The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (38 page)

His wounds were still fresh enough to hurt. He didn’t go over to her or try to pick her up. He just ordered a beer and some olives and crackers and sat down at a little table where he could look at her without making a pest of himself doing it.

She was already drunk, and getting drunker. No doubt hoping to take advantage of her, the guy beside her set a confident Spanish hand on her knee. Chaim wanted to do things like that so confidently. He wanted to flap his arms and fly, too.

Confident or not, the Spaniard misread the signs. La Martellita picked up his beer mug, threw the beer in his face, and broke the mug over his head.
“¡Madre de Dios!”
he shrieked, beer and blood running
down his cheeks and dripping from his nose and chin. “What did you do that for?”

“To teach you to keep your hands to yourself, you shitheaded motherfucking no-balls faggot,” she answered, and went on from there. Spanish was a good language to swear in, and Chaim realized he was listening to a modern master.

Like the beer and his own blood, it all rolled off the Spaniard. With immense dignity, he accepted a towel from the bartender and patted himself dry. When he saw how much blood splotched the towel, he mournfully shook his head. He got to his feet, which impressed Chaim. After a clop like that, the guy might have had a fractured skull.

He actually bowed to La Martellita. “You don’t need to worry about that any more, not with me,” he said. “You may be a whore, but you are a frigid whore.” He turned and walked out. He was taking a chance—she might have knifed him in the back or chased after him and beaten him to peanut butter. All she did, though, was give him more details on where to go and how to get there.

Then, to Chaim’s alarm, she picked up her glass of whiskey or brandy or whatever the hell it was and carried it over to his table. Unlike the hard-headed Spaniard, she wobbled when she walked. She plopped herself down across from him with a warning glare. “Don’t
you
start anything,” she snapped, breathing high-proof fumes in his face.

“What? You think I’m loco?” he said. “I like my head. It’s the only one I’ve got. I don’t want you to break it for me.”

“You’d better not,” she said fiercely. Then she took another big swig from her glass. How many times had she already emptied it? Quite a few, if Chaim was any judge. She slammed the glass down, slopping a little booze over the edge. And then she started to cry.

Weeping belligerent
shikker
women, care and management of
was a manual Chaim hadn’t read. Hell, he didn’t even know where they issued it. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You still mad at that guy?”

She stared at him as if she thought he was even more cretinous than usual. “Claudio? Oh, no. He’s just an asshole,” she answered. “But the revolution in Spain is ru-ru-ruined.” She had to try three times before she could get the word out. It made her cry harder than ever. Eyeliner
and mascara dribbled down her face. She dabbed at her eyes with a dirty handkerchief.

Chaim wanted to cuddle her and comfort her and tell her everything would be fine. He would sooner have tried it with a rattlesnake. All he said was “We’re doing fine. The Nationalists haven’t beaten us yet, and they won’t.”

The look she gave him then made him think he’d have to study to be a cretin. “Where will our munitions come from?” she said. “England and France have jumped into bed with the Nazis. Do you think they’ll keep sending arms to the progressive elements here? It will be even worse than it was before the big war started.”

If she was right, the Spanish Republic was, to use a technical term, screwed. But Chaim only shrugged. “They weren’t sending us much before,” he said. “They were using the stuff themselves.”

“They kept the Sanjurjo junta from getting any, though,” La Martellita said. She hiccuped, whether drunkenly or because she’d been crying Chaim couldn’t tell. “Now they won’t.”

He shrugged again. “If Germany is fighting the Russians right next door, she won’t have much to spare for the half-assed Fascists way the hell over here.”

This time, she eyed him like a floating spar in the middle of the ocean. “Do you really think so?” she asked. He wondered if he could get plastered on her breath.
What a way to go
, he thought dizzily.

“Sure,” he said with yet another up-and-down of the shoulders. “You wait. We’ll whip the bastards yet.”

Instead of answering, she upended the glass and waved peremptorily for a refill. Chaim recognized the brandy bottle the barman brought to the table. That shit was a distilled artillery barrage. She’d regret it come morning. Jesus, would she ever! But she poured down some more. With muzzy suspicion, she said, “Maybe you’re trying to soften me up so you can go to bed with me.”

“No,” he said, and the regret in his voice was plangent. “I don’t want you to kill me, and I don’t want Sanjurjo’s
pendejos
to kill me, either.”

“That’s what you say.” But even La Martellita couldn’t make herself sound too angry at him.

He nodded. “Yes. That is what I say. What can you do after you get killed?”

She considered his foolishness with drunken gravity. Then she thrust out an accusing forefinger at him. “You were very silly there, outside the Party offices. You looked like a boy who couldn’t get the candy he wanted.”

“Así es la vida.”
Chaim used that one a lot. When you spoke a language badly, clichés came in handy. And
So it goes
was better than bursting into tears the way she had. He thought it was, anyhow.

La Martellita wagged the finger his way. “You still want the candy.”

“Well, so what?” He hadn’t drunk a lot of beer, but he could feel his temper fraying. She’d drive a saint to armed robbery. Not without bitterness, he added, “Who wouldn’t? You’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re—” He stopped. Dammit, he didn’t know how to say
sexy
in Spanish. What the hell? He said it in English instead.

She understood it. He saw that right away. He wondered if he’d get a faceful of brandy with a glass chaser, the way she’d baptized luckless Claudio with beer. “But you don’t try groping me,” she said, and drank some of the vicious stuff instead of flinging it.

Yet another shrug. “Not American style. Not my style. Just coming to see you took all the nerve I had.”

La Martellita got to her feet. Chaim was amazed she could. “I am going home,” she announced, as if challenging him to doubt her.

He scrambled out of his chair. “I’ll help you get there.”

“I don’t need nobody’s—anybody’s help!” She swayed, caught herself, and giggled. “Well, maybe I do.”

Out into the blacked-out night. There was a moon, which helped … some. He hoped like hell she remembered where she lived. He also hoped it wasn’t far. She lurched like a schooner in contrary winds. Once all that brandy kicked in, she was going to keel over.

He didn’t grope her, except incidentally, but by the time they got to her block of flats he was pretty much holding her upright. He didn’t quite carry her up the stairs to the third floor, but close. Then along the hallway. “This one,” she said. He hoped she was right. Otherwise, whoever lived in there would think he was getting burgled.

The key worked. They went in. Nobody screamed or opened fire. La
Martellita swiped at a wall switch. By some miracle, she hit it. A blackout curtain kept the light inside. The flat was tiny: a bed, a chair, a chest, a small bookshelf with a radio on top, a sink, a hot plate. The toilet and bathtub had to be down the hall. Chaim had lived in places like that.

She made it to the bed, fell onto it, and smiled at him, or maybe at the low ceiling. She was gassed. Lord, was she ever! A gentleman would have left, and hated himself ever afterwards. As Chaim had told more than one Spaniard, he was no gentleman. And, no matter how drunk she was, she wouldn’t have brought him here if she didn’t think he would try something … would she?

Only one way to find out. He turned off the light and advanced on the bed. She might hate him in the morning. In the morning, though, she’d hate the whole goddamn world. Whatever happened in the morning, he’d worry about it then.

ALONG WITH THE REST
of the forces of the Czech government-in-exile, Vaclav Jezek stood at attention a couple of kilometers behind the now-quiet line. A French major was going to address them. It wasn’t as if the son of a bitch spoke Czech. That would have been too much to hope for. Sergeant Benjamin Halévy stood at his elbow to translate.

The major had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. He coughed into his hand a couple of times before beginning. “Gentlemen, the Republic of France owes you a debt of gratitude. When times were hard, you came to our aid.”

“And now you’re going to sell us down the river, you piece of shit!” a man not far behind Vaclav shouted.

Sergeant Halévy translated that for the major, though probably not all of it. The Frenchman coughed again. “Well, you see, gentlemen, the situation has changed recently,” he said.

More jeers from the Czechs: “You’re fucking Hitler now—he’s not fucking you!” “The Russians really helped us! That’s more than you ever did!” And a rising chorus that drowned out all the individual insults: “Shame!” Vaclav joined in, baying the word at the top of his lungs.

“We do not abandon men who have helped us,” the French major said stiffly. “Under no circumstances will we allow the Germans to take
control of you. We understand that your authorities are still at war with them, even if that, ah, no longer obtains for us.”

Halévy was a good translator. He even put in the officer’s hems and haws, and imitated his tone very well. But so what? The bottom line was, even if the Nazis didn’t get hold of this battered detachment, France would screw the Czechs for them.

The major proceeded to explain just how France would screw them: “If you wish to remain in France as civilians, you may do that. If you wish to be interned in Switzerland, which remains neutral, you may also do that.”

He didn’t say France would do anything for the Czechs. Stay here? Vaclav didn’t know the language, and didn’t much want to learn. More likely than not, he’d starve before he could. Switzerland? He’d already been interned in Poland. The Swiss would probably be friendlier about it—like most Czechs, he didn’t think Poles were nice people—but even so …

“Or there is another possibility,” the French major went on. “This would have to be done unofficially, you understand. Despite altered circumstances, we still maintain diplomatic relations with the Spanish Republic. You would need to enter on tourist visas issued by your government-in-exile, and we would have no formal knowledge of your doing so. But if, once you were there, you continued to uphold your cause, we would be able to say with a clear conscience that it was none of our doing.”

Now that they were licking the Germans’ boots, they didn’t want to piss off the people wearing said boots. That was what it came down to. Even a corporal like Vaclav Jezek didn’t need field glasses to see it.

“Suppose we go after you traitors instead?” another Czech yelled.

Vaclav wondered if Sergeant Halévy would translate that. He evidently did, because the major performed a classic Gallic shrug. He spoke briefly. Halévy put it into Czech, also briefly: “That would be unfortunate—for you.”

Vaclav found himself nodding. He didn’t want to, but he also didn’t see that he had much choice. The Czechs had numbered about a regiment’s worth of men when they went into action in France. They’d taken more casualties than replacements since. They had no tanks, or
even armored cars. They could annoy the French if they rebelled, but that was about all.

Spain. He spat in disgust. It would be another losing war. The Republic was fucked the same way the Czechs were. Politics had got ahead of it, and now it was going under in the backwash.

What were the Nazis doing to Prague? What were they doing to the rest of Bohemia and Moravia? Next to no news came out of Czechoslovakia these days, but the answer had to be
nothing good
.

“God will punish you for selling out freedom!” another Czech shouted, shaking his fist at the major.

It had nothing to do with God. Vaclav understood that very well. France had decided that getting out of the war with Germany would work to her advantage. England had reached the same conclusion. And so they’d gone ahead and done it. The Czechs were just a minor problem to be cleaned up. By their standards, the French were being generous. They could have put their now-useless allies behind barbed wire. Or they could have handed them to their new friends, the Nazis. That would have been sweet, wouldn’t it?

Calmly, the French major answered, “I am prepared to take my chances. Any man who claims he knows what God will do only proves he has no idea what he is talking about.”

Sergeant Halévy went back and forth with the major in French. The officer shrugged once more, but nodded. Halévy turned back to the gloomy French soldiers standing before him. “For whatever it’s worth to you bastards, I’m coming with you. The French Army has let me resign, and the Czech government-in-exile has let me enlist. It needs people—even Jews—and the French authorities can see I won’t make a good little cog in the machine now that Hitler’s at the controls.”

What would the major have said had he understood Halévy’s claim that Hitler was running the French war machine? Something interesting and memorable, without a doubt. But Czech was only noise to him. Being a small nation, Czechs realized they needed to learn other people’s languages. Being a large and proud one, the French expected other people to learn theirs.

Vaclav didn’t know about the other Czechs, but he was glad to have Halévy along. He didn’t know that the Jew spoke Spanish, but he also
didn’t know Halévy didn’t. He did know he wouldn’t have been surprised. And he knew Halévy made a damn good soldier. He wouldn’t have figured that when they first met. Everybody knew Jews weren’t fighters. Here as so often, what everybody knew proved nothing but bullshit.

The officer brayed out some more French. Again, Halévy did the honors: “He says we’re supposed to march to the nearest train station. They’ll take us over the Pyrenees, so they don’t have to think about us any more. That isn’t what he says—it’s me. But it’s what he means.”