Since Charlie did know, all he could say was, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Hell you didn’t. It don’t mean shit,” Garner repeated with mournful emphasis. “Only way it means shit is if I’m still around when Joe Steele kicks the bucket. And you know what else? That ain’t gonna happen, on account of I’m more than ten years older’n he is, an’ on account of I bet he’s got a deal with the Devil, ’cause he just don’t get no older.”
That wasn’t true. Joe Steele was grayer and more wrinkled than he had been in 1932. But he hadn’t aged as much as Garner since then. He also hadn’t drunk as much. Charlie said, “I hope you both last a long time.” Garner had to be more pickled than he looked to talk at all about Joe Steele dying. You couldn’t pick a less safe subject.
He must be sure I won’t rat on him, no matter how plastered he is, Charlie thought. That was a compliment, and not such a small one. It made Charlie feel better for the rest of the day.
When the election came, Joe Steele trounced Dewey. “I wish the President well,” Dewey said in his concession speech, “because wishing the President well means wishing the United States well, and I love the United States, as I know Joe Steele does.” Listening in the White House, Charlie glanced over at the President. Joe Steele didn’t even smile.
XX
It was over. Half of it was over, anyhow. Along with everybody else in Washington, Charlie had gone nuts with joy over reports from German radio that Adolf Hitler had died fighting against the Russians in the blazing ruins of Berlin. Shortly afterwards, Radio Moscow claimed he’d done no such thing-he’d blown out his own brains in his fortified bunker when it finally dawned on him that the Nazis wouldn’t win their war and the Reich wouldn’t last a thousand years.
A few days later, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. A reporter wound up in trouble for breaking the story before it became official. As an ex-reporter with a brother who’d got in trouble for what he’d reported, Charlie sympathized. He still thought the guy was a prime jerk, though.
Slippery to the last, the Germans tried to give up to the Americans and English but not to the Russians. On Joe Steele’s orders, Omar Bradley told them they could do it the way the Allies wanted or they could go back to fighting everybody. They did it the way the Allies wanted. They even staged a second ceremony in Berlin for the Red Army’s benefit. Marshal Koniev signed the surrender there for Leon Trotsky. The guns in Europe fell silent after almost six years.
Joe Steele went on the radio. “This is victory, victory in Europe, V-E Day,” the President said. “And victory is sweet, no doubt of that. It is all the sweeter because it came against such a cruel and heartless foe.”
Charlie grinned when he heard that. He’d suggested it. The reports on what the Nazis had done in their prison camps and their death camps still seemed impossible to believe. How could a famously civilized country go mad like that? But photos of skeletal corpses piled like cordwood had to be real. No one could be sick enough to imagine such things. No one except Hitler’s thugs, anyhow. And they hadn’t just imagined them. They’d made them real.
“And it is all the sweeter because it comes after so much pain and heartache,” Joe Steele went on. “And so we deserve to celebrate-for a little while. Only for a little while, though. Because our job is not done. Japan still fights against the forces of freedom and democracy.”
He could say that with a straight face, because Russia and Japan remained neutral to each other. Trotsky had promised Joe Steele and Churchill he would enter the war against the Japs. Of course he would-he wanted to grab as many goodies from the chaos convulsing Asia as he could. But he hadn’t done it yet.
“Unless the Japanese follow the German lead and yield to our forces without conditions, we will treat their islands as we have treated Germany.” Joe Steele sounded as if he looked forward to it. “We will rain fire and destruction from the skies upon them. We will make a desert, and it will be peace. If the Emperor of Japan and his servants do not think we are determined enough to follow through, they are making the last and worst in a long string of disastrous mistakes. The fire-bombing of Tokyo month before last was only a small taste of what they have to look forward to.”
Charlie whistled softly. Beside him in the front room of their apartment, Esther nodded. Hundreds of B-29s had dropped tons of incendiaries on Tokyo in March. They’d burned-cremated was a better word-more than ten square miles in the heart of the Japs’ capital. Tens of thousands died. Outside of Japan, nobody could be sure how many tens of thousands. Charlie didn’t know if anyone inside Japan could be sure, either.
“So celebrate, Americans, but carry on. I know we will fight as well and as bravely in the Pacific as we did in Europe. I know that victory will be ours there as well,” Joe Steele said. “And I know our country will be a better place once peace returns. Thank you, and God bless America.”
“Like he said, one down, one to go,” Charlie said.
“The big one down, as far as I’m concerned. Hitler wanted the whole world, and he came too close to getting it,” Esther said. “I had cousins and aunts and uncles in Hungary. I don’t know how many of them are still alive. I don’t know if any of them are.”
“Mike’s still in the Pacific somewhere,” Charlie said quietly. “If the Japs don’t quit, we’ll need an invasion that’ll make the one in France look like a day in a rowboat on the Lake in Central Park.”
“There is that,” she said. “I hope he’s all right, too. But that’s all we can do, hope, same as with my kin. The Japs are never going to beat the United States, though, never in a million years. Hitler. . If he’d flattened Trotsky fast, the way he tried, he might have got England, too. Then it would have been our turn. Oh, maybe not right away, but he wouldn’t have waited real long.”
That all sounded disturbingly likely to Charlie. Likely or not, though, it wouldn’t happen now. Because Hitler couldn’t do what he’d wanted to do, other things would happen instead. Charlie said, “Instead of Hitler, Joe Steele’s watching Trotsky and the Reds.”
“And Trotsky’s worth watching.” Esther sounded sad. “Nothing big will happen between us and the Russians till we KO Japan. We need each other till then. After that, watch out.”
“Looks the same way to me.” Charlie smiled a crooked smile. “And now that we’ve tied up all the world’s problems in pink string and put a bow on them, what do you say we make some lunch?”
“Sounds good,” Esther said. “We’ve still got some fried chicken from the other night in the icebox.”
“Yum! But what will you eat?” Charlie said. Laughing, she poked him.
* * *
Mike gnawed on a D-ration bar. They were what the Army gave you to eat when you didn’t have anything else. They were slabs of chocolate made to keep pretty much forever. They tasted something like a Hershey bar and something like a birthday candle. The wax or tallow or whatever it was made them chew like no chocolate bar you’d eat if you didn’t have to.
Rain poured down. Mike’s foxhole had six inches of water in it. It had started raining on Okinawa several days earlier, just after soldiers and Marines had beaten back a Jap counterattack from the Shuri Line. By all the signs, it could keep right on pouring for the next week, too. The downpour didn’t make the war move any faster.
He’d heard about men who drowned in foxholes like this. His other choice was to stand up. If he did, the Japanese soldiers still in the Shuri Line would shoot him. They’d given up most of Okinawa without a big fight, but they were hanging on ferociously here in the mountainous south. The Americans had to dig them out one foxhole, one strongpoint, one tunnel at a time-and to pay the price for doing it.