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

in Marianske Lazne when the war started,” Peggy answered, using the Czech name with malice aforethought.
    Sure as hell, the Berlin cop said, “You were where?” Give a kraut a Slavic place name, and he’d drown in three inches of water.
    “Marienbad, it’s also called,” Peggy admitted.
    Light dawned. “Oh! In the German Sudetenland!” the policeman exclaimed. “How lucky for you to be there when the
Führer’s
forces justly reclaimed it for the
Reich.”
    “Well … no,” Peggy said. For the first time, the cop’s face clouded over.
See? Keep trying
, Peggy jeered at herself.
You’ll stick your foot in it sooner or later
. Trying to extract the foot, she added, “I almost got killed.”
    For a wonder, it worked.
“Ach, ja
. In wartime, this can happen,” the cop said, rough sympathy in his voice. Everything would have been fine if he hadn’t added, “With those miserable, murderous Czech brutes all around, you should thank heaven you came through all right.”
    Peggy bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep from blurting something that
would
have got her sent to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other interesting place.
Count to ten
, she thought frantically.
No. Count to twenty, in Czech!
The Czechs hadn’t been the problem. The Germans had. Shelling and bombing Marianske Lazne was one thing—that was part of war. But the way the Nazis started in on the Jews who were taking the waters after overrunning the place … No, she didn’t want to remember that.
    None of it passed her lips. Herb would have been proud of her. Hell, she was proud of herself. The only thing she said was, “Can I go?”
    “One moment.” The Berlin cop was self-important, like most policemen the world around. “First tell me why you have not returned to the United States.”
    “I was supposed to go back on the
Athenia
, but it got sunk on the way east,” Peggy said.
    “Ach, so
. The miserable British. They would do anything, no matter how vicious, to inflame relations between your country and mine.” The policeman proved he could parrot every line Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry spewed forth.
    Like almost everybody in the U.S. Embassy, Peggy figured it was much more likely that a German U-boat had screwed up and torpedoed the liner. Like Germany, England loudly denied sinking her. If anyone knew who’d really done it, he was keeping it a deep, dark secret. To Peggy, that also argued it was the Germans. Everything was secret around here, whether it needed to be or not.
    “That was several months ago, though. Why have you not left since?” the policeman persisted.
    “Because your government won’t let me go unless I have full passage back to America, and that’s not easy to arrange, not with a war on,” Peggy said. The Nazis had come right out and said they were afraid she’d tell the British just what she thought of them if she stopped in the UK on the way home. She’d promised not to, but they didn’t want to believe her.
    Maybe they also weren’t so dumb after all, dammit.
    The cop scratched his head. “You may go,” he said at last. “Your passport is in order. And you are lucky to be here instead of in one of the decadent democracies. Enjoy your stay.” He gave her a stiff-armed salute and stumped away.
    Peggy didn’t burst into hysterical laughter behind him. That also proved she was winning self-control as she neared fifty. She walked down the street. When she stepped on a pebble, she felt it. Her soles were wearing out. Leather for cobblers was in short supply, and as stringently rationed as everything this side of dental floss. Some shoe repairs were made with horrible plastic junk that was as bad as all the other German ersatz materials. What passed for coffee these days tasted as if it were made from charred eraser scrapings.
    She started to go into a café for lunch. Food these days was another exercise in masochism. The sign on the door—
Eintopftag
—stopped her, though. Sure as