The Man with the Iron Heart

“Ten grams of radium, Goudsmit says. The physicists snatched it there when we grabbed them, and one of them must’ve blabbed to Heydrich.”

“Fuck,” Lou muttered. Then he asked, “How can Goudsmit know that?”

“When the German big brains were in England, they were wired for sound, only they didn’t know it. A couple of them talked about this radium.”

“Fuck,” Lou said again. “If we knew about it, how come we didn’t go in there ourselves and take it away?”

“Good question-damn good,” Frank said. “Best answer I can give you is, we didn’t want to tip off the frogs that they were sitting on something important.”

Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. “Gevalt! And so the Nazis get it instead. Ain’t that a kick in the nuts? What can Heydrich do with the shit?”

“Like I know. I told you once already, I ain’t no Einstein,” Captain Frank said. “But you’ve gotta figure they think they can do something, anyhow. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone after it, right?”

“Right,” Lou said glumly. “Can they make a bomb with it?”

“Beats me.” Frank held up a hand. “No, I take that back. I bet they can’t. We used B-29s to clobber Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so those bombs musta been big old mothers. Ten grams isn’t much. It’s like-what? Half an ounce? Not even. So I figure no way in hell they make it go boom. You think I’m wrong?”

“Well, the way you say it, it makes sense, but I’m no slide-rule jockey, either,” Lou said. “If they can’t make a bomb out of it, what can they do?”

Captain Frank’s shrug wasn’t so elaborate as Captain Desroches’, but it got the message across. “Goudsmit says he’ll let our guys with the thick glasses know about it. We’ll see where we go from there, that’s all.”

“From there, or from wherever the fanatics take us.” After a moment, Lou added, “Too bad we didn’t trust our own allies with the news about the radium.”

“Uh-huh.” Howard Frank nodded. “But if all these Frenchmen are like Desroches, you can see how come we didn’t, too.”

Diana McGraw wondered when a Secretary of State had last made a speech in Indianapolis. She wondered whether a Secretary of State had ever made a speech in Indianapolis before. A Secretary of Agriculture or a Secretary of Commerce, possibly-probably, even.

But State? Indianapolis wasn’t where you went when you talked about foreign policy. Only now it was. And Diana knew why, too, or thought she did. Would James Byrnes have come here if she didn’t live in nearby Anderson? Would he have talked about Germany here if she hadn’t started the movement to get Americans out of the defeated country? She was sure he wouldn’t have. You dropped a bucket of water where something was already burning, didn’t you?

Secretary Byrnes spoke inside the Indiana National Guard Armory, a formidable pile of yellow-brown brick-the color of diarrhea, actually-up on North Pennsylvania. Nobody’d advertised his speech in the papers. No one on the radio had mentioned that he would be there.

So what? Diana thought. She had connections now. She’d known for most of a week that Byrnes would be here. And so she and her cohorts marched outside the armory. These past months, she’d grown intimately familiar with the way a picket sign’s stick pressed against your collarbone as you paraded. Her sign today said HOW MANY MORE WILL DIE FOR NOTHING?: bloody red letters on a white background.

Bored-looking cops stood by the entrance to make sure her people didn’t try to go inside and disrupt the meeting of the Indiana Internationalists or whoever they were. Byrnes’ stooges. Truman’s stooges, Diana thought scornfully. The cops were bored because they’d seen she and her people played by the rules.

She would have loved to storm the podium in there. She would have loved to scream at Secretary Byrnes. Come to that, she would have loved to chuck a grenade at him. But going over the line like that lost supporters. Not drawing to an inside straight, Ed called it. Diana played bridge, not poker, but she understood what her husband meant.

The Indiana Internationalists-or whoever they were-had rigged up loudspeakers so the pickets could hear the Secretary of State even if they weren’t allowed inside. Maybe they thought wise words of wisdom spoken wisely would show the poor heathens out on the sidewalk the error of their ways and lead them back to the true faith.

If they did, they were even dumber than Diana gave them credit for. She wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible, but hey, you never could tell.

“We will not forsake Europe.” Heard through big, cheap speakers, James Byrnes’ voice grated unpleasantly. “I want no misunderstanding. We will not shirk our duty. We are staying there.”

People inside the armory applauded. People outside booed. For a while, Diana couldn’t make out what the Secretary of State was saying. She shrugged, which made the stick shift against her dress. What difference did it make whether she heard or not? Anybody who spoke for the government would be telling lies anyhow.

When the noise subsided, Byrnes was continuing in the same vein: “In 1917 the United States was forced into the first World War. After that war we refused to join the League of Nations. We thought we could stay out of Europe’s wars and we lost interest in the affairs of Europe.”

“What a buncha baloney!” Ed McGraw yelled from right behind Diana. Marching back and forth hurt his poor torn-up foot, but he’d come along tonight.

She was the one who drew the attention, though. “What do you think of the Secretary of State’s speech so far?” E. A. Stuart asked her, poising pencil above notebook to await her reply.

“It’s nothing we haven’t heard before. It’s nothing we haven’t heard way too often before,” Diana answered. “The Truman administration is going to do whatever it wants to do, and it won’t pay any attention to what the little man wants, to what the people want.”

The reporter’s shorthand spread pothooks and squiggles across the page. “How do you propose to change his policies?”

“By showing him he has no popular support. By winning lots of seats for people who oppose his occupation policies in November,” Diana said.

James Byrnes’ voice kept on blaring from the tinny loudspeakers: “We will not again make that mistake. We have helped to organize the United Nations. We believe it will stop aggressor nations from starting wars. The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.”

More applause inside. More boos outside. Diana turned to E. A. Stuart. “Whenever the President or one of his flunkies talks about what the American people want, they’re really talking about what Harry Truman wants.” Stuart wrote down the quote without slowing up.

Diana stopped then, because she wanted to tell the reporter something else. “Keep moving, there!” one of the cops called, setting a hand on his billy club.

She kept moving. She didn’t want to give the police any excuse to get rough. As she marched, she bitterly added, “How peace-loving do the German people seem to you, Mr. Stuart?”

“They have their ups and downs, all right,” Stuart agreed.

So did the Secretary of State. After his series of polite phrases, he got down to the meat of his speech. So it seemed to Diana, anyhow, though she wasn’t so sure Byrnes would have agreed. “The United States is not about to abandon Europe,” he declared. “Security forces will probably have to remain in Germany for a long period. Some of you will know that we have offered a proposal for a treaty with the major powers to enforce peace for twenty-five or even forty years.”

“There!” Diana pounced. She felt as if the enemy-for so she thought of James Byrnes-had delivered himself into her hands. “Did you hear that, Mr. Stuart? Did you? He’s talking about American soldiers in Germany in 1986! Forty years from now! That’s what Truman really wants!”

“He did say that. I heard it.” Wonder filled E. A. Stuart’s voice. He scribbled some more as he walked beside Diana. “We’ve got another guy listening inside, but I can’t afford to let that get by. Forty years from now. Oh, boy.”