Didn't he already have enough on his plate? He seemed likely to win in Norway, and Germany and Poland were doing all right against Russia. Peggy was sure Hitler would happily fight Stalin to the last drop of Polish blood.
But things weren't going so well for the Nazi supermen in the west. And that was the key front… wasn't it? When the war first broke out, she would have been certain it was (with the exception that the German attack on Marianske Lazne almost killed her, and what could be more important than that?). She wasn't so sure any more. One way or another, the Russians would have their say. Peggy was no Red-Herb would have bopped her over the head with something had she leaned that way-but she could look at a map and make sense of what she saw. There was an awful lot of Russia, and there were an awful lot of Russians. Sooner or later, that had to count… unless, of course, it didn't.
Only one way to telclass="underline" wait and see. Peggy had just reached that brilliant conclusion when a knock on the door to her hotel room chased it out of her head. She opened the door without the least hesitation: certainly with less than she would have shown in a hotel back in the States. Stockholm wasn't the kind of place where a burglar was likely to cosh you and make off with whatever he could carry.
"Yes?" she said, and then, "Ja?" The word was the same in Swedish as in German, but she tried to make it sound different. Jut because she could speak some German didn't mean she wanted to.
"Hello. My name is Gunnar Landquist," the man standing in the hallway said in almost perfect English. "I am a reporter from the Handelstidningen, in Goteborg." That was Sweden's second-largest city, right across the Kattegat from Denmark. Landquist was about her own age, tall, with brown hair going gray, very fair skin, and blue eyes.
"Isn't that the newspaper the Germans don't like?" she said.
"One of them," Landquist answered with a small-boy grin that made him look much younger. No, the Nazis weren't happy about freedom of the press, and the freer the press was to call them the SOBs they were, the less happy they got. The Swede went on, "You have seen of the war more than most civilians, or so my friends tell me. Our readers, I am sure, would be interested in the views of an intelligent American traveler."
"That's nice," Peggy said. "Where do you think you'll find one?"
The Swede blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, it will be a pleasure to interview you!" he exclaimed. He was armed with a pencil and a spiral-bound notebook nearly identical to the ones reporters in the USA carried.
"I doubt it, but come on in anyway." Peggy stood aside so Landquist could. He laughed again. When he perched on a chair, Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. "Okay. What do you want to know?" she asked.
"How do you feel about the Germans and their war?" He poised pencil above paper, waiting.
Peggy was about to rip Hitler for all she was worth. Then she wondered what would happen if she did and German troops suddenly appeared in Stockholm, the way they had in Copenhagen. Nothing good, not to her-and not to Sweden, either. The Nazis had long memories when it came to slights: at least, to slights aimed at them.
And so she was more prudent than she might have been: "What I want to do most is get back to the United States. The German diplomats have done everything they could to give me a hand. Even Hitler himself cleared up some red tape for me once. But"-she gave Gunnar Landquist one of her crooked smiles-"they won't stop the shooting just to let me go back, darn it."
He scribbled. "You have been under attack by the Germans and by England and France, is it not so? Which is worse?"
Her smile grew more crooked yet. "The one that's going on right this minute is the worst attack ever. The one you lived through yesterday, you don't need to worry about any more."
"I see. Yes. That makes good sense." Landquist wrote some more.
"Sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again," Peggy said.
He blinked again. Peggy got the feeling he had to put it into Swedish inside his own head before he could realize it was meant for a joke. Once he figured it out, he didn't hold back. He had a big, booming guffaw that made you want to like him. "You are wicked!" he said, plainly meaning it for a compliment.
"Thank you," Peggy answered, deadpan, which produced another explosion of merriment from him.
"My, my," he said. "How am I to write a story when I am laughing so hard? Let me ask you a more serious question: with all the rationing she uses, how long can Germany go on fighting?"
That was serious, all right. Peggy gave it the best answer she could: "A long time, at least by what I saw. The food isn't so great, but there's enough of it. Nobody's going hungry. People can't get many new clothes, but they can manage with their old stuff. Most of what's new goes straight to the Wehrmacht. But I've heard there's rationing in England and France, too. You'd know better than I would, and more about how tight it is."
"I know it is there. Past that…" Landquist shrugged. "No one on either side seems happy to admit he has not got plenty of everything."
"You're bound to be right."
Landquist lit a cigarette: an American Chesterfield. Seeing Peggy's wistful stare, he offered her the pack. They hadn't been her brand back in the USA, but they came closer than any of the European blends she'd been smoking. She sighed with pleasure after he gave her a light. Then he said, "With the fighting to our west, not many more of these will come through."
"The war to the west is why I'm still here," Peggy answered, floating on clouds of tobacco-flavored nostalgia. "I mean, Sweden is a nice country and everything, but I'd still rather go home. I want to, but I can't."
"I am sorry." Unlike a lot of people who said that, Gunnar Landquist actually sounded as if he meant it. "If there were something I could do-"
That subjunctive was correct. Even so, most Americans would have said If there was. Sometimes you could tell foreigners because they spoke your language more accurately than you did.
"Since you cannot go, what will you do?" Landquist asked.
"Stay," Peggy said, which made him laugh yet again. She went on, "If I have to stay somewhere that isn't America, this is a nice place to be."
"I am glad to hear it. I shall write it down and quote you." Write it down he did. He tipped her a wink. "So you like us better than Germany, do you?"
"Oh, Lord, yes!" Peggy blurted. Gunnar Landquist wrote that down, too. Peggy wondered if she ought to ask him not to. If-no, when-the Germans read it, it would only piss them off. She'd been trying to avoid that, even in this interview. Well, too goddamn bad this time, she thought. It was nothing but the truth. THEO HOSSBACH HADN'T MUCH ENJOYED spending a winter in the field in the Low Countries and France. By the way things were going, spending a winter in the field in Poland would be even less fun. He came from Breslau, not that far west of where he was now. Winters got pretty beastly there, too. Not so beastly as this, though. He didn't think so, anyhow.
Adi Stoss came from some lousy little town near Munster, way the hell over on the other side of Germany. He pissed and moaned about the cold and wind like you wouldn't believe. "This weather ought to be against the Geneva Convention," he said with an exaggerated shiver, huddling close to the fire the panzer crew had made of boards taken from a wrecked farmhouse. The peasant whose house it had been was in no position to complain; they'd found his body, and his wife's, and a little boy's, in the ruins.
"Screw the weather," Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander didn't get far from the fire, either, no matter what he said. He wasn't one of the people who could light a cigarette in any weather. Finally giving it up as a bad job, he went on, "What ought to be against the fucking Geneva Convention are the Russians."