Two Fronts (24 page)

ELECTIONS WERE IN
the air. It was a midterm campaign, of course, with only Congressional seats up for grabs, not the White House—the big prize. All the same, the Democrats were doing their best to hang on to as many seats as they could. The GOP tagged the fight against Japan FDR’s war, and said he wanted to mix it up with Germany, too.

Peggy Druce would have liked nothing better than giving Hitler one right in that stupid little toothbrush mustache. Charlie Chaplin had worn one like that for comic effect. The damn thing wasn’t so funny on the
Führer
’s upper lip, though.

She’d seen photos of Hitler from before he got famous, from the days when he was just another soldier in the trenches during the last war. He’d had a mustache then, too, but an ordinary one. She wondered what had made him change it to such an unbecoming style.

But that was neither here nor there. The Republicans were screaming at the top of their elephant lungs that FDR was such a donkey, he wanted to drag the country into a war with the Nazis while it was already fighting the Japs. Peggy only wished the President
would
take the USA into a fight against Germany. But Roosevelt moved with public opinion. He didn’t—he couldn’t safely—get too far out in front of it.

All the same, that put him well ahead of the GOP. She was convinced it did, anyhow. And she was willing—hell, she was eager—to say so in front of anyone who would listen.

“I don’t know why the Republicans use the elephant for their mascot,” she told a big crowd at a Masonic lodge in Scranton. “They ought to use the ostrich instead, because all they want to do is stick their heads in the sand!”

People laughed and clapped. She knew she wasn’t being fair. Wendell Willkie hated and distrusted Hitler at least as much as Roosevelt did, which was saying something. But more isolationists lived in his party than in the President’s. And politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about winning elections. If you did that, you got to do what you thought needed doing. If you didn’t, the yahoos on the other side grabbed the chance to pull off their stupid stunts instead.

“The Republicans think—when the Republicans think; if the Republicans think—the Republicans think, I was saying,
Well, we’ve got oceans on both sides of us, so nothing can get us even if we do stick our heads in the sand
. But I’m here to tell you, oceans don’t always mean you’re safe any more. I was in Berlin when British bombers flew hundreds and hundreds of miles and bombed it.

“And look at all the trouble Hawaii is having from bombers flying off the islands the Japs grabbed right after they jumped us. If they’d got lucky and grabbed Hawaii, too, they might be doing that to the West Coast right now.”

“Little yellow monkeys!” somebody in the crowd yelled. That drew more cheers and applause. The Japs were easy to hate, especially in a place like Pennsylvania, where hardly any of them lived. They looked odd. They spoke a language nobody could understand. The nerve of them: Orientals who thought their country deserved to be a great power!

Getting worked up about the Germans was a lot harder in this part of the country. So many people here had parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who came from Germany. Even people who didn’t knew or were married to people who did. Germans looked like anybody else, too. It made a difference. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did.

“They’re the measles,” Peggy said firmly. “The Germans … The Germans are smallpox.” Shudders ran through the crowd. Plenty of people there, like Peggy herself, were old enough to remember when the horrible disease hadn’t been rare. Warming to her theme, she went on, “And the Republicans are a social disease.”

She smiled suggestively. People whooped and hollered. A couple of wolf whistles rang through the hall. “They are,” Peggy insisted. “They want to get rid of Social Security. They still want to do all the things they did that gave us the Depression. Want another dose?” She leered again. “Then vote for the grand old GOP!”

They gave her a big hand as she stepped away from the mike. She waved—she knew she’d earned it. The local politico who came up to introduce the next speaker wore an electric-green jacket with a big purple windowpane check. The hand-painted hula dancer on his scarlet tie was either voluptuous or built like a brick shithouse, depending on your attitude toward the language.

“It’s my great pleasure to present to you, ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed, as if announcing at a prize fight, “di-rect from Hollywood, California, that fine actor and good guy, Mis-ter George Raft!”

Raft didn’t especially look like a good guy. He looked more like the small-time hood he was supposed to have been before he got into acting. His shiny black silk shirt and knife-sharp lapels did nothing to lessen the impression.

He grinned out at the gathering. “I was gonna say I didn’t want to go on after Mrs. Druce, on account of she did such a great job there,” he began, and led a fresh round of applause for Peggy. Not surprisingly, she found herself liking him even if he did look like a hoodlum. When the clapping died down, Raft continued: “But I
really
don’t want to go on after Eddie Gryboski’s necktie. Ain’t that a beaut?”

Peggy laughed so hard, she almost wet her pants. She wasn’t the only one, and wondered how long it had been since the Masonic hall rocked with mirth like that. Gryboski stood up to show off the hula dancer again. The crowd cheered him. They cheered again when he sat down.

George Raft had a performer’s sense of timing, all right. He sensed just when to start his own speech. The audience was still happy after giving Eddie Gryboski a hand, but they were also ready to listen to whatever the marquee name had to say.

And Raft had plenty. Herb would have said that he tore the GOP a new one. He wouldn’t say what the new one was, not where Peggy could hear him, not unless he was extremely provoked and probably not then, either. It wasn’t that he thought she didn’t know or couldn’t figure it out. But he’d been taught not to cuss in front of women, a lesson no doubt driven home by a clout in the ear when he goofed.

The crowd ate it up. Well, no surprise there. They wouldn’t have come to this hall if they were America Firsters or other people with views like that. When Raft finished, he got a roar of applause. A big hand, yeah, but Peggy didn’t think it was much bigger than the one she’d earned for herself.

As things were breaking up, the actor came over to her and said, “I really meant what I said when I was working the crowd. You were great. You’ve done this a time or two before, I betcha.”

“Now that you mention it,” Peggy said, “yes.” They smiled at each other.

“Me, I haven’t done a whole lot of politicking. Never saw much point to it, not till the fighting started,” Raft said. “Maybe you could give me some pointers, like.”

Peggy blinked. “You’re kidding!” she blurted.

“Not me.” Raft shook his head and raised his right hand as if swearing an oath. “Nope, not me. How’s about you come up to my hotel room? We can talk about stuff there. I’ll call room service for a bottle of champagne on ice or somethin’. Help us relax while we talk, y’know?”

She laughed out loud. “Oh, I know all right, you wolf.” When he said
talk
, he meant
screw
. She spread the fingers of her left hand so the rock in her wedding ring flashed. “Thanks for asking, but no thanks.” How many women did he casually proposition? Quite a few, by his practiced ease. How many came across? Also quite a few, unless Peggy was all wet.

He laughed, too, also unabashed. “Can’t shoot a guy for trying.”

“Sure,” Peggy said. He’d been a gentleman about it, or as close to a gentleman as a guy who’d started out as a small-time hood could come. Getting asked never bothered Peggy. What bothered her were guys who didn’t understand when no meant no. George Raft plainly did. As he turned away—looking for someone else to try to charm—part of Peggy went
Too bad
.

MAIL CAME TO
the Republican lines north and west of Madrid when it felt like coming. The Spaniards called that kind of thing
mañana
. Vaclav Jezek looked down his blunt nose at such inefficiency. The Czech hated and feared his country’s German neighbors, but they’d rubbed off on him more than he realized.

Not that he ever got mail, anyway. The only people in the world who cared about him and weren’t in the Czech government-in-exile’s army lived in Nazi-occupied Prague. He hadn’t heard from family or friends since the war started. He had to hope they were all right.

The Spaniard who carried the burlap mail sack made a horrible hash of Benjamin Halévy’s name. But the Jew was used to Spaniards botching it. “
Sí, Señor. Estoy aquí
,” he said. He’d learned a lot more Spanish than Vaclav had. Oh, he was a cunning linguist, all right.

“Here.” The Spaniard handed him an envelope with his name typed on it, and with a printed return address Vaclav couldn’t read upside down.

It wasn’t upside down for Halévy, of course. He whistled several tuneless notes. “Well, well. Isn’t that interesting?” he said. “I wonder what the Ministry of War wants with me.”

“The
French
Ministry of War?” Jezek asked in disbelief.

“No, of course not. The Paraguayan Ministry of War,” Benjamin Halévy answered tartly. Vaclav’s ears heated. Halévy pulled his bayonet off his belt and opened the letter with it. Letter opener, tin opener, candlestick … Those were all more common uses for the bayonet than sticking enemy soldiers. The Jew took out an official-looking—which is to say, typed on letterhead—letter.

“What’s it say?” Vaclav asked. If it was from the French military, it would be in French. Even if it weren’t upside down for him, he wouldn’t have been able to make much of it. German he could speak and read. He could swear in French, and order booze and food—and come on to the barmaid, too, if he was so inclined. But the written language was a closed book to him even if the book chanced to be open.

Instead of answering, or perhaps by way of answering, Halévy threw back his head and laughed as if he’d just heard the best dirty joke in the world. He laughed till tears cut clean tracks down his grimy cheeks. Speechless still, he held out the letter to Vaclav.

Vaclav pushed it back at him. “Just an asswipe to me,” he said impatiently. “You know I can’t make heads or tails of French.”

“Sorry. Oh,
mon Dieu
!” Halévy wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He started laughing again. Only half kidding, Vaclav made as if to slug him. Halévy took a deep breath, hiccuped, and made himself calm down by what seemed main force of will. He held out the letter once more. This time, though, he explained it, too: “The Ministry of War, in its infinite wisdom, desires to recall me for service in the Army of my
patrie
, the Republic of France.”

“You’re shitting me!”

“Could I make up such a thing?” Halévy shook his head, answering his own question. After a moment, Vaclav did the same thing. He didn’t believe it, either. The Jew went on, “I have a good imagination, sure, but not that good. It takes a government ministry to have an imagination that good.”

“But they waved bye-bye when you left,” Vaclav said. “They didn’t want you around after they cozied up to Hitler. You didn’t want to stick around after that, either.”

“You bet I didn’t,” Benjamin Halévy agreed. “But now I am recalled ‘to fight the Fascist foes of France.’ ” He waved the letter around. “That’s what it says here, anyway.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Jezek asked. Halévy might be a Jew with parents from Prague, but he thought of himself as a Frenchman. He’d been proud to think of himself as a Frenchman till his government hopped into the sack with the Nazis.

That, though, must have been the last straw, because he answered, “What am I going to do? This.” He crumpled the letter into a ball. “And this.” He flipped it up and over the earthen parapet in front of the trench.

A split second later, a rifle shot rang out from the Nationalist lines. A bullet thudded into the dirt in front of them. “Hel-lo!” Vaclav said. “They’ve got a sniper over there keeping an eye on us, to hell with me if they don’t.” Sometimes you’d fire at any motion you saw and worry later about what it might be.

Halévy didn’t care about that. He knew better than to stick his head up where anybody on the other side might see it. And he managed to strike a silent-movie pose without putting himself in danger. “Here you see me, a man without a country!” he said in melodramatic tones.

“Big fucking deal.” Altogether undramatic, Vaclav fumbled in his tunic pocket for his cigarettes. As he lit one, he went on, “About a division’s worth of men without a country within mortar range of where we’re at.”

By some standards, he and the other Czechs in the line here were men without a country themselves. The Germans sat on two-thirds of what had been Czechoslovakia. Father Tiso ruled the Slovaks in the remaining third as a Fascist dictator—and as a Fascist puppet. The Czechoslovakian government-in-exile insisted that would all be put right one day. Jezek had to hope it was right. The Germans and Poles and Magyars and suchlike in the International Brigades had even less reason for optimism, and less of a chance of ever seeing their homelands again.

“I know, I know.” Halévy pointed to the pack. “Give me one of those?”

Vaclav did. “You’re a scrounge without a country, is what you are,” he said. “Plenty of those within mortar range of here, too.” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t bummed plenty of butts off the Jew.

After lighting up, Halévy said, “All of us guys without a country, we should get together and make our own new one. Hell, we could conquer a province somewhere—a lot of us carry guns, right?”

“Sounds great,” Vaclav said. “We could fight some big old wars against our neighbors, whoever our neighbors turn out to be. And if that ever gets boring, we can have civil wars about which language we should speak or whether we should raise taxes or not.”

“I like it.” Halévy clapped his hands together. “We’re not even a country yet, and already we’ve got big-time things to fight about.”