Two Fronts

Chapter 5

Hans-Ulrich Rudel lay beside Sofia in the narrow bed in her cramped little flat in Bialystok. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come back,” he said sorrowfully, running his hand along the velvety skin of her flank. “Rumor is, they’re going to send us to the West again.”

If his half-Jewish mistress was spying for the Russians, he’d just handed her enough to get himself shot at sunrise. “That’s a shame,” she said, with an exquisite shrug. “I’ll miss you-some.” Like a scorpion, she always had a sting in her tail.

“I’ll miss you a lot,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I love you, you know.”

“You think you do,” Sofia answered. “But that’s only because I let you get lucky. You’ll get over it as soon as you find somebody else.”

He shook his head and kissed his way down from under her chin to the tip of her left breast. She arched her back and purred. “It’s not like that. You know it isn’t,” he insisted between kisses. “If things were different …”

“If things were different-if I lived in Byelorussia, say, instead of Poland-you would have dropped bombs on my head instead of trying to pick me up.” As usual, Sofia reveled in being difficult. “And if you didn’t blow me up for being a Communist, you would have shot me for being a Jew.”

“I never shot anybody for being a Jew,” Rudel said, which was technically true but made him out to be less of a good National Socialist than he was. “If things were different …”

She interrupted him again. This time, she didn’t use any words, which didn’t mean she was ineffective. As Hans-Ulrich had discovered before, the difference between being blown and blown up was altogether delightful. “My God!” he gasped when she finished. “I don’t think I can see any more.”

“Oh, no?” she retorted. “Then how come you were watching?”

“A blind man would watch when you did that,” he said. “Himmeldonnerwetter, a dead man would.”

“I’ve got a picture of that,” Sofia said, mocking him the way she so often did.

“When we go-if you go-I’ll miss you more than I know how to tell you,” Hans-Ulrich said once more. “You’re wonderful. I’ve never known anybody like you.”

“You should have started fooling around with Mischlings sooner, then.” No, Sofia couldn’t quit jabbing, even when she was way ahead on points.

“I don’t care what you are. I care who you are.” While Rudel said it, it was true.

By the way Sofia’s eyebrow quirked, she understood that better than he did. “Well, it’s a story,” she replied after a brief pause. Then she squeaked, but not in anger, because Hans-Ulrich was doing unto her as he’d been done by. She seemed to enjoy it quite as much as he had. When he finished, she nodded lazily and said, “I will miss you-some.”

“I’m glad-I suppose,” he answered, as gruffly as he could. But his expression must have given him away, because Sofia started to laugh. He went on, “I don’t know for sure we’ll be transferred. It just looks that way, with France sticking a knife in our back.”

“Germany never did anything to anybody, of course,” Sofia said.

“Aber naturlich,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. She fired a sharp look at him, then caught herself and laughed some more.

He hated getting back on the train and heading into Russia. He also hated changing trains at what had been the border between Poland and the USSR. The wider Russian gauge was deliberately designed to keep Germany from using her own rolling stock and locomotives inside Soviet territory. All the way back in the days of the Tsars, the Russians had worried about invaders from the west. That worry hadn’t gone away because the hammer and sickle replaced the old Russian tricolor.

When he got back to the airstrip, Colonel Steinbrenner greeted him with, “Have a good time on your furlough?”

“Yes, sir,” Hans-Ulrich answered-that one was easy enough.

The squadron commander leered at him. “I hope you didn’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Hans-Ulrich said blandly. “I’ve never been in bed with you.”

Whoops rose from the flyers and groundcrew men who heard that. Colonel Steinbrenner blinked. “You’re right,” he admitted. “There’s something I probably wouldn’t enjoy.”

Getting back to business, Rudel asked, “What are our orders, sir? What’s the latest news?”

“So far, all the talk about going back to the Siegfried Line is just that-talk,” Steinbrenner answered. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be real. The French are at war with us again.”

“Treacherous pigdogs!” Hans-Ulrich said. “Anyone who counts on a Frenchman for anything is setting himself up to be sorry.”

“And this surprises you because …?” Steinbrenner said. “The only good thing about it is that, for the time being, anyhow, it’s the same kind of war in the West it was while we went in and gave the Czechs what they had coming to them.”

Rudel had no trouble figuring out what that meant: “The froggies don’t have the nerve to go toe-to-toe with us.”

“Count your blessings that they don’t,” Colonel Steinbrenner replied. “Two fronts going full blast would cause us problems.”

He was old enough to remember the last war, when fighting on two fronts had proved more than Germany could manage. Hans-Ulrich wasn’t, so he could say, “We were stabbed in the back at the end,” and mean it.

“That’s what they say,” Steinbrenner-agreed? By they, he couldn’t mean anyone but the officials of the current government. Was he criticizing National Socialism and the Fuhrer? After the first attempted coup against Hitler, the SS had taken away the previous squadron commander, Colonel Greim. Greim hadn’t been loyal enough to suit the powers that be. Colonel Steinbrenner, by contrast, didn’t land in trouble with the authorities. He hadn’t up till now, anyhow.

Not wanting to get into deeper political waters-not even wanting to get his political toes wet-Hans-Ulrich changed the subject in a hurry: “So we’re still flying against the Russians, then?”

Steinbrenner nodded. “Till they tell us to do something else, that’s what we’re doing, all right.” Some of the leer came back to his face. “Breaks your heart, doesn’t it, staying someplace where you don’t have any trouble getting back to dear old Bialystok?”

“I’ve heard ideas I liked less-I will say that.” Rudel cocked his head to one side. Those were aircraft engines, off in the distance. A moment later, he realized they didn’t belong to Luftwaffe planes. “The Russians are still flying against us, too!” he exclaimed, and ran for the closest zigzagging slit trench.

Steinbrenner and the rest of the men who’d greeted him on his return ran along with him. The flak guns around the airstrip started banging away even before he leaped down into the trench. He wished he wore a Stahlhelm instead of his officer’s soft cap. Shrapnel falling from several thousand meters could smash in your skull as readily as a rifle bullet.

Russian bombs could punch your ticket for you, too. Down they whistled, and exploded with flat, harsh crumps. The Ivans’ Pe-2s were good bombers. They carried as big a load as any German plane, and were faster even than Ju-88s, the newest and speediest medium bombers the Luftwaffe boasted. They could fly rings around Stukas, but all kinds of planes could do that. Speed wasn’t what kept the Ju-87 in business. Being able to put bombs on top of a fifty-pfennig piece was.

The Pe-2s couldn’t do that. They dropped theirs pretty much at random, then flew off to the east at full throttle before Bf-109s could tear into them. The raid couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes. Rudel stuck his head up over the lip of the trench. A Ju-87 burned inside its revetment, smoke rising high into the gray sky. A couple of big bombs, probably 500kg jobs, had cratered the runway. The flak didn’t seem to have shot down any enemy planes.

Colonel Steinbrenner also surveyed the damage. He delivered his verdict: “Well, we fly against the Russians as soon as we fix things up around here.”

“Yes, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. That was exactly how it looked to him, too.

Pete McGill hadn’t known what they’d do with him once the Ranger got back to Hawaii. If they wanted him to stay aboard the carrier, he’d do that. Carriers took the fight to Japan. Or if they wanted him to splash up out of the Pacific and take some island away from Hirohito’s slanty-eyed bastards, he wouldn’t complain. The only thing that would have pissed him off was a training billet on the U.S. mainland. He wanted to go after the Japs himself, not teach other guys how to do it the right way.

He turned out not to need to worry about that. He stayed with the Ranger. Maybe Rob Cullum put in a good word for him. Maybe they just figured, okay, he was there, he had plenty of shipboard experience, and he knew how to jerk five-inch shells. Why complicate things?

Because it’s the Navy? a sly voice in the back of his head suggested. To the peacetime Navy, Marines were an unmitigated nuisance. Once the guns started going off, leathernecks turned into a slightly mitigated nuisance. They were still a pain to have to cart around aboard ships, but they did have some minor uses: taking islands away from the nasty buggers who occupied them and who refused to get shelled or bombed into extinction, for instance.

Marines thought swabbies were boring. Sailors were convinced Marines stood in the muscle line twice and didn’t bother waiting for brains. Marines figured they carried an extra couple of inches where an extra couple of inches mattered most. If you had to stand in line twice to get those, hey, what better cause was there?

Meanwhile, along with squabbling with each other (and with the Army, which both agreed was beneath contempt), the Navy and the Corps had to fight the Japs. Going toe-to-toe with them in the Pacific and knocking them flat hadn’t worked out the way the admirals wanted. Now the main idea was to keep Tojo’s monkeys from landing in Hawaii. If the USA had to fight the war from the West Coast, all of a sudden it looked a lot harder to win.

Screened by destroyers and light cruisers, Ranger steamed back and forth west of the islands, her combat air patrol alert to anything the Imperial Navy might try to pull. Pete hoped like hell the flyboys were alert, anyhow. When the Japs got the drop on you, it could mess you up but good. He’d found that out in Manila, and several times since.

Little by little, his longing for lost Vera faded, as did the pain from the physical injuries he’d got when Chinese terrorists bombed that Shanghai movie theater. His shoulder and his leg would probably always tell him when rain was on the way. And his heart would always ache when he thought about his Russian sweetheart. But, in the homely, cliched phrase, life did go on.

He felt less and less guilt when he visited the whores on Hotel Street in Honolulu. He couldn’t bring Vera back. If he could have, he would have, and lived happily and faithfully ever after, too-he was sure of that. Being sure of it didn’t make it true, of course-one more thing he didn’t have to dwell on.

Vera was gone, though. He hadn’t even seen her into the ground. He’d been too badly hurt himself. He had to do something with those extra couple of inches. And he did, as often as liberty and the state of his wallet would let him. He felt terrible the first few times. After that, he just felt good, which was, after all, the point of lying down with a woman in the first place.

Those were interludes, though. Most of his time passed aboard the Ranger. He’d never served on a carrier before. His duties stayed the same: the Ranger’s five-inch guns were no different from the ones the Boise had mounted. The ship itself? That was a different story.

Boise’s first order of business had been to steam and to shoot. Ranger’s was to get airplanes where they needed to go. They did the fighting for her. If her own guns went off, it was a sure sign something had hit the fan somewhere.

As Rob Cullum dryly put it, “You notice they gave ’em to us. They figured we’d get into some shit now and again.”

“Think so, do you?” Pete answered, deadpan. The other sergeant grinned and thumped him on the back. It hurt, but Pete didn’t care. It was a sign he was fitting in, and he wanted nothing more.

Being a portable airstrip made Ranger a special kind of seagoing beast. The vast, echoing space of the hangar deck under the flight deck amazed Pete. That it was usually echoing with the snarl of power tools and with Navy mechanics’ inventive bad language as they worked on fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes mattered little. The space was what got to him.

Carrying all those planes meant carrying thousands of gallons of the high-octane gasoline they burned along with the ship’s own fuel oil. Fire at sea was any sailing man’s worst nightmare. Fire at sea aboard an aircraft carrier … “We’re nothing but a torch with a flight deck, are we?” Pete said when he got around to thinking about that.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say so,” Sergeant Cullum answered after a few seconds’ consideration.

“No, huh? What would you call us, then?” Pete challenged.

“More like a furnace with a flight deck,” the other Marine answered. “We’d burn a hell of a lot hotter than some lousy torch.” It was Pete’s turn to consider, but not for long. He nodded. Cullum was right.

No surprise, then, that the Ranger ran more firefighting drills than any other ship Pete had known. No surprise, either, that her sailors and Marines took them more seriously than he was used to. They did their share of goofing off and then some, but not about that.

And no surprise that they were cynical anyhow. “Basically, we better not catch on fire,” Cullum said. “Once we go up, odds are we’re fucked.”

“That’s about what I thought,” Pete said. “I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

“Oh, you’re wrong about all kinds of shit,” Cullum answered easily. “But not about that.”

“Japs must know, huh? I mean, their carriers gotta work the same way.” Having already been aboard one warship bombed and sunk from the air, imagining more dive-bombers and torpedo planes going after the Ranger made Pete feel as if a goose were walking over his grave-probably a goose with a radial engine and with meatballs on its wings.

The twist to Rob Cullum’s mouth said he understood the touch of those heavy webbed feet-or were they tires slamming down on a flight deck? “They may suspect,” he agreed. “Yeah, they just may. How many of our flattops did they sink when we slugged it out west of here?”

“Too many.” Pete couldn’t remember the exact number. All of them but Ranger, was what it amounted to. He did his damnedest to look on the bright side of things: “When the shipyards really get rolling, we’ll build ’em faster’n the Japs can hope to sink ’em. What we’ve gotta do is stand the gaff in the meantime.”

Cullum saluted him as if he’d sprouted stars on his shoulders. No, fat gold stripes on his sleeves, for the other sergeant said, “Thank you, Admiral King. Now that you’ve got all our troubles wrapped up with a pretty pink ribbon around ’em, you should write FDR a nice letter and let him know how he needs to be running the goddamn war.”

“Ah, fuck off,” Pete replied without heat. When guys didn’t chin about women or gambling or sports or the crappy chow in the galley, strategy often reared its ugly head. “Tell me this, man. Suppose I was in charge.”

“We’d be really screwed,” Cullum said at once.

“Odds are,” Pete admitted, which made his buddy blink. He went on, “But how could we be screwed any worse’n we already are?”

That did make Cullum stop and think. “Well,” he said at last, “in the big fight the slanties might’ve sunk Ranger, too. Then we wouldn’t have any carriers operating out of Pearl at all. Past that, though, it couldn’t hardly be fubar’d any worse than it is right now.”

“See?” Pete said triumphantly.

“Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day. That puts it one up on you,” Cullum said. Pete flipped him off. Slowly, without any fuss, they drifted back to work.

Spring was in the air outside of Madrid. All things considered, Vaclav Jezek could have done without it. The bitter cold of winter in central Spain-a nasty surprise, that-kept down the stink of unburied and badly buried bodies, of which there were always far too many. It also fought the reek of latrine trenches, and of the waste that never got as far as the latrine trenches.

Pretty soon, flowers would bloom. They’d smell sweet, but not sweet enough to quell the stenches. Birds would sing, when you could hear them through the rumble of artillery and the machine guns’ deadly chatter.

When Vaclav pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halevy eyed him with his usual air of detached amusement. “I didn’t know we had a poet among us,” the Jew said.

“Oh, fuck you!” Vaclav snarled.

Halevy tapped the little metal star that marked him as a second lieutenant. “That’s ‘Oh, fuck you, sir!’ ” he said.

Vaclav laughed. What were you going to do? In the line, you made your own fun. If you didn’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t have any. A few hundred meters away, the Fascist bastards on the Nationalist side were no doubt cracking the same kind of dumb jokes.

Then the Czech sniper stopped laughing. Homesickness and weariness hit him like a blackjack behind the ear. “Christ, I wish I were back in Prague!” he burst out. “I’ve been carrying a gun for three and a half years. I’m fucking sick of it.”

“Here. Have a knock of this.” Halevy offered his canteen. Vaclav took it. It was full of Spanish brandy-not good, but strong. He swigged, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed back the canteen. The Jew went on, “Some of the people here started two years before you did, you know.”

“That’s right!” Vaclav said in surprise. Not many countries had got it before Czechoslovakia did, but Spain was one of them. He looked around. It was the landscape of war, all right: trenches, shell holes, barbed wire, ragged and muddy uniforms. How many times had this stretch of ground gone back and forth between Nationalists and Republicans? How many more would it change hands till somebody finally won, if anyone ever did? Better not to wonder about such things. Instead, Vaclav asked, “Got a cigarette?”

“That’s also ‘Got a cigarette, sir?’ ” the Jew observed, but he pulled out a pack and handed it to Vaclav. The smokes were Spanish: even harsher than the stove polish and barbed wire the French put in their cigarettes. Given a choice, Vaclav would have opted for a better brand. Given a choice, he never would have come to Spain to begin with. Beggars didn’t get choices like that. He took a cigarette, scraped a match against the much-repaired sole of his boot, and hollowed his cheeks to draw in smoke.

He let it out again with a cough. “Jesus Christ! Is that phosgene, or what?”

Halevy also lit up. After a judicious puff of his own, he answered, “More like mustard gas, I’d say.”

They both went right on smoking. You could complain about the tobacco as much as you pleased. Everybody did. You couldn’t do without it, though. Almost everybody on both sides smoked like a factory chimney. Going without cigarettes while he hid himself somewhere in no-man’s-land always gave Vaclav the jitters. He sometimes thought a smoke would be worth getting shot. He didn’t yield to those temptations, but he had them.

As if to fuel them, Halevy said, “Marshal Sanjurjo’s still out there somewhere.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Vaclav waved that away. “Like he’s gonna come out and stand in the same place where I plugged what’s-his-name-Franco. Nobody’s that goddamn dumb, not even a Nationalist Spanish general.”

“Cojones,” Halevy murmured.

That was a Spanish word the Czech understood. There weren’t many, but he’d picked up the dirty bits first, as he had with French. And maybe it was a question of balls. Would Sanjurjo say, in effect, I’m not afraid to go where Franco got shot? If he did, he was liable to be sorry-but not for long, not if he stopped a 13mm armor-piercing antitank round.

During the night, the Nationalists shelled the Czechs and the Internationals. They hit them harder than most Republican troops. Vaclav, huddling in what he devoutly hoped was a bombproof, could have done without the gesture of respect.

As soon as the shelling stopped, Jezek tumbled out and rushed to a firing step, ready to repel the enemy’s infantry if they pressed the attack. But they didn’t. The Nationalists just wanted to hurt their foes without much risk to themselves. Who wouldn’t make war on the cheap if he could?

Republican guns gave back a belated response after sunup the next morning. Maybe the artillerists wanted to see what they were shooting at. Maybe they hadn’t had any shells handy during the night. Maybe they’d been drinking sangria in a cantina back of the line, and catching crabs from the barmaids. Maybe … Who the hell knew, or cared?

Any which way, Vaclav got to scout no-man’s-land while the Nationalists were keeping their heads down. The two barrages had torn up the landscape-again. He looked for new hiding places from which he might torment Sanjurjo’s men. Then a short Republican round burst in front of the trench and showered him with dirt. He ducked as fragments whined not far enough overhead.

“Fucking assholes!” he shouted. “Whose side are they on?” He brushed at his uniform, for all the world as if it would do any good.

“They’re artillerymen,” Benjamin Halevy said. “If it’s in front of them, it’s a target-and it’s all in front of them.”

“Too right, it is,” Vaclav said. Warily, he straightened and looked out toward the Nationalist trenches again. That new crater with the tall lip facing the enemy’s line … That just might do. Republican shells kept coming down. With his luck, they’d flatten the hidey-hole before he ever got to use it.

But they didn’t. He crawled out to it under cover of darkness. Yes, it was the kind of place he needed. He had foliage stuck to his helmet with a strip of inner tube. A muddy burlap cloak with branches thrust into it also helped break up his outline. And he camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel well before light could give him away.

Then he settled down to wait. He wanted a cigarette, but no, not enough to risk his life for one. He knew the urge would grow on him. He gnawed garlicky Spanish sausage instead. He’d taste that all day, too, but it wasn’t the same thing, dammit.

He eyed the Nationalist lines through a magnified circle with crosshairs. Men in yellowish khaki did the kinds of things soldiers did. Out beyond ordinary rifle range of the Republican forward trench, they didn’t take much cover. They didn’t think they were in any great danger, and they were right. Jezek didn’t feel like wasting his rounds on ordinary jerks. Those fat, fancy bullets were reserved for extraordinary jerks.

Maybe he’d lie here till darkness came again. He didn’t fire every day. When he did pull the trigger, he wanted his shots to mean something. He also didn’t want to get killed himself. He swung the heavy rifle a couple of centimeters to the right, then peered through the scope again.

A glimpse of a fabric long familiar but not seen for some time made his attention snap back to it. The Nationalists wore that diarrhea-colored khaki. Republican forces used khaki, too, khaki or denim or whatever civilian stuff they happened to own. No Spaniard, though, had a uniform of Feldgrau.

Sanjurjo and Hitler, of course, had been in bed together since the war in Spain started. The Germans had helped the Nationalists take Gibraltar away from England. German troops and flyers of the Legion Kondor let the Nazis field-test weapons and doctrines. But Germany’d paid Spain much less attention since the big European fight heated up.

So what was this Nazi officer doing here now? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t keep doing it long. Neither he nor the Spaniard with him worried about snipers. They were more than a kilometer away from the front. Why should they?

Vaclav showed them why. The antitank rifle slammed against his shoulder. The German stood stock-still for a moment, then crumpled. No, he wouldn’t report back to Berlin, or even back to Marshal Sanjurjo. They paid a sergeant pathetically little, but Vaclav knew damn well he’d earned his handful of pesetas today.

Chaim Weinberg huddled in a hole scraped into the front side of his trench, waiting for the Nationalists to quit shelling the front. Sanjurjo’s shitheads were ticked off about something, sure as hell. This was what they did when they got up in arms: used the big guns to make the Republicans sweat. Chaim was sweating, all right.

Latrine-trench rumor said the Czech sniper with the elephant gun had punched some Wehrmacht big shot’s ticket for him. When you got punched with that piece of artillery, you stayed punched, too. Gotta ask him the next time I see him, Chaim thought as another round from a 105 crashed down. That Vaclav knew some German, and Chaim’s Yiddish came close enough.

What really worried the International, though, was why a German officer had been looking over the Republican lines in the first place. Ever since the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia, and especially since Gibraltar went under, they’d had Spain on the back burner.

His fertile imagination could conjure up plenty of reasons for them to bring it to the front of the stove again. If the Nationalists smashed the Republic, German planes in northeastern Spain could pay France back for rejoining the fight against Fascism by knocking the crap out of the southern part of the country. Maybe Sanjurjo could even mount some half-assed raid across the Pyrenees. That would set the froggies hopping like fleas on a hot griddle.

But the Republic wouldn’t fall any time soon. It had been teetering in 1938. After Hitler jumped the Czechs, though, France and England threw enough supplies into Spain to level the war, and it had stayed pretty much level since. Chaim shook his head as he tried to make himself smaller. Christ, but 1938 was a long time ago now! A marriage ago. A child ago. A lifetime ago.

All at once, the shellfire let up. The first thing Chaim did was stick a cigarette in his mouth. His hands shook as he lit it. Shellfire always took a toll on you. Some guys couldn’t get over it. There were beggars in Madrid who twitched all the time. Odds were they’d been reasonably good soldiers once. Modern war dished out more than a lot of human beings were made to take.

Chaim was still with it: at least well enough to make sure the Nationalists didn’t try anything cute while they figured they still had the Abe Lincolns punchy. A couple of Republican machine guns sprayed murder out across the lunar ground between the lines to send Sanjurjo’s men the same message. A Nationalist Maxim hammered back. Chaim ducked, though none of the bullets came close.

A few feet away, Mike Carroll hopped down off the firing step. He was a lot taller than Chaim, so more of him stuck up above the parapet unless he was careful. And he was: he’d been in Spain even longer than Chaim. You learned and you lived. You could learn and not live. Bad luck always lay around the corner somewhere. But you couldn’t not learn and live. Stupidity was its own punishment.

“Wonder what the Fritzes are up to,” Mike said. He’d also heard the scuttlebutt about Vaclav, then.

“Nothing good,” Chaim said with doleful certainty.

“Tell me about it,” Mike said. “Germans are nothing but bad news. Even the Fritzes in the Internationals are a bunch of Prussians. And if the Nazis are sniffing around again …”

“Less I see of ’em, better I like it.” Chaim hadn’t seen any Nazis here, not with his own eyes. But he believed Vaclav had shot one. The way the Nationalists were throwing hate around sure argued for it.

Mike changed the subject, asking, “How’s your kid?”

“He’s great,” Chaim answered with a grin. “He’s at that silly age, where his own toes are the funniest goddamn things in the world. He can laugh and roll over and kinda sit up. He says something that sounds like dada, but he doesn’t know it’s me.”

“Sounds like a baby, all right.” Mike might have heard more than he’d really wanted to know. Perhaps incautiously, he asked another question: “And how’s his mother doing?”

Chaim’s face went hard. “La Martellita is … going along,” he said in a voice like a slammed door. She was not only going along, she was going out with a Red Army captain, one of Stalin’s henchmen who’d stayed in Spain because they had no chance of getting back to the USSR. By everything Chaim had heard, the Russian was shorter and squatter and homelier than he was himself.

If he ever did see the guy, he figured he’d punch him in the nose. If La Martellita had given him the bum’s rush for some tall, handsome Spanish grandee (a Spanish grandee with sense enough not to have joined the Nationalists; there were a few, though not many), he could have lived with that. But a Russian plug-ugly? Maybe she just liked apes.

It was, no doubt, a good thing Chaim had never set eyes on the Red Army captain. If he did give the son of a bitch a fat lip, he might end up in front of a firing squad. The Republic took its friendship with the Soviet Union very seriously.

Maybe La Martellita took up with him not because he was built like a hydrant but because he was a Russian Communist. Did it feel better because you were getting shtupped by somebody from Marxism-Leninism’s holy land? If you expected it to, then it probably did. Women worked that way. Chaim thought it felt great all the goddamn time.

The Nationalists’ loudspeakers came to life then. “You should all come over to our side. You’re just helping the atheistical Russians!” The man at the microphone stumbled a little over atheistical, but he managed to bring it out.

He got nothing but laughs, though. The Nationalists were so wrapped up in the Catholic Church, they thought their enemies were, too. That screwed up their propaganda, especially when they aimed it at the Internationals. “Us, we’re the atheistical Americans, by God!” Chaim said, and laughed harder than ever.

Then the Nationalist propaganda announcer said, “And half the filthy Bolsheviks-more than half-are Jews! Do you want to do what the disgusting Hebrews tell you to do? Of course you don’t!”

Some of the Spaniards who filled out the Internationals’ ranks these days might take that seriously. So few Jews lived in Spain-they couldn’t do it legally till the Republic came along-that the locals believed a lot of the anti-Semitic bullshit the Fascists put out. They’d been hearing the same kind of nonsense their whole lives.

“No wonder the Republic shot so many priests,” Mike Carroll said.

“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed. “Shame they couldn’t have shot that braying jackass, too.”

After the braying jackass finally shut up, one of the young Spaniards in the Abe Lincolns came up to Chaim and said, “You’re the one they call el narigon loco, right?”

“The crazy kike, that’s me.” Chaim nodded, not without pride. He’d earned the nickname the hard way, with his go-to-hell, no-holds-barred style of cantina fighting. “What about it, Rodrigo?”

“Well …” Rodrigo, by contrast, sounded almost shy. “Are you a Marxist, then, or are you a Jew?”

“Absolutamente,” Chaim declared, clearly enunciating each of the six syllables.

For some reason, that didn’t seem to help the Spanish Abe Lincoln. “But which?” Rodrigo asked.

“I sure am,” Chaim replied. Rodrigo started to ask him another question, then plainly decided it was a losing fight. The kid mooched off, hands thrust into the pockets of his revolutionary coveralls.

Mike Carroll laughed, but softly, taking care that the proud Spaniard couldn’t hear him do it. “That wasn’t fair, man,” he said.

“Hey, neither was the question. You can be a Jew and a Marxist at the same time. Look at all the Old Bolsheviks,” Chaim said.

“Yeah, and look what happened to them, too,” Mike said, which made Chaim wince. An awful lot of the Jews who’d helped bring off the Russian Revolution ended up starring in Stalin’s show trials or going to the camps or to the wall without benefit of any trial, show or otherwise. The Soviet Union was a rugged place. As far as Chaim was concerned, it still beat the hell out of the Reich.