Two Fronts (5 page)

“Well, you were right,” Pfaff said to Willi.

“
Ja
. And a whole fat lot of good that does the lieutenant.” Willi didn’t even point toward Freigau’s body, for fear of drawing the machine gunner’s notice.

“Other thing is,” Pfaff went on, “you’ll be commanding the company pretty soon, the way the people above you keep stopping stuff.”

“If I end up commanding the company, we’re all in deep shit,” Willi said. Adam Pfaff didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. After all, what were friends for?

THE NATIONALISTS WERE
spewing out the usual lies through their loudspeakers: “Come across to our lines and we’ll fill you full of mutton stew! Lovely mutton stew! We eat it every day! We’ll fill you so full, you won’t walk any more—you’ll waddle instead!
Lovely
mutton stew!”

Sometimes it was mutton stew. Sometimes it was chicken stew instead. The Nationalists’ announcer sounded as smooth to Chaim Weinberg as any radio pitchman flogging Lucky Strikes back in the States.

Mike Carroll didn’t take it so kindly. “I’m sick of that lying bullshit,” the other Abe Lincoln growled. “I wish putting a bullet through his loudspeaker would make him shut up.”

“As long as you know it’s bullshit, it doesn’t wear on you so much. And as long as you’ve got enough to eat yourself,” Chaim added. “When times were tough, a big old bowl of stew sounded mighty fine.”

“The Nationalists knew it was bullshit. They’d cross over to our lines, hoping we’d feed them,” Mike said.

“Talk about optimists!” Chaim exclaimed.

“Yeah, well, sometimes they’d be skinnier than we were—and that wasn’t easy.”

“I remember. Those days on the Ebro … Everybody was hungry all the goddamn time. Hell, even I was on the way to being scrawny back then.” Chaim was short and thickset; an unkind man would have called him squat. He looked and talked like the New York Jew he was. In Madrid, he’d got himself a different kind of handle:
el narigón loco
—the crazy kike. In bar brawls, he’d sail into guys half again his size. He’d flatten them, too, because there were times when he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died and because he brought his front-line meanness with him when he went on leave.

Mike Carroll, by contrast, could have come off an SS recruiting poster. You’d lose teeth if you were stupid enough to tell him so, though. He was as good a Communist as Chaim or any other Abe Lincoln. He was probably a better Communist than Chaim, as a matter of fact. Chaim had a habit of asking pointed questions. Mike—Mike
believed
.

“Delicious mutton stew!” the Fascist announcer called again.

“What did you do to the sheep before you threw it in the pot?” Chaim yelled back. His Spanish was far from smooth, but he could make himself understood.

These days, Spaniards filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks, and those of the rest of the International Brigades. They understood Chaim fine. Laughing, they started shouting “Sheep-fuckers!” toward the Nationalist trenches.

That pissed off Marshal Sanjurjo’s heroes. It would have pissed Chaim off, too, and he didn’t have the touchy Spanish sense of machismo. The Nationalists’ machine guns started raking the Republican trenches. “Now look what you went and did,” Mike said reproachfully as the Internationals returned fire.

“It’s a war,” Chaim explained. It wasn’t the first firefight jeers at enemy propaganda had touched off, and chances were it wouldn’t be the last.

But he stopped taking it lightly when the Fascists opened up with mortars and artillery. They were more than just pissed off, and they were taking it out on the Republicans. He dove into a bombproof dug into the front wall of the trench, hoping no shell would burst on top of it and bury him alive.

Then somebody banged on a big shell casing with an iron bar. “They’re coming! The bastards are coming!” The shout rang out in English and Spanish.

Chaim scrambled out of the bombproof and took his place on a firing step. Sure as hell, the troops who followed Sanjurjo were rushing across no-man’s-land. It wasn’t like the doomed English plodding forward at the Somme. These fellows knew better. They stayed low. They kept in loose order. Every chance they got, they jumped into shell holes. Some of them fired while others scrambled forward.

That helped, but only so much. Many of them fell scrambling forward. Some lay still once they went down. Others writhed and thrashed and screamed. The noises ripped from the throats of wounded men sounded very much alike regardless of which side they fought on or which country they came from. Suffering was a more universal language than Esperanto ever would be.

One of his own cartridge cases bounced off Chaim’s boot. He loaded and fired and loaded and fired, now and then ducking automatically when an enemy round cracked past his head. Sanjurjo’s men got through the barbed wire with alarming ease. Had they sent out cutting parties the night before? If they had, this attack had been laid on all along; it wasn’t mounted on the spur of the moment.

I can worry about that later—if I’m still around to worry about it
, Chaim thought as he slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He started to fumble for his bayonet. Unless he was going trench-raiding himself, he used it for a knife and a tin-opener, not a weapon. But this might turn out to be one of the rare times he was glad to have it.

Then a Republican machine gun opened up on the Fascists. A moment later, so did another one. Now despair filled the shrieks from Sanjurjo’s men. They’d braved rifle fire. Nobody, though, could hope to cross open ground in the face of the industrialized murder machine guns personified. Concentrated essence of infantry, someone had called them during the last war. That still seemed a plenty good label.

The Nationalists were recklessly brave (so were the Spaniards who fought on the Republican side). This time, their courage only cost them more casualties. They kept coming for a while after more pragmatic troops would have seen the thing was hopeless.

Some of them got close enough to the Republican trenches to fling grenades into them. A fragment ripped Chaim’s baggy trousers. It didn’t bite his leg, though, for which he thanked the God in Whom good Marxist-Leninists weren’t supposed to believe. He didn’t particularly fear dying in battle. Getting badly hurt … He didn’t know anybody who wasn’t scared of that.

At last, sullenly, the Nationalists pulled back. Some more of them got shot before they could reach the protection of their own trenches. Out in the space between the lines, the wounded groaned.

Some of the Abe Lincolns took pot shots at them, as much to shut them up as for any other reason. Part of Chaim thought that was cruel. Part of him hoped somebody would put him out of his misery if he lay there, helpless and suffering, out in no-man’s-land.

Then one of the Abe Lincolns’ officers said, “Let’s bring in some prisoners and see what we can squeeze out of them. You, you, you, you, and you.” Chaim was the second of those
you
s, Mike Carroll the third.

“Thanks a bunch,” Chaim said. You could bitch about an order, but you couldn’t disobey one.

Out he went, keeping his belly on the ground like a serpent. Finding Fascists to bring in wasn’t the problem, not this time. Not getting killed bringing them in might be another matter. He’d worry about that when he came to it.

A Nationalist moaned in the next shell hole. Chaim scrambled down into it. “Aw, fuck,” he said softly. His stomach did a slow lurch. The guy’d been blown almost in half. Why wasn’t he dead? Human beings could be uncommonly hard to kill, yeah, but this was—what was the next step past ridiculous?

His eyes found Chaim’s. “
Por favor, Señor Internacionál
,” he said clearly.

Please, Mr. International
. He could even be polite about it. Chaim wanted to ask if he was sure, but, given the butchered ruin that he was, there couldn’t be much doubt about that. “Fuck,” Chaim repeated. But he would be doing the guy a favor—there couldn’t be any doubt about that, either.

Chaim pulled out his bayonet and did what needed doing. Then he crawled off to find some other wounded Nationalist to haul back for questioning.

BACON AND EGGS
and white toast with plenty of butter and marmalade. If that wasn’t a breakfast to let you go out and spit in winter’s eye, Peggy Druce had never heard of one. She said as much to her husband as she set the plate in front of him.

Herb nodded. “You betcha, babe. Of course, the hot coffee doesn’t hurt, either.” The plume that rose from his Chesterfield behind the morning’s
Philadelphia Inquirer
might have been a smoke signal.

“Want another cup?” Peggy asked.

“Sure do.” Herb murmured thanks when Peggy poured it for him. He tucked into his breakfast.

Peggy sat down and ate, too. “What we’re putting away would feed a family in Germany for a week,” she said. “I don’t know when the last time was they saw white bread or eggs or real coffee.”

“Breaks my heart.” Herb stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “We ought to be at war with Hitler, too, same as we were against the Kaiser.” He tapped the newspaper with a nicotine-stained forefinger. “What I want to know is, how’d it get to be 1942 already? Like a dope, I wrote ‘1941’ on a check yesterday, and I had to void the darn thing.”

“I’ve done it—not this year yet, but I have,” Peggy said. “It’s a pain in the keester, is what it is.”

“What really frosts my pumpkin is, I’m supposed to be one of FDR’s hot-shot efficiency experts, right?” Herb laughed at himself. “Here I can’t even remember what year it is, for cryin’ out loud. Some efficiency, huh?”

“If you don’t tell the people you’re dealing with, they’ll never know,” Peggy said reasonably. “And chances are they’ve all pulled the same rock one time or another.”

“There you go.” Herb lowered the
Inquirer
so he could grin at her across the table. “Which one of us is the lawyer? Remind me again.”

“One of the girls in the dorm room next to mine at Penn State was from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that. She always pronounced it
liar
.”

“She knew what was what, all right.” Herb put away the grub as if he were a doughboy shoveling food into his chowlock at a field kitchen in some ruined village in France. He paused to check his wristwatch. “I’m still good.”

But even as he said that, he sent Peggy a pointed look, so she ate faster, too. “What time does your train head out? A quarter past nine?” she said.

“That’s right.” He nodded.

“You’re fine, then,” Peggy said. “Where are you going this time? Was it Kentucky?”

“Tennessee.”

“Oh, yeah.” She thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “And who’s mucking things up in Tennessee?” Herb had come back from other trips with amazing stories of waste and corruption and stupidity run amok. Anyone who listened to him for a while would be sure the United States couldn’t possibly win the war—unless everybody else in the world was just as fouled up. Humanity being what it was, that made a pretty fair bet.

This morning, though, her husband’s face closed down tight, as if he sat at a poker table or in a conference room with the other side’s attorneys. “Sorry, babe, but I can’t talk about that.”

“What?” Peggy could hardly believe her ears. “I’m your wife, in case you hadn’t noticed. What am I gonna do? Send Hitler a telegram?” She’d spoken to the
Führer
once, when she was marooned in Berlin. To say she had no desire to repeat the experience proved the power of understatement.

“I know, I know. But this is heap big secret—and even that’s more than I ought to say about it.”

“Some of the other stuff you’ve told me about was secret, too.”

He sighed. “Peggy, I can’t talk, not about this stuff. I can’t even talk about why I can’t talk about it. If they had any way to vacuum out my brains after I finish what I need to do there, they’d use it.”

She wasn’t going to get any more out of him. She could see as much, even if she couldn’t see why. But if he couldn’t talk about why he couldn’t talk about why things were secret … “Would they hang me for a spy if I asked you for one of those cigarettes?”

“They’d have to hang me first.” Herb shook the pack till a Chesterfield stuck out. Peggy took it. Herb flicked the wheel on his Zippo. As advertised, a flame shot up the first try.

Peggy leaned forward to get the cigarette going. She sighed out smoke. “That does go nice with food.”

“Sure does.” Herb smoked another one, too. Then he went upstairs, and came down with his suitcase. He shrugged into his topcoat. Peggy put on a coat, too. The dishes could wait till she got back from dropping him off. He said, “One thing about rationing gasoline—less traffic these days.”

“You’ve got that right,” Peggy agreed. Most people’s “A” stickers limited them to four gallons a week. You couldn’t go very far on that—to work and back every day, if you were lucky. The Druces’ Packard got a good deal more fuel; because he was in what the government reckoned an essential occupation, he had one of the rare and coveted “C” stickers.

It was cold but clear. There wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any ice on the roads. Peggy got in on the driver’s side. She’d have to bring the car back. As Herb slid in beside her, he said, “Lucky me. I’ve got myself the best-darn-looking chauffeur in town.”

“You!” Peggy said fondly.

The Packard started right away. There went one more worry. Cold weather could do rude things to a battery. If Herb had had to wait till a taxi got here, he really might have missed his train.

She drove downtown, toward Broad Street Station. When she passed an Esso station, she saw a cop checking ration stickers. Herb noticed, too. “Some ways, it hardly seems like a free country any more, does it?” he remarked.

“Oh, it’s not so bad. Trust me—it’s not.” Peggy had seen with her own eyes what things were like in a country that suddenly stopped being free. The grin on that German’s face at Marianske Lazny after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1938 … He’d been cutting off a Jew’s beard with a big pair of shears. If he cut off some cheek or ear at the same time, well, hey, that only made the fun better. He thought so, anyhow, and he had enough rifles and machine guns and tanks on his side that the poor damned Jew had to stand there and take it unless he felt like dying on the spot. She still wondered sometimes what had happened to him.