“Mais certainement, Lieutenant.” Mirouze sounded almost as dry as Demange could manage.
A couple of more German trucks rattled up to take away more troops. Each one also towed a 105mm howitzer. Demange knew he wouldn’t be sorry to see those snub-nosed murderers disappear back into Germany. The trucks, though, sounded as arthritic as they looked. The Americans, now, the Americans by God knew how to build trucks. Demange knew little and cared less about American boxing stories. Trucks mattered, though.
American trucks, he thought, could even stand up to Russia’s ruts and bogs. German models hadn’t been able to; they started falling to pieces in short order. Demange couldn’t get too scornfully amused about that-French trucks went to bits just about as fast.
More Boches climbed into the trucks. On Belgian roads, they’d do all right. Pretty soon, the Wehrmacht would leave the Low Countries. Everything would get back to normal. Or everything would except the endless kilometers of barbed wire, the minefields that would go on maiming people and farm animals for years to come, the trenches, the bomb craters, the reinforced-concrete fortifications that would take dynamite to remove …
Demange remarked on those. Mirouze looked back at him. “Well, sir, if you’re going to worry about every little detail …”
“Ha!” Demange barked sour laughter. “You’d better watch yourself there, sonny. Bits of me are rubbing off on you. That’s fine when you’re in the trenches like this. Maybe not so good at the university, eh?”
“Maybe-but then you never know for sure,” Mirouze answered. “If I booby-trap a professor’s office, mm, that’s one way to get ahead.”
This time, Demange laughed for real. “There you go! And if the Germans get frisky again and the Army calls you back, you might get stuck with me again.” He’d had plenty of worse men under him, but he was damned if he’d say so. If Mirouze couldn’t figure it out, the hell with him. Demange grubbed in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes.
. .
Chaim Weinberg stared at the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers stabbing the heavens as the Ciudad de Santander chugged into New York harbor. He’d grown up with all this stuff, but it still felt dreamlike to him. He hadn’t set eyes on any of it since 1936.
Just about eight years, he thought in wonder. He’d been a kid when he set off to fight for the Spanish Republic. He wasn’t a kid any more. A lot of things, yeah, but not a kid. He looked down at the wreckage of his left hand. He had the scars to prove he was no kid, all right. He had a son to prove he was no kid, too, a son he’d probably never set eyes on again.
Tugboats shoved the freighter against a pier. The Santander had only a few cabins. They said Chaim’s was the best one. The good news was that he believed them. The bad news, unfortunately, was also that he believed them.
No-the good news was that he hadn’t had to worry about U-boats on the Atlantic crossing. They’d all gone home to Germany. The coalition of generals and fat cats heading the new government didn’t look to be any bargain. Compared to what the generals and fat cats had overthrown, though, they also didn’t seem so bad.
The scene on the pier wasn’t like the ones you saw in the movies when the big ocean liner came into port. No crowds in evening clothes out there, no band playing, no confetti. Next to no nothing. A short, broad-shouldered man in a dark brown fedora, a tweed jacket, and work pants stood there, along with a gray-haired woman wearing a flowered housedress.
Chaim waved. Moishe and Ruth Weinberg-his mother and father-waved back. “I gotta clear customs before I can see you,” he shouted. A moment later, he yelled the same thing in Yiddish. His father waved to show he got that.
Sure enough, when the gangplank came down, it came down on the far side of a chicken-wire fence on wheels that they rolled out to keep people from just strolling on into New York City. Chaim shouldered his duffel bag and went into the customs shed. It wasn’t as if he had a lot of treasures from Spain. A few old clothes, a big bottle of Spanish brandy for his folks, another one that he’d mostly emptied on the way over, some newspapers with photos of the Nationalist surrender-that was about it.
He pulled his passport out of his pocket to show it to the customs clerk. The green cover was bent and crinkled and stained with sweat and mud and blood. Some of the inside pages carried those stains, too.
As soon as the clerk opened the passport, he frowned. It wasn’t because of the stains. As far as Chaim could tell, he didn’t even notice those. He was looking for other things. “Don’t you have any current identification?” he asked in annoyance. “This passport expired years ago.”
“Well, I’ve got this.” Chaim produced his discharge papers from the Army of the Spanish Republic. The document was full of seals and stamps and rococo typography.
But it cut no ice with the customs clerk. “Have anything in a language a man can read? English? French? German?”
“Nope. My mom and pop are waiting for me on the pier, though. They’ll tell you I’m still the same meshuggeneh who got the passport.”
“What have you been doing in Europe, in, ah, Spain”-the clerk went through the endorsements on the passport’s back pages-“after this document became invalid?”
“Fighting Fascism,” Chaim answered proudly. “I can show you my picture in the paper when the Nationalists finally gave up. It’s pretty little, but you can still spot my smiling punim.”
He started to pull the newspaper out of the duffel. The clerk waved for him to stop. “Mr. Simmons!” the fellow called. “We have a difficult case here, I’m afraid.”
Chaim’s heart sank when he saw Mr. Simmons. From pale, bald head to gold-rimmed round glasses to respectable suit, the man was the spitting image of mid-level bureaucrats all over the world. What would he make of a rough-talking Marxist-Leninist Jew with out-of-date travel documents?
“What’s going on?” he asked, and his voice was as gray as his jacket.
The younger clerk and Chaim took turns explaining. Each talked over the other. Pretty soon, each was making a point of talking over the other. Mr. Simmons listened. He asked a few questions. He looked at Chaim’s passport, and at his smashed left hand, and at his discharge papers. Then he asked, “When you were in Spain, Mr. Weinberg, did you know an Abraham Lincoln named Wilmer Christiansen?”
“A long time ago,” Chaim answered. “Redhead, wasn’t he? Poor guy got killed on the Ebro in ’38, if I remember straight. He was all right, Will was. How come?”
“He was my nephew,” Simmons said. “Now let’s get this straightened out, shall we?”
And they did. With a few thumps from a rubber stamp, the irregularities in Chaim’s paperwork disappeared. The clerk who’d called Simmons over looked discontented, but he kept his mouth shut. When you called your superior over and he did something you didn’t expect, you were stuck with it.
Duffel bag over his shoulder again, Chaim walked out of the customs shed. He put the duffel down to thump his father on the back and hug his mother. “Your poor hand! Vey iz mir!” Ruth Weinberg exclaimed.
“It’s okay,” Chaim said. English felt funny in his mouth. He’d used it less and less as time in Spain went by. Americans in the Abe Lincolns kept getting hurt or killed, and Spaniards took their places. German-speaking Internationals could handle his Yiddish. He’d spoken Spanish whenever he went behind the lines, too, except when he was talking with Dr. Alvarez.
“You want I should carry the sack?” his father asked when they headed for the closest subway stop.
“Thanks, Pop. I can do it,” Chaim said. His head might have been on a swivel. None of the buildings here had been hit by bombs or artillery. Out of all the windows he saw, only one or two were boarded up. No bullet holes scarred concrete or pocked wooden doors. Cars and trucks and buses all seemed new and freshly painted. People didn’t have the pale, scrawny, wary look that went with hunger and fear. To someone newly come from Spain, everybody looked rich.