“No kidding,” Diana said. “Has Truman answered him yet?”
“Yup. He doesn’t waste any time-when somebody pokes him with a stick, he pokes right back.” E. A. Stuart sounded admiring and approving. Diana understood why: Truman made good copy. To a lot of reporters, nothing mattered more. They didn’t much care what public figures said or did, as long as it sold newspapers. Mercenaries, Diana thought scornfully. She had to deal with people like that, and to be interesting in her own right for them. She didn’t have to like them.
When Stuart showed no inclination to go on, Diana prodded him: “Well? What did Truman say?”
“He said Taft is like a guy yelling from the bleachers. He’s never been a manager in the dugout, let alone a player on the field. He said Taft doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but what can you expect from a guy up in the cheap seats?”
“The only reason he’s not in the bleachers himself is that FDR died,” Diana snapped. She had the uneasy feeling that Roosevelt wouldn’t have wanted to pull troops out of Germany, but she didn’t mention it to E. A. Stuart. The less you said that could make the people on your side unhappy with you, the better off you were. She’d learned all kinds of unsavory but needful lessons about how to run a political campaign.
Stuart chuckled. “He’d probably call that baptism by total immersion. He’d have a point, too.”
“Phooey,” Diana said. “And you can quote me.”
“Well, maybe I will,” the reporter answered. “Won’t take up any more of your time now. ’Bye.” The line went dead. I’ve got other things to do, he meant: one more polite lie. Diana had learned a raft of them the past few months.
“What did Stuart want?” Ed asked.
“My comments on something Senator Taft said, and on the President’s answer to it.” Diana had said things like that often enough by now that she almost took them for granted-almost, but not quite. “Taft makes good sense. Truman’s full of malarkey.”
“Well, what else is new?” her husband said.
Germans ambled into the market square in Erlangen to hear what Konrad Adenauer had to say. Bernie Cobb didn’t give a damn about the politician from the British zone. He wouldn’t be able to follow the speech anyhow. He’d picked up a little more German since the so-called surrender: enough to order drinks and food, and enough to get his face slapped if he tried to pick up the waitress afterwards. Politics? Who cared about politics?
He and the other GIs at the edge of the square weren’t there to listen to the speech. They were there to frisk the krauts mooching in, to make sure nobody was carrying a Luger or wearing an explosive vest. All Bernie knew about the Adenauer guy was that he was anti-Nazi. Well, no kidding! Otherwise, the occupying authorities never would’ve let him open his yap.
But if the American authorities liked him, you could bet your last pfennig that Heydrich and the fanatics wouldn’t. Which was why U.S. soldiers were searching the German men who came to listen to Adenauer.
“What I want to do is pat down the broads,” Bernie said. “Not all of ’em-you can keep the grannies and stuff. The cute ones. Hey, it’d be strictly line of duty, right?”
“Line of bullshit is what it’d be, Cobb,” said Carlo Corvo. The sergeant pointed toward the WACs and nurses who were searching German women. “See? It’s taken care of.”
One of the gals they were checking was a tall, auburn-haired beauty-just the kind Bernie’d had in mind. “Yeah, but they don’t put their hearts into their work the way I would.”
“Your heart? Is that what you call it these days?” Sergeant Corvo asked. But he was leering at the good-looking German gal, too.
None of the Jerries they frisked had anything lethal on him. Nobody else yelled out an alarm, either. And none of Heydrich’s goons blew himself up, and a few dogfaces with him, in frustration because he couldn’t get close enough to Konrad Adenauer.
The German politico came out to what Bernie thought of as extremely tepid applause. Hitler would have had the Germans screaming themselves sick. Maybe they’d learned better than to get too excited about politicians. More likely, Adenauer was about as exciting as soggy corn flakes without sugar. He was an old fart with a sly face that would have served him well in a poker game.
An American officer introduced Adenauer to the crowd in what sure sounded like fluent German to Bernie. Quite a few officers and some enlisted men could go pretty well auf Deutsch. Some had studied in school. Others, like this Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal, came by it in different ways.
Bernie wondered what Adenauer thought of having a Jew present him to his own countrymen. Or did Keith Rosenthal’s being an American count for more? Wasn’t Adenauer trying to show that Germans could handle their own affairs? Well, sure they could-as long as the occupying authorities said it was okay.
Despite the lukewarm hand Adenauer got, he waved as he stepped up to the microphone. Maybe the krauts had had all their political enthusiasm knocked out of them by now. If they had, that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing. When Bernie said so, Sergeant Corvo nodded. “You better believe it wouldn’t,” he opined. “Or maybe this Adenauer guy is as much of a boring old shithead as he looks like.”
Corvo always said exactly what he meant. Whether Adenauer was getting his message across was liable to be another story. If he fired up the krauts in the crowd, they hid it well. Again, chances were that was good news.
“You know a little of the lingo, right, Sarge?” Bernie said. “What’s he going on about?”
“He says Germany has to…do something with England and France.”
“Germany sure did something to ’em,” Bernie said.
“Shut up,” Corvo snapped. “When you talk, I can’t make out what he’s going on about…. He says Germany needs to reconcile, that’s what it is. He says Germany has a lot to atone for…. Yeah, he’sa Catholic, all right. Catholics like to talk about atoning for shit.”
“If you say so,” answered Bernie, a Methodist who hadn’t seen the inside of a church any time lately. New Mexico was full of Catholics, of course: well, as full of them as a mostly empty state could be. But he paid even less attention to their religion than to his own.
How long would Adenauer go on? Some of Hitler’s rants had lasted for hours, hadn’t they? Did the Jerries expect all their politicians to match that? If they did…If they did, they were even screwier than Bernie Cobb gave them credit for, which was saying a mouthful.
Fighting through France and Germany, Bernie’d hated land mines worse than anything else. They lay in wait for you, and if you stepped on one or tripped over a wire, that was all she wrote. Right behind them-right behind them-came mortar rounds. Ordinary artillery announced itself. Somebody yelled, “Incoming!” and a bunch of dogfaces hit the dirt or dove for holes. But half the time you didn’t know the bad guys had opened up with a mortar till the first bomb tore your buddy’s leg off…or maybe yours.
Bernie heard a faint hiss, a faint whistle, in the air. He had a second or two to pretend he didn’t. It could have been a flaw in the microphone and speakers. It could have been the wind, which was nasty and cold. It could have been…
Bam! An 81mm round burst right in the middle of the crowd of krauts listening to Konrad Adenauer. Next thing Bernie knew, he was as flat on the cobblestones as if a deuce-and-a-half had run over him. He wasn’t hurt. In a way, discovering his combat reflexes still worked was gratifying.
Carlo Corvo had flattened out beside him. Quite a few of the German men were also down on their bellies. Yeah, they’d been through the mill, too. Shrieks said some people were down because the mortar bomb had knocked them down.
And then another round came in, and another, and another. A trained two-man crew could fire ten or twelve a minute. Morons could use an 81mm once it was aimed. You dropped a bomb down the tube and you made sure it didn’t blow your head off when it came out again. It wasn’t near as tough as designing an atomic bomb.