Saul wound up in the Wehrmacht anyhow. He’d somehow managed to get false papers while on the run after smashing in his sadistic laborgang boss’ head with a shovel. Sarah thought that was a fine joke on the Nazis. And even if Saul was fighting the Russians in the East, he had to be safer than he would be in the Reich.
The air raid didn’t last long-no more than fifteen minutes. Sarah wouldn’t have wanted to linger above a well-defended city during the day, either. The French or English bombers buzzed away to the west. Sarah climbed to her feet and dusted herself off.
She scurried out of the shop ahead of the all clear. To her relief, she got away before the owner emerged from a bomb shelter. Someone seeing a Jew coming out was all too likely to assume she’d gone in to steal while the place was deserted. People did that during air raids. A Jew, of course, would never get the benefit of the doubt.
No point going after groceries now. Along with the burbling wail of the all-clear signal, fire-engine bells clanged. Smoke rose in half a dozen places. Hearing the fire engines’ motors-hearing any motors-seemed odd. Fire engines, an ambulance, doctors’ cars: those were the only civilian vehicles still on the streets.
Sarah dithered for a moment. She was closer to the house where she’d grown up than she was to the bakery. Should she go make sure her mother was all right? She didn’t see any smoke coming up from that direction. That made her decide to go back to her husband and his folks. She’d check on her own parents later.
An electric tram rattled past. Sarah kept walking, though it was going her way. In its wisdom and mercy, the Reich had declared public transport verboten to Jews.
The tram stopped short. A bomb had burst in the middle of the street. The Aryan passengers would have to hoof it just like her. The crater was five meters wide and at least two deep. Water from a burst main rapidly turned it into a pond. The blast had blown out the fronts of several shops. A gray-haired man in a leather apron stood on the battered sidewalk in front of his ruined place of business. What would he do now? By the way his head shook like a metronome, he hadn’t the least idea.
On Sarah went. A fire crew sprayed water on a burning building. Perhaps thanks to the smashed main, they didn’t have much water to spray. All they could do was try to keep the flames from spreading. They swore fierce, guttural oaths. Sarah admired the splendid profanity.
She’d thought of the ambulance a few minutes earlier. Its bell clanged on a note different from the fire engines’. A big splash of red against a wall said somebody hadn’t made it to any kind of shelter before the bombs fell. Whoever he was, he was unlikely to need an ambulance now-or ever again. Except for the blood, there was no sign of whoever’d got in the way of that bomb.
No smoke rose from the bakery. All the same, Sarah stopped short when she rounded the last corner. There was another new pond in the street right in front of the place, with water slopping out and pouring down the uncratered pavement. And the building … The building had fallen in on itself.
“No,” Sarah whispered, as if God could or would run the film of the world in reverse till this unhappened.
People were already attacking the wreckage with spades and with their bare hands. Not all of them were Jews, either. Germans could be decent. You just couldn’t count on them to act like that. Sarah ran forward to do what she could.
A man with a white mustache gaped at her. “You’re not in there,” he said foolishly.
“I was shopping.” Absurdly, Sarah felt guilty because she wasn’t buried by bricks and beams.
“Lucky you.” The man with the mustache lived half a block down. Right this minute, she couldn’t remember his name to save her life. She had bigger things to worry about. She dug through the wreckage like a badger.
“Here’s one of them,” another old man said. After a moment, with rough kindness, he added, “Well, he never would’ve known what hit him, anyway, poor bastard.”
That had to be David Bruck. Except, as the rescuers pulled the body free of the rubble, it wasn’t. It was Isidor. Someone draped a cloth over him, but not before Sarah saw how the left side of his head was all smashed in. The man who’d found him was right. That would have killed him right away.
Sarah made a half-choked noise, then started to cry. Within a couple of minutes, the would-be rescuers also found David and Deborah Bruck. They were dead, too. “It’s a shame, girlie,” the man with the white mustache said, offering Sarah a none-too-clean handkerchief so she could blow her nose. “They might’ve been Yids, but they were nice folks.” A Jew in Germany was unlikely to win a better epitaph.
“What’ll she do now?” a woman asked, and then aimed the question right at her: “What’ll you do now, dearie?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah was just getting used to being a wife. Now, all of a sudden, she found herself a widow. “I don’t have any idea. What can I do?” It was Hitler’s war, and he wouldn’t let Jews fight in it. It reached out and killed them just the same.
Sergeant Hideki Fujita swaggered through the streets of Myitkyina. He was in town on a pass, and drunk as a lord. There were things a member of Unit 113 wasn’t allowed to talk about, no matter how drunk he got. That didn’t worry Fujita. It hadn’t worried him before he poured down a big skinful of the local rotgut, either. Germ warfare wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to sit down and gab about, not if you were in your right mind it wasn’t.
Sooner or later, he’d queue up at an enlisted men’s brothel and get the lead out of his pencil. That was an important reason to come into town, after all. But he wasn’t ready yet. He had more drinking to do first.
He wasn’t the only Japanese soldier wandering the Burmese town: nowhere close. He kept an eye out for his countrymen. No matter how drunk he got, there was no excuse for not saluting an officer. No excuse. Ever. If you didn’t show proper respect, you’d catch hell. In the Japanese Army, that was as much a law of nature as sunrise every morning.
He kept an eye on the Burmese, too. They looked like a pack of damned foreigners. They were a pack of damned foreigners. They were too skinny. They were browner than Japanese-not a lot, but enough to notice. Their features were softer than those of his countrymen. Their language sounded like barking dogs to him. It was even uglier than Chinese.
And he had other reasons for keeping an eye on them. Japan was running Burma at the moment because she’d chased out England, which had been running the place till the Japanese arrived. Some Burmese kissed their new overlords’ feet, glad the white men were on the run. Others, though … Well, some slaves would always stay loyal to their old masters.
For the English still lingered in India, not far enough to the west. And they did their best to aid the Chinese bandits who went on struggling against the Japanese drive to shake some order into their miserable country.
That was why Unit 113 was in business. Cholera and the plague had broken out in Yunnan Province. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died on account of the diseases. Let the English try to bring materiel into China from India. What good would it do them if the Chinese who were supposed to unload the guns and munitions were dead or sick or fled to escape pestilence? Not much.
A faded mug of beer on a sign outside a tavern made Fujita walk in. The place had started life as an imitation-no doubt a wretched imitation-of an English pub. It was dark and gloomy inside. The furniture was heavier than anything a Japanese would have made. There was a dartboard on the wall. Behind the bar hung a portrait of the Emperor of Japan in military uniform. Fujita would have bet everything he owned (not much at the moment, but even so) a picture of the King of England had hung there till Myitkyina suddenly changed ownership.