By then, she didn't want to. She found herself pitying Muller, which she wouldn't have dreamt possible a few minutes earlier. As she walked out of the station, the sergeant tore into the cop again-something about getting the Reich in bad with an important neutral power. Let's hear it for the Red, White, and Blue, Peggy thought. Yeah! Let's!
In the end, she did go by the embassy. The underlings quickly shunted her up to Constantine Jenkins, whose job probably included dealing with obstreperous tourists. He heard her out and then said, "Sounds like the sergeant did worse to this fellow than we could manage in a month of Sundays."
"Ain't it the truth!" she said. "All the same, I do want you to make a formal complaint."
"Just remember that the official head of the Prussian police is Hermann Goring," Jenkins said. "He won't listen. If he does listen, he won't care."
"I understand all that," Peggy said. "I still want to get it on the record."
"Okay. I'll do it," Jenkins promised. "Maybe it'll keep some other American from getting dragged to a police station because he runs into a cop in a lousy mood."
"That'd be good," Peggy said. "See? I'm a public benefactor." She'd been a lot of things in her time, but that was a new one.
Undersecretary Jenkins gave her a look that would have been fishy if not for the half-hidden amusement she spotted. "What you are is a troublemaker," he said accurately. "And you enjoy making trouble for the Third Reich, too."
"Who, me?" Peggy couldn't possibly have been as innocent as she sounded. And, as a matter of fact, she wasn't. HANS-ULRICH RUDEL GULPED FROM a big mug of steaming black coffee. Plenty of pilots in the squadron were keeping themselves going with benzedrine. Hans-Ulrich thought pills were even more unnatural than alcohol. He didn't want to use them. If he had to, though, if it meant victory for the Reich…
And any one mission might. He knew that. They were so close, so close. The radio kept going on about the Battle of France, the decisive battle. If they could break through the enemy's lines, he'd never be able to form new ones. Maybe nobody in the whole battle could see that as well as the flyers who went after the French strongpoints.
He wondered whether the Allied fighter pilots had that same sense of seeing the whole chessboard at once when they looked down from five or six thousand meters. Or were they just trying to spot the Stukas before the German dive-bombers roared down and blasted another bridge or train or battery of 75s to hell and gone?
He shrugged. He had more immediate things to worry about. The German attack had accomplished a lot. It had knocked the Low Countries out of the war. It had pushed French and English ground forces back from the middle of Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. The enemy was on the ropes.
But he wasn't out, worse luck. And, while German supply lines had got longer and thinner, those of the Allies had contracted. The irony facing the Germans was that success made further success harder. Nobody on the other side could be in much doubt about what the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had in mind any more, either. That made planning easier for the forces in khaki.
Which didn't mean the forces in Feldgrau couldn't still win. Hans-Ulrich was flying off an airstrip in northern France. Not long before, it had been a French strip. A couple of smashed French fighters still lay alongside the runway. German technicians had cannibalized them for usable parts-they were just scrap metal now.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Rudel hoped it came from his own side, giving the Allies hell. Otherwise, French and English guns would be pounding the Landsers. He thanked God he was no foot soldier. He slept soft, and in a real bed-a cot, anyway. He ate well. Most of the time, he was in no danger. The enemy could still kill him. That came with any kind of military life. But he wouldn't be hungry and filthy and lousy when it happened, if it happened. He wasn't scared all the time, either.
Of course, when he was, he was about as scared as any human being could be. That also held true for the infantry, though. It was true for the ground pounders a lot more often than it was for him, too.
Sergeant Dieselhorst came by, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He sketched a salute and asked, "Have they told you what we're doing next?"
"Not yet." Hans-Ulrich pointed toward Major Bleyle's tent. "As soon as the boss lets me know, I'll tell you."
"If they haven't hauled him off in the middle of the night," Dieselhorst remarked.
Hans-Ulrich looked around in all directions. Nobody stood close to them, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to what they were saying. Even so, he wagged a finger at the rear gunner. "If you aren't careful, they'll haul you off in the middle of the night," he warned.
"Yeah, I know." Dieselhorst made a sour face. "That's not what I signed up for, dammit."
"Neither did I," Rudel said. "Who would have dreamt so many traitors to the Vaterland were still running around loose?"
"Yeah. Who?" Dieselhorst said tonelessly. The cigarette twitched as he eyed Hans-Ulrich. At last, almost against his better judgment, he went on, "Who knows how many of them really are traitors, too?"
"What else would they be, if the government arrested them?" Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.
Sergeant Dieselhorst's cigarette jerked again. "That's right. You're the milk drinker." He might have been reminding himself. "Sometimes people get arrested because they tell friends the truth. Sometimes they get arrested because somebody with pull doesn't like them. And sometimes, by God, they get arrested for no reason at all."
"Dirty traitors tried to overthrow the Fuhrer and stab us in the back again!" Rudel said hotly. "Where would we be if they'd got away with it?"
"Better off?" Albert Dieselhorst suggested. Then he held up his hand. "And if you don't care for that, go tell one of the pigdogs in a black shirt about it. You'll have a new gunner faster than you can fart."
"I don't want a new gunner. I want-"
Before Hans-Ulrich could say what he wanted, Dieselhorst did it for him: "You want a good little boy who never makes trouble and never looks past the end of his nose unless he's aiming at the enemy. You want somebody just like you. I wish I were, Lieutenant-you can bet your ass it'd make my life simpler. But I've got pals-better Germans than I'll ever be-in concentration camps or dead because those SS bastards hauled 'em out of bed in the middle of the night. This isn't Russia, dammit. This is a civilized country, or it's supposed to be."
Had a flyer Rudel didn't know well said anything like that, he would have reported the man to the SS without the least hesitation. But he was alive not least because Sergeant Dieselhorst was good at what he did. By any reasonable definition, Dieselhorst was a good German, a patriotic German. If he was talking this way…
"You're upset. You're not yourself," Hans-Ulrich said.
Dieselhorst stamped out the cigarette. "I'm not crazy, if that's what you're trying to say. This whole war is a lot more fucked up than you've figured out yet. And some of the people who're running it-"
"Don't say any more. I don't want to listen to it," Rudel said. "All I have to do is fly. The same with you, too."
"Christ, Lieutenant, flying is the easy part-any jerk with an airplane can do that," Dieselhorst said. "Trying to steer clear of the shit that pours down from on high, that's where the going gets tough."
"Well, let's see what we have to do, that's all." Hans-Ulrich was grateful for the chance to turn away. As far as Sergeant Dieselhorst was concerned, he was part of the shit that poured down from on high. They'd gone through much too much together for Hans-Ulrich to feel easy about turning in the sergeant now. He'd keep his mouth shut-for the moment, anyway.