The Man with the Iron Heart (21 page)

Bokov had no time to read those volumes, and no interest in them. He was, after all, part of the system himself. He followed his superior into the Cecilienhof.

It was as bad as he’d expected, maybe worse. The palace stank of sweat and smoke and vomit and shit. Men reeled here and there, some clutching their bellies, others rubbing frantically at their eyes. “Who turned out the lights?” a major shouted furiously. The lights were blazing. His eyes had gone dark.
Wood alcohol, sure as the devil,
Bokov thought.

“The NKVD men!” a sergeant shouted. “They’ll take over!”

“Thank God!” another noncom exclaimed.
Now the monkey’s off our backs,
he meant. Nobody could blame the poor underofficers for screwing up if they weren’t in charge.

“No officers here still on the job?” Shteinberg asked, in the tones of a man hoping against hope.

But the two noncoms shook their heads. Bokov wasn’t surprised, either. Why else would a man come to a New Year’s festival, except to drink himself blind? And how many Red Army officers had done just that here tonight?

“Have you got the Germans under guard?” Bokov asked.

The two underofficers gave each other apprehensive looks. “Comrade Captain, we have…some of them,” answered the one who’d spoken first. “Some went home before people started getting sick.” He paused unhappily. “Some may have slipped out when the Devil’s grandfather got loose, too. Things were pretty confused there for a while.”

Whenever a Russian hauled the Devil’s kin into a conversation, he knew he was in the middle of a mess. Bokov knew it, too. As far as he could see, things were still plenty confused. Part of him wanted to lie down and forget about everything but the influenza. But neither duty nor benzedrine would let him.

A word from him or Shteinberg could destroy these noncoms. What point, though? They hadn’t done anything wrong. Most of the ones who had screwed up were poisoned, which served them right.
If I weren’t sick, I’d be poisoned, too,
Bokov thought.

“Comrade Captain, what do we do if the Nazi bandits rise up now?” the other conscript asked. “Who’d give orders to help us fight back?”

“People like you,” Bokov answered. “And if they try it, we’ll whip them right out of their boots. I hope they do—fuck your mother if I don’t. If they come out and fight fair, we’ll smash them like the cockroaches they are. The one way they can hurt us is by sneaking around like this.”

“Unfortunately, they’re too damned good at sneaking.” Colonel Shteinberg’s voice was dry as usual. Only the way his hands shook and the unnatural glitter in his eyes told of the war between disease and drugs inside him. He went on, “Take us to the Germans. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”

Guards with submachine guns stood outside the door to the room where the servers were corralled. Nobody was going anywhere now. Of course, it was much too likely that anyone with guilty knowledge had already got away. As Bokov and Shteinberg went in, one of the guards muttered to another: “Never thought I’d be glad to see the damned Chekists get here.”

“Shut up,” the other fellow hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

If Bokov didn’t have bigger things to worry about…But he did. If Moisei Shteinberg heard the whispers from the Red Army men, he also gave no sign.

Inside the splendid chamber—a plaque said it had been the smoking room—huddled a gaggle of scared-looking Fritzes. Bokov nodded glumly to himself: sure as hell, the women were chosen for looks and figures. The Red Army men in charge were careful about that. About some other things, things that turned out to matter more, they weren’t.

Colonel Shteinberg pointed to one of the women, a statuesque brunette. “You, bitch—come outside with us,” he snarled. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish. She’d be able to follow it, though. And it ought to frighten her even more. Most Germans hadn’t had anything direct to do with killing Jews. But they’d had a notion of what was going on even so. They didn’t like the idea of Jews holding power over them now. They feared revenge—and well they might.

Her lower lip trembled, but she came. As soon as she got out into the hall and the door closed behind her, Bokov slapped her in the face. She stared at him, her mouth an O of injured astonishment. She had eyes green as jade.

She didn’t squawk, which wasn’t what he wanted. “Scream your head off,” he told her. “Give those other pigdogs back there something to worry about.”

When she obeyed, he felt as if he were standing in front of an air-raid siren. “Enough, already!” Shteinberg said, and she shut it off as abruptly as she’d let loose. The Jewish NKVD man went on, “So you’re one of the ones who thought you could wipe out the Red Army, eh?”

“I work in a shoe factory,” the dark-haired woman said. “One of your men pulled me out and said he would shoot my little son if I didn’t come here and give your officers drinks and—” She stopped, then made herself finish: “—and anything else they wanted.”

Bokov didn’t know if she was telling the truth. Her story sounded as if she could be, though. “Tell us what happened here,” he said.

“They gave me these clothes to wear,” she said. The black and white maid’s outfit didn’t cover that much of her. After a sigh, she continued, “I brought drinks. I brought food. I got groped a couple of times, but nothing worse.”

The Red Army officers would still have been more or less sober. And the sour resignation in the woman’s voice said she might have been on the receiving end of worse when the Russians took Berlin. Nobody knew how many rapes there’d been then. A lot, though; no doubt of that.

“Go on,” Bokov told her. “When did people start getting sick?”

“A little before midnight,” she answered. “At first we thought it was because they were drinking like…well, because they were drinking so much.” She had sense enough not to tell a Russian that Russians drank like swine. But Bokov already knew that—knew it from experience. He could have been lying out there stiffening in the snow himself. When he remembered how much he’d looked forward to this feast, and how pissed off he’d been when he came down sick…When he remembered all that, he quickly thought about something else.

“Do you know any of the people—the Germans, I mean—who got out of here before the poison showed itself?” he asked.

“Nein, mein Herr.”
Curls bobbed back and forth as the woman shook her head. “I never saw any of them before. Your man must have liked my looks and thought I would make a good whore here.” She looked defiance at him, daring him to deny that was what the Red Army man had in mind. When Bokov just waited, she shrugged and went on, “I think most of the women got picked that way. The men behind the bar might be a different story. They didn’t get chosen for their looks, anyhow.”

She made good sense, even if she was trying to get the NKVD men to leave her alone. Colonel Shteinberg went back into the smoking room, presumably to grab one of the barmen.

Bokov carried on alone with her. “Show me your papers,” he snapped. He wrote down her name: Elfriede Taubenschlag, a hell of a mouthful. Then he said, “So you have a boy, eh? Where’s your husband?”

“He died in an air raid last year,” she answered bleakly. “He was home, getting over a wound, and he was out drinking beer with some other soldiers in the same boat, and the tavern got hit. I think most of what we buried was him. I hope so.”

If she was looking for sympathy, she was looking in the wrong place. Bokov slapped her again, almost hard enough to knock her over. “Hitler shouldn’t have started the war if he didn’t want it to come home,” he snapped.

“If you treat us like this, no wonder we give you poison,” she said.

This time, he did knock her down. She might not have wanted to yelp, but she did anyway. Bokov had to fight the urge to murder her right there. If he hadn’t thought it came from the benzedrine roaring through him, he wouldn’t have bothered fighting. “We’ll kill all of you if we need to, cunt. Nobody’d miss you a bit. It’s what you tried to do to us.”

Elfriede Taubenschlag kept quiet. She could see he would kill her if she argued. He could read her face, now bruised, too. Like so many Germans, she wasn’t sorry Hitler had started the war. She only regretted losing.

Bokov shoved her back toward the smoking room. “Any luck?” Colonel Shteinberg asked him, pausing with a barman whose flat nose and scarred forehead said he’d done some prizefighting.

“Not much,” Bokov answered, eyeing the German to see if he followed Russian. Seeing no signs of that, he went on, “Since the bitches were chosen for their looks, the barmen look like a better bet.”

“So we’ll see what Uwe here knows,” Shteinberg said. Then he fell back into rasping, guttural Yiddish: “And if he doesn’t sing like a damned canary, we’ll see how he likes Siberia.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Uwe said—like most Germans, he had no trouble with the Jews’ dialect.

“No, huh? If we strip off your monkey suit, will we find an SS tattoo under your armpit?” Shteinberg asked. The Red Army often liquidated SS men it captured. As the war wound down toward disaster for them, some of the Nazi supermen had their blood-group marking surgically removed so it wouldn’t betray them. But a fresh scar right there could also be a death sentence.

“Got no tattoos,” Uwe said stolidly. He pulled up one trouser leg to show he did have an artificial foot. “Goddamn French 75 nailed me outside of Dunkirk in 1940. I tended bar ever since I got out of the hospital. Even the
Volkssturm
wouldn’t take me with a leg and a half.”

Bokov had thought the only prerequisite for the Germans’ last-ditch militia was a detectable pulse, but maybe he was wrong. The answer didn’t faze Shteinberg, who asked, “How about Heydrich’s crowd? You don’t have to run fast to pour wood alcohol into the vodka.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that, and I ain’t no fuckin’ Werewolf,” Uwe said. “Fuckin’ war’s over. We lost. All I want to do is get on with my life.”

“If you know who poisoned it, you’ll live better,” the Jew told him. “We help people who help us.”

Uwe grunted. “Happens I know a couple of dykes who’re pretty much Reds. They make it through the war without the SS grabbing ’em. Red Army shoots its way into Berlin at last. Dykes come out waving and yelling,
‘Kamerad!’
Know what happens next? They get gangbanged. Believing Goebbels’ bullshit cost me my foot. What do I win for believing yours?”

A trip to the gulag,
Bokov thought. You ran your mouth like that, you were asking for it. “Let’s see your papers,” Bokov said. “We may want to ask you more questions later, and we’ll need to know where to find you.”

By his documents, the German was Uwe Kupferstein. Bokov carefully noted his name and address. He didn’t know whether they’d need to question Kupferstein some more or just stuff him onto an eastbound train so he could see how he liked life as a
zek.
Well, that was a worry for another time.

“How are you doing?” Shteinberg asked as the barman stumped back away. The fellow had had practice with that foot; he hardly limped at all.

“I’ve been better, Comrade Colonel, but I’ll keep going as long as the pills let me,” Bokov answered. “How are you?”

“About the same.” The Jew sighed and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We won’t find the answers here tonight—this morning, I should say.” The eastern horizon was starting to lighten.

“I don’t suppose we will, either.” Bokov sighed, too. “But we’ve got to try.”

“Oh, yes. And we have to be seen trying, too.” Maybe the influenza and the benzedrine were what made Shteinberg sail close to the edge: sail over it, really. Shaking his head at what had come out of his mouth, he added, “Let’s go interrogate two more.” Feeling in his pocket to make sure he still had the vial the doctor had given him, Bokov followed him back to the smoking room.

W
HEN
L
OU
W
EISSBERG PASSED FROM THE
A
MERICAN ZONE TO THE
British, the way the Tommies inspected his papers and examined his jeep told him things were just as rugged here as they were where he’d come from. “Having fun with the diehards, are you?” he said.

To his way of thinking, the corporal checking his documents had his chevrons on upside down. The man was pale, almost pasty, and had an ugly scar on his left cheek. He wore a new-style British helmet, halfway between the old tin hat and the American pot. “Too bloody right we are,” he answered, his accent even further from Lou’s than Toby Benton’s drawl was. “When we catch them, they die hard, all right.”

Officially, the Americans didn’t do things like that. Germans caught in arms after the surrender weren’t legally POWs—they were classed as enemy combatants instead. Still, orders were to give them at least a drumhead hearing before shooting them. Lou happened to know those orders didn’t always get observed. The French thought their mere existence absurd: Frenchmen were practical people. Evidently Englishmen were, too.

“You seem to pass muster, Leftenant.” Yes, the corporal spoke English, but not the kind a Yank from New Jersey would use. He gestured with his Sten gun. “Pass on—and for Christ’s sake keep your bleedin’ eyes open.”