Bombs Away (22 page)

Aaron also saw two rifle-toting National Guardsmen in full combat gear checking somebody's papers. Following the lead of Fred Payne of Maine when Bangor got hit, Governor Warren had mobilized them as soon as the bombs fell. His counterparts along the West Coast had done likewise. In Utah and Colorado, the state capitals had got hit, so the Feds took care of it for the governors who weren't there to do it for themselves.

The police station was a low-slung stucco building fronted by trees. The policeman took Aaron inside, led him past the fat sergeant at the desk (who was eating a jelly doughnut to make sure he didn't get any skinnier), and took him into a room next to the chief's office.

The man waiting inside wore a blue uniform, but he wasn't a cop. He was an Air Force lieutenant colonel. Aaron nodded to himself. He'd expected either military brass or an FBI man. To himself, he'd bet on J. Edgar Hoover's boys. Himself would have to find some money to pay off.

“Mr. Finch?” the officer asked. When Aaron nodded, the fellow went on, “I'm Del Shanahan. I'm with Air Force Intelligence.” He held out his hand.

Aaron took it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, which might or might not prove true, depending on how things worked out here. Shanahan's grip said he didn't spend all his time behind a desk.

“I asked you to come in here,” he said, “to talk with you about how you captured Lieutenant Yuri Svechin. He was the navigator on the Russian bomber.”

“Was he? I didn't ask him anything about that. I just got him into my car and took him here,” Aaron said. “I'll tell you what I know, Colonel, but I don't know a whole heck of a lot.”

“You could talk with him, though. Isn't that correct?” Shanahan asked.

“A little bit,” Aaron admitted.

“Do you speak Russian? I know he doesn't speak English.”

“Nah.” Aaron shook his head. With Senator McCarthy bellowing about Communists like an enraged elephant, you didn't want to admit you spoke Russian, even if you did—but he didn't. “I know some Yiddish, though, and I tried that on him. He turned out to speak German, so he could pretty much follow me and I could pretty much follow him.”

“He was willing to give himself up to you?”

“When he saw I wouldn't hurt him, yeah. He was eager, in fact. Take a look at what happened to some of the other guys from that plane and I guess you can see why.”

“That was…unfortunate. We've sent a note to the USSR through the International Red Cross apologizing and offering compensation to the slain flyers' families.”

“You have?” Aaron said in surprise. “How come?”

“We'll have planes shot down over Russian territory. We don't want their civilians to have any excuse to lynch our downed crewmen.”

“Oh.” Aaron thought that over. He didn't need long. “Okay. I gotcha. Makes sense, I guess. Of course, when the Russians watch one of their cities go up in smoke, they're liable not to need any other excuse. We sure didn't, did we?”

“No. As I say, unfortunate.” Lieutenant Colonel Shanahan was in his early forties, with hair held in place by Vitalis and with a thin mustache like the ones that had been popular during the last war. Aaron had worn one then, too. He had a photo of himself with it, feeding the pigeons in St. Mark's Square in Venice. They weren't stylish any more. These days, Aaron's upper lip was bare. Shanahan didn't seem to have noticed the change. He'd probably have a thin white mustache if he lived to be ninety.

Aaron took out a pack of Chesterfields. “Do you mind?” he asked politely.

“Huh? No, not a bit.” Shanahan flicked a lighter for him and lit up himself.

“It's funny,” Aaron said. The Air Force officer made a questioning noise. Aaron went on, “They must have killed a million of us, at least, and maimed more than that. And we've got to be even with them, huh?”

“More than even,” Shanahan said. “That's off the record, if you please, but it's no great big military secret. We can hit them harder than they can hit us.”

“Pretty much what I figured,” Aaron agreed. “But here we are, going through the motions over bomber crews. Isn't it like blowing a thousand bucks on the world's biggest spree and then getting all upset 'cause you can't find a penny in your pants pocket?”

Del Shanahan sighed and blew a cloud of smoke up at the ceiling. “You do what you can, Mr. Finch. You do what the laws of war train you to do. We send those men out. If we can save them, aren't we obligated to try our best to do so? Their families would want no less from us.”

Once more, Aaron nodded after a moment. “If you look at it that way, you've got a point.” He stubbed out his butt. “Need anything else from me?”

“No.” Shanahan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I just wanted to make sure you were only a chance passerby who rescued that Russian instead of, say, bashing in his head with a brick.”

“What else would I be? A spy?” Aaron asked.

“You aren't, clearly. But we had to make sure,” the officer said. That gave Aaron something to chew on as the Glendale policeman drove him back to his house. In Stalin's Russia, he supposed they would have kept him in jail on the principle that he
might
be a spy. This was better, but was it enough better?

“Mommy, I have to go potty!” Linda said.

Marian Staley sighed. Rain was drumming down on the roof of their Studebaker. They were living in it. That seemed better than the tents housing so many refugees from Everett. Her car was one of the few from so close to the bombing that was still in working order. Flash from the blast had set the paint on dark autos afire, but not their yellow one.

Another sigh. “Well, come on,” Marian said. “I'll take you to the outhouse.” That was a polite word for what they had: slit trenches with board seats inside tents to hold off the rain.

“They're stinky!” Linda said. And they were. Latrine workers sprinkled the trenches with lime chloride every day—or they were supposed to, anyway. They didn't always. The trenches got smelly even when they came through, and worse when they didn't. That also could have been worse, though. It could have been summertime, with flies swarming everywhere. Linda went on, “Can't I just tinkle out here? In the rain, who'd know?”

It would have been simpler. Not without a pang, Marian shook her head all the same. “No, that's disgusting. It lets germs get loose. Come on—we'll both go.” Plenty of germs were bound to be loose regardless, with so many people crowded together and with hardly any way to get clean this side of standing naked under the rain.

“I wish I had my Mickey umbrella,” Linda said when they got out of the Studebaker.

“I wish we had any kind of umbrella at all,” Marian said. The ones back at their house had burned. Almost everything back there had burned. If she hadn't stashed a spare car key in a flower pot, they wouldn't have been able to drive away.

Would we be that much worse off?
she wondered as they squelched through the mud toward the outhouse. They were both wearing tattered secondhand clothes—handouts, and what the National Guardsmen and State Police who ran this camp had had in their storerooms. None of it fit well. It was warmer than nothing, and that was about what you could say for it. The blankets they wrapped themselves in at night were wool, and somehow managed to be scratchy and thin at the same time.

They got in and out as fast as they could, and looked at the other women and girls in there as little as they could. There were no stalls. What you did, you did for others to see. That was harder on women than on men, though Marian refused to believe even men relished taking a crap in front of spectators.

There were other things men didn't have to worry about. She really dreaded getting her period in a place like this. Not having privacy when you needed it most…

Linda's little hand in hers, she hurried back to the car. They were both alive. They still had a chance for things to turn around and get better. From what the harried, desperately overworked docs said, they had a good chance of staying alive for a while, too. Some of Marian's hair kept coming out when she combed it. So did some of her daughter's. Their flash burns were healing cleanly. When she put on enough powder, she could hardly see hers.

They hadn't gone bald, the way people with bad radiation sickness did. They weren't puking up their guts all the time, or passing blood, or roasted like a medium-rare leg of lamb. They would have to worry more about cancer down the line. Next to vanishing in a flash of light, next to getting your whole hide seared and your eyeballs melted, next to being too weak and too sick to eat, they were lucky.

Some luck,
Marian thought as she let Linda in ahead of her. They had one ratty towel in there. She dried off Linda first, then used the wet towel to get some of the water off herself, too. She sneezed. They could catch pneumonia. Then they'd end up in a hospital till penicillin cleared it up. If penicillin cleared it up.

Marian had to keep both front windows open a half inch or so, or the inside of the Studebaker got impossibly stuffy. But that let in half-inch slices of rain—one more thing to keep the towel busy.
Boy, this is fun,
ran through her mind.
Yeah, sure.

Just when she was ready to believe things couldn't possibly get any worse, two National Guardsmen came by carrying a corpse. The weary men in olive drab didn't even bother with a stretcher. One had the head end, the other the feet. Cloth shrouded the body, but not well. At least the workers wore camouflaged ponchos, and helmets to keep the water out of their eyes.

“There goes another dead one, Mommy!” Linda adapted to things like this faster and more easily than Marian could.

Well, she saw enough of them. People here died all the time, of radiation sickness and burns and bodies broken by the bomb—and of heart attacks and strokes, and of knife wounds and gunshots when they brawled. More bodies went into the new graveyard by the camp every day. Whenever they filled a new layer in the mass graves, they shoveled dirt over the corpses. They used lime chloride on them, too. As with the latrines, it helped some but not enough.

At seven in the morning, at half past noon, and at six at night, bells rang throughout the camp. That was meal call. Getting food, maybe running into people you knew: the highlights of the day. Keeping the car windows open a smidgen did make sure they heard the bells.

Most of what they got was C-rations and K-rations—canned and packaged stuff—out of the National Guard armories. Like the rest of the camp, it kept you alive without leaving you overjoyed to stay that way. The K-rats sometimes included a starvation allowance of cigarettes: not even enough to keep you from getting the jitters if you'd smoked regularly before the bomb fell. There was a lively trade between people who needed tobacco more than anything else on earth and those who didn't care about cigarettes and were out for whatever else they could get.

When Marian got her ration pack and a real sandwich for Linda (“Dog meat” was her daughter's take on the bologna), someone waved to her from one of the crowded tables in the mess hall. She peered that way, smiled, and waved back. “Mr. Tabakman!” she said. “It's good to see you!” It would have been good to see anyone she knew, but she didn't say that.

“You can eat with my friends and me if you want,” the cobbler said. “We'll make room for you and Linda.”

More than anything else, his remembering her daughter's name decided her. “Come on, dear,” she said, shepherding Linda forward.

Fayvl Tabakman's friends were a couple of other middle-aged Jews. He introduced them as Yitzkhak and Moishe. They both spoke English with accents thicker than his. Plainly, they would have been more at home in Yiddish, or perhaps Polish or Russian. But, like him, they stuck to America's language while talking to lifelong Americans. Any other speech was for when they were amongst themselves.

They were no dopes, even if they did have heavy accents. They talked about how the war in western Germany was going and about how Stalin thought as if they belonged on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I saw Stalin once, in Minsk,” Moishe said. “I was lucky—Stalin didn't see me.”

Accent or not, he made Linda laugh. “That's funny!” she said, and was amused enough (or hungry enough) to take two more bites from her sorry sandwich.

He looked at her over the tops of his bifocals. “Funny now, sure. I can sit here and tell the story. Not so funny then. Stalin is a very scary man. Even in a crowd of people, I was nervous.” Marian got the idea that to him the atomic bomb was only the latest catastrophe he'd lived through, and that he didn't expect it to be the last—or the worst.

Marian got down her own canned-beef ration. Two of the Jews were eating Spam instead. Since they didn't say anything, she didn't, either. Moishe gave her the hard candies from his pack for Linda. She passed back the cigarettes from hers. She didn't smoke enough to miss them much, and his yellow-stained index and middle fingers said he did.

Fayvl walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker. “Thank you,” she said. She'd never had trouble, but she knew she might.

He touched the brim of his old-fashioned cloth cap. “It's a nothing,” he said. “Once upon a time—” Breaking off, he turned and walked away fast. Marian wondered just what he was remembering. Whatever it was, she could tell how much it hurt.

In all his flying time, Boris Gribkov had never been airsick. Less than a day aboard the
Stalin
had him puking up the sausage and sauerkraut he'd eaten an hour before. The destroyer's skipper, a commander named Anatoly Edzhubov, was sympathetic. “I'm sorry, Boris Pavlovich,” he said. “The North Pacific in the wintertime can be a nasty roller coaster. Here, drink this to get the taste out of your mouth.” He held out a tumbler of clear liquid.