The Man with the Iron Heart (15 page)

“We’re gonna get you patched up, Colonel. Don’t you worry about anything right this minute—you’ll be fine,” one of the medics said, and then, to his own comrade, “Get moving, Gabe. Soon as he goes into an ambulance, we’ll come back for this poor sorry son of a bitch.” His hands were full; he pointed with his chin at the soldier Lou was splinting.

“Who you callin’ a sorry son of a bitch?” the GI demanded, and Lou’s admiration for morphine leaped forward again. The medics didn’t bother arguing. They lugged Volchkov away, then returned for the man with the broken ankle.

More wounded people staggered from the wreckage. Some were women. Secretaries? Clerks? Translators? Cleaning ladies? Lou had no idea. All he knew was, bombs weren’t chivalrous. That also applied to the American bombs that had leveled most of Nuremberg, but he didn’t worry about those.

Corpsmen and other GIs also carried women out on stretchers, in blankets, or sometimes just in their arms. Wounded women were slightly shriller than wounded men; otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between them. Most of the casualties here, not surprisingly, seemed to be men.

Lou thought for a moment that someone in a dark robe had to be a woman. Then he saw the person was wearing a man’s black dress shoes—one, anyhow, because the other foot had only a sock on it.
A judge,
he realized dully. American? French? British? That hardly mattered.

The medics didn’t bother with some of the bodies—and pieces of bodies—they found in the smoking wreckage. They piled them off to one side: a makeshift morgue, one growing rapidly. And they cursed the fanatics with a weary hatred that made the close-cropped hair at the nape of Lou’s neck try to stand on end. Turn the guys who wore Red Crosses loose on the Nazis and they might clean them out in twenty minutes flat.

Or, worse luck, they might not.

That enormous explosion hadn’t just brought American soldiers out to see what had happened and do what they could to help. Shabby, scrawny Germans stared at the wreckage of the Palace of Justice and at the rows of corpses off to one side. They didn’t seem especially horrified—but then, they’d seen plenty worse.

“Doesn’t look like they’ll have their trial any time soon,” a middle-aged man remarked to his wife.

She shrugged. “So what? It wouldn’t have been anything but propaganda anyhow,” she said. He nodded. He took out a little can of tobacco—scrounged from butts, no doubt—and started rolling himself a cigarette.

Lou wanted to kick him in the nuts and punch his stringy
Frau
in the nose. But the goddamn kraut was right. God only knew when the authorities would be able to try Göring and Ribbentrop and the rest of those jackals. And who’d want to sit on the bench now and judge them? Hell, who’d dare?

“Goddamn Heydrich to hell and gone,” Lou muttered. But damn him or not, his fanatics had won this round.

T
HE
M
C
G
RAWS HAD A FANCY RADIO SET
. I
T DID EVERYTHING BUT
show you pictures of what was happening at the other end. And now, with this newfangled television thing, that was coming, too. Back before the war, when people first started talking about it, Diana figured it was all Buck Rogers stuff and would never come true.

Well, these days it didn’t do to laugh too hard at Buck Rogers. Look at rockets. Look at the atom bomb. And television was plainly on the way, even if it wasn’t here yet.

Once upon a time, the telegraph and typewriter and telephone were Buck Rogers stuff, too—except Buck wasn’t around yet to give them a name. Diana’s mouth tightened. She wished the telegraph had never happened. Then she wouldn’t have heard about Pat…. She shook her head. That wasn’t the point. The point was, he never should have got killed in the first place.

She’d timed it perfectly. The tubes needed a little while to warm up. Almost the first thing she heard once they did was “This is William L. Shirer, reporting to you from Nuremberg.”

He’d been reporting from Europe since before the war started. He’d covered it from Berlin during the Nazis’ first fantastic run of triumphs. She and Ed had both read
Berlin Diary.
Now he was back on the other side of the Atlantic, broadcasting from the undead corpse of the Third
Reich.
And the photos she’d seen of him—he was a skinny little bald guy who wore a beret and smoked a pipe—didn’t detract (too much) from his authoritative voice and plain common sense.

“As you will have heard by now, Reinhard Heydrich’s brutal diehards bombed the Palace of Justice in this city. The leading captured war criminals from the Nazis regime were to have gone on trial there for war crimes in a few days. Now those trials have been indefinitely postponed. Many people here doubt whether they will ever take place.”

“Ain’t that a…heck of a thing?” Ed said.

Diana shushed him. She wanted to hear William L. Shirer. “The death toll is known to be close to two hundred,” the correspondent went on. “Among the dead are the French, Russian, and American judges and the British alternate. The Russian and British alternates are among the badly wounded, as is Judge Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor.”

“Two hundred dead,” Diana echoed, her voice rising in disbelief. “And for what? To give those thugs the kind of trial they don’t begin to deserve.”

Now Ed raised a hand to quiet her. William L. Shirer continued, “American authorities believe the fanatic who drove the truck loaded with explosives up to the Palace of Justice died in the blast he touched off. Before General Patton’s recent death, he said the idea wasn’t to die for your country but to make the so-and-so’s on the other side die for theirs. Like the Japanese, the German fanatics seem to have taken this idea too much to heart. After these messages, I’ll be back with an American officer who will talk about the problems posed by enemies who don’t care whether they survive.”

A recorded chorus started singing the praises of a particular laundry soap. Diana knew from painful experience that it wasn’t worth the money if you used it with hard water. If you listened to the chorus, it was the greatest stuff in the world. But then, you deserved whatever happened to you if you took radio advertisements seriously.

William L. Shirer returned. “With me is Lieutenant Louis Weissberg of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,” he said. “Thanks for coming on, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks for having me, Mr. Shirer.” By the way Weissberg talked, he was from New York City or somewhere not far away.

“Tell us a little about why it’s harder to defend against enemies who plan to die after completing their missions.”

“For all the reasons you’d expect.” Lieutenant Weissberg didn’t say
You dummy,
but you could hear it in his voice. Shirer wasn’t a dummy—nowhere close—but he remembered that some of the people in his audience were. After a beat, Weissberg went on, “They don’t have to worry about escape routes. And they can take chances ordinary soldiers never would, because they don’t expect to get away anyhow. If you have the nerve to press the detonator, it’s all over in a hurry.”

“Isn’t it just?” Shirer agreed ruefully. “We’re standing here in front of what would have been the courtyard for the trial of the century—the trial that would have warned the world no one can get away with wars of aggression any more—and there’s not much left, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea how the fanatic in the truck was able to pull up right in front of the building?”

“Well, Mr. Shirer, if a jeep isn’t the most common military vehicle in Germany these days, a deuce-and-a-half is. We’ve got more of ’em here than a dog has fleas. Put a guy in an American uniform in the driver’s seat—and you can bet that kraut was wearing one—and nobody paid any attention to him till too late,” Weissberg said.

William L. Shirer asked the same question Diana McGraw would have: “Isn’t that a severe security breach?”

“Sure,” Weissberg answered, which took Diana by surprise. “We slipped up, and we paid for it. We have to hope we don’t do it again, that’s all.”

“Who was responsible for protecting the Palace of Justice?” Shirer asked. “And what’s happened to him since the bombing?”

“Sir, I don’t have the answer to either of those questions,” Weissberg replied. “You gotta remember, I’m just a lieutenant. I see little pieces of the picture, not the whole thing. You’d do better asking General Eisenhower or somebody like that.”

“For the record, I have asked General Eisenhower’s headquarters,” Shirer said. “Spokesmen there declined to comment. They claimed that anything they said might damage an officer’s career. What do you think of that?”

Weissberg ducked again: “If they aren’t going to say anything about it, you can’t really expect me to, can you?”

“Never hurts to try,” Shirer answered easily. “Thank you for your time, Lieutenant Weissberg.”

“Sure,” Weissberg said. William L. Shirer went off the air. The commercial this time was for a brand of cigarettes that, in Ed’s memorable phrase, tasted like it came out of a camel’s rear end.

Diana was steaming. “You see how things go?” she demanded of her husband. “Do you see? They know who was supposed to take care of that building. They know he was asleep at the switch. But will they say so? Don’t hold your breath! Will anything happen to him because he was asleep at the switch? Don’t stay up late waiting for that, either.”

“Army always takes care of its own,” Ed said.

“Two hundred dead,” Diana said one more time. “They aren’t just sweeping dirt under a rug. They’re shoveling it onto graves. That’s wrong.”
That’s wrong, dammit!
was what she wanted to say, but the habits of her whole adult life with Ed suppressed the swear word.

“You’re doing everything you know how to do,” Ed said. “You’re in the papers. You’re on the radio, for cryin’ out loud. Me, I couldn’t get in the newspaper if I robbed a bank. That suits me fine, too.”

“It suited me fine—till Pat got murdered,” Diana answered. “But this craziness won’t stop till we make it stop. If I have to get my name in the paper to do that, I will.”

“Babe, I’m not arguin’ with you,” her husband said.
You’d better not, not about this,
Diana thought. That wasn’t fair, though, and she knew it. Ed had backed her play as much as was in him to do. It wasn’t his fault that she was the more outgoing one in the family.

And speaking of outgoing, or going generally…“I’ll need to make another trip to Washington,” she said.

He grunted. “Can we afford it?” he asked. A reasonable question: he’d always brought in the money, while Diana figured out how to spend it. The arrangement worked well for them, but it meant she had a better notion of what was in the checkbook and the savings account than he did.

She nodded briskly. “Not to worry. We could swing it by ourselves, but we won’t have to. We’ve got donations coming in like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve started…oh, I guess you’d call it a business account. Mothers Against the Madness in Germany, I’m calling it.”

Ed grunted again. “What’ll it do to our taxes? And can the government use it to come after us if we don’t keep everything straight? They got Al Capone on a tax rap when they couldn’t nail him for anything else, remember. If they sent him to Alcatraz, they can sure take a whack at us.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Diana answered with the sublime confidence of one sure of the righteousness of her cause. On a more practical note, she added, “And I’ve talked to a bookkeeper. He says he knows how to keep everything straight.”

“Okay. I hope he knows what he’s talking about,” Ed said. “From what I hear at the plant, tax law is pretty much whatever the government wants it to be.”

“I asked around. Abe is supposed to be the best in town, bar none,” Diana said.

“You got Abe Jacoby?”

“I sure did,” she said, not without pride.

“How about that?” Ed sounded relieved. “If a smart sheeny like him can’t keep us outa trouble, nobody can. Those people know money like they invented it. Maybe they did—wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Diana said. “He doesn’t work cheap—”

Ed guffawed. “There’s a hot headline!”

“Yeah, I know.” Diana laughed, too, a little sheepishly. “But, like I said, the money’s there. And he’s charging less than he might have, too.”

“How come? You bat the baby blues at him?” Ed winked to show he was kidding.

“I did no such thing!” Actually, Diana thought Abe was kind of good-looking, which made her sound stuffier than she would have otherwise. “He’s got a nephew in Munich, and he wants to help make sure Sheldon stays safe.”

“Gotcha. That sure makes sense. Blood’s thicker than water. I guess sometimes it’s thicker than money, too.”

“Let’s hope so,” Diana said. “I won’t be the only one going to Washington, either. If we can get into the papers all over the country for picketing in front of the Indiana state Capitol, think what’ll happen after we picket in front of the White House.”

“They’ll arrest you, that’s what,” Ed predicted.

“No, they won’t, not if we stay peaceful—and we will,” Diana said. “That chowderhead jumped our people in Indianapolis. We didn’t start any brawls. We won’t in Washington, either. But Truman has to know we won’t put up with stalling around in Germany.”

“Well, you’ve got that right.” Ed paused a moment, thinking. “Make sure you tell the papers and the radio before you go. That way, they can be there ready to get the story and the photos—the papers can get the photos, I mean.”

“I understood you.” Diana walked over to him, bent down, and gave him a kiss. “And I’ve already talked to the Indianapolis papers, and to the ones in Washington, and to the
Chicago Tribune
and the
New York Times.
If you want a story to go all over the country, those last two are the papers to aim for. I haven’t got hold of NBC and CBS yet, but I will.”

“Attagirl! I might’ve know you were a jump ahead of me.” Ed chuckled. “Truman doesn’t know what he’s up against, poor sap. When you start something, you don’t stop till you get it done.”

Maybe he was kidding again, maybe not. Diana didn’t care. “This needs doing, darn it,” she said, and Ed didn’t try to tell her she was wrong—not that she would have listened if he had.