Last Orders: The War That Came Early (54 page)

“You want I should carry the sack?” his father asked when they headed for the closest subway stop.

“Thanks, Pop. I can do it,” Chaim said. His head might have been on a swivel. None of the buildings here had been hit by bombs or artillery. Out of all the windows he saw, only one or two were boarded up. No bullet holes scarred concrete or pocked wooden doors. Cars and trucks and buses all seemed new and freshly painted. People didn’t have the pale, scrawny, wary look that went with hunger and fear. To someone newly come from Spain, everybody looked rich.

His mother saw the amazement on his face, but didn’t understand why it was there. “It’s the war,” she said apologetically. “Nothing’s been the way it ought to be since those filthy Japs jumped us.”

Chaim wondered if she’d ever seen a Japanese man in her life.
There were some in New York City, but not many. But that wasn’t why he dropped the duffel on the sidewalk (butts everywhere—not many folks here needed to scrounge them) and laughed till he had to hold his sides. It was either laugh or cry. Laughing felt better.

It did to him, anyhow. Ruth Weinberg looked mad. “I said maybe something funny?” she asked, her voice sharp.

“Yeah, you did, Ma. Sorry, but you did,” Chaim answered. “If this looks bad to you … This is so much better than anything I saw in Spain, I don’t know how to tell you. Now I believe all the stories you guys tell about the shtetls, on account of I’ve seen that kind of stuff myself.”

“So why did you go over there, then?” his mother said.

“Because the Republic was fighting the kind of
mamzrim
who start pogroms, that’s why,” Chaim said. “Because now Spain is free.” That was the simplest way to put it. He didn’t talk about reeducation camps, or about his suspicion that he would have wound up in one if he’d stayed in the Republic much longer.

“What will you do now that you’re back?” his father asked as they went down the steps to the trains.

“I dunno. Whatever I can find.” Chaim worried about it not in the least. In a land like this, dripping with milk and money, he was sure he’d manage something.

When word of the peace with Germany reached the Ukraine, Ivan Kuchkov figured they would do one of two things with him. Either they’d toss him him out of the Red Army and ship him back to his collective farm or they’d put him on the Trans-Siberian Railway and turn him loose against the Japanese. Now that the Fritzes were old news, the fight against the little yellow monkeys was warming up again.

But no. They had something else in mind. His regiment had gone east, all right, but not very far east. They were still this side of Kiev, combing the countryside for Ukrainian nationalist bandits. The Ukrainian rats had jumped straight into bed with the Nazis, hoping to use them to pay back the Soviet government for starving their country into collectivization.

Now the Nazis were gone. Even the stupid Germans couldn’t stomach them any more. But the bandits, or some of them, kept fighting. They had their reasons for hating the Red Army. And they knew they’d get forever in the gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck if they gave up, so what did they have to lose by going down rifle in hand?

“Fuck me if I wouldn’t sooner take on those Hitlerite pricks,” Kuchkov complained after a nasty skirmish with the Banderists. “When they got in trouble, they retreated. These pussies, you’ve got to kill ’em.”

“And they’re trying to kill you till you do,” Sasha Davidov agreed mournfully. He had a bandage on his right forearm. It was only a graze, but you didn’t want to make even a nodding acquaintance with somebody else’s bullet.

“Too goddamn right, they are.” Ivan muttered more obscenities under his breath. He had the bad feeling he knew why his regiment had drawn this stinking, dangerous duty. Someone who could give orders that moved units around was still working on paying them back for plugging that political officer.

He glanced over at Davidov. The little Jew looked back. His shoulders went up and down in a small shrug, as if to say
What can you do?
Ivan already knew what he could do: not a goddamn thing. He couldn’t even complain to Lieutenant Obolensky. If he did, the company commander would tell him
They’re screwing me the same way they’re screwing you
. And he’d be right.

Go over the lieutenant’s head? What a joke! Anyone with fancier shoulder boards would tell him
Shut up and soldier, soldier!
That had only one answer:
I serve the Soviet Union!

If
I serve the Soviet Union!
was all you could say, no point to complaining in the first place. Besides, if he talked to anybody of higher rank than Obolensky, the Chekists would hear about it. Yes, this was a nasty duty. Yes, no one in the blue that was the NKVD’s arm-of-service color would shed a tear if a bandit put one through his brisket.

But they could find worse things to do with him—and to him—if he kicked up a fuss. Right now, they figured he wasn’t worth the trouble. If he made them change their minds … He didn’t want to find out what would happen then.

And so, the next morning, his section combed through the riverside woods again, flushing out Banderists. The bandits were in the woods, all right, in them and well dug in there. Had they been Germans, the Red Army would have pasted the woods with a few dozen Katyushas and then sent in troops to scrape up the stunned survivors.

They were only Banderists, though. Nobody who could order up the rockets wanted to waste them on worthless Ukrainians. The regiment got to clean them out the hard way, the old-fashioned way, then. If some soldiers got killed taking care of it, well, you could always find more soldiers.

The bandits fought with a motley mix of Nazi and Soviet weapons. They had an MG-34, but fired it only in short bursts. Ivan guessed they were low on 7.92mm cartridges. They wouldn’t get any more from the Fritzes. Once what they had was gone, it was gone for good.

They had to know they were licked. Without the Nazis to help them out and to distract the Red Army, they hadn’t a prayer of winning. They stayed in their foxholes and fought it out anyway. Some of them stayed quiet till the Red Army men went past them, then shot their enemies in the back. The Russians had used that trick against the Hitlerites whenever they could. Seeing it turned against them wasn’t so much fun.

“Give it up, you fools!” Sasha Davidov shouted to the Ukrainians. “All you’ll do is die here.”

“Suck my dick, you Communist whore!” a Banderist yelled back. Yes, they knew what they were doing. They knew why they were doing it. They were bound to know it was hopeless, too. They went ahead and did it anyhow. That made them very brave or very stupid, depending on how you looked at things.

The Red Army men took only a couple of prisoners. One of the Banderists actually gave up—he decided he would rather die slowly than all at once. Kuchkov’s men found the other guy behind a tree with a wound in the shoulder and another in the side.

“If you feel like doing me a favor, you’ll finish me off and not let the Chekists get their claws in me,” the Ukrainian said in his accented Russian.

“I will if you want,” Kuchkov said—he had no more use for the
NKVD than he did for the Banderists. “Fuck your mother, are you sure?”

“Fuck you in the mouth, I sure am, Red,” the injured man replied. “I hurt like a son of a bitch. Might as well get it over with.”

A short burst from the PPD gave him what he wanted. One of the men in Ivan’s section must have said something about it to Lieutenant Obolensky, because the company commander took Ivan aside and said, “Are you sure you should have killed that bandit?”

“You mean the wounded prick? Fuck yes, Comrade Lieutenant! He was shot a couple of times. I hope some whore would do that for me if I asked him to. Even the Hitlerites’d put a sorry bastard out of his misery sometimes.”

Speaking carefully, Obolensky replied, “I hope it doesn’t get back to State Security that you killed the Banderist to keep him from telling them whatever he knew.”

“Oh.” Ivan considered that, but not for long. Then he laughed. “Fuck ’em all, you know? They can already drop on me because of Vitya and the
politruk
. If the cunts do, they do.
Nichevo
, right?”

“
Nichevo
—right,” Obolensky said. “But there’s a difference between not being able to do anything about it and swimming around in gravy before you jump into the wolf’s mouth.”

“I guess so, Comrade Lieutenant. You’re a goddamn good guy, you know?”

“Spasibo,”
Obolensky said gravely.

“You’re a goddamn good guy,” Ivan repeated, “but fuck ’em all anyway. I’ve been doing this shit too cocksucking long. I’m not scared any more. I don’t want ’em to jug me, but I’m fucking sick of worrying about it. They shoot me? So, fine—they shoot me. They send me to Kolyma? Kolyma can’t be too much worse than some of the fuck-storms I’ve already been through.”

“I believe you,” Obolensky said slowly. “The NKVD would have a much harder time keeping the country in line if everybody felt that way.”

Ivan only shrugged. What he really wanted to do was ask the lieutenant who’d blabbed about him. He didn’t waste his time, though. Obolensky wouldn’t tell him. He knew as much without asking. In the
lieutenant’s footwraps, he wouldn’t have answered a question like that, either. Obolensky needed people to tell him things. And if Ivan found out who the rat was, that bitch would be a fatal accident that hadn’t happened yet.

So Kuchkov shrugged one more time. He might be able to find out without asking anybody, at least in so many words. He might not read or write, but he sure as hell could add two and two.

Then he could fix things so the Banderists did his dirty work for him. Or if not them, the Japs. Sooner or later, the regiment
would
head for the Far East. The Japs were supposed to be just as much fun as the Germans, only in a different way. Yeah, they’d give plenty of chances for payback. You bet they would!

The big, snorting American lorry rolled away from the front. “And so we bid farewell to beautiful, romantic Belgium,” Alistair Walsh said grandly as he sat in the back with a squad’s worth of men. “We say good-bye to the exotic natives and their quaint and curious customs, and to our fellow holidaymakers from the strange and distant land of Deutsch.”

“Blimey,” Jack Scholes said. “Staff’s gone clean barmy, ’e ’as.” By the way the rest of the Tommies nodded and rolled their eyes, they sided with the gritty little private. No, Scholes had a new lance-corporal’s single chevron on his left sleeve: a parting gift, as it were. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the stripe the hard way.

“Not me,” Walsh said. “You blokes have no poetry in your souls—that’s what the trouble is.”

“Or m’ybe you’ve got rocks in your ’ead,” Scholes said. Again, by all the signs a vote would have gone his way.

Walsh pulled a new packet of Navy Cuts out of his breast pocket. After lighting his own, he passed the cigarettes around. “He may be balmy, but he’s not a bad old bugger,” one of the soldiers said, as if he weren’t there. Most of the others nodded one more time. They were, after all, enjoying his bounty. He was about as much a politician as any other staff sergeant, and not shy about buying popularity.

The canvas top was spread over its steel hoops to keep sun and rain
off the passengers in the truck. Walsh could see out the back, but that wasn’t much of a view: the road the truck had just traveled over, and a little off to one side of it. The farther from the front they got, the fewer the smashed trees and flattened houses he spotted.

“Bloody fucking hell,” said Gordon McAllister, who sat next to him. The big Scot’s burr only added to the sincerity of the sentiment. “We lived through it.” He didn’t talk much. When he did, it was to the point.

Unless we run over a mine or something
ran through Walsh’s head. He left it there. You didn’t want to say some things, for fear of making them come true. Any educated toff would tell you such magical thinking was superstitious nonsense. Walsh didn’t care.
Not
mentioning such things couldn’t make matters worse.

On they went. They met no mines, for which the staff sergeant was duly grateful. They did have to get off the road once, to jounce along on a corduroyed track through a field. When they came back to the paving, Walsh saw why they’d left: a repair crew was filling in an enormous crater.

“Fritzes must’ve dropped that one about an hour before the shooting stopped,” Scholes said.

“Why’d they send us down this stinking road, then?” somebody else asked. “Couldn’t they find one without a big fucking hole in it?”

That was one of those questions without any answer, of course. Maybe the fellow who’d planned the withdrawal had no idea about the bomb crater. Maybe he’d figured the corduroyed stretch would handle the traffic. Maybe he hadn’t given a damn one way or the other. Maybe the driver was lost.

Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, nobody’d given a damn one way or the other. The British Expeditionary Force was leaving Belgium. By lorry, by train, by bus, and, for all Walsh knew, by stagecoach, the Tommies were pulling out and heading for Calais and the other Channel Ports. Pretty soon, they’ll all be off the Continent and back in Blighty again.

Most of their German counterparts were already out of Belgium and Holland and even Luxembourg and back in the
Vaterland
. Walsh wondered what the Salvation Committee would do with all the young
men they’d have to demobilize, and how unhappy those young men would prove when they had trouble finding work.

For that matter, he wondered how his own country would cope with swarms of demobilized soldiers looking for jobs. That hadn’t been easy the last time around. This go looked no easier.

It wasn’t his problem, though. The people who would have to worry about it were the bright young men in the government: the bright young men who were his friends and acquaintances, thanks to an accident of fate.

If Rudolf Hess had chosen to parachute into some other field … Walsh shook his head. In that case, someone else would have fetched the deputy
Führer
to the authorities, and one Alistair Walsh never would have found his affairs commingled with those of the great, the famous, and the powerful. But Hess had come down in that field outside of Dundee, and Walsh had taken him back into the town, and nothing was the same as it would have been otherwise. Better? Worse? How could he know? But surely different.