The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (6 page)

“But which?” Chaim demanded. “Differences are important.”

“One or the other,” the guards said again. They didn’t get it. Maybe they needed to listen to his harangues, too.

Someone
on this side of the wire listened intently to what he told the captured Fascists. The authorities wanted to make sure he preached only good, pure, true Communist doctrine. Heaven—the heaven he didn’t believe in—help him if he showed himself out of step with what Moscow decreed to be so … or, worse, if he showed he’d fallen into the Trotskyist heresy. There were times when the old Inquisition had nothing on the Republic, though Chaim didn’t think of it like that.

He didn’t not least because his minder was one of the best-looking women he’d ever set eyes on. La Martellita—her
nom de guerre
meant
the little hammer
—filled out overalls in a way their designer never intended. Midnight hair. Snapping eyes, coral lips, a piquant nose … He was in love, or at least in lust.

La Martellita looked at him as if she’d just found half of him in her apple. If she didn’t like what he said, she might be able to have him shot. He didn’t care. If anything, the aura of danger that fit her as tightly as those overalls only made him hotter.

He didn’t even know her real name. She wouldn’t tell him, and he hadn’t found anybody else who knew. One of these days, he would. And then, casually, in just the right spot, he’d call her by it. And then what? Chances were she’d tell him to fuck off. Even rejection, coming from her, seemed sweet.

Which was a good thing, because rejection and criticism were all he got from her. He did try to be more careful with the doctrine he preached to the prisoners. He didn’t want to die at the hands of his own side. He didn’t
want
to die at all. He aspired to be shot at the age of 103 by an outraged husband. He’d come to Spain to fight the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, not its friends.

When he said as much to La Martellita, she curled her kissable upper lip. “Then you shouldn’t deviate from the Party line,” she said, as if she were a bishop complaining about a priest’s sermon.

Chaim was no priest. He didn’t have to stay celibate. He didn’t want to, either. La Martellita was also free. Unlike a lot of her Spanish sisters, she wasn’t easy, though, not with him.

“Why don’t you go play with yourself?” she said when she couldn’t be in any doubt of his interest. Spanish women could also be very blunt.

“You’d be more fun,” he answered honestly.

“Not with you, I wouldn’t,” she said. “You’d make any woman wish she were with somebody else.” She stalked away. Maybe she didn’t realize how her hips swung. More likely, she was doing it with malice aforethought.

Oh, yeah?
he wanted to shout back, like a stupid kid.
Says you!
Every once in a while, he’d learned, keeping his big mouth shut came in handy. This looked like one of those times.

Maybe the way to her heart lay in the straight Party line. But Chaim, while a good Communist, was also an American to the tips of his stubby fingers. He enjoyed tinkering with ideas the way a lot of his countrymen enjoyed tinkering with motors. He tore them down and rebuilt them and did his damnedest to get them working better than ever. If they weren’t always the same afterwards, so what? They were new and improved—two magic words in the States.

Not in Spain. (Not in the USSR, either: something Chaim preferred to forget. He knew about the gulags—knew they existed, anyhow, and held dissidents. He also preferred to forget that.) Here, a parrot did better than a tinkerer. Chaim had never been a parrot, and didn’t want to start.

But he did want to jump on La Martellita’s elegantly cushioned bones. “Weinberg wants a cracker!” he screeched in English. It wouldn’t have made sense to the guards even in their own language.

he dreaded call didn’t always come with a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Lieutenant Anastas Mouradian was eating blintzes and drinking his breakfast tea when a hard-faced noncom carrying a submachine gun strode up to him in the officers’ mess and barked, “Comrade Lieutenant, Colonel Borisov requires your presence. Immediately!”

Across the table from Mouradian, his pilot looked horrified. Sergei Yaroslavsky had warned him again and again that he was too sarcastic, too skeptical, for his own good. Maybe Sergei’d been right all along.

Nothing showed on the Armenian’s swarthy face now.
Never let them know you’re worried
, Mouradian thought. And a whole fat lot of good that would do him if they’d already built a case with his name on it. If the powers that be wanted to give him a plot of earth two meters long, a meter wide, and two meters deep, they damn well would, and that was all there was to it.

He got to his feet. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said in his throatily accented Russian, hoping it wasn’t for the last time.

Russians from Siberia talked about the whisper of stars: weather so
cold that, when you exhaled, the moisture in your breath audibly froze. They claimed it never got that cold on this side of the Urals. Mouradian couldn’t have said one way or the other. He’d never heard the so-called whisper of stars, but maybe the Siberians were lying about it.

Even without it, the weather seemed plenty cold enough. He was glad for his flying suit of leather and fur, and for the thick felt
valenki
that kept his feet from freezing. The Russians were good at fighting winter—and they needed to be. He often wondered why so many men from the south, where the weather was mostly decent, came up here to make their careers. When it got this cold, he wondered why he’d ever wanted to leave Armenia himself.

But the answer was simple. Armenia and the rest of the Caucasus were only a little pond. If you wanted to see how good you were in the ocean, you came north and measured yourself against the swarms of Russians. It had worked out pretty well for Georgian-born Joseph Dzugashvili, who commonly went by the Russian handle of Stalin these days.

Of course, things that worked out well for Stalin had a way of working not so well for other people. Mouradian glanced over at the sergeant with the machine pistol. The son of a bitch looked depressingly alert. Were a couple of NKVD men waiting for Mouradian along with Colonel Borisov? Would they ship him off to Kolyma or some other garden spot so he could find out about the whisper of stars for himself?

He’d know soon. Here was the wing commander’s tent. The sergeant gestured with his weapon, telling Mouradian to go in. Sighing out fog but no stars, the copilot and bomb-aimer obeyed.

No NKVD men. Only Colonel Borisov, sitting behind a card table that held some papers and a tumbler full of clear liquid. Despite a brazier next to the table, water would have frozen in a hurry. But, knowing Borisov’s habits, Mouradian would have been astonished had the glass held water.

Saluting, the Armenian said, “Reporting as ordered, Comrade Colonel.”

“Yes.” Borisov looked and sounded bleary. Had he started drinking this early in the morning? Or had he been at it all night, so it wasn’t early
for him? He stared at Mouradian out of pale eyes narrowed by a Tatar fold at the inner corners. “Are you capable of piloting an SB-2?”

“
Da
, Comrade Colonel,” Mouradian answered. A copilot needed to be able to fly his plane. If anything happened to the pilot—a 20mm cannon shell from a Messerschmitt, say—bringing the bomber home would be up to him. Colonel Borisov should have known that. Chances were he did … when he was sober.

He took a slug from that tumbler and breathed antifreeze fumes into Mouradian’s face. “Good,” he said. “Very good, in fact.” He reached for a pencil—and missed. Not a bit put out, he tried again. This time, he captured it. He made a check mark on one of the papers. “Get your things. We’ll put you in a
panje
wagon and haul you off to the nearest railhead.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian said, and then, “Comrade Colonel, where am I going? What will I be doing when I get there?” It still might be Kolyma, despite the blather about whether he could fly the plane. Some Russians were sheeplike enough to report to the gulag even without guards to make sure they got there. If Borisov thought Mouradian grew that kind of wool, he would soon discover that men from the Caucasus weren’t so naive.

“You will report to Far Eastern Aviation. They’re screaming for pilots there,” Borisov told him. “I don’t
know
what you’ll be doing, but fuck your mother if it’s not likely to be dropping rocks on the little yellow monkeys’ heads.”

So it would be Siberia, then. But he’d go there as a free man, a soldier, not as a disgraced prisoner. Mouradian suddenly felt ten degrees warmer, even if Colonel Borisov’s tent remained cold as a hailstone. “I serve the Soviet Union!” he said yet again, this time gladly. “Ah, you have written orders for me?” Without them, he’d never get aboard the local train, let alone the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Borisov blinked owlishly. “Oh, sure. They’re here somewhere.” He fumbled through papers, then thrust one at Mouradian. “Here.”

Mouradian eyed it. “Sir, this is a scheme for winning at dice.”

“What? Give it back to me!” The wing commander snatched it out of his hand. He did some more shuffling. “This is the one you need.”

The other one, no doubt, was the one Borisov needed himself.
Mouradian carefully examined the new document. Sure enough, it showed that Borisov was duly providing the pilot he’d been ordered to furnish. However … “Will you please put my name on it?”

“Oh, all right.” By the way Borisov sighed, Anastas was asking for the sun, the moon,
and
the stars. The colonel scribbled. Mouradian checked again. It would do. Borisov had remembered who he was.

He went out to collect his things. The submachine-gun-toting sergeant still accompanied him. Sergei was in the tent waiting for him. “What are they doing to you?” the pilot asked, alarm in his voice.

“Siberia,” Mouradian answered as he threw this, that, and the other thing into a duffel bag.

“Bozhemoi!”
Yaroslavsky said. “I tried to tell you—”

“No, not the camps.” Anastas’ joke had worked almost too well. “Far Eastern Aviation. They’ll make me a pilot so the Japanese can shoot me down.”

“Oh.” Yaroslavsky kissed him on both cheeks and gave him a hug. “Well, stay as safe as you can, you crazy bastard. I hope I see you after the war.”

“That would be good. Or maybe we won’t have to wait so long. Who knows? Who knows anything nowadays?” Mouradian slung the duffel over his shoulder and went out into the cold again.

The stone-faced noncom drove the
panje
wagon, too. With its boatlike body and big wheels, the wagon could get through winter snow and spring and autumn mud that stymied fancier transport.

For a wonder, the Germans hadn’t hit the railway station. The young lieutenant who’d taken over for the civilian stationmaster gave Mouradian a seat in a second-class compartment. Mouradian shrugged. He could have got a hard bench instead. “You’ll go out at twenty-three minutes past nine,” the lieutenant told him.

He was impressed at the precision. The train actually rattled out of the station a little past noon. That left Mouradian and the other officers in the compartment resigned but hardly surprised. Only a fool or a German would expect a schedule and reality to have much to do with each other.

They shared bread and sausages and cigarettes and vodka. They told dirty jokes. Most of them were going on leave. They sent Mouradian
pitying glances when they found out he wasn’t. “Siberia!” one of them said. “That’s a devil of a long way from here. From everywhere, in fact.”

“I serve the Soviet Union,” Mouradian said one more time. Here, the stock phrase meant
I’m stuck with it
.

“Don’t we all, pal? Don’t we all?” said a Red Army lieutenant who seemed to have more booze than he knew what to do with. So he shared with everyone else in the compartment. It was
samogan
—moonshine—but it was good
samogan
, as good as some of the legitimate (which is to say, taxed) firewater Mouradian had drunk. The army man was genially tipsy, too. He kept coming out with one funny, outrageous crack after another.