Last Orders: The War That Came Early (58 page)

They really wanted Vitya, Ivan, and the lieutenant. They probably wanted Sasha Davidov, too, because he was a smart kike, and smart kikes caused trouble. The rest of the guys in the company? Would the Chekists turn them loose? Not likely! Maybe the population in some camp had dropped below the prescribed norm. Maybe the NKVD didn’t want witnesses. Who could guess? Who cared? What difference did it make?

The NKVD men separated them from one another and searched them. They stole whatever they pleased. That was part of the fun of being a Chekist. They beat them up, too. That was also part of the fun.
Ivan rolled into a ball and tried not to let them kick anything vital. He’d been beaten before; he knew what to expect. He yelled his head off so they’d think they were hurting him worse than they were. The stupid pricks hadn’t even found one of his little holdout knives.

When they got done knocking him around, they tore off his shoulder boards. “You’re a traitor, not a soldier!” an NKVD lieutenant screamed in his face. Ivan did his best to look miserable. Sooner or later, he would catch a break. Maybe he could get away. Or maybe—more likely—he could make a place for himself in the gulag the way he had in the Red Army.

A column of new zeks, hands tied and joined to one another by ropes, stumbled north out of Irkutsk a few days later. A handful of Chekists with machine pistols herded them along. “Kolyma, you sorry bastards!” they jeered. “That’s where you’re headed! North of the Arctic fucking Circle! You’ll freeze your nuts off! It’s summer, but you’ll freeze ’em off anyway!” They laughed and laughed. Ivan kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. Sooner or later, he’d find a chance for … something. He hoped he would, anyhow.

Saul Goldman waved his arms like a sardonic tour guide. “Welcome to beautiful, romantic, historic Münster,” he said. “I can tell you where a lot of interesting things used to be, but most of ’em aren’t here any more, so why should I bother? We liberated this place clear to hell and gone, didn’t we?”

Theo Hossbach nodded. Theo made the perfect victim for someone playing tour guide: he hated talking more than he liked complaining. But Saul didn’t exaggerate much. What the RAF hadn’t managed to smash in years of intermittent bombing, the fight between the Salvation Committee and the Nazi diehards had. Most of the center of town was a rubble field the likes of which Saul hadn’t seen this side of the Soviet Union, and only seldom there.

German flags—old Imperial German flags, now reborn under the Salvation Committee—flew from the buildings and chimneys that still stood. Here and there, hardheaded National Socialists had sneaked
out at night to chalk swastikas on walls and paint them on sidewalks and the fronts of houses.

Prisoners cleaned up the Nazi propaganda. Most of them wore shabby
Feldgrau
with all emblems removed; a few were in shabby black that had been treated the same way. Soldiers in full uniform with tricolor armbands kept the prisoners working.

“C’mon. Let’s go over to the zoo,” Saul said. “That hasn’t taken such a beating.” Theo nodded again and stuck up his thumb. Most Germans adored zoos. This one, and the park surrounding it, lay west of Münster’s city center. Both sides here had done their best not to fight in it. Only a few new shell holes cratered the fancy gardens.

Several people strolling through the gardens waved to the two panzer crewmen. “About time you fellows ran out those fools!” a man called. Had the Nazis won their war, he probably would have called them geniuses. Well, had the Nazis won their war, the generals never would have risen against them. Saul understood that, however little he cared for it.

To his surprise and relief, no one in town had recognized him yet. Maybe he wasn’t so well-remembered from the football pitch as he thought. Or maybe people noticed the the black panzer coveralls and the black service cap with the death’s head and the pink piping and paid no attention to the face between the one and the other.

In the zoo, a bear ate oatmeal with chunks of flesh in it. “Looks like it came straight from one of our field kitchens,” Saul said. Theo chuckled. It was funny, but it was funny because it was true.

A few cages farther down, a leopard tore at a big hunk of meat. It was probably horsemeat, but all the same … Saul hadn’t got letters from home, but his crewmates and the other men in his unit had. Lots of letters complained about how miserable civilian rations were. Meat or fish or fowl of any kind was hard to come by. You had to know somebody, and even that didn’t always help.

Saul supposed it spoke well for the German people, or at least for the clout of German zookeepers, that the animals got what they needed even when people went hungry. What the beasts ate wouldn’t have fed that many more human mouths.

An elephant pulled hay out of a manger with its trunk. That might mean some horses somewhere weren’t getting full rations, but it didn’t have anything to do with people. When people got hungry enough, they ate all kinds of strange things, but nobody ate hay.

A pretty girl was watching the elephant eat lunch, too. She smiled at Saul and at Theo. Theo had always been shy around women. Saul hadn’t, but he wondered what this one would say if she found out he was circumcised. She wasn’t so very pretty that his trouser snake thought he had to find out.

Around the corner from the elephant, some chamois nimbly jumped here and there in a rocky enclosure. They paused every so often to eat hay, too. Next to them were some kangaroos. A couple of the females had joeys’ heads sticking out of their pouches. When you could get your animals to breed in a zoo, you knew you’d made them feel at home.

Another pretty girl was standing in front of the kangaroos and watching them hop about. That was Saul’s first thought. Then he did a double take. The girl did one at the same time as she recognized him, too. “Well, hello!” she said. “I didn’t know whether I’d ever see you again or not.”

“Hello, Sarah.” Saul hadn’t known whether he’d see her again or not, either. He turned to Theo. “Theo, this is my sister, Sarah. Sarah, Theo Hossbach is the radioman in my panzer.”

“Hello,” Theo said, and sketched a salute.

“Hi,” Sarah answered. She looked a question at Saul.

He knew which question it was, too. “Theo’s all right,” he said quickly. “He’s better than all right, in fact. He knows. He’s known for a long time. He’s never said boo.”

“Boo,” Theo said.

They all laughed. Sarah said “Hello” again, this time in a different tone of voice, as if Theo was someone she might like. Then she said, “It’s good to be able to come to the zoo. We couldn’t even do that for a long time.” A few bits of thread were sticking up from the left breast of her blouse. She must have missed them when she removed the yellow star.

“Well, come on, then,” Saul said. “Do you think a couple of panzer
men can keep you safe from the animals in the cages—and from the animals outside of them?”

“I’ve never worried about the ones in there.” Sarah pointed to the kangaroos.

“Those aren’t dangerous. All they do is hop,” Theo said. “Did you see the leopard back there? He’s eating about half a horse.”

“No, I was coming from the other direction,” Sarah answered. “Anyway, the really dangerous animals aren’t the ones that live in the cages. Like Saul said, they’re the ones that build the cages.”

“You’ve got that right,” Theo said. He looked over at Saul. “Saul?” Saul looked back at him. “Saul.” He nodded. That wasn’t the only reason he eyed his crewmate, though. He hadn’t heard Theo talk so much in quite a while.

Sarah, meanwhile, glanced from one of them to the other. “Oops,” she said. “I should have said
Adalbert
.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Saul told her. “Theo doesn’t say anything to anybody. Most of the time he doesn’t, anyway.”

“Who, me?” Theo said. “Let him who is without sin cast the first aspersion.”

“Ouch!” Saul said. He turned to his sister and spread his hands in apology. “I didn’t know he had that in him.”

“Maybe he can get it removed,” Sarah said. “But I don’t mind silly talk. It feels good. If somebody talks silly talk at you, he thinks you’re a human being. Nobody seemed to think we were for a long time.”

“You’ve got that right,” Saul said. She’d gone through more anti-Semitism than he had. What they did to civilian Jews got worse after he escaped into the
Wehrmacht
. He didn’t want to think about that, so he didn’t. He pointed to the aviary. “Let’s go see the birds.”

They saw the birds, or some of them. Bomb fragments had torn open the wire mesh more than once during the war. There’d been some escapes. Saul wondered if hornbills or cocks of the rock were trying to make a living in bushes around the town.

A snack-seller had a tray of pretzels. Saul got some. “You people saved Germany!” said the old man with the tray. He wouldn’t take Saul’s money.

“Thank you very much,” Saul said.

After the old man was out of earshot, Theo said, “These taste like salt and sawdust. Who knows what was in the dough?”

“Who cares?” Sarah said. Theo shook his head to show he didn’t. They ambled through the zoo, chatting and laughing.

“Pass me the centimeter wrench, would you?” Adi Stoss was messing around inside the Panzer IV’s engine compartment.

Saul. His name is Saul
, Theo Hossbach reminded himself as he handed him the wrench. But when you’d been thinking of somebody by one name for several years, adjusting to another wasn’t easy. It especially wasn’t easy when the other fellow plainly wanted to hang on to the name he’d been using, the name the
Wehrmacht
knew him by.

Theo looked around. Nobody else was close to them. He wouldn’t have worried about Lothar or Kurt—not very much, anyway. Claus Valentiner was another story. Theo hadn’t known him long enough to be easy around him. With Theo,
long enough
was usually a long time.

Usually. Not always. Since the coast was clear, he said, “Your sister’s nice.”

That got Adi out of the panzer’s engine. He had a grease smear under one eye. He looked more like a Saul than an Adalbert, grease smear or no grease smear. “Is she?” he said. “I haven’t seen enough of her lately to know. Hell, till I went back at the house I had no idea she’d been married and widowed since I, ah, left.”

“She had?” Theo said. Sarah hadn’t mentioned that at all at the zoo. “What happened?”

“British bombing raid. Got her husband and his folks. Would have got her, too, only she wasn’t home for some reason.”

“Oh,” Theo said. “Too bad.” He was spending more words than he did most of the time. But he couldn’t remember when he’d talked as much as he had at the zoo.

He could hardly remember the last time he’d spent so long in a pretty girl’s company, either, even if her brother was along, too. He’d had a few leaves in Breslau, but he hadn’t taken advantage of them that way. He wondered why not—it wasn’t as if he didn’t get the itch like any other young man. Getting it and scratching it, though, were two
different things. To scratch it, he’d have to talk to a girl first, to show her what a good fellow he was. To him, that seemed somehow more intimate than lying down with her in bed.

Or it did most of the time, anyhow. “Sarah’s easy to talk to, too,” he said.

“I don’t hardly know about that, either. You were banging your gums pretty good there, though.” Adi looked at him sidewise. “So am I going to have a Hossbach in the family? My old man would like it—I’ll tell you that.”

“He would? Why? I’m a gentile.” Theo was surprised into more words yet.

“He wouldn’t care. You’re named Theodosios. Pop would care about that. You bet he would.”

He’d said that his father was a professor of ancient history. Theo hadn’t kept that in the top drawer of his mind—it had been a while ago now. But he remembered when something jogged him, sure enough. “He really wouldn’t care?” Theo asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Adi said. “Although he may feel more
Volkisch
now, on account of everything that’s happened lately.” He used the word so beloved of the Nazis with a sardonic twist all his own.

Theo thought that over. If people despised you because of what you believed, what would that make you do? It might make you drop your beliefs and try to seem as much like everybody else as you could. Or it might make you cling to them all the tighter. He could see going either way. If your ancestors had hung on to their beliefs in a line stretching back three thousand years, wouldn’t you be more inclined to cling tighter? Theo thought so.

“I wouldn’t blame him if he did,” Theo said. “Or Sarah.” She hadn’t acted as if she wanted to spit in his eye because he wasn’t Jewish. She might just have been polite with her brother’s
Kamerad
, though. How could you tell with women? Theo had enough trouble telling with men.

“Big of you,” Adi said, which made Theo’s ears heat. Adi went on, “Stick your head in here with me, will you? Something’s still screwed up with this fan linkage, but I can’t see what.”

Before long, Theo found the trouble. Machinery gave him much
less trouble than people did. Machines were more predictable and less complicated. They did the same things again and again unless they broke. Then you fixed them, and they did those things some more.

People … Who could tell what people would do next? Half the time, they didn’t know themselves till they did it. A lot of the time, they didn’t know what they’d done or why, even afterwards. That was how things looked to Theo, anyway.

“Good job. Thanks,” Adi told him once he’d got the linkage back in order. “Two heads were better than one. Or yours was better than mine.”

Still uncommonly talkative, Theo said, “You’re making a good panzer commander.”

“Am I? I’m glad you think so. How come?”

“You give other people credit. Hermann did that, too.”

“He sure did. I’m trying to act like him. Not so easy—he had more patience than I do. But I am trying, and I’m trying not to be too trying, too.” Adi loosened the props and let the armored, louvered decking slam down over the engine compartment. “I’ll tell you something else, since I know damn well you don’t flap your gums too much. If I never take a panzer into combat again for the rest of my life, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world. What do you think of that?”