But I’m the one who’s laying La Martellita, dammit, Chaim thought. When she feels like it. When she can stand me. Even with the qualifications, that came as close to heaven as a good secular Marxist-Leninist expected to get. As far as Chaim was concerned, laying La Martellita was as close to heaven as Pius XII was likely to get. And, if Pius XII got a look at La Martellita, Chaim figured the Pope would agree with him. Unless his Holiness liked chorus boys, he would, and maybe even then. La Martellita was plenty to make any fag ever born want to try switch-hitting.
The front was only forty-five minutes from Madrid, and Madrid was only forty-five minutes from the front. Supplies came up with ease-when there were supplies, anyway. The Republican forces had been hungry for foreign munitions since France and England jumped into bed with Hitler and jumped on Stalin’s back. Spanish factories did what they could, but the ammo they made was junk. Cartridges misfired or jammed. Shells too often didn’t burst. If you had Mexican or French or German rounds (those, these days, came only from Nationalist corpses), you saved them for when you really needed them.
And so Chaim was surprised and delighted when trucks brought case after case of French cartridges up from the capital. “Where’d these come from?” he asked a driver. “They find ’em in a warehouse they forgot about or something?”
“No se, Senor.” A Spanish shrug was a much more dignified production than its French equivalent. “They loaded them into my truck. They told me to take them to the fighting men. This I have done.” Anything beyond what he’d done, he plainly considered none of his business.
Mike said, “The crates don’t look weathered, like they would if they’d been sitting in a warehouse or something. And the brass on the rounds is shiny, too. Stuff seems new.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Chaim scratched his head with almost the determination he would have given to pursuing a louse. “But that’s crazy. Why would the froggies send us fresh ammo when they’ve gone Fascist, or close enough?”
“Beats me,” Mike answered cheerfully. “You know what, though? I don’t care. I’m gonna shoot it at Sanjurjo’s boys, and I’ll hit more of ’em with it than I would with the Spanish crap we’ve been using.”
“You got that right,” Chaim said. But he was someone who cared about why. He always had been. He wouldn’t have been a Marxist-Leninist-and he wouldn’t have been in Spain-if he weren’t.
He hunted up a French International he knew. Denis was older than he was: a Great War veteran. The Frenchman drank too much, but he was a good fellow to have around when things got tough. He also shared Chaim’s relentless itch to know. And, since he was a Frenchman, Chaim hoped he’d got word of which way the wind blew in his native land.
Chaim spoke no French. Denis knew no English; his German was limited to obscenities and the kinds of commands you might give to prisoners. He and Chaim stumbled along in Spanish. Neither was perfectly fluent, and each had an accent that sometimes puzzled the other, but they managed.
“How much do you want to bet even the War Ministry doesn’t know what’s going on with the ammo?” Denis said. “Maybe the Spaniards spread some money around and loosened things up-unofficially, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” Chaim fought dry with dry. “But the Republic is always broke. Where did it get the money?”
Denis spread his hands. They looked a lot like Chaim’s: the nails were short and ragged, and the callused palms had dirt ground into them. “I don’t know mierda like that. Maybe they got their gold back from the Russians.”
“Sure. Maybe they did.” Chaim exchanged a knowing look with Denis. Now that Stalin had the Republic’s gold reserves-to protect them and to pay for war supplies-how likely was he to send them back? No matter how good a Marxist-Leninist Chaim was, he didn’t believe it for a minute.
The cynical glint in Denis’ eye said he didn’t, either. But he didn’t come out with anything like that, not out loud. Talking too much could land you in more trouble than you ever wanted to see.
In musing tones, Denis said, “I wonder how happy the fucking Nazis would be if they knew France was juicing their little friends’ worst enemies here.”
“They’d be enchanted,” Chaim answered with a sly grin. “Just enchanted.” Encantar — the verb to enchant — bore an obvious resemblance in Spanish to cantar, to sing. After a beat, Chaim realized the relationship to a singing word was there in English, too, but it wasn’t so plain in his native tongue.
“Fuck ’em all, enchanted or not,” Denis said. “If Daladier’d ever spit Hitler’s cock out of his mouth…” He shook his head. “Too much to hope for.”
“Any which way, we’ve still got these cartridges,” Chaim said. No matter who, at whatever level in the French chain of command, had turned a blind eye, the crates were here. They wouldn’t go to waste, either.
As Peggy Druce crisscrossed Pennsylvania and made forays into other states to promote the war effort, she found herself facing an odd fact: the fight might be on, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
For one thing, it was so far away. Two thousand miles from Pennsylvania to the Pacific. Another two thousand from the Pacific to Hawaii. And another two or three thousand miles after that to where the guns were actually going off. Hitler’s fight against Stalin was closer than FDR’s battle with Tojo and Hirohito.
And, for another, it hadn’t affected the country much. Grocery stores were still full of unrationed food. Most gasoline went to the military, and you couldn’t get new tires for love or money. That turned the Sunday-afternoon drive into a thing of the past, but it was about as far as restrictions went. It was more than enough to make people piss and moan as if complaining were going out of style.
Peggy thought they were nuts. Of course, she’d seen Germany. One look at what went on there would have been plenty to make the grumblers turn up their toes. No gas at all for any civilians but doctors. No tires, either-in fact, the Germans took tires and batteries from civilian vehicles so the Wehrmacht could use them. Rationed clothing. All the new stuff was shoddy, or else made of cheap synthetic fibers. And the food… Next to no fruit. Precious little meat. Milk for kids and expectant mothers only. Lots of potatoes and turnips and cabbage and black bread. Awful cigarettes, and even worse ersatz coffee.
The Germans bitched about it. Not even the SS could stop that. But bitching was all they did. They let off steam, and then they went back to the serious business of conquering their neighbors.
By the way a lot of Americans carried on, they wanted to string Roosevelt up from the nearest lamppost. “He said he wouldn’t get us into a war, and then he went and did!” If Peggy’d heard that once, she’d heard it a thousand times. It was commonly followed by, “Who the devil cares what goes on way the devil over there across the ocean?”
“You’d be singing a different tune if the Japs had hit Pearl Harbor as hard as they wanted to,” she would answer.
“If, if, if,” the naysayers said. “Who gives a darn about might-have-beens? It didn’t happen, so what are you jumping up and down about it for?”
What would really have got Pennsylania’s attention was a war closer to home. Had Hitler declared war on the USA… But he hadn’t. He had warned that German U-boats would go after American ships in the Atlantic now that England was fighting him again, but that was as far as he’d gone. He seemed to be telling Roosevelt, If you want to declare war on me, go right ahead. Be my guest.
Peggy had a picture of FDR doing that. Right next to it, she had a picture of Congress refusing to ratify the declaration. The Japs had started shooting at the same time as they declared war on America. That didn’t leave anybody much choice. Hitler, for once, seemed content to let his opponents make the first move.