The Big Switch

Chapter 18

“Here you go, Rudel.” Colonel Steinbrenner signed Hans-Ulrich’s furlough papers with a flourish and handed them to him. “Do you know what you’ll do?”

“Well, sir, I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere very far,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “Five days… That’s not much time, and I don’t want to spend most of it sitting on a train. I thought maybe, oh, Bialystok. It’s a city, and it hasn’t got smashed to the devil like the White Russian towns.”

“Have a good time,” the squadron commander said. “You’ve got a girl back there, don’t you?”

And here Hans-Ulrich thought he’d been so casual! He coughed a couple of times. “Uh, not exactly, sir.”

Colonel Steinbrenner seemed to riffle through a mental card file. “Oh, that’s right,” he said when he came to the card he wanted. “You’re the one who was chasing that little Jew or half-Jew or whatever she is at the tavern. Go on, then. Have fun. I hope you catch her.”

“Thank you, sir.” Hans-Ulrich got out of there as fast as he could. He hoped he caught Sofia, too. Marrying a Jew, or even a half-Jew, would shoot down your career faster than flak from the Ivans. Laying one, though… If there were any regulations against that, he hadn’t heard about them. And he would have, because he kept his ear to the ground.

The nearest railhead was in a town northeast of Minsk. Hans-Ulrich took the squadron’s Kubelwagen to get there; one of the groundcrew men rode along so he could drive it back. As Hans-Ulrich hopped out, the noncom said, “Enjoy yourself, Lieutenant. Fuck that bitch till she begs for mercy.”

“Um,” Rudel said, and was spared the need for anything more because the groundcrew man put the Kubelwagen in gear and drove away. Did everyone in the whole wide world know he was interested in Sofia? Everybody in the squadron did, anyhow.

A Feldgendarmerie sergeant with a shiny gorget checked his papers and his ID before letting him board the train. “Go ahead, sir,” the fellow said when he was satisfied. “You’re you, all right.”

“I hope so,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’m not likely to be anybody else, am I?”

“You’d be surprised,” the military policeman answered. “Matter of fact, you’d be fucking amazed. Some of the guys who try to go west on bad papers or no papers at all… Makes you wonder whose side they’re on, by God.”

With such encouragement ringing in his ears, Hans-Ulrich climbed onto the train. It was already crowded, but he wedged his way into a compartment. He promptly fell asleep. Several hours later, shouts of “Bialystok! All out for Bialystok!” roused him and sent him staggering down onto the platform at the train station.

Yawning, he tried to figure out where Sofia’s place of employment lay. East of the station-he thought. He started that way. If he couldn’t find it, he’d ask somebody. Most Jews and some Poles here understood German.

Quite a few men in Feldgrau prowled the streets-fewer in his Luftwaffe gray-blue. Bialystok wasn’t Paris or even Warsaw, but it wasn’t the front, either. It had enough bars and brothels and cinemas to keep the Germans amused while they unwound after weeks nose-to-nose with Ivan.

He found the place without too much trouble. Since the signs in Bialystok were in two languages he couldn’t read-one with an alphabet as meaningless to him as Hindustani-he took that for a good omen. The next interesting question was whether Sofia would be working when he walked into the tavern. Had he come all this way just to sit around and drink mineral water or coffee?

But there she was, small and dark and slim and maddening. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, as if he hadn’t been away blowing up Russian panzers for weeks. “Well, come on over here and sit down.”

She led him to a little table off in a corner. “What? I don’t deserve a better seat than this?” he said, more or less joking.

Sofia, plainly, wasn’t joking at all. She shook her head. “Why should you? You don’t spend enough cash to make it worthwhile to put you anywhere else. Coffee! Fizzy water!” She rolled her eyes at what they did to profit margins. The expression and the logic behind it certainly made him think of her as a Jew. They didn’t make her any less attractive, though, even if they should have.

Doing his best to sound reasonable, he answered, “I don’t get drunk and tear the place up and break things, either.”

“We can collect on that-sometimes, anyhow. I suppose you’ll want coffee now.” Without waiting to find out whether she supposed accurately or not, she bustled away. Hans-Ulrich admired her trim ankles. He’d never particularly cared about ankles before-things got more interesting as you moved north-but he made an exception here. Hers were turned on a superior lathe.

She came back with the coffee, set it down on the table, and stood there waiting. He gave her money. That made her turn to go again. Before she could disappear, he spoke quickly: “What time do you get off today?”

“Past your bedtime,” Sofia said. Glancing at the steaming cup she’d brought, she added, “Past your bedtime no matter how much coffee you drink.”

“But I came all the way back here to see you,” Hans-Ulrich said. “There’s sure nothing else in Bialystok that would have brought me back.”

“Why is this supposed to be my problem?” Sure as the devil, Sofia specialized in being impossible.

“Because-” Hans-Ulrich hesitated. Because I love you would make her laugh in his face. Because I want to go to bed with you was more honest, but too likely to get him slapped. Hoping the hesitation wasn’t too noticeable, he tried again: “Because you’re the most interesting girl I’ve met since I don’t know when.”

A black eyebrow leaped toward her hairline. “You talk prettier than most of them, but you mean the same thing.” Somebody with an empty beer stein banged it on the table and shouted for her. “I’ve got to go,” she said, and she did.

Hans-Ulrich sipped the coffee. It was better than what a field kitchen made but, he thought, not so good as it had been the last time he was here. The war was rough on everybody, at the front or not.

He watched Sofia. He bought more coffee, and more coffee, and more coffee still. If she kept working till after his bedtime now, she’d be doing a twenty-four-hour shift and then some. He got rid of the used coffee in a crowded, odorous pissoir made more cramped still by the infantry sergeant passed out next to the urinal.

A panzer crew and some foot soldiers started punching one another. Hans-Ulrich helped break up the brawl and throw them out. Then he went back to his table.

After a while, Sofia came over with a fresh cup of coffee. She had his rhythm down, all right. Pausing, she said, “Why should I want anything to do with you? You’re a German. That makes you trouble with a capital T.”

He shook his head. “Nah. Germans in Poland are only trouble with a small t. That’s what your government decided. Russians are trouble with a capital T.”

“I don’t care what the government decided. The government is stupid,” Sofia answered, which could have sent her to a camp had she been overheard in Germany. “Germans are always trouble.”

“This isn’t about Germans and Poles or Germans and Jews or Germans and Portuguese, if you happen to be Portuguese,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s about you and me, that’s all.”

“Easier for the one who drops the bombs to talk like that than for the poor so-and-so they land on.”

How did she know he dropped bombs? He supposed she could find out. Or she might have been using a figure of speech. Before he could find any sort of comeback, a shouted call for a refill sent her scurrying away. He sipped his coffee. His eyes were wide, wide open. Not quite benzedrine, but not so far away.

The tavern stayed crowded no matter how late it got. Sofia accidentally on purpose spilled a mug of beer on a German who tried reaching up under her skirt. The guy’s friends laughed at him, so he couldn’t get mad. He was drunk and hopeful, not really determined. Lucky for him, too, because Hans-Ulrich would have murdered him if he’d tried to take it out on the barmaid.

And then Sofia came to his table without a cup of coffee in her hand. “All right, Herr Hotshot. I’m off work,” she said, her sharp chin lifted in defiance. “Now what?”

Hans-Ulrich sprang to his feet. He was so surprised and happy, he wondered why he didn’t bounce off the ceiling. He offered her his arm. The way she took it was more challenge than anything else. He didn’t care. All he cared about was that she took it. “Let’s both find out,” he said.

“Night bombing.” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko spoke the words as if they tasted bad. “This is what we are reduced to until we can reequip with Pe-2s or some other new bombers. We serve the Soviet Union, of course.” Plainly, he wished the squadron could serve the country some other way.

Sergei Yaroslavsky understood his superior’s pride. He had trouble sharing it, though. Enough was enough. Enough, in fact, was too much. Against the Luftwaffe ’s fighters, the SB-2 had had its day. It was as simple as that. Too many of the faces listening to Ponamarenko were fresh and new. Too many veterans who’d served as long as Sergei were dead, shot down by fighter planes they couldn’t escape.

Yes, night bombing was second-line duty. But it was something the SB-2 could still manage. Finding enemy aircraft at night was largely a matter of luck. Bombing by night was also a matter of luck, with navigation and aim so uncertain. But what about it? The explosives were bound to come down on somebody’s head, and the somebody would more likely than not be a Nazi.

Kerosene lanterns and men with electric torches marked the edges of the runway. “Should be fun finding this place again in the dark, shouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Federov remarked.

Sergei had been thinking the same thing. To keep from dwelling on it, he told his bomb-aimer, “Well, if they lit it up like peacetime, the Germans would find it before we got back.”

From Moscow all the way to Germany’s western border, no one showed a light at night. You didn’t want to give the other side a free shot at you, any more than you wanted to hand the other team a penalty kick in a football match. But the lights were on again in England and France. They didn’t worry about German bombers any more. They didn’t need to: the capitalists had made common cause with the Fascists to destroy the building workers’ and peasants’ paradise here.

It won’t happen, Sergei told himself. We won’t let it happen. The Red Army kept yielding ground, but falling back before the enemy worried him much less than it would have worried, say, a Frenchman. In France, you could fall back only so far till you ran out of real estate.

That wasn’t a problem in Russia. Trading space for time had been a Russian specialty ever since invaders started coming out of the west-pretty much forever, in other words. Napoleon made it to Moscow, but much joy he had from his homecoming. Sergei didn’t think the Germans would get that far, even with help from the other degenerate Western powers. And if they should, he didn’t think they wanted to fight through a Russian winter.

Once they were airborne, an order came over the radio: “Switch off navigation lights!” Sergei flipped the switch. The command came sooner than he’d expected. He hoped the SB-2s wouldn’t collide with each other in the darkness. He saw no bursts of flame or midair explosions, so he supposed they didn’t. He would have waited longer than Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko had all the same.

The bombers droned west. A fat gibbous moon spilled milky light over the Rodina far below. There was the front. It couldn’t be anything else. Those sullen fires down on the ground, the plumes of smoke climbing into the air… “Any target we hit from now on, it belongs to the Nazis,” Federov said.

“Any military target,” Sergei agreed absently. He was studying the compass. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the copilot and bomb-aimer blink. If Federov was NKVD, as he’d wondered, should he have said that? Too late to worry about it now. And how many Byelorussians had the German hordes overrun? Millions, surely, and some Great Russians and Ukrainians as well.

Russians called Germans Nemtsi -the tongue-tied ones. To ancient Russian ears, the German language was sense-free, senseless babble. In German, Slav and slave both came from the same word. Even in the days when they were forming their speech, the Germans had thought their eastern neighbors fit only for doing what they told them to do.

All that went back more than a thousand years-how much more, Sergei didn’t know. He did know not much had changed since.

The navigation lights were out, but he found he could still spot the flames in the exhaust from the other SB-2s’ engines. No doubt they could see his plane the same way. That was good-he supposed. If he saw other ghostly shapes, other exhaust fires, coming out of the west… He shook his head, refusing to borrow trouble.

Compass and airspeed indicator were his only navigation tools. Calling that crude gave it too much credit. “We’re about where we ought to be,” he said at last, hoping he was right. “Let’s give them our present and head back to the airstrip.”

“Sounds good to me,” Federov said.

Sergei shouted into the speaking tube: “Bombs away, Ivan!”

“Right!” the Chimp answered. The bombs fell free. The SB-2 got livelier. “Bombs fucking away!” Kuchkov reported.

“Then I’m getting out of here.” Sergei hadn’t seen any German night fighters, and he didn’t want to, either. He hauled the bomber around in the sky and headed back toward the airstrip. Even more than he had on taking off, he hoped he’d be able to find it.

A moment later, he started hoping he’d get back to Russia to find it. German flak woke up all at once. The Nazis had no searchlights, the way they would while defending their own cities. They were firing by ear and by guess, gauging height and position from the sound of the bombers’ engines.

Fire flashed on the ground as the antiaircraft guns went off. Red and yellow streaks were tracer rounds rising through the air. And the bursts reminded Sergei of the booms when skyrockets turned nights into magic. Here he was, in the middle of one of the fanciest fireworks shows he’d ever imagined.

A fragment clanged into the fuselage. The Germans might be guessing where his plane was, but they made goddamn good guessers. The longer the flak went on, the scarier it got. “You all right back there?” Sergei called to Sergeant Kuchkov.

“Bet your cock I am. Pussy missed me by twenty motherfucking centimeters, easy. Those bitches can’t shoot any better than they can fart.” Kuchkov swore as naturally as he breathed, and a lot more artistically.

“Well, good,” Sergei said, making the bomber jink to help confuse-he hoped-the gunners’ aim. “Any damage to the plane?”

“Nothing the groundcrew assholes can’t fix pretty easy,” the Chimp replied, and Sergei had to be content with that.

After crossing the front, Sergei picked up a little antiaircraft fire from his own side, but only a little. He’d been thinking about football before. Now he did again. Come on, fellows. You don’t want an own goal here. What Ivan Kuchkov called the Russians manning those guns should have unmanned them from several thousand meters.

Sergei peered down toward the ground, looking for the rectangle of lights he’d left-or for any other rectangle of lights he happened to see. They wouldn’t mark a football pitch, but an airstrip.

He almost yipped in surprise when he saw one. Was he that good a navigator, or just that lucky tonight? As he descended, he grew more and more convinced this really was the runway from which he’d set out. The lights were arranged the same way, anyhow, and he didn’t think the authorities would have standardized that.

He lowered the landing gear and put down as gently as if the dirt strip were paved with eggs. Night landings were not for the faint of heart. He was proud of this one, and prouder when Federov said, “We’ve come in rougher than that plenty of times in broad daylight.”

“We have,” Sergei agreed. He tried to sound as if that were routine, but couldn’t even convince himself that he managed it. If those bombs had actually hurt the Nazis, this would be a perfect run.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel was happy in the way only a man who’s wanted a woman for a long time and finally got her into bed can be happy. He was pretty much an idiot, in other words, but a sated and smiling idiot. This was the best furlough of his life. He was sure it was the best furlough of anybody’s life. Yes, he was pretty much an idiot for the time being.

Sofia, he discovered after asking eight or ten times (definitely an idiot), was half-Jewish: a Mischling First Class, as the Reich classified racial categories. She thought of herself as a Jew, though. “My father’s a miserable drunk,” she said. “Why should I want to be like him?”

Sounds like a Pole, Hans-Ulrich thought, as if there’d never been a German drunk in the history of the world. Although an idiot, he wasn’t quite an imbecile: he didn’t say what he was thinking out loud. He did ask, “What does your mother do?”

“She went to Palestine,” Sofia answered. “With the war, I haven’t heard much from her the past year or so. After she broke up with my father, she got the Zionist itch. I think she was making up for marrying a goy, but try and tell her that.” She rolled her eyes. “Try and tell my mother anything. Good luck!”

“And here you are with me,” Hans-Ulrich said, running a hand along the smooth, warm length of her. She had a tiny flat a couple of blocks from the tavern where she worked. “Maybe you’re not so different from her after all. Should I watch it if I try to tell you something?”

Not quite an imbecile, but absolutely an idiot. What woman wants to hear she’s like her mother? “You’d better not start,” Sofia replied with a bayonet-sharp edge to her voice. “And I haven’t talked about marrying you, have I? Gevalt! ”

“Well… no,” Rudel admitted. He hadn’t talked about marrying her, either. You could screw just about anybody, and your superiors wouldn’t care as long as you didn’t come down venereal. He tried to imagine a Luftwaffe officer marrying a Mischling First Class in wartime. His superiors would care about that. Oh, yes, just a little! What better way to shoot your military career right between the eyes? You’d never see another promotion again. They’d probably take the Ritterkreuz away, too.

“All right, then. Don’t be dumber than you can help,” Sofia said, which, at that moment, might have been asking for more than Hans-Ulrich could give.

“How about this, then?” he said, and rolled on top of her. She squeaked with surprise, but not with dismay. He was amazed he could go this often. He was a young, healthy animal in fine physical condition. He had very few limits when it came to horizontal athletics.

Some little while later, after both their hearts stopped thudding so hard, Sofia asked him, “And what do you do when you’re standing up?”

“It’s been too long. I don’t remember,” he answered, deadpan.

“Braggart!” She poked him in the ribs. “You-man, you.” An exquisitely timed pause. “But I repeat myself.”

He did have the mother wit to realize he ought to ask her something personal (and he wasn’t ready for another round [he didn’t think he was, anyhow]). “What do you want to do with yourself?” he said.

“Live through the war,” she said at once. “If I can’t do that, nothing else matters, does it?”

“No,” he said, wishing he’d come out with the question in a different way. His odds of living through the war were… well, not good. Stuka pilots went where things were already hot and made them hotter. That was a good way to win yourself a Knight’s Cross. It wasn’t such a good way to persuade your insurance man to write a fat policy on you.

Most of the time, Hans-Ulrich avoided thinking about that. What combat soldier didn’t? If you started feeling the goose’s footfalls every time it walked over your grave, how were you supposed to do your duty? You couldn’t-it was as simple as that. And so you figured that everything had gone all right the last time, and that meant it would this time, too.

“You’re going to forget me,” Sofia said. “When you remember me, you’re going to be embarrassed you had anything to do with me.” Most women would have started weeping and wailing after they came out with a line like that. Sofia sounded no more excited than she would have if she asked him whether he wanted more coffee.

All the same, Rudel tried to deny everything. “I’ll remember you forever.”

“Oh, cut the crap,” Sofia said. “You’re going to remember me after you’ve got four kids and a blond Aryan wife? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll do your best to pretend nothing in Bialystok ever happened.”

“How do you know I’m not married now?” he asked.

“You’re the kind who’d wear a ring. And even if you didn’t, you’re the kind who’d get upset about cheating on his sweetie back home,” Sofia answered. “It wouldn’t stop you-does it ever stop anybody?-but you’d get upset about it anyway.”

He twisted in the narrow bed so he could face her. The mattress creaked under him. It had been doing a lot more creaking than that lately. The sun was going down; shadows shrouded Sofia’s features. “You don’t much like people, do you?” he said.

She shrugged. The same excellent firm that did her ankles had also sculpted her collarbones. “I am one. What else have I got to like? I’m not one of those jerks who get a dog or a cat and pretend it’s their baby.”

“All right,” he said. He tended to get sloppy over dogs, but not the way she meant. If Sofia were to get a pet, he had the feeling she’d choose a cat instead. Or maybe a viper.

She leaned up on one elbow. Her breasts were small, with broad, dark nipples, almost as if she’d already had a child. Maybe she had; there was a lot he didn’t know about her. When he reached out to touch one, she knocked his hand away. “So,” she said, “what’s it like for a Nazi to fuck a Jew?”

He had no idea how to answer that, so he tried a counterquestion: “What’s it like for a Jew to lay a Nazi?”

“My people already don’t like me because of who my father is,” Sofia replied. “You, though, you’re different. What would your mother say if she found out who I was?”

His mother disapproved of everything that had anything to do with sex. She’d warned him about women before he had any idea what she was talking about. He was sometimes amazed he’d ever been born. His father must have been very persuasive one night-or just too horny to take no for an answer.

“I’m a big boy now,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that any more.”

“Fine.” Sofia found a new place to stick in the needle: “What would your commanding officer say, then?”

“He teased me about having a girlfriend before I set out for Bialystok,” Rudel answered. “I just hoped he was right.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “What? You weren’t sure you could sweep me off my feet?”

“I don’t think anybody’s ever sure of anything with you,” he answered truthfully.

“I hope not.” Sofia took that as a matter of course-and as a matter of pride. “When people are sure about you, things get boring.”

Hans-Ulrich could imagine the two of them parting a lot of different ways. Heading the list was one-which hardly mattered-clanging the other in the ear with a frying pan. Other filmworthy melodramas also stood high up there. Getting bored with each other lay way down below something like being separated in an attack by flying orangutans.

He could imagine her finding a German protector useful. Poles didn’t love the Jews who made up a tenth of their country’s population. Perhaps because they had so many Jews, no laws restricting them were on the books here. The Reich had such laws, of course. Maybe Sofia feared they would come to Poland, too, and hoped a German could help her escape their bite. And maybe she was right in both fear and hope.

That might account for her taking a German into her bed. But what accounted for her taking a particular German, one Hans-Ulrich Rudel? He didn’t ask her. He had a fear of his own: that she might tell him the exact and literal truth. Whatever her reasons were, he was glad she had them. Glad and more than glad…

“Again?” she said as he began to rise to the occasion. “I’m going to have to put some new minerals in your mineral water, I swear I am.” But she didn’t push him away or tell him no. Her arms closed around him, her lips met his, and he wished his furlough could last forever.

Like most of the men in his division, Willi Dernen came from the Breslau Wehrkreis -near the Polish border. He knew a handful of Polish words, most of them foul. Till this campaign, though, he’d never crossed the frontier. He hadn’t even fought in Czechoslovakia; his outfit had guarded the Reich ’s western border against a French attack that never really materialized. A good thing, too. If the froggies had hit hard, they would have cracked the undermanned German defenses like a man breaking the shell on his breakfast soft-boiled egg.

And now Frenchmen and Tommies would help the Wehrmacht smash Stalin’s so-called workers’ paradise. Life-and who was diddling whom at any given moment-could get very strange sometimes.

Minsk, now, wasn’t in Poland. Up until recently, it had been the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now it was where the Germans reorganized before sending units new to the east up to the fighting front. A lot of Jews and Red officials had fled the place before the Germans and Poles broke in. The Russians and White Russians who remained seemed resigned to the town’s sudden change of overlords. The Poles in the population seemed delighted. They flew Polish flags, white over red, at any excuse or none.

Willi watched German engineers cart away larger than life-sized bronze statues of Lenin and Stalin. That wasn’t just to show the locals that Minsk was under new management. There had to be at least a tonne of bronze in each statue. Germany was chronically short of raw materials. Pretty soon Vladimir and Josef would get shot back at the Ivans.

Even Corporal Baatz laughed when Willi remarked on that. Awful Arno hadn’t been as awful as usual, at least not to Willi. He had to inflict his Schrechlichkeit on the replacements who filled out the company, and that took up most of his time and bad temper.

The bulk of the replacements also came from Wehrkreis VIII. The Wehrmacht tried to keep men from the same part of the country in the same outfit. It helped units hold together, and anything that did that looked good to the men who gave orders. If you’d gone to school with one of the new guys, or maybe with a cousin of his, you’d try harder to keep him in one piece, and he’d do the same for you. That was the idea, anyway.

Unfortunately, the high foreheads who’d come up with the idea had never heard of Arno Baatz. He was doing his best to make sure that all the replacements, regardless of which Wehrkreis they came from, hated his guts. And his best, as Willi had too much reason to know, was pretty goddamn good.

His latest target was a new Gefreiter named Adam Pfaff. The fellow was new to the company, that is; a wound badge and a slightly gimpy left leg showed he’d been around the block before. He seemed a good soldier. Normally, even Awful Arno would have had trouble finding something for which he could pick on him.

Normally. But, for reasons of his own, Pfaff had painted his rifle dark gray. The job couldn’t have been neater. But Arno Baatz had never before seen anybody who carried a dark gray rifle. Like any other monkey, he made fun of the unfamiliar without even thinking about whether he ought to. He gaped and pointed and growled, “What the hell are you doing with that stupid thing? You aim to paint polka dots on it next?”

“No, Corporal.” The calm way Pfaff answered made Willi guess he’d got grief from noncoms before. He patted the Feldgrau sleeve of his uniform tunic. “They make our clothes this color on account of it’s hard to see. I figured I’d fix my Mauser up to match. It doesn’t do any harm.”

“It looks stupid,” Awful Arno said, by which he meant It had better not still be gray the next time I see it.

“It doesn’t do any harm,” Pfaff repeated, by which he meant Fuck you.

There were plenty of things Arno Baatz didn’t understand, but he got that, all right. His plump cheeks turned the color of iron in a blacksmith’s forge. “Oh, yeah?” he ground out. “Well, let’s just see what Major Schmitz has to say about that.” He deployed the heavy artillery. Major Heinrich Schmitz commanded not just the company but the whole battalion.

But the barrage failed to obliterate Pfaff. “Fine with me,” he answered easily. “He’s already seen it. He told me he thought it was a pretty good idea.”

“Whaaat?” Baatz stretched the word out to unnatural length. “You expect me to believe that shit? I’m gonna go talk to him right this minute, and if I find out you’re lying-no, when I find out you’re lying-your sorry ass is mine.” Off he stormed, gloating anticipation splashed all over his face.

Pfaff lit a cigarette. “Boy, that was fun,” he said to no one in particular. Then, catching Willi’s eye, he asked, “Is that arselick always that bad?”

“Nah.” Willi shook his head.

“That’s good,” the other Gefreiter said. “Must be on the rag or something, huh?”

Willi shook his head again. He hadn’t finished yet. Now he did: “A lot of the time, Awful Arno’s worse.”

“About the third time I’ve heard people call him that,” Pfaff said with a thin chuckle. “Everybody must love him to death.”

“To death is right,” Willi answered, rolling his eyes. “He’s not yellow or anything like that, I will say. When the shooting starts, he’s all right to have at your elbow. Any other time… It’s like you said. He’s the biggest asshole left unwiped.”

He wanted to ask Pfaff whether he’d been bullshitting when he told Baatz Major Schmitz had given his imprimatur to the gray rifle. But he held his peace. As far as he was concerned, it was everybody in the world against Awful Arno. You didn’t want to let on that you had doubts about someone on your own side. Not only that, but he’d also find out for himself, one way or the other, pretty damn soon.

When Baatz came back about twenty minutes later, he might have had a thunderstorm hanging from his wobbly jowls. He didn’t come up to Adam Pfaff and admit that the new Gefreiter told the truth. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, which meant it was as far beyond Baatz’s ken as the mountains on the back side of the moon.

Since the corporal couldn’t take it out on the man who’d made him embarrass himself, he took it out on everybody else. He screamed at Willi, who’d heard him call Pfaff a liar when the replacement wasn’t. Because Willi had heard all that, he endured the Sturm und Drang with a smile on his face. That only pissed Awful Arno off worse. He couldn’t stick Willi with extra fatigues: the privilege the pip on Willi’s left sleeve gave him. And so Baatz screamed some more. Anybody who could draw extra duty did. Willi’s smile got wider.

“You have that fat clown’s number, by God,” Pfaff said, nothing but admiration in his voice, when Awful Arno finally went away. “How long have you been stuck under him?”

“Since before the shooting started,” Willi answered mournfully.

“Oh, you poor, miserable son of a bitch,” Pfaff said. Willi nodded; he thought of himself the same way. The other Gefreiter went on, “I bet he doesn’t like your rifle, either.”

Willi carried an ancient, beat-up Mauser. It shot pretty well, but it was ugly as Siamese-twin hippos. He’d had the fine sniper’s rifle, but…“I was going to get out from under him. Swear to Jesus, I was. Then the sharpshooter who was training me got his head blown off, and I went back to ordinary duty. Arno made sure of that, and that I didn’t get to keep my nice piece. He said it would shoot too slow with the downturned bolt, y’know? Thank you very much, Corporal Baatz.”

“I’m glad you said he was good in the field. Otherwise…” Pfaff stopped right there. One more word could have landed him in trouble. Willi’d had those thoughts about Baatz himself. He’d never quite done anything about them-Awful Arno wouldn’t be here for Pfaff to discover and admire if he had. But he’d had them. Oh, yes. He would have bet a year’s pay against a sack of sheepshit there wasn’t one single guy in the whole goddamn company who hadn’t.