A few minutes later, something big blew up a few blocks away. The lights flickered and went out for a couple of seconds. Celis' All-Star Orchestra discorded down into silence. A woman squealed. A man yelled, "Merde!" Then the power came on again. The master of ceremonies, a grin pasted onto his Eurasian face, called, "All part of life in Shanghai, folks! Next round on the house!"
That made people forget their jitters in a hurry. Pete grinned at Vera. "You know what, babe?"
"No. What?" she asked, as she knew she should.
"I've never had so much fun not dancing."
"Never?" she said innocently.
"Well, never with my clothes on, anyway," he answered, looking her up and down. She managed another blush. Pete waved for more bubbly. WHEN THREE NAKED GERMANS JUMPED into their stream in northern France, turtles dove off rocks and frogs sprang away into the grass with horrified "Freep!"s. Theo Hossbach didn't give a damn. He had some violet-scented soap he'd liberated from an abandoned French farmhouse, and he wanted to get clean. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a proper bath. The water was cold, but not too cold. You got used to it fast.
Adalbert Stoss and Heinz Naumann were scrubbing themselves, too. The panzer commander splashed Stoss and pointed toward their black coveralls, which all lay together on the bank. "You know, you're out of uniform, Adi," Naumann said.
Stoss splashed back. "What d'you mean? We're all out of uniform." He had soap bubbles in his hair.
"Not like that," Naumann said. "You ought to sew a yellow star on the front of your outfit." He laughed raucously.
"Oh, fuck off," Stoss said without much rancor. "So I had the operation when I was a kid. So what? Goddamn sheenies aren't the only ones who do, you know."
"Yeah, yeah." Naumann didn't push it any more. Sergeant or not, he might have had a fight on his hands if he had. Teasing somebody about looking like a Jew was one thing. Acting as if you really thought he was one was something else again-something that went way over the line.
Theo had known Adi was circumcised, too. You couldn't very well not know something like that, not when the two of you were part of the same panzer crew. He wasn't going to say anything about it, though. Sometimes-often-the best thing you could say was nothing. That was how it looked to him, anyhow. If Heinz thought otherwise… Well, Heinz was a sergeant. Sergeants got all kinds of funny ideas.
The other thing was, Theo wouldn't have wanted Adi Stoss pissed off at him. If Adi got mad, he was liable to go and rupture your spleen first, then feel bad about it afterwards. Theo wouldn't have wanted to take him on. Heinz Naumann thought he was a tough guy. He'd made that plain. If he thought he was tougher than his driver, he needed to think again.
They all started splashing one another and wrestling in the stream, skylarking like a bunch of schoolboys. Maybe by chance, maybe not, Adi held Naumann under water for a very long time. No, Theo wasn't surprised the sergeant couldn't break Stoss' hold. His struggles were beginning to weaken when Adi finally let him go.
"Jesus!" Naumann said, gulping in air till he went from a dusky red-purple back to pink. "You trying to drown me, asshole?"
"Sorry, Sergeant." Stoss sounded so sincere, he might have meant it. "I didn't know you'd turned quite that color."
"I thought I'd have to grow fins," Heinz said. "Save that shit for the Frenchies, huh?"
"You bet." Adi watched Naumann closely. Theo would have, too. If you beat somebody like that, he was liable to try to get his own back. But Heinz just walked out of the stream and started putting his uniform on again. Whatever he was going to do, he wouldn't do it right away.
With a shrug, Theo started for the bank, too. He didn't want his crewmates squabbling. Taking a panzer into battle was hard enough when everybody got along. Another man might have tried to get them to make up. Theo was too withdrawn for that. He hoped they would be sensible enough to see the need without him. Adi seemed to have his head on pretty tight. Theo wasn't so sure about Heinz. The sergeant didn't just have his rank to worry about. He also owned a touchy sense of pride, more like a Frenchman or an Italian than your everyday German.
But the quarrel evaporated as soon as they got back to the encampment. It reminded Theo of nothing so much as an ants' nest stirred with a stick. People ran every which way. Theo watched two panzer crewmen bounce off each other, as if they were in a Chaplin film. Something had happened in the hour or so they'd spent in the stream.
He didn't need long to find out what. The company-well, never mind the company: the whole damned panzer division-was getting pulled out of the line. Where it was going, nobody seemed to know. Somewhere.
"What the hell do they think they're doing?" Heinz Naumann threw his hands in the air. "Are they going to break through without panzers? Not fucking likely!"
"Hey, come on, Sergeant-it's the General Staff," Adi said. "Just like the last war. My father used to tell stories about how the guys in the fancy shoulder straps screwed up half of what the Landsers did. More than half."
"Yeah, my old man goes on the same way." As soon as Stoss agreed with him, Heinz stopped being angry. That was good, anyhow. "But the Fuhrer was supposed to clean up that kind of shit."
"What can you do?" Theo said. Both his crewmates looked at him in surprise. He didn't put his oar in the water very often.
What they could do was follow orders, and they did. Along with the rest of the company's machines, their Panzer II clanked back to Clermont, the nearest German-held railhead. Adalbert Stoss drove it up onto a flatcar. They chained the panzer into place, then boarded a jammed passenger car. Theo hated being surrounded by so many other people. He would rather have made the train trip inside the Panzer II. Expecting your superiors to care about what you would rather do, though, was like waiting for the Second Coming. It might happen, but not any time soon.
They rolled back through France, back through the Low Countries, and across Germany. Theo started to wonder if they would go all the way to Breslau.
They didn't. They went farther than that. The train stopped at the Polish border. Polish soldiers in uniforms of a dark, greenish khaki and domed helmets smoother in outline than the ones German foot soldiers wore waved to the men in the passenger cars. Some of the Germans waved back. Theo would have felt like an idiot, so he didn't.
After a delay of about an hour and a half, the train started moving again-into Poland. Adi whistled softly. "Well, now we know what's up," he said. "We're going to give the Russians a kick in the slats."
Nobody tried to tell him he was wrong. No wonder the Poles were waving and smiling! Here were Germans, coming to do their fighting for them! Theo wouldn't have wanted to be a Pole, forever stuck between bigger, meaner neighbors. Poland offered Germany a shield hundreds of kilometers wide against the Russians. If the Red Army started biting chunks out of that shield, didn't the Reich have to show Stalin that wasn't such a hot idea?
Evidently. And showing it with a panzer division-or more than one, for all Theo knew-would make sure the Reds remembered the lesson. Of course, that could also buy the Reich a much bigger war than it had now. Again, Theo wondered whether the Fuhrer and the General Staff knew what the hell they were up to. Whether they did or not, he couldn't do anything about it but try to stay alive.
Poland sure looked like perfect panzer country: low and flat and mostly open. Every so often, the train would roll through a village or town. Some of them were full of bearded Jews, many wearing side curls. Theo glanced over at Adi Stoss, who happened to be spreading sausage paste-pork sausage paste-from a tinfoil ration tube onto a chunk of black bread. Circumcised or not, he didn't look like a Jew, and he didn't eat like a Jew, either.