The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (63 page)

“Odds were I’d be happier, too,” he muttered. That, however, was easier to say than to prove. He might be fighting the Russians right this minute, and wondering how the hell his country came to make the big switch.

As things had worked out, he bloody well knew how. Whether he was better off knowing was a different question. Somebody’d once said you didn’t want to look too closely at what went into making sausages or politics. Walsh was damned if he could remember who the bright bastard was. Any which way, he’d hit it spot on.

Walsh walked down the street, soaking up more war news from the
Times
. Japanese troops had landed in the Philippines. The Yanks were fighting now, whether they liked it or not. And more Japanese troops had invaded French Indochina. More still were in Malaya, and others in the Dutch East Indies. He scanned the paper for reports that they’d landed in Madagascar, or possibly Peru. He didn’t see any. He supposed that was good news. Other good news about Japan seemed harder to find. None of the stories said anything of Japanese troops retreating. Wherever they’d landed, they were moving forward.

If the same were true of English troops in Russia … Walsh knew he still would have been disgusted at allying with Hitler’s Germany. But it wasn’t true. Winter had frozen the front line solid, except where the Red Army prodded at it. Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, and London denied any serious Soviet penetrations. They might all have been telling the truth. If they were, it would have been a world’s first for Radio Berlin.

With a grimace, Walsh chucked the paper into a rubbish bin. The Nazis had a particularly nasty radio traitor, an Irishman named William Joyce, who was usually called Lord Haw-Haw because of the posh, affected accent he could put on. Lots of people listened to him, though few took him seriously. Ever since the big switch, he’d been broadcasting variations on the theme of
I told you so
. It made Walsh want to
chuck a rock or a pint mug at the wireless set every time the louse’s voice came out of it.

He’d just turned away from the bin when he noticed the skinny fellow with the fawn fedora and the big ears. He’d seen the man a couple of times before as he walked through London. He hadn’t paid much attention to him; London was the biggest city of the world, and full of people. Now he wondered if he was being followed.

Well, he could find out. He walked rapidly down the street and turned a corner. Then he stood in front of a shop window, pretending to admire a display of Wellingtons. Sure as hell, here came the little pitcher with the big ears. He jammed on the brakes when he saw Walsh going nowhere fast.

Walsh turned away from the Wellies and ambled on as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He rounded another corner. This next block had exactly what he was looking for: a deep doorway in which he could stand and wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. The little man walked past him, then stopped in dismay when he realized he no longer had his target in his sights. He turned around—and there stood Walsh, right behind him. “Hello, chum,” Walsh said, almost pleasantly. “Do we know each other?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the little man answered, sounding nearly as affected as Lord Haw-Haw. But his ears betrayed him: they flamed red.

Seeing that told Walsh he wasn’t imagining things. “Then why are you following me?” he demanded.

Even though the stranger’s ears went redder yet, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And I’m bloody sure you do.” If Walsh clouted the bugger right here, a bobby would bring him up on charges, and that wouldn’t be so good. He deliberately kept his hands in the pockets of his civilian topcoat. “Go tell whoever’s paying you that I’m wise to him, and he’d damn well better leave me alone from here on out.”

The little man licked his lips. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, mate,” he said, trying for bravado.

“Hell I don’t. You can tell that to Sir Horace himself, by Jesus,” Walsh said.

This time, the little man’s ears went white, as if he’d rubbed them with crushed ice. He wasted no more time trading words with Alistair Walsh. Instead, he ran off like a fox pursued by a prime pack of hounds.

“Cor!” a Cockney voice said from in back of Walsh. “Yer didn’t ’arf put the fear o’ God in ’im, did yer?”

“Whatever I gave him, he deserves worse,” Walsh said.

Later that day, he met Ronald Cartland and some of the other insurgent MPs at a pub not far from the Palace of Westminster. When he described his shadow, Cartland whistled thoughtfully. “I do believe I’ve made the acquaintance of that particular gentleman,” he said, knocking back the whiskey in his glass. “He gets his pay from Scotland Yard.”

“Bleeding hell!” Walsh burst out. “They’re making it into the
Gestapo
, then! He had no warrant from a judge, to give him the right to follow.”

“The government has no warrant for worse things than that,” Cartland said.

“Ah, well. They spy on us, we spy on them. They diddle us, we diddle them. The game’s not all one-sided, not by a long chalk.” One of Cartland’s comrades in insurgency did his best to wax philosophical.

Philosophy didn’t appeal to Alistair Walsh. “They tell people what to do. They tell the blasted
country
what to do, and the blasted country damned well does it. And we … We sit around in pubs and complain.”

“Oh, we do rather more than that,” Cartland said. “We do a good deal more than that, as a matter of fact. I’d tell you more, but the walls have ears.”

If Scotland Yard tapped telephones, if it used operatives to follow the likes of ex-Sergeant Walsh, no doubt it could and would plant microphones in the public houses the insurgents frequented. “God help the poor blighter who’s got to wade through all the other drivel—” another MP began.

“Before he wades through our drivel.” Cartland’s interruption neatly capped him.

“Talk is cheap,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to take the country back from them, is what we’ve got to do.”

By the way they eyed him, he might have been something escaped from a zoo. Or, then again, he might not. “There’s been no successful
coup d’état
here since 1688,” Cartland said in musing tones. “Maybe it’s high time for another one.”

“Maybe it’s past time,” Walsh said, and he might not have been such a strange beast after all.

EVEN BEFORE THE NAZIS
took over, German bureaucracy had been among the most formidable in Europe. German functionaries didn’t invent pseudo-rational reasons for denying requests: that was a French game. They didn’t casually lose or forget about papers, the way their Italian counterparts were known to do. Once a paper landed in a German file, it was there forevermore, and ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Efficiency.

Before the Nazis took over, Sarah Goldman’s father had taught her to admire Germanic efficiency. He hadn’t altogether changed his mind even when that efficiency began to be aimed at him.

Sarah, now, Sarah had a different opinion. The downside to German bureaucracy was that everything had to be perfectly aligned before anything moved. If a signature was missing, if a permission was not in place, if a rubber stamp was applied so that a few millimeters of colored ink came down outside the box officially designated for them, whatever you were trying to achieve ground to a halt until the defect could be remedied.

When you were trying to get married, that wore on the nerves even more than it did any other time. Sarah was convinced it did, anyhow.

The real trouble was, the Nazis didn’t want Jews getting married to begin with. They wanted fewer Jews in Germany, not more of them. But, damn them, they weren’t altogether stupid. They recognized that Jews denied the right to marry would cohabit without benefit of ceremony and registration, and would then produce more little Jews in spite
of everything. And so they didn’t deny them the right to marry. They just made it as hard as they possibly could.

After yet another infuriating and fruitless afternoon wandering the corridors of Münster’s city hall, Sarah trudged home ready—eager—to bite nails in half. “Those rotten, filthy pigdogs!” she snarled to anyone who would listen: which meant her mother and father.

“That crazy Kafka, in Austria, saw all of this foolishness coming right after the last war,” her father said. “He couldn’t get his stories published. People thought they were impossible nonsense. Everybody laughed at him. But he’d have the last laugh now, if he were still alive.”

“Was he a Jew? Did they kill him for being a Jew?” Sarah asked.

“He was a Jew, all right, but that’s not what killed him,” Father answered. “He had consumption, and he died of it. He died young, poor devil. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to live to see that he knew what he was talking about after all.”

Sarah had no way to guess about that. She said, “For all the trouble they’re putting me through, you’d think I was marrying an Aryan.”

“You wouldn’t have any trouble with them then,” Mother said.

“Huh?” Sarah replied.

“They’d tell you no, and that would be that.”

Father nodded. “New marriages between Jews and Aryans are as
verboten
as Jews’ serving in the
Wehrmacht
. We can’t pollute the state with our blood, and we can’t shed our blood for the state, either.” He still sounded bitter about that.

“One of the clerks asked me for a certificate showing my Aryan bloodlines,” Sarah said. “He got mad when I couldn’t give him one, even though I had the Jewish star right where I was supposed to.” She patted the front of her ratty coat. Even brown coal was in short supply for Jews, and the inside of the house got almost as cold as the outside. All the Goldmans wore plenty of clothes all the time.

“Too bad you couldn’t,” Father said. “I’ve heard there are some Jews who’ve bought themselves an Aryan pedigree. I’m only sorry I don’t have the connections to do it myself.”

“Or the money,” Mother put in.

“Or that,” he agreed.

“I don’t want to be an Aryan. I just want to be what I am and not have people hate me on account of it,” Sarah said. “Is that too much to ask for?”

“I didn’t used to think so. I was a grown man before I had to wonder. These days, though, the answer seems to be yes—it is too much to ask for,” Samuel Goldman said.

“They took over not long before my thirteenth birthday,” Sarah said. No need to wonder who
they
were. “I don’t even know what it’s like, being a grown-up without laws against me.”

“Neither did my great-grandfathers, but the laws against them weren’t as bad as these, and they came off one by one instead of getting piled on again and again.” Father sighed. “I used to believe in progress. I really did. Now? Now I wonder. How can you help wondering?”

“You think it’s progress that a professor of ancient history and classics at the university should become one of Münster’s finest pavement repairers?” Mother said.

Sarah stared at her. Father was usually the one who came out with those sardonic gibes. Mother was sunnier—except, all of a sudden, she wasn’t anymore.

Father chuckled self-consciously. “You give me too much credit, sweetheart. If you don’t believe me, ask my gang boss. If I’m anything more than one of Münster’s slightly below average pavement repairers, I’d be amazed.” He turned back to Sarah. “So what did the clerk say when you couldn’t give him the piece of paper that would have made his heart go pitter-pat?”

“I told him I was a Jew. Like I said, he could already see I was, but I told him anyhow.”

“Good. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. And then?”

“Then he told me he’d have to talk with—to consult with, he said—his superior, so he could get orders about what to do. And he slammed down the brass bars in front of his window thing, and he went away, and he didn’t come back.”

“He’ll be there tomorrow,” Mother said.

“I know.” Sarah was anything but delighted. “That means I have to go back there again, too. Just what I want!”

“Is Isidor having as much trouble getting his permission?” Father asked.

“He was the last time I talked to him, a couple of days ago.” Sarah still wondered whether she’d done the right thing when she said yes. Even though she and Isidor pleased each other in bed or wherever else they could find a little privacy, she couldn’t make herself believe they had a grand passion. And wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about? She made herself finish answering: “He makes it sound as though he’s having more
tsuris
than I am.”

“Well, you’re prettier than he is,” Father said. “If you think that doesn’t make a difference, you’re crazy.”

“It shouldn’t,” Hanna Goldman said.

“Which wasn’t what I said,” her husband replied, and so it wasn’t.

“The Nazis
are
harder on Jewish men than they are on women,” Sarah said. “They haven’t thrown Mother and me into a labor gang, for instance.”

“They’re soft on women any way you look at it,” Father said. “From bits and pieces I’ve heard, the other countries that are fighting have put a lot more women into war plants than the
Reich
has.”

“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,”
Mother said, with no irony a microphone was likely to pick up. That was what the Nazis wanted out of women, all right: children, cooking, and going to church. Anything else, anything more, was modern and degenerate—two words that often marched side by side in National Socialist propaganda.

“It will be interesting to see how long they can keep that up if the war against the Russians drags on and on.” Father might have been talking about a bacteriologist’s experiment, with cultures of germs growing on agar-agar in Petri dishes. But he wasn’t. The Nazis experimented with human beings, with whole countries, with whole continents.

So did the Communists. Maybe the war would show that one bunch of those gangsters or the other was wrong. Maybe it would end up showing that both bunches of gangsters were wrong. It looked that way to Sarah.

Which proved … what, exactly? She could almost hear her father’s dry voice asking the question. They might be wrong, but they were running things. And the past eight years she’d seen, without any room for
doubt, that who had the whip hand carried more weight than who happened to be right.