“That’s twice now you’ve put words in my mouth,” Weyr said.
“Oh, give me a break!” Tom rolled his eyes. “The brass was doing what the brass always does. It was trying to hide the bad news. Sometimes you can get away with that in wartime. See? I admit it! But the war’s over and done with. Harry Truman said so. He even acted like it. Rationing’s dead as a dodo. He wants it both ways here, though. The war’s over and done with…except when the brass says it’s not. The American people aren’t dumb enough to fall for that, Captain.”
“I take it back. You should be a politician, Mr. Schmidt, not a writer. You sure seem to like making speeches,” Weyr said. “But you can huff and puff as much as you want. You still won’t blow the Pentagon down.”
“Too big for that, all right. Even flying an airplane into this place wouldn’t knock down much of it,” Tom said.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Captain Weyr went on, “And you can also huff and puff as much as you want, here in my office or in your column, and you won’t get to Germany to watch the troops coming home…. May I speak off the record? Do you respect that?”
“Yes, I do. And yes, go ahead.” Tom wasn’t happy about it, but he meant it. If you said something was off the record and then went ahead and used it anyway, in nothing flat nobody would talk to you off the record any more. And you needed to hear that kind of stuff, even if you couldn’t use it.
“Okay. This is Ollie Weyr talking, not Captain Weyr. Way it looks to me is, guys like you are a big part of the reason Congress won’t pay for the German occupation any more. If you weren’t pissing and moaning about every little thing that goes wrong over there-”
“And every big one,” Tom broke in.
“Shut up. I’m not done. Maybe Germany’ll be fine once we get out. I don’t know. You can’t know ahead of time. But it’s like the President said on the radio not long ago. If things go wrong, if the Nazis get back in, I know where a bunch of the blame lands.”
“And you say I make speeches?” Tom laughed in the Navy captain’s face. “You ought to look in a mirror some time.”
“At least I’m working for my country,” Weyr said.
“So am I. Last time I looked, the First Amendment was part of what we were fighting for,” Tom retorted. “Too much to expect anybody from the government to understand that.”
“Yeah, you hot reporters go on and on about the First Amendment. All I’ve got to say is, you’re using it to help guys who’d stamp it out first chance they got. We had those SOBs squashed a couple of years ago.”
“You wish you did,” Tom interrupted. “In your dreams, you did.”
“If they start running Germany again, it won’t be because the military failed,” Weyr said. “It’ll be because the press and the pressure groups made it impossible for us to do our job.”
“Can I quote you on that?” As soon as Tom asked, he wished he hadn’t. Now he’d given Weyr a chance to say no.
And Weyr did, or close enough: “That was still Ollie talking, not Captain Weyr. If you want to say it’s a military officer’s personal opinion, go ahead. It’s not the Navy’s official opinion. I can’t speak for the Army, but I’ve never heard anything to make me think it’s their official opinion, either.”
“But a lot of their people believe it, too?” Tom suggested.
Captain Weyr only shrugged. “You said that. I didn’t.”
Too bad, Tom thought.
Bernie Cobb walked through Bad Tolz, looking for a place where he could buy a beer. The town sat in the foothills of the Alps south of Munich. The old quarter, where he was, lay on one side of the Isar; the new district, on the other side of the river, was a lot more modern. Mineral-water springs were what brought people here-people who weren’t GIs with a few days’ leave from prowling through Alpine passes, anyway. And there had been a training school for SS officer candidates here, too. That was out of business now…Bernie hoped.
“Cobb!” called another dogface-no, the guy was a three-striper.
“Sergeant Corvo!” Bernie said. “Jesus! I figured they woulda shipped you back to the States a long time ago.”
“Not me.” Carlo Corvo shook his head. As usual, he talked out of the side of his mouth. Also as usual, a cigarette dangled from one corner. “Draft sucked me in, yeah, but I’ve gone Regular Army. I got better chances in uniform than I ever would back in Hoboken-bet your ass I do.”
“You nuts?” Bernie said. “You got better chances of stopping a bullet or getting your balls blown off.”
“Nah.” Corvo shook his head. “I don’t exactly come from the good part of town-not that Hoboken’s got much of a good part. I don’t exactly hang around with the nice kind of people, neither. I shoot somebody over here, I don’t gotta worry about cops on my tail or spending time in the slammer.”
Mob connections? Bernie’d always wondered about that with Corvo. The swarthy sergeant still wasn’t exactly saying so. Not exactly, no, but it sure sounded that way.
Meanwhile, Corvo asked, “How come you ain’t back in-where was it? Arizona?”
“New Mexico,” Bernie answered. “Not enough points. I’m young. I’m single. I was out of action for a while after the Bulge ’cause of my feet, so I missed out on a couple of campaign stars. And besides, the cocksuckers keep bumping up how many a guy needs before they ship him out. A little luck, though, it won’t be too much longer.”
“You mean the money cutoff?” Sergeant Corvo said.
Bernie nodded. “What else? If they bring everybody home, they can’t very well leave me here all by my lonesome. Hope like hell they can’t, anyway.”
“Stupid fuckin’ assholes can’t even see the ends o’ their pointy noses, let alone past ’em,” Corvo said. “We bail out now, we’ll just hafta fight the Jerries again later on.”
“Later on suits me fine,” Bernie said. “Maybe my number won’t come up then. I don’t owe Uncle Sam one thing more, and he owes me plenty.”
Carlo Corvo sighed. “Always useta think you had pretty good sense.”
“I do. I’m not gonna catch Heydrich on my own. So why should I care more about the Army than the Army cares about me? I’ve been away from home more than three years now. Enough is enough. I’m looking out for number one.” Bernie paused. “I’m looking for some beer, too. You know any decent joints?”
By the way Corvo hesitated, knowing where to drink in Bad Tolz wasn’t the question for him. Whether he wanted to drink with Bernie was. At last, with another sigh, the noncom nodded. “Yeah. C’mon-I’ll show you. If you don’t wanna be no lifer, can’t hardly blame you for thinkin’ like you do, I guess.”
“Love you too, Ace,” Bernie said. He followed Corvo down the narrow, winding street.
XXVII
To Shmuel Birnbaum, K-rations and U.S. Army field kitchens were the greatest inventions in the history of the world. He ate and ate, and never once worried whether what he was eating had pork in it. “I quite caring about that during the war,” he told Lou Weissberg. “If it’s food, you eat it.”
“What with the little you got after the Nazis came through, who could blame you?” Lou said sympathetically.
“Oh. The Nazis. Sure. But I meant the last war, sonny.” One other thing the DP had made the acquaintance of was a safety razor with a limitless supply of blades. His cheeks were as smooth as Lou’s these days, but the stubble he’d had when Lou first met him was gray heading toward white, as was his hair. “Since 1914…a war…a revolution…a civil war…a time to watch yourself…another war…Been a long, long time since I made a fuss about what I got, as long as I got something.”
“You embarrass me because I had it easy in America,” Lou said.
“Your folks were smart-they got out. If I’d been smart, I would’ve got out, too,” Birnbaum said. “But I thought, It’s not so bad. It’s even getting a little better, maybe. Maybe not, too. For sure not, the way things worked out.”