Well, if Rolf came out of the LAH, he damn well had been a Nazi, and doubtless still was. He might well have been an officer then, too. The tattoos were required for them, voluntary for other ranks. That he’d made a point of obliterating his argued he’d needed to. Here, he was just another private…who happened to fight like a homicidal maniac.
Gustav let it go. That kind of stuff was ancient history as far as he was concerned, even if the Russians saw things differently.
Rolf held out the pack of cigarettes. “Want one?” he asked. He could be plenty friendly-as long as you were on his side.
“Thanks.” Gustav took one and leaned close to get a light from his comrade’s glowing coal. He drew in smooth, mild smoke-they were American Luckies.
“We are going to lick the Reds,” Rolf said in tones that brooked no contradiction.
“Well, sure.” Gustav wouldn’t have put his one and only, irreplaceable body on the line if he hadn’t thought so.
“We’re going to lick them,” Rolf repeated, as if Gustav hadn’t spoken. “We should have lined up with the Amis to do it at the end of the last war, but better late than never. We’ll lick them, and we’ll clean out all the puppet regimes they set up in Eastern Europe, and we’ll drive them out of all the land they stole. And Germany will take its natural place in the sun again.”
“Aber natürlich,” Gustav said, though he feared Rolf wouldn’t recognize irony when he heard it. And the ex-LAH man had to mean at the top of the heap when he said natural place in the sun. Gustav added, “The Americans and the Russians have the bomb. We don’t. That’s a problem, you know.”
Rolf looked at him the way a Waffen-SS soldier would have eyed someone accused of defeatism. “We will. Our scientists are plenty smart enough-the best in the world, in fact. All we have to do is clear the foreign soldiers from our soil.”
Some of the foreign soldiers on German soil opened up with a machine gun. Gustav started to reach for his own weapon, then relaxed. The Ivans weren’t close enough to be dangerous-yet. To take Rolf’s mind off dreams of world domination, Gustav said, “I’ve got another question for you.”
“Go ahead-shoot,” Rolf said, amiably enough.
“You were with the Leibstandarte at the end, right? Through the last attack in Hungary after Budapest fell?”
“Operation Spring Awakening? Yeah, I was there for that. We drove them back for a solid week, but in the end they just had too goddamn many tanks and too many men.”
In the end, the Russians had had too many tanks and too many men-to say nothing of too many allies-everywhere. That wasn’t what Gustav wanted to talk about, though. “When the retreat started again, the Führer ordered LAH to take off their cuff titles with his signature, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” Rolf scowled. “He didn’t understand the situation down there.”
By the end of the war, from everything Gustav could gather, Hitler hadn’t understood the situation anywhere. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, either. He said, “I heard that, when you guys heard about that order, what you took off were your medals-and you sent ’em to him in a chamber pot.”
“Oh. That story. I’ve heard it, too.” Rolf nodded. “It isn’t true. It’s cute, but it isn’t true. Sepp Dietrich was commanding the Sixth SS Panzer Army then. The order came through him, and it never got past his headquarters. He figured the Führer was having a bad day, so he didn’t forward it.”
“So you wore the cuff titles to the end?”
“When things fell apart, we all started shedding the SS stuff. You didn’t want to be wearing it if the Bolsheviks caught you.” Rolf drew a finger across his throat. Now Gustav nodded; he knew about that. The SS man continued, “But we didn’t cut off the titles right after Spring Awakening.”
“I get you,” Gustav said. He wondered whether Rolf was telling the truth about the medals in the chamber pot. The LAH man had been on the spot; Gustav hadn’t. But he’d heard the tale from people he had no reason to doubt. Rolf might be sanitizing things for the sake of his unit’s reputation.
Or he might not. Gustav knew he couldn’t be sure himself. He also knew Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had a reputation worth protecting only among the most pro-Nazi Germans. To the Russians and the Americans, it had just been an uncommonly nasty enemy outfit.
A jeep rolled up. This second-string, hastily equipped unit was more motorized than the fanciest SS panzer division had been. That casual show of American wealth was another reason the Third Reich had lost the war.
Sitting next to the driver was Max Bachman. The back seat was full of ration boxes-more American goodies. Max started tossing them to the resting men. “Eat up! Eat up!” he cried merrily. “Hearty meals for the condemned men!”
“Put a sock in it, Max,” Gustav said, but not before he’d snagged some food for himself.
“You know that loudmouthed clown?” Rolf asked, tearing open his own C-ration package.
“Know him? Back in Fulda, I work for him.” After a moment’s thought, Gustav amended that: “Worked for him, I mean. God only knows what it’s like with the commissars giving the orders there.”
“Not good.” Rolf took the bayonet off his belt and opened a can of stew with it. That was a common use for bayonets these days. Another was candlestick: the socket was just the right size to hold a typical German candle. A bayonet could still be a fighting knife or a spearpoint on the end of a rifle. It could, but hardly ever was.
“Nowhere near good. My wife’s back there. I hope Luisa’s still back there,” Gustav said, and opened his own can of soggy ham and eggs.
Rolf set a surprisingly gentle hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, pal. That’s hard.” They set their cans on a grill over the fire to heat.
–
The cook gave Isztvan Szolovits a chunk of black bread and a chunk of ham. He cut the bread in half with his bayonet and surrounded the ham with it. The sandwich was the neatest way he could think of to eat what he had.
One of the other soldiers said, “I’m gonna tell your rabbi on you!”
“He won’t be able to hear you, Andras,” Szolovits answered, and took a bite. It was pretty good ham.
“What? Why the hell not?” Andras Orban demanded, as Isztvan had hoped he would.
“Because your head’s so far up your ass, no noise can get out.” The Jew gathered himself. If Andras wanted a fight, he’d give him one. He’d had more fights like that than he cared to remember. Knuckling under seemed worse.
Andras’ jaw dropped. If he was looking for a deferential Jew or a cowardly Jew, he was looking in the wrong place. He started to get to his feet, but the snickers from the rest of the Magyar soldiers eating and smoking and resting there made him hesitate.
Then Sergeant Gergely snapped, “Cut the crap, Orban. You ragged him, he ragged you back. I think his crack was funnier than yours, but what the hell? It evens out. Your face is funnier than his.”
That made more soldiers laugh at Andras. He turned a dull red. He wasn’t particularly handsome, though Szolovits wouldn’t have called him funny-looking. Well, you aren’t all that handsome yourself, Isztvan thought. He also wasn’t all that Jewish-looking. He had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and an ordinary nose. Only his mouth and the shape of his chin hinted at what he was.
But Gergely hadn’t finished. “I’m going to keep my eye on you, Orban,” he went on. “You think we don’t have enough trouble fighting the Americans and the Germans? You have to stir something up with your own countryman?”
“Him? My countryman, Comrade Sergeant?” Andras Orban looked astonished. “Isn’t he just a waddayacallem? A rootless cosmopolite, that’s it.”
Rootless cosmopolite was what a good Marxist-Leninist said when he meant kike. It had a fine ideological ring to it, but what lay behind it was old as the hills.