Last Orders: The War That Came Early (18 page)

By the way the blackshirt eyed the end of the broken bottle, he didn’t like it at all. Instead of going on with his advance, he drew up a whistle that he wore on a string around his neck and blew a long, shrill blast. More SS men trotted out of the
Rathaus
.

But the whistle also made more ordinary people come hurrying up
to see what was going on. They jeered and hissed at the SS men and shouted for them to go away. “Haven’t you fuckers done enough to us?” a man yelled.

“You’d better clear out, you noisy old fool, or you’ll really get what’s coming to you!” the blackshirt closest to Sarah shouted.

She thought that was a great idea, and sidled away from the building dustup. If a Jew got caught anywhere near trouble, he—or she—would catch the blame for it. And Himmler’s goons would be three times as rough on him—or her—as on an Aryan. She didn’t want to give the SS men the least possible excuse to grab her.

Some of the Germans in the swelling crowd were too fed up to worry about such things. Half a brick arced through the air. Whoever threw it must have had plenty of practice during the last war, putting grenades right where he wanted them. It caught the first blackshirt a couple of centimeters in front of his right ear. He crumpled like a sheet of wastepaper. His truncheon clattered on the paving stones.

A great cheer rose from the crowd. They rushed toward the SS men who’d emerged from the
Rathaus
. More bricks and rocks and bottles flew. One of those SS men went down with a shriek, his hands clutched to his face and blood running out between his fingers.

The crowd let out another cheer. “Kill the bastards!” somebody cried, and in an instant they were all baying it together:
“Kill the bastards!”
Men, women, it didn’t matter. As soon as that one fellow put it into words for them, they knew what they wanted to do.

Some of the SS men had pistols. They started shooting into the crowd, but they’d waited too long. They knocked down a few of the people in the lead, but by then the rest were on them. They screamed as they were overrun, but not for long.

By that time, Sarah had got around a corner, with a solid brick building shielding her from stray gunfire. More people were coming the other way. “What’s going on?” a woman called to Sarah. If she noticed the Stars of David on Sarah’s clothes, she didn’t care about them.

“There’s a mob by the
Rathaus
, and they’re going after the SS,” Sarah answered: just the facts, with no comments.

If any of them were convinced Nazis, they were liable to grab her for the blackshirts. Instead, they all clapped their hands and pumped
their fists in the air. “Let’s go help them!” the woman caroled, and they all did. Some paused to snatch up makeshift weapons. Interestingly, a mechanic was already carrying a stout spanner, while a man who wore the leather apron of a butcher or sausage-maker clutched a cleaver.

More pistol shots rang out from the direction of the
Rathaus
. Sarah wished she had the nerve to join the people going after their Nazi oppressors at last. But she didn’t. They risked themselves, perhaps their families. She was too conscious that anything one Jew did endangered every Jew in the
Reich
. She didn’t dare do anything but go home.

Somehow, news of the trouble had got there ahead of her. “Thank goodness you made it in one piece!” her mother exclaimed when she walked through the door. “They’re shooting at people downtown!”

“I know. I was there when it started. How did
you
know?” Sarah said.

Hanna Goldman gestured vaguely. “You hear things.”

“I guess you do.” Could Mother have heard the gunfire from here? She might have been able to. With so little motor noise in the streets, sounds like that carried a long way.

Half an hour later, and closer to home, first one machine gun and then another opened up. Sarah had no trouble at all hearing them. More faintly, she also heard screams.

She breathed a sigh of relief when her father came in. Samuel Goldman was earlier than usual. His eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve put the whole town under curfew,” he said. “Münster’s bubbling like a pot of stew somebody forgot on the fire. Who knows? Maybe the whole country will start bubbling, too.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sarah said, both for the benefit of any hidden microphones and because, wish as she would, she truly didn’t believe Germany would rise against the Nazis.

The Royal Navy hadn’t tried to sneak a convoy from the British Isles to Murmansk or Archangelsk all through the long, light nights of far northern summer. The
Kriegsmarine
and the
Luftwaffe
had convinced them such efforts were only an expensive form of suicide at that season of the year. U-boats, destroyers, FW-200 long-range reconnaissance
bombers … The odds were stacked against freighters, even escorted freighters.

They got bolder as nights stretched longer, though. And so did Julius Lemp. Night gave freighters more chances to hide, but it also helped cloak stalking U-boats. Along with two other submarines, the U-30 helped scatter a convoy. He credited his boat with two freighters. One blew up with a roar that shook the submerged U-boat. The other burned and burned and burned. If it wasn’t hauling high-octane avgas, he would have been amazed.

He was a happy man, then, or as happy as a dour man ever got, when he came into Namsos after that patrol. And he—and his men—were even happier when the base commandant ordered them down to Wilhelmshaven for a refit more thorough than they could get at the base in the far north of Norway.

Yes, they would be at sea a while longer. All the same, the advantages were obvious. In case they weren’t, Gerhart Beilharz summed them up: “More booze. Better booze. More whores. Better whores.”

“Maybe even a chance for some of us to take a furlough and see their families and friends,” Lemp added dryly.

“That, too, skipper.” By the way the engineering officer said it, it might be true, but it wasn’t all that important. And, from what Lemp knew of U-boat sailors, Beilharz understood their priorities and made them his own. After a moment, he added, “More and better chow, too.”

“Well, we can hope,” Lemp said. “Even for servicemen, rations in the
Vaterland
are getting pretty dismal.”

“Too right, they are,” Beilharz said. “Suppose the
Bonzen
will hang a defeatism rap on us for saying so?”

“You know, Gerhart, I’m old enough that there are things in this world I can live without finding out,” Lemp answered. And that, no doubt, explained why the two of them tossed the question around in whispers in Lemp’s curtained-off cabin. Beilharz pondered the reply and seemed to find it good. Which was fine, unless he hung a defeatism charge on his superior—he wouldn’t hang one on himself, of course.

When the U-30 tied up in the harbor at Wilhelmshaven, the men roared off to the town’s fleshpots. After making his own report, Lemp
had in mind a rather more upper-crust version of the same thing. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to get drunk and he wanted to get his ashes hauled, not necessarily in that order. After a successful combat patrol, he figured he’d earned the right.

What he got instead was a summons to the office of the SS man who’d pulled his best electrician’s mate off his boat for political unreliability the last time he was in Wilhelmshaven. The blackshirt was skinny and looked aristocratic; whether he was entitled to a
von
, Lemp didn’t know. The man punctuated his conversation by blinking his eyes and by licking and licking and licking his lips.

Lemp eyed him with distaste he knew he didn’t hide well enough. “Reporting as ordered,” he said. He didn’t say
Let’s get this over with so I can get the hell out of here
, but his manner said it for him.

Blink. The SS man stared back at him. “I see your ship met no misfortune without Petty Officer Nehring,” he said. Lick.

He still didn’t know enough to call a U-boat a boat, not a ship. Odds were he didn’t know enough to shake it before he stuck it back in his pants, but you couldn’t tell him that. The SS knew everything—if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask them.

“No thanks to you,” Lemp growled. If the pigdog had called him in to gloat about that, he’d … He didn’t know what he’d do. What could you do to an SS man that God hadn’t done already? “Have you got any other reasons for wasting my time today?” No, he wasn’t hiding distaste at all well, was he?

“Do not play games with me, Commander Lemp.” Lick. Blink. “The political situation is far more serious than it was when last we spoke.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Lemp replied. “I’ve been fighting the war since then. How about you?”

Anger turned the SS man’s bony, sallow cheeks almost the color of a normal human being’s. “I told you not to play games, Lemp.” Blink. He didn’t bother with the U-boat captain’s rank any more. “Unrest is abroad in the land, and it is my duty to stamp out that unrest wherever it raises its ugly head. Believe me, I will do my duty.”

“I’m trying to do mine, too,” Lemp said. “If you help the
Reich
lose the war, is that doing your precious duty?”

“Stamping out unrest will help the National Socialist
Grossdeutsches Reich
win the war.” Blink. “Now. Let us get down to business. Who in your crew is from in or near the rebellious city of Münster?”

“Rebellious?” Lemp said.

“That’s right. Rebellious. In a state of resistance against the authority of the National Socialist
Grossdeutsches Reich
.” The SS man brought out the clumsy phrase as if it were one normal people used every day. He punctuated it with another blink, then continued, “Answer my question, Lemp. Who in your crew is from Münster or close by?”

“You already took Nehring away for coming from around there and getting letters from his kin, didn’t you?” Lemp said.

The look the blackshirt sent him was colder than winter water in the Barents Sea. “If you do not stop evading what I ask you, I promise”—lick—“you will be sorry. You have not the faintest idea of how sorry you will be.”

What occurred to Julius Lemp was
With idiots like this in charge, no wonder Münster is up in arms
. He didn’t say that; it would have landed him in water hotter than the SS man’s eyes were cold. What he did say was, “I’m not evading you, dammit. Except by their accents, I don’t know where they’re from, and I don’t care. All I know, and all I do care about, is who does what and how well he does it.”

“Your uncooperative attitude will be noted.” Blink.

“Oh, fuck your noting!” Lemp burst out. “If you want to know where they come from, go through their files. You don’t seem to have anything better to do with your time. I damn well do.” Visions of a perfumed blond
Fräulein
wearing a few wisps of silk capered lewdly across his brainpan. An officers’ brothel would be a lot more fun than this. So would almost anything this side of a depth-charge attack.

“I have already made note of your unsatisfactory attitude,” the SS man said.

“That’s nice,” Lemp answered blandly. “I suppose going out and fighting the war is what does it to me.”

“I am fighting the war against treason and betrayal!” The blackshirt wasn’t doing a lizard impression any more. Now he was really and truly steamed. The shrill fury in his voice showed it, too.

Lemp took off his cap. Even with it on, he looked less imposing
than the Party functionary, because he didn’t bother with the spring stiffener. No U-boat skipper did. But the white cloth cover said he
was
a skipper. The grease stain on the cover said he did some real work in that cap. Whether the SS man could read those signals, he didn’t know.

Blink. “Get out of here!” the SS man said peevishly, as if Lemp had barged in without an invitation rather than in answer to a summons. Lemp got up and left before the fellow could change his mind. The brothel first, he decided, and then the officers’ club.

Arno Baatz had talked with Russian-speaking Germans whose job was to intercept and translate Red Army radio messages. The Ivans had crappy security. They sent way too much in clear. The guys who monitored their signals said that when they started talking about the Devil’s grandfather or his aunty, things had got screwed up but good.

Right this minute, Baatz felt like talking about Satan’s second cousin once removed. Things in this part of Russia had got screwed up, all right, and they wouldn’t unscrew any time soon. Rain poured out of the sky. Arno had yet to see a paved road in Russia more than a few kilometers outside a big city.

On German maps, the roads between Soviet cities had been marked as highways. In any self-respecting country, they would have been highways. In Russia, they were rutted dirt tracks. When the autumn rains fell, and when the drifted snow melted in the spring, they turned to mud. Baatz had never imagined such mud before he got here. It could suck the boots off a
Landser
’s feet. It could swallow a man up to his waist. It could drown a weary mule who let his head sag down into it. It could bog down a truck.

It could bog down a panzer, too. The sensible German engineers who’d designed the
Reich
’s panzer forces had no more dreamt of mud like this than Arno Baatz had himself. Russian T-34s plowed through glop that held Panzer IIIs and IVs the way spiderwebs held beetles. It was demoralizing. It could wreck your chances of living to a ripe old age, too.

Right this minute, there were no T-34s in the neighborhood. Baatz didn’t think there were, anyhow. He looked over his shoulder, but he
couldn’t see much through the downfalling curtains of water. He couldn’t hear much, either. The rain plashed all around. He wouldn’t know Russian panzers were close by till one squashed him flat. That would be just exactly too late.

Adam Pfaff squelched through the mud a few meters away. Like Baatz, he wore his waterproofed shelter half as a rain poncho. It helped a little, but not nearly enough.

Pfaff managed a crooked grin. “You know what?” he said. “I wish we were Panzergrenadiers.”

“Heh,” Baatz said. “I’ve heard ideas I liked less—I’ll tell you that.” Panzergrenadiers didn’t march into battle—or, as now, away from it. They rode armored halftracks so they could keep up with the panzers instead of wearing out shoe leather tramping along behind them.