Captain Frank never lost his smile. When the Frenchman slowed down a little, Frank said, “Et vous. Et votre mere aussi.” Even Lou could figure out what that meant. Desroches stormed out. He slammed the door behind him. It didn’t fly off its hinges, but not from lack of effort.
“Wow,” Lou said, listening to Desroches roar down the corridor like a tornado with shoulder boards. Then he asked, “So what was that all about?”
“I talked with this guy named Samuel Goudsmit. He’s a colonel, I think-some kind of science officer,” Frank said.
“Goudsmit,” Lou said musingly. “Kraut?”
“Dutchman,” Captain Frank replied. “And now I know what the fanatics were after-what it looks like they got.”
“Nu?” Lou said.
“Ten grams of radium, Goudsmit says. The physicists snatched it there when we grabbed them, and one of them must’ve blabbed to Heydrich.”
“Fuck,” Lou muttered. Then he asked, “How can Goudsmit know that?”
“When the German big brains were in England, they were wired for sound, only they didn’t know it. A couple of them talked about this radium.”
“Fuck,” Lou said again. “If we knew about it, how come we didn’t go in there ourselves and take it away?”
“Good question-damn good,” Frank said. “Best answer I can give you is, we didn’t want to tip off the frogs that they were sitting on something important.”
Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. “Gevalt! And so the Nazis get it instead. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts? What can Heydrich do with the shit?”
“Like I know. I told you once already, I ain’t no Einstein,” Captain Frank said. “But you’ve gotta figure they think they can do something, anyhow. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone after it, right?”
“Right,” Lou said glumly. “Can they make a bomb with it?”
“Beats me.” Frank held up a hand. “No, I take that back. I bet they can’t. We used B-29s to clobber Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so those bombs musta been big old mothers. Ten grams isn’t much. It’s like-what? Half an ounce? Not even. So I figure no way in hell they make it go boom. You think I’m wrong?”
“Well, the way you say it, it makes sense, but I’m no slide-rule jockey, either,” Lou said. “If they can’t make a bomb out of it, what can they do?”
Captain Frank’s shrug wasn’t so elaborate as Captain Desroches’, but it got the message across. “Goudsmit says he’ll let our guys with the thick glasses know about it. We’ll see where we go from there, that’s all.”
“From there, or from wherever the fanatics take us.” After a moment, Lou added, “Too bad we didn’t trust our own allies with the news about the radium.”
“Uh-huh.” Howard Frank nodded. “But if all these Frenchmen are like Desroches, you can see how come we didn’t, too.”
Diana McGraw wondered when a Secretary of State had last made a speech in Indianapolis. She wondered whether a Secretary of State had ever made a speech in Indianapolis before. A Secretary of Agriculture or a Secretary of Commerce, possibly-probably, even.
But State? Indianapolis wasn’t where you went when you talked about foreign policy. Only now it was. And Diana knew why, too, or thought she did. Would James Byrnes have come here if she didn’t live in nearby Anderson? Would he have talked about Germany here if she hadn’t started the movement to get Americans out of the defeated country? She was sure he wouldn’t have. You dropped a bucket of water where something was already burning, didn’t you?
Secretary Byrnes spoke inside the Indiana National Guard Armory, a formidable pile of yellow-brown brick-the color of diarrhea, actually-up on North Pennsylvania. Nobody’d advertised his speech in the papers. No one on the radio had mentioned that he would be there.
So what? Diana thought. She had connections now. She’d known for most of a week that Byrnes would be here. And so she and her cohorts marched outside the armory. These past months, she’d grown intimately familiar with the way a picket sign’s stick pressed against your collarbone as you paraded. Her sign today said HOW MANY MORE WILL DIE FOR NOTHING?: bloody red letters on a white background.
Bored-looking cops stood by the entrance to make sure her people didn’t try to go inside and disrupt the meeting of the Indiana Internationalists or whoever they were. Byrnes’ stooges. Truman’s stooges, Diana thought scornfully. The cops were bored because they’d seen she and her people played by the rules.
She would have loved to storm the podium in there. She would have loved to scream at Secretary Byrnes. Come to that, she would have loved to chuck a grenade at him. But going over the line like that lost supporters. Not drawing to an inside straight, Ed called it. Diana played bridge, not poker, but she understood what her husband meant.
The Indiana Internationalists-or whoever they were-had rigged up loudspeakers so the pickets could hear the Secretary of State even if they weren’t allowed inside. Maybe they thought wise words of wisdom spoken wisely would show the poor heathens out on the sidewalk the error of their ways and lead them back to the true faith.
If they did, they were even dumber than Diana gave them credit for. She wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible, but hey, you never could tell.
“We will not forsake Europe.” Heard through big, cheap speakers, James Byrnes’ voice grated unpleasantly. “I want no misunderstanding. We will not shirk our duty. We are staying there.”
People inside the armory applauded. People outside booed. For a while, Diana couldn’t make out what the Secretary of State was saying. She shrugged, which made the stick shift against her dress. What difference did it make whether she heard or not? Anybody who spoke for the government would be telling lies anyhow.
When the noise subsided, Byrnes was continuing in the same vein: “In 1917 the United States was forced into the first World War. After that war we refused to join the League of Nations. We thought we could stay out of Europe’s wars and we lost interest in the affairs of Europe.”
“What a buncha baloney!” Ed McGraw yelled from right behind Diana. Marching back and forth hurt his poor torn-up foot, but he’d come along tonight.
She was the one who drew the attention, though. “What do you think of the Secretary of State’s speech so far?” E. A. Stuart asked her, poising pencil above notebook to await her reply.
“It’s nothing we haven’t heard before. It’s nothing we haven’t heard way too often before,” Diana answered. “The Truman administration is going to do whatever it wants to do, and it won’t pay any attention to what the little man wants, to what the people want.”
The reporter’s shorthand spread pothooks and squiggles across the page. “How do you propose to change his policies?”
“By showing him he has no popular support. By winning lots of seats for people who oppose his occupation policies in November,” Diana said.
James Byrnes’ voice kept on blaring from the tinny loudspeakers: “We will not again make that mistake. We have helped to organize the United Nations. We believe it will stop aggressor nations from starting wars. The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.”
More applause inside. More boos outside. Diana turned to E. A. Stuart. “Whenever the President or one of his flunkies talks about what the American people want, they’re really talking about what Harry Truman wants.” Stuart wrote down the quote without slowing up.
Diana stopped then, because she wanted to tell the reporter something else. “Keep moving, there!” one of the cops called, setting a hand on his billy club.
She kept moving. She didn’t want to give the police any excuse to get rough. As she marched, she bitterly added, “How peace-loving do the German people seem to you, Mr. Stuart?”
“They have their ups and downs, all right,” Stuart agreed.
So did the Secretary of State. After his series of polite phrases, he got down to the meat of his speech. So it seemed to Diana, anyhow, though she wa
sn’t so sure Byrnes would have agreed. “The United States is not about to abandon Europe,” he declared. “Security forces will probably have to remain in Germany for a long period. Some of you will know that we have offered a proposal for a treaty with the major powers to enforce peace for twenty-five or even forty years.”
“There!” Diana pounced. She felt as if the enemy-for so she thought of James Byrnes-had delivered himself into her hands. “Did you hear that, Mr. Stuart? Did you? He’s talking about American soldiers in Germany in 1986! Forty years from now! That’s what Truman really wants!”
“He did say that. I heard it.” Wonder filled E. A. Stuart’s voice. He scribbled some more as he walked beside Diana. “We’ve got another guy listening inside, but I can’t afford to let that get by. Forty years from now. Oh, boy.”
Not everybody seemed to have caught it. Maybe most people out here weren’t listening so closely. Or maybe they just didn’t want to believe what they’d heard. How could you imagine trying to hold Germany down in 1986? Didn’t you have to be a little bit nuts, or more than a little bit, to think you could get away with something like that for so long?
Of course you did. Diana McGraw had no doubts on that score. Why, Jesus Himself hadn’t lived for forty years. If God wouldn’t have been able to hold things together that long, who did Harry S Truman think he was?
Somebody in a Studebaker driving up Pennsylvania honked and yelled, “Goddamn Commies!” A moment later, somebody driving down Pennsylvania really leaned on his horn and shouted, “You stinking Nazis!”
Diana laughed. “Doesn’t that bother you?” E. A. Stuart asked her.
“Not any more. It used to, but now I don’t care,” she answered truthfully. “If some people think we’re Reds and some people think we’re Nazis, chances are we’re really right where I want us to be-in the middle. We’re the genuine Americans. The ones who screech at us, they’re the lunatic fringe.”
“Huh.” That was one of the more thoughtful grunts Diana had ever heard.
Inside, Secretary Byrnes finally finished his speech. The blind fools who’d sat there listening to all that hot air-so they seemed to Diana, anyhow-gave him a big hand. To get one like that after such a speech, he had to be the best hypnotist since…What was the name of that character in the potboiler novel? They’d made a silent movie about him, too. Diana grinned as she dredged it up. The Phantom of the Opera, that’s who he was.
James Byrnes didn’t want to play the Phantom of the Armory. As Truman had in Washington, he came out to talk to the people protesting his policies. City policemen and khaki-uniformed state troopers with drill-sergeant hats surrounded him, but loosely. Experience had taught them that Diana and her group wouldn’t try anything drastic.
Experience had its virtues. If you relied on it too much, though…
“You murderer!” a woman screamed, and hurled herself at the Secretary of State. “How much American blood’s on your hands?” She had blood-or, more likely, red paint-all over hers. She left James Byrnes with one messy scarlet handprint on his jacket and another on his white shirt and necktie.
Before she could do anything else to him-if she had anything else in mind-the startled police officers woke up and wrestled her to the ground. “You’re under arrest!” an Indianapolis policeman yelled.
“Assault on a federal official!” a state trooper added. “That’s a felony!”
Another trooper rounded on Diana. “Clear your people out of here right now, lady,” he snapped. “They stick around, we’ll run ’em in for conspiring with this gal here. That goes for you, too.”
“We’ll go,” Diana said. “I don’t know who that woman is-I want you to know that. I never saw her before.”
“Yeah, I’d say the same thing if I was in your shoes,” the state trooper retorted. “That doesn’t make it true. And even if it is-well, so what? You go around talking nonsense all the time, of course you’ll draw the loonies. A magnet picks up nails, right?”
“We aren’t talking nonsense,” Diana said indignantly. “Were you there?”
“Better believe it. I was lucky. I just got a little crease in my, uh, backside. My brother Matt lost a leg. We run home now, we’ll only have to do it all over again before too long.”
“I don’t think so,” Diana said. “And the war isn’t over, no matter what kind of papers the Germans signed a year ago. We’re already doing it all over again. Can’t you see that’s wrong?”
“No.” Hostility roughened the trooper’s voice. He glanced down at his wristwatch. “You and your chowderheads have one minute to get lost. After that, we start arresting people. One minute from…now. Fifty-nine…Fifty-eight…”
“Chowderheads!” Diana exploded. But, thanks to that woman who’d gone too far, whoever she was, the trooper had the law on his side. And Diana was bitterly certain the cops would seize the excuse to keep a closer eye on her people whenever they tried to march. She wanted to cry. She wanted to swear. All she could do was retreat.
Bernie Cobb drove one of the middle jeeps in a convoy bound from Erlangen up to Frankfurt. The Americans had taken longer than the Russians to adopt that approach, but it seemed to work…as well as anything did. A jeep traveling alone in Germany was in deadly danger, as General Patton could have testified if he were in a position to testify about anything. A jeep in the middle of a convoy was just in danger.
German POWs cleared brush and shrubs back from the sides of the road. GIs with grease guns guarded them. “We shoulda started doin’ that a long time ago,” drawled Bernie’s passenger, an ordnance sergeant named Toby Benton. “If they can’t hide, they can’t shoot their goddamn rockets at us.”
“Hot damn,” Bernie said. “So they lay back a few hundred yards and cut us into dogmeat with their goddamn Spandaus instead. Is that better?”
“Some,” Sergeant Benton said. He looked very ready to use the jeep’s machine gun, a big, beautiful.50-caliber piece. It outranged and outshot any German MG42. But the son of a bitch behind a Spandau could wait in ambush till he found a target he liked, squeeze off a burst, and then disappear. Clearing roadside bushes back a hundred yards would make things tougher for assholes with a Panzerschreck or Panzerfaust. It wouldn’t come within miles of curing all the Americans’ problems here.
Which reminded Bernie…“How come they want you up in Frankfurt, anyway?”
Benton only shrugged. “Some kind of rumor that the fanatics planted a bomb in our settlement there. I’m supposed to check it out. If anybody can find that kind of shit, I’m the guy.” He spoke like a master plumber: he was the fellow other plumbers called when they couldn’t find a leak or fix one themselves.
“You really that good?” Bernie was impressed in spite of himself.
“I’ve been doin’ it since before the surrender, and I’m still in one piece. So are a bunch of other guys,” Benton answered. “The krauts, they’re pretty sneaky, but I’ve learned to be sneaky the same way.”
“Sounds good to me.” Bernie swerved around a freshly repaired pothole. Maybe the fix was legit, or maybe it concealed a land mine. Sure as hell, the diehards were pretty sneaky. He noticed every jeep in front of him had also dodged the pothole. Either the ones behind him also swerved or else it really was okay, because nothing went boom. Things not going boom was one of the sweetest sounds Bernie had ever heard.
He hadn’t been up to Frankfurt before. Erlangen hadn’t suffered badly during the war. Nuremberg had. Frankfurt was bigger than Nuremberg-say, about the size of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. It looked as if God had stomped on the town and then ground in his heel. And so He had, except He’d used B-17s and B-24s and Lancasters instead of a mile-long boot.
“Boy, oh boy,” Bernie said. “You look at a place like this, you wonder how anybody lived through the bombing.”
“People always do,” Toby Benton said. “I guess maybe that’s how come we made the atom bomb. Drop one of those suckers and that’s all she wrote.”
“I’d drop one on Heydri
ch in a red-hot minute if it’d stop all the crap we’ve gone through,” Bernie said. The ordnance sergeant nodded. Bernie couldn’t think of a single dogface in Germany who wouldn’t make that deal.
He honked his horn to warn the Jerries in a labor gang to get out of his way. They stepped aside, though none of them moved any faster than he had to. Regulations said German men weren’t supposed to wear Wehrmacht uniform any more, but these guys either hadn’t got the news or, more likely, didn’t have anything else. They were skinny and pale-hell, most of them looked green-and badly shaven.
“Some master race, huh?” Benton said.
“You betcha,” Bernie agreed. Looking down your nose at the Germans was easy-unless one of the bastards carried an antitank rocket or had dynamite and nails under his raggedy tunic or drove a truck full of explosive till he found a bunch of GIs all together and pressed down on the firing button wired to his steering wheel.
Hausfraus queued patiently for cabbages or potatoes or whatever the guy in the shop was doling out. Most of them looked shabbier than their menfolk. They’d got even less in the way of clothes than German soldiers had. The stuff they were wearing was falling to pieces and years out of style and had been dumpy to begin with. A couple of them had on cut-down Feldgrau-probably the only cloth they owned. Their complexions were also fishbelly pale. A few of them had put on rouge and mascara. It made things worse, not better-Bernie thought of so many made-up corpses.
A block or two farther on, a buxom young Fraulein walked hand in hand with a GI. Nothing wrong with her complexion, by God-she was radiantly pink. She had meat on her bones, too: luxuriantly curved meat. Her dress didn’t cover all that much of her, and clung to what it did cover. The American soldier on whom she bestowed her favors looked as if he’d invented her-but not even Thomas Edison was that smart.
“Some hardass MP spots them, he’ll get in trouble for fraternizing,” Sergeant Benton said.
“Worth it,” Bernie declared. The ordnance specialist didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 28
