The War That Came Early: West and East (11 page)

Above the bar, a sign said
PARIS CAN TAKE IT
in English and what was bound to be the same thing in French. “Whiskey,” Walsh told the barkeep, and slid a silver shilling across the zinc surface.

“Coming up,” the fellow answered in tolerable English. He was graying at the temples; a black patch covered his left eye socket. He didn’t look piratical—he looked tired and overworked. “Ice?”

“Why bother?” Walsh answered. With a shrug, the bartender gave him his drink. He hadn’t asked for good whiskey. He hadn’t got it, either. He consoled himself with the reflection that he probably also wouldn’t have got it if he had asked for it. He made the drink disappear and put another shilling on the bar. “Why don’t you fill that up again?”

“But of course.” The bartender did. He nodded toward the stage. “The girls, they come on soon.”

“Good enough, pal.” Walsh knocked back the fresh drink. After a couple, good and bad didn’t matter so much. Any which way, your tongue was stunned.

The girls weren’t wearing much when they started their number. What they did have on sparkled and swirled transparently as they started gyrating on the little stage. They weren’t so gorgeous as they would have been at the Folies Bergères—this was just a little place—but they weren’t half bad. And they rapidly started shedding their minimal costumes. Walsh pounded the bar and whooped. So did other soldiers and flyers in a camouflaged rainbow of uniforms.

Just before the girls got down to their birthday suits, air-raid sirens started screaming. Polylingual profanity filled the air, burning it bluer than all the tobacco smoke already had.

After yelling through a megaphone in French, the bartender switched to English: “Cellar this way! Must go! Raids very bad!”

What no doubt propelled half the fellows in the joint down into the cellar was the hope that the naked cuties would come down with them. No such luck, though. The girls had somewhere else to hide. Some of the rowdier—read, younger and drunker—men started to go up and look for them. Then, even in the cellar, they heard the German bombs whistling down. That stopped that. No matter how rowdy you were, you didn’t want to meet explosives head on.

Thunderous blasts staggered Walsh and everybody else. A few men screamed. Walsh didn’t, but he didn’t blame them, either. It wasn’t as if he never had when he was under fire. Then the lights went out. More hoarse shouts rose. Walsh put his hand on his wallet, just in case. Sure as hell, before long another hand touched his, there in the pitch blackness. When he stomped, his boot came down on a toe. Somebody yelped. The hand jerked away in a hurry.

Eventually the lights came on again. The all-clear warbled. The crowd in the cellar trooped upstairs. The bartender started serving drinks. Somebody cranked up the gramophone. On came the girls. Except for ambulances and fire engines wailing outside, the raid might never have happened. Except.

Chapter 5

B
ehind Sergei Yaroslavsky’s SB-2, columns of black smoke rose above Wilno. Some of the columns had surely come from the bombs his plane had dropped. “Well,” he said in some satisfaction, “we’re finally starting to get somewhere.”

“Oh, yes.” Anastas Mouradian nodded. If he was anywhere near as pleased as Sergei, he hadn’t bothered telling his face about it. “Somewhere. But where?”

“We’ve got the Poles on the run.” Sergei almost shouted, to make himself heard over the drone of the SB-2’s twin radial engines. “It took a while, but now we do. A week from now, we won’t just be bombing Wilno. We’ll be shelling it—see if we won’t. The Poles are brave, but that only helps so much when you haven’t got the horses—or when the horses are all you’ve got.”

Mouradian nodded again. He’d heard the same stories Sergei had: about how Polish cavalrymen, square-topped
csapkas
on their heads and drawn sabers gleaming in the sun, had charged Red Army tanks. You did have to be brave to do something like that. Didn’t you also have to be out
of your mind? Not many of the Poles who’d galloped forward galloped back again.

“All right. Fine. We have the Poles on the run. Now what?” Mouradian said after what seemed a pause for consideration. His Russian was fluent, but carried a throaty Armenian accent. He sounded a little like Stalin on the radio. Sergei thought so, anyhow, but Mouradian got offended when the Russian told him so. If you listened to Stas, Armenian and Georgian were nothing like each other. But, if you listened to him explaining that, he still sounded like Stalin.

He also took a perverse—a Caucasian?—pride in being difficult. “What do you mean, ‘Now what?’” Sergei said. “We take back the chunk of Poland Pilsudski stole from us while we were fighting our civil war, that’s what.”

“And what do the Poles do then?” Anastas inquired. “Better yet, what do the Germans do then?”

The Germans couldn’t do what Sergei suggested. Human beings weren’t made that way. Mouradian chuckled indulgently, as he might have at a six-year-old showing off. Sergei went on, “But who cares what they do? If the Poles make peace with us, the Nazis have to get out of Poland, right?”

“They’re good at marching into places. They aren’t so good at marching out again,” Stas said, which was bound to be true. He added, “Besides, they’re still at war with us any which way. They have been since Czechoslovakia.”

“Well, so what?” Sergei didn’t like to think about Czechoslovakia. He and Stas and Ivan Kuchkov had come out again, which a lot of other “volunteers” hadn’t. He’d first made the acquaintance of the Bf-109 there. If he never saw another angular German fighter, he wouldn’t be sorry.

“So Hitler will find some other way to keep the fight going,” Mouradian predicted. “He hates the Soviet Union worse than he hates France and England.”

That held a nasty ring of truth. Yaroslavsky was glad to have to pay attention to his flying for a little while as he descended toward this new airstrip on what had been Polish soil. “He may hate us, but is he crazy?” he asked, leveling off again. “Does he
want
a two-front war?”

“Germany almost won the last one,” Anastas answered, which was true even if unpalatable. “And it doesn’t look like America’s going to get into this one.”

Sergei’s grunt could have been taken as one of effort, because he was cranking down the landing gear. A hydraulic or electrical system would have been easier on the pilot. It also would have been more expensive and harder to build. He—and every other SB-2 pilot—went on working the crank.

Without American soldiers and munitions, France and England likely would have lost the World War—the First World War, it was now. That didn’t make Soviet citizens love the USA. American troops in the north and the Far East had done their best to strangle the Russian Revolution in its cradle. They’d gone home, grudgingly, only after their best turned out not to be good enough.

The bomber set down roughly and taxied to a stop. Groundcrew men trotted up as the crew scrambled out of the plane. “How did it go, Comrades?” the chief maintenance sergeant asked.

“We put the bombs on target in Wilno,” Sergei said. “Not much antiaircraft fire. The Poles are wearing down.”

“About time,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know why they got so excited over Wilno to begin with—or why we want it, come to that. Damn town is full of Litvaks and Jews.” He spat in the dirt.

Before Sergei could answer that or even think about it much, Ivan Kuchkov stiffened like an animal taking a scent. He cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Then he said something worse than his usual
mat
-laced obscenities: “Messerschmitts! Heading this way!”

Sergei started running before he heard the planes himself. So did everybody else within earshot of the Chimp. Long before the pilot got to the trenches on one side of the runway, he did hear the hateful roar of the fighters’ engines. That only made him run harder.

He didn’t run hard enough to get to the trenches before the 109s’ machine guns and cannon started stitching down the airstrip. Dust spurted up from the hits. Rounds slammed into the metal and doped fabric covering his SB-2. He didn’t look back. He did a swan dive—if you could imagine a spastic swan—into the zigzagging trench.

That maintenance sergeant landed in the trench beside him. “Too goddamn close,” Sergei said, panting. “I’m lucky I didn’t break my ankle jumping down here.”

The sergeant didn’t answer. He wouldn’t, either. A bullet—or, more likely, a 20mm round—had taken off the top of his head. Blood and brains soaked into the black dirt. One second, he’d been running for cover. The next? It was over. Lots of worse ways to go. Pilots found too many of them. If you got shot down, you were liable to have a lot of time to think before you finally smashed.

“Bozhemoi!”
Anastas Mouradian said. “Poor bugger cashed in his chips all at once, didn’t he?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sergei answered as the Messerschmitts zoomed away at just above treetop height. Now he could smell the maintenance man’s blood, and the nastier smells that said his bowels and bladder had let go when he stopped one.

“Za Stalina,”
Mouradian added somberly. About every third Red Army tank and Red Air Force bomber had
For Stalin!
painted on its side. You fought for Stalin. And you died for Stalin, too. He looked after the 109s. They were long gone now. “You see? The Nazis haven’t dried up and blown away.”

“Well … no.” Sergei didn’t like to admit that. Oh, he knew Poles could kill him, too. But the Germans, damn them, were much too good at such things. He wondered what they’d done to his plane. It wasn’t burning, anyhow. A couple of bullets through the engines sure wouldn’t do it any good, though. Two of the tires on the landing gear were flat. That would make getting it out of the way for repairs even more fun than it would have been otherwise.

They’d have to do it, fun or not. They couldn’t just leave the SB-2 in the middle of the runway. Not only did it clog Soviet air operations here, it sent the
Luftwaffe
an engraved invitation to come back.

“Planes … We can fight back against planes,” Stas said, and Sergei made himself nod. It was true—to a point. The Bf-109 outdid anything the Red Air Force flew. Both biplane and blunt-nosed monoplane Polikarpov fighters were last year’s models—no, year before last’s—next to it. New machines that could meet the fearsome Messerschmitts on even
terms were supposed to be in the works. But the hot Soviet planes weren’t here yet, and the Germans had theirs now. In a low voice, Mouradian went on, “What happens if the Nazis throw their panzers at us?”

Sergei took a deep breath, then immediately wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t just that he smelled the butcher-shop and outhouse reeks of the groundcrew man’s sudden demise. But the damp-earth smell of the trench reminded him of a new-dug grave. He’d smelled that smell when they put his mother in the ground.

“Hitler wouldn’t do that,” he protested, remembering how stunned he’d been then. “He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. He’d really have a two-front war if he did.”

“Well, maybe. I hope you’re right,” Mouradian said. “But so would we, and we didn’t the last time around.”

Only one thing was left for Sergei to do then: swear at the Japanese. He did it, with a flair and verve that made even the Chimp eye him in surprised admiration. With any luck at all, it would satisfy NKVD informers, too—assuming Ivan Kuchkov wasn’t one.

SARAH GOLDMAN STARED
at the rectangle of yellow cloth her mother held. It had crudely printed, fist-sized Stars of David on it. Each six-pointed star bore four black, Hebraic-looking letters:
Jude
. The Jews of Münster, the Jews of Germany, were going to have to put the stars on their clothes and announce to their Aryan neighbors what they were.

But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh, no. The worst was that the Goldmans, like every other Jewish family in Germany, had to give up clothing ration points to get the cloth with which to mark themselves. Whoever’d come up with that masterpiece of bureaucratic
chutzpah
must have won himself a commendation from Himmler, or even from Hitler himself.

“They aren’t just nasty,” Sarah said. “They’re
ugly.”
She tried to imagine wearing a yellow star on the breast of a jacket or blouse. She’d been shabby before—Jews got far fewer clothing points than Aryans. But her mother was good at mending and making do. Come to that, she wasn’t bad herself. How were you supposed to make do with a star that shrieked
JEW!
at the world?

“I might have known it would happen. I should have known,” her father said when he came back from his work on the labor gang that night. He was thinner than Sarah ever remembered seeing him; he did more than the food he got could support. Most nights, he fell asleep like a dead man right after supper. But he somehow seemed to limp less than usual, and his eyes were clear and bright.

“What do you mean, you should have known?” Hanna Goldman demanded. “Who do you think you are, Heydrich or somebody?”

“God forbid,” Sarah’s father answered. Sarah nodded and shivered at the same time. Heydrich might have been the scariest Nazi in business, not least because he looked like such a perfect Aryan. Samuel Goldman went on, “But when the
Wehrmacht
didn’t roll into Paris, Hitler and Goebbels needed something to take people’s minds off the war. Jews are perfect for that: the Nazis can jump all over us, and how are we going to hit back?”