The Big Switch twtce-3 Read online

  And she couldn’t hear Shostakovich-or Aaron Copland, for that matter-without thinking, Oh, yeah. He’s a Red. Maybe the music would outlast the politics. Beethoven’s had. Nobody cared any more about what had inspired him. All that mattered was what he’d conceived in his mind and set down on paper.

  Commercials followed: Ivory Soap, White King detergent, Old Golds, and De Sotos. Thirty seconds a pop, with singing and music as professional as they’d be on a piece of music from Tin Pan Alley. No great surprise there: Tin Pan Alley songsmiths sometimes turned working girl and sold their talent to the highest bidder. So did musicians and singers who hadn’t quite got to the top-and sometimes the ones who had. Neither the Nazis nor the Reds would have approved. Peggy wasn’t so sure she did, either, but for reasons of taste rather than ideology.

  What she wanted was news. It was a quarter to the hour. The next record was a lot duller than the Glenn Miller piece. It was duller than a couple of the ads, in fact. They couldn’t all be gems. That was why some Broadway shows went dark after a week.

  The news turned out to be mostly guesses about electoral turnout and reports of tornadoes ripping through the Midwest. Anything across the sea? Peggy would have done much better to turn on the shortwave set for the BBC or Radio Berlin or-less polished-Radio Moscow.

  More commercials followed. Peggy didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. This was what she’d pined for all the time she was stuck in Scandinavia? As a matter of fact, it was, or at least some of what she’d pined for. The rest, the biggest part, hadn’t come back from the office yet.

  Peggy cast a longing look at the brandy bottle, but she didn’t pick it up. She and Herb still hadn’t had that heart-to-heart about who’d done what while they were apart for so long. She wondered if they ever would. A lot of married years had taught her that the best conversations were sometimes the ones you didn’t have. But there was a difference between didn’t and couldn’t. Couldn’t constipated things.

  She thought so, anyhow. Maybe Herb did, too. Or maybe he didn’t have anything like that to talk about. She just didn’t know, and she didn’t have the nerve to find out. She was pretty sure he would forgive her, but she didn’t want to get any forgiveness unless she could dole out some of her own at the same time.

  “Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?” she told the refrigerator. It didn’t give her any back talk, for which she was duly grateful.

  She had a beef stew going and close to ready when Herb walked through the front door. He fixed himself a stiff bourbon on the rocks. “Well, I voted,” he said, in tones as thrilled as the ones he would have used to announce he’d had a cavity filled.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Peggy said. “Build me one of those, would you?”

  “Sure.” He suited action to word. As he gave her the drink, he said, “Not like the last couple of times, is it? Hard to get excited about what happens.”

  “Landon might win. Then we’d all leave town,” Peggy said.

  “Boy, you can sing that in church!” Herb exclaimed.

  After supper, they sat around with more drinks and plenty of smooth American cigarettes and listened to the returns come in. Taken as a whole, the Republicans put up a better fight against FDR than they had in 1932 or 1936. They picked up seats in the House and in the Senate.

  But, with Alf Landon siphoning votes away from Willkie, Roosevelt won the slot at the top of the ticket going away. State after state reported an FDR plurality, if not always an FDR majority.

  “A third term,” Herb said. “How about that?”

  “How about that?” Peggy echoed. After a moment, she added, “It feels like it should mean more somehow, you know?”

  “If England and France hadn’t flipflopped, we’d probably be in the war by now,” Herb said. Peggy nodded. They could talk about politics. That was easy. The other things, the harder things, still remained unsaid.

  Hans-Ulrich Rudel didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to see snow fall, not even when he was a little boy and it promised him a white Christmas. The snow swirling around the airstrip promised him something even better: a chance to start pounding the Ivans again.

  “About time!” he said, sticking out his tongue so snowflakes would land on it. “I was starting to wonder if the mud would ever freeze hard.”

  Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst chuckled wryly. “Everything happens if you wait long enough. The trick is not going nuts while you’re waiting-and not driving everybody around you nuts, too.”

  “Did I do that?” Hans-Ulrich sounded less innocent than he might have wished he did.

  “You said it, sir. I didn’t,” Dieselhorst answered, which could only mean yes. It was also pretty much the same thing Jesus told Pilate when asked if he was King of the Jews.

  You shouldn’t be thinking about Jews, Hans-Ulrich’s well-trained National Socialist side insisted. But he didn’t always listen to that side. At the moment, his Schwanz didn’t want to listen to that side at all. Sofia’s only a Mischling. She’s not a full-blooded Jew, he told himself uneasily.

  As if reading his mind-a trick good sergeants often gave the impression of owning-Dieselhorst asked, “And how’s your lady friend in Bialystok?”

  “Fine, as far as I know,” Hans-Ulrich answered uncomfortably. “I haven’t heard from her since the last time I went back there on furlough.”

  “Uh -huh,” Dieselhorst said, which could have meant anything at all. “You suppose she knows how to write you through the Feldpost?” Mail to military men got through almost no matter what. Even the Frontschweine got their letters from friends and family and lovers, sometimes under fire in the trenches.

  “Well, I didn’t tell her,” Rudel said, more uncomfortably still. No one superior to him had said anything to him about having a half-Jewish girlfriend. What would happen if he started getting letters from her, though? Letters always made things seem more official, more permanent. They might force the powers that be to notice.

  “Don’t fuss.” Dieselhorst’s good cheer didn’t go with his own worries. “If she wants to find out, I’m sure she can.”

  “Danke schon.” That wasn’t what Hans-Ulrich wanted to hear. He changed the subject: “I wish they’d let us get airborne again now that we can.” Sitting around through the Russian mud time had only given him more of a chance to stew in his own juices.

  “Don’t you worry. It’ll happen soon enough, whether you want it or not.” Dieselhorst shook his head in resigned amusement. “Somebody’s been feeding you raw meat, hasn’t he?”

  By way of reply, Rudel said something he wished he had back the second it came out of his mouth. Instead of withering Sergeant Dieselhorst, it made the rear gunner and radioman laugh. Rudel retreated in disorder.

  He was flying again the very next morning, against a concentration of Russian armor and infantry west of Pskov. Bursts of colored smoke from German artillery pointed out the village in which the Ivans had holed up. Without that, he might not have known which village it was. Nobody could say the Russians weren’t masters at concealing themselves, no matter whether one tried to find them on the ground or from the air. Several Wehrmacht men had got their throats cut inside German lines, with no remaining sign of whoever’d done the dirty work.

  But the huts in the village weren’t big enough to hide panzers from the air. The enemy soldiers had done what they could, piling brush and whatnot over the parts that stuck out. That changed the houses’ outlines, though, and gave the game away. “I’m going in on one,” Hans-Ulrich told Dieselhorst as he tipped the Stuka over into a dive.

  However much he wished he would, he didn’t catch the Russians by surprise. Tracers from enemy machine guns leaped up toward the Ju-87. A bullet gouged his thick windshield but didn’t get through. The panzer he’d picked as his own swelled beneath him.

  His thumb hit the firing button. The Stuka staggered in the air as the underwing cannon went off. One round from each of them and Rudel was hauling back on the stick for all he was worth, yanking the dive
-bomber out of its plunge by brute force.

  “You got him!” Dieselhorst yelled through the speaking tube. “The son of a bitch is burning!”

  “Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Let’s go around again and see if we can take out another one.”

  “You’re the boss,” Dieselhorst replied. If his tone implied that he thought Rudel was a few liters short of a full gas tank, the pilot didn’t have to listen to him.

  Listen Hans-Ulrich didn’t. He fought for altitude. It took a while-the Ju-87 really did lose performance when it carried these 37mm guns. Then he dove again. This time, the Ivans were waiting for him but good. They fired off everything they had as his plane plunged toward the ground. But they had only machine guns and rifles. A Stuka was built to shrug off a good many small-arms hits and keep flying. Hans-Ulrich fired the 37mm guns again.

  “He’s burning, too!” Dieselhorst reported as the pilot pulled out of the second dive. “Burning like a motherfucker!”

  Serving in the Luftwaffe had got Hans-Ulrich past stewing when other people swore, the way a pastor’s son might have. That was between Dieselhorst and God, not between the sergeant and Rudel. So Hans-Ulrich only said “Good” before asking, “Did you see any more panzers in there?”

  “Yeah, there was another one, south of the two you blasted,” Dieselhorst answered.

  That wasn’t what the pilot wanted to hear-not even slightly. But he said what needed saying: “Well, let’s go get it, then.”

  He half hoped-more than half hoped-Dieselhorst would try to talk him out of it. The rear gunner might not have had too hard a time. But Dieselhorst just repeated, “You’re the boss.” He still sounded as if he wondered whether Hans-Ulrich had all his oars in the water, but he sounded that way too often for Hans-Ulrich to worry about it now.

  Hans-Ulrich did worry when a pair of flat-nosed Polikarpov fighters rushed straight at his climbing Stuka from out of the east. They were monoplanes, yes, but old-fashioned next to a Bf-109… which did him not a bit of good. The Ju-87 was hideously vulnerable to fighters any old time-and all the more so when it lugged the pair of antipanzer cannon.

  Running was pointless. They had 150 kilometers an hour on him. And so he tried what he’d done once in the west: he opened up on them at long range with the 37mm guns. And either he was a better shot than he gave himself credit for or he got lucky. One of those big shells tore the wing off the lead Ivan. A round designed to smash through a panzer’s armor did horrible things to a fighter plane. The Polikarpov plummeted to the ground, flame licking along the fuselage. Hans-Ulrich didn’t see a parachute. Tough luck, fellow, he thought.

  After seeing what happened to his buddy, the other Russian decided he wanted nothing to do with the Stuka. He whipped his plane into an improbably tight turn and got the devil out of there. Rudel fired at him, too, but missed.

  “What’s going on?” Dieselhorst asked. Hans-Ulrich explained. “Well, shit,” the rear-facing gunner said. “You’ll be a fucking ace by the time the goddamn war’s done. A Stuka ace! Who would’ve figured that?”

  “That’s not what they need me to do,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s just to stay alive.”

  “I like staying alive,” the sergeant said plaintively.

  “Well, now that you mention it, so do I,” Rudel answered. “But I’m still going to take care of that other panzer.”

  Only he didn’t. The Russians holding the village set as many fires as they could. By the way some of them smoked, the Ivans threw motor oil on them. He couldn’t find the remaining panzer through those gray and black plumes, and neither could Dieselhorst. Bombs would still hurt the Red Army foot soldiers, but he didn’t have any. Dieselhorst reported the situation by radio as they flew away.

  One more mission, Hans-Ulrich thought. He’d done his job, and the Polikarpov made a nice bonus.

  Vaclav Jezek didn’t know what he’d expected when he agreed to go to Spain. He’d expected not to get handed over to the Nazis after France went and crapped out on him. He’d got that much, anyhow.

  As a matter of fact, the Spaniards made a big fuss over the survivors of the Czech regiment. The mayor of some town along their route did some speechifying that would have sent a stolid Czech audience into gales of helpless laughter. He shouted. He wailed. He wept. He beat his breast. He used more, and more melodramatic, gestures than Hitler. And the Spaniards ate it up.

  Of course, Vaclav understood not a word of the local language. As Benjamin Halevy had already shown, he could follow it after a fashion. “So what’s he going on about?” Vaclav whispered.

  “He’s thanking us for not despairing of the Republic,” Halevy whispered back.

  “I should hope not!” Vaclav said. “It’s the only country this side of Russia that doesn’t want to shoot us on sight.”

  “It’s a quotation. It goes back to ancient Rome,” the Jew told him.

  “If you say so.” Vaclav had been on the vocational track in his school days. German… You couldn’t escape German, not in a Czechoslovakia where one person in four was a Fritz. But only greasy grinds had anything to do with Latin.

  German attitudes had rubbed off on Vaclav, or been drilled into him, in ways he didn’t even notice. He’d often thought the French were less efficient than they might have been. They kept trying to muddle through and improvise instead of planning beforehand, the way anyone with a gram of sense would have. So it seemed to someone whose country had been ruled for centuries by Germans, anyhow (even if they were Germans from Vienna and not Prussians).

  But the French had at least heard of planning, whether they bothered to do any or not. With Spaniards, there was nothing but muddling through and improvising. The Republic must have known ahead of time that the Czechs were on their way. Vaclav would have thought one official or another would have decided where the new force was to go and what it would do after it got there.

  No matter what he would have thought, nothing like that had happened. Along with a bunch of his buddies, he got off the train in Sagunto-another town that Halevy said went back to Roman days-to take a leak. He’d already discovered that Spanish pissoirs were even nastier than French ones, but when you had to go, you damn well had to go. He tried not to breathe while tending to his business.

  He came out blinking away ammonia fumes… and discovered, on the platform, a Spanish officer and a civilian official shouting and screaming and gesticulating as if their next step would be pistols at dawn tomorrow. Both of them pointed a lot at the train and at the Czech soldiers getting on and off.

  Vaclav could no more follow them than if they were speaking Tibetan. He looked around to see if Halevy was anywhere close by. Sure as hell, the redheaded Jew (just like Judas ran through Jezek’s mind) was just emerging from the odorous latrine. “What are they going on about?” Vaclav asked.

  Halevy cocked his head to one side, listening. “Where the train’s supposed to take us,” he said.

  “They don’t know?” Vaclav said in dismay.

  “They’re Spaniards. What can you expect?” Halevy answered. So the men of the Republic looked sloppy even to someone used to French ways, did they? That was interesting-not reassuring, maybe, but interesting. And sure enough, Halevy went on, “It’s a good thing the assholes on the other side are Spaniards, too, or this war would’ve been over a long time ago. God, I bet the Nationalists drive the fucking Nazis crazy. Serves the Germans right, you ask me.”

  “If the Germans went straight to hell and roasted for a million years on red-hot griddles with devils turning ’em every ten minutes with pitchforks, that might start to serve them right.” Vaclav spoke with deep conviction. “A bunch of fucked-up Spaniards? Nah. They don’t begin to cut it.”

  Halevy’s smile reached his mouth but not his eyes. “When you put it that way, you’re right.”

  The train ended up taking the Czechs through the heart of Spain to Madrid. Vaclav eyed the city with surprised respect. This side of China, it was one of the few places that had been bombed before Prag
ue. All the others were in Spain, too. This was where the Nazis, and even the Italians, had learned their tricks. Mussolini hadn’t done much with what he’d learned. Hitler, on the other hand…

  An officer in a very plain uniform stood waiting for them on the platform. He wasn’t a Spaniard-he was from the International Brigades. “I am Brigadier Kossuth. I am sorry, but I do not speak Czech. Will you follow me if I use Russian?” he said in that language.

  Vaclav could almost follow him, not least because he spoke slowly. Russian wasn’t Kossuth’s native tongue. The name he used and his accent both proclaimed him a Magyar. Vaclav had no use for Hungarians. They weren’t as bad as Germans, but they weren’t friendly neighbors, either. And so he wasn’t sorry to shake his head and spread his hands. He wasn’t about to oblige this fellow by stretching to try to understand Russian.

  Most of his countrymen seemed to feel the same way. Brigadier Kossuth’s stooped shoulders went up and down in a shrug. He switched languages as easily as he might change his cap: “All right. Do you understand me now?” he asked in German.

  He still kept that fierce accent, but Vaclav had no trouble making out what he said. Neither did most of the other Czechs. The older men would have had German pounded into them when they went to school back in Austro-Hungarian days. Czechs Vaclav’s age still learned it-it was their window on a wider world. The same evidently held true for Magyars.

  “Sehr gut,” Kossuth said. No German had ever pronounced an r like that, but Vaclav knew what it was. The officer went on, “You will serve alongside the International Brigades. It was judged best to put you with men with whom you might be able to talk.” He gave a thin smile: the only kind his weathered face seemed to have room for. “Sometimes this is an advantage.”

  Sometimes it wasn’t, too, or so Vaclav had found in France. More than once, a blank stare and a mumble had probably kept him from getting killed-or from killing some half-smart French lieutenant.