The Man with the Iron Heart (16 page)

W
HEN THE JEEP CARRYING
T
OM
S
CHMIDT CAME TO THE FIRST CHECKPOINT
on the outskirts of Munich, the dogface behind the wheel let out a sigh of relief and lit up a Lucky. “Made it through Injun country one more time,” he said.

“Is that what you guys call it?” The reporter took out a little notebook bound with a spiral wire and wrote it down.

“You betcha, Charlie.” The GI, who answered impartially to Mel or to Horseface, nodded emphatically. “Liable to be some asshole behind a tree, behind a rock, hiding inside any old ruined house or barn—and there sure are enough of ’em.” The cigarette jerked as he spoke.

He wasn’t wrong. Munich and its suburbs had taken sixty-six air raids during the war. The estimate was that it held something like 9,000,000 cubic yards of rubble. And the rubble still held bodies—nobody knew how many. But even in this chilly weather the stink of dead meat hung in the air.

The guards at the checkpoint weren’t delighted to see them. One made Mel pop the hood. Another got down on his stomach and slid a long-handled mirror under the jeep. Tom’s papers got examined with a jeweler’s loupe. “Do you do this to everybody?” Tom asked the MP going over them.

“Sure do,” the noncom answered. “Goddamn krauts can get our uniforms. Stealing a jeep’s easy as pie. And they’re damn good forgers.”

“You must spend a lot of time doing it, then,” Tom said.

“Yes, sir,” the MP said. “Better than letting some bastard through with a bomb, though. They caught a guy a couple of days ago at another checkpoint.”

“What did they do to him?”

“When he saw they were gonna search the car, he hit the switch and blew himself up. He got four of us—one of ’em was a buddy of mine.”

“Sorry.” It wasn’t enough, but it was all Tom could say.

“Yeah. Me, too,” the MP replied. “You look legit, though.” He turned to his comrades. “The jeep clean?” When they told him it was, he nodded. “You can pass on.”

Getting to the
Vier Jahreszeiten
—the Four Seasons, the hotel where Ike was staying—wasn’t easy. Munich had been plastered to a faretheewell, all right. The roads were all potholes or worse. The jeep also had to clear two more checkpoints before they got to the hotel. And the fortifications around it would have done credit to Stalingrad.

“After what happened up in Nuremberg, Mac, we don’t take no chances,” said the GI who patted Tom down. He was so intimate, Tom halfway expected to be asked to turn his head and cough. But, after the blast at the Palace of Justice, how could you complain? Finding nothing more lethal than notebook, fountain pen, wallet, and a box of cherry cough drops, the soldier let him through.

A generator chugged outside the
Vier Jahreszeiten.
The biggest part of the city didn’t have power yet. The hotel had taken bomb damage. Tom would have been surprised if it hadn’t. Most of downtown Munich was nothing but bomb damage. But you could tell this had been a hotel once upon a time, which put it ahead of a lot of places.

He had to cool his heels for forty-five minutes before Eisenhower would see him. That was also par for the course. He’d managed to get an appointment with the American proconsul. At last, a spruce young major led him in to the great man. “You’ve got half an hour,” the youngster said.

Terrific,
Tom thought. He started with a big one: “How do you see things in Germany now?”

“We’re making progress,” Eisenhower said. “Rubbish getting cleared. Power and sewage works coming back. Industry starting up again. People getting fed. We are making progress.” He repeated it, as if to reassure himself.

“How much trouble are the fanatics causing?” Tom asked.

“More than we wish they were. Less than they wish they were,” Ike answered. “They can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, they’ll run out of men willing to die for a dead cause.” How could he know that? Was he whistling in the dark?

Instead of asking directly, Tom said, “How much support do they have among the people?”

“Well, some Germans aren’t sorry they fought the war. They’re only sorry they lost,” Eisenhower said. “They wouldn’t mind getting in the saddle again—I’m sure of that. But I’m just as sure it won’t happen.”

“What do you think about the movement in America to bring home the occupation troops?” Tom asked.

The room wasn’t warm to begin with. The temperature suddenly seemed to drop twenty degrees. “I’m a soldier. I’m not supposed to have political opinions. But I think that would be a poor policy,” Eisenhower snapped.

“In spite of all the casualties we can’t seem to stop?”

“Yes.” Ike bit off the word. He cut the interview short, too. Tom Schmidt was disappointed but, on reflection, again not surprised.

Bernie Cobb swore as he tramped through the woods and fields outside of Erlangen. Fog puffed from his mouth and nose at each new obscenity. When he looked back over his shoulder, he could see his footprints in the snow.

“Fuck this shit,” he said. “I was doin’ this same crap a year ago, when the krauts hit us in the Bulge. That’s how—”

“You got frostbite in your feet,” Walt Lefevre finished for him. “We heard it before, Bernie.”

“Yeah, well, this is still a crock,” Cobb said. “War’s been over since May, for cryin’ out loud. So how come I’m still lugging a fucking grease gun around and making like there’s bandits in the woods?”

“On account of there
are
bandits inna woods.” Sergeant Carlo Corvo talked out of the side of his mouth. He’d never said he had Mafia connections, but he’d never said he didn’t, either. Connections or no, he was a bad guy to screw around with. “We gotta make sure the cocksuckers stay hid and don’t come out an’ make trouble, see?”

“Good luck,” Bernie said. Sergeant Corvo gave him a dirty look. But he couldn’t say Bernie was wrong, not when the fanatics had kicked up so much trouble already. Warming to his theme, Bernie went on, “I wish I had my Ruptured Duck, goddammit. I didn’t sign up to chase diehards through the boonies after the war was done.”

“You signed up to do whatever the fuck Uncle Sam tells you to do,” Sergeant Corvo said. “If he wants you to dig latrines from now till 1949, you’ll fuckin’-A do that. And you’ll like it, too, ’cause he’d find somethin’ worse for ya if ya didn’t. Right now he wants you to go asshole-hunting. You oughta be good at it.”

Experience taught you how much you could argue with a noncom. Corvo took less kindly to backtalk than most.
He isn’t Uncle Sam, even if he thinks he is,
Bernie thought bitterly. But Corvo’s three stripes made him a more than unreasonable facsimile.

“Look for tracks,” Corvo went on. “That’s what we gotta do. With the snow on the ground and the leaves off the trees and the bushes, those Nazi shitheels can’t hide out here no more. We’ve already found a buncha bunkers on account of that.”

At least one of those bunkers had blown sky-high while American soldiers were searching it, too. Maybe more than one. If Bernie were in charge of things, he would keep stuff like that as hush-hush as he could. But he’d known one of the guys who went up in this particular blast. Pete would never try and draw to an inside straight again.

“Something moved over there.” Walt pointed towards a stand of trees a couple of hundred yards away.

“A bird? A deer, maybe?” Bernie didn’t want it to be anything worse.

Lefevre shook his head. “I don’t think so. It ducked back behind a trunk, like.”

“Fuck,” Sergeant Corvo said. For once, Bernie agreed with him completely. “Spread out, youse guys,” Corvo went on. “If that asshole’s got one o’ them automatic rifles, it’s like goin’ up against a BAR, ’cept the German piece only weighs half as much.”

Two grease guns and an M-1. Not impossible odds, but not good, either, not against a weapon that fired full automatic out to…farther than this.
How come the krauts made the good tanks and the good guns?
Bernie wondered.
We’re fuckin’ lucky we won…. Or did we?

He had a finger on the trigger as he slowly approached the trees. He felt all alone. Hell, he was all alone. One burst wouldn’t get everybody that way. But one burst could sure chop him down. When the surrender came, he’d thought he’d got free of this kind of dread. He licked dry lips. No such luck.

Something stirred behind one of those skeleton-branched trees.
“Halt!”
Bernie yelled.
“Hände hoch!”
His accent was horrible, but at least he remembered to use German, not English.

He hit the dirt while he was yelling. A good thing, too, because three or four bullets cracked past the place where he’d stood a second earlier.

He started shooting—not aimed fire, but plenty to make the diehard keep his head down. Walt and Carlo were banging away, too. If the fanatic was a kid, maybe he wouldn’t know which way to answer. If, on the other hand, he was a
Waffen
-SS vet who’d swing for war crimes if they caught him, he damn well would.

He fired at Sergeant Corvo, who had the M-1. That could hit from farthest away, so it was the right move. Wanting to run, Bernie scuttled forward instead. He could smell his own rank fear. The Jerry headed back to another tree. Bernie squeezed off a burst of his own. At least one round caught the kraut in the back. He pitched forward onto his face in the snow.

“Good shot!” Corvo called. He was up and cradling his rifle, so the fanatic hadn’t done anything too drastic to him. “Let’s see what we got. Careful, now—liable to be trip wires for mines around here. You don’t want your balls bounced, watch where you put your clodhoppers.”

With so much free and almost-free pussy over here, Bernie took good care of his balls. He raised and lowered his booted feet with utmost caution. The Germans used a trip wire so thin you could barely see it even when you were looking for it.

The fanatic was still twitching when Bernie came up to him, but he wouldn’t last. He’d caught the whole burst: one in the lower left part of his back, one as near dead center as made no difference, and one just below the right shoulderblade. He turned his head to look at the American.
“Mutti,”
he choked.

“Your mama ain’t gonna help you now, kid,” Bernie said roughly. The other two GIs came up behind him. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip, hoping he wouldn’t heave. The diehard was a kid: with those smooth cheeks, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Well, he wouldn’t see sixteen now.

“Fuckin’ good shooting, Cobb,” Sergeant Corvo said. “They’re all the same size when they pick up a gun.” Just to be on the safe side, he grabbed the fanatic’s piece. Sure as hell, it was one of those nasty new automatic rifles. It looked ugly as sin, all plastic and rough metal, but it was very bad news. That big, banana-shaped clip held what looked like a week’s worth of ammo.

“Mutti,”
the German said again, on a weaker note now. No, he wouldn’t last long. Well, good riddance. But even so…

Bernie spat in the snow. “I don’t like shooting kids, goddammit,” he said. “And those Nazi cocksuckers are using more of them all the time.”

“Sure they are,” Walt said. “Kids don’t mind shooting you, not even a little bit. It’s cowboys and Indians for them—a game, like.”

“Sure—that’s what bothers me,” Bernie said. “They don’t even know the score. Doesn’t seem fair to point ’em at us. This little asshole probably didn’t even figure he could get hurt—”

“Till you put three in his ten-ring,” Corvo broke in. “Get it through your head, man—fair went out the window as soon as these guys didn’t come out with their hands up after the surrender. They catch you, you ain’t goin’ into no POW camp. They catch you, they’ll cut your cock off and shove it down your throat. You think this half-grown fucker wasn’t playin’ for keeps?”

“Unh-unh.” Bernie didn’t hesitate there. He’d come too close to getting ventilated.

“Okay. Maybe you ain’t as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Corvo turned the kid over. That seemed to finish killing him—close enough, anyway. Bernie didn’t notice exactly when he quit breathing for good. The sergeant went on, “We’ll go through his pockets. Maybe he’s stupid—maybe he carried something the CIC guys can do something with.”

But he didn’t. About the most interesting things on the kid’s corpse were three or four little one-pfennig coins: cheap zinc, dark with corrosion, but still displaying the Nazi eagle and swastika. They weren’t legal tender any more. The occupation authorities had come down like a ton of bricks on symbols of the old regime. Well, maybe even a fanatic needed to remind himself what he was fighting for.

Mournfully, Walt said, “Now we’ll have to search this whole goddamn wood, see if there’s a bunker hidden here somewhere. Boy, I’m really looking forward to that.”

“Gotta be done,” Sergeant Corvo said.

Lefevre didn’t argue with him. Neither did Bernie Cobb. The noncom wouldn’t be down on his belly probing. He wouldn’t be doing pick-and-shovel work, either. Bernie knew he and Walt damn well would. No wonder Corvo didn’t mind the prospect so much. Who ever minded the hard work somebody else was doing?

C
APTAIN
H
OWARD
F
RANK SLAPPED A FILM CANISTER DOWN ON
L
OU
Weissberg’s desk. Lou eyed it as if wondering if it had an explosive charge inside. Truth to tell, that wouldn’t have much surprised him.
“Nu?”
he asked.

“Nu, nu,”
Frank agreed, one Jew to another. “And a new headache, too.”

Lou could have done with a Bromo-Seltzer. He tried to make light of it: “I thought you were going to appoint me morale officer and have me show the troops the latest Western.”

“Ha. Funny,” his superior said—about as much as the joke deserved. “I had to rout out a morale officer, ’cause I needed a projector to run this
verkakte
thing. It’s even got sound. Somewhere, Heydrich’s assholes have themselves a regular photo lab.”

“What…exactly is it?” Lou wondered if he wanted to know. A photo lab? What the hell were the fanatics doing now?

“It’s trouble, that’s what. Come see it. I’ll watch it again, too. Maybe one of us’ll spot something I missed the first time. I can hope so, anyway.”

“Okay.” Lou got up. Captain Frank grabbed the canister and carried it off.

The morale officer actually had rigged a screen and a projector in one room of the rambling Nuremberg hotel the CIC had taken for its own. “Why’d you have me take it out of the machine if you want me to run it again?” he asked Captain Frank.

“’Cause I’m dumb, Bruce,” the captain answered. “Do it anyway, okay?”

“Sure.” Bruce was a ninety-day wonder with one gold bar on each shoulder. He wasn’t about to argue. He threaded the film through the projector. He did that very well. For all Lou knew, he was a morale officer because he’d been a projectionist before Uncle Sam grabbed him. As he turned on the machine, he said, “Hit the lights, will you?”

Lou stood closest to the switch, so he flicked it. Squiggles and scribbles filled the screen as leader ran through. Then, without warning, a scared-looking young man stared out at him. The man wore U.S. uniform and looked as if he’d been worked over. His eyes kept sliding to the left, toward something off-camera.
A rifle, aimed at his head?
Lou wondered. Something like that, unless he missed his guess.

“My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army.” He paused to lick his lips and glance left again. Then he rattled off his serial number and went on, “I am a prisoner of the German Freedom Front. They say they will, uh, execute me if U.S. authorities don’t meet their, uh, just demands. For now, I’m being well treated.” The mouse under one eye, the split lip, and the fear all over his face gave the lie to that.

“U.S. forces are to leave Germany at once. Germany is to be free to determine its own destiny like any other nation. The struggle for national liberation will go on until victory is won, no matter what. You cannot hope to outlast the aroused German folk. So-called prisoners of war must also be released to return to their loved ones. Germany demands peace and justice.” Cunningham gulped, then whispered one more word: “Please.”

He disappeared. More squiggles flashed across the screen. Then it showed pure white, which faded as Bruce turned off the projector. Lou turned on the room lights. “Jesus,” he said.

“You betcha,” Captain Frank agreed: a slightly chubby, fundamentally decent man in a hell of an unpleasant place. “How’d you like to get one of those every week, or maybe every day?”

“Jesus!” This time, Bruce beat Lou to the punch.

“Is he really a GI?” Lou asked. “Not just a kraut who speaks good English?”

“A Matthew Cunningham was reported as AWOL in Frankfurt last week,” Frank answered. “We’re bringing in some of his buddies to make sure this is really him, but for now it’s a pretty good bet.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. The kid on the screen sounded just like a Yank. “Shit. What do we do next?”

“That isn’t for the likes of you or me to decide,” Captain Frank said. “But you can bet your last dime we won’t pack up and go home. You can bet we won’t turn all the Jerry POWs loose, either. How many divisions’ worth of new recruits would we give Heydrich if we did?”

“What about the chuckleheads back home?” Bruce said. “What’ll they do when they see this thing? How loud will they squawk?”

“We ain’t gonna show it to ’em,” Frank said. “We ain’t gonna say boo about it. You want to spend the next twenty years in the Aleutians, son? You’ll be lucky to get off that easy if you open your big yap where a reporter can hear. Got it?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Bruce said solemnly. “But how do you know this is the only print those Nazi bastards made?”

“Fuck,” Captain Frank whispered. “I didn’t even think of that.”

Lou hadn’t thought of it, either. He realized he should have. Maybe Bruce really had worked in a movie theater. That would have got him used to thinking about more than one copy of a film at a time. To Lou, a movie was a movie. But how many people, in how many theaters all over the country, could watch the same movie at the same time? Lots. Lots and lots.