“Japs sure blindsided us when they hit Pearl Harbor. We never dreamt they’d be dumb enough to jump on us like that, so they caught us flat-footed,” Frank said. “They were tougher all kinds of ways than we expected. We didn’t know any more about the Zero than the Germans knew about the T-34. And kamikazes…” His voice faded.
“Before the Japs finally quit, we played down how much trouble an enemy who didn’t care if he lived could be,” Lou said. “I guess we were smart-the Japs would’ve done more of that shit if they knew how bad it hurt us. But it seems to me we believed our own propaganda. We didn’t think the krauts could give us much trouble if they pulled stunts like that. Shows what we knew, huh?”
“Other thing we didn’t think was that they would pull shit like that,” Lou said. “Before the surrender, they didn’t hardly. The Master Race must’ve learned something from the Japs. Who woulda believed it?”
“Not me.” Captain Frank held up a sheet of paper. “Word is that that Adenauer guy you brought from Cologne is gonna speak at Erlangen. You really think he’s the straight goods?”
“He’s no Nazi, if that’s what you mean,” Lou replied. “If you mean, is he the Answer with a capital A, hell, I don’t know. But I sure hope like hell somebody can make the Germans run their own government and not automatically go after all their neighbors. If nobody can-”
“Then we’ve got to do it ourselves,” Frank finished for him. Unhappily, Lou nodded. That was what he’d been thinking, all right. His superior went on, “And God only knows how long we’ll stay here.”
“We need to,” Lou said.
“No shit. But what we need to do and what we’re gonna do, they’re two different beasts, and the jerks back home sure aren’t helping. Time may come when we have to go home, prop up whatever half-assed German government we’ve patched together in the meanwhile, and hope like hell Heydrich and the Nazis don’t knock it over as soon as we’re gone.”
“It won’t happen right away.” Lou took what comfort he could from that. “Not till after the fall elections, anyhow.”
Captain Frank lit another cigarette. He blew out smoke and shook his head. “You’re such a goddamn American, Lou.”
Whatever Lou had expected from the other CIC man, that wasn’t it. “I sure hope so, sir.” He hesitated, then asked, “What exactly d’you mean? I’m damn glad I’m an American, but you don’t make it sound like a compliment.”
Frank sighed. “I don’t mean it for an insult, either. But the Europeans play a deeper game than we do, ’cause they know how to wait and we don’t. Heydrich figures if he can put the Nazis back on top ten years from now, or maybe twenty, he’s won. And he’s right, too, God damn him to hell. But us? We get bored, or we find something new to worry about, or we get sick of spending lives a few here, a few there, when it’s got no obvious point. And so you’re right-we won’t do anything much till after the elections. But that’s only this fall, remember. If the Republicans take Congress-and if they take Congress because they’re yelling, ‘What are we doing in Germany now that the war’s over?’-what can Truman do about it? Not much, not if he wants to get elected in ’48.”
Lou thought about that. He shivered, though a coal stove kept Captain Frank’s office toasty. Then he covered his face. “We’re screwed. We are so screwed.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Captain Frank said. “I hoped like anything you’d tell me I was wrong.”
XII
Diana McGraw paid attention to the newspapers in ways she never had before Pat got killed. Back in those prehistoric days, she’d looked at the funnies and the recipes and the advice and gossip columns. Foreign news? As long as the Americans and their allies kept moving forward-and, from 1942 on, they pretty steadily did-who worried about foreign news?
She did, now. The Indianapolis papers didn’t carry as much as she wanted, as much as she needed. And so the postman brought her the New York Times. She got it a few days late, but that was better than not getting it at all. The same went for the Washington Post. If you wanted to find out what was going on in Congress, you had to read a paper that covered it seriously.
She was reading the Times when she looked up and said, “Ha!”
Ed was rereading The Egg and I. He’d stop and chuckle every so often. Diana had read it, too. The only way you wouldn’t stop and chuckle was if you’d had your sense of humor taken out with your tonsils when you were a kid. But that Ha! was on an entirely different note. “What’s up, sweetie?” Ed asked.
She pointed to the story that had drawn her notice. “This German politician named Adenauer”-she figured she was messing up the pronunciation, but she hadn’t taken any German in high school-“is coming into the American zone to talk to the Germans there.”
“He’s not a Nazi, is he?” Ed answered his own question before Diana could: “Nah, he wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t let him get away with it if he was. So how come you think he’s a big deal?”
“I think we’re pushing Truman and Eisenhower and all the other blockheads running things over there-pushing ’em our way, I mean,” Diana said. “If they set up some kind of German government, that gives ’em an excuse to say, ‘Well, we’ve done what we need to do, so we can bring our boys home now.’”
“Sounds good to me,” Ed said.
She nodded. “To me, too. So let’s hear it for Mr. Konrad Adenauer.” She tried the name a different way this time. Ed only shrugged. He’d come back from Over There with a few scraps of German, but he’d forgotten it in the generation since.
The phone rang. She picked it up. “Diana McGraw,” she said crisply. The phone rang all the time these days. She had to answer it as if she were running a business. What else was she doing, when you got right down to it? She was just glad she wasn’t on a party line; the ringing that wasn’t for them would have driven all the other people crazy.
“Hello, Mrs. McGraw. This is E. A. Stuart,” the reporter said.
She’d already recognized his voice. She’d never imagined she would get to know reporters so well, but it didn’t impress her. She would gladly have traded everything-travel, getting acquainted with prominent people, even meeting the President-to have her only son back again. But God didn’t make deals like that. Too bad. It was almost enough to tempt you into atheism.
Since she couldn’t have what she wanted, she did what she could with what she had. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stuart?” She used other reporters’ first names. With Ebenezer Amminadab Stuart, formality seemed a better choice.
“I was wondering if you had any comment on the speech Senator Taft made this afternoon,” Stuart said.
She would see that speech when today’s Post or New York Times got to Anderson…three or four days from now. “Can you tell me what he said?” she asked. “If it got reported on the radio, I missed it.” Radio news made even the local papers look thorough. When you had to shoehorn everything into five minutes’ worth of air time…Well, you couldn’t. That was about the size of it.
“Basically, he said Truman doesn’t know what he’s doing in Germany. He said Truman had won the war, but he was losing the peace. He said we heard all through the war how wicked the German people were. If that’s true, he said, they aren’t worth any more American lives. And if it’s not true, why were the President and the whole government lying to the American people from Pearl Harbor to V-E Day?”
“Wow!” Diana said.
“That’s not a, mm, useful remark,” E. A. Stuart reminded her.
“Sorry. You’re right, of course,” Diana said. “Let me see…. Youcan say I agree with everything the Senator said, and he put it better than I could have.”
“Okey-doke.” She could hear Stuart’s pencil skritching across paper. “Yeah, you may not like Taft-an awful lot of people don’t-but you have a devil of a time ignoring him.”