“If he shows up, I’ll try.” Vaclav didn’t know how many times he’d said that since reaching the Madrid front.
“Kill him. If you can’t fuck, killing’s the next best thing.” Chaim thumped him on the back and mooched away. Vaclav scratched his head. He didn’t get any kind of charge from shooting Fascist officers. The most he took from it was an artisan’s satisfaction at a difficult job done well. Some people had other ideas, though.
Trenches got muddy in fall. Rain made them even less livable than they were when it was dry. Rain also made sniping with the elephant gun harder. Yes, you could still kill somebody two kilometers away. Rain didn’t bother bullets a bit. But if you couldn’t see anybody two kilometers away, how were you supposed to kill him?
Vaclav still went out to one hidey-hole or another between the Republican lines and those of the Nationalists. If he had more trouble finding targets, the enemy would have more trouble finding him. Sometimes he would come back after dark without firing a shot. Better not to fire if you couldn’t do anything worthwhile. He told himself as much over and over again. It was frustrating all the same.
“Don’t worry about it,” Benjamin Halevy said after he blew off steam in the Jew’s ear.
“Easy for you to say,” Jezek snarled.
“Probably.” By refusing to take offense, Halevy only annoyed him more. “But you aren’t obliged to get yourself killed by being stupid. You’ve lived through another day. Maybe the chances tomorrow will look better. As long as you’re still here, you can find out.”
“Well…” Vaclav looked at that from every angle, trying to get angry at it. Try as he would, he couldn’t. “Do you have to be so sensible all the goddamn time?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best not to let it happen again,” Halevy said.
Vaclav wondered if Jews were usually that way. Then he thought about Chaim the American. Whatever else you could say about him, sensible he was not. Jews probably differed as much from one another as anybody else. From where Vaclav had started before the war, that made a pretty fair leap of tolerance and understanding.
It started raining harder. Halevy had a shelter half. He draped it over his shoulder for a poncho. “I hate winter in the field, you know?” he said.
“Tell me about it.” Vaclav’s shelter half dated back to the Czechoslovakian Army. He shrugged it on, too, but wondered why he bothered even as he did it. A lot of the rubberized fabric once coating it was long gone. That meant it let in water just like any other piece of cloth. “Next time we fight a war, let’s do it in Panama or the Belgian Congo or somewhere like that.” He named the places he could think of that were least likely to be afflicted with winter.
“There you go.” Benjamin Halevy nodded. “Good to see you’ve got it all figured out.”
“My ass. If I had it all figured out, I’d be lying on the beach on the Riviera or somewhere like that, next to a girl with hardly any clothes and even less in the way of morals.”
“Sounds good to me,” Halevy said. As a Jew in the French Army, he could have left the service when France threw in with the Nazis. Had he headed down to the Riviera, he could have found a girl like that. From everything Vaclav had seen, France was full of them. But Halevy chose to come to Spain and leave his life on the line. When you looked at him like that, who said he was so goddamn sensible?
Like animals, they both curled up and got what sleep they could. Vaclav woke before dawn-again, like an animal. He gnawed on garlicky sausage and hard bread, then went out into no-man’s-land. There were ways through the wire, if you knew them. Vaclav did-he’d made some of them.
What was left of a smashed house out there didn’t offer a whole lot of cover, but Vaclav didn’t need much. Most important were concealing the outline of his helmet and making sure the Nationalists couldn’t spot the antitank rifle’s long barrel. The ruins let him do both well enough.
He draped the shelter half over the big gun’s telescopic sight. Keeping it dry mattered more than keeping his carcass that way. War was at least as much about tools as about the men who wielded them.
As dawn poured thin gray light over the landscape, Jezek suddenly jerked as if a scorpion had stung him. That was a summertime worry here, but not in weather like this. The Nationalist soldier crawling toward this wreckage, however, was. He’d fixed bushes to his Nazi-style helmet with a strip of inner tube, a trick Vaclav also used. And his rifle had a telescopic sight, so he was probably a sniper on his way out to see what harm he could do the Republicans.
But he’d had a mild case of manana, the common Spanish ailment. He’d had it, and he’d never get over it. Jezek shifted the elephant gun’s barrel so the massive piece bore on the oncoming Spaniard’s track. At less than a hundred meters, he hardly needed the sight. He used it, though. He didn’t want to miss.
When he fired, the gun almost took his shoulder off, as it always did. The Spaniard sank down like a punctured tire. He twitched a few times, even after a hit from a round that could pierce three centimeters of hardened armor plate. Human beings were damned hard to kill. Vaclav chambered another round, just in case. He quickly decided he wouldn’t need it.
He thought about crawling over and getting the enemy sniper’s rifle. It would be a good weapon to bring back. Not while it’s light out, he thought. Somebody might be watching. After darkness would be time enough. You had to be patient if you were going to play this game.
Another trip out of town to raise funds for the war effort-and, on the side, for the Democratic Party. Peggy Druce was more relieved than not to get out of Philadelphia. She never would have felt that way before she went to Europe.
It wasn’t her fault. She understood that. It wasn’t Herb’s fault, either. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just one of the things that happened when two people, even two people who loved each other a lot, got separated from each other for years at a time.
Maybe things would get better pretty soon. Peggy kept hoping so. She had no doubt Herb did, too. Till they did… Sometimes, she was just more comfortable when she didn’t feel that mild awkwardness, that slight constraint, while she was in the same room as her husband.
Carbondale was north and east of Scranton, not very far from the border with New York. It was exactly what its name declared it to be: a coal town, one of perhaps 20,000 people. Most of them were Welsh and Irish-the primarily Slavic mining towns lay farther west. As their ancestors had since the early nineteenth century, the breadwinners went down under the ground to grub out anthracite.
US Highway 6, the main drag, twisted like a snake with a bellyache. What Peggy could see of where people actually lived looked to be on the grim side. Even so, the man who met her at the train station-a plump druggist named Vernon Vaughan-had his own small-scale civic pride.
“Carbondale’s come through the Depression better than a lot of places,” he declared, watery sunlight glinting off the silver rims of his bifocals. “The mines always stayed open. They had to cut back some, but they didn’t shut down. Most people had some money most of the time. That meant the merchants didn’t go under, either.”
“Good for you,” Peggy said, and she meant it. Plenty of towns Carbondale’s size, all across the country, might as well have closed up shop for good after the market crashed in 1929. Since she was here on business, she felt she had to add, “I hope that means you’ll reach for your wallets when it comes time to buy your war bonds.”
“Well, I figure we will.” Vaughan’s double chin wobbled when he nodded. “People here are proud to be Americans. They work hard, sure, but they know they’re better off than they would be if Great-Grandpa stayed in the old country. The Irish, now, they got out ’cause Great-Grandpa was starving. My folks didn’t have it quite so bad, not from the stories I’ve heard, anyway. But I went Over There in 1918, and I was proud to do it.”
“Good for you,” Peggy said again. “My husband was the same way.” She didn’t tell him that she and Herb had lived more than comfortably enough even when the country hurt worst. She didn’t tell him she’d had enough money to stay in Europe for a couple of years, either. The way things worked out, she wished she’d never boarded the liner to begin with.
“There you go,” Vaughan said. “Let me grab your overnight bag there, and I’ll take you to your hotel. It’s only two, three blocks away. And the Rotarians’ hall where you’ll talk is right next door.”
“That all sounds great,” Peggy said, again most sincerely. Some places were better organized, some not so well. Vernon Vaughan seemed to have things under control.
The hotel would never make anyone forget the Ritz Carlton. But it would do. She’d stayed in plenty of worse places on the other side of the Atlantic: she didn’t have to trot down the hall to the bathroom, for instance. And she wouldn’t have to scramble for the shelter when air-raid sirens started shrieking.
She talked about that when she went next door to speak. “They’re still having air-raid alerts on the West
