She knew they talked about her behind her back. Running the pub by herself didn’t quite turn her into a scarlet woman, but it came close. The funny thing was, the USAF and RAF flyers who came to the Owl and Unicorn from Sculthorpe knew bloody well she was no such thing. They would have liked her ever so much better if she were.
They drank her beer and whiskey. They ate her snacks. They played darts in the snug-the locals, better practiced, commonly took their money without the least remorse. And they chatted her up and trotted out all their patented ladykiller routines. And, to a man, they struck out-an American turn of phrase she rather liked.
She knew they talked about her behind her back, too. They called her frigid. They called her a carpet-muncher. She was neither. She liked men fine, thank you very much. When she went to bed not too exhausted, she missed Tom’s arms around her almost more than she could bear. He’d been part of a Cromwell crew in northwestern Germany during the last days of the war. A diehard with a Panzerschreck made sure he never saw Fakenham again.
But she knew that, if she slept with the customers, they wouldn’t come to the Owl and Unicorn for the beer or the pub grub or the darts. They’d come for a go with her. Then she really would be the scarlet woman the Fakenham gossips made her out to be.
She didn’t want that. So she always smiled. She was always friendly, but never too friendly. She was always polite. And she was always unavailable for anything more than a smile.
RAF men wore a slaty blue, Yanks in the USAF a darker shade. She wasn’t sure which uniform annoyed her more. Some of the RAF officers really were bluebloods, and thought women fell at their feet by divine right. Some of the Americans thought all foreign women were tramps.
And then there was Bruce McNulty, one of the B-29 pilots who visited fire and devastation on cities under Stalin’s muscular thumb. He never had come on so strongly as a lot of the flyers did. That left her surprised at herself for slapping him down as hard as she did.
She realized later, when it was too late, she’d done it more because she might be interested than because she wasn’t. She wasn’t used to being interested in a man. She hadn’t been, not that way, since the War Ministry let her know Tom wouldn’t be coming home.
She would have chalked it up to water over the damn dam if he hadn’t shown up with roses one night after closing time not long before. She made sure she took those upstairs to her flat over the pub. If she’d left them where the customers could see them, everybody would have been sure he knew what she’d done to get them. That she hadn’t done that at all had nothing to do with the price of a pint. Her life would have got complicated in ways she didn’t need.
Or did she? She’d sometimes daydreamed about a handsome American pilot sweeping her off her feet and carrying her back to the States when his tour of duty here ended. She’d always assumed no Yank she slept with here would want to take her home with him. With Bruce, she wasn’t so sure.
Then the locals started coming in, and she had no time for daydreams. Once Sculthorpe became a going concern, the men from Fakenham who visited the Owl and Unicorn mostly began to do it in the afternoon. Except for the darts hustlers, they left the evening to the officers and other ranks who bicycled in from the base. Oh, not always, but more often than not.
Some nights, no one from the base showed up. Those were the nights when the roar of big planes climbing into the darkness-and, much later, landing again-reverberated through Fakenham. Daisy always hoped as many came back as had set out.
Sometimes men suddenly stopped coming in. Sometimes she found out what happened to them; sometimes nobody ever mentioned their names again. You never could tell. When that silence fell, she didn’t like to break it by seeming snoopy.
I will, though, if I think anything’s happened to Bruce, she told herself. Then they’d know where her feelings lay. She didn’t care, which was in itself a measure of how strong those feelings were.
Tonight, though, Bruce walked in early, as cheerful as if he were a commercial traveler rather than a B-29 pilot. How many A-bombs had he dropped? How many cities had he ruined? How many people had he incinerated? Daisy didn’t like to think about that, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. Bruce and the other pilots didn’t like to talk about it, so they probably didn’t care to contemplate it, either.
“Pint of your best bitter, dear,” he told Daisy, and shoved two silver shillings across the bar.
A pint cost one and three. Daisy started to make change; he waved for her not to bother. That was a ridiculous tip, but not so ridiculous as the ones he’d left when he started coming around. “Thanks,” Daisy murmured. “You really don’t have to do that, you know.”
He laughed. “What better do I have to spend my money on than good beer from a pretty girl?” he said. “Eat, drink-especially drink-and be merry, because tomorrow…Well, we’re all better off not thinking about tomorrow, aren’t we?”
The pilots might not want to talk about their friends and comrades who went down instead of coming back, but they had them on their minds, all right. They knew that what happened to those fellows could happen to them next. They knew it would happen to them if they flew enough missions. Sooner or later, the ball on the roulette wheel always landed in the zero slot, and people at the table lost their bets. Casinos never went broke. Pilots didn’t keep coming back forever.
After a long draught from the pint, he said, “You know, one of these times, if you can find somebody to ride herd on this place for a while, we ought to go out dancing or something-if there’s any place to go dancing around here.”
“I expect there is.” Actually, Daisy wasn’t so sure of that herself. The last time she’d wondered about it, she’d been going out with Tom before…well, before.
“Can you get somebody, then?” Bruce asked.
“I expect I can.” Daisy wasn’t so sure of that, either. But she was very sure she’d try her hardest.
4
Boris Gribkov and the rest of the Tu-4’s crew had lingered in western Germany much longer than he’d ever expected they would. Having your navigator blow out the back of his head would do that to you.
They could have flown back to an airfield in the eastern zone or in Poland or Czechoslovakia. They could have done a little hop like that without a navigator, or with Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, filling in for poor, dead Tsederbaum. It would have been safe enough.
But no one who outranked Gribkov thought for a moment of letting them get away without interrogation. First came the men from the MGB, the Ministry of State Security. “Did Lieutenant Tsederbaum show any sign of disaffection before committing suicide?” a Chekist with a double chin asked Gribkov.
Of course he did, you dumb prick, Gribkov thought. His face, though, showed nothing of what went on behind his eyes. In the USSR, you learned not to give yourself away…or you gave yourself away and paid the price for it.
You also learned not to give anyone else away if you could possibly help it. His voice as wooden as his features, the pilot said, “Never that I noticed, Comrade.” They couldn’t do anything to Leonid, not now. They could build a dossier against his relatives. Gribkov didn’t care to lend them a hand.
“Before his act, was he in any way unsatisfactory in the performance of his duties?” the MGB man persisted. Yes, they were trying to make a case, all right.
“He wouldn’t have won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal if he had been,” Gribkov said, shaking his head. “We struck Seattle. We struck Bordeaux. We struck Paris. We couldn’t have hit our targets without the best navigation.”
“Then why did he do it?” the fat fool demanded.
He did it because we struck Seattle and Bordeaux and Paris, Boris thought. Tsederbaum made the mistake of seeing enemies as human beings. For a fighting man, that could be fatal. For the thoughtful Jew, it damn well had been.