endless bloody bog through which Truman insisted on wading.
Behind Jerry, somebody called, “And we’ll bring our boys home from overseas!” The voice wasn’t one Jerry recognized, but that didn’t prove anything, not on this Friday, January 3, 1947. Too many new voices, too many new faces. He’d get to know the new kids on the block pretty soon, but he hadn’t yet.
All the rage on both sides that had sizzled just below the surface exploded. Congressmen shouted. Congressmen swore. Some Congressmen clapped their hands. Others shook their fists. Things must have felt like this just before the country tore itself to pieces when Lincoln was elected.
“Order! Order! There will be order!” Joe Martin shouted, plying his gavel with might and main. But there was no order.
The Sergeant at Arms looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. Jerry Duncan wasn’t so sure the poor, unhappy functionary was wrong. One man couldn’t enforce order on 435 (well, 434, because Joe Martin up on the rostrum wasn’t being disorderly) unless they wanted it enforced. And, right this minute, they didn’t. All they wanted to do was yell at one another.
“We haven’t got the money to pay for even half the things we really need!” another new Republican Congressman bawled. He had a bigger, rougher voice than the fellow who’d first ignited the uproar, and he used it like a top sergeant roaring his men forward through an artillery bombardment: “We’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for us to send to Germany to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement!”
Jerry’d only thought things were bad before. A skunk at a picnic, a photographer at a no-tell hotel, couldn’t have raised a tenth the ruckus that furious shout did. Not so many Republicans clapped this time. The Democrats, though…
“Shame!” some of them cried. “Shame!” And they were the polite ones. What the others yelled would have made a dock worker blush. What it did to the handful of Congresswomen…Well, they all seemed to be shouting their heads off, too.
“Order! Order!” Speaker Martin said again, this time in something not far from desperation. He used his gavel so fiercely, Jerry Duncan was surprised the handle didn’t break off in his hand. And he got…something not far from order, anyhow. Maybe everyone was shocked at how fast things had gone down the drain. Jerry knew he was.
“Censure!” Sam Rayburn shouted, shaking his fist at the new Congressman who’d said what he really thought. “I demand a vote of censure! That gentleman”-he spat the word-“is a disgrace to the House!”
“Now, Mr. Rayburn,” Joe Martin said, “if we censure everyone who loses his temper and says something unfortunate-”
“Unfortunate! I don’t know whether he should be more embarrassed for spouting claptrap or we for listening to it,” Rayburn thundered. “I move that we censure…whatever the devil the stupid puppy’s name is.”
“Second!” That cry rang out from all over the Democratic side of the aisle.
By the look on Joe Martin’s face, he was wondering why he’d wanted to be Speaker in the first place. He called for the vote. The motion failed, 196 to 173. Quite a few Congressmen sat on their hands. Jerry voted against the motion, though he didn’t think the new Representative had done himself or his side of the argument any good. At least half a dozen Republicans voted in favor of censuring him.
And that was the first day, the day that was supposed to be ceremonial and nothing but ceremonial. The Eightieth Congress got livelier from there.
They issued Lou Weissberg a corset and a stick when they let him out of the military hospital. They’d already given him his Purple Heart. He could have done without it, but the brass gave it to him anyway.
When he came back on duty, Major Frank greeted him with, “Well, well. Look what the cat drug in.”
“Your mother…sir,” Lou answered sweetly. “I found out how to fly without an airplane. If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d’ve rather walked.” You could do worse than steal your jokes from Abraham Lincoln. You could, and Lou figured he probably would.
“Good to have you back any which way, and more or less in one piece,” Howard Frank told him.
“Goddamn good to be back,” Lou said. “One piece-with a few cracks and chips and shit like that. They’d put me on the discount table at Woolworth’s, you betcha.”
“Well, the problem hasn’t gone away while you were on the bench, that’s for sure,” Frank said. “Matter of fact, you found one of the ways it’s getting worse. Care to guess how many 155mm shells, and 105s, and 88s, are lying around Germany waiting to get turned into bombs?”
“Too fucking many-that’s all I can tell you,” Lou replied. “Government didn’t issue me a slide rule, or maybe I’d do better.”
“‘Too fucking many’ is good enough. Bad enough, I mean,” Major Frank said. “One of the fanatics’ bright boys must’ve had a brainstorm, ’cause they’re starting to play all kinds of cute games with shells lately. Those goddamn trip wires-”
“I found out about those, all right. I found out more than I ever wanted to know,” Lou said.
“Yeah, I bet you did. But that’s not the only thing they’re doing.” If Lou was back, Major Frank would bring him up to date come hell or high water. That kind of persistence made Frank annoying, but it also made him a good officer. He went on, “They’ve got some of them wired so a guy watching half a mile off can blow ’em up when he sees they’ll do him the most good-hurt us worst, I should say.”
“Figured that out, thanks,” Lou said dryly.
“Did you?” Frank gave him a wry grin. “The guy with the detonator’s long gone, natch, by the time we trace the wire back to where he was hiding, but the wire does let us do some tracing. So the assholes have one more stunt. Some of these shells, they’ve got ’em hooked up so they can touch ’em off by radio.”
“Fuck!” Lou spoke with great sincerity.
“You said a mouthful,” Howard Frank agreed. “Try tracing a radio wave. I know, I know-we can do some of that. We can do more than the Jerries ever thought we could. But a signal that lasts this long?” He snapped his fingers, then mournfully shook his head. “Fanatic’s gone, transmitter’s gone-it’s a major-league snafu, is what it is.”
“Sure sounds like one,” Lou said. “Does it matter to a kraut if Heydrich pins a Knight’s Cross on him instead of Hitler?”
“You don’t get a Knight’s Cross pinned on. You wear it around your neck,” Frank said.
He was right, too. Lou had interrogated several German supermen who’d won the award-it was more or less the equivalent of the Distinguished Service Cross. All the same, Lou made a face now. “They shoulda sent you to law school,” he said.
“Nah. I got good at picking nits the times I was lousy,” Captain Frank said. Lou winced; he’d had lice more than once himself. If you spent much time in the field, chances were you would. Frank added, “Thank God for DDT, is all I’ve got to tell you. That shit really works.”
“Yeah!” Lou nodded enthusiastically. He’d seen the same thing himself. From what retreads said, nothing they’d tried in the First World War stopped the cooties. But DDT did the trick, sure as hell. It knocked mosquitoes over the head, too. And it didn’t poison people. How could you
“Well, anyway, like I said, it’s goddamn good to have you back,” Frank told him. “I did want to get you up to speed as fast as I could-and I wanted to let you know you aren’t the only guy the fanatics did for with their new trick.”
“Misery loves company,” Lou said. The funny thing was, it was true. If something happened to a bunch of other guys, too, you didn’t feel quite so bad when it happened to you. Not that Lou had felt good when that 155 or whatever it was went up, but….
“Well, you’ve got it,” Frank said. “Word is they’re working over the Russians the same way, too.”
“I bet Ivan loves that to death.” Lou knew what the Red Army and the NKVD did when they were unhappy. He would have said they’d learned their lessons from the
Before he could say anything more, he heard something outside. A shout-and a shout in English, at that. He hadn’t heard any gunshots or explosions beforehand, but how much did that prove? Any time people-for the shout had definitely come from more than one throat-in occupied Germany started yelling in English, something had hit
