The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (32 page)

So, clean and smooth-cheeked and even fragrant to the extent of a splash of bay rum, his belly full, enough
vino
in him to help him ignore what a jackass he was being, he sat in some late-afternoon shade outside Communist Party headquarters and waited for the revolutionary vanguard to knock off for the day. If he’d drunk a little more, he might have sauntered right on in. And the Reds in there likely would have thrown him out on his ass. Sometimes waiting was better.

He didn’t want to do anything strenuous, not in the ferocious summer heat. Even the pigeons that begged for crumbs begged in slow motion. They retreated in a hurry, though, if he moved in a way that looked dangerous. During harder times, Madrileños had eaten a lot of their
cousins. The survivors were the wary ones. Darwin had known which end was up, all right.

Because of the afternoon siesta, Spanish offices let out late. Chaim didn’t mind; he was used to the rhythm of life here, and liked it better than the way things worked in the States. Except for pissing off the pigeons because he had no crumbs, he was happy enough to wait.

People started to come out about when the blast-furnace heat began easing off. Spaniards either worked or dozed while it was hot outside. Once it got nicer, they did what they wanted to do instead. A damned civilized arrangement, when you got right down to it.

There she was! The adrenaline stab Chaim felt reminded him too much of a near miss from a machine-gun bullet.
You can still chicken out
, he reminded himself. But himself was already getting up and walking toward her. Had he ever stormed into a Nationalist trench so happily? He didn’t think so. Then again, he hadn’t had such incentives storming trenches.

“¡Hola! ¿Qué tal?”
he said. His accent grated in his own ears.

No doubt it sounded even harsher to La Martellita. She was so pretty, Chaim didn’t care. That hair! That mouth! It made him imagine things thoroughly illegal back in good old New York—which didn’t mean people there didn’t do them, and enjoy doing them, as much as they did anywhere else.

She was tiny, but that didn’t bother Chaim, either; he wasn’t very tall himself. Her shape was everything it should have been, and a little more besides. Her eyes … looked at him as if he’d come out of the wrong end of one of those wary pigeons.

“Oh. You,” she said. Her
nom de guerre
meant
The Little Hammer
, the way Molotov’s meant
Son of a Hammer
. And if she’d had a sickle to go with it, she would have cut Chaim down at the ankles. “What do you want?”

“I have some leave. I was hoping”—Chaim heard himself butcher the participle—“you would teach me more 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.”

“Sir?” Lemp did his best to project attentive interest.

“Are your men thoroughly loyal National Socialists, ready to follow the
Führer
’s lead with iron determination?”

That was the last question Lemp had expected. But even Clausewitz had defined war as the extension of politics by other means. And politics, more and more, got extended
into
this war. If the rumored deal
with England and France came off … 
Worry about that later
, Lemp told himself. He answered the question as simply as he could: with a crisp, “Yes, sir!”

But the captain didn’t seem satisfied. “How do we know they are?” he pressed.

Because they didn’t mutiny and take the boat to England
. Lemp swallowed the flip comeback. These people, and the people set over them, would only hold it against him. He said, “Sir, we were ashore here when the traitors tried to strike against the
Führer
. Not a man went over to them. Not a man said a word anyone could imagine disloyal.”

“We have reports that there is grumbling during cruises,” the captain declared.

Lemp cast his eyes up to the heavens. Whatever this fellow might have done, he’d never made a wartime cruise in a submarine. “Sir, they’re U-boat men,” Lemp said, hoping the other officers on the board had some idea of what he was talking about. In case they didn’t, he spelled it out: “They’re crammed into the pressure hull. The food is bad. No one has a bunk or any privacy at all. Nobody washes much. The heads don’t work all the time. Oh, and the lads’re liable to get killed. I’d worry about them if they
didn’t
piss and moan.”

“About the
Führer
?” The captain sounded disbelieving.

“About anything and everything,” Lemp answered, as firmly as he could.

“This cannot be permitted.”

“I don’t know how you can stop it.”

“Summary punishments might do the job.”

“Maybe, sir, but I think they’d help the enemy more than us, and I’d be surprised if you found any other U-boat skippers who told you different.”

The board members looked at one another. Maybe they
had
heard the same thing from other U-boat commanders. If they hadn’t, Lemp’s comrades in arms had missed the chance of a lifetime to speak truth to the powers that be.

At last, the captain who acted like the National Socialist loyalty officer spoke in a grudging voice: “We have received no complaints about
your
dedication to the
Reich
, Lieutenant Lemp.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” In half a dozen words, Lemp spoke his own truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If the higher-ups suspected him, they wouldn’t just beach him, not the way things were since the failed coup against the
Führer
. They’d fling him into a camp, and things would roll downhill from there.

Maybe something of that abject, alarm-tinged relief got through to the rear admiral who headed the board. A smile stretched his face into angles that looked unnatural. “This is secondary, Lieutenant. The data on the
Schnorkel
are what we needed most. After your refit and liberty, we’ll give you something new to try.”