The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (58 page)

“What else can you do?” Sarah asked sympathetically.

“I could do nothing. Then we’d starve. This is better—I suppose.” Father’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He looked up toward the ceiling, or maybe toward whatever lay a mile beyond the moon, as he continued, “A lot of the time, we’re the ones who pull the bodies out of the rubble, too. I didn’t mind bodies much, you
know, when they wore horizon-blue or khaki. I even got used to bodies in
Feldgrau
. Lord knows we saw enough of them. But bodies in pajamas or nightgowns? That’s a lot harder.”

Sarah and Isidor looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what to say to that. At last, Sarah asked, “Have you … found anyone you know? Uh, I guess I mean knew?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “You remember Friedrich
Lauterbach?”

“Sure. He studied under you. He’s in the
Wehrmacht
now, isn’t he?” Sarah left it there. Had the world gone down a different path, she might have been more likely to marry him than the husband she had now. He’d stayed decent even after the Nazis took over, getting Father money for writing articles that would see print under his byline rather than a Jew’s. Sarah hoped he hadn’t stopped
anything.

Her father nodded. “That’s the fellow. His older brother was a doctor here. Was.” He repeated the past tense. Something in the way his jaw set made Sarah fight shy of asking just what had happened to the luckless Dr. Lauterbach.

Isidor yawned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll stay very late,” he said. “You have air raids two or three days in a row, you get so sleepy you can’t see
straight.”

“That’s the truth!” Sarah’s mother exclaimed; she hadn’t had much to say till then. “And the horrible
ersatz
coffee and tea you can get nowadays
don’t have any kick in them at all.” Everybody nodded at that. People grumbled about it all the time.

“They make pills for pilots and other people who’ve got to stay awake,” Father said. “Not the stuff that goes into coffee, but the real
strong stuff, benzedrine and the like. Plenty of times I’ve wished I could get my hands on some of those. I could use them, believe me.”

“Who couldn’t?” Isidor said. “Dr. What’s-his-name—Lauterbach—didn’t have any at his house?”

“If he did, somebody else beat me to them. What can you do?” Samuel Goldman spread his hands. Sarah remembered when they were soft and smooth and impeccably manicured,
with only a writer’s callus on one middle finger. Now they were scarred and battered, with filthy nails and with hard yellowed ridges across the palms. Well, her own hands were a lot harder than they had been, too.

She and Isidor got back to the flat over the bakery well before curfew. In lieu of benzedrine pills, they went to bed early. Sarah thought she could sleep the clock around if she got
the chance. Tired by bad food and nighttime air raids, she wanted to hibernate like a dormouse.

She didn’t get the chance that night. The RAF came over again, a little before midnight. The sirens wailed like damned souls. Sarah and Isidor and the older Brucks did some heartfelt damning of their own as they stumbled down the stairs in darkness absolute.

Then the bombs whistled down. As soon as
Sarah heard them, her terror redoubled. They sounded louder and closer than they ever had before. She tried to burrow into the floor when they started going off.

It sounded as if one hit right across the street. The window in the front of the bakery had survived the whole war. It didn’t survive this: it fell in on itself with a tinkling crash.
“Scheisse!”
Isidor’s father said loudly, and then,
“I beg your pardon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sarah said as the building shook from other hits only a little farther away. Now she understood why her own father still sometimes called bomber pilots air pirates even though the name came straight out of Dr. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. If they were trying to kill you, they weren’t your friends.

After forty-five eternal minutes, the bombers droned
away. “That was awful,” Isidor said. Sarah couldn’t have put it better herself. She
shivered, not just from fear but also because the shattered front window was letting in cold air.

It was letting in light, too. The grocery across the street was on fire. Isidor’s father started to go out to see if he could help. Stepping on broken glass made him change his mind in a hurry.

There wasn’t much
water pressure when a fire engine finally clanged up. What had the bombs done to the pipes under Münster? Nothing good—that was plain. Firemen in what looked like
Stahlhelms
with crests did the best they could with what they had.

“He’s going to lose everything,” David Bruck said gloomily. “I just hope he’s alive. He’s a
goy
, but he’s a
mensh
. The two shops have been across the street from each
other as long as I can remember.”

“It’s terrible,” Sarah said.

“It’s worse than that,” her father-in-law answered. “For him and for us. I know I won’t be able to get glass to fix that window. Heaven only knows if they’ll even give me wood scraps. I’ve got to have something, or people will just come in and steal. How am I supposed to stay in business?”

When Sarah decided to marry Isidor, she’d
figured that getting into a baker’s family would at least mean she had enough to eat. Now even that wasn’t obvious any more. She suddenly hated the RAF almost as if she were a genuine German after all.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN LAY
in his tent, trying to sleep. He had his flying suit of fur and leather, and long underwear below it. He had two thick, scratchy woolen blankets. He had a cot that kept him
off the ground. The tent itself held off the worst of the wind. He was miserably cold even so.

Russian infantrymen learned to sleep in the snow, shrouded by no more than their uniform and greatcoat. Stas was no foot soldier; he was a flyer. He was no Russian, either. He knew what good weather was all about. When it got this frigid, his teeth chattered like castanets.

Then the tent flap flew
open. A blast of air straight from the North Pole rushed inside. So did a human shape—no more than a lumpy outline
in the darkness. “What the devil—?” Stas said, groping for his service pistol.

“You’ve got to hide me!”

The voice was familiar. Stas stopped feeling for the automatic. “What do you mean, hide you, Ivan? Hide you from whom?” he asked. Having learned Russian as a second language,
he was often more precise in his grammar than men who’d spoken it from birth.

But Ivan Kulkaanen wasn’t a native Russian-speaker, either. “Hide me from the Chekists! They’re after me!” The Karelian’s voice wasn’t just familiar. It was desperate. He panted like a hunted animal worn down after a long chase.

Now the ice that ran up Mouradian’s back had nothing to do with the arctic air rapidly
filling the tent.
“Bozhemoi!”
he burst out. “What did you do? What do they think you did?” The questions were related, but not necessarily identical. And the second was the one that really mattered. If the NKVD decided you’d done something, you might as well have, because they’d hang it on you anyway.

“I wrote in a letter to my cousin that the war wasn’t going as well as it ought to be,” Kulkaanen
answered miserably.

“Bozhemoi!”
Stas repeated. This time, his tone was hopeless. “You
wrote
that?” He didn’t ask
How could you be such an idiot?
It had already occurred to him that his copilot and bomb-aimer might be playing a part. The NKVD might be building a case against him and using Kulkaanen as a provocateur. It struck him as unlikely—if the Chekists wanted you, more often than not they
just grabbed you—but it was possible.

“I wrote it,” Ivan agreed. “I wrote it in Finnish. I didn’t think they’d ever be able to read it. But they did, and I’m fucked.” Karelia lay in the far north, next to the Finnish border. A lot of Finns thought it belonged to them by rights, not least because the only differences between Finns and Karelians were the names and where they happened to live.

Of course the NKVD would have men who read Finnish, just as the Chekists had men who read Armenian and Georgian (hell, Stalin could do that) and Azerbaijani and Kazakh and Lithuanian and every other language under the Soviet sun. The NKVD probably had men who read
Sanskrit, for Christ’s sake. Hey, you never could tell when a professor of the ancient languages of India might turn wrecker on you.

“Hide me!” Kulkaanen said again, even more urgently than before. “If I can count on anybody, it’s you!”

There was a compliment Stas appreciated—and one he could have done without. “Hide you where?” he asked, doing his best to sound like the voice of sweet reason. “What do you want me to do with you, Ivan? Stick you in my back pocket?” Kulkaanen was both taller and thicker through the shoulders
than he was himself.

“There’s got to be somewhere!” the Karelian said.

“Under my cot, maybe? That should fool the NKVD for a good second and a half—two if you’re lucky,” Stas said.

Kulkaanen groaned. “I’m fucked,” he said once more: an observation all too likely to be accurate. With yet another groan—or maybe this one was better called a moan—he fled out into the night.

Stas felt like groaning
and moaning, too. Now he didn’t have to worry about whether the cold would keep him awake. Adrenaline would handle the job just fine. He lay there, trying without much luck to relax, heart thuttering in his throat.

He didn’t get to lie there long. Not fifteen minutes after Ivan Kulkaanen disappeared, someone shone an electric torch full in his face and shouted, “Answer, in the name of the Soviet
Union!”

Stas answered, all right: “Turn that goddamn thing off, you stupid motherfucking jackass! Do you
want
to bring Nazi bombers down on us?” If you were going to deal with the NKVD, any moral advantage you could grab was precious.

The torch winked off. Except for a wavering purple-green afterimage, Stas could see nothing at all for a little while. The Chekist demanded, “Did the anti-Soviet
criminal Ivan Kulkaanen come here?”

“Ivan came here, yes,” Stas answered. No matter what Kulkaanen was dumb enough to put in a letter, Mouradian was sure he’d harmed the Hitlerites far more than this blustering Russian ever would. It wouldn’t help him, of course, but it was true.

“What did he want? What did you tell him?” the NKVD man barked.

“He wanted me to hide him. I said I couldn’t.” Stas
gave back the exact truth. It couldn’t land poor Ivan in any more trouble.

“What did he do then?”

“He ran away. You don’t see him here, do you?”

“Never mind what I see,” the intruder snapped. “Why didn’t you instantly report his treasonous behavior?”

“Because he only just now came and went.” That was a lie, but only a tiny one. “And because it’s bloody cold out there.” Truth again. “And because
I expected you people would be on his trail.” One more truth.

“Where did he go?” the NKVD man asked, so even a Chekist could see the sense in his response.

“Comrade Investigator, I have no idea,” Mouradian said, which was also true. “But wherever he is, he can’t have got far.”

“Ha! You’re right about that. And when we catch him, he’ll be sorry he didn’t run off to Venus or Mars.”

The NKVD
man ducked out of Stas’ tent and let the flap fall. He shouted obscenity-filled orders to whatever friends he had out there. They’d comb the grounds around the airstrip. Were they moronic enough to turn on their torches while they did it? They probably were. Who was going to tell Chekists they couldn’t do something? You could wind up in a camp yourself if you tried.

I did it. I got away with
it, too
, Stas thought, not without pride. He was still cold—colder now, in fact, with all the icy air his visitors had let into the tent. He huddled under the blankets. Sleep was hopeless. He’d be pouring down tea tomorrow to keep his eyes open, or coffee if they had any.

Or maybe not. He’d need a replacement copilot if he was going to fly. Could they deliver somebody soon enough to do him any
good? He’d have to see.

Out at the edge of the encampment, somebody yelled. A moment later, someone fired a long burst from a machine pistol. A moment after that, somebody let out a horrible scream. Was that Kulkaanen? Or were the NKVD brutes mowing one another down? Stas knew where his hopes lay.

As a Karelian, Kulkaanen probably knew even more about snow than the Russians coming after him
did. Maybe he could get away. It still didn’t seem likely, but it was possible.

It was possible, but it didn’t happen. They brought him in near daybreak.
They’d beaten the snot out of him for making them work so hard. Odds were he had worse coming. If they didn’t execute him, they’d give him twenty-five years in the gulag. They wouldn’t bother hanging a mere tenner on him, not after he’d gone
and pissed them off.

And the war would grind on, whether run well or badly. Why couldn’t he have seen that? Any which way, no matter what he told his cousin, the goddamn war would grind on.

Chapter 25