The War That Came Early: West and East Read Online Free PDF Page A

jazz.
    Somebody tapped Pete on the shoulder. Distracted, he half turned. There stood a buddy of his, a Marine named Puccinelli. Grinning, the dago said, “Why don’t you make an honest woman out of that broad, man? You looked like you were gonna lay her right here on the dance floor.”
    “Why don’t you get lost, Pooch?” McGill suggested sweetly. If he’d thought Vera would go for it … She might have been pouring down phony drinks, but Pete hadn’t. He’d guzzled enough real whiskey to make it seem like fun, not craziness.
    Vera tugged at his arm. “A little champagne?” she said. “Dancing makes you thirsty, yes?”
    Dancing made Pete horny. “How’s about you and me go off somewhere quiet, just the two of us?” he asked.
    Even half in the bag, he watched the cash registers chinging behind the White Russian girl’s big baby blues. He gave his own mental shrug. It wasn’t as if he thought she was with him because of the charm of his own blunt, ruddy features. If you were looking for love, or even for a facsimile that seemed reasonable while it was going on, in places like this, you needed to keep your wallet in your hand.
    “Sixty dollars Mex,” Vera said.
    That was four times the going rate for a Chinese girl in a Shanghai brothel. It was also fifteen bucks American, or a goodly part of a month’s pay. But when John Henry started yelling … you really wished that asshole on the train hadn’t had four of a kind. “Ouch,” Pete said.
    Vera considered. She wasn’t like a whorehouse whore—she had some discretion about clients and prices. Her features softened a little. “All right, Yankee. For you, fifty Mex,” she said.
    She does like me—some, anyway
, Pete thought. He also knew damn well she wouldn’t come down twice. “Where can we go?” he asked.
    She took his arm. “Follow me,” she said. Right then, he would have followedher through ice or fire or a minefield. He didn’t have to go that far: only to a little room over the dance hall.
    It had a bare, dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling, a mattress on an iron bed frame, one cheap chair, and a nightstand with a pitcher and basin and a couple of folded towels on top. It was astringently clean and astringently neat, which made it stand out among the many whores’ rooms Pete had visited.
    “You like it?” Vera’s mouth twisted as she slid out of her dress. “It is my palace.”
    “Sweetheart, any room with you in it is a palace,” Pete said hoarsely. He might regret blowing so much jack tomorrow, but he sure didn’t now. She looked even better naked than she had in the tight-fitting silk. He hadn’t dreamt she could.
    She gave him a wry smile. “An eager one like you, almost I forget I do this for money.”
    Pete wished she hadn’t said
almost
. But, right this minute, he didn’t care why she was doing it, as long as she was. He flicked off the light and reached for her. Even in the sudden darkness, he knew just where the bed lay.
    LIEUTENANT COLONEL BORISOV GLOWERED at the assembled Red Air Force pilots and copilots. “You people have been sitting around on your asses too damn long,” the squadron commander growled. “High time you went out and earned some of the rubles the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union are paying you.”
    Lieutenant Sergei Yaroslavsky stirred on his folding chair. That was monstrously unfair, and Borisov had to know it. It wasn’t the flyers’ fault that the unpaved Byelorussian airstrip turned to gluey mud in the spring thaw.
Everything
turned to mud during the fall and spring
rasputitsas
.
    “Time to make the Poles sorry they climbed into the sack with that dog turd of a Fascist, Hitler,” Borisov went on. “If they think they can get away with refusing the USSR’s just demands, they’d better think twice.”
    Now Sergei nodded. That was more like it. Blame the enemy, not your own side.
    Sitting next to him, Anastas Mouradian raised a thick, dark eyebrow. One of these days, the