Hitler's War (51 page)

“Oh.” Peggy knew she sounded deflated. Hell, she felt deflated. She paused to visualize a map of southeastern Europe. “Well, if I could get into Yugoslavia, that would do the trick, too. Anywhere but this Nazi snake pit would.”

“I don’t suppose you want to hear that the Hungarians have territorial claims against Yugoslavia, too,” Jenkins said.

“Jesus! Is there anybody the Hungarians
don’t
have territorial claims against?” Peggy exclaimed.

“Iceland, possibly.” Jenkins didn’t sound as if he was joking. He explained why: “If you think Hitler hates the Treaty of Versailles—”

“I’m right,” Peggy broke in.

“Yes. You are,” he agreed. “But Horthy and the Hungarians hate the Treaty of Trianon even more—and with some reason, because Trianon cost them more territory than Versailles cost Germany. A lot of it wasn’t territory where Hungarians lived, but some of it was…and they want the rest back, too. They aren’t fussy, not about that.”

“I’m sure.” Peggy sighed. “People couldn’t have screwed up the treaties at the end of the war much worse than they did, could they?”

“Never
imagine things can’t be screwed up worse than they are already,” Constantine Jenkins replied. “But, that said, in this particular case I have trouble imagining how they could be.”

“Right.” Peggy sighed. She got to her feet. “Well, I’m going to give it a shot. What have I got to lose?”

“Good luck.” For a wonder, the American diplomat didn’t sound as if he meant
And the horse you rode in on, lady
.

So Peggy went off to the train station to try to get a ticket to Budapest. When she displayed her passport, the clerk said, “You will need an entry visa from the Hungarian embassy and an exit visa from the Foreign Ministry. I regret this, but it is strictly
verboten”
—that word again!—“to sell tickets without proper and complete documentation.”

“Crap,” she muttered in English, which made the clerk scratch his bald head. “It’s a technical term,” she explained helpfully, “meaning, well,
crap.”

“I see,” he said. By his tone, he didn’t.

Peggy did, all too well. She went off to the Hungarian embassy at 8 Cornelius-Strasse. “Ah, yes—an interesting case,” said the minor official who dealt with her. His native language gave his German a musical accent. Had he spoken English, she supposed he would have sounded like a vampire. Maybe, for once, German was better. He relieved her of fifty Deutschmarks and stamped her passport. So she was almost good to go.

Last stop, the Foreign Ministry. Nobody wanted to come right out and tell her no, but nobody wanted to give her an exit visa, either. And
nobody did. Finally, one of Ribbentrop’s flunkies sighed and squared his shoulders and said, “It is not practical at this time.”

“Why the devil not?” Peggy blazed. “I’d think you’d be glad to get rid of me.”

The man shrugged “My orders say this visa is not to be issued. I must, of course, follow them.”

By the way he talked, it wasn’t that something very bad would happen to him if he didn’t—though something probably would. But not following an order was as dreadful to him as desecrating the sacrament would have been to a devout Catholic.

“Aw, shit,” Peggy said, and that pretty much summed things up.

VACLAV JEZEK HAD NEVER LIKED
quartermaster sergeants. As far as he was concerned, most of them were fat pricks. This miserable Frenchman was sure wide through the seat of his pants. And he was acting like a prick, all right. He thought he personally owned everything in the depot near the village of Hary.

Vaclav had been arguing with him through Benjamin Halévy, because he still hadn’t picked up much French himself. Since that wasn’t getting him anywhere, he fixed the French sergeant with a glare and asked him,
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

He got exactly what he hoped for: indignant sputters. Then the Frenchman spoke to the Jewish noncom doing the translating: “He wants to know why you think he should speak the enemy’s language.”

“Does he?” Vaclav pounced: “Tell the son of a bitch I figured he would because he’s doing more to help the Nazis by sitting on his ammo till it hatches than he could any other way.”

“Are you sure you want me to say that?” Halévy asked. “He
really
won’t help you if I do.”

“Fuck him. He’s not helping me now. He’s got rounds for my antitank rifle, and he won’t turn them loose,” Jezek said.

“All right. I’ll try. I just wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing.” In the Jew’s French, Vaclav’s insult sounded less nasty than it would have in Czech or German—French was better for kissing ass than for telling somebody off. No matter what it sounded like, the crack got home. The quartermaster went as hot—and as red—as iron in the forge. He said several things that sounded heartfelt.

“What’s all that mean?” Vaclav asked with clinical curiosity.

“You’d break your piece over his head if you knew,” Halévy said.

Vaclav laughed. “Not this goddamn thing.” Antitank rifles were huge, heavy brutes. The heavier the weapon was, the less it kicked when it spat one of its honking big bullets. Jezek approved of that. As things were, his shoulder was sore all the time. You could stop an elephant with an antitank rifle. Sometimes, you could even stop a tank. Elephants couldn’t grow more armor. Tanks, unfortunately, could. The rifle would be obsolete pretty soon, and you’d need a field gun to deal with enemy armor.

In the meantime, Vaclav wished he had a field gun to deal with this goddamn quartermaster sergeant. The Frenchman and the Jew went back and forth. Halévy chuckled. “He doesn’t like you, Jezek.”

“Suits me—in that case, we’re even,” Vaclav said. “I’m trying to defend his lousy country. It’s more than he’s doing, Christ knows. You can translate that, too.”

Halévy did. The French sergeant didn’t just sputter—he bleated. Then he sprang up from his folding chair. Vaclav thought the fellow was going to try and slug him.
Monsieur le Français
would get a dreadful surprise if he did; Jezek promised himself that.

But the quartermaster sergeant spun on his heel and stormed away. The view from the rear was no more appetizing than the one from the front. “If he’s going after military policemen to haul you off—” Halévy began.

“They’ll grab you, too, ‘cause you’re the one who said it in French,” Vaclav said happily. The Jew seemed less delighted.
Too bad for him
, Vaclav
thought. Just to be helpful, he added, “It’s called shooting the messenger.”

In Yiddish, French, and Czech, Halévy told him what he could do with a messenger. To listen to him, shooting was the least of it. Vaclav listened in admiration. He didn’t understand everything Halévy said, but he wanted to remember some of what he did understand.

The quartermaster sergeant came back. A thunderstorm clouded his brow. He said several pungent things of his own. French might lack the guttural power of Czech or German when it came to swearing, but the sergeant did his damnedest. Vaclav hardly cared. At the same time as the Frenchman was cussing him out, he was also handing over half a dozen five-round clips of long, fat antitank-rifle cartridges.

“Tell him thanks,” Jezek said to Benjamin Halévy.

“Sure.” The Jew eyed him. “It won’t do you any good, you know.” He spoke in French. The quartermaster replied. Halévy translated for Vaclav: “He says you can shove a round up your ass and then hit yourself in the butt with a golf club to touch it off.”

“A golf club?” Vaclav had to laugh. “Well, that’s something different—fuck me if it’s not.”

“He’d say fuck you anyway,” Halévy replied. “Let’s get out of here before he decides he really does have to shaft us, just on general principles.”

That seemed like good advice. Vaclav took it. The quartermaster offered a couple of poignant parting shots. Vaclav glanced toward Halévy. The polyglot Jew declined to translate. That was bound to be just as well.

Civilians streamed away from the front. They didn’t want to get caught by bombs and shells and machine-gun bullets. Well, who in their right minds would have? Vaclav didn’t, either. But when you put on a uniform, that was the chance you took.

Some of the Frenchmen and-women eyed the Czechs suspiciously. They weren’t
poilus
. They weren’t Tommies, either. British soldiers were
familiar sights in France. The damnfool locals probably thought they were Germans—it wasn’t as if that hadn’t happened before farther east. Vaclav would have thought German uniforms were plenty familiar here, too. Maybe he was wrong.

Soldiers came back with the civilians. The ones who clutched wounds, pale and tight-lipped, were simply part of what war did. The ones who didn’t seem hurt worried Vaclav more. He’d watched the Czech army fight till it couldn’t fight any more. Then, when the Nazis kept the pressure on, the Czechs went to pieces.

Would the same thing happen here? As far as Vaclav could see, France was in better shape than Czechoslovakia had been. The country seemed united in its fight against the Nazis. Czechoslovakia sure hadn’t been. Half the Slovaks—maybe more than half—wanted the state to come to pieces. Their precious Slovakia was supposed to be independent these days, but Hitler pulled the strings and made Father Tiso dance.

As for the Sudeten Germans, the miserable bastards who’d touched off the war…Vaclav muttered something foul. The Czechs had been pulling them out of the army because they were unreliable. He muttered something else. Too little, too late. Back right after the last war ended, Czechoslovakia should have shipped all those shitheads back to Germany. If they wanted to join the
Reich
so much, well, fine. So long.

It hadn’t happened. Too goddamn bad.

A French captain spotted the enormous rifle Vaclav had slung over his left shoulder. He said something in his own language. Vaclav only shrugged and looked blank. “Do you want me to understand him?” Halévy asked—in Czech.

Vaclav didn’t even have to think about it. “Nah,” he said. “He’ll pull me off to do something stupid that’ll probably get me killed. I’d rather go on back to camp.”

“Makes sense,” the Jew agreed. Like Vaclav, he stared at the French officer as if he had no idea the fellow was talking to them. The Frenchman
said something else. Vaclav and Halévy went right on impersonating idiots. The captain tried bad German. Jezek understood that. He also understood the captain did have something dangerous for him to try. He didn’t let on that he understood one damn thing. He was willing to risk his life: as he’d thought before, that was why he wore the uniform. But he wasn’t willing to get himself killed without much chance of hurting the enemy.

“Ah, screw you both,” the captain said in German when the Czechs wouldn’t admit they followed him. They went right on feigning ignorance. The Frenchman gave up. Vaclav had his ammo, and he didn’t have to try anything idiotic. As far as he was concerned, the day was a victory so far.

ONCE UPON A TIME—
probably not very long ago—the froggies had had themselves a big old supply dump outside a place called Hary Willi Dernen eyed what was left of it with something not far from disgust. The Frenchmen had hauled away whatever they still had a use for, then poured gasoline on the rest and set fire to it. The stink of stale smoke was sour in his nostrils.

“Come on. Get moving,” Arno Baatz growled. “Nothing worth grabbing in this miserable place.”

“Right, Corporal,” Willi said. Whenever Baatz talked to him these days, he had to fight like a son of a bitch to keep from giggling.

Every once in a while, that showed in the way he sounded. The underofficer favored him with his best glare. “Did I say something funny?”

“No, Corporal,” Willi answered hastily, and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek so the pain would drive mirth from his voice. Awful Arno remembered getting slugged in the tavern back in Watigny. He knew it had happened, anyway—you couldn’t very well
not
know when you woke up with an enormous bruise on your chin and a knot on the back of your head.

But Baatz showed no sign of remembering that Willi and Wolfgang Storch had been in there to see his piteous overthrow. He also didn’t remember he’d been jealous because Michelle brought drinks to them but not to him. He’d stopped a good one, all right. And that was highly convenient. Since he didn’t remember, he didn’t blame them for the damaged state of his skull.

Lieutenant Erich Krantz had replaced Lieutenant Gross the same way Gross had replaced Neustadt. Gross had kept his arm after all; he might even come back to duty one day. Neustadt hadn’t been so lucky. Krantz was here now—at least till
he
stopped something. Junior lieutenants seemed to have an unfortunate knack for doing that.

And, if the enemy didn’t get them, they were liable to do themselves in. Krantz stooped and started to pick up a charred board. “Sir, you might want to be careful with that,” Willi said, getting ready to shove the officer aside if Krantz didn’t feel like listening.

But the lieutenant did hesitate. “What? Why?” he asked.

Corporal Baatz butted in: “Sir, Dernen’s right.” He didn’t say that every day, so Willi let him go on: “The French pulled out of here just a little while ago. That’s the kind of thing they might booby-trap.”

“Is it?” Krantz looked surprised and intrigued. “Well, how about that? All right, I won’t mess with it.”

“That’s a good idea, sir,” Baatz said. His narrow, rather piggy eyes said Krantz should have figured this out for himself. Luckily for him, it wasn’t easy to gig a man—especially a noncom—on account of the look on his face. And Baatz looked mean and scornful most of the time, so maybe the lieutenant didn’t notice anything strange.

Krantz was looking south and west. “Now that we’ve driven the French out of here, we should be able to go on to Laon without much trouble.”

We? As in you and your tapeworm?
Willi thought. The way it looked to him, the froggies had hung on so hard at Hary because it shielded
Laon. They were probably digging in a little closer to the city even now—as well as anyone could in this miserable freezing weather.

Krantz was an officer. Wasn’t he supposed to know stuff like that because he was an officer? He didn’t have much experience, obviously. And if he kept poking around in a gutted supply dump, he wouldn’t live long enough to get any, either. Willi didn’t want to be standing close by when something Krantz was playing with went boom.