Two Fronts

Chapter 21

Sarah Bruck was peeling turnips when the air-raid sirens began to shrill. She looked at her mother. “Are they crazy?” she said. “It’s one in the afternoon.” The RAF never came over Munster in broad daylight. Hanna Goldman shrugged. “Maybe it’s a drill.”

“Then the people who run the drills are crazy,” Sarah said. When she started thinking about it, that didn’t seem at all unlikely to her. They were Nazis, so they might well be meshuggeh.

But, through the sirens’ warble, she soon heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. She and her mother lay down under the dining-room table: not much protection, but the best they could do.

Bombs whistled down on their city. After a couple of minutes, flak guns all over Munster thundered to irate life. Sarah thought she understood the reason for the delay. The gun crews wouldn’t have been standing by their weapons in broad daylight, the way they did at night. They would no more have expected a daylight raid than Sarah had.

Whether they’d expected one or not, they’d got one. She thought some of the engines roaring up there high in the sky belonged to Luftwaffe fighters, not bombers from England. She didn’t know what to feel about that. Like the gunners, they supported the regime that tormented her and the rest of Germany’s Jews. But they were trying to drive away the English pilots dropping bombs on her head. One of the young Englishmen up there right now might have dropped the bomb that had killed her husband and his family.

So shouldn’t she hope a German pilot in a Messerschmitt shot down that Englishman? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? The way things were going, a blind world would gum its food from now until eternity.

A great crashing roar shook the house and rattled the windows. That wasn’t a bomb going off; that was a plane’s whole bomb load blowing up at once as it smashed to earth. At least one fighter pilot or flak-gun crew had scored a success. No more than a minute later, another bomber crashed down a little farther away.

“They’re paying for this,” Sarah’s mother shouted into her ear.

“They are, yes,” Sarah agreed. Was that a good thing or a bad? She still couldn’t make up her mind. Both at once was what she wanted to say, but she didn’t think her father would reckon that an acceptable choice.

Thinking of Father made fresh fear stab through her. None of the bombs had fallen close to the house. But he was out in the city somewhere, patching up some of the damage from the RAF’s night raids. She was pretty sure she and Mother would come through this attack all right. But she had no way of knowing where Father was or what sort of shelter from the falling death he’d be able to find. Would he walk through the front door tonight? Would someone from the labor gang knock on the door to let her and Mother know he’d never come home any more? Or would he just be … gone?

Sarah kept her fears to herself. No doubt her mother had them, too, and stayed quiet about them so as not to worry her. Misery didn’t always love company. Sometimes things got worse when you shared them, not better.

Bombing raids always seemed to last forever. When you got the chance to look at a clock afterwards, you were astonished at the small interval during which the RAF planes were actually overhead.

This time, they left after just more than twenty minutes. The sirens went on warbling a while longer. The flak guns went on firing, too. A few chunks of shrapnel clattered down on the roof slates. Nothing sounded heavy, not this time. Once, a big chunk of falling brass had smashed a slate. Father’d gone up there and fixed things before the next time it rained.

He’d been proud of himself for days afterwards, too. He’d done something useful, and he’d done it well. It wasn’t the kind of thing a professor of classics and ancient history would have known how to do. As far as he was concerned, it made his forced departure from the university and his conscription into the labor gang at least partway worthwhile.

As the all-clear finally sounded and as the antiaircraft-gun crews at last decided the bombers were really gone, Sarah had to hope memories like that weren’t all she had left of her father. He might be a decorated and wounded veteran of the last war, but as far as the Nazis were concerned he was still a damn Jew.

She and her mother crawled out from under the table. “Well,” Hanna Goldman said, hands fluffing at her hair, “supper’s going to be later than I thought.”

“It’s a nuisance, but what can you do?” Sarah wasn’t about to let anyone, even her mother, win a dryer-than-thou competition.

But, even after the sorry stew-turnips and potatoes and cabbage and a parsnip or two for a hint of sweetness-started bubbling on the stove, any little noise out in the street made her head whip around. Was that Father coming in? Or was that? Or that? Each time, the answer turned out to be no.

Mother’s head might have been on the same swivel. Neither of them said a word about it.

But those were footsteps coming up the walk. And they were Samuel Goldman’s irregular footsteps. He’d limped ever since he caught one for the Kaiser, even if the Reich’s current lords and masters gave him precious little credit for it.

His key turned in the lock. The door opened. To Sarah’s amazement, her father’s face bore an enormous grin. He wore a shabby tweed jacket. He’d lost a lot of weight on bad food and hard labor, so it hung loose on him. It did most of the time, anyhow. It was tight today, and he held one hand under his belly to support whatever was under there.

“What have you got?” Mother exclaimed, beating Sarah to the punch by a split second.

Instead of answering directly, Father said, “The Englishmen and the Americans did us a favor today. They were trying to murder us, of course, but they did us a favor anyhow.”

“The Americans?” Sarah said. “What have the Americans got to do with it?”

“They sold the RAF these planes-Flying Fortresses, they’re called.” Father said it in English and then in German. Fliegende Festungen: it sounded impressively martial. He went on, “They’re day bombers, all right. They’re stuffed full of armor and machine guns so they can fight their way to where they’re going-except when they get shot down. Some of them did. I watched it happen. But they plastered the rich part of town. We went there to help fight fires and fix water mains and the like. And so …”

He carefully undid his coat. A small ham and several fat sausages fell on the sofa. So did several tins of meat and a small, squat bottle of cherry brandy.

Sarah squealed. Her mother just stared at the sudden bounty, her eyes open wider than eyes had any business opening. Samuel Goldman looked proud and sheepish at the same time. “Yes, I’m a looter. Yes, I’m a thief,” he said. “But everybody was doing it, and I’m sick of going hungry all the time. I’ve got four packs of cigarettes-American cigarettes! — in my inside pockets, too. I don’t know how the Party Bonz whose house we went through got hold of them, and I don’t care, either. He’s smoking down below right now, is my best guess. He was nothing but raw meat in a uniform when we found him.”

An untimely demise like that should have saddened Sarah. But she heard herself saying, “I hope he was the pigdog who gave Isidor and me so much trouble when we wanted to get married, that’s all.”

“There you go.” Father nodded.

Mother said, “Now I’m glad the stew isn’t done yet. I’ll chop up one of those sausages and throw it in.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Sarah said. Pretty soon, it smelled wonderful, too. It tasted as good as it smelled. They drank little glasses of brandy to celebrate the feast. Father lovingly smoked a Pall Mall. It smelled different from the dog-ends he usually had to use. By his blissful expression, it also tasted different.

Father scrounged all kinds of wonderful things when the RAF hit Munster. But he got to do that because the English wrecked homes and shops and killed people. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.

Chaim Weinberg knew all the stupid things people said about war. One of them was that you never heard the one that got you. The Nationalists were throwing mortar bombs at the Internationals’ trenches. That had to be their second favorite sport, right after what they and most of the rest of the world outside the USA called football.

Nothing had come down especially close to Chaim. Sanjurjo’s men were missing by so much, in fact, that he was joking about it with Mike Carroll. “See?” he said to his buddy, who hadn’t been back in action long. “The front line is the safest place you can come.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Mike said. “I-”

There was a brief whining hiss in the air, an understated bang … and all the lights went out for Chaim. When they came on again-he didn’t think it was more than a few seconds later, but he never knew for sure-he saw everything red and his left hand was on fire. He didn’t need long to figure out why his vision had that crimson film. He’d caught a nasty scalp wound, and it poured blood into his eyes. And his hand … It might have looked worse if he’d set it on an anvil and let someone smash it with a sledge hammer, but it also might not have.

And he was the lucky one. Mike was down and groaning and clutching his belly. Blood poured out between his fingers. A butcher couldn’t have gutted a lamb more neatly-or more thoroughly.

“Fuck!” Chaim said. “Oh, fuck!” He pulled a hanky out of his pocket. He tried to wipe some of the blood off his own face, then stuck the cotton square on top of his head to slow down the flow there. Scalp wounds always bled like mad bastards and looked worse than they were. He knew that. If this one hadn’t also cracked his skull, he’d get over it. If it had, he was screwed and he couldn’t do anything about it any which way.

His ruined hand … He had wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. Trying to open one one-handed was something no wounded, half-addled man should have done-except he had no choice. He did a shitty job-there was no other word for it-of wrapping gauze around the wreckage. Then he had to do what he could for his friend.

All that time safe. All that time lucky. Both of them. He hadn’t caught any real wound at all, and Mike only the one in his leg. Well, that streak got smashed to hell in a split second. Mike had wound dressings, too, but he had more wound than they could hope to dress. He also had a couple of morphine syrettes. Chaim injected him with both of them. Even that was plainly sending a very small boy to do a man’s job, but it was the last favor Chaim could give his buddy.

He’d thrown away the second empty syrette when he wished he’d given himself some of it. Too late. He didn’t have one of his own, even if he had reminded himself to get hold of one. His hand was screaming louder every second. He wanted to scream himself. He wanted to, and a moment later he did. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the right.

Mike’s groans quieted. Either the morphine was easing his pain or he was dying. Maybe both those things were true at once. Chaim didn’t know. Even if he had, he couldn’t have done anything about it.

“Senor …,” someone behind him said: one of the Spaniards who’d joined the Abe Lincolns. Chaim turned to face him. The kid blanched and crossed himself. “?Madre de Dios!” he gabbled. As Chaim had seen with La Martellita, Catholicism stuck to even the Spaniards who reckoned themselves most aggressively modern and secular.

“I seem worse than I am,” Chaim said, hoping like hell he was telling the truth. “See to Mike first, por favor. I gave him morphine, but.… ” He started to spread his hands, but arrested the gesture before it was well begun. Moving the left one, even a little, made it hurt more than it already did.

“You have not had morphine yourself?” the Spaniard asked. Chaim shook his head. That hurt, too. The kid took a syrette out of his own belt pouch and stuck him. Then he bent down beside Mike Carroll. He crossed himself again-a quick, convulsive motion. He looked up at Chaim. “I do not believe he can live, Senor.”

“Do what you can for him.” Chaim sounded eerily calm. The drug was hitting almost as hard as the mortar bomb had. He still hurt, but it was as if his body were several kilometers from his brain.

The Spaniard yelled for stretcher-bearers for Carroll. Then he said, “And I will take you back to an aid station. Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. We’ll both find out, won’t we?” Chaim said. What would they do with his left hand? No-what would they do to it? Would he keep it? If he didn’t, how would he, how could he, get along without it? The morphine made all the questions seem much less urgent than they would have without it. He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sorry as hell.” He draped his good arm over the Spaniard’s shoulder. “Let’s go. We’ll see how far I get.”

He made it all the way to the aid station. That surprised him, and seemed to surprise his helper more. By the time he got there, though, the shot was wearing off. But a doctor took one look at the blood all over his face and at the dripping bandage on his hand and stuck him once more. The pain receded again.

Morphine or no morphine, he whimpered when the man peeled off the bandage and examined the ruin of his hand. “Can you save it?” Chaim asked.

“No se, Senor,” the man replied. “It does not looked good, but … Well, perhaps.”

By the way he spoke, Chaim realized he hadn’t even intended to try till he heard the question. “Do what you can, please,” Chaim said. “I don’t think I can use a rifle one-handed, and I want to get even with Sanjurjo’s putos.”

The ghost of a smile briefly bent the doctor’s lips. “Let me do what I can here. Then I will send you back to Madrid. Dr. Alvarez there has done some things that surprised more than a few people.”

“Gracias. De la corazon de mi corazon, gracias.” Chaim did the best he could with his clumsy Spanish. From the heart of my heart? He wouldn’t have said it that way in English.

He got the message across. “De nada, Senor,” the doctor said. This time, his smile lingered long enough to let Chaim be sure he really saw it. The man went on, “Now I will give you ether and make some preliminary repairs. Then-Madrid.”

“Madrid,” Chaim echoed. The ether rag came down on his face.

He thought he would go back to Madrid in an ambulance. He rode in the back of a beat-up Citroen truck with three other wounded men. He was groggy and dopey and hurt a lot in spite of the dope. His hand was swaddled in thick white bandages that got redder and redder as the truck rattled along. His scalp, he discovered, was also properly bandaged. He’d had his hair clipped or shaved off, too. No doubt he looked stupid as hell.

When they got to the hospital, a male nurse asked, “Which is Dr. Alvarez’s patient?”

“Aqui estoy,” Chaim answered. Here I am.

Dr. Alvarez proved to speak English with an accent much more elegant than Chaim’s. He’d studied medicine in London. He cut off the bandages and examined the wound and what the sawbones at the aid station-a man whose name Chaim had never learned-had done to it. Thoughtfully, the English-trained Spaniard rubbed his thin, dark mustache with a forefinger.

“What do you think, Doc? Can it stay on?” Chaim asked. Speaking English was a relief. Half addled by pain and morphine, he suspected he would have made an even worse hash of Spanish than usual.

“Oh, yes. I am certain of it-as long as we can avoid an infection in the wound, anyway,” Dr. Alvarez said. “And I hope … No, I believe … I believe that, once the surgical repairs are complete, you will have some function in it. Not full function, perhaps, but you will be able to use your thumb and some of your fingers.”

“Surgical repairs?” Chaim repeated. “You’re gonna carve on me some more?”

“It is necessary,” Alvarez replied. Maybe he thought Chaim didn’t want more surgery and he had to talk him into it.

If he did, he was dead wrong. “Let’s get on with it, then,” Chaim said. The operating room was spotless and had the antiseptic smell of carbolic acid. As long as Nationalist planes didn’t bomb the hospital, Chaim figured he’d come through fine. He smiled at the nurse who put the ether cone over his nose and mouth, and she had gray hair and a face like a horse. Oblivion swallowed him.

Anastas Mouradian played indifferent chess. Even if it wasn’t the microcosm of war people who didn’t know much about war (or, sometimes, about chess) often claimed, it was a way to make time go by when you weren’t flying. It was less popular than swilling vodka, but easier on the liver.

He found himself playing more now that he was flying with Isa Mogamedov. The Azeri not only didn’t drink like a Russian, he didn’t even drink like an Armenian. He hardly drank at all, in fact. Stas wondered if he was a pious enough Muslim to find alcohol sinful.

Mogamedov didn’t say he was, not even when Russian pilots and bomb-aimers teased him for his abstemiousness. Stas didn’t tease him and did play chess with him. Isa would have been an idiot to admit he was a serious believer. The war had put a damper on the Soviet Union’s aggressive atheism, but hadn’t stifled it altogether. Mogamedov just smiled and shrugged and said things like, “If I drink a lot, I get sick, so I don’t drink a lot.”

He played better than Stas did, but not so much better that Stas had no hope of beating him. He managed a victory about one game in five, which encouraged him to keep playing even though he got trounced most of the time. He sometimes wondered whether Isa threw a game every now and then to keep him interested, but asking about that might have been even less polite than inquiring about religion, so he didn’t.

Naturally, all the flyers who played fancied themselves as reincarnations of Botvinnik or Tal. Mogamedov beat most of them as easily as he handled Stas. Pretty soon, instead of asking for games, they contented themselves with kibitzing when he and Mouradian sat on opposite sides of the board.

As far as Stas was concerned, kibitzers were only slightly more welcome than German flak. Most of their advice and criticism came his way, because even the dullest of them could see that Isa didn’t need much help-if that was what it was-from them.

Stas managed to get into a complicated, crowded midgame position while only a pawn down. He felt moderately pleased; as often as not, the writing was already on the wall by this time. He scratched behind one ear while pondering what to try next. After some thought, he moved a knight.

“Oh, you wood-pusher!” exclaimed one of the vultures hovering over the board.

“When I want your opinion, Arkady, I’ll beat it out of you,” Stas said with his sweetest smile.

Isa sat corpse-still while he was studying a game. His face might have been carved from limestone for all it gave away. When he’d made up his mind, he reached out and took hold of a bishop. It slid across the board and assassinated Stas’ king’s rook’s pawn.

“See?” Arkady said. “What did I tell you?”

“Noisy in here, isn’t it?” Stas said to nobody in particular. Expecting the Russian to take a hint was like expecting the Second Coming day after tomorrow. You could do it, but you’d soon end up disappointed. Braining Arkady with a vodka bottle might have won his attention. It would have made people talk about Stas, though.

He moved the knight again. This time, the move served some obvious purpose: it threatened the bishop that hadn’t gone pawn-killing. Isa pulled it back one square. Stas’ knight advanced again, this time to threaten a rook. Isa slid the rook along the rear rank till it protected the bishop from behind. Of itself, Stas’ hand moved the knight yet again. This time, it forked Isa’s rook and his queen.

Mogamedov smiled, something he hardly ever did during a game. “You saw all that from the beginning, didn’t you?” He didn’t sound angry or accusing: more like a father who’d just watched a boy do something important on his own, and do it well.

“I did.” Stas, by contrast, sounded amazed, because he was. “It was like … like … the sky opening up in front of me, or something.”

Isa nodded. “It feels that way, yes, when you get the long sight of the board. You should try for it more often.”

“I didn’t try this time,” Stas said. “It just happened, that’s all.” He felt like an innocent bystander, the way he might have if he were suddenly to witness a highway smashup.

“You planned all that?” Not so innocent bystander Arkady, by contrast, sounded like someone who didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Da. I did,” Mouradian answered. He’d seen something like ten moves ahead. He’d never done anything like that before. No matter what Isa said, he doubted he ever would again, either. His head wasn’t geared that way-only it had been, this glorious once.

Isa Mogamedov raised an eyebrow in Arkady’s direction. “Just because you can’t do something yourself, Comrade, that doesn’t necessarily mean other people aren’t able to.”

The other, less obnoxious, kibitzers whooped. One of them whistled softly, which might have stung Arkady more. The Russian’s face and ears went hot and red. He stormed away. Without any fuss, Isa moved his queen. Stas took the rook. The game went on. He managed to hang on to the advantage the knight’s tour had given him and to win.

Afterwards, though, when the board was put away and the kibitzers had disappeared, he spoke in a low voice: “You made an enemy there, I’m afraid.”

“Who? Arkaday?” Mogamedov snapped his fingers. “That’s how worried about it I am.”

“He’s a Russian. He’ll know more Russians.” Stas spoke with the resigned annoyance of a nominally equal citizen in a Soviet state where Russians still dominated by weight of numbers and weight of history.

Mogamedov shrugged. “If they stick me in a gulag, I’ll probably die pretty soon. If I keep flying against the Nazis, I’ll probably die pretty soon, too. So what difference does it make? Chances are it won’t be any fun either way.”

Stas opened his mouth. Then, realizing he had nothing much to say to that, he closed it again. After a moment, he managed, “Well, you’ve got me there.”

“We’re fucked, is what we are,” Isa said.

“Can’t argue with that, either,” Stas said. “But if that’s the way you feel, you ought to drink more.”

“I don’t enjoy it,” the Azeri answered. “I feel like an idiot while I’m drunk. I act like an idiot while I’m drunk, too. And the next morning I feel like dogshit. So what’s the point?”

He didn’t say anything about how sinful alcohol was, or about how the Prophet had forbidden it. No, his reasons were rational, the kind of reasons a Russian teetotaler (assuming such a furry fish existed) might advance. His reasons were also the kind a Muslim might bring forth when he was talking with a Christian he didn’t fully trust.

They’d flown together. They’d relied on each other for their lives. They’d had to, or the NKVD would have disposed of them if German fighter pilots or flak gunners didn’t beat the Chekists to the punch. But Mogamedov didn’t think Stas wouldn’t grab the chance to feed him to the men who ran the camps.

That saddened Stas. It made him mad. It didn’t surprise him one bit. He wasn’t sure he could count on Isa Mogamedov that way, either. The fewer chances a Soviet citizen took, the less he revealed himself to the wider world, the better off he was likely to stay. If he made fewer friends than he might have otherwise, what was that but one more part of the price he paid for survival?

Peggy Druce wondered whom the Republicans would run against Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the leaves turned in 1944. She assumed FDR would run again if the war was still on, and the war didn’t look like stopping any time soon.

She shrugged, there alone in the front room of her comfortable Main Line house. The question seemed important and unreal at the same time. With the election at the tail end of next year, there wasn’t a GOP field to start betting on yet. Even if there had been, somebody was still liable to pop out of nowhere, the way Willkie had in 1940. Almost a year and a half away? That was a couple of eternities in politics.

She wished Herb were at home. They could hash things out together. He was bound to have an opinion about what kind of candidate the Republicans would field, and about what the fellow’s chances might be. Whatever Herb’s opinion was, he would have some good, solid reasons to give it weight. He always did.

But Herb was in … where was Herb this time? Texas, Peggy thought. Or was it Alabama? Wherever he was, he was slashing red tape and saving Uncle Sam money. Uncle Sam ought to be grateful, but Peggy didn’t labor under the illusion that he would be. Chances were the government would be so amazed anyone could save it money that it wouldn’t believe such a thing was really happening.

Peggy still wondered what all the ivory-tower chemists or physicists or whatever they’d been were doing now that their gravy train was derailed. Billions of dollars? Billions of dollars on a super-duper bomb that might not work and would take years and years to build even if it did?

You had to be practical. Herb understood that, understood it down to the ground. You couldn’t expect people like Einstein to. He lived in the ivory tower, not just in it but on the very top floor. Okay, he was good at throwing equations around. Fine. Wonderful. Equations cost nothing but paper and ink, or maybe a blackboard and chalk. When you started dealing with the real world, you needed people like Herb Druce.

No, the government would never give him the credit he deserved for slaying the vicious boondoggle. Peggy did. Some money was bound to get wasted. Wasting money was one of the things governments were for. That only got worse during wartime. But you had to do what you could to keep from wasting more than you could help.

She smiled as she lit a cigarette. Feeling good for Herb, feeling good about him, was good. She needed that; she could feel herself needing it. They still weren’t where she wished they would be.

Blowing a stream of smoke up at the ceiling, she wondered if they’d ever get there again. No way to know. There might be a scab over the wound in their trust, but the wound remained. One of these days, it might heal up and turn into a scar. She kept hoping it would.

She smoked the cigarette down to a very short butt, then stubbed it out in the brass baseball-glove ashtray that Herb liked. Then she turned on the radio. The dials lighted up right away. She knew she would have to wait for the tubes inside the big wooden cabinet to warm up before sound came out.

When it did, she changed the station as fast as she could turn the dial. That fast, bouncy jazz might be fine for jitterbugging soldiers on leave, and for the girls they’d sling over their shoulders or between their legs. Peggy wanted something with a real tune to it, though, not that pounding backbeat powered by bass fiddle and drums.

What she wanted was one thing. What she could find was liable to be a different kettle of crabs. A comic with a raspy voice and a Brooklyn accent-he seemed to want you to think he was Jimmy Durante’s cousin-made stupid jokes about how crowded trains were these days.

Trains were crowded. With gas rationing so tight, you couldn’t drive to Grandpa’s if the old man lived two states away. You had to take the train. And soldiers and sailors on leave or on official business had priority for seats. Okay, you could crack jokes about that. But comparing yourself to the cheese in a sandwich was just, well, cheesy. That was a joke Peggy made for herself, and it was a lot funnier than the ones Mr. would-be Durante was coming out with.

She didn’t waste more than a minute listening to him. On the next station she found, an earnest woman was explaining how to can vegetables. “Your victory garden will turn into a defeat unless you get the greatest possible use from it,” she declared.

That was bound to be true, but it wasn’t interesting, at least not to Peggy. She found some classical music. Stations were cautious about putting Wagner and other Nazi favorites on the air. If Germany and the USA did go to war, they’d probably disappear from broadcasts. But this was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Yes, Mussolini was on Hitler’s side and Vivaldi was Italian, but he’d been dead so long it hardly mattered any more.

The Vivaldi was pleasant; as with Bach, you could listen very closely and admire how everything worked and how it all fit together-or you could just listen. Peggy just listened for a while. Then she decided she’d rather hear something else, so she looked for another station.

She found a detergent drama. Mama had just found out her daughter was falling for a guy with black-market connections. Music that had nothing to do with Vivaldi swelled dramatically as Mama tried to figure out whether to turn him in or to start rolling in lamb chops and other goodies she couldn’t hope to get honestly.

Peggy was sure Mama would rat on Rocky. That was the Right Thing to Do, so it was what people in soap operas did. Everything would come out fine in the end anyway, but that was how things worked in soap operas, too. A real Mama probably would have run out and got some mint jelly to go with the lamb chops, but people in Radioland didn’t do stuff like that.

She didn’t care enough to keep listening. Another twist of the dial captured a quiz show. Herb liked those. He was good at them, too-often better than the contestants. The capital of South Dakota? The King of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War? The American League batting champion in 1921? He’d come out with the answer before a contestant could ring a bell. And he’d be right, too. Herb knew all kinds of weird things. That probably made him better as a government examiner.

Peggy also knew a lot of weird things. The difference between her and Herb was that she didn’t passionately care about the capital of South Dakota, while he did. She supposed it was the same kind of difference as the one between people who played cards for the fun of it and the ones who wanted to serve up their opponents on a platter with an apple in their mouth. She nodded to herself. She played a decent game of bridge, and she enjoyed it. Herb fought for every point as if he were crawling under barbed wire to make a trench raid on the Hun.

So she could take quiz shows or leave them alone. She soon left this one alone. She finally found some news. The Navy said its submarines had sunk a Japanese destroyer and two freighters. That sounded good, but not good enough. She didn’t think the war in the Pacific could have been much more mishandled if she were running it herself.

Then the newsman said, “The RAF used American-built Flying Fortresses to conduct daylight raids against German manufacturing centers. The bombers, also known as B-17s, performed well and inflicted heavy damage. They have also been used by our Army Air Force to strike Japanese-held Pacific islands.”

Hitler had made Spain a proving ground for his planes and tanks. Now the Fuhrer was on the receiving end as FDR did the same thing. What went around came around. Peggy would have bet dollars to doughnuts that old Adolf thought it was better to give than to receive.