Ivan Kuchkov was sitting in the pilot’s seat when Sergei led Federov into the cockpit. The two men who didn’t know each other stared. “Who are you?” Federov asked, at the same time as Kuchkov belligerently demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”
“That should be ‘Who the fuck are you, sir?’ ” Sergei said, and made the introductions. The Chimp looked at Federov as if to say Red Air Force standards were lower than he’d thought. The new copilot looked at Kuchkov as if to say he hadn’t expected to see one like this outside of a zoo. As meetings went, it wasn’t a success. Sergei could see that right off the bat.
Federov didn’t say anything much. Kuchkov muttered profanely under his breath, but not far enough under it. Sergei, and no doubt the new officer as well, learned that he thought Federov looked like a jerk and talked like a jerkoff. In point of fact, the Chimp expressed himself more frankly.
He expressed himself so frankly that Sergei leaned close to him. “Come on, Ivan,” he said quietly. “You can’t talk about a new crewmate like that.”
“Why the fuck not?” Ivan returned, still not bothering to hold his voice down. “We’re supposed to fly with that whistleass peckerhead? My dick we are! He’ll screw us over some kind of way-you wait and see.”
“How can you tell?” Sergei asked, clinically curious.
“ Bozhemoi! Just look at the motherfucker. Fuck me in the mouth if he’s not on the lam for something or other.”
Sergei didn’t think Vladimir Federov looked like a robber one jump in front of the law. To him, the new crewman seemed more like a would-be tough guy than the genuine article. Trying to explain that to Ivan would be pointless. It would also be hopeless, because the Chimp was no more inclined to listen than a veritable anthropoid would have been.
Disastrous introduction or not, they flew their first mission together three days later. They-and their squadron of SB-2s-bombed the train station in Bialystok to keep the Fascists from moving men and materiel through it. Federov seemed able to handle the instruments and calculations a bomb-aimer had to use. Sergei wasn’t sure the plane’s bombs hit the station, but they came as close as anyone else’s.
After the SB-2 came back to the airstrip, though, Ivan Kuchkov said, “See? I told you he was a useless cocksucker.” Sergei sighed. Weren’t the Nazis enough trouble? Plainly, Ivan didn’t think so.
Chapter 4
Sarah Goldman and her mother and father stood in a long line outside the Munster Rathaus. Everybody in the line-graybeards, younger adults, children, babies-was Jewish. Everyone except the babies (exempt by the tender mercy of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) wore on his or her clothes a prominently displayed six-pointed yellow star with Jude imprinted on it in big, black, Hebraic-style letters.
The Nazis had figured out a brand-new way to make life miserable for Jewish residents in Germany. (Jews were no longer citizens of the Third Reich.) They all had to get new identity cards. And on each of those cards would be a new first name branding its possessor as a Jew-as if everything else the Reich had done were somehow inadequate.
From now on, her father, Samuel Goldman, would legally become Moses Samuel Goldman. All Jewish men in Germany would have Moses grafted on in front of whatever their first name happened to be. All Jewish women would have a new first name affixed in front of their own, too. For them, it was… Sarah.
“No fair,” Sarah said as the queue slowly advanced. “They shouldn’t need to bother with me. My card’s already fine. I could have stayed home and twiddled my thumbs instead of coming with you and-”
“Twiddling your thumbs here,” Father finished for her. “Even if you’ve already got the name the government aims to give you, it’s just as well you came along. The new card will probably be different from the old one some other way, too. The people who run things will be able to see who’s, God forbid, using an old ID card, and all the people who are will catch it.”
He’d spent many years in the classroom and lecture hall, passing on his knowledge of ancient Greece and especially Rome. Like an actor, he could put anything he wanted into his voice. A stranger walking by would be sure he approved of all the moves the government made. So would an informer. Sarah knew better. So did her mother. Neither Sarah nor Hanna Goldman said anything, though. Why stir up more trouble? Didn’t Jews in Germany already have plenty?
Although a bright sun shone down from a blue sky, it was still bitterly cold. Sarah couldn’t remember a winter that had dug its claws in deeper or clung to Germany, to all of Europe, harder. Neither could Father, who’d spent three winters in the trenches during the last war. That he was a wounded, decorated veteran made things a little easier for the Goldmans than they were for most German Jews. Not much, but a little. When you weren’t in such good shape, you took what you could get.
Naturally, the Jews went into the city hall by a side entrance. If that line had snaked up the stairs to the main doorway, Jews might have-gasp!-inconvenienced Aryans. In the Third Reich, what could be worse? Nothing either Sarah or Nazi officials could think of.
Portraits of Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, and other Nazi Bonzen hung on the walls of the hallway along which the Jews had to go. Maybe it was Sarah’s imagination, but the photographs seemed to be glowering at the Chosen People. Maybe it was her imagination, but she didn’t think so.
When she whispered her thought to Father, he snorted softly and whispered back: “Chosen People, nothing. We’re the Singled-Out People, is what we are.”
“Yes!” Sarah exclaimed. The phrase fit much too well. God had singled out the Jews all those years ago, and now the Nazis were doing it instead. Didn’t that mean the Nazis had assumed the mantle of divinity? If you asked them, they would tell you yes.
Along with the National Socialists’ icons hung portraits of the local Party leaders, men nobody outside of Munster would recognize. They looked just as peevish as the Nazi big shots who ordered much of Europe around from Berlin. Maybe they were less ambitious, maybe only less lucky. Some of them seemed quite ready to start telling Czechs and Danes and Dutchmen what to do.
Down the hallway swept a strange apparition: the Bishop of Munster, in full ecclesiastical regalia: a uniform far older and, to Sarah’s eyes, far more impressive than the quasi-military garb that so delighted the Nazis. He stopped and asked one of the Jews, “What are you poor, unhappy people doing here?”
The man explained. Even speaking politely to a Jew could land someone in trouble. But Clemens August von Galen was already in trouble with the authorities for having the nerve to complain about the way they tried to rein in the Catholic Church in Germany. If they wanted to toss him into a concentration camp, they didn’t need to blame him for being friendly to Jews.
He rolled his eyes now at the answer he got. “This is a disgrace,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. “They aren’t content with harassing you every other way they can think of? Now they have to rob you of your names, too?”
No one was brave enough to reply to him after that. Nazi functionaries clumped up and down the corridor in their shiny jackboots. Anything a Jew said would be noted and held against him.
“Disgraceful,” the Bishop of Munster said again. Robes swirling around him, he strode away. Sarah was far from the only Jew who stared admiringly after him. You couldn’t get in trouble for just looking. She didn’t think you could, anyhow.
Her father leaned close and whispered in her ear: “If a few hundred important people had spoken up like that when things were starting out, none of this Schweinerei would have happened. None of it could have happened.”
“But they didn’t,” Sarah answered.
“I know,” said Samuel Goldman-former professor of ancient history and classics, now a road-gang laborer. No wonder he sounded bleak. Things were bleak for the Jews of Munster, as they were for Jews all over Germany.