The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (29 page)

“Well, hell. Let’s get outa here,” he said after she wiggled off once more, as if it were the Hibiscus Blossom’s fault he had bad luck and worse technique.

They wound up on Hotel Street, as Pete had known they would. Bars, strip joints, whorehouses masquerading as hotels—anything the horny heart could desire was there for the taking—if you had the jack.

Naturally, military
men packed the street. So did MPs and Shore Patrolmen. Pete had his pass checked three times inside of fifteen minutes. Since it was legit, he didn’t mind showing it. Somebody who was there without proper authorization swung on the Shore Patrolman who asked for his papers. That wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa. The SP and his buddies drastically revised the jerk’s phrenology with their billy clubs.
Then they slung him into a paddy wagon. It hauled him off to the brig.

“Man, if you want to fight, don’t fight those assholes,” Pete said. “More expensive than it’s worth.”

“That sorry SOB was screwed any which way,” one of his friends said. “Soon as they found out he was AWOL, he was gonna catch it.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t have to bleed, too.” Pete was a practical man.

“Sometimes you just feel
like brawling and you don’t care who,” the friend said.

“Well, sure.” It wasn’t that Pete had never walked into a bar looking for a fight. It wasn’t that he’d never found one, either. “But even so …” When you took on the SPs, your movie wouldn’t have a happy ending.

His night did, at one of the joyhouses along Hotel Street. If the blonde he chose looked a little like Vera, he didn’t consciously
think about that till later on. Polly wasn’t from Russia by way of Harbin; she told him she came from Fargo, North Dakota.

“So why’d you end up in Hawaii, then?” Pete asked. They had time for a Chesterfield afterwards; having been away from women for so long, he’d come in a hurry. Maybe he’d rise again fast enough for another go. He hoped so. In the meantime …

She laughed. “You go where the
customers are at, Jack. In my line of work, this here is the Promised Land. And besides, if you was ever in Fargo through the winter, you’d get the hell outa there like your pants was on fire.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed. Honolulu was bound to have better
weather than some pissant burg in North Dakota. Honolulu had better weather than anywhere, possibly including heaven. He stubbed out his
cigarette. “How’s about you go down on me for a little while? Then I think I can do it again.”

“How’s about you give me another fin first?” For somebody from Fargo, she imitated his Bronx accent pretty well. Of course, he wouldn’t be da foist guy she evah hoid who talked liked dat.

He pulled an engraved portrait of Abe Lincoln out of his billfold. She stashed it in the nightstand next to the
bed in the bare little room. They went on from there.

ALISTAIR WALSH FELT LIKE
a new man with the uniform back on. He shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. It wasn’t quite right. He felt like his old self again, was what he felt like. He’d felt like a new man in civvies, and he hadn’t fancied the way the new man felt—not a farthing’s worth, he hadn’t.

But he’d left the army out
of shame at Neville Chamberlain’s bargain with Hitler, and out of suspicion that the Bentley that ran down Winston Churchill after Churchill loudly and eloquently denounced the deal wasn’t driven by a drunk, but by someone who knew just what he was about.

England’s new government was still looking into that, as it was looking into a great many things its predecessor had done under Chamberlain’s
lead, and then under Sir Horace Wilson’s. But one thing that didn’t need looking into was the bargain with Hitler. That went straight into the dustbin. The war was on again.

The former government had put a lot of soldiers out to pasture: men who, like Walsh, couldn’t stomach the big switch, and whom the civilians who’d made the switch couldn’t trust to stay loyal. That was funny, if you liked.

George VI had gone on the BBC, saying the change in government and the change in policy had his blessing. In a separate address of her own, his wife had done the same. Walsh had read somewhere that Hitler called Queen Elizabeth the most dangerous woman in Europe. Considering the source, there was a compliment to be proud of.

No matter what the King and Queen said, the
putsch
had horrified many,
many Britons. The Army hadn’t shot Sir Horace, the way Walsh was convinced the collaborating polecat deserved. Instead, it put him into what some higher up with an unfortunately bureaucratic turn of phrase called “preventive detention.”

If only Walsh knew what the detention was supposed to prevent. It didn’t prevent Horace Wilson from getting endless complaints out and seeing them printed in
the
Times
and the other papers that had fawned on him while he was PM. The Army didn’t come down on the papers for printing that self-serving drivel, either. The generals running the country bent over backward to show they didn’t intend to abridge free speech or any other fundamental rights.

“Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but it’s bloody ridiculous,” Walsh complained to Ronald Cartland.
“The buggers we ousted were more tyrannical than we dare be.”

Cartland nodded and waved to a barmaid for another whiskey: they sat in the pub near the Houses of Parliament where they’d done so much conspiring. “No great surprise there,” the MP said—no, the captain, because he was back in uniform, too. “No matter how odious Sir Horace’s government was, it was constitutionally legitimate. That
meant it could do all sorts of outrageous things and get away with them. Because we are extraconstitutional, we have to be much more scrupulous or everyone will start wailing that we’re worse than Hitler. Ironic, what?”

“Oh, perhaps a trifle,” Walsh allowed. He smiled at the barmaid. “Let me have another pint, too, would you, dear?” She was young enough to be his daughter, but he was old enough
that a girl young enough to be his daughter could look delicious to him.

Which, sadly, wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to look delicious to her. “Another pint. Okey-doke,” she said in a pseudo-American accent she must have picked up at the cinema. For all the warmth in her voice, he might have been a post—a thirsty post, but a post nonetheless.

He sighed. He was getting to the age where,
if he wanted a young, pretty girl to make him happy, he had to lay silver on the dresser beforehand. That was an even bigger shame than any of the troubles related to the change of government.

She brought the pint of bitter and went off without a second glance—
at him, anyhow. Ronald Cartland, she noticed. Well, he was younger and of higher rank and therefore probably richer—and better-looking.
If you were going to complain about every little thing …

“The real danger of our position is that we’ve damaged all the principles this country’s run on the past two hundred years and more,” Cartland said. “Anyone who tries to overthrow us will have as much right to do so as we did to throw out Sir Horace—which is to say, none.”

“We may not have had the right, but we had justice, by God,” Walsh
said. “If we didn’t, what was I doing in a cell when I’d committed no crime?”

“You’d plotted treason, old man. And the people with whom you’d plotted it brought it off, too,” Cartland answered with justifiable pride, since he was one of those people.

“Next interesting question is, what does old Adolf do now that the RAF’s in the air again?” Walsh said.

“No. The question is, what
can
he do?”
the officer replied. “He’s got the
Luftwaffe
heavily committed against the Russians. How much can he take away and turn against us?”

“He could have the Frenchmen do his dirty work for him. They’ve got plenty of planes left at home.” Alistair Walsh had crossed the Channel in two wars to help pull French chestnuts out of the fire. Familiarity with England’s nearest neighbor did not warm to liking
or trust.

Cartland looked horrified. “Daladier would never do that! … I don’t think. We aren’t at war with France. God willing, we never shall be.”

“We’re at war with the Fritzes. France is on their side in Russia. The froggies don’t look like giving up the fight there. If we’re at war with them and France is on their side …”

“We aren’t speaking about axioms of geometry. I hope like blazes
we aren’t, any road.” Cartland still sounded worried. Maybe the nasty possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. Walsh hoped it had occurred to someone in charge of running England these days.

He thought of something else. “Is anybody listening to us? We were certain the PM’s people were before we threw out the rascals. Are they still?”

“No.” This time, Cartland sounded sure. He also sounded more
than a little relieved he could sound sure. “We were certain—and we were
damned well right. Some changes have been made at Scotland Yard. Yes, indeed, they have. In case it makes you feel any better, the blokes who jugged you and grilled you afterwards have got their walking papers.”

Draining his pint, Walsh considered that. “As a matter of fact, sir, it does make me feel better. I’d sooner see
the buggers behind bars themselves, because they were playing fast and loose with the law, but we were, too, so what the deuce? If they’re scrounging dog-ends from the gutter and cadging pennies off their betters, I’m happy enough, by God.”

He knew he was stretching things. Bastards like that didn’t have to fall back on begging, no matter how much you wished they would. Not all of their friends
in high places had fallen foul of the new regime. The ones who’d kept their noses clean would give the sacked coppers a hand. You never could tell—they might need their services again one day.

If the new military government looked like losing the war it had restarted, those quiet, powerful men might need the ex-coppers’ services again quite soon.

That thought came back to Alistair Walsh with
painful force two nights later. London’s air-raid sirens began to scream. The blackout had been reimposed, but it was still spotty. Too many folks didn’t care to believe the war had picked up again. The
Luftwaffe
bombers wouldn’t have had much trouble finding the English capital.

Walsh stumbled to a Tube station in the more-or-less dark. It was packed with frightened people, and smelled as bad
as some trenches he’d known. Up above ground, antiaircraft guns thundered. Searchlights would try to pin enemy planes in their beams for the guns. Tethered barrage balloons would make the Nazis fly high and, with luck, drop inaccurately.

Drop they did. Big explosions mingled with the guns’ shorter, sharper reports. Once or twice, the ground shook under Walsh as he lay on a straw pallet and tried
without much luck to sleep. People around him—not all of them women—squealed. Those hits weren’t close, but he didn’t blame the Londoners for panic and inexperience.

He went back to his room after the all-clear sounded. Fire engines clanged toward blazes that scarred chunks of the horizon with orange and gold. None of the fires was close, or likely to trouble him. His room had no damage. He promptly
fell asleep once more.

In the morning, the BBC claimed thirty-one German bombers shot down by guns and night fighters. That seemed like a lot to Walsh. But then, his own side wasn’t immune to the attractions of propaganda. Or maybe they were telling the truth. Stranger things had happened … hadn’t they?

VACLAV JEZEK WAS
gloomily certain he would never learn any Spanish. If a man had grown up
speaking Czech, the sounds and vocabulary of this new language were too strange to stick on his tongue or in his memory. And finding a Spaniard who knew any Czech made the loaves and fishes seem a minor miracle.

When he got leave and went into Madrid, he did find some Spaniards who knew a bit of German. His own accent wasn’t perfect—nowhere close. The locals wanted to impose the staccato rhythms
of their own speech on the alien tongue. They weren’t used to making noises in the back of the throat, either. Comprehension was always an adventure.

He could get drinks. The word for wine didn’t change much from one language to another. The Spaniards used some horrible lisping word for
beer
, though most barkeeps understood
Bier
. But Spanish beer wasn’t worth drinking, not if you had a Czech’s
standards. So he mostly stuck to wine or hard stuff.

He could get laid, too. Brothels were easy to find and not too expensive. Unlike Czech whores, a lot of girls in the Republic seemed proud of what they did. They even had a union. So another soldier on leave told Vaclav, anyway. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but the International swore up and down it was true. So maybe
it was and maybe it wasn’t.

“They going to strike for a raise in pay?” he asked the other guy.

“Better working hours, too. And maybe softer mattresses,” the International said. His German was better than Jezek’s. He was a Dutchman named Jan, though, and got pissed off if anybody took him for a German.

They went on to invent other demands striking prostitutes might make. Those got sillier and
lewder the longer they went on. Of course, they drank more and more while they were at it, too. Vaclav wondered if he’d remember any of it when he sobered up.

The way his head felt the next morning, he wished he didn’t remember his name, let alone last night’s foolishness. Strong coffee—the Spaniards didn’t fool around when they brewed the stuff—and the hair of the dog that bit him helped bring
him back to life. Aspirins were hard to come by here, but a bit of brandy took the edge off his headache.

Jan looked more bedraggled yet. He bore down harder on the brandy and went easy on coffee. After a while, he started reviving, too. “I hurt myself,” he said mournfully.

“Red wine will do it to you, all right,” Vaclav agreed.

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jan said.

Of course, bullets
and bombs and shell fragments would also do it to you, and they wouldn’t give you any fun while they did. No wonder Vaclav and so many other soldiers drank and screwed as if there were no tomorrow whenever they got the chance. For too many of them, there
would
be no tomorrow, and they knew it, whether in the head or, more often, in the belly and the balls.