The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (17 page)

“The guy whose buddy ran off,” Anton said.

“I don’t know what happened to Wolfgang. I wish I did.” Willi wasn’t lying. He’d warned Wolfgang Storch to run off because the SS was about to grab him. And run Wolfgang had—toward the French lines. Willi hoped he was sitting in a POW camp somewhere in southwestern France. He would be … if the
poilus
hadn’t plugged him instead. No way to know, not for Willi. Guys who tried to give up did get plugged sometimes, no matter what the Geneva Convention ordained.

“You clowns should put a cork in it, too,” another
Landser
said. “Or take it outside, anyway.”

Willi wanted to listen to the music, so he shut up. Anton left in a huff. Some people didn’t even know when they were getting themselves in trouble.

When the song ended, somebody sighed and said, “That’s not bad, but it isn’t jazz, either.”

All the other German soldiers in the battered parlor edged away from the music critic. In his own way, the fellow—Willi thought his name was Rolf—was as naïve as poor dumb Anton. The way things worked in the
Reich
these days, your taste in records was a political choice. National Socialist doctrine branded jazz as degenerate music, nigger music. If you liked it, maybe you were a degenerate or a nigger-lover yourself. The
Gestapo
would be happy to find out.

As a matter of fact, Willi was fond of jazz, too. But he liked his own skin even better. He wouldn’t tell anybody he didn’t trust about anything that might be dangerous. If you wanted to get along, you had to think about such things. Or, better, you had to tend to them so automatically, you didn’t need to think about them.

He sat there, listening and smoking, for another hour. After a repeat of the news, an opera tenor started blasting out an aria. He got up and
left then. The
Führer
loved Wagner. It put Willi in mind of cats being choked to an overwrought musical accompaniment.

For the time being, the Germans had the village pretty much to themselves. Only a few French families had stayed behind when the
Wehrmacht
rolled through. The rest packed up whatever they could and ran. Now they were stuck somewhere on the wrong side of the line … if they hadn’t got bombed or machine-gunned from the air while they were on the road.

Off to the west, French 75s barked: a very distinctive sound. The shells didn’t come down on the village, for which Willi thanked the God in Whom he had more and more trouble believing. It wasn’t as if plenty hadn’t already landed here. One of these days before too long, the Germans would fall back some more.
Poilus
in khaki would take the place of
Landsers
in field-gray. And German 105s would kill a few French soldiers, mutilate a few more, and knock down some houses that had stayed lucky so far.

And
then
, maybe, the people who’d run for their lives would come back to see what was left of the things around which they’d built their civilian existence. And they would cry and wail and swear at the Germans and shake their fists … and somebody would yank on a booby-trap left behind for the
poilus
and blow off her hand. Then the crying and wailing and cursing would start all over again, louder than ever.

“War is shit,” Willi muttered, sincerely if with no great originality. He started to cross the main street, the only one in town you couldn’t piss across. Then he stopped. The main drag ran east and west, straight enough to let somebody out there look a long way down it. If the froggies had posted a sniper, he’d be looking this way through a rifle-mounted telescope. Willi had done a little sniping, enough to start to get the feel for it.

He didn’t know the French had put a guy with a rifle out there. No far-off rifleman had punched Anton’s ticket for him. No sniper had got rid of Awful Arno, either.
Too bad
, Willi thought.

Rolf came out, too, a minute or so behind Willi. No surprise: if you liked jazz, dark deeds on the Rhine wouldn’t be your cup of tea. Rolf crossed the street without hesitation. “You might want to watch—” Willi began.

He couldn’t even finish the sentence before Rolf fell over, shot through the head. The distant report arrived after the bullet. Rolf didn’t even twitch. He just lay there, bleeding. He must have died before he hit the ground. Willi shuddered. It could have been him. Oh so easily, it could have been him.

GOING WITH PETE MCGILL
. had done wonders for Vera’s English. The White Russian girl hadn’t known much before they hooked up with each other. Now she was pretty fluent. Half the time, she even remembered not to roll her r’s. Pete was proud of her—it showed how smart she was. She was a good deal smarter than he was, but that hadn’t occurred to the Marine yet.

If Vera was really smart, her being smarter than Pete never would occur to him. Worrying about whether the girl you love loves you back or is calculating the best way to use you to get what she wants is not likely to make an affair last.

At the moment, Pete wasn’t worrying about anything. He’d just got what
he
wanted, and his heart was still beating like a drum. Shanghai had any number of places where a man and a woman could walk in together, sign the guest book as
Mr
. and
Mrs.
, and be asked no questions. This was one of them. The room was small, but the mattress was fairly new and the sheets were clean. He wouldn’t have fussed if they weren’t, but Vera might have.
Women are picky
, he thought.

He rolled half away from her and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. With a little startled squeak, she made as if to cover herself. “Don’t do that, babe,” he said. “I love to look at you.”

When he did, his manhood stirred again. Before long, they’d start another round. In the meantime, a different urge seized him. He rummaged in the trousers of his civilian slacks (till midnight tomorrow, he didn’t have to look like a leatherneck) till he found his Luckies.

As he tapped one against the nightstand, he held out the pack to Vera. “Want one?”

“Sure,” she said. The word came out just like that—perfect. She might have been born in the States. She took a cigarette, tapped it down on her nightstand, and waited for a light. Pete had to dig out his
matches. If he’d been thinking, he would have grabbed them with the butts. If he’d been thinking, he would have been someone else altogether.

He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Smoke filled his mouth, then his lungs. He dropped the match in the glass ashtray next to the lamp.

Vera leaned close for a light from the hot red coal at the end of his Lucky. As she too sucked in smoke, he cupped her breast with his free hand. She made a little noise that might have been a purr or a laugh. Once she had the cigarette going, she said, “You!”

She didn’t say
Men!
That would have reminded Pete there’d been others—and how many others?—before him. She was more than smart enough to steer clear of that kind of tactical error.

She did say, “I like your American tobacco.”

The way she said it made Pete feel he’d grown the weed, harvested it, and cured it himself. “Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?” he said. He’d smoked Chinese tobacco every now and then. It was like inhaling a blowtorch flame. Any smokes were better than none, but still.…

After she’d leaned across him to grind out her cigarette (the room had only the one ashtray, and was lucky to have that), and after he’d taken more friendly liberties with her person while she did it, she asked, “How much longer will the Marines stay in Shanghai?”

“I’ve got no idea,” he said, and he might have been proud of having no idea. As a matter of fact, he was. Like any well-trained hunting dog, he went where he was told and did what he was told. He didn’t need to worry about that kind of thing for himself, and so he didn’t. The question did provoke a little more response in him, though: “How come?”

“Because the Japanese can run over you any time they please. Because I do not want anything bad to happen to you,” Vera said.

Pete grunted. Ever since the Japs overran Peking, he’d known that was true. More often than not, a Marine’s pride kept him from admitting it, even to himself. “They mess with us, they’ve got a war on their hands. A war with the USA. They got to know we’d kick their behinds around the block so darn fast, it’d make their heads swim.” That he censored the automatic Marine curses showed she wasn’t just a joy girl for him—he really cared.

“They bombed the
Panay
. There was no war,” Vera said.

“They apologized afterwards. That’s why,” Pete answered uneasily. “ ’Sides, they’re busy fighting a war with the Russians. They wouldn’t want to tangle with two big countries at once. Japs are crazy, sure, but they aren’t that kind of crazy.”

“They have what they want from Russia. They have Vladivostok.” Vera’s English was a lot better, yeah, but the way she pronounced the town’s named showed what her native language was. “Now Russia has a hard time fighting them.” She spoke with as much assurance as a general.

Pete was good and sure he would never want to suck on a general’s bare tits, though. “What can I do about it?” he said. “I’m nothing but a two-striper. Nobody’s gonna pay attention to me.”

“Talk to your officers. Let them know your concern.”
Let them know my concern
, Vera meant. Pete vaguely sensed that, but only vaguely. She went on, “Some of what you tell them will go into what they tell the people over them, the people back in America.”

How could she be so sure of that? How much experience of the way the military mind worked did she have? When the question came to him like that, Pete shied away from it. It was almost as if his Corps buddies were razzing him about her. Hell, he didn’t need them. He was doing it to himself, right there inside his own head.

What was going through his mind must have shown on his face. Vera suddenly looked impish. “When you turned on the light, I thought it was because you wanted to watch,” she said. “Here. I give you something to watch.”

And she did. Did she ever! She couldn’t have been more distracting if she’d caught fire. She needed experience with men to know how to do what she was doing, too, but Pete didn’t care. While she was doing it, he didn’t care about anything.

After she got done doing it, he wanted to roll over and sleep for a week. Instead, he smoked another cigarette. Then he did something along those lines for her, too. That went a long way toward proving his love. He never would have done anything like it for anyone he didn’t really want to please. If it also proved Vera washed more often and more carefully than other women he’d known—well, he didn’t consciously notice.

He did notice she gave every sign of being pleased when he did it: one more encouragement for him to do it again. “How am I supposed to go dance tomorrow?” she said. “My legs are all unstringed.”

He thought that was supposed to be
unstrung
, but he wasn’t sure enough to tell her so. Correcting a girl who’d just paid you a compliment like that wasn’t the smartest thing you could do, either. Pete might not have been the highest card in the deck, but he could see that. Squeezing the breath out of her seemed a better idea. It was more fun, too.

He wished she didn’t have to go on working as a taxi dancer. He gave her what he could, but he didn’t have enough to put her up the way she’d want to be put up if she quit. A Marine corporal was rich by Shanghai standards, but not rich enough to support a mistress. You needed an officer’s pay for that.

Besides, he didn’t want a mistress. He wanted a wife. That thrilled his superiors, too. It was one more reason they wouldn’t listen to him if he came to them with stories of what the Japs were liable to do. Since he didn’t see how he could explain that to Vera, he didn’t try.

As they were walking back to the dance hall above which she lived, she waved at the European-style buildings all around. “All this? Pretty soon—poof!” She snapped her fingers. “What do you say? Rented time?”

“Borrowed.” Pete only shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it, babe. I don’t know if anybody can do anything about it.”

“The Japs can,” Vera said. “That is the point.”

She wouldn’t let it alone. If Pete hadn’t been head over heels, that would have bothered him. It bothered him a little anyhow, but he overlooked being bothered. Yes, he was in love, all right.

THEY’D DONE SOMETHING
unspeakable to Sergeant Demange. Luc Harcourt laughed and laughed. “A lieutenant? At your age? When you’ve been cussing out officers since before you had to shave? What is the world coming to?”

“Ah, fuck off,” Demange said. His eternal cigarette quivered in fury. “I didn’t ask ’em to do it. God knows I didn’t want ’em to do it. But you can’t tell the assholes no—they don’t listen to you.”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir,” Luc said, and gave Demange the fanciest salute he’d torn off since training-ground days.

“It won’t change anything,” Demange insisted. “I’ve been running this fucking platoon full of cocksuckers anyway.”

“Hey, but now that you’re a lieutenant they’ll figure you can run a company, or maybe a battalion,” Luc answered. “Everybody knows how screwed up our high command is. They just went and proved it, that’s all.”

Demange said something about his mother that violated at least eight of the Ten Commandments. Then he added, “The real proof that those shitheads have lost it will be when they make you a sergeant.”

“Now that you can’t do it, somebody’s got to disgrace the rank,” Luc said reasonably. Demange’s reply took care of the last two Commandments.

Luc wasn’t eager to become a sergeant. If he kept avoiding bullets, though, he would before too long. Slots opened up as people’s luck ran out. You didn’t always need to meet a bullet. Somebody in another company in the regiment had tripped over a length of barbed wire he hadn’t seen and broken an ankle. He’d be out of action for weeks, the lucky
salaud
.

Woods rose up ahead. Beyond them lay the village of Serzy-et-Prin. Beyond that, a good way beyond it, lay Reims, which was a real city. The
Boches
held Reims. They held Serzy-et-Prin, too. And there were bound to be bastards in coal-scuttle helmets in among the trees.