When he'd smoked the handmade cigarette down to a small butt, he carefully unrolled it and put the few remaining shreds back into the pouch. That made Sarah sure he was getting his smokes from anywhere he could. When he noticed her watching him, he shrugged in faint embarrassment. "I have a habit," he said, as if he were talking about injecting himself with morphine. "I feed it as best I can."
"All right." Sarah wasn't sure whether it was or not. But if smoking meant so much to Father that he would let goyim laugh at him for guddling in the gutter, she didn't know what she could do about it. No, on second thought she did know: she couldn't do a thing.
Then she forgot about such trivial matters. Who would pound on the door right after supper? Fear lanced through her, because that was a question with an obvious answer. The Gestapo would. The Gestapo did whatever it pleased.
Someone out on the front porch shouted, "Open up, you stinking Jews, or we'll make you sorry!"
"Happy day. Something to settle supper," Samuel Goldman remarked as he got up and limped toward the front of the house.
He came back a moment later with three blackshirts in his wake. One of them pointed a pistol at him. They all leered at Sarah. She didn't look at them. Her father seemed as calm as if they were graduate students here to discuss a textual problem in Plutarch.
"Where's your murdering bastard of a son, Jew?" the one with the Luger snarled.
"I don't know," Father answered. That was a lie, but everything was fine as long as the Aryans didn't know it was a lie. Trying to show them how much they did know, he went on, "I'm sure you would have found out if we did. You must be keeping track of our mail and what we say on the telephone."
"Bet your ass," the Gestapo man said. "But somebody told us he might've gone and joined the Wehrmacht. Just what the Reich needs-a lousy kike lugging a rifle!" He rolled his eyes-blue, naturally-in disgust.
Fear made the unexpected feast churn in Sarah's belly. If Father felt it, too, he didn't show it. "You must have heard that Saul and I both tried to join up when the war started. Think what you please, sir, but we would have fought for Germany. I did in the last war, you know."
That blackshirt looked as if he'd found half a cockroach in his porridge. "Ja, ja. You were going to capture Paris all by yourself till they shot you. Damn shame they didn't blow your brains out."
"Anyway, this isn't about that," one of the other Gestapo men added. "Or we don't think it is. It's about after he smashed in that Aryan's head. He's a dangerous character, your kid."
Good! Sarah thought fiercely. She almost screamed it in the secret policeman's face. That wouldn't have been so good.
Her father only shrugged. "You know more than I do, I'm afraid. We haven't heard from Saul since… since it happened."
"If we ever find out you're lying-" The Gestapo man glowered fearsomely.
"You wait and see what you'll find out then. You'll wish you'd blabbed, and you can take that to church."
Both his friends thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. The one who hadn't said anything was smoking a pipe. To Sarah, it stank like smoldering garbage. But it kept them from noticing the smell of Samuel Goldman's cigarette. Sarah didn't think gathering dog-ends was against the law for Jews. Anything could be against the law, though, if the Gestapo decided it was.
"Sir, I am very sorry for what my son did," Father said. "If the government had let him join the Wehrmacht, he would have fought the Reich's foreign foes, as I did in the last war. But you must know I do not know where he is." A couple of things he didn't say hung in the air, at least to Sarah. One was What have you done against the Reich's foreign foes? None of the blackshirts looked old enough to have served under the Kaiser, and they obviously weren't at the front now. And the other was If you thought I did know where Saul was, I'd be in Dachau now, and you'd be tearing out my toenails.
The blackshirts got the second of those; fortunately, not the first. "Yeah, well, we got this report, and we had to check it out," said the one who did most of the talking.
"Wherever you got it, I think you should put it back," Samuel Goldman said. "Of all the places where my son might be, I'm sure the army is the least likely."
"So are we," the Gestapo man with the pipe said, taking it out of his mouth for the first time. He didn't notice Father hadn't said Saul wasn't in the Wehrmacht-and a good thing, too. He nodded to the other blackshirts. "We've done what we needed to do. We found out what we figured we would-diddly-squat. Let's blow."
To Sarah's relief, they blew. Her father's shoulders slumped. He let out a long, deep sigh. "Do we have any schnapps?" he asked Mother. "I could use a drink."
"I'll get you one." She hurried away.
"You were terrific!" Sarah exclaimed. "You-"
Before she could say anything more, Father shook his head and pointed to a lamp and to a picture on the wall. The Goldmans hadn't found any microphones in their house. Just because they hadn't found them didn't mean the microphones weren't there-the Gestapo certainly claimed they were. Even if they had found them, what could they have done? Breaking the gadgets would only have convinced the secret police they had something to hide. They did, but convincing the Gestapo of it they needed like a hole in the head.
Mother came back with not one but three little glasses of schnapps, carrying them on a brass tray. She set the tray on the table in front of the sofa. Everybody took a glass. Father pointed again to places where listening devices might lurk. Mother nodded. She raised her glass. "To peace!" she said.
"To peace!" Sarah choked a little on the fiery schnapps, but it felt good when it got to her stomach. Not even a Jew could get in trouble for toasting peace… she hoped. PEGGY DRUCE HAD ALWAYS had a knack for complicating her life. She wouldn't have been in Marianske Lazne when the Nazis invaded if she hadn't. That wasn't the first time she'd done exactly what she wanted to do and worried about the consequences later. It wasn't the first time consequences got up on their hind legs and bit her in the ass, either.
But she'd never done anything like this before. She'd been married to Herb since before the War to End War-another wistful hope shot to hell. She'd gone plenty of places on her own in those years, too; she liked traveling more than Herb did. Plenty of men had tried to get her into bed with them. None had had any luck.
None… till Constantine Jenkins.
She had all kinds of excuses. She'd been away from home, away from Herb, an ungodly long time. She'd been drunk as a skunk. Christ! Had she ever! Her hangover the next morning almost called for a blindfold and a cigarette, not four aspirins and bad German ersatz coffee. And she'd been so sure the young American diplomat was queer. Even drunk she would have been more on guard if she weren't so sure.
Maybe he did like boys better than girls. But he was at least a switch hitter, as she had reason to know.
She muttered to herself, there in her hotel room. The young American diplomat… Her mouth twisted in rueful self-mockery. He wasn't young enough to be her son, not unless she'd started at an age that made people crack jokes about Mississippi and Alabama. He wasn't far from it, though. That had to be one more reason she hadn't had her guard up.
"Shit," she said distinctly. She could come up with all kinds of reasons, all kinds of excuses.