Chaim was still with it: at least well enough to make sure the Nationalists didn’t try anything cute while they figured they still had the Abe Lincolns punchy. A couple of Republican machine guns sprayed murder out across the lunar ground between the lines to send Sanjurjo’s men the same message. A Nationalist Maxim hammered back. Chaim ducked, though none of the bullets came close.
A few feet away, Mike Carroll hopped down off the firing step. He was a lot taller than Chaim, so more of him stuck up above the parapet unless he was careful. And he was: he’d been in Spain even longer than Chaim. You learned and you lived. You could learn and not live. Bad luck always lay around the corner somewhere. But you couldn’t not learn and live. Stupidity was its own punishment.
“Wonder what the Fritzes are up to,” Mike said. He’d also heard the scuttlebutt about Vaclav, then.
“Nothing good,” Chaim said with doleful certainty.
“Tell me about it,” Mike said. “Germans are nothing but bad news. Even the Fritzes in the Internationals are a bunch of Prussians. And if the Nazis are sniffing around again …”
“Less I see of ’em, better I like it.” Chaim hadn’t seen any Nazis here, not with his own eyes. But he believed Vaclav had shot one. The way the Nationalists were throwing hate around sure argued for it.
Mike changed the subject, asking, “How’s your kid?”
“He’s great,” Chaim answered with a grin. “He’s at that silly age, where his own toes are the funniest goddamn things in the world. He can laugh and roll over and kinda sit up. He says something that sounds like dada, but he doesn’t know it’s me.”
“Sounds like a baby, all right.” Mike might have heard more than he’d really wanted to know. Perhaps incautiously, he asked another question: “And how’s his mother doing?”
Chaim’s face went hard. “La Martellita is … going along,” he said in a voice like a slammed door. She was not only going along, she was going out with a Red Army captain, one of Stalin’s henchmen who’d stayed in Spain because they had no chance of getting back to the USSR. By everything Chaim had heard, the Russian was shorter and squatter and homelier than he was himself.
If he ever did see the guy, he figured he’d punch him in the nose. If La Martellita had given him the bum’s rush for some tall, handsome Spanish grandee (a Spanish grandee with sense enough not to have joined the Nationalists; there were a few, though not many), he could have lived with that. But a Russian plug-ugly? Maybe she just liked apes.
It was, no doubt, a good thing Chaim had never set eyes on the Red Army captain. If he did give the son of a bitch a fat lip, he might end up in front of a firing squad. The Republic took its friendship with the Soviet Union very seriously.
Maybe La Martellita took up with him not because he was built like a hydrant but because he was a Russian Communist. Did it feel better because you were getting shtupped by somebody from Marxism-Leninism’s holy land? If you expected it to, then it probably did. Women worked that way. Chaim thought it felt great all the goddamn time.
The Nationalists’ loudspeakers came to life then. “You should all come over to our side. You’re just helping the atheistical Russians!” The man at the microphone stumbled a little over atheistical, but he managed to bring it out.
He got nothing but laughs, though. The Nationalists were so wrapped up in the Catholic Church, they thought their enemies were, too. That screwed up their propaganda, especially when they aimed it at the Internationals. “Us, we’re the atheistical Americans, by God!” Chaim said, and laughed harder than ever.
Then the Nationalist propaganda announcer said, “And half the filthy Bolsheviks-more than half-are Jews! Do you want to do what the disgusting Hebrews tell you to do? Of course you don’t!”
Some of the Spaniards who filled out the Internationals’ ranks these days might take that seriously. So few Jews lived in Spain-they couldn’t do it legally till the Republic came along-that the locals believed a lot of the anti-Semitic bullshit the Fascists put out. They’d been hearing the same kind of nonsense their whole lives.
“No wonder the Republic shot so many priests,” Mike Carroll said.
“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed. “Shame they couldn’t have shot that braying jackass, too.”
After the braying jackass finally shut up, one of the young Spaniards in the Abe Lincolns came up to Chaim and said, “You’re the one they call el narigon loco, right?”
“The crazy kike, that’s me.” Chaim nodded, not without pride. He’d earned the nickname the hard way, with his go-to-hell, no-holds-barred style of cantina fighting. “What about it, Rodrigo?”
“Well …” Rodrigo, by contrast, sounded almost shy. “Are you a Marxist, then, or are you a Jew?”
“Absolutamente,” Chaim declared, clearly enunciating each of the six syllables.
For some reason, that didn’t seem to help the Spanish Abe Lincoln. “But which?” Rodrigo asked.
“I sure am,” Chaim replied. Rodrigo started to ask him another question, then plainly decided it was a losing fight. The kid mooched off, hands thrust into the pockets of his revolutionary coveralls.
Mike Carroll laughed, but softly, taking care that the proud Spaniard couldn’t hear him do it. “That wasn’t fair, man,” he said.
“Hey, neither was the question. You can be a Jew and a Marxist at the same time. Look at all the Old Bolsheviks,” Chaim said.
“Yeah, and look what happened to them, too,” Mike said, which made Chaim wince. An awful lot of the Jews who’d helped bring off the Russian Revolution ended up starring in Stalin’s show trials or going to the camps or to the wall without benefit of any trial, show or otherwise. The Soviet Union was a rugged place. As far as Chaim was concerned, it still beat the hell out of the Reich.
Chapter 6
Alistair Walsh couldn’t stand Germans. The war in North Africa had been going so well. No matter what Mussolini said, no matter how far he stuck out his breakwater of a chin, the Italians mostly didn’t want to fight. The ones who did have some pluck didn’t have the tanks or lorries or planes they needed to do anything with it.
But with the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe in the game, everything changed. Tobruk hadn’t fallen. The road to western Libya hadn’t opened. As a matter of fact, the English in Egypt were more worried about keeping the bloody Fritzes-and the Italians along for the ride-away from Alexandria, the Nile, and the Suez Canal.
Lose the canal and we’ve gone a long way toward losing the war, Walsh thought glumly. It hadn’t come to that. It hadn’t even come close to that-yet. But he watched the skies with a grim earnestness he hadn’t needed till Hitler came down to give Musso a hand. He’d met Stukas in France and in Norway. He didn’t much fancy them.
Hurricanes buzzed above the English army. Walsh approved. Hurricanes could give a good account of themselves even against 109s. And they were death on Stukas. Any planes that could hack dive-bombers out of the air seemed absolutely wizard to him.
He remembered again that he’d actually volunteered for this. I could have stayed back in good old Blighty, he reminded himself. Spring would just be coming into the air.
That was a good joke, or would have been if only it were funny. With no apparent effort, Egypt got hotter not long after the equinox than England did at the height of summer. Every time the wind stirred the desert, it was as if your eyes got sandpapered. He had goggles, but they didn’t help much. And the flies, which were merely bad during the winter, turned horrific as the blast furnace heated up.