about proper Party doctrine.” He couldn’t just say, I want to tear your clothes off and jump on you. Well, he could, but he knew she’d kill him for real if he tried. Dinner and a movie were long odds, too. If she had any kind of weakness where he was concerned, ideology was it. She thought his ideology was weak. Wasn’t it her duty to instruct the ignorant and backward? He sure hoped it was.
Her gull-wing eyebrows rose. “You were?” Then those eyebrows came down and together, as if she were aiming a rifle at his kishkes. “I thought you were proud of your errors.”
“Not me.” Chaim denied everything. When Peter denied knowing Jesus Christ, he probably did it with an eye toward laying some broad in Jerusalem who thought old J.C. was nothing but a windbag. A stiff dick had no conscience.
“Why should I do it?” La Martellita demanded. “Doesn’t the Abraham Lincoln Battalion have a Party cadre?” She knew damn well the Lincolns did.
Humbly, Chaim answered, “You were the one who showed me my mistakes. You must be the one who knows them best.” No, no conscience at all.
She looked at him-looked through him. “Is that all you want me to do?”
“No entiendo,” Chaim lied. He understood her much too well, and she understood him much too well, too.
Was it possible to sound too innocent? Evidently. She stuck her elegantly arched nose in the air. “You can find someone else, I’m sure,” she said, and walked away. Any football ref in America would have given that walk a backfield in motion penalty.
“Doesn’t it matter that I’m fighting for the Republic?” Chaim called after her.
She paused and turned back to him. “It matters to the Republic. It matters to Spain. To me…” She didn’t even bother finishing that. She just turned again and went on walking away.
“Wait!” Chaim cringed at the desperation in his voice.
To his surprise, she did stop once more. “If you need to find a whorehouse so badly, I can tell you where they are.”
She might have torched his ears with a Molotov cocktail. “Never mind,” he muttered.
“Bueno.” Her shrug of victory was magnificent. “I’m sure you can get to one with no help from me. Hasta la vista. ” Away she strode, like a long home run off the bat of Jimmy Foxx or Hank Greenberg: going, going, gone.
Chaim stared after her till she rounded a corner and disappeared. Then he kicked at the battered sidewalk. A tiny pebble skittered away from his boot. A pigeon pecked at it, discovered it wasn’t food, and sent him a stare full of bird-brained reproach. He hardly noticed. “Ahh, shit,” he said in English.
And then, with nothing better to do, he did go find a brothel. It was the lousiest good time he’d ever had in his life. Yeah, he had his ashes hauled, but he left the place gloomier than he’d gone in. You couldn’t get too much of what you didn’t really want to begin with.
He got drunk. Finding a bar in Madrid was even easier than finding a brothel. He got into a brawl. An equally drunk Spaniard pulled a knife on him. He kicked it out of the guy’s hand-which he probably couldn’t have done sober (or wouldn’t have been stupid enough to try)-and pounded the crap out of him. That satisfied Chaim no better than the whore had.
Still plastered, he wandered Madrid’s blacked-out nighttime streets. No moon tonight-only a lot of stars. They were beautiful, but they shed next to no light on things. They might as well have been La Martellita. Or had she shed altogether too much light? That seemed much too likely.
Lurching through the warm darkness, Chaim burst into tears. A woman he couldn’t see said “?Pobrecito!” - poor little one! But he wasn’t even one of those. He was only a drunk on leave, and somewhere down inside he knew it.
Julius Lemp wore a clean uniform-he’d even had it pressed after the U-30 came into Wilhelmshaven. He’d shaved off his at-sea beard. He stood at ramrod-stiff attention before the engineering board and barked out “Reporting as ordered, sir!” to its head. He might almost have served in the Kriegsmarine ’s surface fleet. Almost: he hadn’t replaced the stiffening wire in his white-crowned officer’s cap. A limp cap marked a U-boat skipper every time.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” the boss naval engineer said. Lemp sagged out of his brace, but not very far. The senior engineer was a rear admiral. Neither his gold-encrusted sleeves nor his craggy, weathered face encouraged subordinates to relax. He checked some papers on the table in front of him. After a moment, he nodded to himself. “It seems your boat has been using the Schnorkel longer than any other.”
“Yes, sir,” Lemp answered woodenly. As if the head of the board hadn’t known that without looking at his precious papers! And as if he and his almost equally distinguished colleagues didn’t know why! You were the fuckup who got stuck with the experimental gadget!
But the rear admiral didn’t say anything like that. He just stared at Lemp over the tops of his reading glasses. “And what is your opinion of it?” He raised a hand before Lemp spoke. “Be frank, please. No one is taking written notes or rating you on your response. We really want to know what you think.”
“Sir, I’ve been frank in my reports,” Lemp said. “The thing is useful-no doubt about that. I’m faster underwater with it than without, I can get closer to my targets without being spotted, and I can charge my batteries without surfacing. Those are all good cards to have in my hand.”
“Drawbacks?” one of the other men on the board inquired.
“It’ll suck all the air out of the inside of the boat and feed it to the diesels if the antiflooding valve closes,” Lemp answered dryly. “That leaves the crew trying to breathe exhaust fumes.”
“And you recognize this when it starts smelling better inside the U-boat, eh?” the rear admiral asked, his voice bland.
Lemp opened his mouth, then closed it again. For all his forbidding appearance, the senior man owned a sense of humor after all. Lemp tried to make himself seem as naive as he could. “Sir, I don’t know what you mean.”
All five men on the board chuckled, though a couple of the noises sounded more like coughs. “The devil you don’t,” the rear admiral said, wrinkling his beak. He glanced at the papers again. “And how’s this Beilharz, the puppy who came along with the snort?”
“He’s about two meters’ worth of puppy, sir,” Lemp said.
“That should be fun on a U-boat,” the senior man observed. “How often does he hit his head? Has he got any brains left at all?”
“He wears a helmet-but he is pretty good about ducking,” Lemp replied. “He’s pretty good all the way around. I wanted a second engineering officer the way I wanted another head when he came aboard-meaning no offense to you gentlemen, none at all, but we’re crowded enough as is.”
“And you wanted the Schnorkel the way you wanted another head, too,” the rear admiral said. He did understand why Lemp’s boat had it, then. Well, anybody with three working brain cells would.
“That, too, sir,” Lemp agreed. “But he’s worked out well. He keeps the snort going-and when it isn’t going, he keeps the regular engineering officer posted so we don’t end up asphyxiating ourselves.”
“All right. That’s good to hear. I said we wouldn’t take notes, but do you mind if I write that down so it goes in his promotion jacket?”
“Of course not, sir,” Lemp said. “I’ll put it in writing myself, if you like.”
“Never mind.” The rear admiral scribbled. “If he gets promoted away from you, will you still be able to use the Schnorkel?”
“Oh, absolutely, sir. He’s trained a couple of my petty officers. They don’t quite have his feel for it-he acts like he grew up with it-but they can take care of it well enough and then some.”
“Good.” The rear admiral didn’t say I was hoping you’d tell me something like that. He’d assumed an officer smart enough to command a U-boat was smart enough to see that an important piece of equipment shouldn’t depend on one man’s mastery of it. And he’d been right. Lemp shuddered to think what would have happened to him had he confessed to the board that only Beilharz could make the snort behave.
One thing he didn’t have to worry about, anyhow. But there were others that he did. A captain who hadn’t spoken before said, “This isn’t an engineering question, but it is important to the performance of your boat and crew.”
