Another Green World Read Free Page A

policies.”
    “Nazi, racial, policies.” Ingo pronounced the words with elaborate care, as if weighing each on his tongue. “Sounds like a euphemism.”
    “You could say that. In plain language, we're talking about murder. Murder on an unprecedented scale.”
    “I thought the term for that was
war.”
    “I'm not talking about the war, Ingo. This isn't soldiers killing other soldiers. What I'm talking about—what's
happening
over there is…”
    While she groped for words, Ingo lowered himself to the love seat with a noisy exhalation, coming to rest in conspicuous discomfort. “I should think, Marty, in your position, with your access to classified reports and whatnot, you'd have developed a more skeptical attitude toward that sort of overblown rhetoric. It's normal in warfare, isn't it, to accuse the other side of atrocities, war crimes, all that? Keeps the blood hot, pumps up support on the home front. ‘Why We Fight,’ as revealed to Frank Capra. Gives us all a chance to take part. They also serve who sit and preach.”
    “This isn't propaganda, Ingo.”
    “I'm not saying we're as bad as
they
are. Don't think I'm saying that.”
    “I know what you're saying. Just—listen to me.”
    He made a little show of impatience, tapping his toes, glancing at hiswatch. Somehow, in her laying of plans, she had pictured him sitting here like an attentive schoolboy while she explained the facts of life in a brisk, no-questions-till-I'm-done-please voice—that voice employed to such good effect by a series of interchangeable nuns while she and Ingo sat side by side,
backs quite straight, children, thank you
, at Francis Xavier Elementary.
In a land like ours, boys and girls, only very far away, bad men are taking all the little Jewish children and putting them on trains, and making them breathe bad air, and then burning them.
But now she could see how Ingo would take that—roughly the same as the press and the War Department and the key people on the Hill were taking it. Only more so. It was not, she had come to think, a matter of disbelief. It was an incapacity to imagine. Like you couldn't imagine a sky full of swirling yellow blobs until Van Gogh painted one for you. Then
voilà
, of course, I see it now. How marvelous! How frightful! Surely not
all
of them.
    All of them—but how to spell that out for Ingo, the instinctual unbeliever?
The Nazis are artists, true geniuses, and their medium is immorality.
No: the only way forward was the most brutal and direct, a blow to the heart.
    “You're right.” She fixed him in a particular kind of stare: Oh, you poor, uninformed civilian. “I do have access to classified reports—look, I've brought a few along. Care to join me in breaking the law?”
    She thought she saw his shoulders twitch. Unclasping the handbag—a bit of improvisation here, yielding to a sudden impulse toward violence— she tipped it upside down. A blizzard of daily briefing sheets, memoranda, transcripts, petitions, press clippings, statistical abstracts, railway timetables and fourth-layer carbons on onionskin stormed down, entombing Platen, spilling over onto the drab Edwardian rug.
    For seconds the two of them sat there, joined in a state of mild astonishment. Ingo shook his head. “When I said
spill
, Marty…”
    A giggle escaped her. Like an ear-pop, a sudden equalizing of pressure. It seemed to her that Ingo was struggling to conceal a smile.
    “God,” she said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”
    He waved it off. No need for apologies between old pals, right? “I get the impression, Marty, that you feel you need to
demonstrate
something to me. I wonder why.”
    Not I wonder
what.
    With the practiced eye of a bureaucrat, she parsed the seeming chaos of paperwork. Daintily she plucked up this and this and that, shuffled them together and pressed them on Ingo in the order she deemed most likely topersuade. A State Department circular, distribution limited, three pages dense with columns and