The Big Switch twtce-3 Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Roosevelt also didn’t say what Japan-whose home islands didn’t yield much past rice and tough little men-was liable to do when her access to raw materials she needed suddenly got cut off. We’ll all find out, Peggy thought as she left the hall. ondon bubbled like a pot of oatmeal left too long on the fire. No one could prove the government had arranged for that Bentley to run over Winston Churchill. But if Neville Chamberlain did arrange it, he got precious little time to enjoy what he’d done. He went into the hospital for what were described as routine tests… and came out after surgery for cancer of the bowel.

  It soon became obvious he could not go on as Prime Minister. He laid down the office and left Number 10 Downing Street for a stay in the country “to recover his strength,” as the papers said. Alistair Walsh could read between the lines. Chamberlain was dying, and would never amount to anything again.

  His backers still held a tight grip on Parliament, though. Despite much impassioned oratory from the men Churchill had inspired, Sir Horace Wilson succeeded Chamberlain as the head of government. Wilson was, if anything, even more bonelessly pro-Nazi than his mentor had been.

  “We’re bloody well out of it,” Walsh said one cloudy afternoon over a pint of best bitter at the Lion and Gryphon, a pub not too far from Parliament that these days found itself full of men in ill-fitting civilian clothes they seemed uncomfortable wearing. It was, in other words, a place where veterans the armed services found politically unreliable congregated. Misery loved, and drank with, company.

  Some of the disgruntled ex-soldiers and -sailors and -flyers nodded. But another man who seemed as out of place as Walsh in tweeds and linen said, “We shouldn’t let them sideline us, by God. If the PM and the Foreign Office have gone off the rails, who’s going to set ’em right but us?”

  He spoke like an officer, with a posh Oxbridge accent of the kind much imitated by BBC newsreaders. He had an aristocrat’s long, bony features, too, and an air that said he expected to be taken seriously.

  But ranks didn’t matter any more. They were all demobbed together. Anyone could take a potshot at anyone else, no matter which accent he had. Someone at the back of the room said, “Sounds like treason to me.”

  The aristo-he was too young to have fought the last time around-only shrugged. “Winston would have quoted that bit about treason’s only being treason if it fails-if it prospers, none dares call it treason.”

  His easy use of the Christian name made Walsh ask, “You… knew Churchill?”

 
“I had that honor, yes,” the younger man replied. “And you?” He was trying to place Walsh, as Walsh was trying to place him.

  “I talked with him once,” Walsh said. “He came to see me after they put me on ice here. For my sins, I was the bloke who met up with Hess in the middle of that Scottish field.”

  “The famous Sergeant Walsh!” the other fellow said. “Winston spoke well of you, if that matters. Said you rather wished you’d plugged the bugger instead of bringing him in.”

  Walsh didn’t remember telling Churchill anything like that. Maybe he had. Or maybe Churchill worked it out from what they had said. “Might’ve worked out better if I had,” Walsh said. “Couldn’t very well have worked out worse. On the same side as the bloody Hun…” He drained his pint to show what he thought of that idea.

  “Let me buy you a refill, if I may,” said the man who’d known Churchill. He nodded to the fellow behind the bar. “Publican, if you’d be so kind…?”

  “Coming up.” The barman worked the tap. He slid a fresh pint across the smooth surface to Walsh.

  “Obliged,” Walsh said. “I’ll do the same for you when you finish there. And, begging your pardon, but you’re a step ahead of me.”

  “Oh, quite. My apologies.” The younger man laughed. “The name’s Ronald Cartland.” He held out his hand.

  Walsh shook it. The name rang a bell. “You’re an MP!” he blurted.

  Ruefully, Cartland nodded. “Afraid so. These days, I’m not what you’d call proud of it. But they couldn’t drum me out of Parliament, and I’m not about to resign there, the way I did when they tried shipping me off to Byelorussia to fight alongside the same bastards I’d been shelling after they invaded France.”

  “Same with me, sir,” Walsh didn’t know Cartland had been an officer, but an MP serving in the ranks struck him as wildly improbable. And he liked the certainty of status rank gave. After so long away from it, the arbitrary, whimsical nature of civilian life confused him. “I’d just got back from Norway when the Hun came parachuting down.”

  Cartland upended his glass of whiskey. When Walsh signaled to the barman, the MP shook his head. “Another time. For now, why don’t you come with me?”

  “Come with you where, sir?”

  “Some chaps I’d like you to meet. They’d like to meet you, too, believe me.”

  Walsh frowned. “I fancy the crowd I’m in with now.”

  “Well, I understand that. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel the same way. But…” Cartland’s voice trailed off, as if there were things he wanted to say but didn’t want overheard. “Please, old boy?”

  Wondering what he was getting into, Walsh stood up and lit a Navy Cut. “Lead on, sir. I expect I’ll follow.”

  Once they were out of the Lion and Gryphon, Ronald Cartland let out a sigh of relief. “Bound to be people spying in there-maybe the tapman, maybe a customer, maybe the tapman and a customer, to make sure they don’t miss anything.”

  “Who’s they?” Walsh asked.

  “People who report to Horace Wilson,” Cartland answered. “Like Neville before him, he keeps tabs on anyone who disagrees with him and has a chance of doing anything about it. And he’s smarter than Neville ever was, damn him.”

  “Why’s he sucking up to the Nazis, then?” Walsh demanded.

  “Because he’s afraid of them. It’s the only thing I can think of.” Cartland walked on a few paces, then added, “Almost the only thing, I should say. He’s jealous of them, too. Dictators are very popular these days, as Edward said before he got to be King.”

  “Did he really?” Walsh said. Crawford nodded. Walsh blew out a big cloud of smoke. “A good job he didn’t stay King long, then.”

  “Yes, a lot of people thought so,” Cartland said, and not another word, leaving Walsh to wonder whether Edward’s passion for his American divorcee was the only thing that caused him to lay down the crown.

  Cartland’s case-hardened reserve would have effortlessly turned a question about that. Seeing as much, Walsh just asked, “Where are we going, sir? You can tell me now, eh?”

  “Why, to Parliament, of course,” Cartland answered in surprise. “I should have thought you’d work that out for yourself.”

  “Sorry to be so slow.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It will all come right in the end… unless, of course, it doesn’t.” On that cheerful note, Cartland led him past the guards outside-who nodded respectfully-and into the Parliament building.

  Everything was smaller and shabbier and lit worse than Walsh had expected. This was the fount of democracy in the modern world, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t it be bright and clean and shiny? Evidently not. It reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a down-at-the-heels club for veteran sergeants. The thought made him feel more at home than he’d dreamt he could.

  Cartland rounded up several other MPs. Eden, Macmillan, Cranborne (who seemed to go by Bobbety)… Names washed over Walsh. He wasn’t sure he had them all straight, or connected to the right faces. It seemed to matter little. The others were all at least as incensed with the government and its policies as Cartland.

  “We have to take back the country’s soul,” one of them said; Walsh thought it was Macmillan, but he wasn’t sure. The MP went on, “Whatever our sins, we haven’t done anything to deserve this. ” He waved his left hand. He didn’t use his right arm much. Had he caught a packet in the last war? He was the right age.

  “How do you propose to do that, sir?” Walsh asked. “Short of using soldiers, I mean? There’s plenty who like what’s going on-especially the blokes who don’t have to fight the Fritzes any more.”

  Macmillan and his comrades all looked unhappy. “Ay, there’s the rub,” one of them murmured. “They think they can ride the tiger without coming back inside him.”

  You could get drinks in the commons, as you could in a club. The MPs did. Cartland put Walsh on his chit. He’d come up in the world a bit, all right. These men were as disgusted and furious as any of the veterans in the Lion and Gryphon. Whether they had any better idea about how to change things remained to be seen.

  November 5, 1940, was chilly and gloomy in Philadelphia. It drizzled on and off. It wasn’t cold enough to turn the water in the streets to ice, but it didn’t miss by much. Peggy Druce would have been more disappointed if she’d been more surprised. Indian summer might linger this late, but more often than not it didn’t.

  Her polling place was at a school only a couple of blocks from where she and Herb lived. Every fence and telephone pole was plastered with Roosevelt or Willkie posters. Some had both. Some had Alf Landon posters, too. Some had one guy’s stuck on top of the other’s. Some had a bunch of different layers going back in time like the rock strata that confounded geologists. Whoever got there with his stack of flyers and pastepot won… till the other side’s guys came by.

  She marked her ballot for FDR and stuck it in the box. “Mrs. Druce has voted,” intoned the snowy-bearded poll attendant. He didn’t look old enough to have fought in the Civil War, but he might well have been alive through it.

  She wondered if he’d ever seen Lincoln. One of her grandfathers had. She also wondered what Honest Abe would have made of the present sorry state of the world. If Lincoln could have found anything good to say about it, she would have been very much surprised.

  After completing the little secular ceremony, she went out onto the street. The rain had started up again while she was voting, so she raised her umbrella against it as she started home.

  Several men who looked like bums collecting a day’s pay for booze called out Roosevelt’s name. Several others made noise for Willkie. Pennsylvania had laws against electioneering within a hundred feet of a polling place, but it wasn’t as if anyone took them seriously.

  Peggy peeled off her galoshes when she got back. She was glad she’d worn them, even if they were ugly. She boiled water on the stove, poured it into a cup, and stuck in a bag of Lipton’s tea. They laughed at such things in England, but for fast and
easy you couldn’t beat a teabag.

  Her mouth twisted. She’d loved England and everything it stood for when RAF bombers unloaded on Berlin. They might have killed her, but she loved them anyhow.

  Now… Now loving England wasn’t so easy. She wasn’t fighting Nazi tyranny any more. She was marching with it side by side. How could you say Horace Wilson-or Chamberlain before him-was any better than Hitler?

  Oh, the English didn’t censor their newspapers… too much. They didn’t persecute their Jews… yet. Well, Mussolini didn’t persecute his Jews, either, but how many people held him up as a paragon?

  “Shit,” Peggy said. Why not? Nobody was there to hear her, so the tree fell soundlessly in the middle of the forest. She poured some cognac into the hot tea. Maybe it would help sweeten her mood.

  She drank the improved tea. It did warm her body the best way, from the inside out. Her spirit remained unthawed.

  The radio might help. She turned it on and waited for it to warm up. The station it was tuned to gave forth with a quiz show so nauseating, she almost broke off the dial in her zeal to find a different one. Glenn Miller’s orchestra blaring away pleased her more… for a little while. The Nazis couldn’t stand jazz.

  But her smile quickly slipped. Now that England was marching with Hitler, would it outlaw this “degenerate” music, too? And how about France? How about Django Reinhardt? He wasn’t just a jazz guitarist. He had the nerve to be a Gypsy jazz guitarist. The Nazis gave Gypsies as hard a time as Jews, though Jews outside of Germany made more noise about what happened to their kind. Would the French abuse Django to sweeten up their partners in greed?

  A hell of a thing when you couldn’t enjoy music without worrying about politics. But you couldn’t. Once upon a time, she’d liked Wagner-not always in large doses, but she had. She couldn’t listen to him any more without remembering how he made Hitler and the rest of the Nazi Bonzen stand up and whinny. The thought of that congealed her own pleasure.