When Vaclav looked out, too, he saw that the Landser had tossed aside his Mauser. The fellow got to his feet and trotted toward the French trenches, his hands high and a shamed, kicked-dog grin on his face. "Ja, komm! Mach schnell!" Vaclav shouted. Talking to an enemy soldier the way he would to a waiter in a beer garden-or to a child or an animal-felt good.
The German made it snappy, all right. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" he said, as if he feared a bullet in the back. Maybe he did-and maybe he needed to. He let out what might have been a stifled sob as he jumped down into the trench. To make sure he didn't do anything stupid, Vaclav pointed the antitank rifle at his midsection. "Jesus!" the Landser yipped. "You shoot me with that thing, you can bury me in a coffee can afterwards."
"That's the idea," Halevy said from behind him. The Jew relieved him of the bayonet and potato-masher grenades on his belt, then added, "If you've got a holdout knife, hand it over. We find it on you, you'll never known what Red Cross food packages taste like." Slowly and carefully, the guy in field-gray pulled a slim blade from his left boot. Halevy took it. "That's all?"
"Ja," the German said. "My name is Wolfgang Storch. I'm a private." He rattled off his pay number. "That's as much as I've got to say to you, right?"
"If you know anything that matters, pal, you'll spill it." Vaclav made the rifle twitch. It would have started twitching soon anyhow; the damn thing was heavy. "The French don't like you bastards much better than I do."
Storch seemed to notice the smooth lines of his domed helmet for the first time. "Oh. A Czech," he said. Then he took a longer look at Benjamin Halevy. He didn't need long to work out what Halevy was, either. "And-" He stopped, gulping.
"Yeah. And," Halevy agreed grimly. "Why don't you start by telling us what the hell you're doing here?"
"Damn blackshirts were going to grab me, that's what," the German answered. "A buddy of mine tipped me off. We figured maybe you guys wouldn't shoot me." He licked his lips. He still wasn't sure about that.
"Why would the SS want you?" Vaclav asked.
Storch shrugged. "I talk too much. Everybody says so. I must've said something dumb where some cocksucker heard me and squealed. There's this one corporal who's the biggest asshole in the world. Chances are it was him." His hands-dirty, scarred, broken-nailed, callused, just like Vaclav's-folded into fists.
"What d'you think?" Jezek asked Halevy in Czech.
"It could be," the Jew answered in the same tongue. Storch's eyes said he didn't follow it. Halevy went on, "Not our worry either way. We just have to deliver him and let the fellows behind the line put the pieces together."
"Fair enough." Vaclav went back to German: "All right, Storch-we'll take you back. First things first, though. Cough up your cash, and your watch if you've got one."
"I do. Here." The Landser was fumblingly eager to hand it over. Vaclav had seen that before. New prisoners figured they'd get killed if they didn't let themselves be robbed. They were usually right, too. Storch also emptied out his wallet. He thrust bills at the Czech. "This is all the money I've got."
Most of it was in Reichsmarks, which were too scratchy even to make good asswipes. But he also had some francs. Then Halevy patted him down and took another wad of bills from a tunic pocket. "Nice try," the Jew said dryly.
"I-I'm sorry," Storch stammered.
"Tell me another one," Halevy answered. If he'd plugged the German for holding out, Vaclav wouldn't have said boo. But he only gestured with his rifle. "Get it in gear. If your little friends don't shell us on the way back, you're a POW."
Vaclav slung the antitank rifle as they headed away from the front. That was easier than lugging it in his arms-not easy, but easier. The gun could do all kinds of things an ordinary rifle couldn't, but it weighed a tonne.
A couple of poilus eyed the procession as they zigzagged along a communications trench. One of them called a question in French. Halevy answered in the same language. The poilu snorted. Halevy switched to German: "He asked where we got you, Storch. I said we won you in a poker game."
"Wouldn't you rather have got fifty pfennigs?" the Landser asked. He took Vaclav completely by surprise. The Czech broke up. Damned if a human being didn't lurk under the beetling brow of the German Stahlhelm.
They eventually found a couple of military policemen who were happy enough to take charge of Wolfgang Storch. They'd be less happy when they found out Vaclav and Halevy had already picked the German clean, but that was their hard luck-and maybe Storch's as well.
"Now-we just have to do that another million times, and we've won the fucking war," the Jew said as he and Vaclav started up toward the front-line trenches again.
"Should be easy," Jezek answered. He was damned if he'd let anybody outtry him.
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.