Luc knew exactly how they felt. PARIS IS WORTH A SOMETHING. One French king or another had said that, or something like that, a hell of a long time ago. So much Alistair Walsh knew-so much, and not a farthing's worth more. The veteran underofficer had picked up bits and pieces of knowledge over the years, but too many of them remained just that: bits and pieces. They didn't fit together to make any kind of recognizable picture.
Staff Sergeant Walsh did know what Paris was worth to the Nazis, even if not to that long-ago and forgotten (at least by him) French king. It was worth everything. And, since they couldn't get their hands on it-no matter how bloody close they'd come-they were doing their goddamnedest to ruin it for everybody else.
He'd got leave at last-only a forty-eight-hour pass, but forty-eight hours were better than nothing. He could go back to the City of Light. He could drink himself blind. He could watch pretty girls dance and take off their clothes. He could visit a maison de tolerance, where a girl would take off her clothes just for him… if she happened to be wearing any when he walked into her upstairs room.
He could do all that-if he didn't mind taking the chance of getting blown up while he did it, or the almost equally unpleasant chance of spending big chunks of his precious, irreplaceable leave huddling in a cellar somewhere and praying no bomb scored a direct hit on the building overhead.
The Luftwaffe visited almost every night now. Ever since it became clear the French capital wouldn't fall into Germany's hands like a ripe plum, Hitler seemed to have decided to knock it flat instead. With so much of northern France under German occupation, his bombers didn't have to fly far to get there. They could carry full loads every night, drop them, and go back to bomb up again for a second trip before daybreak.
All of which made Paris the greatest show on earth. The circus just had to find itself a new slogan. Paris was every pinball machine and every fireworks display multiplied by a million. Searchlights darted everywhere, trying to pin bombers in their brilliant beams so the antiaircraft guns could shoot them down. Tracers from the guns scribed lines of red and gold and green across the sky's black velvet. Even the bursting bombs were beautiful-if you didn't happen to be too close to one when it went off.
Paris had already taken a lot of punishment. The Arc de Triomphe had a chunk bitten out of it. The Eiffel Tower was fifty feet shorter than it had been-and a meteorologist who'd been up at the top was never buried, because they couldn't find enough of him to put in a coffin. The Louvre had been hit. So had Notre Dame.
You needed to be determined, then, or maybe a little loopy, if you wanted to visit Paris. Some people said Hitler had vowed to wipe the capital of Germany's great continental rival off the face of the earth. Others claimed he was trying to terrify the Parisians, and the French in general, into tossing in the sponge.
From what Walsh knew of the corporal who'd promoted himself field-marshal, and from what he knew of Germans, that last seemed likely to him. Schrechlichkeit, they called it-frightfulness. If you went into Paris with a forty-eight-hour pass, you had a respectable chance of not coming back. On the other hand, if you were anywhere near Paris with pass in hand and you didn't go in… well, you might never see another chance.
And so Walsh jumped into the back of a British lorry along with the other lucky sods who'd wangled a bit of leave. The lorry bounced over potholes the size of baby washtubs. Just outside of town, it got a flat. The passengers piled out to give the driver a hand. Changing a tire in the rapidly deepening dark was always an adventure. Walsh learned some bad language he'd never heard before. For a man who'd been a soldier for more than half a lifetime, that was almost worth the trip into town by itself.
Hitler might hope to frighten the Parisians into surrendering, but he hadn't had much luck yet. The city was blacked out, of course, but it seemed noisier than ever. Touts stood in front of every establishment, shouting out the delights that lay beyond the black curtains. Quite a few of them used English; they knew a lot of Tommies would be here to blow off steam.
"Girls!" one of them yelled. "Beautiful girls! Wine! Whiskey!"
That all sounded good to Walsh. He pushed past the tout and into the dive. The glare of the electric lights inside almost blinded him. Loud jazz blared from a record. Before the war, there likely would have been a band. How many of the musicians were playing to amuse their buddies in the trenches right now?
Above the bar, a sign said PARIS CAN TAKE IT in English and what was bound to be the same thing in French. "Whiskey," Walsh told the barkeep, and slid a silver shilling across the zinc surface.
"Coming up," the fellow answered in tolerable English. He was graying at the temples; a black patch covered his left eye socket. He didn't look piratical-he looked tired and overworked. "Ice?"
"Why bother?" Walsh answered. With a shrug, the bartender gave him his drink. He hadn't asked for good whiskey. He hadn't got it, either. He consoled himself with the reflection that he probably also wouldn't have got it if he had asked for it. He made the drink disappear and put another shilling on the bar. "Why don't you fill that up again?"
"But of course." The bartender did. He nodded toward the stage. "The girls, they come on soon."
"Good enough, pal." Walsh knocked back the fresh drink. After a couple, good and bad didn't matter so much. Any which way, your tongue was stunned.
The girls weren't wearing much when they started their number. What they did have on sparkled and swirled transparently as they started gyrating on the little stage. They weren't so gorgeous as they would have been at the Folies Bergeres-this was just a little place-but they weren't half bad. And they rapidly started shedding their minimal costumes. Walsh pounded the bar and whooped. So did other soldiers and flyers in a camouflaged rainbow of uniforms.
Just before the girls got down to their birthday suits, air-raid sirens started screaming. Polylingual profanity filled the air, burning it bluer than all the tobacco smoke already had.
After yelling through a megaphone in French, the bartender switched to English: "Cellar this way! Must go! Raids very bad!"
What no doubt propelled half the fellows in the joint down into the cellar was the hope that the naked cuties would come down with them. No such luck, though. The girls had somewhere else to hide. Some of the rowdier-read, younger and drunker-men started to go up and look for them. Then, even in the cellar, they heard the German bombs whistling down. That stopped that. No matter how rowdy you were, you didn't want to meet explosives head on.
Thunderous blasts staggered Walsh and everybody else. A few men screamed. Walsh didn't, but he didn't blame them, either. It wasn't as if he never had when he was under fire. Then the lights went out. More hoarse shouts rose. Walsh put his hand on his wallet, just in case. Sure as hell, before long another hand touched his, there in the pitch blackness. When he stomped, his boot came down on a toe. Somebody yelped. The hand jerked away in a hurry.
Eventually the lights came on again. The all-clear warbled. The crowd in the cellar trooped upstairs. The bartender started serving drinks. Somebody cranked up the gramophone. On came the girls. Except for ambulances and fire engines wailing outside, the raid might never have happened. Except.
Chapter 5
Behind Sergei Yaroslavsky's SB-2, columns of black smoke rose above Wilno. Some of the columns had surely come from the bombs his plane had dropped. "Well," he said in some satisfaction, "we're finally starting to get somewhere."
"Oh, yes." Anastas Mouradian nodded. If he was anywhere near as pleased as Sergei, he hadn't bothered telling his face about it. "Somewhere. But where?"