Last Orders: The War That Came Early (40 page)

Mikhail swallowed his vodka dose, every drop of it. The Red Army men moved out in a ragged skirmish line. More of them carried PPDs like Ivan’s than rifles. At close quarters, all you wanted to do was spray a lot of lead around. A machine pistol was terrific for that.

They moved cautiously, hunching low. The sun coming up behind them could silhouette them against the horizon and throw their moving shadows a long, long way.

Somewhere up ahead sat a farm village. The Germans didn’t seem to want to pull back from it. Maybe one of the cunts there was an extra good lay. Boot the Hitlerites out and the next village was six or eight kilometers farther west. It seemed worth doing.

Sasha hit the dirt a split second before the MG-42 in the village started spitting out death. Ivan didn’t know what kind of animal instinct the little Jew had, but Davidov had it, all right. And, because Ivan kept an eye on him, he also hit the ground before bullets snapped through where he’d been.

Some of the other Red Army men went down on their own as soon as the lead started flying. Others had 7.92mm help in falling. The Russians fired back, though they were still too far outside the village for submachine guns to do much good. Well, that was why you still needed to bring along some riflemen.

“Flank them out!” Kuchkov yelled. “You pussies—yeah, you over there! Go get ’em!”

They tried. They feared him more than they feared the Fritzes. But they started too soon. Hitler’s fearsome buzz saw swung around and knocked them back before they could knock it out. No, the Nazis really didn’t want to leave this place. And, as long as they fed belts into that MG-42, they could kill a regiment’s worth of Russians here.

Ivan knew a lost cause when he saw one. “Back!” he shouted. “We’ll have to shell them out or bomb them out or something, the fuckers.”

The Russian soldiers who could retreat did. Kuchkov wasn’t altogether astonished when he saw that Mikhail wasn’t one of them. The new guy had been part of the flanking party the German machine gun savaged. Wasn’t that a shame? Ivan rolled some coarse
makhorka
in a scrap of newsprint and lit the homemade cigarette.
Fungible
wasn’t
mat
, but it still turned out to be a handy word to know.

Brakes chuffing, the train pulled into Broad Street Station. Peggy Druce looked out the window at the familiar platform. Another political trip down—this one to Altoona. That was about as far west as she usually went. Somewhere around there, Philadelphia’s gravity or influence or whatever you wanted to call it began to fade and Pittsburgh’s to grow.

Even Pennsylvania’s roads reflected the split between the state’s two biggest cities. In the southeast, they looked like a segment of a spider web with Philly sitting where the spider would. Pittsburgh occupied a similar position in the southwest. Geography had something to do with that. Some of it, though, was attitude and who your friends were.

“Broad Street Station! Philadelphia!” the conductor shouted, in case you were too dumb to know where you were.

Peggy was already on her way to the door. She’d scoot back to the baggage car to snag her suitcase. Then she’d splurge and take a cab back to her house.

Only she didn’t. There on the platform waiting for her stood Dave Hartman. The master machinist sent her a crooked grin. “Hey, good-lookin’,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Peggy asked, more surprised than pleased. “Why aren’t you at work?”

“They’re doing a changeover—gotta retool a little on account of we’ll be making a new model,” Dave answered. “So I had me the afternoon off, and I figured I’d pick you up.”

“That was sweet,” Peggy said as she went back to the baggage car.
Dave walked beside her. She gave the colored redcap her claim check, and handed him fifteen cents when he set her suitcase at her feet.

Dave grabbed the suitcase. “Your back!” Peggy squawked.

“Hush your face, doll,” he said. So she did.

When they got to his old Ford, she said, “Honest, Dave, you didn’t need to bother. I know what the gas ration is these days.”

“Hush your face,” he repeated as he threw the suitcase in the trunk. Only after he’d held the door open for her did he go on, “Don’t hardly drive it any which way. Gotta give it a go every once in a while or the tires’ll flatten out and the battery’ll die on me.”

Peggy knew that protesting too much was a losing cause. All she said was, “Well, thank you very much. I was going to grab a taxi.”

“Waste of money when you’ve got your own private chauffeur.” Dave started the car. You could hardly hear the engine, no matter how old it was. Yes, he took care of it better than any garage was likely to. He put it in gear. “I do hope the tires hold out. You really gotta have connections to get your hands on new ones, way things are these days.”

“I may be able to take care of that if you need them,” Peggy said.

“Through the guy who was dumb enough to dump you?” Dave shook his head. “No offense, but I don’t want anything to do with him.”

Herb probably could get new tires when he needed them. No denying he was a well-connected man. But Peggy answered, “I wasn’t thinking about him. Remember, I just came back from a political trip—and I’ve made a lot of them. Plenty of Democratic big shots who owe me a favor or two. I could promote some Firestones or Goodyears, I expect.”

He laughed. “Never thought I’d get to know a fixer, not in a month of Sundays I didn’t. See what happens when you go to a ballgame?”

“All kinds of crazy things,” Peggy agreed with a fond smile. She had no idea whether this was love or just a rebound. People who’d been through divorces said you were commonly crazy the first couple of years after your knot got untied. If it ended up not working, she’d chalk it up to experience and try to go on from there. In the meantime, she’d enjoy it for as long as it stayed enjoyable. It had so far.

Not many cars were on the streets. Compared to Philadelphia before the war, they seemed deserted. Compared to Hitler’s Germany … 
The only civilian vehicles that still operated in the Third
Reich
were fire engines, ambulances, and doctors’ cars. Yes, whether this glass was half empty or half full depended on how you looked at things.

Shops here still had clothes and beer and radio sets and toys and noodles in them. The variety wasn’t as big as it had been before Uncle Sam started fighting the Japs, but you could mostly get what you needed, even if not just what you wanted. Somebody from Berlin plopped down in the middle of Philadelphia would die of shock, or possibly of greed.

Because traffic was so light, they got up to Peggy’s house in nothing flat. “Want to come in for a drink?” she asked.

“Twist my arm.” He held it out. It was firmer and harder than Herb’s; he kept himself in fine shape. Peggy gave a token twist. Dave yowled like a cat with its tail under a rocking chair. “Mercy! Mercy and bourbon.”

“Bourbon is a mercy,” Peggy said. She was going to carry her bag into the house, but Dave didn’t give her the chance. Men could be most annoying when they acted most chivalrous.

Ice cubes clinked in highball glasses as she built the drinks. Dave raised his in salute. “Mud in your eye.”

Idly, she turned on the radio. Once it warmed up, music started coming out. But the record cut off abruptly—so abruptly that somebody at the studio scraped the needle across the grooves. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news flash!” the announcer said in portentous tones.

“Uh-oh,” Dave said, halfway down his drink. “Wonder what went off the rails this time.” He might have meant that literally; along with factory explosions, railway disasters often caused we-interrupt-this-broadcast announcements.

Not this afternoon, though. “Adolf Hitler, the Nazi
Führer
, has announced that, from this time forward, the Greater German
Reich
considers itself to be at war with the United States of America. At the same time as his announcement, German U-boats attacked American merchant ships and naval vessels without warning. Some have been sunk, and American lives have been lost.”

“Holy Jesus!” Peggy said hoarsely. She finished her drink at a gulp.
Then she poured more Jim Beam over the rocks. She needed a refill. Dave drained his glass and held it out for more, too.

“American diplomats in Berlin and their German counterparts in Washington will be exchanged through neutral nations,” the announcer went on. “In an early statement from the White House, President Roosevelt said that he did not want this fight and did not go looking for it. He also said, however, that, while the Nazis may have started the war, the United States will finish it.”

“Yeah!” Dave put down his drink so he could smack one fist into the palm of his other hand.

Peggy, who followed politics more closely than her new boyfriend did, knew FDR wasn’t putting all his cards on the table. The way America had armed and encouraged England and France meant she was already close to being at war with Hitler’s Germany. But why would Hitler want to make things official when FDR couldn’t because he didn’t have the political backing?

Hitler, of course, had problems of his own in Germany. No matter how hard Goebbels tried to keep things quiet, word of the unrest kept leaking out. Maybe the
Führer
had decided declaring war on America might unite the country behind him. If he did …

“He doesn’t know what he’s messing with,” Dave said. “Kaiser Bill didn’t, and Adolf doesn’t, either. But I bet we show him, same as we did the last time around.”

“I bet we do,” Peggy agreed. And that seemed to call for more drinks.

Posters sprouted in Münster like toadstools after a rain. Most of them, of course, came from the government. People who didn’t like what the Nazis were up to took their lives in their hands to print broadsheets with their message, and risked them again when they went out under cover of darkness with paste pots. They did it, though. The regime didn’t have things here all its own way on the propaganda front—not quite, anyhow.

But these latest posters came straight from Goebbels. Sarah Bruck winced when she saw them. One showed FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt
sitting side by side in fancy dress—only the American President’s face was just a false front, behind which you saw a bearded Jew with a great hooked nose and flabby lips. Eleanor was saying, “Franklin! Your mask is slipping!”

The other showed a German eagle, complete with swastika, striking down the one that represented America.
FORWARD THE
REICH
!
that one shouted.
FORWARD TO VICTORY!

Sarah didn’t want to be at war with the United States. Or maybe she did, if that would bring Hitler and the Nazis down faster. But if the USA and its allies knocked Münster flat and killed her … Well, in that case she’d have a thing or two to say to them in the afterlife. If there turned out to be an afterlife.

In spite of the war, in spite of the uprising, in spite of the jumpy German soldiers on the streets, Sarah smiled. Here she was, piling one if on top of another.
Piling Pelion on Ossa
, her father would say. Being the daughter of a professor of classics and ancient history, Sarah even knew what that meant. Those were the mountains the Titans of Greek myth had stacked when they tried to storm the gods on Mt. Olympus.

Some ways, she knew more about the ancient Greeks’ religion than she did about her own. She’d studied theirs more thoroughly. She’d just grown up with hers. She’d grown up with scraps and pieces of hers, anyhow. Till Hitler came to power, her family had been happily secular. Only after he showed how much he hated Judaism did her folks decide there had to be something to it after all.

“Hey, Jewigirl!” a soldier called. “Why don’t you come over here and—” He gave forth with a lewd suggestion.

Cheeks aflame, Sarah walked on as if she hadn’t heard him. The soldier and his buddies laughed, but they didn’t come after her. Ignoring soldiers had always worked up till now. When it stopped working, if it stopped working … She didn’t want to think about that, so she didn’t.

Someone had painted a slogan on a wall:
NAZIS ROT IN HELL!
Nobody’d whitewashed over it yet. That was one of the things labor gangs did these days. Her father sometimes came home with his clothes dappled with whitewash.

Sarah read the slogan out of the corner of her eye. She knew better
than to turn her head to look at it. Doing that got you in trouble, the same way screaming back at the dirty-minded soldiers would have. Somebody was always watching you. Whenever you went outdoors, you had to act as if somebody was, anyway.

She ducked into the grocer’s shop. It was late in the afternoon, of course. The grocery wouldn’t have had much when it opened hours ago. It had even less now. Before the war, sheep would have turned up their noses at the mangy turnips in the produce bin. Now Sarah was glad to see them. She could bring
something
home.

There was a difference between bad and worse. She picked some of the less diseased-looking turnips. In a bin farther back, she found rutabagas. Kale and spinach remained, too. And they had powdered mustard. She hadn’t seen any for a long time. Some of the powder would probably be yellow chalk, but what could you do? She got a couple of packets.

The grocer took her money and the required ration coupons. He still had a double chin. What kinds of things did he get that he didn’t sell? No, you wouldn’t expect people who dealt in food to go hungry. Her baker husband and in-laws hadn’t. She hadn’t, either, not while she was married to Isidor. These days, the worm gnawed her stomach again.

She chose a different way back to her house. She didn’t want to pass that bunch of soldiers again. They already had ideas. If they saw her one more time, they might decide to do something about them. The fewer chances you took, the better off you were.

A blackshirt at a checkpoint demanded her papers. She produced them. They were in order. “Well, go on, kike,” he growled: the small change of insult.

She hadn’t gone more than a few steps before gunfire rang out in the center of town. That dreadful ripping snarl could only come from an MG-42. German soldiers were hosing down a building from which rebels had fired—or maybe just a building from which they thought rebels had fired. If they shot a few people who had nothing to do with the uprising, they wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.