The War That Came Early: West and East (29 page)

Across the table from him, Anastas Mouradian raised one dark eyebrow a few millimeters. The Armenian had no trouble understanding news reports, either. Sergei sometimes thought Armenians and Jews and people like that were born reading between the lines. He wondered why Russians weren’t. Some Russians didn’t even seem to know there were lines to read between.

“Despite the Red Army’s displays of heroism, the campaign in the area illegally occupied by the Polish junta has not necessarily gone to the Soviet Union’s advantage in all respects, due to the Nazis’ treacherous intervention in a fight where they had no true interest.” The radio newsreader paused portentously. “Accordingly, Comrade Stalin finds that the situation has changed.”

He paused again, making sure he had everyone’s attention. He did—all the officers waking up in the tent stared toward the radio. Curls of smoke rose from
papirosi
being smoked or held between index and middle fingers. Changed. In the middle of a war, there were few more ominous words. Changed
how?

The newsreader had the answer, straight from the General Secretary’s lips: “Up till this time, our dispute with the vile Polish clique has concerned only the border region they unjustly occupied. But, now that the jackals have invited the deadly German viper into their filthy burrow, they make it only too clear that they are a danger to all lovers of peace. This being so, we are no longer concerned with the border region alone. We shall punish the Smigly-Ridz regime as it deserves. Its very existence is a product of our unfortunate weakness during the civil wars following the glorious Soviet revolution. We shall make Poland—all of Poland—pay for its brazen effrontery.”

He went on to talk about the war in the Far East. He also described the fighting there as heavy, which wasn’t good news. But Sergei listened with only half an ear. He and Stas Mouradian weren’t the only men who exchanged glances of what looked much too much like consternation. No one said anything; people naïve or stupid enough to do that had been weeded out by a process of brutal Darwinian selection. Even expressions
could endanger, though. Somebody in here was bound to report to the NKVD.

Then again, maybe the local Chekist, whoever he was, also wore a look of consternation. Who wouldn’t? If what the newsreader said meant what it sounded like, the USSR intended to attack, or more likely was attacking, Poland up and down their long frontier. The Red Army was much bigger than its Polish opposite number. If it was much better, it hadn’t shown it yet.

And that was only half the problem—the smaller half, at that. So far, Hitler had been fighting a limited war against the Soviet Union. If Stalin widened that war, wouldn’t the
Führer
do the same? The Red Army was bigger than the
Wehrmacht
, too. Better? Anybody who said so … probably spewed out propaganda for the radio and the newspapers.

Widening the war would have been adventurous enough without the fight in the Far East. With it? Sergei was reminded of a dinosaur like
Brontosaurus
. If it was looking forward when something bit it at the end of the tail, how long would it take to notice the trouble back there?

He shook his head as he lit a
papiros
of his own and stuck the end of the paper holder into his mouth. He had to watch himself. The USSR was a progressive state—the most progressive state in the world, as a matter of fact. You’d better not think of it as a dinosaur. If you did, you were liable to say something like that out loud. And if you did open your big mouth, it would be a camp or a bullet in the back of the head for you. Darwinian selection, all right!

The news ended. Music as syrupy-sweet as Crimean champagne poured out of the radio. No one turned it off even so. If you didn’t want to listen to what the state wanted you to hear, weren’t you subtly anti-Soviet? Somebody was liable to think you were, anyhow, and that would be all it took.

But you didn’t have to pay attention to the music, the way you did with the news. “Well, well,” someone ventured.

“How about that?” someone else added.

“We can whip the Poles,” Sergei said. That was only a kopek out of his ruble of thought, but it was the kopek he could spend in public.

“Sure we can!” Three or four men said the same thing at the same time.
They all sounded relieved to be able to come out with something safe. Well, Sergei was relieved to come out with something safe himself.

“I wish Hitler didn’t have panzers in Poland,” Anastas Mouradian remarked.

No one responded to that, not for a little while. Stas liked to sail close to the wind, and everybody knew it. Who in the tent didn’t wish there were no Germans in Poland? The Poles were easier to beat. Mouradian hadn’t criticized anyone. Still, even mentioning those panzers seemed faintly indecent.

“Well, maybe it won’t be so bad,” Sergei said. You couldn’t get in trouble for optimism (though he did wish he could have that
maybe
back).

“Maybe the Nazis will see we’re serious about this Polish business and clear out,” another flyer put in. “They’ve got their own troubles on their other frontier.”

“We don’t, of course,” Mouradian said dryly. He was no
Brontosaurus;
he could contemplate wounded head and wounded tail at the same time. “Not like theirs,” the other flyer insisted.

He wasn’t wrong. How much did being right matter, though? “They only fought for four years on two fronts last time,” Mouradian said. This wasn’t the first time he’d brought up that inconvenient truth.

“They lost,” Sergei said. His crewmate sent him an
Et tu, Brute?
look.

Before Mouradian could say anything, the other pilot ran to the conversational ball and booted it far down the pitch: “That’s right! And they’ll lose this time, too! The historical dialectic makes it inevitable.”

The dialectic! Heavy artillery! You could blow anybody out of the water when you trotted out the dialectic. But Anastas Mouradian didn’t stay there to be blown to rhetorical smithereens. He nodded politely. “No doubt, Comrade. But how far will the cause of Socialism be set back by the conflict? How many farms and cities and little children will go up in smoke?”

“A fine question for the fellow who aims the bombs to ask,” the pilot sneered.

“I serve the Soviet Union,” Mouradian said. “I do try to serve the Soviet Union intelligently.”

There was another one nobody wanted to touch. Sergei was far from sure serving the Soviet Union intelligently was what the apparatchiks who ran the country wanted. You got a command. You carried it out. You had no business wondering about it. That wasn’t your responsibility.

But were you a man or were you a sheep? Which way were you more valuable to the state? If you were a man, weren’t you safer pretending to grow wool? Sergei knew damn well you were. How much baaing had he already done? How much more would he have to do?

THE POWER TO BIND
. The power to loose. St. Peter had it, if you took Jesus seriously. Whether you took Jesus seriously or not, Adolf Hitler had it—inside the borders of the Third
Reich
, anyhow. Peggy Druce found that out in a hurry.

Once the
Führer
said she could leave Germany, the mountains that had stood in her way for so long all at once turned into molehills. Konrad Hoppe came to her hotel room and affixed an exit visa to her passport as exactingly as if he were working with gold leaf. The scrawny Foreign Ministry official had met with her once before, to explain why she couldn’t get out.
Because we don’t want you to, that’s why
, was what it boiled down to.

Peggy couldn’t resist saying, “Nice of you to change your mind.”

Hoppe didn’t notice the sarcasm—or, if he did, he was armored against it like a battleship. “My superiors have given me my orders,
Frau
Druce. I follow them.”

They’d given him different orders not so long before. He’d followed those, too. What did Jerome K. Jerome call the German attitude toward civic responsibility? Peggy smiled, remembering.
Blind obedience to everything in buttons
—that was it. And the Englishman, writing at the very end of the nineteenth century, had gone on to say
Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, it will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine
.

Had Jerome K. Jerome had a crystal ball, or maybe one of H.G. Wells’
time machines, to look into the future and see just what would happen next? If he could see it, why couldn’t everybody else? Hell, why couldn’t anybody else? Why couldn’t the Germans see it themselves?

Blind obedience to everything in buttons, dammit.

She realized she’d missed some pearl of wisdom falling from
Herr
Hoppe’s lips. “I’m sorry?”

“I
said”
—he rolled his eyes at Anglo-Saxon lightmindedness—“the train to Copenhagen departs each afternoon at half past three. Shall I secure you a Pullman berth on today’s train?”

Now they couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. “Yes, please,” she said, and even unbent enough to add, “Thank you very much.” Then she decided to press her luck a little: “Can you send me a cab, so I can bring my suitcase along easier?” She would have gone without it—Lord, she would have gone naked if she had to!—but why not see what she could get away with?

Konrad Hoppe didn’t even blink.
“Aber natürlich
. The cab will be here at half past two, precisely.” Taxis in wartime, fuel-starved Berlin were almost as scarce as Nazi big shots with Jewish wives, but the
Führer
had ordered the machinery to give Peggy what she wanted, and Hoppe was one of those smoothly turning gears. He did say, “Please remember to be punctual.”

“Jawohl!”
Peggy said. Mussolini boasted that he made the trains in Italy run on time, but he lied. Everything in Germany ran on time. As far as Peggy could see, nobody had to make it do that; it just did. Half past two wouldn’t mean 2:29 or 2:31. It would be 2:30 on the dot. And she would be in the lobby waiting.

“Very well, then.” Hoppe clicked his heels. “If you will excuse me, dear lady …” With a nod that was almost a bow, he made his getaway.

I’ll make mine, too
, Peggy thought, almost delirious with glee. But she had to attend to one more thing, no matter how little she wanted to. She picked up the telephone in her room. When the hotel operator asked whom she wanted to call, she sighed and said, “The American embassy, please.”

“One moment,” the German woman said primly. It took more than a moment, but Peggy had known it would. Like every other part of civilian
life, the telephone system was neglected these days. Well, all except one part of it: somebody from the
Gestapo
or the SD would be listening to her conversation. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. What could you do, though?

The embassy operator came on the line. The hotel operator put Peggy through. She gave her name and asked to speak to Constantine Jenkins. “One moment,” the embassy operator said, only in English, not German. “He may be in a meeting.”

If he was, Peggy could get out of Berlin with a clear conscience. She laughed a sour internal laugh. Would she ever have a clear conscience again? It seemed painfully improbable, but she would have done her best here. No, it wasn’t the same thing, goddammit.

The operator came back on the line. “I can connect you to him.”

“Thank you,” Peggy said, not without wincing. She’d been connected to the undersecretary, all right! Hadn’t she just?

“Hello, Mrs. Druce.” Jenkins sounded properly formal. No doubt he also knew the Nazis would be tapping the telephone lines.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know they’ve got a place for me on the train to Copenhagen this afternoon,” Peggy said. “And I wanted to thank you for all your help.”

“It was my pleasure, believe me,” Jenkins answered. Did he sound all male and knowing there for a moment, or was that only Peggy reading between the lines? She couldn’t very well ask him.

“If you hadn’t suggested that I write to the
Führer
with my problem, I don’t know if it ever would have got fixed,” Peggy said. Not only was that true, but it reminded the lurking listeners Hitler was on her side.
Can’t hurt
, she thought.

“Nothing else was working. I figured you should go straight to the top and try your luck there,” he said. Peggy found herself nodding. Blind obedience to everything in buttons, sure as hell. Jenkins spoke again, on a different note this time: “And I hope everything else is all right?”

“Oh, yes!” Peggy said quickly. She’d got her period—and what the Germans used for pads these days was a shame and a disgrace. Wouldn’t
that
have been fun? She couldn’t have brought a visible sign of her shame home to Herb. But how she could have found a discreet German doctor
without opening herself up to
Gestapo
blackmail forever was beyond her. One thing she didn’t need to worry about, anyhow. Those things made a dismayingly short list these days.

“Well, that’s good,” Jenkins said. “Believe me, we like to do everything we can for Americans in Germany. Too often, it’s less than we’d want. I hope everything goes very well for you, and I hope to see you again one day after everything settles down, if it ever does.”

“Thanks again,” Peggy said. “So long.” She hung up.
I hope to see you again
? If that didn’t mean
I hope to lay you again
, what did it mean? She was damned if she’d ever get drunk with a diplomat again.

She lugged her suitcase down the hall to the elevator at ten after two. It was heavy and clumsy. Why didn’t it have wheels and a handle with more reach? But that was a side issue. She wouldn’t be late here, not for nothin’.

The elevator operator was a woman. A gray-haired man had had the job, but something—war work? conscription? trouble with the
Gestapo
?—had pulled him away from it. The war was biting more and more people these days.

Peggy checked out and settled down to wait. She watched traffic go by on the street outside. There wasn’t much to watch: buses, military vehicles, a doctor’s car (a placard taped to the door proclaimed what that one was).