The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (55 page)

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 for milking before they were for ogling? If men didn’t admire them and grab them and lick them and suck at them, how many babies would get born to nurse from them? Not many, by God!

It was like the chicken and the egg, only a hell of a lot more fun to think about. If he brought it back to the Abe Lincolns,
they’d argue about it for days, if not for weeks. It was more interesting than what the lousy Nationalists were liable to try next, no two ways about it.

Deftly, La Martellita switched Carlos from one side to the other. He ate like a pig. If he didn’t know when he had a good thing going, he was no son of Chaim’s. When she put him up on her shoulder and patted his back, he belched as if he’d been
drinking Coca-Cola instead of milk.

She reached a finger inside his diaper. “Wet again,” she said resignedly, and set about fixing that. Chaim would have been afraid he’d stick the kid with a pin. La Martellita wasn’t, and she didn’t.

Carlos wasn’t circumcised. Chaim had never seen a Spaniard who was. He felt a pang of tradition flouted. Jews had had that covenant with God for thousands of years.
Never mind that the top of Chaim’s mind made a point of not believing in God. He felt the pang even so.

He didn’t say anything about it. If he were going to take Carlos and La Martellita back to the States, he might have. But they’d stay in Spain. Carlos would have to fit in as best he could. A funny-looking cock wouldn’t help.

He tried something less likely to cause trouble: “Thanks for letting
me visit you. Thanks for letting me see my son.” Technically, they remained man and wife. She hadn’t divorced him yet. Having a baby probably kept you too busy to worry about something you could take care of any old time. He knew too well the writing was on the wall.

She nodded as she started rocking Carlos in her arms. The baby’s yawn showed off pink, toothless gums. His little crib only cramped
her tiny flat even more.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You aren’t the best Communist ever, but it’s not like you’d go over to the other side.”

She really did think that way. Not whether he was a good guy, not whether he’d make a good father, but how good a Communist he was. Chaim admired such dedication without sharing it. He would have wanted to jump on her adorably padded bones if she were
Marshal Sanjurjo’s mistress. Hell, he would have wanted to jump on her bones if she headed up Sanjurjo’s General Staff.

She hummed a lullaby to ease Carlos down into sleep. Chaim thought the tune sounded oddly familiar. Was it one American mothers used, too? Then he recognized it and started to laugh.

“
Now
what?” La Martellita asked after making sure his silly noises hadn’t bothered the baby.

“Nothing—I suppose. But how many kids go nighty-night to the
Internationale
?”

“And why shouldn’t he?” La Martellita would have bristled more, but she was easing Carlos down into the crib. He made a little noise as she slid her arm free, but only a little one. Then he kind of sighed and went on sleeping.

“No reason at all,” Chaim said. “It did surprise me, though.”

A soft answer turned away
wrath. Sometimes. When La Martellita didn’t feel the overwhelming urge to rip somebody a new asshole. Chaim braced himself for
tsuris
. It didn’t come. Instead, La Martellita sat down on the edge of the narrow bed where Carlos had got started. A sigh whistled out of her. “You have no idea how tired I am,” she said.

Actually, Chaim thought he did. La Martellita had done a lot for the Republic and
the revolution, but he didn’t believe she’d ever fought in the line. When you spent most of a week on a couple of hours’ worth of snatched catnaps … Some battles petered out just because both sides got too goddamn exhausted to keep going any more.

But if, for once, she didn’t feel like squabbling, Chaim wouldn’t go out of his way to provoke her. All he said was, “I know raising kids isn’t easy.”

La Martellita nodded. “It would be harder still if I’d had to invent a last name for Carlos, or if he had to do without one.”

“I’m glad to give him mine,” Chaim said, fearing he knew what was coming next.

“I’ll bet you are.” La Martellita smiled cynically. “You got the fun that goes along with being married.”

Got
. Past tense. Chaim’s Spanish wasn’t perfect—nowhere close—but he understood that,
all right. He felt as if he were defending the Ebro again, back in the days before England and France went to war with Germany. Not much hope, but he was damned if he’d retreat. “Bits of it,” he said, “when I could come back into Madrid. And if you didn’t have some fun with me, you ought to be in the movies, on account of you sure acted like it.”

She flushed. He’d managed to hit a nerve, even
if that was all he’d managed. “There were … moments,” she admitted.

“There could be more.” Chaim wanted like anything to sound debonair and suave. He had the bad feeling he seemed horny and desperate instead. Well, he was—both.

“No. It’s over.” La Martellita, by contrast, sounded altogether sure of herself. When didn’t she, dammit? “I have gone to the Palace of Justice to register the dissolution
of our marriage.”

In the Republic, that was all you needed to do. Very simple. Very clean. Very civilized. “Aw, shit,” Chaim said in English. He’d known all along it was coming. That should have made it easier when it got here. Somehow, it didn’t. La Martellita didn’t speak English. He translated for her:
“Mierda.”

“I don’t mind if you want to keep seeing the baby,” she said—she really was trying
to be civilized. “But …” She didn’t go on, or need to. If he tried to touch her again, he’d leave without his
cojones
.

“Shit,” he said again. No, it didn’t hurt any less. More, if anything. He got to his feet. “Take care of yourself,
querida
. You could do worse than me.” He couldn’t help a little vinegar: “And I bet you do.”

“My worry. Not yours.” La Martellita looked toward the door. Out Chaim
went. He headed for the bar a few blocks away, the one from which he’d taken her on the night they started Carlos. He brawled with
a guy half again his size, and left him moaning and bloody on the floor.
El narigón loco
—the crazy kike—was on the loose again.

VACLAV JEZEK LISTENED
to the impassioned Yiddish pouring out of the American International. The Czech guessed he was getting maybe two words
out of three. That was plenty to understand what was wrong with the other guy.

“Women,” he said in his own slow, clumsy German when the American finally paused for breath. “Nothing better than a woman to drive a man nuts.”

He hadn’t cared about any one woman since he had to leave Czechoslovakia. When he got the urge, he went to a whorehouse and laid his money down. It was easy and quick. If
it didn’t give him everything he might have wanted … Well, what did? Especially in wartime?

“Man, you got that right,” Chaim said. “I never thought I’d get this one to begin with. To get her and then to lose her like that—it’s a bastard and a half.”

“You had her for a while. That’s better than not having her at all,” Vaclav said.

“Is it? I fucking wonder,” the American replied.

Was it? Wasn’t
it? Vaclav was trying for sympathy, not philosophy. He didn’t know. He didn’t think anybody could know. And, right now, it wasn’t his worry any which way. He unbuttoned his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Here. Have one of these.”

“Thanks. You’re a
mensh
, you know?” Chaim had an American lighter he fueled with brandy these days. Its blue flame was almost invisible, but lit
his cigarette and one for Vaclav. They smoked together, and both stashed their tiny butts in tobacco pouches—waste not, want not. Chaim went on, “That was good. Not as good as pussy, but good.”

“You do what you can,” Vaclav answered with a shrug.

“Yeah. And when you can’t, you don’t.” The International reached out to touch the long barrel of Vaclav’s antitank rifle. “I hope you do, pal. I hope
you blow that cocksucker Sanjurjo’s head from here to Bilbao, you know?”

“You do what you can,” Jezek repeated. People kept telling him to finish off the Nationalist leader. Nobody told him how, though.
Wait till he shows up, then shoot him
. That was what it boiled down to. If it were so easy, by now Sanjurjo would have as many holes in him as a colander. But only another sniper would understand
that.

Or maybe not. “You can do it,” Chaim said. “Honest to God, you can. That Big Bertha you carry, it can reach farther than those Nationalist
tukhus-lekhers
really imagine.”

“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 Halévy said after he blew off steam in the Jew’s ear.

“Easy for you to say,” Jezek snarled.

“Probably.” By refusing to take offense, Halévy 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,” Halévy 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. Halévy 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 Halévy 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,” Halévy
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 Halévy 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
mañana
, 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.