"Oh, yeah? How come not to the general?"
"I am ordered to take you to Major von Rehfeld." For a German, nothing else needed saying. "You will please come with me."
Peggy please came with him. Major von Rehfeld proved to be a tall, handsome man of about thirty-five who was missing the lower half of his left ear. That and a wound badge said he'd seen real fighting somewhere. "So you are the notorious Mrs. Druce," he said in excellent English.
"That's right, buster. Who in blazes are you?" Peggy snapped.
"Among other things, I am the man assigned to get you to Stockholm," the German officer answered. "Believe me: we do respect the Fuhrer's order to give you all the help we can. Once you reach Sweden, you are on your own, however. I do not know how soon you will be able to travel from there to England and on to the United States. It is a pity, but Norway remains a war zone."
"And whose fault is that?" Peggy said.
The major shrugged. "I would say it is the fault of France and England, but I am sure you would call me a lying Nazi if I did. So I will not say anything about that. Never mind whose fault it is. It is a war zone. Nothing travels through it without grave risk of being attacked by both the two sides. Is this so, or is it not so?"
It was so. Of that Peggy had no doubt whatever. Nobody in her right mind could. "How long do you think I'll have to stay in Stockholm?" she asked.
"This I cannot say." The major spread his hands, doing his best to look and sound as reasonable as he could. "It is not up to the Reich alone, you know. The enemy has also something to say about it. I can tell you that we are making much better progress in Norway than we were only a few days ago. We prove that air power is stronger than sea power. The Royal Navy is sorry to learn this, but learn it they do."
Maybe that was so, too. Or maybe he was parroting Goebbels' propaganda line as if it were Polly wants a cracker! Peggy couldn't tell. Since she couldn't, she asked, "How do I get to Stockholm?"
"The usual ferry is sailing again. Tickets are easy to come by. You will have no trouble with an exit visa-I promise you that," Major von Rehfeld replied.
"Will you have German soldiers on the ferry, the way you did on the ships in Copenhagen harbor?" Peggy gibed.
To her astonishment, the major blushed scarlet. "We saved needless bloodshed," he said, but he sounded none too proud of it. A moment later, he added, "It was a legitimate ruse of war," but that didn't seem to convince him, either.
If he meant what he said about getting her to Stockholm, Peggy wasn't inclined to be fussy. "How soon can I go?" she asked.
"As soon as you have your ticket, come back. I will provide you with an exit visa. No one will stand in your way," von Rehfeld said.
"You aren't planning to, uh, protect Sweden as soon as I get there, are you?"
"Why would we? With Denmark and Norway safe from English interference, iron ore can travel from Sweden to the Reich without risk of interruption."
Had the major claimed that Germany would never do such a wicked thing, Peggy wouldn't have believed him for a minute. When he talked about national self-interest, he was much more persuasive. That didn't mean he was telling the truth. It also didn't mean Peggy would be able to get out of Sweden once she got in. But she was willing to try it. What can go wrong now? she asked herself. But the question had a simple, obvious answer. Damn near anything could. SERGEANT HERMANN WITT MADE a panzer commander very different from Heinz Naumann. Theo Hossbach noted the differences with nothing but relief. Most important, Witt could laugh at himself. He didn't have to feel he was better and tougher than everyone else in the panzer to give orders. He didn't go out of his way to give people a hard time to show he was tougher than they were.
If that came as a relief to Theo, it had to be something close to heaven for Adalbert Stoss. Witt hadn't taken long to realize the driver was missing something most German men had. Imagining three men living closer together than they did in a Panzer II was next to impossible. Theo sure didn't want to think about it, anyhow. Only bedbugs and lice lived closer to him than his crewmates did.
Naumann hadn't been able to quit riding Adi Stoss about his circumcision. No wonder they hadn't got along. Theo wouldn't have wanted anybody razzing him about his dick, either. A couple of days after taking charge of the panzer, Witt looked up from the skinny little chicken he was roasting and said, "Ask you something, Adi?"
"Sure, Sarge. What's up?" Stoss answered-about how Theo would have responded to a casual question.
"When they drafted you-"
"They didn't, Sarge. I volunteered."
"Did you? Well, all right. Good for you. When you did, you filled out about a million forms, right?" Witt said.
Adi nodded and made a face. "Sure. Pain in the ass, but you've got to do it."
"Yeah. You do. You gave all the right answers on the one about your ancestors, didn't you?" the new panzer commander said.
Stoss didn't even try not to understand him. "You bet I did-in spite of the operation, if you know what I mean."
"I expect I do," Sergeant Witt replied. "That's what I needed to know." He turned the chicken's carcass on the branch that did duty for a spit. "And I think this bird's about ready to eat. White meat or dark?"
As Theo gnawed the meat off a drumstick and thigh, he belatedly realized Witt hadn't asked Adi if he was a Jew. He'd only asked if the driver had given the right answers on the military paperwork. Of course Adi had. They wouldn't have let him into the Wehrmacht if he hadn't. But the question covered the sergeant's ass. If by some chance Stoss did turn out to be Jewish, Witt could say the driver had denied it.
Theo'd wondered himself. Yes, some gentiles did have a medical need to part with their foreskin. But if you ran into somebody without his, what would you think first? You'd think the guy was a Jew, that was what.
The idea made Theo want to giggle. A Jew in the Wehrmacht was like a chameleon on a green rug. You wouldn't look for one on the rug to begin with, so of course you wouldn't notice it if it happened to be there. Theo wouldn't have said anything about his wonderings, even if the Gestapo decided to interrogate him. He never said much about anything. And he had his reasons not to. When you didn't love the regime under which you lived, keeping your mouth shut was the smartest thing you could do.
Besides, if Adi really was Jewish, wasn't that about the richest joke anyone could play on the Nazis? Theo might have thought otherwise if Stoss were a bad soldier, or a gutless one. He wasn't. He did fine. As long as he made a good Kamerad, who gave a rat's ass about the other crap?
With sizable help from the Polish infantry-which seemed to view retreat as a worse affront than treason-it looked as if they'd be able to hold the Red Army outside of Warsaw. The Poles had managed that after the last war, too. If they hadn't, Germany and Russia might not be quarreling on Polish soil right now. They'd be at each other's throats, the way they had been in 1914.
Quite a few Polish foot soldiers were obviously Jews. What did they think of fighting on the same side as the German National Socialists? Theo was tempted to ask some of them. A German who put some effort into it could make sense of Yiddish. In the end, though, the radioman kept his mouth shut. That was what he usually did, so it wasn't hard for him. And his sense of self-preservation warned him his fellow soldiers would give him funny looks if he all of a sudden started chatting up Jews.
Some of the villages they went through were full of them: men in beards, wide-brimmed hats, and black clothes straight out of the eighteenth century. One of the guys from another panzer in the company said, "Boy, you can sure see why the Fuhrer wants to clean out the kikes, can't you? They're like something from Mars. Shame we can't wipe these places up any which way."