"If the Fuhrer's government has arranged that you should go to Romania, to Romania you will go." The German official might have said, Sunrise tomorrow is at half past seven. He would have sounded no more certain about that.
Which only proved he'd never had anything to do with Peggy Druce. "No," she said.
Had he worn a monocle, it would have fallen out. His eyes opened that wide. "Who do you think you are, to challenge the carefully arranged"-he liked that word-"plans of the Reich?"
"I'm an American citizen," Peggy said. St. Paul could have sounded no prouder proclaiming that he was a citizen of Rome. If the Germans didn't worry about doughboys coming Over There-well, Over Here-they'd forgotten about 1918.
Maybe Mr. Beefy had. "You are not in America now," he reminded her. "We are obliged to repatriate you as we can. We are not obliged to be convenient for you." By the way he said it, he would drive fifty miles out of his way to be inconvenient for her.
"You won't even let me buy a train ticket for somewhere I want to go? You won't even let me spend my own money?" Peggy had trouble believing that. People always wanted you to spend your money. That had been her experience for as long as she'd had money to spend.
But the Nazi's nasty smile said he was going to tell her no. It also made Peggy give back an even nastier smile: the bastard had some of the worst teeth she'd ever seen. "You will go where we want you to go when we want you to go there. We will tell you how to go. This is to prevent espionage, you understand. We are at war."
"Certainement," Peggy replied. "If I told you where to go and how to get there, you would need to pack for a mighty warm climate. You can count on that."
The German official looked puzzled. So did her fellow internees. None of the handful of other Americans seemed to speak French well enough to understand what she'd just told him. The Europeans, most of whom knew French at least as well as she did, didn't get the American idiom. Bound to be just as well.
Romania! She threw up her hands. If she'd wanted to visit Romania, she would have gone there. Or she'd thought so, anyhow. Now she looked to be on her way whether she wanted to go or not. BACK IN THE USSR. SERGEI YAROSLAVSKY didn't realize how lucky he was to have got out of Czechoslovakia in one piece till he found out how many aircrews and bombers hadn't. The Nazis had far better planes, and far more of them, than they'd shown in Spain.
Even trying to learn what had happened to the fellows you didn't see at the airstrip near Kamenets-Podolsk was risky. Ask too many questions, or the wrong questions, or even the right questions of the wrong people, and you'd end up in a camp. Over the past couple of years, generals-marshals!-had disappeared or been shot for treason after show trials. The NKVD wouldn't blink at gobbling up a junior officer.
The Fascists could kill you. So could your own side. With the Fascists, it wasn't personal. You were just an enemy. To your own side, you were a traitor. They'd put you over a slow fire and make you suffer.
Most of what Sergei knew about the missing crews, he knew because of Anastas Mouradian. Sergei still didn't like people from the Caucasus for beans, but they had their uses. In a Soviet Union dominated by Russians (and by Jews, Yaroslavsky added to himself), the southern peoples had to stick together to survive, much less get ahead. They had their own built-in underground, so to speak.
And so the copilot knew to whom he could talk and how much he could say. He had reasonable confidence what he said wouldn't go past the person he said it to. And Armenians and Georgians and such folk were like Jews: they…knew things. You never could tell how they knew, but they did.
One bomber had crash-landed in Poland. The pilot saved his crew, though the Poles interned them. Had the story ended there, Sergei would have been glad to hear it. If your plane had battle damage or mechanical failure, you just hoped you could walk away from the landing. But things took an ugly turn.
In a low voice, Mouradian said, "The families…" and shook his head.
Sergei needed no more than that to understand what was going on. "Camps?" he asked, dismally sure he knew the answer.
"Da." Anastas Mouradian looked faintly pained that the pilot even needed to say the word. To Russians, Armenians and Georgians seemed sneaky, subtle, devious bastards. You never could trust them. Till now, Sergei had never wondered how he might seem to Anastas. Like a dim backwoods bumpkin? He wouldn't have been surprised.
He wasn't surprised to hear the aircrew's families had been seized, either. If you didn't come back to the Rodina-the motherland-the NKVD would figure you didn't want to. Battle damage? Mechanical failure? The secret police wouldn't give a rat's ass about any of that. They'd scent treason whether it was there or not. And everybody knew treason was contagious. Whether the bomber crew caught it from their families or spread it to them, the families would have to be cauterized.
NKVD men got paid to think like that. Ordinary Soviet citizens had to, if they wanted to stay…well, not safe-nobody was safe-but somewhere close, anyhow.
"Bozhemoi," Sergei muttered. "You're sure?"
Mouradian's dark, bushy eyebrows leapt reproachfully. "If I say something happened, it happened." His voice went hard and flat. "Yob tvoyu mat'," he added-literally, I fuck your mother. As always, tone and emphasis were everything when you said something like that. Said another way, it would have started a fight. But he meant something more like I shit you not.
"All right, all right. I believe you," Yaroslavsky said. "It just…gets to you sometimes, you know?"
"Nichevo," Anastas answered. Everybody in the USSR, Russian or not, used and understood that word. What can you do? or It can't be helped fit too many Soviet scenarios, as it had in the days of the Tsars. Somebody once said Russian peasants ran on cabbage, vodka, and nichevo.
At a pinch, Sergei supposed you could do without cabbage.
As he had before, Mouradian looked around again. His voice dropped again: "You don't want to tell this to the Chimp. He used to drink with the bombardier on the plane that went down."
"He drank with everybody," Sergei said. Sure as hell, Ivan Kuchkov ran on vodka.
"Just keep quiet. He may find out about it anyway, but better he doesn't find out from you," Anastas Mouradian said.
"Right." Sergei nodded. If Ivan found out his drinking buddy was interned and the man's family off to the gulag, he'd want to break something…or somebody. He'd get drunk, which wouldn't make him any cheerier. And he'd babble about where he got the news. All of that could easily add up to trouble. Maybe changing the subject was a good idea: "Hear anything about when we'll start flying again?"
"Not supposed to be too long," the copilot said. "But who knows what that means?"
"Right," Yaroslavsky repeated. Like old Russia, the new USSR always ran late. Five-Year Plans were trying to drag the Soviet Union into a consciousness of time like that in the West. Clocks sprouted everywhere, like toadstools. But with a language where the verb to be had no present tense, how far could the apparatchiks go with their changes?
Sergei thanked the God in Whom he wasn't supposed to believe that that was somebody else's worry. He just had to follow orders and not think too much. He was sure he could manage that.
A corporal in the groundcrew came over to him. "Sir, Captain Kuznetsov wants to see you right away."
"I'm coming." Yaroslavsky couldn't suppress a nasty twinge of fear. "Did he say why?" he asked. Was he bound for Siberia? Did Kuznetsov get a command to take him out and shoot him? Sometimes following your own orders and not thinking too much wouldn't save you. Sometimes nothing would.
But the corporal shook his head. "No, sir. Only that he wants to see you."
"I serve the Soviet Union!" Sergei hurried off toward the captain's tent. Anastas Mouradian nodded to him as he went. Something glinted in the Armenian's dark eyes. Sympathy? Anastas was no fool. He knew all the things that could happen. He knew they could happen to him, too. The corporal, by contrast, was too dumb and too stolid ever to get in trouble.