only been captured by the Ivans. Hans-Ulrich was sure, though, that if he’d started having doubts about what Germany could hope to accomplish here, other people had worse ones and had had them longer. He was automatically loyal to the Reich, to the Party, and to the Fuhrer. Others tried to separate the idea of Germany from the people actually running the country.
And there were other worries. Not long after the ground got hard enough to let them start flying again, Albert Dieselhorst sidled up to Rudel on the airstrip and spoke in a low voice: “What have you heard about the French?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich blinked. “What do you mean, what have I heard about them? They eat frogs’ legs and snails. They make good wine, too, though you’d care more about that than I do. What else am I supposed to know?”
His radioman and rear gunner breathed out twin gusts of exasperation through his nostrils. “In a military sense… sir.” The military honorific plainly took the place of something more like you donkey.
“Well…” Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care, even with Dieselhorst. If he talked about the way the French had held the Reich out of Paris two wars in a row, he could still end up in trouble. So he stuck with the obvious: “They’re holding a stretch of the line not too far south of here.”
“Yes. They are.” The sergeant exhaled again, not quite so extravagantly this time. “How hard are they holding it?”
“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich repeated. This time, though, he didn’t stay a blockhead long. Even an innocent like him began looking for plots when the war wasn’t going so well. “What? Do you think they’re going to try and pull an England on us?”
“It’s… possible.” Dieselhorst seemed happier that his superior did have some kind of clue after all. “Are you ready to fly against them if we have to?”
“I’m always ready to fly against the enemies of the Reich,” Rudel answered, now without the least hesitation.
Sergeant Dieselhorst grinned crookedly. He reached out and set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s arm. It wasn’t the kind of thing a noncom was supposed to do with an officer. It was, though, the kind of thing an older man might naturally do with a younger one he liked. “There you go, sir. I should’ve known you’d come out with something like that.”
“Well, what else do you expect me to say?” If Hans-Ulrich sounded irritable, it was only because he was. He was a falcon. Fly him at something, and he’d kill it for you. What it was didn’t matter, as long as you wanted it dead. He didn’t think of himself in those terms, of course. But then, chances were a true winged, taloned falcon didn’t think of itself in those terms, either.
“Not a thing, sir. Not a goddamn thing.” Dieselhorst paused, perhaps wondering whether to go on. After a few seconds, he did: “If the froggies screw us over, we’ve got a two-front war for real.”
“God forbid!” Rudel burst out. That had been the nightmare in the last fight, one that Germany hadn’t had to face this time around. If she did… Well, the war got harder.
“God won’t forbid it. God doesn’t work that way.” Dieselhorst spoke about God with as much assurance and conviction as Hans-Ulrich’s father ever had. He went on, “People are going to have to take care of it. One way or another, it’ll be people. It always is.”
He sketched a salute and ambled off. No one, not even a National Socialist Loyalty Officer, could have made anything of the conversation if he didn’t overhear it. They’d been flying together since the start of the war: more than three years now. Of course they’d have things to talk about.
If France went bad, the Luftwaffe would have to fight back out of Germany itself. Well, out of the Low Countries, too. But all that seemed small consolation for so much fighting, so much treasure, so much blood. And if France let England back onto the Continent while the war against the Russians ground on… That could be very bad. Hans-Ulrich didn’t need to be a General Staff officer to see as much.
Two days later, he got up the nerve to ask Colonel Steinbrenner, “Sir, just how loyal are the French?”
The squadron commander blinked. “Et tu, Brute?” he said.
“Sir?” He might as well have been speaking Latin. After a moment, Hans-Ulrich realized he was.
Sighing, Steinbrenner dropped back into plain old Deutsch: “So you’ve heard the rumors, too, have you?”
Rudel also realized that, if he had, odds were everybody else in the squadron had been buzzing about them this past fortnight, or maybe longer. There was an encouraging thought. Not even winning the Knight’s Cross had made him less of a white crow. “Yes, sir. I’ve heard them,” he mumbled.
“Well, now that you have, you know as much as I do,” Steinbrenner said. “If they turn out to be true, we’ve got some new troubles. If they don’t, we’ve got our old lot. Any other questions?”
What came out of Hans-Ulrich’s mouth then surprised him: “Can I get a little bit of leave, sir? Long enough to go back to Bialystok? If things turn bad, I’d like to have the chance to say good-bye to Sofia.”
“You know, you ask so few favors, it makes me nervous sometimes,” Steinbrenner said. “Yes, I’ll give you leave. What you do with it is your business, not mine. Enjoy yourself, though.”
“Thank you very much, sir!” Hans-Ulrich stiffened to attention and saluted. Colonel Steinbrenner’s answer was more a wave than a salute, but that was a superior’s privilege.
Three days later, Hans-Ulrich was back in Poland. It was snowing in Bialystok, too. He didn’t feel so cold there, though. The tavern where Sofia worked wasn’t far from the train station. German and Polish soldiers crowded the place, drinking as if they didn’t want to think about tomorrow-and they probably didn’t.
The bartender stuck his head into the back room and shouted something in Polish that had Sofia’s name in it. She came out a moment later, trim and neat as always. The bartender pointed toward Hans-Ulrich, who sat at a small table against the wall.
She walked over to him. “You again. So they haven’t shot you down yet?”
“As a matter of fact, they did, but I managed to bail out,” he answered, which sobered her. He went on, “Bring me a coffee, will you?”
“You’ll make us rich!” she exclaimed, snippy as ever. Her pleated skirt swished around her legs as she went off to get it.
When she set it-almost slammed it-down on the tabletop, Hans-Ulrich said, “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep coming back here. We’re liable to get transferred.” He didn’t say anything about the possibility of flying from Germany again. Let her think he was going to the Ukraine or something. He assumed she was no spy, but he took no chances.
He waited for one of her patented zingers to come back at him. She surprised him by gnawing at her lower lip and not saying anything for a little while. Finally, she murmured, “Well, it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
“It’s not over yet,” he said quickly.
“You want to lay me some more, you mean.” That sounded like her, all right.
He quirked an eyebrow. “You’d be amazed.”
“It’s been more fun than I ever figured it could be, so maybe you’ll get another chance,” she said. “Maybe-if you wait like a good boy till I come off my shift.”
He clasped his hands on the table in front of him, as if he were eight years old and sitting at a school desk. Laughing, Sofia swirled away again.
Carlos Federico Weinberg yowled lustily in Chaim’s arms. The baby had La Martellita’s blue-black hair-a startling amount of it, when so many little tiny guys were bald. Telling who newborn babies looked like was a mug’s game-they mostly looked squashed. Chaim hoped this one would end up taking after its mother.
Carlos screwed up his face and started to cry. “Hey, I’m not that ugly,” Chaim said, first in English and then in Spanish.
La Martellita rolled her eyes. She hardly ever thought his jokes were funny. “Give him to me. He’s hungry,” she said. “When he cries like that, that’s what he means.”
Chaim handed her his son. She handled the baby with practiced efficiency, where he was as careful as if he were taking a detonator out of a land mine. As soon as he settled Carlos in the crook of her left arm, she unbuttoned her blouse and gave the baby her breast.
She saw Chaim eyeing her. He could no more help it than he could help breathing. “They’re for this, too. They were for this before they were for men to stare at,” she said pointedly.
“I guess so.” Chaim didn’t want to argue with her. He just wanted to keep looking. Were women’s tits really
