He won’t rat on me, Ivan thought. In the USSR, that was the touchstone of trust. Zhid or not, Sasha passed. He and Ivan had saved each other’s nuts plenty of times. Mikhail, on the other hand …
Soviet officers used up men the way they used up machine pistols and tanks and planes. Ivan had joked about the Germans’ manufacturing soldiers. His own superiors behaved more as if they thought their side did. Doing this or that would cost so many men, so many machines. So when they did this or that, they didn’t care a bit if they lost that many tanks and that many soldiers. They even had a word for that; Ivan had heard them use it. The troops and the equipment were fungible, was what they were.
And if Soviet officers had an attitude like that, what kind of attitude was a hard-nosed Soviet sergeant likely to have?
Next morning, Ivan booted his men out of their bedrolls before any light showed in the eastern sky. “C’mon, you whores,” he growled. “We’re gonna shove ourselves up the Fritzes’ cunts before they’ve pissed away their morning hard-ons.” Somebody laughed. Ivan rounded on him. “What’s so fucking funny?”
“Nothing, Comrade Sergeant,” the soldier said quickly. “I serve the Soviet Union!” It was as soft an answer as he could give. If he’d tried to explain about mixed metaphors, Ivan would have knocked the crap out of him.
They ate black bread and sausage. Some of them gulped their hundred-gram vodka ration to keep from worrying about what might happen pretty soon. Kuchkov drank some of his, but not all. Sasha Davidov didn’t touch any. At the point, he needed to stay alert as a hunted rabbit.
Mikhail swallowed his vodka dose, every drop of it. The Red Army men moved out in a ragged skirmish line. More of them carried PPDs like Ivan’s than rifles. At close quarters, all you wanted to do was spray a lot of lead around. A machine pistol was terrific for that.
They moved cautiously, hunching low. The sun coming up behind them could silhouette them against the horizon and throw their moving shadows a long, long way.
Somewhere up ahead sat a farm village. The Germans didn’t seem to want to pull back from it. Maybe one of the cunts there was an extra good lay. Boot the Hitlerites out and the next village was six or eight kilometers farther west. It seemed worth doing.
Sasha hit the dirt a split second before the MG-42 in the village started spitting out death. Ivan didn’t know what kind of animal instinct the little Jew had, but Davidov had it, all right. And, because Ivan kept an eye on him, he also hit the ground before bullets snapped through where he’d been.
Some of the other Red Army men went down on their own as soon as the lead started flying. Others had 7.92mm help in falling. The Russians fired back, though they were still too far outside the village for submachine guns to do much good. Well, that was why you still needed to bring along some riflemen.
“Flank them out!” Kuchkov yelled. “You pussies-yeah, you over there! Go get ’em!”
They tried. They feared him more than they feared the Fritzes. But they started too soon. Hitler’s fearsome buzz saw swung around and knocked them back before they could knock it out. No, the Nazis really didn’t want to leave this place. And, as long as they fed belts into that MG-42, they could kill a regiment’s worth of Russians here.
Ivan knew a lost cause when he saw one. “Back!” he shouted. “We’ll have to shell them out or bomb them out or something, the fuckers.”
The Russian soldiers who could retreat did. Kuchkov wasn’t altogether astonished when he saw that Mikhail wasn’t one of them. The new guy had been part of the flanking party the German machine gun savaged. Wasn’t that a shame? Ivan rolled some coarse makhorka in a scrap of newsprint and lit the homemade cigarette. Fungible wasn’t mat, but it still turned out to be a handy word to know.
Brakes chuffing, the train pulled into Broad Street Station. Peggy Druce looked out the window at the familiar platform. Another political trip down-this one to Altoona. That was about as far west as she usually went. Somewhere around there, Philadelphia’s gravity or influence or whatever you wanted to call it began to fade and Pittsburgh’s to grow.
Even Pennsylvania’s roads reflected the split between the state’s two biggest cities. In the southeast, they looked like a segment of a spider web with Philly sitting where the spider would. Pittsburgh occupied a similar position in the southwest. Geography had something to do with that. Some of it, though, was attitude and who your friends were.
“Broad Street Station! Philadelphia!” the conductor shouted, in case you were too dumb to know where you were.
Peggy was already on her way to the door. She’d scoot back to the baggage car to snag her suitcase. Then she’d splurge and take a cab back to her house.
Only she didn’t. There on the platform waiting for her stood Dave Hartman. The master machinist sent her a crooked grin. “Hey, good-lookin’,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” Peggy asked, more surprised than pleased. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“They’re doing a changeover-gotta retool a little on account of we’ll be making a new model,” Dave answered. “So I had me the afternoon off, and I figured I’d pick you up.”
“That was sweet,” Peggy said as she went back to the baggage car. Dave walked beside her. She gave the colored redcap her claim check, and handed him fifteen cents when he set her suitcase at her feet.
Dave grabbed the suitcase. “Your back!” Peggy squawked.
“Hush your face, doll,” he said. So she did.
When they got to his old Ford, she said, “Honest, Dave, you didn’t need to bother. I know what the gas ration is these days.”
“Hush your face,” he repeated as he threw the suitcase in the trunk. Only after he’d held the door open for her did he go on, “Don’t hardly drive it any which way. Gotta give it a go every once in a while or the tires’ll flatten out and the battery’ll die on me.”
Peggy knew that protesting too much was a losing cause. All she said was, “Well, thank you very much. I was going to grab a taxi.”
“Waste of money when you’ve got your own private chauffeur.” Dave started the car. You could hardly hear the engine, no matter how old it was. Yes, he took care of it better than any garage was likely to. He put it in gear. “I do hope the tires hold out. You really gotta have connections to get your hands on new ones, way things are these days.”
“I may be able to take care of that if you need them,” Peggy said.
“Through the guy who was dumb enough to dump you?” Dave shook his head. “No offense, but I don’t want anything to do with him.”
Herb probably could get new tires when he needed them. No denying he was a well-connected man. But Peggy answered, “I wasn’t thinking about him. Remember, I just came back from a political trip-and I’ve made a lot of them. Plenty of Democratic big shots who owe me a favor or two. I could promote some Firestones or Goodyears, I expect.”
He laughed. “Never thought I’d get to know a fixer, not in a month of Sundays I didn’t. See what happens when you go to a ballgame?”
“All kinds of crazy things,” Peggy agreed with a fond smile. She had no idea whether this was love or just a rebound. People who’d been through divorces said you were commonly crazy the first couple of years after your knot got untied. If it ended up not working, she’d chalk it up to experience and try to go on from there. In the meantime, she’d enjoy it for as long as it stayed enjoyable. It had so far.
Not many cars were on the streets. Compared to Philadelphia before the war, they seemed deserted. Compared to Hitler’s Germany … The only civilian vehicles that still operated in the Third Reich were fire engines, ambulances, and doctors’ cars. Yes, whether this glass was half empty or half full depended on how you looked at things.