Chapter 8
Airplane engines droned overhead. Chaim Weinberg looked up warily, ready to dive for cover if bombs started falling. The Condor Legion, the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo's Spanish pilots had already given Madrid a big dose of what Paris was catching now, and what Hitler no doubt wanted to visit on London as well.
But these were Republican planes: obsolescent bombers the French could pass on for use on a less challenging front. Chaim recognized the Fascists' Junkers and Capronis at a glance. The French planes were even uglier. He wouldn't have thought it possible, but there you were.
The Spaniards on the streets knew the bombers belonged to the Republic, too. They waved and blew kisses up toward the sky, though the pilots were too high up to see them. "Kill the traitors!" someone called, and several people clapped their hands.
Mike Carroll's smile had a sour twist. "Hell of a thing to say, isn't it?" he remarked in English. "In a civil war, everybody's a traitor to somebody."
Chaim hadn't thought of it like that. He nodded, but he said, "We aren't traitors. We're just lousy mercenaries-if you believe the Nationalists."
Mike mimed scratching his head and his armpits and the seams of his trousers. "I'm not lousy right now. Don't think I am, anyway."
"Yeah, me neither," Chaim said. Fighting in and around a big city had its advantages. When you weren't actually up there trying to murder the other bastards and to keep them from murdering you, you could come back and clean up and get your clothes baked and sprayed so you wouldn't be verminous… for a while.
Bomb blasts thudded off to the northwest. Chaim and the Madrilenos on the street grinned at one another. Knowing the other guys were catching it for a change felt mighty good. Do unto others as they've been doing unto you, only more so. That might not make it into the Bible any time soon, but it was the Golden Rule of war.
"I'm gonna buy me a beer and celebrate," Mike declared, as if he thought Chaim would try to stop him.
If he did, he was out of his tree. "Sounds good," Chaim said. They didn't have to go more than half a block before they found a bar. About one business in three in Madrid seemed to sell something to help people forget their troubles. Well, people around here had a lot of troubles that needed forgetting.
No one in the dark little dive even blinked when two foreigners in ragged uniforms with rifles on their backs walked in. The skinny little guy behind the bar looked like a wall lizard with a Salvador Dali mustache. He raised one eyebrow a couple of millimeters by way of inquiring what the new patrons wanted.
"Cerveza," Carroll said, doing his damnedest to give it a proper Castilian lisp: ther-VAY-tha.
"Dos," Chaim added. His Spanish was bad, but not so bad that he couldn't get himself a beer with it.
Then the bartender said, "Okay, boys," in clear, American-accented English. As he poured, he went on, "I worked in Chicago for five years. I came back when the war started."
Chaim set coins on the bar. Mike nodded thanks. Chaim bought more often than not. The last thing he wanted was a reputation for being a cheap Jew. When the bartender started to make change, Chaim waved for him not to bother. Earlier in the war, the fellow probably would have given him his money, and a lecture to go with it. Tipping was seen as a leftover of class differences, and beneath a proper proletarian's dignity. That stern puritanism-always stronger in Barcelona than Madrid-had eased off now. The bartender nodded his thanks. He gave them the beers.
The glasses were none too clean. That would have bothered Chaim back in New York City. Not any more. Considering what all he'd eaten and drunk in the field, this was the least of his worries. He did note they were etched with the name of a German lager. That wasn't what they held now: nobody wanted to buy, or could buy, Fascist beer inside Republican territory. Fascists or not, the Germans brewed better than locals dreamt of doing. This tasted like horse piss.
But it was beer. Chaim raised his eye to the barman. "?Salud!"
"Mud in your eye," the Spaniard said gravely. "If I didn't have to eat, I'd give 'em to you on the house. You're doing my job for me now."
Something in the way he said the last word made Chaim look at him in a different way. "Spent some time at the front, did you?"
"Uh-huh. I'd still be there, only I'm standing on a peg." The bartender shrugged microscopically. "I should count my blessings. I'm still here. Plenty of guys who caught ones that didn't look so bad, they're pushing daisies now."
Mike Carroll put down a couple of pesetas. "Buy yourself one, buddy."
"Thanks." The bartender could smile, most cynically. "I'd be on my ass if I poured down all the ones people buy me. I will this time, though." He poured his own beer. "?Viva la Republica!"
"?Viva!" Chaim and Carroll echoed. Chaim drained his glass. He dug in his pocket for more coins. "Let me have another one."
"Me, too," Mike said. He grabbed Chaim's money before the bartender could and gave it back to him. "I'll buy this time."
"Thanks." Chaim nodded. Fair was fair.
Along with the beers, the barman set out olives and crackers and pork sausage the color of a new copper penny. Chaim eyed the sausage warily. He liked the stuff: what wasn't pork was garlic and peppers. But it didn't like him. Every time he ate it, it gave him the runs. He stuck to the crackers and olives.
Mike started in on the sausage as if he thought they'd outlaw it tomorrow. Maybe his guts were made of stronger stuff than Chaim's. Or maybe he'd spend the next week being sorry. You never could tell.
Two more men walked into the bar. It got quieter than it had when the Americans came in. That made Chaim look around. They weren't Spaniards or even fellow Internationals-they were a pair of genuine Soviet officers, squat and hard-faced. You didn't see them very often any more. The Russian mission in the Republic was smaller than it had been before the bigger European war broke out. Some of the men had gone home to the motherland, while hardly anyone came out to replace them. Maybe getting from Russia to Spain was harder than getting back to Russia from Spain. Or, more likely, the Soviet government just had things to worry about in its own back yard.
These fellows might have been movie actors overplaying their roles. They stomped up to the bar, barely favoring Chaim and Mike with a glance. "You give us whiskey," one of them told the bartender, as if ordering him to assault Nationalist trenches.
"And something to eat," the other one added. Spanish with a Russian accent sounded as weird as German with a Spanish accent, which Chaim had also heard.
He eyed the Soviets. One was an obvious Russian. The other… Chaim would have bet they had more than accented Spanish in common. "Nu, friend, you understand me when I talk like this?" he asked in Yiddish.
"Nu, why shouldn't I?" the Soviet said. Like a lot of Jews Chaim knew, he looked clever-maybe too clever for his own good. "Where are you from?"
"New York. You?"
"Minsk."
"One of my grandmothers came from there. Maybe we're cousins."
"Maybe." The Soviet officer didn't seem impressed. Blood might be thicker than water, but ideology was thicker than blood. Jew or not, the officer knew what mattered to him: "How long have you been here? Where have you fought?"
Mike Carroll, the barman, and the Russian were all watching the two Yehudim. Chances were none of them could follow the Yiddish. Hell, they were liable to think it was German. Well, too goddamn bad if they did. "Almost two years," Chaim said, not without pride. "I've been on the Ebro front, and lately down here." He looked a challenge to the Soviet officer. "How about you?"
"Since 1936," the other Jew answered. That trumped Chaim's claim. It also meant the fellow had been here through the purges back home. Maybe that had saved him. Then again, who could say? Some of the Russians had gone back to almost certain arrest-but they'd gone. Soviet discipline, in its own way, was as formidable as the Prussian variety. The Jew went on, "I have fought here, and in the south, and on the Ebro, and now here again."