The Eastern Front(106)

Say no to that, if you dare.

Eric Krenz had been the one who first suggested the idea. Tata had initially dismissed it as just a typical Eric Krenz ploy to improve his creature comforts. Of course he'd want to recuperate from his injuries in a palace bed!

But she'd gotten to know Krenz well enough by then to realize that he had a habit of couching serious ideas and proposals within a frivolous and casual shell. Why he did that was a mystery to her, but she'd come to recognize the pattern.

So, she'd given it a second thought. It hadn't taken her long then to realize what a cunning idea it was.

Two days later, all the recuperating soldiers in the city were moved into the palace. As a mere afterthought, a casual side effect, a stray feather in the wind, the CoC moved in as well. Within a short time, the palace had become their fortress.

Krenz did wind up in a palace bed. But Tata insisted that he had to share it with Lieutenant Nagel.

Who, for his part—he was a very odd young man—kept making peculiar remarks about hidden mothers and sightless men and the iniquity of fate.

Eric had been very disgruntled. Mostly, Tata thought, because having to share a bed with Nagel created obvious difficulties for his campaign to seduce Tata.

Which was part of the reason she'd done it, of course. She hadn't made up her mind yet and didn't like to feel unduly pressured. Krenz could be relentless, in his insouciant sort of way.



In a different part of the city, Noelle Stull was also studying the sky, and looking almost as disgruntled as Gretchen.

"This sucks," she pronounced.

"What are you talking about?" countered Denise Beasley. "I think it's way cool. Dresden's where all the excitement is. Or is gonna be, anyway. You watch."

She and Minnie Hugelmair were perched on a divan in the main room of the house, playing cards. Noelle had no idea which particular game they were playing. She'd been only passingly familiar with up-time card games. These down-time games were incomprehensible. The two teenagers were using Italian cards that Eddie had gotten for Denise as a gift. The cards were round, not oblong. And instead of the familiar four suits of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, they had five suits: swords, wands, cups, coins and rings.

"How is it ‘cool'?" Noelle demanded crossly. "I want to get back home."

"Why? We're moving to Prague soon anyway. And that so-called ‘home' you rented in Magdeburg was a tiny little dump."

Minnie nodded, as she laid another card on the cushion between them that they were using as a table. "Yeah. Compared to that place, this is a palace."

It was a very nice house, in most respects. The departure of so many of the city's upper crust had left a lot of vacancies—and Noelle was operating with Francisco Nasi's money here in Dresden, not her own. But she'd expected to be here for only a short time, to oversee the preparation of the airfield while Eddie flew back to get Gretchen. She hadn't anticipated getting trapped in the city by a storm.

A very nice house in most respects, yes. But not all—and not the most critical.

"My apartment in Magdeburg may have been tiny—"

"Smelly, too," Denise chipped in.

"Cockroaches everywhere you looked," was Minnie's contribution.

"—but it had plumbing."

That shut them up. With few exceptions, even the wealthiest residences in Dresden still had traditional seventeenth-century toilet facilities. The use of such facilities started with the verb "squat" and went downhill from there.

In contrast, buildings in Magdeburg were less than five years old, with very few exceptions. The sack of the city by Tilly's army in 1631 had destroyed almost everything. And since most of the construction that came later had happened after American influence started to spread, and given the CoCs' well-nigh-fanatical observation of sanitary measures, even the most wretched living quarters in Magdeburg had access to running water.

And sewers.

"You think my apartment smelled bad, Minnie? How d'you like the aroma out in the streets here? Should I open the window to remind you?"

"Don't rub it in," said Denise. "Besides, I bet the rain's washed most of it away by now."

"Yeah, I bet it has—right into the river. Where we get our water from. Can we say ‘typhus,' girls?"

"She's going to keep rubbing it in, isn't she?" said Minnie.

Denise whooped and swept up the pile of cards on the cushion. Apparently, she'd won something. A hand? A game? A trick? Who knew?

Noelle's grandmother had warned her that cards were an instrument of the devil. Here, she figured, was living proof.





Chapter 34


The Warta river, between Gorzów and Poznań

The reports had been accurate. Hidden within a small grove of trees, Lukasz Opalinski looked onto the Warta. Just as the Cossacks had said, there on the road running by the river was one of the huge American war machines. An "APC," it was called, whatever that meant. Lukasz had forgotten to ask Jozef Wojtowicz what the initials stood for.