The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (37 page)

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Fujita knew better than to argue with an officer. He also knew better than to ask the Burmese woman what all went into the stew. It didn’t taste half bad, even if it was spicier than he fancied. Better not to
wonder where the meat came from. He’d had stews like that before. As long as it filled him up, he wouldn’t complain.

LA MARTELLITA LOOKED
daggers at Chaim Weinberg. If this was the kind of love wives were supposed to show husbands, he sure didn’t want to see how she’d act when she was pissed off at him. (As a matter of fact, he had seen that, and more often than he wanted.)

Her hands cupped
her bulging belly. “You did this to me!” she screeched, more or less accurately.

They were walking along a street in Madrid. La Martellita didn’t care. She let him have it any which way. Other people within earshot turned to listen. Street theater was the best, and cheapest, entertainment in town. It was a hell of a lot more interesting than the crap either the Republicans or the Nationalists
put on the radio.

Chaim knew about street theater. Growing up in New York City’s Lower East Side, he couldn’t very well not know about it. But he enjoyed watching and listening to other people more than being watched and listened to.

“Take it easy, Magdalena,” he said, trying to soothe his inamorata till they got to some place where she could scream at him in something resembling privacy.

“And don’t call me by that name!” she told him, still at top volume. “Don’t you dare call me by that name! You’ve got no business knowing that name! I’m the Little Hammer! Do you hear me?”

“
Sí
, Magdalena,” Chaim answered easily. If she was going to work like a Stakhanovite to piss him off, the least he could do was return the disfavor.

She said something so incandescent that a little old woman
with a face like a Roman bust that was starting to crumble crossed herself. In the aggressively anticlerical Spanish Republic, that was shock indeed. Someone might denounce you for showing you believed.

As for Chaim, he understood most of what his very pregnant sweetheart called him. He would have murdered any man who said a quarter of that to him, and not a jury in the world would have convicted
him, either. Plenty of Spaniards would have decked a woman who talked to them like that. (Some would have got a shiv in the ribs after decking them, too. Spain was a lively country.)

He’d already proved he was a soft American—and no one who tried belting La Martellita would have had joy of it afterwards. So, instead of making a fist and playing the goon, he gave her his blandest, stupidest smile.
“¿Qué?”
he said sweetly.

She started to explode. Then she saw he was waiting for that. She
sent him a glare acid enough to etch glass. Instead of shrieking, she asked, “Are you playing games with me?” in a deadly quiet voice.

“You’re the one who’s been playing all the games,” Chaim answered. “Yes, you’re going to have a baby. I didn’t rape you. I did marry you. What else do you want from me?”

Unfortunately, he knew what else she wanted. She wanted him not to be so short and stumpy. She wanted him to have a handsomer face. He wouldn’t have minded a handsomer face himself, but he was stuck with the mug he’d been issued. His looks weren’t the real problem, though. Even his being Jewish wasn’t the real problem, though in a way it came closer. The real problem was, he wasn’t a good enough
Communist to suit her.

Maybe that had something to do with his being Jewish. It sure as hell had something to do with his being American. He was so used to thinking for himself, he did it without thinking, so to speak. La Martellita was made for knocking unorthodoxy flat. She would have been great in the Inquisition—she had the full measure of Spanish zeal. If he’d really wanted to hurt her,
he would have told her so.

“You didn’t rape me,” she agreed, and well she might—any man who tried to have his way with her without her consent would leave his
cojones
behind. “But I wasn’t sober when you did me, either.”

“Neither was I, the first time,” Chaim said, which was at least partly true. “But we both were the next morning.”

“There wouldn’t have been a next morning if there hadn’t been
a first night.”

Chaim sighed. That was also true, dammit. He spread his hands. “All we can do now is try and make the best of it. Yelling at me all the time doesn’t help. It just gives me a headache.”

“I don’t yell at you all the time,” La Martellita said. “When you’re up at the front, I can’t.”

“No, all they can do up there is kill me,” Chaim said. She looked at him in incomprehension. It
wasn’t his Spanish, either; he’d said what he meant. But she didn’t get it.

She was beautiful. She was dangerous. The combination was irresistible to Chaim, much as a tiger’s terrible beauty had to be to a beast-tamer. One split second of inattention, one tiny mistake with the chair,
and you’d be lying on the ground in the middle of the center ring bleeding your life out, and all the marks in
the bleachers would go
Oooh!
Life with La Martellita was a lot like that.

Too much like that? For what had to be the first time, Chaim wondered. Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was dangerous. Yes, the combination was intoxicating. But, when you got right down to it, how bright was she really?

Intoxicated, Chaim had never stopped to worry about it. He’d never stopped to think it might matter.
Not
thinking was most unusual for him, and telling testimony to just how head over heels he was about her. Most of the time, he thought convulsively, propulsively, continuously. If he hadn’t turned Red, he would have made a
yeshiva-bukher
to be remembered for generations. If he thought about La Martellita instead of remembering what touching her felt like …

“Why are you looking at me like that?”
she asked.

“Like what?” Chaim feared he knew like what, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it, even—especially—to himself. For a while, you imagine that something broken will put itself back together by magic. But magic is in desperately short supply in the material world.

“Like the way you’re looking at me, that’s like what.” It was obvious to La Martellita. “Like I just died or something.”

“No, not you,” Chaim said sadly. He’d never imagined himself a prophet, but he could see the future all too clearly now. It was a future where he didn’t see the son or daughter swelling in La Martellita’s belly. It was a future where he didn’t see her, either, and probably one where she told the child nothing but bad things about its father. He’d just watched his love die, and he had no idea what
he could do about it.

“What, then?” she demanded. It wasn’t obvious to her. He could see why not, too. She’d never been in love with him. If he’d thought she was, it was only because he’d made her reflect what he most wanted to see.

He could tell her. What difference would it make? Not much, which was part of the problem. But, like a wounded soldier who won’t look to see how badly he’s hit,
Chaim didn’t want to bring out the fatal words. He said “Never mind” instead, hoping against hope the wound wasn’t mortal after all.

Chapter 16

N
othing in Central Europe or France had braced Vaclav Jezek for summer outside Madrid. Dust. Blazing sun. Air that sucked moisture from your body like a vampire. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stink of death. That stayed the same everywhere. It was bound to be the same in hell, assuming this
battlefield wasn’t one of Satan’s ritzier suburbs.

Vaclav wasn’t the only one to feel the heat, either. Several of his countrymen got carried off the field with sunstroke. He heard later that one of them had died.

Through it all, Benjamin Halévy went about his business as calmly as if it were an April day in Paris or Prague. He might have been made of metal. Whatever he was made of, the savage
Spanish heat couldn’t melt him.

“Why aren’t you baked like the rest of us?” Vaclav snarled. The weather left him short-tempered, too.

“It’s hot,” Halévy said. “But my people came out of the desert, remember. I guess the memory of it’s still in my bones.”

He sounded serious. As Jezek had seen, though, he often sounded that way when he was anything but. “Desert, my ass,” the sniper said.

“Well,
if your ass seems cooler than the rest of you, maybe it came out of the desert, too.” Halévy eyed him. “Have to say you don’t
look
like you’ve got any Jews in the woodpile.”

What first sprang to Vaclav’s mind was something about Halévy’s mother. But he could see for himself how Halévy would parry that. You didn’t want to get into a manure fight with a guy who ran a fertilizer factory. Halévy
thought faster and nastier than he did, and that was all there was to it. Instead of being bitchy, Jezek asked, “Have you heard anything about when Marshal Sanjurjo will inspect the trenches again?” He waved toward the Nationalist lines, taking care not to raise any part of his arm above parapet level.

Benjamin Halévy grinned crookedly. “I’ve finally sucked you in, huh? You want him?”

“Bet your
sweatless ass I do,” Vaclav answered, and the Jew laughed out loud. Undeterred, Vaclav continued, “If I pot the fat old bastard, they’ll pin a medal on me. They’ll promote me, so I get some extra pay for real and more besides in promises. They’ll send me back to Madrid and let me drink and fuck as much as I want. Maybe they’ll even pay for the spree. So, yeah, if Sanjurjo shows up, I’ll punch
his ticket for him.”

“You’ve got all kinds of good reasons,” Halévy allowed. “And, on top of it, it might even help the war effort.”

“That, too,” Vaclav agreed. The damned Jew started laughing again. Vaclav couldn’t see why. If it had provoked him enough, he might have taken a swing at his buddy. Halévy was an officer now, so that could have been a capital crime. Worrying about it wasn’t what
held Vaclav back. The sensible concern that he’d wake up in the bottom of the trench with a sore jaw and maybe a couple of broken teeth had much more to do with it.

Instead of decking the Jew, Jezek lugged his antitank rifle down the line and spied on the Nationalist positions. The enemy soldiers carried on in plain sight of him. He could have killed some of them, but to what end? They’d tighten
up and get more wary. That was the last thing he wanted.

Almost the last thing … A Spanish sharpshooter had hunted him for a little while. The would-be marksman was now of concern only to his next of kin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been brave. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t been a good shot. But he must have got what he knew about
concealment out of some badly translated manual from the last war.
The Nationalists wore German-style helmets, which made them familiar-looking enemies. Those helmets were pretty good. But they wouldn’t stop an ordinary bullet, let alone the fat ones Vaclav used. That sniper got only one lesson in the art, a very final one.

There were steel loopholes along the line from which Vaclav could inspect the enemy’s trenches. As was his habit, he stayed away from them.
An ordinary soldier couldn’t put a bullet through one except by luck, and from what he’d seen Spanish soldiers were often less than ordinary. But you never could tell. The Nationalists might have a few real experts. Or they might talk to their Italian allies or to the Germans of the
Legion Kondor
. For someone who knew what he was doing, a loophole was a challenge, not something too tough to bother
with.

He crossed into the trenches the International Brigades held. They greeted him in several languages, some of which he understood. A—probable—Magyar spoke in German: “Haven’t seen any elephants around here for a long time.”

“I keep snapping my fingers—that’s why,” Vaclav answered in the same language. The International made a horrible face. Vaclav trudged on down the line.

The Americans
in the Abe Lincoln Battalion (or maybe it was a brigade; even they didn’t seem sure) had more trouble talking to him than most of the other Internationals. They knew English, and some of them had picked up enough Spanish to get by. Neither of those did him much good, and they were unlikely to speak any other tongue.

One exception was—surprise!—a Jew from New York City. Chaim understood Vaclav’s
German, and Vaclav usually managed to cope with his Yiddish. The Abe Lincoln didn’t look very happy right now.

“What’s up?” Vaclav asked.

“My girl and me—it’s gonna go down the drain.” Chaim mimed a little whirlpool in case Vaclav didn’t get it.

But he did. “It’s gonna go down the drain?” he echoed. “It hasn’t happened yet? Maybe it won’t.”

“It’s gonna,” Chaim repeated gloomily. “Some stuff
you see coming way ahead of time. You can’t stop it, not unless you’re Superman. Maybe not even if you are.”

“Not unless you’re who?” Vaclav asked.

“Superman.
Übermensch
, it’d be in German, but the English doesn’t make you sound like a fucking Nazi. The guy’s a comic-book hero. Lemme show you—a buddy sent me a couple from the States, and they honest to God got here, would you believe it? They’re
pretty good.” Chaim rummaged in his pack till he grunted in victory and pulled out a gaudily printed comic book.