lost, spoken Yiddish made far more sense to him than the written kind, and Bialystok was full of Jews. He could have asked one of them. These days, the town also had its share of chain dogs-German Feldgendarmerie, their gorgets of office hung around their necks from chains. He was glad he didn’t need to talk to them. The less he had to do with them, the better.
A drunk Pole reeled out of a tavern. That would have been a cliche, except the Pole, in a uniform of dark, greenish khaki, was arm in arm with an equally plastered German in Feldgrau. They were both murdering the same tune, each in his own language. Drunken Germans weren’t such a cliche, which didn’t mean Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen his share of them and then some.
As a matter of fact, he was heading for a tavern himself, though not this one. Another block up from the station, half a block over… He nodded to himself. He recognized the Polish sign out front, even if it made no sense to him. He walked in. The place smelled of tobacco and sweat and beer and fried food-and stale piss from the jakes out back.
Poles and Germans drank together here, too. So did Jews and Germans, which would have been unimaginable back in the Reich. The Poles didn’t like their Jews, but they didn’t hit them with the same legal restrictions the Germans did. Maybe they couldn’t; one person in ten in Poland was a Jew, only one in a hundred in Germany. Wehrmacht personnel here had orders to conform to local customs and laws.
A short, swarthy barmaid sidled up to Hans-Ulrich. She spoke in throaty Yiddish: “You may as well sit down, not that the boss’ll make a zloty off you if you keep on drinking tea.”
“Hello, Sofia. Won’t you at least tell me you’re glad to see me?” Rudel didn’t grab her or kiss her in public. She didn’t like that. Did she go with other men while he was in the East fighting the war? If she did, he’d never heard about it. The way things were these days, that would do.
“I’m at least glad to see you,” she answered, deadpan. She wasn’t exactly a Jew; she had a Polish father, which in the Reich ’s classification scheme made her a Mischling first class. But she thought of herself as Jewish, and she was snippy like a Jew. Back in Germany, Hans-Ulrich would have endangered his career by having anything to do with her. He could get away with it here-could, and did.
She took him to a corner and brought him a glass of tea. She found his teetotaling as funny as most of his service comrades did. She was also as nervous about seeing a German-and a Nazi Party member at that-as he was about going with a Jewess. In bed, everything was fine. The rest of the time… Hans-Ulrich sometimes thought they came from different planets, not just different countries.
Sofia was well informed about his planet, though. Along with the sweet, milkless tea, she gave him a mocking grin. “So even the Catholics in Germany say Hitler can’t get away with some of the stuff he’s trying to pull?” she said.
As a Lutheran minister’s son, his opinion of Catholics had never been high. “A lot of that is just enemy propaganda,” he said. None of it had come over the German radio or appeared in any army or Luftwaffe newspaper. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard a few things, or more than a few. It did mean he wasn’t obliged to believe them- not officially, and not when Sofia tried to rub his nose in them.
She quirked a dark eyebrow. “Well, if you say so,” she answered, which meant she wasn’t obliged to believe him, either. She went on, “The big switch was good for something, anyhow. I got a card from my mother the other day, from Palestine.”
While England and Germany were at war, mail from Palestine-a British League of Nations mandate-didn’t travel to Poland because it was friendly to Germany. Now that England had joined the crusade against Bolshevism, things moved more freely. “There’s rather more to it than that, you know,” he said stiffly. He often was more literal-minded than might have been good for him. Sofia enjoyed getting under his skin. As if having a mother who felt strongly enough about being Jewish to go to Palestine after the Pole she’d married (a drunkard, if you listened to Sofia) walked out weren’t enough!
“If you say so,” Sofia repeated. Big things-like who would win the war-meant little to her. Or, if they did, she wouldn’t let on. A small thing-like getting a card from her mother after a long silence-counted for more.
“I think you’re trying to drive me crazy,” Hans-Ulrich said.
“It would be a short drive,” she retorted, which made him regret-not for the first time-getting into a battle of words with her. He was a good flyer, not such a great talker. But everybody knew Jews were born talking, and in that Sofia took after her mother. Rudel assumed as much, anyhow, without even thinking about it.
He tried to change the subject: “What time do you get off today?”
“Why? What have you got in mind?” She didn’t just answer a question with another question. She answered one with two.
“Whatever you want, of course,” Hans-Ulrich said. Bialystok’s nightlife consisted of a few movie houses, a dance hall or two, and a Yiddish theater. Even with trees lining the streets, Paris it was not.
Sofia laughed raucously. “Whatever you want, you mean. And what else does a man ever want?”
Rudel’s ears heated. “Well, what if I do? If I didn’t, you’d think I was sleeping with somebody else, and you’d give me trouble on account of that.”
“I wouldn’t give you trouble. I’d drop you like a grenade. No-I’d throw you like a grenade.” She cocked her head to one side. “You mean you don’t visit the officers’ whorehouse? I’m sure they’ve set one up somewhere not far from you. They always do things like that, don’t they?”
As a matter of fact, they did. An officers’ brothel-and one for other ranks-operated in a village a couple of kilometers from the airstrip. Hans-Ulrich knew Sergeant Dieselhorst had visited the one for enlisted men. He hadn’t called at the officers’ establishment. That gave his fellow flyers one more reason to think he was strange, though they knew about Sofia and didn’t think he was a fairy.
“The girls there would just be doing it because they were doing it,” he said slowly, trying to put what he thought into words. “They wouldn’t be doing it because they wanted to do it with me.”
And I do? He waited for the barmaid’s jeers. Rather to his surprise, it didn’t come. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “That matters to you?”
“Yes, it matters to me.” He was in his midtwenties. He often risked his life several times a day. He gave Sofia a crooked grin. “Well, most of the time, anyhow.”
He wondered if she’d get mad. Instead, he startled a laugh out of her. “You’d better watch yourself. If you aren’t careful, you’ll make me think you’re honest.”
Hans-Ulrich prided himself on his honesty-he was a pastor’s son. He started to get angry, then realized she was teasing him. “You…” he said, more or less fondly.
She grinned at him, altogether unrepentant. “Did you expect anything different?” Before he could answer, the soldiers at another table yelled for her to fetch them another round of drinks. She fluttered her fingers at him and hurried away. Hans-Ulrich realized she never had told him when she got off. How much tea would he soak up before she finally did? He wasn’t even that fond of tea. But he was fond of Sofia, and so he waited and ordered glass after glass.
Alistair Walsh’s principal use to the Conservative conspirators against Sir Horace Wilson’s alliance with the Reich was that he knew soldiers. Some of them had put on the uniform after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, but he’d worn it for more than twenty years-for his whole adult life, till his political unreliability led him to resign from the service and led the army to accept his resignation.
So he knew soldiers in ways the toffs didn’t. And he also knew soldiers-literally. At one time or another between the wars, he’d served under most of England’s prominent and high-ranking officers. Senior officers tended to remember senior noncoms. Those long-serving veterans were the army’s backbone. They counted for more in the scheme of things than lieutenants and captains and sometimes even majors because they knew all the things the junior officers were just learning-and more besides, especially if you listened to them.
And Walsh could do things in an unofficial capacity that would have raised eyebrows-to say nothing of hackles-had an MP gone about them. If the conspirators talked to a general, for instance, Sir Horace and his none too merry men would naturally suspect them of skullduggery. The Prime Minister and his henchmen would be right, too.
But if Alistair Walsh called on General Archibald Wavell-well, so what? He was only an out-to-pasture underofficer. For all Scotland Yard could prove, he was asking for a job, or maybe a loan.
That was also true for all General Wavell knew. He might not have had any idea of the company Walsh was keeping these days. He did know who Walsh was, though, and did agree to meet him at General Staff headquarters.
