That was something a good Soviet citizen wasn't supposed to notice. After all, didn't Pravda mean Truth? Maybe only someone who was serving in the military-maybe only someone serving in the military who'd spent some time in a foreign country-would notice the discrepancies. Once you spotted a few lies, though, you started wondering what else you heard was malarkey.
Across the table, Anastas Mouradian sat there smoking papirosi one after another. Did irony fill his liquid black eyes, or was that only Sergei's imagination? Anastas was going to get in trouble one of these days. Anybody who looked ironic in the middle of the morning news was bound to get noticed. The only surprise was, it had already taken this long.
When the announcer shifted to increased production and overfulfillment of the Five-Year Plan's norms, the officers started to relax. This was only fluff; they'd already got the meat from the news. If you were careful, you could smile about this stuff without risking too much.
At last, music replaced the news. "Two fronts," remarked the flyer from Siberia, the guy who came from a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk and laughed at the cold weather here. Quickly, Bogdan Koroteyev added, "It's not what we wanted, of course, but it's what we've got."
"We'll win anyhow," Anastas Mouradian said. Sergei nodded vigorously. He grinned at his crewmate. That was how you were supposed to talk! He had his doubts whether Anastas meant it, but what did that have to do with anything? The picture you showed the outside world was more important (to your survival, anyhow) than whatever you carried deep inside your heart.
"You'd better believe we will," Lieutenant Colonel Borisov boomed. "We can whip the little yellow monkeys with one hand tied behind our back, and as soon as things are dry here we'll show the Nazis and Poles what we can do."
No one argued with the squadron commander. For one thing, he was the squadron commander. For another, what he said was bound to be the Party line. Russia hadn't beaten the Japanese the last time around, but it was easy to blame that on Tsarist corruption, as the radio announcer had. The Red Army had performed well in recent border clashes.
Well, it had if you believed the news. Sergei wished he hadn't started wondering about what he heard on the radio and read in the papers. It made him wonder about everything. Oh, well. What could you do? Doubting the official stories might give you a better notion of what was really going on. What was the phrase in the Bible? You saw through a glass, darkly-that was it. In the USSR, that was likely to be your closest approach to truth.
No enemy planes came overhead. If German or Polish bombers had taken off from paved runways, they were harassing other Soviet fields. And the SB-2s here couldn't fly even if the pilots wanted to. As with the winter blizzards, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around and wait.
Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka. It was early to start drinking. Sergei thought so, anyhow. By the way Bogdan Koroteyev tilted back the bottle, he started at this heathen hour all the time-or maybe he hadn't stopped from the night before. Sergei took a swig, too, when the bottle came his way. Why not? You didn't want to look like a wet blanket or anything. NEWSBOYS HAWKED THE VOLKISCHER BEOBACHTER on every street corner in Berlin. "Decisive battle in France!" they yelled. DECISIVE BATTLE IN FRANCE! the newspaper headline shouted in what had to be 144-point type. The photo under the headline showed three Wehrmacht men, rifles in hand, leaping over some obstacle in unison. Except for the weapons and helmets, they might have been Olympic hurdlers. NOTHING CAN STOP OUR INFANTRY! the subhead boasted.
"Paper, lady?" asked a towheaded kid of about fourteen. If the war lasted long enough, he'd put on the same uniform the soldiers on the front page were wearing.
See how you like it then, you little son of a bitch, Peggy Druce thought. Aloud, all she said was, "Nein, danke." In another block or two, she knew she'd have to do it again.
Boys, old men, women…The only men of military age were cops, soldiers and sailors on leave, and middle-aged fellows who'd been too badly wounded in the last war to have to wear the uniform this time around. She supposed some farmers and doctors and factory workers were also exempt, but she didn't see them. Whatever jobs they had, they were busy doing them.
Another newsboy cried a different headline: "Soviet Russia now encircled in a ring of steel!" Several people stopped to pay a few pfennigs for his paper. The Germans like that idea. When they thought about it, they didn't have to think that the Reich was fighting a two-front war.
Peggy wouldn't have called a half-assed fight over here and what might be a bigger, more serious one way the hell over there a ring of steel. A ring with gaps so big would fall off your finger pretty damn quick. But the Goebbels school of newspaper writing had perpetrated far worse atrocities. Even a Hearst headline man might have come up with this one.
A big, beefy cop came out of his tavern. He was in his fifties, with a big mustache he'd probably grown before the last war and never bothered to shave off. At the moment, he was using a prehensile lower lip to suck beer foam out of it. He saw Peggy watching him do it. To cover his embarrassment, he did just what she'd known he would: he held out his hand and said, "Papieren, bitte!"
Out came her American passport. "Here," she said. "I'm a neutral, as you see."
He scowled at the passport, and at her. "In the struggle against Bolshevism and world Jewry, there can be no neutrals," he declared. Some Germans really did talk that way, the same as some Communists really did parrot the Moscow line. Then he said, "Come to the station with me, so my captain can decide what to do with you."
"To the station?" Peggy yelped. "You've got no right!"
"I am an officer of police," the cop said importantly. "Of course I have the right." In Hitler's Germany, he damn well did, too. He touched the billy club on his belt. "Do you defy my authority?" I'll bust your head open if you do.
"No," she said. "But let me see your papers, please. I will complain to my embassy, and I want to know who you are."
"Ha! Much good it will do you!" He showed her his ID willingly enough. His name was Lorenz Muller. Peggy wrote it down. She didn't think the embassy would be able to do anything, either, but it was the only card she had, so she played it with as much panache as she could.
The station was only a couple of blocks away. Except for his uniform and haircut, the desk sergeant looked like a desk sergeant back in the States: fat and bored but wary, in other words. Muller spewed out a stream of German, too fast for Peggy to follow it. The sergeant listened, then turned to her. "What happened?" he asked.
"I said I was a neutral, and I am-I'm an American. And he got angry at me and brought me here," Peggy answered.
"An American? Let me see your passport, please." When the desk sergeant said please, he sounded as if he meant it. Peggy handed him the passport. After studying it, he gave it back. "Yes, it is in order. Danke schon. You may go."
"What?" Lorenz Muller spluttered furiously-for about a second and a half. Then, without raising his voice, the desk sergeant gave him the most thorough reaming out Peggy had ever heard. She understood maybe one word in three, but that was plenty. Muller would've needed to get plopped into a specimen jar as soon as he was born to be as congenitally idiotic as the sergeant claimed, and he would have had to be 165 years old to have acquired all the vices the sergeant imputed to him. By the time the man got done, nothing was left of Muller but a demoralized puddle of goo on the floor. So it seemed to Peggy, anyhow.
"I am sorry you ran into this…individual," the desk sergeant told her. She'd never dreamt the word could sound so filthy. "By all means visit your embassy. A formal complaint will go into his record, which is good."