Joe Steele

XVIII

In Washington, the war seemed like voices from another room even after more than a year. The Germans surviving in Trotskygrad threw down their guns and surrendered early in 1943. They marched off into Red captivity with their hands clasped on top of their heads. Seeing Russian photos of those glum, dirty, starving men, Charlie wondered how many of them would ever get back to the Vaterland. Precious few, unless he missed his guess.

For a while, it looked as if the Nazis’ whole position in southern Russia would unravel. But the Führer’s generals still knew what they were doing. They let the Red Army outrun its supplies, then counterattacked. Pretty soon, the Russians, not the Germans, were the ones hoping the spring thaw that stopped operations for weeks would come early. They’d hurt Hitler, but they’d got hurt in turn.

In the Pacific, Eisenhower’s soldiers and Nimitz’s sailors and Marines won control of the Solomons. It was neither easy nor cheap, but they did it. The Japs fell back in New Guinea, too. Like the Germans, their reach had exceeded their grasp. Now they were finding out what hell was for.

And in Washington, people grumbled because gasoline for civilians was rationed, tires were hard to get, and you couldn’t buy all the sugar or coffee you wanted. Nobody starved. Nobody went hungry who hadn’t been hungry before the war. Fewer people were hungry these days. With factories open and humming, jobs were easy to get.

Sarah turned five. Patrick turned one. Charlie wondered how that had happened. He hadn’t aged a day since his first child was born. Eyeing Esther, he was sure no time had passed for her, either. But Sarah would be starting kindergarten in the fall, and Patrick was saying dada and mama and connecting the noises with the people they belonged to.

Joe Steele’s henchmen in the White House seemed contented if not happy. “A year ago, things looked terrible,” Stas Mikoian told Charlie. “The Germans were going crazy. They were smashing the Russians. They were sinking everything in sight on the Atlantic. Hell, in the Caribbean, too. It looked like they might take the Suez Canal. The Japs were running wild, too. We couldn’t slow ’em down, let alone stop ’em. Neither could England or Holland. The boss was really worried we might lose the war.”

“It won’t happen now,” Charlie said.

“Nope. It sure won’t,” Mikoian agreed. He and Scriabin had more gray in their hair than they did when Charlie came to work at the White House. So did Joe Steele. Lazar Kagan didn’t. Charlie suspected him of discreetly touching it up. If he did, though, only his barber knew for sure.

“How long do you think it’ll take?” Charlie asked, and then answered his own question: “Somewhere between one year and three, I bet. Peace again in 1945 or ’46-maybe ’44 if we get lucky.”

“That sounds about right,” Mikoian said. “I mean, unless something goes wrong somewhere. All things considered, the war may be hard on the rest of the world, but it’s good for us.”

“Funny-I was thinking the same thing not long ago,” Charlie said. “When everything’s done, the Japs and the Nazis’ll be knocked flat. The Russians are doing all the dying against Hitler, so they’ll be a while getting back on their feet, too. England can’t fight Germany without us, ’cause we make so much of what she needs. We make what everybody needs, and Hitler and Tojo can’t get at us.”

Mikoian nodded. He smiled. He had an inviting smile, one that urged you to come and be amused, too. “And the war lets Joe Steele finish getting the country properly disciplined without a bunch of people grousing all the time.”

“Properly disciplined. .” Charlie tasted the phrase. “Is that what he calls it these days?”

“Oh, no. You’ve got to blame me for it. It’s my line,” Stas Mikoian said. “But that’s about the size of it, you know. When the boss took over, everything was a mess. Everybody was screaming at everybody else like a bunch of monkeys in a cage. The government didn’t have the power to do anything.”

“Hey, c’mon. Only us chickens here, okay?” Charlie said. “When you say the government, you mean the President.”

“Well, sure.” Mikoian didn’t even try to deny it. “Who else? Congress? What were they but the loudest monkeys around? The Supreme Court? If Joe Steele hadn’t taken care of the Supreme Court, we’d still be screwed up. All they ever said was no. So who does that leave? If the President doesn’t do it, nobody would.”

“Yes, but if he goes overboard, how do you stop him?” Charlie asked-not the least dangerous question in the White House. He wouldn’t have asked it of Scriabin or Kagan. He sure as hell wouldn’t have asked it of Joe Steele. But he trusted the Armenian-a little bit, anyhow.

Mikoian smiled again. “I know what’s eating you-your brother went to a labor encampment.”

“That’s sure some of it,” Charlie admitted.

“But we need labor encampments. They’re good for discipline, too. They keep people from being stupid. They keep people from being careless. My brother works with Douglas, remember. There were wreckers among the aeronautical engineers, believe it or not.”

“You’ve said that before, but your brother didn’t get a term,” Charlie said harshly.

“He could have. If they’d put a case together against him, he would have. Do you think being my brother would have made any difference? You don’t know Joe Steele very well if you do.”

After Charlie did think about it, he decided Mikoian was right. Anybody could get a term, anybody at all. It was just something that happened, like getting a toothache. “How long do you suppose he’ll be President?” Charlie asked, not quite out of thin air.

Stas Mikoian looked at him as if he’d come up with a really stupid question. “As long as he wants to be, of course,” the Armenian said. Charlie nodded. That had been a stupid question, sure as hell.

* * *

Mike had been in the Army for months now. He still couldn’t decide whether he’d been smart to trade the wrecker’s shabby uniform for the soldier’s sharp one. You had to keep a soldier’s uniform neat. They gave you grief if you didn’t. They gave you grief for all kinds of stuff the Jeebies didn’t give a damn about.

The thing of it was, the Jeebies were making it up as they went along. The Army had ways of doing things that went back to George Washington’s day. Hell, the Army probably had ways of doing things that went back to Julius Caesar’s day, if not to King Tut’s. And most of those ways of doing things were designed to make sure you did exactly what your superiors told you to do, the second they told you to do it.

Saluting. Marching. Countermarching. Going through intricate maneuvers on the parade ground, all in perfect step. Keeping your uniform, well, uniform. Making your cot just so, with the sheets tight enough so you could bounce a quarter on them.

The cot’s mattress was softer than the sawdust-filled burlap sack he’d had in the wintertime-much softer than the bare slats he’d slept on during the summer. It still felt funny, wrong, to him after five years in the labor encampment. He wasn’t the only wrecker who bitched about that-nowhere close.

He also wasn’t the only wrecker who bitched about the weather. The Army encampment-no, the Army just called them camps-was right outside of Lubbock, Texas. The weather came as much of a shock as the discipline. After five years in the Montana Rockies, he’d forgotten there was weather like this.

One thing hadn’t changed a bit: they were still behind barbed wire. This was a punishment brigade. The War Department officials who’d created it figured anyone who got stuck in it might light out for the tall timber if he got half a chance.

As a wrecker, Mike had become a good lumberjack. As a soldier, he became a good killer. He surprised himself by proving a pretty fair shot. They gave him a marksman’s badge. He wore it with more pride than he would have expected. A top sergeant a couple of years older than he was taught bayonet fighting.

“This is what I learned last time around,” the noncom told his pupils. “I’m gonna work you guys harder than I would with most troops. Places you’re going, things you’ll do, you’ll need it.”

A younger fellow, a limey who wore his chevrons upside down, taught them the tricks of the trade with a different toy: the entrenching tool. You could, it turned out, do some really horrible things with an entrenching tool, especially if you ground down the edges to get them sharp.

They marched. They dug foxholes and trenches. They ran. They exercised. They trained against one another. Mike got a scar on his arm blocking a knife thrust that might have gutted him like a trout. Not at all by accident, he broke the other guy’s nose with an elbow a split second later. Then he said, “You fucking jackass.”

“Ah, your mudder,” the other man said. He didn’t have a speech impediment-only a rearranged snoot.

They went to the infirmary together. Mike got half a dozen stitches. A doc put the other soldier’s nose back roughly the way it had been before Mike broke it. A couple of burly attendants had to hold the fellow while the doctor attended to it.

The one thing the punishment brigade didn’t do was go fight the Germans or the Japs. Mike bitched about it to his company CO. Captain Luther Magnusson was a gloomy Swede. He’d been brought back from North Africa in disgrace after getting his company cut up when he gave stupid orders because he was drunk.

He still drank; Mike could smell it on him while he was complaining. Magnusson’s pale eyes were tracked with red. They could have shot him for screwing up the way he did; Joe Steele’s Army didn’t have many soft spots. Or they could have given him a sledgehammer to make big ones into little ones for the next thousand years.

Instead, he had one more chance. He would redeem himself or die trying. That was what punishment units were all about. His mouth quirked. “Why do you think they haven’t shipped us out?”

“I was hoping you’d know, sir,” Mike said. Military courtesy was one more thing they’d drilled into him. “You’ve been in this racket longer than the rest of us.”

“Yeah, I have, and a hell of a lot of good it’s done me,” Magnusson said. “But I can answer that one. So can you, if you think a minute. You’re no dope, Sullivan-I’ve seen that.”

“Thanks-I think.” Then Mike did think. He didn’t need long, once he remembered what a punishment brigade was all about. Like Luther Magnusson, they’d all redeem themselves or die trying. Odds were the stress lay on the last three words. “They still haven’t found any place that’s hot enough to make it worth their while to throw us in?” he suggested.

“I can’t prove a thing, you know, but that’s sure as hell the way it looks to me,” Magnusson said.

Mike shrugged. “Hey, it’s something to look forward to, right?” He won a chuckle from the dour, disgraced captain.

* * *

A troopship packed men together even tighter than the bunks in a labor-encampment barracks. Mike wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but there you were. And here he was, out on the Pacific. A faint whiff of vomit always hung in the air. Some guys’ stomachs couldn’t stand the motion. Mike didn’t think it was too bad, but that distant stink didn’t help his own insides settle down.

He wore two stripes on his left sleeve, two stripes and a P that announced what kind of outfit he was in. A T under your stripes-or between chevrons and rockers if you were a senior sergeant-meant you were a technician. That P meant you were vulture bait, assuming any of the miserable islands out in the Pacific boasted vultures.

He didn’t care about being a corporal. Oh, he was modestly pleased they didn’t think he was a screwup. He hadn’t joined the Army just to get out of the labor encampment. He’d joined because he honest to God wanted to fight for the United States in spite of the murderous tyrant infesting the White House.

But making corporal wouldn’t help him stay alive. That was going to be a matter of luck any which way. He’d need a big dose of it to come out the other side.

He made a few dollars more every month now, but he wasn’t jumping up and down about that, either. Were things different, he might have sent Stella some money. But things weren’t different. Part of him hoped she’d found somebody else and was happy. Part of him hoped she was sorry she’d dumped him every minute of the day and night.

Before they’d boarded the train to San Diego, they’d gone into Lubbock for a spree. He’d had about ten minutes with a Mexican-looking gal in a nasty crib-the first time he’d laid a woman since the Jeebies grabbed him. It was-what did they say? — more a catharsis than a rapture. Afterwards, he’d clumsily used the pro kit they issued him. Either the hooker was clean or the kit worked. He hadn’t come down with a drippy faucet.

Every fifteen or twenty minutes, the ship would zigzag to confuse any Jap subs that might be stalking them. More soldiers seemed to throw up when they headed straight into the swells. Waves hitting the bow tossed the ship up and down, up and down. You felt as if your stomach was going up and down, up and down, too.

They got to Hawaii ten days after they set out. The camp where they stayed was on the island of Maui. Except for the port, it might have been the only thing on the island of Maui. It was the only part of the island the punishment brigade saw, anyhow. A couple of guys had been to Honolulu. They talked with awe in their voices about the chances for debauchery there. On Maui, nobody got so much as a beer.

The ship took on fuel, food, and fresh water. Then it sailed on, west and south. Every passing minute took the men closer to the time and the place where Uncle Sam-or was it Uncle Joe? — would start using them up. Most of them didn’t seem to care. The poker games started up as soon as the men got back aboard. The dice started rolling, too.

Mike didn’t gamble much. He lay in his bunk, plowing through paperbacks. He hadn’t had much chance to read in the labor encampment. He was trying to make up for lost time. These cheap little books were great for that.

It got hotter and stickier every day. When they crossed the Equator, the sailors summoned the soldiers topside and drenched them with fire hoses. King Neptune and his court magically transformed the polliwogs to sturdy shellbacks.

They disembarked at Guadalcanal. The scars in the jungle were already healing, but the place still looked like hell. They went into an encampment that made the one outside of Lubbock seem like a Ritz-Carlton by comparison.

There’d been mice in the barracks in Montana. Some of the guys there, with nothing else to give their affection to, had made pets out of them. No mice scurrying over these bunks. There were cockroaches instead: cockroaches almost as big as mice. You couldn’t tame them. All you could do was squash them, and they made a mess when you did.

Ordinary soldiers, Mike quickly discovered, weren’t allowed to mingle with men from punishment brigades. No fraternization-that was what the Army called it. That was why they had the P on their sleeves. They were soldiers, and then again they weren’t.

Time dragged on. The brass still didn’t seem to have decided how best to dispose of them. Some men cooked up a nasty brew from fruit and sugar and whatever else they could promote that would ferment. A fellow from South Carolina who swore he’d been a moonshiner rigged a still. What came out of it was even fouler than the undistilled product. Mike sampled both, so he had standards of comparison.

Captain Magnusson hunted him up when he was still feeling the aftereffects. “One thing about this year,” the company CO said. He’d been putting away rotgut, too; his breath stank of it.

“What’s that, sir?” Mike was discovering that heat and humidity didn’t improve a hangover. He wished Magnusson would go away.

But the captain had tabbed him as somebody he could talk to. “We go into action before it’s over, that’s what,” he said. “And we see how many of us get to say hello to 1944, let alone 1945.”

“You always know how to cheer me up, don’t you, sir?”

As if he hadn’t spoken, Luther Magnusson went on. “And you know what else? I’m still looking forward to it.” Almost in spite of himself, Mike nodded. He was, too.

* * *

Charlie looked out of the hotel at Basra. The smells coming in through the window would have told him he wasn’t in America any more even if he couldn’t have seen any of the Iraqi city. No town in the United States had smelled like this since the turn of the century, maybe longer. Neither the locals nor the British, who’d grabbed hold of Iraq after the First World War (and who’d hung on to it despite a pro-Nazi uprising) seemed to have bothered with putting in flush toilets or sewer lines. The canals near the river only added to the stink.

Right by the Shatt al-Arab Hotel was a little England, at least to the eye. Rich people, limeys and their wog flunkies, lived in those rose-gardened houses. Farther away, most of the buildings he could see were made of mud brick, with flat roofs. He could have found the like in Albuquerque or Santa Fe; he’d done a good bit of knocking around the country in his AP days. But nowhere in the USA would he have seen domed mosques with minarets spearing up toward the sky. Just looking at them made him think of the Arabian Nights, or of Douglas Fairbanks buckling a swash in a silent movie.

Basra wasn’t silent. The mosques weren’t even close to silent. They had PA systems to amplify the muezzins’ wailing calls to prayer. The first time Charlie heard one, he knew he wasn’t in Kansas any more.

The hotel, like its surrounding district, was a little bit of England dropped into the Middle East. The elevator-the lift, they called it-creaked. The beer was warm. The dining room served roast beef and Yorkshire pudding although, even in October here, Basra was hotter than London ever got.

Charlie didn’t know how many Tommies were protecting the hotel from any mischief the natives or even the now-distant Germans could brew up. He did know the number wasn’t small. And the security was needed. Charlie wouldn’t have come a quarter of the way around the world if Joe Steele hadn’t come. The President had his own guards under J. Edgar Hoover, who was also along.

Joe Steele wasn’t just playing tourist. He hadn’t come to ride in one of the almost-gondolas that plied the canals. He’d come here to meet with Winston Churchill, and with Leon Trotsky. They needed to plan how the rest of the war would go, and to talk about what the world might look like once it didn’t hold crazy Nazis and fanatical samurai.

Churchill had greeted Joe Steele when he and his followers flew in from Cairo. Trotsky was due at the airport any minute now. He’d said he didn’t want to be greeted. He would meet the leaders of the Western democracies when he got to the hotel.

How many people around the world would have wanted to be in the room to witness the first confrontation between Trotsky and Joe Steele? Millions. Millions and millions, for sure. I get to be one of the lucky ones who do it, Charlie thought. The reporter he had been quivered in anticipation.

Someone knocked on the door. Charlie opened it. There in the wildly carpeted hallway stood J. Edgar Hoover. “I just received word that Trotsky has arrived safely. The President and the Prime Minister will greet him in the Grand Ballroom on the first floor.” He made a face. “What the limeys call the first floor. It’d be the second floor to us.”

“Gotcha. Thanks,” Charlie said. To an Englishman, the American first floor was the ground floor. Two countries separated by the same language. Charlie couldn’t remember who’d said that. Whoever it was, he’d known what he was talking about.

He walked down the stairs to the Grand Ballroom. He didn’t trust that lift. He wouldn’t have trusted it if they’d called it an elevator. The ballroom was a garish horror. It was a bad English imitation of Arab decor that was bad to begin with. Low couches, footstools, silk brocade, cloth-of-gold. . Put it all together and it spelled tasteless. The British crystal candelabra with light bulbs in place of candles only added to the surreal gaucheness.

Churchill and his entourage sat on the right side of the chamber as you came in. Joe Steele and his were over to the left. Charlie headed that way. In the center would be Trotsky and his followers. Only a few hard-faced Red security men stood there now. They eyed the decadent capitalist imperialists to either side of them with an odd and-Charlie was to learn-very Russian mix of fear and contempt.

Lazar Kagan nodded to Charlie as he came over. So did General Marshall. Scriabin ignored him. Mikoian and Joe Steele were whispering back and forth. The President chuckled at something Mikoian said.

J. Edgar Hoover strode in. He’d only grown heavier and jowlier in the years since Charlie first met him when he seized the Supreme Court Four. He took his place with the rest of the Americans. “Any minute now,” he said.

A British military band outside the hotel struck up “The Internationale.” That had to be one of the more bizarre moments of Charlie’s life. It also had to mean the boss Red was here.

When the lift worked, you could hear it all over the building. Charlie listened to it now. Into the Grand Ballroom strode Trotsky, accompanied by a couple of generals, by Foreign Commissar Litvinov, by a skinny little man who had to be his translator, and by some more tough-looking Russian security men with submachine guns. The three leaders’ guardsmen could have themselves quite a little war if things went south.

But they didn’t. “My dear Leon-a lion indeed!” Churchill said warmly. He’d met Trotsky before-he’d gone to Moscow a couple of times after England and Russia both found themselves fighting the Nazis. Now he walked up to the Red leader carrying, of all things, a sword. “Allow me to present to you the Sword of Valor, given to you in the name of the Russian people by his Majesty, King George VI.”

Trotsky murmured something in Russian. The translator sounded as if he’d gone to Oxford (maybe he had): “He says this is not how he ever expected the ruler of the world’s biggest empire to give him the sword.”

Charlie laughed in surprise. Even translated, that showed wit. Well, Trotsky looked as foxy as ever, with that shock of graying red-brown hair, the red-brown chin beard-also graying-the nose that did duty for a muzzle, and the clever eyes behind glasses a lot like Scriabin’s. Chances were he hadn’t risen to the top in the dog-eat-dog world of Red politics by accident.

Winston Churchill laughed, too: a booming chortle that invited everyone who heard it to join in. “Politics is a strange business, all right,” he said. “But anyone who opposes Adolf Hitler passes the most important test.” He glanced over his shoulder and saw Joe Steele coming up. “And now let me introduce you to the President of the United States, whom you have not met before.”

Joe Steele and Leon Trotsky sized each other up. Plainly, there was still no love lost between them. But when, after two or three seconds, Trotsky stuck out his hand, Joe Steele took it. The President spoke first: “Churchill has it right. We will beat Germany and Japan first, and worry later about everything that comes later.”

As a matter of fact, Russia and Japan had a neutrality treaty. Russian freighters crossed the Pacific, loaded up on American weapons to shoot at the Germans, and steamed back to Vladivostok to put them on the Trans-Siberian Railway without worrying about Japanese submarines. As Churchill said, politics was a mighty strange business.

Trotsky’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, we can start worrying about them now, but we won’t let them stand in our way,” he said.

“Fair enough,” Joe Steele said. The two men took a step back from each other, both at the same time.

Joe Steele was short and lean. Leon Trotsky was short and had a middle-aged man’s potbelly, but wasn’t really heavy. Winston Churchill was short and roly-poly. Charlie didn’t know what that meant, or whether it meant anything. From what he’d heard, though, Adolf Hitler also wasn’t exactly a skyscraper. The short shall inherit the earth, or at least order it around? Since Charlie didn’t have a whole lot of inches, he found himself liking the idea. Vince Scriabin probably would, too.

As the leaders chatted, Trotsky through his interpreter, their entourages warily mingled. Among the Russians, Litvinov spoke good English. He’d been Red envoy to England and, Charlie found out, had an English wife. Lazar Kagan knew enough Yiddish to get by, and it was close enough to German to let him talk with a couple of the Red generals.

* * *

At the banquet that evening, Trotsky drank vodka as if it were water. Churchill poured down whiskey the same way. Joe Steele had but one liver to give for his country, and manfully kept up. Charlie had not been unacquainted with strong drink in the course of his life. He put down enough that evening to know he’d be sorry in the morning. Scriabin was doing a good job of knocking them back, too. Charlie didn’t know where the little man put all the booze, because he didn’t show it. Maybe he had a hollow leg. He and Litvinov got into a row about the Second Front. The Russians had wanted England and the USA to invade France in 1943. It hadn’t happened, and they were still steamed about that. Just to make matters worse, Scriabin and Litvinov seemed to love each other as little as Joe Steele and Trotsky did.

From everything Charlie’d seen, Churchill had stalled the landings on the Channel coast more than Joe Steele had. Churchill remembered too well the bloodbath in France from the last war. He didn’t want England to go through that again. Meanwhile, the Russians went through a bigger bloodbath of their own.

Charlie took three aspirins before he finally hit the hay that night. He woke up with the jimjams anyway. He sent more aspirins down the hatch, then headed for the ballroom in search of coffee. The kitchen had gone native to the extent of offering an Arab-style brew: thick as mud, clogged with sugar, and served in tiny cups. Charlie drank three, one after the other. They didn’t cure him but, along with the little white pills and the hair of the dog that had mauled him, they left him functioning.

Other men from all three great powers staggered down, most of them a good deal the worse for wear. Yanks, limeys, Ivans-it didn’t matter. A hangover hurt just as bad no matter who had it. A couple of the worst sufferers walked with great care, as if afraid their heads would fall off. Charlie wasn’t quite so damaged, but he sympathized.

When Churchill came down, he seemed fresh as a daisy. He greeted Charlie with “Ah, the Irishman!” and went on to guzzle tea and eat a hearty breakfast. Trotsky also showed few signs of all he’d drunk the night before. If you were going to run Russia, you had to be able to hold your liquor. Joe Steele was sallow and scowling, but he was always sallow and often scowling, so that proved nothing.

After breakfast, the leaders and their top military and political men sat down together to hash things over. Charlie wasn’t a big enough wheel to be invited to that get-together. He knew why Joe Steele had brought him along: to help draft the statement the President would release when the conference ended.

In the meantime, he could see a little of Basra. He bought a copper-and-glass water pipe at a bazaar. He likely paid four times what it was worth, but it was still cheap. Some of the filth and poverty. . The worst Hoovervilles at the Depression’s lowest ebb hadn’t come within miles of this. He went back to the Shatt al-Arab Hotel with a new respect for Western civilization.

At the banquet that evening, Scriabin whispered to him: “Trotsky! That son of a bitch is the stubbornest man in the world.”

“Is he?” Charlie whispered back. He’d always thought the Hammer was in the running for that prize, and Joe Steele with him. Saying so didn’t seem smart. Scriabin nodded. He probably figured he was a reasonable fellow, which only proved not everybody knew himself.

After dinner, the booze came out. People made toasts. “To the bravery of the Red Army!” Joe Steele said. Everybody drank.

“To the heroic U.S. Navy!” Churchill said-he was, as he was fond of noting, a former naval person. Everyone drank again.

Trotsky stood up. He raised his glass. “God save the King!” he said in English. He tossed back the vodka with a virtuoso flip of the wrist. Laughing, everybody drank to that one, too.

General Marshall took his turn. “To victory!” he said, and drank with soldierly aplomb. The rest followed suit. It was going to be another long night.

Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris said, “May American planes treat Japan as the RAF is treating Germany.” That one would take a while to fulfill. American planes weren’t in range of the Home Islands yet. People drank anyhow.

Marshal Koniev, Trotsky’s top general, spoke in Russian. “Death to the Hitlerites!” the interpreter said. Nobody could resist such a toast.

It went on and on. It got bleary out. Eventually, Charlie lurched to his feet. Then he realized he had to say something. “To truth!” he blurted, and drank.

“Hear! Hear!” Churchill downed the toast. As soon as he did, the others drank, too. Charlie sagged down into his seat again.

The statement that came out of the Basra Conference promised independence for the captured nations of Europe and the Far East and punishment for the German and Japanese warlords who’d plunged the world into chaos for the second time in a generation. It promised an international organization with enough teeth to make the peace last.

It didn’t talk about the deals the Big Three cut among themselves. Joe Steele got Trotsky to agree that, when the time came, the Red Army would help the United States invade Japan. At that point, Trotsky said, the neutrality treaty would be old galoshes. The translator helpfully explained that was Russian slang for a used rubber.

Trotsky wanted Russian hegemony over every square inch of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. After some effort, Churchill talked him into yielding dominant influence in Greece to England. Scriabin told Charlie how he’d done it: “He said to Trotsky, ‘There’s not an acre of the country the Royal Navy’s guns can’t reach. Your bloody Red bandits would have no place to hide.’ That did the trick.”

“I guess it would,” Charlie said. “Good thing we’re all on the same side, isn’t it? We’d have even more fun if we were enemies.”

“Strength matters to Trotsky. He’s like the boss that way,” Scriabin said. “And we’ll all stay friends till this war’s over. Hitler’s too dangerous for us to do anything else.”

Charlie nodded. “You said it. Some of the things the Russians are finding now that they’re taking back land the Nazis held for a while. . That stuff would make Genghis Khan lose his lunch.”

Of course, the Nazis screeched about the way the Reds fought the war, too. And in the Pacific, neither the Japs nor the Americans seemed interested in taking prisoners. The Japs would kill themselves before they surrendered. And the Americans had learned the hard way that it was better not to land in a Japanese POW camp.

It was, Charlie thought, better not to land in anybody’s prison camp of any variety. He was sure his brother could go on in far more detail on that theme than he could. Every once in a while, though, you were better off not knowing a subject exhaustively. This seemed like one of those times.