The Big Switch

Chapter 19

“Weinberg! Hey, Weinberg!” The call was urgent, even imperative.

“Yeah? Nu? What’s up??Que paso? ” Chaim answered, wondering who the hell needed him and for what. He thought he knew the voice of every Yank and Spaniard in the Abe Lincoln Battalion. Whoever was taking his name in vain, he’d never met the guy before.

And he found out, because the fellow (a Spaniard) said, “You’re wanted in Madrid. Pronto. ” Chaim might know all the Abe Lincolns, but he damn well didn’t know every one of the couple of million people left in Madrid.

“Wanted? By who?”

“The cops,” put in one of the guys he did know.

“Funny, Hank, funny like a dose of the clap. Har-de-har-har. See? I’m laughing my ass off.” Chaim switched from English to Spanish to ask his question again: “Who wants me?”

“Why, the Party, of course.” The messenger seemed amazed he would need to ask about anything that obvious.

Patiently, he tried again: “The whole Party, or somebody in particular?”

Maybe he screwed up the grammar worse than usual, so the messenger didn’t get it. Or maybe he owned more patience than the Madrileno, because the man just repeated, “Pronto.”

“All right, already. I’m coming,” Chaim said with no great enthusiasm. He wanted to stay with his buddies. The Communist Party cared no more for what he wanted than for any other individual’s desires. But he wasn’t exactly brokenhearted about going back to the capital. With a little luck, he’d be able to see La Martellita after the apparatchik who’d pulled his card out of a box got done with him.

His blunt, pudgy features softened. “Magdalena,” he whispered under his breath. That was her real name, Magdalena Flores. She’d been desperately hung over the next morning. She barely remembered making love with him while she was drunk. But he tended to her so well-aspirins, strong coffee, the hair of the dog, a very little mild but greasy food-that he convinced her he cared about her along with wanting her sweetly curved body. It wasn’t quite that the road to her heart ran through her stomach, but it also wasn’t very far removed from that. She’d let him back into her bed when she was sober. What more could any man not a fairy want?

And so he followed the messenger south through the zigzagging communications trenches. By the time they came out into the open, they were too far behind the line to need to worry about snipers. The messenger took charge of his own bicycle and another one reserved for Chaim. They pedaled into Madrid. No manana here; pronto meant what it said.

To call Chaim’s bike a piece of junk would have given it too much credit. “If this were a horse, I’d shoot it,” he said.

“You can walk if you want to. Still a few kilometers to go, though,” the messenger answered. Chaim shut up.

People on foot, people on other bikes, people on donkeys and horses, people on animal-drawn wagons and carriages, even a few people in cars: afternoon traffic in Madrid. Everyone who had a horn blew it. Everyone who didn’t shouted or whistled instead. It made New York City seem not just sedate but sedated. Foul language and obscene gestures were all part of the show.

Chaim wasn’t much surprised when the messenger led him to the building where La Martellita worked. He was summoned on Party business, and this was Party headquarters. But when the fellow said, “Report to room 371,” he blinked. That was her office.

Why had she pulled him out of the line? Was she going to put him back on propaganda duty with Nationalist prisoners? He thought-in fact, he was sure-she didn’t believe his ideology was pure enough to let him do that. Maybe one of her bosses had overruled her, and she was going to read him the riot act before she let him tell the POWs what a gang of fat, exploiting slobs their former bosses were.

That made more sense than anything else he could come up with. Which didn’t mean it was right, of course. One way or another, he’d find out in a couple of minutes.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor (which would have been reckoned the fourth floor in the USA). The building had an elevator, and it worked. No one used it. It required an operator, and the Party had decided positions like that demeaned the proletarians who had to fill them.

La Martellita looked up from her paperwork when he walked into her cramped little room. Emotions chased one another across her face too fast to let him sort them out. All she said was, “Close the door, por favor. ”

Close it he did. Had she summoned him so she could fool around right here, and on company time? The mere idea was enough to heat his blood. “What is it, my pretty one, my sweet one, my little dove?” he asked as he stepped toward her. Compliments sounded so much more, well, complimentary in Spanish.

Then he stopped in his tracks, as he would have when he saw a sign with skull and crossbones that warned of a minefield ahead. He recognized her expression now, all right: raw, red rage. “You goddamn stinking son of a bitch, I’m going to have a baby!” she screeched. So much for the closed door.

“Oof!” he said, as if someone had punched him in the pit of the stomach. Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it. He wondered why not. The next time they used a safe would be the first. Condoms were hard to get here; despite the Republic’s progressive social policies, Spain remained a Catholic country.

“What are you going to do about it?” La Martellita demanded.

“Seems to me I already did what I do,” Chaim said. If looks could kill, they would have dragged him out of the little office by his feet after the one she gave him. Helplessly, he spread his hands. “Babies are a chance you take, you know.” He made pregnancy sound like a social disease. Well, wasn’t it the ultimate social disease? Without it, there wouldn’t be any society.

La Martellita’s glare did not abate. “You aren’t helping,” she said pointedly.

“What am I supposed to say?” he asked in what he thought of as reasonable tones. Odds were La Martellita thought he was hectoring her. Hectoring or not, he went on, “If you want me to marry you, I will.”

Did that just come out of my mouth? he wondered dizzily. Damned if it didn’t. He knew damn well it was dumb luck he’d ever got to sleep with her in the first place. She’d drunk herself sad-hell, she’d drunk herself tragic-and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. There’d never been a dull moment in the sack with her, whether she was drunk or sober. All the same, he’d always figured himself for the cat that fell into the cream pitcher. Before long, it would have to scramble out and lick its fur dry, and then it would have a memory to last forever.

But if he could keep right on bedding down with her… If he could see if he might make a go of it with this fierce, beautiful, eminently kissable creature… That would be joy beyond his wildest dreams-at least till she decided she’d rather murder him than live with him any more.

“Well!” she said, nodding slowly. “You are a gentleman after all. Yes, let’s do that. It will give the child a name-and I can divorce you as soon as it’s born.” She sounded as if she eagerly looked forward to it, too.

She probably did. Divorce was easy in the Spanish Republic: easier than in the States, even in Nevada. Where Marshal Sanjurjo ruled, it was impossible. He and his followers took their religion seriously, or at least legislated as if they did.

Chaim took the bull by the horns. “Let’s go find a judge,” he said. If he was going to be married, he hoped to enjoy the privileges of matrimony for as long as he could.

La Martellita kept right on glaring. She didn’t have to be Einstein or Freud to know what was in his beady little mind. “You only want to keep screwing me.”

“Not only, my sweet,” Chaim answered with such dignity as he could muster. “But a man has to be a maricon not to want to screw you. Even if he is a maricon, he’ll think about it.”

You never could tell what she’d like and what would piss her off. That, she seemed to like. She even laughed a little. “You’re crazy,” she said, not without admiration.

“ El narigon loco, that’s me,” he agreed, not without pride. The crazy kike: a nickname he’d acquired by brawling in bars like a man who didn’t care if he lived or died. Well, if marrying La Martellita wasn’t a good reason to go on living, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

And if she was going to have a baby, so was he. He hadn’t left a wife and kids behind to come fight in Spain, the way some Abe Lincolns and a lot of other Internationals had. This would be his first time as a father. He liked that idea, too-maybe not so much as jumping on La Martellita’s elegant bones whenever he felt like it, but he did.

“ Moscow speaking.”

Along with the other officers in his squadron, Anastas Mouradian listened to the hourly news. When you were fighting a war, you only know how your own little piece of it was going. Often enough, you weren’t even sure about that. If you were going to see the bigger picture, you’d see it through the radio and the newspapers.

“There is fierce fighting against the Fascist invaders near the border between the Byelorussian SSR and the Russian Federated SSR,” the newsreader went on. Stas heard him rustle the papers from which he was reading. “And heavy fighting continues in the northwestern Ukrainian SSR.”

Fierce fighting meant fierce fighting. Heavy fighting meant the Red Army was taking it on the chin. Nobody in the Soviet Union ever came right out and admitted things were going badly. You had to decode the news and read between the lines if you were even going to see through a glass, darkly.

“Lieutenant General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov continues to distinguish himself in combat against the Hitlerites,” the announcer said. “An entire German panzer division has been hurled back in confusion by his troops.”

That was interesting. Except for Stalin and Marshal Zhukov, the news rarely mentioned generals by name. Maybe that was a hangover from a few years before, when so many of them got purged. Any which way, this Andrei Vlasov seemed to have evaded the restriction.

“There is also an important announcement in the field of foreign relations,” the newsreader said. Mouradian tensed-and he wasn’t the only flyer listening to the news who did. What had gone wrong now? Had Finland declared war on the USSR? Had the United States? The one would be a misfortune; the other, a catastrophe. But, for once, it wasn’t that kind of announcement. The familiar voice continued, “Foreign Minister Litvinov will travel to Tokyo to confer with officials from the Empire of Japan about terms for ending the war in the Far East which Japan will find acceptable.”

Mouradian and several other officers sighed on the identical note. Peace against Japan hadn’t come cheap in the early years of the century, and it would be even more expensive now. Vladivostok would go, and with it the Soviet Union’s main Pacific port. The Trans-Siberian Railway wouldn’t go all the way across Siberia any more. The last war had cost Russia the southern half of Sakhalin Island north of Japan; this one would probably cost the USSR the rest of the place. And who could guess what else Japan would want to squeeze out of Litvinov?

On the other hand, the USSR desperately needed peace on the distant frontier, because it had a much bigger, much more urgent war much closer to home. When it came, the country could pay full attention to the Nazis and everybody else coming out of the west. Stas only hoped that would prove good enough to save the Soviet Union. Frighten all your neighbors and make them hate you, and this was the kind of mess you wound up in.

“President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States has offered to help mediate the dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan,” the announcer said. “His cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was President of the USA during the Russo-Japanese War, and helped work out the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended it. General Secretary Stalin immediately accepted the American proposal. The Japanese, however, refused it, declaring that they doubted America was truly committed to peace. This being so, Japan and the peace-loving Soviet Union will pursue their talks bilaterally.”

Some of Mouradian’s colleagues scratched their heads, trying to work out what was going on there. He sighed inside his own mind; some people really shouldn’t have been allowed to run around loose. Japan thought the USA would sabotage the peace talks, not help them along. That was obvious to Stas, if not to his comrades. As long as Japan was busy fighting the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t also take on the United States-not if her leaders were in their right mind, she wouldn’t.

But she was clearing the decks for the big fight, the important fight, no less than Stalin was. Knock America back on her heels and Japan was master of the Pacific. No one else could challenge her there. England and France were busy far closer to home. Holland, mistress of the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, lay under Nazi occupation. If Japan didn’t have to worry about the USA…

The newsreader spoke of the anticipated harvest and by how much it would exceed the norms established by the agricultural planners. Only the planners had any real idea of how much grain came in across the country. If they cooked the books to make things sound better, who would stop them? Who else would even know? As long as people didn’t start starving, nobody. And if people did start starving, it might be for reasons political rather than agricultural. Anyone who didn’t believe that could ask the surviving Ukrainians.

“Stakhanovite shock brigades continue to increase steel, coal, and aluminum production,” the newsreader said proudly. “Output rises even as factories are knocked down and transported east, out of range of the Hitlerite savages and their terror-bombing campaign.”

“Good. That’s good,” murmured the pilot sitting next to Mouradian. It would indeed be good if it was true. That it could be true struck Stas as most unlikely. The less you said, sometimes, the better. He said not a word here.

The newsreader blathered on and on. He seemed to speak very candidly: everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Mouradian smiled a little when that occurred to him. Too bad it was a joke he would have to keep to himself. Somehow, he didn’t think the NKVD would find it funny.

When music finally came out of the speaker instead of the newsreader’s perpetual optimism, Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky addressed the squadron: “Well, boys, you heard it yourselves. We’re going to make nice with the little slanty-eyed shitheads for a while. One thing at a time, I always say. Once we give the Nazis what they deserve, we’ll go back to the East and pay what we owe there. Oh, yes. You’d best believe we will.”

Speaking of perpetual optimism… Did the squadron commander really believe what he was saying? If he did, Stas wanted some of whatever he’d been drinking. Or maybe not. Whatever it was, it was probably too full of sugar to be palatable for an ordinary man.

Then again, perhaps you needed that kind of spirit-and that kind of spirits-if you were going to keep serving the Soviet Union. They weren’t flying from the airstrip they’d used when they first took their Pe-2s into action against the Germans and Poles. German bombers had worked that one over.

As far as Mouradian could see, the new Russian plane was better than any bomber the Luftwaffe used. It had at least as large a bomb load, and it was faster and more maneuverable than the German bombers. But that mattered only so much. Back in the day, the SB-2 really had been able to outrun the biplane fighters it met in Spain. Against the Bf-109, it turned into a death trap. If the Germans had chased the Pe-2 across the sky with Heinkel and Dornier bombers, everything would have been lovely. Sadly, the Messerschmitt fighter remained more than a match for the Petlyakov machine as well.

But the USSR was a big place-bigger, maybe, than the Nazis fully understood. They had only so many 109s: nowhere near enough to cover all of Soviet airspace all the time. The Pe-2s stood a much better chance of getting through and coming back than did the older, slower SB-2s. Not for the first time, Mouradian hoped Sergei Yaroslavsky and Ivan the Chimp remained among those present.

Plenty of train lines in southern France went down toward Spain. Only two actually crossed the border: one near the Atlantic, which led into territory loyal to Marshal Sanjurjo, and this one hard by the Mediterranean, which took the Czech soldiers who had fought for France against Germany into the Republic to fight Fascism now that France wasn’t interested any more.

Vaclav Jezek made a sour face when Benjamin Halevy told him that. “So those French assholes could be shipping shit to Sanjurjo at the same time as they’re giving us to the Republic?” he said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Halevy agreed. He was heading into exile, too.

Because he was, Vaclav saw fit to add, “Nothing personal.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Jew replied. “I think they’re assholes, too.” He wore a new uniform from the army of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, with a Czech sergeant’s three dots on his shoulder straps replacing the French hash mark on his sleeve. Running a finger between his collar and his neck, he grumbled, “I’m still not used to the way this damn thing fits.”

“If you’re a Czech, you never fit in the way you’re supposed to,” Vaclav said. “You’d better get used to it.”

Halevy raised a gingery, ironic eyebrow. “I think I can just about manage that, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Vaclav felt foolish. The only way Jews would ever feel at home anywhere was to get their own country. Fat chance of that! And even if they did, they’d probably kick Christians and Moslems around just because they could. They were human beings, weren’t they?

Till Vaclav got to know Halevy, he wouldn’t have bet a single Czech koruna that Jews were human beings. He’d scorned them, distrusted them, despised them for no better reason than that they had their own funny religion-and, as often as not, they were too goddamn smart for their own good.

Halevy was no dummy. He wouldn’t put Einstein out of business any time soon, though. And he made a good noncom, even if he’d had his cock clipped. He took war seriously. He wouldn’t be wearing a Czech uniform, he wouldn’t be carrying Czech papers in his pocket, if he didn’t. Even the French weren’t dumb enough to try to make Jews fight on the same side as Nazi Germany. He could have sat out the war in safety. He could have, but he didn’t want to.

On second thought, who said he was no dummy?

Over the border, Vaclav saw the last of the French tricolor. He was glad to see the last of it, even if the colors were the same as those of his conquered homeland. They stood for liberty, equality, and fraternity, and what did any of those have to do with fighting side by side with Adolf Hitler? Damn all, as far as he was concerned.

On the other side of the frontier flew the Spanish Republic’s flag-another tricolor, this one of red, yellow, and purple. It was certainly gaudier than France’s standard, or Czechoslovakia’s. But the Republic hadn’t turned its back on whatever those colors stood for. It wouldn’t still be fighting if it had.

Marshal Sanjurjo’s side had another flag yet. Well, to hell with him. This was the one Vaclav had chosen. It might not be his first or even his second choice, but it seemed better than anything else out there right now.

The train wheezed to a stop. At first, he thought it had broken down again. The French had given the Czechs going off to fight in Spain the worst rolling stock they had. Their good passenger cars and new locomotives were hauling French troops east to fight the Russians. That being so, breakdowns were almost a badge of honor.

But no. This was some kind of customs inspection. Normally, countries frowned on large bands of uniformed men importing weapons. These weren’t normal times, though. Vaclav doubted he would live to see normal times again.

He stared when a Republican officer came into the car. He supposed this was an officer, anyhow-what else would the fellow be? But the man was bareheaded, and wore denim coveralls over a collarless worker’s shirt. He looked more likely to repair a clogged drain than to give orders.

“Revolutionary chic,” Benjamin Halevy whispered to Vaclav. After that, the fellow’s outfit made more sense. He spoke a sentence in a language that wasn’t French but sounded something like it. Vaclav couldn’t even swear in Spanish. He was surprised, but not very surprised, when Halevy answered in what sounded like the same tongue.

After a bit of back and forth, the Republic officer grinned and nodded and went on to the next car. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Vaclav told the Jew in admiring tones.

“Not Spanish-Catalan. Kind of halfway between Spanish and French,” Halevy answered. “And I don’t speak it, but I can fake it some.”

“Ah.” Jezek nodded. He could make a stab at Slavic languages not his own. It didn’t always work-he’d been reduced to speaking German with the Polish soldier who interned him. But it was usually worth a try. He hadn’t thought that the Romance languages might work the same way. He found a more relevant question: “So what did the guy want?”

“To make sure we’ve come to fight for the Republic and against the Nationalist shitheads-I think that’s what he called them.”

“Sounds right to me,” Jezek said. “What did you tell him?”

“That we were really here for a picnic, and to meet all the pretty Spanish gals,” Halevy replied without changing expression.

“Ahh, your mother.”

“She was a pretty gal, but not Spanish.” Halevy seemed willing to tell bad jokes all day. Vaclav planted an elbow in his ribs, not hard enough to hurt but to suggest he should quit acting like a jerk. It was a forlorn hope, and Vaclav knew it. Still, you had to make the effort. Vaclav also knew all about making the effort despite forlorn hope. If he hadn’t, would he have come to Spain?

Another officer strode into the car. This one wore khaki, and he had on a cap with a flat crown. If his pink skin, broad face, and pale eyes hadn’t told which army he belonged to, the uniform would have. He greeted the Czechs not in Spanish but in Russian, which he confidently expected them to understand.

Vaclav caught the gist, anyhow. Most of his countrymen probably did. The USSR had helped Czechoslovakia when nobody else would. Now the Czechs were helping Spain, the Soviet Union’s ally, when hardly anyone else would. He thanked them for that.

Had he left it there, everything would have been fine. But he went on to say something to the effect that now the Czechs would have to follow Stalin’s orders like everybody else. That was what Vaclav thought he said, anyhow. The Russian took no questions. He went on to inflict his greetings on the next car farther back.

“Did he say what I thought he said?” Vaclav asked Halevy.

“I don’t know,” the Jew answered. “But what I thought he said, I didn’t like it for beans.”

“Neither did I,” Vaclav said. “That probably means we both think he said the same stupid thing.”

“What can you do?” Halevy said with a sigh. “He’s a Russian. Without the Russians, the Republic would have lost the war a long time ago. Then France would have had to ship us to Paraguay or something when she switched sides.”

“Is there a war in Paraguay? I hadn’t heard about a new one, and I thought the old one was over,” Vaclav said.

“For all I know, it is,” the Jew replied. “The French government would ship us over there any which way. They’re my people, too, and I know how they work. If nobody’s fighting there now, they’d count on us to start something.”

That had an appalling feel of probability to it. Vaclav said, “Me, I was thinking they’d send us to China if they didn’t have Spain. Everybody hates the Japs, pretty much-even the Russians.”

“You’re right. They do,” Benjamin Halevy agreed. “The Japs may play even less by the rules than Hitler and Stalin do.” He threw his hands in the air in mocking triumph. “And they said it couldn’t be done!”

The train chose that moment to jerk into motion again. On they went, deeper into Spain and a brand-new war.

Pete McGill was getting to the point where he could move pretty well on crutches. He could even hobble fifty feet or so with just a cane. And he’d made it from his bed to a chair nearby with no artificial aids whatever, for all the world as if he were a normal human being. One of these days, the cast on his arm would come off, and then he could truly start working on getting his strength back.

He couldn’t wait. He wasn’t the only injured serviceman in Manila who wanted to get back into action as fast as he could, or else a little faster. When he listened to the radio or read a paper, he could add two and two and get four. He might have had trouble in school, but he sure didn’t in the real world.

Russia had patched up a cease-fire with Japan. She was trying to fight Hitler with everything she had. Okay, fine, but that also meant the Japs wouldn’t have any distractions any more. Oh, they were stuck in China, but they could lick the Chinks whenever they set their minds to it. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops wouldn’t parade through Tokyo any time in the next hundred years. And neither would Mao Tse-tung’s, no matter how much Stalin wished they would.

Well, if Japan had gone and started clearing her decks for action, where would the action be? To Corporal Pete McGill, right about here looked like the best answer to that question.

It wasn’t as if the prospect of a war between Japan and the United States was a first-class military secret. The exact plans for fighting it were bound to be secret, of course. But almost every Navy file and leatherneck could give the short version of those plans. (Pete wasn’t nearly sure Army guys could do the same thing: a firm Marine Corps belief was that men who joined the Army were a few ice cubes short of a whole tray.)

When you got down to it, the thing looked simple. The U.S. Navy would steam west from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Navy would steam east from Tokyo Bay. Wherever they bumped into each other, they’d start slugging away. The last fleet standing would go on and thump hell out of the other side till they got sick of it and gave up. Not subtle. Not pretty. But plans didn’t have to be. They just had to work, and being simple sure didn’t hurt.

Things like aircraft carriers did complicate the game. Pete assumed his side knew how many the Japs had so they could make more. That wasn’t necessarily the wisest assumption, but Pete had never tried to persuade American taxpayers to fork over for national defense. What he didn’t know could hurt him, but he didn’t know that, either.

He figured the fight would look like Jutland from the last war, only bigger. Somebody’d described the English admiral at Jutland as the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Both the American and Jap commanders in the next fight would wear the same mantle, whether they liked it or not-and chances were they wouldn’t.

The logical place for the big smashup was somewhere in Philippine waters. Japan would want to clear the USA out of this colony so close to the Home Islands. Do that and you’d also deprive the U.S. Navy of bases within striking distance of Japan. And the Americans wouldn’t be able to interfere with whatever Japan decided to do in China and French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.

Which was why Pete wanted to get back to active duty as soon as he could. Every Navy ship had a Marine detachment. On battlewagons and cruisers, Marines served the secondary armament: not the great big guns in the turrets, but the next size down. Marines kept order on smaller warships, and did whatever else people told them to do. If the Navy was going to fight the big fight against the Japs, Pete wanted to be there and join in.

A physical therapist gave him exercises to help him heal faster. He performed them with a dedication that amazed and alarmed the man. “If you tear a tendon working out, you won’t do yourself any good,” the fellow said severely.

“Right,” Pete answered. Take this guy seriously? Forget it! For one thing, he wondered if the therapist was a faggot. For another, he subscribed to the informal Marine Corps creed: anything worth doing was worth overdoing.

The therapist didn’t need long to realize that Pete was hard of listening. “Why are you pushing yourself like that?” he demanded. “It won’t change things by more than a few days one way or the other.”

“Could be a big few days,” Pete said stubbornly. “Could be the difference between getting a ship and staying beached.”

That, the therapist couldn’t very well misunderstand. “Even if you do get beached, Corporal, there’ll still be plenty for you to do,” he said. “Or don’t you think the Japs will try to land troops in the Philippines when the balloon goes up?”

“Huh,” Pete said: a thoughtful grunt. He’d worried so much about the big head-on collision between navies that he hadn’t wasted time with what might happen on land. Maybe he should have.

Or maybe not. “Doesn’t matter whether they do,” he said. “That’ll just be a watchacallit-a secondary engagement, like. I aim to be where the real action is. I owe those yellow sonsabitches plenty-better believe I do. The more I can give ’em back in person, the better I’ll like it.”

“Well, you won’t like a torn Achilles’ tendon, so take it easy, okay?” the physical therapist said.

“I’ll… try.” Pete couldn’t have sounded more grudging if the man had recommended that he quit screwing for the next five years.

He’d had to quit screwing while he was laid up. He hadn’t been interested, either, not while he was mourning Vera. It would have seemed disloyal to her memory. Come to that, it still did, which didn’t keep him from noticing whenever he spotted anything female and under the age of fifty.

People told dirty stories about military nurses and about how they’d blow you or jack you off if you needed it and you didn’t have anyone of your own to take care of things for you. Pete had hoped those stories were the straight goods. They weren’t just dirty. They were… what was the word? Therapeutic came pretty close.

The next sign of their truth he found would be the first. Oh, the gals were one hundred percent nonchalant when they handled your John Henry in the line of duty. But none of them here showed the least bit of interest in doing anything with Pete’s but shoving it in a bedpan. Too bad, he thought, and so it seemed.

Time hung heavy. Everything in the Philippines seemed to move as lazily as the ceiling fans that stirred the air without cooling it. There was talk of air-conditioning the hospital, but there seemed to be neither will nor money to get on with the job. The talk was as desultory as everything else. Best guess was that the system would be installed by 1949 or the day before Philippine independence, whichever came last.

People grumbled about the mere idea of Philippine independence. There was already a small Philippine army, under the command of Douglas MacArthur. He served the Philippines with the exalted rank of field marshal, to which he couldn’t aspire in the U.S. Army if he stayed in till he was 147.

“Goddamn Filipinos can fucking well keep him,” said a U.S. Army sergeant in Pete’s ward. “When he ran the Bonus Army out of Washington, my old man and my uncle were two of the guys he rousted.”

“That was chickenshit, all right,” another Army guy agreed. “So how come you joined up if you already knew they’d screw you the same as they screwed your father and your uncle?”

A resigned shrug from the sergeant, who’d got hurt in a car crash. “Shit, man, it was nineteen-fucking-thirty-four. There wasn’t no work nowhere. I knew they’d feed me long as I stayed in. Afterwards? I didn’t give a rat’s ass about afterwards. Crap, I still don’t. Afterwards’ll just have to take care of itself.”

“Boy, I figured the same thing when I signed on the dotted line for the Corps,” Pete said. “I was broke, I couldn’t land a job… World had me by the short hairs.”

“Has it let go since?” the sergeant asked.

“Not hardly,” Pete answered in a high, squeaky voice. Everybody laughed, as if he’d been joking.