"Dos," Chaim added. His Spanish was bad, but not so bad that he couldn't get himself a beer with it.
Then the bartender said, "Okay, boys," in clear, American-accented English. As he poured, he went on, "I worked in Chicago for five years. I came back when the war started."
Chaim set coins on the bar. Mike nodded thanks. Chaim bought more often than not. The last thing he wanted was a reputation for being a cheap Jew. When the bartender started to make change, Chaim waved for him not to bother. Earlier in the war, the fellow probably would have given him his money, and a lecture to go with it. Tipping was seen as a leftover of class differences, and beneath a proper proletarian's dignity. That stern puritanism-always stronger in Barcelona than Madrid-had eased off now. The bartender nodded his thanks. He gave them the beers.
The glasses were none too clean. That would have bothered Chaim back in New York City. Not any more. Considering what all he'd eaten and drunk in the field, this was the least of his worries. He did note they were etched with the name of a German lager. That wasn't what they held now: nobody wanted to buy, or could buy, Fascist beer inside Republican territory. Fascists or not, the Germans brewed better than locals dreamt of doing. This tasted like horse piss.
But it was beer. Chaim raised his eye to the barman. "?Salud!"
"Mud in your eye," the Spaniard said gravely. "If I didn't have to eat, I'd give 'em to you on the house. You're doing my job for me now."
Something in the way he said the last word made Chaim look at him in a different way. "Spent some time at the front, did you?"
"Uh-huh. I'd still be there, only I'm standing on a peg." The bartender shrugged microscopically. "I should count my blessings. I'm still here. Plenty of guys who caught ones that didn't look so bad, they're pushing daisies now."
Mike Carroll put down a couple of pesetas. "Buy yourself one, buddy."
"Thanks." The bartender could smile, most cynically. "I'd be on my ass if I poured down all the ones people buy me. I will this time, though." He poured his own beer. "?Viva la Republica!"
"?Viva!" Chaim and Carroll echoed. Chaim drained his glass. He dug in his pocket for more coins. "Let me have another one."
"Me, too," Mike said. He grabbed Chaim's money before the bartender could and gave it back to him. "I'll buy this time."
"Thanks." Chaim nodded. Fair was fair.
Along with the beers, the barman set out olives and crackers and pork sausage the color of a new copper penny. Chaim eyed the sausage warily. He liked the stuff: what wasn't pork was garlic and peppers. But it didn't like him. Every time he ate it, it gave him the runs. He stuck to the crackers and olives.
Mike started in on the sausage as if he thought they'd outlaw it tomorrow. Maybe his guts were made of stronger stuff than Chaim's. Or maybe he'd spend the next week being sorry. You never could tell.
Two more men walked into the bar. It got quieter than it had when the Americans came in. That made Chaim look around. They weren't Spaniards or even fellow Internationals-they were a pair of genuine Soviet officers, squat and hard-faced. You didn't see them very often any more. The Russian mission in the Republic was smaller than it had been before the bigger European war broke out. Some of the men had gone home to the motherland, while hardly anyone came out to replace them. Maybe getting from Russia to Spain was harder than getting back to Russia from Spain. Or, more likely, the Soviet government just had things to worry about in its own back yard.
These fellows might have been movie actors overplaying their roles. They stomped up to the bar, barely favoring Chaim and Mike with a glance. "You give us whiskey," one of them told the bartender, as if ordering him to assault Nationalist trenches.
"And something to eat," the other one added. Spanish with a Russian accent sounded as weird as German with a Spanish accent, which Chaim had also heard.
He eyed the Soviets. One was an obvious Russian. The other… Chaim would have bet they had more than accented Spanish in common. "Nu, friend, you understand me when I talk like this?" he asked in Yiddish.
"Nu, why shouldn't I?" the Soviet said. Like a lot of Jews Chaim knew, he looked clever-maybe too clever for his own good. "Where are you from?"
"New York. You?"
"Minsk."
"One of my grandmothers came from there. Maybe we're cousins."
"Maybe." The Soviet officer didn't seem impressed. Blood might be thicker than water, but ideology was thicker than blood. Jew or not, the officer knew what mattered to him: "How long have you been here? Where have you fought?"
Mike Carroll, the barman, and the Russian were all watching the two Yehudim. Chances were none of them could follow the Yiddish. Hell, they were liable to think it was German. Well, too goddamn bad if they did. "Almost two years," Chaim said, not without pride. "I've been on the Ebro front, and lately down here." He looked a challenge to the Soviet officer. "How about you?"
"Since 1936," the other Jew answered. That trumped Chaim's claim. It also meant the fellow had been here through the purges back home. Maybe that had saved him. Then again, who could say? Some of the Russians had gone back to almost certain arrest-but they'd gone. Soviet discipline, in its own way, was as formidable as the Prussian variety. The Jew went on, "I have fought here, and in the south, and on the Ebro, and now here again."
"And what do you think of it all?" Chaim asked.
"We are still fighting," the other man replied. He raised his glass. "Let us keep fighting!" He said it in Yiddish, and then in his strange Spanish. Everybody drank. ONE OF THE SS MEN who'd come to grab Wolfgang Storch had taken an ugly leg wound. He was in a military hospital somewhere well behind the line. When he got out, he'd be able to wear a wound badge that would make him the envy of his deskbound friends. Willi Dernen wondered how much he'd care. Sometimes you paid more for things than they were really worth.
The one who was left was named Waldemar Zober. He thought Willi had something to do with Wolfgang's disappearance. He thought so, yes, but he couldn't prove a goddamn thing as long as Willi played dumb.
And Willi did. His old man had called him a goddamn dummy plenty of times. Back in the day, that had pissed Willi off. Now, for the first time, in came in handy. "No, I don't know what happened to him," he told Zober. "For all I know, he took a direct hit, and there wasn't enough of him left to bury. The Frenchies got kind of busy that day, you know."
Zober had the grace to look away. He knew how busy the French had been, all right. But he still suspected Willi. "You went running off to the trenches. Storch was already up there." It made perfect sense to the SS man. Well it might have, too. He only had to connect the dots.
But he didn't know for sure he had connected them. Willi had no intention of telling him. "I ran to the trenches to shoot at the enemy in case he followed up the shelling with an attack. That's what I get paid for, you know-and I don't get paid real well, either."
Waldemar Zober not only had rank-he had those SS runes on his collar tab. They made him Heinrich Himmler's fair-haired boy. They also meant he got more money than a Wehrmacht soldier of equivalent rank would have. And, most of the time, he never came unpleasantly close to shells or bullets. Life wasn't fair-not even close.
His lips were uncommonly red. He pushed out the lower one now, like a four-year-old about to throw a tantrum. You could spank a spoiled little brat. Nobody could wallop an SS man, no matter how much he deserved it.
"Interfering with an SS investigation is a crime with severe punishment attached," he growled.
"Der Herr Jesus!" Willi burst out. "I've been at the front ever since the fight in the West started. The Frenchies could blow my foot off any old time, same as they did with your buddy. They could blow my balls off, for Christ's sake! And you're going on about severe punishment? Give it a rest, why don't you?"