[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  The older man might as well not have heard him. “They commended him,” he said. “Commended!” Disbelief put the full tally of his years in his voice, which usually sounded much stronger and younger.

  “What will you do?” Lal asked quietly. A match flared, dazzling in the dark, as he lit another cigarette.

  “They shall not govern India in this fashion,” Gandhi snapped. “Not a soul will cooperate with them from now on. We outnumber them a thousand to one; what can they accomplish without us? We shall use that to full advantage.”

  “I hope the price is not more than the people can pay,” Nehru said.

  “The British shot us down too, and we were on our way toward prevailing,” Gandhi said stoutly. As he would not have a few days before, though, he added, “So do I.”

  Field Marshal Model scowled and yawned at the same time. The pot of tea that should have been on his desk was nowhere to be found. His stomach growled. A plate of rolls should have been beside the teapot.

  “How am I supposed to get anything done without breakfast?” he asked rhetorically (no one was in the office to hear him complain). Rhetorical complaint was not enough to satisfy him. “Lasch!” he shouted.

  “Sir?” The aide came rushing in.

  Model jerked his chin at the empty space on his desk where the silver tray full of good things should have been. “What’s become of what’s-his-name? Naoroji, that’s it. If he’s home with a hangover, he could have had the courtesy to let us know.”

  “I will enquire with the liaison officer for native personnel, sir, and also have the kitchen staff send you up something to eat.” Lasch picked up a telephone, spoke into it. The longer he talked, the less happy he looked. When he turned back to the field marshal, his expression was a good match for the stony one Model often wore. He said, “None of the locals has shown up for work today, sir.”

  “What? None?” Model’s frown made his monocle dig into his cheek. He hesitated. “I will feel better if you tell me some new hideous malady has broken out among them.”

  Lasch spoke with the liaison officer again. He shook his head. “Nothing like that, sir, or at least,” he corrected himself with the caution that made him a good aide, “nothing Captain Wechsler knows about.”

  Model’s phone rang again. It startled him; he jumped. “Bitte?” he growled into the mouthpiece, embarrassed at starting even though only Lasch had seen. He listened. Then he growled again, in good earnest this time. He slammed the phone down. “That was our railway officer. Hardly any natives are coming in to the station.”

  The phone rang again. “Bitte?” This time it was a swear word. Model snarled, cutting off whatever the man on the other end was saying, and hung up. “The damned clerks are staying out too,” he shouted at Lasch, as if it were the major’s fault. “I know what’s wrong with the blasted locals, by God—an overdose of Gandhi, that’s what.”

  “We should have shot him down in that riot he led,” Lasch said angrily.

  “Not for lack of effort that we didn’t,” Model said. Now that he saw where his trouble was coming from, he began thinking like a General Staff-trained officer again. That discipline went deep in him. His voice was cool and musing as he corrected his aide: “It was no riot, Dieter. That man is a skilled agitator. Armed with no more than words, he gave the British fits. Remember that the Führer started out as an agitator too.”

  “Ah, but the Führer wasn’t above breaking heads to back up what he said.” Lasch smiled reminiscently, and raised a fist. He was a Munich man, and wore on his sleeve the hashmark that showed Party membership before 1933.

  But the field marshal said, “You think Gandhi doesn’t? His way is to break them from the inside out, to make his foes doubt themselves. Those soldiers who took courts rather than obey their commanding officer had their heads broken, wouldn’t you say? Think of him as a Russian tank commander, say, rather than as a political agitator. He is fighting us every bit as much as the Russians did.”

  Lasch thought about it. Plainly, he did not like it. “A coward’s way of fighting.”

  “The weak cannot use the weapons of the strong,” Model shrugged. “He does what he can, and skillfully. But I can make his backers doubt themselves, too. See if I don’t.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’ll start with the railway workers. They are the most essential to have back on the job, yes? Get a list of names. Cross off every twentieth one. Send a squad to each of those homes, haul the slackers out, and shoot them in the street. If the survivors don’t report tomorrow, do it again. Keep at it every day until they go back to work or no workers are left.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lasch hesitated. At last he asked, “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Have you a better idea, Dieter? We have a dozen divisions here; Gandhi has the whole subcontinent. I have to convince them in a hurry that obeying me is a better idea than obeying him. Obeying is what counts. I don’t care a pftnnig as to whether they love me. Oderint, dum metuant.”

  “Sir?” The major had no Latin.

  “‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’”

  “Ah,” Lasch said. “Yes, I like that.” He fingered his chin as he thought. “In aid of which, the Muslims hereabouts like the Hindus none too well. I daresay we could use them to help hunt Gandhi down.”

  “Now that I like,” Model said. “Most of our Indian Legion lads are Muslims. They will know people, or know people who know people. And”—the field marshal chuckled cynically— “the reward will do no harm, either. Now get those orders out, and ring up Legion-Colonel Sadar. We’ll get those feelers in motion—and if they pay off, you’ll probably have earned yourself a new pip on your shoulderboards.”

  “Thank you very much, sir!”

  “My pleasure. As I say, you’ll have earned it. So long as things go as they should, I am a very easy man to get along with. Even Gandhi could, if he wanted to. He will end up having caused a lot of people to be killed because he does not.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lasch agreed. “If only he would see that, since we have won India from the British, we will not turn around and tamely yield it to those who could not claim it for themselves.”

  “You’re turning into a political philosopher now, Dieter?”

  “Ha! Not likely.” But the major looked pleased as he picked up the phone.

  “My dear friend, my ally, my teacher, we are losing,” Nehru said as the messenger scuttled away from this latest in a series of what were hopefully called safe houses. “Day by day, more people return to their jobs.”

  Gandhi shook his head, slowly, as if the motion caused him physical pain. “But they must not. Each one who cooperates with the Germans sets back the day of his own freedom.”

  “Each one who fails to ends up dead,” Nehru said dryly. “Most men lack your courage, great-souled one. To them, that carries more weight than the other. Some are willing to resist, but would rather take up arms than the restraint of satyagraha.”

  “If they take up arms, they will be defeated. The British could not beat the Germans with guns and tanks and planes; how shall we? Besides, if we shoot a German here and there, we give them the excuse they need to strike at us. When one of their lieutenants was waylaid last month, their bombers leveled a village in reprisal. Against those who fight through nonviolence, they have no such justification.”

  “They do not seem to need one, either,” Nehru pointed out. Before Gandhi could reply to that, a man burst into the hovel where they were hiding. “You must flee!” he cried. “The Germans have found this place! They are coming. Out with me, quick! I have a cart waiting.”

  Nehru snatched up the canvas bag in which he carried his few belongings. For a man used to being something of a dandy, the haggard life of a fugitive came hard. Gandhi had never wanted much. Now that he had nothing, that did not disturb him. He rose calmly, followed the man who had come to warn them.

  “Hurry!” the fellow shouted as they scrambled into his oxcart while the humpbacked cattle watched indif
ferently with their liquid brown eyes. When Gandhi and Nehru were lying in the cart, the man piled blankets and straw mats over them. He scrambled up to take the reins, saying, “Inshallah, we shall be safely away from here before the platoon arrives.” He flicked a switch over the backs of the cattle. They lowed indignantly. The cart rattled away.

  Lying in the sweltering semidarkness under the concealment the man had draped on him, Gandhi peered through chinks, trying to figure out where in Delhi he was going next. He had played the game more than once these last few weeks, though he knew doctrine said he should not. The less he knew, the less he could reveal. Unlike most men, though, he was confident he could not be made to talk against his will.

  “We are using the technique the American Poe called ‘the purloined letter,’ I see,” he remarked to Nehru. “We will be close by the German barracks. They will not think to look for us there.”

  The younger man frowned. “I did not know we had safe houses there,” he said. Then he relaxed, as well as he could when folded into too small a space. “Of course, I do not pretend to know everything there is to know about such matters. It would be dangerous if I did.”

  “I was thinking much the same myself, though with me as subject of the sentence.” Gandhi laughed quietly. “Try as we will, we always have ourselves at the center of things, don’t we?”

  He had to raise his voice to finish. An armored personnel carrier came rumbling and rattling toward them, getting louder as it approached. The silence when the driver suddenly killed the engine was a startling contrast to the previous racket. Then there was noise again, as soldiers shouted in German.

  “What are they saying?” Nehru asked.

  “Hush,” Gandhi said absently, not from ill manners, but out of the concentration he needed to follow German at all. After a moment he resumed, “They are swearing at a black-bearded man, asking why he flagged them down.”

  “Why would anyone flag down German sol—” Nehru began, then stopped in abrupt dismay. The fellow who had burst into their hiding-place wore a bushy black beard. “We had better get out of—” Again Nehru broke off in midsentence, this time because the oxcart driver was throwing off the coverings that concealed his two passengers.

  Nehru started to get to his feet so he could try to scramble out and run. Too late—a rifle barrel that looked wide as a tunnel was shoved in his face as a German came dashing up to the cart. The big curved magazine said the gun was one of the automatic assault rifles that had wreaked such havoc among the British infantry. A burst would turn a man into bloody hash. Nehru sank back in despair.

  Gandhi, less spry than his friend, had only sat up in the bottom of the cart. “Good day, gentlemen,” he said to the Germans peering down at him. His tone took no notice of their weapons.

  “Down.” The word was in such gutturally accented Hindi that Gandhi hardly understood it, but the accompanying gesture with a rifle was unmistakable.

  Face a mask of misery, Nehru got out of the cart. A German helped Gandhi descend. “Danke,” he said. The soldier nodded gruffly. He pointed the barrel of his rifle—toward the armored personnel carrier.

  “My rupees!” the black-bearded man shouted.

  Nehru turned on him, so quickly he almost got shot for it. “Your thirty pieces of silver, you mean,” he cried.

  “Ah, a British education,” Gandhi murmured. No one was listening to him.

  “My rupees,” the man repeated. He did not understand Nehru; so often, Gandhi thought sadly, that was at the root of everything.

  “You’ll get them,” promised the sergeant leading the German squad. Gandhi wondered if he was telling the truth. Probably so, he decided. The British had had centuries to build a network of Indian clients. Here but a matter of months, the Germans would need all they could find.

  “In.” The soldier with a few words of Hindi nodded to the back of the armored personnel carrier. Up close, the vehicle took on a war-battered individuality its kind had lacked when they were just big, intimidating shapes rumbling down the highway. It was bullet-scarred and patched in a couple of places, with sheets of steel crudely welded on.

  Inside, the jagged lips of the bullet holes had been hammered down so they did not gouge a man’s back. The carrier smelled of leather, sweat, tobacco, smokeless powder, and exhaust fumes. It was crowded, all the more so with the two Indians added to its usual contingent. The motor’s roar when it started up challenged even Gandhi’s equanimity.

  Not, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness, that that equanimity had done him much good.

  “They are here, sir,” Lasch told Model, then, at the field marshal’s blank look amplified: “Gandhi and Nehru.”

  Model’s eyebrow came down toward his monocle. “I won’t bother with Nehru. Now that we have him, take him out and give him a noodle”—army slang for a bullet in the back of the neck— “but don’t waste my time over him. Gandhi, now, is interesting. Fetch him in.”

  “Yes, sir,” the major sighed. Model smiled. Lasch did not find Gandhi interesting. Lasch would never carry a field marshal’s baton, not if he lived to be ninety.

  Model waved away the soldiers who escorted Gandhi into his office. Either of them could have broken the little Indian like a stick. “Have a care,” Gandhi said. “If I am the desperate criminal bandit you have styled me, I may overpower you and escape.”

  “If you do, you will have earned it,” Model retorted. “Sit, if you care to.”

  “Thank you.” Gandhi sat. “They took Jawaharlal away. Why have you summoned me instead?”

  “To talk for a while, before you join him.” Model saw that Gandhi knew what he meant, and that the old man remained unafraid. Not that that would change anything, Model thought, although he respected his opponent’s courage the more for his keeping it in the last extremity.

  “I will talk, in the hope of persuading you to have mercy on my people. For myself I ask nothing.”

  Model shrugged. “I was as merciful as the circumstances of war allowed, until you began your campaign against us. Since then, I have done what I needed to restore order. When it returns, I may be milder again.”

  “You seem a decent man,” Gandhi said, puzzlement in his voice. “How can you so callously massacre people who have done you no harm?”

  “I never would have, had you not urged them to folly.”

  “Seeking freedom is not folly.”

  “It is when you cannot gain it—and you cannot. Already your people are losing their stomach for—what do you call it? Passive resistance? A silly notion. A passive resister simply ends up dead, with no chance to hit back at his foe.”

  That hit a nerve, Model thought. Gandhi’s voice was less detached as he answered, “Satyagraha strikes the oppressor’s soul, not his body. You must be without honor or conscience, to fail to feel your victims’ anguish.”

  Nettled in turn, the field marshal snapped, “I have honor. I follow the oath of obedience I swore with the army to the Führer and through him to the Reich. I need consider nothing past that.”

  Now Gandhi’s calm was gone. “But he is a madman! What has he done to the Jews of Europe?”

  “Removed them,” Model said matter-of-factly; Einsatzgruppe B had followed Army Group Central to Moscow and beyond. “They were capitalists or Bolsheviks, and either way enemies of the Reich. When an enemy falls into a man’s hands, what else is there to do but destroy him, lest he revive to turn the tables one day?”

  Gandhi had buried his face in his hands. Without looking at Model, he said, “Make him a friend.”

  “Even the British knew better than that, or they would not have held India as long as they did,” the field marshal snorted. “They must have begun to forget, though, or your movement would have got what it deserves long ago. You first made the mistake of confusing us with them long ago, by the way.” He touched a fat dossier on his desk.

  “When was that?” Gandhi asked indifferently. The man was beaten now, Model thought with a touch of pride: he had s
ucceeded where a generation of degenerate, decadent Englishmen had failed. Of course, the field marshal told himself, he had beaten the British too.

  He opened the dossier, riffled through it. “Here we are,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. “It was after Kristallnacht, eh, in 1938, when you urged the German Jews to play at the same game of passive resistance you were using here. Had they been fools enough to try it, we would have thanked you, you know: it would have let us bag the enemies of the Reich all the more easily.”

  “Yes, I made a mistake,” Gandhi said. Now he was looking at the field marshal, looking at him with such fierceness that for a moment Model thought he would attack him despite advanced age and effete philosophy. But Gandhi only continued sorrowfully, “I made the mistake of thinking I faced a regime ruled by conscience, one that could at the very least be shamed into doing that which is right.”

  Model refused to be baited. “We do what is right for our Volk, for our Reich. We are meant to rule, and rule we do—as you see.” The field marshal tapped the dossier again. “You could be sentenced to death for this earlier meddling in the affairs of the fatherland, you know, even without these later acts of insane defiance you have caused.

  “History will judge us,” Gandhi warned as the field marshal rose to have him taken away.

  Model smiled then. “Winners write history.” He watched the two strapping German guards lead the old man off. “A very good morning’s work,” the field marshal told Lasch when Gandhi was gone. “What’s on the menu for lunch?”

  “Blood sausage and sauerkraut, I believe.”

  “Ah, good. Something to look forward to.” Model sat down. He went back to work.

  MULES IN HORSES’ HARNESS

  Michael Cassutt

  I

  In the humid depths of August downtown Atlanta looked like a tomb and smelled like a charnel house, or so Gene imagined. There was less traffic than one would find on a Secession Day weekend and in all the streets between the Peachtree Tunnel and Butler House Gene counted no more than a dozen men in suits. The fragrance of nearby darktown settled on the scene like a noxious cloud. Yet each corner had its cluster of the usual painted and preening entrepreneurs of both sexes. Gene noted that the prostitutes outnumbered their potential customers, making him wonder, again, just how accurate those frightening stories out of New Orleans were.