Free The War That Came Early: West and East by Harry Turtledove Page A

good enough for Chaim. He’d go back up to the line PDQ. Till he did … What was that line?
Eat, drink, and be merry
, he thought, and deliberately forgot the rest of it.

Chapter 4
    P eggy Druce positively hated Berlin. The Philadelphia socialite had visited the capital of Germany several times between the wars. She’d always had a fine old time then. If you couldn’t have a fine old time in the Berlin of the vanished, longed-for days before Hitler took over, you were probably dead.
    If you
could
have a fine old time in this miserable land of blackouts and rationing, something had to be wrong with you. Almost all civilian cars had vanished from the streets. Even the parked ones were in danger. One propaganda drive after another sent people out to scavenge rubber or scrap metal or batteries.
    That didn’t mean the streets were empty, though. Soldiers paraded hither and yon, jackboots thumping. When they passed by reviewing stands, they would break into the goose step. Otherwise, they just marched. The characteristic German stride looked impressive as hell—the Nazis sure thought so, anyhow—but it was wearing. Soldiers, even German soldiers, were practical men. They used the goose step where they got the most mileage from it: in front of their big shots, in otherwords. When the bosses weren’t watching, they acted more like ordinary human beings.
    Columns of trucks and half-tracks and panzers also rumbled up and down Berlin’s broad boulevards. Peggy took a small, nasty satisfaction in noting that the treads on the tanks and half-tracks tore hell out of the paving. Repair crews often followed the armored columns, patching up the damage.
    A Berlin cop—a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a limp he’d probably got in the last war—held out his hand to Peggy and snapped,
“Papieren, bitte!”
    “Jawohl,”
she replied.
Ja-fucking-wohl
, she thought as she fumbled in her purse. Her German had got a lot better than it was when she first arrived in Berlin. Getting stuck somewhere would do that to you. She found her American passport and pulled it out with a flourish. “Here,” she said, or maybe,
“Hier.”
The word sounded the same in English and
auf Deutsch
.
    The cop blinked. He didn’t see an eagle that wasn’t holding a swastika every day. He examined the passport, then handed it back. “You are an American.” He turned truth to accusation. He was a cop, all right.
    “Ja.”
Peggy was proud of herself for leaving it right there. She damn near added
Nothing gets by you, does it?
or
Very good, Sherlock
or something else that would have landed her in hot water. Her husband always said she talked first and thought afterwards. Good old Herb! She missed him like anything. He knew her, all right.
    “What is an American doing in Berlin?” the cop demanded. He took it for granted that, even though the USA was neutral, Americans wouldn’t be pro-German. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all.
    And Peggy gave him the straight truth: “Trying to get the hell out of here and go home.”
    As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she had them back. Too late, as usual. She’d given another cop the straight truth not too long ago, and he’d hauled her down to the station on account of it. If a desk sergeant with better sense hadn’t realized pissing off the United States wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa for the
Reich
, she might have found out about concentration camps from the inside.
    If this policeman was another hothead … If his desk sergeant was,too … You never wanted to get in trouble in Hitler’s Germany. And, since the Germans themselves were walking on eggs after a failed coup against the
Führer
, you especially didn’t want to get in trouble now.
    The cop paused. He lit a Hoco. Like any other German cigarette these days, it smelled more like burning trash than tobacco. “If you don’t want to be in Berlin to begin with, what are you doing here?” he asked reasonably.
    “I was