fought like tough assholes, too. He still would rather have shot at them than at the Ivans.
A few more SS men herded some Jews into the square. One of the Jews might have been brother to the guy who’d given Luc plum brandy. Laughing, an SS sergeant drew his Luger and raised it to the back of the Jew’s head.
Maybe he just meant to scare the graybeard. Maybe. Luc didn’t wait to find out. He had his rifle pointed at the SS noncom’s belly button in nothing flat. “Halt!” he yelled. He didn’t speak much German, but he had that one down solid.
Slowly, his mouth dropping open in disbelief, the SS man lowered the pistol. An SS officer spoke in badly accented French: “But this foolishness is. We are allies, n’est-ce pas? And these are only Jews.”
Other SS men looked as ready to fight their “allies” as Luc was to plug that sergeant. Lieutenant Demange dove behind some shattered masonry. He shouted in German probably as lousy as the SS officer’s French. Then he translated for Luc: “I told ’em I’d give ’em the whole fucking drum of ammo if they didn’t leave the damn Hebes alone.”
The Waffen — SS officer quivered with outrage. “Tell me your name,” he snarled at Demange. “I shall to your superiors report you.”
“Fuck off and die,” the lieutenant replied auf Deutsch, not breaking cover. Luc got that fine. Demange said something else in German, then repeated it in French: “You want to report us for stopping a murder, you’ll be at war with every Frenchman in Russia by this time tomorrow.”
Luc nodded. So did the poilus he’d brought along. The SS man swore in his own language, but he let the Jews go. And nobody reported the confrontation to anybody’s superiors.
Chapter 9
The major standing by Alistair Walsh murmured to himself: “ ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’ ”
“What’s that, sir?” Walsh kept looking across the street toward what had to be England’s most famous address.
“That”-the major’s handsome face set in disapproving lines at Walsh’s ignorance, and very likely at his accent, too — “ that is Shakespeare. Macbeth, to be precise.” He was the sort who’d set great stock in precision. Yes, the Army needed that kind of man… which didn’t mean the bloke would have a great pack of friends.
“We ought to move a bit, not let ourselves be seen staring at the place,” Walsh said. He didn’t think he himself was important in the grand scheme of things: not in the other side’s calculations, at any rate. He didn’t know what kind of reports they had about the major. He didn’t even know the man’s name. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell, no matter how clever-or cruel-the questioner.
Absently, the major nodded. “Quite,” he said, and started mooching down the street. Sighing, Walsh went along. The major was bound to be very good at… well, at whatever he was good at. Whatever that might be, it wasn’t acting. He might have drawn more notice with a battery-powered signboard featuring flashing electric lamps. On the other hand, he also might not have.
Walsh didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the guards in front of the famous address. Of course, if the other side was on the job, he wouldn’t. But if the other side were on the job, he wouldn’t have been strolling along with the officer.
He did some murmuring of his own: “Gunpowder.”
“Oh, we’ve got better toys than that these days,” the major said.
“I meant the Gunpowder Plot, sir. Guy Fawkes’ Day.”
“Well, don’t equivocate, then,” the major snapped. “Say what you mean.”
“Yes, sir,” Walsh replied with dour precision. Since he was nominally a civilian, he couldn’t salute, even sarcastically, but he had to remind his twitchy arm of that. “What I mean, sir, is that if we bugger this up little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors and get browned off because they’ve got to memorize our names.”
“Little tykes a hundred years from now will take lessons about the Second World War Traitors regardless.” The major spoke with gloomy certainty. “The only question left is which list of names they’ll have to memorize.”
Walsh grunted. That was much too likely to be true. A nice-looking blonde came up the street past him. Of itself, his head swiveled so he could check her hip action, too. The little things in life went on no matter how grandiose the big things were. A blackbird on a rooftop opened its yellow beak and poured out springtime song. It hopped into the air and flew off, right over Walsh and the major.
The officer ducked away. Walsh eyed him sympathetically. He must have had a rugged war if a thrush could remind him of a grenade or a shell fragment. The ribbon for the Military Medal on his chest did nothing to argue against that. But then the major said, “Ought to be a bounty on those bloody things. Did you ever try to clean bird shit off your cap visor?”
“Er-no.” Walsh’s sympathy evaporated.
“Stinking nuisance,” the major said, before returning to the business at hand: “I’m told you know something of this business. What do you think of our chances for success?”
Do I know something of this business? Walsh wondered. He’d planned and led attacks on strongpoints in urban settings-no doubt of that. It made him more of an expert than most people, even probably more of an expert than most soldiers. He pursed his lips, weighing what he’d seen. “So long as we do keep the advantage of surprise, chances look tolerably good to me. If they’re waiting for us when we make the attempt…”
“We’re ruined for fair, then,” the major finished for him, which wasn’t how Walsh would have gone on. Again, though, that didn’t make him wrong.
A boy on a street corner was waving the Times of London and bawling out the latest war headlines. The British Expeditionary Force and the rest of the Nazis’ allies were advancing deeper into Russia. In Malaya and Burma, the Japanese kept pushing imperial troops back. Even Singapore, said to be the strongest fortress in the world, might come under attack soon.
“Strange business,” the major said, walking past without buying a paper.
“How’s that, sir?”
“Well, the bleeding Japs are supposed to be Hitler’s chums. But we’re supposed to be Hitler’s chums, too, and we’re at war with Japan. And the Russians are Hitler’s deadly enemies, but they’ve already had their war with Japan, so they’re neutral now. And the USA and Japan are fighting, but Russian ships can cross the Pacific free as so many fish, load up on guns in American ports, and haul all that stuff back to Russia to fire it off against the Nazis-and us.”
When you thought of it like that, it was enough to make your head swim. Walsh found one problem: “How many ships in the Pacific have the Russians got left now that Vladivostok’s fallen?”
“They have some yet. And there’s a road connection-not a good one, but it’s there-between Magadan and what the Russians still hold of the Trans-Siberian Railway. No, the real question is, how much can they bring in whilst the harbor at Magadan’s not iced up?”
Walsh had never heard of Magadan. He had no idea where in Siberia it lay, or, for that matter, whether the major was simply inventing it to bolster his argument. The officer ducked into a pub. Walsh followed. A pint of bitter made him stop caring whether Magadan was real.
Beer, steak-and-kidney pie, more beer… A French estaminet couldn’t hold a candle to a proper pub. Two wars’ worth of experience on the other side of the Channel and years of diligent experimenting in his own country left Walsh as sure of that as made no difference. The major wasn’t the best drinking companion he’d ever had, but also wasn’t the worst.
It was dark by the time Walsh went back to his little furnished room. London’s lights were on again. With Germany friendly, the need for a blackout disappeared. Sometimes conveniences came at too high a price. Walsh thought so, anyhow. The Prime Minister would have disagreed. Walsh reckoned disagreeing with Sir Horace Wilson sure to put him in the right.
Because of the beer he’d taken on board, the knock at the door took longer to rouse him than it might have.
