The Man with the Iron Heart (24 page)

Frank stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe we can hang around long enough to teach the Germans how to stand on their own two feet. You said that Adenauer guy over in Cologne impressed you. Gotta be more where he came from.”

“I’m sure there are.” But that wasn’t agreement, because Lou went on, “But if we leave the way that McGraw broad and her pals want us to, those guys won’t have the chance to stand up for themselves. The Nazis’ll bump ’em off, first chance they get. And then we start worrying about World War III, all in one lifetime.”

“Maybe not,” Frank said. Lou made a rude noise. In a more rules-conscious army, it might have landed him in the stockade. Captain Frank just laughed. “You said Stalin’s scared of us. Well, yeah, but he’s fucking terrified of the Germans. If we do pull out, he’s liable to head for the Rhine to make sure we don’t get round two of the Third
Reich.
”

“We can’t let him do that. France shits its pants if he does—same with Italy,” Lou said gloomily. “So we go to war against him on account of the fucking krauts? God, that’d be a kick in the nuts, wouldn’t it? And it sounds a hell of a lot like World War III, too.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Captain Frank eyed the glowing coal of his cigarette. “You’d think that when everybody says a war is over, it’d really be over.”

“Yeah. You would.” Lou put out his cigarette, too. The ashtray was soldier-made from the base of a 105mm shell. “I figured I’d be home by now. I figured my wife’d be expecting another baby by now.”

“Okay. I understand what you mean. Morrie’d probably be getting a little brother or sister if they’d given me a Ruptured Duck when I thought they would,” Frank said. “But things after the surrender didn’t work out the way anybody hoped. You know that. And what we’re doing here is worth doing. You know that, too. Hell, everybody knows that.”

“Not Diana McGraw and her crowd. And it seems like her crowd gets bigger every day.” Lou tapped the
Herald-Trib
with his index finger. “That guy who smuggled out the Cunningham film is with these people, too. Tom Shit, whatever the hell his name was.”

“Schmidt,” Captain Frank corrected primly. Then he shot Lou a dirty look. “Funny guy. You and Danny Kaye and Groucho Marx. You ought to have your own radio show. You’d sell tons of toothpaste and shaving soap.”

“All
Yehudim.
If Hitler had his way, he would’ve
made
us into shaving soap.” Lou hesitated, then went on, “Some of the Jewish guys over here, they don’t hardly seem to give a damn. Sure doesn’t stop ’em from laying German broads.”

“Nope. Me, I’d sooner jack off. If I fucked one of those bitches, I’d break every mirror I own,” Frank said. Lou nodded; he felt the same way. But, a moment later, his superior went on, “Other people see it different, that’s all. I heard one guy say he was getting his revenge nine inches at a time.”

Lou snorted. “A fucking braggart. Or maybe a braggart fucking—who knows?” Captain Frank sent him another severe look. He ignored it; he was used to them. “More fun than going up against the
Wehrmacht
or the
Waffen
-SS, I will say that.”

“Or than going up against the fanatics,” Frank said. “Know what I heard?”

“’Fraid I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?” Lou said.

“Sure am. The MPs here grabbed a couple of German broads with VD who say people told ’em not to get cured. They wanted these gals to make as many of our guys come down venereal as they could.”

“Makes a twisted kind of sense,” Lou said. “Or it did, anyway, before sulfa and penicillin. A guy with a drippy faucet’s just as much a casualty as a guy who got shot in the leg. He was, anyway, till you could cure him with a needle in the ass or a handful of pills.”

Captain Frank suddenly looked alert. He pulled a fountain pen from his left breast pocket and scribbled a note. “Something to remember: Heydrich and the other bastards down in the salt mines or wherever the hell they are don’t know everything we can do. They’ve got old German intelligence reports—”

“And new newspapers,” Lou broke in.

“Mm-hmm. And those.” Howard Frank nodded. “And which bunch has more crap mixed in with the good stuff is anybody’s guess.”

“Well, you’ve got that right, sir. If Hitler’s intelligence on us were any good, he never would’ve taken us on. Christ, if his intelligence on Russia were any good, he would’ve let Stalin alone, too,” Lou said.

“Back toward the end of ’41, the Germans had already wiped out as many divisions as they thought the Red Army had,” Frank said. “At the start, they didn’t know the Russians had the T-34, either. You kinda lose points with your bosses when you miss stuff like the best tank in the war, y’know?”

“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said, which wrung a dry chuckle out of the captain. Then Lou asked, “What are we missing that we ought to see?”

For a moment, Captain Frank looked almost comically astonished. He was in the intelligence racket, too. Did he really imagine he saw everything there was to see? Didn’t imagining something like that take colossal—almost Germanic—arrogance? Captain Frank started to say something, then closed his mouth. What he did say was probably quite different from what had almost come out: “You’re a disruptive son of a bitch, you know that?”

“Thank you, sir,” Lou said, which earned him another pointed glance. “But I’m serious. God knows the Nazis have their blind spots, but so do we. If we try to shrink ’em, maybe we can.”

“Japs sure blindsided us when they hit Pearl Harbor. We never dreamt they’d be dumb enough to jump on us like that, so they caught us flat-footed,” Frank said. “They were tougher all kinds of ways than we expected. We didn’t know any more about the Zero than the Germans knew about the T-34. And kamikazes…” His voice faded.

“Before the Japs finally quit, we played down how much trouble an enemy who didn’t care if he lived could be,” Lou said. “I guess we were smart—the Japs would’ve done more of that shit if they knew how bad it hurt us. But it seems to me we believed our own propaganda. We didn’t think the krauts could give us much trouble if they pulled stunts like that. Shows what we knew, huh?”

“Other thing we didn’t think was that they would pull shit like that,” Lou said. “Before the surrender, they didn’t hardly. The Master Race must’ve learned something from the Japs. Who woulda believed it?”

“Not me.” Captain Frank held up a sheet of paper. “Word is that that Adenauer guy you brought from Cologne is gonna speak at Erlangen. You really think he’s the straight goods?”

“He’s no Nazi, if that’s what you mean,” Lou replied. “If you mean, is he the Answer with a capital A, hell, I don’t know. But I sure hope like hell somebody can make the Germans run their own government and not automatically go after all their neighbors. If nobody can—”

“Then we’ve got to do it ourselves,” Frank finished for him. Unhappily, Lou nodded. That was what he’d been thinking, all right. His superior went on, “And God only knows how long we’ll stay here.”

“We need to,” Lou said.

“No shit. But what we need to do and what we’re gonna do, they’re two different beasts, and the jerks back home sure aren’t helping. Time may come when we have to go home, prop up whatever half-assed German government we’ve patched together in the meanwhile, and hope like hell Heydrich and the Nazis don’t knock it over as soon as we’re gone.”

“It won’t happen right away.” Lou took what comfort he could from that. “Not till after the fall elections, anyhow.”

Captain Frank lit another cigarette. He blew out smoke and shook his head. “You’re such a goddamn
American,
Lou.”

Whatever Lou had expected from the other CIC man, that wasn’t it. “I sure hope so, sir.” He hesitated, then asked, “What exactly d’you mean? I’m damn glad I’m an American, but you don’t make it sound like a compliment.”

Frank sighed. “I don’t mean it for an insult, either. But the Europeans play a deeper game than we do, ’cause they know how to wait and we don’t. Heydrich figures if he can put the Nazis back on top ten years from now, or maybe twenty, he’s won. And he’s right, too, God damn him to hell. But us? We get bored, or we find something new to worry about, or we get sick of spending lives a few here, a few there, when it’s got no obvious point. And so you’re right—we won’t do anything much till after the elections. But that’s only this fall, remember. If the Republicans take Congress—and if they take Congress because they’re yelling, ‘What are we doing in Germany now that the war’s over?’—what can Truman do about it? Not much, not if he wants to get elected in ’48.”

Lou thought about that. He shivered, though a coal stove kept Captain Frank’s office toasty. Then he covered his face. “We’re screwed. We are so screwed.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Captain Frank said. “I hoped like anything you’d tell me I was wrong.”

Diana McGraw paid attention to the newspapers in ways she never had before Pat got killed. Back in those prehistoric days, she’d looked at the funnies and the recipes and the advice and gossip columns. Foreign news? As long as the Americans and their allies kept moving forward—and, from 1942 on, they pretty steadily did—who worried about foreign news?

She did, now. The Indianapolis papers didn’t carry as much as she wanted, as much as she needed. And so the postman brought her the
New York Times.
She got it a few days late, but that was better than not getting it at all. The same went for the
Washington Post.
If you wanted to find out what was going on in Congress, you had to read a paper that covered it seriously.

She was reading the
Times
when she looked up and said, “Ha!”

Ed was rereading
The Egg and I.
He’d stop and chuckle every so often. Diana had read it, too. The only way you wouldn’t stop and chuckle was if you’d had your sense of humor taken out with your tonsils when you were a kid. But that
Ha!
was on an entirely different note. “What’s up, sweetie?” Ed asked.

She pointed to the story that had drawn her notice. “This German politician named Adenauer”—she figured she was messing up the pronunciation, but she hadn’t taken any German in high school—“is coming into the American zone to talk to the Germans there.”

“He’s not a Nazi, is he?” Ed answered his own question before Diana could: “Nah, he wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t let him get away with it if he was. So how come you think he’s a big deal?”

“I think we’re pushing Truman and Eisenhower and all the other blockheads running things over there—pushing ’em our way, I mean,” Diana said. “If they set up some kind of German government, that gives ’em an excuse to say, ‘Well, we’ve done what we need to do, so we can bring our boys home now.’”

“Sounds good to me,” Ed said.

She nodded. “To me, too. So let’s hear it for Mr. Konrad Adenauer.” She tried the name a different way this time. Ed only shrugged. He’d come back from Over There with a few scraps of German, but he’d forgotten it in the generation since.

The phone rang. She picked it up. “Diana McGraw,” she said crisply. The phone rang all the time these days. She had to answer it as if she were running a business. What else was she doing, when you got right down to it? She was just glad she wasn’t on a party line; the ringing that wasn’t for them would have driven all the other people crazy.

“Hello, Mrs. McGraw. This is E. A. Stuart,” the reporter said.

She’d already recognized his voice. She’d never imagined she would get to know reporters so well, but it didn’t impress her. She would gladly have traded everything—travel, getting acquainted with prominent people, even meeting the President—to have her only son back again. But God didn’t make deals like that. Too bad. It was almost enough to tempt you into atheism.

Since she couldn’t have what she wanted, she did what she could with what she had. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stuart?” She used other reporters’ first names. With Ebenezer Amminadab Stuart, formality seemed a better choice.

“I was wondering if you had any comment on the speech Senator Taft made this afternoon,” Stuart said.

She would see that speech when today’s
Post
or
New York Times
got to Anderson…three or four days from now. “Can you tell me what he said?” she asked. “If it got reported on the radio, I missed it.” Radio news made even the local papers look thorough. When you had to shoehorn everything into five minutes’ worth of air time…Well, you couldn’t. That was about the size of it.

“Basically, he said Truman doesn’t know what he’s doing in Germany. He said Truman had won the war, but he was losing the peace. He said we heard all through the war how wicked the German people were. If that’s true, he said, they aren’t worth any more American lives. And if it’s not true, why were the President and the whole government lying to the American people from Pearl Harbor to V-E Day?”

“Wow!” Diana said.

“That’s not a, mm, useful remark,” E. A. Stuart reminded her.

“Sorry. You’re right, of course,” Diana said. “Let me see…. Youcan say I agree with everything the Senator said, and he put it better than I could have.”

“Okey-doke.” She could hear Stuart’s pencil skritching across paper. “Yeah, you may not like Taft—an awful lot of people don’t—but you have a devil of a time ignoring him.”

“No kidding,” Diana said. “Has Truman answered him yet?”

“Yup. He doesn’t waste any time—when somebody pokes him with a stick, he pokes right back.” E. A. Stuart sounded admiring and approving. Diana understood why: Truman made good copy. To a lot of reporters, nothing mattered more. They didn’t much care what public figures said or did, as long as it sold newspapers.
Mercenaries,
Diana thought scornfully. She had to deal with people like that, and to be interesting in her own right for them. She didn’t have to like them.

When Stuart showed no inclination to go on, Diana prodded him: “Well? What did Truman say?”

“He said Taft is like a guy yelling from the bleachers. He’s never been a manager in the dugout, let alone a player on the field. He said Taft doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but what can you expect from a guy up in the cheap seats?”

“The only reason he’s not in the bleachers himself is that FDR died,” Diana snapped. She had the uneasy feeling that Roosevelt wouldn’t have wanted to pull troops out of Germany, but she didn’t mention it to E. A. Stuart. The less you said that could make the people on your side unhappy with you, the better off you were. She’d learned all kinds of unsavory but needful lessons about how to run a political campaign.

Stuart chuckled. “He’d probably call that baptism by total immersion. He’d have a point, too.”

“Phooey,” Diana said. “And you can quote me.”

“Well, maybe I will,” the reporter answered. “Won’t take up any more of your time now. ’Bye.” The line went dead.
I’ve got other things to do,
he meant: one more polite lie. Diana had learned a raft of them the past few months.

“What did Stuart want?” Ed asked.

“My comments on something Senator Taft said, and on the President’s answer to it.” Diana had said things like that often enough by now that she almost took them for granted—almost, but not quite. “Taft makes good sense. Truman’s full of malarkey.”

“Well, what else is new?” her husband said.

G
ERMANS AMBLED INTO THE MARKET SQUARE IN
E
RLANGEN TO HEAR
what Konrad Adenauer had to say. Bernie Cobb didn’t give a damn about the politician from the British zone. He wouldn’t be able to follow the speech anyhow. He’d picked up a little more German since the so-called surrender: enough to order drinks and food, and enough to get his face slapped if he tried to pick up the waitress afterwards. Politics? Who cared about politics?

He and the other GIs at the edge of the square weren’t there to listen to the speech. They were there to frisk the krauts mooching in, to make sure nobody was carrying a Luger or wearing an explosive vest. All Bernie knew about the Adenauer guy was that he was anti-Nazi. Well, no kidding! Otherwise, the occupying authorities never would’ve let him open his yap.

But if the American authorities liked him, you could bet your last pfennig that Heydrich and the fanatics wouldn’t. Which was why U.S. soldiers were searching the German men who came to listen to Adenauer.

“What I want to do is pat down the broads,” Bernie said. “Not all of ’em—you can keep the grannies and stuff. The cute ones. Hey, it’d be strictly line of duty, right?”

“Line of bullshit is what it’d be, Cobb,” said Carlo Corvo. The sergeant pointed toward the WACs and nurses who were searching German women. “See? It’s taken care of.”

One of the gals they were checking was a tall, auburn-haired beauty—just the kind Bernie’d had in mind. “Yeah, but they don’t put their hearts into their work the way I would.”

“Your heart? Is that what you call it these days?” Sergeant Corvo asked. But he was leering at the good-looking German gal, too.

None of the Jerries they frisked had anything lethal on him. Nobody else yelled out an alarm, either. And none of Heydrich’s goons blew himself up, and a few dogfaces with him, in frustration because he couldn’t get close enough to Konrad Adenauer.

The German politico came out to what Bernie thought of as extremely tepid applause. Hitler would have had the Germans screaming themselves sick. Maybe they’d learned better than to get too excited about politicians. More likely, Adenauer was about as exciting as soggy corn flakes without sugar. He was an old fart with a sly face that would have served him well in a poker game.

An American officer introduced Adenauer to the crowd in what sure sounded like fluent German to Bernie. Quite a few officers and some enlisted men could go pretty well
auf Deutsch.
Some had studied in school. Others, like this Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal, came by it in different ways.

Bernie wondered what Adenauer thought of having a Jew present him to his own countrymen. Or did Keith Rosenthal’s being an American count for more? Wasn’t Adenauer trying to show that Germans could handle their own affairs? Well, sure they could—as long as the occupying authorities said it was okay.

Despite the lukewarm hand Adenauer got, he waved as he stepped up to the microphone. Maybe the krauts had had all their political enthusiasm knocked out of them by now. If they had, that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing. When Bernie said so, Sergeant Corvo nodded. “You better believe it wouldn’t,” he opined. “Or maybe this Adenauer guy is as much of a boring old shithead as he looks like.”

Corvo always said exactly what he meant. Whether Adenauer was getting his message across was liable to be another story. If he fired up the krauts in the crowd, they hid it well. Again, chances were that was good news.

“You know a little of the lingo, right, Sarge?” Bernie said. “What’s he going on about?”

“He says Germany has to…do something with England and France.”

“Germany sure did something to ’em,” Bernie said.

“Shut up,” Corvo snapped. “When you talk, I can’t make out what he’s going on about…. He says Germany needs to reconcile, that’s what it is. He says Germany has a lot to atone for…. Yeah, he’sa Catholic, all right. Catholics like to talk about atoning for shit.”

“If you say so,” answered Bernie, a Methodist who hadn’t seen the inside of a church any time lately. New Mexico was full of Catholics, of course: well, as full of them as a mostly empty state could be. But he paid even less attention to their religion than to his own.

How long would Adenauer go on? Some of Hitler’s rants had lasted for hours, hadn’t they? Did the Jerries expect all their politicians to match that? If they did…If they did, they were even screwier than Bernie Cobb gave them credit for, which was saying a mouthful.

Fighting through France and Germany, Bernie’d hated land mines worse than anything else. They lay in wait for you, and if you stepped on one or tripped over a wire, that was all she wrote. Right behind them—
right
behind them—came mortar rounds. Ordinary artillery announced itself. Somebody yelled, “Incoming!” and a bunch of dogfaces hit the dirt or dove for holes. But half the time you didn’t know the bad guys had opened up with a mortar till the first bomb tore your buddy’s leg off…or maybe yours.

Bernie heard a faint hiss, a faint whistle, in the air. He had a second or two to pretend he didn’t. It could have been a flaw in the microphone and speakers. It could have been the wind, which was nasty and cold. It could have been…

Bam!
An 81mm round burst right in the middle of the crowd of krauts listening to Konrad Adenauer. Next thing Bernie knew, he was as flat on the cobblestones as if a deuce-and-a-half had run over him. He wasn’t hurt. In a way, discovering his combat reflexes still worked was gratifying.

Carlo Corvo had flattened out beside him. Quite a few of the German men were also down on their bellies. Yeah, they’d been through the mill, too. Shrieks said some people were down because the mortar bomb had knocked them down.

And then another round came in, and another, and another. A trained two-man crew could fire ten or twelve a minute. Morons could use an 81mm once it was aimed. You dropped a bomb down the tube and you made sure it didn’t blow your head off when it came out again. It wasn’t near as tough as designing an atomic bomb.

“Where the fuck you think they are?” Corvo yelled as fragments whined not nearly far enough overhead.

“The mortar guys, you mean?” Bernie said. Corvo nodded without raising his head. Bernie’s shrug actually hunched him down lower. “Could be anywhere. With a full charge, one of those cocksuckers’ll shoot a mile and a half.”

He tried to imagine securing everything within a circle three miles across centered on the market square. His imagination promptly rebelled. Somewhere—in a fenced-in yard or a back alley or up on a roof—a couple of mortarmen were having a high old time. And they could just leave the tube and bipod behind when they finished. How many mortars—German and American and British and Russian—littered the local landscape? Thousands, maybe even millions.