La Martellita’s glare did not abate. “You aren’t helping,” she said pointedly.
“What am I supposed to say?” he asked in what he thought of as reasonable tones. Odds were La Martellita thought he was hectoring her. Hectoring or not, he went on, “If you want me to marry you, I will.”
Did that just come out of my mouth? he wondered dizzily. Damned if it didn’t. He knew damn well it was dumb luck he’d ever got to sleep with her in the first place. She’d drunk herself sad-hell, she’d drunk herself tragic-and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. There’d never been a dull moment in the sack with her, whether she was drunk or sober. All the same, he’d always figured himself for the cat that fell into the cream pitcher. Before long, it would have to scramble out and lick its fur dry, and then it would have a memory to last forever.
But if he could keep right on bedding down with her… If he could see if he might make a go of it with this fierce, beautiful, eminently kissable creature… That would be joy beyond his wildest dreams-at least till she decided she’d rather murder him than live with him any more.
“Well!” she said, nodding slowly. “You are a gentleman after all. Yes, let’s do that. It will give the child a name-and I can divorce you as soon as it’s born.” She sounded as if she eagerly looked forward to it, too.
She probably did. Divorce was easy in the Spanish Republic: easier than in the States, even in Nevada. Where Marshal Sanjurjo ruled, it was impossible. He and his followers took their religion seriously, or at least legislated as if they did.
Chaim took the bull by the horns. “Let’s go find a judge,” he said. If he was going to be married, he hoped to enjoy the privileges of matrimony for as long as he could.
La Martellita kept right on glaring. She didn’t have to be Einstein or Freud to know what was in his beady little mind. “You only want to keep screwing me.”
“Not only, my sweet,” Chaim answered with such dignity as he could muster. “But a man has to be a maricon not to want to screw you. Even if he is a maricon, he’ll think about it.”
You never could tell what she’d like and what would piss her off. That, she seemed to like. She even laughed a little. “You’re crazy,” she said, not without admiration.
“ El narigon loco, that’s me,” he agreed, not without pride. The crazy kike: a nickname he’d acquired by brawling in bars like a man who didn’t care if he lived or died. Well, if marrying La Martellita wasn’t a good reason to go on living, he couldn’t imagine what would be.
And if she was going to have a baby, so was he. He hadn’t left a wife and kids behind to come fight in Spain, the way some Abe Lincolns and a lot of other Internationals had. This would be his first time as a father. He liked that idea, too-maybe not so much as jumping on La Martellita’s elegant bones whenever he felt like it, but he did.
“ Moscow speaking.”
Along with the other officers in his squadron, Anastas Mouradian listened to the hourly news. When you were fighting a war, you only know how your own little piece of it was going. Often enough, you weren’t even sure about that. If you were going to see the bigger picture, you’d see it through the radio and the newspapers.
“There is fierce fighting against the Fascist invaders near the border between the Byelorussian SSR and the Russian Federated SSR,” the newsreader went on. Stas heard him rustle the papers from which he was reading. “And heavy fighting continues in the northwestern Ukrainian SSR.”
Fierce fighting meant fierce fighting. Heavy fighting meant the Red Army was taking it on the chin. Nobody in the Soviet Union ever came right out and admitted things were going badly. You had to decode the news and read between the lines if you were even going to see through a glass, darkly.
“Lieutenant General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov continues to distinguish himself in combat against the Hitlerites,” the announcer said. “An entire German panzer division has been hurled back in confusion by his troops.”
That was interesting. Except for Stalin and Marshal Zhukov, the news rarely mentioned generals by name. Maybe that was a hangover from a few years before, when so many of them got purged. Any which way, this Andrei Vlasov seemed to have evaded the restriction.
“There is also an important announcement in the field of foreign relations,” the newsreader said. Mouradian tensed-and he wasn’t the only flyer listening to the news who did. What had gone wrong now? Had Finland declared war on the USSR? Had the United States? The one would be a misfortune; the other, a catastrophe. But, for once, it wasn’t that kind of announcement. The familiar voice continued, “Foreign Minister Litvinov will travel to Tokyo to confer with officials from the Empire of Japan about terms for ending the war in the Far East which Japan will find acceptable.”
Mouradian and several other officers sighed on the identical note. Peace against Japan hadn’t come cheap in the early years of the century, and it would be even more expensive now. Vladivostok would go, and with it the Soviet Union’s main Pacific port. The Trans-Siberian Railway wouldn’t go all the way across Siberia any more. The last war had cost Russia the southern half of Sakhalin Island north of Japan; this one would probably cost the USSR the rest of the place. And who could guess what else Japan would want to squeeze out of Litvinov?
On the other hand, the USSR desperately needed peace on the distant frontier, because it had a much bigger, much more urgent war much closer to home. When it came, the country could pay full attention to the Nazis and everybody else coming out of the west. Stas only hoped that would prove good enough to save the Soviet Union. Frighten all your neighbors and make them hate you, and this was the kind of mess you wound up in.
“President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States has offered to help mediate the dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan,” the announcer said. “His cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was President of the USA during the Russo-Japanese War, and helped work out the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended it. General Secretary Stalin immediately accepted the American proposal. The Japanese, however, refused it, declaring that they doubted America was truly committed to peace. This being so, Japan and the peace-loving Soviet Union will pursue their talks bilaterally.”
Some of Mouradian’s colleagues scratched their heads, trying to work out what was going on there. He sighed inside his own mind; some people really shouldn’t have been allowed to run around loose. Japan thought the USA would sabotage the peace talks, not help them along. That was obvious to Stas, if not to his comrades. As long as Japan was busy fighting the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t also take on the United States-not if her leaders were in their right mind, she wouldn’t.
But she was clearing the decks for the big fight, the important fight, no less than Stalin was. Knock America back on her heels and Japan was master of the Pacific. No one else could challenge her there. England and France were busy far closer to home. Holland, mistress of the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, lay under Nazi occupation. If Japan didn’t have to worry about the USA…
The newsreader spoke of the anticipated harvest and by how much it would exceed the norms established by the agricultural planners. Only the planners had any real idea of how much grain came in across the country. If they cooked the books to make things sound better, who would stop them? Who else would even know? As long as people didn’t start starving, nobody. And if people did start starving, it might be for reasons political rather than agricultural. Anyone who didn’t believe that could ask the surviving Ukrainians.
“Stakhanovite shock brigades continue to increase steel, coal, and aluminum production,” the newsreader said proudly. “Output rises even as factories are knocked down and transported east, out of range of the Hitlerite savages and their terror-bombing campaign.”