Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read online

  Some of the crew visited an army whorehouse. Theo stayed away. Shy among men, he was even more so with women. Adi Stoss didn’t go, either. “I don’t mind buying it, as long as the girl’s there for the money,” he said. “But when they use bayonets to drag ’em out of the village …” He shook his head. “That’s not my idea of a good time.”

  “Nope. Not mine, either.” Theo gave forth with a few words.

  Instead of fornication, they had football. Some Polish troops were getting in a little rest and recuperation not far from the German encampment. Among their supplies, they had goals and nets—they used football to keep fit. When they challenged the panzer crews to a match, national pride forbade turning them down.

  Theo was a goalkeeper—fittingly, the loner on the pitch. And Adi was a center-forward: a striker. A pretty decent player himself, Theo knew Adi outclassed him … and almost everyone else. The Poles didn’t know it yet. Well, they’d find out.

  The pitch was the flattest stretch of nearby field they could find. German and Polish soldiers gathered by the touchlines to watch and to bet. A lot of the Poles spoke German (some of the Polish soldiers spoke Yiddish, one of the more interesting complications in a war full of them). To most of the Wehrmacht men, Polish was just as much mooing and barking as Russian was. Not to Theo, who came from Breslau, not far from the border. Lots of Poles lived and worked in Breslau. He would never be fluent in their language, but he understood bits and pieces of it.

  He said no more about that than he did about anything else. What the Poles didn’t know wouldn’t help them.

  The referee was a German. Both linesmen were Poles. With a little luck, their biases would offset each other. Without that luck, they might turn the spectators and gamblers into brawlers.

  No one on either side or in the crowd expected the referee to call the match closely. Army football was a different beast from the game the professionals played on close-cropped grass. You bumped, you shoved, you elbowed, you got away with whatever you could. It wasn’t quite rugby, but you could see rugby from there.

  As soon as the match started, the Poles discovered that Adi was faster and more nimble than any of them. They started roughing him up to slow him down. That was how army football worked. Then one of the Poles staggered away from him with blood streaming from his nose.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Adi said. “Didn’t mean to do that.” If they elbowed him, he’d elbow them right back. If he claimed he didn’t do it on purpose, well, that was how army football worked, too.

  He scored a lovely goal a couple of minutes later—or he thought he did. But the linesman’s flag was up, signaling offside. The goal didn’t count. He thought he’d been onside when the ball was kicked. So did Theo, though he had to admit the linesman was closer and had a better viewing angle than he did.

  Even without any one player who could match Adi, the Poles were good. They seemed to have played together more than their German foes. They ran plays: one guy knew where the other guy was going, and did his best to put the ball there. Their greenish khaki uniforms were always down close to the German goal.

  A slick pass put the ball at the feet of a Pole in the penalty box. Theo ran toward him, spreading his arms. Make yourself big was a ’keeper’s first commandment. It made the shot harder for the attacker.

  “Far post!” another Pole yelled.

  Guessing the guy with the ball would follow the advice, Theo flung himself to his left. The ball took a deflection off his hand and bounced wide of the post. The Poles got a corner kick, but not a goal.

  “Gowno!” the shooter said loudly, the way a German would have said Scheisse! He sent Theo a suspicious stare. “Did you understand him?” he asked in Polish, as if that would have been cheating. Theo gave him a high-grade idiot stare. The man asked the same thing auf Deutsch. Theo looked just as blank. Shaking his head, the Pole jostled for position for the corner.

  When Theo punched the ball away, another German booted it farther down the pitch. The Poles had brought up their backs in hopes of converting the corner; their defense was in momentary disarray. Adi Stoss got to the ball a split second ahead of a Pole. He faked right, went left, and squirted past him. The Pole tried to knock him down, but he jumped over the fellow’s upraised leg.

  The Polish ’keeper ran out to close down the angle. Adi softly chipped the ball over the luckless man’s head. It bounced once in front of the goal, then rolled into the net.

  Not even the Polish linesman down there could find any way to disallow the score. He looked as impressed as everybody else, in fact. The German soldiers watching the match whooped and cheered like maniacs. Even some of the Poles applauded. The goal was that pretty.

  Two Polish forwards stood catching their breath in the German penalty area. “Not bad,” one of them said to the other, “but let’s see the fucker do it again.” His friend nodded.

  It was 2–2 at the half. One of the Poles’ scores was an own goal—a cross bounced off a German defender’s behind. It was past Theo and into the net before he could do anything about it.

  After the break, they switched ends and went at it again. The Poles scored—that one went right through Theo’s spraddled legs. He was mad, because he thought he should have stopped it. A few minutes later, the Germans leveled. Adi made a sweet pass into the area, and another German headed it home.

  There things stuck. Theo made a good save. So did the Poles’ goalkeeper, who jumped as if on springs to tip a rifle shot of Adi’s just over the crossbar. Adi waved to him, paying his respects. The ’keeper sketched a salute in return. He’d seen what he was up against.

  As they neared the final whistle, Theo grew just about sure the match would end in a draw. He wanted a win, but a draw wasn’t so bad. Nobody’s national pride would be damaged that way. He did wish he hadn’t let in the last goal.

  The Polish ’keeper must also have decided it was safe to relax a little. He took a couple of steps forward, away from the frame of the net. Why not? Safe as houses. The ball was out near the halfway line.

  Theo could have told him nowhere on the pitch was safe when Adi was around. He could have, but he didn’t need to. Adi showed the Pole instead. He launched a howitzer shot with his right foot, high and looping and dropping down straight toward the goal. The ’keeper staggered back, desperately throwing up his arms. He got the fingertips of his right hand on the ball. Theo hadn’t thought he could even do that. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t flip the ball over the bar this time. It went in. Adi’d done it again, all right—in spades.

  When the referee blew the whistle a couple of minutes later, the triumphant Germans carried him off the field on their shoulders. He was grinning like a fool and laughing like a lunatic. Part of that might have been triumph, too.

  Part of it, Theo judged, was something else altogether. Had the Wehrmacht men knew more, they likely would have celebrated less. Adi had more in common with some of the soldiers in Polish uniform than he did with them. Most of the Poles wouldn’t have been happy about that, either. Theo cracked a smile. Not only had his side won, he shared a joke with only one other man out of the whole crowd.

  Dr. Alvarez clucked like a laying hen. “You really should not leave hospital so soon,” he insisted.

  He’d been trained in England, all right; any American would have said leave the hospital. Chaim Weinberg noticed, but he didn’t care. “Doc, you’ve said you’re not gonna do any more carving on me, right?” he said.

  “Yes,” the hand surgeon answered with a reluctant nod. “But you have not done enough exercises to give you the full strength and dexterity possible in your hand.”

  “So I’ll keep doing ’em once I get to the front,” Chaim answered. “And I’ll do other stuff with it, too. You gotta understand, Doc—I’m just sick to death of laying around here on my butt.”

  “Lying,” Alvarez said.

  “No, honest to God, it’s the truth.” Then Chaim realized what the doctor meant. He started to laugh. Wasn’t it a hell of a
note when a foreigner knew more about your language’s grammar than you did? He went on, “I’ll be okay—I really will. You can’t tell me the Republic doesn’t need another soldier who doesn’t halfway know what he’s doing, either. ¡Viva la República!”

  “¡Viva!” Dr. Alvarez echoed. He had to do that much. If he didn’t, somebody was liable to report him as a Sanjurjo sympathizer. If his actual politics lay on the Nationalist side, Chaim no more wanted to know about it than Alvarez wanted him to find out.

  One way the surgeon could have kept him in Madrid would have been not to give him any clothes. The filthy, bloody uniform in which he’d come here had long since been thrown away—or, more likely, burned to prevent contagion. But they fitted him with a pair of dungarees and a peasant’s collarless cotton shirt. That would do to get him to the front. They’d issue him a new uniform there … or maybe they wouldn’t, if they didn’t happen to have one. If they didn’t, he could wear this in the trenches till it got too ragged to stand. It wasn’t as if he’d never been ragged before.

  When he stuck his good hand in the pocket of the dungarees, he found a small roll of pesetas in there. He started to thank the surgeon, then clamped down on it. By the look in his eye, Alvarez wanted no thanks and would have denied putting the money in there. Some people were like that: they didn’t care to admit, maybe even to themselves, that they could be nice.

  A couple of the nurses kissed Chaim before he left. One of them was halfway cute, or more than halfway. Why couldn’t they have been a little more friendly when all he could do was lay there—no, lie there—in bed like a sack of peas, dammit?

  He was sweating before he’d walked even a block. Part of that was Madrid’s fierce summer heat and the blazing sun overhead. And part of it was that he’d spent too goddamn long lying there like a sack of peas. He hadn’t realized how far out of shape he’d got.

  Madrid itself kept the hectic gaiety he’d always found here. Buildings without damage were scarce, glassed windows scarcer. Nationalist, Italian, and German bombers had pounded the Republican stronghold since the civil war started in 1936. Madrileños repaired, rebuilt, and carried on.

  Chaim needed a little while to orient himself. He hadn’t been at his best when they brought him to the hospital, which was putting things mildly. And the building, like most here, had boarded-up windows. So he hadn’t known where he was. Now that he did …

  Luckily, Party headquarters was only a few blocks away. The first person he saw when he walked in there was La Martellita. She was hurrying across the lobby with a fat folder of papers squeezed between her arm and her sweetly curved side. She saw him, too—with no great delight. “What?” she said. “They turned you loose?”

  “Afraid so,” he answered.

  “And so you came over here to bother me?” She jumped to a natural conclusion.

  But he shook his head with more dignity than he could usually muster. “Sorry, querida, but no. I came over here to ask where I could get a ride up to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”

  “Oh,” La Martellita said in a different tone of voice. That was business. She told him what he needed to know. The bus depot wasn’t far, either, for which he was glad. Then she asked, “And your hand—it’s better?”

  “It’s good enough.” He showed her he could bring thumb and forefinger together. He tried not to show her it still hurt. His pride was of a different sort from the Spaniards’ flashy variety, which didn’t mean he had none.

  “It’s still not pretty,” she said.

  He shrugged. “It’ll never be pretty. Así es la vida. You, now, you’re pretty.”

  Flattery got him nowhere. He hadn’t expected it would. Hoped, sure, but not expected. “Go find your bus,” she told him. “If you stay here very long, you won’t find anything but trouble.”

  He blew her a kiss as he turned to go. “Hasta la vista. Say hello to my son for me.”

  She headed for the stairway without answering. He suspected Carlos Federico Weinberg wouldn’t get the hello. Sighing, he walked out and trudged over to the depot.

  Every last bus in the Republic would have been junked for spare parts in the States—except the ones old and strange enough to go straight into a museum. The ancient French ruin he boarded might have rushed troops from Paris to the Marne in the darkest days of 1914. It wouldn’t have been fresh from the factory then, either.

  It rattled. It farted. It stank of gasoline—something was leaking somewhere. At least half of what should have been teeth on the gears in its transmission were only memories. Its shocks weren’t even memories, because Chaim didn’t think it had ever had any.

  But it still ran. The maniac behind the wheel drove with a cheerful disregard for life and limb: his own, his handful of passengers’, and those of anyone else unfortunate enough to come anywhere near him.

  Heading north and west was getting a picture of how the war had gone. The Nationalists came within a whisker of taking Madrid. They pushed into the northwestern suburbs, and onto the campus of the university. Little by little, the Republican forces had driven them back, till now the front lay well out of artillery range. As the bus clattered along, craters in the ground—sometimes craters in the road—got fresher and deeper. Less grass grew in them. The rusting hulks of burnt-out armored vehicles from both sides grew more modern and dangerous-looking.

  After a while, brakes screeching, the bus shuddered to a stop. “The sector of the Internationals!” the driver shouted. He undid the wire around the handle that held the door closed. Chaim got out.

  A lot of so-called Internationals nowadays were Spaniards. Casualties and time had thinned the foreign Marxists’ ranks, and the bigger European war meant few new volunteers came here. But the ones who were left, Europeans and Americans, were uncommonly hard to kill.

  “What do you need?” asked a man who spoke Spanish with some kind of guttural Central European accent.

  Chaim held up his much-scarred, much-repaired left hand. “I’m just over a wound,” he answered. If the other fellow had trouble with his crappy Spanish, he figured Yiddish would be the next thing to try. If you knew German, you could cope with it. “Where do I find the Abe Lincolns these days?”

  The Central European followed him. The guy pointed up and to the left. “They’re over there. So you’re back for more fun, are you?”

  “Fun? Oh, of course.” Chaim flexed the fingers that still worked. “Any more fun and I’d be dead. Round that got me killed one of my friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” the other man said. “We all have stories like that by now. Well, go on. Buena suerte.” Chaim nodded as he headed up toward the line. Good luck was as much as you could hope for, and more than you usually got.

  A groundcrew sergeant regretfully spread his hands. Anastas Mouradian eyed the callused palms with the dirt ground into the ridges of leathery flesh. “I’m very sorry, Comrade Lieutenant, but the hydraulics on your bomber are totally shot to shit,” the noncom said.

  “How long will you need to fix things?” Mouradian demanded. “We’ll be flying again tomorrow as long as the weather stays good.”

  Before answering, the groundcrew man used a strip torn from Pravda and some makhorka he took out of a pouch on his belt to roll himself a cigarette. After he scraped a match on the sole of his boot and lit the smoke, he courteously offered Mouradian the makings. When the pilot shook his head, the mechanic blew out a stream of smoke and said, “We’ll do the best we can. I don’t know what else to tell you right now.”

  “Khorosho,” Stas replied, although it wasn’t good or even close to good. The longer he served in the Red Air Force, the more time he spent among Russians, the better he understood why they’d raised profanity to an art form practiced by virtuosos. The reason was simple: they had to deal with other Russians practically all the time. And if dealing with Russians all the time didn’t make you want to swear, nothing ever would.

  He went back to the officers’ tent and gave Isa Mogamedov the news. Armenians and Azeris
had been rivals, usually enemies, since time out of mind. All the same, Stas understood his copilot in ways he would never understand a Russian. The two peoples had lived in—and picked—each other’s pockets for so long, they’d rubbed off on each other.

  Mogamedov’s tiny shrug meant Well, what can you hope for when Russians are working on something? Aloud, the Azeri said, “Maybe someone will come down sick and we’ll fly even if the plane can’t go.”

  “You never can tell,” Stas said. “We serve the Soviet Union.”

  “We serve the Soviet Union!” Mogamedov agreed loudly. You could never go far wrong saying that where plenty of other people heard you. He went on, “If we fly, we fly. If we don’t, it’s … that we don’t, is all.”

  “Sure,” Mouradian said. What had his crewmate almost come out with before changing course? If we don’t, it’s God’s will, maybe? Something like that, Stas guessed. Something that sounded not only religious but Muslim. Something you didn’t want to say where plenty of other people heard you, in other words.

  Stas let his eyes very casually flick around the tent. He didn’t think any of the Russians in here had noticed Mogamedov’s tiny hesitation. Even if they had noticed it, chances were they would be too dim to understand what it likely meant. They were only Russians, after all. A lot of things men from the Caucasus took for granted sailed right over their heads.

  When Stas’ eyes came back to Mogamedov, he noticed that the Azeri was watching him. An instant later, Mogamedov wasn’t any more, at least not in any noticeable way. But the copilot would know that he knew; Mouradian knew that much himself. And he knew Mogamedov would worry, knowing that he knew. You could drown in all the permutations of knowing and knowing-about-knowing and worrying-about-knowing-about-knowing and …

  “Nichevo, Isa. Nichevo,” Stas said. There was a useful Russian word, a Russian Russian word. It meant What can you do? or You can’t do anything or It can’t be helped. Russians had put up with a lot over the years. Their language showed it.