As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she had them back. Too late, as usual. She'd given another cop the straight truth not too long ago, and he'd hauled her down to the station on account of it. If a desk sergeant with better sense hadn't realized pissing off the United States wasn't exactly Phi Beta Kappa for the Reich, she might have found out about concentration camps from the inside.
If this policeman was another hothead… If his desk sergeant was, too… You never wanted to get in trouble in Hitler's Germany. And, since the Germans themselves were walking on eggs after a failed coup against the Fuhrer, you especially didn't want to get in trouble now.
The cop paused. He lit a Hoco. Like any other German cigarette these days, it smelled more like burning trash than tobacco. "If you don't want to be in Berlin to begin with, what are you doing here?" he asked reasonably.
"I was in Marianske Lazne when the war started," Peggy answered, using the Czech name with malice aforethought.
Sure as hell, the Berlin cop said, "You were where?" Give a kraut a Slavic place name, and he'd drown in three inches of water.
"Marienbad, it's also called," Peggy admitted.
Light dawned. "Oh! In the German Sudetenland!" the policeman exclaimed. "How lucky for you to be there when the Fuhrer's forces justly reclaimed it for the Reich."
"Well… no," Peggy said. For the first time, the cop's face clouded over. See? Keep trying, Peggy jeered at herself. You'll stick your foot in it sooner or later. Trying to extract the foot, she added, "I almost got killed."
For a wonder, it worked. "Ach, ja. In wartime, this can happen," the cop said, rough sympathy in his voice. Everything would have been fine if he hadn't added, "With those miserable, murderous Czech brutes all around, you should thank heaven you came through all right."
Peggy bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep from blurting something that would have got her sent to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other interesting place. Count to ten, she thought frantically. No. Count to twenty, in Czech! The Czechs hadn't been the problem. The Germans had. Shelling and bombing Marianske Lazne was one thing-that was part of war. But the way the Nazis started in on the Jews who were taking the waters after overrunning the place… No, she didn't want to remember that.
None of it passed her lips. Herb would have been proud of her. Hell, she was proud of herself. The only thing she said was, "Can I go?"
"One moment." The Berlin cop was self-important, like most policemen the world around. "First tell me why you have not returned to the United States."
"I was supposed to go back on the Athenia, but it got sunk on the way east," Peggy said.
"Ach, so. The miserable British. They would do anything, no matter how vicious, to inflame relations between your country and mine." The policeman proved he could parrot every line Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry spewed forth.
Like almost everybody in the U.S. Embassy, Peggy figured it was much more likely that a German U-boat had screwed up and torpedoed the liner. Like Germany, England loudly denied sinking her. If anyone knew who'd really done it, he was keeping it a deep, dark secret. To Peggy, that also argued it was the Germans. Everything was secret around here, whether it needed to be or not.
"That was several months ago, though. Why have you not left since?" the policeman persisted.
"Because your government won't let me go unless I have full passage back to America, and that's not easy to arrange, not with a war on," Peggy said. The Nazis had come right out and said they were afraid she'd tell the British just what she thought of them if she stopped in the UK on the way home. She'd promised not to, but they didn't want to believe her.
Maybe they also weren't so dumb after all, dammit.
The cop scratched his head. "You may go," he said at last. "Your passport is in order. And you are lucky to be here instead of in one of the decadent democracies. Enjoy your stay." He gave her a stiff-armed salute and stumped away.
Peggy didn't burst into hysterical laughter behind him. That also proved she was winning self-control as she neared fifty. She walked down the street. When she stepped on a pebble, she felt it. Her soles were wearing out. Leather for cobblers was in short supply, and as stringently rationed as everything this side of dental floss. Some shoe repairs were made with horrible plastic junk that was as bad as all the other German ersatz materials. What passed for coffee these days tasted as if it were made from charred eraser scrapings.
She started to go into a cafe for lunch. Food these days was another exercise in masochism. The sign on the door-Eintopftag-stopped her, though. Sure as hell, Sunday was what the Master Race called One-Pot Day. The only lunch available was a miserable stew, but you paid as if you'd ordered something fancy. The difference was supposed to go into Winter Relief. Peggy had heard it got spent on the military instead. That sounded like the kind of shabby trick the Nazis would pull. She was damned if she wanted to give Hitler her money when he'd use it to blow up more of France, a country she liked much better than this one.
She had some bread-war bread, and black, but tolerable once you got used to it-and apples back in her hotel room. She hadn't intended to eat them today, but she'd forgotten about Eintopftag. She wouldn't put an extra pfennig in the Fuhrer's war chest, and Eintopf was always swill, anyway.
Tomorrow? Tomorrow would take care of itself. She'd believed that ever since she was a little girl. If coming much too close to getting killed several times the past few months hadn't changed her mind, nothing less was likely to. JOAQUIN DELGADILLO FLATTENED OUT behind a pile of broken bricks like a cat smashed by a tank. The Republican machine gun up ahead spat what seemed like an unending stream of bullets not nearly far enough above him.
"Stinking Communists," he muttered into the dirt. This machine gun happened to be French, not Russian. Joaquin couldn't have cared less. Like everybody in Marshal Sanjurjo's army, to the depths of his soul he was convinced the people on the other side took their orders straight from Stalin.
After all, weren't the International Brigades fighting in the ruins of Madrid's University City, too? And weren't the International Brigades a bunch of Reds who'd come to meddle in what was none of their damned business?
Germans and Italians fought on Marshal Sanjurjo's side. Joaquin didn't think of them as meddlers. They were allies. And they weren't spraying machine-gun rounds right over his head.
"?Maricones!" someone from his side of the line shouted at the Internationals. Even groveling in the dirt the way he was, Joaquin giggled. Oh, it wasn't that he hadn't called the Republic's foreign mercenaries faggots along with anything and everything else he could think of. It was just that his own battalion CO, Major Uribe, was the biggest fairy who didn't have wings.
Most of the time, Joaquin would have had trouble understanding how a flaming queer could rise so high in the Nationalists' straitlaced army. Not with Bernardo Uribe. The major was, quite simply, the bravest man and the fiercest fighter he'd ever seen. The only miracle with Uribe was that he hadn't got his head blown off long since. As long as he stayed alive, nobody was going to care where he stuck his dick.
As abruptly as if someone had shut off a faucet, the machine gun fell silent. Major Uribe's high, sweet voice rang through the bruised silence: "Look alive, sweethearts! We're liable to have company for tea!"
The first time he came out with something like that, Joaquin's eyes almost bugged out of his head. The second time the major did it, Delgadillo nearly pissed himself laughing. Now he took it for granted.
So did Sergeant Carrasquel. Joaquin never laughed at him. Carrasquel was the kind of guy who'd tear off your head and then spit in the hole. He was a good sergeant, in other words. "Major's right," he rasped now. "Those fuckers'll hit us, sure as the devil. Don't let 'em push you back."