No one eating breakfast said anything to that. No one imagined anything could be safe to say. No one even wanted to look at anyone else. The look on your face could betray you, too.
Soviet generals-far more than four of them-started disappearing in 1937. Like some of the Old Bolsheviks who started getting it in the neck at the same time, a few confessed to treason in show trials before they were executed. Others were simply put to death, or vanished into the camps, or just…disappeared.
It wasn't only generals, either. Officers of all ranks were purged. So were bureaucrats of all ranks, and so were doctors and professors and anyone who seemed dangerous to anyone else.
Now the same thing was happening in Germany? Sergei had sometimes thought that Communists and Nazis were mirror images of each other, one side's left being the other's right and conversely. He'd never shared that thought with anyone; had he tried, he would put his life in the other person's hands. He wished the idea had never crossed his mind. Just having certain notions was deadly dangerous. They might show up on your face without your even realizing it. And if they did, you were dead.
Or maybe worse.
So did the enemy have to worry about the kinds of things that had convulsed the Soviet Union for the past couple of years? Good, Sergei thought. If both sides were screwed up the same way, the one he was on looked to have a better chance. LUDWIG ROTHE LIT A GITANE he'd got from a German infantryman who'd taken a pack from a dead French soldier. It was strong as the devil, but it tasted like real tobacco, not the hay and ersatz that went into German cigarettes these days.
"Have another one of those, Sergeant?" Fritz Bittenfeld asked plaintively.
"You look like a hungry baby blackbird trying to get a worm from its mama," Ludwig said. Fritz opened his mouth very wide, as if he really were a nestling. Laughing, Ludwig gave the panzer driver a Gitane.
"Chirp!" Theo Hossbach said, flapping his arms. "Chirp!" He got a cigarette, too.
They'd all smoked them down to tiny butts when a blackshirt who'd been prowling around the panzer park finally got to them. "Can I talk to you boys for a minute?" he asked, a little too casually.
His shoulder straps were plain gray, with two gold pips. That made him the SS equivalent of a captain. How could you say no? You couldn't. "What's up, sir?" Ludwig tried to keep his voice as normal as he could.
"You men have served under Major Koral for some time-isn't that so?" the SS man said.
"Ja," Ludwig said. Fritz and Theo both nodded. No harm in admitting that, not when the blackshirt could check their records and find out for himself that Koral had led the panzer battalion since the war started.
"All right," the SS man said, in now-we're-getting-somewhere tones. "How often have you heard him express disloyalty toward the Fuhrer and the Reich?"
"Disloyalty?" Ludwig echoed. He had trouble believing his ears. But the SS man nodded importantly. He seemed as full of his own righteousness as the more disagreeable kind of preacher. Picking his words with care, Ludwig said, "Sir, you do know, don't you, that Major Koral's already been wounded in action twice?"
"Yes, yes." The SS man nodded impatiently, as if that were of no account. To him, it probably wasn't. He went on, "I'm not talking about his military behavior. I'm talking about his political behavior." You idiot, his gaze added. You're supposed to know things like that without being told.
Sergeant Rothe bristled at so obviously being thought a moron. But then he chuckled to himself. If the blackshirt figured him for a Dummkopf, a Dummkopf he would be, by God. "Sir, the major just gives me orders. He doesn't waste his time talking politics with noncoms."
"What's going on, anyway?" Theo sounded as innocent as an un-weaned baby. His dreamy features let him get away with that more easily than Ludwig could have.
The SS man didn't hesitate before answering, "You will have heard that certain Wehrmacht generals betrayed their country by viciously plotting against the Fuhrer?"
Ludwig had heard that, all right, from Hitler's own lips. Telling the SS man as much struck him as the very worst of bad ideas. "Gott im Himmel!" he exclaimed, as if it were a complete surprise. "I heard it, ja, but I thought it was only enemy propaganda." Beside him, Theo and Fritz nodded.
"It's true, all right," the blackshirt said. "They were disgraces to the uniform they wore, disgraces to the Volk, disgraces to the Reich. And so we must purify the army of all their associates and of everyone who might have shared their vicious views. Now do you understand why I am inquiring about Major Koral?"
"He wouldn't do anything like that," Fritz said. "He wouldn't put up with anybody else who did, either."
Theo nodded again. "That's right."
"I think so, too," Ludwig said.
"You might be surprised. You might be very surprised indeed," the SS man said. "We've found treason in some places where no one would have thought to look for it if these generals hadn't disgraced themselves."
If Ludwig hadn't heard it from the Fuhrer, he would have wondered what that meant. He did wonder what the SS and the Gestapo were up to now. Had they sniffed out more real treason, or had they "discovered" it regardless of whether it was really there? He didn't ask this fellow that kind of question. That it could occur to him might be plenty to mark him as disloyal.
He did ask, "Why do you think Major Koral might be mixed up in this…this Scheisse?"
"Scheisse it is," the SS man agreed. He pulled a scrap of paper from the right beast pocket of his tunic. "He has…let me see…a long history of association with General Fritsche, and also with General Halder. He may have been a Social Democrat before 1933-the record is not completely clear about that, but it is worrisome. And one of his cousins was formerly married to a Jew."
If Fritsche and Halder were two of the generals who'd tried to overthrow the Fuhrer, that might mean something. Or, of course, it might not. Ludwig had a long history of association with his cats, but he'd never wanted to eat mice himself. The rest didn't seem to mean much. The Social Democrats had been the biggest party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. They were about as exclusive as a blizzard. Ludwig had no great use for Jews, but he thought one of his cousins was married to one, too. He hoped to God the SS would never dig that out and use it against him.
"Sorry not to be more help, sir," he said insincerely.
"Like the sergeant said, Major Koral's always been brave in combat," Theo added. "Didn't he win the Iron Cross First Class? Didn't they put him up for the Ritterkreuz?"
The Iron Cross First Class-just like the Fuhrer, Ludwig thought-one more thing he knew better than to say out loud. But the two awards weren't really comparable. Lots of officers got the Iron Cross First Class now. For a common soldier in the Kaiser's army to have won it the last time around was much more remarkable. Even the Knight's Cross in this war wasn't the same.
The SS man looked unhappy enough at Theo's mild questions. "That has nothing to do with anything," he said stiffly. "If you recall anything suspicious about him, report it to your superiors at once. At once, do you hear?" He tramped off, his back ramrod straight.
"Jesus Christ on roller skates!" Fritz said. "I think I'd sooner go to the dentist than get another little visit like that."
"You can spread that on toast and call it butter," Theo agreed. Ludwig supposed it was agreement, anyhow. The radioman came out with the strangest things sometimes.