The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (28 page)

“Damn straight,” Jezek answered proudly. “How come you’re asking such a stupid thing?”

“On account of Czechs aren’t usually crazy like that. Even Frenchmen aren’t usually crazy like that. You sure you’re not a Yid in disguise?”

“Damn straight,” Vaclav repeated, still proudly. Had someone not a Jew asked him that, he would have decked the son of a bitch. As things were, he added, “Nobody’s gonna get near
my
dick with the gardener’s clippers.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” Halévy said. “Or I don’t think it is. I was only eight days old when it happened to me, so I wasn’t taking notes.”

“No, huh? Doesn’t it bother you not having a foreskin?”

“Why would it? Does having one bother you?”

“Nope,” Vaclav said. “What bothers me is that Nazi shithead. He’s out there somewhere, and he wants to punch my ticket for me.”

“Do unto others before they do unto you,” Halévy said. “It may not be just what Jesus said, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad advice.”

It was, in fact, damn good advice. Vaclav had already been following it, even if he hadn’t phrased it so well. He decided he’d better head out into no-man’s-land himself. If he didn’t nail the sniper, he’d have a better shot at other German soldiers.

Maybe they’d pick the same nook. Wouldn’t that make for a cheery meeting in the dark?

He spent the rest of the day scouting places to hide. Some of the ones that looked best lay several hundred meters in front of the line
Czech and French troops shared. The very best one, or so it seemed, was behind or perhaps under a rusted-out French armored car that had probably been sitting there since the big German advance a year and a half before. The Fritzes would have taken whatever parts and weapons and tires they could use and left the shell to gather dust … and, now, snipers.

When he told Halévy of his plan, the Jew said, “Well, you can do that if you want, but I sure wouldn’t.”

“How come?” Jezek yelped indignantly.

“You already answered your own question: it’s been sitting there the past year and a half. You think the Germans haven’t noticed it? You think they haven’t booby-trapped it six ways from Sunday?”

Vaclav paused to find out what he did think. After a few seconds, he said, “Aw, shit.” After a few more, he added, “Thanks.” Nothing came harder than admitting the other guy was right. But Halévy was, sure as hell. The sergeant nodded back. Vaclav started looking for a different place to hide.

eggy Druce had been through things none of her friends and acquaintances in Philadelphia could match. The more she talked about them, the plainer that got. She’d changed, and they hadn’t. She was convinced that she’d changed for the better, and that they needed to move in the same direction as fast as they could. They seemed disappointingly dubious.

Herb always listened to her. A good thing, too, or she would have gone round the bend in a hurry. Even as things were, more than a few of those friends and acquaintances would have said she’d already done it.

“For crying out loud,” she told her husband after finding that even more people didn’t want to pay any attention to her, “it’s like I’m the only one who knows what love is, and everybody else thinks I’m lying when I talk about it. What am I supposed to do? Besides haul off and belt somebody in the chops, I mean.”

He clicked his tongue between his teeth. Doing his best to keep a judicious tone—Peggy recognized the tone, and the effort—he answered, “Well, it might help some if you didn’t sound so much like a missionary out to convert the heathen Chinee.”

The nineteenth-century phrase made her smile … for a moment. But only for a moment. Then she got mad—not at him, but at everybody deaf to her blandishments. That meant, basically, at almost everyone she knew on this side of the Atlantic. If Herb had also thought she was a crank, she didn’t know what she would have done. Thank God, he didn’t.

“For crying out loud,” she said again, “the way a lot of people sound, they’re halfway to being Nazis. More than halfway. It’s terrible! The way they go on, they
want
England and France to line up behind Hitler and knock Russia flat.”

“Stalin’s no bargain,” Herb said: once more, judiciously.

“Yes,
dear.
” Peggy’s own oversweet tone was redolent of I-expected-better-from-you-of-all-people. “Next to Hitler, though, he’s George Washington and Abe Lincoln rolled into one.”

“I’m sure he would agree with you,” Herb remarked.

“So what?” Peggy said. “Next to Hitler, Attila the Hun is a bargain. I ought to know. I’ve talked to the man.”

“To Attila?” her husband asked, not innocently enough.

Peggy sent him a severe look. “Hitler. As. You. Know. Perfectly. Well.” She bit off the words one by one, as if from a salami.

“Okay, okay,” Herb said. “Did you ever talk to Hess, too, or meet him?”

“I saw him a couple of times. I never really met him,” Peggy answered. “Do you think he parachuted out over London or Paris or wherever it was, the way people are saying?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Oh, yeah? Name two.”

“Mm … There were the Braves in 1914.”

“That’s one,” Peggy said.

Her husband said nothing for some little while. Then he spread his hands, as he might have done after turning over a bad dummy at the bridge table. “Maybe I can’t think of anything else that peculiar. But it’s been a pretty crazy war any way you look at it, hasn’t it?”

“Think so, do you? I’ll tell you something.” Peggy took a deep breath, then proceeded to do exactly that: “America’s even stranger than
all the crazy places I saw in Europe. The ostrich with his head in the sand is wearing an Uncle Sam top hat.”

“Honey,
I
don’t want to see us in the war,” Herb said. “I went Over There. I saw the elephant. That’s what my granddad would have called it, anyway: what he
did
call it after he came home from the Army of the Potomac. The only reason I’ve ever been glad we couldn’t have kids is that a son of mine would be draft age right about now. Some of the things I did, some of the things I saw … I wouldn’t wish them on my son.”

“Herb—” Peggy didn’t know how to go on. They hardly ever brought up the subject of children; it was too raw and painful. In the early days of their marriage, she’d miscarried three times in the space of two years. After that, her doctor warned her that any more tries probably wouldn’t succeed, and would put her life in danger. So she and Herb had relied on French letters and on techniques some people called perverted, and remained fond of each other’s company to this day.

If something was necessarily missing, well, what could you do?
Something
was missing from everybody’s life. Peggy had more leisure—and more money—with which to travel. Most of the time, she and Herb could look on the bright side of things.

(She hadn’t worried about any of that when she ended up letting Constantine Jenkins into her bed in Berlin. She’d been so sloshed, she hadn’t worried, or thought, about one goddamn thing then. She’d guessed the embassy undersecretary was queer. She’d been pretty sure, in fact. If he was, he sure could switch-hit every now and then. Only luck he didn’t put a bun in her oven. And wouldn’t
that
have fouled up her life?)

She took a deep breath. “Somebody’s got to stop Hitler. If that means us, it means us, no matter what it costs.”

“Maybe,” he said. Unlike her, he held back a lot of what went through his mind. Most of the time, she thought that made him easier to live with. Most of the time, but not always. After a moment, he added, “But if Chamberlain and Daladier are pushing him forward, who’s going to ask us to hold him back?”

The question was painfully good. The only reason the USA had gone
into the last war was to pull England and France’s chestnuts out of the fire. Still, Peggy found a possible answer: “Stalin?”

Her husband snorted. “He may ask, but who’ll listen to him? Not enough Russian votes—or Red votes, come to that—to get FDR’s bowels in an uproar, especially with this third-term boom. Most people don’t want a war. They can finally see the end of the Depression, or they think they can, and they just want to stay under their own vine and fig tree.”

Peggy’s strict parents had sent her to Sunday school every week till she got big enough to put her foot down and quit going. Bits and pieces of it stuck to this day. She could come out with chapter and verse from Micah (in the King James version, of course; her folks seemed to think that was what God had used to talk to the Hebrews): “ ‘But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.’ ” She sighed wistfully. “Boy, that’d be swell!”

Herb smiled, whether at the quotation or at the old-fashioned slang she couldn’t tell. “It would, wouldn’t it? The way it looks to most people, we’ve got the Atlantic and the Pacific instead of the vine and the fig tree. With all that water between us and trouble, why worry?”

As usual, he sounded calm and reasonable. And Peggy usually liked him to sound that way, which only proved the old saw about opposites attracting. “England thought it was safe behind the Channel, too, till Hitler started bombing London,” she snapped.

“Kaiser Wilhelm did the same thing the last time around,” Herb answered. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

“It’s not,” Peggy insisted.

“What’s the difference?”

“Hitler hits harder.” Listening to herself, Peggy thought she might have come up with a campaign slogan for the
Führer
. But Hitler didn’t need to worry about campaign slogans any more. That was one of the advantages of being a dictator. Now everybody else had to do the worrying.

“I’m not the person you need to tell. Roosevelt is,” Herb said.

“Well, I’ll do that, then,” Peggy declared. She’d met the President before; his New York background was not so very different from hers here in Philadelphia. She couldn’t hop on a train to Washington and walk
into the White house with the confident expectation that he would see her right away. If she wrote him a report on what she’d seen and what she thought about it, though, she did think it would reach him.

What he’d do afterwards, and whether he’d do anything … That, she’d just have to find out. Her parents had also made sure she could type. There’d been other crashes before this latest one. Somebody with a salable skill always had an edge. She sat down at the family Royal and began getting the past year and a half down on paper.

A RUSSIAN PRISONER
staggered, stumbled, slumped to his knees, and then, with a small groan, rolled over on his side. The Japanese guard tramping along fifty meters or so in front of Hideki Fujita walked over to the skinny, filthy man on the ground. He shouted at the luckless fellow. The Russian only lay there. The Japanese soldier kicked him: once, twice, three times.

The prisoner groaned again, louder. He tried to stand but could not. He looked up at the guard. His hands spread in a hopeless last appeal.

Hopeless indeed. Not even wasting a bullet, the guard bayoneted him in the throat. The Russian thrashed his life away. It didn’t take long; he had little life left to lose.

Sergeant Fujita trudged past the still feebly writhing body. He didn’t spare it so much as a sideways glance. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen plenty of others just like it. And it wasn’t as if plenty of the Red Army men who’d surrendered outside of Vladivostok but still managed to shamble along through Manchukuo wouldn’t keel over themselves pretty soon.

One of the prisoners—a man shaggy as a bear, because he hadn’t shaved or trimmed his hair since the surrender—caught Fujita’s eye and stretched out an imploring hand, palm up. “Food, please, soldier-sama?” the Russian said in bad Japanese.
Lord soldier
—the fellow knew which side his bread was buttered on.

It didn’t help him, not here. “They’ll feed you soon,” Fujita said roughly. The prisoner’s blank stare said he didn’t understand. Fujita simplified things even more: “No food now. Food later. Keep marching.”

Keep marching
. That was the essential command. Fujita was glad he
had the pair of fine Russian boots he’d taken from a dead soldier in the Siberian woods. They were much easier on his feet than the clodhoppers the Japanese Army issued. What the Russians didn’t know about leather wasn’t worth knowing.