The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (23 page)

Lothar Eckhardt came back with the gear. He anxiously showed it to Sergeant Witt. “Is it all right?” he quavered. No doubt he was imagining bread and water, if not a blindfold and a last cigarette at dawn, if
the answer was no.

The panzer commander carefully inspected the part. If it wasn’t all right, he would go back to the maintenance section and give those clowns a piece of his mind. But he nodded. “Looks good. They knew they couldn’t pull a fast one on you, so they didn’t even try.”

“Wow!” Eckhardt breathed.

“Now you and Kurt are going to install the son of a bitch,” Witt said. “The more you
know about keeping your panzer running on your own, the better off you’ll be. One of these days, you’ll run into trouble where you can’t go off to the mechanics.”

Eckhardt and Poske both gulped. “I’m not sure we know how to do that, Sergeant,” the loader said, which could only mean
We have no idea how to do that
.

Witt chuckled; he understood at least as well as Theo. “Adi and I will coach you,”
he said. “It isn’t black magic. It isn’t even real hard, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. And you’d damn well better not. Now come on, both of you.” He led them back to the waiting Panzer III.

Chapter 10

G
oing back to Madrid was nothing new for Chaim Weinberg. Going back to Madrid with money in his pocket was. He was carrying the proverbial elephant-choking roll. He’d played a lot of poker since coming to Spain. (He’d played a lot of poker before he came to Spain, too, which didn’t hurt.) When luck and
skill came together … He shook his head in wonder. He’d never known a night when luck and skill came together like the night before.

Fins, sawbucks, pound notes, fivers … It was just about all good money, not asswipes like pesetas and francs. Poker, after all, was serious business. It brought out the hard currency.

On rattled the ancient, beat-up French truck. Chaim tried to listen for aircraft
noises over the engine’s farting and the rattle of stones off the undercarriage. Of
course
a Nationalist bomber or a Legion Kondor Messerschmitt would pick this exact moment to target this ratty truck.…

But none did. Brakes squealing—hell, brakes shrieking—the truck shuddered to a stop.
“Raus!”
the driver yelled. He wasn’t a German. He was an Estonian, or something like that. But he knew
Raus!
was something
everybody in the back of the truck would get. And everybody did. Out scrambled the soldiers. The Spanish kid who hopped down just in front of Chaim mimed rubbing at his abused kidneys. Chaim chuckled and nodded.

He looked around. As always, Madrid saddened and awed him at the same time. You could kill tens of thousands of people if you bombed the crap out of a big city. Everyone
between the wars had seen that clearly. The heavy-duty thinkers hadn’t understood just how big a big city was, though. With the worst will in the world, bombers couldn’t smash all of one.

And bombing a city didn’t cow the people it failed to kill. Instead, it really pissed them off. The heavy-duty thinkers missed that one, too—missed it by a mile. They underestimated the proletariat’s resilience
(and the bourgeoisie’s, though Chaim had no great use for the bourgeoisie, either).

So Madrid looked like hell. Streets were cratered. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. There were mounds of rubble that had been buildings in happier times. Window glass was a prodigy; whenever Chaim caught a glimpse of some, his head started to whip around, as if toward a pretty girl.

Communist Party headquarters,
where his own particular pretty girl worked, had taken a pounding. Naturally, the Nationalists wanted to knock it flat. But you couldn’t hit one building in particular with high-altitude bombing—one more place where the theorists had it wrong. And enough antiaircraft guns surrounded the place to make even the most fanatical Stuka pilot think twice before tipping his plane into a dive.

Men from
one of the gun crews waved to Chaim as he walked into the building. They recognized him by now. “You lucky so-and-so!” one of them called—they knew who La Martellita was, too. Chaim laughed and waved back.

If his Spanish ladylove was glad to see him, she hid it very well. “What are you doing here?” she snapped when she looked up from the report she was working on. Chaim couldn’t read Spanish
upside down. He wondered what the report was about, and how many people would wind up in trouble because of it. Party reports always landed people in
trouble—that was what they were for. He counted himself lucky that none of La Martellita’s reports had had his name in them.

“What am I here for? I’ll show you, babe.” Chaim reached into one of his front pockets and extracted the roll. (He wasn’t
dumb enough to carry it in a hip pocket, where it practically begged to get stolen.) He started peeling off greenbacks and British banknotes and laying them on the desk one after another. “Here you go. These are for you—and for the kid,
claro
.”

He startled her, enough so she couldn’t keep from showing it. “Where did you get all this?” she asked, as if sure he couldn’t have come by it honestly.

I earned it by oppressing the working class
. Communist or not, Chaim made that kind of joke without even thinking about it. But he did have to think about it to translate it into Spanish. And thinking about it, this time, made him decide
not
to translate it. La Martellita wouldn’t appreciate it.

That should have warned that they weren’t destined for many long and happy years together. But she
was stunning, she tasted good, and she felt even better. Infatuation had blinded plenty before him. It wasn’t likely to stop after he ran aground, either.

Instead of joking, he said, “Cards,” and let it go at that.

She was counting the money and, he supposed, turning the count into pesetas. “You don’t win like this all the time,” she said accurately.

“
Querida
, nobody wins like this all the
time. Nobody who doesn’t cheat, anyhow,” Chaim answered, also accurately. “But at least I have the sense to use the money. I’m not going to waste it, and I didn’t lose it all again as fast as I won it.”

“You didn’t gamble the sun away before morning,” La Martellita said.

It sounded like a proverb, but it wasn’t one Chaim had heard before. “The sun?” he echoed.

“One of the
conquistadores
in
Peru got a big golden sun disk as his share of the loot from the Incas. He lost it at dice before the real sun came up,” La Martellita explained.

“Gotcha.” Chaim knew plenty of guys like that. Spaniards weren’t the only ones who came down with gambling fever. Oh, no—not even close.

She looked from the cash on the desk in front of her to him and back again. “You
didn’t
waste it or lose it again,”
she agreed slowly. “You brought it to me. Why?”

“Why do you think?” He knew he sounded irritable, but he couldn’t help it. “Because I want to take care of the baby the best way I can. And because I love you.” Speaking Spanish imperfectly meant he had to say what was on his mind: he couldn’t beat around the bush, as he might have in English.

Saying what was on his mind didn’t necessarily help
him, though. By the look on La Martellita’s face, she was on the point of laughing in his. She didn’t—quite—do that. She did say, “The more fool you. The people’s cause matters more than any personal attachments.”

“Really?” he said. “What is the people’s cause, if it isn’t to make people happy with other people?”

“It has nothing to do with love,” La Martellita insisted.

“What a pity!” Chaim
answered.
¡Qué lástima!
sounded much more pitiful to him than its English equivalent did.

A slow flush heated her olive-skinned face. She tossed her head in annoyance, as if that could make the blush go away. She might have wanted to tell him where to head in, but she didn’t quite do that, either, not with all the money he’d given her still sitting on top of her desk. Her elegant nostrils flared.
“You enjoy being as difficult as you can,” she accused.

“I’m sure Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers agree with you,” he said. “They probably talk about it a lot down in hell.”

“None of this would have happened if I hadn’t got drunk that one night.” Was she reminding him or herself?

“You can’t pretend it didn’t happen, though.” With a certain sardonic relish, Chaim added, “It’s part of the historical
dialectic now, after all.”

Those gull-winged nostrils flared again, wider this time. “And I suppose you’ll tell me it’s part of the historical dialectic that I should sleep with you some more because you thought to bring me this money. Well, I’ll tell you right now that the historical dialectic hasn’t made me your
puta
.”

Chaim had been thinking about saying something like that if he
could find
a way to do it that wasn’t quite so blunt. Since she’d forestalled him, all he said was, “The historical dialectic did turn you into my wife.”

“Sí,”
La Martellita answered. That wasn’t delight filling her voice, no matter how much Chaim wished it would have been.

“I am trying to take care of you, and take care of our child, the way a husband ought to,” he said. “I’m doing my best.”

“Sí,”
she
said again, a little more warmly this time. “Maybe—
maybe
—I’ll do the things a wife ought to do, as long as you don’t try to make me do them.”

That kind of reply should have made him bang his head against the wall. Coming from La Martellita, who was mercury fulminate in a sweetly curved wrapper, it made a weird kind of sense. “Whatever you say,” Chaim told her, which only proved him a born optimist.

ALISTAIR WALSH HAD
spent some time in the stockade, and in civilian jails as well. Boys will be boys, and soldier boys will be soldier boys. Sometimes the police, military or otherwise, showed up before the tavern brawl finished. He’d never hurt anybody badly in those little dustups, and he’d never spent long behind bars.

Things were different this time. And he liked none of the differences.
If they jugged you for rearranging a bloke’s face after he tried to smash a pint mug over your head, you knew what you’d done and you knew how long you’d stay jugged on account of it.

If they jugged you for treason, though … In that case, they were making up the rules as they went along. He’d asked for a solicitor. They didn’t laugh in his face, but they didn’t give him one, either. They might
as well not have heard him.

But when they asked him questions, they expected answers. Oh, yes! No one asked you questions after a barroom brawl, except maybe
Why were you such a bloody idiot?
Here, they wanted to know everybody he’d ever met, what all those people had said in the past six months, and what he’d said to them. They weren’t just building a case against him. He was a minnow. They
were trying to use him to hook the big fish.

They weren’t fussy about how they went at it, either. Bright lights,
lack of sleep … “No wonder you back the buggers who threw in with the Nazis,” he told one of them. “The SS must have taught you all its tricks.”

That won him a slap in the face. They didn’t bring out the thumbscrews and the hot skewers. He wondered why not. Some lingering memory
of the days when they were decent coppers? It seemed too much to hope for.

They told him all the other traitors were in cells, too. They told him the others were singing like canaries. They told him half a dozen people had named him as one of the earliest and most deeply involved plotters. “Then you don’t need me to tell you anything more, do you?” he said.

He got another wallop in the chops
for that. When his ears stopped ringing, one of the detectives—if that was what they were—said, “You can make it easier on yourself if you give us what you know.”

“If you think I’m a traitor, you won’t go easy on me any road,” Walsh said. He might be sore. He might be half drunk with sleepiness. No matter what he was, that seemed obvious to him.

The interrogators muttered amongst themselves.
Things didn’t seem to be going the way they wanted. One of them gave him another whack. “Talk, damn you!” the bastard bellowed. Blood salty on his tongue, Walsh rattled off his name, former rank, and pay number. The Scotland Yard man glowered. “You aren’t in the Army any more, and you aren’t a prisoner of war, either.”

“Then give me a solicitor,” Walsh said yet again. He got another slap for
his trouble. He also got frogmarched back to his cell. He counted that a victory of sorts. He’d made them change plans.

Which was worth … what? Anything? They didn’t let him see newspapers, of course. They also didn’t let him listen to the BBC. That they still held him and went on knocking him around argued that Sir Horace Wilson remained Prime Minister, and that England remained allied to Hitler.

If they decided he was too big a nuisance—or if they decided he didn’t know anything they had to learn—they might just knock him over the head and get rid of his body. They went on and on about traitors, but they were at least as far outside the law as any traitors could be.