Bombs Away Read online

  “Yes, sir. That’s exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We’d betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers—China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He’s right across the river from the fighting, and we’re six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”

  “You’ve got something there.” Now it was Truman’s turn to sound surprised. He hadn’t expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn’t looked for the general’s thoughts to march with his own so well. He’d already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?

  —

  “Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don’t dawdle! We’ve got to go to the cobbler’s and then to the supermarket.”

  “I’m coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I’m just putting my coat on now.”

  “Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn’t have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn’t fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”

  Linda’s blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill’s, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.

  Young children’s sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We’ll be away from home for a while.”

  A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian’s flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn’t think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn’t done anything. If she was wrong, she’d find out about it.

  “It’s raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.

  “Don’t do that indoors! It’s bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”

  Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot—much plainer than her daughter’s, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn’t raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.

  By what Bill’s letters said, Korea wasn’t like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.

  The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C’mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver’s-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.

  Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick—who couldn’t?—but she didn’t believe in working any harder than you had to.

  Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren’t paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler’s was only a few blocks away.

  The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler’s small hammer painted on it, and a legend: FAYVL TABAKMAN—COBBLER. REPAIRS & RESOLING. Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn’t read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.

  Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.

  What he knew, though, he didn’t peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he’d learned English since the war, he’d done a bang-up job.

  “My name is Linda!” Linda said.

  “Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”

  “You had one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”

  “Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”

  “I’m sure they’re great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.

  “You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”

  Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn’t blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.

  The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They’d bought the house with the idea that they’d keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn’t easy, but Marian had made it work so far.

  She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She’d eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn’t had to.

  She splurged a little—a whole nickel—on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.

  When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.

  Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn’t her idea of fun.

  She got everything into the house. Linda didn’t feel the urge to play explorer—maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she’d done the things she had to do.

  A cup of Lipton’s would be nice now, she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn’t worry—so much—about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.

  Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of Tootle and said, “Read to me.”

  Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he’d stop and read
when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who’d do the same thing. Marian wasn’t quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good—not least because she didn’t want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.

  “Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”

  “Okay!” Linda said.

  —

  The Ivans were giving the Wehrmacht hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn’t save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them—and glanced off the monster’s cleverly sloped armor.

  Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the Katyushas rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there’d be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.

  Screams…

  Gustav Hozzel’s eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.

  Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again, Liebchen,” his wife said sadly.

  “I…I guess I did.” Gustav’s voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

  “Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.

  “It’s always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He’d never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her—and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn’t come as often as it used to. I haven’t had it for a couple of months now.”

  Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That’s good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”

  “Please God,” Gustav agreed. He’d fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he’d fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army’d grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin’s prison camps—unless they’d decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.

  Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman’s badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn’t taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn’t as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn’t have their own little collections of medals.

  “Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll try. What time is it, anyhow?”

  The alarm clock ticking by Luisa’s side of the bed had glowing hands. She rolled over to look at it. “Half past two,” she said.

  “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” To Gustav, that was about the worst time there was. Everything in him was at low ebb—except his fear. He sighed. “The only good news is, I don’t remember the last time I had those nightmares twice in one night.”

  “Fine. So sleep.” Luisa’s yawn said she intended to try again, too, even if getting jerked awake like that had to be as horrible for her as it was for him.

  Sleep Gustav did. The alarm clock woke him at a quarter to seven. It didn’t seem nearly so bad—or so loud—as the explosions inside his head. He ate black bread and jam and drank a big cup of coffee almost white with milk. Then he put on a hat and his beat-up tweed jacket and headed for work.

  His breath smoked when he left the block of flats. It was cold out there—what else, at the end of the first week of January?—but not a patch on what he’d known in Russia and Poland. And he could come in from this cold whenever he wanted, and no one would shoot him if he did. It was still dark, too—darker than it had been before, in fact, because the moon was down.

  Fulda had come to life even in the long winter night. The noises of carpentry rose from the Dom. An American air raid had damaged the cathedral six or eight months before the end of the war. The same raid had smashed the square that housed the vegetable market. One day before too long, though, and you’d look things over and have no idea that bombers had ever struck here. So many German cities got hit far harder than Fulda. A town of only 40,000 or so, it couldn’t have been an important target. Bit by bit, those ravaged places were getting back on their feet, too.

  They were in the zones the Americans and British and even the French held, at any rate. But something like a third of Germany had gone straight from Hitler to Stalin: a bad bargain if ever there was one. Reconstruction on the other side of the Iron Curtain moved slowly when it moved at all. The Russians were more interested in what they could pry out of their new subjects than in giving them a helping hand.

  A jeep with two American soldiers in it rolled past Gustav and east toward the border with the Russian zone. The German veteran kept his head down and glanced at it only out of the corner of his eye. He’d fought the Ivans his whole time in the Wehrmacht, but that didn’t mean he loved the Amis. If they hadn’t decided Stalin made a better ally than Hitler did, the world would look different today.

  Another jeep passed him a minute or two later. This one sported an American heavy machine gun on a post fixed to the floorboards. Those damn things could kill you out to a couple of kilometers. U.S. fighter planes also carried them. He’d got strafed by an American fighter the day before he surrendered. He didn’t remember it fondly, but it hadn’t given him wake-up-screaming nightmares.

  He opened the door to the print shop. Max Bachman, who owned the place, looked up from some proofs he was reading. “Morning, Gustav. Was ist los?”

  “Not much.” Gustav didn’t talk about his nighttime horrors with anyone. He wouldn’t have talked about them with Luisa if they hadn’t jolted her awake, too. For all he knew, Bachman also had them. He’d been a Frontschwein himself. If he did, though, he didn’t let on, either. But then Gustav held up a forefinger. “I take that back. Are the Americans jumpy about the border? Two jeeps went by me heading that way.”

  “I haven’t heard anything special, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are,” Bachman answered. “If Stalin decides to start something, all the Russian panzers in the world’ll charge west through the Fulda Gap.”

  Gustav grunted and lit a cigarette. With the Deutschmark a going concern, you could smoke your cigarettes again. They weren’t currency any more, the way they had been in the first couple of years after the war.

  The ritual of tapping the cigarette and striking a match gave him a few seconds to think. Max wasn’t wrong. Gustav knew it. The Amis had to know it, too. The broad, flat valley of the river that ran by Fulda was the best panzer country along the Russian zone’s western frontier. Once through it, the T-34s—and whatever new models Stalin had up his sleeve—could swarm straight toward the Rhine.

  “I wonder whether they’d want us to lend a hand if the Reds do come,” Gustav said in musing tones, blowing a smoke ring up at the low ceiling. “Some of us still remember what to do.”

  “Think so, eh?” Bachman said with a dry chuckle. “Well, maybe we do. And I’ll tell you this—they might not have wanted to play with Adolf, but they won’t mind the rest of us dying for our country…and theirs. When the Russians come, you grab everybody you can.” Gustav nodded. Again, his boss wasn’t wrong.

  KONSTANTIN MOROZOV SLID a ruble across the bar. “Another,” he said in Russian.

  “Da,” the bartender said, and gave him a fresh
mug of beer. The man in the apron was a German, but he understood enough Russian to get by. Damn near every Fritz in Meiningen did. With a couple of Soviet tank armies stationed near the border with the American zone, bartenders and shopkeepers and waiters and whores needed to know the occupiers’ language if they were going to get money out of them.

  For that matter, Morozov could have asked for his refill in German. He’d never be fluent, but he could manage. Unless he had to, though, he preferred not to. He’d been a tankman since 1944. He’d joined the Red Army just before Operation Bagration, the great attack that drove the Nazis out of the Soviet Union. He’d seen what they’d done to the rodina, the motherland. And he’d paid them back, with as much interest as he could add, in the grinding drive west that ended in Berlin the following spring. German still felt dirty in his mouth.

  He’d been a private starting out, of course, a seventeen-year-old kid slamming shells into the breech of a T-34/85’s cannon. New fish always started as loaders; the job didn’t take much in the way of brains. If you showed you had something on the ball—and if you lived, naturally—you could go on to bigger and better things.

  He’d had four (or was it five?) tanks killed out from under him. A puckered scar on his left calf showed where a German machine-gun bullet bit him when he was bailing out from one of them. Burn scars mostly hidden by the right sleeve of his khaki tunic reminded him he hadn’t got out of another soon enough. That had hurt like a mad bastard—and burning human flesh smelled too much like a pork roast forgotten in a hot oven.

  But he was still here. That put him ahead of the game right there. So many of the men who’d fought alongside him were dead, some in graves, some not. And the Nazis had murdered civilians for fun, or so it seemed. He’d heard officers arguing about whether the Great Patriotic War cost the USSR twenty or thirty million deaths. Both numbers were too enormous to mean much to him. Twenty or thirty deaths? A tragedy. Multiply by a million? A statistic, nothing more.