Two Fronts (60 page)

“
You
come out with that?” Vaclav stared at him. “You’re a Red, right?”

“Sure I’m a Red.” Weinberg sounded proud of it, too—proud and faintly embarrassed at the same time. “I haven’t thought about any of that shit since I got bar mitzvahed to shut my old man up and he let me quit going to
cheder
.”

“To what?” Vaclav couldn’t unravel that one.

“Hebrew lessons. Religious lessons,” Weinberg said. “But some of it stuck after all. What are you gonna do? Everybody’s mind is like a rubbish heap, and sometimes the crap at the bottom floats to the top some kind of way.”

Is my mind a rubbish heap?
Vaclav wondered. He didn’t want to think so. When he considered some of the weird, useless stuff he remembered, though, while things he should have recalled slipped right out of his head, he couldn’t very well claim the American International was wrong. He didn’t even try. He took another slug of flamethrower fuel instead.

“Me?” Chaim Weinberg said plaintively. Vaclav gave him the bottle. He drank from it, coughed, thumped his chest with his good hand, and gave it back. “Thanks, friend. You’re good in my book. Y’know, this here is far and away the longest I’ve been out of the line since I got to Spain in ’36.”

Not many people had been fighting longer than Vaclav. Some Chinese and Japanese, some Spaniards, and a handful of Internationals like Weinberg. “It seems like I’ve carried a rifle my whole life,” Vaclav said. “If the fighting ever stops, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

“Me, neither,” Weinberg agreed. “That’s why I want to get patched up—so I can go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

¡Viva la muerte! Here’s to death!
One of Marshal Sanjurjo’s generals was supposed to have used that for a toast. Most people who heard it thought it was disgusting and barbarous. Vaclav did, too … after a fashion. But he also understood it in ways most people didn’t, never would, and never could. Plainly, so would Weinberg. Like that goddamn Fascist, by now they were both creatures of the war, shaped in its image.

Between them, the two creatures of the war ended up killing the bottle.

THE
GESTAPO
MAN
reminded Julius Lemp of a wall lizard, even though he wasn’t green. He blinked very slowly, and he kept licking his thin lips with a pointed tongue. He made more trouble than a wall lizard ever dreamt of doing, though.

Blink. “You have aboard your ship, the U-30, an electrician’s mate named”—blink, lick—“Eberhard Nehring.” Blink.

“That’s right. What about it?” Lemp tried to hide his contempt. The wall lizard with the high-crowned cap didn’t even know submarines were styled boats, not ships.

“I will tell you what about it,” the
Gestapo
man answered coldly. Lick. Blink. “You are to leave him ashore here at Wilhelmshaven when your ship puts to sea on its next cruise.”

“What? What the hell for?” Lemp yipped. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen for squeezing extra time and extra juice from the batteries. I need him, dammit.”

“You may not have him.” Lick. “He is”—blink—“politically unreliable.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Lemp said. “What’s he going to do? Scuttle the boat?”
He
did it right, not that the blackshirt would notice. “Knock my radioman over the head with a spanner and signal the Royal Navy where we’re at?”

The
Gestapo
man eyed him as if he were a fat, foolish grasshopper just about within snapping-up range. “I am not required to explain to you the details. The fact is sufficient.” Blink.

“
Quatsch!
” Lemp retorted. “If I leave Nehring ashore, I’ll have to put to sea with some half-assed
Dummkopf
on his first patrol. And that kind of numbskull is liable to get me sunk. So you can explain or you can go fuck yourself.”

When the
Gestapo
man blinked this time, it was in amazement, and not nearly so mannered as usual. “I could kill you for that, and I would not even have to fill out a report,” he said, in a voice even more frigid than usual.

He was trying to put Lemp in fear. He needed to try harder. Lemp laughed at him. “Listen to me, man. The ocean can kill me. My own lousy boat can kill me. The enemy can kill me. So why the devil should I worry about you? If you don’t level with me, I’m damned if I’ll pay any attention to you.”

“Notes on this conversation will go into your promotion jacket.” Lick.

Lemp laughed again, raucously. “Like I care!” He hadn’t expected to make lieutenant commander. He knew he’d never see commander. Blink. “You are being difficult.”

“You should talk! If you don’t give me some halfway decent reason for leaving Nehring ashore, I’m going to take him with me, and you can pound sand up your ass. He’s that good.”

Maybe the
Gestapo
man wasn’t used to running into somebody who didn’t turn to gelatin around him. He licked his lips once more, this time in what looked like real distress. “Oh, very well. He is engaged in correspondence of questionable loyalty with his family in Münster.” By the way the blackshirt said it, Münster was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah as a den of iniquity, and Nehring a nastier deviant than someone who snatched little girls off the sidewalk and did horrible things to them.

“What’s the big deal about Münster?” Lemp asked.

“In Münster, they have twice made insurrection against the
Reich
.” Blink. “Twice!”

“Was Nehring involved in any of this?”

“No, but”—lick—“his letters clearly show his awareness. He cannot be relied upon to serve the
Führer
as he should.”

“I’ve relied on him to serve Germany for two or three years now,” Lemp said. “He’s done it, too, and done it damn well.”

“They are not the same thing.” Blink. The
Gestapo
man sounded sure.

“Of course they are!” So did Lemp.

“If you allow this man aboard your ship, I can—I will—have you fired upon as you leave the harbor.
I
serve the
Führer
!” Blink.

“But not Germany?” Lemp suggested.

The wall lizard’s pale cheeks gained a little color. “I serve the National Socialist
Grossdeutsches Reich
, the one and only legitimate German government. I have its authority behind me when I tell you you may not use this politically unreliable individual.”

“But—” Lemp tried once more, but broke off before he was well begun. The
Gestapo
man was implacable. Lemp gave up: “Have it your way. You will anyhow, won’t you?”

“
Reich
security demands it,” the wall lizard said smugly. Lick.

“
Wunderbar
.” Lemp turned away in disgust. He did fire a Parthian shot: “If some jerk of an electrician’s mate comes aboard instead of Nehring and we get sunk on account of that, do you think it does
Reich
security one hell of a lot of good?”

Blink. “If the
Kriegsmarine
allows incompetents to fill these important roles, then it is the entity impairing
Reich
security. In due course, perhaps we shall examine that more closely.”

Defeated, despising himself for not having the balls to tell the wall lizard where to head in, Lemp stormed away. As the
Gestapo
man had warned, Nehring was not among the ratings who boarded the U-30. A newcomer was, an inoffensive little man whose name, Lemp saw when he examined the fellow’s papers, turned out to be Martin Priller.

As soon as Lemp got the chance, he summoned Priller to his tiny cabin. The new electrician’s mate saluted. “Reporting as ordered, Captain!”

“Oh, belay that spit-and-polish crap,” Lemp said wearily. “Save it for the surface navy—don’t waste my time with it. Did they tell you why you were supposed to report here?”

“They said your boat needed an electrician’s mate.” Priller visibly suppressed a
sir
. “I am one, so they sent me.”

“Did they tell you why we needed one?” Lemp asked.

“
Nein
.” Another obvious swallowed sir. “I figured your fellow didn’t come back from leave or came down sick or whatever the hell.”

“
Whatever the hell
is about the size of it.” Lemp grilled Martin Priller on what he knew about U-boat batteries. The new man wasn’t a
Dummkopf
. He also wasn’t afraid to admit he didn’t know something. He wouldn’t be so good as Nehring, not till he had a few patrols under his belt, but with a little luck he wouldn’t be hopeless, either, which was what Lemp had feared most. Grudgingly, the U-boat skipper said, “All right, go on back to the engine room. Do the best you can, and yell if you need help.”

“I’ll do that.” Bobbing his head in a little nod, Priller pulled aside the cabin’s curtain so he could escape into the corridor. He closed the curtain behind him as he hurried aft.

“
Scheisse
.” Lemp said it very softly. He still wished he had Eberhard Nehring there in his familiar slot. No matter what the wall lizard said, Nehring was about as political as a halibut, and if Münster was up in arms about the way things were going, whose fault was that? Nehring’s? Not likely! Wasn’t it the government’s, for screwing up the war and the economy to the point where even uncomplaining Germans started showing they could take only so much?

Lemp had never cared much for politics. He didn’t think they were fitting for a
Kriegsmarine
officer. But he wasn’t a blind man. If he wrote anyone a letter with those thoughts in it, would the
Gestapo
let
him
take the U-boat out on its next patrol?

No. They’d sit him in a black room, shine blinding lights in his face, and hurt him till he told them who all his treasonous friends were. If he had no treasonous friends, they’d keep hurting him till he named some names anyhow. Then they’d grab those people and start in on
them
.

Was that any way to run a war? Or a country? Even the apolitical Lemp couldn’t make himself believe it. But that was the war and the country and the government he had.

PEGGY DRUCE WAITED
nervously in the foyer. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another one. She didn’t chain-smoke very often, but she did now. Behind her, a clock in the living room started to chime six.

Where the devil was Herb? She blew an angry stream of smoke toward the ceiling. You could always set your watch by him. Or you could have, until …

He knocked on the front door as the living-room clock bonged for the fifth time. Peggy had all kinds of reasons for being mad at him. Try as she would, she couldn’t fault him for being late.

She opened the door. There he stood, as solid and familiar as if things between them had never soured. “Hi,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Her voice might have come from Greenland. They’d talked on the phone since he’d come back from Nevada, but this was the first time they’d set eyes on each other. She’d made a point of not being home when he came by to retrieve clothes and books and golf clubs and fishing gear and whatever else he’d taken.

He grimaced. “You don’t have to do this at all, you know.”

“I am trying to be civilized, just like you,” Peggy answered.

“Okay.” He didn’t sound as if things were okay. He sounded as if he’d been ordered to charge a German machine-gun nest in France in 1918. With the same kind of bleak courage he might have shown then, he nodded and said, “Well, come on, then.” As he led her out to his car by the curb, he chuckled in faint—or not so faint—embarrassment. “Fine set of wheels, huh?”

“Catch me!” she said. It was a long, angular Hupmobile from the first years of the Depression. The whole company had gone belly-up not long before the USA got into the war.

Herb shrugged. “I couldn’t find anything better in a hurry. Lord knows what I’ll do if it breaks down and needs parts. But I won’t be putting a whole bunch of miles on it, so maybe it’ll last a while.”

He held the passenger door open for her. She slid inside. He went around and got behind the wheel. The car rattled when he started it. It seemed all the noisier because she was used to the silky-smooth Packard. The Hupmobile wheezed and rattled when he drove off.

Donofrio’s was their favorite Italian place. Herb ordered spaghetti and meatballs. Peggy chose the lasagna. “You have chianti, George?” Herb asked the waiter.

“Only from California,” George answered regretfully—he was a Greek playing at being a dago. “Can’t hardly get no gen-u-ine Eye-talian stuff.”

“Well, bring us a bottle just the same,” Herb said. Peggy nodded. Vino might blunt the edge of what she was feeling. She wasn’t the kind of person who’d let out a war whoop and swing the bottle at her now ex-husband’s head if she got loaded. She didn’t think she was, anyhow.

The guy in the bow tie and the red apron set the bottle on the table. Herb poured for both of them. He raised his glass. “Good luck to you.”

Peggy couldn’t even not drink to that. The wine was … red. “Thursday vintage,” she guessed.

“Oh, it’s older than that. Tuesday, I bet,” Herb said. They bantered as if they’d been married for years. And so they had. And so they weren’t. Peggy drained the big glass in a hurry, but no faster than Herb. He filled them both up again.

They were halfway down their second glasses when the food came. Donofrio’s lasagna was as familiar as … as being married to Herb. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?” Peggy asked. “Jesus, why didn’t you even tell me you wanted to do that?”

Herb was using fork and tablespoon to twirl a bite of spaghetti. He paused and looked down at the plate for a moment. Then he met Peggy’s eyes again. Sighing, he answered, “On account of I didn’t feel like a screaming row, and that’s what we would’ve had. When I found out Uncle Samuel was sending me to Nevada anyhow, I figured I’d use the time I was stuck there two different ways.”

That did sound like him; he was nothing if not organized. And it cleared up something she’d wondered about: “So you didn’t make up the story about going to Nevada because the government sent you there?”