Armistice Page 17

  They were all well fed. Most of them had suntans. They wore nice clothes. They put on more makeup than some of them knew what to do with. In spite of it all, they seemed younger than the girls he’d known back in Budapest. Istvan didn’t think they were, but they seemed that way.

  When he remarked on it to Geller, the American Jew nodded. “In Budapest, the girls you knew lived through the Horthy dictatorship and the war and the Russians and the Hungarian Communists. Here, the war was a voice from another room for these girls. They’d been pretty much at peace their whole lives till the bombs fell on L.A.”

  “Except for that refugee camp, even those hardly seem to have happened,” Istvan said.

  “They don’t if you’re in college here, yeah,” Geller replied. “But that’s not the only camp. They’re scattered across the Los Angeles area, with more up the coast for other places that got hit. Life in them is no fun at all. Then there are the people who got killed and the people who got hurt or poisoned with radiation and the people who lost everything they had but didn’t go into the camps. They sleep wherever it’s warm and dry and do whatever they have to to get money and food.”

  “Wherever it’s warm and dry…” Istvan waved up at the bright sun. “Isn’t it always warm and dry?” The air might be foul from too many cars, but Los Angeles, to him, had weather that would make God want to retire here.

  “Only most of the time,” Myron Geller said. “It gets chilly during the winter, and rainy, too. It even snowed in 1949. January, that was.”

  Istvan shook his head in wonder. It had snowed…three and a half years ago now. That it had snowed at all was remarkable enough to have made Geller mention it. Snow, to Istvan, was an annual nuisance. To Russians, and to the Germans who’d fought in Russia, it had been a fact of life from October into March.

  He finished the lunch. He’d discovered he loved fried foods. He hadn’t had them very often before Captain Kovacs sent him here. He hadn’t known what he was missing, either. He threw his trash in a galvanized sheet-metal can.

  Geller threw away his garbage, too, except for a couple of fries he tossed to the pigeons. They were beggar birds; all they needed were sunglasses and tin cups. Then Geller said, “Let’s head back.”

  “Can you question me here?” Istvan asked. “It’s nice in the sunshine.”

  The older man laughed. “You just got to L.A., but you’re turning into a Californian, all right.”

  “Do you think so?” The idea excited Istvan.

  —

  Thumping noises said the Independence was lowering its landing gear. The DC-6 landed smoothly at Orly. The airport was too far from the center of Paris to have been damaged by the A-bomb that tore the heart out of the French capital.

  Peering out the plane’s window toward that battered heart, Harry Truman couldn’t see much. One of the things he couldn’t see was the Eiffel Tower. Some of it had melted and the rest had fallen over, smashing buildings that might otherwise have survived the bomb.

  As the Independence slowed, Truman slid forward in his seat till the belt held him in place. French airport personnel brought a wheeled stairway to the plane’s door. They locked the wheels in place and turned cranks to bring the top of the stairway level with the bottom of the door. A Secret Service man opened the door and stepped out. Another followed him. After the second man was satisfied no assassins lurked nearby, he waved to Truman that it was safe.

  French soldiers stood guard on the runway, some carrying rifles, others submachine guns. When the soles of the President’s shoes touched French soil, the officer in charge of the men gave the open-palmed salute Truman remembered from World War I. Well, Lafayette, here I am, Truman thought.

  A moment later, that officer saluted again. Charles de Gaulle came out of the terminal and walked across the tarmac toward the Independence. Though de Gaulle wore a plain gray suit, his straight back reminded anyone who saw him that he was a career soldier. He headed the French Committee of National Salvation, which had run the country since the A-bomb decapitated the Fourth Republic.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” he said, extending his hand. “May your coming be crowned with success.” He spoke good but accented English.

  “Thank you, General.” Truman shook hands with de Gaulle. He had to look up and up while he did it. Truman was a perfectly ordinary, perfectly respectable five-nine. The big-nosed beanpole who ran France had to be six-three, maybe even six-four.

  “Your Soviet opposite number arrived yesterday,” de Gaulle said. One of his shaggy eyebrows twitched. “We placed him in a fine Parisian hotel…the closest one to the blast zone that still stands. His room has an excellent view of the destruction his bomber created.”

  “Good,” Truman said, and then, “Did you lodge me in the same hotel?”

  Charles de Gaulle shook his big head. “Pas de tout,” he said, surprised back into French. Returning to English, he continued, “Your country has not attacked mine. Through three wars now in this century, we have fought together. You are at an altogether more enjoyable residence with a much improved vista. Mr. Attlee is staying there as well.”

  “That all sounds fine.” Truman was briefly embarrassed at giving de Gaulle the glove. Only briefly, though. It wasn’t as if de Gaulle didn’t do everything he could to annoy the United States. He’d grown up in the days when France was a great power and the USA wasn’t. He still remembered those days. So did Truman, but he also remembered how times had changed.

  A limousine—a Cadillac from Detroit—pulled up to take Truman to the hotel from which he wouldn’t see any bomb damage. As soon as he got there, he rang Clement Attlee’s room. The hotel operator spoke better English than de Gaulle did.

  Truman and the British Prime Minister ate supper together in the hotel restaurant. Attlee, bald and mustached, looked weary unto death. “In normal times, we should have held an election last year,” he said. “You might well have been dining with Mr. Churchill here tonight. But all parties agreed to postpone the vote until something like peace returned.”

  “I think I’m going to have to do something like that, too,” Truman said. “It will make people scream at me, but they’ve been screaming ever since Roosevelt died. You do what you’ve got to do. Then you make it look legal afterwards.”

  “Your elections are more regularly scheduled than ours.” In Attlee’s mouth, the word came out sheduled. Truman hid a smile. The Englishman asked the key question: “Can you get away with it?”

  “I can…because I have to. There’s just been too much disruption. Unlike our friends on the far side of the Iron Curtain, I don’t enjoy ruling by decree, but I haven’t had much choice. Congress got smashed to hell and gone.”

  “Quite.” Unlike de Gaulle and Truman, Attlee hadn’t had his capital devastated. He’d only—only!—seen some of his provincial cities go up in fire and radioactive smoke.

  De Gaulle had arranged for the leaders of the three greatest Western democracies to meet Vyacheslav Molotov at the palace of Versailles. He might have been remembering the peace negotiations at the end of World War I. If he was, he was forgetting how that treaty’d turned out. Or he might have wanted to remind Molotov that France remained a rich country with a rich history.

  Molotov was a little chunkier, a little grayer, than Truman remembered him from 1945. They hadn’t got on well then; Molotov was reported to have said no one had ever talked to him the way Truman did. Truman’s attitude was that somebody should have done it a long time before. One thing hadn’t changed: the new Soviet leader’s face remained a hard, cold, expressionless mask.

  Unlike the others, Molotov didn’t speak English. His interpreter’s Oxonian accent was even more elegant than Attlee’s. Through the worried-looking little man, the Russian said, “Enough is enough. If we return to the prewar situation and the USSR is granted a free hand to set its own house in order, we are happy enough to liquidate this conflict with capitalism.”

  “No A-bombs on the satellites. No A-bombs on the Baltic r
epublics, either,” Truman said. “Otherwise, the USA agrees.”

  “The Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian Soviet Socialist Republics are not within your purview,” Molotov said. “They are constituent parts of the USSR.”

  “We don’t recognize their annexation. De jure, they remain independent,” Truman said. Charles de Gaulle and Clement Attlee nodded. They had diplomats from the Baltic republics in their countries, too. Like the USA, they recognized them more to annoy the Soviet Union than in the belief that they were real nations any more. The President went on, “So no A-bombs there.” He didn’t say Don’t overrun them with tanks. He knew Molotov wouldn’t have listened if he did.

  Still Molotov’s face didn’t change. The interpreter looked more worried than ever. He wasn’t used to anybody save perhaps Stalin laying down the law to his boss. After a pause that lasted half a minute, Molotov shrugged, waggled one hand, and said, “Let it be as you wish.” The interpreter let out a loud sigh of relief.

  “Don’t cheat on this one,” Truman said. “You’ll be sorry if you do. We’ll make you sorry if you do.”

  “I understand,” Molotov said, and not another word. Either he’d listen or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t…I’ll make him sorry, Truman thought.

  “Now, the next thing we have to touch on is the matter of China,” Truman said. “Mao’s won the war there. We’re stuck with him. Chiang has to stay on Formosa. We won’t help him if he doesn’t. But if Mao doesn’t leave South Korea alone, he’ll end up envying your country, I promise. We’ll knock him flat.”

  As soon as the interpreter finished translating that, Molotov said, “Nyet.” He added detail through the worried little man: “For one thing, Mao is a free agent. I cannot control him. For another, too many A-bombs have already fallen since you started using them. If we are to refrain in the areas you demand, you must refrain in China. Conventional weapons, yes. A-bombs, no. Or you will find out we can still hurt you.”

  Truman opened his mouth to tell Molotov he was in a lousy position to make demands. But anyone who could manufacture and deliver A-bombs (and, soon, no doubt H-bombs, too) wasn’t in such a lousy position as all that. “All right,” Truman said. “All right, if you stop sending arms to China and to North Korea. If you don’t, all bets are off, and I promise we’ll hurt you worse than you hurt us.”

  “You are a man of no culture,” Molotov said. Truman only shrugged. Molotov gnawed on his mustache for a moment, then nodded. “It is agreed.”

  “Good.” Truman had to hope this Treaty of Versailles would turn out better than the one from 1919 did.

  —

  Aaron Finch found himself still working with Jim Summers. Something had gone wrong somewhere. The Jew to whom he was supposed to show the ropes hadn’t come to work at Blue Front. Herschel Weissman spread his hands to show he didn’t know what was going on, either.

  Jim was whistling a song as he got ready to go out on deliveries for the last run on a hot July Friday afternoon. “What is that tune?” Aaron asked. Jim wouldn’t put a mockingbird out of business any time soon. Since Aaron also frightened notes he couldn’t hit, they were well matched in that, anyhow.

  “It’s ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,’ of course,” Jim answered. The way he whistled, there was no of course about it. He went on, “Seems to fit, don’t it, when it looks like the goddamn stupid war’s over and done with at last?”

  “Boy, I hope you’re right,” Aaron said. “It is in Europe, anyway. But looks like it’s still going on in the Far East, same as the last one did after the Nazis caved in.”

  “Oughta blow up all them Commie Chinks till they glow in the dark,” Jim opined. “Then we won’t gotta worry about ’em no more.”

  Aaron didn’t say anything to that. He could see why Jim had liked Joe McCarthy for President. Well, these days whatever was left of Tail-Gunner Joe was bound to glow in the dark. Aaron didn’t miss the Senator from Wisconsin one bit. To him, blowing McCarthy off the map was one of the few good things the Russians had done when they A-bombed Washington.

  Off they went, to deliver a stove and a refrigerator to a house in Burbank. Jim went right on dissecting the political scene: “Truman’s even more hoity-toity than FDR was. FDR wanted to cancel elections, I betcha, but old Harry’s gone and done it.”

  “They’ll come,” Aaron said. “We’re still picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off. We’re better off than Russia, but we’re still pretty beat-up.”

  He might as well have saved his breath. Jim went ahead as if he hadn’t spoken: “Jesus H. Christ, even Abe goddamn Lincoln didn’t keep folks from voting. Old Abe was a nigger-loving son of a bitch, but he knew better than to fuck around with elections.”

  A nigger-loving son of a bitch? At the public schools Aaron went to in Portland, they’d taught him that Lincoln and Washington were the two greatest Presidents. Nothing he’d heard or read since made him disbelieve that, though he thought Franklin D. Roosevelt belonged right up there with them. They must have had other ideas in Alabama or Arkansas or wherever Jim got his sketchy education. Or maybe Jim had picked up that opinion at the same shoddy store where he bought his others.

  He went right on venting his spleen while Aaron drove the truck down to Burbank. Then they had to buckle down and get to work. Moving in a refrigerator was always tricky. You couldn’t tilt it much. If you didn’t keep it close to upright, you’d kill the motor. After they plugged it in, Aaron satisfied himself that it was cooling before he got to work on the gas and electrical connections for the stove. He lit the pilot lights for the lady of the house and made sure the oven and all the burners worked.

  “Thank you both very much,” she said. As they headed back to the truck, she gave them each two dollars.

  “Thank you, ma’am. You don’t have to do that. We’re just doing our jobs,” Aaron said. Jim looked daggers at him.

  “It’s hard work on a hot day,” the woman answered. “You deserve a little something extra for it.”

  “Much obliged, ma’am,” Jim said loudly. Aaron let it go. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t use the money, but tips made him nervous. He was already getting paid to do what he did. He didn’t think he deserved to get paid twice. Jim’s conscience was more elastic.

  Summers drove back to the warehouse in Glendale. He took it slow, to make sure they got back after quitting time. Aaron would have hurried, but he held his peace. After Jim parked the truck behind the warehouse, they clocked out. “See you Monday,” Aaron called as he headed for his Chevy. He tried to stay polite. Jim grunted something or other. Aaron got into the car, lit a cigarette to replace the one he’d just stepped on, and headed for home.

  He spent a quiet weekend with Ruth and Leon. No annoying relatives from either side of the family visited. Aaron watched a baseball game on TV. The big-leaguers didn’t look any better than the hometown heroes from the PCL. He worked on a rocking horse he was making for his son. He had a Burgie with dinner Saturday and another one Sunday.

  “See?” he said. “I’m turning into a lush.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure.” Ruth knew better. But she also knew better than to argue with him.

  He reread The Egg and I for the umpteenth time. He read to Leon. He tried to get Leon to read to him. Leon could manage little words, but he wasn’t nearly so good with whole sentences.

  At half past seven, Leon went to bed. Aaron found himself yawning, too. “Boy, this is great,” he said. “I get sleepy at the same time as my little kid. Is God trying to tell me I’m an alter kacker?” Turning fifty still felt very strange to him. It was a marker that showed more lay behind you than ahead.

  “You’re tired because you work hard, and because you’ve got to get up early in the morning tomorrow to work some more,” Ruth said. “So kindly quit talking like a shlemiel.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” he said. Till he got married, no one had ever been able to boss him around. Plenty of people had tried, but he had the full measure of Finch stubbornness. Ruth managed, th
ough. Maybe, till he knew her, no one had ever tried to boss him in a pleasant tone of voice.

  He went to bed at ten. Before he turned off the lamp on the nightstand, he made sure the alarm clock was set for six. Then he rolled over so he could kiss his wife. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

  He woke well before six, and without benefit of the alarm clock. The house was shaking, the walls groaning. Something fell off a shelf in the living room and crashed on the floor. The Venetian blinds beat against the windows.

  “Aaron!” Ruth squalled. “What is it?”

  “Earthquake. A big one. I’ll get Leon.” Aaron jumped out of bed. His first automatic motion when he did was to grab for his glasses, but the quake had knocked them away from where he always left them. Well, it was dark. He couldn’t see much even with them.

  He lurched down the hall to his son’s room. The floor shifted under his feet like a Liberty ship’s deck in a heavy sea. He grabbed Leon out of bed and carried him back to his own bedroom. The shaking eased just as he got there. “Whee!” Leon said. “Do it again, Daddy!”

  “Christ, I hope not,” Aaron said. Ruth turned on the light on her side of the bed. Aaron blinked. Since he was specs-less, the room stayed blurry. “Can you find my glasses, honey?”

  A shape that was probably his wife leaned toward his side of the bed. She handed him something. “They were next to your pillow,” she said.

  He put them on. The world came back into focus. “Watch that first step,” he said. “It’s a dilly. That one just kept going on and on.”

  The phone rang. He put Leon down and went out to answer it. When he did, his brother Marvin, who also lived in Glendale, laughed a shaky laugh in his ear. “Watch that first step,” Marvin said. “It’s a doozy.”

  Aaron laughed, too. “Not half a minute ago, I called it a dilly,” he said. “You guys okay?”

  “We aren’t hurt,” Marvin answered. “Olivia’s scared like anything, and Caesar’s going meshuggeh.” Olivia was his teenage daughter, Caesar his German shepherd. Aaron liked the dog better than the rug-eating schnauzer that had preceded it. After a beat, Marvin asked, “How about your gang?”