She brought the pint of bitter and went off without a second glance-at him, anyhow. Ronald Cartland, she noticed. Well, he was younger and of higher rank and therefore probably richer-and better-looking. If you were going to complain about every little thing…
“The real danger of our position is that we’ve damaged all the principles this country’s run on the past two hundred years and more,” Cartland said. “Anyone who tries to overthrow us will have as much right to do so as we did to throw out Sir Horace-which is to say, none.”
“We may not have had the right, but we had justice, by God,” Walsh said. “If we didn’t, what was I doing in a cell when I’d committed no crime?”
“You’d plotted treason, old man. And the people with whom you’d plotted it brought it off, too,” Cartland answered with justifiable pride, since he was one of those people.
“Next interesting question is, what does old Adolf do now that the RAF’s in the air again?” Walsh said.
“No. The question is, what can he do?” the officer replied. “He’s got the Luftwaffe heavily committed against the Russians. How much can he take away and turn against us?”
“He could have the Frenchmen do his dirty work for him. They’ve got plenty of planes left at home.” Alistair Walsh had crossed the Channel in two wars to help pull French chestnuts out of the fire. Familiarity with England’s nearest neighbor did not warm to liking or trust.
Cartland looked horrified. “Daladier would never do that!.. I don’t think. We aren’t at war with France. God willing, we never shall be.”
“We’re at war with the Fritzes. France is on their side in Russia. The froggies don’t look like giving up the fight there. If we’re at war with them and France is on their side…”
“We aren’t speaking about axioms of geometry. I hope like blazes we aren’t, any road.” Cartland still sounded worried. Maybe the nasty possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. Walsh hoped it had occurred to someone in charge of running England these days.
He thought of something else. “Is anybody listening to us? We were certain the PM’s people were before we threw out the rascals. Are they still?”
“No.” This time, Cartland sounded sure. He also sounded more than a little relieved he could sound sure. “We were certain-and we were damned well right. Some changes have been made at Scotland Yard. Yes, indeed, they have. In case it makes you feel any better, the blokes who jugged you and grilled you afterwards have got their walking papers.”
Draining his pint, Walsh considered that. “As a matter of fact, sir, it does make me feel better. I’d sooner see the buggers behind bars themselves, because they were playing fast and loose with the law, but we were, too, so what the deuce? If they’re scrounging dog-ends from the gutter and cadging pennies off their betters, I’m happy enough, by God.”
He knew he was stretching things. Bastards like that didn’t have to fall back on begging, no matter how much you wished they would. Not all of their friends in high places had fallen foul of the new regime. The ones who’d kept their noses clean would give the sacked coppers a hand. You never could tell-they might need their services again one day.
If the new military government looked like losing the war it had restarted, those quiet, powerful men might need the ex-coppers’ services again quite soon.
That thought came back to Alistair Walsh with painful force two nights later. London’s air-raid sirens began to scream. The blackout had been reimposed, but it was still spotty. Too many folks didn’t care to believe the war had picked up again. The Luftwaffe bombers wouldn’t have had much trouble finding the English capital.
Walsh stumbled to a Tube station in the more-or-less dark. It was packed with frightened people, and smelled as bad as some trenches he’d known. Up above ground, antiaircraft guns thundered. Searchlights would try to pin enemy planes in their beams for the guns. Tethered barrage balloons would make the Nazis fly high and, with luck, drop inaccurately.
Drop they did. Big explosions mingled with the guns’ shorter, sharper reports. Once or twice, the ground shook under Walsh as he lay on a straw pallet and tried without much luck to sleep. People around him-not all of them women-squealed. Those hits weren’t close, but he didn’t blame the Londoners for panic and inexperience.
He went back to his room after the all-clear sounded. Fire engines clanged toward blazes that scarred chunks of the horizon with orange and gold. None of the fires was close, or likely to trouble him. His room had no damage. He promptly fell asleep once more.
In the morning, the BBC claimed thirty-one German bombers shot down by guns and night fighters. That seemed like a lot to Walsh. But then, his own side wasn’t immune to the attractions of propaganda. Or maybe they were telling the truth. Stranger things had happened… hadn’t they?
Vaclav Jezek was gloomily certain he would never learn any Spanish. If a man had grown up speaking Czech, the sounds and vocabulary of this new language were too strange to stick on his tongue or in his memory. And finding a Spaniard who knew any Czech made the loaves and fishes seem a minor miracle.
When he got leave and went into Madrid, he did find some Spaniards who knew a bit of German. His own accent wasn’t perfect-nowhere close. The locals wanted to impose the staccato rhythms of their own speech on the alien tongue. They weren’t used to making noises in the back of the throat, either. Comprehension was always an adventure.
He could get drinks. The word for wine didn’t change much from one language to another. The Spaniards used some horrible lisping word for beer, though most barkeeps understood Bier. But Spanish beer wasn’t worth drinking, not if you had a Czech’s standards. So he mostly stuck to wine or hard stuff.
He could get laid, too. Brothels were easy to find and not too expensive. Unlike Czech whores, a lot of girls in the Republic seemed proud of what they did. They even had a union. So another soldier on leave told Vaclav, anyway. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but the International swore up and down it was true. So maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.
“They going to strike for a raise in pay?” he asked the other guy.
“Better working hours, too. And maybe softer mattresses,” the International said. His German was better than Jezek’s. He was a Dutchman named Jan, though, and got pissed off if anybody took him for a German.
They went on to invent other demands striking prostitutes might make. Those got sillier and lewder the longer they went on. Of course, they drank more and more while they were at it, too. Vaclav wondered if he’d remember any of it when he sobered up.
The way his head felt the next morning, he wished he didn’t remember his name, let alone last night’s foolishness. Strong coffee-the Spaniards didn’t fool around when they brewed the stuff-and the hair of the dog that bit him helped bring him back to life. Aspirins were hard to come by here, but a bit of brandy took the edge off his headache.
Jan looked more bedraggled yet. He bore down harder on the brandy and went easy on coffee. After a while, he started reviving, too. “I hurt myself,” he said mournfully.
“Red wine will do it to you, all right,” Vaclav agreed.
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jan said.
Of course, bullets and bombs and shell fragments would also do it to you, and they wouldn’t give you any fun while they did. No wonder Vaclav and so many other soldiers drank and screwed as if there were no tomorrow whenever they got the chance. For too many of them, there would be no tomorrow, and they knew it, whether in the head or, more often, in the belly and the balls.
Vaclav was anything but thrilled about going back into the line when his leave ended. He was even less thrilled when he got there. Spanish spring packed the punch of Central European summer. The sun blazed down out of a sky a brighter, less washed-out blue than you ever saw in Prague. Dust was everywhere. It even smelled baked. And the stink of dead flesh seemed nastier than he’d ever known before. Meat spoiled in nothing flat in weather like this.
When Vaclav complained about the reek, Benjamin Halevy said, “You notice it more because you got away from it for a while, you lucky son of a bitch.”
“Ahh, your mother,” Jezek replied without rancor. “That’s part of it, but I don’t think that’s all. The heat really does make everything smell worse. And how much hotter will it get in the summertime?”
“We’ll find out,” the Jew said. “The Internationals talk about salt tablets and heatstroke.”
