Now come on, both of you.” He led them back to the waiting Panzer III.
Chapter 10
Going back to Madrid was nothing new for Chaim Weinberg. Going back to Madrid with money in his pocket was. He was carrying the proverbial elephant-choking roll. He’d played a lot of poker since coming to Spain. (He’d played a lot of poker before he came to Spain, too, which didn’t hurt.) When luck and skill came together… He shook his head in wonder. He’d never known a night when luck and skill came together like the night before.
Fins, sawbucks, pound notes, fivers… It was just about all good money, not asswipes like pesetas and francs. Poker, after all, was serious business. It brought out the hard currency.
On rattled the ancient, beat-up French truck. Chaim tried to listen for aircraft noises over the engine’s farting and the rattle of stones off the undercarriage. Of course a Nationalist bomber or a Legion Kondor Messerschmitt would pick this exact moment to target this ratty truck…
But none did. Brakes squealing-hell, brakes shrieking-the truck shuddered to a stop. “Raus!” the driver yelled. He wasn’t a German. He was an Estonian, or something like that. But he knew Raus! was something everybody in the back of the truck would get. And everybody did. Out scrambled the soldiers. The Spanish kid who hopped down just in front of Chaim mimed rubbing at his abused kidneys. Chaim chuckled and nodded.
He looked around. As always, Madrid saddened and awed him at the same time. You could kill tens of thousands of people if you bombed the crap out of a big city. Everyone between the wars had seen that clearly. The heavy-duty thinkers hadn’t understood just how big a big city was, though. With the worst will in the world, bombers couldn’t smash all of one.
And bombing a city didn’t cow the people it failed to kill. Instead, it really pissed them off. The heavy-duty thinkers missed that one, too-missed it by a mile. They underestimated the proletariat’s resilience (and the bourgeoisie’s, though Chaim had no great use for the bourgeoisie, either).
So Madrid looked like hell. Streets were cratered. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. There were mounds of rubble that had been buildings in happier times. Window glass was a prodigy; whenever Chaim caught a glimpse of some, his head started to whip around, as if toward a pretty girl.
Communist Party headquarters, where his own particular pretty girl worked, had taken a pounding. Naturally, the Nationalists wanted to knock it flat. But you couldn’t hit one building in particular with high-altitude bombing- one more place where the theorists had it wrong. And enough antiaircraft guns surrounded the place to make even the most fanatical Stuka pilot think twice before tipping his plane into a dive.
Men from one of the gun crews waved to Chaim as he walked into the building. They recognized him by now. “You lucky so-and-so!” one of them called-they knew who La Martellita was, too. Chaim laughed and waved back.
If his Spanish ladylove was glad to see him, she hid it very well. “What are you doing here?” she snapped when she looked up from the report she was working on. Chaim couldn’t read Spanish upside down. He wondered what the report was about, and how many people would wind up in trouble because of it. Party reports always landed people in trouble-that was what they were for. He counted himself lucky that none of La Martellita’s reports had had his name in them.
“What am I here for? I’ll show you, babe.” Chaim reached into one of his front pockets and extracted the roll. (He wasn’t dumb enough to carry it in a hip pocket, where it practically begged to get stolen.) He started peeling off greenbacks and British banknotes and laying them on the desk one after another. “Here you go. These are for you- and for the kid, claro.”
He startled her, enough so she couldn’t keep from showing it. “Where did you get all this?” she asked, as if sure he couldn’t have come by it honestly.
I earned it by oppressing the working class. Communist or not, Chaim made that kind of joke without even thinking about it. But he did have to think about it to translate it into Spanish. And thinking about it, this time, made him decide not to translate it. La Martellita wouldn’t appreciate it.
That should have warned that they weren’t destined for many long and happy years together. But she was stunning, she tasted good, and she felt even better. Infatuation had blinded plenty before him. It wasn’t likely to stop after he ran aground, either.
Instead of joking, he said, “Cards,” and let it go at that.
She was counting the money and, he supposed, turning the count into pesetas. “You don’t win like this all the time,” she said accurately.
“ Querida, nobody wins like this all the time. Nobody who doesn’t cheat, anyhow,” Chaim answered, also accurately. “But at least I have the sense to use the money. I’m not going to waste it, and I didn’t lose it all again as fast as I won it.”
“You didn’t gamble the sun away before morning,” La Martellita said.
It sounded like a proverb, but it wasn’t one Chaim had heard before. “The sun?” he echoed.
“One of the conquistadores in Peru got a big golden sun disk as his share of the loot from the Incas. He lost it at dice before the real sun came up,” La Martellita explained.
“Gotcha.” Chaim knew plenty of guys like that. Spaniards weren’t the only ones who came down with gambling fever. Oh, no-not even close.
She looked from the cash on the desk in front of her to him and back again. “You didn’t waste it or lose it again,” she agreed slowly. “You brought it to me. Why?”
“Why do you think?” He knew he sounded irritable, but he couldn’t help it. “Because I want to take care of the baby the best way I can. And because I love you.” Speaking Spanish imperfectly meant he had to say what was on his mind: he couldn’t beat around the bush, as he might have in English.
Saying what was on his mind didn’t necessarily help him, though. By the look on La Martellita’s face, she was on the point of laughing in his. She didn’t-quite-do that. She did say, “The more fool you. The people’s cause matters more than any personal attachments.”
“Really?” he said. “What is the people’s cause, if it isn’t to make people happy with other people?”
“It has nothing to do with love,” La Martellita insisted.
“What a pity!” Chaim answered.?Que lastima! sounded much more pitiful to him than its English equivalent did.
A slow flush heated her olive-skinned face. She tossed her head in annoyance, as if that could make the blush go away. She might have wanted to tell him where to head in, but she didn’t quite do that, either, not with all the money he’d given her still sitting on top of her desk. Her elegant nostrils flared. “You enjoy being as difficult as you can,” she accused.
“I’m sure Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers agree with you,” he said. “They probably talk about it a lot down in hell.”
“None of this would have happened if I hadn’t got drunk that one night.” Was she reminding him or herself?
“You can’t pretend it didn’t happen, though.” With a certain sardonic relish, Chaim added, “It’s part of the historical dialectic now, after all.”
Those gull-winged nostrils flared again, wider this time. “And I suppose you’ll tell me it’s part of the historical dialectic that I should sleep with you some more because you thought to bring me this money. Well, I’ll tell you right now that the historical dialectic hasn’t made me your puta.”
Chaim had been thinking about saying something like that if he could find a way to do it that wasn’t quite so blunt. Since she’d forestalled him, all he said was, “The historical dialectic did turn you into my wife.”
“Si,” La Martellita answered. That wasn’t delight filling her voice, no matter how much Chaim wished it would have been.
“I am trying to take care of you, and take care of our child, the way a husband ought to,” he said. “I’m doing my best.”
“Si,” she said again, a little more warmly this time. “Maybe- maybe — I’ll do the things a wife ought to do, as long as you don’t try to make me do them.”
That kind of reply should have made him bang his head against the wall. Coming from La Martellita, who was
