The War That Came Early: West and East (15 page)

Fujita walked over to it. Russian boots were very fine—far more supple than Japanese issue. If this luckless fellow was anywhere close to his size … But the dead man wasn’t. He was twenty centimeters taller than Fujita and twenty-five kilos heavier, and had feet to match his size. Large for a Russian, he would have made an enormous Japanese.

“Shigata ga nai,”
Fujita muttered—nothing to be done about it. But it wasn’t as if this fellow were the only dead Russian close by. Oh, no. Fujita and his countrymen had plenty of corpses to strip.

And there were plenty of Japanese corpses to dispose of, too. The dead soldiers’ souls would go to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan would honor them for all eternity. That was a great deal … but somehow it didn’t seem quite enough to Fujita right this minute. Maybe that was simple relief at coming through another fight unhurt. He hoped so. He wanted to give his fallen comrades all the respect they deserved.

But he didn’t want to join them in death. And the Russians, even though pushed away from their precious railroad, hadn’t given up. Artillery from back in the woods to the northeast started screaming in. Fujita stopped worrying about anyone else’s boots and started worrying about getting blasted out of his. He jumped into the closest foxhole. A dead Russian already lay in there, crumpled like a broken doll. He rolled himself into a ball and hoped the shelling would let up soon.

It did, but then two or three Polikarpov biplane fighters strafed the Japanese at not much more than treetop height. They looked old-fashioned alongside the Japanese planes that fought them in the air, but they got the job done. One of the engineers who’d chucked the body off the tracks reeled away, clutching at his chest. He slumped to the muddy ground. Fujita feared he wouldn’t get up again.

Japanese fighters showed up ten minutes after the Russians had
zoomed away. Fujita watched them buzz around like angry bees looking for someone to sting. When they didn’t find anybody, they flew away. “Bastards,” he said. What were they good for if they came to the party late?

Sooner or later, the Reds would run out of gas for their planes and shells for their guns. That was the whole point to cutting the railroad. Sooner or later, yes, but not yet, dammit. Not yet.

Then Japanese bombers droned past, flying much higher than the fighters had. Fujita cocked his head, listening to the distant thunder of explosions from their bombs. Yes, those came from the general direction from which the Russian guns had been firing. Japanese flyers would presently claim they’d silenced those guns … till the artillery opened up again. Fujita was willing to admit the bomber pilots did try. He wasn’t willing to admit anything more than that.

He needed to get rid of the dead Russian keeping company with him. The poor devil was just starting to stink, but that problem would get worse in a hurry. Grunting with effort, Fujita wrestled the body out of the hole.

He was about to drag it downwind when he noticed the dead man’s boots. Damned if they weren’t about his size. He wrestled one off the corpse and tried it on. It fit better than the boots his own country’s quartermasters had given him. And the leather really was glove-flexible. He stripped off the Russian’s other boot and put that on, too. As he walked around in the new pair, a broad smile spread across his face. He could kiss blisters good-bye!

The dead man didn’t complain. He wasn’t even wearing socks—just strips of cloth wrapped around his feet like puttees. Fujita had seen other Russians who did the same thing. They were welcome to the style, as far as he was concerned.
His
socks
—tabis
—were like mittens, with a separate space for his big toe on each foot. When the weather got warm, he could wear sandals with them. He wondered if the weather in Siberia ever got that warm. He wouldn’t bet on it.

It was warm enough for mosquitoes right now. Siberian mosquitoes were numerous, savage, and
large
. A Japanese joke said one of them had
landed at an airstrip, and groundcrew men pumped a hundred liters of gasoline into it before they realized what it was. Fujita thought it was a joke.

You didn’t notice the bites when they happened. If you didn’t feel the mosquito walking on your skin, or see it there, the damn thing would fly away happy. You’d feel it later, though—you’d itch for a week. Scratching only made things worse, too.

Back of the line, Japanese soldiers lit candles of camphor or citronella. You couldn’t do it at the front. The scent, wafting on the wind, told the Russians where you were. They were like animals; they’d take clues a civilized man, a Japanese man, wouldn’t even notice, and they’d use them to kill you.

An officer’s whistle squealed like an angry shoat. “Advance!” Lieutenant Hanafusa shouted. “We have to push their guns away from the railroad line!”

Right now?
Fujita wondered. A sergeant couldn’t ask something like that out loud, not unless he wanted to get busted back to private—or, more likely, shot for cowardice. You’d disgrace your whole family if you did. Your father wouldn’t be able to hold his head up at work. Your mother couldn’t show her face at the vegetable market any more. Your little sister would never find a husband—or, maybe worse, she’d marry a latrine cleaner.

All that went through Fujita’s head in less than a heartbeat. And so, instead of asking questions, he scrambled out of his hole, shouted, “My squad—advance!” and ran forward, clutching his rifle in hands whose palms were wet with fear-sweat.

Into the woods on the far side of the tracks. He wasn’t alone. His squad—and the rest of the company—went in there with him. That made things a little easier. He didn’t know whether misery loved company, but it
needed
company.

Were there Russians in the woods? Of course there were. There always were. Their damned machine guns started yammering right away. Cleverly hidden soldiers would let you run past, then shoot you in the back. They died after that, of course, but they didn’t seem to care. They were so indifferent to death, Fujita wondered if they were human.

He got a flash of something moving, bounding away from the racket of combat as fast as it could. He started to bring his Arisaka up to his shoulder, then checked the motion, his jaw dropping in awe. “Damned if there aren’t,” he said softly.

“Aren’t what, Sergeant?” asked a soldier at his elbow.

His cheeks heated; he hadn’t meant to be overheard.
“Tora,”
he answered. “That was a tiger over there.” He pointed. “I’ve seen a tiger, a live tiger.”

“You should have killed it,” the other soldier said. “That’d be a hell of a souvenir. A tiger’s skin? I hope so! I wish I’d seen it.” He sounded jealous and wistful.

But Fujita shook his head. “It was too beautiful. I couldn’t.” He’d seen too much of war, here and in Mongolia. War was ugly, the ugliest thing there was. And war, he was certain, had nothing to do with tigers.

“HELLO, PEGGY!
How are you?” The receptionist at the U.S. embassy in Berlin greeted Peggy Druce with an all-American smile and a harsh Midwestern accent that would have set her teeth on edge back in the States but sounded heavenly here at the heart of the Third
Reich
.

“Hello, Lucinda. How’s your daughter these days?” Peggy had been stuck in Berlin so long, she was on a first-name basis with everybody at the embassy and knew everybody’s problems.

Lucinda’s smile got wider. “She’s much better, thanks. Those new pills, those waddayacallems, sulfas, fixed her up like magic—I just got a letter from her.
And
her husband finally has a job. He’s riveting in an airplane factory that opened up a coupla miles from where they live.”

“That does sound good,” Peggy said. An airplane factory opening up in Omaha?—she thought it was Omaha. That sounded strange. Maybe FDR had decided the United States did need to be ready for trouble, just in case. Maybe he’d persuaded Congress that that might be a pretty decent idea. Having met war face-to-face, Peggy thought you had to be a jackass not to see it was a good idea. But when you were talking about Congressmen …

Lucinda continued, “And Mr. Jenkins is waiting for you. Go right on
upstairs to his office.” She chuckled. “Maybe you won’t come around here all the time in a while. Maybe you’ll be on your way home.”

“Home.” It sounded like a dream to Peggy—a receding dream, one she couldn’t remember so well as she wished she could. She headed for the stairs, trying to drum up optimism inside herself, to believe she wasn’t just going through the motions one more time. It wasn’t easy. Nothing had been easy since German shells started falling on Marianske Lazne.

CONSTANTINE JENKINS—UNDERSECRETARY:
gold-filled Roman-looking letters on a black nameplate on a door. At the moment, it was a closed door. Peggy fumed. It shouldn’t have been. She was right on time, and Lucinda had said the undersecretary was ready. Peggy’d always been one to grab the bull by the horns. She knocked briskly.

The door opened. Constantine Jenkins looked out at her: mid-thirties, tall, thin, pale, almost handsome “Oh, yes,” he said, his voice low and well-mannered. If he wasn’t a queer, Peggy’d never seen one. “Give me five minutes, please. Something’s come up.”

Those five minutes stretched to fifteen. Peggy was ready to snarl, maybe to bite. Then the door opened again. Out came a short, trim, graying man with four gold stripes on the sleeves of his uniform. The naval attaché gave her a brusque nod and a murmured “Sorry about that,” then hurried down the corridor.

“Come on in,” Jenkins said.

Still a little irked—maybe more than a little—Peggy went on in. “What was that all about?” she snapped.

“Business I had to take care of,” he answered, which told her exactly nothing. He held out a package of Chesterfields—they came from the States through Sweden and Switzerland, in diplomatic pouches. “Cigarette?”

“Oh, God, yes!” If anything could fix Peggy’s mood in a hurry, real tobacco could. What you were able to buy in Germany got lousier by the day. She let him light the coffin nail for her—he had exquisite manners. Smooth, flavorful smoke filled her lungs. “Wow!” she said. “You put up with Junos for a while, you forget what the real stuff is like. And Junos are pretty good, at least next to the other German brands.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said coolly. With those diplomatic pouches, he
didn’t have to pollute his lungs with German tobacco, or whatever it was. After he got a Chesterfield of his own going, he asked, “What can I do for you today?”

“Tell me how to get to Stockholm or Geneva or Lisbon or anywhere else that’ll let me get back to America,” Peggy answered.

He sighed out smoke. “I’m sorry. I wish I could. Believe me, you aren’t the only American who wants to be somewhere else.” He paused. “I wouldn’t recommend Lisbon, not when you have to cross Spain to get there.”

“Okay. The hell with Lisbon. How about Copenhagen? Oslo? Athens, even, for crying out loud? Jesus, I’d take Belgrade right now. Anywhere but here!” Peggy said.

Jenkins spread well-manicured hands. “Difficult to arrange for anyone. More difficult for you, because you haven’t so much as tried to hide how you feel about the Nazis.”

“Wouldn’t that make them want to get rid of me?” she demanded.

“Not when they fear what you’ll say once you get to a neutral country,” the undersecretary replied.

Peggy took a last angry puff on the Chesterfield and stubbed it out in a glass ashtray on Jenkins’ desk. German officials had told her the same thing. She’d made them all kinds of promises. They hadn’t believed her. Maybe they weren’t so dumb as she wished they were.

“As it happens,” Jenkins said, “I have two tickets for the opera tonight. My, ah, friend has come down sick. Would you care to go with me?”

She looked at him in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t so queer as all that. No—she would have bet dollars to acorns his “friend” was a pointer, not a setter. And he was at least ten years younger than she was, probably fifteen. He couldn’t be after getting her into bed. Even if he was, she was sure she could take care of herself. “Thanks!” she said. “Thanks very much. I
would
like that.”

“Good enough,” he said. “I’ll come by your hotel about six, then. We can get some supper before the performance. It’s Wagner.”

“Surprise!” Peggy said. They both chuckled. Wagner was Hitler’s favorite, of course. And what point to being
Führer
if you couldn’t get your favorites up on stage? Hitler could, and he did.

Only after Peggy left the embassy did she realize the opera invitation had also let Constantine Jenkins get her out of his hair much faster than he would have otherwise. He might be a fairy, but he knew something about diplomacy.

She put on a blue silk gown that did nice things for her figure and played up her eyes. It was the fanciest one she had with her, which meant it was also the one she’d worn least. Jenkins showed up in the lobby at a quarter to six, looking dashing in black tie. Not even the blandness of a German dinner took the edge off things. Peggy drank schnapps to make sure nothing would. She was pleasantly buzzed when they walked over to the Staatsoper.

Berlin lay almost as far north as Edmonton, Alberta. You didn’t think about that most of the time, but you did when you saw how long light lingered as spring neared summer. Even so, it would be dark when they came out. Getting back in the blackout might not be much fun.

The tickets were for the front row of the first balcony. Peggy peered down into the orchestra section as Nazi big wigs and their ladies took their seats. Jenkins handed her chromed opera glasses. “Goebbels and Göring are here,” he said. “I don’t see the
Führer
tonight.”

Peggy wasn’t disappointed. She did wonder about security. If someone up here pulled out a submachine gun instead of opera glasses … But nobody did.

Then the lights dimmed. The opera was
Tannhäuser
. It was early Wagner. It had raised a sensation when it was new, but it hadn’t been new for a long time. It didn’t beat you over the head with rocks, the way the later stuff did. So Peggy would have said, anyhow. A real Wagner lover might have had a different opinion—as if she cared.