He listened anxiously to find out whether any of the newly launched shells would gouge fresh holes in the rubble right around here. In that case, they might gouge holes in him, which was not something he eagerly anticipated. But the bursts were at least half a mile off. Nothing to get hot and bothered about-not for him, anyhow. If some poor damned Madrilenos had just had their lives turned inside out and upside down… well, that was a damn shame, but they wouldn't be the first people in Spain whose luck had run out, nor the last.
Republican guns answered the Nationalist fire. Those were French 75s. The sound they made going off was as familiar to Chaim as a telephone ring. The Republicans had a lot of them: ancient models Spain had bought from France after the last war, and brand new ones the French had sent over the Pyrenees when the big European scrap started. All at once, the neutrality patrol turned to a supply spigot when the French and English realized Hitler was dangerous after all.
And then, after the Wehrmacht hit the Low Counties and France itself, the spigot to Spain dried up. The Republic would have been screwed, except Sanjurjo also had himself a supply drought: the Germans and Italians were using everything they made themselves.
One of the explosions from the 75s sounded uncommonly large and sharp. Weinberg and Carroll shared a wince. Chaim knew what that kind of blast meant. The French guns mostly fired locally made ammunition these days. And locally made ammo, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. Chaim carried Mexican cartridges for his French rifle. He didn't trust Spanish rounds. German ammunition was better yet, but impossible to get these days except by plundering dead Nationalists.
A barmaid stepped out of a cantina and waved to the two Internationals. "?Vino?" she called invitingly.
Chaim surprised himself by nodding. "C'mon," he told Mike. "We can hoist one for the poor sorry bastards at that gun."
"Suits," Carroll said. You rarely needed to ask him twice about a drink. Very often, you didn't need to ask him once.
The cantina was dark and gloomy inside. It would have been gloomier yet except for a big hole in the far wall. It smelled of smoke and booze and sweat and urine and hot cooking oil and, faintly, of vomit-like a cantina, in other words. Mike did order wine. Chaim told the barmaid, "Cerveza." He tried to lisp like a Castilian.
She understood him, anyhow. Off she went, hips working. She brought back their drinks, then waited expectantly. Chaim crossed her palm with silver. That made her go away. He raised his mug. "Here's to 'em."
"Here's to what's left of 'em, anyway," Carroll said. They both drank. Mike screwed up his face. "Vinegar. How's yours?"
"Piss," Chaim answered. Sure as hell, the beer was thin and sour. But, save for a few bottles imported from Germany, he'd never had beer in Spain that wasn't. You could drink it. He did.
And Mike got outside his vinegary red. He raised his glass for a refill. The barmaid took care of him and Chaim. He paid this time. Outside, the not-distant-enough enemy guns started booming again. Again, nothing came down close enough to get excited about. That was good enough for Chaim. He'd go back up to the line PDQ. Till he did… What was that line? Eat, drink, and be merry, he thought, and deliberately forgot the rest of it.
Chapter 4
Peggy Druce positively hated Berlin. The Philadelphia socialite had visited the capital of Germany several times between the wars. She'd always had a fine old time then. If you couldn't have a fine old time in the Berlin of the vanished, longed-for days before Hitler took over, you were probably dead.
If you could have a fine old time in this miserable land of blackouts and rationing, something had to be wrong with you. Almost all civilian cars had vanished from the streets. Even the parked ones were in danger. One propaganda drive after another sent people out to scavenge rubber or scrap metal or batteries.
That didn't mean the streets were empty, though. Soldiers paraded hither and yon, jackboots thumping. When they passed by reviewing stands, they would break into the goose step. Otherwise, they just marched. The characteristic German stride looked impressive as hell-the Nazis sure thought so, anyhow-but it was wearing. Soldiers, even German soldiers, were practical men. They used the goose step where they got the most mileage from it: in front of their big shots, in other words. When the bosses weren't watching, they acted more like ordinary human beings.
Columns of trucks and half-tracks and panzers also rumbled up and down Berlin's broad boulevards. Peggy took a small, nasty satisfaction in noting that the treads on the tanks and half-tracks tore hell out of the paving. Repair crews often followed the armored columns, patching up the damage.
A Berlin cop-a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a limp he'd probably got in the last war-held out his hand to Peggy and snapped, "Papieren, bitte!"
"Jawohl," she replied. Ja-fucking-wohl, she thought as she fumbled in her purse. Her German had got a lot better than it was when she first arrived in Berlin. Getting stuck somewhere would do that to you. She found her American passport and pulled it out with a flourish. "Here," she said, or maybe, "Hier." The word sounded the same in English and auf Deutsch.
The cop blinked. He didn't see an eagle that wasn't holding a swastika every day. He examined the passport, then handed it back. "You are an American." He turned truth to accusation. He was a cop, all right.
"Ja." Peggy was proud of herself for leaving it right there. She damn near added Nothing gets by you, does it? or Very good, Sherlock or something else that would have landed her in hot water. Her husband always said she talked first and thought afterwards. Good old Herb! She missed him like anything. He knew her, all right.
"What is an American doing in Berlin?" the cop demanded. He took it for granted that, even though the USA was neutral, Americans wouldn't be pro-German. Maybe he wasn't so dumb after all.
And Peggy gave him the straight truth: "Trying to get the hell out of here and go home."
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she had them back. Too late, as usual. She'd given another cop the straight truth not too long ago, and he'd hauled her down to the station on account of it. If a desk sergeant with better sense hadn't realized pissing off the United States wasn't exactly Phi Beta Kappa for the Reich, she might have found out about concentration camps from the inside.
If this policeman was another hothead… If his desk sergeant was, too… You never wanted to get in trouble in Hitler's Germany. And, since the Germans themselves were walking on eggs after a failed coup against the Fuhrer, you especially didn't want to get in trouble now.
The cop paused. He lit a Hoco. Like any other German cigarette these days, it smelled more like burning trash than tobacco. "If you don't want to be in Berlin to begin with, what are you doing here?" he asked reasonably.
"I was in Marianske Lazne when the war started," Peggy answered, using the Czech name with malice aforethought.
Sure as hell, the Berlin cop said, "You were where?" Give a kraut a Slavic place name, and he'd drown in three inches of water.
"Marienbad, it's also called," Peggy admitted.
Light dawned. "Oh! In the German Sudetenland!" the policeman exclaimed. "How lucky for you to be there when the Fuhrer's forces justly reclaimed it for the Reich."
"Well… no," Peggy said. For the first time, the cop's face clouded over. See? Keep trying, Peggy jeered at herself. You'll stick your foot in it sooner or later. Trying to extract the foot, she added, "I almost got killed."
For a wonder, it worked. "Ach, ja. In wartime, this can happen," the cop said, rough sympathy in his voice. Everything would have been fine if he hadn't added, "With those miserable, murderous Czech brutes all around, you should thank heaven you came through all right."
Peggy bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep from blurting something that would have got her sent to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other interesting place. Count to ten, she thought frantically. No. Count to twenty, in Czech! The Czechs hadn't been the problem. The Germans had. Shelling and bombing Marianske Lazne was one thing-that was part of war. But the way the Nazis started in on the Jews who were taking the waters after overrunning the place… No, she didn't want to remember that.