Off went the tompion. It dangled from the barrel by a chain so it wouldn’t roll into the ocean. The gun roared. The flying boat fired back with its machine gun. Lemp had hoped the gunfire would scare it off, but no such luck.
Then he cheered when smoke and fire spurted from the Russian plane’s engine. The MBR-2 came down in the Baltic. Lemp hoped it would cartwheel and break to pieces. Again, no such luck. There it sat, on the water, and it went on shooting at the U-boat. Bullets clanged off the conning tower. Some bit through it. Those holes would have to be patched before the boat could dive again.
“Man the deck gun!” Lemp yelled down the hatch. He had to jump back as sailors sped up the steel ladder inside. The antiaircraft gun was still trading fire with the flying boat’s machine gun. Chunks flew from the plane’s metal wing and wooden hull, but the Ivans inside kept up their fire. No one could say they had any quit in them.
Then the deck gun roared. It wasn’t identical to the 88mm antiaircraft piece that was also a fearsome antipanzer weapon, but it came close enough. No plane could take that kind of pounding. A couple of rounds into the cockpit and the enemy machine guns went quiet.
Two more sailors were down, one at the flak gun, the other at the 88mm. The latter had taken one through the head. They’d bury him at sea, along with the poor devil with the belly wound, although that unlucky fellow might be a long time dying. The other wounded man had a neat hole through his leg. He’d probably live.
“Good Lord!” Lemp said, deeply shaken. “I hope we never have to do that again!” Everybody up on deck with him nodded. Several ratings crossed themselves. Lemp was no Catholic, but he felt like doing the same thing.
Peggy Druce had already voted for FDR twice. She had every intention of voting for him again. If ever anyone deserved a third term, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the man. It looked that way to her, anyhow.
Most of her Main Line friends and acquaintances were rock-ribbed Republicans. Rock-headed Republicans, as far as she was concerned. They seemed convinced the world ended right where good old American beaches gave way to the ocean. The sole exceptions they recognized were shopping trips to London and Paris and gambling junkets to Havana.
The only thing Peggy wished was that Roosevelt weren’t so coy about the chances the USA would get into the war. “On which side?” one of her friends asked, altogether seriously.
“Whichever side isn’t Hitler’s,” Peggy answered without the least hesitation.
“But-!” The other woman stared at her in horror undisguised. “That would mean fighting for Stalin and the Bolsheviks!”
“So what?” Peggy answered. “Winston Churchill said that if Hitler invaded hell, he’d try to give the Devil a good notice in the House of Commons.”
“He’s dead,” her friend reminded her. “He’s dead, and England doesn’t want to fight for Stalin. You ask me, Chamberlain’s no dope.”
Peggy didn’t blow up. She’d already had this argument more than once. By now, she was resigned to it. People who hadn’t been to Europe and seen what Nazi Germany was like for themselves didn’t-couldn’t-believe it. Russia was the devil they knew, the radical state that wanted to bury capitalism forever. To most head-in-the-sand Americans, anything that wanted to smash the Reds seemed swell.
Her friend went on, “I only wish Willkie didn’t sound so much like That Man in the White House. He ought to give the New Deal a good, swift kick, is what he ought to do.”
“If you say so, Blanche,” Peggy said.
“I just did,” Blanche replied. “And I tell you, we’re getting some very different people donating to Bundles for Britain these days. Not everyone quit after the Big Switch the way you did.” She raised her nose in the air-only a little, but it got through. It also let Peggy see the sagging flesh under Blanche’s chin. Since her own jawline was still pretty good, she soaked up some Schadenfreude on that score.
“I’ll bet you are,” she said, feeling the need for a saucer of cream. “The ones who stand up and whinny when the band plays ‘Deutschland uber Alles,’ I suppose.”
“It’s not like that.” Blanche’s voice went shrill. “But it is a different crowd. Hardly any of those people come in any more.”
“Why don’t you just call them Jews? The Fuhrer does. ‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ ” She did her best to thunder like Hitler on the radio. It wasn’t very good. That had to be just as well. She didn’t want people jumping to their feet and screaming “Sieg heil!” every time she opened her mouth.
“I suppose they have to live somewhere, but I wish they were better at knowing their place,” Blanche said.
“They do in Germany. One of them made a mistake-he sold me something when he shouldn’t have. Then some brownshirts went into his shop and beat him up. He won’t do anything that rude and pushy any time soon,” Peggy said.
“Oh, come on. I don’t mean that. You know what I mean,” Blanche said.
“I know what Hitler means, too,” Peggy answered. Outside the cafe where they were not enjoying time together, well-dressed, well-fed people hurried by. Shop windows promised the moon-and they’d deliver if you put down enough cash. Cars-so many cars!-whizzed up and down the street. Dealers were gearing up to start selling 1941 models. You could buy as much gas as you wanted, and for next to nothing. Rationing? Nobody on this side of the Atlantic had ever heard of rationing.
Blanche did have the grace to turn pink, if not red. “I don’t want to go as far as the Germans do.”
“I’m sure those people would be so glad to hear it,” Peggy said. The scary thing was that, in spite of being sarcastic, she was also right. Jews, these days, were pathetically grateful for any crumbs you threw them. Considering what they got in the Reich in place of crumbs, they had reason to be. Peggy smiled sweetly. “No yellow stars or anything?”
This time, Blanche really did redden. “I don’t know what to make of you any more. You’ve changed since you came back from Europe. I haven’t. The rest of our crowd hasn’t.”
Fools never do. It sat on the tip of Peggy’s tongue, along with the last bite of a really good BLT. You couldn’t get anything like that in Berlin! But she swallowed the bite, and she swallowed the mean comeback, too. That might have been mature wisdom. Or it might just have meant she was too tired to argue all the time. She hadn’t given up. She was getting better at picking her spots.
She looked at her watch and stood up. “I’ve got to run.”
“So good to see you,” Blanche said with transparent relief. Peggy tossed two dollars on the table-you paid for atmosphere at this place-and got out as fast as she could with any manners, or perhaps a little faster than that.
Out on the sidewalk, she waved for a cab. She got one in nothing flat, and another taxi driver drove off with a scowl because he’d missed the fare. The guy behind the wheel was about twenty-five. “Where to, lady?” he asked.
She gave him her address. He put the Plymouth in gear and pulled back into traffic. In almost any country in Europe, he would have been in the army. His cab wouldn’t have been on the road any more, either. People in Berlin had stared at the one that took her from her hotel to the train station.
Shop windows, billboards, and neon signs all shouted at her as the taxi went along. Buy! they screamed. Buy! Buy! Buy! And people listened to them. There was a boy eating an ice-cream cone. There was a woman with her arms full of packages. There was a man in a sharp suit walking past shiny new cars at a Packard dealership while a salesman in a loud plaid jacket followed, a hungry smile on his face.
“So much stuff,” Peggy murmured. Anyone on the other side of the Atlantic who’d been making do with what he had since the war started would drop dead if he could see this. And the politicians over there who’d made people live like that would count themselves lucky if they didn’t get hanged from the closest lamppost.