The Man with the Iron Heart (11 page)

“Sure.” Gladys withdrew without closing the door all the way. He heard her say, “You can go in now.”

“Thank you.” The door opened again. Duncan got to his feet. The woman who came in was about as old as he was. She must’ve been hot stuff when she was younger. She wouldn’t have been bad now if she weren’t wearing black…and if the look on her face didn’t say hot stuff was the furthest thing from her mind. “Congressman Duncan?” she said. Automatically, Jerry nodded. She held out her hand. “I’m Diana McGraw.”

As automatically, Duncan shook it. Her grip was firm but cool. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. McGraw,” he said. “And I was very sorry to hear about your tragic loss. Please accept my sympathies. Too many boys are dead.”

Her nod was bitter and determined at the same time. “Yes. Too many boys are dead,” she agreed. “And for what, Congressman?
For what?
Why did Pat have to die, after the war was supposed to be over?”

Gladys came in with a tray. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Jerry was glad for the interruption. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked while Gladys poured two cups.

“Thank you.” She sat stiffly, as if her machinery needed oiling. Gladys put cream and sugar into Jerry’s cup, then looked a question at her. “Black is fine,” Mrs. McGraw said.

“Here you are, then.” The secretary set cup and saucer near the edge of Jerry’s desk, then went out again.

Without preamble, Diana McGraw said, “Do you know how many American soldiers besides my Pat have been killed since the Nazis said they surrendered?”

Congressman Duncan started to answer, but caught himself. “No, I don’t know, not exactly. The War Department hasn’t publicized the numbers, whatever they are.”

“It sure hasn’t,” Mrs. McGraw agreed with a sniper’s smile. “How many do you think, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Over a hundred—I’m sure of that,” Jerry said. “Some of the atrocities do get into the papers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were twice that number, maybe even three times.”

She smiled that frightening smile again. It made Jerry Duncan want to dive for cover. “The true figure is at least a thousand dead.
At least.
” She seemed to repeat herself for emphasis. “That doesn’t count wounded. All since the so-called surrender.”

Cautiously, Jerry asked, “How do you know?”
Do you really know?
was what he meant. Still picking his words with care, he went on, “As I say, the War Department doesn’t go out of its way to talk about figures.”

“Would you, if you had to talk about figures like that?” Diana McGraw returned. “As for how I know, well, I have connections.” She held up a hasty hand. “Not political connections, not the kind you usually think about. But when Pat and Betsy were in school, I was in the PTA. I was Central Indiana vice-chairwoman for several years, as a matter of fact. I went to a couple of the national conventions. I know mothers all over the country. Ever since Pat…died, I’ve been on the phone. I’ve been sending wires. My friends have been asking questions where they live. That’s what they’ve found out, and I believe them.”

Jerry whistled softly. “I believe you,” he said, and meant it: she radiated conviction. “Over a thousand? Good Lord!”

“You have to understand,” she said. “If some German killed Pat in the Battle of the Bulge, I wouldn’t be here talking with you now. I’d be as sorry as I am, but not quite the same way. War is war, and things like that can happen. But we’re at peace now, or we’re supposed to be. Why did Pat have to die almost five months after the war was supposed to be over? Why have a thousand American kids died after it was supposed to be over?”

“That’s…a better question than I thought it would be when you made this appointment,” Jerry said slowly. Like a lot of Midwestern Republicans, he’d wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe when it broke out. He hadn’t called himself an isolationist, but he hadn’t been far from thinking that way, either.

Then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Of course he voted for the declaration of war. He wanted to—he was as furious as anybody else. And if he hadn’t, his district would have tarred him and feathered him and ridden him out of Congress on a rail.

Hitler declared war on the USA. That saved him from wondering how he would have voted when Roosevelt asked for war against Germany. Maybe not knowing was just as well.

“What do you want me to do, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked.

“Get some answers,” she said at once. “Why are we still over there now that the war’s over? What are we doing over there that could possibly be worth a thousand lives? Why is the War Department trying to hush up everything that’s going on over there?”

Those were all good questions. Jerry Duncan said so. They were especially good questions for a Republican to ask, since they could hold a Democratic administration’s feet to the fire. “And what will you be doing yourself?” Jerry inquired.

“Me?” Diana McGraw sounded surprised he needed to ask. “I’m going to the papers and the radio stations. You can’t keep things secret forever, Congressman. You just can’t.”

“You’re right,” Duncan said. “You’re absolutely right. Some of the mistakes we made in the first part of the war…Well, thank God we didn’t lose on account of them. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t. Believe me, I do. And the public still doesn’t know about a lot of them.”

“A few weeks ago, I would have been shocked if you told me something like that. Shocked. Now I believe you,” she said. “Why do those people want to sweep everything under the rug?”

“To keep folks from pointing a finger at their mistakes.” Again, Jerry replied without hesitation. With a politician’s facility, he chose not to remember that he’d voted against the draft bill that passed by a single vote the summer before Pearl Harbor, and that he’d also voted against more money for the War and Navy Departments before the USA actually got into the fighting. Pointing a finger at the administration’s mistakes was easy. Pointing a finger at his own…

“High time somebody did,” Mrs. McGraw said. “Germany’s smashed. It’s knocked flat. It’s not going to magically come back to life if we bring our boys home.”

“I hope not.” Jerry did remember that people had said the same thing after World War I. But nobody’d blown up American doughboys in the aftermath of that fight. Who could say now what would have happened had the Germans tried it then?

“Let’s get on with it,” she said crisply. “How many GIs will the fanatics have killed by this time next week or next month or next year? And why will those GIs have died? For what?”

“For making sure the Nazis don’t come back and start up again.” Jerry knew exactly what his Democratic colleagues would say. He said it himself, to see how Diana McGraw responded.

She snorted. She looked at him as if she’d found half of him in her apple. She was nothing but a housewife, but she made him flinch. “Oh, nonsense,” she said, and somehow she got more scorn into that than a cigar-puffing committee chairman would have from
Oh, bullshit.
“How do you hold down a whole country?” she went on. “And how do you fight people who’ll blow themselves up to get rid of you? If they’re already willing to die, what can you do to make them quit?”

Jerry Duncan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Nobody in America had been able to find a good answer to that. One of the things the public didn’t know was how much damage Japanese kamikazes had done. How much more would they have inflicted if the USA’d had to invade the Home Islands? Jerry silently thanked God for the A-bomb. It had saved one hell of a lot of American casualties. Probably kept a good many Japs from joining their ancestors, too, not that he gave a rat’s ass about them.

“It’s a good question,” he said, hoping his pause wasn’t too noticeable. “I’ll be honest with you—I don’t know. Maybe some Army officers do—”

“Fat chance,” Mrs. McGraw broke in.

“I was going to say, but if they do, they sure haven’t given any sign of it.”

“No. They haven’t.” Her bitterness was hidden while she planned action. It came back now. “And Pat’s dead, and my grandson will grow up never knowing his uncle, and my husband stumbles around like a man in a daze—no, like a man who’s stopped caring. And he has. And how can you blame him, if Pat died for nothing?”

“If—” Jerry began.

She interrupted him again: “If we get our troops out of there because of what happened to Pat, it may turn out to be worthwhile after all. It may. If we don’t…” She shook her head, then brushed at the bit of transparent black veiling that came down over her eyes from her hat.

She left a few minutes later, back straight, stride determined. She had a Cause, and she’d stick with it come hell or high water. Jerry Duncan stared after her, even though she’d closed the door when she went out. Damned if she hadn’t given him one, too.

B
RESLAU WASN’T IN
G
ERMANY ANY MORE.
F
OR THAT MATTER
, B
RESLAU
wasn’t Breslau any more. Stalin had shoved the USSR’s border several hundred kilometers west, and shoved newly resuscitated Poland west about as far at Germany’s expense to make up for it.

The Poles were calling the place Wroclaw, which they pronounced something like
Breslau.
Captain Vladimir Bokov didn’t give a damn what they called it. He also didn’t give a damn that he was in Soviet-occupied Poland rather than Soviet-occupied Germany. As long as the Red Army was around, nobody except the Fascist bandits he was trying to root out would give him any trouble. Local officials sure as hell wouldn’t.

Breslau, Wroclaw, whatever you wanted to call it, had its share of bandits and then some. Its garrison, surrounded on all sides, had held out till just before the general surrender. The Poles were trying to solve their German problem by resettling their countrymen from Lwow and other cities to the east who didn’t want to live under Soviet rule, and by uprooting the local Germans and marching them west toward the new border—at gunpoint, if necessary. That would probably work…in the long run. For the time being, it gave the remaining Germans every reason to support the fanatics.

Thus, the local Polish governor had just come to a sudden and untimely end. A sniper had put a Mauser round through his head from close to a kilometer away. Shooting Poles had its points; Bokov had done it himself, more than once. Even shooting Communist Party members was sometimes necessary, as anyone who’d worked through the purges of the late 1930s could attest.

But shooting someone who was in the Soviet government’s good graces went over the line. And so Vladimir Bokov had come east to do something about it. The highway to Wroclaw was wide and fine. It had been part of the German
Autobahn
system. Now the Poles got to use it.

There was an American film where one police official told another, “Round up the usual suspects.” The local authorities in Wroclaw, Polish and Russian, seemed to have followed that rule. To them, the usual suspects seemed to include anyone who thought the city should still be called Breslau…should, in other words, stay German.

They’d rounded up hundreds of
Wehrmacht
veterans. They’d added all the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who’d ever said anything bad about Poles or Russians. In a town like Wroclaw, that gave them plenty to choose from.

A captain in a
csapka
met Bokov outside the wire-fenced camp where the locals were stowing their prisoners. Bokov thought the square-crowned Polish headgear looked asinine, but that wasn’t his worry. After a couple of false starts, he and Captain Leszczynski conversed in German. He could almost understand Leszczynski’s Polish, but Leszczynski didn’t want to try to follow his Russian. The Pole wore three Red Army decorations on his chest, but he was plainly a nationalist as well as a Communist.

One day, no doubt, Leszczynski would get purged. Bokov was sure of it. Maybe the proud Pole knew it, too. But they were on the same side now.

“These damned Werewolves are driving us nuts,” Leszczynski said. Bokov was highly fluent in German; he’d studied it for years. Leszczynski spoke it like a native. Before the war, he’d likely used it as much as Polish. The Poles might hate and fear their western neighbors, but they leaned toward them as if drawn by a magnet. In Russian, a traveling fort with a cannon in the turret was a
tank,
as it was in English. The Poles borrowed
pancer
from the Germans.

“We’ll deal with them. One way or another, we will,” Bokov said confidently.

“Jawohl. Aber natürlich.”
Irony filled Captain Leszczynski’s voice. Poles didn’t like Russians much better than they liked Germans. They looked down their noses at Russians, though, and hardly bothered to hide it. So did Germans, of course. It was almost less annoying from them than from fellow Slavs.

“We will,” Bokov insisted. “If we have to kill them all, we’ll do that.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe.” Captain Leszczynski seemed to be reminding himself they were allies here. “Which prisoners will you want to interrogate?”

“The ones you think likeliest to know something about Comrade Pietruszka’s murder,” Bokov answered. Before the Pole could say anything, he added, “The ones who hate us worst.”

“Oh, they all hate us,” Leszczynski said. “The only question is, which ones did something about it?”

Adrian Marwede said he’d been a
Wehrmacht
noncom. He still wore a ratty field-gray service blouse. Bokov eyed a slightly darker ring on the left sleeve near the cuff: the sort of ring a cloth cuff-title might leave after it was removed. Only a few
Wehrmacht
divisions used cuff-titles. However…“You were really in the
Waffen
-SS,
nicht wahr?
” All their outfits had them.

Marwede turned pale. “Well—yes,” he muttered.

But then Captain Leszczynski took Bokov aside. “When Breslau surrendered, all the defenders were promised life, personal property, and eventual return to Germany—the SS included.”

“What?” Bokov couldn’t believe it. “Who made such an idiotic promise?”

With a certain somber relish, the Pole replied, “Lieutenant General Gluzdovsky, commander, Soviet Sixth Army, First Ukrainian Front.”