The Big Switch

Chapter 21

Some of the Russian prisoners at the camp south of Harbin were quick to learn bits of Japanese. They spoke without much grammar, but they made themselves understood. One skinny, hairy fellow bowed to get Hideki Fujita’s attention-they learned Japanese customs, too-and said, “Peace now Russia, Japan-yes, Sergeant- san?”

“Hai,” Fujita agreed. He couldn’t very well deny it, not when the peace had at last been officially announced.

“We go home?” the maruta asked.

To that, the Japanese sergeant only shrugged. “I have no orders one way or the other,” he answered. It was harder to think of the prisoners as logs when they became talking logs: not impossible, but harder.

“So sorry-don’t understand,” this Russian said.

“No orders,” Fujita repeated. They might be talking logs now, but no, they didn’t talk well. You had to keep things as simple as you could, as if you were talking to a retarded three-year-old.

The maruta got it this time. “Arigato,” he said. “When orders? Soon?”

Fujita shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said again, and walked away. He didn’t expect the orders the Russian wanted to come quickly, but he could see that admitting as much would only cause trouble. The Soviet government seemed to care about the men Japan had captured almost as little as the imperial government would have worried about Japanese prisoners. These Russians had lost Vladivostok, and so they were in disgrace.

It made perfect sense to Fujita. It made much more sense than most of the things the Russians did. It was, in fact, a very Japanese attitude. And if the Russians didn’t care what happened to their prisoners, how could anyone expect Japan to care? Simple: nobody could. And nobody did. The prisoners became maruta, became logs, and whatever happened to them was their hard luck.

Muttering, Fujita rubbed his arm and his backside. He’d had more shots since coming to Pingfan than ever in his life before. So it seemed now, anyhow. He was inoculated against everything from smallpox (they’d poked him again, even though he’d been vaccinated not too long before) to housemaid’s knee. Again, so it seemed to him.

But there were no inoculations against some of the diseases they used here. If you came down with the plague, odds were you would die. He’d never seen people so nervous about fleas as they were at this place. If you found one on yourself, you had to catch it and kill it and give it to one of the people from the inner compound so he could examine its guts under the microscope or whatever the devil they did in there.

Another maruta said, “Food? More food?”

That, Fujita could and did ignore. The prisoners got as much food as the officers in charge of such things said they should. He had nothing to do with it either way. If the officers wanted them plump and healthy, plump and healthy they would be. It happened. Sometimes the scientists needed to see what germs did to people who had nothing wrong with them but a particular disease. More often, though, the POWs went hungry, as POWs deserved to do.

“Why treat us like this?” yet another Russian asked. “Us people, too. What we do to you?”

How many Red Army soldiers had tried to kill Fujita? More than he could count-he was sure of that. But it wasn’t the point. Japan would have treated-did treat-Chinese prisoners the same way. And she would have treated other Japanese who surrendered to their enemies the same way, too. Thousands of years of history proved that, too. Soldiers who gave up weren’t people any more, not in the eyes of their captors they weren’t.

Could he explain that to a blond gaijin with shaggy cheeks? He not only couldn’t, he didn’t feel like wasting his time trying. He grudged the Russian two words: “You lost.” He felt the man’s pale eyes boring into him as he walked away, but so what? Those eyes only further separated the prisoner from him. They should have belonged to a cat, not to a human being.

A few days later, some of the white-coated men from the inner sanctum came forth. They needed fifty Russians to test something or other they’d developed. And, of course, they needed guards to make sure none of the Russians got unruly or got away. A lieutenant, a sergeant, ten ordinary soldiers… Fujita was the sergeant.

“What do we do, sir?” he asked the lieutenant-a chunky man named Ozawa-who’d been at Pingfan when he got there.

“Whatever the scientists tell us to do, we do that,” Ozawa answered. “They’re the ones who run this place. We’re here to make sure that whatever they need to have happen, happens. Got it?”

“Hai,” Fujita said quickly. He’d already figured out that much for himself. He was hoping the officer would tell him more. But if not, not. As long as a sergeant followed orders, he couldn’t go too far wrong.

They let Fujita choose the soldiers who would come along to keep an eye on the Russians. One of the first men he grabbed was Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi. “Yes, Sergeant- san, I’ll do it,” Hayashi said, as he had to. If he was pleased about the assignment, his face didn’t show it. Neither did his voice.

Fujita could have just whacked him in the side of the head and told him to do his job. But they’d served together for a long time. To his own surprise, the sergeant found himself explaining why he’d chosen the junior man: “I need you. You’ve got good sense.”

That was part of it, but not all. He needed Hayashi’s education, too, because he came off a farm himself. But there were things you could say and things you couldn’t. He said as much as he could. If Hayashi was so goddamn smart, he could figure out the rest for himself.

He nodded now, accepting if still less than thrilled. “All right, Sergeant- san. We’ll see what happens.”

Trucks growled up to haul the Russians, the guards, and the bacteriologists away from Pingfan. A rail spur… Motor transport laid on whenever they needed it… The people who ran things here had it good. They had it better than most of the ordinary units in the Kwantung Army, that was for sure. Fujita thought about all the shoe leather he’d gone through because nobody could be bothered with sending out a truck to pick him up.

Well, he was riding now, north through Harbin and then into the forests beyond the city. One of the things that had always struck him about Manchukuo was all the space here. To someone who came from crowded Japan, it was especially noticeable. These were woods where no one had ever logged. They might have stood here, untouched, since the beginning of time.

Or so he thought till the trucks stopped in a clearing gouged out of the woods a couple of hundred kilometers north and east of Harbin: not far from what had been the Siberian border, in other words. Wind whistled cold through the trees. Fujita had unhappy memories of fighting in country like this. So, no doubt, did Hayashi, and several other common soldiers. For all he knew, so did the Red Army men. Winter was on the way, all right.

The bacteriologists had memories of their own. They’d used this place before. Poles had been driven into the ground in rough circles around a central open space. One of the white-coated men spoke to Lieutenant Ozawa, who nodded and relayed orders to the other ranks: “We tie a Russian to each pole, facing toward the middle there.”

“Yes, sir,” Fujita said. He didn’t have to do the tying himself. He just supervised: the advantage of being a sergeant. One of the maruta tried to run away. A soldier shot him in the back, then walked over and bayoneted him. The men in white coats scribbled in their notebooks: they would be working with forty-nine, not fifty.

They set up something that looked like a bomb casing made of pottery in the central open area. Then they put on gauze masks and handed one to each of the soldiers. At their orders, all the Japanese retreated to the edge of the woods. The scientists got behind trees. So did the soldiers, a beat or two later.

The bomb, or whatever it was, went off. It sounded louder than a hand grenade, softer than a bursting shell. “Now we take the prisoners back and await developments,” one of the bacteriologists said. No one asked him what the developments would be. He did condescend to add, “You would be wise to leave your masks on. Yes-very wise.”

Some of the Russian prisoners were wounded by flying pottery-mostly the ones close to the burst. The others didn’t seem to have been harmed. The soldiers herded them all into the trucks again. They rolled south, back toward Pingfan.

They got there in the middle of the night. The prisoners went into the walled-off compound instead of back to the pens. “They won’t come out of there-not alive, they won’t,” Senior Private Hayashi said in a low voice.

Sergeant Fujita nodded-the other man was bound to be right. “Well, who’ll miss ’em?” Fujita said, and Hayashi’s head went up and down in turn.

As long as the war dragged on, Sarah Goldman was positive things wouldn’t get any better for Germany’s Jews. Rather more to the point, she was positive things wouldn’t get any better for her or her family. And she was positive she would start screaming about that any minute now.

Of course, she’d been positive of the same thing ever since the war started. Two years ago! Was that really possible? It was, however much she wished it weren’t: not only possible but true.

She nodded to remind herself that the war had been going on for so long. Neither the radio nor the newspapers mentioned the anniversary. When she did remark on that, her father said, “The powers that be don’t want you to remember, because then they’ll also remember the fighting hasn’t all gone the way some people promised it would.”

Samuel Goldman chose his words with care. Sarah feared he wasn’t careful enough, not if the Gestapo really was monitoring what they said in the house. There’d never been any proof of that, not in all the time since Saul killed his labor-gang boss, but the worry never went away.

Hanna Goldman’s view of things was less political and more pragmatic: “Ever since we really started banging heads with the Russians, rations have gone to the devil. They were bad before, but they’re a lot worse now. When they start taking coupons for potatoes and turnips…”

“Did they do that even in the last war?” Father asked. “I was at the front, and there was usually enough there. It wasn’t very good, but we got fed. And we took everything we could from the countryside. I’m sure some of the bunnies we stewed meowed, but we weren’t fussy.”

He’d brought home a rabbit from somebody in his work gang the year before. He’d hoped it was a rabbit then, anyhow. No matter what it was, he’d eaten it without a qualm. So had Sarah and her mother. Sarah’s mouth filled with spit as she remembered the rich, meaty taste. She hadn’t got to enjoy it much since.

“What happened to that fellow who sold you one here?” she asked. “Could you get more from him?”

“Gregor?” Regretfully, Father shook his head. “He disappeared not too long after I bought the last one. Well, maybe he disappeared and maybe he was disappeared, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t tell you whether he’s on the lam or in a camp.”

“I hope…” Sarah paused and thought before she spoke. “I hope he’s in a camp, getting what he deserves.”

If some bored Gestapo technician did chance to be listening in on her right now, he was probably fighting nausea. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying one thing while more obviously meaning the other. Father’s eyes twinkled. “Aber naturlich,” he said. “So do I. So does any right-thinking person.”

“That’s the truth,” Mother chimed in. They beamed at one another in companionable hypocrisy.

To Sarah’s amazement, a few days later Father brought home not a rabbit but half a dozen dressed pigeons wrapped in bloody newspaper. He had to hold one arm pressed against his jacket to keep them from falling out. Together with the limp from his war wound, that made him seem more crippled than he was.

“Where did you get them?” Mother exclaimed when he set the prize package on the kitchen counter.

“You’d better not tell the Pigeon-Racers’ Association, but it turns out there’s a sly fellow who traps them,” Father answered. “He lives out on the edge of town, so nobody’s going to catch him at it. If I lived out there, I would, too. It can’t be very hard. Pigeons aren’t the smartest birds God ever made. A few bread crumbs and you can probably get as many as you want.”

As she had with the rabbit, Mother asked, “What did you pay for them?”

As he had with the rabbit, Father looked pained and didn’t give her a straight answer. “It’s not as though we’re spending money on nightclubs or Strength through Joy cruises,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” Mother said. “But we are spending money on food and fuel and rent, and we aren’t made of gold. So what did you pay?”

“We won’t go to the poorhouse tomorrow on account of them,” Samuel Goldman told her.

“How about the day after tomorrow?” Sarah suggested.

Her father sent her a reproachful look. “Doesn’t the Bible say something about ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’?”

“I’m not an ungrateful child,” Sarah said. “I’ll never be ungrateful when you bring meat home.” She just hoped her rumbling stomach didn’t embarrass her in front of her parents. If it didn’t, that would only be because theirs were rumbling, too.

“All right, not ungrateful,” Father said. “Difficult, though. Let’s see you talk your way out of ‘difficult.’ ”

“Why should she?” Mother said. “Only right that someone in the family should take after you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father replied with dignity.

But he did. Sarah was sure of that. So did she. Her mother was much more easygoing than her father. Saul was a purely physical being; strength and speed served him the way rational thought did for Father. Sarah was rational, or hoped she was. She was also prickly and impatient with other people’s foolishness. That too marked her as her father’s daughter.

So did her hunger. Eagerly, she asked her mother, “How are you going to cook them?”

“Does it matter?” Hanna Goldman said.

“As long as they’re hot and not too burnt, no,” Father said. Sarah nodded-that summed things up for her, too.

Her mother stuffed the squab with bread crumbs and roasted them. They were wonderful. “I don’t dare tell Isidor how good that was,” Sarah said after crunching through the smaller bones and sucking all the meat off the larger ones. “Bread may be the staff of life, but meat is the gold crown on the end of the staff.”

Her father raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t come from the Bible or the Greek philosophers, but it sounds as though it should.”

“Just out of my own mouth. Sorry,” Sarah said.

“Don’t be,” Father told her. “Old wisdom gets-well, old. We need new wisdom, too. Here and now, we really need it.”

“We have new wisdom. It comes from the Fuhrer,” Mother said brightly. “The Fuhrer is always right. That’s what everybody says.”

“Well, yes, of course. I knew that myself, as a matter of fact.” Father was also playing to the listener who might not be there. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he made as if to gag. The SS might have planted microphones in the house. Putting secret movie cameras in there was beyond the Nazis’ skill. They might want to, but they couldn’t.

Sarah smiled at her parents. Somehow, the silly games they had to play made her happy. Jews in Munster had no business being happy. The Fuhrer would surely have agreed with that. But, no matter what he wanted to decree, no matter what his minions tried to enforce, happy she was.

Father winked at her. “It’s the meat,” he said. “It does strange things-especially after so long without.”

If she was the one most like him, no wonder he could guess what she was thinking. “Maybe it is. Whatever it is, I like it,” she answered. The Fuhrer wouldn’t approve of that, either. Well, too bad for the Fuhrer- that was all there was to it.

One of the ratings on the U-30’s conning tower jerked as if a horsefly had bitten the back of his neck. He pointed to port. “Mine!” he said. “To hell with me if that’s not a goddamn mine!”

Julius Lemp’s binocular-enhanced gaze followed the German sailor’s outthrust index finger. Sure as the devil, the metal horns of a contact mine and part of the sheet-iron sphere itself stuck up out of the cold gray water of the Baltic. “Good job, Sievert,” he said. The mine drifted a few hundred meters away, no great danger to the U-boat now. Still, nobody in his right mind wanted to leave one of those hateful things bobbing in the sea, waiting for a target.

“Shall we get rid of it, Skipper?” another sailor asked eagerly. What was it about things that went boom that got grown men as excited as a pack of kids at a fireworks show?

Whatever it was, Lemp had it, too. “You bet we’ll get rid of it,” he answered, and bawled an order down into the pressure hull: “Man the deck gun!”

The sailors from the gun crew swarmed up the ladder. They hurried to the 88mm cannon on the deck in front of the tower. One of them carefully removed the tompion from the muzzle and let it dangle on its chain. Lemp nodded to himself-he hadn’t even had time to give the order. Nothing would ruin your day like opening fire without uncorking your gun.

He did give the order that swung the cannon toward the floating mine. The gun crew banged away with great enthusiasm and no great skill. The 88 was really an anachronism left over from the days of more gentlemanly warfare. It couldn’t fight any kind of surface warship. The idea behind it was that a surfaced U-boat could stop a freighter, pause while the crew took to the lifeboats, and then sink the vessel with gunfire, saving valuable torpedoes.

But that didn’t work in an age of escorted convoys and radio sets. If an enemy destroyer wasn’t bearing down on you at top speed, the freighter was calling in bombers to blow you out of the water. Antiaircraft guns gave you a chance against those, and the U-30 did carry one aft of the conning tower. And it had the 88, too, as much from the designers’ force of habit as for any other reason.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Flame burst from the gun’s muzzle as each round went off. Brass cartridge cases clanged on the deck. Columns of seawater leaped into the air as shells burst all around the mine. But the damned thing went right on bobbing in the sea. Lemp waited for a hit with rapidly mounting impatience.

At last, when he was about to shout something sharp to the gunners, he got one. It yielded a much bigger Blam!-one that rocked him and the submarine even though the mine wasn’t close. The gout of water that rose on high was much bigger and much less tidy than the ones the shells had produced.

At the 88, the ratings shouted and pumped fists in the air and capered like lunatics. “We killed it!” one of them yelled. A couple of others dug fingers into their ears. They’d be ringing, all right. Lemp’s rang even though he stood up on the conning tower. That was part of the chance you took when you played with things that went boom.

“Very good, heroes,” he called to the gunners. “You can go below now.”

They pretended not to hear him. Or maybe, since they’d been playing with explosives, they weren’t pretending. Lemp figured they were. Coming topside was a rare treat for a lot of the men cooped up inside his steel cigar. They could breathe fresh air. They could focus their eyes on something farther away than their outstretched hands. Why would they want to go down into the dim red light, the humid air, and the symphony of stinks that characterized any working U-boat? Wasn’t it like descending into hell? Wasn’t it much too much like that?

Lemp had to give the order again before the gun crew obeyed it. They resealed the 88 and climbed from the deck to the conning tower once more: climbed far more slowly than they’d rushed down to start shooting. The fun was over now, and their dragging steps said as much.

They were even glummer about climbing down the hatch and into the U-30. One of them wrinkled his nose. “I wish they could make a U-boat that didn’t smell like a polecat three days dead,” he remarked.

“Well, Martin, if you don’t fancy it, you should have stayed in the surface navy,” Lemp said sweetly.

That did the trick. Martin-bearded, grimy, in a uniform that hadn’t been washed any time lately-vehemently shook his head, as if the skipper had suggested that he engage in some unnatural vice. “Not me, by God,” he declared. “The surface pukes, they fuss about every little thing like they’re on the rag or something.” And he vanished into the U-boat’s fetid bowels. His buddies followed without another word of complaint.

Julius Lemp smiled. It wasn’t that he thought the sailor was wrong. On the contrary. He was a U-boat man himself, after all, not a surface puke. He remembered how horribly out of place he’d felt when Captain Patzig summoned him to the bridge of the Admiral Scheer. Aboard the U-30, he was lord of all he surveyed. On the pocket battleship, he felt like a poor relation, and a damn scruffy poor relation at that, even if he’d put on his best clothes for the visit.

“Skipper?” said the man who’d spotted the mine.

“Eh?” Lemp came back to the here-and-now. “What is it, Sievert?”

“Was that a Russian mine, or one of ours?”

“I don’t know,” Lemp replied after a moment’s thought. “Considering where we are, it could be either. I sure couldn’t tell through field glasses. And I’ve heard the Ivans just copied our model when they started making their own mines, so there might not have been much to tell from.”

“You couldn’t read the ‘Made in Moscow’ plate bolted to the shell, eh?” Sievert asked with a grin.

“Er-no.” Lemp managed a chuckle of his own, even if it took some effort. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the poor thing did suffer from lack of exercise.

“Well, it won’t take us out, and it won’t take any of our surface ships out, and we’ll do for any Russian ships we come across,” the rating said.

“That’s right.” Lemp nodded. No jokes lurking in the underbrush there. He felt relieved.

The watchers on the conning tower had gone on scanning sea and sky even while the gun crew played with its big, loud toy. Lemp would have been furious had they let the fireworks distract them. In the Baltic’s close confines, trouble was never far away. It could land on you all too fast even when you were lucky enough to spot it before it showed up. If you didn’t… If you didn’t, some flying-boat crew would go home to paint a U-boat silhouette on the side of their fuselage and then fly off to look for more unwary Germans.

I should have paid more attention, too, Lemp thought. He made a quick scan himself, first with the naked eye and then sweeping his binoculars through a quadrant of the sky. Nothing. His breath smoked as he sighed with gratitude aimed at a God Who didn’t listen enough. He remembered the horror that had coursed through him when he’d spotted a small silver speck in the sky not too long before. He’d been about to shout for a crash dive before he realized the planet Venus probably wouldn’t strafe the U-30.

He made a more careful scan of the sea, looking for periscopes. No matter how much the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe harried them, Red Fleet U-boats did get out into the Baltic. Ending up on the wrong end of one of their eels would be embarrassing, to say the least.

Again, nothing. His boat might have had the sea all to itself. He was master of everything he surveyed: gray water and gray sky. A gull winging its way south didn’t acknowledge his supremacy. Gulls never did. They were an ill-bred lot, scroungers and scavengers and ne’er-do-wells. They were quite a bit like submariners, in other words.

His nose flinched when he had to lay below after his watch ended. He logged the incident with the mine. His script was tiny, cramped, and precise. Things could have been better: he might have sunk a Russian battleship. But they could also have been worse: nothing at all might have happened on his watch. Or no one might have spotted an approaching enemy U-boat. He wouldn’t have had to log anything then: he would have been a trifle too dead. The one small detail aside, he couldn’t see anything to like about that.

FDR was coming to Philadelphia. The election was only a few days away. Four more years? Peggy Druce hoped so. At least, she supposed she hoped so. Everything in the world seemed to have turned inside out and upside down since England and France did their spectacular back-flip with Germany.

Before the big switch, Roosevelt had sent England and France as many planes and guns as American factories could crank out, along with a whole fleet of destroyers he said the United States didn’t need any more. Wendell Willkie, the latest Republican to try to boot FDR out of the White House, hadn’t yelled at him for that. He’d yelled at the President for not doing more and not doing it faster. A bunch of Republicans were isolationists, but not Willkie.

Trouble was, all of a sudden isolationism looked a lot better than it had even a few weeks earlier. If England and France were on Hitler’s side against Russia, they weren’t using the American guns and planes and ships against the Fuhrer, the way FDR had had in mind. Nobody in Washington was (or, at least, admitted to being) in love with Stalin, but nobody much wanted to see all those weapons turned against him, either.

Willkie’s trouble was, he agreed too much with Roosevelt. He was Tweedledum complaining about Tweedledee. After the big switch, some Republicans tried to boot him off the ticket and run somebody more in line with how they figured the party ought to think. Their only problem was, they settled on Alf Landon again: a man only a diehard isolationist Republican could love. (And even then, remembering how FDR had trounced him in 1936, it wasn’t easy.) Landon’s campaign mostly amounted to I told you so. He himself had no hope of winning. The more votes he stole from Willkie, the easier the time FDR would have.

“You ready?” Herb called to Peggy. “The rally starts at half past seven.”

“Just about.” Peggy patted each cheek with a powder puff one more time. Looking in the mirror made her sigh. It would have to do, but it was a long way from perfect. Well, too goddamn bad, she thought. She was a long way from perfect. Perfect would have been twenty-five-twenty-nine, tops.

They drove down into the city. Blazing street lamps and headlights and neon signs reminded Peggy she wasn’t in Europe any more. She supposed they’d lifted the blackout in London and Paris. People there were probably happy as could be. You could buy happiness, all right-as long as you didn’t care what you paid for it.

A valet-a kid, maybe still in high school, maybe just out-took charge of Herb’s Packard in the parking lot. As Herb tipped him, Peggy reflected that he would be wearing a different kind of uniform on the other side of the Atlantic. The USA didn’t know how lucky it was.

At the Arena on Market Street, Herb confidently said, “Druce-that’s D-R-U-C-E,” to an important-looking fellow with a clipboard.

The man ran his finger down a typed list. The moving finger suddenly stopped. “Oh, yes, sir!” he said, and then, to a younger fellow standing behind him, “Eddie, take Mr. and Mrs. Druce down front. Make sure they’ve got good seats.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Terwilliger,” Eddie said. “Come with me, folks.”

They couldn’t have got better seats unless he put them up on the podium. Peggy recognized most of the big shots who were sitting up there: Pennsylvania politicos and union leaders. Herb was neither, for which she thanked heaven.

He seemed happy enough with where Eddie put them. Peggy also recognized quite a few of the couples sitting near them. The men of the family were doctors, lawyers, accountants. Clothes and double chins said they’d done well for themselves. Several couples were obviously Jewish. Remembering what she’d seen in Czechoslovakia and Germany, Peggy felt better about being here because of that.

Senator Guffey introduced the President. He spent a few minutes laying into the Republicans before he did. If you listened to him, the Republicans had their nerve for running anybody at all against FDR, and even more nerve for trying to run two people. “The Donkey is always the Donkey,” he said, “but over there it’s like 1912 all over again. They’ve got the Elephant and the Bull-Something.”

Peggy joined the laugh. She was old enough to remember 1912. Taft had run as a regular Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt (FDR’s distant cousin) on the Progressive or Bull Moose ticket. Nobody in his right mind would call starchy, upright Alf Landon a Bull Moose. Guffey had to be thinking of something more like Bullshit.

He didn’t say that, of course. You couldn’t say anything along those lines in a public forum. But letting the audience fill in the dirty word for itself was even more delicious.

The house lights darkened. A tight spot played on Senator Guffey. It gleamed from the frames of his reading glasses. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honor and high privilege to present the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” he said, and stepped away from the lectern.

Next thing you knew, FDR was standing behind it instead. They must have wheeled him on while the only light in the house was the spot on Guffey. Roosevelt was sensitive about being seen-and especially about being photographed-in his wheelchair, and who could blame him? With heavy braces on his legs, he could stand and even take a few stiff steps, but he also didn’t like showing them off. In back of the lectern, he didn’t have to.

Where you could really see him only from the shoulders up, Roosevelt looked strong and vigorous. He waved to the cheering throng in the Arena. The cheers got louder. Then he waved again, in a different way, and they eased off. “Thank you, folks,” he said, his voice booming out of the loudspeakers hooked to the microphone. “Thank you very much. I’m glad to be in Philadelphia. This is where our freedom got its start. This is where the Declaration of Independence was written, and where the Liberty Bell rang out before it cracked.” More cheers. Smiling, the President waited them out. “And I want to tell you, liberty almost everywhere seems a little cracked, or more than a little, today.”

No one applauded that. People leaned forward to listen to whatever FDR would say next. Peggy found herself doing it, and saw Herb was, too. The President didn’t keep them waiting: “Up till very recently, the war in Europe was a war against liberty-liberty there and liberty everywhere. We weren’t fighting, but we were involved, because what happened there was liable to happen to us next. And we acted accordingly, doing what we could for the countries that thought more like we did.”

Sadly, he shook his big, strong-jawed head. “But Europeans are still Europeans. President Wilson, in whose Cabinet I had the privilege of serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, found that out the hard way after the last war. And now we discover it all over again. When the so-called democracies make common cause with the Nazis against the Communists, no one cares for liberty any longer. It returns to the same sad old story of the strong trying to steal from the weak for no better reason than that they think they can. And I say, and America must say, a plague on all their houses!”

The Arena went nuts. That has how Peggy put it when she talked about the speech later on. At the moment, she and her husband yelled and stomped and clapped as loud as anybody else. She was as disgusted by England and France’s jump from war against Germany to war against Russia as she’d ever been by anything in her life. (Except, perhaps, her self-disgust at waking up in bed with Constantine Jenkins. But wasn’t waking up in bed with Adolf Hitler a thousand times worse?)

“And so,” Roosevelt went on, “we are sending no more weapons to England or to France. And I have ordered the appropriate authorities to ensure that we sell no more oil or scrap metal to Japan until she ends her aggression against China. Governments must no longer see their neighbors as their prey.”

He got another ringing round of applause. Peggy noticed that he didn’t say anything about Japan’s just-ended war with Russia. Chances were he didn’t want to remind people. Even some of his supporters had been hoping the Communists would lose, as they did.

Roosevelt also didn’t say what Japan-whose home islands didn’t yield much past rice and tough little men-was liable to do when her access to raw materials she needed suddenly got cut off. We’ll all find out, Peggy thought as she left the hall.