No real sergeant would have hurled around the technical terms Colonel Ishii used. He talked about infection rates and vectors and plague and cholera and typhoid and paratyphoid. He talked about rodent breeding and insect breeding. He talked about anthrax and glanders and horses and cattle and spores. Much of it flew straight over Fujita’s head, except that he recognized it as scientific.
Ishii talked too much, as far as Fujita was concerned. But how could a sergeant say something like that to a senior officer? Simple-he couldn’t.
“I may be going off again before too long, either back to Japan for another lecture or off to south China to see what happens when we put some of what we’ve learned into action,” Ishii told his men. “Even when I’m gone, though, I know you’ll carry on with the work. Isn’t that right?”
“Hai!” they chorused.
“We are protecting Japan. We are serving the Emperor. Isn’t that right?” Ishii shouted.
“Hai!” the men repeated, louder this time.
“Good. Very good.” The colonel who was also a bacteriologist nodded, apparently satisfied. “Any country foolish enough to make Japan angry will regret it for ten thousand years! And isn’t that right, too?”
“Hai!” everyone yelled again.
Chapter 16
The next time Chaim Weinberg ran into La Martellita, it wasn’t because he was looking for her. It was because he got a pass to go back into Madrid and happened to walk into the bar where she was already drinking. Madrid had a lot-a devil of a lot-of bars. It was just dumb luck. After the way she’d sliced him to pieces outside Party headquarters, he was damned if he thought it was good luck.
His wounds were still fresh enough to hurt. He didn’t go over to her or try to pick her up. He just ordered a beer and some olives and crackers and sat down at a little table where he could look at her without making a pest of himself doing it.
She was already drunk, and getting drunker. No doubt hoping to take advantage of her, the guy beside her set a confident Spanish hand on her knee. Chaim wanted to do things like that so confidently. He wanted to flap his arms and fly, too.
Confident or not, the Spaniard misread the signs. La Martellita picked up his beer mug, threw the beer in his face, and broke the mug over his head. “?Madre de Dios!” he shrieked, beer and blood running down his cheeks and dripping from his nose and chin. “What did you do that for?”
“To teach you to keep your hands to yourself, you shitheaded motherfucking no-balls faggot,” she answered, and went on from there. Spanish was a good language to swear in, and Chaim realized he was listening to a modern master.
Like the beer and his own blood, it all rolled off the Spaniard. With immense dignity, he accepted a towel from the bartender and patted himself dry. When he saw how much blood splotched the towel, he mournfully shook his head. He got to his feet, which impressed Chaim. After a clop like that, the guy might have had a fractured skull.
He actually bowed to La Martellita. “You don’t need to worry about that any more, not with me,” he said. “You may be a whore, but you are a frigid whore.” He turned and walked out. He was taking a chance-she might have knifed him in the back or chased after him and beaten him to peanut butter. All she did, though, was give him more details on where to go and how to get there.
Then, to Chaim’s alarm, she picked up her glass of whiskey or brandy or whatever the hell it was and carried it over to his table. Unlike the hard-headed Spaniard, she wobbled when she walked. She plopped herself down across from him with a warning glare. “Don’t you start anything,” she snapped, breathing high-proof fumes in his face.
“What? You think I’m loco?” he said. “I like my head. It’s the only one I’ve got. I don’t want you to break it for me.”
“You’d better not,” she said fiercely. Then she took another big swig from her glass. How many times had she already emptied it? Quite a few, if Chaim was any judge. She slammed the glass down, slopping a little booze over the edge. And then she started to cry.
Weeping belligerent shikker women, care and management of was a manual Chaim hadn’t read. Hell, he didn’t even know where they issued it. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You still mad at that guy?”
She stared at him as if she thought he was even more cretinous than usual. “Claudio? Oh, no. He’s just an asshole,” she answered. “But the revolution in Spain is ru-ru-ruined.” She had to try three times before she could get the word out. It made her cry harder than ever. Eyeliner and mascara dribbled down her face. She dabbed at her eyes with a dirty handkerchief.
Chaim wanted to cuddle her and comfort her and tell her everything would be fine. He would sooner have tried it with a rattlesnake. All he said was “We’re doing fine. The Nationalists haven’t beaten us yet, and they won’t.”
The look she gave him then made him think he’d have to study to be a cretin. “Where will our munitions come from?” she said. “England and France have jumped into bed with the Nazis. Do you think they’ll keep sending arms to the progressive elements here? It will be even worse than it was before the big war started.”
If she was right, the Spanish Republic was, to use a technical term, screwed. But Chaim only shrugged. “They weren’t sending us much before,” he said. “They were using the stuff themselves.”
“They kept the Sanjurjo junta from getting any, though,” La Martellita said. She hiccuped, whether drunkenly or because she’d been crying Chaim couldn’t tell. “Now they won’t.”
He shrugged again. “If Germany is fighting the Russians right next door, she won’t have much to spare for the half-assed Fascists way the hell over here.”
This time, she eyed him like a floating spar in the middle of the ocean. “Do you really think so?” she asked. He wondered if he could get plastered on her breath. What a way to go, he thought dizzily.
“Sure,” he said with yet another up-and-down of the shoulders. “You wait. We’ll whip the bastards yet.”
Instead of answering, she upended the glass and waved peremptorily for a refill. Chaim recognized the brandy bottle the barman brought to the table. That shit was a distilled artillery barrage. She’d regret it come morning. Jesus, would she ever! But she poured down some more. With muzzy suspicion, she said, “Maybe you’re trying to soften me up so you can go to bed with me.”
“No,” he said, and the regret in his voice was plangent. “I don’t want you to kill me, and I don’t want Sanjurjo’s pendejos to kill me, either.”
“That’s what you say.” But even La Martellita couldn’t make herself sound too angry at him.
He nodded. “Yes. That is what I say. What can you do after you get killed?”
She considered his foolishness with drunken gravity. Then she thrust out an accusing forefinger at him. “You were very silly there, outside the Party offices. You looked like a boy who couldn’t get the candy he wanted.”
“Asi es la vida.” Chaim used that one a lot. When you spoke a language badly, cliches came in handy. And So it goes was better than bursting into tears the way she had. He thought it was, anyhow.
La Martellita wagged the finger his way. “You still want the candy.”
“Well, so what?” He hadn’t drunk a lot of beer, but he could feel his temper fraying. She’d drive a saint to armed robbery. Not without bitterness, he added, “Who wouldn’t? You’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re-” He stopped. Dammit, he didn’t know how to say sexy in Spanish. What the hell? He said it in English instead.
She understood it. He saw that right away. He wondered if he’d get a faceful of brandy with a glass chaser, the way she’d baptized luckless Claudio with beer. “But you don’t try groping me,” she said, and drank some of the vicious stuff instead of flinging it.
Yet another shrug. “Not American style. Not my style. Just coming to see you took all the nerve I had.”