The Man with the Iron Heart (40 page)

Diana, of course, had her sights set on one thing and one thing only. “The sooner the boys come home, the sooner no more mothers will start hating the Western Union delivery boy,” she said.

How were you supposed to answer that? Jerry couldn’t, all the more so because he thought she was right. But she seemed sure the election would make things happen as if by magic. As a multiterm Congressman, Jerry Duncan knew better. There’d be plenty of horse trading and log rolling before anything got done. Washington was like that. It always had been. If it ever changed, he would be astonished.

“If Truman won’t see reason, you ought to impeach him and throw him out on his ear,” Diana said.

Jerry held up a hand like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. “Don’t even try to get anybody to talk impeachment. You’d only be wasting your time, and no one would listen to you,” he said. “Truman’s not doing anything unconstitutional. He’s just wrong. There’s a big difference.”

“If they impeached everybody in Washington who was wrong, the place’d be empty inside of two weeks,” Betsy said.

“If you’re wrong enough—” Diana began.

Maybe she had something, too. If Roosevelt had been on the point of losing the war, wouldn’t people have run him out of town on a rail? Jerry suspected they would…which, in those days, would have left Henry Wallace President of the United States, a genuinely scary thought. Truman had no Vice President at the moment. That would make the Speaker of the House President if he got impeached. And the new Speaker would be a Republican….

E
D
M
C
G
RAW READ THE PAPER WHILE HE ATE BACON AND EGGS OVER
easy and toast with butter and jam and smoked a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “looks like you’ve got the kind of Congress you’re gonna need.”

“What are the final numbers?” Diana asked around a mouthful of toast—she was eating breakfast, too.

Her husband read from the front-page story: “‘If present trends continue, the House in the Eightieth Congress will consist of at least 257 Republicans, 169 Democrats, and one American Labor Party member. The final eight races are too close for a winner to be declared. In the Senate, there will be at least fifty-three Republicans and forty-two Democrats. Again, the final Senate race is still up in the air.’”

“That’s amazing,” Diana said. “The Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Congress the last time around.”

Ed rustled the newspaper to show he wasn’t done yet. “‘This historic reversal is surpassed in recent times only by the Democratic sweep that went with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election,’” he read. “‘Pundits believe many of the voters who turned to the GOP yesterday did so in protest against President Truman’s costly and bloody occupation of Germany. Diana McGraw’s opposition movement galvanized voter unhappiness.’” He grinned at her around the cigarette, which was about to singe his lips. “How about that, babe? You and zinc and sheet metal.” In the nick of time, the butt went into the ashtray.

“How about that?” Diana echoed. She didn’t quite get the joke, but Ed had been making factory jokes she didn’t quite get ever since they were newlyweds. She went on, “Jerry said something like that last night, but he’s on the same side as we are, so it’s hard to take him all that seriously.”

“Jerry…” Ed McGraw shoveled in a forkful. He took a bite of toast. Then he lit another cigarette. “Ever figure you’d call a Congressman by his first name?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Diana started to say that the Congressman’s wife didn’t like it very much. She swallowed the words before they came out. Why have Ed wondering whether Betsy Duncan had a good reason not to like it? That would set Ed wondering, too, which wouldn’t be good when nothing was going on between her and Jerry. And, she realized a beat later, it would be even worse if something
were
going on.

“You’re hot stuff, kiddo.” Ed took the cigarette butt out of his mouth long enough to drink some coffee. After that, it went right back in. “But I’ve known you were hot stuff since high school.”

“Oh, you—!” she said fondly. She never had confessed some of the things that went on in the back seat of his beat-up old Chevy before they got married. What the priest in the booth didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him…and God, of course, had already seen it.

“So how does it feel?” he asked. He’d never looked for any of the limelight himself. He wasn’t that kind of man. All he cared about were his house and his job and their family. “You know all these big shots. You met the President and everything. You get your name in the papers.”

“I wish nobody’d ever heard of me,” Diana said. “That would mean we had Pat back. To hell with all this other stuff.”

No, she didn’t usually swear in front of her husband. She hardly noticed doing it this time. Ed didn’t notice at all. His big bald head bobbed up and down. “You got that right. Oh, boy, do you ever. I’d trade anything for another minute with him, even. But you don’t get those chances over again.”

“You sure don’t.” Diana drained her own coffee mug. She looked at the clock above the stove. It always ran fast, but she made the correction without conscious thought. “You’d better get going.”

“I know. I know.” Ed stood up. He grabbed his sheet-metal dinner pail. “Tongue sandwich in here?”

“Sure.”

“Good—one of my favorites.” Ed leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, leaving affection and the smell of tobacco smoke behind. Then he was out the door and heading for work, right on time. Ever since they got married, he’d been as reliable as the machines he tended.

Diana smiled as the Pontiac backed down the driveway and chugged out into the street. Ed was reliable here, too—not just on the job. She didn’t want him to think she was running around, even if he didn’t always leave her glowing in bed any more. He’d never given her any reason to think he was, not even during the war, when all those Rosie the Riveter types flooded into the plant. Some of them—plenty of them, in Diana’s jaundiced opinion—were looking for more than work. If they’d found it, they hadn’t found it with Ed.

Reaching across the kitchen table, Diana snagged the newspaper. Ed always got it first, because he had to hustle out the door—and, not to put too fine a point on it, because he was the man. But she could look it over now. It had maps and charts showing Senators and Representatives by party in the old Congress and the new.

No doubt Jerry was right (
yes, I do know my Congressman by his first name,
Diana thought): some Republicans would back the occupation, while some Democrats would vote against it. But the more Republicans in Congress, the better the chances it would end soon. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.

“We
will
bring them home,” Diana said, there in the empty kitchen. It would have been empty even if Pat did come home: he would’ve gone off to work with Ed. But it would have been a different empty. It wouldn’t have been such an aching emptiness. Pat would have been gone, but he wouldn’t have been
gone.
Diana nodded to herself. Pretty soon, nobody else would have to worry about the aching kind of emptiness. She hoped.

More than a year and a half after the war in Europe was supposed to have ended, London remained a sorry, miserable place. Food was still rationed. So was coal. People wore greatcoats even indoors. Demobilized soldiers seemed to huddle in theirs as they ambled along looking for work—but jobs were as hard to come by as everything else in Britain these days.

Police Constable Cedric Mitchell counted himself lucky. He’d had his position reserved for him when he came back from the war—if he came back. Plenty of his mates hadn’t. He’d made it across the Channel from Dunkirk in a tugboat that got strafed by two Stukas. Then he’d gone to North Africa, and then on to the slow, bloody slog up the Italian boot. Now he had a Military Medal, a great puckered scar on the outside of his right thigh, and nightmares that woke him up shrieking and sweating once or twice a week.

He also had a new dream that wasn’t so nasty: to retire to Algiers or Naples or somewhere else with decent weather one day. Down in those countries, winter didn’t mean long, long nights and fogs and endless coughs and shivers. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but he damn well had.

“Italy’s wasted on the bloody Eyties,” he muttered, his breath adding to the mist that swirled in front of Parliament. “Fucking wasted.”

He walked his beat, back and forth, back and forth. The most lethal weapon he carried was a billy club. Thinking of that made him snort, which also added to the mist. No Jerry’d sneak up behind him and cut his throat here. No stinking dago who still loved Mussolini’d chuck a German potato-masher grenade into his foxhole. He didn’t need a Sten gun or a fighting knife or an entrenching tool—which could be a lot more lethal than a knife if you knew what to do with it, and he did.

A fellow in American pinks and greens—khaki trousers and olive-drab jacket—looked left before he stepped out into St. Margaret’s Street. “Watch yourself, Yank!” PC Mitchell shouted. The American froze. A truck rumbled past from the direction in which he hadn’t looked.

“Jesus!” he said. “Why don’t you guys drive the right way?”

“We think we do,” Mitchell answered. “And since you’re over here, you’d jolly well better think so, too.”

“That’s the third time the past two weeks I almost got myself creamed,” the Yank said.

Do you suppose you ought to suspect a trend?
But Mitchell didn’t say it. Even though the Americans were two years late getting into the war—a year better than the last time around, at that—they’d done all right once they got going. He’d fought alongside them in Italy, so he knew they’d paid their dues. And Britain would have gone under without the supplies they sent. So…

“Well, have a care crossing,” was what did come out of Mitchell’s mouth. His sergeant would have been proud of him. He beckoned the American on. “Seems safe enough now.”

“It
seemed
safe enough before,” the Yank said darkly. But he made it from the houses of Parliament to Westminster Abbey without getting run down. Not that many cars were on the road. Petrol was still rationed, too, and hard to come by.

PC Mitchell wondered how long the country would need to get back to normal. Then he wondered if it ever would. India wanted to leave the Empire, and nothing short of another war seemed likely to keep it in. Without India, what was left wasn’t worth tuppence ha’penny. And there wouldn’t be a war on the far side of the world when Germany, only a long spit away, had turned into a running sore.

Blam!
No sooner had Mitchell heard the explosion than he was flat on his belly. It hadn’t knocked him over—he’d hit the dirt. That was a hell of a big bomb going off somewhere not far enough away—not close enough to hurt him, but nowhere near far enough away.

Across the street, the Yank in pinks and greens had also flattened out like a hedgehog smashed by a lorry.
He’s seen action, too, then,
Mitchell thought as he started to scramble to his feet.

Lorries. No sooner had they crossed his mind than a big one—one of the kind the USA had built by the millions during the war—came tearing down the middle of the street toward him. It was as if the driver knew he ought to stay on the left but had trouble remembering. “Jesus!” Mitchell said, furiously blowing his whistle. Just what the poor sorry world needed: a drunken Yank driving a deuce-and-a-half like he’d just been let out of the asylum.

Then PC Cedric Mitchell got one glimpse of the driver’s face as the fellow swerved across the street toward Westminster Abbey. The bloke was a nutter, all right, but not
that
kind of nutter. Not barking mad but exalted mad. He had the face of someone about to do something marvelous, and the devil with the consequences. He had a face that made PC Mitchell hit the dirt again.

Right after Nazi fanatics bombed the Eiffel Tower, soldiers had appeared in front of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s and a few other places. Then, when nothing happened, they vanished again. Mitchell had most of a second to wish men with rifles and Sten guns were anywhere close by—or even that bobbies like him carried firearms.

Then the fanatic in the truck—and he couldn’t have been anything else—touched it off. The other explosion had been too close for comfort, frightening but not dangerous. This one…When this one went off, it was like getting stuck in the middle of the end of the world.

Much too much like that, in fact.

Blast picked PC Mitchell up and slammed him into something hard. “Oof!” he said, and then, “Ow!” He could barely hear himself, even though that second noise came closer to a shriek than a yelp. Blast had also smashed at his ears.

Had the Nazi struck at Parliament, Mitchell would have been nothing more than a smear on the sidewalk. But he’d steered his truck into Westminster Abbey before detonating it…and God help that poor bloody American in his smart uniform.

Broken glass clattered and clinked down around the bobby. A big, sharp shard shattered between his legs. He shuddered. A foot higher up and that one would have cut it right off him or left him with no need to shave for the rest of his days.

He snuffled as he staggered to his feet. A swipe at his nose with his sleeve showed he was bleeding there like a mad bastard. No great surprise: he realized he was lucky he was still breathing. Blast could tear up your lungs, kill you from the inside out, and not leave a mark on you. He’d seen that more than once, fighting north through Italy.

No broken ribs grated and stabbed when he moved. That was nothing but fool luck. And his bobby’s helmet had kept him from smashing his head. It wasn’t anywhere near so tough as an army-style tin hat, but evidently it was tough enough.

Across the street…Every English or British sovereign since William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey. The bulk of the structure dated from the reign of Henry III, in the late thirteenth century. Not all of it was ancient; the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the last war was in the west nave.

No. Had been in the west nave. The Abbey’d come through the Blitz and the later unmanned German Doodlebugs and the even more terrifying V-2s without much damage. But Cedric Mitchell couldn’t imagine a building in the world that would have come through unscathed if a deuce-and-a-half stuffed to the gills with high explosives blew up alongside it. And Westminster Abbey hadn’t.

Through rags of mist and through much more roiling dust—literally, the dust of centuries—he saw the Abbey was nothing more than rubble and wreckage. But for the size of the pile, it might have been an Italian country-town church hit by shellfire. Flames started licking through the brick and stone and timber. Wood burned—Mitchell shook his head, trying to clear it.
Of course wood burns, you bloody twit. So does anything with paint on it.

To his slack-jawed amazement, people came staggering and limping and crawling out of the rubble. A priest in bloodied vestments lurched up to him and said—well, something. Police Constable Mitchell cupped a scraped hand behind his right ear. “What’s that, mate?” he bawled. His mouth was all bloody, too. Was he also bleeding from the ears? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

“More caught in there,” the priest shouted, loud enough this time for Mitchell to make out the words. “Will you help?”

“I’ll do my damnedest,” Mitchell answered. The words didn’t seem blasphemous to him till later. The injured priest took them in stride.

Another wall went over with a crash that made Mitchell flinch. Anything loud enough for him to hear was liable to be frightening. He followed the priest across St. Margaret’s to the ruin. They both had to skirt the crater the exploding lorry had blown in the pavement. Water was rapidly filling it.

“Bloody Nazi must have wrecked the pipes,” Mitchell said. The priest, a pace in front of him, didn’t turn around. The other man’s ears must have suffered in the blast, too.

A woman’s legs lay under some bricks. Together, the bobby and the priest pulled some of them off her. Then Mitchell twisted away, wishing they hadn’t. What was left of her upper body wasn’t pretty.

“How do we get revenge for this?” he bawled into the priest’s ear.

“I don’t know,” the man answered. “It may be un-Christian of me to say so, but we need to do that, don’t we? Here and St. Paul’s—”

“That’s where the other one was?” PC Mitchell broke in. The priest nodded. Mitchell swore, not that that would do any good, either. Would anything? He didn’t think so.

N
OW
L
OU
W
EISSBERG HAD SEEN BOTH
S
TARS AND
S
TRIPES
AND THE
International Herald-Trib.
No English shutterbug seemed to have matched the photographer who’d snapped the Eiffel Tower in mid-topple. No picture of St. Paul’s splendid dome collapsing, nor of Westminster Abbey falling down. Only rubble and wreckage and bodies.

And rage. Some of it came from Clement Attlee’s Labour government. “The Germans show why their ancestors were named Vandals,” Attlee thundered—as well as a mild little bald man with a scrawny mustache could thunder. “Destruction and murder for the sake of destruction and murder will settle nothing, and will only rouse the hatred of the entire civilized world.”

That was good, as far as it went. A lot of Englishmen didn’t think it went nearly far enough. Winston Churchill, wandering in the wilderness after the electorate turned him out of office the year before, aimed his thunder
at
the Labour government. “How could these barbarous swine smuggle the tools of their filthy trade into our fair country?” he demanded. “How could they do so altogether undetected? ‘Someone had blundered,’ Tennyson said. The poet never claimed to know who. I hope we shall do rather better than that in getting to the bottom of our shameful failure here.”

Major Frank walked into Lou’s office while he was drowning his sorrows in coffee. Somehow this latest outrage didn’t make him want to run out and get crocked the way the fall of the Eiffel Tower had. Maybe you could get used to anything, even enormities. Wasn’t that a cheery thought?

Howard Frank pointed to the picture of the ruins of St. Paul’s on the front page of the
Herald-Trib.
“Well, the fuckers got the frogs and they got the limeys,” he said. “Next thing you know, they’ll make it to Washington and blow up the Capitol.”

Lou eyed him. “If they wait till the new Congress gets sworn in next January before they try it, they’ll do the country a big favor.”

“Now, now.” Frank clucked at him like a mother reproaching a little boy. “We have to respect the will of the people.”

“My ass,” Lou said, and then, a long beat later, “sir.”

“Dammit, we really do,” Major Frank said. “If we don’t, what’s the difference between us and the fucking Nazis?”

“What did Trotsky tell one of the guys who followed him? ‘Everybody has the right to be stupid, Comrade, but you abuse the privilege.’ Something like that, anyhow,” Lou said. “Well, the American people are abusing the privilege right now, goddammit, and we’ll all end up paying ’cause they are.”

“Treason,” Frank said sadly.

“Damn straight,” Lou agreed. “Call the MPs and haul me off to Leavenworth. I’ll be a hell of a lot safer in Kansas than I am here.”

“If they don’t get to take me away, they don’t get to take you, either,” Frank said. “And I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Ha! That’s what you think,” Lou told him. “Fucking isolationists in Congress won’t give Truman two bits to keep us here. We’ll all be heading home pretty damn quick. Got a cigarette on you?”

“You give me all this crap I don’t need and then you bum butts offa me?” Major Frank shook his head in mock disbelief. “I oughta tell you to
geh kak afen yam.
” Despite the earthy Yiddish phrase, he tossed a pack down onto the newspapers on Lou’s desk.

When Lou picked it up and started to extract a cigarette, he paused because his eye caught a phrase he’d missed before. “Here’s Heydrich, the smarmy son of a bitch: ‘Thus we remind the oppressors that the will to freedom still burns strong in Germany.’ And we’re gonna turn our backs on this shit and just go home?” He did light up then, and sucked in smoke as hard as he could.