A couple of men came around the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street, on the far side of the White House grounds. They wore ordinary off-the-rack suits, and hats that might have come from Sears, but they looked like combat soldiers just the same. Diana had seen men who looked like that too often to doubt her snap judgment. And, a moment later, she understood why they did. Behind them strode Harry Truman.
Diana’s knees knocked. That was the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, even if he did look like a small-town druggist in his Sunday best, right down to his bright bow tie. She’d never dreamt he would come out of the White House. Too bad the newsreel crew was gone.
He pushed past his bodyguards-they didn’t look happy about it-and walked straight up to her. In person, he seemed a little smaller, a little older, than he did when he got his picture in the paper or showed up in a newsreel on the big screen.
“You’re Mrs. McGraw, aren’t you? The woman who started this whole silly thing.” His voice was familiar, too, and yet not quite so: it had a different timbre coming from his own mouth rather than booming out of a speaker.
“Uh, yes, sir.” Diana knew her own voice shook. She forced it to firmness as she went on, “Only I don’t think it’s silly.”
She kept walking as she answered; the demonstration would have bogged down if she hadn’t. Harry Truman kept pace with her. With her! Only later would she think about how surreal that was.
“Well, yes, I can see how you’d feel that way,” Truman said. “I commanded an artillery battery in the last war. We must’ve had four-leaf clovers in our pockets-we only took a couple of minor wounds. Most other units weren’t so lucky. Always unfortunate when you lose people, but that’s war.”
“Yes. That’s war.” Diana nodded. “But the war in Europe’s been over since May. That’s what everybody says, anyhow. What are we still doing over there if the war’s been over since May?”
“Making sure it doesn’t start up again for real.” Truman had an agreeable Missouri twang. It made him sound like a small-town druggist, too. “Parts of Germany got occupied after World War I, too, remember. The Nazis are more dangerous than Kaiser Bill ever was, so this time around the Allies have to sit on the whole blamed country.”
He wasn’t the first one Diana had heard who argued that way. She’d had to study up since starting her crusade. She couldn’t afford to sound like a jerk when she came up against somebody who thought she was talking through her hat. “But the Germans weren’t killing our soldiers in 1919. How many men have we lost since they said they surrendered? Must be close to two thousand by now. And what about England? And France? And Russia?”
Truman’s face hardened. “Yes, what about Russia? Stalin isn’t acting like good old Uncle Joe any more. Now that Hitler’s gone and Germany’s kaput, he wants Russia to fill her shoes and then some. Suppose we do what you want. Suppose we come home with our tails between our legs. What happens next? That’s what you haven’t thought about, Mrs. McGraw. Either Heydrich’s goons come out of hiding and start getting ready for the next war or Stalin marches in where we marched out…and starts getting ready for the next war.”
“Oh, piffle!” One more thing Diana had never imagined was that she might one day say piffle! to the President, but that day seemed to be at hand. “If they get out of line, we drop one of our atom bombs on them, or more than one if they need that the way the Japs did. Then we go in and pick up the pieces-except there won’t be any pieces left to pick up, will there?”
“It’s not so simple as you make it sound. Do you know, nobody told me about the atom bomb till after I was in the White House? I was Vice President, and nobody told me. That’s how secret it was.” Truman sounded plaintive-and who could blame him? “One thing is plain-it’s not something you can use casually. It’s like swatting a fly by dropping a Sherman tank on it.”
“And so we have this running sore instead,” Diana said. “How long will the Germans go on murdering GIs, sir? Will we still have soldiers over there in 1949? In 1955? Do you think the American people will let something this senseless go on that long?”
“Holding down the Nazis and holding out the Reds isn’t senseless,” Truman insisted. “If we’d done things the right way after World War I, we never would’ve had to fight World War II.”
“Getting thousands of soldiers killed after everybody said the war was over is senseless.” Diana could dig in her heels, too. “Grandchildren who’ll never be born…” She told herself not to puddle up. That wasn’t easy, but she managed.
“I have to do what I think is right,” Truman said. “I have to think of the long term, not just today and tomorrow.”
“If you foul up today and tomorrow, what’s the long term worth?” Diana retorted. “And if you foul up today and tomorrow, the American people will throw you out before you can do anything about it later on.”
“Chance I have to take,” Truman said.
“You’ll be sorry, sir,” Diana told him. “I am already, and you will be.”
X
New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. The big holiday in the Soviet year. Behind Christmas in the Gregorian calendar, but conveniently ahead of the old Julian reckoning the Orthodox used. This year, celebrating the slide from 1945, the year of victory, to 1946, the year of…what? The year when the Soviet Union didn’t need to worry about victory any more. Not much, anyhow.
And, here in Berlin, the year where the Russians could celebrate in style. Here where Fascism had grown, here where it had done its bloody-handed best to annul the Revolution and destroy the Soviet people…How many officers would swill up the loot of a conquered country? How many frightened German barmen would pour the drinks? How many frightened German barmaids would serve them? How many of those frightened German barmaids would serve the conquerors in other ways later on, whether they much wanted to or not?
Three days earlier, Vladimir Bokov had been looking forward to getting his own drunken blowjob from some blond German bitch. Life wasn’t fair. He’d thought so for a long time. Now he was sure of it. Instead of going off and drinking till he puked and getting his cock sucked, he lay tossing on the meager mattress of a steel-framed cot, knocked flat by the nastiest case of influenza he’d ever had.
Colonel Shteinberg lay one cot to his left. Shteinberg looked like hell. No doubt Bokov looked like hell, too, but he couldn’t see himself. He and his superior were both running a fever close to forty Celsius. Bokov’s head ached. So did every other part of him. Sometimes he shivered and wished he had more blankets. Five minutes later, sweat would river off of him.
He was, in short, a mess. So was Moisei Shteinberg. The only difference between them was that Bokov remembered liking Christmas when he was a small, small boy before the Revolution. Shteinberg never would have given a damn about it.
A male nurse-a Red Army private who’d done something wrong and was lucky not to have drawn some worse punishment-brought them aspirins and glasses of heavily sugared hot tea. The tea stayed down. Some of the other things Bokov had tried didn’t want to. He had vivid memories of that, and wished he didn’t.
The sullen nurse moved no faster than he had to. No doubt he wished he were out carousing, too. And he had plenty to keep him busy. Bokov and Shteinberg weren’t the only ones down with the grippe-not even close. As the aspirins lent Bokov’s wits brief clarity, he thought, You’ll probably catch it yourself, you sorry fucker.
“This is shit,” Colonel Shteinberg said-maybe the little white tablets were also helping him think straighter. “We’ll be flat on our backs for days more, and then feeling steamrollered for another week after that. Pure shit, nothing else but.”
“Don’t worry about it, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said.