Two Fronts

Chapter 2

A medal. Kisses on the cheek from a Spanish Republican brigadier who smelled of garlic. A three-day pass for Madrid, and a fat wad of pesetas to spend there. Vaclav Jezek couldn’t have cared less about the first two. The medal was gilded, not gold; it clanked instead of clinking. The brigadier was just another Spaniard with a graying mustache.

The pass and the roll, though, those were worth having. The Czech sniper could hardly wait to go hunting for more Fascist generals. The Republic promised the sun, moon, and little stars for Marshal Sanjurjo, the Caudillo of the enemy’s half of Spain. The payoff on General What’s-his-name-Franco, that was it-wasn’t half bad, either.

Vaclav didn’t speak much Spanish. The only foreign language he did speak was German. Seeing as the Nazis backed the Spanish Fascists, in the Red Republic that was more likely to land him in trouble than to help him. But he could order drinks. He could get at least some food. And, eked out with gestures, he could let a whore know what he wanted her to do. The putas liked him fine: he didn’t want anything fancy, and he had plenty of money to spend. As far as they were concerned, that made him the perfect customer.

Being a stolid, thrifty, solid man, he still had a little cash in his wallet when the leave, like all other good things, came to an end. A bus took him back up toward the stretch of front the soldiers of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile held northwest of Madrid. Almost everything on the way was smashed by bombs, pocked with bullet holes, or both together. For a while, Sanjurjo’s men had pushed into the capital’s outskirts. Slowly and painfully, a few meters at a time, the Republicans had forced them back.

If France hadn’t hopped into the sack with Hitler, the Czechs would have stayed there, making sure the Germans advanced only over their dead bodies. The cynical politicos in Paris thought they were generous to let the Czechs cross the Pyrenees instead of interning them. Maybe they were even right.

Now, though, Daladier and his cronies must have decided old Adolf made a lousy lay. They weren’t in bed with him any more. That meant the on-and-off supply spigot between France and the Spanish Republic was on again. It also meant the Germans and Italians had trouble keeping their Spanish pals in toys for a while. If the Republican officials and officers didn’t stow their brains up their asses, they’d try to take advantage of that.

The bus wheezed to a stop several kilometers short of the front. The driver said something in lisping Spanish. Since most of his passengers were Czechs or men from the International Brigades, his own language did him less good than it might have. Seeing as much, he solved the problem another way. He yanked the door open-whatever hydraulics it might have had once upon a time were long gone-and yelled, “Raus!”

Chances were it was the only word of German he knew. But it did the job here. Grumbling, the soldiers hopped out one by one. A hulking blond International said something in Polish. Jezek almost understood it. He cupped a hand behind one ear and said, “Try that again?” in Czech.

His words would have had the same annoying near-familiarity to the Pole as the other guy’s did for him. The big, fair man repeated himself. Vaclav shrugged. He still didn’t get it. “Gawno,” the Pole muttered. Vaclav followed that fine. Shit was shit in any Slavic tongue. Then the big guy did what a Pole and a Czech would often do instead of staying frustrated by each other’s languages: he asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ja,” Vaclav answered resignedly. He’d gone through this before. He’d hoped to skip it this time, but no such luck.

“Gut,” the Pole said. “What I said was, we have had our holiday, and now we are going back to the factory.” Like Vaclav, he spoke German slowly, hunting for words. As Poles would, he put the accent in every polysyllabic word on the next to last, whether it belonged there or not.

“To the factory, is it?” Jezek responded. “Well, here’s hoping we stay away from industrial accidents.”

“Here’s hoping. Ja-fucking-wohl.” That wasn’t exactly proper German, but Vaclav followed some improper German, too.

He and the Pole tramped along together for a while. They told each other the usual lies about the drinking and screwing they’d done in Madrid. A jackhammer couldn’t have done all the pounding the Pole claimed. Vaclav pretended to believe him. Life was too short for some arguments.

They waved when they separated, and wished each other luck. The Internationals’ trenches were north and east of the stretch the Czechs held. “Hey, look who’s back!” Vaclav’s countrymen shouted. One of them added, “You don’t look as rumpled as you ought to, dammit!”

“Rumpled? I’ll tell you about rumpled, by Jesus!” Vaclav retold some of the stories he’d fed the Pole. His buddies ate them up. He’d already thought them through once, and they sounded a hell of a lot better in Czech than they had in German. He hoped he gave good value.

Through all the stories, Lieutenant Benjamin Halevy listened with an ironically raised eyebrow. Everybody got promoted a grade on coming to Spain; that was why Vaclav was a sergeant now. Halevy had been a sergeant-a sergeant in the French Army. His parents were from Prague; he’d been born in Paris. Fluent in French and Czech (and several other languages), he’d served as liaison between French troops and the men who served the government-in-exile.

And he’d accompanied the Czechs to Spain. Like any other Jew, he couldn’t stomach France’s alliance with the Third Reich. French authorities hadn’t much wanted him around, either. He could have gone back to civilian life with an honorable discharge. Instead, he’d kept on fighting Fascism.

He was a good soldier, clever and brave. Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews till the war started. When it came to fighting the Nazis, though, they were in it to the end. A couple of Slovaks in Vaclav’s squad at the beginning of things ran out the first chance they got. They were probably in Father Tiso’s “independent” Slovakian army right now, fighting the Russians. Vaclav chuckled nastily. That’d serve the stupid shitheels right!

“Where’s my toy?” he asked Halevy. He didn’t bother with a sir; neither of them took the promotions they’d got from the Spaniards too seriously. The extra pay, in cash and in promises, did come in handy, though.

“Well, somebody saw an elephant out behind the Fascists’ lines. He went hunting with your piece, and we haven’t seen it or him since,” Halevy answered blandly.

Vaclav snorted. “My ass! Is the beast still where I stashed it?”

“You bet it is,” the Jew replied. “C’mon, man-get real. Who in his right mind would want the goddamn thing?”

“Well, I do,” Vaclav said with such dignity as he could muster.

“I said, ‘Who in his right mind?’ ” Halevy repeated patiently. Vaclav snorted again. Halevy led him to the bombproof where he’d left the antitank rifle before he went down to paint the town red (or, given its politics, redder). He’d taken it from a French soldier who was too dead to need it any more. It was a beast and a half: almost as long as a man was tall, and more than twice as heavy as an ordinary rifle. It fired rounds as thick as a thumb, and not much shorter.

Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it almost broke your shoulder every time you pulled the trigger. But those fat bullets would pierce at least twenty-five millimeters of hardened steel, which made it death on armored cars and powerful enough to trouble any tank they’d had in 1938 (more modern marks shrugged off any rifle bullets).

It might not wreck a new tank. To the logical French, that made it obsolete and therefore useless. To Vaclav, it only meant he needed to use the monster for something else. The antitank rifle fired heavy rounds on a flat trajectory with a ridiculously high muzzle velocity. That made it a wonderful sniper’s rifle, especially after he fitted it with a telescopic sight. He could kill a man two kilometers away.

He could, and he damn well had. General Franco hadn’t been so far off-he’d been out around 1,500 meters. Franco, by all accounts, had been a careful and logical man, more methodical than brilliant. No doubt he would have agreed with the French about the obvious uselessness of an outdated weapon. He would have, yes, till Vaclav plugged him. At the moment, he had no opinions about anything. And Vaclav planned on doing some more sniping tomorrow.

The winter before, the Wehrmacht hadn’t had proper clothes for fighting in Russia. The German greatcoat served tolerably well in Western Europe. Russian winds bit right through it. Willi Dernen had acquired-a polite way to say had stolen-a sheepskin jacket in a peasant village. German boots also sucked. The hobnails in their soles took cold right up to your feet, and they also fit too closely to be padded. Willi’d taken a pair of valenki-oversized felt boots-off a Russian corpse. He’d done much better after that.

Things were different this time around. German soldiers got cold-weather gear as good as anyone else’s. Even the Ivans stole Wehrmacht-issue felt-and-leather boots when they could get them. Willi was relieved. Shivering and risking frostbite were bad enough. Having even your Polish allies laugh at you-or, sadder yet, pity you-because you were shivering and frostbitten was worse.

Willi came from Breslau. Just about everybody in the division was drawn from the Wehrkreis-the recruiting district-centered on that town. Poland bordered it on the east. Plenty of Poles lived in the district, and in Breslau. Like most Germans, Willi looked down his nose at them. Watching them look down their noses at him and his countrymen here was flat-out embarrassing.

The Wehrmacht first came east to help the Poles drive Stalin’s hordes out of their country. The Germans had done that. Now they were in Russia up to their armpits, the boundary between Poland and the USSR hundreds of kilometers behind them, Moscow still hundreds of kilometers ahead.

Where, in all this Russian immensity, did victory lie? Anywhere? If it lay anywhere close by, Willi couldn’t see it. He didn’t think any of the other Landsers in his outfit could, either. He’d quit worrying about it. All he cared about were staying alive and coming home in one piece.

He peered out from the edge of some woods across the snow-covered fields to the east. His new winter coat was white on one side, Feldgrau on the other. He’d slapped whitewash on his Stahlhelm. With snow dappling the pines and birches that sheltered his section, any watching Red Army man wouldn’t be able to see him from very far away.

Which proved less than he wished it would have. For all he knew, a Russian in a snowsuit was lying in that field not fifty meters away. The Germans didn’t call their enemies Indians by accident. For one thing, Indians were red men. For another, Indians were supposed to be masters of concealment. They were supposed to be, and the Ivans damn well were.

If a Russian was lying in the field, he wouldn’t give himself away by moving. He could lie there all day without doing that. He could lie there all day without freezing to death, too. German troops often wondered whether Russians were half animal. If they were, it was the wrong half, as far as Willi was concerned.

Boots crunched in the snow behind him. He turned his head. Nothing to get excited about: just one of his buddies. “Anything going on?” Adam Pfaff asked.

“Well, I don’t see anything,” Willi answered.

“Mpf,” the other Obergefreiter said. Willi couldn’t have put it better himself. Pfaff went on, “Maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn’t.”

“I was just thinking the same thing before you came up,” Willi said. “If you want to look around for yourself, be my guest. I won’t get pissed off if you spot Ivans I missed. I’ll thank you kindly, on account of you’ll be saving my ass, too.”

“Sure, I’ll look. I don’t think I’m likely to spot anything you didn’t, but even when it comes to cabbage two heads are better than one.” Cradling his Mauser, Pfaff moved up alongside Willi. The woodwork on the rifle was painted a gray not far from Feldgrau. He’d carried that Mauser since he joined the regiment as a replacement. Arno Baatz, the Unteroffizier who’d led this squad, tried to tell him to make the piece ordinary again. The company commander had said it was all right, though. That didn’t make Pfaff and Baatz get along any better.

Then again, Awful Arno didn’t get along with anybody. He and Willi had had run-ins aplenty. Right this minute, Baatz was recovering from an arm wound, and the squad belonged to Willi. He didn’t care what Pfaff did with his rifle, as long as it fired when he pulled the trigger.

Willi’s own weapon was a sniper’s Mauser, with a telescopic sight and a special downturned bolt rather like an English Lee-Enfield’s because the scope got in the way of an ordinary one. Awful Arno also hadn’t liked him to carry that piece.

After scanning the landscape to the east, Pfaff said, “Looks a hell of a lot like Russia, y’know?”

“Wunderbar. And here I was expecting Hawaii,” Willi said sourly. “Russia? I could do that well myself. Hell, I did do that well myself.”

“Always glad to be of service.” His buddy sketched a salute.

“You think we can advance across those fields?” Willi asked.

“Sure-as long as there aren’t any Russians in the woods on the far side,” Pfaff said. “But if they’ve got a couple of machine guns set up amongst the trees there, they’ll screw us to the wall if we try it.”

“Yeah, that’s about how it looks to me, too. Not a pfennig’s worth of cover along the way.” Willi sighed out a young fogbank. “Leutnant Freigau, he kinda wants us to go forward, though.”

The junior lieutenant commanded the company now for the same reason a senior private led the squad: the guy who should have had the slot was getting over a wound. Adam Pfaff sighed, too. “If he’s so hot to go charging ahead like that, let him come here and scout it out. Christ, even ordinary riflemen’d give us a hard time. Like you said, they’d be shooting from cover, and we don’t have any.”

“Go tell him to come up and check for himself,” Willi said. “If he sends us out anyway …” He shrugged. He would have made the effort, anyhow.

“I’ll do it. Can’t hurt. Maybe he’ll have a rush of brains to the head.” Pfaff’s tone said that was likely to be too much to hope for. Even so, he bobbed his head at Willi and went back to the west.

Willi had time to duck behind a pine and smoke a cigarette before Pfaff came back with Rudi Freigau. The Leutnant was only a couple of years older than the two Obergefreiters. He wore a neat mustache that was blond almost to the point of invisibility. Instead of a rifle, he carried a Schmeisser. He greeted Willi with, “Pfaff says you’re not too happy about moving up from here.”

“See for yourself, sir,” Willi replied. “If they’re waiting for us in that next bunch of trees, we’re sticking our heads in the sausage machine.”

Lieutenant Freigau did look. He was as careful as Willi and Adam Pfaff had been. He’d seen his share of tight spots before; he didn’t want to make things easy for a Russian sharpshooter. After eyeing the bare field and the woods on the far side, he said, “Everything looks quiet.”

“Well, sure, sir. It would if they’re trying to see whether we’re dumb enough to go out there, too.” As soon as he spoke, Willi realized he might have put that more tactfully.

“Or if they aren’t there at all. Which is my judgment of the situation, Dernen.” Freigau sounded irked. Willi supposed he would have, too, if he were an officer who’d just got the glove from somebody hardly even a noncom.

The lieutenant started across the snowy field. Yes, he wore winter white, but that didn’t come close to making him invisible. Willi and Adam Pfaff exchanged stricken looks. “Sir, don’t you want to come back? You’ve made your point,” Willi called after him.

Freigau shook his head. “No need,” he answered. “I’m not going to run away from shadows and ghosts and unicorns and other imaginary things. And every advance we make brings us that much closer to-”

A Russian machine gun barked to life. Willi and Adam Pfaff both flattened out. The gunner might not be aiming at them, but they were still close to his line of fire. Lieutenant Freigau went down, too, but not because he meant to. He writhed feebly and made horrible choking noises. He’d been hit at least twice: once in the belly and once in the neck. Blood darkened his snowsuit and pooled and steamed in the drift where he lay. After a couple of minutes, he quit gurgling and lay still.

“Well, you were right,” Pfaff said to Willi.

“Ja. And a whole fat lot of good that does the lieutenant.” Willi didn’t even point toward Freigau’s body, for fear of drawing the machine gunner’s notice.

“Other thing is,” Pfaff went on, “you’ll be commanding the company pretty soon, the way the people above you keep stopping stuff.”

“If I end up commanding the company, we’re all in deep shit,” Willi said. Adam Pfaff didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. After all, what were friends for?

The Nationalists were spewing out the usual lies through their loudspeakers: “Come across to our lines and we’ll fill you full of mutton stew! Lovely mutton stew! We eat it every day! We’ll fill you so full, you won’t walk any more-you’ll waddle instead! Lovely mutton stew!”

Sometimes it was mutton stew. Sometimes it was chicken stew instead. The Nationalists’ announcer sounded as smooth to Chaim Weinberg as any radio pitchman flogging Lucky Strikes back in the States.

Mike Carroll didn’t take it so kindly. “I’m sick of that lying bullshit,” the other Abe Lincoln growled. “I wish putting a bullet through his loudspeaker would make him shut up.”

“As long as you know it’s bullshit, it doesn’t wear on you so much. And as long as you’ve got enough to eat yourself,” Chaim added. “When times were tough, a big old bowl of stew sounded mighty fine.”

“The Nationalists knew it was bullshit. They’d cross over to our lines, hoping we’d feed them,” Mike said.

“Talk about optimists!” Chaim exclaimed.

“Yeah, well, sometimes they’d be skinnier than we were-and that wasn’t easy.”

“I remember. Those days on the Ebro … Everybody was hungry all the goddamn time. Hell, even I was on the way to being scrawny back then.” Chaim was short and thickset; an unkind man would have called him squat. He looked and talked like the New York Jew he was. In Madrid, he’d got himself a different kind of handle: el narigon loco-the crazy kike. In bar brawls, he’d sail into guys half again his size. He’d flatten them, too, because there were times when he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died and because he brought his front-line meanness with him when he went on leave.

Mike Carroll, by contrast, could have come off an SS recruiting poster. You’d lose teeth if you were stupid enough to tell him so, though. He was as good a Communist as Chaim or any other Abe Lincoln. He was probably a better Communist than Chaim, as a matter of fact. Chaim had a habit of asking pointed questions. Mike-Mike believed.

“Delicious mutton stew!” the Fascist announcer called again.

“What did you do to the sheep before you threw it in the pot?” Chaim yelled back. His Spanish was far from smooth, but he could make himself understood.

These days, Spaniards filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks, and those of the rest of the International Brigades. They understood Chaim fine. Laughing, they started shouting “Sheep-fuckers!” toward the Nationalist trenches.

That pissed off Marshal Sanjurjo’s heroes. It would have pissed Chaim off, too, and he didn’t have the touchy Spanish sense of machismo. The Nationalists’ machine guns started raking the Republican trenches. “Now look what you went and did,” Mike said reproachfully as the Internationals returned fire.

“It’s a war,” Chaim explained. It wasn’t the first firefight jeers at enemy propaganda had touched off, and chances were it wouldn’t be the last.

But he stopped taking it lightly when the Fascists opened up with mortars and artillery. They were more than just pissed off, and they were taking it out on the Republicans. He dove into a bombproof dug into the front wall of the trench, hoping no shell would burst on top of it and bury him alive.

Then somebody banged on a big shell casing with an iron bar. “They’re coming! The bastards are coming!” The shout rang out in English and Spanish.

Chaim scrambled out of the bombproof and took his place on a firing step. Sure as hell, the troops who followed Sanjurjo were rushing across no-man’s-land. It wasn’t like the doomed English plodding forward at the Somme. These fellows knew better. They stayed low. They kept in loose order. Every chance they got, they jumped into shell holes. Some of them fired while others scrambled forward.

That helped, but only so much. Many of them fell scrambling forward. Some lay still once they went down. Others writhed and thrashed and screamed. The noises ripped from the throats of wounded men sounded very much alike regardless of which side they fought on or which country they came from. Suffering was a more universal language than Esperanto ever would be.

One of his own cartridge cases bounced off Chaim’s boot. He loaded and fired and loaded and fired, now and then ducking automatically when an enemy round cracked past his head. Sanjurjo’s men got through the barbed wire with alarming ease. Had they sent out cutting parties the night before? If they had, this attack had been laid on all along; it wasn’t mounted on the spur of the moment.

I can worry about that later-if I’m still around to worry about it, Chaim thought as he slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He started to fumble for his bayonet. Unless he was going trench-raiding himself, he used it for a knife and a tin-opener, not a weapon. But this might turn out to be one of the rare times he was glad to have it.

Then a Republican machine gun opened up on the Fascists. A moment later, so did another one. Now despair filled the shrieks from Sanjurjo’s men. They’d braved rifle fire. Nobody, though, could hope to cross open ground in the face of the industrialized murder machine guns personified. Concentrated essence of infantry, someone had called them during the last war. That still seemed a plenty good label.

The Nationalists were recklessly brave (so were the Spaniards who fought on the Republican side). This time, their courage only cost them more casualties. They kept coming for a while after more pragmatic troops would have seen the thing was hopeless.

Some of them got close enough to the Republican trenches to fling grenades into them. A fragment ripped Chaim’s baggy trousers. It didn’t bite his leg, though, for which he thanked the God in Whom good Marxist-Leninists weren’t supposed to believe. He didn’t particularly fear dying in battle. Getting badly hurt … He didn’t know anybody who wasn’t scared of that.

At last, sullenly, the Nationalists pulled back. Some more of them got shot before they could reach the protection of their own trenches. Out in the space between the lines, the wounded groaned.

Some of the Abe Lincolns took pot shots at them, as much to shut them up as for any other reason. Part of Chaim thought that was cruel. Part of him hoped somebody would put him out of his misery if he lay there, helpless and suffering, out in no-man’s-land.

Then one of the Abe Lincolns’ officers said, “Let’s bring in some prisoners and see what we can squeeze out of them. You, you, you, you, and you.” Chaim was the second of those yous, Mike Carroll the third.

“Thanks a bunch,” Chaim said. You could bitch about an order, but you couldn’t disobey one.

Out he went, keeping his belly on the ground like a serpent. Finding Fascists to bring in wasn’t the problem, not this time. Not getting killed bringing them in might be another matter. He’d worry about that when he came to it.

A Nationalist moaned in the next shell hole. Chaim scrambled down into it. “Aw, fuck,” he said softly. His stomach did a slow lurch. The guy’d been blown almost in half. Why wasn’t he dead? Human beings could be uncommonly hard to kill, yeah, but this was-what was the next step past ridiculous?

His eyes found Chaim’s. “Por favor, Senor Internacional,” he said clearly.

Please, Mr. International. He could even be polite about it. Chaim wanted to ask if he was sure, but, given the butchered ruin that he was, there couldn’t be much doubt about that. “Fuck,” Chaim repeated. But he would be doing the guy a favor-there couldn’t be any doubt about that, either.

Chaim pulled out his bayonet and did what needed doing. Then he crawled off to find some other wounded Nationalist to haul back for questioning.

Bacon and eggs and white toast with plenty of butter and marmalade. If that wasn’t a breakfast to let you go out and spit in winter’s eye, Peggy Druce had never heard of one. She said as much to her husband as she set the plate in front of him.

Herb nodded. “You betcha, babe. Of course, the hot coffee doesn’t hurt, either.” The plume that rose from his Chesterfield behind the morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer might have been a smoke signal.

“Want another cup?” Peggy asked.

“Sure do.” Herb murmured thanks when Peggy poured it for him. He tucked into his breakfast.

Peggy sat down and ate, too. “What we’re putting away would feed a family in Germany for a week,” she said. “I don’t know when the last time was they saw white bread or eggs or real coffee.”

“Breaks my heart.” Herb stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “We ought to be at war with Hitler, too, same as we were against the Kaiser.” He tapped the newspaper with a nicotine-stained forefinger. “What I want to know is, how’d it get to be 1942 already? Like a dope, I wrote ‘1941’ on a check yesterday, and I had to void the darn thing.”

“I’ve done it-not this year yet, but I have,” Peggy said. “It’s a pain in the keester, is what it is.”

“What really frosts my pumpkin is, I’m supposed to be one of FDR’s hot-shot efficiency experts, right?” Herb laughed at himself. “Here I can’t even remember what year it is, for cryin’ out loud. Some efficiency, huh?”

“If you don’t tell the people you’re dealing with, they’ll never know,” Peggy said reasonably. “And chances are they’ve all pulled the same rock one time or another.”

“There you go.” Herb lowered the Inquirer so he could grin at her across the table. “Which one of us is the lawyer? Remind me again.”

“One of the girls in the dorm room next to mine at Penn State was from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that. She always pronounced it liar.”

“She knew what was what, all right.” Herb put away the grub as if he were a doughboy shoveling food into his chowlock at a field kitchen in some ruined village in France. He paused to check his wristwatch. “I’m still good.”

But even as he said that, he sent Peggy a pointed look, so she ate faster, too. “What time does your train head out? A quarter past nine?” she said.

“That’s right.” He nodded.

“You’re fine, then,” Peggy said. “Where are you going this time? Was it Kentucky?”

“Tennessee.”

“Oh, yeah.” She thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “And who’s mucking things up in Tennessee?” Herb had come back from other trips with amazing stories of waste and corruption and stupidity run amok. Anyone who listened to him for a while would be sure the United States couldn’t possibly win the war-unless everybody else in the world was just as fouled up. Humanity being what it was, that made a pretty fair bet.

This morning, though, her husband’s face closed down tight, as if he sat at a poker table or in a conference room with the other side’s attorneys. “Sorry, babe, but I can’t talk about that.”

“What?” Peggy could hardly believe her ears. “I’m your wife, in case you hadn’t noticed. What am I gonna do? Send Hitler a telegram?” She’d spoken to the Fuhrer once, when she was marooned in Berlin. To say she had no desire to repeat the experience proved the power of understatement.

“I know, I know. But this is heap big secret-and even that’s more than I ought to say about it.”

“Some of the other stuff you’ve told me about was secret, too.”

He sighed. “Peggy, I can’t talk, not about this stuff. I can’t even talk about why I can’t talk about it. If they had any way to vacuum out my brains after I finish what I need to do there, they’d use it.”

She wasn’t going to get any more out of him. She could see as much, even if she couldn’t see why. But if he couldn’t talk about why he couldn’t talk about why things were secret … “Would they hang me for a spy if I asked you for one of those cigarettes?”

“They’d have to hang me first.” Herb shook the pack till a Chesterfield stuck out. Peggy took it. Herb flicked the wheel on his Zippo. As advertised, a flame shot up the first try.

Peggy leaned forward to get the cigarette going. She sighed out smoke. “That does go nice with food.”

“Sure does.” Herb smoked another one, too. Then he went upstairs, and came down with his suitcase. He shrugged into his topcoat. Peggy put on a coat, too. The dishes could wait till she got back from dropping him off. He said, “One thing about rationing gasoline-less traffic these days.”

“You’ve got that right,” Peggy agreed. Most people’s “A” stickers limited them to four gallons a week. You couldn’t go very far on that-to work and back every day, if you were lucky. The Druces’ Packard got a good deal more fuel; because he was in what the government reckoned an essential occupation, he had one of the rare and coveted “C” stickers.

It was cold but clear. There wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any ice on the roads. Peggy got in on the driver’s side. She’d have to bring the car back. As Herb slid in beside her, he said, “Lucky me. I’ve got myself the best-darn-looking chauffeur in town.”

“You!” Peggy said fondly.

The Packard started right away. There went one more worry. Cold weather could do rude things to a battery. If Herb had had to wait till a taxi got here, he really might have missed his train.

She drove downtown, toward Broad Street Station. When she passed an Esso station, she saw a cop checking ration stickers. Herb noticed, too. “Some ways, it hardly seems like a free country any more, does it?” he remarked.

“Oh, it’s not so bad. Trust me-it’s not.” Peggy had seen with her own eyes what things were like in a country that suddenly stopped being free. The grin on that German’s face at Marianske Lazny after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938 … He’d been cutting off a Jew’s beard with a big pair of shears. If he cut off some cheek or ear at the same time, well, hey, that only made the fun better. He thought so, anyhow, and he had enough rifles and machine guns and tanks on his side that the poor damned Jew had to stand there and take it unless he felt like dying on the spot. She still wondered sometimes what had happened to him.

“If you say so,” Herb answered, which meant he didn’t think it was worth an argument. He left no doubt where he stood, though: “I don’t have to like it, and I darn well don’t.”

“Neither do I. Who does?” Peggy said. “But things are worse plenty of other places.”

She pulled up in front of the station. Herb leaned toward her for a quick good-bye kiss. He got out, pulled his suitcase off the back seat, and lugged it inside. Peggy waited till he disappeared before heading back to the house.

A long sigh escaped her when she pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t that she worried he’d go looking for some round-heeled waitress or hat-check girl as soon as he got to whatever super-duper-secret place he was inspecting in Tennessee. It wasn’t, dammit. But they’d been apart for two years while she was stuck in Europe, and he’d had himself a little fling while she was gone. She’d had her own-mishap was probably the best word for it-over there, too.

When things came out, they’d forgiven each other. Peggy meant it when she did it. She was sure Herb was every bit as sincere. But forgiving wasn’t quite the same as forgetting. Their marriage wasn’t the same as it had been before she sailed for the Continent.

Peggy hadn’t the least desire to go to Nevada and get a quickie divorce. Again, she was sure Herb didn’t want to, either. It didn’t seem like that to her. It was just one more thing the war had wounded. And it was also the reason she fixed herself a stiff highball as soon as she got into the house.