At half past nine-an unexpected hour-the tent flap opened, showing muddy grass and watery sunshine outside. Daisy noticed them for only the shortest fragment of a split second. Into the tent ducked Bruce McNulty. He looked dashing in his dark blue U.S. Air Force uniform.
Daisy, on the other hand, looked like hell and knew it. She got a desultory sponge bath every other day. She hadn’t had her hair, what there was of it, washed in much too long.
But all the other women in their cots, and even the much cleaner and healthier sister, stared as McNulty came over to stand by her. He took off his officer’s cap and held it in both hands. “How are you, sweetie?” he asked.
“I feel better now you’re here,” she said, which was sappy but true.
“Yeah, well-” He left it there. Had he been at Sculthorpe when the Russian bomb fell, he would have been blasted to vapor. He had to know it, and to know she knew it, too. Instead, he was fine.
And why was he fine? Because he’d been up in his B-29, visiting the same hell that had fallen on her on untold thousands of people on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was everything she admired in a man-and he was also a killer with more deaths on his shoulders than all but a few of the most heinous Nazi murderers.
Did the Russian who’d bombed Sculthorpe wonder about such things, assuming the fighters hadn’t shot him down? How could he not? He was a man, wasn’t he?
“I just came to see how you were doing,” Bruce said.
“They think I’ll get better,” she answered. “I haven’t the faintest notion what I’ll do once that happens. Not much left of Fakenham, is there?”
“I drove past it on my way here. It got knocked around pretty good, yeah,” McNulty said. “Anything you need that I can take care of, though, you just have to ask. Anything at all. You know that, right?”
“It’s good to hear,” Daisy said quietly. That was also true. She had no claim on him, none he was obliged to honor. “Thank you.”
“Sure. Look, babe, I gotta go. But I’ll come see you first chance I get, promise.” He bent to kiss her cheek. Then he left. Daisy noticed the sunshine this time.
11
“Fire and fall back!” Sergeant Gergely shouted.
Istvan Szolovits popped up out of his foxhole like a malevolent jack-in-the-box. He fired a couple of rounds at the advancing Americans-or maybe they were Englishmen or Germans-and then, satisfied he’d made them put their heads down, trotted east through the war-shattered Ruhr.
War-shattered or not, this town (whichever town it happened to be) still had people living in it. “Look at the Russian pigdogs run!” one of them said to her equally elderly friend.
I’m not a Russian, you ugly German twat, Istvan thought. He laughed. Anger, under the circumstances, seemed absurd. Well, war was nothing if not absurd. He’d already found that out, over and over again.
The other old lady scrounging with a stringbag clucked like a laying hen. She pointed right at Istvan as he loped by. “Look at that one, Ilse!” she shrilled. “His whole face is peeling. How did he get a sunburn this late in the year?” He counted himself lucky. That was the burn scar healing, not radiation sickness. His unit hadn’t got it nearly so bad as others closer to the bomb.
Bullets were still cracking along the street, some from the Hungarians, others from the soldiers pushing forward against them. They bothered the two German crones no more than they did the men in uniform. Then again, it wasn’t as if the old ladies weren’t veterans at this kind of thing, too.
As for Istvan, he trotted around a corner and ducked into a recessed doorway. From there, he could shoot at anybody coming after him.
Some of the real Russians who’d come back from nearer to where the bomb went off had their noses and ears melted into their faces and the sides of their necks. He’d seen some things that gave him new nightmares. Just when you started to think you were hardened to horror, horror went and showed you you didn’t know so much after all.
More boots thumped on the shattered pavement. Istvan leaned forward. He still didn’t like shooting at Americans, but he’d seen they didn’t mind shooting at him one bit. You did what you had to do to stay alive. Everything else, you could worry about later.
But these weren’t Americans. They were comrades from the Hungarian People’s Army. My countrymen, Istvan thought, not without bitterness. It was less than even money that they would think of him that way. They were Magyars. He was just a damned Jew who chanced to live in Hungary and to speak Magyar as if he’d learned it while he was a baby-which, of course, he had.
One of them trotted past the doorway without even noticing Istvan in its shadow. The other, more alert, started to swing his PPD that way. Then he recognized the uniform, if not the Jew wearing it. He lowered the machine pistol, waved, and ran on.
Istvan waved back. He didn’t want the other man having doubts about what he was and which side he belonged to. From short range like this, there wasn’t much that was deadlier than a PPD.
Then the door opened behind him. He whirled, sure he was dead. There stood Sergeant Gergely, a cigarette in his mouth, his own submachine gun cradled in his arms, a wicked grin on his face. “Hi, there,” he said.
“Fuck you!” Istvan blurted, his heart still pounding like a runaway hippo.
“That’s ‘Fuck you, Sergeant!’?” Gergely clucked in mock reproof. “You have to respect the rank.”
“Fuck you, Sergeant! All right? Happy now?” After a ragged breath, Istvan managed to go on, “How the devil did you get there?”
“I was on the landing, one floor up, and I saw you coming. So I thought I’d bake you a cake.” The sergeant was still grinning. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
It didn’t seem that way to Istvan. Saying so, though, would only make Gergely laugh at him. What he did say was, “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Keep fighting. Slow the enemy down as much as we can. Make him pay for everything he gets.” Gergely would have listened to German officers talking that way in 1944 and 1945-talking that way about the Red Army, the army now on the same side he was. He went on, “And hope Stalin pulls some wonder weapons out of his back pocket, or maybe out of his asshole.”
He spoke the key word in German: Wunderwaffen. There was irony, if you chanced to be looking for some. The Germans had talked about wonder weapons in the last war. They’d talked about them more than they’d produced them, as a matter of fact. The ones they did produce-the long-range rocket, the jet fighter-were too little and came too late.
Now the Americans and the Russians had the wonder weapons, with the atom bomb topping the list. And where did they trot out their fancy new toys? Why, on what was left of Germany. If Hitler had a grave, wasn’t he bound to be spinning in it?
“Bet your balls he is, Jewboy,” Gergely said when Istvan brought out that conceit. Somehow, the insulting name seemed like an endearment from him. He went on, “The guys who invented the fucking gyroscope got the idea by watching the way old Adolf spun.”
Istvan gaped at him. “Bugger me blind if you aren’t crazier than I am, Sergeant.”
“I’ve seen way more shit than you have, kid,” Gergely answered. “If that doesn’t drive you round the bend, well, Christ, you ain’t half trying.” His eyes narrowed. In less than a heartbeat, he went from storyteller to wary soldier. No, he hadn’t stayed alive to see all that shit by accident. “Something’s coming,” he said. “Sounds like trouble.”
“Uh-huh.” Istvan heard it, too: the rumbling clatter of a tracked vehicle. It was moving from west to east, which meant the people inside wouldn’t be friendly. He ducked into the doorway Gergely’d come out of. The sergeant followed, closing the door after him. If those unfriendly people didn’t see them, they wouldn’t start shooting at them. Or Istvan hoped they wouldn’t.