The War That Came Early: West and East (25 page)

PEGGY DRUCE HAD ALWAYS
had a knack for complicating her life. She wouldn’t have been in Marianske Lazne when the Nazis invaded if she hadn’t. That wasn’t the first time she’d done exactly what she wanted to do and worried about the consequences later. It wasn’t the first time consequences got up on their hind legs and bit her in the ass, either.

But she’d never done anything like this before. She’d been married to Herb since before the War to End War—another wistful hope shot to hell. She’d gone plenty of places on her own in those years, too; she liked traveling more than Herb did. Plenty of men had tried to get her into bed with them. None had had any luck.

None … till Constantine Jenkins.

She had all kinds of excuses. She’d been away from home, away from Herb, an ungodly long time. She’d been drunk as a skunk. Christ! Had she ever! Her hangover the next morning almost called for a blindfold and a cigarette, not four aspirins and bad German ersatz coffee. And she’d been so sure the young American diplomat was queer. Even drunk she would have been more on guard if she weren’t so sure.

Maybe he did like boys better than girls. But he was at least a switch hitter, as she had reason to know.

She muttered to herself, there in her hotel room. The young American diplomat … Her mouth twisted in rueful self-mockery. He wasn’t young enough to be her son, not unless she’d started at an age that made people crack jokes about Mississippi and Alabama. He wasn’t far from it, though. That had to be one more reason she hadn’t had her guard up.

“Shit,” she said distinctly. She could come up with all kinds of reasons, all kinds of excuses.

One of these days, she still expected to get back to the States. When she did, she expected a happy reunion with her husband. She hadn’t written him about what the dog did in the nighttime—and it wasn’t nothing, dammit. She didn’t intend to. Lots of people (including several friends) carried on affairs that lasted for years without the other spouse’s being any the wiser. She wondered how they managed. Maybe they’d had their consciences surgically extracted.

The Nazis probably had a medical center somewhere that did exactly that. Hitler would have been the first patient, followed by Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels. Everybody who’d joined the SS would have followed suit. Real heroes could get the job done without benefit of anesthesia.

Peggy shook her head. If she wasn’t punch drunk … But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she’d cheated on the man she’d loved for almost her entire adult life. And she hadn’t had her conscience removed, no matter how convenient it would have been.

He’ll never know
. She’d been telling herself as much since she woke up next to Con Jenkins. Con … She shook her head again, even more ruefully. She hadn’t known someone with such a formal—even formidable—name had that one-syllable nickname. She hadn’t known all kinds of things about him. Oh, no!

But Con Jenkins wasn’t the point, even if he’d given her the problem. Herb Druce was. And so was Peggy herself.
He’ll never know
wasn’t the point.
She
knew. She couldn’t forget, and she couldn’t forgive herself, either. She was going to have to deal with this, dammit.

She also couldn’t drop Con like a live grenade. Had she done something stupid with one of the Germans who’d shown he was interested, she
could have cut him out of her life from then on. That would have helped her get back her good opinion of herself.

But if anybody could help her go home at last, Constantine Jenkins was the man. If he got angry at her, how hard would he work to send her back to Philadelphia? And, now that she’d slept with him once—and, by all the signs, enjoyed it in a drunken way, even if she hardly remembered it now—how the hell was she supposed to tell him she didn’t want to go to bed with him any more?

On the other hand, if she took him to bed again in the hope that that would make him move heaven and earth to get her out of Berlin, how was she different from the ladies of the evening who prowled the blacked-out nights, looking for anything in pants and looking to get the men they found out of their pants as fast as they could?
I’m classier
, she thought. As with
He’ll never know
, it wasn’t enough of an answer.

And something else occurred to her. If she kept laying the embassy undersecretary, how hard would he work to send her home? Wouldn’t he have the best reason in the world—from a man’s point of view, or at least from a stiff dick’s, assuming there was any difference—for wanting to keep her available?

“I’m screwed if I screw him, and I’m screwed if I don’t screw him,” she blurted, and started to laugh. She could still she how ridiculous this all was, anyhow. If she were reading a novel, she’d keep turning pages like nobody’s business. It was still funny in real life, but with a bitter edge no novel could match.

The telephone chose that moment to ring. Peggy jumped, then sprawled across the bed to pick it up.
“Bitte?”
she said.

“Hello, Peggy.” Of course it was Constantine Jenkins. Who else would it be?
Just to drive me crazy
, she thought.
Um, crazier
. He went on, “I know you speak German pretty well.”

“Fair,” she said. “Better than when I got here. I know a lot more French—and much good
that
does me.”

“As a matter of fact, so do I,” he said. And he really was fluent
auf Deutsch
, while Peggy struggled to make herself understood and to follow what other people said to her. If he
did
speak French better … But he was
after something else, because he asked her, “How well do you write German?”

“Write it?” Peggy could hear herself squeak in surprise. “I don’t think I’ve tried since I was in high school. I’d make a horrible mess of the grammar—I’m sure of that. How come?”

“Because I want you to write a letter to Adolf Hitler,” Jenkins answered. Whatever he thought of the
Führer
, it didn’t show in his voice. Peggy had a good idea of his opinion. No
Gestapo
man tapping the phone line would, though. The blackshirt might wonder if he’d gone round the bend, of course.

And who could blame a hard-working blackshirt for that? Peggy wondered the same thing. She also wondered whether her own hearing had gone south. “You want … me … to write a letter … to Hitler? In German?”

“He doesn’t read English, and I don’t want his secretaries to sidetrack this. They may anyhow, but if it comes by way of the American embassy you have a chance of getting him to look at it,” Constantine Jenkins said. “Sometimes you have to go straight to the top here, if you can do it.”

“What should I say?” By now, Peggy was beyond flabbergasted.

“Tell him what you’ve been telling all the other Germans. You’re a neutral, you’re stuck here, and you’d appreciate it if he’d make it possible for you to go back to the USA and to your family. A couple of paragraphs should do it.”

“You really think that will work?”

“I don’t know. It may. Lots of leaders will do favors for little people because it makes them look good and doesn’t cost anything much. And if he says no, how are you worse off?”

Peggy had no answer for that. Even though he couldn’t see her, she nodded. “Okay, Con—I’ll take a shot at it. I’ll bring it by the embassy this afternoon.”

She thought for a moment, then called the front desk. “A German-English dictionary?” said the clerk who answered.
“Ja
, we can supply one. Please wait. A bellboy will deliver it
sofort.”
As Jenkins had before him, he hung up.

It didn’t come immediately, but it didn’t take long enough to annoy her. The bellboy was at least sixty-five, with a bushy white mustache and a limp. What had he stopped in the last war? She tipped him more than she would have if he were some kid.
“Danke,”
he said gravely, and brushed a forefinger against the brim of his cap.

She felt like cheering when she found the dictionary included a table of declensions, and another one for conjugations. She’d still write bad German, but it wouldn’t be quite
so
bad.

Führer
, she began—he wasn’t
Mein Führer
, not to her. She set out her problem and what she wanted as simply as she could. As Jenkins had predicted, it didn’t take much more than half a page.
I thank you very much for your help
, she finished, and signed her name.

She put the letter in an envelope but didn’t seal it: Con Jenkins would want to look it over before it went out. Before it went to the
Führer
. She laughed again. Would Hitler see it? What were the odds? But, as Jenkins had also asked, if he didn’t see it, or if he said no or just ignored it, how was she worse off?

She set the dictionary on the check-in counter as she left for the embassy. “I hope it was useful to you,” the desk clerk said.

“It was.
Danke schön,”
Peggy answered.

Jenkins certainly didn’t treat her like a lover when she got there. She had to cool her heels for half an hour before she could see him. Again, he was closeted with the gray-haired naval attaché. Well, that fellow probably had enough on his mind and then some. The whole business with the
Admiral Scheer
and the Royal Navy had played out right on the USA’s front porch, so to speak.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” the undersecretary said briskly when she made it into his office at last. She was just as happy to stay businesslike. She handed him the letter. He read it, then grinned at her. “Oh, this is fine, Peggy. Much better than I expected. You didn’t give your German enough credit.” She told him how she’d borrowed the dictionary. He clapped his hands. “Good for you, sweetheart!”

He didn’t sound like a fairy being arch. He sounded like a lover praising his lover. Peggy wished he would have seemed more faggoty. At least
he didn’t say something like
I’ll show up at your hotel tonight so you can thank me the right way
. Peggy asked, “How long do you think it will take before I know?”

“Hitler’s staff will have the letter tonight,” Jenkins said. “What they do with it, what he does with it—that’s out of my hands.”

“Okay,” Peggy said. “Thanks again.” She got out of there as fast as she could without being rude.

Three days later, the telephone in her room rang at a quarter to five in the morning. At first, muzzy with sleep, she thought it was the air-raid siren going off. When she realized it was the phone, she got good and pissed off. What asshole would call at this ungodly hour? It was getting light, but even so—!
“Bitte?”
she snarled.

“Sind Sie Frau Druce?”
A man’s voice.

“Yes, I’m Peggy Druce. Who the devil are you?”

“Adolf Hitler here,” the voice answered. And it was. As soon as he said it, she knew it was. She’d heard him on the radio too often to have any doubt. “You are having trouble leaving my country?”

When Hitler said it was his country, he damn well meant it. “Uh, yes, sir,” she managed.

“The trouble will end. Whatever neutral nation you wish to visit, you may. Never let it be said we keep anyone who does not wish to stay,” the
Führer
told her.

“Uh—” Peggy kept saying that. She’d never expected a call from one of the two or three most powerful men in the world. She’d never expected anything to come of her letter, truth to tell. “Thank you very much, sir!”

“You are welcome. Have you any questions?” He spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure she could follow. Even over the telephone, the weight of his personality made her sag.

“Uh—” There it was again! “Why are you up so early?” she blurted.

He actually chuckled. How many people could say they’d made Hitler laugh? “I am not up early. I am up late. The enemies of the
Reich
do not sleep, and neither do I. Good-bye, Mrs. Druce. Finding a problem so easy to solve is a pleasure, believe me.”

“Thank you.” Peggy finally managed not to say
Uh
, but she was talking to a dead line.

Chapter 11

D
own screamed the Stuka. Vaclav Jezek had never yet met a man who’d lived through a dive-bomber attack and didn’t hate the German warplane with a fierce and deadly passion. Outside of a few luckless people down in Spain, no one had hated the Stuka like that longer than he had. He’d been dive-bombed on the very day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, and more often than he cared to remember since.

“Get down!” he yelled to Benjamin Halévy, who was working his way across the field with him.

“I
am
down,” the Jewish sergeant answered. So was Jezek. He lay flat as a flapjack. The smells of grass and dirt filled his nostrils.

That Stuka screeched like a soul tormented in hell. The sirens built into the landing gear were one more piece of German
Schrechlichkeit
. Vaclav sneaked a glance at it. It looked funny. What were those pods under its wings? Not bombs, surely.

The dive bomber couldn’t have been more than fifty meters off the ground when fire blasted from the ends of the gun barrels projecting from the pods. That was when Vaclav realized they
were
gun barrels. Till
then, he’d hardly noticed them—no great surprise, not when the Stuka was hurtling down at several hundred kilometers an hour.