Free Jitterbug by Loren D. Estleman Page B

the corner streetlight. From that angle he could see the entire cover. It featured a Norman Rockwell painting of a gang of half-dressed boys running away from a pond with a NO SWIMMING sign prominently displayed. It was the July issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

chapter ten
    H E SHAVED OFF THE disappointing moustache first thing Sunday morning. Taylor hadn’t worn one in Bataan, and the clean look shouted America, drowning out cries for Hitler’s toothbrush and Tojo’s graying chevron. While his hands were occupied with the razor, Father Coughlin came on WJR and he was forced to suffer through the bombast. He had once listened avidly to the fiery pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, only to tune out when Coughlin broke with FDR and denounced him as anti-God.
    He was a great admirer of Roosevelt. The economy was of no interest to him, and First Lady Eleanor’s efforts to raise the status of American Negroes left him unmoved, but the “Day of Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941, had made him a disciple. He’d seen and heard the speech in a newsreel at the State and gone directly from there to the Armory to sign up. His subsequent rejection had only reinforced his conviction that the president was surrounded with traitors.
    One of these was U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle. It was Biddle who had resisted his chief executive’s order to intern all 600,000 German aliens registered in the United States. Biddle’s move to round up 125,000 Japanese-Americans was hardly conciliatory. The first man, the man he’d seen buying oranges in the Eastern Market with cash from a wallet stuffed with unredeemed ration stamps, had looked a little like Biddle in a picture he’d seen of the attorney general with Roosevelt in Liberty. He’d followed him down to the river, waited for a young couple dressed up for a concert at Ford Auditorium to pass, then moved in from behind, cut him, and tipped him into the water, reaching down to grip the fat wallet, effectively allowing the old man to fall away from his hoard. It was all over in three seconds.
    He rinsed, toweled off, and stepped through the open bathroom door to change stations on the tombstone-shaped Philco that came with the apartment, but there was no war news and he turned it off. He hadn’t been able to add a flag pin to the National Geographic map since Pantelleria. He hoped the troops weren’t bogged down in trenches. World War I movies, obsessed with rows of tin-hatted doughboys wallowing in mud behind coils of barbed wire, depressed and disillusioned him. They pushed the pacifist party line by making soldiering as unromantic as ditch-digging.
    He ran a finger down the radio guide he’d torn from the Free Press and taped to the top of the sideboard, stopping at the selection he’d circled in pencil:
    9:00 P.M. (EDT)
    NBC-BLUE: HOLLYWOOD PLAYHOUSE—JOHN GARFIELD, GUEST.
    Garfield was an actor he’d liked in Air Force. He’d played a G.I. who at the climax hoisted a hefty fifty-caliber machine gun to his hip and chopped down a Japanese Zero for strafing a buddy in a parachute; Taylor couldn’t have done it better.
    He looked at his wristwatch, a waterproof Hamilton in a brass case with a shatterproof crystal, approved by the U.S. Navy. Then he switched on the fan in front of the open window, as if moving the sluggish air around would make the twelve and a half hours go faster. The fan, gleaming aluminum with a cast-iron base and a housing shaped like the nacelle of a B-17, whirred and lifted the loose end of the radio guide. He glanced around, located the Modern Library edition of Mein Kampf on the coffee table, and laid it atop the rectangle of newsprint. Hoping to understand the mind of the enemy, he’d struggled through the first twenty pages, then put it down and gone to see Hitler’s Children instead. The movies and the radio were his principal sources of information. At times he thought they spoke to him directly, in coded messages