The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (9 page)

Although a bright sun shone down from a blue sky, it was still bitterly cold. Sarah couldn’t remember a winter that had dug its claws in deeper or clung to Germany, to all of Europe, harder. Neither could Father, who’d spent three winters in the trenches during the last war. That he was a wounded, decorated veteran made things a little easier for the Goldmans than they were for most German Jews. Not much, but a little. When you weren’t in such good shape, you took what you could get.

Naturally, the Jews went into the city hall by a side entrance. If that line had snaked up the stairs to the main doorway, Jews might have—gasp!—inconvenienced Aryans. In the Third
Reich
, what could be worse? Nothing either Sarah or Nazi officials could think of.

Portraits of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and other Nazi
Bonzen
hung on the walls of the hallway along which the Jews had to go. Maybe it was Sarah’s imagination, but the photographs seemed to be glowering at the Chosen People. Maybe it was her imagination, but she didn’t think so.

When she whispered her thought to Father, he snorted softly and whispered back: “Chosen People, nothing. We’re the Singled-Out People, is what we are.”

“Yes!” Sarah exclaimed. The phrase fit much too well. God had singled out the Jews all those years ago, and now the Nazis were doing it instead.
Didn’t that mean the Nazis had assumed the mantle of divinity? If you asked them, they would tell you yes.

Along with the National Socialists’ icons hung portraits of the local Party leaders, men nobody outside of Münster would recognize. They looked just as peevish as the Nazi big shots who ordered much of Europe around from Berlin. Maybe they were less ambitious, maybe only less lucky. Some of them seemed quite ready to start telling Czechs and Danes and Dutchmen what to do.

Down the hallway swept a strange apparition: the Bishop of Münster, in full ecclesiastical regalia: a uniform far older and, to Sarah’s eyes, far more impressive than the quasi-military garb that so delighted the Nazis. He stopped and asked one of the Jews, “What are you poor, unhappy people doing here?”

The man explained. Even speaking politely to a Jew could land someone in trouble. But Clemens August von Galen was already in trouble with the authorities for having the nerve to complain about the way they tried to rein in the Catholic Church in Germany. If they wanted to toss him into a concentration camp, they didn’t need to blame him for being friendly to Jews.

He rolled his eyes now at the answer he got. “This is a disgrace,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. “They aren’t content with harassing you every other way they can think of? Now they have to rob you of your names, too?”

No one was brave enough to reply to him after that. Nazi functionaries clumped up and down the corridor in their shiny jackboots. Anything a Jew said would be noted and held against him.

“Disgraceful,” the Bishop of Münster said again. Robes swirling around him, he strode away. Sarah was far from the only Jew who stared admiringly after him. You couldn’t get in trouble for just looking. She didn’t think you could, anyhow.

Her father leaned close and whispered in her ear: “If a few hundred important people had spoken up like that when things were starting out, none of this
Schweinerei
would have happened. None of it
could
have happened.”

“But they didn’t,” Sarah answered.

“I know,” said Samuel Goldman—former professor of ancient history and classics, now a road-gang laborer. No wonder he sounded bleak. Things
were
bleak for the Jews of Münster, as they were for Jews all over Germany.

Typewriters clattered up ahead as clerks made out the new identity cards. In due course, the Goldmans reached the front of the line. They duly surrendered their old cards. The new blanks, Sarah saw, had
JEW
printed on them in much bigger letters than the old ones had used.

“For all official purposes, you are now Moses Samuel Goldman,” their clerk said as he handed Father his new card.

“I understand,” Father answered. That was safe enough. He didn’t have to tell the clerk whether he agreed or approved. But he couldn’t very well fail to understand.

Mother got hers next. “For all official purposes, you are now Sarah Hanna Goldman,” the clerk droned.

She also said, “I understand.”

Then it was Sarah’s turn. The clerk started to type, but hesitated. He got up from behind the desk and went over to talk with an older man a couple of desks away. Sarah couldn’t hear what they said. Her clerk shrugged and came back. He typed again, this time with assurance: someone had told him what to do, and he was doing it.

Handing Sarah her new card, he intoned, “For all official purposes, you are now Sarah Sarah Goldman.”

“What? That’s silly!” she blurted.

“That is what regulations require in your circumstances. I have verified it with
Herr
Memminger, my supervisor.” The clerk nodded toward the older man. He sounded as confident as a Catholic who’d just consulted with Bishop von Galen on a subtle theological point.

“It’s still silly,” Sarah said.

“If you feel strongly enough about the matter, you may make a formal complaint to the Office for Jewish Affairs in Berlin,” the clerk said with no irony Sarah could hear.

She gulped. “Never mind,” she said quickly. The last thing—the very last thing—she wanted was to draw the notice of the Office for Jewish Affairs. No matter how bad things were, they could always get worse.

“Very well,” the clerk said. “Goldmans, is everything on your cards
now correct? At this time, there is no fee for adjusting them. If you find an error later and return to have it changed, the law requires a ten-Reichsmark charge.”

Did the law require the same thing for Aryans? It might. Governments were greedy whenever they found the chance. Sarah checked the card. Except for being ridiculous, it was accurate. So were her parents’. They all got out of there as fast as they could. Sarah, Sarah … When they were smaller, her brother would have turned it into a mocking chant. Even the Office for Jewish Affairs didn’t know what had happened to Saul. Sarah did, but she would never, ever tell.

PETE MCGILL WAS
full of what a philosopher might have called existential despair. Pete was no philosopher. He was a hard-faced, raspy-voiced Marine corporal, one of the relatively small garrison charged with protecting the American consulate in Shanghai. Back in the days when the Marines, like similar forces from the European powers, protected their country’s interests against Chinese mobs, the arrangement had been reasonable enough. (The Chinese didn’t think so, but the next time any of the powers worried about what the Chinese thought would be the first.)

Things were different now, though. Like Peking (where Pete had served before coming closer to the coast, to a city where evacuation by sea was possible), Shanghai lay under Japanese occupation. The Japs had divisions’ worth of infantry near the two big cities. The Western powers’ companies of troops stayed on only because Japan didn’t feel like cleaning them out. Existing on Japanese sufferance rubbed Pete—and the rest of the leathernecks—the wrong way.

But that was only an insult, an accident of geopolitics. It was plenty to piss Pete off. Existential despair, though? No way in hell. What drove him there was falling head over heels for a White Russian taxi dancer named Vera. She was a blonde. She was built. She was, in his admittedly biased opinion, drop-dead gorgeous. She screwed like there was no tomorrow. She was even smart. And, in spite of that last, she gave every appearance of having fallen head over heels for Pete.

It was the kind of romance officers went out of their way to warn
you against. Blah, blah, blah till they were as blue in the face as a USMC dress uniform. A lot of the time, of course, a guy fell for a girl simply because he was horny. Or a girl looked at a guy and saw a meal ticket, a sugar daddy, maybe even somebody who could get her to the States.

Vera wasn’t like that—Pete was sure of it. Oh, he’d bought her presents. But so what? In China, even a Marine corporal’s miserable pay stretched as if rubberized. And he had looked into what it would take for her to go back to America with him. That was because he loved her and wanted to stay with her forever, though, not because she’d pushed him into it. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name.

By what the Marine lieutenant with whom he’d spoken told him, he had two chances of getting Vera across the Pacific: slim and none. And that was what really left him floundering in the slough of despond.

Being sloppy drunk sure didn’t help. He sat in a bar not far from the consulate, one of a long procession of whiskey-and-sodas in front of him. The dive was called the Globe and Anchor. As its name implied, it catered to Marines. On the barstool next to him sat another leatherneck, a bruiser named Herman Szulc. He was a Polack with a Slavic spelling for his German name, which was pronounced
Schultz
.

Pete poured out his tale of woe. It wasn’t as if Szulc hadn’t heard it before. He had. But whiskey and loneliness made Pete talk—and talk and talk and talk. “I’ll never get her back to New York City,” he mourned, that being where he was born and raised and did such sketchy growing up as he’d done before the Corps got its hands on him. “Never!”

“Not if you play by the rules, anyway, sounds like.” Szulc paid no more attention to the rules than he had to. If he weren’t doing time in the Marines, he probably would be serving it in the state pen.

Pete was much more inclined to stay on the up-and-up. He had been, anyhow, till Vera discombobulated all his warning circuits. “How do you get somebody from China to New York if you don’t play straight?” he asked. Before Herman could answer, he drained his latest whiskey-and-soda and waved to the bartender for yet another refill.

“Coming right up, chief!” the barman said in excellent English. If he watered his drinks more as his customers got drunker, well, hey, it was a tough old world and he had a family to support. He also wanted to hear
how to get from Shanghai to New York City—or anywhere else in the USA—without losing sleep over all the tiresome formalities of immigration.

“You gotta know who to pay off,” Szulc explained.

“Hey, this is China, man. Now tell me something I didn’t know,” Pete said. He supposed every country ran on cash and was lubed by the smooth slipperiness of greased palms. Chinamen were a lot more blatant about it than Americans, though. If you didn’t fork over here, you could forget about anything you wanted. But if you played ball the Chinese way, you rapidly discovered all things were possible.

“Yeah, it’s China. But you won’t just be paying off Chinks,” Szulc said. “You gotta find out which immigration people will look the other way when a gal without the right paperwork gets on a ship. Your girlfriend’s white, anyway. If you’d fallen for one of those slanty-eyed broads, you’d be shit outa luck. Nobody’d put himself out on a limb for you then.”

“Tell me about it,” McGill said. America wanted a square deal for Chinamen in China. But God forbid if any Chinamen—or slanty-eyed broads, as Szulc put it—or Japs wanted to sully the US of A. We sure didn’t want any more of them there. We didn’t like the ones we already had.

That wasn’t a problem with Vera, though. She was white enough to satisfy—hell, to thrill—a cross-burner in a sheet.
So I caught a break for a change
, Pete thought.
Hot damn! That makes one
.

“Do you know who the right guys to pay off are?” he asked.

“Couple of ’em,” Herman Szulc answered smugly. “An English colonel who drinks too fuckin’ much and this little old wizened-up Portugee who can maybe slide her out through Macao. You know what they say about that place—you can sneak anybody and anything through there, long as you know who to keep happy.”

“How much will it cost me?” Pete said. “I ain’t rich or nothing, you know.”

“Like I am,” Szulc said, rolling his eyes. He named a figure. Pete flinched. The guy behind the bar, who was listening avidly, too, didn’t. How many silver Mex dollars did he have socked away? That many and then some.

Pete did more than flinch. He said, “I’m not gonna rob a bank for you, Herman.”

“How much loot does your lady-love have?” Szulc returned.

“I’m not gonna take from her, neither,” Pete said. If Vera paid her own way to the States, how long would she remember a Marine who helped her make connections? No matter how head over heels Pete was, he wasn’t—quite—blind.

“Okay, okay. Don’t get your tits in a wringer,” Herman said. “I—”

“Wait a sec.” There were other ways in which Pete wasn’t blind, too. “How much would it be if you didn’t glom on to a big cut from the fee?”

The other Marine looked affronted. “Look, ace, I ain’t in this for my health. You don’t want to keep me sweet, you can goddamn well go find these other guys for yourself.”

An English colonel. An old, skinny, wrinkled Portuguese—assuming Szulc wasn’t lying about the details, which wasn’t what you’d call a lead-pipe cinch. “I didn’t say don’t take anything,” Pete replied, backtracking a little. “But you screw the guys you may have to go to war with, will you trust ’em at your back?” Shrewdly, he added, “I bet I’m not the only one who wants to know shit like this.”

“I already figured a discount into what I told you,” Szulc whined.

“Swell. Now figure another one. I can go down to the waterfront, too,” Pete said.

Herman Szulc snorted. “You try it, you’ll end up wearing cement overshoes. You’re a nice guy, Pete. You know what the Shanghai waterfront does with nice guys? Trust me, you don’t want to find out.”

“I can take care of myself.” Pete believed it.

Szulc, by contrast, giggled. So did the bartender, though right away he tried to pretend he hadn’t. His reaction did more to persuade Pete he was talking nonsense than Szulc’s did. And Herman came down—some. They drank and haggled, haggled and drank. The guy behind the bar soaked in every word.

THEO HOSSBACH GATHERED
with the rest of the panzer crewmen in his company to hear the word come down from on high. It came down through Captain Werner Schellenberg, the company CO. He read from
a piece of paper that he must have got from regimental HQ: “To ensure continued loyalty amidst the pressures of our ruthless war against Bolshevism and international Jewry, we are going to introduce National Socialist Leadership Officers into the command structure. They will give the troops support in creating and maintaining a proper National Socialist worldview, and will see to it that all orders issued by the regular officer corps are in complete accord with National Socialist doctrines and ways of thought. This change in the command structure is to be implemented immediately.” He looked out at the men he led. “Questions?”