been a capital crime. Worrying about it wasn’t what held Vaclav back. The sensible concern that he’d wake up in the bottom of the trench with a sore jaw and maybe a couple of broken teeth had much more to do with it.
Instead of decking the Jew, Jezek lugged his antitank rifle down the line and spied on the Nationalist positions. The enemy soldiers carried on in plain sight of him. He could have killed some of them, but to what end? They’d tighten up and get more wary. That was the last thing he wanted.
Almost the last thing… A Spanish sharpshooter had hunted him for a little while. The would-be marksman was now of concern only to his next of kin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been brave. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t been a good shot. But he must have got what he knew about concealment out of some badly translated manual from the last war. The Nationalists wore German-style helmets, which made them familiar-looking enemies. Those helmets were pretty good. But they wouldn’t stop an ordinary bullet, let alone the fat ones Vaclav used. That sniper got only one lesson in the art, a very final one.
There were steel loopholes along the line from which Vaclav could inspect the enemy’s trenches. As was his habit, he stayed away from them. An ordinary soldier couldn’t put a bullet through one except by luck, and from what he’d seen Spanish soldiers were often less than ordinary. But you never could tell. The Nationalists might have a few real experts. Or they might talk to their Italian allies or to the Germans of the Legion Kondor. For someone who knew what he was doing, a loophole was a challenge, not something too tough to bother with.
He crossed into the trenches the International Brigades held. They greeted him in several languages, some of which he understood. A-probable-Magyar spoke in German: “Haven’t seen any elephants around here for a long time.”
“I keep snapping my fingers-that’s why,” Vaclav answered in the same language. The International made a horrible face. Vaclav trudged on down the line.
The Americans in the Abe Lincoln Battalion (or maybe it was a brigade; even they didn’t seem sure) had more trouble talking to him than most of the other Internationals. They knew English, and some of them had picked up enough Spanish to get by. Neither of those did him much good, and they were unlikely to speak any other tongue.
One exception was-surprise! — a Jew from New York City. Chaim understood Vaclav’s German, and Vaclav usually managed to cope with his Yiddish. The Abe Lincoln didn’t look very happy right now.
“What’s up?” Vaclav asked.
“My girl and me-it’s gonna go down the drain.” Chaim mimed a little whirlpool in case Vaclav didn’t get it.
But he did. “It’s gonna go down the drain?” he echoed. “It hasn’t happened yet? Maybe it won’t.”
“It’s gonna,” Chaim repeated gloomily. “Some stuff you see coming way ahead of time. You can’t stop it, not unless you’re Superman. Maybe not even if you are.”
“Not unless you’re who?” Vaclav asked.
“Superman. Ubermensch, it’d be in German, but the English doesn’t make you sound like a fucking Nazi. The guy’s a comic-book hero. Lemme show you-a buddy sent me a couple from the States, and they honest to God got here, would you believe it? They’re pretty good.” Chaim rummaged in his pack till he grunted in victory and pulled out a gaudily printed comic book.
The text was in English, of course. Vaclav knew even less English than Spanish-he could get beer and some food in Spanish now, and was starting to be able to swear when he didn’t get them fast enough to suit him. But there wasn’t a whole lot of text, anyway. The pictures carried the action, and pictures were a universal language. For what he couldn’t get from them, Chaim made an enthusiastic translator and explainer.
“See, Metropolis is pretty much like New York City,” the American Jew said. “Not exactly, but pretty much. I’m from New York City, so I should know, right?”
“New York City is like that?” Vaclav pointed to one of the panels. Superman was rescuing a scantily clad girl with one hand and picking up an enormous locomotive in the other. The bad guys’ Tommy-gun bullets ricocheted off his chest as if he were armored like a tank.
“Well, not exactly.” Chaim sounded a little embarrassed. “But the look of the place-the skyscrapers and the cars and the clothes and all-that’s pretty close. And the newspaper office where Superman works when he’s being Clark Kent, that looks like a newspaper office. I mean, it’s bigger and cleaner than a real one-I’ve been in ’em, so I know-but it’s got the idea right, anyway.”
Vaclav had been in a newspaper office in Prague. It was tiny and airless and dark, housed in some building left over from the eighteenth century. It smelled of ink and beer and tobacco and unwashed people. How it turned out a newspaper every day, God only knew; the editor plainly had no idea. Next to that, even a rougher version of what the comic book showed seemed very much like heaven.
“America must be a strange place,” Vaclav said.
“Man, you got no idea,” Chaim answered.
“If you lived there, why did you come here?”
“For freedom. For adventure. For love.” The Jew’s face twisted. “And I got ’em all, and they ain’t worth shit. Women are crazy, you know? You can’t live with ’em and you sure as hell can’t live without ’em.”
Not much originality there, but great feeling. Carefully, Vaclav said, “You aren’t the first guy who ever found this out.”
“I guess not, but that don’t make it hurt any less,” Chaim replied, and Vaclav found himself without a comeback for that.
Willi Dernen sewed his pip onto a patch with a chevron, then sewed the chevron onto the left sleeve of his uniform tunic. Not just a Gefreiter — an Obergefreiter. The promotion gods had smiled on him again, presumably because he’d stayed lucky enough not to stop anything. He was a very senior private indeed.
He found it obvious that, if and when a bullet finally found Arno Baatz, he could step right up and do Awful Arno’s job better than Arno did himself. Corporal Baatz, unsurprisingly, held a different opinion. “You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you?” Baatz said. “Well, puff and blow all you want. They won’t make you an Unteroffizier if you live to be a million.”
Blow me, Arno, Willi thought. Aloud, he said, “How about that?” It was a pretty safe phrase any old time.
“Well, they won’t, dammit,” Awful Arno insisted. “You have to go to noncoms’ school to learn to do all the stuff an Unteroffizier has to do. It takes weeks. You’d never hack it-no way in hell.”
As far as Willi was concerned, if Awful Arno had made it through noncoms’ training school, anything this side of Hans the counting horse could probably do the same. Telling him as much was a great temptation. Regretfully, Willi held back. Life was too short… he supposed.
So all he said was, “I notice you’re wearing your shoulder straps upside down so the Ivans don’t spot the pips on them.”
“I should hope I am,” Baatz said importantly. “Most noncoms do, you know. The Reds understand that we’re what makes the army tick. They’d sooner shoot a corporal than a private any old day.”
Willi had never dreamt he would sympathize with the Red Army, but all of a sudden he did. Again, letting Baatz know everything on his mind struck him as less than a good idea. He hoped he sounded patient as he answered, “I understand that. But my pip’s on my sleeve, where I can’t hide it. And the chevron only makes it stand out more.”
“Shall I cry for you?” Awful Arno said, and Willi sympathized with the Russian sharpshooters more than ever. Luckily not understanding that, Baatz went on, “Anyway, you’ve only got it on one side. From the right, the Russians will just figure you’re an ordinary, miserable, no-account private.”
“Wunderbar,” Willi said. At least Baatz hadn’t added instead of an ordinary, miserable, no-account Obergefreiter. He was probably thinking it, though, the same way Willi was having unexpected kind thoughts about the Ivans.
No matter what he thought about them, they didn’t love the Wehrmacht. Several batteries of 105s opened up on the German positions southwest of Smolensk. Willi and Corporal Baatz both dove for a foxhole. It was big enough to hold the two of them, though Willi would have bet Baatz was no happier about being cheek-to-cheek with him than he was smelling Awful Arno’s stale sweat.
If a shell came down on top of them, they’d both head for the Pearly Gates at the same instant. Willi looked forward to passing through while demons with pointy pitchforks dragged the Unteroffizier down to a warmer place.
