Two Fronts

Chapter 23

Pete McGill was glad to be out on patrol aboard the Ranger. Yeah, bad shit could still happen to him. A Jap sub might sink the carrier. Three Jap carriers might show up, heading straight for Pearl. Their Zeros would make short work of the combat air patrol, and then their dive-bombers and torpedo planes would make short work of the Ranger.

But he was a Marine. They paid him-not much, not even with three stripes on his sleeve, but they did-to go where bad shit could happen to him. He did his stolid best not to worry about it.

Besides, he could have been worse off. “You know what?” he said to Bob Cullum.

“You’d sooner be in Philadelphia?” the other leatherneck suggested, proving his taste in flicks ran to W.C. Fields.

“I’ll tell you, man, right this minute I’d sooner by anywhere but Honolulu,” Pete answered. “I’d sooner be out here, and I shit you not. God damn the Japs. God damn the rats.”

“Who would’ve imagined we’d see anthrax in Honolulu in this day and age?” Cullum said. “I never even heard of anthrax till they started giving shots. And the plague, too.”

“Plague was one of the things we always worried about on duty at the legation in Peking,” Pete said. “We had lots of traps and lots of cats to keep the rats away. Never saw it while I was there-told you that before-but some of the guys who were old hands when I first came, they said they’d lost buddies from it back in the day.”

“I hear you,” Cullum said. “But I bet there’s been plague in China as long as there’ve been Chinamen. Not like that in Hawaii. There wasn’t any till the Japs went and brought it to us. None of that anthrax shit, neither.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past the Japs, not anything at all. Stinking slanty-eyed assholes.” Pete hardly even noticed he was cursing them, he did it so automatically.

“Boy oh man, I bet all the bars and the cathouses on Hotel Street are going broke.” By the way Bob Cullum said it, that was the worst consequence of the outbreak of disease in Honolulu. Mournful still, he went on, “I mean, you lay a broad and you don’t use your pro kit, maybe she gives you the clap. Nobody dies from the fuckin’ clap. It just hurts like hell for a while when you piss.”

“Uh-huh.” Pete nodded. “Come down with the clap and you worry about trouble with the brass. Come down with anthrax or the plague and you worry about trouble with Saint Peter.”

Sergeant Cullum laughed. “Good one! Now we just hope like hell we don’t have any rats on the ship.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Pete said. Sure, the Ranger’s mooring lines always wore the usual outward-facing hollow copper cones designed to keep the rodents from boarding. The carrier also boasted a ship’s cat. They’d got a big red tabby out of the Honolulu pound and named him Rusty. How much hunting he did, though, was open to question. He spent a lot of time in the galley, where the cooks fed him and fed him. He was already noticeably plumper than he had been when he came aboard.

Even if he’d spent all his time going after rats, whether he could have murdered every last one of them was also open to question. Pete remembered a photo he’d seen of a couple of dozen dead rats and mice found aboard a freighter after the ship was fumigated. Also in the photo was the ship’s cat, which hadn’t got off before they turned loose the gas.

An albatross soared past the carrier. It didn’t really have a wingspan as wide as a fighter’s, but it sure seemed to.

“Goddamn Japs don’t just break international law. They kick it while it’s down and then they shit on it.” Cullum returned to the business at hand.

“You got that right.” Pete nodded again. “They fight us the same way they fight the Chinamen-dirty. You believe what you read in the papers, they started this germ-warfare crap on them years ago.”

“I believe that. The fuckers have it down to a science,” Cullum said. “But if you believe everything you read in the papers, you’re a sucker and a sap, is what you are.”

“Oh, sure.” Pete knew that. Not knowing it, he supposed, was the mark of a sucker and a sap. He absentmindedly scratched an itch. Then, noticing what he’d done, he rolled his eyes. “Every time I itch, I wonder if I’m gonna squash a flea when I scratch.”

If you did kill a flea when you scratched, you had standing orders to report to sick bay on the double. The docs down there couldn’t do anything much for you if the glands under your arms and in your groin started swelling up, but they had an isolation ward so maybe you wouldn’t infect your shipmates.

“And when you gotta shower with seawater and saltwater soap, bet your ass you’re gonna have itches,” Cullum said. “If they let us take Hollywood showers all the time, I almost wouldn’t mind the plague, y’know? It’d be doing me some good, anyhow.”

“Then you wake up,” Pete said. “Not enough fresh water on the ship to use for washing.”

“Tell your granny how to suck eggs,” Cullum retorted. “And clean the wax outa your ears while you’re at it. I said if.”

The Ranger’s Wildcats buzzed in circles above the ship and its escorts, ready to do what they could if the Japanese attacked with airplanes instead of germs. From everything Pete had seen and heard, a Wildcat stood a chance against a Zero, but not a great chance. The American fighters had to slash and run and slash again. If you tried to dogfight a Zero, the first thing you’d wonder was how he’d managed to turn inside you and get on your tail. That was also much too likely to be the last thing you’d ever wonder.

A radar antenna spun round and round, round and round, on top of the carrier’s island. It could warn of approaching planes long before you saw them or heard them. They were talking about using radar to direct gunfire, too. Pretty soon, it would all be one side’s machines squaring off against the other side’s machines. Men wouldn’t have to study war any more, because they wouldn’t be good enough at it to have a prayer of winning.

When Pete brought out that conceit, Sergeant Cullum gave him a funny look. “So what’ll lugs like you and me do then?” he asked.

“Play football. Drink. Brawl in bars,” Pete answered. “Same kind of shit we do now, only without the uniforms.”

“But the uniforms are what makes it matter.” Cullum had been a Marine even longer than Pete. He might have been reciting the Athanasian Creed. By the conviction with which he spoke, he more than half thought he was.

So did Pete. “I won’t argue with you, man.” Since he’d cut closer to the bone than he’d meant to, he changed the subject: “I wonder how much in the way of supplies will have got to Hawaii by the time we’re back at Pearl.”

“There’s an interesting question!” Cullum exclaimed.

Interesting it was, as in the Chinese curse. The USA had to hang on to Hawaii. Without it, fighting a war against Japan was impossible. But Hawaii couldn’t feed or fuel itself. Without shiploads of stuff from the mainland, it would starve. The last thing merchant sailors wanted to do was come down with some horrible disease themselves or bring it back to the West Coast. People on the West Coast were screaming bloody murder and having hysterics. Los Angeles and Oakland had held Kill-a-Rat Days, and proudly displayed piles of long-tailed little corpses. They were kidding themselves if they thought they’d got them all, of course.

“It’s a mess, all right,” Pete said.

“Everything we do in this lousy war is a mess,” Cullum said. “You think we’ll ever get one right from the start?”

“Don’t hold your breath, is all I’ve got to tell you. You’ll turn bluer than a Billie Holiday song if you do,” Pete answered.

He scratched again. No flea crunched under his fingernail. He worried every time he did it anyhow. You couldn’t not worry, even when you were fine. That might have been the scariest thing of all about germ warfare. Whether or not the germs got under your skin, the fear did.

The Japanese naval base-the former American naval base-on Midway made Myitkyina, Burma, seem like Tokyo by comparison. You could walk around on the little islet. None of it reached higher than a few meters above the sea from which it halfheartedly rose. After Burma’s extravagant greenery, the few scrubby grasses that struggled to grow on sand and rocks seemed all the more pathetic.

You could go down to the sea and fish. That was more than just a way to make time pass by. Whatever you pulled out of the water, you could eat. For Japan, Midway was at the very end of a long, long supply line. It was also close to the American naval and air bases farther south and east. Not a lot of freighters made the journey to try to supply the imperial sailors and soldiers there. Not all the ships that tried succeeded.

So fresh-caught fish became an important part of what everyone there ate. Fujita gobbled as much sushi and sashimi in a month as he would have in a year in the Home Islands. You couldn’t get sashimi any fresher than what you’d just caught yourself and cut to pieces with a bayonet or a utility knife.

Or you could hang around the barracks that had formerly housed American Marines and Navy men. Bombardment from the air and sea had battered the barracks as the Japanese took Midway. Repairs to the buildings were haphazard at best. Even so, the quarters-if not the food-seemed luxurious by the standards Fujita was used to.

He needed a while to learn to ignore the chug of the generators that powered the desalination plant. They ran night and day. Fresh water was in short supply on Midway. Cisterns captured what rainwater they could. Water would have been scarcer still if not for the plant, which was taken over from the Americans.

A noncom who’d been there longer than Fujita said, “When we attacked, we were careful not to shell the water-making factory, and our planes didn’t bomb anywhere close to it. We were afraid the Yankees would blow it up themselves when they saw they were going to lose the island, but they didn’t.”

“That’s good luck,” Fujita said.

“Hai.” The other sergeant nodded. He was a stocky fellow a few years older than Fujita. His name was Ichiro Yanai. He went on, “It was like they never expected us to get here, and they didn’t know what to do when we did.”

“Russians can be like that, too,” Fujita said. “White men are hard to figure out. Half the time, I don’t think they know what they’re going to do before they do it.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Yanai answered. “But I don’t care how inscrutable they are.”

“There’s a ten-yen word for you!” exclaimed Fujita, who hoped he understood what it meant.

Sergeant Yanai chuckled self-consciously. “It is, isn’t it? … Where was I going with this? … Ah, hai. They were stupid here, is what they were. They could have given us all kinds of misery if they’d wrecked the waterworks so bad, we couldn’t have fixed it. I don’t even know if we make installations like this one. If we do, shipping one all the way out here sure wouldn’t have been easy. And I’m not sure you can keep any kind of garrison here on nothing but rainwater.”

Fujita looked around. Sand. Rock. Scrub. Sea-endless sea in every direction. Airstrips, with bombers and fighters near them in revetments covered with nets designed to make them look like more sand and scrub from the air.

Gliding in for a landing on one of the strips was not a G4M Navy bomber but an albatross. “Oh, this should be good!” Fujita said.

“Hai!” Yanai’s eyes glowed in anticipation.

An airborne albatross was a miracle of flight. Fujita had never imagined that anything so enormous could also be so graceful. The birds spent almost their whole lives on the wing, and it showed.

An albatross coming in for a landing was a disaster waiting to happen. This disaster didn’t have long to wait. The bird put down its weak little legs as if they were landing gear. If only it could have grown a wheeled undercarriage instead! It was going much too fast for its feet to have a prayer of stopping it or even slowing it down.

It somersaulted-tumbled, really-along the sandy tarmac, head over tail. Its wings stuck out at ridiculous angles. Why they didn’t break-or break off-Fujita had no idea.

The albatross finally came to rest on its back. The first time Fujita watched one land like that, he was sure it must have killed itself. A G4M that flipped over would have burst into flames and incinerated its crew. But that first albatross had just wiggled up onto its legs and walked away. So did this one now. They were made to crash. The birds already on the sand ignored the spectacle that fascinated the two sergeants. Why shouldn’t they? They’d all come back to earth the same way. Unlike the Japanese, they took it for granted.

“After we captured Midway, a newsreel crew came out here to photograph us so people back home could see what we’d done,” Yanai said. “That was what they came for, but they ended up using a lot of their film on the albatrosses. They couldn’t get over them.”

“I believe it,” Fujita said. “You never get tired of watching them. They don’t come in the same twice in a row, not ever. They always find some new way to smash themselves.”

“It’s never one you expect, either,” Yanai said.

“Has anyone found out what they taste like?” Fujita asked. They weren’t like chickens, that was for sure-you wouldn’t eat both wings and still be hungry for more.

“Oh, yes. They’re pretty fishy-not what you’d call good,” the other sergeant said. “You can eat them if you have to, but they’re more fun to watch than they are to shoot.”

“They’re more fun than anything else you can do on this island,” Fujita said, a certain edge in his voice. The base here wasn’t big enough for the authorities to have bothered bringing in any comfort women to keep the troops happy. Extra mouths to feed, the old men reasoned coldbloodedly. The people in charge of things here had to be too old to get it up very often. Had Fujita known Midway suffered from that kind of shortage, he wouldn’t have come a quarter of the way around the world to drop germ bombs on the Yankees’ heads.

“Nothing I can do about that.” Yanai had no trouble following him. “Nothing you can, either.”

A few days later, American four-engined bombers hit the island. Zeros zoomed up to try to fight them off. The U.S. planes fought back. Unlike G4Ms, they could take a lot of bullets and keep flying. They also spat out a lot of bullets. They bristled with heavy machine guns. The Zeros shot down at least one of them, but a pair of Japanese Navy fighters tumbled into the Pacific.

Bombs whistled down on the island. They seemed to fall at random; the Zeros did at least joggle the Americans’ elbows. Lying in a shallow trench, Fujita heard explosions far and near. He hoped the albatrosses weren’t getting blown up. They hadn’t done anything to deserve to be bombed.

He knew he had. War was like that. You hurt the people on the other side every chance you got, as hard as you could. If they didn’t give up, they paid you back with all the strength they had. Eventually, one side or the other decided it had had enough and gave up.

It seemed a stupid way to settle the world’s disagreements. No doubt it was a stupid way, only nobody had come up with a better one. People had been fighting wars, some smaller, some larger, for as long as there’d been people. Chances were they’d go right on fighting them, too.

And Japan always wins in the end. Always, Fujita thought. That made him feel a little better as the American bombs kept falling on Midway, but not so much as he’d hoped.

Bullets cracked past, a meter or two above Aristide Demange’s head. The Germans were spraying the French lines with machine-gun fire again. They wanted to keep Demange’s countrymen from getting frisky.

Most of the rounds you never saw. Some were tracers, so the assholes serving the MG-34 or MG-42 could see what their stream of bullets was doing. When one of those flew by, you thought you could light your cigarette on the red streak it left in the air.

Demange lit a Gitane-with a match. He spat the tiny butt of the last one he’d smoked into the mud. A couple of good, hard puffs started reducing the new smoke as well.

How many packs have I gone through since the war started? he wondered. He didn’t know the answer in numbers, but sometimes numbers didn’t matter. He’d gone through as many packs as he could, and he had the cough to prove it. The only times he hadn’t chain-smoked were when the tobacco ration didn’t get through to wherever he happened to be.

He’d felt weird then: light-headed, dizzy, shaky. Probably too much oxygen getting through to his brain. He couldn’t imagine what else might cause it.

Down the trench from him, the Communist private named Marcel groused, “Don’t those cochons ever run low on ammo?” He was the tall one of the pair, not the short-Demange finally had them straight.

“Hold up the red flag with the hammer and sickle on it,” the lieutenant said, Gitane bobbing in his mouth as he spoke. “That’ll make the Nazis fold up and run away. Sure it will.”

Marcel sent him a reproachful look. “The Fascist swine are in retreat in the Soviet Union, sir.” Several more bullets cracked over them as the enemy murder mill traversed. Marcel grimaced. “They sure aren’t in retreat here in Belgium.”

“You stupid piece of shit.” Demange enjoyed it when he could focus his boundless scorn for all mankind on one luckless individual. “The dumb Boches bit off more than even they could chew over there. They’re fighting on a front a couple of thousand kilometers across. When they have to fight here, too, of course they’re gonna get stretched too thin and have to fall back from the Ivans. It’s not ’cause Stalin is the second goddamn coming of Jesus Christ, you dumb prick. It’s because he has a fucking huge country.”

“He runs it with power to the proletariat, too,” Marcel said. “If we would only do that-”

He got no further. Demange cut him off. “My ass,” the veteran growled. “I was there, kid. I saw the Russian proletariat. Hell, I shot some of the Russian proletariat. A bunch of those guys, when they found out we were Frenchmen instead of Germans, they went over to us faster than those machine-gun bullets are going over us now. Some of them went over to the Nazis, too, but most of ’em figured Hitler was an even bigger salaud than Stalin. That’s the figuring you’ve got to do-which one of ’em makes the worst con.”

“Hitler does,” Marcel said confidently.

“Well, for now the big shots back in Paris think you’re right,” Demange said. “But that doesn’t turn Stalin into a bargain. The only thing that could ever turn Stalin into a bargain is, mm, Hitler.”

He was lighting another fresh Gitane when the Germans started lobbing mortar bombs at the poilus in the trenches. If you had a good, thick parapet in front of you and you kept your head down, machine-gun bullets were just an annoyance. As long as you stayed in your hole, you had to be mighty unlucky to get hurt.

Mortars whispered up and whined down. If one landed beside you, it would slice you into dogmeat even if you stayed behind your parapet. Demange despised mortars. So did every foot soldier who’d ever been on the receiving end of an attack. You couldn’t hide from them, and the bastards on your own side wouldn’t let you run away from them, either.

Screams rose from the next job over in the trench. Somebody over there had caught it, all right-caught it pretty bad, by the horrible noises he was making. Rolled into a ball in the bottom of the trench, Demange wished the bearers would cart off the luckless bugger. His shrieks were plenty to demoralize a whole regiment.

At last, they fell silent. Maybe he’d passed out. Maybe he’d died. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t feel his tormented body any more. That was a mercy, and not such a small one. People could be so dreadfully wounded, they begged you to kill them and thanked you if you had the nerve to do it.

War movies didn’t show stuff like that. A wound in a war movie meant a clean, white bandage-where were the blood and the mud? — and a nurse with big tits to bat her eyelashes at you while you recovered. If only life worked out so neatly … especially for that sorry fool over there.

The next interesting question was whether the Germans were going to follow up all this ironmongery with an attack of their own. They hadn’t been doing that very often in Belgium. They were content to let the Tommies and poilus come at them, and to slaughter the Allies when they tried.

You never could be sure, though. Whenever you thought you knew what the Boches were up to, they’d let you figure you were right for a little while and then, when you were good and set up, they’d shove it right up your ass.

Regretfully, Demange unfolded from the fetal position. Even more regretfully, he got up on the firing step and peered over the top of the parapet. That brought the machine-gun bullets terrifyingly close to the top of the crest on his helmet. Why that stupid crest was there he’d never known, in the last war or this one. To give style? It didn’t seem reason enough. The Tommies and the Ivans got along fine without crests. So did the Germans, whose helmets were hands down the best in both wars.

“Up! Up, you shitheads!” Demange yelled. “They’re moving!” He unslung his rifle-no pissy officer’s automatic for him-and started banging away at the oncoming Boches.

He felt better when French machine guns began gnawing at the enemy. The German attack soon ran out of steam. The Fritzes didn’t have any tanks supporting their foot soldiers. The infantrymen sensibly decided there was no point to getting killed when they hadn’t a prayer of making any real advance. They trotted back to their start line or at most hung on in shell holes between the lines.

After a while, a German officer stood up waving a white flag: a bed-sheet nailed to a pole. Firing on both sides slowly died away. The officer strode forward, still carrying the flag of truce.

As soon as the German got within shouting distance, Demange yelled, “Far enough, pal!”

The Boche obediently stopped. “An hour’s cease-fire?” he shouted back in guttural French. “So we can pick up our wounded?”

“Send your guys hiding in the craters back to your start line and you can have it,” Demange answered.

“D’accord,” the German agreed after a short pause for thought. “We gain little advantage from them anyhow.”

Demange saw it the same way-for now. But the Germans might try to reinforce them under cover of darkness. Then they could make more trouble here tomorrow or further down the line. “An hour’s cease-fire, starting-now!” he called to his own men. “Don’t shoot at their stretcher-bearers, and let their troops go back out of no-man’s-land.” The German officer turned and bellowed auf Deutsch.

Out came the Boches with Red Cross vests and with Red Crosses painted inside white circles on their helmets. The effect, to Demange, was that of a wolf dyed pink. It still looked dangerous, but now it looked peculiar, too. The bearers hauled wounded men back toward German aid stations. Unwounded Germans scuttled away to their entrenchments. Demange guessed not all of them would abandon the ground they’d so painfully won, no matter what their officer promised. Nobody ever kept promises all the way. Demange wouldn’t have, in the German’s shoes. A night patrol would root out the ones who’d stayed behind, and then this stretch of front could get back to normal.

No more Flying Fortresses had raided Munster, for which Sarah Bruck thanked the God in Whom she had ever more trouble believing. Maybe the daylight raid cost the RAF more than it wanted to pay. Other English bombers still hit the town by night, though.

Samuel Goldman seemed absurdly cheerful about it. “Well, I don’t lack for work, anyhow,” he said one evening over supper. “For a while there, when England and France were at peace with the government, I was afraid they’d want me as much as a laborer as they did when I was a professor.”

“Supper’s good,” Hanna Goldman said, which both wasn’t and was an answer. The Nazis hadn’t let Sarah’s father go on teaching at the university. Expelling him from the faculty had been a disaster. If they threw him out of the labor gang, that would be a catastrophe.

He nodded to Mother now. “Not too bad, if I say so myself.” He preened just a little. The spaetzle and the tinned fish that went with them had come from his inspired scrounging.

It wasn’t impossible for Jews to survive in the wartime Reich without such help, not quite. Life might be lived, yes, but it wasn’t worth living. Barely enough food, and almost all of it dreadful … They wanted you to know what they thought of you, all right.

When Father couldn’t steal better edibles than German Jews were legally entitled to, he stole clothes. Sarah had no idea how he’d managed to stuff a cashmere sweater into one of his inside jacket pockets, but he had. Even the yellow Stars of David she’d sewn onto it, front and back, didn’t seem to deface it too badly.

She supposed that was her vanity talking. After so long in the altered old clothes she’d got from the rabbi, anything nice seemed extra wonderful. With the wretched clothing ration Jews got, she might have been able to buy a sweater like that around the turn of the twenty-first century-provided she didn’t need anything else in the meantime.

The only reason she had that sweater was that some Aryan woman had got blown to gory smithereens. Father and the other laborers in his gang, Jews and petty criminals alike, robbed the dead whenever they saw the chance. The people the RAF killed didn’t need their things any more. The laborers who cleaned up the mess the bombers left behind did, desperately.

Sometimes Sarah salved her conscience by thinking that the woman who had owned her sweater was a raging anti-Semite, and that it served her right for the sweater to pass to a Jew. But she had no way of knowing that. The Nazi big shots who ran Munster did everything they could to make life miserable for Jews, sure. So did some ordinary folk. Most people in the town, though, were just trying to get by from one day to the next and hoping their relatives in the Wehrmacht were all right. They didn’t have the time or the energy to run around screaming “The Jews are our misfortune!”

Sarah hoped her brother in the Wehrmacht was all right, too. That was all she could do. If anything did happen to Saul, she wouldn’t find out about it. He had-she hoped he still had-his assumed name and identity. Whatever happened to him, wherever he was, he was bound to be better off than he would have been had the authorities grabbed him after he smashed in that gang boss’s head when the vicious man hit him once too often for no reason.

Saul hardly ever got mentioned in the Goldman house. When he did, it was always in the past tense. Sarah and her mother and father never said a word about his hiding in plain sight of the National Socialist authorities.

Father didn’t always scavenge goodies when the RAF hit Munster. Sometimes nothing was left to scavenge: houses and shops and blocks of flats often went up in flames. Sometimes younger, sprier men beat him to the goodies. And sometimes the firemen and police who were also on duty kept laborers from grabbing the way they wanted to.

“I’d mind that less if they didn’t steal for themselves,” he said after being thwarted by a fireman. “But they do. I’ve watched them.”

“Not fair!” Sarah said in angry sympathy.

He smiled crookedly. “Yes? And so?” She had no comeback for that.

When his scrounging was bad, the luck she had shopping mattered more. That luck would never be good, of course. Jews were allowed in stores only just before closing time, after Aryan customers had picked over whatever happened to be available. But sometimes what she could get was truly awful, while sometimes it was only wretched. Like everything else, misery had its degrees.

Since the trams were also denied to those who wore the yellow star, she walked all over Munster trying to find this, that, or the other thing. She often thought she used as much energy getting food as she took in when she finally ate it. She didn’t know what she could do about that, either. She and her parents were all much thinner than they had been before the Nazis took over. She doubted there were any German Jews who weren’t.

Late one afternoon, she was coming home with a kilo and a half of flour she’d got across town. Despite the long trip, she was pleased with herself. For what you could get hold of these days, the flour looked pretty good. It had some peas and beans and dried potatoes ground into it, but everybody’s flour these days was like that. People old enough to remember did say the bread in the last war had been even worse, stretched with sawdust and maybe even clay. Sarah could hardly believe it, but there you were.

And here she was, coming up to the square that fronted on Munster’s Catholic cathedral. The square was about half full of people: women, boys, old men. Most of the men of military age were either wearing one uniform or another or working long hours in factories to give the Reich’s soldiers and flyers and sailors the murderous tools of their trade.

Some men wore police uniforms, not military ones. Some of them were in the square, too, between the crowd and the cathedral. They clutched truncheons. Two or three of them carried Schmeissers instead. They all looked nervous.

Sarah felt nervous. A crowd not organized by the state was astonishing in Hitler’s Germany. Sarah scuttled along the walls of the buildings on the far side of the square, as far from the crowd and the police as she could get. She felt like a mouse who’d walked into a gathering of cats by mistake. Maybe they wouldn’t notice her-or the yellow stars she wore.

The crowd began to move toward the cathedral, and toward the thin line of police in front of it. Voices rose: “Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!”

Archbishop von Galen had presumed to protest the way the Reich disposed of mental defectives (though he’d never said a word about the way the Reich treated its Jews). The Gestapo had grabbed him and hustled him off to prison or a concentration camp. And Munster’s Catholics had rioted. The authorities put them down and made more arrests. But that they’d risen once was a prodigy.

That they’d been put down and were rising again was whatever went two steps past a prodigy. And that I’m here right now is whatever’s two steps past a calamity, Sarah thought. She hurried along as fast as she could without running and drawing notice to herself.

“Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!” The crowd’s chant swelled ever louder.

A police official with a megaphone shouted through the chorus: “Disperse this criminal assembly, in the name of the Grossdeutsches Reich!”

“Give us back the archbishop, in the name of God!” The chant changed.

When Sarah heard the harsh crack of gunfire then, she could scarcely believe it. Some people in the crowd screamed and ran away. Some fell, injured or killed. And some roared and charged the police. They roared louder when they got their hands on a few of the uniformed men. Sarah made her escape. For once, no one paid any attention to a Jew.