Paris had already taken a lot of punishment. The Arc de Triomphe had a chunk bitten out of it. The Eiffel Tower was fifty feet shorter than it had been-and a meteorologist who'd been up at the top was never buried, because they couldn't find enough of him to put in a coffin. The Louvre had been hit. So had Notre Dame.
You needed to be determined, then, or maybe a little loopy, if you wanted to visit Paris. Some people said Hitler had vowed to wipe the capital of Germany's great continental rival off the face of the earth. Others claimed he was trying to terrify the Parisians, and the French in general, into tossing in the sponge.
From what Walsh knew of the corporal who'd promoted himself field-marshal, and from what he knew of Germans, that last seemed likely to him. Schrechlichkeit, they called it-frightfulness. If you went into Paris with a forty-eight-hour pass, you had a respectable chance of not coming back. On the other hand, if you were anywhere near Paris with pass in hand and you didn't go in… well, you might never see another chance.
And so Walsh jumped into the back of a British lorry along with the other lucky sods who'd wangled a bit of leave. The lorry bounced over potholes the size of baby washtubs. Just outside of town, it got a flat. The passengers piled out to give the driver a hand. Changing a tire in the rapidly deepening dark was always an adventure. Walsh learned some bad language he'd never heard before. For a man who'd been a soldier for more than half a lifetime, that was almost worth the trip into town by itself.
Hitler might hope to frighten the Parisians into surrendering, but he hadn't had much luck yet. The city was blacked out, of course, but it seemed noisier than ever. Touts stood in front of every establishment, shouting out the delights that lay beyond the black curtains. Quite a few of them used English; they knew a lot of Tommies would be here to blow off steam.
"Girls!" one of them yelled. "Beautiful girls! Wine! Whiskey!"
That all sounded good to Walsh. He pushed past the tout and into the dive. The glare of the electric lights inside almost blinded him. Loud jazz blared from a record. Before the war, there likely would have been a band. How many of the musicians were playing to amuse their buddies in the trenches right now?
Above the bar, a sign said PARIS CAN TAKE IT in English and what was bound to be the same thing in French. "Whiskey," Walsh told the barkeep, and slid a silver shilling across the zinc surface.
"Coming up," the fellow answered in tolerable English. He was graying at the temples; a black patch covered his left eye socket. He didn't look piratical-he looked tired and overworked. "Ice?"
"Why bother?" Walsh answered. With a shrug, the bartender gave him his drink. He hadn't asked for good whiskey. He hadn't got it, either. He consoled himself with the reflection that he probably also wouldn't have got it if he had asked for it. He made the drink disappear and put another shilling on the bar. "Why don't you fill that up again?"
"But of course." The bartender did. He nodded toward the stage. "The girls, they come on soon."
"Good enough, pal." Walsh knocked back the fresh drink. After a couple, good and bad didn't matter so much. Any which way, your tongue was stunned.
The girls weren't wearing much when they started their number. What they did have on sparkled and swirled transparently as they started gyrating on the little stage. They weren't so gorgeous as they would have been at the Folies Bergeres-this was just a little place-but they weren't half bad. And they rapidly started shedding their minimal costumes. Walsh pounded the bar and whooped. So did other soldiers and flyers in a camouflaged rainbow of uniforms.
Just before the girls got down to their birthday suits, air-raid sirens started screaming. Polylingual profanity filled the air, burning it bluer than all the tobacco smoke already had.
After yelling through a megaphone in French, the bartender switched to English: "Cellar this way! Must go! Raids very bad!"
What no doubt propelled half the fellows in the joint down into the cellar was the hope that the naked cuties would come down with them. No such luck, though. The girls had somewhere else to hide. Some of the rowdier-read, younger and drunker-men started to go up and look for them. Then, even in the cellar, they heard the German bombs whistling down. That stopped that. No matter how rowdy you were, you didn't want to meet explosives head on.
Thunderous blasts staggered Walsh and everybody else. A few men screamed. Walsh didn't, but he didn't blame them, either. It wasn't as if he never had when he was under fire. Then the lights went out. More hoarse shouts rose. Walsh put his hand on his wallet, just in case. Sure as hell, before long another hand touched his, there in the pitch blackness. When he stomped, his boot came down on a toe. Somebody yelped. The hand jerked away in a hurry.
Eventually the lights came on again. The all-clear warbled. The crowd in the cellar trooped upstairs. The bartender started serving drinks. Somebody cranked up the gramophone. On came the girls. Except for ambulances and fire engines wailing outside, the raid might never have happened. Except.
Chapter 5
Behind Sergei Yaroslavsky's SB-2, columns of black smoke rose above Wilno. Some of the columns had surely come from the bombs his plane had dropped. "Well," he said in some satisfaction, "we're finally starting to get somewhere."
"Oh, yes." Anastas Mouradian nodded. If he was anywhere near as pleased as Sergei, he hadn't bothered telling his face about it. "Somewhere. But where?"
"We've got the Poles on the run." Sergei almost shouted, to make himself heard over the drone of the SB-2's twin radial engines. "It took a while, but now we do. A week from now, we won't just be bombing Wilno. We'll be shelling it-see if we won't. The Poles are brave, but that only helps so much when you haven't got the horses-or when the horses are all you've got."
Mouradian nodded again. He'd heard the same stories Sergei had: about how Polish cavalrymen, square-topped csapkas on their heads and drawn sabers gleaming in the sun, had charged Red Army tanks. You did have to be brave to do something like that. Didn't you also have to be out of your mind? Not many of the Poles who'd galloped forward galloped back again.
"All right. Fine. We have the Poles on the run. Now what?" Mouradian said after what seemed a pause for consideration. His Russian was fluent, but carried a throaty Armenian accent. He sounded a little like Stalin on the radio. Sergei thought so, anyhow, but Mouradian got offended when the Russian told him so. If you listened to Stas, Armenian and Georgian were nothing like each other. But, if you listened to him explaining that, he still sounded like Stalin.
He also took a perverse-a Caucasian?-pride in being difficult. "What do you mean, 'Now what?'" Sergei said. "We take back the chunk of Poland Pilsudski stole from us while we were fighting our civil war, that's what."
"And what do the Poles do then?" Anastas inquired. "Better yet, what do the Germans do then?"
The Germans couldn't do what Sergei suggested. Human beings weren't made that way. Mouradian chuckled indulgently, as he might have at a six-year-old showing off. Sergei went on, "But who cares what they do? If the Poles make peace with us, the Nazis have to get out of Poland, right?"
"They're good at marching into places. They aren't so good at marching out again," Stas said, which was bound to be true. He added, "Besides, they're still at war with us any which way. They have been since Czechoslovakia."
"Well, so what?" Sergei didn't like to think about Czechoslovakia. He and Stas and Ivan Kuchkov had come out again, which a lot of other "volunteers" hadn't. He'd first made the acquaintance of the Bf-109 there. If he never saw another angular German fighter, he wouldn't be sorry.
"So Hitler will find some other way to keep the fight going," Mouradian predicted. "He hates the Soviet Union worse than he hates France and England."