He lit a Lucky of his own. After a deep drag, he said, “They ought to pin gongs on those machine gunners.”
“Amen!” Max agreed.
“You bet.” Rolf nodded, too. “Hit the Ivans from the side when they don’t expect it and it’s two to one they go to pieces. They’re as sensitive about their flanks as a virgin.”
“They aren’t virgins any more,” Gustav said. “We fucked ’em pretty hard here.” He got a dirty laugh from Rolf and a smile from Max.
Not all the men lying in front of Warberg were dead. Some still thrashed and cried out to the uncaring heavens. An Ivan carrying a white flag came forward. “Permission to pick up our wounded?” he shouted in good German. “An hour’s truce?”
“An hour,” a German officer agreed. “Starting now.” The Russian waved. Stretcher-bearers hurried forward. Gustav swore under his breath. The nerve of them, taking ammo away from him like that!
HARRY TRUMAN TURNED ON the radio in the Oval Office. After it warmed up, music came out. It wasn’t music he particularly enjoyed, but it didn’t make him want to heave the set through the window and watch it smash on the White House lawn.
Fewer and fewer comedies and dramas were on the radio these days. Some of them had migrated to TV; others had simply disappeared. For more than a few of them, disappearing was the best thing they could have done. Now if only something interesting had taken their place.
Whoever this singer was, he wouldn’t make Sinatra go back to hustling pool and shooting craps in Hoboken. The President endured him because it was almost the top of the hour. Like the papers, radio news helped him keep a finger on the country’s pulse.
The song stopped. The singing commercials that followed it made Truman think Beethoven had done its music and Caruso the singing. It wasn’t that good. They were that bad. He thought only residents of a home for the feebleminded would want to buy the cleanser and soap and margarine they plugged, but some ad man out there was in a high tax bracket because he’d perpetrated them.
Then an announcer said, “This is WRC radio, Washington, D.C., 980 on your dial.” NBC’s familiar chimes followed. The announcer went on, “The National Broadcasting Corporation brings you the news.”
“Good evening,” the newscaster said. “Here is the news. In the war, Red jet bombers have staged nuisance raids against France, Italy, and southern England. Damage is said to be light, and American and English night fighters have claimed several Russian planes as destroyed or damaged. No fighters are known to have been lost.”
Just because they’d claimed them didn’t mean they’d hit them. Those Russian Beagles were pests. They got in, they dropped their bombs, and they got out. They didn’t hang around waiting to get shot down the way the lumbering Soviet Bulls (and identically lumbering American Superfortresses) did. The only thing they couldn’t do was carry atom bombs. Thank God for small favors, thought Truman, who didn’t have many large favors to thank Him for.
“Italian defense authorities have officially denied that Bologna is under Russian control,” the newscaster went on. “They insist that their forces, stiffened by American soldiers and tanks, still hold the important city.”
And that was a bunch of bologna, or Bologna, or plain old baloney, too. Truman knew it was only too well. No matter what the Italians denied, the Red Army was in Bologna. Italy was a backwater in this war, as it had been in the last. Had Stalin wanted to, he could have grabbed much more of it. But his generals were mostly using it as a road to southern France.
American troops waited to try to stop the Russians if they got past the mountains on the border between Italy and France. They waited here and there, scattered across Provence and Savoy. You couldn’t concentrate men the way marshals had all through history. One A-bomb and they would be history themselves. Everybody was having to learn how to fight all over again.
“In Korea, the UN High Command has admitted the fall of the town of Kaeryong to the Red Chinese and North Koreans. Strong defensive positions south of Kaeryong will make it impossible for the enemy to advance any farther.”
Truman wished he had a knock of bourbon. The whiskey might wash the taste of all these lies out of his mouth. The strong defenses had been on the high ground north of Kaeryong. They’d kept back the flood for a long time, but here it was.
“In domestic politics, Senator McCarthy has won the allegiance of two convention delegates from Ohio, which is Senator Taft’s home state,” the broadcaster said.
Truman said something he was glad Bess couldn’t overhear. Her reproachful cluck would have hurt him worse than a smack in the face from someone he cared about less. Even George Marshall would have raised an eyebrow at Truman’s choice of words. The men who’d served the battery of 75s he’d commanded in 1918, though, would have laughed till they had to hold their ribs—not at what he’d said, for they all talked that way Over There, but at the idea that a little cussing could embarrass him.
Well, Joe McCarthy embarrassed him. That the United States could think Joe McCarthy made a good President did more than embarrass him. It scared the crap out of him.
Not that anyone political paid the least attention to a word he said these days. Since announcing he wouldn’t run again, he was a lame duck, a ruptured duck, a dead duck. He’d known he would be. He’d put it off as long as he could.
His fellow Democrats thought he’d put it off too damn long. Alben Barkley wanted to be President, but no one else seemed to want him in the White House. When you were the Vice President in an administration that pulled the country into an atomic war, that was liable to happen to you. Averell Harriman, who was Truman’s fix-it man in Europe and the Middle East, also wanted to be President. He had the same problem on a smaller scale, because fewer people had heard of him. Estes Kefauver wanted to be President, too. Whether the country felt like electing anyone, even a capable Senator, from the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line was anybody’s guess.
And Adlai Stevenson wanted to be President. He was from Illinois, a good state to be from if you had that particular craving. He was smart. He was witty. He had everything a good politician needed except any real connection with the little man.
That would hurt him against McCarthy, who was nothing if not an ordinary Joe. It would hurt him against Dwight Eisenhower, too. Eisenhower had presided over a war America won cheaply and easily. That also gave him a leg up on any Democratic foe.
If the Republicans ran Taft…But Robert Taft was their Stevenson. He had brains. He had integrity. His main reason for wanting to sit in the White House, though, seemed to be that his father had sat there before him, so now it was his turn. Turn or not, he was about as warm as an ice cube.
Put it all together and it spelled a mess. Truman wished the new President would have been inaugurated on March 4 instead of January 20, as he had been starting in 1936. In case McCarthy got nominated and elected, that would have given the outbound Truman six extra weeks to try to set things right.
He didn’t have those six extra weeks. Maybe he didn’t deserve them. Again, he wished he did stash a bottle of bourbon in the desk here. He really wanted a good, stiff knock. He’d done everything with the best intentions—and he’d gone straight down the road paved with good intentions to its appointed destination.
Western Europe smashed even worse than it had been during the last war? Who would have dreamt that was even possible? The West Coast laid waste? Oh, and Russia and Manchuria and Korea? And the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal?
“That’s one hell of a bumpy ride, all right,” Truman muttered. Mercifully, a slick-voiced huckster told him which brand of cigarettes doctors preferred because its smoke was so smooth. That, at least, he could ignore. He wished he could do the same with the news.
He’d done what he’d done. He hadn’t thought Stalin would do what he’d done. How many million people were dead because he’d miscalculated? How many million twenty-first-century schoolkids would learn to curse his name along with Benedict Arnold’s and Aaron Burr’
s because he’d miscalculated?
When you looked at it that way, how could Joe McCarthy possibly do worse than he had?
The radio went back to music. It was trying to get on with normal life. So were people all over the world. They didn’t want war to interrupt important things like getting enough to eat and having a warm place to sleep, like falling in love and watching their children.
Too many children wouldn’t grow up now. With a sharp twist of the wrist, Truman turned off the radio.
—
A road led from Smidovich to Birobidzhan. The capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region lay about eighty kilometers to the west. The road paralleled the Trans-Siberian Railway. With Khabarovsk to the east and Blagoveshchensk to the west both hit by atom bombs, the railway was eerily quiet.
Vasili Yasevich walked along the road. His valenki crunched in the snow. The endless pines of the taiga ran close to the road, which was no more than a dirt track hacked through them. The pines were snow-dappled, too. They looked like overgrown Christmas trees in a children’s book.
That thought made Vasili laugh. From what people in Smidovich said, corrective-labor camps were scattered through the taiga. Every day, zeks went out and chopped down more pines. Did the Communists send them forth on that particular kind of corrective labor to attack the trees for being symbols of religion?
He had no answers. From what he’d seen, the Communists had no answers, either. If they thought you thought that, though, you would learn more about corrective labor than you’d ever wanted to know.
His breath smoked as he walked along. His own footfalls were the only human sounds he heard. He might have been the sole person for a thousand kilometers in every direction.
He wasn’t, of course. Smidovich lay only three or four kilometers behind him. Still, the odd feeling lingered. In China, separating yourself from all the other people who swarmed around you was next to impossible. It was the easiest thing in the world on this side of the Amur.
A hooded crow on a snow-covered branch cawed rustily. Nice warm feathers covered its body, but its feet were bare and scaly, like a lizard’s. Why didn’t they freeze? Maybe scientists knew, but Vasili didn’t.
He walked on. A red squirrel chittered, warning whatever else lived in the forest that a dangerous human was running around loose. Its tail made a momentary splash of color as it darted around to the far side of the pine. A moment later, it peered around the trunk to see where he was, showing only its nose and its beady black eyes.
Vasili lit a Belomor cigarette and let the lit match fall into the snow. He got his reward—a tiny hiss he could hear clearly as the flame went out. The squirrel heard it, too, and chittered again. When Vasili blew smoke its way, it vanished to the far side of the pine once more.
He stood there smoking till the coal from the Belomor almost scorched his lips. Then he spat the butt out into the snow. No hiss this time: just a sudden extinguishing.
With a sigh, he started back to Smidovich. He hadn’t felt like working today, so he damn well hadn’t. He had no boss to threaten to sack him for taking the day off. Enough rubles padded his pockets to keep him in food and tobacco for a while. If he wanted to buy a magazine—and if he could find one to buy—he could do that, too.
He didn’t have a big, fancy house or an expensive motorcar, a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce. He’d soon seen that, as long as he lived in the Soviet Union, he never would. But neither would any of the other tovarishchi who lived here with him. No point mooning after what wasn’t available.
When he got into town again, the first person he saw was Gleb Sukhanov. He waved. He didn’t want the MGB man annoyed at him. But Sukhanov looked like someone with other things on his mind. His face could have doubled for the Mask of Tragedy carved on the façade of the biggest Russian theater in Harbin.
“Gleb Ivanovich!” Vasili said as he drew near the Chekist. “What’s troubling you?” By the way Sukhanov’s mittened left hand kept going to the side of his face, Vasili could make a shrewd guess, but he knew he might be wrong.
He wasn’t. “This stupid tooth is killing me,” Sukhanov answered. “It blew up last night, and I’ve got little men driving spikes into my jaw. I’ve swallowed so many aspirins, my ears are ringing like cathedral bells. Stinking thing still hurts like a kick in the balls. I see the dentist tomorrow morning so he can yank the goddamn bastard, but it feels like a million years between now and then.”
“Maybe I can do something for you, Comrade.” Vasili dug in his jacket pocket. He pulled out a dirty handkerchief wrapped around a lump of dark, sticky stuff. After shedding his own mittens, he pinched off about half a walnut’s worth and offered it to Sukhanov. “Here. Chew half of this now and the rest tonight. That should keep you going till the dentist can do his dirty work.”
“What is it?” the Chekist asked.
“Somebody paid me with poppy juice for some work I did,” Vasili answered, which was true enough.
“How much do you want for it, though?” Sukhanov asked. “I know that stuff’s not cheap on the left.” He meant the unofficial buying and selling that went on in spite of Soviet disapproval. He wasn’t wrong, either.
But Vasili said, “For you, Gleb Ivanovich, it’s free. You’re my friend, and you’re hurting. You don’t just want poppy juice. You need it.”
“Thanks very much! I won’t forget that,” Sukhanov said.
That was exactly what Vasili hoped. Having an MGB man in his corner was worth more than a little opium ever could be. It could prove worth its weight in gold and then some. “I hope it helps, that’s all,” he said.
“So do I!” Sukhanov shed his mittens, too, so he could divide the lump. He popped half into his mouth and put the rest in his pocket. As he gingerly chewed, he made a new face. “Tastes like a mountain of poppy seeds boiled down to half a liter,” he said.
“That’s close—it’s the juice from the seed pods,” Vasili said. “My father was a druggist. I never wanted to do that myself, but I know a little bit about it.”
“How long does the stuff take to work?” By the way Sukhanov said it, the sooner the better.
“Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour,” Vasili answered. “You’ll get light-headed and sleepy. It’s not just like being drunk, but it’s more like being drunk than anything else.”
“I was going to get drunk tonight,” the Chekist said. “Anything to dull this fucker even a little bit.”
“If you drink some now, that won’t be too bad. But don’t get smashed,” Vasili told him. “That wouldn’t be smart, not with the booze and the poppy juice in you at the same time. If the poppy does the job, you won’t need so much vodka anyway.”
“Here’s hoping!” Gleb Sukhanov looked at his wristwatch. Wearing one marked him as a prominent man in Smidovich, as it would have in Harbin. There weren’t enough in China or in Russia for all the men who wanted them. You had to have connections to get hold of one. “Bozhemoi! Why is the second hand moving so slow?”
“I hope the poppy juice helps, Comrade,” Vasili said again, “and I hope the dentist isn’t too awful.”
“This won’t be the first time I’ve visited Yakov Benyaminovich,” Sukhanov answered glumly. “He has ether to knock you out before he does his worst.”
“That’s good, anyhow.”
“Da.” Sukhanov nodded. “It’ll still be sore after I wake up, but it won’t be sore like this.” The rotten tooth must have twinged, because he pulled another horrible face.
Vasili thought about saying the Chekist could have some more opium then. He kept quiet, though. If Sukhanov came looking for it, he’d give him some. If not, not, and he’d have more to sell or trade. He’d already done his good deed for the day.
He did say, “Good luck, Gleb Ivanovich.”
“Thanks. I can use some.”
“Can’t we all?” Vasili patted him on the shoulder. They went their separate ways.
—
Juris Eigims sat by the T-34/85, cutting up sausage with a
bayonet he wasn’t likely to use for anything more bloodthirsty. He reached back and set a hand on one of the tank’s big steel road wheels. “She’s an old whore, Comrade Sergeant,” he said, “but she’s our old whore.”
“Too right, she is. Who else would want the ancient bitch?” Konstantin Morozov returned. “Hack me off about twenty centimeters of that, will you?”
“Here you go.” The gunner tossed him a length.
“Thanks.” Konstantin took a bite. It was stale—not surprising, when it was plunder from an abandoned butcher’s shop. But it had enough salt and garlic and pepper in it to keep the ground-up pork from being too nasty. He alternated bites of chewy sausage and chunks of black bread.
“I never thought I’d get inside one of these beasts.” Eigims paused to light a cigarette, then went on, “I sure watched plenty of them go by when I was a little kid.”
“I bet you did,” Morozov said. Latvia and Lithuania had seen heavy fighting during the last war. The Balt knew better than to say that he hadn’t welcomed the T-34s he’d watched then. He would have been cheering on the Panzer IVs and Panthers that tried to hold them back. Well, too bad for him. All the Baltic lands were back under Russian rule, where they belonged. Morozov added, “When you were a little kid, I was in one of them, learning to be a tankman.”
Juris Eigims grinned crookedly. “Tell me more, Grandpa.”
What Konstantin told him was “Yob tvoyu mat’.” Had the Balt taken him the wrong way, the bayonet might have got blood on it along with sausage grease. As with most things, though, what you said mattered less than how you said it.
“It’s still a decent tank. It’s better than I thought it was going to be.” Eigims patted the road wheel again. “No wonder the Germans hated them so much. The only thing I still don’t like about it is the sight. That really needs to be better.”
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