"You!" one of them rumbled, raising a hand roughly the size of a ham and pointing at him. "Come here!"
"What do you want?" Willi didn't move.
"To ask you some questions," the SS man said. "If you're lucky, we won't ask about your name or your pay number. Now get over here!"
Goddamn asphalt soldiers, Willi thought. The SS looked marvelous on parade. In the field… That was the Wehrmacht's place. But the bastards with the runes on their collars were Hitler's fair-haired boys. Willi ambled over to this pair. If he didn't, they could make him disappear, and nobody would ever know where he'd gone. "Well, what is it?" he said. "You boys better watch yourselves around here, you know? French guns can reach this far, easy."
The big goons traded glances. But nobody was shooting at them right this minute. They could seem brave, even to themselves. One pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. "Do you know a certain, ah, Wolfgang Storch?" he asked, and rattled off Storch's pay number.
"Name sounds kind of familiar." Willi stopped right there. He'd see the SS men in hell before he ratted on a friend. Wolfgang and he had saved each other's bacon more times than he could count. They'd shared cigarettes and socks. They'd sworn at Awful Arno together. Would these clowns understand any of that? Not a chance in church. Willi eyed them. "How come you want to know?"
"We don't have to tell you that," said the goon with the notebook.
The other one tried to be subtle. He wasn't very good at it: "Have you ever heard this Storch make comments that reflect unfavorably on our beloved Fuhrer or the National Socialist German Workers' Party?"
"Nope," Willi said at once. Everybody in the field always swore at the idiot politicians who'd put them in danger of getting their heads blown off. Would the SS men get that? Again, not a chance. Nope was safer.
Or so Willi thought, till the blackshirt with the notebook said, "If we can show that you are lying, the two of you will be judged guilty of conspiring against the Reich."
No talk of trials or anything like that. Just You will be judged guilty. And what would happen afterwards? Nothing good. Willi didn't need a road map or a compass to figure that out.
"You said it yourselves-everybody loves the Fuhrer," Willi said. "Nobody has anything bad to say about him." Nobody did where somebody who might blab could hear, anyway. But if the SS men really believed all the Party bullshit, they might think Willi meant it.
By the way their faces hardened, he'd laid it on too thick. The one with the notebook said, "We have reliable reports that this Storch has delivered disloyal utterances on repeated occasions." He could talk that way without even realizing what a jackass he sounded like.
"Well, I never heard him do it," Willi said.
They didn't believe him. He could see it in their pale, merciless eyes. That meant his goose was cooked, too. Then he caught a break. French artillery really did open up on the village. Willi'd never dreamt he could be glad to get shelled, but he was now.
"Hit the dirt!" he yelled, and flattened out himself.
Because the SS men were greenhorns, they stayed on their feet longer than they should have. When shells started bursting and fragments screeched past, they got the message. "Hail, Mary, full of grace!" one of them gabbled as he got down. Whoever'd said there were no atheists in foxholes had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.
Willi didn't like getting up in the middle of a barrage, but he didn't like getting hauled off to Dachau, either. He hurried toward the last place where he'd seen Wolfgang: a trench fifty meters or so south of where the houses petered out. Behind him, a 105 round turned the blackshirts' Mercedes into burning scrap metal. He laughed out loud.
"Where are you going?" one of the SS men called after him.
"To fight. You wouldn't know about that, would you?" he answered. And he even meant it. The froggies were liable to follow up the shelling with an attack. But he also had other things on his mind.
To his vast relief, he found Wolfgang right away and jumped into the trench beside him. "You trying to get yourself killed?" Storch asked.
"No. I'm trying not to get you killed. The SS wants your ass," Willi said. "I always told you you talked too goddamn much."
"Who squealed?" Wolfgang got right down to brass tacks.
"They didn't say, but my money's on Baatz. Doesn't matter now. Get the fuck out of here. Go across the line and surrender to the Frenchies. You can sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp."
"They're liable to shoot me if I do," Wolfgang said. Surrendering was always tricky. If the guys on the other side didn't like your looks or couldn't be bothered with you, you were dead meat.
"You've got a chance that way," Willi answered. "What kind of chance do you have with the blackshirts?"
Storch's unhappy expression told exactly what kind of chance he had. He pumped Willi's hand. "You're a good guy. Wish me luck." He scrambled out of the trench and crawled toward the enemy positions a few hundred meters away.
"Luck," Willi whispered. Most of the French shells were long. If Wolfgang really got lucky, they'd blow up the SS goons. Even as the thought crossed Willi's mind, he feared it was too much to hope for. VACLAV JEZEK CAUTIOUSLY LIFTED his head. There was less to see than he'd hoped: the dust and smoke the bombardment had already kicked up obscured his view of later shell hits on the Nazi-held village. He ducked down again. "They're knocking the shit out of that place," he remarked.
"And so?" Benjamin Halevy didn't sound impressed. "Not like the German mamzrim don't have it coming."
A Czech fighting for his government-in-exile after the Nazis jumped on his country with both feet. A Jew fighting the regime that had been giving his people hell ever since it came to power. Who hated harder? They could argue about it. They did. They both despised the enemy enough for all ordinary purposes and then some.
Which didn't mean they didn't respect the soldiers in Feldgrau. Fierce in attack, the Germans were also stubborn in defense. They would have been less frightening if they weren't so good at what they did.
Vaclav popped up again. This time, he laid his antitank rifle on the dirt thrown up in front of the entrenchment. He didn't see any panzers, but the monster rifle made mincemeat-sometimes literally-of foot soldiers, too. "What's up?" Halevy asked him.
"Goddamn German crawling this way," Jezek answered. "I'm gonna ventilate the asshole." He took another quick look, then swore. The enemy soldier had disappeared behind a burnt-out armored car. No, here he came again. Vaclav swung the heavy rifle a hair to the right.
"Is it a real attack, or only the one guy?" the Jewish sergeant inquired. He raised his head, too. "I only see the one."
"Where you see one, there's usually a dozen you don't," Vaclav said. But he didn't pull the trigger. "This fucker isn't doing his best to hide, is he?"
"Nope. Maybe he's had enough of the war," Halevy said.
"I know I have. But he's a damn German," Vaclav said. Easier to think of the Landsers as mechanical men. You could break them, yes, but imagining them with mere human weaknesses came much harder.
It did for Vaclav, anyhow. But Halevy said, "Oh, they're people. They wouldn't be so scary if they weren't." The Czech wasn't sure of that: not even close. No matter whether he was or not, the Jew stuck his head above the trench lip again and yelled in German (which Vaclav hadn't known he spoke), "Throw away your rifle and get your sorry ass over here! You're vultures' meat if you don't!"