"Don't worry-I won't," Vera answered. She spoke Russian to him. He used a mix of Russian and Polish with her, flavored with Yiddish and French. They could both get along in six or eight different languages. Going around with Pete was doing wonders for her English.
She could have been polishing her Japanese just as easily. Tall, busty blond women fascinated Asians, as she had reason to know. To her, these days, men were men, regardless of where they came from. Well, almost. She'd never met even a Japanese major as open-handed as Pete McGill.
"You may really get to like him-who the hell knows?" Grynszpan said.
"Maybe." Vera left it right there. She knew Pete was nuts about her. She also knew exactly why: the sweaty athletics they performed together in her little upstairs room. He was a puppy. He didn't want anything fancy. He hardly knew there was anything fancy to want. For Vera, that made life easy. Well, easier.
She was made up and perfumed and wearing a blue silk dress-easy and cheap to do in Shanghai-when he came to the club to get her two days later. His eyes lit up as soon as he saw her. That was exactly what she'd had in mind. "Wow, babe! You look great!" he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
Most of the men she'd been with would have groped her, just to show everyone around that they could. She wondered if anybody'd kissed her on the cheek since she was ten years old. Offhand, she didn't think so. "What do we do? Where do we go?" she asked in English. That was the only language Pete knew, except for tiny bits of foul Chinese.
"We'll go to the Vienna Ballroom, and we won't dance," Pete declared.
That was one of the half-dozen fanciest cabarets in Shanghai. It put the Golden Lotus to shame. (So did plenty of clubs a lot less fancy than the one Pete named.) "What you do? Win lottery?" Vera asked. She meant it. She played the lottery herself. Ten dollars Mex could win half a million. Odds were long, but the lottery was legit. People did win, and did get paid when they won.
"I'm not that rich, but I didn't do bad. Had me four jacks when this other guy was mighty proud of his full house," Pete answered. He started to reach for his wallet, as if to show off how fat it was, but then stopped. You could land in all kinds of trouble if you flashed a roll in Shanghai-or in Dubuque, come to that.
The Vienna Ballroom sat at the corner of Majestic Road and Bubbling Well Road. The yellow brick building would have looked more at home in Vienna than it did in the Orient, but that was true of most of the International Settlement and the French Concession. Hard-faced guards with Lee-Enfield rifles stood outside the place. They were probably soldiers from one army or another who hadn't felt like leaving China when their tours were up. They only nodded to Pete and his lady. They were there to keep out the strife between Chinese and Japanese.
Inside, Celis' All-Star Orchestra blared away: second-rate jazz, with most of the tuxedoed musicians Chinese and the rest from all over the world. Pete wouldn't have been surprised if some of the white players were ex-soldiers, too. China got under some guys' skins the way Vera had got under his.
The maitre d' sized him up. A U.S. Marine in dress blues… two chevrons… not the best table. Expecting that, Pete slipped the guy a little something. Things improved: less than he would have liked, but enough to keep him from grousing out loud.
"Champagne, sir?" the fellow asked.
"You bet," Pete answered. He winked at Vera. "You get to drink the real stuff tonight, babe." She summoned up a blush.
He ordered steaks big enough to have come off the side of an elephant and rare enough to have still been mooing a couple of minutes earlier. Vera stared at hers in amazement but made it disappear as fast as Pete's. Waste not, want not had been drilled into her since she was a baby, when her mother and father made it to Manchuria one short jump ahead of the Reds. When the Japanese took Harbin, she'd made it to Shanghai the same way. If she jumped the right way now…
Some of the men out on the dance floor were European and American businessmen hanging on in Shanghai in spite of the widening war between China and Japan. Some were Japanese businessmen and officers. And some were sleek, plump Chinese collaborators in expensive suits, whirling their partners around as if Satchmo himself fronted the All-Star Orchestra.
Every single Oriental man danced with a white woman: almost all of them with a blonde or a redhead. Pete tried to guess which girls were hostesses here, which mistresses. Some danced better than others, but that was his only clue. The Japs and Chinamen all looked uncommonly smug. See? We've got the West by the short hairs, they might have been saying.
A Chinese man with gray at the temples came up to Vera and said, "Willst du tanzen?"
Even Pete could figure out that much German. "She's my friend," he said. "She doesn't work here."
He wasn't surprised when the Chinese fellow understood English; he'd assumed the man would. The Chinese eyed him, maybe wondering whether to make something out of it. Since Pete was half his age and twice his size, he decided not to: one of his smartest business decisions ever. He walked off, muttering what probably weren't compliments in Chinese.
A few minutes later, something big blew up a few blocks away. The lights flickered and went out for a couple of seconds. Celis' All-Star Orchestra discorded down into silence. A woman squealed. A man yelled, "Merde!" Then the power came on again. The master of ceremonies, a grin pasted onto his Eurasian face, called, "All part of life in Shanghai, folks! Next round on the house!"
That made people forget their jitters in a hurry. Pete grinned at Vera. "You know what, babe?"
"No. What?" she asked, as she knew she should.
"I've never had so much fun not dancing."
"Never?" she said innocently.
"Well, never with my clothes on, anyway," he answered, looking her up and down. She managed another blush. Pete waved for more bubbly. WHEN THREE NAKED GERMANS JUMPED into their stream in northern France, turtles dove off rocks and frogs sprang away into the grass with horrified "Freep!"s. Theo Hossbach didn't give a damn. He had some violet-scented soap he'd liberated from an abandoned French farmhouse, and he wanted to get clean. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a proper bath. The water was cold, but not too cold. You got used to it fast.
Adalbert Stoss and Heinz Naumann were scrubbing themselves, too. The panzer commander splashed Stoss and pointed toward their black coveralls, which all lay together on the bank. "You know, you're out of uniform, Adi," Naumann said.
Stoss splashed back. "What d'you mean? We're all out of uniform." He had soap bubbles in his hair.
"Not like that," Naumann said. "You ought to sew a yellow star on the front of your outfit." He laughed raucously.
"Oh, fuck off," Stoss said without much rancor. "So I had the operation when I was a kid. So what? Goddamn sheenies aren't the only ones who do, you know."
"Yeah, yeah." Naumann didn't push it any more. Sergeant or not, he might have had a fight on his hands if he had. Teasing somebody about looking like a Jew was one thing. Acting as if you really thought he was one was something else again-something that went way over the line.
Theo had known Adi was circumcised, too. You couldn't very well not know something like that, not when the two of you were part of the same panzer crew. He wasn't going to say anything about it, though. Sometimes-often-the best thing you could say was nothing. That was how it looked to him, anyhow. If Heinz thought otherwise… Well, Heinz was a sergeant. Sergeants got all kinds of funny ideas.
The other thing was, Theo wouldn't have wanted Adi Stoss pissed off at him. If Adi got mad, he was liable to go and rupture your spleen first, then feel bad about it afterwards. Theo wouldn't have wanted to take him on. Heinz Naumann thought he was a tough guy. He'd made that plain. If he thought he was tougher than his driver, he needed to think again.