“They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t there to give them big, fat, juicy targets!” Diana burst out.
“Some people will say the fanatics wouldn’t still be fighting if we weren’t in Germany,” Truman said, as if he were sitting in the kitchen with the McGraws.
Ed chuckled and lit a cigarette. “They oughta put you in the White House, babe.”
“How could I do worse?” Diana said. “It wouldn’t be easy.”
“The Republican Party in Congress seems to feel that way,” Truman said.
“Not just Republicans! Not even close!” Diana said hotly.
“It would be nice if the world were so simple. Or it would be nice if the Republicans weren’t so simple.” Truman wouldn’t-didn’t-miss a chance to throw darts at the opposition. “But the fact is, the Nazis have a long history of attacking anybody and everybody they can reach. The world knows that, to its sorrow.”
“We’ve got the atom bomb. They don’t,” Diana said.
“If we run away from Germany, the first thing the Nazis will do if they get back into power is start working on an atom bomb,” the President said. “They will deny it. They will swear on a stack of Bibles that they would never do anything like that. They told the same lies after World War I, and look what happened to the people who believed them then-the Lindberghs and the Liberty Lobby and the rest of the fools.
“And the second thing the Nazis will do if, God forbid, they get back into power is start working on a rocket that can reach the United States from Germany,” Truman said. “They had one on the drawing board when V-E Day came and made them shelve their plans. If they build a transatlantic rocket with an atom bomb in its nose, nobody is safe any more. Nobody. Not a single soul. Not anywhere in the world.”
“Yeah, yeah, enough with the Buck Rogers bull…manure,” Ed said. “If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Diana smiled at him. He might not be exciting, but his heart was in the right place. His head, too.
“Do the Republicans in Congress see that?” Harry Truman answered his own question: “They don’t. They might as well be ostriches, not elephants, the way they’ve stuck their heads in the sand. They flat-out refuse to put any money in the budget for keeping our armed forces in Germany. Without money, we will have to start bringing troops home.”
“Good!” Diana said. “That’s the idea! We should have done it a long time ago. If we had, maybe…Pat’d still be alive.” Her voice roughened at the last few words; she still couldn’t talk about him without wanting to cry.
“I know, hon,” Ed said softly, and he sounded husky, too.
There on the radio, Truman kept chattering away: “An old proverb talks about being penny wise and pound foolish. It’s so old, it goes back to the days before our independence. Nowadays, we’d understand it better if it talked about penny wise and dollar foolish. The point of it is, you’re making a mistake if you only worry about what’s right in front of you and not about what happens half a mile or a mile or five miles farther down the road. And that’s exactly what the Republicans who are starving our forces in Germany are doing.”
“My…heinie!” Diana had heard an awful lot of bad language the past couple of years. She’d used more of it herself than she ever did before. But she still tried not to when Ed could hear her.
He chuckled now, knowing-of course! — what she hadn’t said. “Way to go, babe. You tell ’em.”
“They won’t listen to me,” Truman said sadly.
“That’s ’cause they’ve got better sense than you do!” Diana also had a lot of practice talking back to politicians on the radio.
This time, the President didn’t seem to listen to her. “Trouble is, they’re Republicans, and that just naturally means they aren’t what you’d call good at listening,” he continued. “All the same, they’d better hear this, and hear it loud and clear. If they make us clear out of Germany, if they make us leave long before we really ought to, what happens afterwards is their fault. They’ll be responsible for it. I know the situation we have now isn’t very pretty. What we’ll get if we go their way will be worse. And they will be to blame for it.”
A Bronx cheer didn’t count as cussing. Diana sent the radio the wettest, juiciest raspberry she could. Ed laughed out loud.
“I wish I didn’t have to tell you things like this,” Harry Truman said. “But, unlike some people I could name, my job is to tell you what’s so, not what sounds good or what might get me a few extra votes. Thanks. Good night.”
“That was the President of the United States, Harry S Truman,” the announcer said, as if anybody in his right mind didn’t already know.
“He’s full of…malarkey,” Diana declared as Ed turned off the radio.
Her husband laughed again. “You better believe it.” He bent down and gave her a kiss. Then he nuzzled her neck. “So to heck with him for a little while, anyways.”
“Yeah. To heck with him.” Diana went upstairs to the bedroom willingly enough. You needed to keep a man happy every so often. She didn’t have anything against Ed. When it was over and he turned on the nightstand lamp so he could find his cigarettes, he had a big, sloppy grin plastered across his face. Diana made herself smile, too. She’d just started to warm up when, too soon, it was over. Was that happening more and more these days, or was she simply noticing more?
Because she didn’t want to make Ed angry or upset, she didn’t say anything about it. He finished the cigarette, gave her a tobacco-flavored kiss, then got up to use the bathroom and brush his teeth. Five minutes later, he was snoring.
Diana lay there in the darkness. It should have been better than this, shouldn’t it? Once upon a time, it had been better than this, hadn’t it? Hadn’t it?
She was a long time sleeping.
Lou Weissberg wondered what the hell Brigadier General R.R.R. Baxter’s initials stood for. There they were, three R’s in a row on the nameplate on Baxter’s desk. Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic Baxter? It seemed as likely as anything else. A company-grade officer couldn’t very well come right out and ask a general something like that. Lou would just have to let his imagination run wild.
He glanced over at Howard Frank. Was the same burning question uppermost in Frank’s mind, too? The other Jewish officer didn’t seem to keep glancing at the nameplate the way Lou did. But did that mean anything?
Baxter had cold blue eyes that bifocals did nothing to warm up. He eyed Lou and Major Frank in turn. If either man impressed him, he hid it goddamn well. Well, he doesn’t impress me, either, Lou thought. Except his initials. A star on each shoulder put R.R.R. Baxter among the Lord’s anointed in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass whether he impressed a lonely subordinate or not.
“How’s your German, boys?” he asked in that language. His own Deutsch had a strong American accent, but he was plenty fluent.
“Ganz gut, Herr General,” Howard Frank said. Lou nodded.
“Figured as much, but I wanted to make sure. From what I hear, German will work well enough,” Baxter said.
“Well enough for what, sir?” Lou paused, filled by a hope he hardly dared believe. “Has the Red Army finally decided to work with us?”
“Not the Red Army,” Baxter replied, and Lou’s hope crashed and burned. Then it rose phoenixlike from the flames, for the CIC big wheel went on, “The NKVD. The Russians wanted to try the top Nazis in their zone in Berlin ’cause we screwed it up twice. If they did it right, they figured they could score propaganda points off of us. Well, they ended up with egg on their face, too. They don’t like that any better than we would. They’re proud people.”
“After what they went through against the Germans, pride’s about all they’ve got left,” Lou remarked.