The Man with the Iron Heart (14 page)

“Not me,” Klein said.

“Not me, either,” Heydrich said. “I read this, and I thought the Yankees were trying to trick us. But a couple of our people have lived in America. They say it really works this way. Any crackpot can get up and go on about whatever the devil he wants.”

“How did they lick us?” Klein asked. No German asked that about the Russians. Stalin put out a fire by throwing bodies on it till it smothered. He commanded enough bodies to smother any fire, too, which had come as a dreadful surprise to the
Führer
and the General Staff. But the Americans were…well,
different
seemed a polite word for it.

After some thought, Heydrich said, “That may be the wrong question.”

“Well, what’s the right one, then?”

“If they really are this naïve”—Heydrich still had trouble believing it, but didn’t see what else he could think if the
Herald-Tribune
story wasn’t made up—“how do we take advantage of it?”

“Ah.
Ach, so.
” Once Klein saw the right question, he focused like the sun’s rays brought to a point by a burning glass. Like any long-serving noncom, he had a lot of practice taking advantage of officers with more power but less subtlety. His predicament with them was much like the
Reich
’s with its occupiers. Heydrich waited to see what he could come up with. After a few seconds, Klein said, “We have to keep fighting the Amis—”

“Aber natürlich!”
Heydrich broke in.

“We have to keep fighting,
ja.
” The
Oberscharführer
seemed to remind himself of where he’d been before he got to where he was going: “But we should also let them down easy, give them something these people who want to go home can latch on to and use for an excuse so they don’t look like a pack of gutless quitters.”

Like the pack of gutless quitters they really are,
Heydrich thought. But Hans Klein wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s morale mattered. Germany had done well with propaganda against the Low Countries and France, then completely botched it against the Russians. Treating them like a bunch of niggers in the jungle wasn’t the smartest thing the
Reich
could have done. A little late to worry about that now, though. Heydrich leaned forward intently. “What have you got in mind?”

“Well, sir, way it looks to me is, we ought to say something like we’re only fighting to get our own country back again. We ought to let ’em know how much that means to us, and to ask ’em how happy they’d be if some son of a bitch was sitting on their head. And we ought to say we’ll be mild as milk if they just pack up and go away.”

Klein winked at Heydrich. The
Reichsprotektor
laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Of course Germany would rearm the moment it had the chance. And of course German physicists would get to work on atom bombs as soon as they could. That sparked another thought.

“As long as they’ve got this fancy bomb and we don’t, they have the whip hand, too,” Heydrich said. “We should tell them we understand that.”

“And we should promise we’d never go after the bomb. We should promise on a big, tall stack of Bibles.” Hans Klein winked again.

And damned if Heydrich didn’t laugh again. After the last war, the Treaty of Versailles said Germany couldn’t have all kinds of weapons. Her top aeronautical engineers designed civilian planes. Other engineers tested panzers in Russia—the Soviet Union was another pariah state. Artillery designs for Sweden, U-boats for Holland…When Hitler decided it was time to rearm, he didn’t have a bit of trouble. If Germany needed atom bombs to get ready for the next round, she’d have them.

“Can we do something like that, sir?” Klein asked.

“You’d better believe it.” Heydrich got up from his desk and walked over to a file cabinet under the
Führer
’s framed photo. It held a complete run of
Signal,
the
Reich’s
wartime propaganda magazine.
Signal
was a slick product, printed in many languages; people said enemy publications like
Life
and
Look
had stolen from its layout and approach. That wasn’t why Heydrich started poring over back issues, though. They’d run an article he could adapt. He remembered it had come late in the war, after things on the Eastern Front went bad. That helped him narrow things down. He grunted when he found the copy he needed. “Here we go.”

“What have you got?” Hans Klein inquired.

“See for yourself.” Heydrich held out the magazine to him. The article was called “What We Are Fighting for.” It showed a wounded
Wehrmacht
man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain. On the facing page was a closeup of a blond, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old. The two photos summed up exactly what the
Reich
was fighting for, but text went with them. That text was what Heydrich wanted.

Klein’s eyes lit up. “Wow! Amazing, sir. I saw this, too. I remember, now that you’re showing it to me again. But I never would have thought of it, let alone come up with it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Words are weapons, too,” Heydrich said. “You need to know where you can get your hands on them. Why don’t you go grab yourself some chow? I want to fiddle with this for a while.”

As soon as Klein left, Heydrich sat down again and started writing. He worked in German; he knew he’d make a hash of things if he tried to compose in English. But it would get translated. Other people would suggest changes and add things, too. That was all right. He was fighting again.

In Nuremberg, the city jail was near the center of town. The Palace of Justice—a fancy name for the local courthouse—lay off to the northwest. It had taken some bomb damage. That didn’t surprise Lou Weissberg. In Nuremberg, it was much easier to list the buildings that hadn’t taken bomb damage than to set down the ones that had.

Bomb damage or not, the Allies were going to try the Nazi big shots they’d captured at the Palace of Justice. The American judge and his opposite numbers from the UK, France, and the Soviet Union would give Göring and Hess and Ribbentrop and Streicher and Jodl and Keitel and the rest the fair trials they hadn’t given to countless millions. And then, without the tiniest bit of doubt, most of those goons would hang or face a firing squad or die in whatever other way that extraordinary court decreed.

In the meantime, the Nazis cooled their heels in the Nuremberg jail as if they were ordinary burglars or wife beaters. Well, not quite. They had a wing of the jail all to themselves. They had a lot more guards in that wing than anybody in his right mind would have wasted on burglars or wife beaters.

And the jail was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests and concrete antitank barriers. The pointed obstacles looked to Lou like German designs. They’d probably been yanked from the Siegfried Line and carted back here. In a way, Lou appreciated the irony. The obstacles intended to slow up American and British tanks were now going into action against the krauts who’d made them.

In another way, that irony was scary. Almost six months after the alleged surrender, the occupation authorities needed to stay buttoned up tight to make sure the Germans didn’t liberate their leaders.

If they somehow did, that would give the United States a godawful black eye. All the same, Lou wondered how much Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have to do with men who might have the rank to order him around. Somebody like Göring wouldn’t be able to resist trying. And Heydrich, damn his little shriveled turd of a soul, was managing just fine by himself. Anybody who tried to jog his elbow might come down with a sudden and acute case of loss of life.

Lou eyed the jail again. “Fuck,” he said softly. Despite all the barbed wire and the antitank barriers and the machine-gun nests and the swarms of jittery dogfaces manning the position, somebody’d managed to stick one of the fanatics’ new propaganda sheets on the wall.

Shaking his head, Lou walked over and tore the sheet down. It was what Europeans used for typing paper, a little taller and a little skinnier than good old 8
¹
/
₂
× 11. Lou had seen English and German versions of the propaganda sheet. A printer was giving the fanatics a hand. If the occupation authorities caught him at it, he’d be sorry. Lou snorted under his breath. That didn’t seem to worry the bastard one whole hell of a lot.

This was the English version. It was obviously translated from the German, translated by somebody better with German than with English.
WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?
it said: smudgy type on cheap paper.

What Germans desire to acquire by victory is the fulfillment of the idea that an individual shall be respected for his own self. This is what makes life worth living for us.

“Assholes,” Lou muttered. The Nazis had sure respected Jews and Gypsies and Russians for their own selves, hadn’t they?

We fight for the sake of our own culture,
the propaganda sheet went on.
If you had invaders ruthlessly occupying your own land, you too would rise up against them. How can a brave folk do anything else?

“Assholes,” Lou said again, louder this time. Tito’s guerrillas, Russian partisans, the French
maquis
—what did the SS and the
Wehrmacht
do to real freedom fighters when they caught them? Everybody knew the answer to that one. Lou had seen a photo a German soldier took of a hanged Russian girl maybe eighteen years old. Around her neck the SS had put a warning placard in German and Russian:
I SHOT AT GERMAN SOLDIERS.

Once we have once more our own state back in our hands, we solemnly vow that we seek no new foreign conflict. Europe has seen enough of war,
the sheet declared, as if Hitler hadn’t had thing one to do with that war and the way the Nazis fought it.
All we seek is a fair peace and our own national self-determination, which is the proper right of any free people.

What kind of self-determination did the
Reich
give Poles and Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians and Frenchmen and Yugoslavs and Greeks and Russians and…? But Germans had a knack for feeling a shoe only when it pinched
them.

Lou started to crumple the sheet and toss it aside. Then he caught himself, even though CIC already had plenty of copies. A major with a double chin was giving orders to some GIs. Lou walked over to him and said, “Major, I just found this stuck to the wall here. How come somebody was able to put it up?”

The major snatched the paper out of his hand, gave it one quick, scornful glance, and barked, “Who the hell are you, Lieutenant, and who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m Lou Weissberg, Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Lou said calmly. “And who are you…sir?”

By the way he said it, he made the title one of reproach, not respect. The major took a deep breath and opened his mouth to scorch him. Then the man had very visible second thoughts. Even a lieutenant in the CIC might have connections that could make you sorry if you crossed him. As a matter of fact, Lou did. Raising when you really held a full house gave you confidence that showed.

“My name’s Hawkins—Tony Hawkins,” the major said in a different tone of voice. He took a longer look at the propaganda sheet. “You found this goddamn thing here—at the jail?”

“Just now, like I said. Right over there.” Lou pointed. “You’ve got this whole shebang around the building, and I wondered how some Jerry snuck this thing in here and put it up without anybody noticing.”

“Goddamn good question,” Major Hawkins said. “Fuck me if I know for sure, but my best guess is—”

His best guess got interrupted. The explosion wasn’t anywhere close by, but it was big. The ground shook under Lou’s feet. One of the soldiers said, “That an earthquake?”

“You California jerks think everything’s a goddamn earthquake,” another GI answered. “That’s a motherfucking bomb going off, is what that is. One huge honker of a bomb, too.”

That echoed Lou’s thoughts much too well. He looked around in all directions. At least even money the jail’s gray bulk would hide whatever had just happened…But no. There it was, off to the northwest: a swelling cloud of black smoke and dust.

Major Hawkins had already proved he had a foul mouth. He outdid himself now. Then he rounded on Lou. “What do you wanna bet that’s the fucking courthouse? You CIC cocksuckers are such hot shit, how come you didn’t keep the fanatics from blasting it to the moon?”

“Oy!”
Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. That hadn’t occurred to him. But as soon as he heard it, he would have bet anything he owned that Hawkins was right. The older officer’s words had that oracular feeling of truth to them. A bomb there couldn’t be anything else. Well, it could, but he was only too sure it wasn’t. A moment later, he said,
“Oy!”
again, and, “Aren’t the judges working in there now?”

If they could have bottled what Major Hawkins said then, they could have heated water in every house in Nuremberg for a year. “In spades,” the portly major added, in case Lou didn’t think he meant it.

Lou had other things on his mind. “C’mon!” he said. “Maybe we can do some good hauling people out of the ruins.”

“You go on, Lieutenant,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “Me, I aim to sit tight and do what I’m supposed to be doing. For all we know, those mothers are trying to lure us away from here so they can rush this place and spring the big prisoners while we’re all making like a Chinese fire drill.”

“Right,” Lou said tonelessly. And the major was, no two ways about it. That didn’t make Lou like him any better. Sketching a salute, Lou took off.

He trotted on parallel to the Pegnitz, the river that ran through town. The river made a better guide than the streets. With so much of Nuremberg ruined, what was street and what was rubble weren’t always easy to tell apart. As he hurried toward the Palace of Justice, he sadly clucked several times. The fanatics could sound reasonable. That sheet they’d put out would make some people back in the States go,
See? They only want to run their own affairs and be left alone.
But, no matter how they sounded, they went and did something like this….

Lou loped past a pile of wreckage about a story and a half tall. That gave him his first good look at the Palace of Justice—or rather, what had been the Palace of Justice. He skidded to a stop, gravel and shattered bits of brick scooting out from under his boots. “Holy crap,” he yelped.

Somebody must have screwed up. That was the first thing that occurred to him. The American occupiers had gone out of their way to protect the jail. They hadn’t taken so many precautions at the Palace of Justice. The authorities must have thought no one would attack it till the Nazis honchos went on trial.

Oops.

What the American authorities had thought might have been reasonable. That turned out not to matter when reasonable was also wrong. Somebody—who?—would have to answer questions now that the pooch was screwed.
We did everything we reasonably could…
In his mind, Lou could already hear the calm, sober voice explaining things. Whoever the voice belonged to, it would be calm and sober. He was sure of that. Would calm sobriety be enough to save the dumb fuckup’s career? It might. You never could tell.

But that would be tomorrow’s worry. Today’s was more urgent. Shattered wreckage of a truck—probably one of the ubiquitous GMC deuce-and-a-halfs—blazed in front of what was left of the Palace of Justice. Three wings had projected out from the main body of the building. One of those wings—the central one, the one in front of which the truck had stopped—was just gone, clean off the map. The other two were shattered, tumbledown, smoking, ready to fall down any second now.

Christ! How much TNT did that fucking truck carry?
Lou wondered. The sleepless, analytical part of his mind instantly supplied the answer, and a sneer to go with it.
Two and a half tons, dummy.
The Palace of Justice sure as hell looked as if a 5,000-pound bomb had gone off right in front of it.

Some of the rubble shook. Lou thought more of it was falling down, but that wasn’t what was going on. A dazed, bleeding American soldier pushed a door off of himself and tried to stand up. He keeled over instead.

Lou hurried over to him and pulled away more bricks and stones and chunks of woodwork. The wounded man’s left ankle bent in a way an ankle had no business bending. Lou fumbled at his belt. Sure as hell, he still carried a wound dressing and a morphine syrette. The guy needed about a dozen bandages, but Lou covered up a nasty cut on the side of his head, anyhow. The morphine was probably also sending a boy to do a man’s job, but it was what he had. He stabbed the wounded soldier and bore down on the plunger.

To his amazement, the GI opened his eyes a few seconds later. “What happened?” he asked, his voice eerily calm. Maybe the morphine was doing more than Lou’d thought it could.

“Truck bomb.” Lou added the obvious: “Great big old truck bomb.”

“Boy, no shit,” the man said. “You musta stuck me, huh?” When Lou nodded, the guy went on, “You think you can splint my ankle while the dope’s working? Best chance I’ll get.”

“I’ll try. I’m not an aid man or anything.”

The wounded soldier waved that aside. Lou got to work. He had no trouble finding boards, and he cut up the other GI’s trouser leg to get strips of cloth to tie the splint into place. Morphine or no morphine, the guy wailed when he straightened that shattered ankle as best he could.

Some aid men were there. More ambulances rolled up, bells clanging, as Lou wrestled with the splint. Some soldiers set up a .50-caliber machine-gun position, too. Lou wondered if they’d gone Asiatic till one of them said, “Assholes ain’t gonna run another truck in here and blow up all the guys who came in to help.” That hadn’t occurred to Lou, but some of the Americans seemed properly paranoid. He supposed that was good.

Stretcher bearers carried a groaning wounded man past him and the fellow he was helping. All badly hurt men sounded pretty much the same, no matter where they came from. But Lou happened to look up at just the right moment. He saw a not-so-familiar uniform on the stretcher.

“Holy cow!” he blurted, in lieu of something stronger. “Is that General Nikitchenko?” He was proud of knowing the name of the Soviet judge for the upcoming trial.

To his surprise, the man on the stretcher knew some English. “I is Lieutenant Colonel Volchkov,” he said. “Alternate to Iona Timofeye-vich. The general, he is—” He broke off, gathering strength or looking for a word. After a moment, he found one:
“Kaput.”
It wasn’t exactly English, but it wasn’t exactly
not
English, either. Lou had no trouble understanding it, anyhow.