Excerpt
January 1943

An old man with sunken cheeks slipped out of the New Yorker Hotel.
Shivering, he loped down the busy street of New York City. Clutching a package to his tattered coat.
His dark eyes darted about.
They’re following me.
His knees felt weak. Weaker than usual.
They were poisoning him. He was sure of it.
But they must not get my papers.
From shops and sidewalk vendors, radios broadcast the latest news. Bad news. Another world war consuming a world gone mad.
Newsstands hawked tabloids with headlines in large print. The end of the world as they knew it.
So it seemed as the Second World War was in full swing.
The countries of Europe had fallen like dominos under the Nazi juggernaut. Japanese aggression swept like a tsunami across the Far East. And after Pearl Harbor, the United States got sucked into the madness.
Gold stars were going up everywhere. Many sons killed in action. This war would make corpses of them all.
But with this war, the high unemployment of the 1930s had evaporated in the 1940s. The workforce jumped to full capacity. And like the First World War, women filled men’s jobs on the home front.
A few blocks down, the old man stumbled inside the post office. He plopped the package on the counter.
“Special delivery,” he rasped.
“Ivan Orlovic, Round Up, Montana?” the Postmistress asked. “No specific address, sir?”
“It’s a small town, miss,” he answered with an Eastern European accent. “It will get there. And they know who to give it to.”
The Postmistress laughed. She couldn’t think of a more hick town than one with that name. Of course it would get there.