That was good advice and Hewlitt knew it.
“Whatever comes your way,” Frank continued, “you pass on to me, or if you can’t, give it to Barbara. Mostly, though, she and Mary will be feeding you. You know what the word ‘control’ means in this business?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, I’m your control, which means that I give the orders, I pick up your info and, if it comes to that, I look after you if I can. Nobody else, not even Davy, if I go under. If that happens, hang on tight and someone’ll get to you. Right now you can trust Barbara, Mary, Davy, and me, later you’ll get a couple more.”
“It sounds as though I’m going to be the cell leader.”
“No, Barbara is, but you’re the contact man because it’s a lot easier than to have me seein’ a white girl all the time. She’s got the experience, so she calls the signals, but you work with me.”
“How do we do that?”
“You follow my lead. Never talk to me, no matter what, unless I ask you first if Barbara’s given in yet. If’n I do, that means that it’s safe. Because of the way we had to set this up, Barbara knows who I am; we’ve worked together before. But the others don’t and you die before you tell ’em, you got that?”
Hewlitt digested the words. “Clearly,” he answered. He was beginning to believe in this man.
“All right,” Frank said. He rose to his feet and Hewlitt got up with him. “Don’t be surprised,” Frank said when they were standing together, “if Barbara and her friend move in here after a little while.”
“In this neighborhood?”
“About the best place for it,” Frank answered. “We’re goin’ to turn this into a real nice whorehouse.”
8
The following thirty days were the most traumatic in the history of the United States of America. It had faced disaster, civil war, and Pearl Harbor — even the divisive agony of the Vietnam war — but never before the galling indignity of defeat. The belief that had persisted at first — that the country would somehow extricate itself from its unexpected, awkward embarrassment, died under a series of events which fell like hammer blows throughout every part of the nation. Each day dozens of flights from overseas terminated at major airports with pay loads of up to four hundred of the enemy — troops, administrators, censors, secret police, and even scientists to take over existing plants and facilities. In a few places people resisted; they were ruthlessly pushed aside and were lucky if they escaped with their lives. Some did not.
It came as a bitter shock to most Americans when a swift and tight control was clamped on all forms of news dissemination. This was something almost impossible for a free people to understand, even for those comparative few who had visited East Berlin and had had to surrender every scrap of paper which might bear tidings of the West before being permitted to pass into the Communist-controlled portion of the city. Such isolation might be the unfortunate lot of certain other peoples, but it had been inconceivable that it could happen to the citizens of the greatest nation on earth.
The news vacuum was filled by an undisciplined mass of rumors which scurried back and forth like a maze of molecular particles. Some were cautious, but most were fearful, wild, irrational, frightful, uncertain, terrifying, fanciful, and at times distorted beyond any hope of reality. In mid-America the report was rife that the granaries would be rapidly emptied for shipment of their contents overseas and that severe rationing would face the American public during the winter to come.
The news blackout was followed by sharp restrictions on travel; flights from one part of the country to another were permitted only after specific permission had been granted for each individual trip. The commercial airlines reduced their schedules to the minimum, but the larger aircraft still flew half empty. Enemy uniforms began to appear everywhere while the now controlled radio and television stations constantly warned that any attempt whatsoever to impede the actions of the men who wore them would be severely punished.
For the first time in living memory Americans were forced to keep their women at home and out of sight. It all became part of the larger picture, the still incredible circumstance that the nation had been defeated — that an aggressor had been able to impose his will by force of arms, and that the decimated military of the United States had not been equal to the challenge. It had happened before in world history to many different countries and peoples, but never to the land of the free and the home of the brave, the land of Patrick Henry, of Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. The nation desperately wanted a leader who could do something about all this, but no such man appeared. The President was somewhere out of sight for his own protection and safety, but in the cold gray light of this disastrous dawn he was seen revealed as a choice of political expediency, adequate to do a satisfactory job, but far from the man that the country so urgently needed.
In a few places individual Americans remembered the time that a retired admiral had had his say before a congressional committee, but he was dead. The citizens of the United States had only one choice open to them, and that was to do as they were told.
Of all the Americans in this plight, those who had the greatest cause for concern were Jewish. Some few of them who still bore tattooed numbers on their forearms were bitter to the point of denouncing life itself and asked their God what they had ever done in their history as a people to deserve this deadly final blow. Some found no answer and quietly took their own lives; double suicides by elderly couples whose children had married and moved away passed unnoticed by the limited, tightly censored, daily press.
There were others who viewed the new policy as a heaven-sent opportunity to escape from the grasp of a vicious enemy known to be anti-Semitic long before the beginning of the period of goodwill which had immediately preceded the sudden outbreak of the war.
At Kennedy International Airport the employees of the largest American overseas airline were doing their best to handle the tide of passengers. Yiddish-speaking personnel were pressed into emergency service when it was discovered that many of those going abroad had never learned the English language.
Most of the passengers booking during the first thirty days were only too glad to leave behind a country which had suddenly shifted from one where certain restrictions still existed in a few areas to one wherein anyone born a Jew might well be in growing peril of his life.
In the hastily constructed lounge for departing refugees the scene brought back memories of train terminals during World War II. People slept, babies cried, mothers changed diapers without worrying whether they and their infants were on public view or not. Some complained and a few demanded; the majority simply waited for the opportunity to climb on board an aircraft, occasionally feeling again the slight bulge on their persons where they had their extra money concealed. As far as was known, no one had as yet been subject to search.
Threading their way through the several hundred waiting people were three individuals in a little group who were trying their best to make a systematic circuit of the whole area. Very little attention was paid to them; those who were nearby sensed that they were not Jewish and in view of the circumstances which prevailed, slightly resented their presence. Despite the fact that all of the people who were ticketed for overseas were leaving on their own volition, a tight sense of suppressed misery could almost be felt in the air. They were going, but they were not happy, even those who had relatives waiting to greet them and make them feel welcome. Some few of them had relatives waiting ready to tell them that they were not wanted and that God only knew how they were to be taken care of or housed.