have stopped shoveling in kasha and mystery meat. They would have put down the vodka jugs (no, they wouldn’t have had any vodka jugs to begin with). And they would have leaped to their feet, stiffened into attention, and saluted the squadron commander.
A couple of them nodded. One man paused in lighting a cigarette long enough to wave. The rest went on with what they were doing. Steinbrenner took that for granted. He shed his officer’s cap and scowled at the drops of water on the patent-leather brim. “Fucking wet out there,” he remarked.
“Too right it is,” said the pilot with the cigarette.
One of the men passing around the jug held it out to the colonel. He laughed, shook his head, and went over to the pot full of stew. The cook filled his mess kit. Then Steinbrenner caught Hans-Ulrich’s eye, wordlessly asking, May I sit next to you?
Hans-Ulrich nodded and did his best to look eager and inviting. Discipline at the front didn’t work the way it did in the Reich during peacetime, but you needed some mighty good reason to tell your squadron commander to get lost, and he had none.
“How’s it going?” Steinbrenner asked as he parked himself.
“In this weather, sir? It’s not going anywhere,” Rudel said.
“You’ve got that right, anyway. The Landsers’ll just have to live without air support for a while. Well, so will the Russians.” Steinbrenner dug into breakfast. He chewed thoughtfully before delivering his verdict: “I’ve had worse, but I’ve sure had better. What’s the meat?”
“Don’t know,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.
“Didn’t you ask?” Steinbrenner said.
“Yeah, but the cook said I’d be better off not finding out,” Rudel answered.
The squadron commander turned and shouted at the guy behind the cauldron: “Hey, Klaus, what did you kill before you dumped it into this slop?” He didn’t worry about the enlisted man’s precious sensibilities.
And Klaus didn’t worry about his, either. “Sir, I believe that’s your granny,” he replied. The mess tent erupted with laughter.
Colonel Steinbrenner spooned up some more meat. His jaws worked again. He shook his head. “Nah. Granny’d be tougher than this no matter how long you stewed her.” More laughter. The cook held up the ladle in salute, acknowledging the hit.
Hans-Ulrich knew he couldn’t have done anything like that. He could sass Sergeant Dieselhorst that way, and maybe a couple of the other flyers he felt comfortable with, but not a cook he didn’t care a pfennig for one way or the other. Yes, Colonel Steinbrenner was older than he was, but Rudel suddenly realized more than age and rank went into running a squadron.
He didn’t go on from there to realize Steinbrenner had asked to sit next to him for a reason. He was a gear with a worn-down tooth or two, and didn’t fit smoothly into the squadron’s mechanism. Had he realized something like that, he would have taken another step toward being ready to lead such an outfit.
“So what are you going to do now that flying gets tricky?” Steinbrenner asked him. Then the colonel shook his head once more. “Now that flying gets stuck in the mud, I should say.”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. Maybe I’ll see if I can con a furlough out of my squadron commander,” Rudel said blandly. “Some people can drink so that weeks seem to go by in days. If you don’t drink, though, weeks stuck in the mud seem more like years.”
“Best argument for drinking I’ve heard lately,” Colonel Steinbrenner remarked. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t intended it as anything of the kind, but he could see how the older man might hear it that way-and jab him with it. Steinbrenner went on, “If you did get a furlough-by some miracle, you understand-where would you go? What would you do? And ‘Anywhere away from here’ isn’t a good enough answer.”
Now Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care: “Well, I might take a train back to Poland to get away from the war for a bit. To, ah, Bialystok.” Why deny it? Steinbrenner knew about Sofia.
He nodded. Yes, he was unsurprised. “And how’s your girlfriend there?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out, sir. She, ah, she doesn’t write much,” Rudel said. In point of fact, Sofia didn’t write at all. He’d never told her not to, but she knew getting love letters-or any letters-from a Mischling wouldn’t be good for him.
Colonel Steinbrenner nodded. “That may not be the worst thing in the world,” was all he said, but it told Hans-Ulrich he not only knew about Sofia but also about her racial makeup.
If they wanted to make a case against me, they could. The weight of the Knight’s Cross on his neck felt most reassuring to Rudel. But that kind of thing wouldn’t stop them if they decided you were disloyal. It might slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. The only thing that would stop them was obvious, unswerving loyalty to the Reich and to National Socialism. Hans-Ulrich had it, in abundance. He also had a half-Jewish girlfriend. Would that make them doubt the other? All he could do-if he didn’t want to give Sofia up, and he didn’t-was hope not.
You explain how you messed up. You promise not to do it again, and you mean what you’re saying from the bottom of your heart. After that, the sun’s supposed to come out and everything’s supposed to be wonderful: just the way it was before. It’s straight out of a Hollywood script.
Peggy Druce was discovering that real life didn’t work out the way movies did. It was nothing she hadn’t suspected before. But, despite confessions, she and Herb couldn’t seem to go back to the way they’d been before she sailed for Europe in late summer 1938. They could talk about forgiving each other. Meaning it was harder- harder than she’d ever expected.
It wasn’t anything showy or dramatic. He didn’t haul off and belt her one. She didn’t smash crockery over his noggin. They still enjoyed each other’s company, at the dining-room table and even in the bedroom. They weren’t going to end up in divorce court. Nothing like that.
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Peggy felt the lack, the way she’d felt it when she woke up from the ether without her wisdom teeth. She could still go back there with her tongue and remember when she’d had them. She could remember this other thing that was missing now, too.
They’d given her codeine to keep the extractions from hurting so much. She wished there were also a pill for this. She tried bourbon, but that seemed to make matters worse, not better.
Herb was drinking more these days. He wasn’t drinking what anybody would call a lot, but he was drinking more. Peggy wondered if she should say something about it: at least let him know she’d noticed. In the end, she kept her mouth shut. She also wondered whether she should have done that about their adventures while apart.
She didn’t think so. This was better than the looming thing in the room with them that neither had wanted to admit was there. The trouble was, she’d thought that better would turn out to be the same thing as what kids called all better. Nope. And the difference between the one and the other was enough to tempt her back toward the Old Grand dad bottle again.
Then one dreary, rainy, early-darkening afternoon Herb came through the door with more bounce in his step than she’d seen since she got back from Europe. “Ha!” he said as he hung his topcoat on a peg so it would drip on the tile floor.
“Ha?” Peggy asked.
“Ha!” He said it again, even more emphatically. For good measure, he added, “Hoo-hah!” Then he lit a cigarette.
“Okay, now I get it,” Peggy said. “You’re all excited because Glenn Miller just took you on as a scat singer.”
He coughed, blowing out ragged puffs of smoke. “Don’t do that,” he wheezed. “You’ll make me choke to death.”
“Sorry.” She did her best to sound properly contrite. It wasn’t easy; she still wanted to laugh. “Maybe I wouldn’t need to if you’d tell me what’s really going on.”
“Well, I was going to.” Herb took another, cautious, drag on the coffin nail. This time, he didn’t try to explode when he exhaled. “Needed more finagling than I ever thought it would, but I finally did it.”
“That’s nice,” Peggy answered. “Did what?”
“Persuaded Uncle Sam I could do something that would help give the war effort a kick in the pants.” Her husband looked proud enough to bust the buttons on his vest.
And well he might have. He’d been trying to do something for the country ever since Japan attacked the
