The Man with the Iron Heart

XIX

Bernie Cobb was not a happy man. Occupation duty in Erlangen hadn’t been so bad. Oh, you looked sideways at about every third Jerry you passed on the street, but he’d kind of got used to that. And Erlangen wasn’t a big city. Yeah, the fanatics had bumped off that Adenauer guy there, but that was just one of those things. (Half-remembered bits of Cole Porter spun through his head-something about gossamer wings. He wished he had some right this minute.)

What he was doing now wasn’t occupation duty. It was war-no other name for it. He was part of a skirmish line combing through a valley somewhere in the Alps, looking for-well, anything that didn’t belong there. Some of the things that didn’t belong here were krauts with rifles and Schmeissers and machine guns. Not all of them were Heydrich’s diehards. The rest were just brigands. They’d lived by robbery all through the war, and hadn’t felt like quitting after the surrender. But they could kill you every bit as dead as any fanatic.

Yeah, those gossamer wings would come in handy, all right. Bernie imagined flying above the rocky landscape, spying out trouble that’d be hard to spot from the ground. Then he imagined some asshole in a ragged Wehrmacht greatcoat doing antiaircraft work with an MG42. His imagination came back to earth with a thump, the same way he would if the bastard shot him down.

His breath smoked. His short Eisenhower jacket didn’t keep him warm enough. Fall was here, sure enough. Erlangen was cooler than Albuquerque-all of Europe that he’d seen was cooler than Albuquerque-but in summer that was okay. Now, tramping through these miserable mountain valleys…He shook his head and exhaled more fog.

Haystacks dotted the valleys. All the grass was going yellow because of the night freezes, so the stacks were less picturesque than they would have been a few weeks earlier. That didn’t mean they were any less dangerous. Haystacks were great to sleep in and to hole up in. Bernie’d found that out for himself plenty of times before the surrender.

He and his buddies warily approached the closest stack. They fanned out so they could make sure nobody was hiding on the far side. Inside was harder to be sure about. “Raus!” Bernie yelled. “Hande hoch!”

Nobody came out with his hands up. “Want me to give it a burst?” another dogface asked, hefting his grease gun.

“Bet your ass, Roscoe,” Bernie said. The rest of the GIs stood clear. Roscoe sprayed three short bursts through the haystack. Nobody staggered out bleeding and wailing, either.

“Okay. This one’s clean,” another soldier said.

“Is now, by God,” Bernie agreed. If some German hiding in there had just quietly died with his brains blown out, Bernie wouldn’t shed a tear. Son of a bitch had the chance to give up. That was more than he would’ve given the guys hunting him.

The Americans tramped on. Bernie lit a cigarette. A few hundred yards off, a GI in another group of troops waved, silently asking what the gunfire meant. Bernie’s answering wave said everything was jake. The distant soldier gave back one more flourish to show he got it. Then he returned to his own hunt.

Bernie’s bunch came to a farmhouse and outbuildings. The farmer was about fifty, so maybe he’d put in his time and maybe he hadn’t. His skinny wife eyed the Americans as if she’d just taken a big swig of vinegar. They had a daughter who might’ve been cute if she hadn’t looked even more sour than her ma.

And, on the mantel, they had a framed photo of a young man in the uniform of a Wehrmacht junior noncom. Bernie pointed at it and raised an eyebrow. “Ostfront,” the farmer said. “Tot?” A sad shrug. “Gefangen?” Another one.

“Dead or captured fighting the Russians,” said Roscoe, who had the usual GI bits and pieces of German.

“Yeah, I got it, too,” Bernie said. He pointed at the farmer. “Soldat? Du? Westfront? Ostfront?”

“Nein. Bauer durchaus Krieg,” the man replied in elementary Deutsch. German for morons, not that Bernie cared. He got the answer he needed-the guy claimed he’d farmed all through the war.

And maybe the kraut was even telling the truth. He was wearing patched overalls, like an Okie fleeing the Dust Bowl in the ’30s. His shirt and shoes weren’t Wehrmacht issue, either. A lot of Germans hung on to their army clothes because those were all they had. This stuff wasn’t any better than what the Jerries got from the Wehrmacht, but it was different.

“Let’s search the joint,” Bernie said.

Maybe Mother and Daughter Vinegar Phiz knew some English, because they looked even nastier than they had before. It did them exactly no good. They might have got themselves shot if they did anything more than glare, but they didn’t.

The GIs turned the place upside down and inside out. They opened drawers and scattered clothes all over the floor. Some of them got a giggle out of throwing women’s underwear around. They poked and prodded the mattress and bedclothes, and lifted them up to check underneath. They found a stash of dirty pictures, with plump, naked Frauleins doing amazing things to men with old-fashioned haircuts. Those were good for a giggle, too. Several guys helped themselves to the best ones. Bernie wondered how the farmer would explain them to his pickle-faced wife. That wasn’t his worry, thank God.

What they didn’t find were any weapons. The most lethal things in the place were the kitchen knives. They went out to the barn and the other outbuildings. Guys who’d grown up on farms back in the States led the search there. Again, they came up with nothing. Maybe these people really didn’t hang around with bandits.

“Danke schon,” Bernie said as the soldiers started to leave. He tossed the farmer a pack of Luckies. It wouldn’t square things, but it might help.

By the farmer’s expression, and by some of the things he muttered under his breath, it didn’t. If any of Heydrich’s fanatics wanted to hide here from now on, the guy would probably serve them roast goose and red cabbage. Well, too goddamn bad.

As the GIs trudged away, the farmer’s wife started screeching at him. “Oh, boy, is he gonna catch it,” Roscoe said, not without sympathy. He had one of the farmer’s finest photos carefully tucked into a breast pocket.

They hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when they came to the place where a mineshaft plunged into the hillside. It wasn’t much to look at: a roughly rectangular hole, a little bigger all the way around than a man was tall. Bernie went in as far as the light reached, which wasn’t very. Spider webs shrouded support timbers that looked as if they’d stood there since Napoleon’s day, or maybe Martin Luther’s.

But you never could tell. This was the kind of stuff they’d been sent out to find. One of the guys had a radio set on his back instead of his ordinary pack. He was already on the horn to divisional HQ when Bernie came out of the shaft. Bernie told him what little he’d seen, and the radioman passed it on.

He listened for a little while, then gave the word: “They’ll send a search team and a demolition team. We’re supposed to wait till they get here, and then support the search team.”

“Suits,” Bernie said. He flopped down in front of the big, black hole in the ground and lit a cigarette. Some of the dogfaces dug out K-ration cans and chowed down. Others promptly started snoring. Bernie had lost the knack for sleeping on bare ground, and wasn’t sorry he had. But if they kept giving him shit like this to do, he might have to get it back.

The demolition squad and the searchers showed up a couple of hours later. Bernie wasn’t anxious to go back into the mine, but he did it. The search team brought flashlights that could have doubled as billy clubs.

“You oughta sell these suckers to MPs,” Bernie said, turning his this way and that. All he saw was carved-out gray rock and more of those ancient support timbers. His boots thumped on the stone floor of the shaft.

“Not a half-bad notion. Damn snowdrops’d be dumb enough to fork over,” said a corporal on the search team. Bernie snickered. The MPs’ white helmets and gloves gave them the scornful nickname.

“Hold up,” somebody called from ahead. “Big old cave-in here. This is the end of the road.” Bernie glanced at the corporal. The two-striper was already turning around. Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow him out-not even a little bit.

“Everybody out?” a man from the demolition squad yelled into the shaft. No one answered. Bernie looked around. All his people were standing outside the mine. The sergeant in charge of the search team seemed to have all his guys, too. The demolitions people placed their charges. They backed away from the opening. Again, Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow. The man who’d yelled used the detonator.

Boom! It wasn’t so loud as Bernie’d expected. Dust spurted out of the shaft. When it cleared, the hole was gone: full of fallen rock. “That’ll do it,” he said.

“Yeah,” agreed the soldier who’d touched off the blast. “Nobody going in or out of there. Now all we gotta do is seal off about a million more of these motherfuckers and we’ve got it licked.”

“Er-right.” Bernie wished he hadn’t put it that way. It made him think he’d be tramping through these miserable mountains forever. He looked around. Hell, he was liable to be.

Boom! The explosion was a long way off, which didn’t mean Reinhard Heydrich didn’t hear it. He swore. The Amis had just plugged one of the ways into and out of his underground redoubt. They didn’t know they’d done that, of course; all the shafts that led down here were artfully camouflaged to look as if they deadended. Even so…

Things had picked up. The Amis wanted him dead. They’d wanted him dead before, of course, but now they really wanted him dead. They wanted him dead enough to put some real work into killing him: into killing him in particular because he was what and who he was, not because he was some Nazi diehard.

I should thank them for the compliment, he thought wryly. He’d got under their skin. He’d hurt the enemy enough to make the enemy want to hurt him back. No, to make the enemy need to hurt him back. This wasn’t just war. It was politics, too. American elections were coming up soon. If the Amis could show off photos of Reinhard Heydrich’s mutilated corpse, their hard-liners would win votes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” It would go out over the radio, in the newspapers, in their magazines. And the oppression of Germany would go on.

Clausewitz said war was an extension of politics by other means. Hitler had often-too often-forgotten that. Now that the Fuhrer was dead, Heydrich could look at him and his policies more objectively. And Heydrich didn’t have the mighty Wehrmacht at his back. The mighty Wehrmacht was rotting meat and scrap metal. Heydrich couldn’t bludgeon foes out of the way. He had to keep stinging them, wasplike, till they decided Germany was more trouble than it was worth and left on their own.

He wanted to stay alive, too. He wanted to enjoy the free Germany he’d created. And he especially didn’t want to die if dying gave the occupying powers an advantage and hurt the rebuilding Reich.

Hans Klein walked in. “They aren’t coming after us.”

“Good.” Heydrich nodded. “I didn’t think they would. We spent a lot of time and a lot of Reichsmarks making the holes in the ground that lead in here look like holes in the ground that don’t go anywhere.”

“When you’re playing bridge, one peek is worth a thousand finesses,” Klein said. “When you’re playing our game, one traitor’s worth a thousand tonnes of camouflage.”

Heydrich grunted. Nothing like a cynical noncom to put his finger on your weakness. “We haven’t had to worry about that so far,” the Reichsprotektor said.

“We’ve been lucky so far,” Klein retorted.

Again, Heydrich couldn’t very well tell him he was talking through his hat. Klein damn well wasn’t. At least Heydrich had the sense to see as much. Plenty of people who’d yelled “Heil Hitler!” as loud as anybody were serving the Anglo-Americans now. Or they were licking the lickspittle Frenchmen’s boots, or else kowtowing to Stalin the way they’d once bowed down to their proper Fuhrer.

When such folk made conspicuous nuisances of themselves, Heydrich’s men disposed of them. A sniper from 800 meters, a bomb planted in an automobile or posted in a package, poison at a favorite eatery…There were all kinds of ways. Collaborators knew they had to be careful. Some of them decided the risk wasn’t worth it and quit collaborating. Every one like that counted as a victory.

But the enemy also had his weapons. One of them was cold, hard cash. Heydrich remembered the huge price on his head. A million U.S. dollars now, wasn’t it?

Would that be enough to tempt some sniveling little Judas who’d got sick of staying cooped up in a hole in the ground for years? Heydrich nodded to himself. A million dollars was plenty for a traitor to buy himself an estate and a Rolls and the kind of pussy that went with an estate and a Rolls. Then all he’d need to worry about was his former friends’ revenge.

He might figure the resistance movement would die with Heydrich. He might be right, too, though the Reichsprotektor didn’t think so. If the resistance had gone on after Hitler died, it would go on after Heydrich, too. Jochen Peiper was more than capable in his own right-and freedom for Germany was more important than any one man.

Which didn’t mean treason couldn’t hurt. “People do have to keep their eyes open,” Heydrich said.

“That’s right,” Klein agreed. “You can’t push it too hard, though, not when we’ve all been down here so long. Folks stop listening to you. Anything you have to say over and over starts sounding like Quatsch… uh, sir.”

“And you not even a Berliner,” Heydrich said with a mock-sorrowful shake of the head. But the slang word for bilge was understood all over Germany these days. After some thought, Heydrich nodded much more seriously. “That is one of the troubles with a fight like this. Well, if you think the warnings get to where they do more harm than good, let me know.”

“Will do, Herr Reichsprotektor,” Klein promised. Heydrich had no doubt he would, too. Klein was solid. You couldn’t win a war without leaders, but you also couldn’t win it without reliable followers. Heydrich would have paid a reward of his own to bring in more just like Hans Klein.

Meanwhile…“We’ve lost one doorway. We’ve still got plenty. If they think we can’t hurt them now-they’ll find out.”

November 5. Election day. Sunny but chilly in Anderson. Early in the morning, Jerry Duncan and his wife made the ceremonial stroll from their house to the polling place a couple of blocks away. Sure enough, two or three reporters and their accompanying photographers stood waiting on the sidewalk.

“Wave to the nice people, Bets,” Jerry said in a low voice, and followed his own advice.

Betsy Duncan did, too. Also quietly, she answered, “I know what to do. It’s not like this is the first time.”

“Nope,” Jerry agreed. The one who’d be sweating rivets was Douglas Catledge. Duncan didn’t think the Democrat had ever run for anything before he came back from the war.

“Who you gonna vote for, Congressman?” one of the reporters called.

“Who do you think, E.A.?” Jerry said. E. A. Stuart grinned. One of the other reporters laughed out loud. It was funny, and then again it wasn’t. About every other election, you heard of some little race-school board, maybe, or town councilman-decided by one vote. Sometimes it was decided when-oops! — one candidate chivalrously voted for his opponent. Like any serious politician, Jerry believed in winning more than he believed in chivalry.

The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school. Jerry shook hands with people in there till an election official-a skinny old lady and undoubtedly a Democrat-said, “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polls.”

“I wasn’t electioneering-just meeting friends,” Jerry lied easily.

He got his ballot, went into a booth, and pulled the curtain shut behind him. After he’d marked his ballot, he folded it up and gave it to the clerk in charge of the ballot box. That worthy stuffed it into the slot. “Mr. Duncan has voted,” he intoned ceremoniously. Betsy came out of her booth a moment later. The clerk took her ballot, too. “Mrs. Duncan has voted.”

Flashbulbs from the photographers’ cameras filled the dingy auditorium with bursts of harsh white light. The walk back to the house was attended only by E. A. Stuart. Jerry’d hoped he would get to be an ordinary human being on the way home, but no such luck.

“What will you do if the Republicans win a majority today?” Stuart asked.

“Celebrate,” Betsy answered before Jerry could open his mouth.

Chuckling, Jerry said, “She’s right. You can write it down. I think the first thing we’ll do after that is try and bring our boys home from Germany.”

“President Truman won’t like it,” E.A. Stuart predicted. Jerry tried to remember his full handle, but couldn’t. It was something ridiculous and Biblical-he knew that. No wonder he went by his initials.

“Truman’s had a year and a half to fix the mess,” Jerry said. “He hasn’t done it-not even close. Things are worse now than they were right after the surrender. If he won’t get cracking on his own, we’ll just have to make him move.”

“And if the Democrats hold on?” Stuart asked. Jerry and Betsy Duncan made identical faces. The reporter laughed. “I can’t quote expressions, folks,” he said.

“Awww,” Jerry said, and E. A. Stuart laughed again.

He tried another question: “Would you oppose the occupation so strongly if Diana McGraw hadn’t mobilized opinion against it?”

Betsy’s step faltered, ever so slightly. She was jealous of Diana. Jerry hadn’t given her any reason to be, but she was. (What she didn’t know about a few young, pretty clerk-typists back in Washington wouldn’t hurt her.) He picked his words with care: “Of course Mrs. McGraw comes from my district.” He stressed Mrs. for his wife’s benefit. “That makes me pay some extra attention to her views. But the President’s disastrous policy would have sparked opposition with her or without her. I have to think I would have been part of it.”

“Okay,” Stuart said, scribbling. “Now-”

Jerry held up a hand. “Can we hold the rest for tonight or tomorrow? Then I’ll know what’s what. Right now I’d just be building castles in the air, okay?”

“Well, sure.” E. A. Stuart smiled crookedly. “But that’s half the fun.”

“Maybe for you.” Jerry turned into his own walk. A man’s home was his castle, and reporters and other barbarians could damn well wait outside.

The polls closed at seven. Jerry and Betsy were at his campaign headquarters-a storefront three doors down from the Bijou-at five past. Radios turned to CBS, RCA, and Mutual stations blared returns. Some people had trouble straining information out of election-night chaos. Not Jerry. He could pick the East Coast nuggets from all the random chatter.

And all the nuggets seemed pure gold. Democrat after Democrat was losing or “trailing significantly,” as the pundits liked to say. Republican after Republican claimed victory. Excitement made Jerry’s fingertips tingle. It had been so long, so very long.

“And now we have the first returns from Indiana,” one of the radio announcers said. Everybody at campaign headquarters yelled for everybody else to shut up. While people were yelling, the announcer read off the returns. In spite of Jerry’s ear, he couldn’t make them out.

“Downstate,” someone said. “We’re leading three to two.”

“Is that all?” Someone else sounded disappointed. Downstate Indiana, down by the Ohio River, was as solidly Republican as anywhere in the country. Still, three to two wasn’t half bad, not by any standards. And most of the votes might have come from some local Democratic stronghold. Till you knew provenance, you had to be careful about what the raw numbers meant.

“In the suburbs of Indianapolis,” the announcer went on, “incumbent Jerry Duncan leads his Democratic challenger. The totals are 1,872 to 1,391 in what are still preliminary results.”

Cheers erupted. So did a few four-letter words aimed at the man on the radio. People from Anderson and Muncie didn’t like to hear their towns called suburbs of Indianapolis. When you got right down to it, they were, but folks didn’t like to hear it or think about it.

“What were the numbers like two years ago? I don’t remember exactly,” Betsy said.

“Not as good as they are now. I was only up by maybe a hundred votes at this stage of things.” Like most politicos, Jerry had total recall for all the returns in every election he’d ever contested. But he was also cautious: “Can’t tell too much yet. Besides, who knows where these votes come from?”

“Okay,” Betsy said. “But I sure like it a lot better than I would if you were behind by that much.”

He laughed. “Well, when you put it like that, so do I.”

The air got thick with cigarette smoke and the odd pipe and cigar. Then it got thicker. Jerry was puffing away like everybody else, but he didn’t like it when his eyes started to sting and water. That took a good thing too far.

More good news kept blaring out of the radio. “This does look like a repudiation of Harry Truman’s domestic and foreign policy,” a broadcaster said. “Unless things out West dramatically change the situation, the Republican Party stands to gain control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration.”

More cheers. Jerry shouted along with everybody else. But he couldn’t help wishing the guy on the radio hadn’t mentioned Hoover. If ever there was a jinx…

But not even the ghost of Hoover and the Depression could jinx the GOP tonight. Around half past ten, when Jerry’s lead had swelled to over 5,000 votes, one of the telephones at campaign headquarters jangled. The staffer who answered it waved to try to cut the hubbub in the room. Not having much luck, he bellowed, “It’s Douglas Catledge, Congressman!”

Jerry jumped to his feet and hurried over to the phone. The campaign workers yelled and clapped and stamped their feet. But when Jerry waved for quiet, he got it. He grabbed the handset, saying, “Thanks, Irv.” He talked into the telephone: “This is Jerry Duncan.”

“Hello, Congressman. Doug Catledge here.” The young Democrat sounded tired and sad but determined: about the way Jerry would have sounded in his shoes. One of these days, I will sound that way. Going to Washington is always a round-trip ticket. But not today, thank God, Jerry thought. After an audible deep breath, his opponent went on, “I called to congratulate you…on your reelection.”

“Thank you very much, Doug. That’s mighty gracious of you,” Jerry said. “You ran a strong campaign. I was worried right up till the polls closed.” He hadn’t been; he’d thought things looked pretty good. But if the other fellow was gracious you had to follow suit.

“Kind of you to say so,” Catledge replied. “If you don’t mind my two cents’ worth now, I do hope you’ll soft-pedal the pullout foolishness you spouted the past few weeks.”

Jerry frowned. Douglas Catledge had lost not least because he backed Truman’s policies, and he was telling Jerry what to do? Go peddle your papers, sonny. Jerry came that close to saying it out loud.

But no. Just because the other guy couldn’t mind his manners didn’t mean Jerry had to imitate him. What he did say was, “The fight over there costs more men and more cash than we can afford. Our dollar is falling against the Swiss franc and the Canadian dollar and even the Mexican peso. It would be falling against the pound, but England’s stuck in this flypaper, too.”

“If we run away from Germany, either the Russians grab all of it or the Nazis come back in and start getting ready for World War III,” Catledge said. “I don’t think either one helps the United States.”

“I don’t think either one is anything we’ve got to worry about, not as long as we have the atom bomb,” Jerry answered. “Good night, Mr. Catledge.” He wasn’t about to argue, not tonight.

“Good night,” Douglas Catledge said sadly. “I still think you’re making a bad mistake.”

“I know you do. But the voters don’t.” Jerry said “Good night” once more and hung up. He’d got the last word. So had the voters: the only word that mattered in an election. Jerry stood up and held up his hands. Everybody in the crowded room looked his way. “My opponent has just generously conceded,” he told the campaign workers. “I want to thank him, and I want to thank all of you for making my victory possible. I’m the one who’s going back to Washington, but I couldn’t possibly do it alone. Thanks again to every one of you from the bottom of my heart.”

He got another round of applause. He went over and kissed Betsy. Then somebody stuck a lighted cigar in his mouth. He didn’t usually smoke them, but he took a few puffs with it held at a jaunty angle while the photographers snapped away. It was like a victory lap at the Indianapolis 500. As soon as the photographers were done, he stuck the cheroot in an ashtray and forgot about it.

Diana McGraw walked into the campaign headquarters about fifteen minutes later. The campaign workers gave her a hand, too. Jerry joined in. His wife, he noticed, didn’t. No, Betsy never came out and said anything about Diana, but she didn’t need words to make her feelings plain.

“Congratulations,” Diana said. “When the radio said Catledge had conceded, I figured I could come over without causing too much distraction.”

“We’re going to have another term,” Jerry said. Betsy’s smile might have been painted on.

“Another term,” Diana agreed. “How long do you think it will take to get the bonehead in the White House to bring our men home?”

“Good question. If Truman’s shown one thing, it’s that he’s at least as stubborn as FDR ever was,” Jerry answered.

“But Congress holds the purse strings,” Diana said. “If you don’t give him the money to keep troops in Germany-”

“Have to see what things look like, what the lineup is after they count all the votes,” Jerry said. He’d been trying to make that calculation himself. Knowing the numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the upcoming Eightieth Congress would help only so much. Some Democrats would steer clear of Truman for fear of losing the next time around, while some Republicans would stick with him because they were scared of Stalin-or just because the people in their districts thought occupying Germany was still a good idea.

Diana, of course, had her sights set on one thing and one thing only. “The sooner the boys come home, the sooner no more mothers will start hating the Western Union delivery boy,” she said.

How were you supposed to answer that? Jerry couldn’t, all the more so because he thought she was right. But she seemed sure the election would make things happen as if by magic. As a multiterm Congressman, Jerry Duncan knew better. There’d be plenty of horse trading and log rolling before anything got done. Washington was like that. It always had been. If it ever changed, he would be astonished.

“If Truman won’t see reason, you ought to impeach him and throw him out on his ear,” Diana said.

Jerry held up a hand like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. “Don’t even try to get anybody to talk impeachment. You’d only be wasting your time, and no one would listen to you,” he said. “Truman’s not doing anything unconstitutional. He’s just wrong. There’s a big difference.”

“If they impeached everybody in Washington who was wrong, the place’d be empty inside of two weeks,” Betsy said.

“If you’re wrong enough-” Diana began.

Maybe she had something, too. If Roosevelt had been on the point of losing the war, wouldn’t people have run him out of town on a rail? Jerry suspected they would…which, in those days, would have left Henry Wallace President of the United States, a genuinely scary thought. Truman had no Vice President at the moment. That would make the Speaker of the House President if he got impeached. And the new Speaker would be a Republican….

Ed McGraw read the paper while he ate bacon and eggs over easy and toast with butter and jam and smoked a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “looks like you’ve got the kind of Congress you’re gonna need.”

“What are the final numbers?” Diana asked around a mouthful of toast-she was eating breakfast, too.

Her husband read from the front-page story: “‘If present trends continue, the House in the Eightieth Congress will consist of at least 257 Republicans, 169 Democrats, and one American Labor Party member. The final eight races are too close for a winner to be declared. In the Senate, there will be at least fifty-three Republicans and forty-two Democrats. Again, the final Senate race is still up in the air.’”

“That’s amazing,” Diana said. “The Democrats had big majorities in both houses of Congress the last time around.”

Ed rustled the newspaper to show he wasn’t done yet. “‘This historic reversal is surpassed in recent times only by the Democratic sweep that went with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election,’” he read. “‘Pundits believe many of the voters who turned to the GOP yesterday did so in protest against President Truman’s costly and bloody occupation of Germany. Diana McGraw’s opposition movement galvanized voter unhappiness.’” He grinned at her around the cigarette, which was about to singe his lips. “How about that, babe? You and zinc and sheet metal.” In the nick of time, the butt went into the ashtray.

“How about that?” Diana echoed. She didn’t quite get the joke, but Ed had been making factory jokes she didn’t quite get ever since they were newlyweds. She went on, “Jerry said something like that last night, but he’s on the same side as we are, so it’s hard to take him all that seriously.”

“Jerry…” Ed McGraw shoveled in a forkful. He took a bite of toast. Then he lit another cigarette. “Ever figure you’d call a Congressman by his first name?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Diana started to say that the Congressman’s wife didn’t like it very much. She swallowed the words before they came out. Why have Ed wondering whether Betsy Duncan had a good reason not to like it? That would set Ed wondering, too, which wouldn’t be good when nothing was going on between her and Jerry. And, she realized a beat later, it would be even worse if something were going on.

“You’re hot stuff, kiddo.” Ed took the cigarette butt out of his mouth long enough to drink some coffee. After that, it went right back in. “But I’ve known you were hot stuff since high school.”

“Oh, you-!” she said fondly. She never had confessed some of the things that went on in the back seat of his beat-up old Chevy before they got married. What the priest in the booth didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him…and God, of course, had already seen it.

“So how does it feel?” he asked. He’d never looked for any of the limelight himself. He wasn’t that kind of man. All he cared about were his house and his job and their family. “You know all these big shots. You met the President and everything. You get your name in the papers.”

“I wish nobody’d ever heard of me,” Diana said. “That would mean we had Pat back. To hell with all this other stuff.”

No, she didn’t usually swear in front of her husband. She hardly noticed doing it this time. Ed didn’t notice at all. His big bald head bobbed up and down. “You got that right. Oh, boy, do you ever. I’d trade anything for another minute with him, even. But you don’t get those chances over again.”

“You sure don’t.” Diana drained her own coffee mug. She looked at the clock above the stove. It always ran fast, but she made the correction without conscious thought. “You’d better get going.”

“I know. I know.” Ed stood up. He grabbed his sheet-metal dinner pail. “Tongue sandwich in here?”

“Sure.”

“Good-one of my favorites.” Ed leaned down and brushed his lips across hers, leaving affection and the smell of tobacco smoke behind. Then he was out the door and heading for work, right on time. Ever since they got married, he’d been as reliable as the machines he tended.

Diana smiled as the Pontiac backed down the driveway and chugged out into the street. Ed was reliable here, too-not just on the job. She didn’t want him to think she was running around, even if he didn’t always leave her glowing in bed any more. He’d never given her any reason to think he was, not even during the war, when all those Rosie the Riveter types flooded into the plant. Some of them-plenty of them, in Diana’s jaundiced opinion-were looking for more than work. If they’d found it, they hadn’t found it with Ed.

Reaching across the kitchen table, Diana snagged the newspaper. Ed always got it first, because he had to hustle out the door-and, not to put too fine a point on it, because he was the man. But she could look it over now. It had maps and charts showing Senators and Representatives by party in the old Congress and the new.

No doubt Jerry was right (yes, I do know my Congressman by his first name, Diana thought): some Republicans would back the occupation, while some Democrats would vote against it. But the more Republicans in Congress, the better the chances it would end soon. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that.

“We will bring them home,” Diana said, there in the empty kitchen. It would have been empty even if Pat did come home: he would’ve gone off to work with Ed. But it would have been a different empty. It wouldn’t have been such an aching emptiness. Pat would have been gone, but he wouldn’t have been gone. Diana nodded to herself. Pretty soon, nobody else would have to worry about the aching kind of emptiness. She hoped.