“Strong stuff,” Lemp remarked, in lieu of saying rotgut.
“Ja.” The barkeep nodded and shrugged at the same time, which made him look like something out of a bad movie. “What can I do, though? This is as good as we’re able to get.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Lemp said. Anything more, anything like The Reich is in deep water if Kriegsmarine men have to guzzle paint thinner like this, would have made the petty officer write a note as soon as he stepped away from the bar.
With a nod, Lemp ambled over to the tables and sat down at one. Nobody else was using that little pocket of space. He wouldn’t have minded company, but he got the feeling most of the officers in the club didn’t want his just then. They were pouring down booze with the dedication of men who intended to be swallowing aspirin tablets in the morning.
Here and there, they talked with one another in groups of two or three. They kept their voices down. Lemp made a point of not seeming to listen. He had the feeling that he might have an accident when he went outside if any of those little groups of officers decided he was trying to eavesdrop. Would it be a fatal accident or only an instructive one? That came from the large group of questions more interesting to ask than to answer.
A commander got up from one of those tables. He raised his arm in the Party salute. “Heil Hitler!” he said in normal tones that seemed abnormally loud, and made for the door.
“Heil!” echoed his comrades in … well, in whatever. They also raised their voices to come out with the Party greeting and farewell. Then they lowered them again and went back to talking about something that didn’t need so much noise. Whatever it was, Lemp couldn’t make it out. He could, and did, make a point of not seeming to try.
Whenever men got up to leave or joined groups of friends, they went on exchanging “Heil!”s. A cynical man might have said they were making a point of doing it so no one with a suspicious, cynical mind would suspect whatever they talked about in those near-whispers.
Lemp didn’t suspect them. Of course not. He didn’t have anything in the least resembling a cynical, suspicious mind. Again, of course not.
While ostentatiously not listening, he got to the bottom of his next schnapps. Foul though the stuff was, it called for reinforcements. He heard it calling more clearly than he heard anything that was going on at those other tables. He raised an index finger and waited for the petty officer behind the bar to notice him.
It didn’t take long-the fellow was back there for a reason. A very young sailor, so young he hardly needed to shave, carried Lemp’s drink over to him on a tray. “Here you go, sir,” he said.
“Danke schon,” Lemp answered, trying not to laugh in the kid’s face. That broad dialect said the youngster was just off a Bavarian farm, a place about as far from the ocean as any in Germany could be. Well, plenty of Bavarians had turned into tolerable sailors-better than tolerable, even-once the Kriegsmarine knocked them into shape. Chances were this fresh-faced lad would, too. But, in the meantime, he still sounded like somebody just off a farm from the back of beyond. A casting director in a comedy couldn’t have found anybody who talked less like a sailor.
More of that wicked schnapps snarled down Lemp’s throat. The cynical, suspicious mind-the one he didn’t have at all, of course-wondered whether the kid worked here because he talked like that. If such an obvious bumpkin fetched you drinks, wouldn’t you go on talking about whatever you’d been talking about? Wouldn’t you assume he wouldn’t pay your words any mind and couldn’t understand them even if he did?
Sure you would. And wouldn’t you be surprised when the Sicherheitsdienst started whacking you with pipes and rubber hoses and pulling out your toenails a few days from now? Wouldn’t you wonder how Himmler’s hounds had got their teeth into you? Sure you would. And would you even remember the hick with the thick South German accent who’d brought you a fresh drink in the officers’ club? Sure you wouldn’t.
Maybe I’m all wet. Maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, Lemp thought. But he didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Things didn’t happen by accident, not in the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich they didn’t.
And if all the little gaggles of officers talking to one another and anxious not to be overheard meant anything … If they did mean anything, they most likely meant the people who ran the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich had reason to try to find out what they were saying.
As part of one of those little gaggles, Lemp might have had a thing or two to say himself. Whether the other officers would have taken him seriously was a different question. They might have figured him for an agent provocateur. For that matter, some of the gaggles would already have an agent provocateur or two in them. If you made the mistake of joining the plots he spun, you were a dead man-a stupid dead man-talking.
Lemp decided he wasn’t so bad off sitting here by himself. All he had to worry about was this lousy schnapps. He gulped his glass dry, then raised a finger to show the bartender he wanted to worry about some more of it.
The sun rose off to Vaclav Jezek’s right. The Republican and Nationalist lines here ran almost due east and west. He could see farther and farther: not just the inside of the shell hole where he lay, but also the pocked landscape that stretched out to and beyond Marshal Sanjurjo’s barbed wire and entrenchments. If he turned to peer back over his shoulder, he could see his own countrymen’s entrenchments and barbed wire, too. They looked the same as the enemy’s.
What he had to remember was, the farther he could see, the farther from which he could be seen. He’d done what he could to make that harder. The antitank rifle had bits of branches wired to the barrel to break up its outline (the wire was carefully rusted so the sun wouldn’t flash off it). His helmet had more foliage stuck to it. Strips of burlap and still more greenery fixed to his tunic meant that, from any distance, he didn’t look like a man at all. He’d rubbed his face and hands with dirt. A sniper who wasn’t careful wouldn’t have a long career.
But even a sniper who was careful could have something go wrong. Or the enemy could have somebody uncommonly good hunting him. The first thing he knew of that would be the last thing he knew of the world.
He pressed his eye up to the telescopic sight. There were Sanjurjo’s men, all right. The ones at any distance behind the forward trenches went about their business without a care in the world. Artillery or mortars might hurt them, but they couldn’t do anything about those. They didn’t worry about riflemen, who could hit them only by accident.
Jezek could hit them on purpose. They had to have family in the provinces, the way he had family in Prague. If their kin lived on this side of the line, they might not have heard from them for as long as he’d gone without a letter from home.
But so what? They were still Fascist shitheads, followers of their fat almost-Fuhrer. Vaclav smiled, remembering all the honors with which the Republic had showered him for exterminating General Franco. He’d get even more if he could blow Marshal Sanjurjo’s head off. And if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a wonderful Christmas, he thought.
He scanned the area behind the Nationalists’ lines, trolling for targets. No overweight marshal in a gaudy uniform presented himself to be shot. Since the Czech hadn’t expected to spot Sanjurjo, he wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t. He kept searching for other officers who might deserve to catch an antitank round in the teeth.