Armistice Read online

  “Scotch and water, please, Aaron?” Roxane said.

  Howard nodded. “That’ll work for me, too.”

  “Okay. Follow me.” Aaron went into the kitchen to play bartender. Ruth also asked for scotch. Aaron built the drinks, and used a church key to open a bottle of Burgermeister for himself. He raised the Burgie in salute. “L’chaim!” he said.

  “L’chaim!” everybody echoed, even Leon. Glasses clinked. To life! was a nice, safe toast. Nobody could argue about it or disagree with it. He wondered whether he’d be able to say that about the rest of the evening.

  For the moment, he didn’t need to worry about that. He got Leon to show off. He spelled out simple words with the wooden alphabet blocks he’d made for his son: CAT, FAT, DOG, HOG, PIG, BIG. Leon had a little trouble with the last two, but read the rest with the greatest of ease.

  “Kid’s a genius!” Howard said, suitably impressed.

  “Oh, at least,” Aaron said, which got a laugh. “Now the next question is, will he ever make a living?”

  Howard laughed again, but when he said, “ ‘Ay, there’s the rub,’ ” his voice had an edge to it. No, he wasn’t doing so well these days. He glanced down at his glass, seeming surprised to find it empty. “Any chance of a refill?”

  “Oh, I expect that can be arranged,” Aaron said, though he was only halfway down his own beer. He made another drink and handed it to Howard. “Here you go.”

  “Much obliged!” Bauman said. “How do you want to toast this time?”

  “How about L’shalom?” Aaron suggest. “To peace!”

  “Omayn!” Ruth said, and drained her first drink. She didn’t ask for another one. Like Aaron, she thought a little was good but a lot was not so hot.

  Howard and Roxane also drank. How could you not drink to peace in a world that had seen so much war? Then Roxane said, “It would have been a whole lot better if this stupid war had never started.” She added, “Can you make me another drink, too?”

  “Uh-huh,” Aaron said, even if he wasn’t sure that was such a great idea. As he mixed scotch and water and ice cubes, he asked Ruth, “How’s dinner coming, babe?”

  Ruth used a potholder to take the lid off the big aluminum kettle on the stove. She stirred the stew with a wooden spoon and poked at a potato with a serving fork. “I think we’re ready. Let me take the salad out of the icebox, and you can all help yourself.”

  Howard Bauman wasn’t a great big man; he came within half an inch of Aaron’s five-nine. He took enough to feed a couple of basketball players. Yes, this was the kind of spread he didn’t get to see every day. After he made it disappear, he went back for seconds.

  So did Roxane. There wouldn’t be a lot of leftovers. As she worked her way through the new helping, she said, “The war wouldn’t have been so horrible if Truman hadn’t started dropping A-bombs.” She didn’t quite spit when she said the President’s name, but she came close.

  “We’d still have peace if North Korea hadn’t blitzed into South Korea.” As soon as blitzed came out his mouth, Aaron knew he’d have a quarrel on his hands. Comparing Communists to Nazis was guaranteed to make Roxane’s blood boil. He gave a mental shrug. It wasn’t as if Finches never argued.

  “Can we say L’shalom! and just leave it right there? Please?” Ruth was more peaceable than her husband and her cousin. “L’shalom! in the world and L’shalom at the table?”

  “Let’s do that,” Howard said. Roxane looked at him as if he’d stuck a steak knife in her back. Their marriage was less placid than the one Aaron and Ruth enjoyed.

  But the two couples managed to get through the evening without a screaming row. That didn’t always happen. As Roxane and Howard left, Aaron even managed to say “Hope to see you soon” without sounding like too big a liar. He wondered if he ought to try the acting game himself.

  STALIN WAS DEAD. Every time the thought ran through Ihor Shevchenko’s head, it brought something new with it. He remembered hunger, hunger to the point of starvation, in the Ukraine when he was a kid. Stalin was going to get rid of the kulaks and collectivize the countryside if he had to kill everyone in sight to do it. He damn near did, too. Damn near.

  And with that hunger came fear. If you didn’t care to do Stalin’s bidding but he didn’t manage to starve you to death, you might say something unkind about him. If you did, it could cost you a bullet at the base of the skull. Or, if you had a different kind of bad luck, you could vanish into the chain of gulags for ten years or for twenty-five.

  No wonder so many Ukrainians greeted the Nazis with flowers and with bread and salt when Germany invaded in 1941. After Stalin’s famine, Hitler seemed a liberator. But not for long. Pretty soon, most Ukrainians saw that Hitler made Stalin look good by comparison.

  Most, Ihor among them. Not all. Some of his countrymen enjoyed helping the Fritzes kill Russians and Jews. Some used the chaos to try to set up a Ukraine free of Russians and Germans. Some of them stayed in the field for years after the Red Army drove out the Wehrmacht.

  Ihor had fought in the Red Army. He’d come to respect Stalin for his strength and his indomitable will. He hadn’t forgotten the 1930s, but the way Stalin made the Soviet Union fight the Hitlerites made him forgive a big part of them.

  He’d ended the war wounded, and gone back to the kolkhoz for what he expected to be the rest of his life. The USSR had come out of the Great Patriotic War one of the two greatest powers in the world. That was nice. That was something you could be proud of. It was something you could brag about while you sat around drinking.

  But a new war when the country was still trying to pick up the pieces from the old one? Kiev went into the atomic furnace, along with so many other cities around the world. For a while, Ihor’s old wound kept him from having to go back into the Army. Then, after enough healthier men had got themselves shot or blown to bits, it didn’t any more.

  So here he was in Poland. The Poles who’d rebelled against their People’s Republic and the Soviet Union didn’t love Stalin. They cheered when they found out he was dead. Ihor wondered how loyal the Poles who made up the People’s Republic were. The only man he figured the USSR could rely on was the Minister of Defense. In addition to his place in the Polish cabinet, Konstantin Rokossovsky held marshal’s rank in the Red Army.

  A Pole came out of a foxhole waving a white flag. “Don’t shoot him, boys!” Ihor called to the section he led. To the Pole, he called, “Are you surrendering?” He guessed the bastard would understand.

  And the fellow did. “Fuck your mother, no!” he answered in fluent Russian. “What kind of clodhopper are you? I just want to parley. Do you know what parleying is?”

  Stung, Ihor said, “I know an asshole when I hear one. Come ahead and parley, asshole. I’ll take you back myself.”

  The Pole did come forward, a big grin on his face. He kept holding the flag high. Now that he’d found out how much he and Ihor loved each other, he wanted to keep reminding him not to open fire. He didn’t know Ihor had greased one of his own sergeants. Ignorance, in his case, was bliss.

  “Well, move along,” Ihor said gruffly, gesturing with his AK-47. “If you want to let our officers get their hands on you, that’s your lookout.”

  “We have Red Army prisoners. If I don’t get back in four hours, we start doing things to them,” the Pole replied.

  That might make Ihor’s superiors think twice about flaying the bandit a centimeter at a time, or it might not. Soviet officers thought soldiers were as disposable as hand grenades. Soviet marshals—like Rokossovsky, for instance—thought officers were disposable the same way. Stalin thought Soviet marshals were.

  But Stalin had been disposed of himself. The Polish bandit reminded Ihor of that: “What are you going to do now that Iosef Vissarionovich is trying to give the Devil orders?”

  “Why are you asking me? I’m just a corporal,” Ihor said reasonably. “I do what they tell me, or they chop my dick off.”

  As if on cue, an MGB man popped up from behin
d a boulder. “Halt!” he shouted. “What are you doing, moving back from the line?” If he didn’t like what he heard from Ihor, he’d shoot him, and probably win a promotion for doing it.

  Ihor nodded at the Pole. “This bandit wants to talk with our officers. I’m taking him back so he can do it.”

  The Chekist tapped his shoulder board. It showed him to be a first lieutenant. “Fine. I’m an officer. What have you got to say, svoloch?”

  “Takes a scumbag to know a scumbag,” the Pole answered with the air of a man who’d heard worse. “I don’t want to talk to a piece of shit of a Chekist. I need a Red Army officer, a real soldier.”

  He’d just said things Ihor had wanted to say for his entire life. Ihor knew better than to let his face move by so much as a millimeter. If the MGB lieutenant knew what he was thinking, he was a dead man. The Pole might be a bandit, but he had a flag of truce to protect him. Ihor didn’t.

  Face purple as a bowl of borscht, the secret policeman choked out, “Take him, then. Take him fast, or he’ll never get there.”

  “You talk big,” the Pole said. “What will you do when they wise up and put strychnine in Beria’s soup or something?”

  “They won’t,” the Chekist replied. Ihor wasn’t so sure about that. He didn’t want Stalin’s porky henchman calling the shots. But even if Beria wasn’t commanding the MGB, what difference would it make? This MGB guy wouldn’t lose his job. Ihor couldn’t imagine the Soviet Union without its secret policemen.

  “Come on,” Ihor said. He wondered for a moment whether the Chekist would shoot the Pole in the back. And he had an itch of his own, right between the shoulder blades. But they got away from the first lieutenant.

  “You see?” the Pole said. “You see? This is how come we don’t want you sons of bitches giving us orders any more.”

  “If we don’t, who would?” Ihor answered his own question: “The fucking Germans, that’s who. And then they’d be on our ass again.”

  “We stand on our own two feet,” the bandit insisted.

  “Oh, horseshit,” Ihor said, and the Pole went as dusky as the MGB man had before. Since the end of the eighteenth century, Poland had had maybe twenty years where it was really independent. How long would it last even if it did manage to kick out everyone in the Red Army from Marshal Rokossovsky on down?

  Here came a company of Soviet soldiers, with a couple of T-34/85s to put some metal in their fist. The tanks were obsolete, but obsolete tanks knocked the crap out of none. A sergeant saw the white flag and took Ihor and the Pole to the young lieutenant in charge of the company.

  “What do you want?” the kid asked the local.

  “A cease-fire around here till you people work out what you’re going to do without Stalin,” the Pole answered. “If peace breaks out, why get people killed for nothing? If it doesn’t, you can always start up again.”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “I can’t do that, not without orders from my superiors. And you know as well as I do, they won’t give orders like that.”

  “In the name of Christ, do it on the left, then.” The Pole really did speak Russian well. On the left was slang for unofficially or through the black market.

  But the kid didn’t have the nerve. “I can’t,” he repeated. “They’d cut my balls off. And besides, if we clear you out of here, I don’t have to worry about you any more.” He turned his pale eyes on Ihor. “Take him back to where he came from.”

  “Comrade Lieutenant, I serve the Soviet Union!” Ihor would have loved a local truce. But he had to follow orders, too—as long as other people were watching, which they were here. His chunk of the war would go on.

  —

  Someone knocked on the door to Harry Truman’s office. “Yes?” the President said. The door opened. In came his private secretary. Truman nodded to him. “What’s up, Mike?”

  Mike Rogers laid a sheet of paper on his desk. “Cable from Minister Patterson in Bern, sir,” he said. “Just now decoded.” His voice was soft and even. Truman was still getting used to him. He suspected the man was queer, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask. Rogers had passed an FBI vetting—if he was queer, he wasn’t getting blackmailed about it or anything. He was plenty capable, that was plain. Rose Conway, who’d served Truman before, died in the bombing of Washington.

  Truman unfolded the paper. “From Switzerland, hey?” he said. That was one of the places where Americans and Russians still talked with one another. Not many neutrals were left in Europe.

  “That’s right,” Rogers said.

  “Have you looked at it?” Truman asked.

  “No, sir. I didn’t think it was any of my business.” Mike Rogers sounded slightly shocked at the question.

  “Okay. But the world won’t end if you do. You need to know what’s going on. If anyone thought you’d be sending Moscow smoke signals, somebody else’s behind would warm your chair,” Truman said. Rogers seemed pained again, this time, no doubt, at the homely figure of speech.

  Truman peered through the lower half of his bifocals to read the decoded cable. Minister Turginov says Soviets interested in your definition of status quo ante bellum, Dick Patterson wrote. Acceptance possible if control over satellites conceded. Turginov states—unofficially—Beria’s position unstable.

  The President muttered to himself. He knew how much he was playing things by the seat of his pants. A lot of the State Department’s experts on the Soviet Union—hell, a lot of the State Department—had got smashed when that first Russian Bull got through. But he still had one man whose judgment and expertise he respected.

  “Do me a favor, Mike,” Truman said. “Put a call through to George Kennan at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. If you don’t get him, leave a message for him to call me back as soon as he can.”

  “I’ll take care of it right away, Mr. President,” Rogers said. He was as good as his word, too. Five minutes later, the phone on the President’s desk jangled. When Truman picked it up, his private secretary told him, “I have Mr. Kennan on the line.”

  “Terrific! Put him through, then.”

  After a few clicks and pops and hisses, Kennan said, “Is that you, Mr. President?”

  The diplomat’s patrician tones made Truman more than usually conscious of his own Missouri twang. Not long after the last war ended, Kennan had first proposed the policy of containing the USSR’s expansionism. He’d got on well with George Marshall when the soldier headed up Foggy Bottom. After Dean Acheson took over as Secretary of State, he hadn’t liked Kennan so well. Kennan and Marshall were both used to being the brightest bulb in the chandelier. While nobody’s dope, Acheson wasn’t quite in that class. Kennan might have let him know it.

  Kennan hadn’t wanted MacArthur to go north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, much less all the way to the Yalu. Few others had seen danger in that, but he had. And danger had been there, too. Being right was often its own punishment, which explained why he’d been at Princeton and not working for the government. It explained why he was still alive, in other words. And few living Americans knew more about what was going on in Russia. “I just now got a cable from Patterson in Bern,” Truman said, reading it to Kennan. When he finished, he said, “How does that look to you?”

  “I think you ought to give the Russians the guarantee they want for the Eastern European countries,” Kennan said at once. “I understand that we’ve hurt them worse than they’ve hurt us, but I would be surprised if we have the manpower to make them liberate Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary and their part of Germany. I know perfectly well we don’t have the manpower to occupy the USSR. Hitler thought he did, and look how well that turned out for him.”

  “Hitler didn’t have the A-bomb or the H-bomb,” Truman said.

  “I understand that, Mr. President, and I thank God for it, but the bomb is too fat a screwdriver to fit every screw’s thread, if you know what I mean,” Kennan replied.

  Truman sighed heavily. “Well, it’s not as if
I can tell you you’re wrong, no matter how much I wish I could.”

  “Russia’s impossible, sir. It always has been,” Kennan said. “No matter what Hitler thought, it’s too big to occupy. Unless you kill every single Russian, it’s going to be a great power.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too. I was hoping you’d say something different, doggone it. We can’t even run them back to the border they had in 1939, can we?”

  “Not unless you want to start a bunch of little wars—just to name one, Hungary and Romania still can’t stand each other. And the little ones would only build towards another big one.”

  “We can’t stand another big one. We can’t really stand any more little ones.” The President sighed again. “For the next big one, the Russians’ll be able to get at us as easily as we can get them, won’t they?”

  “You would know that better than I would, sir,” Kennan replied. “But from what I do know, it seems mighty likely to me.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to Patterson, then, and let him know I don’t mind if the Russians keep holding the satellites down. The people who live in those countries may have a thing or three to say about that, though.”

  “Yes. They may. And then you’ll have the enjoyable job of making the Russians believe you don’t have anything to do with that.” George Kennan paused. “Assuming you don’t, of course.”

  “Mm-hmm. Assuming.” Truman said nothing more about that. The CIA had been trying to stir up trouble for Russia in the satellites since shortly after the last war ended. Till the new one heated up, the American spies hadn’t had much luck. The President found a different question: “Do you think Beria will be able to hold on to the top slot there?”

  “I doubt it. Beria scares all the other Soviet big shots, because he has a nice, fat dossier on every single one of them,” Kennan said. “It would be like J. Edgar Hoover taking over the United States.”

  “There’s a cheerful thought!” Truman had neither liked nor trusted the FBI director. Hoover hadn’t had anything like the power Beria enjoyed in Russia or Himmler’d had in Germany, but he’d had too much for the chief cop in a democracy. But Hoover was up in smoke now, too, along with so many other people who deserved it so much less. The FBI was doing the best it could with each city’s agents acting pretty much on their own. So far as Truman could tell, the Reds weren’t doing much harm here. He asked, “Who’d be in that horse race?”