The Man with the Iron Heart

IV

Erlangen was shut down tight-“tighter’n a fifty-buck whore’s snatch,” one GI put it-for General Patton’s funeral procession. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside of town made sure nobody unauthorized got in. Mustangs and Thunderbolts buzzed overhead, ready to strafe infiltrators or shoot down any enemy airplanes that tried to interrupt the proceedings.

Lou Weissberg wondered how much good all that would do. If the fanatics-a name for the diehard Nazis the papers were using more and more often-already had people in town, they wouldn’t need to sneak in more now. He wondered why nobody with a grade higher than his seemed to have thought of that. No one to whom he mentioned it seemed to want to listen.

He also wondered why the occupation authorities were making such a show out of Patton’s rites. As far as he was concerned, Old Blood and Guts was a blowhard, a good fighter with few other virtues. During the war, his men worshipped and despised him in about equal numbers. Since…If he could have stirred up a war with the Red Army, he would cheerfully have rearmed the Jerries and sent them into battle alongside the U.S. Army. He cared not a pfennig for Eisenhower’s denazification orders.

Rumor said Eisenhower was about to remove him from command of Third Army when the krauts removed him permanently. Lou didn’t know whether the rumor was true. He wouldn’t have been surprised, though. Eisenhower and Patton had been banging heads since the invasion of Sicily, two years ago now.

But here came Ike, driven down Erlangen’s Hauptstrasse-main drag-in a jeep, a look of pious mourning on his face. Another jeep followed, this one with Patton’s coffin on a standard Army quarter-ton trailer hooked up behind. An American flag covered the coffin.

The Hauptstrasse led to the Altstadter Kirche-the Old City Church-north of the market square. American soldiers lining the parade route fell in behind the jeep to crowd into the square. Germans who tried to do the same were discouraged, more firmly than politely. Again, Lou hoped it would matter.

A couple of GIs with scope-sighted rifles peered out from the church’s steeple. Snipers, Lou thought. Terrific. But maybe having them there was better than not having them. Maybe.

Newsreel cameras recorded the goings-on. One of them peered up at the riflemen. And how would they look to folks back home, here months after peace was supposed to have come? What were they thinking on the far side of the Atlantic? How much did they like this festering aftermath of war?

Eisenhower climbed down from his jeep. Two unsmiling dogfaces with Tommy guns escorted him to a lectern in front of the church’s steps. The sun glinted from the microphones on the lectern…and from the pentagon of stars on each of Ike’s shoulder straps. “General of the army” was a clumsy title, but it let him deal with field marshals on equal terms.

He tapped a mike. Noise boomed out of speakers mounted to either side of the lectern. Had some bright young American tech sergeant checked to make sure the fanatics didn’t try to wire explosives to the microphone circuitry? Evidently, because nothing went kaboom.

“Today it is our sad duty to pay our final respects to one of the great soldiers of the twentieth century. General George Smith Patton was admired by his colleagues, revered by his troops, and feared by his foes,” Ike said. If there were a medal for hypocrisy, he would have won it then. But you were supposed to speak only well of the dead. Lou groped for the Latin phrase, but couldn’t come up with it.

“The fear our foes felt for General Patton is shown by the cowardly way they murdered him: from behind, with a weapon intended to take out tanks. They judged, and rightly, that George Patton was worth more to the U.S. Army than a Stuart or a Sherman or a Pershing,” Eisenhower said.

“Damn straight,” muttered the man standing next to Lou. He wore a tanker’s coveralls, so his opinion of tanks carried weight. Tears glinted in his eyes, which told all that needed telling of his opinion of Patton.

Eisenhower’s voice hardened, his Midwestern accent stern as weathered granite: “But these Nazi cowards also judged they could scare us out of Germany by murdering General Patton. They judged they could run us out of Germany, and they judged they could take over again once we cut and ran-take over and start getting ready for the Third World War. That’s what they thought. That’s how they thought.”

He looked out at the assembled GIs. “Well, folks, I am here-I am right here, in Erlangen, in the American occupation zone-to tell them they are wrong.”

Lou whooped. He clapped. He was one of many, very many. The soldiers here had seen too much of what Hitler’s thugs had done ever to want to see any more of that.

“We are doing all we can to put an end to their wicked violence,” Eisenhower went on. Then he used the word of the moment: “Because they’re fanatics, our enemies are taking longer than they should to realize they can’t hope to defeat the might of the United States of America.”

He got another round of applause, louder than the first. The tankman next to Lou joined in, but he also murmured, “Son of a bitch, but I wish I was back in Omaha.”

Lou wished he were back in New Jersey, too. Unfortunately, wishing wouldn’t put him there. Cleaning up the leftover Nazis just might. It looked like his best chance, anyhow.

“I have one more message for you men, and for the SS goons who skulk in the woods and in the darkness,” Eisenhower said. “It’s very simple. We are going to stay here as long as it takes to make sure Germany can never again trouble the peace of the world.”

He probably expected more cheers then. He got…a few. Lou was one of the men who clapped. The guy in the tanker’s coveralls edged away, as if afraid he had something contagious. That saddened him without much surprising him. He wondered how many of the others who applauded there were also Jewish. Quite a few, unless he missed his guess.

Yes, Eisenhower had looked for more in the way of approval there. He’d acted professionally grim before. Now his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned down. He wasn’t just grim any more; he was pissed off.

“We would waste everything we’ve done up till now if we walked away too soon,” he said, and Lou thought he was speaking off the cuff rather than from prepared remarks, as he had earlier. He pointed south. “Down in Nuremberg, we’re going to try the thugs who are the only reason we had to come here at all. And after that I’d be very much surprised if we don’t hang ’em higher than Haman.”

This time, Lou clapped till his palms hurt. Most of the soldiers in the market square joined him. They wanted to see the war criminals get what was coming to them, all right.

Eisenhower looked a little happier after that-not much, but a little. “And if we catch Reichsprotektor Heydrich by then, we’ll try him and hang him, too,” he said. “Or maybe we won’t bother trying Mr. Heydrich, not when the maniacs he leads have done so much dirty work after the surrender.”

More hot, fierce applause. Heydrich was Public Enemy Number One these days, sure as hell. Lou and the Counter-Intelligence Corps were responsible for that. Posters displaying Heydrich’s rather lizardy features were plastered to everything that didn’t walk. They promised the famous $500,000, tax-free to GIs, for information leading to his capture…or to his body. To a dogface making fifty bucks a month-and, with luck, to a kraut, too-that had to look pretty damn good.

It also looked pretty damn good to Lou: 250 years’ worth of a first lieutenant’s salary. He glanced around. Lots and lots of GIs. No Reinhard Heydrich, dammit. Heydrich was too cool a calculator to risk himself for the glory of it. He’d be hiding away somewhere, cooking up more trouble.

“And there’s one more reason we don’t want to step away before it’s time.” Eisenhower looked east. “The fanatics have hurt the Soviet Union, too. Remember, they killed Marshal Koniev before they got General Patton. But whatever Heydrich’s men do over in the Russian zone, they won’t drive drive out the Red Army. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

Lou looked around again. That comment didn’t raise much applause, but it made a good many soldiers nod thoughtfully. Almost the only thing that kept the USA and USSR on speaking terms was that they both hated and feared the Nazis worse than they hated and feared each other. Without the fanatics, they might have squabbled even more. There’s irony for you, Lou thought.

Having got in his licks, Eisenhower stepped away from the lectern. After that, Patton’s memorial service was in religious hands. It wasn’t Lou’s religion, but that wasn’t why he stopped listening. Ike had surprised him a couple of times. The preacher sounded canned. You knew what he’d say three sentences before he got around to saying it. Nothing was wrong with his remarks, exactly, but they got bloody dull.

Somebody not far from Lou enlivened the proceedings by passing out. He’d stood in the sun too long, and was fine as soon as they flipped water on him. But the near-panic when he pitched forward on his face told how jumpy all the GIs were. No German snipers, no nothing-only jitters. Enough jitters, though, and you didn’t need anything else.

As the memorial broke up, a corporal talking to his buddy delivered his own verdict on Patton: “Sure he was a ballbuster, but he was our ballbuster.” The buddy nodded. So did Lou. That made more sense than most of the highfalutin blather he’d listened to before.

Like any Soviet citizen, Vladimir Bokov had learned more about what war could do than he ever wanted to know. Leningrad: besieged by the Germans and Finns for three years, with hundreds of thousands dead of bombs and shells and hunger and cold and disease. Stalingrad: blasted from the air, then systematically pounded flat by two armies till one could fight no more. Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don: both taken by the Nazis, retaken by the Red Army, taken back by the Nazis, and finally seized for good by the USSR, with each side slaughtering the other’s collaborators and toadies as soon as it grabbed power.

And those were only a few of the high points-or the low points, if you thought that way.

But despite everything Captain Bokov had learned, despite everything he’d seen, despite his utter lack of sympathy for the folk who’d come too close to enslaving the Soviet Union forever, Dresden gave him the willies. British and American bombers had visited hell on the city in the winter before the war…was alleged to have ended.

“Bozhemoi,” Bokov muttered, surveying square kilometers of barrenness, of charred shells of buildings, of places where asphalt had puddled and then run like rivers. The twin stenches of burning and death still thickened the air. He suspected they would linger for years.

“Cunts had it coming,” said his driver, a stolid peasant named Gorinovich.

“Oh, no doubt,” Bokov agreed. Not only did he really feel that way, but you never could tell to whom Gorinovich reported. An NKVD man saw wheels within wheels whether they were there or not. In the USSR, and in Bokov’s line of work, they commonly were. He did add, “If the Americans could do this without their fancy new bombs, screw me if I know why they needed them.”

Gorinovich grunted in response to that. Then he said, “You were going to Division HQ, sir?”

“Da.” Bokov nodded.

“All right. I’ll get you there.”

And he did. The paving was chewed up and sometimes nonexistent, but neither mud nor gravel nor anything else fazed the two-and-a-half-ton American truck. U.S. tanks had thin armor, weak guns, and highly inflammable gasoline engines. The planes the Americans gave the Soviet Union were mostly ones they didn’t want themselves. But nobody ever said a bad word about their trucks. The Red Army would have had a devil of a time winning the war without them.

With a word of thanks, Bokov hopped out of this one in front of the battered house flying the divisional commander’s flag. Sentries with submachine guns stood in front of the door. Like most of their kind, they scrambled out of the way with comic haste when they spotted his arm-of-service colors.

In a way, that wasn’t so good. A Nazi who got hold of an NKVD cap and shoulder boards might bluff his way in to see-or to assassinate-almost anybody. Worry about it later, Bokov told himself. One thing at a time. He turned the knob and walked into the house.

Major General Boris Antipov was drinking tea and laughing with a pretty redhead half his age. When Bokov came in, she turned red, exclaimed in German, and disappeared with a rustle of silk. She’d landed on her feet in postwar Germany-or more likely on her back.

“Who the-?” Antipov growled. Then he too noticed Bokov’s shoulder boards and cap. Some of the hostility left his voice as he went on, “Oh. You’re the fellow they sent from Berlin.”

“That’s me,” Bokov said. “Does your, ah, friend speak Russian?”

“Not a word of it. But she fucks like it’s going out of style, so who cares? Why do you-?” Antipov broke off again and clapped a meaty hand to his forehead. “Son of a bitch! Are you thinking Trudi’s a spy? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“I’m not thinking that,” Bokov said carefully-even the NKVD had to pick its spots before it risked pissing off a general. “But you should recognize the possibility even so. And I wanted to make sure we could talk without her eavesdropping.”

“Well, we can,” Antipov said. “You’ll want to know about the prisoner, eh?”

Bokov leaned forward like a hunting dog taking a scent. “Yes. I’ll want to know about the prisoner.” His voice was soft and eager.

“Can’t tell you a whole hell of a lot,” Antipov said. “What I mainly know is, his bomb didn’t go off. Maybe it was a dud, or maybe he chickened out at the last second. But my boys noticed him acting weird, so they jumped on him. When they found his vest, they tied him up good and tight and let me know. I called you people. That kind of stuff is your baby.”

“Thanks,” Bokov said. Some Red Army men would have tried putting the screws to an important prisoner themselves. In fact, maybe Antipov had. Casually, Bokov asked, “Get anything out of him?”

“His name, his rank, his pay number-that’s about it. Like I said, we didn’t work him over much. Figured that was your business,” Antipov answered. “Oh. And he says he’s a prisoner of war.”

“Prisoner of war, my dick,” Bokov said. “Not after the Hitlerites surrendered, he’s not. He’s nothing but a fucking bandit. And even before…”

General Antipov nodded. The USSR treated German prisoners only slightly better than the Nazis treated captured Soviet troops. Hundreds of thousands of German POWs went into the gulags. Maybe some would come out one day. On the other hand, maybe none would. Bokov wouldn’t lose any sleep over that.

“I’ll take him back to Berlin, where we can interrogate him properly,” the NKVD man said. They would get answers out of the German. Bokov was sure of that. The NKVD had ways of finding out what it needed to know. They weren’t pretty, but they worked.

“Come on, then.” Antipov got to his feet. For a moment, Bokov thought the general himself would take him to the prisoner, but he didn’t. As soon as they got outside, Antipov bawled for some men. A squad appeared on the double. The soldiers were well turned-out and looked very alert. “Take him to the German,” Antipov told them. “Do whatever he says.”

“Yes, Comrade General!” the men chorused. Their sergeant saluted Bokov. “Come with us, sir.”

They’d disarmed the would-be bomber and stowed him in a shed a couple of hundred meters away. Four soldiers with submachine guns stood guard around it. That German wasn’t going anywhere. At Bokov’s nod, one of the guards unbarred the door. “Heraus!” he shouted. It might have been the only word of German he knew-or needed.

Slowly, the Fritz emerged. He had bruises and scrapes on his face and a cut lip. By the way he cradled his right wrist in his left hand, it was sprained, maybe broken. Well, the soldiers wouldn’t have been gentle when they grabbed him.

“Ought to string him up by the nuts,” one soldier said.

“Roast him over a slow fire,” another agreed.

The way the captive watched them made Bokov wonder. “Do you speak Russian?” he asked in German.

“Sir, my name is Fenstermacher, Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher. My rank is Obergefreiter.” Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher rattled off a serial number. “I am a prisoner of war. Under the Geneva Convention, I don’t have to say anything else.”

He was about twenty-five-a few years younger than Bokov-with blue eyes and brown hair. The Wehrmacht had several ranks between senior private and corporal; he held one of them. He wore ragged Feldgrau as if it were new and pressed and kitted out with his rank badges and medals.

Bokov laughed in his face. “Fuck you, fuck your mother, and fuck the Geneva Convention, too.” It would have sounded better in Russian, but German would do. “You’re dead meat. You’re dogshit, nothing else but. Have you got that?”

Fenstermacher stood mute. Bokov murmured to a Red Army man beside him. Grinning, the trooper stepped up and whacked the German on his bad wrist. Fenstermacher wailed. He went white. He started to sag to his knees, but managed to catch himself.

“Have you got that, dogshit?” Bokov asked again. Obergefreiter Fenstermacher hesitated. “Don’t screw around with me,” Bokov advised him. “If you were a hero, you would’ve died yesterday. Last chance, arselick-have you got that?”

The German licked his lips. “Ja,” he whispered, just before Bokov told the soldier to give him another lick.

“Better,” Bokov said. And it was. Once a girl who’d been holding out let you get a hand between her legs, everything else was easy. Interrogations worked the same way. “So…do you speak Russian?”

Another hesitation-a shorter one this time. “Not much. Mostly bad words,” Fenstermacher said.

Plenty of Russians Bokov knew spoke bits of German the same way. Which didn’t mean this snake was telling the truth. The right lie now could give him his chance later. He’d think so, anyhow. Bokov didn’t intend to let anything like that happen.

The U.S.-built truck waited not far from the house General Antipov had commandeered. The driver stood outside, leaning against a fender and smoking a cigarette. By the look of him, Gorinovich didn’t care whether he stayed there another half hour or another week.

“Tie the German up,” Bokov told Antipov’s men. “Don’t hurt him more than you have to unless he gives you trouble. You, you, and you”-he pointed to three soldiers, one after another-“you’ll come back to Berlin with us and make sure nothing happens to him. Get moving.”

They did. Had he said they were going to London, they would have done the same. After they hogtied Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher, they half-frogmarched, half-lugged him over to the truck. When they were about to throw him in the back, he finally asked the question that must have burned in his mind since Bokov got him out of the shed, or more likely since he let himself be taken alive: “What…will you do to me?”

Images formed in the NKVD officer’s mind. A cell too small to stand up or lie down in. Not nearly enough food. Not nearly enough sleep, which could be even worse. Bright lights. Pain. Fear. Always fear.

Fenstermacher had to be imagining most of those same things. For Vladimir Bokov, they weren’t imaginary. They were the tools of his trade, like a mechanic’s wrench and pliers or a sculptor’s mallet and chisel. But that was all right…to Bokov. Imagination and anticipation were tools of his trade, too. What a prisoner imagined his captors doing to him could break him faster than what they did.

Bokov trotted out a couple of small tools: a pitying sigh and a shake of the head. “You won’t like any of it,” he said. “And by the time it’s over, you’ll tell us everything. You’ll be glad to, and you’ll wish you could tell us more.”

“I won’t.” Even Fenstermacher had to hear how hollow his defiance sounded.

“Oh, you will,” Bokov promised him. “One way or another, you will…. You could come clean before it all starts. Believe me, it won’t change anything in the end, except you’ll be a lot happier.” He eyed the German. “Think about it on the way to Berlin. I’ll ask you again then. If you say no-you’ll find out just what we do to you, that’s all.”

“I-” Fenstermacher began.

“Chuck him in the truck,” Bokov told the Red Army men, cutting him off. Let him stew in his own juices all the way back to the ravaged capital of the ravaged Reich. After that…The NKVD would get its answers. Captain Bokov didn’t much care how.

Diana McGraw was just starting to dust the spare bedroom when the doorbell rang. “Damn!” she said, and then looked around guiltily to make sure Ed hadn’t heard. But the rattle and squeak of the old lawnmower out back told her he was still working on the yard. That was a relief. He didn’t like her to swear, not even a little bit.

She hurried downstairs: a slim woman in her late forties, going from blond to gray but not all the way there yet. She muttered wordlessly as she opened the door. Her daughter and son-in-law were half an hour early. That was annoying, even if they would have little Stan with them.

“Oh!” she blurted. It wasn’t Betsy and Buster and the baby out there. It was a kid in a dark green jacket with brass buttons.

“Mrs., uh, McGraw?” The kid had to look down at the pale yellow envelope in his right hand to get the name. He was just about old enough to start shaving. When Diana nodded, he thrust the envelope at her. “Wire for you, ma’am.”

“Uh, thanks,” she said in surprise. She hadn’t got a telegram in months. “Hold on a second. Let me grab my handbag.”

But when she came back with the purse, the Western Union delivery boy was bicycling down the street, pedaling hard. Her mouth fell open as she stared after him. He hadn’t waited for his tip! How far behind on his work was he? Far enough to be scared of getting fired if he didn’t go like a bat out of you-know-where? That was the only thing that made even a little sense to her.

Then she opened the envelope, and everything stopped making sense. The wire was from the War Department. In smudgy, carbon paper-like printing, it said, The Secretary of War deeply regrets to inform you that your son, Patrick Jonathan McGraw, private, U.S. Army-Pat’s serial number followed-was killed outside of Munich, Germany, on 19 September 1945.

There was more, all of it over the typed signature of a lieutenant colonel. But all Diana saw was Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed. That looked big as the world, and blotted out everything else.

She staggered toward the back of the house as if Joe Louis had landed an uppercut right on the button. After a moment, she reversed course long enough to shut the front door.

It was impossible. The war in Europe was over. It had been for months. Oh, there were stories in the paper about fanatics and diehards. They’d even killed General Patton. But Pat’s letters assured her everything was quiet in his sector. Like a fool-like a mother-she’d believed him.

Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed.

“Ed?” she said when she got to the back door. One syllable was all she had in her.

The lawnmower stopped. Ed McGraw’s bald head gleamed under the end-of-summer Indiana sun. “Dang!” he said-he wouldn’t swear in front of her, either. “They here already?” Then he got a good look at her face. The half-rueful, half-annoyed grin on his own faded. “What is it, hon? What’s the matter?”

So she had to find more syllables after all. She managed two: “Pat. He-” But she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t. She held out the telegram instead. It had the words. Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed.

Ed McGraw stumped over to her. He’d lost the last two toes on his left foot in France in 1918. In spite of that, he’d tried to reenlist the day after Pearl Harbor. They wouldn’t take him. They probably wouldn’t have if he weren’t maimed-he was well overage. So he went on working at the Delco-Remy plant in Anderson, the way he had since he came home with eight toes, making good money and socking away a nice chunk of it.

Anderson, halfway between Indianapolis and Muncie, was almost as big as the latter. But people all over the country had heard of Muncie. Plenty of people in Indiana had no idea Anderson existed. Neither Diana nor Ed cared about that. They liked Anderson fine. They’d raised two good kids there, and expected a fine crop of grandchildren. It had already started coming in. Now…

Diana had just started to cry when Ed took the wire from her, saying gently, “Your mother?”

Her mother was seventy-seven, frail and starting to be forgetful. If, God forbid, something were to happen to her, it would be sad, but it would be part of the natural order of things. But when a parent had to put a child in the ground…

Ed held the yellow sheet out at arm’s length. He wasn’t wearing his reading glasses, not to mow the lawn. Diana wondered if he’d be able to see what it said. If he couldn’t, she’d have to read it to him or tell him, and she thought she would rather die herself.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said hoarsely. He could read it, all right. When he raised his face to her, it bore the same blind, helpless look she had to be wearing herself. “Pat…” He was stumbling over things, too. “Germany…Those crazy fucking assholes…”

Even now, she stared at him. He didn’t say things like that. Oh, maybe at the factory, but never around the house. Never. Except he just did. And why not? What else were the Germans who’d murdered Pat?

“It’s wrong.” If Diana didn’t say what was wrong, maybe she wouldn’t have to think about that. So much. Quite so much. Maybe. “It’s wrong. The war is over. They’ve got no business doing that.” Close call there.

“Pat…” Ed said again. He was a minute or two behind her. Right now, a minute or two bulked big as a mountain. “What are we going to do without Pat?”

He’d come closer to actually talking about death than Diana had. “We have to make it stop,” she said. “The war’s over. How many people are still getting wires like-” She broke off, her mouth falling open. No wonder the Western Union boy pedaled away so fast! She’d heard they didn’t take tips when they brought news like that. It seemed to be true.

“Hello!”

Diana almost jumped out of her skin. There stood Betsy, holding Stan. And there beside them was her husband, Buster Neft. He had a limp worse than Ed’s: he’d come back from the South Pacific a year and a half before with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He’d been an outstanding high-school tackle before the war. He’d talked about playing college ball, but a shellburst made damn sure he wouldn’t. Now he worked at Delco-Remy, too. Close to half of Anderson did.

Betsy went on, “We knocked at the front door, but nobody came. Bus heard you guys talking back here, so we came around and….” She ran down when she noticed her folks weren’t responding the way she’d expected them to.

Her husband saw the telegram still in Ed’s hand. “What happened?” he asked sharply. When Ed didn’t answer, Buster came up and took the wire. He didn’t need to hold it away from himself to read it. “Oh, no!” he said, and threw his free hand in the air in anguish. “God damn those motherfucking sons of bitches to hell!”

Part of Diana thought those were the words she’d been looking for herself but couldn’t find. Part thought they didn’t go nearly far enough.

“What is it?” Betsy snatched the telegram away from Buster. “Pat!” she wailed, and let out a shriek that set the baby howling. Buster took him. Betsy ran to her mother and father. They clung together.

That shriek brought neighbors out to see who was murdering whom, and why. They converged on the McGraws’ house. Several of them had lost somebody in their family, or at least had somebody hurt. They knew what the McGraws were going through because they’d done it. And the ones who hadn’t-the lucky ones-all knew people who had. How could you not?

Somebody-Diana forgot who-pressed a cold tumbler into her hands and said, “Drink this up.” She did, thinking it was 7-Up. It turned out to be gin and tonic, and almost went down the wrong pipe. But she felt a little better with it inside her. It built a thin wall between her and everything else. She could still see through the wall, and hear through it, too. She could even reach over it and feel what was there. But the bit of distance the gin gave was welcome.

“Such a crying shame,” a neighbor said. She was crying; it made her mascara run. “Pat was a good boy.”

Everybody nodded. “If you didn’t like Pat, you didn’t like people,” another neighbor said. “I don’t know a soul who didn’t.” Everyone nodded again.

“Such a…waste.” With women all around him, Buster swallowed some of what he might have said. “I mean, when I got hit, we were fighting the Japs. I knew why I was on that beach-to make the slant-eyed so-and-so’s say uncle. But to get killed on occupation duty? That’s a joke, or it would be if it was funny. What the heck are we wasting our time-wasting our people-over there for now that the…darn war’s done?”

“That’s what I said when I showed Ed the wire,” Diana exclaimed. “That’s just exactly what I said. Isn’t it, Ed?” She blinked-she was talking very loud and very fast. The gin must have hit her harder than she thought.

“You sure did, honey.” Ed had a glass in his hand. Where did that come from? Diana had no idea. Not surprising, not when she didn’t know who’d given her that welcome gin.

“I wonder how many people all over the country are going through the same thing for no reason,” Betsy said. Her mascara was all over her face, too. Most of the women’s was.

“Too many,” Diana said. “One would be too many. One is too many.” Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed. Yes, she could feel what was there.

“It’s a lot more than one,” Buster said. “All these loonies with bombs strapped on…But I don’t know how many. I wonder if anybody outside the War Department does. Papers sure don’t talk about it. You just pay attention to them and the radio, everything’s fine over there.”

“And that’s not right, either,” Ed said. His face was redder than the sun should have made it. Whoever’d handed him that drink had fixed him a doozie. Well, why not? Wagging his index finger in the air, he went on, “I can see why we didn’t talk so much about casualties while the war was still cooking. Hitler and Tojo’d find out stuff they didn’t need to know? But now? What makes a difference now?”

“Brass hats don’t want folks back here to find out how bad they snafu’d things over there,” Buster said wisely.

Ed nodded, vigorously enough to make the flesh of his double chin shake. So did most of the men gathered there: the ones who’d served in either war, Diana realized. She only blinked again, in confusion. “Snafu’d?” She wasn’t sure she’d even heard it right.

“It’s short for ‘situation normal-all, uh, fouled up,’” her son-in-law explained. Even at a time like that, Ed managed a grin and a grunted chuckle. Diana wondered why. Then she saw it could also be short for something else. She blamed the drink for slowing her wits. She wasn’t about to blame herself-no, indeed.

“We ought to know the truth about what’s going in,” she said. “Isn’t that what we fought the darn war for?” The news about Pat had horrified Ed into swearing in front of her. She couldn’t imagine a calamity that would make her swear in front of the neighbors.

“You’re right,” Betsy said. She took Stan back from Buster.

The baby was eight months old. He had two teeth. He could say “dada” but not “mama” yet, which irked Betsy. He smiled whenever anybody smiled at him or whenever he just felt like smiling. Why not? He had no idea what was going on, the lucky little guy.

Betsy’s face crumpled. “He’ll never get to know his Uncle Pat now,” she said-almost the same thought as Diana’s. Betsy started crying again. Stan stared at her. He could cry whenever he felt like it, too-could and did. He wasn’t used to seeing Mommy do the same thing.

A neighbor touched Diana on the arm. “If there’s anything we can do over the next few days, sweetheart, you sing out, you hear? Anything at all, and don’t be shy,” she said. “If we don’t help each other, who’s gonna?”

“Thanks, Louise. God bless you.” That made Diana think of something else. She still could think straight if she worked at it. “Ed! We’ve got to call Father Gallagher.”

“We sure do.” He shook his head, which made his jowls wobble some more. “So much to take care off. And for what? For a waste, a big dumb waste.”

“That’s what it is, all right. Nothing else but. And nobody should have to die on account of a big, stupid waste,” Diana said. “Not Pat, and not nobody-uh, anybody-else, either. It’s wrong, don’t you see? It’s wrong.” More nods said her neighbors thought so, too.