Since he didn’t, he just said, “Okay, kids-playtime’s over. Get it in gear and knock down some wood.”
“Sure thing,” Mike said. You couldn’t tell ’em to piss up a rope. But you could look busier than you were. Slaves had known that trick before the Pyramids rose. In the outside world, most of the wreckers had been hard workers. Not here, not when they didn’t have to. What was the point? Mike didn’t see any at all.
* * *
Sometimes things happened too fast for outsiders to keep up with them. Watching Europe through August, Charlie had that feeling. Every day seemed to bring a new surprise, each one more horrible than the last.
Hitler shrieked about the Polish Corridor the way he’d shrieked about the Sudetenland the year before. It had belonged to Germany. Germans still lived there. The Poles were mistreating them. Therefore, the Corridor had to return to the Reich.
But the year before, he’d sold France and England his bill of goods. They weren’t buying this time around. The way he’d gobbled up Bohemia and Moravia after pledging he wouldn’t finally persuaded them they couldn’t believe a word he said. They told him they would go to war if he invaded Poland.
They still weren’t eager about it, though. In the war against the Kaiser, Russia had done a big chunk of the Entente’s dying. France and England wanted Russia on their side again, even if it was Red, Red, Red. They sent delegations to Moscow to sweet-talk Trotsky into bed with them.
Charlie had always thought Trotsky looked like a fox, with his auburn hair, his knowing eyes, his sharp nose, and his pointed chin whiskers. He listened to what the French and English diplomats and military envoys said-and what they didn’t or wouldn’t say. He listened, and he made no promises, and he waited to find out whether he heard from anyone else.
When he did. . At the start of the last week of August, Maxim Litvinov flew from Moscow to Berlin. The Jew ruling Red Russia sent his Jewish foreign commissar to the world’s capital of anti-Semitism. Litvinov and Ribbentrop put their heads together. The very next day, with Adolf Hitler beaming in the background, they signed a nonaggression treaty and an enormous trade package.
The news burst like a bomb in Paris and London. . and in Warsaw. Whatever the Russians would do, they wouldn’t fight to keep the Germans out of Poland. Russians didn’t think Poles were Untermenschen, the way the Nazis did. But an independent Poland affronted Moscow almost as much as it outraged Berlin.
Lazar Kagan was the first important aide Charlie ran into after the story broke. “What do we do about this?” Charlie asked him, feeling very much like a jumped-up reporter. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know.” Kagan sounded as stunned as Charlie felt. When Charlie realized the large, round man was thrown for a loop, too, something inside of him loosened. This wasn’t just too big for him. This was too big for everybody. After a moment, Kagan went on, “There’s probably nothing the United States can do except to tell France and England to stick to their guns. We’re too far away from what’s going on to influence Germany and Russia one way or the other.”
“I guess so.” Charlie hesitated, then asked, “Have you seen the boss?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him.” Kagan managed a nod. “He. . isn’t very happy.”
And that would do for an understatement till a bigger one rolled down the pike. If Charlie was any judge, none would any time soon. The two world leaders Joe Steele despised more than any others had suddenly made common cause. Charlie found one more question: “How long does he think Poland’s got?”
“Days. Not weeks-days,” Kagan answered. “The Poles say they’ll fight. It’s just a question of how well they can. They have a lot of men in uniform-a lot more than we do. Maybe Hitler has bitten off more than he can chew. Maybe.” He sounded like a man trying to talk himself into believing it but not doing very well.
“Okay. Thanks-I guess.” Charlie went back to his office and wrote a statement condemning the Nazis and Reds for joining in a pact “obviously aimed at the nation between them” and hoping that the remaining European democracies “would remain true to their solemn commitments.”
When Joe Steele spoke on the radio that night, he used Charlie’s phrases unchanged. Listening, Charlie felt satisfaction mixed with dread. Joe Steele had the air of a doctor standing outside a sickroom, going over things with the relatives of a patient who wouldn’t pull through.
But Sarah grinned and banged her Raggedy Ann doll on the coffee table. Charlie watched to make sure she didn’t bang her head on it-at not quite a year and a half, she didn’t have walking down pat yet. She also didn’t know what was going on across the Atlantic. Even if she had known, she wouldn’t have cared.
Plenty of much older Americans didn’t care, either. They or their ancestors had come here so they wouldn’t have to worry about Europe’s periodic bouts of madness. Another war, so soon after the last one? You had to be crazy to do something like that. Didn’t you?
Crazy or not, just over a week later Germany invaded Poland with tanks and dive-bombers and machine guns and millions of marching men in coal-scuttle helmets and jackboots. France and England sent ultimatums, demanding that Hitler withdraw. He didn’t. First one and then the other declared war.
But that was all they did. They didn’t attack Germany the way Germany was attacking Poland. There were a few small skirmishes along the Reich’s western frontier. Past that, nothing. Meanwhile, before the fighting farther east was more than a few days old, it grew crystal clear that the Poles were in way over their heads. Shattered by weapons and by doctrine they couldn’t start to match, they reeled back or charged hopelessly. Charlie read reports about mounted lancers attacking tanks.
“Yes, I’ve seen those, too,” Vince Scriabin said when he mentioned them. “It’s very brave, but it isn’t war, is it?”
“What would you call it, then?” Charlie asked.
“Murder,” Scriabin answered. He had on his desk just then a typewritten page full of the names of men condemned for wrecking and other kinds of treason. It was upside down, but Charlie could read things that way-a handy skill for a reporter to pick up. Scriabin had written HFP-all in red in the narrow margin above the names.
Charlie did his best not to shiver. HFP abbreviated Highest Form of Punishment. In other words, that was a page full of the names of dead men. On how many other sheets had Scriabin scribbled those same three ominous letters? Charlie had no idea, but the number couldn’t be small.
He didn’t see Mike’s name on the sheet. That was something: a small something, but something. If he had seen it, the sentence would already have been carried out. Nothing to do then but kill himself or take his best shot at killing Scriabin and J. Edgar Hoover and Joe Steele.
Well, he didn’t have to worry about that, thank God. All he had to worry about was a new world war. Next to what happened to his brother, it didn’t seem like so much.
Then, with Poland on the ropes, Trotsky jumped what was left of it from behind. His excuse, such as it was, was as cynical as anything Joe Steele could have come up with. He blandly announced that, since Poland had fallen into chaos, Red Army troops were moving in to restore order.
And to split the country’s corpse with Hitler. Nazi and Red officers shook hands at the new frontier (which Litvinov and Ribbentrop had agreed to in advance). A British cartoonist turned out what became a famous drawing of Hitler and Trotsky graciously bowing to each other over a body labeled POLAND. The smirking Führer was saying, “The dirty Jew, I believe?”, to which the smiling Red leader was replying, “The assassin of the workers, I presume?”
Joe Steele made a speech before the National Press Club. That wasn’t what it had been back in the day. If you didn’t like the President-if you insisted on saying you didn’t like the President-you weren’t at the banquet in a suit and tie or a tux. No, you were somewhere farther west, eating plainer grub and not much of it, and wearing less elegant attire.