If he admitted it hurt a little, it doubtless hurt a lot. Theo didn’t want to command the panzer, even for a little while. He saw he’d have to, though. He made himself nod. “All right.” The first thing he did after that-even before he scrambled into the turret to trade places with Witt-was to stick a fresh thirty-two-round box on his machine pistol.
Leave in Madrid. Chaim Weinberg couldn’t have been happier. Sure, he’d left New York City, come to Spain, and joined the Abe Lincolns to fight Fascism. When he first got off the boat, he’d been raring to shoot the enemies of the working class every hour of every day of every week.
But that was three years ago now. One of the big differences between a rookie and a veteran was that the vet developed a sense of proportion. Chaim still wanted to kill Fascists. Every hour of every day? Well, no. For one thing, that increased the chances that the Fascists would kill him instead. And, for another, there was more to life than killing people, no matter how much they deserved it.
A hot bath. Delousing. Clean clothes. A shave with hot lather from a barber. Hell, with any lather. In the field, Chaim just scraped his face with a straight razor when he bothered to shave at all.
And then… Madrid! Wine-usually not good wine, but he wasn’t fussy. The lousy Spanish beer would also do. Women-usually not good women, either, but who needed an excessively good woman when you were just back from the front? Song-either in a cantina or coming out of the speakers at a movie house. Sitting in a comfortable chair in the dark for a couple of hours, watching beautiful people do things that had nothing to do with war, was not the least of pleasures… at least, if the air-raid sirens didn’t start to scream right when the flick was getting to the good part.
The food was better in Madrid, too. It also cost more. This particular leave, Chaim wasn’t inclined to complain. He’d come away from the trenches with money in his pocket. A dice game with an optimist had redistributed some wealth. From him, according to his abilities. To me, according to my needs, Chaim thought happily.
So, clean and smooth-cheeked and even fragrant to the extent of a splash of bay rum, his belly full, enough vino in him to help him ignore what a jackass he was being, he sat in some late-afternoon shade outside Communist Party headquarters and waited for the revolutionary vanguard to knock off for the day. If he’d drunk a little more, he might have sauntered right on in. And the Reds in there likely would have thrown him out on his ass. Sometimes waiting was better.
He didn’t want to do anything strenuous, not in the ferocious summer heat. Even the pigeons that begged for crumbs begged in slow motion. They retreated in a hurry, though, if he moved in a way that looked dangerous. During harder times, Madrilenos had eaten a lot of their cousins. The survivors were the wary ones. Darwin had known which end was up, all right.
Because of the afternoon siesta, Spanish offices let out late. Chaim didn’t mind; he was used to the rhythm of life here, and liked it better than the way things worked in the States. Except for pissing off the pigeons because he had no crumbs, he was happy enough to wait.
People started to come out about when the blast-furnace heat began easing off. Spaniards either worked or dozed while it was hot outside. Once it got nicer, they did what they wanted to do instead. A damned civilized arrangement, when you got right down to it.
There she was! The adrenaline stab Chaim felt reminded him too much of a near miss from a machine-gun bullet. You can still chicken out, he reminded himself. But himself was already getting up and walking toward her. Had he ever stormed into a Nationalist trench so happily? He didn’t think so. Then again, he hadn’t had such incentives storming trenches.
“?Hola!?Que tal?” he said. His accent grated in his own ears.
No doubt it sounded even harsher to La Martellita. She was so pretty, Chaim didn’t care. That hair! That mouth! It made him imagine things thoroughly illegal back in good old New York-which didn’t mean people there didn’t do them, and enjoy doing them, as much as they did anywhere else.
She was tiny, but that didn’t bother Chaim, either; he wasn’t very tall himself. Her shape was everything it should have been, and a little more besides. Her eyes… looked at him as if he’d come out of the wrong end of one of those wary pigeons.
“Oh. You,” she said. Her nom de guerre meant The Little Hammer, the way Molotov’s meant Son of a Hammer. And if she’d had a sickle to go with it, she would have cut Chaim down at the ankles. “What do you want?”
“I have some leave. I was hoping”-Chaim heard himself butcher the participle-“you would teach me more about proper Party doctrine.” He couldn’t just say, I want to tear your clothes off and jump on you. Well, he could, but he knew she’d kill him for real if he tried. Dinner and a movie were long odds, too. If she had any kind of weakness where he was concerned, ideology was it. She thought his ideology was weak. Wasn’t it her duty to instruct the ignorant and backward? He sure hoped it was.
Her gull-wing eyebrows rose. “You were?” Then those eyebrows came down and together, as if she were aiming a rifle at his kishkes. “I thought you were proud of your errors.”
“Not me.” Chaim denied everything. When Peter denied knowing Jesus Christ, he probably did it with an eye toward laying some broad in Jerusalem who thought old J.C. was nothing but a windbag. A stiff dick had no conscience.
“Why should I do it?” La Martellita demanded. “Doesn’t the Abraham Lincoln Battalion have a Party cadre?” She knew damn well the Lincolns did.
Humbly, Chaim answered, “You were the one who showed me my mistakes. You must be the one who knows them best.” No, no conscience at all.
She looked at him-looked through him. “Is that all you want me to do?”
“No entiendo,” Chaim lied. He understood her much too well, and she understood him much too well, too.
Was it possible to sound too innocent? Evidently. She stuck her elegantly arched nose in the air. “You can find someone else, I’m sure,” she said, and walked away. Any football ref in America would have given that walk a backfield in motion penalty.
“Doesn’t it matter that I’m fighting for the Republic?” Chaim called after her.
She paused and turned back to him. “It matters to the Republic. It matters to Spain. To me…” She didn’t even bother finishing that. She just turned again and went on walking away.
“Wait!” Chaim cringed at the desperation in his voice.
To his surprise, she did stop once more. “If you need to find a whorehouse so badly, I can tell you where they are.”
She might have torched his ears with a Molotov cocktail. “Never mind,” he muttered.
“Bueno.” Her shrug of victory was magnificent. “I’m sure you can get to one with no help from me. Hasta la vista. ” Away she strode, like a long home run off the bat of Jimmy Foxx or Hank Greenberg: going, going, gone.
Chaim stared after her till she rounded a corner and disappeared. Then he kicked at the battered sidewalk. A tiny pebble skittered away from his boot. A pigeon pecked at it, discovered it wasn’t food, and sent him a stare full of bird-brained reproach. He hardly noticed. “Ahh, shit,” he said in English.
And then, with nothing better to do, he did go find a brothel. It was the lousiest good time he’d ever had in his life. Yeah, he had his ashes hauled, but he left the place gloomier than he’d gone in. You couldn’t get too much of what you didn’t really want to begin with.
He got drunk. Finding a bar in Madrid was even easier than finding a brothel. He got into a brawl. An equally drunk Spaniard pulled a knife on him. He kicked it out of the guy’s hand-which he probably couldn’t have done sober (or wouldn’t have been stupid enough to try)-and pounded the crap out of him. That satisfied Chaim no better than the whore had.