She flushed. He’d managed to hit a nerve, even if that was all he’d managed. “There were… moments,” she admitted.
“There could be more.” Chaim wanted like anything to sound debonair and suave. He had the bad feeling he seemed horny and desperate instead. Well, he was-both.
“No. It’s over.” La Martellita, by contrast, sounded altogether sure of herself. When didn’t she, dammit? “I have gone to the Palace of Justice to register the dissolution of our marriage.”
In the Republic, that was all you needed to do. Very simple. Very clean. Very civilized. “Aw, shit,” Chaim said in English. He’d known all along it was coming. That should have made it easier when it got here. Somehow, it didn’t. La Martellita didn’t speak English. He translated for her: “Mierda.”
“I don’t mind if you want to keep seeing the baby,” she said-she really was trying to be civilized. “But…” She didn’t go on, or need to. If he tried to touch her again, he’d leave without his cojones.
“Shit,” he said again. No, it didn’t hurt any less. More, if anything. He got to his feet. “Take care of yourself, querida. You could do worse than me.” He couldn’t help a little vinegar: “And I bet you do.”
“My worry. Not yours.” La Martellita looked toward the door. Out Chaim went. He headed for the bar a few blocks away, the one from which he’d taken her on the night they started Carlos. He brawled with a guy half again his size, and left him moaning and bloody on the floor. El narigon loco — the crazy kike-was on the loose again.
Vaclav Jezek listened to the impassioned Yiddish pouring out of the American International. The Czech guessed he was getting maybe two words out of three. That was plenty to understand what was wrong with the other guy.
“Women,” he said in his own slow, clumsy German when the American finally paused for breath. “Nothing better than a woman to drive a man nuts.”
He hadn’t cared about any one woman since he had to leave Czechoslovakia. When he got the urge, he went to a whorehouse and laid his money down. It was easy and quick. If it didn’t give him everything he might have wanted… Well, what did? Especially in wartime?
“Man, you got that right,” Chaim said. “I never thought I’d get this one to begin with. To get her and then to lose her like that-it’s a bastard and a half.”
“You had her for a while. That’s better than not having her at all,” Vaclav said.
“Is it? I fucking wonder,” the American replied.
Was it? Wasn’t it? Vaclav was trying for sympathy, not philosophy. He didn’t know. He didn’t think anybody could know. And, right now, it wasn’t his worry any which way. He unbuttoned his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Here. Have one of these.”
“Thanks. You’re a mensh, you know?” Chaim had an American lighter he fueled with brandy these days. Its blue flame was almost invisible, but lit his cigarette and one for Vaclav. They smoked together, and both stashed their tiny butts in tobacco pouches-waste not, want not. Chaim went on, “That was good. Not as good as pussy, but good.”
“You do what you can,” Vaclav answered with a shrug.
“Yeah. And when you can’t, you don’t.” The International reached out to touch the long barrel of Vaclav’s antitank rifle. “I hope you do, pal. I hope you blow that cocksucker Sanjurjo’s head from here to Bilbao, you know?”
“You do what you can,” Jezek repeated. People kept telling him to finish off the Nationalist leader. Nobody told him how, though. Wait till he shows up, then shoot him. That was what it boiled down to. If it were so easy, by now Sanjurjo would have as many holes in him as a colander. But only another sniper would understand that.
Or maybe not. “You can do it,” Chaim said. “Honest to God, you can. That Big Bertha you carry, it can reach farther than those Nationalist tukhus-lekhers really imagine.”
“If he shows up, I’ll try.” Vaclav didn’t know how many times he’d said that since reaching the Madrid front.
“Kill him. If you can’t fuck, killing’s the next best thing.” Chaim thumped him on the back and mooched away. Vaclav scratched his head. He didn’t get any kind of charge from shooting Fascist officers. The most he took from it was an artisan’s satisfaction at a difficult job done well. Some people had other ideas, though.
Trenches got muddy in fall. Rain made them even less livable than they were when it was dry. Rain also made sniping with the elephant gun harder. Yes, you could still kill somebody two kilometers away. Rain didn’t bother bullets a bit. But if you couldn’t see anybody two kilometers away, how were you supposed to kill him?
Vaclav still went out to one hidey-hole or another between the Republican lines and those of the Nationalists. If he had more trouble finding targets, the enemy would have more trouble finding him. Sometimes he would come back after dark without firing a shot. Better not to fire if you couldn’t do anything worthwhile. He told himself as much over and over again. It was frustrating all the same.
“Don’t worry about it,” Benjamin Halevy said after he blew off steam in the Jew’s ear.
“Easy for you to say,” Jezek snarled.
“Probably.” By refusing to take offense, Halevy only annoyed him more. “But you aren’t obliged to get yourself killed by being stupid. You’ve lived through another day. Maybe the chances tomorrow will look better. As long as you’re still here, you can find out.”
“Well…” Vaclav looked at that from every angle, trying to get angry at it. Try as he would, he couldn’t. “Do you have to be so sensible all the goddamn time?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best not to let it happen again,” Halevy said.
Vaclav wondered if Jews were usually that way. Then he thought about Chaim the American. Whatever else you could say about him, sensible he was not. Jews probably differed as much from one another as anybody else. From where Vaclav had started before the war, that made a pretty fair leap of tolerance and understanding.
It started raining harder. Halevy had a shelter half. He draped it over his shoulder for a poncho. “I hate winter in the field, you know?” he said.
“Tell me about it.” Vaclav’s shelter half dated back to the Czechoslovakian Army. He shrugged it on, too, but wondered why he bothered even as he did it. A lot of the rubberized fabric once coating it was long gone. That meant it let in water just like any other piece of cloth. “Next time we fight a war, let’s do it in Panama or the Belgian Congo or somewhere like that.” He named the places he could think of that were least likely to be afflicted with winter.
“There you go.” Benjamin Halevy nodded. “Good to see you’ve got it all figured out.”
“My ass. If I had it all figured out, I’d be lying on the beach on the Riviera or somewhere like that, next to a girl with hardly any clothes and even less in the way of morals.”
“Sounds good to me,” Halevy said. As a Jew in the French Army, he could have left the service when France threw in with the Nazis. Had he headed down to the Riviera, he could have found a girl like that. From everything Vaclav had seen, France was full of them. But Halevy chose to come to Spain and leave his life on the line. When you looked at him like that, who said he was so goddamn sensible?
Like animals, they both curled up and got what sleep they could. Vaclav woke before dawn-again, like an animal. He gnawed on garlicky sausage and hard bread, then went out into no-man’s-land. There were ways through the wire, if you knew them. Vaclav did-he’d made some of them.
What was left of a smashed house out there didn’t offer a whole lot of cover, but Vaclav didn’t need much. Most important were concealing the outline of his helmet and making sure the Nationalists couldn’t spot the antitank rifle’s long barrel. The ruins let him do both well enough.
He draped the shelter half over the big gun’s telescopic sight. Keeping it dry mattered more than keeping his carcass that way. War was at least as much about tools as about the men who wielded them.