Walk in Hell (58 page)

“Victory!” Flora exclaimed. Bruck was doing everything he could to help her beat the appointed Democrat. That she had to give him. “Victory?” This time, it was a question, a mocking question. She looked around, as if she thought she would see it close by. “Where is it? Washington, D.C., has lain under the Confederates’ heavy hands since the first days of the war. We have won a few battles, but how many soldiers has General Custer thrown away to get to Tennessee? And how many battles were shown to be wasted when the Confederates, only two weeks ago, drove our forces back to the Roanoke River? How can anyone in his right mind possibly claim this war is a success?”

Applause poured over her like rain. Two years ago, when she’d urged the people here not to throw the United States onto the fire of a capitalist, imperialist war, she’d been ignored or booed even in the Socialist strongholds of New York City. Now people had seen the result of what they’d cheered to the skies. Having seen it, they didn’t like it so well.

She went on, “My distinguished opponent, Mr. Miller, will tell you this war is a success. Why shouldn’t he tell you that? It’s made
him
a success. He was a lawyer no one had ever heard of till Governor MacFarlane pulled his name out of a top hat after Congressman Zuckerman died, and sent him off to Philadelphia to pretend to represent this district.

“Friends, comrades, you know I wouldn’t be standing here today if Myron Zuckerman were alive. No, I take that back: I might be standing here, but I’d be campaigning for him, not for myself. But I tell you this: if you remember what Congressman Zuckerman stood for, you’ll send me to Philadelphia this November, not a fancy-pants lawyer who’s made his money doing dirty work for the trusts.”

More applause, loud and vigorous. In preparation for her speech, party workers had done a fine job of sticking up election posters printed in red and white on black all over the brewery, the synagogue across the street, and even the school at the corner of Chrystie and Hester. The Democrats had more money and more workers, which meant they usually put up more posters and hired people to tear down the ones the Socialists used to oppose them. Not this time, though.

And no hulking Soldiers’ Circle goons lurked to break up the rally, either. As the fighting heated up, more and more of them—the younger ones—had been called into the Army they so loudly professed to love. And, as the Remembrance Day riots of 1915 slowly faded into the past, the lid on New York City politics slowly loosened. Socialists elsewhere in the country were using government repression in New York as a campaign issue, too. Embarrassment was often a good tool against the minions of the exploiting class.

A couple of caps went through the crowd. Before long, they jingled as they passed from hand to hand. Party workers talked that up: “Come on, folks, give what you can. This is how we keep the truth coming to the American people. This is how we beat the Democrats. This is how we end the war.”

Flora descended from her platform. A couple of men—boys, rather—and a couple of solidly built women who looked like factory workers disassembled it and hauled it off to the wagon on which it had come from Socialist Party headquarters. Conscription had hit the party as hard as anyone else.

Herman Bruck made his way out of the crowd. Flora wondered how and why he’d been lucky enough to stay in gabardine and worsted and tweed and out of the green-gray serge most men his age wore. Her brother David was in green-gray, and, from his latest letter, about to be shipped off to one of the fighting fronts. If the war went on long enough, the same thing would happen to Isaac, who was two years younger.

So how
had
Herman escaped? It wasn’t as if he had a job in an essential industry. On the contrary—a lot of Socialist activists had been conscripted in spite of employment in industries related to the war. Asking him would have been rude, but she almost asked anyhow. Before she could, he said, “That was a fine speech. Hearing you out in the crowd instead of being up on the platform with you, I see how you came to be our candidate. I think you’ll win.”

She knew he had an ulterior motive—several ulterior motives, some personal, some political—for speaking as he did. But she was no more immune to flattery than any other human being ever born. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I will, too. The bad news in the war does nothing but help us. It reminds the people that we opposed the fighting from the start, and that we were right when we did.”

Bruck’s mouth twisted down. Her record on opposing the war was sounder than his. But then a sly glint came into his eye. “When they do elect you, you’ll have the salary of a capitalist—$7,500 a year. What will you do with all that money?”

Any notion of asking him why he wasn’t in the Army flew out of her head. She’d thought about winning the election and about taking her seat in the House of Representatives. Up till that moment, she hadn’t thought about getting paid for her services. Herman Bruck was right—$7,500 was a lot of money. “I’ll be able to make sure my family doesn’t want for anything,” she said at last.

He nodded. “That’s a good answer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the families here”—his wave encompassed the entire district—“didn’t want for anything?
Nu
, that’s why you’re running.” The sly look returned to his face. “And now you’ll have another reason to say no when I ask you out: what would a rich and important lady see in a tailor’s son?”

Flora snorted. “One thing I see in a tailor’s son is someone who nags like a grandmother.”

“If I ask you out, maybe you’ll say no, but maybe also you’ll say yes,” Herman answered. “If I don’t ask you out, how can you possibly say yes?”

She had to laugh. As she did so, she was more tempted to let him persuade her than she had been for a long time. This didn’t seem to be the right place, though, not with the crowd drifting away after the rally. And here came a couple of policemen, looking like old-time U.S. soldiers in their blue uniforms and forage caps. “All right, Miss Hamburger, you’ve had your speech,” one of them said in brisk tones. “No one gave you a bit of trouble during it or before it, and I’ll thank your people not to give me trouble now.”

“No trouble because of what?” she asked warily.

The cop didn’t answer. A couple of his friends came down Chrystie Street, one of them twirling a nightstick on the end of its leather strap. And then a shiny new White truck, the same sort the Army used, pulled to a stop in front of the Croton Brewery. Instead of being green-gray, it was painted red, white, and blue.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF NEW YORK CITY
, said the banner stretched across the canvas canopy. Another, smaller, banner below it read,
Daniel Miller for Congress
.

Out of the back of the truck jumped half a dozen men in overalls. A couple of others handed them big buckets of paste, long-handled brushes, and stacks of freshly printed posters. On the front of every one was Miller’s smiling face, half again as big as life, and the slogan,
HELP TR WIN THE WAR
.
VOTE MILLER
—
VOTE DEMOCRATIC
.

Into the buckets went the brushes. Matter-of-factly, the work crew went about the business of smearing fresh paste over Flora’s posters that had gone up only the day before. She stared in mute outrage that did not stay mute long. “They can’t do that!” she snarled at the policeman.

“Oh, but they can, Miss Hamburger,” he answered, respectful enough but not giving an inch. “They will. It’s a free country, and we let you have your posters and your speech and all. But now it’s our turn.”

Up went Daniel Miller’s posters, one after another. “Free country?” Flora said bitterly. Some of the last of the crowd she’d drawn were hanging about, watching with anything but delight as her message was effaced. If she shouted to them, they’d resist these paperhangers. New York City had seen political brawls and to spare since the rise of the Socialists. But, after Remembrance Day the year before, could she contemplate another round of riots, another round of repression?

“Don’t even let it cross your mind,” the cop said. He had no trouble thinking along with her. “We’ll land on the lot of you like a ton of bricks, and hell will freeze over before you get yourself another peaceable rally, I promise you.”

“Do you mean we, the police, or we, the Democratic Party?” she demanded. The policeman just stared at her, as if the two were too closely entwined to be worth separating. In fact, that wasn’t
as if
. Coppers could harass the Socialists, and so could Democratic agitators and hooligans. Her party could return the favor, but only on a smaller scale.

She glanced at Herman Bruck. If he was ready to raise hell to keep the Democrats from silencing her posters, neither his face nor his body showed it. Maybe he’d avoided the Army by the simple expedient of being afraid to fight. Or maybe, she admitted to herself, he’d simply done a good job of figuring out how likely—or how unlikely—they were to succeed here.

“Democrats are free,” she told the policeman. “Socialists and Republicans and other riffraff are as free as the Democrats let them be.” He stared steadily back at her, a big, stolid man doing his job and doing it well and not worrying about the consequences of it, maybe in honest truth not even seeing that those consequences were bad.

Inside half an hour’s time, Daniel Miller’s posters had covered every one of hers.

Flying was beginning to feel like work again. Jonathan Moss’ eyes went back and forth, up and down, flicking to the rearview mirror mounted on the side of the cockpit. He looked back over his shoulder, too, again and again. It was the one you didn’t see who’d get you, sure as hell.

He still felt out of place, flying to the right of Dud Dudley. That was Tom Innis’ slot in the flight, no one else’s. Or it had been. But Tom was pushing up a lily now, with a rookie pilot named Orville Thornley sleeping on the cot that had been his. Thornley got endless ribbing because of his first name, but he didn’t seem to be the worst flier who’d ever come down the pike.

“A good thing, too,” Moss said, his eyes still on the move. The limeys had managed to sneak a few Sopwith Pups across the Atlantic, and, if you were unlucky enough to run up against one of them in a Martin one-decker, odds were the War Department would be sending your next of kin a telegram in short order. A Pup was faster, more maneuverable, and climbed better than the bus he was riding, and the British had finally figured out how to do a proper job with an interrupter gear.

Just thinking about the Pup was plenty to make him grimace. “Good thing they don’t have very many of ’em here,” he said. “It’d be a damn sight better if they didn’t have any at all. Damn Navy, asleep at the switch again.”

That was not fair. He knew it wasn’t fair. He didn’t care. The Atlantic Fleet had been built to close the gate between Britain and Canada, and to help the High Seas Fleet open the gate between Germany and the USA. It hadn’t managed to do either of those things. Among them, the British, the French, and the Confederates made sure none of the Atlantic was safe for anyone at any time, and the Germans remained bottled up in the North Sea.
Too bad,
Moss thought.
Too damn bad
.

He looked down. The front over which he flew was quiet now, nobody doing much of anything. The Canucks and the limeys had run out of steam after pushing the U.S. line four or five miles farther from Toronto, and the Army hadn’t yet tried pushing back. It was as if the mere idea of having had to fall back so startled the brass, they hadn’t figured out what to try next.

Dud Dudley waggled his wings and pointed off toward the west.
Let’s go home,
he meant, and swung his fighting scout into a turn. Moss wasn’t sorry to get away from the line, not if that meant another run where he didn’t meet any Pups. A year before, the enemy had been terrified of the Martins and their deadly synchronized guns. Now, for the first time, he understood how the fliers on the other side of the line had felt.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a single aeroplane dove at his flight from the rear, machine gun spitting flame through the prop disk. He threw the joystick hard over and got the hell out of there. The flight exploded in all directions, like a flock of chickens with a fox in among them.

Tracers stitched their way across Orville Thornley’s bus. It kept flying, he kept flying, and he was shooting back, too, but Jesus, Jesus, how could you keep your gun centered on the other guy’s aeroplane when he was thirty miles an hour faster than you were? The short answer was, you couldn’t. The longer—but only slightly longer—answer was, if you couldn’t, you were dead.

Moss maneuvered now to help his flightmate, trying to put enough lead in the air to distract the limey bastard in the Pup from his chosen prey. He couldn’t keep a bead on the enemy aeroplane. Everything they’d said about it looked to be true. If it wasn’t doing 110, he’d eat his goggles. You couldn’t make a Martin do 110 if you threw it off a cliff.

And climb—The enemy pilot came out of his dive and clawed his way up above the U.S. machines as if they’d been nailed into place. And here he came again. Yes, he still wanted Thornley. He’d probably picked him for easy meat: last man in a flight of four would be either the worst or the least experienced or both.

The kid was doing his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. The Pup got on his tail and clung, chewing at him. Moss fired at the limey, but he was a few hundred yards off, unable to close farther, and he didn’t think he scored any hits.

Thornley’s single-decker went into a flat spin and plummeted toward the ground below, smoke trailing from the engine cowling. Moss didn’t see Thornley doing anything to try, no matter how uselessly, to bring the aeroplane back under control.

No time to worry about that now anyway. The Pup was like a dragonfly, darting everywhere at once, spitting fire at the American aeroplanes from impossible angles. Bullets punched through the canvas of the fuselage. None of them punched through Moss. None of them started a fire, for which he would have got down on his knees and thanked God—but he had no time for that, either.