“This place is like a morgue,” he said to the petty officer behind the bar. The man was older than he was, and might have mixed drinks here for the Kaiser’s bewhiskered officers during the last war.
“Yes, sir. Sure is,” the rating agreed. “Wish we could pep things up a bit.”
Before Lemp answered, he asked himself the necessary question: to whom does this man report? The bartender was bound to report to somebody. If it was only the base commandant, that was one thing. If it was the Gestapo or one of the Reich’s many other security agencies, that was something else again. You went into one of those interrogations as beefsteak, but you came out as ground round-and maybe burnt ground round, at that.
With such gloomy reflections on his mind, Lemp answered, “Sometimes peace and quiet is the best thing you can hope for,” after what he hoped was an imperceptible pause.
“Well, I don’t expect anyone could argue about that.” The petty officer pointed to Lemp’s empty glass. “You need to take some more ballast on board, sir?”
“Oh, you bet I do,” Lemp said.
He woke up with cats yowling the next morning. Timbermen, the Danes called a hangover: little guys felling trees inside your sorry skull. By the way he ached, they were using power saws. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. They helped some. The coffee he poured down would have done better had it held more of the real bean and less chicory or whatever other ersatz they used to stretch it. The military got the best the country could give. If this was the best, no wonder the political pot had started bubbling some more.
Lemp had better sense than to say that out loud. He got called on the commandant’s carpet even so. Rear Admiral Markus Apfelbaum looked as if he’d been left out in the North Sea brine too long. He stared at Lemp with eyes of Baltic gray. “You have been asking questions.” By the way he said it, that might have been a capital crime. And indeed, if the Reich was in ferment, it might prove to be one.
“Sir, it’s always a good idea to find out which way the wind’s blowing,” Lemp said stolidly. “How else do you judge how to trim your sails?”
“You trim them by loyalty to the Reich,” Apfelbaum ground out. “First, last, and always. You can do nothing else.”
“I don’t want to do anything else. If anyone doesn’t think I’m loyal to the Vaterland, he should go talk to the English and Russian skippers I’ve sent to the bottom.”
But that wasn’t good enough. Lemp might have known it wouldn’t be. As a matter of fact, he had known, but he’d hoped against hope he was wrong. “You are loyal to the Vaterland, you say.” Apfelbaum sounded implacable as fate. “But are you loyal to the Fuhrer and the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich? They are not necessarily one and the same, I must remind you.”
When some families lost a son in the war, the death notice said died for Fuhrer and Vaterland. Other notices simply said died for the Vaterland. It was one of the few ways people had to show what they thought of the current regime.
“I am loyal to the Fuhrer,” Lemp replied, as he had to-and as was true. He hadn’t said anything to the petty officer behind the bar that would have made Markus Apfelbaum summon him. What he’d said to Gustav the diesel mechanic, though … Well, now I know to whom he reports, anyhow, Lemp thought.
Admiral Apfelbaum went on studying him. “People who are loyal don’t need to go snooping around.” The senior man might have been Moses delivering the Tablets of the Law-except Moses was a damn Jew, while Apfelbaum was anything but.
What the admiral said admitted of only one possible response. Lemp gave it: he came to stiff attention, saluted, clicked his heels, and said, “Zu Befehl!”
“All right. Get out of here. You’ve wasted enough of my time,” Apfelbaum said.
Lemp saluted again, and got. He half wondered if a couple of blackshirts would be waiting for him outside the commandant’s office. But no. He let out a discreet sigh of relief. The enemy, you could fight. Your own side? That often seemed a hell of a lot harder.
Elections were in the air. It was a midterm campaign, of course, with only Congressional seats up for grabs, not the White House-the big prize. All the same, the Democrats were doing their best to hang on to as many seats as they could. The GOP tagged the fight against Japan FDR’s war, and said he wanted to mix it up with Germany, too.
Peggy Druce would have liked nothing better than giving Hitler one right in that stupid little toothbrush mustache. Charlie Chaplin had worn one like that for comic effect. The damn thing wasn’t so funny on the Fuhrer’s upper lip, though.
She’d seen photos of Hitler from before he got famous, from the days when he was just another soldier in the trenches during the last war. He’d had a mustache then, too, but an ordinary one. She wondered what had made him change it to such an unbecoming style.
But that was neither here nor there. The Republicans were screaming at the top of their elephant lungs that FDR was such a donkey, he wanted to drag the country into a war with the Nazis while it was already fighting the Japs. Peggy only wished the President would take the USA into a fight against Germany. But Roosevelt moved with public opinion. He didn’t-he couldn’t safely-get too far out in front of it.
All the same, that put him well ahead of the GOP. She was convinced it did, anyhow. And she was willing-hell, she was eager-to say so in front of anyone who would listen.
“I don’t know why the Republicans use the elephant for their mascot,” she told a big crowd at a Masonic lodge in Scranton. “They ought to use the ostrich instead, because all they want to do is stick their heads in the sand!”
People laughed and clapped. She knew she wasn’t being fair. Wendell Willkie hated and distrusted Hitler at least as much as Roosevelt did, which was saying something. But more isolationists lived in his party than in the President’s. And politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about winning elections. If you did that, you got to do what you thought needed doing. If you didn’t, the yahoos on the other side grabbed the chance to pull off their stupid stunts instead.
“The Republicans think-when the Republicans think; if the Republicans think-the Republicans think, I was saying, Well, we’ve got oceans on both sides of us, so nothing can get us even if we do stick our heads in the sand. But I’m here to tell you, oceans don’t always mean you’re safe any more. I was in Berlin when British bombers flew hundreds and hundreds of miles and bombed it.
“And look at all the trouble Hawaii is having from bombers flying off the islands the Japs grabbed right after they jumped us. If they’d got lucky and grabbed Hawaii, too, they might be doing that to the West Coast right now.”
“Little yellow monkeys!” somebody in the crowd yelled. That drew more cheers and applause. The Japs were easy to hate, especially in a place like Pennsylvania, where hardly any of them lived. They looked odd. They spoke a language nobody could understand. The nerve of them: Orientals who thought their country deserved to be a great power!
Getting worked up about the Germans was a lot harder in this part of the country. So many people here had parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who came from Germany. Even people who didn’t knew or were married to people who did. Germans looked like anybody else, too. It made a difference. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did.
“They’re the measles,” Peggy said firmly. “The Germans … The Germans are smallpox.” Shudders ran through the crowd. Plenty of people there, like Peggy herself, were old enough to remember when the horrible disease hadn’t been rare. Warming to her theme, she went on, “And the Republicans are a social disease.”