Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Tags: #Fiction, #Alternative History, #Science Fiction, #General
They liberated. Zieberhost robbed.
They kept a close eye on him after that, and dubbed him “Wild Card Zee.” He didn’t have the least idea why.
Surrendering German soldiers did not dare be taken with a weapon, for fear its possession might be mistaken for intent to fire, so there were stacks of weapons everywhere. Sam, playing cards with Wink, Grease, and Howie one night during the first week in their new parlor, watched Wild Card Zee stagger past with three machine guns and struggle up the stairs. He’d taken over an upper room in which to dismantle, clean, and ship them home in pieces, to be reassembled later and used for aggressive defense purposes.
“Zee’s a nut,” said Grease, surveying his cards.
Howie, the book collector who gave Sam his intro to the theatrical warehouse in London, had turned his interest toward fancy hunting rifles, antique pistols, and ceremonial swords. “True. He wants to kill people. I’m building a nest egg.”
Wink said, “I’m sure my future wife, bless her heart whoever she may be, will wish I had been that forward-looking. Gin. You really need to pay more attention.” He swept three silver forks and one cake knife into his growing pile. “Your silver set is not going to be very complete, guys.”
At a knock on the door, Wink drew his gun, got up, and opened it a crack. The town still harbored many German soldiers, some of them regular army, the Wehrmacht, who were eager to surrender. Others were ferocious SS, with their fearsome fight-to-the-death oath and culture.
Earl T. grabbed his pistol from the table next to him.
“He’s okay,” said Wink. “He’s Russian. What say we serve him dinner.”
They admitted Leonid, a bald human skeleton wearing rags and tied-together pieces of leather, which were the remains of a pair of boots. He staggered into the room, then crumpled sideways and lay motionless on the floor.
Earl T. cradled the Russian in one arm while passing a shot glass of brandy beneath his nose. His bruised eyelids fluttered open.
“He has an unholy smell,” observed Grease.
They sat him down and fed him broth from their feast; a little bread. His eyes brimmed with tears and his hands shook. Wink questioned him as he ate. “He’s not a Jew. He said that all of the Jews were shot last week when the Germans knew that we were coming. They were in the process of being starved to death, but I guess it was taking too long.”
No one spoke for a moment. The fire, made of wood pried from the shed behind the house, snapped in the stove. Overhead, Zee dropped something heavy and cursed. Wink resumed his questioning. After a few moments they nodded to one another, smiling.
“Long-lost brothers?” asked Earl T. He handed Leonid a cigarette and lit it for him.
“Better. He’s a music professor from Moscow. Was drafted, lucky enough to be captured—”
“Yeah, he looks lucky,” said Grease.
“And has spent most of the war working for the Germans. First he worked on a dairy farm and lived with a family. They weren’t bad, he says. But for the past six months he’s been making concrete submarines in a nearby plant.”
“You understand him right?”
“The Germans are out of steel,” said Wink, after a few more questions.
Sam added, “Radar won’t see a concrete sub.”
Leonid offered to cook for them until he was able to be on the move again. He wanted to return to Moscow, but was not certain that was a good thing to do. Wink explained, “He’s heard that the Russians are treating former prisoners quite badly. Stalin figures that they must have surrendered too quickly. It seems, though, his commanders neglected to issue weapons for the particular battle in which Leo was captured. He had to fight with a scythe.”
“I vote we try him out,” said Sam. “Even a music professor is probably a better cook than any of us.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Wink, pretending to be offended. But it was agreed, all except for Zee, whom they did not need for a majority.
The main order of business was getting their shops set up. The deserted submarine factory a hundred feet from their garden gate was the perfect candidate.
The next morning, before dawn, Sam made himself some good, strong American instant coffee from a Red Cross package and sleepwalked Wink over to the submarine factory. Their footsteps crunched in the grit and dust from shelling. A woman walking past on the street, both hands in the pockets of a black overcoat, called out, hopefully, “Zig zig?”
Sex, the GI’s had discovered, had become incredibly cheap. Sam shook his head. When they reached the front door, Wink mumbled something, dropped to the pavement, and leaned against the wall to finish his slumber.
Sam walked through the first floor. The weak light showed only indeterminate shapes of mammoth plant equipment, and the air was permeated by the smell of heavy oil.
Wink dragged himself through the door. Sunlight topped the building across the street and came through the windows full force, illuminating a mountain of metal reinforcement bars—rebars—at the far end of the building. Mike “Sunny” Sunmeyer, their new CO, had given them a week to clear it out.
Sam said, “Come see what I found yesterday.”
Wink followed him upstairs, to a relatively clear, cavernous space. To one side was a large office with a heavy door.
Sam said, “Our new lab.”
Wink brightened. “Smashing! We’ll be back in business in no time.”
They were back downstairs when a rebar clanged against the concrete floor. They drew their pistols. “Out!” said Wink.
About fifty feet away, a man rose slowly from behind a pile of rebar, his hands in the air. He said, “Pole.”
“Take off your coat,” commanded Wink. “No, don’t pretend not to understand. Now!”
The prisoner jumped at Wink’s sharp tone. Slowly, he eased off one sleeve, then the other, and let the coat drop to the floor. He was clad in a button-down shirt, fine wool slacks, and an unmarred leather belt.
“Too damned fat,” said Wink. “I know him. He’s a German.”
“
Nein
! Pole!”
To Sam’s astonishment, Wink shot over the man’s head. The report reverberated in the plant. “Get over here, you frigging Nazi.” As he began to shuffle toward them, Wink added, “And bring that coat. Turn it right side out.”
“Stolen! I am Pole—”
“Cut the crap.”
Sam had never seen Wink this way before. Wink herded the man out the door and down the stairs. Indeed, the coat, when right side out, was covered with German medals, and indeed, the man was somewhat corpulent, an impossibility for a Polish slave laborer.
Wink directed him to sit in back of the jeep. He kept his gun on the man, who now had a contemptuous look on his face.
Sam avoided piles of pushed-aside bricks as he passed shops emptied of every object—he knew they were empty because he had been in many of them and had seen the bare shelves. He pulled up in front of Company C’s new office, which, handily, had been the office of an insurance company and came complete with desks and file cabinets.
“Get out,” ordered Wink. He marched the German into the CO’s office, where a clerk looked up, startled.
“Who’s this?”
“Prisoner of war.”
“Sunmeyer isn’t in yet.”
“Call him.”
“No phones. We’re working on getting field phones laid out. I’ll take the information. I’m not sure what we’ll do with him. Maybe the Brits should take him.” He rummaged through a drawer, pulled out a form, and slapped it on a clipboard. In something that even Sam could recognize as terrible German, he began to ask questions.
“I do not speak to filthy Jews,” said the man, and spat on the clerk, square in his face.
Wink hit the German on the head with his pistol butt. The prisoner collapsed on the floor. Blood flowed down his forehead.
The clerk wiped his face with his handkerchief. “Fucking Nazi.”
They all stared down at the man, from whose head wound blood flowed steadily. He groaned.
Sunny opened the door and peered inside. “What’s going on?”
They climbed back into their jeep. Sam put it in gear, but didn’t start it. “I’ve never seen you act that way before.”
Wink rubbed his face with both hands. “Maybe it was just for lack of opportunity, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’m nuts. It’s unsettling—but it was very clear. I saw the good officer’s obnoxious, smirking face before, and we were not in the factory. We were instead in a prisoner of war camp. Leonid’s former home. I was actually there the other day, of course, disinfecting it for the German prisoners, so maybe I’m just remembering the general physical surroundings.
“Anyway, we were prisoners there. I had a whole set of memories about how the Germans pushed the British back and captured us the other night.
“So I’m in the exercise yard and on the other side of the fence, this guy, this exact same guy, I swear, is beating a Russian prisoner with his rifle butt. The Russian falls to the ground and the German just beats the hell out of him, then swings his rifle, smashes the Russian’s head, and leaves him there. It was like…a new place in my mind.”
“In other words, you’re going crazy.”
Wink nodded slowly. “Yeah, it certainly seems that way. Or maybe I just wasn’t completely awake. What’s the criteria for reality, anyway? It’s damned hard to realize you’re dreaming when you are dreaming. I mean, it is for me. Has this happened to you?”
Sam nodded. “Just…quick visions. I think that actually I’ve always had them—you know how you remember this or that, or imagine what might happen—but there’s more…palpability to this. More…authority.”
“Kind of frightening.”
Sam nodded. “Indeed.”
Upon arrival in Muchengladbach, we immediately began an endless round of chores: KP; dragging heavy, unwieldy rebar from the Weller submarine factory, loading them on trucks, and hauling them out to the country to be abandoned in some convenient field; guard duty (watching anything that someone would like to carry away or a place that someone would want to get into or get out of); and ash and trash (picking up garbage from the mess hall, trash from the various companies and work sites, and trucking it to the designated dump and unloading it).
Up to the previous week, the Weller submarine factory and the sub air-handling equipment factory next door depended on a retinue of slave labor. They occupied a stockade across Rheydt Strasse and traveled back and forth under guard. When Patton’s troops came through the week before, the troops closed the two factories and released the slave laborers. Some of the laborers left town, and others moved to the city dump to live on the pickings.
So here I come with W. and a few other soldiers on our ash and trash mission having no notion of the new dump occupants.
As we back up to make our deposit the occupants move in on us, intent on first dibs on our succulent pickings. I am becoming very dubious about the developments, but without anything programmed to do about it.
We dump our cans and the occupants lunge at the garbage; an ancient crone comes up triumphant with a large piece of fresh-looking bread. A large lout a little slow on the approach but with overwhelming firepower knocks the crone ass-over-teakettle, in the process separating her from her booty; he retreats from the fray, stuffing his spoils in his mouth.
I am left with a decision. Do I point my gun at him? Arrest him? Turn him over to the authorities? What authorities? Shoot him? There is nothing in the guidebook telling me what to do.
In the end I do nothing—the same as everybody else. I am sure nobody had any intention of doing anything. Just look the other way and come back tomorrow and watch a similar performance.
At least I was spared the need to form a decision, or even a series of decisions.
This time I had little opportunity to review my options; next time I wouldn’t have that excuse.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, but most of us don’t get that close-up view.
Next: back to picking up and dumping rebars. Our route was east on Neusser Strasse out of town and toward the Rhine River. We were acutely aware that the Rhine was still in Nazi hands, our troops had not yet made the crossing, and the Rhine was only six miles from Muchengladbach; maybe three miles from where we dumped our bars. We dumped our load and someone said while we were this close we should drive up to the last hill and see what the battle site looked like. Yeah! See the war before it moves on!
We drove over the next hill, down the other side, and an American soldier jumped out of the bushes waving at us.
“Get the hell out of here!” he yelled. “You’re drawing fire.”
Sam was bone-weary when they dragged back to Neusser Strasse to an unexpected but wholly welcome scene.
Leonid was boiling a large kettle of water in the backyard for their baths. Rabbit stew, with carrots, potatoes, and onions, exuded a heavenly smelling steam from the kitchen. The table was set.
“This is
real butter
!” said Sam, after one taste of what he presumed was oleo.
“Impossible!” said The Mess. “How the hell did you get it?”
The butter vanished quickly.
Leonid was profusely admired. He smiled his first smile—tired, but genuine, and later that evening accepted a shirt from Grease. In the parlor, standing next to the stove, he removed layers of rags and threw them on the floor.
“Nothing but skin and bones,” said Grease.
“What are those numbers on your arm?” asked Earl T., looking up from a solitaire hand he was dealing.
Wink translated. “He says the Germans liked to keep track. And I say, maybe they’ll hang the bastards who did this.” He got out his violin for Leonid to play after they’d cleaned up, but the Russian was dead asleep on the sofa.
Sam, though, did not get much sleep that night. In an empty bedroom upstairs, he got out his Hadntz notes and studied them. Her thoughts rang in his head, almost as if she were sitting next to him, speaking aloud in that wonderful, rich voice with the distinctive accent. She’d been seeing Leonid’s world for years. This was her solution.
They needed parts, though. It was daunting to think of re-creating the whole setup, even if they had brought much of it with them from England. They were in an entirely new foraging situation, in a country completely destroyed.