every other place she’d visited in winter-to shame.

Not only that, all the lights stayed on through the long, cold nights. After her time inside the Third Reich, that seemed something close to a miracle. It had in Copenhagen, too… till the Germans marched in. Now the Nazis’ twilight swallowed up Denmark, too.

Yes, Stockholm was a wonderful, bright, civilized place. The only problem was, she didn’t want to be here. She had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been able to come to Marianske Lazne in Czechoslovakia without it, or to maintain herself when the war stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, all her jack couldn’t get her back to the good old US of A, or to the husband she hadn’t seen for well over a year.

Norway remained a war zone. Because it did, there was no air traffic between Sweden and England-no sea traffic, either. She wished she could go to Moscow and head for Vladivostok by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Though it was the long way back to the States, it would have done the job. But, with the railroad cut and Vladivostok under Japanese siege, that didn’t work, either.

And so she stayed where she was. Stockholm made a far more likable prison than Berlin had. The food was better, and she didn’t wonder whether everyone she spoke to would report her to the Gestapo. All the same, she wasn’t where she wanted to be.

She’d never been one to suffer in silence. If she was unhappy, she let people hear about it. The American embassy in Berlin had got to know her much better than the clerks and secretaries and diplomats ever wanted to. (And, one drunken night, she’d got to know one of the diplomats much better than she ever expected to. She did her damnedest not to remember that.)

Now she bent the personnel of the embassy in Stockholm to her will-or did her best. Again, the trouble was that, even when they wanted to do what she wanted (and they did, if for no more noble reason than to get her out of their hair), they couldn’t.

“I can’t call an airplane out of nowhere, Mrs. Druce,” said the undersecretary in charge of dealing with distressed travelers. “I haven’t got a liner, or even a freighter, up my sleeve, either.”

“Yes, I understand that, Mr. Beard,” Peggy answered. To her secret amusement, Jerome Beard sported a hairline mustache. “But if you could arrange something with the German and British authorities…”

He ran a hand over the top of his head, from front to back. Once upon a time, he might have used the gesture to smooth his hair. But where were the snows of yesteryear? He was on the far side of fifty-a few years older than Peggy. He had one of the baldest domes she’d ever seen, though, and it made him look older.

“Why don’t you ask me something easy?” he said testily. “Walking across the Baltic, for instance?”

“It’s frozen over for miles out to sea.” Peggy, by contrast, sounded as bright and helpful as she could.

Beard’s harried expression said he understood she was being difficult but sugarcoating it. “Pardon my French, Mrs. Druce, but hell will freeze over before they cooperate. Last time around, both sides were perfectly correct. They did everything they could to help displaced persons like you. Now?” He shook his head. His bare scalp gleamed under the overhead lamp. “No. I’m very sorry, but it’s not just a war.”

“You said that before,” Peggy pointed out. She was bound and determined to be difficult, regardless of whether she sugarcoated it.

“Well, what if I did?” Beard ran his hand over his crown again. “It’s true. You have no idea how much those two regimes despise each other.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I was in Berlin, remember,” Peggy said.

“All right, then.” The undersecretary yielded the small point. He wasn’t about to yield on the larger one. In fact, he poured more cold water over it: “And the same holds true for France and Germany. The French don’t merely hate the Germans, either-they’re scared to death of them. That makes joint efforts even more unlikely.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” Peggy demanded.

“How about thanking God you’re in one of the few countries on this poor, sorry continent where there’s plenty of food and no one is trying to kill anyone else?” Beard said. “You couldn’t pick a better spot to wait out the war.”

“I thought the same thing about Copenhagen. Then I watched German soldiers get out of their freighters and march on the palace,” Peggy said bitterly. “No guarantee the same thing won’t happen here.”

“No guarantee, no.” Beard paused to fill a pipe and light it. The mixture smelled like burning dirty socks. “Swedish blend,” he explained, a note of apology in his voice. “All I can get these days. But to come back to your point… The Swedes will fight. They’ve made that very plain to Germany. Since the Germans have plenty of other pots on the fire, Sweden’s safe enough for now. That’s the ambassador’s judgment, and the military attache’s, too.”

“And maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong,” Peggy said. “All I want to do is go home. It’s 1940, for crying out loud. I was going to be in Europe for a month in fall 1938.”

“You picked the wrong month, and the wrong part of Europe,” Beard said.

“Boy, did I ever!”

“There may still be a way,” he said. “You would have to take some chances.” He shook his head. “No-you would have to take a lot of chances.”

“Tell me,” Peggy answered. “If I don’t have to put on a uniform and carry a gun, I’ll do it. And I’d think about putting on a uniform, as long as it isn’t a Nazi one.”

“You can still travel to Poland. From Poland, you can get to Romania. From Romania, you can probably find a ship that will take you to Egypt. Once you get through the Suez Canal, you’ve left most of the war behind you,” Beard said.

Italy and England were fighting a desultory war over Somaliland and Abyssinia, a campaign neither one of them could get very excited about. But that was the least of Peggy’s worries. “Like the kids’ magazines say, what’s wrong with this picture?” she replied. “If I fly in to Warsaw, say, the Red Army’s liable to be running the airport. And if it isn’t, the Luftwaffe will be. Besides, isn’t there fighting in the stretch of Poland that borders Romania?”

“There is,” Beard acknowledged. “But you could skirt it by going from Poland to Slovakia and to Romania from there.”

For all practical purposes, going into Slovakia was the same as going back to Nazi Germany. There was no guarantee the Russians wouldn’t invade Father Tiso’s almost-country, either. Come to that, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t invade Romania. As the embassy undersecretary’d pointed out, there was a war on. There were no guarantees anywhere.

Peggy’d told him she was willing to take a lot of chances. Had she meant it? “Well,” she said brightly, “can you help me with the arrangements?”