Delgadillo pointed north. "That way, about a kilometer and a half. Why do you need him?" He would never have asked that of one of his own officers. Spanish common soldiers didn't ask their officers anything. They existed to do as they were told. But the Germans were so foreign, so exotic, they might not know that.
Sure enough, this one answered readily enough: "We need spare parts to discuss. Since the big war in Europe began, we have from a shortage of them suffered."
Why didn't he put his verbs where they would do him some good? Did he hide them in his own language, too? He must have, or he wouldn't have done it in Spanish.
"I don't know if he'll be able to help you, Senor." Delgadillo was polite. He didn't tell the Condor Legion men the engineering officer didn't have a chance in hell of doing them any good. Lieutenant Lopez tried hard. Sometimes he could come up with a new bolt or a spring for a rifle. He'd done yeoman's duty repairing the broken axle on a horse-drawn wagon. But he knew no more about airplane parts than a goat knew about the miracle of transubstantiation.
"Well, we will out find. Many thanks. Much obliged," the German said. He and his pal headed north. A Spaniard, on a mission bound to be futile, would have taken his time. The Germans marched away as if they were on a parade ground. Why anybody would be so diligent without some superior's eye on him was more than Delgadillo could fathom. He shrugged. The foreigners might be a little bit crazy, but they were good at what they did, and they were on his side.
He looked west again. No British battleships. No smoke in the distance. No enormous shells crashing down like the end of the world. Nothing but one Spanish soldier with the jitters.
Well, no. That wasn't quite true. A couple of hundred meters away, an officer with enormous, tripod-mounted binoculars scanned the horizon. Delgadillo knew there were observation posts up on the heights of the Rock, too. They could see farther from there.
If the battleships came and those Germans didn't have their spare parts…What would happen then? The same thing that would happen if there were no airplanes. The ships would pound the stuffing out of Gibraltar.
He laughed at himself. What could he do about it any which way? Jump into the closest foxhole, work his rosary for all it was worth, and pray to the Virgin to keep the guns from blowing him to dogmeat. A common soldier's life wasn't easy, but most of the time it was pretty simple.
Any common soldier, no matter whose army he belonged to, learned to look busy, even-often especially-when he wasn't. Sergeant Carrasquel turned his basilisk stare on Joaquin, but didn't put him to work. If you had a rag and a brush, you could look as if you were cleaning your rifle. No underofficer ever complained if he caught you doing that. And if you weren't so diligent as you might have been…well, how could a sergeant tell?
Having successfully evaded any real duty most of the day, Delgadillo queued up for supper with no small feeling of accomplishment. Food on the Rock was pretty good. Not the smallest reason was that much of it came from captured British supplies. The enemy had done his best to destroy what he could before Gibraltar fell, but the Spaniards took the place before he could ruin it all. Joaquin had heard that the Tommies scorned bully beef, but it beat the devil out of going empty.
Pride went before a fall. He got nabbed for kitchen police. Washing and drying and scrubbing weren't dangerous, but they weren't any fun, either. Pepe Rivera, the boss cook, was a top sergeant, and an evil-tempered son of a whore, too. No matter what Joaquin did, it wasn't good enough to suit him.
Delgadillo had just gone to bed when antiaircraft guns woke him up. He grabbed his helmet-a Spanish copy of the German model from the last war-and ran for the closest trench. "God damn the French to hell!" he said as he scrambled down into it.
"He will. He does," another soldier said. It wasn't the first time French bombers had crossed from Morocco to hit Gibraltar. They were only nuisance raids-nothing like the pounding the papers said the Germans were giving to London and Paris. But you could get killed in a nuisance raid, too, if you were careless or unlucky.
Bombs whistled down. They exploded, none of them especially close. The drone of aircraft engines overhead faded away. The antiaircraft guns kept hammering for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they seemed satisfied and shut up.
"Gracias a Dios y su Madre," Joaquin said, climbing out of the trench. He yawned enormously. Maybe he could grab some sleep at last. OUT ON THE STREETS OF MUNSTER, away from any possible microphones, Sarah Goldman said, "I wish we'd get another letter." Even here, she named no names and gave no details. You never could tell who was listening. If people in Germany had learned anything since 1933, that was it.
Her mother nodded. "So do I. But we were lucky to get one, and Frau Breisach put herself in danger to bring it to us."
"I know. It was kind of her. Brave of her, too," Sarah said.
Propaganda posters sprouted like mold on walls and fences and tree trunks. Some showed jut-jawed, blue-eyed men in coal-scuttle helmets: recruiting posters for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Sarah didn't mind those so much. Germany was at war, after all. Father and Saul would have joined if the country had let them. In spite of everything, Saul had joined.
There'd been more Waffen-SS posters lately, especially since the coup against Hitler failed. Sarah didn't like that, but she didn't know what she could do about it. No. Actually, she did know. She couldn't do a thing.
Other posters showed hook-nosed, flabby-lipped Jews pulling the strings on puppets of Chamberlain and Daladier, or a capitalist Jew in a morning coat and top hat shaking hands with a Communist Jew in overalls and a flat cloth cap above a woman's corpse labeled GERMANY. Still others carried a stark, simple message: THE JEWS ARE OUR MISFORTUNE.
"Why do they hate us so much?" Sarah whispered. The poison made her want to hate herself.
"I only wish I knew," Mother answered. "Then maybe I could do something about it." She sighed. Her breath smoked. Spring was supposed to be on the way, but it hadn't got here yet. "Or maybe knowing wouldn't make any difference. Sometimes things just are what they are, that's all."
"That's what I was afraid of," Sarah said. "If it made sense, though…" She shook her head in frustration. "If it had to make sense, the goyim wouldn't do it."
"They might. Sometimes people don't care what they do." Mother paused, then added, "And look at the name you just called them. If you could, you'd do worse than call them names, wouldn't you?"
"I wouldn't start anything," Sarah said. "But after all they've done to us, shouldn't we get even if we can?"
"An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. And after a while everyone's blind and nobody has any teeth," Mother said sadly.
Laborers were still repairing British bomb damage and hauling away rubble one wheelbarrow at a time. The RAF wanted to make sure Germany had no eyes or teeth. Sarah had always thought of herself as a German, at least till the Nazis wouldn't let her any more, and the enemy bomber crews were trying to kill her, too. All the same, she wouldn't have shed a tear if one of their bombs blew up Hitler and Hess and Goebbels and Goring.
The laborers paused when Sarah and her mother went by. Sarah felt their eyes on her-and maybe on Mother, too. She tried to pretend the sweaty men in overalls weren't there: that was one more complication she didn't need.
And looking at them would have reminded her of Saul working in a gang just like this one…and of his shovel caving in the gang boss' skull. She wished she could forget she'd ever seen that. She wished she could forget she'd ever heard it, too.
"Hey, sweetheart!" one of the workmen called. He rocked his hips forward and back. His buddies laughed.
Sarah just kept walking. "They don't know we're Jews," she said in a low voice.
"A good thing, too. They'd be worse if they did," her mother answered. "I keep hearing they're going to make us put yellow stars on our clothes. Thank God it hasn't happened yet-that's all I can say."