Well, he could find out. He walked rapidly down the street and turned a corner. Then he stood in front of a shop window, pretending to admire a display of Wellingtons. Sure as hell, here came the little pitcher with the big ears. He jammed on the brakes when he saw Walsh going nowhere fast.
Walsh turned away from the Wellies and ambled on as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He rounded another corner. This next block had exactly what he was looking for: a deep doorway in which he could stand and wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. The little man walked past him, then stopped in dismay when he realized he no longer had his target in his sights. He turned around-and there stood Walsh, right behind him. “Hello, chum,” Walsh said, almost pleasantly. “Do we know each other?”
“Not to my knowledge,” the little man answered, sounding nearly as affected as Lord Haw-Haw. But his ears betrayed him: they flamed red.
Seeing that told Walsh he wasn’t imagining things. “Then why are you following me?” he demanded.
Even though the stranger’s ears went redder yet, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And I’m bloody sure you do.” If Walsh clouted the bugger right here, a bobby would bring him up on charges, and that wouldn’t be so good. He deliberately kept his hands in the pockets of his civilian topcoat. “Go tell whoever’s paying you that I’m wise to him, and he’d damn well better leave me alone from here on out.”
The little man licked his lips. “You don’t know who you’re messing with, mate,” he said, trying for bravado.
“Hell I don’t. You can tell that to Sir Horace himself, by Jesus,” Walsh said.
This time, the little man’s ears went white, as if he’d rubbed them with crushed ice. He wasted no more time trading words with Alistair Walsh. Instead, he ran off like a fox pursued by a prime pack of hounds.
“Cor!” a Cockney voice said from in back of Walsh. “Yer didn’t ’arf put the fear o’ God in ’im, did yer?”
“Whatever I gave him, he deserves worse,” Walsh said.
Later that day, he met Ronald Cartland and some of the other insurgent MPs at a pub not far from the Palace of Westminster. When he described his shadow, Cartland whistled thoughtfully. “I do believe I’ve made the acquaintance of that particular gentleman,” he said, knocking back the whiskey in his glass. “He gets his pay from Scotland Yard.”
“Bleeding hell!” Walsh burst out. “They’re making it into the Gestapo, then! He had no warrant from a judge, to give him the right to follow.”
“The government has no warrant for worse things than that,” Cartland said.
“Ah, well. They spy on us, we spy on them. They diddle us, we diddle them. The game’s not all one-sided, not by a long chalk.” One of Cartland’s comrades in insurgency did his best to wax philosophical.
Philosophy didn’t appeal to Alistair Walsh. “They tell people what to do. They tell the blasted country what to do, and the blasted country damned well does it. And we… We sit around in pubs and complain.”
“Oh, we do rather more than that,” Cartland said. “We do a good deal more than that, as a matter of fact. I’d tell you more, but the walls have ears.”
If Scotland Yard tapped telephones, if it used operatives to follow the likes of ex-Sergeant Walsh, no doubt it could and would plant microphones in the public houses the insurgents frequented. “God help the poor blighter who’s got to wade through all the other drivel-” another MP began.
“Before he wades through our drivel.” Cartland’s interruption neatly capped him.
“Talk is cheap,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to take the country back from them, is what we’ve got to do.”
By the way they eyed him, he might have been something escaped from a zoo. Or, then again, he might not. “There’s been no successful coup d’etat here since 1688,” Cartland said in musing tones. “Maybe it’s high time for another one.”
“Maybe it’s past time,” Walsh said, and he might not have been such a strange beast after all.
Even before the Nazis took over, German bureaucracy had been among the most formidable in Europe. German functionaries didn’t invent pseudo-rational reasons for denying requests: that was a French game. They didn’t casually lose or forget about papers, the way their Italian counterparts were known to do. Once a paper landed in a German file, it was there forevermore, and ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. Efficiency.
Before the Nazis took over, Sarah Goldman’s father had taught her to admire Germanic efficiency. He hadn’t altogether changed his mind even when that efficiency began to be aimed at him.
Sarah, now, Sarah had a different opinion. The downside to German bureaucracy was that everything had to be perfectly aligned before anything moved. If a signature was missing, if a permission was not in place, if a rubber stamp was applied so that a few millimeters of colored ink came down outside the box officially designated for them, whatever you were trying to achieve ground to a halt until the defect could be remedied.
When you were trying to get married, that wore on the nerves even more than it did any other time. Sarah was convinced it did, anyhow.
The real trouble was, the Nazis didn’t want Jews getting married to begin with. They wanted fewer Jews in Germany, not more of them. But, damn them, they weren’t altogether stupid. They recognized that Jews denied the right to marry would cohabit without benefit of ceremony and registration, and would then produce more little Jews in spite of everything. And so they didn’t deny them the right to marry. They just made it as hard as they possibly could.
After yet another infuriating and fruitless afternoon wandering the corridors of Munster’s city hall, Sarah trudged home ready-eager-to bite nails in half. “Those rotten, filthy pigdogs!” she snarled to anyone who would listen: which meant her mother and father.
“That crazy Kafka, in Austria, saw all of this foolishness coming right after the last war,” her father said. “He couldn’t get his stories published. People thought they were impossible nonsense. Everybody laughed at him. But he’d have the last laugh now, if he were still alive.”
“Was he a Jew? Did they kill him for being a Jew?” Sarah asked.
“He was a Jew, all right, but that’s not what killed him,” Father answered. “He had consumption, and he died of it. He died young, poor devil. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to live to see that he knew what he was talking about after all.”
Sarah had no way to guess about that. She said, “For all the trouble they’re putting me through, you’d think I was marrying an Aryan.”
“You wouldn’t have any trouble with them then,” Mother said.
“Huh?” Sarah replied.
“They’d tell you no, and that would be that.”
Father nodded. “New marriages between Jews and Aryans are as verboten as Jews’ serving in the Wehrmacht. We can’t pollute the state with our blood, and we can’t shed our blood for the state, either.” He still sounded bitter about that.
“One of the clerks asked me for a certificate showing my Aryan bloodlines,” Sarah said. “He got mad when I couldn’t give him one, even though I had the Jewish star right where I was supposed to.” She patted the front of her ratty coat. Even brown coal was in short supply for Jews, and the inside of the house got almost as cold as the outside. All the Goldmans wore plenty of clothes all the time.
“Too bad you couldn’t,” Father said. “I’ve heard there are some Jews who’ve bought themselves an Aryan pedigree. I’m only sorry I don’t have the connections to do it myself.”
“Or the money,” Mother put in.
“Or that,” he agreed.
“I don’t want to be an Aryan. I just want to be what I am and not have people hate me on account of it,” Sarah said. “Is that too much to ask for?”
“I didn’t used to think so. I was a grown man before I had to wonder. These days, though, the answer seems to be yes-it is too much to ask for,” Samuel Goldman said.
“They took over not long before my thirteenth birthday,” Sarah said. No need to wonder who they were. “I don’t even know what it’s like, being a grown-up without laws against me.”
“Neither did my great-grandfathers, but the laws against them weren’t as bad as these, and they came off one by one instead of getting piled on again and again.” Father sighed. “I used to believe in progress. I really did. Now? Now I wonder. How can you help wondering?”
“You think it’s progress that a professor of ancient history and classics at the university should become one of Munster’s finest pavement repairers?” Mother said.
Sarah stared at her. Father was usually the one who came out with those sardonic gibes. Mother was sunnier-except, all of a sudden, she wasn’t anymore.
Father chuckled self-consciously. “You give me too much credit, sweetheart. If you don’t believe me, ask my gang boss. If I’m anything more than one of Munster’s slightly below average pavement repairers, I’d be amazed.” He turned back to Sarah. “So what did the clerk say when you couldn’t give him the piece of paper that would have made his heart go pitter-pat?”
“I told him I was a Jew. Like I said, he could already see I was, but I told him anyhow.”