Berlin. Broken capital of the Third Reich. Quadruply occupied symbol of Allied solidarity, even when there wasn’t a hell of a lot of Allied solidarity to go around. A place where Heydrich’s fanatics pulled off enough bombings and other atrocities to generate more Allied solidarity than there would have been otherwise.
Lou Weissberg stared at the wreckage-some of it mighty grandiose wreckage, too-for all the world like a tourist. Behind him, Howard Frank also did some tall rubbernecking. Lou lit a cigarette. Smoking helped you not notice the other thing that remained in the air, even two years and more after the fighting was said to be over. A lot of people had died here, and not so many of them lay in graves.
His superior smoked away with him. Major Frank puffed like a steam engine on an uphill grade. “Maybe we’ll bring it off this time,” he said.
A blackbird chirped, sounding like a robin back home. Like those good old American robins, blackbirds ate worms. What the worms ate…was perhaps better left uncontemplated in Berlin.
“Maybe we will.” If Lou sounded as if he didn’t believe it, that was only because he didn’t. “We tried it in ’45-and they blew up the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. We tried it in ’46-and Frankfurt is still waddayacallit…radioactive. So what the hell will they do here?”
“We got the Nazi big shots here. That’s something, anyhow,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t’ve given good odds we’d manage that.”
“Chances are Heydrich’s waiting till they go on trial,” Lou said. “Then his merry men will try something really juicy, know what I mean?”
“Merry men, my ass.” But Frank’s green-persimmon pucker said he knew just what Lou meant, no matter how much he wished he didn’t. He glanced east. “Trial’s gonna be in the Russian zone, so the security monkey’s off our back, anyway.”
“Unless they holler for help,” Lou said.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Howard Frank said. “They wouldn’t do that unless they were in deeper shit than they are now.”
“I guess,” Lou said. Scuttlebutt said that back in 1942, when things looked black for the USSR, Stalin asked FDR and Churchill for American and British divisions to fight alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Scuttlebutt even said he’d promised to let them keep their own command structure, which for a Russian leader was like handing over the crown jewels and the key to whatever he used instead of Fort Knox. The Anglo-American troops didn’t go. Trucks and avgas and Spam and ammo did, by the bazillions of tons. And Uncle Joe found enough Soviet bodies to make Hitler blow his brains out.
And that was what so many of them turned into, too-bodies. To this day, you could smell them, and the Germans they’d taken with them, in Berlin.
Lou and Major Frank smoked their cigarettes down to teeny-tiny butts before tossing them away and lighting new ones. The tobacco scroungers were on those little, spit-soaked dog-ends like Dracula on a pretty girl’s neck. Tobacco fueled what was left of the German economy-and you could even smoke it.
Labor gangs shifted rubble one broken brick at a time. Old people, women who’d probably been chic once upon a time, and shabby demobilized soldiers labored side by side. Everybody was skinny. The ration was supposed to be up to 1,500 calories a day, which wasn’t saying much. You’d lose weight doing nothing on 1,500 calories a day. Doing hard physical labor…
Considering what the Germans had done in occupied Europe, Lou had trouble working up much sympathy. He suspected the Red Army men in the Russian zone found it even tougher.
Howard Frank was also eyeing the skinny krauts. “Now if we sent everybody who looked at us sideways off to a camp-”
“We’d be just like the Russians. And just like the Nazis,” Lou finished for him. “But we’re not. Hell, we can’t even keep our own guys here.”
“Last GI in Germany, close the door on your way out,” Frank agreed. “Gotta admire Congress, don’t you?”
“God must love idiots, or He wouldn’t have made so many of them,” Lou said, which might have been an answer or might not.
“Yeah, but how come so many of ’em got elected?” Frank said. “You ready to go back to the States yet?”
“A lot of me is. I’ve been away from my family way too goddamn long-I mean way,” Lou said. “Hate to leave feeling like I didn’t do my job, though. If I could punch Heydrich’s ticket before I climbed on a plane or a boat or a unicycle or whatever the hell…”
“I got a picture of you on a unicycle. I got a picture of you back in the hospital after you fall off the fuckin’ unicycle, too,” Frank said. Lou Weissberg, not the most graceful of men, maintained a dignified silence.
During the war, there’d been a German propaganda photo of a soldier raising the swastika flag over the ruins of Stalingrad. That didn’t quite work out for Hitler’s crew. Right before V-E Day, Stalin got his answer: a photo of a Red Army man planting the hammer and sickle on the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin. The Wehrmacht gave up a few days later, and everything was supposed to be hunky-dory from then on out.
Well, theory was wonderful.
Getting into the Russian zone to see the Chancellery wasn’t easy. You had to clear a checkpoint, sign a log, show your ID, and get patted down. You also had to talk to a Red Army lieutenant who spoke American English like a native and probably was one.
“Okay-youse guys are legit,” the guy said: a turn of phrase Lou heard all the time from New Jersey high-school kids in his English classes. The Red Army soldier went on, “We gotta keep our eyes open, y’know? Damn Fascist hyenas try and pull all kinds of sneaky stunts.”
“Sure,” Lou said. He’d heard that hyena line, too-mostly from people who read the Daily Worker. It came from Russia there, and it came from Russia here.
If anything, the Russian zone in Berlin looked worse than the American zone. It was the eastern part of the city, and the part where the fighting had been heaviest. The labor gangs here were guarded by Russian soldiers with submachine guns that looked as if they’d been made in somebody’s basement. For all Lou knew, they had.
The Chancellery and the other fancy buildings from which the Nazis had run the Reich were all smashed wreckage. Lou took out a Brownie and clicked away. “These’ll remind me they got some of what was coming to them, anyhow,” he said. He wasn’t the only Allied soldier photographing the ruins, either. Amateur shutterbugs nodded to one another, all probably thinking the same kinds of thoughts.
“Americans? You have any money? You have any cigarettes?” The guy who asked spoke Yiddish, not German. He rolled up a sleeve on his frayed shirt to show a number tattooed on his upper arm. He’d lived through the death camps, then. His face was all nose and staring eyes. Even now, more than two years after he’d been liberated, he looked as if a strong breeze-hell, a weak breeze-would blow him away.
“Here, buddy.” Lou handed him a pack of Luckies and five bucks and half a D-ration chocolate bar he had in a jacket pocket.
Major Frank was similarly generous. “Beat it,” he told the displaced person after giving him stuff. “Somebody’ll knock you over the head if you hang around.”
“Thank you both. If I still believed in God, I would ask His blessings on you,” the DP said. He disappeared like a cockroach vanishing down a crack in the floor.
“If I still believed in God…” Lou echoed, in Yiddish and then in English. It sounded just as bad either way. But when you’d been through what the DP had, when millions of people who went into the camps came out only as smoke from a crematorium chimney, when God-if there was a God-sat there and watched without doing anything…The Chosen People? Chosen for what? For this? Lou had done his best not to think about it. If you did think about it, how could you go on believing?
Lou started to ask Howard Frank about that. Then, seeing the look on the other Jew’s face, he didn’t. Frank was wrestling with the same demons. When you did start to think, how could you help it?
One way was to stop thinking about it. They got their chance, and in a hurry. Other beggars had seen them give to the Jewish DP. They might have marked themselves with the brand Sucker. Hungry people in threadbare clothes converged on them from all directions, hands outstretched, voices shrill and desperate.
Yes, they all needed food. Yes, they were all broke. But there were too many of them for two U.S. Army officers to help much, even if they stripped themselves naked. Lou wasn’t inclined to do that anyway. That almost all the beggars were Germans did nothing to endear them to him any further.
Major Frank said, “No.” So did Lou. Then they said, “Hell, no!” Then they said, “Go away!” Finally, it was, “Fuck off!” And Lou wondered if he’d have to draw his sidearm to show he meant business.
Before he did, a couple of Russian soldiers came over to see what the yelling crowd was all about. That got the beggars moving. Did it ever! They didn’t want the Russians to pay any special attention to them. Oh, no!
The Russians understood bits of German. Lou explained what had caused the fuss. “Stupid to give to a German,” one Russian said.
By the look on his face, he wouldn’t have been impressed had Lou told him he’d given to a Jew. Lou didn’t try. He just spread his hands and said, “Ja, sehr dumm.” That gave the Russians nothing to chew on. Having broke up the crowd, they went on their way.
“Ain’t this fun?” Major Frank said.
“Oh, boy.” Lou nodded. “Some fun.”
Vladimir Bokov didn’t know a single NKVD man who wasn’t nervous. Twice now the United States had failed to try the leading German war criminals. The first failure had cost the court building and most of the jurists who would sit in judgment on the Nazis. And the city of Frankfurt hadn’t recovered from the second, nor would it for years.
So it was up to the Soviet Union to do things right this time around. It was up to the Soviet Union to give the thugs who almost overran the world what they deserved. High time for that. Long past time. And if everything went well, the USSR would get the credit for doing what the USA couldn’t.
But if things failed to go well, the USSR would get the blame. Marshal Stalin had made one thing unmistakably plain: he did not wish the workers’ paradise to be seen as blameworthy in any way. If blame accrued to the Soviet Union, blame would also accrue to the men who should have kept the trial running smoothly. Stalin’s blame.
Would accrue to the NKVD.
No wonder Bokov was nervous. No wonder his colleagues twitched if anyone looked at them sidewise, or even if no one did.
They’d found what had been a minor municipal courthouse still standing near the eastern edge of the Soviet zone in Berlin. Most of the buildings around it had already been leveled. They’d finished the job for a kilometer around in all directions. And they’d fortified that two-kilometer circle in ways that would have made the Soviet generals who planned the fieldworks for the Battle of Kursk jealous.
The best estimate-given by people who had reason to know such things-was that it would cost any enemy 250 tanks or a couple of divisions of infantry to batter through those fortifications to the courthouse. And that was before the NKVD and the Red Army started throwing in reinforcements.
Bokov was still nervous. He wasn’t the only one, either.
Moisei Shteinberg didn’t just twitch. He quivered. As a Jew, he had extra reason to want to see Goring and Ribbentrop and Rosenberg and Streicher and the rest of the brutes dead. And, as a Jew, he had extra reason to fear what would land on him if anything went wrong.
“They cannot get through,” he said to Bokov, surveying the fortified belt from the outside.
“No, Comrade Colonel, they can’t,” Bokov agreed. He was a little easier in his mind than Shteinberg was. He was no Jew. He was no colonel, either. Less blame for any failure would stick to him. He could hope so, anyhow.
He did hope so. With all his heart.
“They can’t give it to us up the ass, either.” Shteinberg went on worrying as if Bokov hadn’t spoken. “We have our own generator. We’ve sealed off the water lines. We’ve sealed off the sewer lines. We’ve got our own water tower by the courthouse. We’ve got a sealed-off septic tank to handle the drains. The Heydrichites can’t possibly get at or get into any of that stuff. They can’t, dammit.”
“You’re right, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. What else was he supposed to say? You couldn’t very well go wrong agreeing with your superior officer. And, as far as he could see, Colonel Shteinberg was right.
Right, maybe, but not reassured. He looked up into the air. The only planes there were a couple of the ubiquitous C-47s. They were too far away to let Bokov tell if they were American originals or the Soviet copies called Li-2s: the one had its entry door on the left side of the fuselage, the other on the right. It hardly mattered either way. They sure as the devil weren’t German.
Even Shteinberg saw as much. “The Luftwaffe’s dead. I don’t miss those wolves at all,” he said. “Ever have a Stuka bomb your trench?”
“No, sir.” Bokov hadn’t seen front-line service.
“Only happened to me once, and I’m not sorry,” Shteinberg said. “It was early in the war. I had to deal with a major who lost his head.” Lost his head probably meant something like retreated without orders. And deal with certainly meant something like kill. “I was going to take him away, and this damned thing with a shark mouth painted on its nose screamed down on us, and…Well, I didn’t have to worry about the major any more. Not enough of him left to bury. It could have been me.”
It could always be you. In the Soviet Union, that was as axiomatic as anything out of Euclid. The knock on the door, the tap on the shoulder…It didn’t have to be nearly so dramatic as a screaming shark-mouthed dive bomber.
No wonder Shteinberg was so jumpy. No wonder everybody with a blue stripe around his cap was.
Another C-47 flew by, this one right overhead. “Don’t worry too much, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. “We’ll make it work.”
“Da,” Shteinberg said, and then, “We’d better.”
Red Army sentries discouraged Germans from getting too close to the fortified zone. They shouted one warning-they’d learned to say “Heraus!” After that-usually only seconds after that-they opened fire.
They did just that this morning. Bokov heard the sharp, peremptory cry-German was a wonderful language for giving orders. He heard the sharp stutter of a three-round burst from the guard’s PPSh submachine gun when somebody didn’t listen to the order no matter how wonderfully peremptory it sounded. And he heard a screech that said at least one of those rounds connected.
Sure as hell, somebody was down and thrashing maybe seventy-five meters outside the perimeter. Bokov and Shteinberg loped over to him. He was a half-starved fellow with a beak of a nose and several days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin and cheeks. At the moment, he was clutching his left leg and cussing a blue streak.
Seeing two NKVD men bearing down on him only made him turn his indignation on them. “That verkakte mamzer went and shot me!” he exclaimed in what came fairly close to German.
“Nu? What did you expect him to do? Give you a big kiss?” Moisei Shteinberg replied in the same language. Bokov could follow it well enough to realize what was going on. A Jew. A DP, he thought.
The guard came up. He didn’t want to see two NKVD men, either. Anxiously, he said, “He didn’t move when I yelled. Orders are to open fire if they don’t move. I did what everybody above me told me to do.”
“It’s all right,” Bokov told him. “You’re not in trouble. Go back to your post.” With an enormous sigh of relief and a parade-ground salute, the guard obeyed.
“How bad are you hit?” Colonel Shteinberg asked the wounded man. The fellow pulled up his trouser leg. He had a bloody groove in the outside of his calf. Shteinberg waved dismissively. “That isn’t worth getting excited about.”
“Easy for you to say. It isn’t your leg, either,” the Jew-no, the other Jew-retorted. “Hurts like shit.” He didn’t say Scheisse; he said govno. Chances were he’d started out in Poland or the Soviet Union, then. Where he’d been since…
Bokov spoke German, not Yiddish: “Why didn’t you clear out when the guard warned you?”
“Gevalt! Some warning!” the DP said-Bokov had figured he’d be able to follow regular Deutsch. “The fucking Nazis couldn’t kill me off, so now you Russian mamzrim try and finish the job for them? A kholeriyeh on you!”
“Mamzrim?” Bokov asked Shteinberg. It had to be the plural of the earlier insult, but Bokov didn’t know what the insult meant to begin with.
“Bastards,” Shteinberg supplied economically. He gave his attention back to the DP. “Everybody’s got a sob story these days. Some of them are even true. The rest aren’t good for wiping your ass.”
Muttering under his breath, the skinny man displayed a tattoo on his arm. “Know what that means, you-?” He bit back whatever he’d been about to add: no doubt a good idea.
But Colonel Shteinberg had to nod. Bokov also recognized a death-camp serial number. This fellow had seen hell on earth, all right. If he kept mouthing off, he might get to compare the Nazi and Soviet versions of it, too.
“And before they shipped me to Auschwitz, they had me digging their fucking mines for them in the mountains,” the Jew went on. “I go through all that, I live through all that, and your miserable shithead puts a hole in my leg. The way you talk, I should thank him.”
“Maybe you should,” Shteinberg said. “He could have hit you in the head.”
“Wait,” Vladimir Bokov said. Both Colonel Shteinberg and the DP looked at him in surprise. Bokov eyed the survivor. “You say you worked in the mines in the mountains. Down in the Alps?”
“That’s right,” the skinny man said. “What about it?”
“Were you just…digging out gypsum or whatever it was?” Bokov asked.
“No-tea with fucking lemon wedges,” the DP snapped. “What the devil else would I be doing down there?”
Bokov seldom faced such sarcasm, not from a man he was interrogating. The half-swallowed chuckle that came from Colonel Shteinberg didn’t help, either. Doing his best to ignore sarcasm and amusement, Bokov asked, “Did the Nazis care how much you brought up?”
“They cared how much I dug,” the wounded Jew answered. “If you didn’t do enough to suit ’em, you were a goner right there.”
“But did they care how much-fuck, call it gypsum-you brought up, or just how much you dug?” Bokov persisted, excitement tingling through him despite his best efforts to hold it down.
“Oh,” Shteinberg said softly. “I know what you’re driving at.”
“I sure don’t,” the DP said. Shteinberg had spoken Russian, not Yiddish or German. The DP still followed him.
That didn’t surprise Bokov, not after his earlier guesses. “Just answer my question,” he snapped, this time with an NKVD officer’s authority in his voice.
After frowning in memory-and, no doubt, in pain as well-the DP said, “As long as we moved rock, they didn’t give a shit. Some of us thought it was funny. Some of us just thought the Nazis were meshigge.”
“Nuts,” Shteinberg translated, adding, “That’s an ass-end-of-nowhere dialect of Yiddish he talks.”
“Who, me?” The skinny Jew sounded affronted. “I’m no dumb Litvak who goes fiss like a snake when he means fish.”
“Shibboleth,” Moisei Shteinberg murmured, which seemed to mean something to the DP even if it didn’t to Bokov. Shteinberg took out a clasp knife and cut some cloth from the DP’s already-ragged trouser leg so he could bandage the bloody gouge. Then Shteinberg frisked him. He found a small chunk of a D-ration bar and-much better hidden-a U.S. five-dollar and a ten-dollar bill. “Where’d you get these?” he asked. “Tell it straight the first time, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Sorry? I’m already sorry,” the skinny man said. Before Shteinberg could say anything else, he went on, “Yeah, I know-I’ll be sorrier. You people know how to take care of that. The guys who gave me the money were a couple of American soldiers. Officers, even, I think. They gave me the chocolate, too. It’s not so great, but it fills you up. I’ve been empty a lot.”
“Americans, eh?” Bokov sounded less suspicious than he would have most of the time. His own thoughts were racing in a different direction. Eyeing the DP, he asked, “Were they Jews, too?”
“Yeah. They talked Yiddish to me, not German. Better than him, too-one of them sounded just like me.” The man sneered at Shteinberg. Captain Bokov wouldn’t have wanted to piss off an NKVD colonel, but the DP didn’t seem to give a damn. “They treated me a hell of a lot better all the way around, if you want to know what I think.”
“Fat chance,” Shteinberg said.
Bokov thought exactly the same thing at the same time. All the same, he asked, “This place where the Nazis had you digging-could you find it again? Could you show us where it is?” He leaned forward, waiting for the answer.
The DP said only, “It ain’t in your zone.”
“I understand that.” Bokov could be patient when he needed to. “But could you?”
“Maybe.” The skinny Jew wasn’t about to admit anything, not till he knew which way the wind blew.
Shteinberg made a fist and brought it down-on the cement next to the fellow’s wounded leg. “Then…maybe…we won’t have to get rough to find out.”
“Are you still thinking along with me, sir?” Bokov asked.
The colonel smiled a vulpine smile. “Maybe,” he said.
The Fourth of July had always been Diana McGraw’s favorite holiday-well, except for Christmas, which was a different kind of thing altogether. The Fourth went with picnics and beer and sometimes going to the park to listen to bands and patriotic songs and speeches and waiting through the long hot sticky day for nightfall at last and cuddling with Ed while fireworks set the sky ablaze above them and the kids went “Ooooo!”
And here was the Fourth come round again. Here she was in a park again, only in Indianapolis, not Anderson. The McGraws had gone to the state capital a couple of times before the war, to see if the fireworks were better. Once they were. They weren’t the next time, so the family didn’t go back.
Diana looked out at the throng of people in the park with her, at the throng of American flags, at the throng of placards. They stretched from just in front of the speakers’ platform to too far away to read, but the ones she couldn’t make out were bound to say the same things as the ones she could. If you were here today, you wanted Harry Truman to bring the boys home from Germany.
If you were here today…She turned to the Indianapolis police officer who stood on the platform with her and the other people who would talk in a while. “How big a crowd to you think we’ve got today, Lieutenant Offenbacher?”
Offenbacher’s beer belly and double chin said he spent most of his time at a desk. He didn’t look happy standing here sweating in the sun. Still, he shaded his eyes with a hand and peered out over the still-swelling mass of people. “From what I can see, and from what I’ve heard from the men on crowd-control duty, I’d say, mm, maybe fifteen or twenty thousand folks.”
Experience had taught Diana that cops cut the size of crowds by at least half-more often two-thirds-when they didn’t like the cause. By now, she’d had a good deal of practice gauging them, too. This one looked more like forty or fifty thousand to her. But even Offenbacher’s estimate was impressive enough.
“Just think,” she said brightly. “We’ve got rallies like this in every big city from coast to coast-and in a lot of cities that aren’t so big, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lieutenant Offenbacher’s voice held no expression whatever.
They had governors and Congressmen and Senators speaking at the rallies, too. It had been less than two years since Diana started her movement. Back then, most politicians wanted nothing to do with it or with her. Jerry Duncan, bless him, was the exception, not the rule. But things had changed. Oh, yes, just a little!
And they also had actors and actresses speaking. It wasn’t bad publicity, not any more. They had singers. They had ministers and priests-next to no rabbis. They had baseball players. (Not all of them, of course. What Ted Williams told them to do with their invitation wasn’t repeatable in polite company. It wasn’t physically possible, either.) They had writers-newspapermen and novelists.
They had some of just about every kind of people who could make other people listen. No, Diana hadn’t known what she was getting into when she started out. She also hadn’t known how many others she could bring along with her.
And they still had people who hated their guts. The cops Offenbacher led weren’t just keeping the anti-occupation crowd orderly. They were also keeping counter-demonstrators from wading into the crowd with their own picket signs-and with baseball bats and tire irons and any other toys they could get their hands on. Some of the chants that rose from their opponents might have made Ted Williams blush.
“Can’t your men arrest them for public obscenity?” Diana asked Offenbacher.
“Well, they could,” the boss cop allowed. “Maybe if things get worse.”
“Worse? How?”
“You never know,” Lieutenant Offenbacher said. Diana understood that much too well. The Indianapolis police sympathized with the counter-demonstrators. They wouldn’t do anything against them they didn’t absolutely have to.
Time to get the show on the road. Diana stepped up to the microphone. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, and paused while cheers and applause drowned out the noise from the opposition’s peanut gallery. “Thank you for coming out this afternoon. We’ve got some terrific people lined up to talk to you, and we’ve got one of the best fireworks shows in town waiting for you after the sun goes down.” More cheers, maybe even louder this time. As they ebbed, Diana went on, “But most of all, thank you for being here, no matter why you came. We still need to show Harry Truman and all the people in Washington with their heads in the sand that there are lots and lots of us, and we aren’t about to go away!”
A great roar swelled up from the crowd: “That’s right!”
“It sure is,” Diana said. “And now it’s my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, City Councilman Gus van Slyke!”
Van Slyke had a belly even bigger than Lieutenant Offenbacher’s. He’d made a fortune selling used cars. He hadn’t come down one way or the other on the German occupation till a friend’s nephew got wounded over there. That convinced him. (That he couldn’t stand Truman probably didn’t hurt.)
“We won the war. By gosh, we did,” he said. His voice was gruff and growly, like a bear’s just waking from hibernation. “Now enough is enough. What are we doing over there in Europe? We’re getting good young men, our best, killed and maimed. We aren’t accomplishing anything doing it. The fanatics are still there, no matter what we’ve tried. And how much money have we flushed away? Billions and bill-”
When Diana heard the sharp pop! it didn’t register as anything but a backfire. But Gus van Slyke fell over. Something warm and wet splashed Diana’s arm-she was wearing a sleeveless dress because of the heat. It was blood. She could smell it. She could smell something else, too-van Slyke had fouled himself. His feet drummed on the platform, but not for long. He lay in a spreading pool of his own gore.
Diana jammed a hand in her mouth to keep from shrieking. Out in the crowd, people did start screaming. Some of them tried to run away. They stepped on other people. No, they trampled them-they weren’t being polite about it. More screams and yells and wails rang out, which only led to more trampling as chaos spread.
Lieutenant Offenbacher stepped around the red, red pool as he strode to the microphone. “This assembly is canceled,” he declared. “This is a crime scene, a murder investigation.” That didn’t stop the panic in the crowd, either. If anything, it made matters worse.
The fireworks got canceled, too.
Official Washingtoncelebrated the Fourth of July on the Mall. The President made a speech. No doubt it was full of patriotic fervor. The fireworks display was second to none. With Uncle Sam footing the bill, they could afford to make it lavish.
Tom Schmidt wasn’t there. Somebody else was covering President Truman’s hot air for the Chicago Tribune. Unofficial Washington gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to tell official Washington what it thought of Truman’s German policy. Official Washington, of course, was hard of hearing.
“No,” Tom muttered as Clark Griffith, who owned the Washington Senators-first in boos, first in shoes, last in the American League-tore into Truman. “Official Washington is hard of listening.”
“What’s that?” another reporter asked him.
“Nothing. Just woolgathering,” Tom lied. He wrote the line down. Sure as hell, it would help the column along.
Griffith finally ran out of words and backed away from the microphone. Next batter up was Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Dirksen had kind of fishy features, wildly curly hair, and the exaggerated gestures of a Shakespearean ham actor. The combination should have made him ridiculous. Somehow, it didn’t. His baritone bell of a voice had a lot to do with that. So did the genuine outrage that poured from him now.
“Out in Indiana, they are killing us-killing us, I tell you!” he thundered, pounding a fist down on the lectern. “Councilman Augustus van Slyke tried to exercise his rights under the First Amendment of our great Constitution. He tried to peaceably petition our government for redress of grievances. And our government has a great many grievances to redress, but I shall speak of that another time. Augustus van Slyke tried to tell the truth to the powers that be, and what became of him? What became of him? He was shot dead, my friends, shot down like a dog in the highway, without so much as a bunch of lace at his throat!”
Something stirred in Tom Schmidt as he scribbled notes. That was from a poem. He’d read it in high school. “The Highwayman,” that was it, though he was damned if he could remember who wrote it. Well, he could check Bartlett’s when he got back to the bureau. Only somebody like Dirksen (though there wasn’t really anybody like Dirksen-he was one of a kind) would throw a poem into a political speech.
But it worked. The hum that rose from the crowd said it worked. Half the people there, maybe more, must’ve read “The Highwayman” or heard somebody recite it. Dirksen might be a crazy fox, but a fox he was.
“How dare they? How dare they?” He pounded the lectern again. “They are no longer content with lying to us. No, that does not satisfy them any more, for they begin to see that we begin to see through the tissue of their lies. And so, where words will not suffice them, they commence to argue with bullets. But will even bullets stop us, friends?”
“No!” the crowd roared. That cry must have rattled windows in the White House. Harry Truman wasn’t there to hear it-he’d be speechifying to his friends right now. If he had any friends. To his supporters, anyhow. Maybe he’d hear it on the Mall, too.
Hammier than any actor, Dirksen cupped a hand behind one ear. “What was that?” he asked mildly.
“No!” That oceanic crowd-roar came again, even louder this time. Tom’s ears rang. A little nervously, he wondered how many people here carried guns. Some pulp horror writer-Schmidt couldn’t come up with his name, either, and it wouldn’t be in Bartlett’s-once advanced a rule about raising demons. Do not call up that which you cannot put down. Had Everett Dirksen ever heard of that rule? The White House was right across the street. If the crowd tried to storm it, Councilman van Slyke wouldn’t be the only one who got shot today. Unh-unh. Not even close.
“They say, in Indianapolis, they have yet to find the murderer-to find the filthy assassin.” Dirksen hissed the last word with poisonous relish. “He shot a man dead in broad daylight, before witnesses uncounted, and they have yet to find him? My friends, how hard are they looking?”
Another roar rose up from the throng gathered together in the hot, sticky July night. This one was wordless, and all the angrier for that. Suddenly, Tom Schmidt wasn’t just anxious any more. He was scared green. Politics was what you did instead of shooting people who didn’t think like you. But once you started shooting, where did you stop? Anywhere?
If the Second Revolution-or maybe the Second Civil War-starts here, it’s a hell of a story, yeah, Tom thought, but am I gonna live long enough to file it?
And then he caught a break. Maybe the whole country caught a break-he was never sure afterwards, but he always thought so. Over on the Mall, the super-duper fireworks show began.
The noise was like gunfire, but the polychrome flameflowers and torrents of blazing sparks exploding across the velvet-black sky proclaimed by their beauty their peace. Everett Dirksen looked over his shoulder at them. That was probably sheer reflex to begin with, but he seemed transfixed by the spectacle-he couldn’t look away.
At last, he did. He lifted his glasses with one hand and rubbed at his eyes with the other. Then, softly at first but with his great voice swelling as the words poured out of him, he began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was a bitch of a song to sing, but he did it. He raised his hands, and the crowd joined in.
Tom Schmidt started singing before he quite realized he was doing it. He couldn’t carry a tune in a sack, but it didn’t matter right then. None of the reporters nearby sounded any better than he did. Chances were most of the people in Lafayette Park wouldn’t run Alfred Drake or Ethel Merman out of business any time soon, either. That also turned out not to matter. Added all together, they sounded pretty damn good.
“The bombs bursting in air…” Tears ran unashamed down Everett Dirksen’s cheek, glistening in the spotlights. Did he mean them, or could he bring them on at command? With Dirksen, you never could tell. But half the hard-bitten newshounds near Tom were sniffling, too, as bombs did burst in air. And nobody stormed the White House.