The Big Switch

Chapter 24

“Well, that’s fucked up.” Lieutenant Demange tried to speak with his usual savage satisfaction. In spite of himself, though, he sounded impressed.

“Oh, just a little,” Luc Harcourt agreed. The Germans had been so sure nothing could happen to their massive supply dump. As far as Luc could see, the Germans were always sure. The trouble was, the damned Boches weren’t always right.

A wan, watery sunrise through roiling clouds showed how very wrong they’d been here. Back before the shooting started, some expert or other had gravely warned, The bomber will always get through. Two years of fighting had proved that-surprise!-nothing would always do anything. But they also proved that almost anything would sometimes do something. And, this time, the Russian bombers had got through.

Smoke still rose from the devastated dump. Some of it stank of cordite-ammo of all sizes from small-arms to 155mm was still cooking off in there. The explosions-sometimes single spies, sometimes in battalions-made the dawn even more nervous than it would have been otherwise. And some of it smelled like the world’s biggest and worst stew forgotten on top of a fire: probably on top of a forest fire. How many rations were burning up a couple of kilometers away? Enough to turn a quartermaster sergeant irrational.

The Nazis had assigned several French-speaking officers as liaisons with their enemies-turned-allies. Listening to the guttural rendition of his language coming out of one of their mouths did nothing to reassure Luc. Neither did the officer’s arrogance, even if the German might have been more inclined to call it confidence.

“They got lucky,” the fellow in Feldgrau insisted. “The advance will go on as if they had not.”

“My left one,” Lieutenant Demange muttered, which pretty much summed up what Luc thought of the German’s declaration. Easier to advance when you had supplies than when you didn’t. That should have been obvious even to a Nazi.

And also easier to advance when it wasn’t so goddamn cold. At first, the Germans had been relieved when the ground froze. It let their tanks and halftracks and motorcycles and trucks move forward again instead of getting stuck in the mud every few meters.

But Russian cold didn’t know when to quit. The winter before had been as cold as any Luc had ever known in France. Now he’d decided he was only a beginner when it came to frigid winters. He also feared he wouldn’t be by the time he came home from Russia-if he ever did. Winters hereabouts were born knowing things their tamer cousins in Western Europe never learned.

If he ever came home from Russia… Neither he nor his countrymen had been thrilled about the idea of taking on the Red Army. A good many Frenchmen were Reds themselves, and not all of them had been weeded out of the expeditionary force, not by a long shot. Even the French soldiers who weren’t Communists would have been happier to keep fighting Hitler’s crew. The Germans, after all, had invaded them.

But their politicians had cut a deal, and this was what came of it. The Russians had dropped leaflets (written in better French than most Germans used) urging the French soldiers to go over to them, promising not just good treatment as prisoners but practically anything else their little hearts desired.

A few Frenchmen did desert. But the promises were so overblown, they roused Luc’s ever-ready suspicions. Anything that sounded too good to be true probably was.

He and his comrades hadn’t advanced against the Russians with any great enthusiasm. But the Russians, no matter how juicy the promises they packed into their leaflets, fought like wild animals. They weren’t skilled military technicians, the way the Germans were. They had no quit in them, though. If you wanted to shift them, you had to kill them. They weren’t about to run away.

And you needed to make sure you killed them all. They had the wild animal’s gift for concealment. If you saw one, you could bet ten more were hiding close by. If you didn’t see one, ten more were liable to be hiding close by anyhow. The Russians had the charming habit of digging foxholes camouflaged from the front and shooting troops who incautiously went past them in the back.

If you walked off into the bushes to take a crap, you were liable to get your throat cut. You were liable to have worse than that happen to you, too. One poor bastard in Luc’s company had been found with a French flag-just the kind you might wave if you were lining the sidewalks at a Paris parade on Bastille Day-stuck up his ass. Luc wondered if that happened to the poor, sorry poilus who went over to the Russians with leaflets in hand. He hoped not, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.

One thing the way the Red Army fought undoubtedly did: it made the French fight the same way. When the other bastards were sneaky and murderous and cruel, the international proletarian brotherhood looked a lot less persuasive all of a sudden. You wanted to do unto others as they were doing unto you. Wasn’t that your best chance to stay alive?

The Germans sure thought so. They’d fought a pretty clean war in France: not perfect, but pretty clean. Luc, who’d seen Landsers shot while trying to give up, knew his own side hadn’t fought a perfect war, either. Pretty clean, maybe, but not perfect. Here in Russia, the Germans didn’t even pretend to try. They fought at least as foully as the Red Army did. Most of the time, they didn’t bother taking prisoners. When they did, they often didn’t bother feeding them.

They also often didn’t bother feeding civilians in towns they captured. Whatever they got their hands on, they seized for themselves. In a way, that made military sense. In another way…

“They know how to make people love ’em, don’t they?” Luc said after tramping through a village full of hollow-eyed peasants.

“Oh, maybe a little,” Lieutenant Demange said. Somehow, he’d managed to keep himself in Gitanes. Luc, these days, was smoking anything he could find. Russian tobacco was bad; German, worse.

“Tell you one more thing?” Luc went on. Demange nodded and raised an eyebrow, waiting for whatever the one thing was. Luc said, “I’ve always been glad I’m not a Jew, you know? I mean, who isn’t? But what with the way the Boches and the Poles treat ’em here, now I’m really fucking glad I’m not a Jew.”

“I dunno. If you’d got your cock clipped right after you were born, you wouldn’t’ve had to come here. For some reason or other, the brass doesn’t think Jews and Nazis mix so well,” Demange said.

“Wonder why that is,” Luc said. “Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” the older man answered. “But the other funny thing is, the Germans aren’t doing anything to the kikes in Poland. They can’t stand ’em, and neither can most of the Poles, like you said. But the government there doesn’t want the Nazis fucking with ’em, on account of they’re Poland’s kikes. Politics can spin your head around faster’n absinthe.”

“You ever drink that shit?” Luc asked. It had been illegal about as long as he’d been alive, but Demange was old enough to have tried it before it was outlawed… and afterwards, if he respected the laws against it the same way he respected everything else.

“Oh, sure,” the veteran said casually. “Take some mighty strong brandy and smoke some hashish while you’re pouring it down. That’ll give you the idea.”

“Got you.” Luc had no more smoked hashish than he’d drunk absinthe, but he wasn’t about to let on. Demange would have been as ready to scorn lower-middle-class respectability as he was with anything else that drew his notice. Strong brandy Luc did know. He’d heard about the kinds of things hashish did, so he could make what he thought was a halfway decent guess about absinthe.

If Demange saw through him, the veteran didn’t let on. He didn’t have much time to let on: the Russians started shelling the French positions. They might have most of Europe in arms against them, but they showed no signs of giving up. Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had fallen down on their backs with their legs in the air and their bellies showing when the Germans invaded them. Czechoslovakia and Norway hadn’t lasted much longer. Now that they were conquered, they weren’t giving the Nazis much trouble any more.

Only France had fought back hard (with, Luc grudgingly admitted to himself, some help from England). France… and now Russia. France hadn’t-just barely hadn’t, but hadn’t-let the Wehrmacht nip in behind Paris. Moscow was a hell of a lot farther from the German, or even the Polish, border than Paris was from the Rhine. The same held for St. Petersburg-no, it was Leningrad these days-and Kiev. The Russians could trade much more space for time than France had been able to.

Luc wished he hadn’t had such thoughts with Red Army 105s crashing down all around him. He wanted to hope he’d go home one day, not to know he’d be stuck in this goddamn Russian icebox forever and a day. What he wanted and what he was likely to get no doubt weren’t even related to each other.

Chaim Weinberg had seen Czechs in Spain before. There were more than a few of them in the International Brigades, along with men from just about every other country in Central Europe. That’s why they call ’em Internationals, smart guy, he jeered at himself. He admired what he’d seen of them, too. They had the same solid virtues as most Germans, without being such assholes about it. Almost all of them spoke German, and they could make out his Yiddish, so he could talk with them. He approved of talking. Plenty of people said he did it too fucking much.

He’d never seen so many Czech soldiers all at once, though. And he’d never seen so many who weren’t all solidly Marxist-Leninist, either. But the Popular Front was alive and well in Republican Spain. These Czechs might not be Communists, but nobody could say they weren’t anti-Fascist. They’d hated the Nazis enough to keep shooting at them even after their own country went under.

Chaim rapidly discovered they were damn fine soldiers, too. Nothing they saw outside of Madrid fazed them, not even a little bit. On the contrary: they’d learned their trade in a harder classroom than any Spain offered. One guy used an antitank rifle as a sniper’s piece. That struck Chaim as swatting flies with an anvil, but the Czech was a damn maestro with the brute. Anything that moved, out to a mile away from him, maybe farther, was liable to stop moving very suddenly.

His name was Votslav, or something like that. He looked down his rather blunt nose at Marshal Sanjurjo’s men. “They don’t know much about taking cover, do they?” he said in slow, deliberate Deutsch.

“They’re brave. They’re Fascist pishers, but they’re brave.” Chaim admired the courage of the Spaniards on both sides. As far as he was concerned, they carried it to, and sometimes past, the point of insanity.

But Votslav, a military pragmatist, only shrugged. “A fat lot of good it does them. They wouldn’t be so easy to kill if they didn’t parade around like a bunch of dumbheads left over from Napoleon’s time.”

It wasn’t the first time Chaim had heard a European talking about Napoleonic tactics when he meant something old and outdated. The guys from the Abe Lincoln Battalion who thought about history (some cared no more about it than Henry Ford did) spoke of the Civil War the same way.

The other Civil War, Chaim reminded himself. A redheaded guy in a new-looking tunic with Czech’s sergeant’s pips came up to them in the trench. He spoke to Votslav in Czech, but Chaim needed no more than the blink of an eye to realize what he was. “Vos macht a Yid?” Chaim said.

And the other fellow needed only a moment to size Chaim up. “You’d know the mamaloshen, all right,” he said. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

“I’m Chaim Weinberg, out of New York City. You?”

“Benjamin Halevy. Paris. My folks came from Prague, so I grew up with a bunch of different languages. I was liaison for the free Czechs till Daladier decided to turn into Hitler’s tukhus-lekher. Now I’m here.” His wave didn’t get higher than the parapet-the Nationalists would have snipers, too. “The verkakte Garden of Eden, right?”

“ Verkakte is right, anyway.” Chaim didn’t need to look around to know how abused the landscape was.

“Go slow,” Votslav said. “I have trouble keeping up when you guys jabber like that. It’s not the German I learned in school.”

“Bet your putz it’s not, buddy,” Chaim said, not without pride. Benjamin Halevy chuckled. The real Czech only sighed and scratched his head. Both he and Halevy wore Adrian helmets. They covered less of the head than the ones the Spanish army issued. Chaim liked them better even so. Spanish helmets looked too much like the German Stahlhelms they were modeled on. He didn’t like looking like a Nazi storm trooper-no way, nohow. He sometimes did it; he’d seen too many men dead from a piddly little fragment that happened to pierce their skull to want to avoid that if he had any chance at all. Nothing could make him happy about it.

Halevy waved again, this time toward Sanjurjo’s lines. “Jezek’s right-those guys aren’t such hot stuff. We ought to advance and clean ’em out.”

Was I that eager when I first got here? Chaim supposed he had been. He was still willing. He wouldn’t have stood in this chilly trench if he weren’t. But he doubted he’d ever be eager again. He said, “The French must have been feeding you a lot of raw meat.”

Benjamin Halevy’s crooked smile was all Jew. “Because we’re new here, we think everything’s easy, you mean?”

“Yup.” That was English-of a sort. Halevy and-Jezek, was it?-understood anyhow.

“Maybe this is true. And maybe we have reason for it.” The Czech soldier’s German could be awkward, but it worked. It was a hell of a lot better than Chaim’s Spanish. Jezek explained, “Now that we cannot shoot Nazis any more, we have to make do with people who get into bed with Nazis.”

“People who dance the mattress polka with Nazis,” Halevy amended. Chaim grinned. The Yiddish phrase had more bounce than the polite German, both literally and figuratively.

Thinking about dancing the mattress polka naturally made him think about La Martellita. He’d got what he wanted from her, all right. And he’d also got much more than he’d bargained for when he first jumped on her shikker bones. She didn’t want to see an abortionist. Even under the Republic’s liberal laws, they were illegal, which didn’t mean business ever went bad for them, here or anywhere else.

That she didn’t want to find one had surprised Chaim. La Martellita seemed such a perfect Red, somebody who wouldn’t think twice about something like that. Maybe taking the girl out of the Catholic Church was easier than taking the Catholic Church out of the girl. Heaven knew that was true about plenty of Jews who converted to Christianity.

So now things were official. The civil ceremony took a minute and a half-two minutes, tops. He didn’t feel particularly married afterwards. Married or not, he hadn’t been anywhere close to sure his brand-new bride would let him touch her again. That, in fact, was an understatement. He’d wondered if she would plug him as soon as the “I do”s were over. A widow could give a baby a legitimate last name, too.

But no. He really must have pleased her the second time they made love together, when she’d let him touch her after he tenderly battled her hangover. And so he got one night’s worth of honeymoon back at her cramped flat. It would have been just his luck to have a Nationalist air raid interrupt things at some critical moment. But, again, no.

And, again, he worked hard to please her. Despite that second time, when they started as man and wife she looked ready to spit in his eye and tell him he was the lousiest fuck in the history of fucking. Had she kept that attitude after they turned out the lights, he would have begun with three, maybe four, strikes against him.

One more time, though, no. She seemed to decide that, as long as she was going to do this, she might as well do it right. When she did it right, she did it up brown. She was no blushing virgin bride-anything but. Some of the things she did without being asked might have surprised a pro. They sure surprised Chaim, not that he complained.

Afterwards, his heart still thundering, he blurted, “When I can see again, I’ll try to tell you how marvelous that was.”

“You are… as good as I remember,” La Martellita answered-tepid praise compared to his, but better than he’d hoped for. She added, “Get off me now. You’re squashing me flat.”

“Lo siento.” And Chaim had been sorry. He hadn’t wanted to do anything to ruin this. And, some time in the not very indefinite future, he’d looked forward to another round, and then, with luck, one more after that.

Dancing the mattress polka… He smiled, there in the trench. One of these days before too long, he’d get another furlough. And then he’d hurry back to Madrid, hurry back to his new wife. If he had only not quite nine months of marriage ahead of him here, he aimed to make the most of them.

Julius Lemp hated winter patrols. A U-boat would roll in a spilled glass of water. When the seas were high and the wind howled down from the north, he feared the U-30 would capsize. That wasn’t likely; U-boats were designed for these conditions. But the sour stink of puke never left the boat when she tossed and capered like a badly spooked pony.

He’d hoped things would be better in the Baltic’s close confines than in the North Sea or the wide, wild winter waters of the North Atlantic west of the British Isles. And things were… better. That only illuminated the vast gap between better and good.

Some of the waves the harsh winds stirred up here were big enough to send deluges of frigid seawater down the hatch at the top of the conning tower and into the U-30. Besides drenching the sailors, the water shorted out electrical equipment, gave the pumps a workout, and even threatened the massive batteries that powered the U-boat’s electric motors while she was submerged.

“If we stayed at Schnorkel depth, skipper, we wouldn’t have to put up with this,” Gerhard Beilharz said up on the conning tower, water dripping from his oilskin cape and headgear.

“Maybe,” Lemp answered. “But maybe not, too. When we’re running seas like this, what are the odds a big wave-or a bunch of big waves, one after another-would make the Schnorkel ’s safety valve shut? And then how long would the diesels take to suck all the fresh air out of the pressure hull? Or, if the valve didn’t work, water would come down the pipe and flood the engines, and then we’d really be screwed.”

A little stiffly, Beilharz said, “That safety valve is plenty reliable.”

“All right,” Lemp said in magnanimous tones. “We wouldn’t get flooded. We’d just have to learn to breathe diesel fumes instead.”

“That… can happen,” the engineering officer admitted. A good thing for him, too: Lemp might have pitched him off the conning tower and down into the pale gray sea had he tried to deny it. Still sounding like a maiden aunt talking about the facts of life, Beilharz went on, “That’s only possible with waves like these. When the water’s calmer, the snort behaves just fine.”

“I know. I know.” Lemp also knew the Schnorkel wasn’t the only thing with a slightly unreliable safety valve. Gerhart Beilharz had one, too. Since Lemp didn’t want it to stick and Beilharz to explode, he kept on soothing the tall junior engineering officer: “It’s very valuable most of the time. But you don’t want to use it when the seas run this high.”

That you was deliberate. Beilharz had made it plain he did want to use the snort now. Lemp made him think twice. At least he could think twice, which put him one up on a lot of people Lemp knew… and two up on some. With a sigh, Beilharz said, “When you put it that way, I guess you’re right.”

“Happens to everyone now and again.” If Lemp laughed at himself, he beat other people to the punch.

As usual, the ratings atop the conning tower swept sky and sea with their field glasses. The sky was cloudy, with a low ceiling. The sea’s mountains and chasms changed places without cease. The Ivans were unlikely to come across them till things moderated… which might be tomorrow and might be next spring. But unlikely didn’t mean impossible. The ratings stayed alert. They were solid men. Lemp didn’t have to get on them to make sure they stayed that way.

Having escaped one Russian plane, he didn’t want another one to run across him. He might not stay lucky twice. The Baltic wasn’t very deep or very wide, not when you set it alongside the Atlantic, but it had plenty of room to let a U-boat’s crushed hull disappear forever.

And if a Russian destroyer suddenly appeared out of seaspray and mist… In that case, Lemp would take the U-30 down as fast as she could go, and pray the Ivans’ depth charges didn’t peel her open like the key to a tin of sardines.

But the heavens stayed good and gloomy. That made enemy shipping harder to spot at any distance, but it also meant no Red Air Force planes were likely to swoop down on the U-boat. Given the choice, Lemp preferred the low, scudding clouds.

Gerhart Beilharz eyed the sky, too. His thoughts ran down a different track. “How bad will it get in the middle of winter if it’s already like this? Will we be able to operate at all? Or will the whole sea freeze solid?”

“Not the whole sea,” Lemp answered. “That doesn’t even happen up around Murmansk and Archangelsk, and they face on the Arctic Ocean, for heaven’s sake.”

The younger officer nodded, but he didn’t let go. “Oh, sure, Skipper. But they have the Gulf Stream going for them, so warm water flows up to them from the southwest. Without it, they’d probably be icebound all year around, not just in winter.”

“I wish they were. It would make our lives easier.” Lemp gave Beilharz a grudging nod. “Well, fair enough-you’ve got a point. But the Baltic doesn’t freeze all the way across. There will be ice on it some way out from shore, but the Ivans have icebreakers to clear the way for their U-boats when it’s at its worst. We can’t be rid of them so easily, however much I wish we could.”

“Too bad.” Beilharz grinned crookedly.

“Isn’t it just!” Lemp agreed. “Everything would be a lot easier if the enemy acted like a Dummkopf all the time.” Or if the people on our own side weren’t Dummkopfs themselves, more often than they ought to be. He sighed, wondering whether the Reich had been wise to get entangled with the Soviet Union. Most of Russia might be undeveloped, but that colossal sweep of red on the map remained intimidating.

Again, Beilharz’s thoughts ran in a different direction: “Now that we’ve patched things up with England, will the Royal Navy come into the Baltic and give us a hand against Ivan? Battleships, aircraft carriers, more U-boats… We sure could use ’em.”

“I know,” Lemp said. Germany’s only carrier, the Graf Zeppelin, remained incomplete and unlaunched. He wondered whether it would ever be finished and go into action, or if the powers that be would find better uses for all those thousands of tonnes of steel and order it broken up. That wasn’t for him to say. Hell’s bells-he couldn’t even give the Schnorkel man a straight answer. “If the limeys are coming this way, nobody’s told me about it. And now you know as much as I do.”

“It’d be nice if we found out ahead of time,” Beilharz said plaintively. “We shoot an eel at an English dreadnought by mistake, that won’t make ’em want to stay friendly with us.”

“No. It won’t.” Were the Baltic as cold as Julius Lemp’s voice, it would have frozen solid from surface to bottom on the instant, and never thawed out again afterwards. Lemp had already sunk one important ship by mistake. He didn’t even want to imagine another screwup so monumental.

Beilharz hadn’t joined the crew when the Athenia went down. The Schnorkel man had joined the crew, in no small measure, because the Athenia went down. And what they’d seen since! The failed putsch against the Fuhrer, with history playing out before their eyes to the accompaniment of machine-gun chords. And then the great reversal, so that machine guns stopped firing in the west and started up against the Reds.

Hitler had a lot to be proud of… if he could beat the Russians and make it stick. The last people who’d managed that were the Mongols. They’d done it a devil of a long time ago now. They’d stormed out of the east, too. Coming from the west, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, English and French together… everyone had failed.

Which didn’t mean the Reich and its shiny new Anglo-French alliance couldn’t succeed where everybody else had had to toss in the sponge. Of course it didn’t. Of course it doesn’t, Lemp told himself, thinking louder than he might have. The previous track record sure didn’t improve the odds, though.

Track record? On land these days, the track was muddy where it wasn’t frozen. The Wehrmacht and its allies kept gaining ground all the same. They just had to go on doing it, that was all. And the U-boats and the rest of the Kriegsmarine had to help.

Theo Hossbach wondered why he seemed to play football only when it was bloody cold. Here he was, standing in goal on another snow-streaked, bumpy pitch, watching his buddies and-this time-a bunch of Tommies pound up and down. They got warm. Running the way they did, they would have stayed warm at the South Pole.

He, by contrast, was freezing his ass off. A goalkeeper was often as much a spectator as the Germans and Englishmen watching-and betting on-the action from the sidelines. Well, he always had been more a detached observer than a participant in life. If you were going to play football at all, goalkeeper was about the best you could do along those lines, as radioman was if you happened to be part of a panzer division.

Sometimes the world came after you whether you wanted it to or not. A shell from an enemy panzer or antipanzer gun could smash through your armor unless you were good, or at least lucky (or was that lucky, or at least good?-no one seemed to know).

And sometimes a grinning Tommy in khaki dribbled past what were supposed to be your rear four defenders and drew back his leg to drive the ball into the net-they had proper goals this time, loot from a Russian school. Unlike an antipanzer round, he couldn’t blow you to smithereens. But he could humiliate you, which hurt almost as much and was far more public.

Make yourself big. That was what they told goalkeepers in trouble. Theo duly did it, running out at the Englishman to cut off the angle, waving his arms over his head, spreading his legs, and for good measure yelling at the top of his lungs. The Tommy shot. The ball banged off Theo’s left foot and slithered out of bounds for a corner kick.

“Fucking ’ell,” the thwarted footballer snarled. Theo didn’t speak English, but he recognized an endearment when he heard one. He smiled sweetly.

As the two sides jostled each other before the kick, his own teammates thumped him on the back. “That’s the way to play it,” Adi Stoss said. “You couldn’t have done any better.”

“Thanks,” Theo muttered. Praise on the pitch from Adi was praise indeed. As usual, the panzer driver seemed to be in his own world here. He far outshone his countrymen. He far outshone his opponents, too, and the English had invented the game. He’d already scored once, and only a leaping, sprawling save by the other ’keeper kept him from claiming another goal.

The Tommies did the same thing other German sides did: they tried to knock him off his game by knocking him around. Nasty tackles sent him sprawling a couple of times. In a professional match, they would have got the guilty parties sent off. If nobody needed an ambulance here, you just kept playing.

Adi was no fool. He could tell which way the wind blew. He’d probably known it would blow his way long before it did. And he took care of things on his own. One of his tormentors went down in a heap and didn’t get up again for a long time. At last, when Theo was starting to wonder if they would need an ambulance, the Englishman staggered to his feet and play went on. A few minutes later, another Tommy skidded a long way on his face. He rose with blood running from his nose, looking for a fight. Adi stood right there. If the fellow in khaki wanted one, he could have it. He decided he didn’t want it. The match resumed once more.

At last, the English lieutenant serving as timekeeper and referee blew his officer’s whistle. Play ground to a stop. The Landsers had beaten the Tommies, 5-3. A few of the Englishmen seemed amazed they could lose at their own game, even in a pickup match like this. A couple of others seemed furious. Most, though, were as winded as their German counterparts. They and the Germans clapped one another on the back, clasped hands, and tried to talk, using fragments-often foul fragments-of their opponents’ language.

On the sidelines, cash and chattels personal-especially tobacco and liquor-changed hands as bettors settled up. One of the Germans who seemed to have done well for himself went up to Adi. Whatever he said didn’t sit well with Theo’s crewmate. Stoss turned away, obviously angry.

The other German said something else. Adi snarled something in return. Theo trotted over to them, ready for anything. You didn’t let your buddies down, on the battlefield or on the pitch.

But the fellow who’d infuriated Adi didn’t want to bang heads. He just looked bewildered at what he’d started. “You can clear off, pal,” he said to Theo. “I didn’t mean to get him mad at me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Theo only half-believed that. On the one hand, nobody in his right mind would want Adi Stoss mad at him. The Englishman with the bloody nose had seen that. He’d backed off, too. On the other hand, Adi wasn’t a guy with a short fuse. He didn’t go looking for trouble or start it. He didn’t get sore for no reason at all, either.

Or did he? The other German said, “Yeah. Honest to God. All I said was, he played as well as the last time I saw him on the pitch.”

“Liar,” Adi said, and if that wasn’t murder in his voice, Theo had never heard it.

“I don’t think so.” Theo might have heard the danger in his voice, but the other fellow plainly didn’t. He went on, “I was selling stuff in Munster three, four years ago, and Bayern Munchen was playing a friendly against some town side-the Foresters, that’s who they were. I’m from Munich, so I went. I remember you ’cause you were the only good thing on the pitch for your club.”

Adi shook his head. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but that wasn’t me.”

“Right.” The man from Munich didn’t believe it for a second. “Then it was either your twin or your ghost-that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

“Could have been either one,” Adi said. “All I’ve got to tell you is, it wasn’t me.”

“Huh!” No, the stranger wasn’t convinced. But what could he do in the face of such stubborn, stony denial? Walk off shaking his head, was the only thing that occurred to Theo. And that was just what the fellow from Munich did.

Adi Stoss swore, loudly and foully. He kicked at the half-frozen ground under his feet. “Now I can’t even play fucking football any more,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry about it.” Words never came easily for Theo. He found a few more anyway: “He’s from Munich, not Munster. Whatever you’re running from, he doesn’t know anything about it.”

Sudden hard suspicion filled Adi’s voice: “Why do you think I’m running from anything?”

He’d been ready to kill the guy from Munich. He’s liable to want to murder me, too, Theo realized. And, all things considered, how can you blame him? He picked his next words with even more care and reluctance than he usually used: “It’s not like half the guys in the company don’t already know.”

“Know what?” Stoss demanded.

This time, Theo didn’t say a word. He glanced toward the crotch of Adi’s black coveralls, held his eyes there long enough to make sure the driver noticed him doing it, and then looked away.

Adi was swarthier than most Germans. That didn’t keep him from going white now. “You… know?” he whispered.

“ ’Fraid so,” Theo answered.

“And you didn’t turn me in to the Gestapo or the SD or the rest of those pigdogs?”

“Oh, sure I did. Six months ago. The rest of the panzer guys have done it dozens of times,” Theo said, deadpan.

Stoss stared. For a second, maybe a second and a half, he believed Theo. He didn’t know whether to clout him with a rock, look around frantically for blackshirts, or just start running. Then he realized he’d tripped over irony. “You son of a bitch!” he said, and he couldn’t have sounded more relieved if the Panzer II’s armor had just held out a burst of machine-gun fire. “You son of a bitch! Maybe the whole world’s not out to ruin us after all.” He didn’t say which us the world was after, but Theo hadn’t, either. They both knew, all right.