West and East

Chapter 4

Peggy Druce positively hated Berlin. The Philadelphia socialite had visited the capital of Germany several times between the wars. She'd always had a fine old time then. If you couldn't have a fine old time in the Berlin of the vanished, longed-for days before Hitler took over, you were probably dead.

If you could have a fine old time in this miserable land of blackouts and rationing, something had to be wrong with you. Almost all civilian cars had vanished from the streets. Even the parked ones were in danger. One propaganda drive after another sent people out to scavenge rubber or scrap metal or batteries.

That didn't mean the streets were empty, though. Soldiers paraded hither and yon, jackboots thumping. When they passed by reviewing stands, they would break into the goose step. Otherwise, they just marched. The characteristic German stride looked impressive as hell-the Nazis sure thought so, anyhow-but it was wearing. Soldiers, even German soldiers, were practical men. They used the goose step where they got the most mileage from it: in front of their big shots, in other words. When the bosses weren't watching, they acted more like ordinary human beings.

Columns of trucks and half-tracks and panzers also rumbled up and down Berlin's broad boulevards. Peggy took a small, nasty satisfaction in noting that the treads on the tanks and half-tracks tore hell out of the paving. Repair crews often followed the armored columns, patching up the damage.

A Berlin cop-a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a limp he'd probably got in the last war-held out his hand to Peggy and snapped, "Papieren, bitte!"

"Jawohl," she replied. Ja-fucking-wohl, she thought as she fumbled in her purse. Her German had got a lot better than it was when she first arrived in Berlin. Getting stuck somewhere would do that to you. She found her American passport and pulled it out with a flourish. "Here," she said, or maybe, "Hier." The word sounded the same in English and auf Deutsch.

The cop blinked. He didn't see an eagle that wasn't holding a swastika every day. He examined the passport, then handed it back. "You are an American." He turned truth to accusation. He was a cop, all right.

"Ja." Peggy was proud of herself for leaving it right there. She damn near added Nothing gets by you, does it? or Very good, Sherlock or something else that would have landed her in hot water. Her husband always said she talked first and thought afterwards. Good old Herb! She missed him like anything. He knew her, all right.

"What is an American doing in Berlin?" the cop demanded. He took it for granted that, even though the USA was neutral, Americans wouldn't be pro-German. Maybe he wasn't so dumb after all.

And Peggy gave him the straight truth: "Trying to get the hell out of here and go home."

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she had them back. Too late, as usual. She'd given another cop the straight truth not too long ago, and he'd hauled her down to the station on account of it. If a desk sergeant with better sense hadn't realized pissing off the United States wasn't exactly Phi Beta Kappa for the Reich, she might have found out about concentration camps from the inside.

If this policeman was another hothead… If his desk sergeant was, too… You never wanted to get in trouble in Hitler's Germany. And, since the Germans themselves were walking on eggs after a failed coup against the Fuhrer, you especially didn't want to get in trouble now.

The cop paused. He lit a Hoco. Like any other German cigarette these days, it smelled more like burning trash than tobacco. "If you don't want to be in Berlin to begin with, what are you doing here?" he asked reasonably.

"I was in Marianske Lazne when the war started," Peggy answered, using the Czech name with malice aforethought.

Sure as hell, the Berlin cop said, "You were where?" Give a kraut a Slavic place name, and he'd drown in three inches of water.

"Marienbad, it's also called," Peggy admitted.

Light dawned. "Oh! In the German Sudetenland!" the policeman exclaimed. "How lucky for you to be there when the Fuhrer's forces justly reclaimed it for the Reich."

"Well… no," Peggy said. For the first time, the cop's face clouded over. See? Keep trying, Peggy jeered at herself. You'll stick your foot in it sooner or later. Trying to extract the foot, she added, "I almost got killed."

For a wonder, it worked. "Ach, ja. In wartime, this can happen," the cop said, rough sympathy in his voice. Everything would have been fine if he hadn't added, "With those miserable, murderous Czech brutes all around, you should thank heaven you came through all right."

Peggy bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep from blurting something that would have got her sent to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other interesting place. Count to ten, she thought frantically. No. Count to twenty, in Czech! The Czechs hadn't been the problem. The Germans had. Shelling and bombing Marianske Lazne was one thing-that was part of war. But the way the Nazis started in on the Jews who were taking the waters after overrunning the place… No, she didn't want to remember that.

None of it passed her lips. Herb would have been proud of her. Hell, she was proud of herself. The only thing she said was, "Can I go?"

"One moment." The Berlin cop was self-important, like most policemen the world around. "First tell me why you have not returned to the United States."

"I was supposed to go back on the Athenia, but it got sunk on the way east," Peggy said.

"Ach, so. The miserable British. They would do anything, no matter how vicious, to inflame relations between your country and mine." The policeman proved he could parrot every line Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry spewed forth.

Like almost everybody in the U.S. Embassy, Peggy figured it was much more likely that a German U-boat had screwed up and torpedoed the liner. Like Germany, England loudly denied sinking her. If anyone knew who'd really done it, he was keeping it a deep, dark secret. To Peggy, that also argued it was the Germans. Everything was secret around here, whether it needed to be or not.

"That was several months ago, though. Why have you not left since?" the policeman persisted.

"Because your government won't let me go unless I have full passage back to America, and that's not easy to arrange, not with a war on," Peggy said. The Nazis had come right out and said they were afraid she'd tell the British just what she thought of them if she stopped in the UK on the way home. She'd promised not to, but they didn't want to believe her.

Maybe they also weren't so dumb after all, dammit.

The cop scratched his head. "You may go," he said at last. "Your passport is in order. And you are lucky to be here instead of in one of the decadent democracies. Enjoy your stay." He gave her a stiff-armed salute and stumped away.

Peggy didn't burst into hysterical laughter behind him. That also proved she was winning self-control as she neared fifty. She walked down the street. When she stepped on a pebble, she felt it. Her soles were wearing out. Leather for cobblers was in short supply, and as stringently rationed as everything this side of dental floss. Some shoe repairs were made with horrible plastic junk that was as bad as all the other German ersatz materials. What passed for coffee these days tasted as if it were made from charred eraser scrapings.

She started to go into a cafe for lunch. Food these days was another exercise in masochism. The sign on the door-Eintopftag-stopped her, though. Sure as hell, Sunday was what the Master Race called One-Pot Day. The only lunch available was a miserable stew, but you paid as if you'd ordered something fancy. The difference was supposed to go into Winter Relief. Peggy had heard it got spent on the military instead. That sounded like the kind of shabby trick the Nazis would pull. She was damned if she wanted to give Hitler her money when he'd use it to blow up more of France, a country she liked much better than this one.

She had some bread-war bread, and black, but tolerable once you got used to it-and apples back in her hotel room. She hadn't intended to eat them today, but she'd forgotten about Eintopftag. She wouldn't put an extra pfennig in the Fuhrer's war chest, and Eintopf was always swill, anyway.

Tomorrow? Tomorrow would take care of itself. She'd believed that ever since she was a little girl. If coming much too close to getting killed several times the past few months hadn't changed her mind, nothing less was likely to. JOAQUIN DELGADILLO FLATTENED OUT behind a pile of broken bricks like a cat smashed by a tank. The Republican machine gun up ahead spat what seemed like an unending stream of bullets not nearly far enough above him.

"Stinking Communists," he muttered into the dirt. This machine gun happened to be French, not Russian. Joaquin couldn't have cared less. Like everybody in Marshal Sanjurjo's army, to the depths of his soul he was convinced the people on the other side took their orders straight from Stalin.

After all, weren't the International Brigades fighting in the ruins of Madrid's University City, too? And weren't the International Brigades a bunch of Reds who'd come to meddle in what was none of their damned business?

Germans and Italians fought on Marshal Sanjurjo's side. Joaquin didn't think of them as meddlers. They were allies. And they weren't spraying machine-gun rounds right over his head.

"?Maricones!" someone from his side of the line shouted at the Internationals. Even groveling in the dirt the way he was, Joaquin giggled. Oh, it wasn't that he hadn't called the Republic's foreign mercenaries faggots along with anything and everything else he could think of. It was just that his own battalion CO, Major Uribe, was the biggest fairy who didn't have wings.

Most of the time, Joaquin would have had trouble understanding how a flaming queer could rise so high in the Nationalists' straitlaced army. Not with Bernardo Uribe. The major was, quite simply, the bravest man and the fiercest fighter he'd ever seen. The only miracle with Uribe was that he hadn't got his head blown off long since. As long as he stayed alive, nobody was going to care where he stuck his dick.

As abruptly as if someone had shut off a faucet, the machine gun fell silent. Major Uribe's high, sweet voice rang through the bruised silence: "Look alive, sweethearts! We're liable to have company for tea!"

The first time he came out with something like that, Joaquin's eyes almost bugged out of his head. The second time the major did it, Delgadillo nearly pissed himself laughing. Now he took it for granted.

So did Sergeant Carrasquel. Joaquin never laughed at him. Carrasquel was the kind of guy who'd tear off your head and then spit in the hole. He was a good sergeant, in other words. "Major's right," he rasped now. "Those fuckers'll hit us, sure as the devil. Don't let 'em push you back."

Joaquin ground his teeth. Something in his lower jaw twinged. One of these days-if he lived, if he ever got out of the line-he'd have to visit the dentist. He feared that worse than he feared facing the International Brigades. He'd seen a lot of war. He knew what it could do. He'd never been to the dentist. What you didn't know was always scary.

He did know that, if Sergeant Carrasquel ordered no retreat, somebody behind the line would be waiting to shoot him if he tried. Both sides gave troops that duty, to make sure people kept their minds on what they were supposed to be doing. The only trouble was that, while you could call the men in the International Brigades every filthy name in the book, anybody who'd ever bumped up against them-and Joaquin had, along the Ebro-knew they were damn good fighting men.

Between the Devil and a hard place. A rock and the deep blue sea. As Joaquin chambered a round in his old Mauser, he hardly noticed the phrases were all mixed up in his head. He didn't want to look out over the brick pile that had sheltered him from the enemy machine gun. If some rotten Red with a scope-sighted rifle was up on some high ground, waiting to blow his brains out…

A grenade burst, maybe fifty meters in front of him. Something clanged off his brick pile, flipped up in the air, and fell down a few centimeters from his face. It was a bent tenpenny nail. Along with grenades from every country in Europe, both sides used homemade models. A quarter-kilo of explosives, some nails or other metal junk, a tobacco tin if you had one, a blasting cap, a fuse… You could blow yourself up, too, of course, but you could also do that with a factory-made bomb.

Where grenades went off, men wouldn't be far behind. Grenades weren't like machine-gun bullets; they didn't fly very far. Joaquin popped up for a look-and a shot, if he had one. He hated to show himself. Yes, he wore a helmet: a Spanish one, almost identical to the German style. But it wouldn't keep out a rifle bullet. He'd seen much too much gruesome proof of that.

Sure as hell, there was an International, scrambling from one bit of maybe-cover to the next. The fellow had red hair and foxy features. Wherever he came from, he was no Spaniard. Catching sight of Joaquin, he started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.

Too late. Joaquin fired first. The foxy-faced man from God knew where clutched at himself and started to crumple. Joaquin didn't wait to find out whether he was dead or only wounded. Down he went again. Some other hard case from the middle of Europe or across the sea might be drawing a bead on him right now.

Most Spaniards on both sides were lousy shots. Without false modesty, Joaquin knew he wasn't. He had been, but Sergeant Carrasquel cured him of it. Carrasquel was a veteran of the fighting in Spanish Morocco. He knew how to make a rifle do what it was supposed to do: hit what you aimed at. All the survivors in his squad shot well.

And so did the Internationals. Some of them had learned soldiering a generation earlier, in a harsher, less forgiving school than even Spanish Morocco. The younger Reds had picked up their trade from the veterans-and anyone who lived through a few weeks of fighting made an infinitely better soldier than a raw recruit.

Joaquin wriggled like a lizard to find a fresh place from which to shoot. No one before had been watching the rubble pile from which he'd fired. Somebody would be now. He was grimly certain of that. You didn't want to give them two chances at you. For that matter, you didn't want to give them one chance at you. All too often, though, you had no choice.

He raised himself up high enough to see over his new pile of bricks. Once upon a time, this miserable wreckage had housed the department of agriculture. He'd seen a shattered sign that said so. The ruins had changed hands a lot of times since then, though.

Joaquin gasped. There squatted an International, not three meters away. The Red looked just as surprised-and just as horrified-as Joaquin felt. Neither man had had the faintest idea the other was around. They both fired at the same instant. They were both veterans, both experienced fighting men, both presumably good riflemen.

They both missed.

"Fuck!" Joaquin said fervently. He grabbed a broken brick and flung it at the International. The brick didn't miss. It thudded against the other man's ribs and kept him from working the bolt on his French rifle. The fellow said something hot and guttural. Then he jumped down behind Joaquin's rubble pile and tried to stick him with his bayonet.

With a desperate parry, Joaquin drove aside the long knife on the end of the other rifle. He'd learned bayonet fighting. Sergeant Carrasquel made sure you learned everything that had anything to do with soldiering. He'd learned it, but he'd never had to use it before. He knocked the International's feet out from under him with the barrel of his own rifle.

Then they were clawing and grappling and kneeing and gouging, there in the dirt. They were a couple of wild animals, snapping for each other's throats. One of them would get up again, the other wouldn't. It was as simple and mindless as that. In the end, what else did war come down to?

A rifle cracked. It wasn't Joaquin's. When he heard it, he figured it had to be the International's. And if it was, he had to be dead, and hearing the reverberations from the next world. He prayed he would rise to heaven, not sink down to hell.

But the foreigner was the one who groaned and went limp. Hardly believing he could, Joaquin shoved the man's suddenly limp body away from him. He bloodied his hands doing it-a human being held a shocking amount of gore.

There on the ground a couple of meters off to one side sprawled Sergeant Carrasquel, rifle in hand. "You had a little trouble there," he remarked.

"Only a little," Joaquin said, as coolly as he could with his heart threatening to bang its way out of his chest. After a moment, he managed to add, "Gracias."

"De nada," Carrasquel said. "If you would've shot the asshole in the first place, you wouldn't've had to dance with him."

"Dance? Some dance!" Joaquin laughed like a crazy man. Relief could do that to you. Then he lit a cigarette and waited for whatever horror came next. LUC HARCOURT SEWED a second dark khaki hash mark onto the left sleeve of his tunic. He sewed much better now than he had before he got conscripted. Work with needle and thread wasn't something the French army taught you. It was something you needed to learn, though, unless you wanted your uniform to fall apart. You had to make repairs as best you could; the French quartermaster corps was unlikely to minister to your needs.

Sergeant Demange came by. Things were quiet in front of Beauvais, the way they had been on the border before the Germans made their big winter push. Luc wished that comparison hadn't occurred to him. He was proud that the poilus and Tommies had stopped the Nazis at Beauvais and not let them get around behind Paris the way they planned. He was even proud he'd made corporal, which surprised him: he sure hadn't cared a fart's worth about rank when the government gave him a khaki suit and a helmet.

The Gitane that always hung from the corner of Demange's mouth twitched when he saw what Luc was doing. "Sweet suffering Jesus!" he said. "They'll promote anything these days, won't they?"

"It must be so," Luc answered innocently. "You're a sergeant, after all."

You had to pick your spots when you razzed a superior. After he'd just razzed you was a good one. Demange wasn't just a superior, either. He was a professional, old enough to be Luc's father-old enough to have got wounded in 1918. He was a skinny little guy without a gram of extra fat. No matter how old he was, Luc, six or eight centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, wouldn't have wanted to tangle with him. Demange had never heard of the rule book, and knew all kinds of evil tricks outside of it.

He grunted laughter now, even if it didn't light his eyes. "Funny man! You know what that two-centime piece of cloth is, don't you? It's all the thanks you're gonna get for not stopping a bullet yet."

"If they keep promoting me for that, I hope I'm a marshal of France by the time the war's over." Luc poked himself with the needle. "Nom d'un nom!"

He made Demange laugh again, this time in real amusement. "The war may go on a long time, sonny, but it ain't gonna last that long."

"Well, maybe not." Luc chuckled, too. It wasn't a bad line, and a sergeant's jokes automatically seemed funny to the men he led.

German 105s started going off in the distance. Luc looked at his watch. Yes, it was half past two. Those shells would land on a road junction a kilometer and a half to the south. When the Boches weren't trying to pull the wool over your eyes, they could be as predictable as clockwork.

"Dumb cons," Sergeant Demange said with a contemptuous wiggle of his Gitane. "Like we're going to run anything through there at this time of day! What kind of jerks do they think we are?"

"The same kind they are, probably," Luc answered.

"Then they really are dumb," Demange said. "Maybe Englishmen wouldn't notice what they're up to, but we're French, by God! We've got two brain cells to rub together, eh?"

"Most of us do. I'm not so sure about our officers," Harcourt said.

That was safe enough. Any sergeant worth his miserable joke of a salary looked down his nose at the men set over him (privates looked at sergeants the same way, something sergeants tended to forget). And Demange had been a noncom a very long time. "Oh, officers!" he said. "You're right-officers can't find their ass with both hands half the time. But they'll have sergeants to keep 'em from making donkeys of themselves."

"Sure, Sergeant," Luc said, and left it right there. Yes, lieutenants and captains did need sergeants at their elbow. But that said more about their shortcomings than about any great virtues inherent in sergeants. So it seemed to a new-minted corporal, anyhow.

Demange stamped out his cigarette just before the coal singed his lips. Then he lit another one and strode off to inflict himself on somebody else in the platoon.

Luc lit a Gitane of his own. It wasn't as good as Gitanes had been before the war. Everything had gone down the crapper since then. Captured Germans loved French cigarettes, though. Luc knew why, too: their own were even worse. Poor sorry bastards, he thought, puffing away. And what they used for coffee! A dog would turn up its nose at that horrible stuff.

Almost as big as a light plane, a vulture glided down out of the sky and started pecking at something in the middle of the kilometer or so that separated the French and German lines right here. Maybe it was a dead cow or sheep. More likely, it was a dead man. If it was, Luc hoped it was a dead Boche. The Germans had been falling back in these parts, so the odds were decent it was.

Closer to him, blackbirds hopped across the torn-up, cratered dirt with their heads cocked to one side. Plenty of worms out there-and plenty of new worm food, too, even after the vultures ate their fill. The vultures and the blackbirds-and, no doubt, the worms-liked the war just fine.

You could walk around out in the open. Sergeant Demange was doing it. Odds were the Germans wouldn't open up on you. Luc didn't want to play the odds. It would be just his luck to have some eager German sniper itching to test his new telescopic sight right when he decided to take a stroll.

Peeking out of his foxhole, he could see Germans moving around in the distance. That had happened last fall, too. The Boches had stayed very quiet in the west while they were flattening Czechoslovakia. The French had advanced a few kilometers into Germany, skirmished lightly with the Wehrmacht, and then turned around, declared victory, and marched back across to their own side of the border.

When the Wehrmacht marched into France, it didn't dick around. If Luc never saw another Stuka-better yet, if no Stuka pilot ever spotted him again-he wouldn't shed a tear. And, if the war ever ended, he would happily buy drinks for all the Stuka pilots who hadn't spotted him.

Demange came back just before sunset. "Got a job for you, Corporal Harcourt." The stress he gave the rank convinced Luc it would be a dirty job. And it was: "When it gets good and dark, take a squad to the German lines, nab a couple of prisoners, and bring 'em back for questioning. The boys with the fancy kepis want to know what the damned Boches are up to."

"Thanks a bunch, Sergeant!" Luc exclaimed.

"Somebody's gotta do it. I figure you have a better chance to come back than most." After a moment, Demange added, "If it makes you feel any better, I'm coming along. I played these games in the trenches last time around."

Actually, it did make Luc feel better. The sergeant was a handy man to have around in a tight spot. Luc was damned if he'd admit it, though. He rounded up the men he'd been leading since he made PFC: a couple of veterans and the new fish just finding out what the water was like. The news thrilled them as much as it had him.

"Why us?" one of them whined.

"Because you'll get your miserable ass court-martialed if you try and wiggle out, that's why," Luc explained. "Maybe the Germans won't do for you. Your own side? You know damn well they will. Be ready an hour before midnight."

Nobody bugged out before the appointed hour. The French soldiers must have feared their own gendarmerie worse than the Nazis. Sergeant Demange said, "We'll get 'em at the latrine trenches. Easiest way I can think of to nab the sons of bitches. C'mon."

He made it sound easy. Of course, sounding easy didn't mean it was. Luc had already had that lesson pounded into him. They had to make it across no-man's-land without any German sentries spotting them. The night was dark, but even so… Then they had to get past the enemy's forward positions. Luc was sweating enough to let him smell his own fear.

Sergeant Demange, by contrast, took everything in stride. "This is too fucking simple," he whispered as the Frenchmen crawled past the German foxholes. "No ten-meter belts of wire, no continuous trench line… Nothing to it." He sounded affronted, as if he'd expected the Germans to do a better job and wanted to ream them out for being sloppy. Luc wasn't so choosy.

Finding the latrine trenches proved easy enough. Something in the air gave them away. The Germans used lime chloride to keep the stench down, but even that couldn't kill it. Clutching their rifles, the Frenchmen waited in the bushes nearby.

They didn't have to wait long. A yawning Boche ambled over and squatted above a trench. Demange hissed at him in bad German. Luc thought he said he'd blow the Nazi a new asshole if he didn't get over here right now. That made the enemy soldier finish what he was doing a lot faster than he'd expected to. He didn't even try to clean himself. He just yanked up his trousers and followed orders.

"Amis! Amis!" he whispered in equally bad, very frightened French.

"We're no friends of yours. Shut up if you want to keep breathing." After a moment, Luc added, "You stink." Abstractly, he sympathized. He'd stunk worse than this a time or two.

He was just glad the prisoner didn't want to be a hero. That would have shortened everybody's life expectancy. A few minutes later, another German stood at the latrine trench and unbuttoned his fly. Sergeant Demange asked him if he felt like getting circumcised with a bullet. The Boche pissed all over his own boots. After that, he was amazingly cooperative.

"We need more than two?" Luc asked.

"Nah. They asked for a couple, and that's what we'll give 'em," Demange answered. "Now let's get the fuck out of here."

Luc had never heard an order he liked better. The German captives were at least as good at sneaking across broken ground as the poilus herding them along. They didn't let out a peep till they were inside the French lines. They seemed pathetically grateful still to be alive.

Luc knew exactly how they felt. PARIS IS WORTH A SOMETHING. One French king or another had said that, or something like that, a hell of a long time ago. So much Alistair Walsh knew-so much, and not a farthing's worth more. The veteran underofficer had picked up bits and pieces of knowledge over the years, but too many of them remained just that: bits and pieces. They didn't fit together to make any kind of recognizable picture.

Staff Sergeant Walsh did know what Paris was worth to the Nazis, even if not to that long-ago and forgotten (at least by him) French king. It was worth everything. And, since they couldn't get their hands on it-no matter how bloody close they'd come-they were doing their goddamnedest to ruin it for everybody else.

He'd got leave at last-only a forty-eight-hour pass, but forty-eight hours were better than nothing. He could go back to the City of Light. He could drink himself blind. He could watch pretty girls dance and take off their clothes. He could visit a maison de tolerance, where a girl would take off her clothes just for him… if she happened to be wearing any when he walked into her upstairs room.

He could do all that-if he didn't mind taking the chance of getting blown up while he did it, or the almost equally unpleasant chance of spending big chunks of his precious, irreplaceable leave huddling in a cellar somewhere and praying no bomb scored a direct hit on the building overhead.

The Luftwaffe visited almost every night now. Ever since it became clear the French capital wouldn't fall into Germany's hands like a ripe plum, Hitler seemed to have decided to knock it flat instead. With so much of northern France under German occupation, his bombers didn't have to fly far to get there. They could carry full loads every night, drop them, and go back to bomb up again for a second trip before daybreak.

All of which made Paris the greatest show on earth. The circus just had to find itself a new slogan. Paris was every pinball machine and every fireworks display multiplied by a million. Searchlights darted everywhere, trying to pin bombers in their brilliant beams so the antiaircraft guns could shoot them down. Tracers from the guns scribed lines of red and gold and green across the sky's black velvet. Even the bursting bombs were beautiful-if you didn't happen to be too close to one when it went off.

Paris had already taken a lot of punishment. The Arc de Triomphe had a chunk bitten out of it. The Eiffel Tower was fifty feet shorter than it had been-and a meteorologist who'd been up at the top was never buried, because they couldn't find enough of him to put in a coffin. The Louvre had been hit. So had Notre Dame.

You needed to be determined, then, or maybe a little loopy, if you wanted to visit Paris. Some people said Hitler had vowed to wipe the capital of Germany's great continental rival off the face of the earth. Others claimed he was trying to terrify the Parisians, and the French in general, into tossing in the sponge.

From what Walsh knew of the corporal who'd promoted himself field-marshal, and from what he knew of Germans, that last seemed likely to him. Schrechlichkeit, they called it-frightfulness. If you went into Paris with a forty-eight-hour pass, you had a respectable chance of not coming back. On the other hand, if you were anywhere near Paris with pass in hand and you didn't go in… well, you might never see another chance.

And so Walsh jumped into the back of a British lorry along with the other lucky sods who'd wangled a bit of leave. The lorry bounced over potholes the size of baby washtubs. Just outside of town, it got a flat. The passengers piled out to give the driver a hand. Changing a tire in the rapidly deepening dark was always an adventure. Walsh learned some bad language he'd never heard before. For a man who'd been a soldier for more than half a lifetime, that was almost worth the trip into town by itself.

Hitler might hope to frighten the Parisians into surrendering, but he hadn't had much luck yet. The city was blacked out, of course, but it seemed noisier than ever. Touts stood in front of every establishment, shouting out the delights that lay beyond the black curtains. Quite a few of them used English; they knew a lot of Tommies would be here to blow off steam.

"Girls!" one of them yelled. "Beautiful girls! Wine! Whiskey!"

That all sounded good to Walsh. He pushed past the tout and into the dive. The glare of the electric lights inside almost blinded him. Loud jazz blared from a record. Before the war, there likely would have been a band. How many of the musicians were playing to amuse their buddies in the trenches right now?

Above the bar, a sign said PARIS CAN TAKE IT in English and what was bound to be the same thing in French. "Whiskey," Walsh told the barkeep, and slid a silver shilling across the zinc surface.

"Coming up," the fellow answered in tolerable English. He was graying at the temples; a black patch covered his left eye socket. He didn't look piratical-he looked tired and overworked. "Ice?"

"Why bother?" Walsh answered. With a shrug, the bartender gave him his drink. He hadn't asked for good whiskey. He hadn't got it, either. He consoled himself with the reflection that he probably also wouldn't have got it if he had asked for it. He made the drink disappear and put another shilling on the bar. "Why don't you fill that up again?"

"But of course." The bartender did. He nodded toward the stage. "The girls, they come on soon."

"Good enough, pal." Walsh knocked back the fresh drink. After a couple, good and bad didn't matter so much. Any which way, your tongue was stunned.

The girls weren't wearing much when they started their number. What they did have on sparkled and swirled transparently as they started gyrating on the little stage. They weren't so gorgeous as they would have been at the Folies Bergeres-this was just a little place-but they weren't half bad. And they rapidly started shedding their minimal costumes. Walsh pounded the bar and whooped. So did other soldiers and flyers in a camouflaged rainbow of uniforms.

Just before the girls got down to their birthday suits, air-raid sirens started screaming. Polylingual profanity filled the air, burning it bluer than all the tobacco smoke already had.

After yelling through a megaphone in French, the bartender switched to English: "Cellar this way! Must go! Raids very bad!"

What no doubt propelled half the fellows in the joint down into the cellar was the hope that the naked cuties would come down with them. No such luck, though. The girls had somewhere else to hide. Some of the rowdier-read, younger and drunker-men started to go up and look for them. Then, even in the cellar, they heard the German bombs whistling down. That stopped that. No matter how rowdy you were, you didn't want to meet explosives head on.

Thunderous blasts staggered Walsh and everybody else. A few men screamed. Walsh didn't, but he didn't blame them, either. It wasn't as if he never had when he was under fire. Then the lights went out. More hoarse shouts rose. Walsh put his hand on his wallet, just in case. Sure as hell, before long another hand touched his, there in the pitch blackness. When he stomped, his boot came down on a toe. Somebody yelped. The hand jerked away in a hurry.

Eventually the lights came on again. The all-clear warbled. The crowd in the cellar trooped upstairs. The bartender started serving drinks. Somebody cranked up the gramophone. On came the girls. Except for ambulances and fire engines wailing outside, the raid might never have happened. Except.