matter, how does it make him any different from Adolf Hitler?’”
“Wow,” Diana said appreciatively. “That’s strong stuff.” She felt as if she’d poured a slug of brandy into her own morning coffee.
“Wait. There’s more. Let me give you the best part.” Ed paused for a moment, then resumed: “‘Truman claims a silent majority backs the steps he is taking in Germany and his stubborn refusal to cut his losses-our losses-and come home. The reason this so-called majority is silent appears to be that it is not there. Most things that are not there make very little noise.’ How about
“Yeah, how about that? I want to applaud,” Diana said.
“‘What is Truman accomplishing in Germany? Anything? Anything at all?’” Ed read. “‘The longer this pointless occupation goes on, the less likely that seems. Thousands of men, dead. Billions of dollars, wasted. Down a rathole. What will happen when the United States finally gives up and comes home? The same thing that would have happened if we’d come home right after V-E Day. Everybody knows it. Even Harry Truman probably knows it by now. The trouble is, he’s too pigheaded to admit it.’”
“That’s about the size of things, all right. Silent majority!” Diana scoffed the idea to scorn. “We’ll have to show Truman where the majority is. And we’ll have to show him how much noise it can make, too.”
“You do that, babe-and I know darn well you will.” Her husband let the paper flop down onto the kitchen table. “Me, I gotta go to work.” He grabbed his lunch bucket, pecked Diana on the cheek, and headed out the door. In the driveway, the Pontiac started up with a whir and a groan. Ed backed out, put it in first, and drove off to the Delco-Remy plant.
Alone in the house, Diana sighed very quietly. Now that she’d met so many hard-driving men, Ed McGraw seemed…well, just a little dull. Or more than just a little. Oh, he made a decent enough living. And he loved her. And he was as reliable as the 1:27 out of Indianapolis. And, while he looked at pretty women, she knew he’d never do more than look.
But…The only way Ed would ever show any spark was if he got struck by lightning. Diana hadn’t known she missed that till she saw it in other men.
Some women, faced with a question like that, took direct action: they went out and found the spark they thought they were looking for. Some took indirect action: they quietly started emptying the cooking sherry or the brandy or the bourbon or whatever along those lines happened to be handy. If they put out the spark in themselves, they wouldn’t miss it in anyone else.
And some, like Diana, worked harder than ever at what they were already doing. If they stayed too busy to notice the spark wasn’t there, not having it almost didn’t matter. Almost.
She grabbed the newspaper and reread the column Ed had read out loud. It just made her madder the second time around. “Silent majority!” she snorted. Then, because no one else was there to hear her, she added, “My ass!” And then she put down the paper, picked up the telephone, and got cracking.
The McGraw household had a new phone line these days, one paid for with funds from Mothers Against the Madness in Germany. That was the one Diana parked herself in front of. She’d never imagined making so many long-distance phone calls. All the local long-distance operators recognized her voice. One had had a son wounded in Austria, so almost all of them were on her side.
Over and over again, across the country, she summarized Tom Schmidt’s column for the movement leaders who hadn’t seen it yet (several already had, and were just as stirred up about it as Diana was). “Silent majority!” she fleered, again and again. “Do we have time to organize rallies on the Fourth of July? We’ll show Truman where the majority is. We’ll show him it isn’t silent, too. And we’ll show him it isn’t on his side.”
By the time she got hungry enough to think about lunch, she’d made plans to turn the country upside down and inside out. She’d run up the phone bill by God only knew how much, but so what? It wasn’t her money. She still kept careful track of every penny of it-all those years in the PTA had ground that into her-but she didn’t worry about it any more.
She raided the icebox for leftovers and heated them on top of the stove. As she ate, she read the rest of the paper. Two more poor GIs blown up when a roadside artillery shell went off as their jeep drove by-another soldier wounded, too. She shook her head. Such a senseless waste!
She wished she hadn’t had that exact thought. Ed’s face appeared in her mind when she did. That wasn’t fair, and she knew it. They’d had a lot of good years together. They’d raised two good kids. If Pat had come home right after V-E Day, everything would still be fine. Everything still was fine-unless she decided it wasn’t.
Why did Ed have to look so much like a 1933 De Soto with a dented fender and a broken taillight?
“Nothing wrong with Ed. Not a single, solitary thing,” she said, there where nobody else could hear.
But that wasn’t what bothered her. What bothered her was, there wasn’t enough right with Ed.
She got on the phone again. The busier she stayed, the less time she’d have to look at things like that.
XXIV
Berlin. Broken capital of the Third
Lou Weissberg stared at the wreckage-some of it mighty grandiose wreckage, too-for all the world like a tourist. Behind him, Howard Frank also did some tall rubbernecking. Lou lit a cigarette. Smoking helped you not notice the other thing that remained in the air, even two years and more after the fighting was said to be over. A lot of people had died here, and not so many of them lay in graves.
His superior smoked away with him. Major Frank puffed like a steam engine on an uphill grade. “Maybe we’ll bring it off this time,” he said.
A blackbird chirped, sounding like a robin back home. Like those good old American robins, blackbirds ate worms. What the worms ate…was perhaps better left uncontemplated in Berlin.
“Maybe we will.” If Lou sounded as if he didn’t believe it, that was only because he didn’t. “We tried it in ’45 -and they blew up the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. We tried it in ’46-and Frankfurt is still waddayacallit… radioactive. So what the hell will they do here?”
“We got the Nazi big shots here. That’s something, anyhow,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t’ve given good odds we’d manage that.”
“Chances are Heydrich’s waiting till they go on trial,” Lou said. “Then his merry men will try something really juicy, know what I mean?”
“Merry men, my ass.” But Frank’s green-persimmon pucker said he knew just what Lou meant, no matter how much he wished he didn’t. He glanced east. “Trial’s gonna be in the Russian zone, so the security monkey’s off our back, anyway.”
“Unless they holler for help,” Lou said.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Howard Frank said. “They wouldn’t do that unless they were in deeper shit than they are now.”
“I guess,” Lou said. Scuttlebutt said that back in 1942, when things looked black for the USSR, Stalin asked FDR and Churchill for American and British divisions to fight alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Scuttlebutt even said he’d promised to let them keep their own command structure, which for a Russian leader was like handing over the crown jewels and the key to whatever he used instead of Fort Knox. The Anglo-American troops didn’t go. Trucks and avgas and Spam and ammo did, by the bazillions of tons. And Uncle Joe found enough Soviet bodies to make Hitler blow his brains out.
And that was what so many of them turned into, too-bodies. To this day, you could smell them, and the Germans they’d taken with them, in Berlin.
Lou and Major Frank smoked their cigarettes down to teeny-tiny butts before tossing them away and lighting new ones. The tobacco scroungers were on those little, spit-soaked dog-ends like Dracula on a pretty girl’s neck. Tobacco fueled what was left of the German economy-and you could even smoke it.
Labor gangs shifted rubble one broken brick at a time. Old people, women who’d probably been chic once
