Two Fronts (56 page)

No one would ask any inconvenient questions, not out loud. That was the point of this exercise, of the terror that had ruled this broad land since the Revolution.

Stas wished for some vodka—not something he was used to doing. Even thinking this way was dangerous. The more you did it, the more likely you were to slip. And if you slipped, they would catch you. Hell, sometimes they would catch you even if you didn’t slip. They’d catch you on general principles, or because they needed to fill a quota and one of the guys they were really after had gone fishing that day before they could clap the handcuffs on him.

The newsreader went on to brag about the marvels of Soviet productivity. Stakhanovite aluminum smelters from a Magnitogorsk plant had set a new record—
another
new record!—in outproducing norms by 350 percent. A shock campaign in a coal mine near the Don River produced similar stunning results. Of course it did. All you had to do was believe what Radio Moscow told you.

HERB DRUCE KISSED
Peggy’s cheek on the platform at the Broad Street Station. “Off I go again,” he said. “Nevada this time—can you believe it?”

“Just barely,” Peggy answered, which wasn’t far from true. To someone from Philadelphia, Nevada was nothing but alkali desert, jack-rabbits, and Hoover Dam. She had trouble seeing how anything out there could be big enough or important enough to require the services of an ace troubleshooter like her husband.

She didn’t say so. They never talked much about what Herb was up to where other people could hear. Herb didn’t talk about a lot of it even with her.

“All aboard!” The shout rose from the conductors. The PA system announced the train’s imminent departure.

“See you,” Herb said, and climbed onto the train, attaché case in hand.

“Love you!” Peggy blew him a kiss. He was already finding his seat; she didn’t think he saw her do it.

She let out a long sigh as she left the platform, left the station, and headed for the family Packard, which was parked not far away. You couldn’t do much driving on the crappy gasoline ration the government doled out, but today Herb didn’t feel like coming down here on the streetcar with his attaché case and a couple of big old suitcases. This trip would be longer than usual, so she’d splurged and driven him.

Peggy sighed again when she slid behind the wheel to go home. She didn’t know all the details of what Herb would be doing out there in the Great American Desert. From what little he’d said, she didn’t think he knew all the details yet, either. He’d find out more about what was going on when he actually got there. But it looked as if he’d be gone for weeks, not days.

She put the car in gear and swung out into traffic. There wasn’t much. Everyone else had to worry about the crappy gas ration, too. She zipped along on the way home, as she and Herb had zipped along coming down to the station. That was the one good thing you could say about rationing. Traffic jams were a thing of the past.

You could get a little bit of gas. Peggy didn’t know what she’d do if one of the tires went, though. Hardly any rubber goods were available to civilians. An article in the paper had talked about a burning tool mechanics could use to cut new and deeper treads into tires that had gone bald. That didn’t sound safe to her. Then again, riding around on bald tires wasn’t exactly safe, either.

She pulled into the driveway. A wartime accessory she
was
thinking of getting was a gas cap with a lock and key. Since rationing clamped down, some people liberated gasoline with a siphon and a bucket. They either burned it themselves or sold it on the black market.

“Bastards,” she muttered, then quickly looked around. No, no neighbors out to be scandalized by her unladylike language. Well, good. If she was going to scandalize people, she wanted to do a first-class job.

She walked into the house. One more big sigh in the foyer. She’d spend more time rattling around here like a pea in an oversized pod. Things with Herb weren’t everything they had been or everything they might have been, but she still liked having him around.

A robin hopped on the front lawn, cocking its head to one side as it searched for bugs and worms. Every so often, it caught something. Peggy watched as one fat earthworm wrapped itself all the way around the robin’s yellow beak, struggling for all it was worth against getting eaten. The worm wasn’t worth enough. The robin bit it in half and swallowed the writhing pieces one after the other.

Unexpected tears stung Peggy’s eyes. Wasn’t that poor damned earthworm doing the same thing as all the sorry little people who got caught in the war’s iron jaws? Sure it was. It only wanted to live, the same as they did. But the robin didn’t let it, any more than the war spared those people.

The robin, at least, had the excuse of being hungry. If it didn’t eat bugs and worms, it would starve. What was Hitler’s excuse, though, or Tojo’s? They already headed great nations. What more could they possibly need? Would they be fatter and healthier and happier if they devoured other nations’ small stores of happiness?

They evidently thought so.

Before Peggy quite realized what she was doing, she walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where the liquor bottles lived. After a bourbon on the rocks—or, say, two bourbons on the rocks—she might be able to look at the world through a less jaundiced eyed.

Or two bourbons on the rocks might turn into a good many more than two, and she’d wake up tomorrow morning with a head like a drop-forging plant and a mouth like a latrine trench. Then she’d have one to take the edge off … and then everything would start all over again.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know some quiet lushes, and a few more who weren’t so quiet. But she also knew what she thought of them. Nothing wrong with a drink every so often. Nothing wrong with a drink or three, even, every so often … as long as you were holding the bottle. When the bottle got hold of you, you turned into one of the people other people thought about that way.

So the bourbon on the rocks could damn well wait till after dinner. In the meantime, she lit a Chesterfield. Nothing wrong with cigarettes, by God! Not even if her granny would have got the vapors seeing her smoke one like a loose woman. Nothing wrong with coffee, either. She turned on the stove to heat up what was in the pot sitting there.

When Herb was out of town, time crawled by. A postcard from Reno—which, by the gaudy picture on the front, billed itself as the biggest little city in the West—was no substitute for the man himself.
I won fifty bucks at a slot machine the night I got here
, he wrote,
and I’ve been putting it back a dime at a time ever since
. He didn’t say anything about what he was doing way the hell out there, but she wouldn’t have expected him to.

She made one of her own patriotic forays into the Lehigh Valley, which kept her hopping for a few days. A speech at an Odd Fellows hall near the Civil War monument in what they called the Circle in Easton had the crowd eating out of her hand. The next morning, a Sunday, the Easton Democrats who’d sponsored her told her they’d never seen anybody else sell war bonds like that.

“All in the wrist,” she answered, not without pride.

A young man who looked like a black Irishman—the town seemed about a third Irish, a third German, and a third everything else—gave her a lift back to the train station. “I bought a bond myself,” he said. “Paying my own salary, like. I’m going into the Marines next week.”

“Good luck to you,” Peggy said from the bottom of her heart.

“Thanks,” he answered. “I’ll take whatever I can get.” That struck her as a sensible attitude. But if he was so sensible, why was he joining the Marines?

Because he was a man, so he could. Peggy made speeches and did volunteer work and used all the other substitutes for fighting a middle-aged woman could find. And if she sometimes had a drink or three to blunt the edge of loneliness, she did keep hold of the bottle, not the other way around.

She coped. It was with some astonishment that she realized Herb had been gone almost two months. Even by his standards and those of the government that ran him around, it was a long time to be away.

A couple of days after that thought crossed her mind, a fat manila envelope plastered with stamps was stuck in the mailbox. The postmarks on the stamps were from Reno. The return-address label was from a law firm there. “What the hell?” Peggy said, and carried the envelope and the rest of the mail inside.

The envelope held a sheaf of typed and printed legal papers. Paper-clipped to the front was a note in Herb’s familiar scrawl.
I’m sorry, Peggy
, it said,
but honest to God I think this is for the best. I still like you more than anybody, but I just don’t love you any more. As you’ll see, the house is yours, free and clear. So is a big chunk of the bank account, and so is the car. I’ve got myself an apartment not far from the office. Not great, but it’ll do. Take care. When I get home, I’ll explain it all some more—or you can spit in my eye if you’d rather. Herb
.

She numbly flipped through the papers. He’d established legal residence in Nevada. He’d petitioned for and been granted an interlocutory decree. Terms were … pretty much what he’d outlined in the note. They were fair: more than fair, in fact.

It all felt like a boot in the stomach just the same. “Jesus Christ in the foothills!” Peggy yipped. “I’ve been Reno-vated!” Then she started to cry.

RAF FIGHTER-BOMBERS STREAKED
low above the
Luftwaffe
strip near Philippeville. Machine guns and cannon blazing, they shot up anything they saw. Then, their engines roaring flat out, they pulled tight turns and streaked off to the west no more than a hundred meters off the ground.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Albert Dieselhorst huddled in a zigzagging trench alongside the runway. A bullet thumped into the back wall of the trench, half a meter above Hans-Ulrich’s head. He dug his nose even deeper into the dirt than it already was.

When the enemy planes disappeared, Sergeant Dieselhorst said, “You know, I’d rather go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled.” His voice sounded muffled. He hadn’t pulled his face out of the dirt yet, either.

“Without novocaine,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. Cautiously, he did stick up his head. He felt like a turtle coming out of its shell to see if the hawks were gone.

They were, but they’d left something to remember them by. One of the squadron’s Stukas burned in its revetment. Earthen walls and camouflage netting hadn’t saved it. The netting was on fire now, too. A column of greasy black smoke mounted from the dead Ju-87 and blew off toward the
Reich
on the breeze.

Dieselhorst looked out, too. His forehead and chin had mud on them.
So do mine, I bet
, Hans-Ulrich thought. He rubbed his nose, which was also bound to be muddy. Dieselhorst gave forth with what good news he could: “It’s not our plane, anyway.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. “And the
Jabos
weren’t carrying bombs—or else they’d already dropped them somewhere else. They didn’t crater the runways. We can fly off them.”

“You’re right. We can.” Dieselhorst sounded less than delighted at the prospect. “But are you sure you still want to? It’s a different world out there these days.”

He wasn’t wrong. Rudel wished he were. The Stuka was designed to fly where the
Luftwaffe
dominated the air, where Bf-109s kept enemy fighters away from it. The dive-bomber wasn’t quite a sitting duck in flight, but it sure was a waddling duck, especially when weighted down by panzer-busting cannon pods.

“What else can we do?” Hans-Ulrich said. “If they order us up, we’ll go. And we’ll do the best we can while we’re up, too.”

“Of course we will,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. They’d flown all those missions together. Even if they didn’t always like each other, that bound them together more tightly than some husbands and wives. Each of them would have been dead a dozen times if not for the other. Then the sergeant went on, “Have to hope we come down in one piece, though.”

“Hope? Yes,” Rudel said. “But sometimes you do what you have to do because other people depend on you to do it right.”

And you’ve got to do it no matter what happens to you
. He didn’t come out with that. Sergeant Dieselhorst understood it perfectly well. The difference between them was that Dieselhorst hated it, while to Hans-Ulrich it was just a price that might have to be paid as part of the cost of doing the
Führer
’s business. He wasn’t eager to pay the price, but he was ready.

They flew again, against batteries of English heavy guns that German artillery hadn’t been able to take out. The Stuka had been invented as an extension of artillery. It was the ideal kind of mission for the dive-bombers—as long as German fighters could keep enemy planes off them.

Somebody had to think the mission was important: both Bf-109s and FW-190s flew top cover for the Stukas. Some Focke-Wulf fighters were also being used as ground-attack planes, beginning to take on the role the Ju-87 had held for so long. FW-190s were much faster and more maneuverable than Stukas—no doubt about that. But they couldn’t put their bombs down right on the center of a fifty-pfennig coin. They couldn’t terrorize enemy soldiers with Jericho Trumpets, either. They were too modern. They had retractable landing gear, not the Stuka’s fixed installations.

Hans-Ulrich liked the kind of plane he flew. He’d been in the Stuka since the war started. He didn’t want anything new. The Ju-87 might look obsolete, but it was still up for jobs no other aircraft could match. The squadron wouldn’t have been attacking this English artillery unit if that weren’t so.

The front near the Belgian border seemed pretty quiet as the Stukas flew over it. Both the French and the English had made some spasmodic lunges against the
Wehrmacht
’s defenses. They’d got bloodied for their trouble, and hadn’t seemed so eager since.

A little flak came up at the Ju-87s, but only a little. Some machine guns winked petulantly upward, too, even if they had not the slightest chance of reaching high enough to hurt the planes.