The Big Switch twtce-3 Read online

  Even if the alarms outside didn’t go off, the ones inside his head did when somebody knocked on the door one night at half past eleven. His heart pounded as he walked over to it. Was this the moment? Had they decided to imitate the Fascists and the Reds and dispose of him at midnight?

  If they had, he could do damn all about it. Defiantly, he threw the door wide. There in the hall stood a short, portly man in his mid-sixties, with a round red face-a wrinkled, irascible baby face, it was, although he smoked a large and decidedly unbabyish cigar.

  Walsh recognized him right away. Few Britons wouldn’t have, of course. “Winston!” he blurted.

  “At your service,” Winston Churchill replied, his voice familiar from the wireless but more resonant now that he was here in the flesh. “May I come in?”

  “How can I say no?” Walsh stepped back to let the politician enter, then closed the door behind him. He pointed to a whiskey bottle on the sideboard. “I could use a drink, sir. Would you care for one?”

  “How can I say no?” Churchill repeated, blue eyes twinkling. Moving as if in a dream, Walsh poured for them both. He gestured toward the siphon-equipped soda bottle beside the whiskey: a silent question. Churchill shook his head. Walsh was just as well pleased. He wanted something potent himself.

  Churchill raised his glass. “The King!” he said. Walsh echoed the toast. They both drank. Churchill smacked his lips. “Not bad. They are treating you satisfactorily?” The six-syllable word sounded natural in his mouth, though more often than not he was the most plainspoken of politicos.

  “Yes, sir.” Walsh finished his whiskey at a gulp-he needed it. “Did you come here to ask me that?”

  “I did not,” Churchill rasped. “I came to ask you this: how would you and your comrades in arms like to march with the Germans and against Russia?”

  That was as plainspoken as a man could get. Walsh poured himself a refill. Churchill held out his glass, and Walsh filled it as well. “I don’t care to speak for anyone but myself, sir…”

  “Then by all means do that. Your reluctance does you credit.”

  Shrugging, Walsh said, “I don’t know anything about that. What I know is, I’m damned if I want some Nazi general giving me orders. And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We’d be helping Hitler do what he already wants to-hell, what he’s already started doing. He couldn’t lick us, so now he wants us to join him. I’ve fought against Fritz twice now. I don’t want to be on his side. He makes a fine enemy, but I doubt he’d prove such a good friend. If he’s after the Russians now, there’s more to Stalin than I looked for.”

  The words poured out of him, fueled more by nerves than by whiskey. Once he ran dry, he wondered whether he’d just doomed himself. If the government had already decided to throw in with Adolf…

  But the wrinkles smoothed out of Churchill’s face as he smiled. “God bless you, son. I thought you’d say that-I hoped you would-but I was far from sure. Even if you’re too modest to say so, I feel sure you spoke for most British fighting men. And, most eloquently, you spoke for me as well.”

  “Good Lord!” Walsh did not expect ever to win the VC. Aside from that, he couldn’t imagine a finer honor. He dared a question of his own: “Is it decided? What we’ll do, I mean?”

  “Decided?” Churchill snorted and shook his head. “Not likely! Neville Chamberlain couldn’t decide to change his drawers if he shat in them.” That made Walsh blink. Then he remembered Churchill had fought in the Boer War and commanded a battalion on the Western Front in the last big go-round. Some of it must have stuck-he knew how soldiers talked, all right. He went on, “No, Sergeant, it’s not decided. But I daresay you’ve helped put a spike in Herr Hess’ wheel. That you have.” This time, he poured the whiskey. He raised his glass. “Down with Hitler!”

  “Down with Hitler!” Alistair Walsh had never heard a toast he was gladder to join.

  Rumors always rumors. Vaclav Jezek didn’t like the ones he was hearing lately. “That’s what they’re saying,” Benjamin Halevy told him. “There’s supposed to be talk in Paris about throwing in with the Germans.”

  “They can’t do that!” Vaclav exclaimed in dismay verging on horror.

  “Tell me about it,” the Jewish sergeant said. “But the trouble is, they damn well can. And the poilus think they’re going to.”

  Most of the time, Vaclav found speaking next to no French an asset. If he didn’t understand an idiot officer, he didn’t have to follow idiotic orders-unless the fellow knew German, as some of the bastards did. Now, though, he wished he could pick up the trench rumors at first hand instead of relying on Halevy to pass them along.

  “Some of the poilus want to fight. Some of them don’t, though.” Vaclav put that as politely as he could. He didn’t want to offend the sergeant, who was at least as much Frenchman as Czech (and, to Jezek, more Jew than either).

  He needn’t have worried. Because Halevy was more Jew than anything else, or Jew first and everything else later, he was all for giving the Nazis one in the nuts. “Too right they don’t. How’d you like to take on the Russians instead?”

  “Oh, so it works like that, does it?” Vaclav said. Halevy nodded. Vaclav didn’t need to think it over. “No, thanks. Not me. Russia tried to help Czechoslovakia when Hitler jumped us, and that’s more than anybody else can say-France included.”

  Once more, the challenge turned out not to be one. “Yes, I know,” Benjamin Halevy answered. “We did as little as we could to technically honor our treaty.”

  “Aren’t there a lot of Reds in the French Army?” Vaclav said. “What’ll they think about fighting for Hitler and against Stalin?”

  That made Halevy pause, at any rate. “Interesting question,” he said at last. “I’m not sure. We’ll just have to find out, if that’s what the big wheels decide to do. Most of them would sooner throw in with the Nazis-you can bank on that.”

  “Oh, sure,” Vaclav agreed. “France really would have done something when Germany invaded us if your government didn’t halfway wish you were in bed with Hitler.”

  He wondered if that would make Halevy angry, but the redheaded noncom took it in stride. His only response was “I’m glad you said ‘halfway.’ ”

  “What are we supposed to do while the boys in the cutaways and the striped pants figure out which way to jump?” Jezek asked.

  “Ha! That I can tell you: same as we’d do any other time. We keep on killing the assholes in Feldgrau and do our goddamnedest to keep them from killing us.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Vaclav allowed.

  The Germans wanted to kill him in particular. They knew too much about him, too: they knew he was a Czech, not a Frenchman. Their imported sharpshooter (or maybe he was homegrown-Vaclav didn’t know for sure) started singling out men who wore the domed Czech helmet rather than the crested Adrian style that made poilus look as if they were still fighting the last war. This was a better Adrian helmet than the old model. It was stamped from a single piece of manganese steel instead of being built up from two pieces of lower-quality ironmongery. But it still looked old-fashioned. And it still was made of thinner metal than the Czech pot.

  Not without regret, Vaclav switched to a French helmet. He’d done that before; doing it again didn’t bother him too much. He wanted to hang on to the Czech helmet he was abandoning, but he didn’t. The antitank rifle meant he lugged around extra weight as things were. He didn’t need another kilo or kilo and a half.

  Somewhere over there, off to the east, that German sniper lurked in the trenches. Or maybe he wasn’t in the trenches any more. Maybe he sprawled in a shell hole between the lines, or inside the carcass of a dead automobile, or under a smashed-up rubbish bin. You could sneak out under cover of darkness. One shot would be all you needed. Odds were nobody would see where it came from. When night came, back you’d go. In the meantime, you could amuse yourself by carving another notch into your rifle’s stock.

  You could if you were a nice, thorough German, anyhow.
Vaclav wouldn’t have cared to be captured carrying a rifle that bragged that way. If you were, your chances of seeing the inside of a POW camp ranged from slim down toward none. He chuckled sourly when that crossed his mind. The weapon he carried was a hell of a lot more conspicuous than any ordinary rifle, notched or not.

  He began looking with a new eye at possible hiding places out in no-man’s-land. The way he went about it made him laugh once more, on as dry a note as he’d used earlier. Was this how ducks scouted for hunters’ blinds in the marshes at river’s edge as they flew down to land and feed?

  There was a difference, though. Unlike the ducks, he could shoot back.

  He suddenly laughed again, this time in real amusement. He imagined flocks of mallards or pochards or smews with machine guns under their wings and cannon in their beaks. By God, you’d think twice-three times, if you had any sense-before you went after one of those!

  “All right. What’s so funny?” Benjamin Halevy asked. Vaclav explained his conceit. The Jew gave him a peculiar look and found another question: “Are you sure you’re a Czech?”

  “Damn straight,” Jezek answered proudly. “How come you’re asking such a stupid thing?”

  “On account of Czechs aren’t usually crazy like that. Even Frenchmen aren’t usually crazy like that. You sure you’re not a Yid in disguise?”

  “Damn straight,” Vaclav repeated, still proudly. Had someone not a Jew asked him that, he would have decked the son of a bitch. As things were, he added, “Nobody’s gonna get near my dick with the gardener’s clippers.”

  “That’s not how it’s done,” Halevy said. “Or I don’t think it is. I was only eight days old when it happened to me, so I wasn’t taking notes.”

  “No, huh? Doesn’t it bother you not having a foreskin?”

  “Why would it? Does having one bother you?”

  “Nope,” Vaclav said. “What bothers me is that Nazi shithead. He’s out there somewhere, and he wants to punch my ticket for me.”

  “Do unto others before they do unto you,” Halevy said. “It may not be just what Jesus said, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad advice.”

  It was, in fact, damn good advice. Vaclav had already been following it, even if he hadn’t phrased it so well. He decided he’d better head out into no-man’s-land himself. If he didn’t nail the sniper, he’d have a better shot at other German soldiers.

  Maybe they’d pick the same nook. Wouldn’t that make for a cheery meeting in the dark?

  He spent the rest of the day scouting places to hide. Some of the ones that looked best lay several hundred meters in front of the line Czech and French troops shared. The very best one, or so it seemed, was behind or perhaps under a rusted-out French armored car that had probably been sitting there since the big German advance a year and a half before. The Fritzes would have taken whatever parts and weapons and tires they could use and left the shell to gather dust… and, now, snipers.

  When he told Halevy of his plan, the Jew said, “Well, you can do that if you want, but I sure wouldn’t.”

  “How come?” Jezek yelped indignantly.

  “You already answered your own question: it’s been sitting there the past year and a half. You think the Germans haven’t noticed it? You think they haven’t booby-trapped it six ways from Sunday?”

  Vaclav paused to find out what he did think. After a few seconds, he said, “Aw, shit.” After a few more, he added, “Thanks.” Nothing came harder than admitting the other guy was right. But Halevy was, sure as hell. The sergeant nodded back. Vaclav started looking for a different place to hide. eggy Druce had been through things none of her friends and acquaintances in Philadelphia could match. The more she talked about them, the plainer that got. She’d changed, and they hadn’t. She was convinced that she’d changed for the better, and that they needed to move in the same direction as fast as they could. They seemed disappointingly dubious.

  Herb always listened to her. A good thing, too, or she would have gone round the bend in a hurry. Even as things were, more than a few of those friends and acquaintances would have said she’d already done it.

  “For crying out loud,” she told her husband after finding that even more people didn’t want to pay any attention to her, “it’s like I’m the only one who knows what love is, and everybody else thinks I’m lying when I talk about it. What am I supposed to do? Besides haul off and belt somebody in the chops, I mean.”

  He clicked his tongue between his teeth. Doing his best to keep a judicious tone-Peggy recognized the tone, and the effort-he answered, “Well, it might help some if you didn’t sound so much like a missionary out to convert the heathen Chinee.”

  The nineteenth-century phrase made her smile… for a moment. But only for a moment. Then she got mad-not at him, but at everybody deaf to her blandishments. That meant, basically, at almost everyone she knew on this side of the Atlantic. If Herb had also thought she was a crank, she didn’t know what she would have done. Thank God, he didn’t.

  “For crying out loud,” she said again, “the way a lot of people sound, they’re halfway to being Nazis. More than halfway. It’s terrible! The way they go on, they want England and France to line up behind Hitler and knock Russia flat.”

  “Stalin’s no bargain,” Herb said: once more, judiciously.

  “Yes, dear. ” Peggy’s own oversweet tone was redolent of I-expected-better-from-you-of-all-people. “Next to Hitler, though, he’s George Washington and Abe Lincoln rolled into one.”

  “I’m sure he would agree with you,” Herb remarked.

  “So what?” Peggy said. “Next to Hitler, Attila the Hun is a bargain. I ought to know. I’ve talked to the man.”

  “To Attila?” her husband asked, not innocently enough.

  Peggy sent him a severe look. “Hitler. As. You. Know. Perfectly. Well.” She bit off the words one by one, as if from a salami.

  “Okay, okay,” Herb said. “Did you ever talk to Hess, too, or meet him?”

  “I saw him a couple of times. I never really met him,” Peggy answered. “Do you think he parachuted out over London or Paris or wherever it was, the way people are saying?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Oh, yeah? Name two.”

  “Mm… There were the Braves in 1914.”

  “That’s one,” Peggy said.

  Her husband said nothing for some little while. Then he spread his hands, as he might have done after turning over a bad dummy at the bridge table. “Maybe I can’t think of anything else that peculiar. But it’s been a pretty crazy war any way you look at it, hasn’t it?”

  “Think so, do you? I’ll tell you something.” Peggy took a deep breath, then proceeded to do exactly that: “America’s even stranger than all the crazy places I saw in Europe. The ostrich with his head in the sand is wearing an Uncle Sam top hat.”

  “Honey, I don’t want to see us in the war,” Herb said. “I went Over There. I saw the elephant. That’s what my granddad would have called it, anyway: what he did call it after he came home from the Army of the Potomac. The only reason I’ve ever been glad we couldn’t have kids is that a son of mine would be draft age right about now. Some of the things I did, some of the things I saw… I wouldn’t wish them on my son.”

  “Herb-” Peggy didn’t know how to go on. They hardly ever brought up the subject of children; it was too raw and painful. In the early days of their marriage, she’d miscarried three times in the space of two years. After that, her doctor warned her that any more tries probably wouldn’t succeed, and would put her life in danger. So she and Herb had relied on French letters and on techniques some people called perverted, and remained fond of each other’s company to this day.

  If something was necessarily missing, well, what could you do? Something was missing from everybody’s life. Peggy had more leisure-and more money-with which to travel. Most of the time, she and Herb could look on the bright side of things.

  (She hadn’t worried about any of that whe
n she ended up letting Constantine Jenkins into her bed in Berlin. She’d been so sloshed, she hadn’t worried, or thought, about one goddamn thing then. She’d guessed the embassy undersecretary was queer. She’d been pretty sure, in fact. If he was, he sure could switch-hit every now and then. Only luck he didn’t put a bun in her oven. And wouldn’t that have fouled up her life?)

  She took a deep breath. “Somebody’s got to stop Hitler. If that means us, it means us, no matter what it costs.”

  “Maybe,” he said. Unlike her, he held back a lot of what went through his mind. Most of the time, she thought that made him easier to live with. Most of the time, but not always. After a moment, he added, “But if Chamberlain and Daladier are pushing him forward, who’s going to ask us to hold him back?”

  The question was painfully good. The only reason the USA had gone into the last war was to pull England and France’s chestnuts out of the fire. Still, Peggy found a possible answer: “Stalin?”

  Her husband snorted. “He may ask, but who’ll listen to him? Not enough Russian votes-or Red votes, come to that-to get FDR’s bowels in an uproar, especially with this third-term boom. Most people don’t want a war. They can finally see the end of the Depression, or they think they can, and they just want to stay under their own vine and fig tree.”

  Peggy’s strict parents had sent her to Sunday school every week till she got big enough to put her foot down and quit going. Bits and pieces of it stuck to this day. She could come out with chapter and verse from Micah (in the King James version, of course; her folks seemed to think that was what God had used to talk to the Hebrews): “ ‘But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.’ ” She sighed wistfully. “Boy, that’d be swell!”

  Herb smiled, whether at the quotation or at the old-fashioned slang she couldn’t tell. “It would, wouldn’t it? The way it looks to most people, we’ve got the Atlantic and the Pacific instead of the vine and the fig tree. With all that water between us and trouble, why worry?”