The War That Came Early: West and East (17 page)

When no more shells fell in the neighborhood, Joaquin cautiously rose. “Get up!” he snapped.

“What else am I going to do?” The Red pushed himself upright, using his left hand and both feet. Joaquin made him open the good hand—he might have hidden a rock in there. He might have, but he hadn’t. A more clever man might have felt foolish at seeing that dirty palm. Delgadillo didn’t. Just one more chance he hadn’t taken. You had to take too many any which way. Avoiding the ones you could made you more likely to live longer.

“Well, well! What have we here, sweetheart?” That was Major Uribe. That, in fact, couldn’t very well have been anybody else. Uribe had been closer to where the 155 went off than Joaquin or his prisoner. Not a smudge, a stain, or a rumpled crease on his uniform suggested that he’d dove for cover. If he hadn’t, wouldn’t he be
ropa vieja
right now? (Even thinking of the stew of shredded beef—literally, old clothes—made Joaquin’s stomach growl.) Maybe not. He had to be lucky as well as brave, or he would have died long since.

The International stared at him as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Chances were he couldn’t. What were the odds of finding not just a faggot but an obvious—no, a flaming—faggot among the Nationalists’ officers? Marshal Sanjurjo’s whole campaign was about running such riffraff out of Spain, wasn’t it? Of course it was—everybody on both sides knew that. But it was about running Reds out of Spain, too. Bernardo Uribe might want to stick it all kinds of places the priests didn’t approve of (not that the priests didn’t stick it into places like that, too), but he really and truly hated the Reds. Joaquin understood that, having seen him in action. The prisoner hadn’t, and didn’t.

“Yeah. What
have
we here, sweetheart?” With that miserable, ugly accent and a deep, rasping voice, the International couldn’t coo the way Major Uribe did, but he gave it his best—or maybe his worst—shot.

Joaquin could have told him twitting the major wasn’t the smartest thing to do. He could have, but he never got the chance. Uribe didn’t even blink. He didn’t waste a moment, either. “I’ll show you what we have here, darling,” he said, and drew his pistol. Raising it, he shot the captive in the face.

Red mist blew out of the back of the man’s head. He fell over and scrabbled in the dirt. Uribe watched for a few seconds, then set the pistol by the International’s ear and pulled the trigger again. The scrabbling stopped.

“That’s
what we have here, asshole,” Uribe said, holstering the pistol once more.

“¡Madre de Dios!”
Joaquin crossed himself. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I was taking him back for questioning.”

“¡Ai! ¡Qué lastima!”
Major Uribe exclaimed. And it
was
a pity—for the International, whose blood still soaked into the thirsty ground. “The One Who questions him now already knows all the answers. And when He gets through with this fellow—it won’t take long—the fucker will wish what I did to him was all he got. But he’ll have worse, for all eternity.”

“Er—yes.” Delgadillo also believed in hell. The Bible talked about it, so it had to be true. And he believed Internationals were bound to go there. All the same, he hadn’t intended to give Satan this one right then. “I, uh, thought we ought to find out what he knew,
Señor.”

Uribe flipped his hand, a gesture that magnificently mingled effeminacy and scorn. “I’ll tell you what he didn’t know, Joaquin: he didn’t know how to keep a civil tongue in his head. And I’ll tell you something else he didn’t know, too: God forgives what you do in bed. He must, or He wouldn’t have made it possible to do those things.”

“Er,” Joaquin said again. Something more seemed called for. “Yes, sir” seemed safe enough, so he tried that. How many priests would have apoplexy if they heard Major Uribe’s doctrine? All of them, probably, clear on up to the Holy Father in Rome. If he told Uribe that … He tried
not to shiver. He might end up lying in the dirt next to the dead International.

“Don’t trouble your head about it, my dear,” Uribe said. “Go back up and kill some more of these Communist monkeys. That’s all you need to worry about.”

“Yes, sir,” Joaquin repeated, and he got out of there in a hurry. He’d often been more afraid of Sergeant Carrasquel than he was of the enemy. But Carrasquel would shoot him only if he tried to run away or something like that. The major might do it for the fun of watching him die. If that wasn’t a bulge in Uribe’s breeches, Joaquin had never seen one.

The Internationals might shoot him, too. He knew that. They’d come too close too often. But it was business for them, not sport. Killing for sport … He’d never been so glad to hurry to the front. Anything, as long as it got him away from Major Uribe.

“YOU!
Dernen! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Arno Baatz shouted.

“Just working on my foxhole, Corporal,” Willi replied. Maybe a soft answer would turn away wrath. If Awful Arno was on the rag—and he sure sounded that way—the odds were against it, though.

Sure as hell, he thought one lousy pip on each shoulder strap made him a little tin god. “Well, cut that crap out and do something useful instead,” he snarled. “Go chop up some firewood.”

Willi didn’t think fixing up his hole so he was less likely to get killed—and so he could sleep without getting all muddy—was crap. Saying as much would only piss Corporal Baatz off worse than ever, if such a thing was possible. They did need firewood; Willi happened to know that. He didn’t know how he’d drawn the short straw for chopping it, but that was just Baatz moving in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

“Right, Corporal,” Willi said resignedly, and scrambled out of the foxhole. He had some wood in there, shoring up what would be his sleeping compartment. He kept his mouth shut about it, for fear Awful Arno would tell him to rip it out.

The Frenchies had left a lot of lumber behind when most of them
cleared out of this village. Willi didn’t particularly blame them for bailing. If his own small home town had got shelled and bombed first by one side and then by the other, he would have wanted to get the hell out of there, too.

They’d also left behind a really lovely axe: light, well balanced, sharp. It almost made chopping wood seem more sport than work. Almost. Imagining that fine steel edge coming down on Baatz’s neck instead of blond oak livened up the job, too.

Awful Arno came by after a while to check on how Willi was doing. He eyed the pile of firewood, grunted, and went away again. From him, that was the equivalent of awarding the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. If Baatz couldn’t find anything to piss and moan about, there was nothing to find.

Quitting now, though, would only bring him back and give him the excuse he wanted to come down on Willi. Willi knew as much. He kept chopping for another twenty minutes. By then, the squad had enough wood for the next six months. It did if you listened to him tell it afterwards, anyhow.

He marveled that his palms weren’t blistered when he did set down the axe. Part of that was the smooth, fine helve. And part of it was the thick calluses he’d acquired. Sure as the devil, soldiering toughened you up.

It also turned you into an accomplished thief. As soon as he got done, he started going through the houses in the village. Yeah, they’d already been picked over, but you never could tell what you’d find if you poked around a little. Some canned salmon, a little flask of what smelled like applejack, 250 francs somebody’d forgotten when he got out of town … A good scrounger could come up with all kinds of things other people had missed.

He’d share the salmon and the firewater. You didn’t want to get greedy with stuff like that. Your buddies wouldn’t stay buddies if you did. The French money went into a tunic pocket. You never could tell when that might come in handy. He came out into the late-afternoon sunshine, more than a little pleased with himself.

He came out into that sunshine at the exact moment a black Mercedes about as long as a light cruiser rumbled into the village. Two enormous
men in black uniforms jumped out. Willi had been thinking soldiering toughened you. He might be tough, but he wouldn’t have wanted to mess with either one of these SS behemoths. Something in the planes and angles of their faces said they not only knew all the dirty tricks but got off on them.

“You!” one of them rumbled, raising a hand roughly the size of a ham and pointing at him. “Come here!”

“What do you want?” Willi didn’t move.

“To ask you some questions,” the SS man said. “If you’re lucky, we won’t ask about your name or your pay number. Now get over here!”

Goddamn asphalt soldiers
, Willi thought. The SS looked marvelous on parade. In the field … That was the
Wehrmacht’
s place. But the bastards with the runes on their collars were Hitler’s fair-haired boys. Willi ambled over to this pair. If he didn’t, they could make him disappear, and nobody would ever know where he’d gone. “Well, what is it?” he said. “You boys better watch yourselves around here, you know? French guns can reach this far, easy.”

The big goons traded glances. But nobody was shooting at them right this minute. They could seem brave, even to themselves. One pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. “Do you know a certain, ah, Wolfgang Storch?” he asked, and rattled off Storch’s pay number.

“Name sounds kind of familiar.” Willi stopped right there. He’d see the SS men in hell before he ratted on a friend. Wolfgang and he had saved each other’s bacon more times than he could count. They’d shared cigarettes and socks. They’d sworn at Awful Arno together. Would these clowns understand any of that? Not a chance in church. Willi eyed them. “How come you want to know?”

“We don’t have to tell you that,” said the goon with the notebook.

The other one tried to be subtle. He wasn’t very good at it: “Have you ever heard this Storch make comments that reflect unfavorably on our beloved
Führer
or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party?”

“Nope,” Willi said at once. Everybody in the field always swore at the idiot politicians who’d put them in danger of getting their heads blown off. Would the SS men get
that?
Again, not a chance.
Nope
was safer.

Or so Willi thought, till the blackshirt with the notebook said, “If we can show that you are lying, the two of you will be judged guilty of conspiring against the
Reich.”

No talk of trials or anything like that. Just
You will be judged guilty
. And what would happen afterwards? Nothing good. Willi didn’t need a road map or a compass to figure that out.

“You said it yourselves—everybody loves the
Führer,”
Willi said. “Nobody has anything bad to say about him.” Nobody did where somebody who might blab could hear, anyway. But if the SS men really believed all the Party bullshit, they might think Willi meant it.

By the way their faces hardened, he’d laid it on too thick. The one with the notebook said, “We have reliable reports that this Storch has delivered disloyal utterances on repeated occasions.” He could talk that way without even realizing what a jackass he sounded like.

“Well, I never heard him do it,” Willi said.

They didn’t believe him. He could see it in their pale, merciless eyes. That meant his goose was cooked, too. Then he caught a break. French artillery really did open up on the village. Willi’d never dreamt he could be glad to get shelled, but he was now.

“Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and flattened out himself.

Because the SS men were greenhorns, they stayed on their feet longer than they should have. When shells started bursting and fragments screeched past, they got the message. “Hail, Mary, full of grace!” one of them gabbled as he got down. Whoever’d said there were no atheists in foxholes had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.

Willi didn’t like getting up in the middle of a barrage, but he didn’t like getting hauled off to Dachau, either. He hurried toward the last place where he’d seen Wolfgang: a trench fifty meters or so south of where the houses petered out. Behind him, a 105 round turned the blackshirts’ Mercedes into burning scrap metal. He laughed out loud.

“Where are you going?” one of the SS men called after him.

“To fight. You wouldn’t know about that, would you?” he answered. And he even meant it. The froggies were liable to follow up the shelling with an attack. But he also had other things on his mind.

To his vast relief, he found Wolfgang right away and jumped into the trench beside him. “You trying to get yourself killed?” Storch asked.

“No. I’m trying not to get
you
killed. The SS wants your ass,” Willi said. “I always told you you talked too goddamn much.”

“Who squealed?” Wolfgang got right down to brass tacks.

“They didn’t say, but my money’s on Baatz. Doesn’t matter now. Get the fuck out of here. Go across the line and surrender to the Frenchies. You can sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp.”

“They’re liable to shoot me if I do,” Wolfgang said. Surrendering was always tricky. If the guys on the other side didn’t like your looks or couldn’t be bothered with you, you were dead meat.

“You’ve got a chance that way,” Willi answered. “What kind of chance do you have with the blackshirts?”

Storch’s unhappy expression told exactly what kind of chance he had. He pumped Willi’s hand. “You’re a good guy. Wish me luck.” He scrambled out of the trench and crawled toward the enemy positions a few hundred meters away.

“Luck,” Willi whispered. Most of the French shells were long. If Wolfgang really got lucky, they’d blow up the SS goons. Even as the thought crossed Willi’s mind, he feared it was too much to hope for.

VACLAV JEZEK CAUTIOUSLY LIFTED
his head. There was less to see than he’d hoped: the dust and smoke the bombardment had already kicked up obscured his view of later shell hits on the Nazi-held village. He ducked down again. “They’re knocking the shit out of that place,” he remarked.

“And so?” Benjamin Halévy didn’t sound impressed. “Not like the German
mamzrim
don’t have it coming.”