Last Orders: The War That Came Early (41 page)

“You stinking Jews!” the SS man shouted after Sarah. “This trouble is all your fault!”

She wanted to argue with him. Himmler had got Münster up in arms against him by seizing the Catholic prelate, Cardinal von Galen. The cardinal hadn’t said a word about Jews; all the signs were that he couldn’t have cared less about what happened to them. He’d protested the “mercy killings” of mental defectives. Other people sick of the way the government was botching the war joined the anti-Nazi movement and swelled its ranks. Jews had nothing to do with any of that, either.

But talking back to an SS man was stupid for any German, and suicidally stupid for a Jew. As she had with the soldiers, Sarah kept walking. As long as the blackshirt stuck to talk, she wouldn’t worry. Talk was even cheaper and more worthless than kale, which was really saying something.

He sent a parting shot after her: “After we beat the Americans, we’ll give all the Hebes over there what-for, too!”

Again, Sarah kept her mouth shut. She had to bite down hard on the inside of her lower lip to manage it, but she did. The
Reich
hadn’t been able to beat England and France and torment their Jews, though horrible things were supposed to have happened to the ones they’d caught in Russia. The SS man must have pulled his vision of triumph over the United States out of an opium pipe. Or maybe you needed to smoke something stronger than opium to get that kind of hallucination.

She managed to escape. No one was shooting around here right this minute. But a rifle or machine-gun bullet could fly a couple of kilometers and kill somebody who chanced to be in the wrong place at the wrong instant. There hadn’t been any funerals like that on the block where her parents’ house stood, but the next block over had seen one, and a little girl in the hospital with a hole in her leg. Bad luck? God’s will? Sarah had no idea. She wasn’t even sure there was a difference.

A cigar butt lay on the sidewalk: three centimeters or so of stepped-on tobacco, soggy at one end. As casually as if she’d been doing it all her life, she bent and picked it up. She had no use for it herself—she’d never got the smoking habit. But her father would mix it in with his own scroungings. Jews got no tobacco rations. If Father was going to smoke, he had to make do with other people’s leavings.

Or, sometimes, he managed to steal unsmoked cigarettes he found in bombed-out houses—another kind of scrounging. He’d even got American cigarettes that way, from the home of a Party
Bonz
whose connections let him latch on to things ordinary people couldn’t even dream of. Those connections, though, hadn’t kept his fancy place from getting blown to smithereens … or a Jew from enjoying things for which he had no further use.

When Sarah came home at last, her mother asked, “How did it go?”

“Could have been worse.” Sarah displayed the produce in her stringbag. “And I found part of a cigar for Father.”

“That’s good. He’ll be happy,” Hanna Goldman said. “What have you got there? Mustard? When was the last time they had any?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while. If only we had some meat to put it on,” Sarah said.

“Well, it won’t go bad,” her mother said—they didn’t. All you could do was try to get by and hope the war ended before you did. Did America’s entry into the European fight make that more likely or less? Sarah didn’t know. Like everyone else, she could only wait and find out.

Arno Baatz puffed out his chest. The
Unteroffizier
knew something most people didn’t. He’d heard it from a
Gestapo
officer. The secret policeman hadn’t been talking to him, and might not have talked at all had he known Arno was eavesdropping. But that had nothing to do with anything. Arno had heard. He knew. He felt proud. He felt important. He liked feeling important.

Part of the fun of knowing something other people didn’t was getting the chance to tell them. Then they knew, too, of course, but they also knew you’d known before they did. That was how you scored points with your fellow men.

And so Baatz gathered his squad together and said, “Listen, you clowns, you’d better behave yourselves and keep all your gear better than new for the next few days, or else you’ll catch hell.”

“Since when did they appoint you God?” Adam Pfaff inquired.

“Might’ve known you’d be the one to piss and moan. But it won’t have anything to do with me. You’ll catch hell from everybody,” Arno said loftily.

“Oh, yeah? How come?” the
Obergefreiter
asked.

“How come? I’ll tell you how come. Because the
Führer
’s coming to Münster to make a big speech, that’s how come.” There. It was out. What Arno knew, he’d spread. Whether it was something he was supposed to spread, he simply didn’t worry about. He could no more keep it quiet than he could do without eating or drinking or breathing.

Some of the soldiers gaped at him. He hadn’t convinced all of them, though. Speaking for the unconvinced, Pfaff said, “Sure he is. And when he decided he would, the very first person he phoned up to tell him was
Unteroffizier
Arno Baatz. In your dreams!”

“No, of course the
Führer
didn’t phone me,” Baatz snapped. “Don’t be a bigger
Dummkopf
than you can help.”

“So how
do
you know, then?” Pfaff said. “Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk—again?”

“Doubt all you want. You’ll find out,” Baatz answered. “And when you get your ass in a sling, don’t come crying to me and say I didn’t warn you. Us and the SS guys, we’ve got to make sure the
Führer
stays safe while he’s in town and the rebels don’t kick up any fuss.” By the way he said it, the forces protecting Adolf Hitler would include Himmler’s police and prison guards and praetorians … and this one squad of
Landsers
.

“You really believe this shit, don’t you?” Pfaff sounded less skeptical himself now.

“I believe it because it’s true,” Arno said. “And I want to see you clean yourself up—all of you, in fact! You look like pig sties in marching boots. Oh, and Pfaff, when we line up for the
Führer
’s inspection, you’d damn well better be toting a rifle with a varnished stock, you hear me?”

The
Obergefreiter
unslung his gray-painted Mauser. Arno Baatz had hated that nonregulation piece since the second he set eyes on it. Pfaff started to say something, then had second thoughts. At last, he answered, “If the
Führer
inspects us, I’ll do it. But he was a
Frontschwein
himself. I bet he’d understand.”

“He’d understand what a square peg you are, that’s what he’d understand,” Baatz retorted. Adam Pfaff clung to a wounded, dignified silence.

For the next couple of days, nothing out of the ordinary happened. The soldiers began to give Arno funny looks when they didn’t think he could catch them doing it. But he had what might as well have been a radio antenna to pick up such things. He noticed, all right.

He noticed, and he worried. What if he’d heard wrong? What if the
Gestapo
officer had been talking through his high-crowned cap? Arno knew he would never live it down if he’d made a mistake. The men didn’t respect him enough as it was (they would have had to treat him like a field marshal to give him the respect he felt he deserved). They wouldn’t respect him at all if the
Führer
didn’t show.

But then things started tightening up. Parties of soldiers and labor gangs full of convicts and Jews went to work cleaning up Münster. The city hadn’t taken as much of a beating as some Russian town that went back and forth between the
Wehrmacht
and the Red Army three or four times, but it wasn’t in what anybody would call great shape.

Grudgingly, Adam Pfaff said, “Well, maybe you were right, Corporal. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be putting mascara and rouge on this corpse.”

“Bet your ass we wouldn’t,” Baatz agreed, also grudgingly. Neither Pfaff’s rank nor his own, which shielded them from most fatigue duties, kept them from shoveling and hauling as if they were kikes or jailbirds. His hands were getting blisters in places where they didn’t already have calluses.

Even more galling was the ironic glint that sparked in the dark eyes of the big-nosed bastards with the yellow stars on their clothes.
See?
they might have been saying.
You like Hitler, and what has it got you? You’re doing the same kind of shit we are
.

If one of them
had
said anything like that to Arno, he would have knocked the pigdog’s teeth down his throat with an entrenching tool. The Jews knew better than to open their big yaps. Whether or not they said anything, though, their eyes spoke for them.

The SS began moving in in droves:
Gestapo
men, SD men, hard-faced troopers from the
Waffen
-SS. The looks they gave ordinary German
soldiers were even more scornful than the ones the
Landsers
got from Jews. To the SS functionaries, soldiers were only cowflops under their boots. Medieval barons must have looked at peasants the same way.

Every so often, the peasants had risen up against their noble overlords. They’d killed all the barons and counts and princes they could catch. Arno had never sympathized with the peasants till now. He finally understood.

He still got angry when he saw Jews eyeing him in their sneaky, snotty way. His understanding wasn’t all that flexible. It stretched only so far.

SD men—faggots if he’d ever seen any—started hanging red-white-and-black bunting and swastika banners all over town. They wanted to give the impression that Münster loved the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the
Führer
. Even Arno knew better than that. Why were soldiers and panzers holding the place down under martial law if everybody in it was such a contented citizen of the
Grossdeutsches Reich
?

Well, everybody in it except the Jews. They weren’t citizens of the
Reich
. They were only residents. Most Germans—most good, moral, upright Germans—wished they weren’t even that.

A few RAF bombers came over by night. In the confusion of the air raid, someone with matches and a can of kerosene torched a lot of banners and bunting. The soldiers had more important things to worry about. For Arno and his men, staying alive stood pretty high on the list.

By contrast, the blackshirted fairies pitched conniption fits when the sun came up and they discovered how their artistic handiwork had been vandalized. They started screaming and wailing and demanding house-to-house searches to smoke out the culprit. Some of the things they wanted to do to him once they caught him made Arno’s blood run cold. For somebody who’d spent so long on the Eastern Front, that was saying something.

“Boy, they’re sweethearts, aren’t they?” Adam Pfaff said.

“At least,” Arno answered. He wasn’t used to agreeing with the miserable
Obergefreiter
, but they saw eye-to-eye on this one.

The artistic SS men raised such a hue and cry that it finally took a
Wehrmacht
colonel general to tell them to shut up and to make it stick. Along with Himmler’s elite, high-ranking Army, Navy, and
Luftwaffe
officers were coming into Münster to hear what their chief of state had to say. Some of them eyed the SS paladins the way the blackshirts looked at
Landsers
. An interesting time was had by all.

Pete McGill handed the Marine Corps quartermaster sergeant his helmet. He’d worn one like it ever since he became a leatherneck. So had a zillion other Marines, and even more doughboys and dogfaces. Any English soldier who’d gone over the top at the Somme in 1916 would have recognized them: they were nearly exact copies of the limeys’ tin hats. Tommies wore them to this day.

Marines and soldiers had worn them to this day, or something close to it. But Progress with a capital P was now reaching even the garrison on Midway. In exchange for Pete’s steel derby with its broad brim, the quartermaster sergeant handed him a pot-shaped plastic helmet liner and a helmet that fit tightly over it. You could adjust the straps and padding inside the liner so it gave a good fit to your particular noggin.

When Pete started to do that, the quartermaster said, “One thing at a time, if you don’t mind. You’ve got to sign for this baby first.”

As a matter of fact, Pete had to sign twice: once for the helmet and once for the liner. He said, “You sure there’s not an extra form for the goddamn chin strap?”

“No, that’s included on the form for the helmet proper, to which it attaches,” the quartermaster sergeant answered automatically. Then, a beat slower than he should have, he realized Pete was being sarcastic. He jerked his thumb at the tent flap. “Funny guy, huh? Get the hell outa here, funny guy.”

Grinning, Pete got. He looked out at sand and at the Pacific, which from Midway seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. The island still stank faintly of dead Japs. The Marines hadn’t taken more than a handful of prisoners, most of them captured too badly wounded to die fighting or kill themselves. As far as Pete was concerned, if Hirohito’s boys hadn’t caused so much trouble from this place, they would have been welcome to it.